OK, this guy does not sound like my favorite person. But he does have one point that is often overlooked.
How many Europeans can travel 2000 km and still be in the same country, with people speaking the same language?
For example, travel from Madrid, Spain to Bonn, Germany. That is 1115 miles, about 1794 km. How many countries did you pass thorough? At least Spain, France and Germany. You could have gone through the Belgium also. You will also be rather close to the Netherlands and Luxembourg. That is at least 4 languages. (OK, I assume there are a few other regional languages somewhere along the route, but as I am a dumb American with a deficient geography education I am not sure what they are.)
Now travel from Richmond, VA, USA to Topeka, KS, USA. That is about 1130 miles, or about 1821 km. How many countries did you go through? One. (In fact, you're not even halfway across the country.) You may have passed through 8 states, but most of the people in Virgina, West Virgina, Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas speak American English as their native language. (hey, that's not my route, it's MapQuest's) None of these states is anywhere near a border, other than the fact that Virginia is on the coast.
Go to California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, southern Texas or Florida and you will find a fair number of Anglos that do speak Spanish. These are border states.
In other words, while there may be good reasons to learn more than one language, it is practical in most of the US to speak only American English. In Europe it is not nearly as practical to speak any single language.
I want a patent on a common item that has lots of prior art so that I can come up with a lame lawsuit. Everybody else is doing it, why can't I?
(furiously searching the patent database to see if the "Dialog Box" has been patented yet)
My thoughts exactly. Sorry I haven't read the entire article, so I don't know if/how content can be deleted from Publius, but IIRC Freenet doesn't have any way (other than age) to remove content. Spammer Heaven!
Of course, the size limit and lack of a search engine are just ways to make the system more complicated than it needs to be. If this does take off, I probably won't be the only one writing a bot (Hmmmm... this isn't the "Web" so we can't call the bot a "Spider"...how about "PubCrawler?" ) to do indexing and a nifty little utility to split/reassemble all those little bits of larger files.
Re:I really don't see how they could get sued.
on
Hacker Crackdown?
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· Score: 1
Yes! Most analogies attempting to compare software to something in the real world fail at some point. This one seems to be rather exact.
I guess the main difference is that we have a long tradition of making our own documents , but we don't have that much tradition of making our own audio recordings (despite the fact that the technology has been around for a while.) So "Digitized Audio Clip" is presumed to be "Copyrighted material." After all, music isn't something that just anyone can make, it requires the funding of a big record label to produce.
I would say not. If you truly want to communicate with the friend that will be in China in a way that will not be noticed encryption isn't the way to go.
Low profile seems to be important here: If the encrypted data gets through, but is detected it may not matter if the government can break the encryption. If your friend gets arrested for suspicion of treason, the fact that the proof of treason is encrypted won't help them.
IMHO, I'd use a code instead of encryption. You know, "I had a great time today. We visited a nice outdoor market. See you soon!" == "They almost caught me as I investigated a slave labor camp. Can not leave right now."
That way, even if the message IS intercepted and read, it raises no red flags. The only catch is that you have to devise the code in the first place, and either memorize it, or bring a codebook that would mark you as a spy.
The difference? In the hypothetical Russia that you write of (which banned the capitalistic magazine) it is also probably illegal to leave the country.
In the schools, you can leave to go home now and then (even boarding schools.)
You say" We don't allow witnesses to testify in court anonymously. Why should we allow people to go into a financial chat room and unleash false rumours about companies that bring down their valuations?"
True.
But do we allow people to read a newspaper without telling the publisher their home address, income, what other publications they may have read in the past year, what color they painted their house, their medical conditions....
Do we allow people to get on a soapbox anonomyously? What about the crowd that gathers around the guy on the soapbox? Do we take pictures of them and find out who they are?
Yes, it's not quite that bad. But I rather dislike the idea that by simply viewing web pages, not saying anything of any kind, I reveal all sorts of info through doubleclick and it's ilk. (or did before Junkbusters)
It's one thing to hold people accountable for their public statements. It's another to keep track of their movements without their knowledge. I like my privacy. But I'm beginning to think that total transparancy is preferable to the current situation. It's not just that companies and governments are gathering information about me. It's that (other than the big 3 credit reporting companies) I don't even know who they are, what information they have (correct or incorrect) or how they're using it. THEY have privacy. I don't.
