I was stunned and amazed when I read this sentence. I had to read it twice before I believed it! Someone actually spelled "ridiculous" correctly on slashdot! Its gotten so that it doesn't even look correct anymore. Nice work!
At first I thought you were "stunned and amazed" that such a bug could last so long.
The most common example is the Personal Toolbar--if you, for example, have a link to Slashdot in your personal toolbar, which you abbreviate so that it doesn't take up too much real estate (like "/."), that overwrites the bookmark name in your regular bookmarks list.
More generally, if you sort your bookmarks by category, certain bookmarks may fit into multiple categories.
The most dangerous thing about this bug is that if you delete one instance of the bookmark, you delete all such instances.
Mozilla has been my browser of choice for a while now, but it still has some serious bugs. So consider this criticism based in love. It's also encouraging that all these bugs have a real chance of being fixed. Even I could theoretically fix them.
There is a huge bug with bookmarks:
51683: Unable to have 2 differently named bookmarks for the same url.
This is more than a bit ridiculous, since the bug was submitted September 2000.
Another, less serious bookmark bug: 85469: Bookmark select/cut/paste operation is sensitive to order of selection
This is a major meta-bug: 73812: Browser doesn't fit with Mac OS X UI Specs
Anyone who uses a Mac uses it because of the user interface--having a program that doesn't comply with the guidelines is extraordinarily frustrating. But they're definitely getting closer.
Large textareas overwhelm Mozilla. This makes editing in WP, for example, very frustrating. Totally unacceptable.
However, it's great watching bugs get steadily fixed. So vote for the above bugs, get them fixed, submit patches, hooray. The rendering engine really is marvelous.
1. Wikipedia isn't currently actually compliant with the GNU FDL, since it doesn't have the necessary license notice. Also, the intent of the Bomis people is slightly out of sync with what the GFDL allows (with respect to attribution), though their hearts are in the right place.
Instead of adding something to Wikipedia, just release the book under the GNU FDL. Then content from the book could be incorporated into Wikipedia by anyone who wants to.
The GFDL seems overly ornate, but I've done a careful analysis of it, and particularly for print works it's concise and complete, especially if you don't have any invariant sections.
If that's the case, then all you have to do to be compliant with the GFDL is include the license and the license notice, make it clear what the title, author, and publisher are, and make available a "transparent" copy (e.g. a url to an ASCII/Tex etc. version of the book).
They've got this great service whereby their
site confirms that you own a CD, and then you
can use their catalog of MP3's on the fly, saving
the trouble of ripping all of your CDs one at a time. It's a classic example of the American dream, where innovation with new technology creates new markets, expanding the horizons of creativity and comfort while driving the economy to everyone's benefit.
Oh, wait, the recording industry, which takes huge profits from the work of creative artists long after any of its contributions to production and marketing have been recouped, and sells product to consumers at monopoly prices, thus gouging both sides of the buyer-seller equation, might not benefit.
This is something I've done a lot of research about, and in fact have discussed this issue with Kleinrock and Stewart Brand (who is pro-Baran & Davies), and read Davies' paper. The first thing people should know is that Katie Hafner is the author of "Where Wizards Stay Up Late", a book she assiduously researched but which many of the participants within claim she did a bad job on. I think they might be confusing some of it with Janet Abbate's "Inventing the Internet", which I wasn't terribly impressed by.
This is Hafner's passage of interest:
By the end of July, 1968, Roberts had finished drafting the RFP...It was a rich piece of technical prose, filled with an eclectic mix of ideas. Kleinrock had influsenced Roberts's earliest thoughts about the theoretical possibilities. Baran had contributed to the intellectual foundation on which the technical concept was based, and Roberts's dynamic routing scheme gave an extra nod to Baran's work; Roberts had adopted Davies' term "Packet" and incorporated his and Scantlebury's higher line speeds; Clark's subnet idea was a stroke of technical genius.
Then she continues with a quote from Baran that "Everything is tied to everything else" with respect to who did the most important part.
It's weird, because from my perspective the participants seem to be arguing and use strong language like "spreading lies" to describe the alternative history, but when you look at the specifics, the dispute lies on some very fine nuances which are evidently impossible to untangle now, and may only be creations of recent times.
The number one question, to my understanding, is whether packet switching is such a central concept that the work by Baran and Davies which details it (since they both built experimental packet-switching networks and then wrote extensively about them, providing a base of information for Roberts) is important, or whether it really should just be understood as a relatively arbitrary (and self-obvious) implementation of multiple-node store-and-forward queuing theory, which Kleinrock is the father of, no question.
Did Baran and Davies' work matter to the ARPANET? It pretty much has to have. Baran wrote multiple volumes of detailed information from his experimental network; those volumes were available to and used by Bob Taylor, Roberts' boss and (according to Brand, at least) in the Baran camp, and Roberts credits them heavily in his early work.
All the early documentary evidence points only to Baran and Davies. However, the close association of Roberts and Kleinrock, the fact that Roberts helped Kleinrock do his thesis by doing programming for it (funny fact: the third guy in their little Lincoln Lab thesis group was Ivan Sutherland), and Kleinrock's lab's role as the first IMP site and ARPANET analysis center makes it absurd to believe that Kleinrock's influence wasn't major.
