Abolition of Slavery? Abilitionism started in Christian churches.
Um, actually, the Quakers were the first truly outspoken group to call for the abolition of slavery in the Americas, and they were not considered Christians by most Europeans. In fact, Charles II had thousands of Quakers in England killed as 'heretics and heathens' after regaining the throne in 1660.
Women's Sufferage in the US? Started by Christian women (Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott. Susan B. Anthony joined later, but was also a prominent Christian woman.)
Again - not quite true. As an adult, Elizabeth Stanton explicitly rejected her Calvinist upbringing and the organized Protestant churches of her day. She maintained that "logic and a humane sense of ethics were the best guides to both thought and behavior".
Lucretia Mott was a Quaker. As I mentioned above, even in the 19th century, many Americans did not consider Quakers to be true Christians.
As for Susan B. Anthony - she started life as a Quaker, converted to Unitarianism (which still today is not considered a Christian faith by many, even here in its stronghold of New England), and in later years publically (and to many of her peers - scandously) distanced herself from organized religion entirely, and encouraged others to do the same.
Civil Rights? Movement led by Christian churches and one particular Baptist Minister (Dr. Martin Luther King.)
And opposed by just as many churches.
The only "bad" social movement that I can think of in US history attributed to Christians would be the Temperance movement that eventually led to Prohibition. Obviously that didn't last.
Unless you count the continuing scourge of organized crime, broadly held by historians to have gained its strength and pervasiveness in American culture as a result of the 'boon' years of prohibition.
And I note that you forgot to mention that opposition to the emancipation of blacks and women often came from the established churches, and the words of the testaments were used many times in our history to justify the mass enslavement and murder of Africans, American Indians, and even female 'witches'.
More recently, I'd point out that during the "Red Scare" years, the deeds of groups like the House Un-American Activities Committee and of individuals like Senator Joseph McCarthy were often justified by overtly Christian rhetoric.
I was raised a Christian, and the words of Jesus's New Testament have had a major and predominantly positive impact on my life and philosophy. But I would be a fool to deny that untold suffering and death has been meted out by those claiming to follow the same teachings. Our founding fathers understood just how disasterous the confluence of state and religious authority could be. And they also, more begrudgingly I think, appreciated that reasonable people could have profoundly different opinions about God's will for humanity.
Very true. But informing oneself fully about the issue in question is even more fundamental - to wit:
I have contacting my senators and congress woman concerning legislation that might make it difficult to have community and personal gardens (House and Senate bills HR 875 and S 425).
Having an active interest in both community gardening and organic farming, I spent a modest amount of time reading the text of these and other bills related to the recent food-safety debacles (like HR 814 - ref http://thomas.loc.gov/), and reading analyses from respected pro-consumer food safety advocates (eg http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/food/foodsafety/background-on-h-r-875). It quickly became clear that there's been a bit of a rush to judgement by some people about just what's in these bills.
I understand that the last few years (heck, the last several decades) may have made many of us prone to hair trigger paranoia wrt govt/corporate quid-pro-quos. But breathless panic doesn't serve our personal or public interests any better than ignornace or willful denial.
To bring this back to the original topic, I'm glad KEI is pursuing this information and I hope that people will press the administration on it, but it does look as though this initial denial of FOIA can be laid at the feet of a longtime civil servant's overenthusiam for the rubber stamp, and not current Executive policy. I believe that the truly important part of this story will be to see how the Obama administration reacts when made explicitly aware of the issue.
Yeah AC, that was my (old techie) reaction as well. Along with - "What an irresponsible asshat, to drop a CRT into a regular trash bin". Around here (and I think in most of the US nowadays), that's a huge non-no - CRTs contain wicked amounts of heavy metals that are verboten in regular landfills, and the implosion risk aka a face full of glass shards to a trash collector (the professional, paid-to-do-it kind) is non-zero enough to warrant the proscription.
If you'd tried to pull that stunt at the MIT Electronics flea mkt (third Sunday every month april-oct Albany st garage - best of its kind in North America), you'd been thrown out on your ass - for good.
If you notice, the Harvard Law degree came after the Community Organizer phase of his life.
Well, that's only true if you consider solely his experience as director of the Developing Communities Project. But according to that same wikipedia article*, after he graduated from Harvard and returned to Chicago, he was closely involved with Project Vote, Public Allies, the Woods Fund of Chicago, the Joyce Foundation, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, and the Center for Neighborhood Technology - all of which can quite reasonably be described as community-action organizations.
* - Please note that I haven't vetted that wikipedia article's sources, and am assuming their accuracy for purposes of this discussion. Feel free to enlighten me if the article is bogus - It looks good at first pass, but we all know that wikipedia can be less-than-reliable when the topic is controversial.
Their weddings may be more fun because the average length of a gay/lesbian marriage is much shorter than your typical hetero marriage.
