... The best way of manipulating the public is to supress your reasonable opponents and exaggerate the unreasonable opponents. It's a subtle variation on a straw-man argument. If the only people the public sees oppose you are lunatics, it makes it much easier for them to believe yours is the only reasonable course of action...
That may be the real agenda behind the excitement about "holocaust denial". "Holocaust denial" is a nutty position and easy to oppose. Noise there helps to distract attention from real issues that affect Israel, like "should the US supply weapons to Israel" or "should something be done to reduce AIPAC's influence on Congress and the Administration".
For good measure, we could have a cartoon of Jesus using thumbscrews or having sex or something too
Things have gone way beyond that.
There's a 1998 play, Corpus Christi, by Terrence McNally. It portrays Jesus as having a homosexual relationship with Judas. The play has run in London, New York, and Austin, Texas, plus some college productions. Protests by Catholic and Christian groups yielded picketing and angry letters. Nothing violent.
An Islamic group, the "Defenders of the Messenger Jesus", issued a fatwa calling for the death of the playwright. "Whoever insults any messenger of God must be killed." Now that's a nut group. Fortunately, they seem to be an ineffective nut group; the playwright is still alive and has had four new plays on Broadway since, including "Ragtime", "The Full Monty", and "Chita Rivera", now playing.
Here's a review of Corpus Christi. It's not McNally's best work; it's more like an experiment he did between doing big-budget musicals.
The problem with "wiretapping" in the US today is that the courts aren't in the loop. The way this ought to work is that the actual setup of the wiretap request is made by a court clerk, not law enforcement. The court clerk's office should be automatically logging everything law enforcement is doing. Then, it's possible for the judicial system to verify what law enforcement is doing.
But today's wiretapping system isn't set up that way. The way it actually works is that there's a back door into the routing system for telephony, SS7.
The back door is run by private companies, mostly Verisign. Verisign calls this their NetDiscovery Service.
Wiretapping is done by issuing commands to switches (phone, cellular, IP) over the SS7 network.
Take a look at what Verisign describes as the subpoena processing flowchart. Note that there are no blocks on that chart for the court system. There's no data transfer back to the court system. The "legal review" step is marked as "optional". There's supposed to be a subpoena to start the process, but there's no external validation that what is monitored matches the subpoena.
That's the real problem. We need to put the courts back in the loop. It's wrong for them to be out of it. Courts have an obligation to monitor compliance with their subpoenas, and to oversee law enforcement. They're being denied the tools to do it.
Any particular reason you haven't tried to get FriendFinder and Bebo to lose cash on their bond?
We tried.
From ReturnPath's "compliance" department:
"Since
Bonded Senders are not required to be Double Opt In, a single spam trap
hit does not justify a suspension or termination.
That said, we will note it on their Bond Group and indicate to them that
we are watching their spam trap hits as measured by our system - via the
SpamCop system. Should they exceed the acceptable threshold, we will
take appropriate action."
They may still be sending, but they're now blocked, so we wouldn't see them.
This sort of thing is why you don't want to let Bonded Spammer bypass your filters.
Here's the actual press release. Note the strong resemblance of the "story" to the press release. There does not seem to be an accompanying scientific paper.
It's hard to get that excited about an "in vitro" ("in glass") result. Lots of things work in vitro. There's no indication of whether this works in animals. When they can show it working in mice with human immune systems (there are genetically engineered mice with human immune systems, used for this kind of research), they'll have something. This is a long way from an "AIDS cure".
The reason nobody can find the term "ceragenins" in Google is that compounds of this class are called "cationic steroid antibiotics" in the literature.
"Ceragenins" is a PR term.
Gmail often interferes with Adblock's ad blocking features, causing Firefox to crash. Our engineers are working hard to fix the problem, but in the meantime, disable Gmail for testing purposes, and clear your browser's cache.
If disabling Gmail resolves the problem, but you'd still like to use it in conjunction with Adblock, you may want to contact Gmail's support team for help customizing your settings so you can still access your Gmail account after re-enabling the extension.
