Though I agree that this article is rather lame, Bush is *not* simply trying to defend his ability to write executive orders or his war-declaration powers (which are in fact hotly debated). His administration has a clear policy of silence on matters where it should be open. One o the most obnoxious examples of this is in Cheney's refusal to hand over the conversations on energy policy with the Enron folks. The Bush Administration claims it has executive privilege on those documents, no matter their impropriety or content.
Slashdot is all about "open source" and its cultural and economic ramifications. It's time we start demanding that more things in our lives be open, starting with our political processes. There are very few things anyone in the political sphere should be able to keep secret, and they *all* relate to national security. Even then, numerous reports indicate that information is classified far too often under the guise of national security.
When it comes to finances, political contributions, or ties with corporations that have knowingly screwed over millions and millions of people, there should be no secrets. Once you are a politician I think you should have to divulge, for public scrutiny, all of your and your spouse's finances for the past several years. If you don't want to do that, don't become a politician. The public has a right to know if your financial ties to any organization are going to unfairly influence your decision-making, as they appear to in this administration (single-bid Halliburton contracts, Enron energy policy, etc).
Governments need to be open to protect the masses against their tyranny. There is no small amount of irony in the Bush Administration expecting us to open all of our lives and finances up in the guise of national security (through the PATRIOT Act) and then turning around and claiming it can keep the energy policy information secret.
While number one sounds like it might be feasible, number two sounds like a load of bull. While it's theoretically possible (like it's theoretically possible that you could be hit by a falling airplane wing at any moment), in practice it's rather like saying that you need to be careful about doing kernel compiles or playing Doom 3 lest your GPU or CPU overheat.
DVD players are meant to play DVD's and have specialized DSP's that don't run ridiculously hot like a Prescott. The idea that some DVD's are "just too much for your DVD player to handle" is slightly ridiculous.
But this article is aimed at small manufacturers of ASICs and IP vendors, which it is saying are being squeezed out of the market because of relentless pressure to cram everything into a cell phone, meaning their customs ASICs are not longer needed for the previously individual devices. I don't think the article says anywhere that the handset manufacturers are being squeezed, and aside from Nika thier recent earnings would bolster this assertion.
http://www.prwatch.org and all of the books by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber are fascinating looks at PR. It is arguably the most corrupt industry in existence since it is the primary mechanism through which all other corruption is allowed to take place without much public scrutiny. PR allows companies and governments to do something evil and then lie about it (PR people like to lie about the lying itself and call it "spinning").
Some PR people actually liken themselves to lawyers, saying that anyone who needs PR help should have it. However, since no one is legally guaranteed PR help, it ends up that only the people who can pay for it get it. Another obvious difference is that law is highly regulated and there are severe penalties for lying in a court of justice. PR, however, has no such regulatory framework. It plays out in the court of public opinion, and the only rules there are "convince the monkeys that their bananas aren't poisoned."
PR is unfortunately unregulated and will probably never be regulated. The PR flaks themselves control the lobbying machine in the US, and they would lobby the shit out of any attempt to regulate their behavior.
Thus you will never see something like that come to light, because PR is a dirty, dirty game and there are no real rules.
This is rather remarkable in that there is no discussion of the risks of such a treatment. Drugs generally work by either mimicking neurotransmitters themselves, mimicking their precursors, or by mimicking other chemicals that cause a release of neurotransmitters. This is true of both recreational drugs and prescription drugs like Prozac or Zoloft.
Cocaine, for instance, is known to work by effecting a massive release of dopamine into the brain, which is then reuptaken quickly, providing the high. Alcohol similarly effects a release of GABA (among other neurotransmitters), while GHB is actually a precursor to GABA itself and is converted thus in the brain.
It would seem to me that messing with the pathways through which any given drug actually works, unless it is almost impossibly specific, would mess with the normal operation of the brain. What's to say that a "vaccine" designed to prevent cocaine's method of activity won't prevent or at least diminish all such activity in the brain? Parkinson's Disease is caused at least partially by screwy dopamine levels in the brain. Who knows if injecting people with a virus that prevents rushes of dopamine won't affect the normal rushes of dopamine that occur during life, like after a particularly good orgasm or a 10K-run?
