"Wow....massive environmental changes can be caused by...OTHER ENVIRONMENTAL changes! This has been my biggest gripe with environmental groups. "
Actually, it's the anti-environmental lobby that latches onto the natural cycles argument, using it as an excuse to do nothing. Because doing something usually costs them money, or results in lawsuits, or whatever.
Environmentalists understand that there are natural cycles but are concerned that the natural cycles are being upset by human action in ways that will be very difficult to reverse the longer the upset occurs.
The Sun's involvement in ozone depletion has been a fixture of atmospheric conditions for millions of years, and has reached equillibrium. Inject human-generated CFC's and the equillibrium is upset. We can't change the Sun, but we can change the human factors.
Also, the right-wing bloggers in the Rather case never dug past the surface. OK, the document was a forgery. Great. So who forged them? Well meaning friends of the person who supposedly wrote it? Karl Rove? Who? That's the story begging to be written.
The reason why the right-wing bloggers stopped is instructive: their goal was to discredit Rather so that the "Bush was AWOL" story could be pushed off the front page. They never intended to get to the truth.
In the case of Gannon, the goal wasn't to discredit him but to find out who he really was, who he worked for, etc. To get past the surface impression and do some real investigation. In the process, some salacious details were turned up. But they were never the reason why the investigation was started, or is continuing.
While the open source angle is interesting, this is really a case of "many hands make light work". Just as open source projects can bring a lot of people together to work on a project, from all over the world, blog media is now doing the same for investigative reporting.
The reason why we've rarely seen this effect in media before is that it used to be very difficult to get all of the interested parties in the same news room at one time. Usually only one or two journalists at a paper would be working on a story, and had limited bandwidth to check all the angles before meeting the deadline.
Now, the work can be distributed between large numbers of people who care about the story itself, more than the deadline and the paycheck.
I think the trick for blog media will be finding a Linus Torvalds who can bring it all together into one coherent pile at the end of the day. And a Richard Stallman to set the ethical tone to ensure that it doesn't degenerate into the gossip column nonsense that currently passes for TV news.
ZigZag is a pretty nifty data organisation idea. Everything is linked together along "dimensions" that describe some property. e.g. start at a person's details, go out along the "age" dimension and you'll find everyone else of that age. Or go out on the "city" dimension and find everyone in the same city.
There are two problems with it. The first is that no one except Ted thinks that way. That's just not how we tend to organise things to ourselves in the everyday. The second is that you can get 95% of the above functionality with a simple SQL database, which most people do understand.
This is just a re-run of Xanadu. I've always seen Xanadu as a brilliant thing to have around if you already had one. But there's no bootstrap step to get there, and few people think and work that way anyway. The Web, for all its faults, is actually the right solution for a constantly changing, hetrogeneous information environment.
Ted needs to realise that "solves 95% of the problem in a straight-forward way" is better than "solves the last 5% in the most brilliant fashion possible".
With more and more people moving to broadband, which is typically served out of a local telco or cable operator switch, what's the problem? Levy the 911 fees or what-not off that instead, perhaps with a rebate if you're already paying the levy on a separate connection.
This is just another beat-up by the telcos who are afraid of VOIP. They should get into the data carriage business, and concentrate on delivering high speed data pipes to every home instead.
It's the wire going in the door that you levy, stupid, not the protocol going over the wire! And those wires are in local neighborhoods, subject to local taxes. Just like they've always been.
actually the reason Fox has kicked the collective asses of the other networks is because people were sick to death of the strong left slant of CBS, CNN and whatnot. they are much farther Left than Fox is Right.
Left of what? CBS/CNN/etc are about two feet to the left of Fox. Which means squat when you realise that Fox is six miles to the right of center. You don't have a left-wing "liberal" TV news network in the US. You have no idea what one looks like (I speak as an Australian who regularly watches several news networks, including Fox).
This isn't exclusively a Democrat problem. Republicans live in their own echo chambers. They call them churches, or board rooms, or Fox News. And a not inconsiderable number of blogs too.