Of course, framing the dispute this way ignores how crucial the work of BBN was in all of this; they were amazing in designing and building the IMP. While Roberts' RFP had insane amounts of information, the IMP Guys did equivalent amounts of new work and recreation of ideas in their proposal.
Actually, the subject's kind of a lie, but it's also kind of true. I was just talking about this very issue with my friend earlier, who's been getting very depressed about news addiction. We both live in New York City.
I've made sure that each day I go out into the city, talking with people, learning their stories, taking pictures.
<p class="Katzian">
What prevents the downward spiral of information-void-despair is becoming a white hole, sending out information as well. What we nerds/information Morlocks are good at is processing information--if all we're doing is storing, compiling it, it'll drive us crazy. It's crucial to find a way to create something with that knowledge.
</p>
What I've been doing with a bunch of other people is to build an open, free site in memoriam of the event and the victims--ostensibly as part of Wikipedia. That way the emphasis is on super-efficient information delivery, and it works just great as a balance on the news gathering addiction.
Of course, I'm currently having the apposite problem of overcreation, having spent the last 10 hours straight on it, but I'll deal. I'm making sure to get together with my friends, away from computers and hopefully televisions.
Speaking of which, radios seem to be the equivalent of the nicotine patch. They give me the info-dosage I need without trapping and obsessing me; a soothing buffer of bits instead of a mesmerizing stream.
So if you want help yourself, and you want to help--because telling the stories of the victims, or creating a definitive repository of knowledge, is so very helpful to everyone else--go to wikipedia and flood their servers with all the knowledge and analysis you've gleaned. Or figure out how to take over the information already used to make an even better site.
I'm hoping that I'll be able to get my fix from just this one site, so I won't have to ever be searching.
Some photos from Brooklyn, of the crowds leaving over the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges, of the smoke billowing out over the Manhattan skyline, occluding the sun.
Some friends of mine watched the fire spread down the floors from the plane crashes before the towers collapsed.
That analogy is not ESR; it's Larry Wall, from the Third State of the Onion. It's a great extended metaphor, but does make the mistake of calling the two sides "open source" and "commercial", as opposed to "non-proprietary" and "proprietary". RMS isn't against commercial software per se, just proprietary software, which is currently the dominant commercial model (which did make him effectively against commercial software until the recent establishment of revenue streams for free aka open source software).
To quote:
This is the molecule known to most of you as acetylene.
If we're to make this correspond to last year's picture, then this hydrogen atom on the left is named Richard, and the one on the right is named Bill. (Hmm, they seem to be circling each other. How appropriate.) [Well, they were circling in my talk, anyway.] This carbon atom on the left is all the open source folks that are trying to cooperate constructively with commercial folks, and this other carbon atom is all the commercial folks trying to cooperate with open source folks. The bond in the middle is simultaneously the strongest bond and the weakest bond. It's the strongest bond, because it's a triple bond. It's also the weakest bond, because it's a very energetic bond, and could be broken by outside forces.
But not by inside forces.
Let me be specific. Some folks in this room are extremely leery of Bill. Others are extremely leery of Richard. These people tend to be leary not only of the opposite hydrogen, but also the opposite
carbon. They are supplying the repulsive forces, because they fear the opposite extreme.
At the same time, there are lots of good people who are actively supplying the attractive forces. Nobody has enough power to crush the two carbons together. Nobody has enough power to tear them
apart. They're in a metastable state. They have tensegrity. It's my hope that the open source movement achieves this kind of tensegrity.
That being said, acetylene is flammable. If it is abused too much, it can explode. I only ever had one unanticipated explosion when I was doing chemistry in my basement, and that was when I was
generating acetylene. I was an idiot, and was generating it in a small glass jar. Don't try this at home. Fortunately, it was a very small glass jar, and I was already wearing glasses at the time. I was shaken but unhurt. I don't play with acetylene much any more, because it is rather touchy stuff. So maybe, if you're thinking about starting a war between the open source folks and the commercial folks, you should think again. First of all, you'll be fighting against a lot of good folks, and you'll probably lose. Second of all, you might win, and the world will be split up into separate atoms.
Maybe that's what the hydrogens on the end want, but the carbons in the middle would really like to stick together and make something useful.
If we try hard enough, maybe we can make open source into something stable in the middle.
No, you're not alone. It's certainly a bold stroke--resembles the Apple migration to OS X. I'm hesitant, but I am pretty trustful of Larry Wall and I'm not too tied to syntax to have my brain collapse at such a drastic change. Change is necessary--and if done with intelligence, even drastic change can be good.
But with this one, definitely only time will tell.
--
David Minnaar, Donald Erb, sci.physics, etc.
on
Duct Tape
·
· Score: 4
The reasonable thing to conclude about this story is that David Hahn is a real person, who managed to make a radioactive mess, and probably successfully extracted some radioactive elements, but very much did not make a nuclear breeder reactor.
One of the people mentioned in the story is David Minnaar, who works for the Michigan DEP. He's certainly a real person; see Antique crock turns out to be radioactive and Michigan DEP site with his e-mail address (minnaard@state.mi.us) and phone number (517-335-8197).
Another person mentioned is Donald Erb, mentioned on International Isotope Society Membership List, and can be reached at
U.S. Department of Energy
22404 Goshen School Road
Gaithersburg , MD , 20882-9801
Phone: (301) 253-5530
Fax: (301) 903-5434
So at the minimum they're real people, and can certainly easily confirm or deny the story or its details, unless they refuse to talk about it, which would be a bit silly.