It just sounds like fucking with neurotransmitters, especially on a genetic level, is a recipe for disaster.
Cougars have many local names, including mountain lion, puma, panther, paint, screamer and catamount. Then there are cheetahs, lions, tigers, caracals, bobcats, lynxes. They've only used a couple of those, so they have a few years left.
Personally I don't know why they don't just start naming everything after LOTR Characters.
This is true. Microsoft won its copyright/patent case against Apple in the early 90's because the judge believed their "dashboard" argument: the dashboard to a car cannot be patented or copyrighted because it is part and parcel of the way a car must be built.
In this case there are only a handful of ways an operating system can in fact be built.
The best service that went the way of the dodo during the boom was either Kozmo.com or Urban Fetch. Though they started out with video & DVD rentals, you could order ANYTHING from them. In one instance, our office was swelteringly hot during the summer. I hopped onto Urban Fetch and ordered myself an air conditioner. I also ordered Palms, ice cream, videos, and Smith & Wollensky steaks.
At one point Urban Fetch dropped off a "free" CD along with a DVD rental that the bicycle delivery people had "written, produced, and directed." It was horrible-- all I can remember was something about "what can we fetch fo' u?" rapped to nasty pseudo-hip-hop music. I scrawled a "please never deliver one of these promos to me again" note on it and returned it alongside my DVD rental.
How about don't let your webhost register domains for you, and don't give your webhost administrative contact status in your domain? Do it yourself at a registrar that respects your rights, like GANDI.
They have the ability to self-regulate as an industry rather than be regulated from above. One of my clients is a porn company and they are worried about Aschcroft, et al, raiding them yet again. They really do try to keep themselves out of trouble, and yet trouble finds them. If they had a dot-sex domain and some kid got there they could just give the finger to the instituion or parent who was moronic enough to not block it.
In most cities porn stores can only be way out in the boondocks or a certain distance from residences and schools. Someone could try to set up shop next to a school, but the authorities would shut them down. If they go where they know they won't be harmed, they stand a much better chance of being left alone. dot-sex would act more as a protective measure for the companies than anything else-- a red-light district for the net.
PR mavens do this all the time. They send out a press release and lazy news organizations just post it. My boyfriend used to do tech PR before he got fed up with it, and says that this sort of thing happens all the time.
90% of the "news" you read is placed there, sometimes verbatim, by a savvy PR person. This is especially true of technology reporting. A PR staffer calls a journalist, tells them what to say, and a lot of times, they say it.
A good book on the topic is "Toxic Sludge is Good for You! : Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry." It's a frightening book and highly recommended.
I have tried over and over again to switch to Cyrus from UW-IMAP and have finally decided that I have no need to do so. UW-IMAP is written by the guy who wrote the IMAP protocol, Mark Crispin. For all means and purposes it is the definitive IMAP server. It is extremely simple to setup, can scale up to tens of thousand of users, and supports every mailbox type you can think of. It also supports SSL with very little configuration. The O'Reilly IMAP book is a good guide to it (and to IMAP in general).
The one thing you really must keep in mind with UW-IMAP is not to use MBOX. The MBX format, on the other hand, is high-performance and very powerful. The maintainers of UW-IMAP have kept MBOX as the default for years now, but once you get past about 50MB of mail in a given folder you end up with problems.
My advice is to look through ALL of the docs to learn how to modify the source code. The docs are scattered in random places but they do contain most of the info you need to become a relative expert in UW-IMAP.
All in all I am very happy with UW-IMAP. I have been running it on Gentoo forever now (though I don't emerge it, I compile it myself) alongside Sendmail and Procmail and have never, ever, ever had a problem with it. Months of uptime, broken only my physical server moves...
Re:Got enough of the lil blighters out there alrea
on
Should You Hire a Hacker?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I think a lot of these "hiring convicted criminals gives a majorly wrong idea" posts miss a big point: prison. Sentance times for hackers are getting longer and longer and longer; if Mitnick was convicted today he would probably be Ashcrofted of his citizenship, stuck in solitary somewhere, and never heard from again. Young hackers have at least a certain level of brains about them; they have at least a twinkle of understanding that hacking can lead to some Big Problems nowadays.
