As one of my teachers used to say when asked how long an essay should be, "As long as a piece of string." In other words, it should be as long as it needs to be to serve the subject.
That answer doesn't have any oomph. The one I always use is that an essay, like a
speech, should be like a miniskirt: long enough to cover the subject, and short
enough to maintain interest.
I used to think the NFL was the world's greatest hype machine, with the
annual orgy of coverage about the Super Bowl, a game that's usually not
as interesting as the commercials.
But Apple has probably gotten something like a billion dollars of free
publicity for six months about the iPhone, which almost nobody
has actually held in their hands yet. I'm convinced that the business
last week with Safari was planned way in advance, as was this bit with
the batteries and the screen, so that in the last few weeks before the
iPhone came out Apple would be getting more gobs of free press.
Is there anybody who works the press as well as Steve Jobs?
Everybody who talks about Michael Moore or Cuba in response to that
stunt is an idiot. Michael Moore isn't important. Cuba isn't even
very important. Talking about either is showing a complete lack of
priorities.
What's important is that US heroes felt they couldn't get the care
they needed inside the USA.
Whenever I read an article in the paper about conjoined twins who come
to this country to be separated, I feel good about the USA. I'm glad I
don't live in a country where you have to go to a more advanced place to
get complex medical care. I feel sorry for people who live in those
places, and I'm happy that at least we were here to help them out.
But then we get a story like this, and it's not even poor villagers: these were 9/11 workers, the heroes lauded in so many speeches for months after
the attacks. And we DO live in the kind of country that people have to
go overseas for care.
Nobody was talking about those workers, so Michael Moore pulled one of his
attention-grabbing stunts. It's distasteful, but if it's the only way to
get people to talk about the 9/11 workers, I can put up with it.
And the response? The country's ample supply of idiots STILL won't talk
about the 9/11 workers. They'll only talk about Michael Moore and Cuba.
This was my friend's idea of how to destroy the CCCP. You take every classified document in the US, shuffle, and ship.
An attorney I know says this is common practice during discovery, if you've got something bad that
your opponents can use in court. You give them a couple pallet-loads of documents and let the client go broke trying to pay lawyer time for everybody reading it. Most of it is crap, but the bit they care about (and which the court ordered them to hand over) is buried in there somewhere.
My friend tells me this is so common they have a name for it, "papering them over".
Well, to be fair, linking to the Brady Campaign's website is about as balanced as linking to the RIAA's page on piracy.
I'm pretty sure nobody from the RIAA has ever been shot in the head with
a used CD.
PARANOID LUNATICS PLEASE NOTE: I do not advocate shooting anyone in the
head ever with anything. This is intended to point out that used CDs are
not actually as dangerous as guns.
Not sure that'll be enough; I sure hope the weather is nice in Cuba...
It's a website in the USA run by US citizens. What's wrong with an Amero-centric way of looking at it?
It's not YouTube's job to police the Japanese people. If the Japanese government wants to limit what their citizens can look at, they can do it themselves.
If Japan's laws say speeches can't be broadcast except through government-controlled TV, then I'm sorry, but that's the law.
It's a web page. It doesn't broadcast anything. People have to go and look for it.
A web page is nothing but a billboard in your front yard, except that everybody in the world can get a pair of huge binoculars, so they can see the billboard from wherever they are. YouTube is in the USA; Japan has no say whatever about what they put on their billboard. If Japan doesn't want Japanese citizens to be able to see YouTube's billboard, they can ban binoculars.
I'm a US citizen. I don't give up my First Amendment rights for anybody. As long as I'm not stomping the rights of someone who created a work, I feel totally free to put anything on my web page that I like, and if people in Japan don't like it they can turn off their computers. It's my billboard. MINE. I'll say ANYTHING on it I want to. And if you want to say something too, maybe I'll let you have a corner. And anyone who doesn't like what I have to say is out of luck.
At least once a week, I try to visit ArabNews.com, MoscowTimes.ru, xinuanet.com, francedaily.com, and japantimes.co.jp. The point of a World-Wide Web, it seems to me, is to encounter things from all around the world. ArabNews often has the most amazing cartoons, such as this one:
http://www.arabnews.com/cartoon/2003/07/06.jpg.
Another interesting source is WatchingAmerica.com, which has English translations of articles from foreign
sources. Many sites have different material for locals than they have for foreigners, and it's interesting to see what they say in their own languages.
