Another poster said, "the democratic race has always been a race to find out who is going to lose to Bush."
I can't think of anyone I would rather see picked to lose than Dean. Here's the thing -- we could try running an 'electable' candidate against Bush. Someone who knows how to position themselves in the middle, lie to look like they're friends with everybody, never say anything risky or unpolitic.
But Gore already lost. Last time, it was by a little. This time, if we try the same strategy, it will be by a lot. Bush, as the incumbant, has the boring non-vote locked down.
So instead of trying to be safer and more electable than Bush, I want a candidate who's the anti-Bush -- and the anti-Gore. Someone who tells you what they actually believe, and why, so that you can clearly understand and respect their logic whether or not you agree. Someone whose platform is governed by the result of that logic, rather than on trying to appeal to some group. Someone who acknowledges in a debate that their stance may require modification based on new evidence.
For me, Dean represents all of those things. For the first time, he's a candidate for president who I can really respect. I want to gamble that there are a lot of other Democrats -- indeed, a lot of other voters -- who are looking for the same thing.
If we're going to lose, let's do it with a candidate we can believe in. Not with Bush Lite.
It sounds like it's the people who were in the subways, and on the streets, who had a problem with this. Oh, and the ones in the elevators. I bet they would have been glad to go outside...
When power fails regularly, it's a very different thing from when it fails for the first time in years. New Orleans would be a disaster area if it got hit by the kind of earthquake that's common-place in California. (Last I checked, most of your city is below sea level, isn't it?)
But when you take it upon yourself to violate someone's property rights for their own good (or whatever it is when you install software on their machine without their permission), you're taking quite a risk. What if they don't think it's good for them? Or what if you screw up, and it actually does something that isn't good for them? (As with that famous worm from 15 years ago whose TLA escapes me... RTM? RTFM? ).
Thinking about this seriously, I can't imagine it being worth the risk -- and I suspect that anyone who thought it was worth the risk would be the sort of irresponsible type I wouldn't want installing software on my box without permission.
Let's say you're a business using this report to decide which OS to install. People you hire who will be using computers will probably be a lot like the ones in this test. They'll have used a computer before, most likely a version of Windows, but not the most recent one. You can therefore expect that they'll have about the same difficulty using your new OS as the test group did.
Strictly speaking, it would be a fairer and more enlightening test from a programmer's perspective to have a bunch of people who had never even heard of computers try each one. But from a decision-making perspective, the way they did it is much more useful.
Well, OK, not really. But that was my assumption when I saw the article -- that some anti-DMCA hacker was trying to draw attention to the silliness of it all. I mean, Pac Man? Come on...
So I've seen suggestions on this board that we make honeypots to draw the bots into a world of false positives. Let's do them one better -- let's make our own bots to send cease and desist letters at random, and really discredit the whole concept. Send a letter for every file that contains the word 'Men' or 'Day' or 'Part 2'. Lots of copyrighted material with names like that...
I'm tired of the Supreme Court gag... what happened in 2000 was that our election came down within the margin of error of the voting process (flawed as that was). Bush won by statistically zero in Florida, and Gore won by a statistical value of zilch nationally.
So what happened? Instead of descending into civil war, the coin toss was made by the courts and we moved on. The outcome of the election was handled roughly as fairly as it could have been.
If you want to be mad at the system, don't blame the Supreme Court -- blame the two party system that handed us two candidates so bland that the average voter stayed home. That wasn't an accident -- it's a deliberate policy of both party machines to select a safe, predictable and manageable candidate. If we had run Bradley vs McCain instead of Bush vs Gore, do you really think the election would have been decided by the courts? I doubt it -- because then voters would have cared enough to vote. And frankly, either of them would have been better than our actual choices.
Yes, the election was stolen -- but it happened long before the Supreme Court got involved, and the longer it takes us to notice the longer it's going to go on that way.
Let's say I have an email autoloader. I often receive lots of wonderful links from my amusing coworkers. Instead of following all those links manually, I simply drag the emails into my new autoloader tool, and it preloads all the links for me. Sometimes I get around to checking the contents, and sometimes not, but they're always there if I need them.