Seriously, if even just half of the US population in the last four years switched from Fox News to CNN or BBC World for just ten minutes a day, they might not be quite so easy to hoodwink.
At least concerning the Switzerland, I cannot say for Italie, the problem was that Indymedia was publishing some pictures of swiss cops under cover with 1 name, addresses from both cops.
From this point of view I can understand that it's quite dangerous for them to be exposed in such way.
In which case, the authorities should have gotten a court order to remove the information in question (and only that information), and then enforced that, with contempt of court proceedings for the admins if necessary.
It is never acceptable to confiscate the entire Web site of a media organisation, cutting off access to huge numbers of articles that were completely unrelated.
Currently, many states apportion their votes in a winner-take-all manner. A few apportion them according to the popular vote. States can, however, apprtion their votes pretty much however they want. Don't like it? Talk to your state legislature.
And this is part of the problem. Having a federal voting system vary from one state to another is lunacy, plain and simple.
How is the average voter supposed to know how their vote is counted? Especially with populations being highly mobile these days. It is a rare family that doesn't have members in many states.
Whatever counting mechanism that is used (winner takes all, instant run-off, approval, etc), the system should be the same everywhere.
The whole US system is a holdover from the difficulty of running elections over long distances in pre-1800 times. The only instituations capable of conducting polls back then were the states. In an age of instant world-wide communication, the current system is stupid.
I didn't read this particular article, but I did read one on the same subject just a couple of days ago, and it mentioned that this was a "training bomb" with live nuclear material but no detonation cap, so it *can't* go off. WTF they were doing with live nuke material in a training bomb is beyond me, but I thought I'd mention the no detonator thing anyway.
Uranium and Plutonium, being heavy metals, are well... heavy. It is difficult to build a simulated bomb that would have the same weight and size ratio that can be packed into a bomber without using the actual materials. Which makes it difficult to test how the bomber performs over long distances carrying such payloads.
Oh, there's a problem all right (finding things you've forgotten where you put them). It's just that huge amounts of metadata in the filesystem can't solve it.
Database filesystems are a concept long sought after but have the same problem as Ted Nelson's Xanadu: bootstrapping. If you had this big interlinked thingamyjig, all indexed with the right metadata in the right places, it would be fantastic!
Here's the problem: there's no clear path to get from "here" (random documents with no metadata) to "there" (everything indexed) in one easy step. It has to be done gradually over time. So you have to do things gradually, with a less advanced system as a starting point. But once you do that people say "well, I have a job to do, so I can't be bothered entering this metadata stuff". And then you are back where you started with random collections of unindexed junk.
The sad thing is, we do have an incremental bootstrap solution that works. A cron job indexing the files every night at midnight to produce a Google-like index for your hard drive. You don't need metadata for things the user worked on today, because the user knows already where they are! A one-day delay in the index is acceptable.
But I suppose that is just too obvious for the researchers who dream of this fantastic metadata future that they've never been able to reduce to actual code.
I'm just curious as to what is there to negotiate? Either they license it royalty-free for all fields of use, or it does not belong in an officially-recognised IETF standard. There is no "middle ground" license that will satisfy the community. Patents are, by definition, incompatible with open standards.
Top 25 US Stories not reported by the US media. Some other nations media may well have covered this stuff.
True. But since the US is in many cases the only country with any ability to *fix* the problems stated in the article, the lack of coverage in the US misinforms the global debate. It doesn't matter in the slightest if the rest of the world is wise to the issues if the average US citizen can be hoodwinked with impunity.
It doesn't patent "the use of a keyboard to navigate a web page." What it patents is, as far as I can tell, the use of the tab key to navigate to and to place a non-rectangular highlight over a weblink, or to place any-shaped highlight over an imagemap.
Which, if the USPTO was actually following its own rules and procedures, would be unpatentable.
It is obvious that some way of highlighting the current link is necessary for this kind of feature. Strike 1: obvious.
The method of highlighting is immaterial. Whether it is a rectangle, inverse video, non-rectangular, or whatever. The USPTO rules state that merely changing a color, or substituting one material for another, is not patentable. Strike 2: substitution on something otherwise obvious.
