What is the consequence if the law treats any source of information for a reporter as a source? It just means the reporter can't be compelled to answer "Where did you get that information" all the time, including if the answer is, "I got it from a web search."
Now in most cases a reporter would answer the question, but the law simply gives them the option not to ask. It may be that the commenter on the blog is *also* a secret source who decided to make a public comment. There are other reasons.
I see no harm in saying that anything is a source, because it doesn't affect what people do, just what the reporter can be compelled to reveal.
And is it not useful for a journalist site to be able to say, "comments on this blog are anonymous and we can't be compelled to give you up" if the site wishes to? At to have them be able to back that up? Must the protected source information only come via a secret meeting?
The summary made me do a double-take, and if you RTFA you will see the summary is wrong. The real plate isn't based on the fake plates. The fake plates were a copy of Armando's plate long ago, he made them himself. When Armando left New Hampshire, maddog apparently took over the plate.
I have one of the fake plates from Usenix, when Armando had dec make them.
Correct. In particular, there you are showing that if you run somebody else over, that you can pay for what you did. The government only requires insurance to cover you hurting other people on the road, as it can't be sure you will have the means to pay when something happens.
You are not required to buy collision or theft, though if you have a car loan the bank will probably demand it, as they don't want to worry that you won't pay back the loan on your stolen car with them having no repo ability.
There is no free lunch. Of course it costs you. There is a subsidy in that it is untaxed income, but leaving that aside, the plan costs the employer money. It is part of their cost of hiring you, and if they didn't pay it you could negotiate more pay.
Note that being economically viable is *not* the same as being the most cost effective way to reduce load on the dirty grid. When it's not viable, it is silly to do it from a financial standpoint, and your only reason is to waste some money making the world a greener place. After it's viable you can come up with a more direct justification. But If you can make the world 10x greener with your money by not using solar panels, what is the right decision?
That's how bad PV is -- they don't have to recoup the energy output or savings to do a better job of being green! It's just amazing.
With PV you (or government subsidies) will spend perhaps $250 to $300 to remove a MWH from the grid, and then save $100 (10 cents/kwh, your rate may vary) by not having to buy the power.
With CFL lights, you might spend $39 giving away lights to people to remove a MWH from the dirty grid. You don't reap any of the savings -- the people you gave the lights get those -- but as you can see, better to spend $39 and get no savings than to spend $300 and save $100.
With new fridges you spend about $100 to take a MWH off the grid. Again, you get none of the power savings, the person you gave the new fridge to gets that. But you still remove more MWH from the dirty grid per buck as with solar.
If you can capture the savings, either because it's your lights and fridge, or the person you give the fridge to pays them back to you, even better!
Right. Insurance is for that catastrophic thing you can't afford to handle yourself (or which you expose yourself to so rarely that you can't self insure.) So a medical repatriation might qualify, but a damaged bag does not.
Replacing screens can be a pain, actually, and people overcharge for them.
When I wrecked a screen on an older laptop, I saw somebody selling the exact same laptop (down to the sub-model) on eBay with no hard drive. I picked that up cheap, and took out my hard drive from the old laptop and slotted it in the new one -- bingo, easy fix full working laptop. plus I had the driveless, screenless laptop as well to do things with. These can be useful, for example you can put a flash card in them or an older drive, and make them drive a digital picture frame, or mythtv station etc.
It should be impossible, in theory, and usually in practice, for insurance to be a good value for anybody who flies with any frequency. Insurance companies make profits, after all. They probably pay out half of what they take in, if that.
Insurance is only for risks where you can't handle the cost of the risk. For example, financially you could not handle replacing your house, so fire insurance makes sense. Life insurance can make sense to look after a family. Health insurance to cover a $300,000 operation can make sense, while dental or optical plans make little sense. Extended warranties (which are just insurance) make no sense and are very high margin because of that. Which is why they push them on you.
For anything small, it is far better to self-insure. That's a mathematical certainty.
Now there are two exceptions. One, if you know you are taking a risk that is far above average, and the insurance company hasn't figured out to charge you more or block you, insurance can be a value. Secondly, with medical insurance, you may find you don't want to have to consider cost when making medical decisions, you just want it covered. (Of course now an insurance company will be weighing cost as it decides if you are covered.)