My email autoloader is even scriptable -- it can select emails to autoload by quite a complicated set of rules, instead of my having to manually select them each time. I then don't even have to read "Hey! Check out this funny flash site!" -- the email is automatically deleted, and the site is preloaded for my convenience.
This is my uninformed opinion, so someone tell me if I'm wrong, but it's for that reason that the Matrix seems a little scarier than the TIA program. TIA, I thought, was at least controlled by the FBI. I opposed it for slippery slope reasons, but I figured it would pretty much be used for its intended purpose.
This, on the other hand, would be in the hands of every local police station. That's way more access points, in the control of much less qualified officials. I don't know how accurate the parent post's stereotypes are -- I suspect that most cops are basically just trying to do their job -- but I would certainly not trust the Matrix in the hands of my local police force.
Let's all say that again, by the way. We're all gonna be in a database called the Matrix. Who has you? That's right -- the Matrix has you! Yay!
Oooh, they screwed up this time. Bring on the PR...
www.sniggle.net ("the culture jammer's encyclopedia") links to a couple of little hacks like this. In the most famous one, a group switched a bunch of voice chips between Barbie and GI Joe dolls, so Joe was saying things like "Let's go shopping!" Another interesting if less pointed experiment involved filling a bunch of teddy bears with cement and placing them on the shelves of a major toy store...
You pick an interesting example. My mom's a psychiatrist.
She used to accept those free meals and whatever, until she learned that drug reps get paid even more than doctors. Why? Because every time they visit a hospital, prescription rates for whatever they're pushing go way up. All those doctors would say that they're uninfluenced by the gifts -- but the precription rates would say different.
Now, she throws out anything that comes from a marketing firm, unread in the case of pamphlets or uneaten in the case of food. She only reads literature that is not provided by one or another of the drug companies.
I wish that my politicians were equally principled in dealing with large cash donations -- whether they believe it affects their judgement or not.
"any idiot could walk into a courthouse, lodge a form with a court clerk and the process is started."
Wait a minute. Could *I* do this? Could I perhaps inadvertantly target, say, certain industry associations, because my spidering software had mistakenly identified them as distributors of my IP? Could I then hold them to the same standards of proof that they are holding random Kazaa users, and force their lawyers to establish a precident, as the defendants, for just what you have to show in court before you can win such a case?
Seriously, it seems that there's a nice legal hack to be had in creatively abusing the ability to send subpeonas without a judge. Could someone who IAL suggest some possibilities?
This seems more equivalent to wire tapping. If someone is breaking the law over phone lines, the phone company isn't responsible -- but they still have to help investigators, and so, it seems, do ISPs.
Note that I didn't come down, in this particular post, on whether file sharing is actually illegal, whether it should be, or whether the RIAA should have the same powers that criminal investigators do.:-)
"His attendance, discipline, grades, and test scores are down, but he's white, so that counts in his favor."
"Her attendance, discipline, grades, and test scores are great, but she's black, so let's put her on the watch list."
Race might be correlated with some of the factors that lead to dropping out, but it in itself is not a factor. It would be dangerous to confuse the impact of having a black father with the impact of having a father in prison, just cause we've got so many black men locked up in this country.
It's important to keep in mind that, at least in America, we've always had control over what media we viewed. We always had the choice of not watching TV, as many books as we wanted on any subject, publications devoted to any group...
That being said, I also believe that the computer as all-purpose media box makes that alternative content far more accessable. You're right that something new is going on.
But the point is that the big media primarily didn't gain their dominance by some kind of exclusive rights -- they gained it by being easier, cheaper, and often better than the alternative. That means that our new internet alternatives are by no means assured -- we have to work to keep them easy, affordable, and good.
It seems, essentially, like trying to brute force a password. I know that the revolutionary concept is that we gradually move toward the 'correct' answer -- but we still know that 99,999 out of 100,000 will be wrong. And with poems, that will apply even right up to the end, because a good poem mated with another good poem is still likely to be garbage.