Every Internet set-top box known to man in the mid to late 90's implemented something like this in their TV Web browsers. Not to mention Lynx. Strike 3: prior art.
Another example of why the USPTO must be hauled to account for not doing their job!
The paper trail is not best implemented as a "Receipt" for voting, as that denies anonymity and allows coercion.
I really wish people would stop calling these things "receipts". They are "ballots", placed in a ballot box by the voter for eventual counting by voting officials.
The computer count should be nothing but a quick guide to the result. But if that result differs substantially from the exit polls and a random sampling of actual ballots, or the result is too close to call, then you throw the computer out the window and count the paper ballots by hand.
I loved Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon, but the Baroque Cycle... got 2/3rds into Quicksilver and put it away. I liked the story in the abstract and where he was going with it, but it was *way* too long at getting to the point.
I'm seeing more and more of this in SF - three and four part stories, each part longer than a novel used to be. Huge world-building sure. But do we really need to know about the characters every bowel movement? Move it along people!
I blame the book shops in part for this: they make more money off trilogies than standalone novels. But I fear that it is destroying the art of good storytelling. Snow Crash (a single novel) was intense. Quicksilver was glacial.
I'm a neophyte, so excuse my ignorance, but how does the fact that a full-time researcher (working on the SHA-0 algorithm), using a computation requiring: (direct quote follows):... to find two different input values which produce the same output value (I presume that's what they did.. I could be wrong) make _any_ sort of practical difference?
Once upon a time, you needed millions of dollars and specialized hardware to crack 56-bit DES. Now it can be done with commodity hardware and a little time. Moore's Law is relentless. Today's TERA NOVA is tomorrow's PDA.
wtf? where is the windows.forms implementation under Linux? They are writing it from scratch because the previous version was using Wine and didnt work properly, so now they are doing it 'natively'.
Microsoft hasnt written a windows.forms implementation under Linux - they are not playing 'catch up', they are implementing something that doesnt yet exist.
Actually, it does. DotGNU Portable.NET has had a native implementation of SWF for over a year now.
We discarded Wine as a viable option from day one.
In the waiting, I refer to the 3.5 months that Americans wait between Election Day (early November) and Inaugural Day (late January). As I detailed in the parent post, America's greater size brings greater complexity. Complexity doesn't simply scale down with distributed management, it scales up, so a more complex management system is required.
The 3.5 months is due to history, not complexity. In the late 1700's and early 1800's, running a national election was a very difficult thing to do. There were no telegraphs and so results had to be carried from the states to Washington by horse and cart. This took time.
The electoral college system, fixed voting days, and delayed results is a holdover from this period. It makes no sense in an era of instant world-wide communication.
As an Australian, who lived for a few years in the US, I just shake my head every time the US holds an election. You're sticking to a voting system that is out of date and has virtully no checks and balances to prevent corruption.
Check www.linspire.com for a license to do DVD playback with xine. You can get a full, legal license. I think the companies responible for the DVD standard are required, either by law or by their own contracts, to license DVD to all comers willing to pay.
None of this would be required if the MPAA and DVD/CCA had a modicum of common sense. It's just data! I should not need a license to transform 1's and 0's into viewable images, skip the ads, watch it in a different country, or create a backup.
Those are normal uses required to properly enjoy the work. If you cannot perform normal uses, then what is the point of the exercise?
One of the early lessons that programmers learn is that algorithms and data are separable issues. Properly formatted and standardised data can be read by any compatible algorithm. What the MPAA and friends want to do is to make it illegal to write certain algorithms, even though there is no technical reason why those algorithms won't work.
Depends on wether or not Florida has it's shit together this time.
Florida will be squeaky clean this time around, because all the world's attention will be focused on it. You should instead be keeping an eye on other states, particularly those with Diebold machines and the like.
After Farenheit 9/11, the only way Bush can win is either (a) massive terrorist strike just before the election causing rally around the flag patriotic nonsense, or (b) vote rigging. My money is on (b).
Mostly, photographers are so concerned with copyright because they like to eat.