This is about what you'd expect for a new non-Von Neumann architecture. It's going to take a while to figure out what to do with an array of cell processors.
This stuff isn't easy. Figuring out how to split things up, parallelize them, and deal with the limitations on intercommunication is hard.
The PS2 had many of the same problems. In the PS2, most of the processing power is in the vector units; the "main CPU" is relatively weak. It took about a year for developers to figure out how to push more of the work out to the vector units. Graphics weren't that hard, but physics had to be pushed out, and that was tough. (Especially since the PS2 only had a 32-bit FPU, which meant you couldn't use some of the better approaches. But that's another story.)
As a result, the first year of PS2 games was rather disappointing. It took about a year before developers really figured out how to use the beast effectively.
In the latest round, both of the major players have wierd architectures. Which is why the games that launched with the XBox 360 aren't that impressive. It will probably take a year to get that platform figured out.
I have all mail from IP addresses approved by Bonded Spammer (yes, Ironport calls it Bonded Sender) going into a Bonded Spammer folder. Let's see what's in there.
ALT.com News: Real-time scenes, hot pics inside! ALT.com, part of Friendfinder, Inc, the notorious spammer, is sending ads approved by Bonded Spammer. They're sending them to an e-mail address I used with a defunct service around 1999. Apparently, Friendfinder bought their mailing list. Amusingly, the IP address for Friendfinder's e-mail sender has at times appeared in both the Spamcop and Bonded Sender databases, both of which are run by Ironport. I have about 20 spams from Friendfinder, all approved by Bonded Spammer.
Bebo.com -- Join me on Bebo. About 30 messages from Bebo.com, one of the unsuccessful "social networking" sites. I've never used them. Apparently they don't validate signups, so other people can sign up your e-mail address.
Google - mail bounces Google uses Bonded Sender on their outgoing corporate mail, and for a while, mail bounces from joe-jobs were being signed.
Gooogle fixed that after I complained.
Significantly, there's nothing in there I wanted that the main SpamAssassin spam filters would have rejected. So, except for spammers, Bonded Spammer has no value. If you have a Bonded Sender rule in your spam filters, it might be of modest value, but definitely do not let it bypass the filters, like Ironport's patches will make it. Ironport's patch to SpamAssassin gives Bonded Spammer mail a spam value adjustment of -100. Try +1 instead.
Saudi Arabia still has public executions. They're usually held in "Chop-Chop Square", in Riyadh. Fridays at noon.
A minor official from the Interior Ministry read out the charges against the kneeling prisoner. The executioner--a large black man with a scimitar--approached the kneeling prisoner from behind. After the sentence was read, the executioner jabbed the prisoner in the lower back with the tip of the sword, causing the prisoner to involuntarily jerk up. When he did, the sword flashed down. At that moment the head is sliced off and sent flying across the square. Blood jets from the severed carotid arteries and jugular veins, spraying into the air like a fountain. The frenzied crowd screams in choreographed unison, "Allah Akbar"!
In the US, it's amusing that the anti-video-game people are often the same as the pro-gun people. "For only a little more, you can own the real thing!"
At 300GHz, you have to have line of sight between transmitter and receiver. The wavelength is only 1mm, and you're not going to diffract around anything bigger than a broom handle. This will work more like an IR link.
There have been some changes.
The Westinghouse Air Brake Company, formed in 1869, was intact until the 1990s.
The railroad brake business was sold off to SAB in the UK, which became SAB WABCO. The automotive brake business was sold off to American Standard, and now operates as WABCO Automotive Products Group.
SAB WABCO was taken over by Vestar Capital Partners LLP in a leveraged buyout in 2003. It was then sold off to Faiveley Transport in 2004.
Faively still sells railroad brakes. But today they're axle-mounted disk brakes.
So MySQL generates only $40 million in revenue per year. That's OK. That's enough for perhaps 400 people. How many programmers do you really want working on a database? Beyond 50 or so, they'll probably add more bugs than they fix. And they'll be tempted to put stuff in the database that shouldn't be there.