With cracking passwords, we don't ask 'is it possible?' but 'how long will it take?' So a better question than 'is it theoretically possible to get a good poem' would be 'how many page views will we need to get a good poem?'
Keeping in mind that this thing seems to be running on a DSL line, I'm afraid it may be a bit too many. Are there ways to estimate that number?
From the in-the-wild sample for the Camoflauge technique:
"those rearing lands Plasticine sex-cartoons. eel harness highest Absolutely new category of adu1t sites. nobody jets held Northumbria- diamond sleep."
Option 3: systems set up reciprocal merchant accounts with eachother.
Why not? PaySite uses PayAlice. In order to give my two cents to PaySite, I have to give two cents to PayAlice. Fortunately, I have an account with PayBob -- and PayAlice has a merchant account with them. I simply use PayBob to give 2 cents to PayAlice, and PayAlice transparently passes it on to PaySite. This is an awfully large favor on the part of PayAlice -- but it's worth it, because through this alliance they've doubled the number of sites they can claim using their system.
This is a lot like the way open source operating systems work. Even though there's lots of competing systems, they interoperate, so you don't need to separately develop software for each one -- and it would never be in the interests of any but the largest to not interoperate.
You might say that, in the software world, we're looking at a competition between your option 1 and my option 3. Perhaps the same sort of situation will appear in micropayments?
The reason I ended up opposing the war was that, first of all, it was a diplomatic failure. Given that, as you say, Saddam was evil, how is it that we ended up alienating France, Germany, and Russia, as well as most of the UN? Given that it could easily have been a just war, how is it that less than 1/4 of the UN member nations agreed to it? We screwed up something fierce on that front.
But more importantly, I don't believe that humanitarian aid was the motivating factor behind the war. Burma, for example, has been equally hideous for half a century (I talked to a refugee in Thailand who said, "they found out I was a democrat [wanted democracy], so they were coming to arrest me, so I ran, so they arrested my father instead." As far as I know, if his father is still alive he's in prison.) Humanitarian reasons alone do not motivate the US to war.
But when I read interviews with Pentagon officials (the ones who have wanted to depose Saddam since the last Bush was President), it started to make more sense. Their thinking went like this: the future after Saddam is rosy. Iraq is very convenient to us, because it's a foothold in the Mideast. We now have a cornerstone of democracy, which will become a thriving economy, putting strong pressure on Iran and Syria to become democratic as well. We also have Iraq's oil reserves, freeing us from uneasy alliances with such questionable governments as Saudi Arabia. This allows us to put increased diplomatic pressure on them, resulting in further democratic change.
Basically, Iraq is seen as the first step in a sort of domino effect transforming the entire region. And in some ways that's all right -- I don't really disagree with the principles we're pushing over there. But I would prefer it if my government came right out and said, "we are overthrowing this regime to gain leverage in the regional politics of the mideast, so as to ultimately topple all governments with principles antithetical to our own."
The trouble is, I'm still not sure I could support the war under those circumstances. Could you?
Yeah. You're right that it's a possibility. There were those mined oil fields that were never blown up (because the order didn't get through?).
Still, now we're talking about weapons we can't find, that in fact we can't prove exist, that weren't ready to use, and that Saddam chose not to use. Can you see why I'm skeptical about using this issue to guide our national policy? Even if you think it's ultimately worth it, you have to admit that there's a certain level of FUD being deployed.
As far as diplomacy, I don't think anyone has ever supported Saddam (at least since Rumsfeld was allegedly delivering anthrax to him in the 80s). I remember the day that over a million people demonstrated throughout the world, and Saddam made a statement about how all those people supported him in the coming war... I just thought, what a great way to drive away people who oppose the war. Here's the one world leader who's worse at diplomacy than Bush.
Slashdot Mirror
Another poster said, "the democratic race has always been a race to find out who is going to lose to Bush."
I can't think of anyone I would rather see picked to lose than Dean. Here's the thing -- we could try running an 'electable' candidate against Bush. Someone who knows how to position themselves in the middle, lie to look like they're friends with everybody, never say anything risky or unpolitic.