Rubbish. Photographers already have the "I must eat" angle well and truly covered. They do quite well from charging for their time at studio sittings, "glamour" shoots, weddings, etc.
The amount of money that they make from these is far more than they could ever collect in royalties on family portraits and wedding photos exchanged via e-mail.
Only a very small number of photos ever reach iconic status within a culture. The rest should fall into the public domain almost immediately. Which is Lessig's point: too much protection is being given to things that don't need any.
Being able to extend ones compiler with different
plugins sounds good in theory. Until you need
to send your code to someone in Florida who
doesn't have exactly the same setup as you do.
It's bad enough tracking down the umpteen
libraries that an open source program depends
upon now. Now we have to track "Bob's special
compiler" as well?
Besides, we already have compiler "plugins" for
extending the syntax. They have names like bison
and flex. Anyone can layer new functionality on
a language through meta-translation, if there is
a reason to do so. But you better have a reason!
My first thought was "How exactly do you waste
money on something that is free?".:-)
Yeah, yeah, free speech, not free beer, and
all.
Of course free software is attractive to
governments in Asia, South America, Africa,
etc, etc, etc. Every dollar saved on the cost
of a desktop OS or database server is a dollar
that can be spent on health care, education,
etc. You know - those pesky issues that ordinary
people care about more than "How much richer
is Bill today?".
Microsoft seems to be operating under the
delusion that the only thing a government should
care about is growing a local software industry.
Heaven forbid that they have other priorities.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it's the anti-environmental lobby that latches onto the natural cycles argument, using it as an excuse to do nothing. Because doing something usually costs them money, or results in lawsuits, or whatever.
Environmentalists understand that there are natural cycles but are concerned that the natural cycles are being upset by human action in ways that will be very difficult to reverse the longer the upset occurs.
The Sun's involvement in ozone depletion has been a fixture of atmospheric conditions for millions of years, and has reached equillibrium. Inject human-generated CFC's and the equillibrium is upset. We can't change the Sun, but we can change the human factors.
The reason why the right-wing bloggers stopped is instructive: their goal was to discredit Rather so that the "Bush was AWOL" story could be pushed off the front page. They never intended to get to the truth.
In the case of Gannon, the goal wasn't to discredit him but to find out who he really was, who he worked for, etc. To get past the surface impression and do some real investigation. In the process, some salacious details were turned up. But they were never the reason why the investigation was started, or is continuing.
The reason why we've rarely seen this effect in media before is that it used to be very difficult to get all of the interested parties in the same news room at one time. Usually only one or two journalists at a paper would be working on a story, and had limited bandwidth to check all the angles before meeting the deadline.
Now, the work can be distributed between large numbers of people who care about the story itself, more than the deadline and the paycheck.
I think the trick for blog media will be finding a Linus Torvalds who can bring it all together into one coherent pile at the end of the day. And a Richard Stallman to set the ethical tone to ensure that it doesn't degenerate into the gossip column nonsense that currently passes for TV news.
There are two problems with it. The first is that no one except Ted thinks that way. That's just not how we tend to organise things to ourselves in the everyday. The second is that you can get 95% of the above functionality with a simple SQL database, which most people do understand.
This is just a re-run of Xanadu. I've always seen Xanadu as a brilliant thing to have around if you already had one. But there's no bootstrap step to get there, and few people think and work that way anyway. The Web, for all its faults, is actually the right solution for a constantly changing, hetrogeneous information environment.
Ted needs to realise that "solves 95% of the problem in a straight-forward way" is better than "solves the last 5% in the most brilliant fashion possible".
This is just another beat-up by the telcos who are afraid of VOIP. They should get into the data carriage business, and concentrate on delivering high speed data pipes to every home instead.
It's the wire going in the door that you levy, stupid, not the protocol going over the wire! And those wires are in local neighborhoods, subject to local taxes. Just like they've always been.
Left of what? CBS/CNN/etc are about two feet to the left of Fox. Which means squat when you realise that Fox is six miles to the right of center. You don't have a left-wing "liberal" TV news network in the US. You have no idea what one looks like (I speak as an Australian who regularly watches several news networks, including Fox).