Yeah, none of the legal marriages of any homosexuals with whom I am personally familiar have lasted longer than, hmmm, nine months and six days...so far!;)
Or perhaps you meant "wedding" when you said "marriage"? Because my wife and I have been to three weddings between same sex couples since last May and two were as long as any high-church hoohaw that I've ever been to (and as a Catholic, I've been to some doozies). Mostly because so many of the couple's family and friends wanted to be part of the event!
So far the gay weddings have been more fun than average - or maybe it'd be more accurate to say - expressively joyful. Probably because, given the socio-political context in which they are taking place, they have been enhanced by particularly synergistic feelings of both emancipation and inclusion.
Having said all that, I too will defend the ability of heteros to have fun weddings - My wife and I were wed on a small island off the coast of Maine, outside under an oak tree and a clear September sky, with a couple hundred of our dearest loved ones, eating amazing food, listening to tunes spun by my bro-in-law and enjoying nearly 60 gallons of home-brewed beer. Five years later we still get compliments (and requests for more home brew).
I have to admit that I laughed when I read the parent - but the reason it took me a while to respond is because this stuff is dense. It didn't help that the Fallow's article is filled with some silly anti-Clinton bias that made me question just how accurate the rest of his reporting was (cf. A-130 was not drafted by the Bush I OMB - it was Reagan's OMB. Bush I's OMB stonewalled on implementation - as did Clinton's, before Clinton relented and signed the Data Quality Act shortly before he left office. The DQA basically forces the federal government to comply with the policies in A-130).
Of course, we don't know whether Bush II's administration is going to do the right thing (imo - make agencies comply fully with A-130 et al) or avoid government transparency and play footsies with powerful business interests the way Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and first-term Bush II administrations have all done. I will reserve judgement until we see how this actually plays out.
(oh yeah - IANA legislative expert - just someone with some time to kill, a healthy distrust of government (whichever party of sneeches is running things) and the ability to use google and read mind-numbing bureaucratese on Thomas, OMBWatch.org, and the OMB's own web site. Now I need to go take some ibuprofen.)
Well, hopefully you saw that I corrected my dates above - the initial draft was floated in 96, not 86, so it has been less than ten years.
Even if it was less then 10 years ago, 10 years is a long time in Internet land. 10 years ago most people had barely even heard of the Internet.
That actually proves my point - ten years ago most people might have barely heard of the Internet, but it had been around for 25 years (first ARPANet nodes were brought online in '69 - one can even make a case for it being 30 years if you go by the 1964 initial public proposal by the RAND Corporation.
Maybe you misspoke though and meant the World Wide Web. Well the first web browser was built in 1990, but the first working hypertext system is arguably Doug Engelbart's NLS back in the early 60s! (for which he also built the first mouse, btw. What a creative brain!)
It can take a long time for technologies to mature.
The whole idea of "Internet time" is a myth. What there is "dot.com business cycle" time, which is faster than normal, perhaps in part because of the technologies involved, but also in large part because of the naïveté (ie gullibility) of both the associated employee and investor populations.
***
In any case, the article we are discussing isn't interesting because of the specific details (XML, Google, Preident Ashcroft ) but because of the larger idea that emerging inet technologies may (continue to) radically change the nature of information exchange and commerce. It makes sense to think about and debate the possible forms that this change could take and what advantages and pitfalls might be waiting for us.
I'd have to say "Microsoft Bob" peaked pretty early.
I'm pretty sure that you meant that facetiously, but I'll bite and point out that MS Bob was simply an early (bad) implementation of a context-sensitive help system. In ten years, the ways that everyday computers will be able to deduce and anticipate users' needs and desires is going to be light years ahead of this. For examples you can check out any number of academic research programs - MIT's Media Lab http://www.media.mit.edu/ is a good place to start. In particular, the Things That Think group, and the research of Maes, Leiberman, Ariely and Selker.
Remember back when we all thought that XML was going to achieve the semantic web by making good search engines unnecessary?
Not really, and XML is still such a recent development that to say "Remember when" is silly if not outright disengenuous. I was at the SGML '86 conference in Boston where the XML initial draft was presented. That's less than ten years ago. Can you name a information technology that reached anything like its full potential less than a decade after its first mention?
Very interesting ideas, but I seriously doubt that Google could (or would) try to squeeze a percentage out of every transaction performed using the hypothesized marketplace manager. That just doesn't seem to fit their modus operandi. More likely they'd give place preference to paying clients, much as they do now with the existing search pages.
But as I said, a provocative read. Metadata truly is the future.
Every time the Newt comes up in a/. discussion, many people slam it for its larger-than-palm-sized form factor(s). And I think they have a point, I believe a smaller Newton would have been a market success.