But Gore already lost. Last time, it was by a little. This time, if we try the same strategy, it will be by a lot. Bush, as the incumbant, has the boring non-vote locked down.
So instead of trying to be safer and more electable than Bush, I want a candidate who's the anti-Bush -- and the anti-Gore. Someone who tells you what they actually believe, and why, so that you can clearly understand and respect their logic whether or not you agree. Someone whose platform is governed by the result of that logic, rather than on trying to appeal to some group. Someone who acknowledges in a debate that their stance may require modification based on new evidence.
For me, Dean represents all of those things. For the first time, he's a candidate for president who I can really respect. I want to gamble that there are a lot of other Democrats -- indeed, a lot of other voters -- who are looking for the same thing.
If we're going to lose, let's do it with a candidate we can believe in. Not with Bush Lite.
It sounds like it's the people who were in the subways, and on the streets, who had a problem with this. Oh, and the ones in the elevators. I bet they would have been glad to go outside ...
When power fails regularly, it's a very different thing from when it fails for the first time in years. New Orleans would be a disaster area if it got hit by the kind of earthquake that's common-place in California. (Last I checked, most of your city is below sea level, isn't it?)
But when you take it upon yourself to violate someone's property rights for their own good (or whatever it is when you install software on their machine without their permission), you're taking quite a risk. What if they don't think it's good for them? Or what if you screw up, and it actually does something that isn't good for them? (As with that famous worm from 15 years ago whose TLA escapes me ... RTM? RTFM? ).
Thinking about this seriously, I can't imagine it being worth the risk -- and I suspect that anyone who thought it was worth the risk would be the sort of irresponsible type I wouldn't want installing software on my box without permission.
Everyone thinks they're the center of the world ...
There's just more of them than there are of you.
Between this and the Attack of the Rabbit People story, I'm starting to think that article yesterday may have come a bit too soon ...
Let's say you're a business using this report to decide which OS to install. People you hire who will be using computers will probably be a lot like the ones in this test. They'll have used a computer before, most likely a version of Windows, but not the most recent one. You can therefore expect that they'll have about the same difficulty using your new OS as the test group did.
Strictly speaking, it would be a fairer and more enlightening test from a programmer's perspective to have a bunch of people who had never even heard of computers try each one. But from a decision-making perspective, the way they did it is much more useful.
Well, OK, not really. But that was my assumption when I saw the article -- that some anti-DMCA hacker was trying to draw attention to the silliness of it all. I mean, Pac Man? Come on ...
...
So I've seen suggestions on this board that we make honeypots to draw the bots into a world of false positives. Let's do them one better -- let's make our own bots to send cease and desist letters at random, and really discredit the whole concept. Send a letter for every file that contains the word 'Men' or 'Day' or 'Part 2'. Lots of copyrighted material with names like that
I'm tired of the Supreme Court gag ... what happened in 2000 was that our election came down within the margin of error of the voting process (flawed as that was). Bush won by statistically zero in Florida, and Gore won by a statistical value of zilch nationally.
So what happened? Instead of descending into civil war, the coin toss was made by the courts and we moved on. The outcome of the election was handled roughly as fairly as it could have been.
If you want to be mad at the system, don't blame the Supreme Court -- blame the two party system that handed us two candidates so bland that the average voter stayed home. That wasn't an accident -- it's a deliberate policy of both party machines to select a safe, predictable and manageable candidate. If we had run Bradley vs McCain instead of Bush vs Gore, do you really think the election would have been decided by the courts? I doubt it -- because then voters would have cared enough to vote. And frankly, either of them would have been better than our actual choices.
Yes, the election was stolen -- but it happened long before the Supreme Court got involved, and the longer it takes us to notice the longer it's going to go on that way.
- Who's there?
- OJ.
- OJ who?
- *You* can be on the jury!
"I have removed countless porn-related trojans from friends' PC's."
...
You don't *need* Trojans. Your friends must be newbies, huh?
Ahem.
