The particular instantiations of Anonymous with whom you have interacted have certainly been effective in conditioning individuals such as yourself to post a standard retort to word usage, rather than addressing the substantial issue.
We run a not large site that gets 20,000-40,000 spam comment attempts per day. Some simple filters leave us with dozens of items to manually review per year: 1) English (language in general) employs rules that yield statistical patterns. For example, personal names and occupations do not contain 50 per cent upper case letters and 50 per cent lower case letters in English. This bins the bots that fill unmatched fields with random characters, without bothering human users since CSS is good now (our forms sometimes include randomly named fields...). We also test for average word length to catch excessive use of brand names and URLs. These two rules catch almost everything except the human operators. 2) To tarpit the human operators who try to whitelist their accounts/IPs through repeatedly posting benign comments, new users who post a lot (more than four comments an hour) in an initial period (24 hours after signup) and do not interact with others will see their own comments, but others will not.
We have five other filters but have turned them into warnings for the users instead (bots do not want to solve "That's a lot of links. please delete http:/// from your links"). Our next challenge is to better protect the mobile site which has a different set of dynamics.
*this silly form insists on linkifying my http colon slash slash and adding a third slash...
> Directly commenting on the consequences of the topic of the article is apparently off-topic.
Yes. Critical thinking is hard. That's why (for the most part) we only stop to consider issues as they come up in the news, as opposed to being constantly mindful of the frameworks around us.
Despite claiming to support such radical causes in the pseudo-public realm online reputation effects, many forumers remain conditioned to the concept of the geographic sovereign nation state as the optimal and inviolable mode of human organization. Anonymous may or may not be effective, but to be cognitively offended by the possibility of alternatives does not require rational consideration of the circumstances.
It's not their fault. Silver platters of turds are still silver platters.
I don't understand your question. Steeltoe cites a Wikipedia article as evidence of US government badness over decades. That such a list is represented as describing obvious badness spanning decades indicates that accountability problems have not been successfully solved by the usual actors (citizens, industry, media, other states) despite strong social and economic profit motives to solve those problems.
On the assumption that Steeltoe's claims are fully supported by the evidence cited, I'm trying to find out what has been done to address such concerns, why such concerns have not been successfully addressed, and about suggestions that Steeltoe might have about new ways to address such concerns.
I'm trying to provide Steeltoe with every opportunity to educate me about the issues he raises via logical arguments. That individual has not since engaged me in any further substantial discussion or provided any further information I seek to better understand his claims and evidence. I am left to conclude that either the evidence does not support the claims, or that the badnesses claimed have not been a high priority for any of the millions of domestic and international actors empowered to ameliorate them over the last 60 years.
I apologize if you've mistaken my explicit request for evidence for a belief I neither hold nor express. But thank you for helping me to set the record straight about this conversation with your duly entitled summary judgements.
Despite a clear and documented pattern of disagreeable (to a great many people) conduct by the US and other liberal democratic governments, why have there been no successful actions to successfully address these concerns, and what improved strategies would you suggest?
Asserting a proof by conspiracy doesn't help to fix the problems you describe. If you have evidence of unethical "surveillance, covert-operations, false flag operations", please present it so that the perpetrators can be held responsible.
You've also described the features and benefits of twitter. Counting screen time at a pull URL is so 2006; the number of screens, devices, and people via which twitter and its massive federation of third-party parters can push information far eclipses anything that can happen on a website. Also, twitter's security is model is far more transparent, robust, and elegant.
@strack: I want the public to routinely think of the world as containing more than steers, grass, and shit, so that we need not rely on experts in steers, grass, and shit, to lead a strongly sustainable existence. Shit on the asshole could be annoying, but doesn't tell anything near a complete story.
I would view as an improvement the public's ability to differentiate for themselves from among steers, grass, and shit, in place of being told which is which, and how to view each as virtuous and/or disgusting. What we do or do not do with shit we identify on an asshole is much more important than just letting others point out that it's there.
Leaks provide (some) information. Value and harm are outputs of users of that information. I'm still waiting for news stories about acts of heroism and good things from the Iraq leaks. Just like bugs in public software, that the data is available has no substantial value until attention is put to it. (If the Iraq or present leaks did not contain any disclosures about non-adverse interactions, then we need to ask more questions about how the data was selected before we can pass judgement either way.) Protecting the ability to leak in law and in practice provides no assurance that leaks will be used in a fair, or any other, way. Focusing on the formal law, rather than on their social origins, yields a large and unproductive distraction from the substance of our actions in reality.