Arguing that Mitnick is glorifying hacking is like saying that The Sopranos is a "wrong" show because it glorifies New Jersey-- I mean the Mafia.
After 9/11 I took some time away from New York with my boyfriend and we stayed with my family in Ohio, taking care of my sick grandmother, working out, and just kind of recuperating from Dotbomb + WTCBomb. I had always been interested in gardening, and my mom got this very cool magazine called Countryside http://www.countrysidemag.com/ that is sort of an instruction manual for what it calls the "Voluntary Simplicity" movement.
It serves a whole range of people from a whole range of backgrounds, from neo-hippie bodybuilder-ish urban technoqueers like myself to rural born-again Christians to Nebraska farmers, and as such has a variety of different views to draw from. I had gardened before, but this magazine takes it to a whole new level. It introduces ways to become totally self-sufficient, including ways to generate your own power and build cheap and sustainable housing. It's a non-tech equivalent of Slashdot, rather like Alton Brown is for cooking.
But I digress.
Re:Is it cosher? Is it lenten?
on
Lab-Grown Steak
·
· Score: 1
Though, Troll II, lots of religious edicts are based around ideas that once made sense and now do not. IIRC, the sun is the center of our little solar system now. Other examples will keep this thread a-flamin', but I'm sure just about everyone can come up with more on their own.
As far as these inevidable [sic] US invasions, you didn't say the word, but essentialy you're accusing us of imperialism, which is complete, utter, delusional nonsense. We could've ruled the world long ago. After WW II, we were the only real power left on Earth. It would've been easy to establish the first truly global empire and rule the entire planet. Instead, we rebuilt Europe and Japan, then went home. You can find a much more cogent argument here.
Unfortunately that's not true. Capitalism was just beginning to sweep the globe around World War I and II, and it is capitalism that the US fights for, with democracy being the virtuous and pretty stepchild that is the prima facie reason for its global exploits. The US shrewdly realized that imperialism need not occur via direct warfare but instead was easier to accomplish via economic means. American imperialism has not occurred via direct military action but instead through the long arm of the American corporate enterprise. I don't particularly need to argue this point; American companies dominate the global economic landscape, and where they don't, the dominant company generally stems from a place where America rebuilt using its own ideology, such as Japan or Germany.
This sort of thing has been going on for over a hundred years now. Photographs don't provide a perfect representation of the subject; they're a scaled-down analog version that's good enough to fool the eye. The same thing can be said of any data transmission-- the quality of a phone conversation is much lower than what the human ear can perceive.
Furthermore, television, movies, and computer monitors are based on persistence of vision-- the idea that the eye and brain can be fooled into perceiving motion if the pictures are switched fast enough (in the case of NTSC TV, 30 frames per second). This is a significant "compression" of the data, far larger than the amount of data being thrown out by psychoacoustic compression. NASA uses cameras that record 10,000 fps to examine explosions and things of that nature that occur far too fast for us to perceive.
Reality occurs at a rate that technology currently finds impossible to record in full. That doesn't mean it's damaging us.
Pay-per-view and the associated product tie-ins that follow. HBO is of course the shining example of this: it managed to surivive initially on subscriber fees alone. After taking risks on shows it now has a raft of amazing shows and is able to sell them on VHS and DVD. The Sopranos is phenomenal, and its DVD sales have consistently been in the top 10.
The scary thing is that I just read that mary-kateandashley's latest horrific mind-trip has managed to sell more than even The Sopranos.
To clarify: it does not mean operating an open 802.11 access point is a crime, but instead that using someone else's 802.11 access point without their permission is a crime. That's a good point, and should be used as the basis to prosecute spam and DOS attacks.
Not that these all sound like pop music, but instead that these all are the sort of electronica people who listen to "non-electronica" might find easier to relate to:
The Chemical Brothers (Dig Your Own Hole and Brothers Gonna Work It Out)
Moby (really only Play and 18)
Garbage (Version 2.0 is amazing!)