Most consumers are NOT suitably protected/firewalled. Are you saying that the Bill of Rights and other parts of the constitution are not there to protect us (US citizens) from our government? That it is the individual's responsibility to take all due care to protect themselves from the government, and if they fail, so what? No recourse?
Have you checked out the request string for some of the DoubleClick cookies? They contain the name and contents of every form element on the page. (see the articles mentioned elsewhere about Quicken and Doubleclick) This IS "collection of data" and not just "references to external cookie locations."
As far as logging on to slashdot via cookies... Point taken that cookies have their good uses. BUT even though I'm not in favor of outlawing knives (hey, I use them every day myself when preparing dinner) I certainly don't want it to be legal for someone to stab me. IMHO Doubleclick's use of cookies should be illegal.
I don't think so. Standard Neural Nets are a mathematical model of what we understand goes on inside of real neurons. These guys are attempting to build a physical model. Besides which, AFAIK (sorry I don't have relevant links) there are already commercially produced standard neural net chips that are often used in handwritten character recognition.
A good mathematical model, by it's nature, captures all the relevant details but ignores irrelevant details. (When calculating the lift on a new design of airplane wing, do you really care what color it's painted?) I can only guess that these guys are hoping that some of the "irrelevant details" lost in the standard model of neural nets are actually relevant.
You say "Again I will state it, Catholics are not Christians, they are in fact Satanists like the rest."
So please explain to me how Lutheranism, Anglicanism, and all of the other christian religions that formed when some Catholics got tired of what the Pope was doing ARE Christian. And how about all the rest of the christian religions that formed when people in the first generation of reformed christian religions had differences of opinion and schismed even more? How are they christian? If Catholicism isn't Christianity, then the only religions that CAN rightly carry the name are those that are OLDER than Catholicism, or newer ones that can not trace their roots To the Catholic church!
That leaves, let's see...Ethiopian Christianity, the Greek and Eastern Orthodox churches, and a few smaller ones that I can't think of right now. It does NOT leave most mainstream Western Chrisitan religions.
Doing a Military style Failure Modes Effects and Criticality Analysis (FMECA) is rather similar to a NASA style one. The criticality is obtained by multiplying the failure rate by the severity of the failure. (in general terms that's how all FME(C)A's are performed, even those in the auto industry) Thus, a minor failure that happens frequently is as much of a problem as a severe failure that almost never occurs. You MUST design out potential failures that are both severe and likely.
However, the worst severity in a Military FMECA is NOT "loss of life." It is "Mission Failure." Which makes sense. Losing a pilot (and aircraft) is bad, and very expensive. Losing a battle is rather worse. Fortunately for the pilots, a failure that kills the crew also tends to hamper their effectiveness in completing their missions.
"In recent days, networking-gear maker 3Com, PC maker Gateway, and chipmakers LSI Logic and Xilinx, and electronics retailer Circuit City all warned that earnings will fall short of expectations, knocking their stocks down as much as 36 per cent
That's it in a nutshell. FALL SHORT OF EXPECTATIONS. It may be a loss. It may be a profit. But if it isn't what the market expected, the stock will fall.
The Dot-Com phenomenon is a creation of the market and the media. Both of those run on perception and nothing else.
Investors want to buy stock low and sell it high. Whether the company makes a profit or not isn't important. In fact, if the company doesn't make a profit, and instead plows all the money that would otherwise go to dividends into mergers, the stock price goes up! It doesn't matter if the company makes a product. Or sells a service. Or does nothing. If enough people think it's worth something, then by definition it is worth something. On paper anyway.
Finally reality is catching up to that sort of thinking. That's a good thing, IMO. I'd rather a company with at least one predictable revenue stream to a company with lots of promise but no cash flow. (other than flowing out)
Also any type of investment that will hit the bottom line but only yield results on the medium/long-term will not be made.
Truer words were never written. You also said it makes more sense to generate short-term sucesses by sacrificing long-term sucess. Yup. If you measure short term success and reward based on that measurement, there is absolutely no incentive for anyone to ensure long term success.