My suspicion is that the present leaks will continue to yield more reporting about adverse interactions than about desirable interactions, simply because it's easier to research and report on the FUBAR moments than on decades of sustained and constructive interactions that enable the system to work as well as it appears to. But even with all the reported badness described by WL's disclosures, the current method of analysis and interpretation of the leaks has brought few, if any, individuals to account for their actions in a public way. I have not yet seen much on either side of the ledger so far from WL's post-wiki disclosures, and I wouldn't mind if some effective competition came online.
If we want to use the leaks to generate constructive value, presumably by altering the system from which they sample, we need to understand the system moreso than each of the warts. The widely reported incidents are certainly interesting as one-offs, but their more important value is as exceptions to the rules that tell us about how the system operates most of the time and where the pressure points are located. (If the reported badness is the rule rather than the exception, it would be much more efficient to achieve socially beneficially change through whatever is buffering the badness, but I digress.) The resources required to do that kind of analysis are not generally easy to muster, with the expected result being that substantial knowledge won't find its way easily to or through the public. I'm not currently persuaded of the social benefits of providing a dump that enables a slightly different set of elites with fairly exclusive knowledge of how to manipulate international diplomacy, but I'm open to being convinced one way or another. (This is true even if we don't know what kind of sample the disclosed documents represents. Knowledge about the sample tells us how urgently to apply resources to their study.)
I'm far more interested in ways to public-source the analysis to pursue social value not defined by the agendas of WL or popular media or their respective critics or targets, but that would require convincing many other people who still have critical thinking skills such as yourself that there's a world outside a sandbox full of everyone's sparkly shit.
Half my post was expressed in personal terms, about my personal reservations with the discussion as it's currently framed. The other half pertained to what I view to be basic information required to carry out rational analysis in any ambiguous situation, in explicitly general terms because this topic's most vocal discussants seem to have turned off that particular faculty.
I apologize again if I've failed to make clear that the debates surrounding legality or analogies to previous disclosures are almost irrelevant to the social relevance and value of the present leaks.
In no uncertain terms: No deal, since the deal you posit requires me to assent to unevidenced assumptions preceding the (non-) conclusions on which you appear to fixate.
My response does not depend on the (non-) sarcastic nature of your post. It stands independently of that intent, and highlights a flaw in assumptions about the thing argued, rather than in any of the particular arguments.
Overall, I'm only trying to judge what's important for me. At present, WL and analysts have provided insufficient context for me to do that, thus I refrain from passing judgement. I present some insights about how I might judge the leaks with more information, but such has been lacking so far. I'm sorry if my unilateral refusal to immediately assume either body of anger for myself places you in an awkward situation.
I freely admit to not having time or requisite knowledge or experience to immediately read and understand 300,000+ cables that have not been released, but even ultimately incorrect analyses could provide valuable points of entry. At present, my limited experience with negotiating business and technology transfer deals with foreign government representatives permits me to know that I do not know enough about international diplomacy to render any kind of conclusion about the particular set of interactions presented by WL.
I'm content to wait to see where other analysts think the leaked cables fall between trivia and systematic concerns. WL have systematically limited my ability to start my own analysis by removing the "wiki" portion of their system, by being unclear about the context of their data, and by opaque disclosure, and I would be grateful if you know of any remedy to that situation. But please feel free to assume a conclusion on my behalf if that is to your liking.
"there is no difference under the law between 'dumping' and 'analyzing' data"
If the meaning in law of this action is your top concern, than the battle has been lost. The main stated purpose of the two disclosures pertain to accountability by the powers that be to the people at large. Analyses of the Pentagon Papers highlighted many ways in which government conduct were harmful or helpful in social dimensions, often in the absence of applicable international law. A simple dump of either set of papers simply does not provide the social context for society to render any judgements about whether the actions described are, or are not, desirable.