Every week or so I also hit a few political sites, such as thenation.com and amconmag.com, again to get different views on different issues.
For general knowledge, I hit The Numbers Guy at the Wall Street Journal, Bruce Schneier's blog at schneier.com and TheStraightDope.com.
The only reason Microsoft has the position they do is that the governments of various countries have made it illegal for you to access information in certain ways. If it wasn't for government interference in the free actions of individuals, there would be no copyright laws at all. The government interferes with people's activities in this case because they contend an overall social good results.
Now, the governments have concluded that interfering with Microsoft will produce an overall social good. For Microsoft defenders to speak as if government interference is always a bad thing is ridiculous: they are complaining about the very thing that gives Microsoft any position at all.
And for what it's worth, if I were the CIA in the U.S., you'd bet I'd be leaning on Microsoft to seriously backdoor every piece of software that it sold for military purposes abroad.
You might do that, but that's not all you'd do.
If I were the CIA, I'd be sure that at least a dozen or
so CIA agents with impeccable references applied for jobs at Microsoft, and had back doors
in the code and smuggled private stuff out for analysis and all kinds of similar work. I'd also do that if
I were the FSB, or Mossad, or any other government intelligence agency. But as Microsoft is
in the USA, I'd figure the CIA has an easier time of it.
I'd also have agents at Sun, and Apple, and IBM, and Xerox. This isn't a Microsoft rant; this
is just pointing out that "good spy agencies have good spies anywhere machines are made that
process important information".
The National ID Card is a bad idea because the assumption will be that if
you have the card, you must be you. Since everyone will assume forging the
card is impossible, someone who forges one won't have to worry about being
challenged.
Consider it from an efficiency perspective: there are 300million people
in the USA. If the ID card system is 99.9% accurate (a measure far beyond
what the government is likely to do), that means that, at any given time,
300,000 of the cards will be wrong.
I speak here from experience: I once got a parking ticket for a car I did
not own. According to the New Jersey department of Motor Vehicle Services,
that license plate number was connected to my name. But I had never owned
any car with that license plate number, in New Jersey or any other state.
When I asked my lawyer what I should do, he said "Just write a letter to the
court explaining that the records are in error." I asked if the judge was
going to believe that, and he said "Stuff like that happens all the time."
He was blasé about it; government records are so riddled with errors
that people who deal with them all the time don't even think the errors are
a big deal.
But once people get brainwashed into believing that THIS card can never
be faked or incorrect -- something that's never happened and is actually
impossible -- who's going to believe you when you say "That wasn't me."?
Grammar tip: don't use the same word three times in one sentence.
Ever read Churchill's `fight' speech?
We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.
My question, based on less-than-satisfactory experiences as a customer with both companies,
is "What happens when something goes wrong?"
Will Ford say that it's not their responsibility to fix the troubles from Microsoft? Will users have
to sign an EULA that says "This car comes with no warranty"?
What if people try to get repairs for the system under the warranty, and Microsoft shafts Ford
on supporting their stuff, the way Microsoft has shafted everybody they've ever partnered with?
Can even Microsoft hold off a lawsuit from a major carmaker?
And has a fixed-width table!
on
Slashdot's Vastu
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Even worse than being ugly, the page uses fixed-width tables for
layout:
But you don't want that kind, if you like Monty Python.
You want somebody who shares your interests, and has enough
common background to get your jokes.
Lots of family communication is by short-cut, when you refer to
some shared experience. Having one-phrase ways of saying entire
paragraphs is good for a relationship. When some politician is on
TV talking rubbish, and I say "I think he will not so much fly as
plummet.", not only have I communicated, I've made her laugh too.
There's no reason you couldn't be for Microsoft and also be
for some other entity too. The deception would pretending to
be for Microsoft alone. But if you work for the NSA,
and you get a job at Microsoft, you may well write good code,
and fix security holes, and otherwise help them succeed
even while ensuring NSA access to things secured using
Microsoft products. Very few things in life are
completely either/or.
If Microsoft caught you and you got sued, the last thing that
would happen is the NSA saying a word. I suspect the
following, in decreasing order of probability:
You make it look like a huge mistake.
You tell them you wrote your password down and put it
in your wallet, and your wallet was lost and later
returned, and you didn't think to update the password.
Some heretofore unknown rich uncle dies and leaves you
enough money to cover the lawsuit.
You die in an auto accident.
In any case, before placing an asset in such a position,
the NSA would probably train such a person with the right
lies to tell if something goes wrong.