Solar PV is one of the least efficient ways to take money and make the world greener. As a charitable organization, the Vatican could get 50x the MWH offsets per buck by giving away efficient lighting, or if that is too abstract it could get 3x the MWH offset per dollar by buying new fridges for the poor who have old fridges from 1990 and earlier. Those fridges from the past use 2-3 times the energy per year that a modern one does, and so it is much greener if the Vatican buys them for the poor and uses grid power itself rather than putting up wasteful solar panels.
As I said, I know there are scripts, and I have used them. What I am saying is that this should be the new expected way because it is really superior in every way except on a machine that won't boot from the drives you have in mind.
(It's even the superior way on a system which won't boot. In that case, burn a generic CD which will boot for you, and have it then complete the process from the external drive/stick. That booting CD would not need to change for new distros.)
As I result, I encourage distros to offer the USB stick/drive image by default, and a script to turn it into an ISO, rather than other way round as it is done right now.
Work to convince the big distros of the world -- I'm looking at you Ubuntu -- to switch from using CD Rom Images as their prime mode of distribution to bootable flash/usb/ide disk images. Once you've tried it this way you will never go back, and you will now have a use for little drives.
Of course there are scripts that will turn the CD images into usb stick images, but they are time consuming taking away some of the time you save booting from a quicker medium. Instead of releasing a CD and a script to convert it, release a drive image and a script to turn that into an ISO, or release both.
(Plus, with writable media, it's easier to add a 2nd partition where the user can stuff drivers, localization scripts, answers to install questions etc.)
Then you could also donate all these media to linux distros who could fill them up with linux live disks and installs, and mail them out to people for postage.
This is brilliant because it's simple. People have dreamed and worked on flying cars for ages. And failed. They could not figure a way around the trade-offs. Make it too much like a plane and it's hard to get the wings away for driving.
With a cloth wing, this is mainly a car, but if you come to something you can't drive across, or want to fly over, and the weather is good, you can fly over it.
It is not the car that takes off from your house like Moller or the Jetsons, nor a plane that only goes to airports. I think it's a very clever compromise. No reason for it to cost 50,000 pounds though, and soon it probably won't.
Re:Don't give up on the made-up words
on
Anathem
·
· Score: 1
You don't have to use the words to appreciate them. Without going into too many spoilers, it is important that the book convey what is different about this society, how it is not Earth, and how it has a much deeper history of advanced thought than present-day Earth.
The words are one of the prime means to communicate this. If he used regular words, like "technology" instead of "praxis" you might fall into the trap of thinking this is Earth. The key is to use just enough new words to make it alien, but not so many as to make it unreadable.
NS (and his friends who helped) do a pretty good job at this balance, though obviously some are complaining they went too far.
A large number of the made-up words are things like the names of philosophies, ancient philosophers and historical events. For these there is no choice to make up words, because to use Earth proper names would really give the wrong message. He's trying to show the deep history of Arbre and so he makes up names for important events in its political and more specifically intellectual history.
If he called it "Catholic church" instead of "Ark of Baz" it would miss what he's trying to do.
Now there are a bunch of words that you might consider arbitrary -- making up new words for trucks, cars, cell phones, camcorders and the like. You might criticise these but there really aren't so many of them. Most of the new words are for concepts and events that are different, even if subtly, from ours.
Re:Very disappointing review.
on
Anathem
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
While you may or may not want to read Anathem, don't decide not to based on this review, which misses the mark about what's good and bad in the book.
Don't give up on the made-up words
on
Anathem
·
· Score: 1
First of all, here's my more detailed review of Anathem, including a latter half (with warnings) that is discussion of the ending of the book, which of course means spoilers.
I guess you will either hate or love the made-up words. No questions they are not for everybody, and they do create a barrier to some who want to read it, but by the end you are enjoying them, even speaking them in your geeky conversations. I think you will find people in the nerd community using these words in conversations for years to come.
This book does indeed have the best ending of a NS work -- but that's not saying much. While now there is an ending, the question is how much the ending makes sense (see the spoilers for more discussion of that.)
However, one thing I will give the ending -- the very last 3 pages give you important realizations that reinform your reading of the entire book, and see it in a new light, and that's pretty high praise for an ending. However, not everybody gets these big revelations, I have seen, so see my spoilers as to why.
Clearly this book is only for those who like exploring philosophy and science. But for those who do like these things, this book is a must-read.