Keep in mind, however, that the lack of a palm-sized Newt was at most a temporary situation. One of the great things about NewtOS and NewtonScript is that they were designed to support a practically unlimited variety of form factors. With some forethought and clever UI design, a single Newton app could run on anything from a watch to a jumbotron sized device - a point *often* made by the Newton developer support group.
In fact, I was in Cupertino only days before the rollout of Newton Inc. as an independent subsidiary of Apple (a move unfortunately aborted by Jobs upon his return). While I was there, I saw physical prototypes of Newton-logo'ed devices the size of watches and legal-sized tablets. I assume these were working prototypes because I saw them on the repair bench.
As an independent developer of vertical market mobile-computing applications, my company was very excited by the potential and possibilities of the Newton platform. When Apple axed it, that was pretty much the end of our enterprise, as no other platform available at the time was as capable for such an affordable price - for some applications, there was no alternative platform at *any* price.
And we were hardly unique. There were scores of small and mid-sized mobile-computing developers that were starting to make a real go of it. Nearly all of them folded up shop within a year or two of Newton inc's demise. Quite frankly, Apple threw away the Newt just when it was starting to catch on with industry. We are only *just now* - years later - starting to see mobile platform solutions that can be deployed as inexpensively and efficiently as was being done with the Newton.
Its a situation very similar to the 'dark age' of voice-rec software we are just now beginning to emerge from following the implosion of Dragon Sytems/L&H et al.
Granite Island Group has already one-upped this story. Fuck wireless security, we're talking about actual bona fide security problems here.
The report mentioned above is silly to the point of being irresponsible. The pictures look like they were taken a couple weeks ago - for instance, the trash cans and newspaper boxes that you can see in several of the report's pictures went away at least a week ago (funny how the report didn't even mention them as a security issue though - doh!) Of course the facility and surrounding area were 'unsecured' at that time - it's the middle of the flippin' city!
If you've gone by the Fleet in the last couple days (as I did this morning, to check out the protester cage, um I mean 'free speech area' - but that's another story) you will see a completely different environment than portrayed in that GIG report. The Fleet and the blocks around it are buttoned down pretty tight (too tight, in my small-l libertarian opinion).
I'm a firm believer that State governments should be manacled by the Constitution as well, and in my perfect world the State would be just as restricted in making laws against speech.
Um, they are. States cannot make laws which (explicitly) violate the US constitution.
A recent (and highly controversial) example of this would be the US Supreme Court ruling that the Texas anti-sodomy laws are unconstitutional. The majority decision read in part - "[consenting adults'] right to liberty under (the US Constitution) gives them the full right to engage in their [personal] conduct without intervention of the government...".
(Btw, Justice O'Connor agreed with and voted with the majority decision, but in a separate opinion indicated that the law should have been overturned because it violated the 14th Amendment which guarantees equal protection for all persons. Another example of the principle of US law trumping state law).
(Also btw, I am just using the above example because it is a recent and clear example of US Constitutional law trumping state law. I don't wish to get sidelined into a flame/discussion about the validity of decriminalizing homosexual behaviour (at least in this thread)).
So, getting back to the parent's original point - if the Feds decided that P2P was inherently constitutional, it would make it extremely difficult for states to pass law restricting it. Conversely, were the US gubbamint to place significant restrictions on P2P and those laws held up in the federal courts, then that would pretty much preclude it's use anywhere in the US, given the interstate nature of the 'net.
Oh yeah - IANACLE.
- Jeff
"Long as you're not afraid, nobody can run your life for you. Remember that. Hell is being scared of things. Heaven is refusing to be scared." - Tom Robbins
Ah well, I got this: http://www.cm.nu/~shane/lists/rec.arts.star trek.te ch/2003-07/0355.html
Just trying to give an example. Do a regular google search and you'll get a reasonable number of hits which are reffering to ST as an oater (plus plenty of other garbage of course).
I don't think I ever heard Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica called "oaters."
Hang out among sci-fi geeks of a certain age (ie those of us who remember Bonanza and classic Trek) and you'll hear them called [space]oaters all the time. Google: 'oater "Star Trek"' and hit "I feel Lucky". Bam - there you go!
But I agree with you that Firefly holds closer to the classic recipe.
Series was a space oater set 500 years in the future,
tracking the journeys of the crew aboard the Serenity.
Ah yes, a "space oater." I'm fond of those.
Actually, it's a real term, sort of. An oater is what they used to call Western soap operas (usually episodic) which were popular back in the middle third of the 20th century (think the weekly Will Rogers featurettes at the movies, or TV's Bonanza). A space oater is just a space opera that borrows western themes or has a western flair. Star Trek (the original) arguably falls into this category, as does Battlestar Galactica.