I shouldn't read this site so early in the day
Let's say I have an email autoloader. I often receive lots of wonderful links from my amusing coworkers. Instead of following all those links manually, I simply drag the emails into my new autoloader tool, and it preloads all the links for me. Sometimes I get around to checking the contents, and sometimes not, but they're always there if I need them.
My email autoloader is even scriptable -- it can select emails to autoload by quite a complicated set of rules, instead of my having to manually select them each time. I then don't even have to read "Hey! Check out this funny flash site!" -- the email is automatically deleted, and the site is preloaded for my convenience.
Now isn't that nice and convenient (and legal)?
This is my uninformed opinion, so someone tell me if I'm wrong, but it's for that reason that the Matrix seems a little scarier than the TIA program. TIA, I thought, was at least controlled by the FBI. I opposed it for slippery slope reasons, but I figured it would pretty much be used for its intended purpose.
...
This, on the other hand, would be in the hands of every local police station. That's way more access points, in the control of much less qualified officials. I don't know how accurate the parent post's stereotypes are -- I suspect that most cops are basically just trying to do their job -- but I would certainly not trust the Matrix in the hands of my local police force.
Let's all say that again, by the way. We're all gonna be in a database called the Matrix. Who has you? That's right -- the Matrix has you! Yay!
Oooh, they screwed up this time. Bring on the PR
Uh, yeah, that was all ...
www.sniggle.net ("the culture jammer's encyclopedia") links to a couple of little hacks like this. In the most famous one, a group switched a bunch of voice chips between Barbie and GI Joe dolls, so Joe was saying things like "Let's go shopping!" Another interesting if less pointed experiment involved filling a bunch of teddy bears with cement and placing them on the shelves of a major toy store ...
You pick an interesting example. My mom's a psychiatrist.
She used to accept those free meals and whatever, until she learned that drug reps get paid even more than doctors. Why? Because every time they visit a hospital, prescription rates for whatever they're pushing go way up. All those doctors would say that they're uninfluenced by the gifts -- but the precription rates would say different.
Now, she throws out anything that comes from a marketing firm, unread in the case of pamphlets or uneaten in the case of food. She only reads literature that is not provided by one or another of the drug companies.
I wish that my politicians were equally principled in dealing with large cash donations -- whether they believe it affects their judgement or not.
"any idiot could walk into a courthouse, lodge a form with a court clerk and the process is started."
Wait a minute. Could *I* do this? Could I perhaps inadvertantly target, say, certain industry associations, because my spidering software had mistakenly identified them as distributors of my IP? Could I then hold them to the same standards of proof that they are holding random Kazaa users, and force their lawyers to establish a precident, as the defendants, for just what you have to show in court before you can win such a case?
Seriously, it seems that there's a nice legal hack to be had in creatively abusing the ability to send subpeonas without a judge. Could someone who IAL suggest some possibilities?
This seems more equivalent to wire tapping. If someone is breaking the law over phone lines, the phone company isn't responsible -- but they still have to help investigators, and so, it seems, do ISPs.
:-)
Note that I didn't come down, in this particular post, on whether file sharing is actually illegal, whether it should be, or whether the RIAA should have the same powers that criminal investigators do.
"His attendance, discipline, grades, and test scores are down, but he's white, so that counts in his favor."
"Her attendance, discipline, grades, and test scores are great, but she's black, so let's put her on the watch list."
Race might be correlated with some of the factors that lead to dropping out, but it in itself is not a factor. It would be dangerous to confuse the impact of having a black father with the impact of having a father in prison, just cause we've got so many black men locked up in this country.
Hah hah hah hah hah ...
Heh.
No, seriously, what?
It's important to keep in mind that, at least in America, we've always had control over what media we viewed. We always had the choice of not watching TV, as many books as we wanted on any subject, publications devoted to any group ...
That being said, I also believe that the computer as all-purpose media box makes that alternative content far more accessable. You're right that something new is going on.
But the point is that the big media primarily didn't gain their dominance by some kind of exclusive rights -- they gained it by being easier, cheaper, and often better than the alternative. That means that our new internet alternatives are by no means assured -- we have to work to keep them easy, affordable, and good.