As for length, I agree somewhat, in that I think the book could have worked by removing the trip over the pole (moving the few plot-essential elements from that to other circumstances) but I don't think the beginning is slow. I think a lot happens in the beginning.
This is a very complex issue. We moved from time-sharing and mainframes to PCs, even though the PCs were slower and with clunky software because they were under our control. They had one super powerful attribute: Nobody could tell you "no" when you wanted to do something on them.
People will put up with a lot, in order to not have somebody who can tell you no.
That's why, even when the timesharing has had many technological advantages, such as greater efficiency, ability to roam, and having somebody else maintain things for you, the "inferior" PC has always won.
However, it's possible that this new wave of cloud computing/web 2.0 might be the first real incursion. That's because you can choose from a variety of different places to host your web apps, and also because we've made maintaining the software on your own computer harder and harder and harder.
But it's dangerous. The courts ruled that the 4th amendment doesn't apply to your data in the hands of 3rd parties. It really means your data in your house. Cloud computing runs the risk of erasing the 4th amendment as we store all our lives in the hands of 3rd parties. No small feat.
And now there's a movement afoot under the name "data portability" which sounds nice but really means "bulk export of your personal data made easy." What can be shared, will be shared. What you make easy to do will be done.
I've written some essays on these topics you may find of interest, including:
And these on a proposal to reverse could computing that I call "data hosting." In such a system, you have a server (or pay for one) which holds your data, and applications come to your data and run in sandboxes on it, sending output to your browser.
There is no easy answer. People will love the positive features of cloud computing, and it will be a tall order to get them to switch to something that keeps those and doesn't have the negatives.
Yes, obviously his glide ratio must be much worse than that, since he needs the jets. Or perhaps this is just to look cool. How large a wing would you have to strap onto a suit to get a glide ratio of 15 to 1, with the non-aerodynamic shape of a human body?
In the 80s, I was building a "syntax directed editor" system called Alice Pascal. There was also a Basic version. You can download it and its source at http://www.templetons.com/brad/alice.html if you like.
Anyway, as a program structure editor, it had the ability for you to select a block of code and "hide" it, which mean replacing it on the screen with "..." and a comment. You could expand and re-hide the tree. Nice way to see the full structure on screen at one time.
It also had an interpreter.
During development, we had a new build and the interpreter (run command) had checked out OK. However, when we tested the hide function, the program crashed. The error message was boring, it was my reaction to the error that makes the other programmer smile to this very day.
Well, of course we differ, but in one respect you are clearly wrong. What will come of this, at a minimum, is that a court will consider what was done, and will examine the evidence of EFF witnesses. The court may rule against us, the court may rule that the case can't proceed due to state secrets, but at a minimum there will still have been a court. Right now we have unilateral action by the executive branch.
Forgot to add: The Blizzard case did not rule that reverse engineering is infringement. Rather, it hinged on whether they could enforce a "no reverse engineering" cause in the click-to-agree EULA on the games. We're going to see a lot more cases in the future (not just involving EFF) about what clauses in click-to-agree contracts are valid, I think I can predict.
The FISA amendment granted immunity to the phone companies for their civil liability for participating in illegal programs if they had proper assurances from the executive branch.
It did not, and as far as I know cannot grant immunity to government officials who violated the 4th amendment.
There is a suggestion in what you write that "reverse engineering... is infringement" because we lost the case. In cases such as these, there was a plaintiff declaring this to be so. This seems to imply that the defendants might have won had we not gotten involved, which is surely not not true. We may have wasted resources, of course.
But I hope nobody thinks you can win them all. If you win them all, you are in fact not at the edge, and we try to only take cases on the edge. In spite of that, we win a lot.
An attempt was made to dismiss the case against AT&T due to state secrets. The court ruled in EFF's favour, NOT to throw out the case. This was then appealed, but the court of appeals has yet to rule, and is unlikely to rule for some time due to the passage of the recent FISA bill, which granted immunity to phone companies who participated in illegal wiretaps if they got various assurances from the government.
At present, it is anticipated that they will come into the courtroom in the future and ask for this immunity, but this has yet to happen.
Slashdot Mirror
These bottles were banned two years ago, though not in the USA. This is hardly a bulletin.