Of course, this is a problem for Oracle. Building Larry Ellison's house cost far more than MySQL generates in profit. I drive by the place all the time. Under construction, it looked like a mall. Oracle stock dropped from $50 to $12 while the house project was underway.
Shared libraries aren't necessarily a win on a single-user system. On the plus side, if you're running things that use a shared library, you get a gain. On the minus side, if you use one function in a shared library, you bring in the whole library.
It's worthwhile, as an exercise, to build an application with all libraries statically linked. That gives you a real size number to compare against. If that number is much smaller than the size with shared libraries, linking with shared libraries may be a lose. Remember that if you run two instances of the same application, you share the code, so shared libraries are a win only when you have different apps sharing the same library.
This is also a load time issue. Bringing in a huge number of shared libraries is one of the things that runs up program launch times.
Bluefish is sort of a programmer's editor with extra features for HTML, not a web site design tool like Dreamweaver. The user shouldn't have to look at HTML source much, if at all.
Actually, it's surprising that the open source community hasn't developed a really good web design tool. So much open source work revolves around web site design and implementation, yet there's nothing as good as Dreamweaver 4 in the open source world. (Dreamweaver took a wrong turn after v4; the "MX" versions are designed to make you overuse Macromedia technologies, especially Flash.)
Geek Squad used to be kind of cool, but then Best Buy bought them. As a standalone company, they had only a few locations, but now they're in every Best Buy store, with the consequent decline in quality.
The whole point of Geek Squad was that you called them, they came over immediately, and they fixed your problem for a flat fee. A large flat fee. That's why they got celebrity clients. Not that many people are willing to pay $1000 or so to have their laptop fixed at 3AM. Now, as a unit of Best Buy, they mostly do home LAN installs.
Today's article sounds like a Geek Squad puff piece from about five years ago.
American Committee for the Weitzman Institute?
on
Tracking the Cracks
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
This press release comes from the American Committee for the Weitzmann Institute of Science. Who are they? The Weitzmann Institute is a good research school in Israel, but this "American Committee" thing is apparently some kind of a fund raising operation. The return address on the press release is from Janine Gordon Associates, "Where corporate and brand reputations are built, enhanced, and transformed." They also promote "bankrate.com" and Bridal Guide magazine.
Janine Gordon Associates specializes in placing favorable PR pieces, rather than direct advertising. See their case histories page, where they boast about how they plant stories. (Note: annoying all-Flash site.)
This is a Roland the Plogger story, of course. But, for once, none of the links benefit his search engine ranking.
So one wonders if Janine Gordon Associates uses Roland the Plogger.
Crooks who get into car chases are generally idiots. After all, it usually happens because the crook screwed up. Most of the time, the chase ends when the idiot hits something.
My favorite dumb chase were the kids who had a moderate-speed chase for many miles up US 101 to San Francisco. The CHP just followed them, not trying hard to pull them over. The kids exited 101 at the last San Francisco exit, and turned into an alley. The alley led down a ramp and into a building. At which point, heavy doors closed behind them. They'd driven into the loading ramp of SF's main jail.
If you really want the reliabilty you say you want, you probably need something like QNX with the High Availability Toolkit. That's what drives the newer Cisco routers. Or a Tandem system from HP. Or some kind of fault-tolerant cluster architecture.
But you probably don't, or you would have mentioned MTBF requirements and allowed restart times.
Actually, the safe career choice is becoming a HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) technician. That's what people in Silicon Valley are studying to get out of the offshoring rat race. Every building has an HVAC system, and they all need some attention now and then. The job can't be offshored; you have to go mess with the equipment on site.
Slashdot Mirror
That may be the real agenda behind the excitement about "holocaust denial". "Holocaust denial" is a nutty position and easy to oppose. Noise there helps to distract attention from real issues that affect Israel, like "should the US supply weapons to Israel" or "should something be done to reduce AIPAC's influence on Congress and the Administration".
Things have gone way beyond that. There's a 1998 play, Corpus Christi, by Terrence McNally. It portrays Jesus as having a homosexual relationship with Judas. The play has run in London, New York, and Austin, Texas, plus some college productions. Protests by Catholic and Christian groups yielded picketing and angry letters. Nothing violent.