It seems, essentially, like trying to brute force a password. I know that the revolutionary concept is that we gradually move toward the 'correct' answer -- but we still know that 99,999 out of 100,000 will be wrong. And with poems, that will apply even right up to the end, because a good poem mated with another good poem is still likely to be garbage.
With cracking passwords, we don't ask 'is it possible?' but 'how long will it take?' So a better question than 'is it theoretically possible to get a good poem' would be 'how many page views will we need to get a good poem?'
Keeping in mind that this thing seems to be running on a DSL line, I'm afraid it may be a bit too many. Are there ways to estimate that number?
From the in-the-wild sample for the Camoflauge technique:
"those rearing lands
Plasticine sex-cartoons.
eel harness highest
Absolutely new category of adu1t sites.
nobody jets held
Northumbria- diamond sleep."
Any lit majors able to explain this one?
Option 3: systems set up reciprocal merchant accounts with eachother.
Why not? PaySite uses PayAlice. In order to give my two cents to PaySite, I have to give two cents to PayAlice. Fortunately, I have an account with PayBob -- and PayAlice has a merchant account with them. I simply use PayBob to give 2 cents to PayAlice, and PayAlice transparently passes it on to PaySite. This is an awfully large favor on the part of PayAlice -- but it's worth it, because through this alliance they've doubled the number of sites they can claim using their system.
This is a lot like the way open source operating systems work. Even though there's lots of competing systems, they interoperate, so you don't need to separately develop software for each one -- and it would never be in the interests of any but the largest to not interoperate.
You might say that, in the software world, we're looking at a competition between your option 1 and my option 3. Perhaps the same sort of situation will appear in micropayments?
The reason I ended up opposing the war was that, first of all, it was a diplomatic failure. Given that, as you say, Saddam was evil, how is it that we ended up alienating France, Germany, and Russia, as well as most of the UN? Given that it could easily have been a just war, how is it that less than 1/4 of the UN member nations agreed to it? We screwed up something fierce on that front.
But more importantly, I don't believe that humanitarian aid was the motivating factor behind the war. Burma, for example, has been equally hideous for half a century (I talked to a refugee in Thailand who said, "they found out I was a democrat [wanted democracy], so they were coming to arrest me, so I ran, so they arrested my father instead." As far as I know, if his father is still alive he's in prison.) Humanitarian reasons alone do not motivate the US to war.
But when I read interviews with Pentagon officials (the ones who have wanted to depose Saddam since the last Bush was President), it started to make more sense. Their thinking went like this: the future after Saddam is rosy. Iraq is very convenient to us, because it's a foothold in the Mideast. We now have a cornerstone of democracy, which will become a thriving economy, putting strong pressure on Iran and Syria to become democratic as well. We also have Iraq's oil reserves, freeing us from uneasy alliances with such questionable governments as Saudi Arabia. This allows us to put increased diplomatic pressure on them, resulting in further democratic change.
Basically, Iraq is seen as the first step in a sort of domino effect transforming the entire region. And in some ways that's all right -- I don't really disagree with the principles we're pushing over there. But I would prefer it if my government came right out and said, "we are overthrowing this regime to gain leverage in the regional politics of the mideast, so as to ultimately topple all governments with principles antithetical to our own."
The trouble is, I'm still not sure I could support the war under those circumstances. Could you?
Yeah. You're right that it's a possibility. There were those mined oil fields that were never blown up (because the order didn't get through?).
... I just thought, what a great way to drive away people who oppose the war. Here's the one world leader who's worse at diplomacy than Bush.
Still, now we're talking about weapons we can't find, that in fact we can't prove exist, that weren't ready to use, and that Saddam chose not to use. Can you see why I'm skeptical about using this issue to guide our national policy? Even if you think it's ultimately worth it, you have to admit that there's a certain level of FUD being deployed.
As far as diplomacy, I don't think anyone has ever supported Saddam (at least since Rumsfeld was allegedly delivering anthrax to him in the 80s). I remember the day that over a million people demonstrated throughout the world, and Saddam made a statement about how all those people supported him in the coming war