The existence of David Hahn is plausible; that he accomplished anything resembling a nuclear reactor isn't. It takes a lot of math and physics to build a safe nuclear reactor, but it only takes a pile of radioactive material to get radioactive readings. As extracting elements is pretty much the most basic task in chemistry, and it's all the guy had to do, I believe that he could have done it. Calling what he made a nuclear breeder reactor is pure journalistic hoo-hah (or more charitably, gross exaggeration)...actually, the journalist merely implies that's what Hahn did, by using the phrase "breeder reactor" over and over again. A good lesson in the difference between what's actually said and what's implied. He may have had a dangerous nuclear pile, but that's far from a genuine reactor.
Remember, this is 19th century chemistry that he was doing, and had the advantage of extracting radioactive materials from already purified sources.
Thank you. The author is such a loon. But I have to say that I love observing the processes of pseudoscience, from astrology to faith-healing to the mystical outgrowths of political systems--from libertarians to liberals, you can find the One True Answer, "supported" by countless reams of evidence that just so happen to have at the core the One True Answer, thus happily completing the circular argument, from the Invisible Hand of the Free Market to the Golden Rule. At least the Golden Rule encourages people to be nice, though.
Religions are good, of course, but even better are the Kabbalists and the numerologists. There's some fun stuff. It's a pity there aren't more movies exploring this; Pi only scratched the surface.
It's too bad for the author of this book that his frothings are demonstrably false. It's much better to insert your own goofy readings into something that's a bit less well documented. Like, say, the Bible. Or the stock market. It's funny how the media can always tell why the market acted the way it just did, but can never predict it, huh?
--
The Letter I wrote to my Congressman and Senators
on
Is Law Copyrighted?
·
· Score: 2
I'm extremely troubled by the recent 5th Court of Appeals decision (Veeck vs. S. Building Code Congress International Inc., No. 99-40632) that, in short, rules that the public does not own the law.
The decision allows companies to enforce copyright to prevent free and unfettered dissemination of the law, if such companies have had a part in writing the law. (Which is a practice I find in many ways
distasteful, and fear that it is becoming ever more rampant, as evidenced by the recent bankruptcy bill passed by the Senate.)
This is evidently not an issue with which we can trust the courts. I am hoping that you side with the vast plurality of legal scholars who find this and the previous district court opinion appalling and incredible.
As this nation moves into the information age, it is welcome and crucial that the apparatus of the United States government is available online--
from e-mail address of senators, to the text of the laws that govern the land, to the voting history of our representatives (which is, in fact, not readily available from any of my elected federal representatives).
It is terrifying to think that the laws of this nation are controlled not by the nation but by private companies. From the San Diego Union-Tribune
"Public laws owned by the public? Think again, copyright rulings show" Kathryn Balint, May 13, 2001
"By its very nature, the law belongs to the public," said Malla Pollack, associate professor of law at Northern Illinois University.
"For some reason, the U.S. courts do not seem to take seriously the public domain."
"Every time I bring up this case to other academic professionals, they all say that such a ruling is impossible. But such a ruling happened."
She thinks the case could end up in the U.S. Supreme Court because, she says, it raises fundamental issues about due process.
The way things stand, Pollack said, citizens have no choice but to pay a private organization to get a copy of a law they're required to obey.
"Basically, government is agreeing to allow a private party to make as
much money as it can by picking its own price and selling copies of
the law to people who need them."
---
I sincerely hope that you, the New York delegation, the House Democrats, and all elected officials will stand against this affront to the public domain, and vile threat to our democracy.
Don't let the Supreme Court decide this issue for our nation; take action.
A constituent.
--
Re:Wow! Another corporate conspiracy novel! Pass.
on
The Business
·
· Score: 2
The above comment was unfairly moderated down. Sure, the plaint against taco was unnecessary, but the book probably was written to appeal to the pulp thriller audience. Banks probably was trying to make fun of the pulps as much as he was trying to emulate them (and, IMHO, doesn't do too well), but the above comment is a lot more right than it is wrong.
Just because something's antagonistic doesn't mean it's a troll. I too think there are much better books to be reviewed on Slashdot, eve nby the same author.
--
Review WAY overrates the Business
on
The Business
·
· Score: 4
The Business is mediocre at best. Sure, mediocre Iain Banks is still highly readable, but the book offers little in the way of plot or characterization that is strikingly original. Even the characteristic flourishes of parody didn't grab me: the plane catapult, the teeth extraction, etc. clashed with the rather flat, melancholy tone of the rest of the book.
I have to agree with stephnd's comment:
And it has his usual problem: the female characters are just not very well formed (they're just men with breasts). Unfortunately, a female character is the hero...
I think a basic problem of this book is that ultracapitalists are boring people, unless they are completely insane and godlike (c.f. James Bond villains, Felix Jongleur of Otherland, the Tessier-Ashpools of Neuromancer). They all have too much money and cleverness and inability to find satisfaction in non-material things, so they have lots of toys. There's the eccentric Brit with his castle and aforementioned airplane-catapult; the eccentric American with military surplus and war movie fetish; the eccentric Japanese who likes to destroy ships. What seems like variety at first reveals itself to be a cookie-cutter approach to humor. They have no real fear of failure (since they have too much money and power and sense to ever lose all of it), are much too rational and intelligent to suffer severe emotional struggle, and can't really experience any kind of spiritual sense, since they've replaced that with the effective but boring belief in the Invisible Hand. Those who aren't cut out right, who are in the Business but suffer from one of the seven deadly sins, all get their tediously moralistic comeuppance.