CUPERTINO, California--January 14, 2004--Apple(R) today announced financial results for its fiscal 2004 first quarter ended December 27, 2003. For the quarter, the Company posted a net profit of $63 million, or $.17 per diluted share. These results compare to a net loss of $8 million, or $.02 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Revenue for the quarter reached a four-year high of $2.006 billion, up 36 percent from the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 26.7 percent, down from 27.6 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 44 percent of the quarter's revenue.
Apple got everything right with the Newton except the size. What a foolish mistake they made cancelling it as a product instead of redesigning it in a slightly smaller form factor.
True story - I was a Newton developer back in the day, and while on a business trip to the west coast, I damaged my Newt (cracked the screen by dropping it against the corner of a marble table) just before a client presentation. I called the folks in Cupertino and they very graciously agreed to take a look at it. I drove down right away, and was met by someone from developer relations who swore me to secrecy because there was a huge "NEWTON INC." banner hanging in the lobby - yes, this happened just a day before Apple announced the rollout of Newton into its own subsidiary.
Anyway, she took me down to the repair lab, where a couple of very interesting fellows proceeded to open my machine and replace the screen while I waited. As they worked, I looked casually around and in addition to the regular zoo of MPs and eMates, I spied several devices that made me drool - at least two different tablet devices (one roughly letter-sized and one even larger) and a large wristwatch sized device with a screen and a Newton logo.
I was very excited because as a developer, I knew that the NewtonOS was designed in such a way that it could support displays of almost arbitrarily large or small sizes (I think that when figured at ~80dpi the largest display can be almost a couple hundred meters on a side). The layout of screen elements in a Newton app is done using relative coordinates, so the same sw will run full-screen on an MP130 or a 2x00 even though one has a display half again as large. A well-written app can even make decisions about which elements to display, if there is too little screen real estate to show all the controls at once. God, I loved NewtonScript!
Anyway, none of the Newton folks would answer any questions - they were in serious info-lockdown mode, and I didn't press, figuring that I'd hear about it soon. Alas, it was not to be, for Jobs had just returned to power and shut down the Newton Inc. experiment before it ever got off the ground.
Wouldn't it have been great if they had been allowed to try? Contrary to popular belief, the Newton division was starting to generate substantial positive revenue and Sandy Bennet, head of the Newton Group, gave a presentation to the board showing that all R&D costs would be paid off in less than 5 years - pretty good in the consumer electronics industry for a completely new platform. Alas, Jobs had just returned to power and saw Newton as part of his now-enemy Scully's legacy. Like the new alpha lion of a pride, he felt he had to kill all his predecessors offspring.
Sorry SuperBanana, I too have a 2100 (have had several actually, and at least one of every other commercially released version of Newton hw - I was a Newt developer for several years), and the later versions of hwr (hand writing recognition) work great for me - I can easily correct letters "out of order". (The first version of newton hwr deserved the jibes but it was quickly updated to truly useful versions - public opinion damage was already done unfortunately).
Have you tried tweaking prefs>handwriting recognition>options>fine tuning? Sliding the "Recognize my handwriting" towards "slower, more accurately" will help with recognition (you do have the Newt tuned to learn your hw, yes? That option is off by default). And also in fine tuning, if you slide "Transform my handwriting" towards "after a delay" you will have more time to make mid-course corrections. Taking the time to adjust these two settings (and those in p>hr>o>letter shapes) can make all the difference in usability.
It's really unfortunate that Apple/Newton never took the time to create a good user tutorial on how to train the Newt hwr. Many people who came to our Boston user groups meetings back in the day would have a complete turnaround wrt their Newtons after we spent just a few minutes showing them how to effectively train the hwr engine.
Great GoogliMoogli - is it really Allen Varney? Creator of GLOBBO - the best magazine insert bonus game ever! And the third(?) Illuminati expansion set, and an amazing number of high-quality gaming supplements (Paranoia's "Send in the Clones" - yes!), and probably far more stuff of which I'm completely unaware.
And I thought *I* was an amazingly old fart to be hanging out on Slashdot!
Judging by the last couple of years, I had'nt realised that the Whitehouse had a scientific advisor!!
Actually, Bush didn't nominate a Science Advisor until a year and a half after he came into office! And the Senate didn't get around to approving the nomination until October of 2001.
The fellow's name is John Marburger, btw. A physicist who used to be the president of SUNY and then ran Brookhaven Labs (one of the DoE's big research facilities).
Slashdot Mirror
Abolition of Slavery? Abilitionism started in Christian churches.
Um, actually, the Quakers were the first truly outspoken group to call for the abolition of slavery in the Americas, and they were not considered Christians by most Europeans. In fact, Charles II had thousands of Quakers in England killed as 'heretics and heathens' after regaining the throne in 1660.
Women's Sufferage in the US? Started by Christian women (Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott. Susan B. Anthony joined later, but was also a prominent Christian woman.)