What is the consequence if the law treats any source of information for a reporter as a source? It just means the reporter can't be compelled to answer "Where did you get that information" all the time, including if the answer is, "I got it from a web search."
Now in most cases a reporter would answer the question, but the law simply gives them the option not to ask. It may be that the commenter on the blog is *also* a secret source who decided to make a public comment. There are other reasons.
I see no harm in saying that anything is a source, because it doesn't affect what people do, just what the reporter can be compelled to reveal.
And is it not useful for a journalist site to be able to say, "comments on this blog are anonymous and we can't be compelled to give you up" if the site wishes to? At to have them be able to back that up? Must the protected source information only come via a secret meeting?
The summary made me do a double-take, and if you RTFA you will see the summary is wrong. The real plate isn't based on the fake plates. The fake plates were a copy of Armando's plate long ago, he made them himself. When Armando left New Hampshire, maddog apparently took over the plate.
I have one of the fake plates from Usenix, when Armando had dec make them.
Correct. In particular, there you are showing that if you run somebody else over, that you can pay for what you did. The government only requires insurance to cover you hurting other people on the road, as it can't be sure you will have the means to pay when something happens.
You are not required to buy collision or theft, though if you have a car loan the bank will probably demand it, as they don't want to worry that you won't pay back the loan on your stolen car with them having no repo ability.
There is no free lunch. Of course it costs you. There is a subsidy in that it is untaxed income, but leaving that aside, the plan costs the employer money. It is part of their cost of hiring you, and if they didn't pay it you could negotiate more pay.
Work out the math yourself or try the spreadsheet at http://ideas.4brad.com/are-solar-panels-wasteful-way-go-green
Note that being economically viable is *not* the same as being the most cost effective way to reduce load on the dirty grid. When it's not viable, it is silly to do it from a financial standpoint, and your only reason is to waste some money making the world a greener place. After it's viable you can come up with a more direct justification. But If you can make the world 10x greener with your money by not using solar panels, what is the right decision?
That's how bad PV is -- they don't have to recoup the energy output or savings to do a better job of being green! It's just amazing.
With PV you (or government subsidies) will spend perhaps $250 to $300 to remove a MWH from the grid, and then save $100 (10 cents/kwh, your rate may vary) by not having to buy the power.
With CFL lights, you might spend $39 giving away lights to people to remove a MWH from the dirty grid. You don't reap any of the savings -- the people you gave the lights get those -- but as you can see, better to spend $39 and get no savings than to spend $300 and save $100.
With new fridges you spend about $100 to take a MWH off the grid. Again, you get none of the power savings, the person you gave the new fridge to gets that. But you still remove more MWH from the dirty grid per buck as with solar.
If you can capture the savings, either because it's your lights and fridge, or the person you give the fridge to pays them back to you, even better!
Right. Insurance is for that catastrophic thing you can't afford to handle yourself (or which you expose yourself to so rarely that you can't self insure.) So a medical repatriation might qualify, but a damaged bag does not.
Replacing screens can be a pain, actually, and people overcharge for them.
When I wrecked a screen on an older laptop, I saw somebody selling the exact same laptop (down to the sub-model) on eBay with no hard drive. I picked that up cheap, and took out my hard drive from the old laptop and slotted it in the new one -- bingo, easy fix full working laptop. plus I had the driveless, screenless laptop as well to do things with. These can be useful, for example you can put a flash card in them or an older drive, and make them drive a digital picture frame, or mythtv station etc.
It should be impossible, in theory, and usually in practice, for insurance to be a good value for anybody who flies with any frequency. Insurance companies make profits, after all. They probably pay out half of what they take in, if that.
Insurance is only for risks where you can't handle the cost of the risk. For example, financially you could not handle replacing your house, so fire insurance makes sense. Life insurance can make sense to look after a family. Health insurance to cover a $300,000 operation can make sense, while dental or optical plans make little sense. Extended warranties (which are just insurance) make no sense and are very high margin because of that. Which is why they push them on you.
For anything small, it is far better to self-insure. That's a mathematical certainty.
Now there are two exceptions. One, if you know you are taking a risk that is far above average, and the insurance company hasn't figured out to charge you more or block you, insurance can be a value. Secondly, with medical insurance, you may find you don't want to have to consider cost when making medical decisions, you just want it covered. (Of course now an insurance company will be weighing cost as it decides if you are covered.)