Or maybe it's just the main character (and the book is in the limited first person, so it's all about her and from her perspective) who is painfully, painfully boring. She is a dull woman. Yes, she's beautiful, smart, clever, and driven, but she doesn't really suffer a bit in the book. (Ooh! She loves a man who she can't have, and doesn't love the man she can! But, in the end, she does the right thing, and ends up slowly growing fond of the man who she can have. Maybe it's the best ending for her, but it's painfully dull for the reader.)
The peripheral male characters lead interesting lives and act irrationally and pout and suffer and all those things that make a non-flashy book like this (aka "a Novel") enjoyable and satisfying, but they are mere garnishes on the gray, tough meat of the book. Read the first chapter to get the witty description of the Business (or just read Michael's fawning review), and then put the book down. The promises made of an interesting mystery and unusual situations are not kept.
But if you want to read how very incapable Brits are of being happy (or sad, really), this is a good choice.
Read the Bridge instead, a lyrical and strange novel that lies in the realm of Borges and Calvino.
evil_spork's comment was hilarious. Just in case it stays at -1:
By posting news associated with Doom, Quake, and others, you are encouraging young readers of this site to take railguns and rocket
launchers to school and shoot their classmates. That is a truly awful thing and I don't see how any of you can live with that on your
conscience. And they can't really sue Slashdot over it because VA Linux doesn't have any assets, so any families of children shot over this
probably won't receive any compensation. And that's just sick, so you should all be ashamed.
Too bad the AC's comment was modded down, It's pretty funny:
ARMS RACE! We need a site listing the home addresses of anti-abortion crusaders who have committed murder, calling for THEIR deaths. As well as a list of the anti-abortion crusaders who contributed to the web site listing the doctor's addresses. When the dust settles there will be no one left alive with a strong opinion on abortion. ALL YOUR FETUSES ARE BELONG TO US!
The AYBABTU ref is unnecessary, but the idea of rivaling web sites causing the elimination of all people who care about an issue, one way or another, is pretty good satirical SF. Not only that, it points out an interesting contrast between government-sponsored justice/violence and vigilante justice/violence.
The people who developed the Internet, including J.C.R. Licklider (the first head of the IPTO (no, not that IPTO or that IPTO, this IPTO, okay, it's ITO now)) and Len Kleinrock (the man who invented packet-switching), proposed and worked on the idea of deploying mobile radio networks via soldiers back in the 60's.
A central problem is that all the efficiencies possible in a large-scale network are lost without some aggregation, some centralization. Kleinrock worked a bit on the idea of allowing groups of soldiers to cluster together to form temporary hubs close to where additional bandwidth was necessary, but the problem is extraordinarily difficult both mathematically and physically--it's taken a long time for systems to get small enough for the research to be feasible.
Moreover, ARPA/IPTO/ITO really lost steam around the 80's, when Bob Kahn stepped down (no offense, Saul). And they didn't have no Linux, neither. So maybe the time is right, now.
Doug Engelbart (doug@bootstrap.org), the inventor of the mouse, experimented with a head-mounted mouse. As he put it,
About that time I also rigged up a mechanism that utilized a lightweight helmet for the user to wear: turning his head from side to side would move the cursor horizontally, and nodding the head
up and down would move the cursor vertically. This looked a bit strange, but it worked. AND this also gave me cramps, in the neck, after ten minutes or so.
He also tried a knee-cursor, which was very popular with new users, as well as a foot-mouse, etc. He settled on a mouse and a 5-key chording keyset. NLS (aka AUGMENT) is an impressive thing in action.
And don't forget this eBay auction:
http://slashdot.org/articles/00/11/27/195220.shtml .
Of course, the collection was probably sold,
and ebay doesn't keep records of old auctions (or does it? Is there a way to search for closed auctions?). MrP- put up a mirror.
This is a fun troll to respond to, because federalism is a fun issue. Also, I'd like to say that complaining that the Constitution didn't explicitly permit the establishment of a space agancy is pretty amusing.
Yes, NASA faces budget cuts. NASA is illegal. It shouldn't have a budgegt AT ALL.
Of course, the legality of NASA clearly has nothing to do with its budget. And the word you're looking for is "unconstitutional", not "illegal".
The National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 justifies the establishment of NASA by stating "The Congress declares that the general welfare and security of the United States require that adequate provision be made for aeronautical and space activities."
The Congress was given by the Constitution "Power To...provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States".