In the case of international diplomacy, there are certainly no international laws as such governing personal conduct or business practices. Rather, that community has developed social codes of conduct that we as outsiders may very easily judge (without having anything close to complete information) as being good or bad, but about which we have no recourse through any domestic legal system. Again, the judgement must be rendered via the social analysis of the data, rather than in its disclosure alone.
If you want to engage intent as an argument in the present series of disclosures, you must engage the intent of all the players. Whatever nuances Pfc Manning may have had in his intent, it certainly was not to simply have the papers out there, but to elicit some kind of socially relevant change. The same can be said of all the other players. And it is on that social basis that we must judge the disclosed actions, since there are no international or domestic laws against world leaders banging sexy ladies or diplomats conducting ethnographies of the same.
I personally cannot presently infer any particular nuanced intent on the part of WL or its downstream partners with respect to the current set of disclosures, nor the plausible social benefits from their disclosures, most of which would be fit for publication on TMZ or Entertainment Tonight by sed'ing the names of some participants. Of the tiny remainder, neither the dump, nor the analyses, provide enough context to understand whether the incidents incompletely described are exceptions or regular events.
WL has provided no way to understand their sample of international diplomatic interactions. I would want to be upset if the bad stuff reported is SOP. I would want to be apathetic about the government's conduct of international affairs if the hundreds of misdeeds reported are cherry-picked from a sea of millions of inconsequential or socially productive interactions, since that would represent better quality control, accuracy, and precision than I get from my doctor or lawyer or accountant. Conversely, I would want to be upset at JA for causing hundreds of millions in HR charges to the tax payer to shuffle diplomatic staff if his intent were solely to put egg on the face of a human system with three-nines of reliability.
It's also important to note that the Pentagon Papers were not the Pentagon Papers immediately after their release. It took years of analysis to understand their contents and their context. Taking JA at his word, the current disclosure has barely begun, so it would be impossible for you, or anyone else, to understand their contents, nor what analysts will find in the future.
The numeric rating and the text of the review seem to disagree. The reviewer generally finds that the book lacks good editing, content flow, and accessibility for its intended audience, yet assigns it a rating that would put it above most of its competitors.
But perhaps, I just don't understand the review. Having developed modules, plugins, themes, etc for WP, Joomla, Drupal, and other CMSes--but not recently--this review provides me almost no useful information on which to make a purchasing decision about the book reviewed. I don't know whether it attempts too much by attempting to tackle the differences in the new version specifically, and Drupal modules in general, and security and database concepts, project managent, and whatever else, or whether it attempts too little by only regurgitating material elsewise available online without overarching context.
The reviewer does not even present the single useful item of technical information in the review about poor indexing in a useful way. Does the volume/require/ a topical index to be appropriately useful to the reader, and is the content searchable or indexed in some on-line form? The answer--obtainable if the reviewer took the time to understand the volume s/he reviewed--makes a great difference as to whether this book is suitable as a desktop companion, commuter reading, or for some other purpose.
Most book review guidelines, including/.'s, implore the reviewer to provide more than just a summary of the volumes reviewed. In this review, I see many individual nit-picky criticisms and praises (applicable to almost any volume when read by particular kinds of reviewers) but almost nothing about whether this stands as a good book.
Background section makes several unstated assumptions about the agency of various actors mentioned.
Introduction section describes novel pre-experimental research activity which is inadequately documented in the Methods.
Background section describes novel post-experimental research writing activity but does not explain method of transcription or filtering applied to interviews of children at local pub.
Unclear if or how human subjects provided informed consent to participate in this experiment.
Sociological stances and arguments introduced in the background are not sustained in the main.
Overall, this is a solid paper about bees marred only by the PIs' clumsy insertion of themselves into the actual scientific activity without employing an adequate theoretical framework. Not news.
If the telecoms want to use a model in which prices are based on content, and if cable companies want to continue their role as content license managers, we should help them out with it.
If the eyeball networks have the technical capacity to inspect the contents of their customers' packets and deciding how to bill based on what they find and are able to back that up for billing disputes, then they should have no problems using that same kit to make other business decisions based on their total knowledge as gleaned from inspecting their customers' packets.
Content creators should attach individual licenses to creative works with respect to distribution, as already occurs for television and film distribution rights. Such licenses should contain randomly generated variation in their terms (with respect to geography, time of day, caching, end user plans, etc.) that differ each time the content is accessed in machine and human-readable formats. Since the content industry is adamant that copyright infringement occurs even if the infringer access accessed or distributed content against license terms unknowingly or unintentionally, they should have no issues with following the same standards in their own actions.