Aphex Twin (Windowlicker)
Bran Van 3000 (Discosis)
Delerium (Karma and Poem)
Death in Vegas (Dead Elvis)
Rather than this being an exhaustive list, these are a few that are amazng albums. If you then look at compilations in the store, you can buy ones that have these artists on them and get a gradually broadening idea of the genre.
I hate MS as much as the next guy, but my bet is that they will follow the exact pattern they have for years: announce what they are going to do (make their products secure), and then throw $40 billion at it for a couple of years until they have what they claimed. It's happened before and I would put money on it happening again. Mark my words: MS will, at some point, start shipping products that do not have these security flaws.
Apple's press release touts that the new Airport has a built-in firewall; it has, in fact, always had one. They are simply marketing-droid-ing DHCP/NAT.
Slashdot Mirror
Though I agree that this article is rather lame, Bush is *not* simply trying to defend his ability to write executive orders or his war-declaration powers (which are in fact hotly debated). His administration has a clear policy of silence on matters where it should be open. One o the most obnoxious examples of this is in Cheney's refusal to hand over the conversations on energy policy with the Enron folks. The Bush Administration claims it has executive privilege on those documents, no matter their impropriety or content.
Slashdot is all about "open source" and its cultural and economic ramifications. It's time we start demanding that more things in our lives be open, starting with our political processes. There are very few things anyone in the political sphere should be able to keep secret, and they *all* relate to national security. Even then, numerous reports indicate that information is classified far too often under the guise of national security.
When it comes to finances, political contributions, or ties with corporations that have knowingly screwed over millions and millions of people, there should be no secrets. Once you are a politician I think you should have to divulge, for public scrutiny, all of your and your spouse's finances for the past several years. If you don't want to do that, don't become a politician. The public has a right to know if your financial ties to any organization are going to unfairly influence your decision-making, as they appear to in this administration (single-bid Halliburton contracts, Enron energy policy, etc).
Governments need to be open to protect the masses against their tyranny. There is no small amount of irony in the Bush Administration expecting us to open all of our lives and finances up in the guise of national security (through the PATRIOT Act) and then turning around and claiming it can keep the energy policy information secret.
DVD players are meant to play DVD's and have specialized DSP's that don't run ridiculously hot like a Prescott. The idea that some DVD's are "just too much for your DVD player to handle" is slightly ridiculous.
But this article is aimed at small manufacturers of ASICs and IP vendors, which it is saying are being squeezed out of the market because of relentless pressure to cram everything into a cell phone, meaning their customs ASICs are not longer needed for the previously individual devices. I don't think the article says anywhere that the handset manufacturers are being squeezed, and aside from Nika thier recent earnings would bolster this assertion.
http://www.prwatch.org and all of the books by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber are fascinating looks at PR. It is arguably the most corrupt industry in existence since it is the primary mechanism through which all other corruption is allowed to take place without much public scrutiny. PR allows companies and governments to do something evil and then lie about it (PR people like to lie about the lying itself and call it "spinning").
Some PR people actually liken themselves to lawyers, saying that anyone who needs PR help should have it. However, since no one is legally guaranteed PR help, it ends up that only the people who can pay for it get it. Another obvious difference is that law is highly regulated and there are severe penalties for lying in a court of justice. PR, however, has no such regulatory framework. It plays out in the court of public opinion, and the only rules there are "convince the monkeys that their bananas aren't poisoned."
PR is unfortunately unregulated and will probably never be regulated. The PR flaks themselves control the lobbying machine in the US, and they would lobby the shit out of any attempt to regulate their behavior.
Thus you will never see something like that come to light, because PR is a dirty, dirty game and there are no real rules.
This is *it*! Linux is finally ready for the desktop.
This is rather remarkable in that there is no discussion of the risks of such a treatment. Drugs generally work by either mimicking neurotransmitters themselves, mimicking their precursors, or by mimicking other chemicals that cause a release of neurotransmitters. This is true of both recreational drugs and prescription drugs like Prozac or Zoloft.