If I were going to do something like that, I'd make
up a fake history for the person before Microsoft hired
him, and if he got caught then the FBI could investigate
and tell Microsoft he was actually a spy for the Mossad.
It wasn't even his real name or anything!
But for sure the NSA would keep their name out of it.
There's a reason they're known as the "No Such Agency".
Aside from the obvious "what about buffer overruns?"
questions, aimed at the usually poor competence Microsoft
shows in writing code, there's also "what about cryptographic
strength?" question -- maybe the NSA already has a simple
and fast way to break whatever encryption BitLocker will
end up using.
And, of course, there may well be several people working at
Microsoft who actually work for the NSA or MI-6 or the FSB.
(I'd be astonished if there weren't at least a few such
people on the Microsoft payroll.) Those people may well
do things as described in
Reflections
on Trusting Trust, without letting their superiors
know.
I think one of the biggest problems facing our society is not being willing to acknowledge when the other group is correct or when we are wrong.
Before the 2004 elections, I asked people who supported Bush
to name five issues on which they thought Bush was wrong, and
people who supported Kerry to name five issues on which Kerry
was wrong. To prime the pump, and demonstrate my own good
will, and be bipartisan, I named five issues on which
I believed both men were lost.
I posted the request for "where is your guy wrong?" to several Usenet groups, sent it to some newspaper columnists
who had made endorsements, and sent it out to a few mailing lists. I was really hoping for some intelligent replies.
I got exactly one reply, by e-mail, from a Republican
columnist. Nobody in any newsgroup, nobody on any mailing
list, not even the people I'd mailed it to directly asking
for their opinions, said a word. When I tried to follow up after the election, the replies made it clear: 99% of
people didn't want to think about the idea that they were
supporting a candidate who might be wrong on some issue.
Walter Lippman was right: "Where all think alike, none
think very much."
Slashdot Mirror
They randomise starting back-rank positions now in some tournaments, to stave off the eventual "book death" that has already conquered checkers.
I made up my own variation with randomness that I call Schrödinger's Chess.
Let me know if you try it out.
As one of my teachers used to say when asked how long an essay should be, "As long as a piece of string." In other words, it should be as long as it needs to be to serve the subject.
That answer doesn't have any oomph. The one I always use is that an essay, like a speech, should be like a miniskirt: long enough to cover the subject, and short enough to maintain interest.
I am not sure that i want anyone but those i tell to know if darren@yahoo.com and darren@gmail.com is read by the same person.
Of course they're read the by the same person: Alberto Gonzalez.
I used to think the NFL was the world's greatest hype machine, with the annual orgy of coverage about the Super Bowl, a game that's usually not as interesting as the commercials.
But Apple has probably gotten something like a billion dollars of free publicity for six months about the iPhone, which almost nobody has actually held in their hands yet. I'm convinced that the business last week with Safari was planned way in advance, as was this bit with the batteries and the screen, so that in the last few weeks before the iPhone came out Apple would be getting more gobs of free press.
Is there anybody who works the press as well as Steve Jobs?
Everybody who talks about Michael Moore or Cuba in response to that stunt is an idiot. Michael Moore isn't important. Cuba isn't even very important. Talking about either is showing a complete lack of priorities.
What's important is that US heroes felt they couldn't get the care they needed inside the USA.
Whenever I read an article in the paper about conjoined twins who come to this country to be separated, I feel good about the USA. I'm glad I don't live in a country where you have to go to a more advanced place to get complex medical care. I feel sorry for people who live in those places, and I'm happy that at least we were here to help them out.
But then we get a story like this, and it's not even poor villagers: these were 9/11 workers, the heroes lauded in so many speeches for months after the attacks. And we DO live in the kind of country that people have to go overseas for care.
Nobody was talking about those workers, so Michael Moore pulled one of his attention-grabbing stunts. It's distasteful, but if it's the only way to get people to talk about the 9/11 workers, I can put up with it.
And the response? The country's ample supply of idiots STILL won't talk about the 9/11 workers. They'll only talk about Michael Moore and Cuba.
Zaphod Beeblebrox for president!
Isn't he actually two? One head leans to the left, and one leans to the right?
This was my friend's idea of how to destroy the CCCP. You take every classified document in the US, shuffle, and ship.