An Islamic group, the "Defenders of the Messenger Jesus", issued a fatwa calling for the death of the playwright. "Whoever insults any messenger of God must be killed." Now that's a nut group. Fortunately, they seem to be an ineffective nut group; the playwright is still alive and has had four new plays on Broadway since, including "Ragtime", "The Full Monty", and "Chita Rivera", now playing.
Here's a review of Corpus Christi. It's not McNally's best work; it's more like an experiment he did between doing big-budget musicals.
But today's wiretapping system isn't set up that way. The way it actually works is that there's a back door into the routing system for telephony, SS7. The back door is run by private companies, mostly Verisign. Verisign calls this their NetDiscovery Service. Wiretapping is done by issuing commands to switches (phone, cellular, IP) over the SS7 network.
Take a look at what Verisign describes as the subpoena processing flowchart. Note that there are no blocks on that chart for the court system. There's no data transfer back to the court system. The "legal review" step is marked as "optional". There's supposed to be a subpoena to start the process, but there's no external validation that what is monitored matches the subpoena.
That's the real problem. We need to put the courts back in the loop. It's wrong for them to be out of it. Courts have an obligation to monitor compliance with their subpoenas, and to oversee law enforcement. They're being denied the tools to do it.
That's actually reasonable - one language from each of the major food groups.
We tried. From ReturnPath's "compliance" department:
"Since Bonded Senders are not required to be Double Opt In, a single spam trap hit does not justify a suspension or termination.
That said, we will note it on their Bond Group and indicate to them that we are watching their spam trap hits as measured by our system - via the SpamCop system. Should they exceed the acceptable threshold, we will take appropriate action."
They may still be sending, but they're now blocked, so we wouldn't see them. This sort of thing is why you don't want to let Bonded Spammer bypass your filters.
It's hard to get that excited about an "in vitro" ("in glass") result. Lots of things work in vitro. There's no indication of whether this works in animals. When they can show it working in mice with human immune systems (there are genetically engineered mice with human immune systems, used for this kind of research), they'll have something. This is a long way from an "AIDS cure".
The reason nobody can find the term "ceragenins" in Google is that compounds of this class are called "cationic steroid antibiotics" in the literature. "Ceragenins" is a PR term.
This company also claims that these compounds can be used to treat cancer, macular degeneration, and multiple-antibiotic resistant infections. They also can be used for skin cream for dry, itchy skin. There's an proposed antiterrorism application, to make smallpox vaccination safer.
However, there are no claims that these compounds improve gas mileage.
Ticker symbol: CGXP.OB. Up 122% today on this press release.
If disabling Gmail resolves the problem, but you'd still like to use it in conjunction with Adblock, you may want to contact Gmail's support team for help customizing your settings so you can still access your Gmail account after re-enabling the extension.
Look at the dates. The Tagboard drone flew in 1964. It barely had onboard computing. GPS was more than a decade in the future.
The PS2 had many of the same problems. In the PS2, most of the processing power is in the vector units; the "main CPU" is relatively weak. It took about a year for developers to figure out how to push more of the work out to the vector units. Graphics weren't that hard, but physics had to be pushed out, and that was tough. (Especially since the PS2 only had a 32-bit FPU, which meant you couldn't use some of the better approaches. But that's another story.)
As a result, the first year of PS2 games was rather disappointing. It took about a year before developers really figured out how to use the beast effectively.
In the latest round, both of the major players have wierd architectures. Which is why the games that launched with the XBox 360 aren't that impressive. It will probably take a year to get that platform figured out.
Significantly, there's nothing in there I wanted that the main SpamAssassin spam filters would have rejected. So, except for spammers, Bonded Spammer has no value. If you have a Bonded Sender rule in your spam filters, it might be of modest value, but definitely do not let it bypass the filters, like Ironport's patches will make it. Ironport's patch to SpamAssassin gives Bonded Spammer mail a spam value adjustment of -100. Try +1 instead.
Yes, the Tagboard drone. There's one on display at the Museum of Flight at Boeing Field. Fully automated celestial navigation - no GPS.