Cocaine, for instance, is known to work by effecting a massive release of dopamine into the brain, which is then reuptaken quickly, providing the high. Alcohol similarly effects a release of GABA (among other neurotransmitters), while GHB is actually a precursor to GABA itself and is converted thus in the brain.
It would seem to me that messing with the pathways through which any given drug actually works, unless it is almost impossibly specific, would mess with the normal operation of the brain. What's to say that a "vaccine" designed to prevent cocaine's method of activity won't prevent or at least diminish all such activity in the brain? Parkinson's Disease is caused at least partially by screwy dopamine levels in the brain. Who knows if injecting people with a virus that prevents rushes of dopamine won't affect the normal rushes of dopamine that occur during life, like after a particularly good orgasm or a 10K-run?
It just sounds like fucking with neurotransmitters, especially on a genetic level, is a recipe for disaster.
One is also lead to believe that the proper pronunciation of "gigabyte" is jy-guh-byte as its root, "giga," is most often pronounced as "gigantic."
Cougars have many local names, including mountain lion, puma, panther, paint, screamer and catamount. Then there are cheetahs, lions, tigers, caracals, bobcats, lynxes. They've only used a couple of those, so they have a few years left.
Personally I don't know why they don't just start naming everything after LOTR Characters.
Mac OS X 10.5: Gandalf
That would be *so* cool.
This is true. Microsoft won its copyright/patent case against Apple in the early 90's because the judge believed their "dashboard" argument: the dashboard to a car cannot be patented or copyrighted because it is part and parcel of the way a car must be built.
In this case there are only a handful of ways an operating system can in fact be built.
How about:
SELECT order_number FROM order WHERE customer_email = thepatentofficeisretarded@uspto.gov
Seriously, this can't be defensible. It's a database lookup. I mean I know USPTO is fucked, but this is ridiculous.
At one point Urban Fetch dropped off a "free" CD along with a DVD rental that the bicycle delivery people had "written, produced, and directed." It was horrible-- all I can remember was something about "what can we fetch fo' u?" rapped to nasty pseudo-hip-hop music. I scrawled a "please never deliver one of these promos to me again" note on it and returned it alongside my DVD rental.
Ahh, the good old days.
How about don't let your webhost register domains for you, and don't give your webhost administrative contact status in your domain? Do it yourself at a registrar that respects your rights, like GANDI.
They have the ability to self-regulate as an industry rather than be regulated from above. One of my clients is a porn company and they are worried about Aschcroft, et al, raiding them yet again. They really do try to keep themselves out of trouble, and yet trouble finds them. If they had a dot-sex domain and some kid got there they could just give the finger to the instituion or parent who was moronic enough to not block it.
In most cities porn stores can only be way out in the boondocks or a certain distance from residences and schools. Someone could try to set up shop next to a school, but the authorities would shut them down. If they go where they know they won't be harmed, they stand a much better chance of being left alone. dot-sex would act more as a protective measure for the companies than anything else-- a red-light district for the net.
PR mavens do this all the time. They send out a press release and lazy news organizations just post it. My boyfriend used to do tech PR before he got fed up with it, and says that this sort of thing happens all the time.
90% of the "news" you read is placed there, sometimes verbatim, by a savvy PR person. This is especially true of technology reporting. A PR staffer calls a journalist, tells them what to say, and a lot of times, they say it.
A good book on the topic is "Toxic Sludge is Good for You! : Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry." It's a frightening book and highly recommended.
I have tried over and over again to switch to Cyrus from UW-IMAP and have finally decided that I have no need to do so. UW-IMAP is written by the guy who wrote the IMAP protocol, Mark Crispin. For all means and purposes it is the definitive IMAP server. It is extremely simple to setup, can scale up to tens of thousand of users, and supports every mailbox type you can think of. It also supports SSL with very little configuration. The O'Reilly IMAP book is a good guide to it (and to IMAP in general).
The one thing you really must keep in mind with UW-IMAP is not to use MBOX. The MBX format, on the other hand, is high-performance and very powerful. The maintainers of UW-IMAP have kept MBOX as the default for years now, but once you get past about 50MB of mail in a given folder you end up with problems.