Solar PV is one of the least efficient ways to take money and make the world greener. As a charitable organization, the Vatican could get 50x the MWH offsets per buck by giving away efficient lighting, or if that is too abstract it could get 3x the MWH offset per dollar by buying new fridges for the poor who have old fridges from 1990 and earlier. Those fridges from the past use 2-3 times the energy per year that a modern one does, and so it is much greener if the Vatican buys them for the poor and uses grid power itself rather than putting up wasteful solar panels.
As I said, I know there are scripts, and I have used them. What I am saying is that this should be the new expected way because it is really superior in every way except on a machine that won't boot from the drives you have in mind.
(It's even the superior way on a system which won't boot. In that case, burn a generic CD which will boot for you, and have it then complete the process from the external drive/stick. That booting CD would not need to change for new distros.)
As I result, I encourage distros to offer the USB stick/drive image by default, and a script to turn it into an ISO, rather than other way round as it is done right now.
Work to convince the big distros of the world -- I'm looking at you Ubuntu -- to switch from using CD Rom Images as their prime mode of distribution to bootable flash/usb/ide disk images. Once you've tried it this way you will never go back, and you will now have a use for little drives.
Of course there are scripts that will turn the CD images into usb stick images, but they are time consuming taking away some of the time you save booting from a quicker medium. Instead of releasing a CD and a script to convert it, release a drive image and a script to turn that into an ISO, or release both.
(Plus, with writable media, it's easier to add a 2nd partition where the user can stuff drivers, localization scripts, answers to install questions etc.)
Then you could also donate all these media to linux distros who could fill them up with linux live disks and installs, and mail them out to people for postage.
This is brilliant because it's simple. People have dreamed and worked on flying cars for ages. And failed. They could not figure a way around the trade-offs. Make it too much like a plane and it's hard to get the wings away for driving.
With a cloth wing, this is mainly a car, but if you come to something you can't drive across, or want to fly over, and the weather is good, you can fly over it.
It is not the car that takes off from your house like Moller or the Jetsons, nor a plane that only goes to airports. I think it's a very clever compromise. No reason for it to cost 50,000 pounds though, and soon it probably won't.
You don't have to use the words to appreciate them. Without going into too many spoilers, it is important that the book convey what is different about this society, how it is not Earth, and how it has a much deeper history of advanced thought than present-day Earth.
The words are one of the prime means to communicate this. If he used regular words, like "technology" instead of "praxis" you might fall into the trap of thinking this is Earth. The key is to use just enough new words to make it alien, but not so many as to make it unreadable.
NS (and his friends who helped) do a pretty good job at this balance, though obviously some are complaining they went too far.
A large number of the made-up words are things like the names of philosophies, ancient philosophers and historical events. For these there is no choice to make up words, because to use Earth proper names would really give the wrong message. He's trying to show the deep history of Arbre and so he makes up names for important events in its political and more specifically intellectual history.
If he called it "Catholic church" instead of "Ark of Baz" it would miss what he's trying to do.
Now there are a bunch of words that you might consider arbitrary -- making up new words for trucks, cars, cell phones, camcorders and the like. You might criticise these but there really aren't so many of them. Most of the new words are for concepts and events that are different, even if subtly, from ours.
While you may or may not want to read Anathem, don't decide not to based on this review, which misses the mark about what's good and bad in the book.
First of all, here's my more detailed review of Anathem, including a latter half (with warnings) that is discussion of the ending of the book, which of course means spoilers.
http://ideas.4brad.com/book-review-anathem-neal-stephenson
But some short responses:
I guess you will either hate or love the made-up words. No questions they are not for everybody, and they do create a barrier to some who want to read it, but by the end you are enjoying them, even speaking them in your geeky conversations. I think you will find people in the nerd community using these words in conversations for years to come.
This book does indeed have the best ending of a NS work -- but that's not saying much. While now there is an ending, the question is how much the ending makes sense (see the spoilers for more discussion of that.)
However, one thing I will give the ending -- the very last 3 pages give you important realizations that reinform your reading of the entire book, and see it in a new light, and that's pretty high praise for an ending. However, not everybody gets these big revelations, I have seen, so see my spoilers as to why.
Clearly this book is only for those who like exploring philosophy and science. But for those who do like these things, this book is a must-read.