The states are in fact in favor of federalism - of a sort. Witness the support for devolution, the fight over unfunded mandates, and an endless stream of 10th and 11th Amendment cases. But the federalism they want isn't competitive federalism. It's what the antitrust lawyers among you will recognize as a horizontal-vertical conspiracy.
and
As Gordon Wood once put it, if you ask about the relationship of this federal Constitution to democracy, you have to understand that democracy was the problem to which the Constitutional Convention was called to frame a response. The problem of populist democracies in the state legislatures was part of the Convention debate as early as May 31. Randolph of Virginia observed that the general object of the Convention was to provide a cure for the evils under which the states labored - that in tracing these evils to their origin, every man had found it in the turbulence and follies of democracies.
and
What speaks cleanest, the supremacy clause, actually binds state officers directly to federal law. As the Supreme Court said back at a time when it was a little closer to the beginning -- 1876, to be exact -- the laws of the United States are the laws in the states.
and perhaps most to the point:
The choice is this -- are the basic decisions of Government going to be made by judges or by the people you elect? If judges insist that the propriety of legislation, or the necessity of it, be demonstrated to them, then they are really in charge. And you are not going to like that because you don't get to throw us out of office every two years or every four years or every six years. You know, it takes murder to get rid of a federal judge.
So who is this mighty Timothy who deigns us with his apparently oh-so-correct opinion?
His statement wasn't that inaccurate; perhaps it should have read "But hey, at least rich people get a tax cut (even if some of the richest don't want one)". It's not an inappropriate comment, seeing as how tax cuts which benefit primarily the rich are Bush's number one priority, which certainly affects NASA's budget.
Your plaint about the effect of the estate tax on farmers is a straw man, as there's no opposition from pretty much any quarter (at least in respect to Congress) to eliminating/reducing the estate tax for such people. The debate is over a complete elimination of the estate tax, a tax which ensures the blessings of liberty upon this nation.
As Noah Webster wrote:
A general and tolerably equal distribution of landed property is the whole basis of national freedom...An equality of property, with a necessity of alienation, constantly operating to destroy combinations of powerful families, is the very soul of a republic--While this continues, the people will inevitably possess both power and freedom; when this is lost, power departs, liberty expires, and a commonwealth will inevitably assume some other form.
If you continue to punish the wealthy you will stifly any true progress in this country (I would dare say we see some of that
currently).
That's why even though the top tax bracket pays the highest marginal tax their incomes have enjoyed the fastest rate of increase?
The very wealthy have been punished by earning more money faster than anyone else. The higher taxes they pay doesn't seem to be harming their ability to produce wealth.
It is unfortunate that, as James Madison pointed out, "A distinction of property results from that very protection which a free Government gives to unequal faculties of acquiring it." It is unfortunate because that distribution creates distinct interests, which leads to factions, and thus the tyranny of the majority, inimical to promise of the Republic that all people should share in the blessings of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness equally.
To eliminate all distinctions is a great evil and a fool's errand; to ignore them utterly and to choose not to strive for moderation is a greater evil and as foolish.
Nothing like busting unions made up of creative people, artists, etc. Some writers get oodles and oodles of dough, but most don't, and it's pretty lame to say, lookee, a writer's strike, let's let the megacorps trample all over individuals because the rabble won't support its own.
Civil liberties are dependent on grass-roots-level solidarity (ooh, scary word that); just as militias and insurrections are our defense against the depredations of a corrupt government (see Yugoslavia, the Phillipines, Indonesia, etc.), unionizing, strikes, walk-outs etc. are our defense against the depredations of corrupt corporations.
I mean, the sides are writers who are ST geeks vs. UPN aka Viacom/Paramount etc.
Hooray for megacorps. BTW, the Viacom boardroom is sweet, let me tell you.
The court's argument against your argument was that copyright protection encourages copyright owners to preserve works under their copyright, which is better than just having those works disappear. (Think of movies, e.g. which are on highly ephemeral media.) It's an astoundingly weak argument.
Their other arguments are that Congress can do what it damn well pleases, the EU has just as bad copyright law, and that the plaintiffs didn't bring up the best argument, which you more or less outlined above.
The plaintiffs did bring up the argument, but they gave the court an out by not disputing Schnapper.
Not only that, but the dissenting judge made much of being a conservative of the type Dubya and the Scalia Five like, which probably won't hurt its cause up at the Big Court.
Slashdot Mirror
I was stunned and amazed when I read this sentence. I had to read it twice before I believed it! Someone actually spelled "ridiculous" correctly on slashdot! Its gotten so that it doesn't even look correct anymore. Nice work!
At first I thought you were "stunned and amazed" that such a bug could last so long.
By the way, it's "It's", not "Its".
The most common example is the Personal Toolbar--if you, for example, have a link to Slashdot in your personal toolbar, which you abbreviate so that it doesn't take up too much real estate (like "/."), that overwrites the bookmark name in your regular bookmarks list.
More generally, if you sort your bookmarks by category, certain bookmarks may fit into multiple categories.
The most dangerous thing about this bug is that if you delete one instance of the bookmark, you delete all such instances.
Mozilla has been my browser of choice for a while now, but it still has some serious bugs. So consider this criticism based in love. It's also encouraging that all these bugs have a real chance of being fixed. Even I could theoretically fix them.
There is a huge bug with bookmarks:
51683: Unable to have 2 differently named bookmarks for the same url.
This is more than a bit ridiculous, since the bug was submitted September 2000.
Another, less serious bookmark bug:
85469: Bookmark select/cut/paste operation is sensitive to order of selection
This is a major meta-bug:
73812: Browser doesn't fit with Mac OS X UI Specs
Anyone who uses a Mac uses it because of the user interface--having a program that doesn't comply with the guidelines is extraordinarily frustrating. But they're definitely getting closer.