If it happens that the machine-readable version requires a particularly computationally intensive and time-consuming algorithm to obtain "Verizon may distribute on the next two Sundays between 9:43 and 11:12 a.m. to customers within 100 miles of [legal land description] whose plans cost more than $16.48 including state but not federal surcharges", I wouldn't blame a judge who categorically threw out such capricious and overly complicated content and distribution licensing schemes on the grounds of being against the public interest.
The important advance is in the presentation of weighted atomic masses as ranges with context, rather than the wet chemistry behind the changed numbers. At the very least, presenting a range of masses reminds us to think about the sources of the atoms analysed and variations in their collective attributes.
This attack doesn't cut off the companies from receiving faxes, it simply gets them to more finely tune their sorting procedures, including moving their important traffic to numbers and handlers to which the public now no longer has access. No modern document management system for a global organization relies on paper-printing fax machines, nor hard copper lines to receive faxes over PSTN.
Better yet, where's the report? We have this new fangled "hypertext" thingee now, where documents can link to external resources on the "Internet". Even if the churnalists are too busy to link to the the original document reporting the summarized findings, would it be too much to ask of the editors to locate and point to the source? The Linux Foundation doesn't seem to want to make it easy to find popular documents on their website, and many of the sites re-reporting the story seem to have moved from the atrocious kind of single-source reporting that various groups have trained the media to practice, to zero source reporting.
Government can and will continue to do things that do not require public knowledge, but simply make no records of them subject to discovery. Novice participants are routinely given this advice.
Since the government has centuries more expertise at this than the average/. reader, it is left as an exercise to the reader to infer just how trivial the present disclosures are within the broader context.
Slashdot Mirror
The particular instantiations of Anonymous with whom you have interacted have certainly been effective in conditioning individuals such as yourself to post a standard retort to word usage, rather than addressing the substantial issue.
Well played, *Anonymous.
So what? It demonstrates a point relevant to the discussion.
--
Discount Helicobacter pylori
We run a not large site that gets 20,000-40,000 spam comment attempts per day. Some simple filters leave us with dozens of items to manually review per year:
1) English (language in general) employs rules that yield statistical patterns. For example, personal names and occupations do not contain 50 per cent upper case letters and 50 per cent lower case letters in English. This bins the bots that fill unmatched fields with random characters, without bothering human users since CSS is good now (our forms sometimes include randomly named fields...). We also test for average word length to catch excessive use of brand names and URLs. These two rules catch almost everything except the human operators.
2) To tarpit the human operators who try to whitelist their accounts/IPs through repeatedly posting benign comments, new users who post a lot (more than four comments an hour) in an initial period (24 hours after signup) and do not interact with others will see their own comments, but others will not.
We have five other filters but have turned them into warnings for the users instead (bots do not want to solve "That's a lot of links. please delete http:/// from your links"). Our next challenge is to better protect the mobile site which has a different set of dynamics.
*this silly form insists on linkifying my http colon slash slash and adding a third slash...
> Directly commenting on the consequences of the topic of the article is apparently off-topic.
Yes. Critical thinking is hard. That's why (for the most part) we only stop to consider issues as they come up in the news, as opposed to being constantly mindful of the frameworks around us.
Despite claiming to support such radical causes in the pseudo-public realm online reputation effects, many forumers remain conditioned to the concept of the geographic sovereign nation state as the optimal and inviolable mode of human organization. Anonymous may or may not be effective, but to be cognitively offended by the possibility of alternatives does not require rational consideration of the circumstances.
It's not their fault. Silver platters of turds are still silver platters.
I don't understand your question. Steeltoe cites a Wikipedia article as evidence of US government badness over decades. That such a list is represented as describing obvious badness spanning decades indicates that accountability problems have not been successfully solved by the usual actors (citizens, industry, media, other states) despite strong social and economic profit motives to solve those problems.
On the assumption that Steeltoe's claims are fully supported by the evidence cited, I'm trying to find out what has been done to address such concerns, why such concerns have not been successfully addressed, and about suggestions that Steeltoe might have about new ways to address such concerns.