As for length, I agree somewhat, in that I think the book could have worked by removing the trip over the pole (moving the few plot-essential elements from that to other circumstances) but I don't think the beginning is slow. I think a lot happens in the beginning.
This is a very complex issue. We moved from time-sharing and mainframes to PCs, even though the PCs were slower and with clunky software because they were under our control. They had one super powerful attribute: Nobody could tell you "no" when you wanted to do something on them.
People will put up with a lot, in order to not have somebody who can tell you no.
That's why, even when the timesharing has had many technological advantages, such as greater efficiency, ability to roam, and having somebody else maintain things for you, the "inferior" PC has always won.
However, it's possible that this new wave of cloud computing/web 2.0 might be the first real incursion. That's because you can choose from a variety of different places to host your web apps, and also because we've made maintaining the software on your own computer harder and harder and harder.
But it's dangerous. The courts ruled that the 4th amendment doesn't apply to your data in the hands of 3rd parties. It really means your data in your house. Cloud computing runs the risk of erasing the 4th amendment as we store all our lives in the hands of 3rd parties. No small feat.
And now there's a movement afoot under the name "data portability" which sounds nice but really means "bulk export of your personal data made easy." What can be shared, will be shared. What you make easy to do will be done.
I've written some essays on these topics you may find of interest, including:
http://ideas.4brad.com/tags/openid
And these on a proposal to reverse could computing that I call "data hosting." In such a system, you have a server (or pay for one) which holds your data, and applications come to your data and run in sandboxes on it, sending output to your browser.
http://ideas.4brad.com/tags/data-hosting
There is no easy answer. People will love the positive features of cloud computing, and it will be a tall order to get them to switch to something that keeps those and doesn't have the negatives.
Yes, obviously his glide ratio must be much worse than that, since he needs the jets. Or perhaps this is just to look cool. How large a wing would you have to strap onto a suit to get a glide ratio of 15 to 1, with the non-aerodynamic shape of a human body?
I guess it's more agile, too.
In the 80s, I was building a "syntax directed editor" system called Alice Pascal. There was also a Basic version. You can download it and its source at http://www.templetons.com/brad/alice.html if you like.
Anyway, as a program structure editor, it had the ability for you to select a block of code and "hide" it, which mean replacing it on the screen with "..." and a comment. You could expand and re-hide the tree. Nice way to see the full structure on screen at one time.
It also had an interpreter.
During development, we had a new build and the interpreter (run command) had checked out OK. However, when we tested the hide function, the program crashed. The error message was boring, it was my reaction to the error that makes the other programmer smile to this very day.
"Hmm. You can run, but you can't hide."
Well, of course we differ, but in one respect you are clearly wrong. What will come of this, at a minimum, is that a court will consider what was done, and will examine the evidence of EFF witnesses. The court may rule against us, the court may rule that the case can't proceed due to state secrets, but at a minimum there will still have been a court. Right now we have unilateral action by the executive branch.
Forgot to add: The Blizzard case did not rule that reverse engineering is infringement. Rather, it hinged on whether they could enforce a "no reverse engineering" cause in the click-to-agree EULA on the games. We're going to see a lot more cases in the future (not just involving EFF) about what clauses in click-to-agree contracts are valid, I think I can predict.
The FISA amendment granted immunity to the phone companies for their civil liability for participating in illegal programs if they had proper assurances from the executive branch.
It did not, and as far as I know cannot grant immunity to government officials who violated the 4th amendment.
There is a suggestion in what you write that "reverse engineering ... is infringement" because we lost the case. In cases such as these, there was a plaintiff declaring this to be so. This seems to imply that the defendants might have won had we not gotten involved, which is surely not not true. We may have wasted resources, of course.
But I hope nobody thinks you can win them all. If you win them all, you are in fact not at the edge, and we try to only take cases on the edge. In spite of that, we win a lot.
An attempt was made to dismiss the case against AT&T due to state secrets. The court ruled in EFF's favour, NOT to throw out the case. This was then appealed, but the court of appeals has yet to rule, and is unlikely to rule for some time due to the passage of the recent FISA bill, which granted immunity to phone companies who participated in illegal wiretaps if they got various assurances from the government.
At present, it is anticipated that they will come into the courtroom in the future and ask for this immunity, but this has yet to happen.