Again - not quite true. As an adult, Elizabeth Stanton explicitly rejected her Calvinist upbringing and the organized Protestant churches of her day. She maintained that "logic and a humane sense of ethics were the best guides to both thought and behavior".
Lucretia Mott was a Quaker. As I mentioned above, even in the 19th century, many Americans did not consider Quakers to be true Christians.
As for Susan B. Anthony - she started life as a Quaker, converted to Unitarianism (which still today is not considered a Christian faith by many, even here in its stronghold of New England), and in later years publically (and to many of her peers - scandously) distanced herself from organized religion entirely, and encouraged others to do the same.
Civil Rights? Movement led by Christian churches and one particular Baptist Minister (Dr. Martin Luther King.)
And opposed by just as many churches.
The only "bad" social movement that I can think of in US history attributed to Christians would be the Temperance movement that eventually led to Prohibition. Obviously that didn't last.
Unless you count the continuing scourge of organized crime, broadly held by historians to have gained its strength and pervasiveness in American culture as a result of the 'boon' years of prohibition.
And I note that you forgot to mention that opposition to the emancipation of blacks and women often came from the established churches, and the words of the testaments were used many times in our history to justify the mass enslavement and murder of Africans, American Indians, and even female 'witches'.
More recently, I'd point out that during the "Red Scare" years, the deeds of groups like the House Un-American Activities Committee and of individuals like Senator Joseph McCarthy were often justified by overtly Christian rhetoric.
I was raised a Christian, and the words of Jesus's New Testament have had a major and predominantly positive impact on my life and philosophy. But I would be a fool to deny that untold suffering and death has been meted out by those claiming to follow the same teachings. Our founding fathers understood just how disasterous the confluence of state and religious authority could be. And they also, more begrudgingly I think, appreciated that reasonable people could have profoundly different opinions about God's will for humanity.
Actually, pushing back is a good idea.
Very true. But informing oneself fully about the issue in question is even more fundamental - to wit:
I have contacting my senators and congress woman concerning legislation that might make it difficult to have community and personal gardens (House and Senate bills HR 875 and S 425).
Having an active interest in both community gardening and organic farming, I spent a modest amount of time reading the text of these and other bills related to the recent food-safety debacles (like HR 814 - ref http://thomas.loc.gov/), and reading analyses from respected pro-consumer food safety advocates (eg http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/food/foodsafety/background-on-h-r-875). It quickly became clear that there's been a bit of a rush to judgement by some people about just what's in these bills.
I understand that the last few years (heck, the last several decades) may have made many of us prone to hair trigger paranoia wrt govt/corporate quid-pro-quos. But breathless panic doesn't serve our personal or public interests any better than ignornace or willful denial.
To bring this back to the original topic, I'm glad KEI is pursuing this information and I hope that people will press the administration on it, but it does look as though this initial denial of FOIA can be laid at the feet of a longtime civil servant's overenthusiam for the rubber stamp, and not current Executive policy. I believe that the truly important part of this story will be to see how the Obama administration reacts when made explicitly aware of the issue.
Yeah AC, that was my (old techie) reaction as well. Along with - "What an irresponsible asshat, to drop a CRT into a regular trash bin". Around here (and I think in most of the US nowadays), that's a huge non-no - CRTs contain wicked amounts of heavy metals that are verboten in regular landfills, and the implosion risk aka a face full of glass shards to a trash collector (the professional, paid-to-do-it kind) is non-zero enough to warrant the proscription.
If you'd tried to pull that stunt at the MIT Electronics flea mkt (third Sunday every month april-oct Albany st garage - best of its kind in North America), you'd been thrown out on your ass - for good.
If you notice, the Harvard Law degree came after the Community Organizer phase of his life.
Well, that's only true if you consider solely his experience as director of the Developing Communities Project. But according to that same wikipedia article*, after he graduated from Harvard and returned to Chicago, he was closely involved with Project Vote, Public Allies, the Woods Fund of Chicago, the Joyce Foundation, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, and the Center for Neighborhood Technology - all of which can quite reasonably be described as community-action organizations.
* - Please note that I haven't vetted that wikipedia article's sources, and am assuming their accuracy for purposes of this discussion. Feel free to enlighten me if the article is bogus - It looks good at first pass, but we all know that wikipedia can be less-than-reliable when the topic is controversial.
Really? How about this young woman? http://coop.jsc.nasa.gov/biography/jordann.html
Or these ladies? http://web.mit.edu/madmatt/Public/Pics/cheerbig.jpg
Or if you like a little controversy with your sexy, how about one of the most gifted (and hot) young computer enthusiasts I know - http://bea.st/sight/archive/08/05/star/
Their weddings may be more fun because the average length of a gay/lesbian marriage is much shorter than your typical hetero marriage.