I'm trying to provide Steeltoe with every opportunity to educate me about the issues he raises via logical arguments. That individual has not since engaged me in any further substantial discussion or provided any further information I seek to better understand his claims and evidence. I am left to conclude that either the evidence does not support the claims, or that the badnesses claimed have not been a high priority for any of the millions of domestic and international actors empowered to ameliorate them over the last 60 years.
I apologize if you've mistaken my explicit request for evidence for a belief I neither hold nor express. But thank you for helping me to set the record straight about this conversation with your duly entitled summary judgements.
Despite a clear and documented pattern of disagreeable (to a great many people) conduct by the US and other liberal democratic governments, why have there been no successful actions to successfully address these concerns, and what improved strategies would you suggest?
Asserting a proof by conspiracy doesn't help to fix the problems you describe. If you have evidence of unethical "surveillance, covert-operations, false flag operations", please present it so that the perpetrators can be held responsible.
You've also described the features and benefits of twitter. Counting screen time at a pull URL is so 2006; the number of screens, devices, and people via which twitter and its massive federation of third-party parters can push information far eclipses anything that can happen on a website. Also, twitter's security is model is far more transparent, robust, and elegant.
@strack: I want the public to routinely think of the world as containing more than steers, grass, and shit, so that we need not rely on experts in steers, grass, and shit, to lead a strongly sustainable existence. Shit on the asshole could be annoying, but doesn't tell anything near a complete story.
I would view as an improvement the public's ability to differentiate for themselves from among steers, grass, and shit, in place of being told which is which, and how to view each as virtuous and/or disgusting. What we do or do not do with shit we identify on an asshole is much more important than just letting others point out that it's there.
Yes, but do not trade one trap for another.
Leaks provide (some) information. Value and harm are outputs of users of that information. I'm still waiting for news stories about acts of heroism and good things from the Iraq leaks. Just like bugs in public software, that the data is available has no substantial value until attention is put to it. (If the Iraq or present leaks did not contain any disclosures about non-adverse interactions, then we need to ask more questions about how the data was selected before we can pass judgement either way.) Protecting the ability to leak in law and in practice provides no assurance that leaks will be used in a fair, or any other, way. Focusing on the formal law, rather than on their social origins, yields a large and unproductive distraction from the substance of our actions in reality.
My suspicion is that the present leaks will continue to yield more reporting about adverse interactions than about desirable interactions, simply because it's easier to research and report on the FUBAR moments than on decades of sustained and constructive interactions that enable the system to work as well as it appears to. But even with all the reported badness described by WL's disclosures, the current method of analysis and interpretation of the leaks has brought few, if any, individuals to account for their actions in a public way. I have not yet seen much on either side of the ledger so far from WL's post-wiki disclosures, and I wouldn't mind if some effective competition came online.
If we want to use the leaks to generate constructive value, presumably by altering the system from which they sample, we need to understand the system moreso than each of the warts. The widely reported incidents are certainly interesting as one-offs, but their more important value is as exceptions to the rules that tell us about how the system operates most of the time and where the pressure points are located. (If the reported badness is the rule rather than the exception, it would be much more efficient to achieve socially beneficially change through whatever is buffering the badness, but I digress.) The resources required to do that kind of analysis are not generally easy to muster, with the expected result being that substantial knowledge won't find its way easily to or through the public. I'm not currently persuaded of the social benefits of providing a dump that enables a slightly different set of elites with fairly exclusive knowledge of how to manipulate international diplomacy, but I'm open to being convinced one way or another. (This is true even if we don't know what kind of sample the disclosed documents represents. Knowledge about the sample tells us how urgently to apply resources to their study.)
I'm far more interested in ways to public-source the analysis to pursue social value not defined by the agendas of WL or popular media or their respective critics or targets, but that would require convincing many other people who still have critical thinking skills such as yourself that there's a world outside a sandbox full of everyone's sparkly shit.
Is your intent to be sarcastic again?
Half my post was expressed in personal terms, about my personal reservations with the discussion as it's currently framed. The other half pertained to what I view to be basic information required to carry out rational analysis in any ambiguous situation, in explicitly general terms because this topic's most vocal discussants seem to have turned off that particular faculty.