128658: Typing in textarea really slow
Large textareas overwhelm Mozilla. This makes editing in WP, for example, very frustrating. Totally unacceptable.
However, it's great watching bugs get steadily fixed. So vote for the above bugs, get them fixed, submit patches, hooray. The rendering engine really is marvelous.
A couple more points from another Wikipedian:
1. Wikipedia isn't currently actually compliant with the GNU FDL, since it doesn't have the necessary license notice. Also, the intent of the Bomis people is slightly out of sync with what the GFDL allows (with respect to attribution), though their hearts are in the right place.
Instead of adding something to Wikipedia, just release the book under the GNU FDL. Then content from the book could be incorporated into Wikipedia by anyone who wants to.
The GFDL seems overly ornate, but I've done a careful analysis of it, and particularly for print works it's concise and complete, especially if you don't have any invariant sections.
If that's the case, then all you have to do to be compliant with the GFDL is include the license and the license notice, make it clear what the title, author, and publisher are, and make available a "transparent" copy (e.g. a url to an ASCII/Tex etc. version of the book).
They've got this great service whereby their
site confirms that you own a CD, and then you
can use their catalog of MP3's on the fly, saving
the trouble of ripping all of your CDs one at a time. It's a classic example of the American dream, where innovation with new technology creates new markets, expanding the horizons of creativity and comfort while driving the economy to everyone's benefit.
Oh, wait, the recording industry, which takes huge profits from the work of creative artists long after any of its contributions to production and marketing have been recouped, and sells product to consumers at monopoly prices, thus gouging both sides of the buyer-seller equation, might not benefit.
Oops...never mind.
This is Hafner's passage of interest:
Then she continues with a quote from Baran that "Everything is tied to everything else" with respect to who did the most important part.
It's weird, because from my perspective the participants seem to be arguing and use strong language like "spreading lies" to describe the alternative history, but when you look at the specifics, the dispute lies on some very fine nuances which are evidently impossible to untangle now, and may only be creations of recent times.
The number one question, to my understanding, is whether packet switching is such a central concept that the work by Baran and Davies which details it (since they both built experimental packet-switching networks and then wrote extensively about them, providing a base of information for Roberts) is important, or whether it really should just be understood as a relatively arbitrary (and self-obvious) implementation of multiple-node store-and-forward queuing theory, which Kleinrock is the father of, no question.
Did Baran and Davies' work matter to the ARPANET? It pretty much has to have. Baran wrote multiple volumes of detailed information from his experimental network; those volumes were available to and used by Bob Taylor, Roberts' boss and (according to Brand, at least) in the Baran camp, and Roberts credits them heavily in his early work.
All the early documentary evidence points only to Baran and Davies. However, the close association of Roberts and Kleinrock, the fact that Roberts helped Kleinrock do his thesis by doing programming for it (funny fact: the third guy in their little Lincoln Lab thesis group was Ivan Sutherland), and Kleinrock's lab's role as the first IMP site and ARPANET analysis center makes it absurd to believe that Kleinrock's influence wasn't major.
Of course, framing the dispute this way ignores how crucial the work of BBN was in all of this; they were amazing in designing and building the IMP. While Roberts' RFP had insane amounts of information, the IMP Guys did equivalent amounts of new work and recreation of ideas in their proposal.
Actually, the subject's kind of a lie, but it's also kind of true. I was just talking about this very issue with my friend earlier, who's been getting very depressed about news addiction. We both live in New York City.
I've made sure that each day I go out into the city, talking with people, learning their stories, taking pictures.
Then I put them up.
<p class="Katzian">
What prevents the downward spiral of information-void-despair is becoming a white hole, sending out information as well. What we nerds/information Morlocks are good at is processing information--if all we're doing is storing, compiling it, it'll drive us crazy. It's crucial to find a way to create something with that knowledge.
</p>
What I've been doing with a bunch of other people is to build an open, free site in memoriam of the event and the victims--ostensibly as part of Wikipedia. That way the emphasis is on super-efficient information delivery, and it works just great as a balance on the news gathering addiction.
Of course, I'm currently having the apposite problem of overcreation, having spent the last 10 hours straight on it, but I'll deal. I'm making sure to get together with my friends, away from computers and hopefully televisions.
Speaking of which, radios seem to be the equivalent of the nicotine patch. They give me the info-dosage I need without trapping and obsessing me; a soothing buffer of bits instead of a mesmerizing stream.
So if you want help yourself, and you want to help--because telling the stories of the victims, or creating a definitive repository of knowledge, is so very helpful to everyone else--go to wikipedia and flood their servers with all the knowledge and analysis you've gleaned. Or figure out how to take over the information already used to make an even better site.
I'm hoping that I'll be able to get my fix from just this one site, so I won't have to ever be searching.
Some photos from Brooklyn, of the crowds leaving over the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges, of the smoke billowing out over the Manhattan skyline, occluding the sun.
Some friends of mine watched the fire spread down the floors from the plane crashes before the towers collapsed.
http://www.kband.com/photo/
High-resolution versions of these photographs are available on request.
To quote:
But with this one, definitely only time will tell.