But exactly what science are you talking about?
The science of management? That's not a science. Sure, people are trying to make it into one, with mixed results, but at this point it's still more like a quantatative art than a science.
Oh, you said "IT methodologies". My bad.
That said, I don't disagree with the idea of trying to measure. If you can't measure, you don't know if you're meeting goals or not.
My distaste for management methodologies like those mentioned in the original article is that they often measure things that are not relevant to the work. Lines of code metric? Good, I'll be wordy and put no more than one statement per line. I'm not being more productive, but I'll look like it. It's sort of like that neural net that was trained to do a particular task. It turned out it learned very well how to optimize it's measured score, not the task that was supposedly measured.
Or in the rare case that the measurement is actually relevant, management does not allow the extra time to make the measurement. As others have said, documenting things takes time. But often management doesn't seem to realize that if they add an extra 20-30% more work to their developers, it won't make products ship faster. It won't even make them ship on time. It will slow them down.
OK, enough incoherent rambling for now, hopefully my next post will make more sense. Hey, it's early in the new year, I'm not awake yet.
Slashdot Mirror
How many Europeans can travel 2000 km and still be in the same country, with people speaking the same language?
For example, travel from Madrid, Spain to Bonn, Germany. That is 1115 miles, about 1794 km. How many countries did you pass thorough? At least Spain, France and Germany. You could have gone through the Belgium also. You will also be rather close to the Netherlands and Luxembourg. That is at least 4 languages. (OK, I assume there are a few other regional languages somewhere along the route, but as I am a dumb American with a deficient geography education I am not sure what they are.)
Now travel from Richmond, VA, USA to Topeka, KS, USA. That is about 1130 miles, or about 1821 km. How many countries did you go through? One. (In fact, you're not even halfway across the country.) You may have passed through 8 states, but most of the people in Virgina, West Virgina, Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas speak American English as their native language. (hey, that's not my route, it's MapQuest's) None of these states is anywhere near a border, other than the fact that Virginia is on the coast.
Go to California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, southern Texas or Florida and you will find a fair number of Anglos that do speak Spanish. These are border states.
In other words, while there may be good reasons to learn more than one language, it is practical in most of the US to speak only American English. In Europe it is not nearly as practical to speak any single language.
I want a patent on a common item that has lots of prior art so that I can come up with a lame lawsuit. Everybody else is doing it, why can't I? (furiously searching the patent database to see if the "Dialog Box" has been patented yet)
Of course, the size limit and lack of a search engine are just ways to make the system more complicated than it needs to be. If this does take off, I probably won't be the only one writing a bot (Hmmmm... this isn't the "Web" so we can't call the bot a "Spider"...how about "PubCrawler?" ) to do indexing and a nifty little utility to split/reassemble all those little bits of larger files.
I guess the main difference is that we have a long tradition of making our own documents , but we don't have that much tradition of making our own audio recordings (despite the fact that the technology has been around for a while.) So "Digitized Audio Clip" is presumed to be "Copyrighted material." After all, music isn't something that just anyone can make, it requires the funding of a big record label to produce.
So this is how the UFOs do it!
Sure they could. They could fire the people that made the decision. Just who do you think owns ICQ?
Low profile seems to be important here: If the encrypted data gets through, but is detected it may not matter if the government can break the encryption. If your friend gets arrested for suspicion of treason, the fact that the proof of treason is encrypted won't help them.
IMHO, I'd use a code instead of encryption. You know, "I had a great time today. We visited a nice outdoor market. See you soon!" == "They almost caught me as I investigated a slave labor camp. Can not leave right now."
That way, even if the message IS intercepted and read, it raises no red flags. The only catch is that you have to devise the code in the first place, and either memorize it, or bring a codebook that would mark you as a spy.
Still, it seems safer than encryption.
In the schools, you can leave to go home now and then (even boarding schools.)
True.
But do we allow people to read a newspaper without telling the publisher their home address, income, what other publications they may have read in the past year, what color they painted their house, their medical conditions....
Do we allow people to get on a soapbox anonomyously? What about the crowd that gathers around the guy on the soapbox? Do we take pictures of them and find out who they are?