;)
Yeah, none of the legal marriages of any homosexuals with whom I am personally familiar have lasted longer than, hmmm, nine months and six days...so far!
Or perhaps you meant "wedding" when you said "marriage"? Because my wife and I have been to three weddings between same sex couples since last May and two were as long as any high-church hoohaw that I've ever been to (and as a Catholic, I've been to some doozies). Mostly because so many of the couple's family and friends wanted to be part of the event!
So far the gay weddings have been more fun than average - or maybe it'd be more accurate to say - expressively joyful. Probably because, given the socio-political context in which they are taking place, they have been enhanced by particularly synergistic feelings of both emancipation and inclusion.
Having said all that, I too will defend the ability of heteros to have fun weddings - My wife and I were wed on a small island off the coast of Maine, outside under an oak tree and a clear September sky, with a couple hundred of our dearest loved ones, eating amazing food, listening to tunes spun by my bro-in-law and enjoying nearly 60 gallons of home-brewed beer. Five years later we still get compliments (and requests for more home brew).
I have to admit that I laughed when I read the parent - but the reason it took me a while to respond is because this stuff is dense. It didn't help that the Fallow's article is filled with some silly anti-Clinton bias that made me question just how accurate the rest of his reporting was (cf. A-130 was not drafted by the Bush I OMB - it was Reagan's OMB. Bush I's OMB stonewalled on implementation - as did Clinton's, before Clinton relented and signed the Data Quality Act shortly before he left office. The DQA basically forces the federal government to comply with the policies in A-130).
Of course, we don't know whether Bush II's administration is going to do the right thing (imo - make agencies comply fully with A-130 et al) or avoid government transparency and play footsies with powerful business interests the way Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and first-term Bush II administrations have all done. I will reserve judgement until we see how this actually plays out.
(oh yeah - IANA legislative expert - just someone with some time to kill, a healthy distrust of government (whichever party of sneeches is running things) and the ability to use google and read mind-numbing bureaucratese on Thomas, OMBWatch.org, and the OMB's own web site. Now I need to go take some ibuprofen.)
It's too bad Apple and Microsoft don't seem to care about it. :-\
. ht ml
Au contraire, mon frere:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/spotlighttech
1986 was 18 years ago.
Well, hopefully you saw that I corrected my dates above - the initial draft was floated in 96, not 86, so it has been less than ten years.
Even if it was less then 10 years ago, 10 years is a long time in Internet land. 10 years ago most people had barely even heard of the Internet.
That actually proves my point - ten years ago most people might have barely heard of the Internet, but it had been around for 25 years (first ARPANet nodes were brought online in '69 - one can even make a case for it being 30 years if you go by the 1964 initial public proposal by the RAND Corporation.
Maybe you misspoke though and meant the World Wide Web. Well the first web browser was built in 1990, but the first working hypertext system is arguably Doug Engelbart's NLS back in the early 60s! (for which he also built the first mouse, btw. What a creative brain!)
It can take a long time for technologies to mature.
The whole idea of "Internet time" is a myth. What there is "dot.com business cycle" time, which is faster than normal, perhaps in part because of the technologies involved, but also in large part because of the naïveté (ie gullibility) of both the associated employee and investor populations.
***
In any case, the article we are discussing isn't interesting because of the specific details (XML, Google, Preident Ashcroft ) but because of the larger idea that emerging inet technologies may (continue to) radically change the nature of information exchange and commerce. It makes sense to think about and debate the possible forms that this change could take and what advantages and pitfalls might be waiting for us.
I'd have to say "Microsoft Bob" peaked pretty early.
I'm pretty sure that you meant that facetiously, but I'll bite and point out that MS Bob was simply an early (bad) implementation of a context-sensitive help system. In ten years, the ways that everyday computers will be able to deduce and anticipate users' needs and desires is going to be light years ahead of this. For examples you can check out any number of academic research programs - MIT's Media Lab http://www.media.mit.edu/ is a good place to start. In particular, the Things That Think group, and the research of Maes, Leiberman, Ariely and Selker.
I was at the SGML '86 conference in Boston where the XML initial draft was presented.
That was SGML '96 of course. D'oh!
Remember back when we all thought that XML was going to achieve the semantic web by making good search engines unnecessary?
Not really, and XML is still such a recent development that to say "Remember when" is silly if not outright disengenuous. I was at the SGML '86 conference in Boston where the XML initial draft was presented. That's less than ten years ago. Can you name a information technology that reached anything like its full potential less than a decade after its first mention?
Very interesting ideas, but I seriously doubt that Google could (or would) try to squeeze a percentage out of every transaction performed using the hypothesized marketplace manager. That just doesn't seem to fit their modus operandi. More likely they'd give place preference to paying clients, much as they do now with the existing search pages.
But as I said, a provocative read. Metadata truly is the future.