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One of the people mentioned in the story is David Minnaar, who works for the Michigan DEP. He's certainly a real person; see Antique crock turns out to be radioactive and Michigan DEP site with his e-mail address (minnaard@state.mi.us) and phone number (517-335-8197).
Another person mentioned is Donald Erb, mentioned on International Isotope Society Membership List, and can be reached at
U.S. Department of Energy
22404 Goshen School Road
Gaithersburg , MD , 20882-9801
Phone: (301) 253-5530
Fax: (301) 903-5434
So at the minimum they're real people, and can certainly easily confirm or deny the story or its details, unless they refuse to talk about it, which would be a bit silly.
There was a long cross-posted thread in alt.folklore.urban, sci.physics, and sci.skeptic at the beginning of last year about this, Some good posts:
- the young Mr. Hahn did not build a nuclear breeder reactor...
- one about his Geiger counter readings: More likely, he was measuring stuff on his clothes, or perhaps his body...
- Actually, I'm not AT ALL impressed with the young Mr. Hahn's "accomplishments"...
The existence of David Hahn is plausible; that he accomplished anything resembling a nuclear reactor isn't. It takes a lot of math and physics to build a safe nuclear reactor, but it only takes a pile of radioactive material to get radioactive readings. As extracting elements is pretty much the most basic task in chemistry, and it's all the guy had to do, I believe that he could have done it. Calling what he made a nuclear breeder reactor is pure journalistic hoo-hah (or more charitably, gross exaggeration)...actually, the journalist merely implies that's what Hahn did, by using the phrase "breeder reactor" over and over again. A good lesson in the difference between what's actually said and what's implied. He may have had a dangerous nuclear pile, but that's far from a genuine reactor.Remember, this is 19th century chemistry that he was doing, and had the advantage of extracting radioactive materials from already purified sources.
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Religions are good, of course, but even better are the Kabbalists and the numerologists. There's some fun stuff. It's a pity there aren't more movies exploring this; Pi only scratched the surface.
Of course the best these days are the conspiracy theorists, which is why Foucault's Pendulum and the Illuminatus! Trilogy are such fine books. There's a great loony right now who's convinced that Heidi Klum is the unwitting focus of an age-old Satanist conspiracy.
It's too bad for the author of this book that his frothings are demonstrably false. It's much better to insert your own goofy readings into something that's a bit less well documented. Like, say, the Bible. Or the stock market. It's funny how the media can always tell why the market acted the way it just did, but can never predict it, huh?
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The decision allows companies to enforce copyright to prevent free and unfettered dissemination of the law, if such companies have had a part in writing the law. (Which is a practice I find in many ways distasteful, and fear that it is becoming ever more rampant, as evidenced by the recent bankruptcy bill passed by the Senate.)
This is evidently not an issue with which we can trust the courts. I am hoping that you side with the vast plurality of legal scholars who find this and the previous district court opinion appalling and incredible.
As this nation moves into the information age, it is welcome and crucial that the apparatus of the United States government is available online-- from e-mail address of senators, to the text of the laws that govern the land, to the voting history of our representatives (which is, in fact, not readily available from any of my elected federal representatives).
It is terrifying to think that the laws of this nation are controlled not by the nation but by private companies. From the San Diego Union-Tribune "Public laws owned by the public? Think again, copyright rulings show" Kathryn Balint, May 13, 2001
"By its very nature, the law belongs to the public," said Malla Pollack, associate professor of law at Northern Illinois University. "For some reason, the U.S. courts do not seem to take seriously the public domain."
"Every time I bring up this case to other academic professionals, they all say that such a ruling is impossible. But such a ruling happened."
She thinks the case could end up in the U.S. Supreme Court because, she says, it raises fundamental issues about due process.
The way things stand, Pollack said, citizens have no choice but to pay a private organization to get a copy of a law they're required to obey.
"Basically, government is agreeing to allow a private party to make as much money as it can by picking its own price and selling copies of the law to people who need them." --- I sincerely hope that you, the New York delegation, the House Democrats, and all elected officials will stand against this affront to the public domain, and vile threat to our democracy.
Don't let the Supreme Court decide this issue for our nation; take action.
A constituent.
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Just because something's antagonistic doesn't mean it's a troll. I too think there are much better books to be reviewed on Slashdot, eve nby the same author.
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I have to agree with stephnd's comment:
And it has his usual problem: the female characters are just not very well formed (they're just men with breasts). Unfortunately, a female character is the hero...
I think a basic problem of this book is that ultracapitalists are boring people, unless they are completely insane and godlike (c.f. James Bond villains, Felix Jongleur of Otherland, the Tessier-Ashpools of Neuromancer). They all have too much money and cleverness and inability to find satisfaction in non-material things, so they have lots of toys. There's the eccentric Brit with his castle and aforementioned airplane-catapult; the eccentric American with military surplus and war movie fetish; the eccentric Japanese who likes to destroy ships. What seems like variety at first reveals itself to be a cookie-cutter approach to humor. They have no real fear of failure (since they have too much money and power and sense to ever lose all of it), are much too rational and intelligent to suffer severe emotional struggle, and can't really experience any kind of spiritual sense, since they've replaced that with the effective but boring belief in the Invisible Hand. Those who aren't cut out right, who are in the Business but suffer from one of the seven deadly sins, all get their tediously moralistic comeuppance.