Yes, it's not quite that bad. But I rather dislike the idea that by simply viewing web pages, not saying anything of any kind, I reveal all sorts of info through doubleclick and it's ilk. (or did before Junkbusters)
It's one thing to hold people accountable for their public statements. It's another to keep track of their movements without their knowledge. I like my privacy. But I'm beginning to think that total transparancy is preferable to the current situation. It's not just that companies and governments are gathering information about me. It's that (other than the big 3 credit reporting companies) I don't even know who they are, what information they have (correct or incorrect) or how they're using it. THEY have privacy. I don't.
Have you checked out the request string for some of the DoubleClick cookies? They contain the name and contents of every form element on the page. (see the articles mentioned elsewhere about Quicken and Doubleclick) This IS "collection of data" and not just "references to external cookie locations."
As far as logging on to slashdot via cookies... Point taken that cookies have their good uses. BUT even though I'm not in favor of outlawing knives (hey, I use them every day myself when preparing dinner) I certainly don't want it to be legal for someone to stab me. IMHO Doubleclick's use of cookies should be illegal.
A good mathematical model, by it's nature, captures all the relevant details but ignores irrelevant details. (When calculating the lift on a new design of airplane wing, do you really care what color it's painted?) I can only guess that these guys are hoping that some of the "irrelevant details" lost in the standard model of neural nets are actually relevant.
So please explain to me how Lutheranism, Anglicanism, and all of the other christian religions that formed when some Catholics got tired of what the Pope was doing ARE Christian. And how about all the rest of the christian religions that formed when people in the first generation of reformed christian religions had differences of opinion and schismed even more? How are they christian? If Catholicism isn't Christianity, then the only religions that CAN rightly carry the name are those that are OLDER than Catholicism, or newer ones that can not trace their roots To the Catholic church!
That leaves, let's see...Ethiopian Christianity, the Greek and Eastern Orthodox churches, and a few smaller ones that I can't think of right now. It does NOT leave most mainstream Western Chrisitan religions.
However, the worst severity in a Military FMECA is NOT "loss of life." It is "Mission Failure." Which makes sense. Losing a pilot (and aircraft) is bad, and very expensive. Losing a battle is rather worse. Fortunately for the pilots, a failure that kills the crew also tends to hamper their effectiveness in completing their missions.
That's it in a nutshell. FALL SHORT OF EXPECTATIONS. It may be a loss. It may be a profit. But if it isn't what the market expected, the stock will fall.
The Dot-Com phenomenon is a creation of the market and the media. Both of those run on perception and nothing else.
Investors want to buy stock low and sell it high. Whether the company makes a profit or not isn't important. In fact, if the company doesn't make a profit, and instead plows all the money that would otherwise go to dividends into mergers, the stock price goes up! It doesn't matter if the company makes a product. Or sells a service. Or does nothing. If enough people think it's worth something, then by definition it is worth something. On paper anyway.
Finally reality is catching up to that sort of thinking. That's a good thing, IMO. I'd rather a company with at least one predictable revenue stream to a company with lots of promise but no cash flow. (other than flowing out)
Truer words were never written. You also said it makes more sense to generate short-term sucesses by sacrificing long-term sucess. Yup. If you measure short term success and reward based on that measurement, there is absolutely no incentive for anyone to ensure long term success.
Oh, you said "IT methodologies". My bad.
That said, I don't disagree with the idea of trying to measure. If you can't measure, you don't know if you're meeting goals or not.
My distaste for management methodologies like those mentioned in the original article is that they often measure things that are not relevant to the work. Lines of code metric? Good, I'll be wordy and put no more than one statement per line. I'm not being more productive, but I'll look like it. It's sort of like that neural net that was trained to do a particular task. It turned out it learned very well how to optimize it's measured score, not the task that was supposedly measured.
Or in the rare case that the measurement is actually relevant, management does not allow the extra time to make the measurement. As others have said, documenting things takes time. But often management doesn't seem to realize that if they add an extra 20-30% more work to their developers, it won't make products ship faster. It won't even make them ship on time. It will slow them down.
OK, enough incoherent rambling for now, hopefully my next post will make more sense. Hey, it's early in the new year, I'm not awake yet.