Every time the Newt comes up in a /. discussion, many people slam it for its larger-than-palm-sized form factor(s). And I think they have a point, I believe a smaller Newton would have been a market success.
Keep in mind, however, that the lack of a palm-sized Newt was at most a temporary situation. One of the great things about NewtOS and NewtonScript is that they were designed to support a practically unlimited variety of form factors. With some forethought and clever UI design, a single Newton app could run on anything from a watch to a jumbotron sized device - a point *often* made by the Newton developer support group.
In fact, I was in Cupertino only days before the rollout of Newton Inc. as an independent subsidiary of Apple (a move unfortunately aborted by Jobs upon his return). While I was there, I saw physical prototypes of Newton-logo'ed devices the size of watches and legal-sized tablets. I assume these were working prototypes because I saw them on the repair bench.
As an independent developer of vertical market mobile-computing applications, my company was very excited by the potential and possibilities of the Newton platform. When Apple axed it, that was pretty much the end of our enterprise, as no other platform available at the time was as capable for such an affordable price - for some applications, there was no alternative platform at *any* price.
And we were hardly unique. There were scores of small and mid-sized mobile-computing developers that were starting to make a real go of it. Nearly all of them folded up shop within a year or two of Newton inc's demise. Quite frankly, Apple threw away the Newt just when it was starting to catch on with industry. We are only *just now* - years later - starting to see mobile platform solutions that can be deployed as inexpensively and efficiently as was being done with the Newton.
Its a situation very similar to the 'dark age' of voice-rec software we are just now beginning to emerge from following the implosion of Dragon Sytems/L&H et al.
...of that through-traffic chase in The Fifth Element (you know - the one that was shamelessly ripped off by Lucas in Attack of the Clones).
Police: Are you classified as human?
Dallas: No, I am a meat popsicle.
The report mentioned above is silly to the point of being irresponsible. The pictures look like they were taken a couple weeks ago - for instance, the trash cans and newspaper boxes that you can see in several of the report's pictures went away at least a week ago (funny how the report didn't even mention them as a security issue though - doh!) Of course the facility and surrounding area were 'unsecured' at that time - it's the middle of the flippin' city!
If you've gone by the Fleet in the last couple days (as I did this morning, to check out the protester cage, um I mean 'free speech area' - but that's another story) you will see a completely different environment than portrayed in that GIG report. The Fleet and the blocks around it are buttoned down pretty tight (too tight, in my small-l libertarian opinion).
I'm a firm believer that State governments should be manacled by the Constitution as well, and in my perfect world the State would be just as restricted in making laws against speech.
Um, they are. States cannot make laws which (explicitly) violate the US constitution.
A recent (and highly controversial) example of this would be the US Supreme Court ruling that the Texas anti-sodomy laws are unconstitutional. The majority decision read in part - "[consenting adults'] right to liberty under (the US Constitution) gives them the full right to engage in their [personal] conduct without intervention of the government...".
(Btw, Justice O'Connor agreed with and voted with the majority decision, but in a separate opinion indicated that the law should have been overturned because it violated the 14th Amendment which guarantees equal protection for all persons. Another example of the principle of US law trumping state law).
(Also btw, I am just using the above example because it is a recent and clear example of US Constitutional law trumping state law. I don't wish to get sidelined into a flame/discussion about the validity of decriminalizing homosexual behaviour (at least in this thread)).
So, getting back to the parent's original point - if the Feds decided that P2P was inherently constitutional, it would make it extremely difficult for states to pass law restricting it. Conversely, were the US gubbamint to place significant restrictions on P2P and those laws held up in the federal courts, then that would pretty much preclude it's use anywhere in the US, given the interstate nature of the 'net.
Oh yeah - IANACLE.
- Jeff
"Long as you're not afraid, nobody can run your life for you. Remember that. Hell is being scared of things. Heaven is refusing to be scared." - Tom Robbins
Ah well, I got this:r trek.te ch/2003-07/0355.html
http://www.cm.nu/~shane/lists/rec.arts.sta
Just trying to give an example. Do a regular google search and you'll get a reasonable number of hits which are reffering to ST as an oater (plus plenty of other garbage of course).
I don't think I ever heard Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica called "oaters."
Hang out among sci-fi geeks of a certain age (ie those of us who remember Bonanza and classic Trek) and you'll hear them called [space]oaters all the time. Google: 'oater "Star Trek"' and hit "I feel Lucky". Bam - there you go!
But I agree with you that Firefly holds closer to the classic recipe.
Series was a space oater set 500 years in the future,
tracking the journeys of the crew aboard the Serenity.
Ah yes, a "space oater." I'm fond of those.