Or maybe it's just the main character (and the book is in the limited first person, so it's all about her and from her perspective) who is painfully, painfully boring. She is a dull woman. Yes, she's beautiful, smart, clever, and driven, but she doesn't really suffer a bit in the book. (Ooh! She loves a man who she can't have, and doesn't love the man she can! But, in the end, she does the right thing, and ends up slowly growing fond of the man who she can have. Maybe it's the best ending for her, but it's painfully dull for the reader.)
The peripheral male characters lead interesting lives and act irrationally and pout and suffer and all those things that make a non-flashy book like this (aka "a Novel") enjoyable and satisfying, but they are mere garnishes on the gray, tough meat of the book. Read the first chapter to get the witty description of the Business (or just read Michael's fawning review), and then put the book down. The promises made of an interesting mystery and unusual situations are not kept.
But if you want to read how very incapable Brits are of being happy (or sad, really), this is a good choice.
Read the Bridge instead, a lyrical and strange novel that lies in the realm of Borges and Calvino.
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By posting news associated with Doom, Quake, and others, you are encouraging young readers of this site to take railguns and rocket launchers to school and shoot their classmates. That is a truly awful thing and I don't see how any of you can live with that on your conscience. And they can't really sue Slashdot over it because VA Linux doesn't have any assets, so any families of children shot over this probably won't receive any compensation. And that's just sick, so you should all be ashamed.
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The AYBABTU ref is unnecessary, but the idea of rivaling web sites causing the elimination of all people who care about an issue, one way or another, is pretty good satirical SF. Not only that, it points out an interesting contrast between government-sponsored justice/violence and vigilante justice/violence.
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A central problem is that all the efficiencies possible in a large-scale network are lost without some aggregation, some centralization. Kleinrock worked a bit on the idea of allowing groups of soldiers to cluster together to form temporary hubs close to where additional bandwidth was necessary, but the problem is extraordinarily difficult both mathematically and physically--it's taken a long time for systems to get small enough for the research to be feasible.
Moreover, ARPA/IPTO/ITO really lost steam around the 80's, when Bob Kahn stepped down (no offense, Saul). And they didn't have no Linux, neither. So maybe the time is right, now.
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He also tried a knee-cursor, which was very popular with new users, as well as a foot-mouse, etc. He settled on a mouse and a 5-key chording keyset. NLS (aka AUGMENT) is an impressive thing in action.
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But people like The Optimizer, drinkypoo, rapett0, bungelo, and JatTDB collect video games. The Optimizer has a huge collection.
See also jakdin's account of old video games lying around in Tokyo shops
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Yes, NASA faces budget cuts. NASA is illegal. It shouldn't have a budgegt AT ALL.
Of course, the legality of NASA clearly has nothing to do with its budget. And the word you're looking for is "unconstitutional", not "illegal".
The National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 justifies the establishment of NASA by stating "The Congress declares that the general welfare and security of the United States require that adequate provision be made for aeronautical and space activities."
The Congress was given by the Constitution "Power To...provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States".
The tenth amendment does not abridge that power.
Here's a transcript of an excellent panel discussion on the concept of federalism, states' rights, and the enumerated powers doctrine; with such gems as:
and and and perhaps most to the point: Here's some notes on the enumerated powers doctrine.--
His statement wasn't that inaccurate; perhaps it should have read "But hey, at least rich people get a tax cut (even if some of the richest don't want one)". It's not an inappropriate comment, seeing as how tax cuts which benefit primarily the rich are Bush's number one priority, which certainly affects NASA's budget.
Your plaint about the effect of the estate tax on farmers is a straw man, as there's no opposition from pretty much any quarter (at least in respect to Congress) to eliminating/reducing the estate tax for such people. The debate is over a complete elimination of the estate tax, a tax which ensures the blessings of liberty upon this nation.
As Noah Webster wrote:
If you continue to punish the wealthy you will stifly any true progress in this country (I would dare say we see some of that currently).
That's why even though the top tax bracket pays the highest marginal tax their incomes have enjoyed the fastest rate of increase?
The very wealthy have been punished by earning more money faster than anyone else. The higher taxes they pay doesn't seem to be harming their ability to produce wealth.
It is unfortunate that, as James Madison pointed out, "A distinction of property results from that very protection which a free Government gives to unequal faculties of acquiring it." It is unfortunate because that distribution creates distinct interests, which leads to factions, and thus the tyranny of the majority, inimical to promise of the Republic that all people should share in the blessings of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness equally.
To eliminate all distinctions is a great evil and a fool's errand; to ignore them utterly and to choose not to strive for moderation is a greater evil and as foolish.
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Civil liberties are dependent on grass-roots-level solidarity (ooh, scary word that); just as militias and insurrections are our defense against the depredations of a corrupt government (see Yugoslavia, the Phillipines, Indonesia, etc.), unionizing, strikes, walk-outs etc. are our defense against the depredations of corrupt corporations.
I mean, the sides are writers who are ST geeks vs. UPN aka Viacom/Paramount etc.
Hooray for megacorps. BTW, the Viacom boardroom is sweet, let me tell you.
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Their other arguments are that Congress can do what it damn well pleases, the EU has just as bad copyright law, and that the plaintiffs didn't bring up the best argument, which you more or less outlined above.
The plaintiffs did bring up the argument, but they gave the court an out by not disputing Schnapper.
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