My advice is to look through ALL of the docs to learn how to modify the source code. The docs are scattered in random places but they do contain most of the info you need to become a relative expert in UW-IMAP.
All in all I am very happy with UW-IMAP. I have been running it on Gentoo forever now (though I don't emerge it, I compile it myself) alongside Sendmail and Procmail and have never, ever, ever had a problem with it. Months of uptime, broken only my physical server moves...
Arguing that Mitnick is glorifying hacking is like saying that The Sopranos is a "wrong" show because it glorifies New Jersey-- I mean the Mafia.
It serves a whole range of people from a whole range of backgrounds, from neo-hippie bodybuilder-ish urban technoqueers like myself to rural born-again Christians to Nebraska farmers, and as such has a variety of different views to draw from. I had gardened before, but this magazine takes it to a whole new level. It introduces ways to become totally self-sufficient, including ways to generate your own power and build cheap and sustainable housing. It's a non-tech equivalent of Slashdot, rather like Alton Brown is for cooking.
But I digress.
Though, Troll II, lots of religious edicts are based around ideas that once made sense and now do not. IIRC, the sun is the center of our little solar system now. Other examples will keep this thread a-flamin', but I'm sure just about everyone can come up with more on their own.
Unfortunately that's not true. Capitalism was just beginning to sweep the globe around World War I and II, and it is capitalism that the US fights for, with democracy being the virtuous and pretty stepchild that is the prima facie reason for its global exploits. The US shrewdly realized that imperialism need not occur via direct warfare but instead was easier to accomplish via economic means. American imperialism has not occurred via direct military action but instead through the long arm of the American corporate enterprise. I don't particularly need to argue this point; American companies dominate the global economic landscape, and where they don't, the dominant company generally stems from a place where America rebuilt using its own ideology, such as Japan or Germany.
Furthermore, television, movies, and computer monitors are based on persistence of vision-- the idea that the eye and brain can be fooled into perceiving motion if the pictures are switched fast enough (in the case of NTSC TV, 30 frames per second). This is a significant "compression" of the data, far larger than the amount of data being thrown out by psychoacoustic compression. NASA uses cameras that record 10,000 fps to examine explosions and things of that nature that occur far too fast for us to perceive.
Reality occurs at a rate that technology currently finds impossible to record in full. That doesn't mean it's damaging us.
Pay-per-view and the associated product tie-ins that follow. HBO is of course the shining example of this: it managed to surivive initially on subscriber fees alone. After taking risks on shows it now has a raft of amazing shows and is able to sell them on VHS and DVD. The Sopranos is phenomenal, and its DVD sales have consistently been in the top 10.
The scary thing is that I just read that mary-kateandashley's latest horrific mind-trip has managed to sell more than even The Sopranos.
To clarify: it does not mean operating an open 802.11 access point is a crime, but instead that using someone else's 802.11 access point without their permission is a crime. That's a good point, and should be used as the basis to prosecute spam and DOS attacks.
Not that these all sound like pop music, but instead that these all are the sort of electronica people who listen to "non-electronica" might find easier to relate to:
The Chemical Brothers (Dig Your Own Hole and Brothers Gonna Work It Out)
Moby (really only Play and 18)
Garbage (Version 2.0 is amazing!)
Aphex Twin (Windowlicker)
Bran Van 3000 (Discosis)
Delerium (Karma and Poem)
Death in Vegas (Dead Elvis)
Rather than this being an exhaustive list, these are a few that are amazng albums. If you then look at compilations in the store, you can buy ones that have these artists on them and get a gradually broadening idea of the genre.
I hate MS as much as the next guy, but my bet is that they will follow the exact pattern they have for years: announce what they are going to do (make their products secure), and then throw $40 billion at it for a couple of years until they have what they claimed. It's happened before and I would put money on it happening again. Mark my words: MS will, at some point, start shipping products that do not have these security flaws.
Apple's press release touts that the new Airport has a built-in firewall; it has, in fact, always had one. They are simply marketing-droid-ing DHCP/NAT.