A minor official from the Interior Ministry read out the charges against the kneeling prisoner. The executioner--a large black man with a scimitar--approached the kneeling prisoner from behind. After the sentence was read, the executioner jabbed the prisoner in the lower back with the tip of the sword, causing the prisoner to involuntarily jerk up. When he did, the sword flashed down. At that moment the head is sliced off and sent flying across the square. Blood jets from the severed carotid arteries and jugular veins, spraying into the air like a fountain. The frenzied crowd screams in choreographed unison, "Allah Akbar"!
The Saudi "General Presidency for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vices has a page listing some things they prohibit. There are pictures of prohibited items, including some of video games. Most dolls are illegal. Barbie is definitely illegal. Valentine's Day gifts are illegal. Spandex seems to be illegal.
No prohibited weapons, though.
In the US, it's amusing that the anti-video-game people are often the same as the pro-gun people. "For only a little more, you can own the real thing!"
At 300GHz, you have to have line of sight between transmitter and receiver. The wavelength is only 1mm, and you're not going to diffract around anything bigger than a broom handle. This will work more like an IR link.
Faively still sells railroad brakes. But today they're axle-mounted disk brakes.
Of course, this is a problem for Oracle. Building Larry Ellison's house cost far more than MySQL generates in profit. I drive by the place all the time. Under construction, it looked like a mall. Oracle stock dropped from $50 to $12 while the house project was underway.
It's worthwhile, as an exercise, to build an application with all libraries statically linked. That gives you a real size number to compare against. If that number is much smaller than the size with shared libraries, linking with shared libraries may be a lose. Remember that if you run two instances of the same application, you share the code, so shared libraries are a win only when you have different apps sharing the same library.
This is also a load time issue. Bringing in a huge number of shared libraries is one of the things that runs up program launch times.
Actually, it's surprising that the open source community hasn't developed a really good web design tool. So much open source work revolves around web site design and implementation, yet there's nothing as good as Dreamweaver 4 in the open source world. (Dreamweaver took a wrong turn after v4; the "MX" versions are designed to make you overuse Macromedia technologies, especially Flash.)
Somebody didn't get the message. First, the city is actually holding a competition for the best photograph of the Liberty Bridge. The city is officially encouraging people to photograph that bridge. Second, the city of Greenville requires permission for use of their own pictures.
The whole point of Geek Squad was that you called them, they came over immediately, and they fixed your problem for a flat fee. A large flat fee. That's why they got celebrity clients. Not that many people are willing to pay $1000 or so to have their laptop fixed at 3AM. Now, as a unit of Best Buy, they mostly do home LAN installs.
Today's article sounds like a Geek Squad puff piece from about five years ago.
Janine Gordon Associates specializes in placing favorable PR pieces, rather than direct advertising. See their case histories page, where they boast about how they plant stories. (Note: annoying all-Flash site.)
This is a Roland the Plogger story, of course. But, for once, none of the links benefit his search engine ranking. So one wonders if Janine Gordon Associates uses Roland the Plogger.
Yeah. Brittle fracture and soil mechanics are completely different problems.
My favorite dumb chase were the kids who had a moderate-speed chase for many miles up US 101 to San Francisco. The CHP just followed them, not trying hard to pull them over. The kids exited 101 at the last San Francisco exit, and turned into an alley. The alley led down a ramp and into a building. At which point, heavy doors closed behind them. They'd driven into the loading ramp of SF's main jail.
If you really want the reliabilty you say you want, you probably need something like QNX with the High Availability Toolkit. That's what drives the newer Cisco routers. Or a Tandem system from HP. Or some kind of fault-tolerant cluster architecture.
But you probably don't, or you would have mentioned MTBF requirements and allowed restart times.
Actually, the safe career choice is becoming a HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) technician. That's what people in Silicon Valley are studying to get out of the offshoring rat race. Every building has an HVAC system, and they all need some attention now and then. The job can't be offshored; you have to go mess with the equipment on site.
Anonymous ads without moderation just don't work any more.