An attorney I know says this is common practice during discovery, if you've got something bad that your opponents can use in court. You give them a couple pallet-loads of documents and let the client go broke trying to pay lawyer time for everybody reading it. Most of it is crap, but the bit they care about (and which the court ordered them to hand over) is buried in there somewhere.
My friend tells me this is so common they have a name for it, "papering them over".
Medically, this is interesting, but of course if Lincoln had
been shot in 2007, it would have been with a modern gun...
Well, to be fair, linking to the Brady Campaign's website is about as balanced as linking to the RIAA's page on piracy.
I'm pretty sure nobody from the RIAA has ever been shot in the head with a used CD.
PARANOID LUNATICS PLEASE NOTE: I do not advocate shooting anyone in the head ever with anything. This is intended to point out that used CDs are not actually as dangerous as guns.
Not sure that'll be enough; I sure hope the weather is nice in Cuba...
He could have made a map of the White House, or perhaps the Pentagon?
I suppose Sunstorm Interactive, creators of Duke It Out In D.C., are already on their way to Gitmo.
It's a website in the USA run by US citizens. What's wrong with an Amero-centric way of looking at it?
It's not YouTube's job to police the Japanese people. If the Japanese government wants to limit what their citizens can look at, they can do it themselves.
If Japan's laws say speeches can't be broadcast except through government-controlled TV, then I'm sorry, but that's the law.
It's a web page. It doesn't broadcast anything. People have to go and look for it. A web page is nothing but a billboard in your front yard, except that everybody in the world can get a pair of huge binoculars, so they can see the billboard from wherever they are. YouTube is in the USA; Japan has no say whatever about what they put on their billboard. If Japan doesn't want Japanese citizens to be able to see YouTube's billboard, they can ban binoculars.
I'm a US citizen. I don't give up my First Amendment rights for anybody. As long as I'm not stomping the rights of someone who created a work, I feel totally free to put anything on my web page that I like, and if people in Japan don't like it they can turn off their computers. It's my billboard. MINE. I'll say ANYTHING on it I want to. And if you want to say something too, maybe I'll let you have a corner. And anyone who doesn't like what I have to say is out of luck.
At least once a week, I try to visit ArabNews.com, MoscowTimes.ru, xinuanet.com, francedaily.com, and japantimes.co.jp. The point of a World-Wide Web, it seems to me, is to encounter things from all around the world. ArabNews often has the most amazing cartoons, such as this one: http://www.arabnews.com/cartoon/2003/07/06.jpg.
Another interesting source is WatchingAmerica.com, which has English translations of articles from foreign sources. Many sites have different material for locals than they have for foreigners, and it's interesting to see what they say in their own languages.
Every week or so I also hit a few political sites, such as thenation.com and amconmag.com, again to get different views on different issues.
For general knowledge, I hit The Numbers Guy at the Wall Street Journal, Bruce Schneier's blog at schneier.com and TheStraightDope.com.
The only reason Microsoft has the position they do is that the governments of various countries have made it illegal for you to access information in certain ways. If it wasn't for government interference in the free actions of individuals, there would be no copyright laws at all. The government interferes with people's activities in this case because they contend an overall social good results.
Now, the governments have concluded that interfering with Microsoft will produce an overall social good. For Microsoft defenders to speak as if government interference is always a bad thing is ridiculous: they are complaining about the very thing that gives Microsoft any position at all.
And for what it's worth, if I were the CIA in the U.S., you'd bet I'd be leaning on Microsoft to seriously backdoor every piece of software that it sold for military purposes abroad.
You might do that, but that's not all you'd do. If I were the CIA, I'd be sure that at least a dozen or so CIA agents with impeccable references applied for jobs at Microsoft, and had back doors in the code and smuggled private stuff out for analysis and all kinds of similar work. I'd also do that if I were the FSB, or Mossad, or any other government intelligence agency. But as Microsoft is in the USA, I'd figure the CIA has an easier time of it.
I'd also have agents at Sun, and Apple, and IBM, and Xerox. This isn't a Microsoft rant; this is just pointing out that "good spy agencies have good spies anywhere machines are made that process important information".
The National ID Card is a bad idea because the assumption will be that if you have the card, you must be you. Since everyone will assume forging the card is impossible, someone who forges one won't have to worry about being challenged.
Consider it from an efficiency perspective: there are 300million people in the USA. If the ID card system is 99.9% accurate (a measure far beyond what the government is likely to do), that means that, at any given time, 300,000 of the cards will be wrong.