I apologize again if I've failed to make clear that the debates surrounding legality or analogies to previous disclosures are almost irrelevant to the social relevance and value of the present leaks.
In no uncertain terms: No deal, since the deal you posit requires me to assent to unevidenced assumptions preceding the (non-) conclusions on which you appear to fixate.
My response does not depend on the (non-) sarcastic nature of your post. It stands independently of that intent, and highlights a flaw in assumptions about the thing argued, rather than in any of the particular arguments.
Overall, I'm only trying to judge what's important for me. At present, WL and analysts have provided insufficient context for me to do that, thus I refrain from passing judgement. I present some insights about how I might judge the leaks with more information, but such has been lacking so far. I'm sorry if my unilateral refusal to immediately assume either body of anger for myself places you in an awkward situation.
I freely admit to not having time or requisite knowledge or experience to immediately read and understand 300,000+ cables that have not been released, but even ultimately incorrect analyses could provide valuable points of entry. At present, my limited experience with negotiating business and technology transfer deals with foreign government representatives permits me to know that I do not know enough about international diplomacy to render any kind of conclusion about the particular set of interactions presented by WL.
I'm content to wait to see where other analysts think the leaked cables fall between trivia and systematic concerns. WL have systematically limited my ability to start my own analysis by removing the "wiki" portion of their system, by being unclear about the context of their data, and by opaque disclosure, and I would be grateful if you know of any remedy to that situation. But please feel free to assume a conclusion on my behalf if that is to your liking.
"there is no difference under the law between 'dumping' and 'analyzing' data"
If the meaning in law of this action is your top concern, than the battle has been lost. The main stated purpose of the two disclosures pertain to accountability by the powers that be to the people at large. Analyses of the Pentagon Papers highlighted many ways in which government conduct were harmful or helpful in social dimensions, often in the absence of applicable international law. A simple dump of either set of papers simply does not provide the social context for society to render any judgements about whether the actions described are, or are not, desirable.
In the case of international diplomacy, there are certainly no international laws as such governing personal conduct or business practices. Rather, that community has developed social codes of conduct that we as outsiders may very easily judge (without having anything close to complete information) as being good or bad, but about which we have no recourse through any domestic legal system. Again, the judgement must be rendered via the social analysis of the data, rather than in its disclosure alone.
If you want to engage intent as an argument in the present series of disclosures, you must engage the intent of all the players. Whatever nuances Pfc Manning may have had in his intent, it certainly was not to simply have the papers out there, but to elicit some kind of socially relevant change. The same can be said of all the other players. And it is on that social basis that we must judge the disclosed actions, since there are no international or domestic laws against world leaders banging sexy ladies or diplomats conducting ethnographies of the same.
I personally cannot presently infer any particular nuanced intent on the part of WL or its downstream partners with respect to the current set of disclosures, nor the plausible social benefits from their disclosures, most of which would be fit for publication on TMZ or Entertainment Tonight by sed'ing the names of some participants. Of the tiny remainder, neither the dump, nor the analyses, provide enough context to understand whether the incidents incompletely described are exceptions or regular events.
WL has provided no way to understand their sample of international diplomatic interactions. I would want to be upset if the bad stuff reported is SOP. I would want to be apathetic about the government's conduct of international affairs if the hundreds of misdeeds reported are cherry-picked from a sea of millions of inconsequential or socially productive interactions, since that would represent better quality control, accuracy, and precision than I get from my doctor or lawyer or accountant. Conversely, I would want to be upset at JA for causing hundreds of millions in HR charges to the tax payer to shuffle diplomatic staff if his intent were solely to put egg on the face of a human system with three-nines of reliability.
It's also important to note that the Pentagon Papers were not the Pentagon Papers immediately after their release. It took years of analysis to understand their contents and their context. Taking JA at his word, the current disclosure has barely begun, so it would be impossible for you, or anyone else, to understand their contents, nor what analysts will find in the future.
Months ago, BoingBoing unintentionally outed Manning as someone undergoing gender transition and related challenges. That story didn't have legs.
The numeric rating and the text of the review seem to disagree. The reviewer generally finds that the book lacks good editing, content flow, and accessibility for its intended audience, yet assigns it a rating that would put it above most of its competitors.