Actually, it's a real term, sort of. An oater is what they used to call Western soap operas (usually episodic) which were popular back in the middle third of the 20th century (think the weekly Will Rogers featurettes at the movies, or TV's Bonanza). A space oater is just a space opera that borrows western themes or has a western flair. Star Trek (the original) arguably falls into this category, as does Battlestar Galactica.
Any idea of what Apple's current earnings are right now?
l ts .html
...
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2004/jan/14resu
Apple Reports First Quarter Results
Revenue Increases 36 Percent Year-Over-Year
CUPERTINO, California--January 14, 2004--Apple(R) today announced financial results for its fiscal 2004 first quarter ended December 27, 2003. For the quarter, the Company posted a net profit of $63 million, or $.17 per diluted share. These results compare to a net loss of $8 million, or $.02 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Revenue for the quarter reached a four-year high of $2.006 billion, up 36 percent from the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 26.7 percent, down from 27.6 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 44 percent of the quarter's revenue.
Apple got everything right with the Newton except the size. What a foolish mistake they made cancelling it as a product instead of redesigning it in a slightly smaller form factor.
True story - I was a Newton developer back in the day, and while on a business trip to the west coast, I damaged my Newt (cracked the screen by dropping it against the corner of a marble table) just before a client presentation. I called the folks in Cupertino and they very graciously agreed to take a look at it. I drove down right away, and was met by someone from developer relations who swore me to secrecy because there was a huge "NEWTON INC." banner hanging in the lobby - yes, this happened just a day before Apple announced the rollout of Newton into its own subsidiary.
Anyway, she took me down to the repair lab, where a couple of very interesting fellows proceeded to open my machine and replace the screen while I waited. As they worked, I looked casually around and in addition to the regular zoo of MPs and eMates, I spied several devices that made me drool - at least two different tablet devices (one roughly letter-sized and one even larger) and a large wristwatch sized device with a screen and a Newton logo.
I was very excited because as a developer, I knew that the NewtonOS was designed in such a way that it could support displays of almost arbitrarily large or small sizes (I think that when figured at ~80dpi the largest display can be almost a couple hundred meters on a side). The layout of screen elements in a Newton app is done using relative coordinates, so the same sw will run full-screen on an MP130 or a 2x00 even though one has a display half again as large. A well-written app can even make decisions about which elements to display, if there is too little screen real estate to show all the controls at once. God, I loved NewtonScript!
Anyway, none of the Newton folks would answer any questions - they were in serious info-lockdown mode, and I didn't press, figuring that I'd hear about it soon. Alas, it was not to be, for Jobs had just returned to power and shut down the Newton Inc. experiment before it ever got off the ground.
Wouldn't it have been great if they had been allowed to try? Contrary to popular belief, the Newton division was starting to generate substantial positive revenue and Sandy Bennet, head of the Newton Group, gave a presentation to the board showing that all R&D costs would be paid off in less than 5 years - pretty good in the consumer electronics industry for a completely new platform. Alas, Jobs had just returned to power and saw Newton as part of his now-enemy Scully's legacy. Like the new alpha lion of a pride, he felt he had to kill all his predecessors offspring.
Sorry SuperBanana, I too have a 2100 (have had several actually, and at least one of every other commercially released version of Newton hw - I was a Newt developer for several years), and the later versions of hwr (hand writing recognition) work great for me - I can easily correct letters "out of order". (The first version of newton hwr deserved the jibes but it was quickly updated to truly useful versions - public opinion damage was already done unfortunately).
Have you tried tweaking prefs>handwriting recognition>options>fine tuning? Sliding the "Recognize my handwriting" towards "slower, more accurately" will help with recognition (you do have the Newt tuned to learn your hw, yes? That option is off by default). And also in fine tuning, if you slide "Transform my handwriting" towards "after a delay" you will have more time to make mid-course corrections. Taking the time to adjust these two settings (and those in p>hr>o>letter shapes) can make all the difference in usability.
It's really unfortunate that Apple/Newton never took the time to create a good user tutorial on how to train the Newt hwr. Many people who came to our Boston user groups meetings back in the day would have a complete turnaround wrt their Newtons after we spent just a few minutes showing them how to effectively train the hwr engine.
Great GoogliMoogli - is it really Allen Varney? Creator of GLOBBO - the best magazine insert bonus game ever! And the third(?) Illuminati expansion set, and an amazing number of high-quality gaming supplements (Paranoia's "Send in the Clones" - yes!), and probably far more stuff of which I'm completely unaware.
And I thought *I* was an amazingly old fart to be hanging out on Slashdot!
Judging by the last couple of years, I had'nt realised that the Whitehouse had a scientific advisor!!
Actually, Bush didn't nominate a Science Advisor until a year and a half after he came into office! And the Senate didn't get around to approving the nomination until October of 2001.
The fellow's name is John Marburger, btw. A physicist who used to be the president of SUNY and then ran Brookhaven Labs (one of the DoE's big research facilities).