I speak here from experience: I once got a parking ticket for a car I did not own. According to the New Jersey department of Motor Vehicle Services, that license plate number was connected to my name. But I had never owned any car with that license plate number, in New Jersey or any other state. When I asked my lawyer what I should do, he said "Just write a letter to the court explaining that the records are in error." I asked if the judge was going to believe that, and he said "Stuff like that happens all the time." He was blasé about it; government records are so riddled with errors that people who deal with them all the time don't even think the errors are a big deal.
But once people get brainwashed into believing that THIS card can never be faked or incorrect -- something that's never happened and is actually impossible -- who's going to believe you when you say "That wasn't me."?
Grammar tip: don't use the same word three times in one sentence.
Ever read Churchill's `fight' speech?
that most of the living creatures on the planet have sex
Not to be pedantic, but most of the living creatures on the planet are asexual.
My question, based on less-than-satisfactory experiences as a customer with both companies, is "What happens when something goes wrong?"
Will Ford say that it's not their responsibility to fix the troubles from Microsoft? Will users have to sign an EULA that says "This car comes with no warranty"?
What if people try to get repairs for the system under the warranty, and Microsoft shafts Ford on supporting their stuff, the way Microsoft has shafted everybody they've ever partnered with? Can even Microsoft hold off a lawsuit from a major carmaker?
Even worse than being ugly, the page uses fixed-width tables for layout:
She shouldn't be writing books on web design; she needs to read quite a few of them first.
But you don't want that kind, if you like Monty Python. You want somebody who shares your interests, and has enough common background to get your jokes.
Lots of family communication is by short-cut, when you refer to some shared experience. Having one-phrase ways of saying entire paragraphs is good for a relationship. When some politician is on TV talking rubbish, and I say "I think he will not so much fly as plummet.", not only have I communicated, I've made her laugh too.
There's no reason you couldn't be for Microsoft and also be for some other entity too. The deception would pretending to be for Microsoft alone. But if you work for the NSA, and you get a job at Microsoft, you may well write good code, and fix security holes, and otherwise help them succeed even while ensuring NSA access to things secured using Microsoft products. Very few things in life are completely either/or.
If Microsoft caught you and you got sued, the last thing that would happen is the NSA saying a word. I suspect the following, in decreasing order of probability:
In any case, before placing an asset in such a position, the NSA would probably train such a person with the right lies to tell if something goes wrong. If I were going to do something like that, I'd make up a fake history for the person before Microsoft hired him, and if he got caught then the FBI could investigate and tell Microsoft he was actually a spy for the Mossad. It wasn't even his real name or anything! But for sure the NSA would keep their name out of it. There's a reason they're known as the "No Such Agency".
Aside from the obvious "what about buffer overruns?" questions, aimed at the usually poor competence Microsoft shows in writing code, there's also "what about cryptographic strength?" question -- maybe the NSA already has a simple and fast way to break whatever encryption BitLocker will end up using.
And, of course, there may well be several people working at Microsoft who actually work for the NSA or MI-6 or the FSB. (I'd be astonished if there weren't at least a few such people on the Microsoft payroll.) Those people may well do things as described in Reflections on Trusting Trust, without letting their superiors know.
I think one of the biggest problems facing our society is not being willing to acknowledge when the other group is correct or when we are wrong.
Before the 2004 elections, I asked people who supported Bush to name five issues on which they thought Bush was wrong, and people who supported Kerry to name five issues on which Kerry was wrong. To prime the pump, and demonstrate my own good will, and be bipartisan, I named five issues on which I believed both men were lost.
I posted the request for "where is your guy wrong?" to several Usenet groups, sent it to some newspaper columnists who had made endorsements, and sent it out to a few mailing lists. I was really hoping for some intelligent replies.
I got exactly one reply, by e-mail, from a Republican columnist. Nobody in any newsgroup, nobody on any mailing list, not even the people I'd mailed it to directly asking for their opinions, said a word. When I tried to follow up after the election, the replies made it clear: 99% of people didn't want to think about the idea that they were supporting a candidate who might be wrong on some issue.
Walter Lippman was right: "Where all think alike, none think very much."
There was no "film"; the researchers used a digital camera.
This seems like a really weak defense and I'd be interested to know what the justifications the judges are using to make such a ruling.
The Sixth Amendment to the Constitution says in part:
If the nature of the accusation is "this machine says you're drunk", then the operation of that machine is most certainly relevant information.