But perhaps, I just don't understand the review. Having developed modules, plugins, themes, etc for WP, Joomla, Drupal, and other CMSes--but not recently--this review provides me almost no useful information on which to make a purchasing decision about the book reviewed. I don't know whether it attempts too much by attempting to tackle the differences in the new version specifically, and Drupal modules in general, and security and database concepts, project managent, and whatever else, or whether it attempts too little by only regurgitating material elsewise available online without overarching context.
The reviewer does not even present the single useful item of technical information in the review about poor indexing in a useful way. Does the volume /require/ a topical index to be appropriately useful to the reader, and is the content searchable or indexed in some on-line form? The answer--obtainable if the reviewer took the time to understand the volume s/he reviewed--makes a great difference as to whether this book is suitable as a desktop companion, commuter reading, or for some other purpose.
Most book review guidelines, including /.'s, implore the reviewer to provide more than just a summary of the volumes reviewed. In this review, I see many individual nit-picky criticisms and praises (applicable to almost any volume when read by particular kinds of reviewers) but almost nothing about whether this stands as a good book.
Background section makes several unstated assumptions about the agency of various actors mentioned.
Introduction section describes novel pre-experimental research activity which is inadequately documented in the Methods.
Background section describes novel post-experimental research writing activity but does not explain method of transcription or filtering applied to interviews of children at local pub.
Unclear if or how human subjects provided informed consent to participate in this experiment.
Sociological stances and arguments introduced in the background are not sustained in the main.
Overall, this is a solid paper about bees marred only by the PIs' clumsy insertion of themselves into the actual scientific activity without employing an adequate theoretical framework. Not news.
If the telecoms want to use a model in which prices are based on content, and if cable companies want to continue their role as content license managers, we should help them out with it.
If the eyeball networks have the technical capacity to inspect the contents of their customers' packets and deciding how to bill based on what they find and are able to back that up for billing disputes, then they should have no problems using that same kit to make other business decisions based on their total knowledge as gleaned from inspecting their customers' packets.
Content creators should attach individual licenses to creative works with respect to distribution, as already occurs for television and film distribution rights. Such licenses should contain randomly generated variation in their terms (with respect to geography, time of day, caching, end user plans, etc.) that differ each time the content is accessed in machine and human-readable formats. Since the content industry is adamant that copyright infringement occurs even if the infringer access accessed or distributed content against license terms unknowingly or unintentionally, they should have no issues with following the same standards in their own actions.
If it happens that the machine-readable version requires a particularly computationally intensive and time-consuming algorithm to obtain "Verizon may distribute on the next two Sundays between 9:43 and 11:12 a.m. to customers within 100 miles of [legal land description] whose plans cost more than $16.48 including state but not federal surcharges", I wouldn't blame a judge who categorically threw out such capricious and overly complicated content and distribution licensing schemes on the grounds of being against the public interest.
The important advance is in the presentation of weighted atomic masses as ranges with context, rather than the wet chemistry behind the changed numbers. At the very least, presenting a range of masses reminds us to think about the sources of the atoms analysed and variations in their collective attributes.
This attack doesn't cut off the companies from receiving faxes, it simply gets them to more finely tune their sorting procedures, including moving their important traffic to numbers and handlers to which the public now no longer has access. No modern document management system for a global organization relies on paper-printing fax machines, nor hard copper lines to receive faxes over PSTN.
When was the last time that WikiLeaks had a Wiki to which the public could contribute context or analysis?
Compare the experimental curve with the approximation and refine until the two match in the parts of the curve of interest?
If there is something topical to be leaked, Cryptome will post it in minutes, instead of weeks or years later.
Better yet, where's the report? We have this new fangled "hypertext" thingee now, where documents can link to external resources on the "Internet". Even if the churnalists are too busy to link to the the original document reporting the summarized findings, would it be too much to ask of the editors to locate and point to the source? The Linux Foundation doesn't seem to want to make it easy to find popular documents on their website, and many of the sites re-reporting the story seem to have moved from the atrocious kind of single-source reporting that various groups have trained the media to practice, to zero source reporting.
Government can and will continue to do things that do not require public knowledge, but simply make no records of them subject to discovery. Novice participants are routinely given this advice.
Since the government has centuries more expertise at this than the average /. reader, it is left as an exercise to the reader to infer just how trivial the present disclosures are within the broader context.