Seriously, if even just half of the US population in the last four years switched from Fox News to CNN or BBC World for just ten minutes a day, they might not be quite so easy to hoodwink.
From this point of view I can understand that it's quite dangerous for them to be exposed in such way.
In which case, the authorities should have gotten a court order to remove the information in question (and only that information), and then enforced that, with contempt of court proceedings for the admins if necessary.
It is never acceptable to confiscate the entire Web site of a media organisation, cutting off access to huge numbers of articles that were completely unrelated.
And this is part of the problem. Having a federal voting system vary from one state to another is lunacy, plain and simple.
How is the average voter supposed to know how their vote is counted? Especially with populations being highly mobile these days. It is a rare family that doesn't have members in many states.
Whatever counting mechanism that is used (winner takes all, instant run-off, approval, etc), the system should be the same everywhere.
The whole US system is a holdover from the difficulty of running elections over long distances in pre-1800 times. The only instituations capable of conducting polls back then were the states. In an age of instant world-wide communication, the current system is stupid.
Uranium and Plutonium, being heavy metals, are well ... heavy. It is difficult to build a simulated bomb that would have the same weight and size ratio that can be packed into a bomber without using the actual materials. Which makes it difficult to test how the bomber performs over long distances carrying such payloads.
Extended Edition ... now with twenty more "No, it isn't finished yet - here's *another* finale" scenes.
Oh, there's a problem all right (finding things you've forgotten where you put them). It's just that huge amounts of metadata in the filesystem can't solve it.
Database filesystems are a concept long sought after but have the same problem as Ted Nelson's Xanadu: bootstrapping. If you had this big interlinked thingamyjig, all indexed with the right metadata in the right places, it would be fantastic!
Here's the problem: there's no clear path to get from "here" (random documents with no metadata) to "there" (everything indexed) in one easy step. It has to be done gradually over time. So you have to do things gradually, with a less advanced system as a starting point. But once you do that people say "well, I have a job to do, so I can't be bothered entering this metadata stuff". And then you are back where you started with random collections of unindexed junk.
The sad thing is, we do have an incremental bootstrap solution that works. A cron job indexing the files every night at midnight to produce a Google-like index for your hard drive. You don't need metadata for things the user worked on today, because the user knows already where they are! A one-day delay in the index is acceptable.
But I suppose that is just too obvious for the researchers who dream of this fantastic metadata future that they've never been able to reduce to actual code.
I'm just curious as to what is there to negotiate? Either they license it royalty-free for all fields of use, or it does not belong in an officially-recognised IETF standard. There is no "middle ground" license that will satisfy the community. Patents are, by definition, incompatible with open standards.
True. But since the US is in many cases the only country with any ability to *fix* the problems stated in the article, the lack of coverage in the US misinforms the global debate. It doesn't matter in the slightest if the rest of the world is wise to the issues if the average US citizen can be hoodwinked with impunity.
Which, if the USPTO was actually following its own rules and procedures, would be unpatentable.
It is obvious that some way of highlighting the current link is necessary for this kind of feature. Strike 1: obvious.
The method of highlighting is immaterial. Whether it is a rectangle, inverse video, non-rectangular, or whatever. The USPTO rules state that merely changing a color, or substituting one material for another, is not patentable. Strike 2: substitution on something otherwise obvious.
Every Internet set-top box known to man in the mid to late 90's implemented something like this in their TV Web browsers. Not to mention Lynx. Strike 3: prior art.
Another example of why the USPTO must be hauled to account for not doing their job!
I really wish people would stop calling these things "receipts". They are "ballots", placed in a ballot box by the voter for eventual counting by voting officials.
The computer count should be nothing but a quick guide to the result. But if that result differs substantially from the exit polls and a random sampling of actual ballots, or the result is too close to call, then you throw the computer out the window and count the paper ballots by hand.
Why is this so hard to understand?
I'm seeing more and more of this in SF - three and four part stories, each part longer than a novel used to be. Huge world-building sure. But do we really need to know about the characters every bowel movement? Move it along people!
I blame the book shops in part for this: they make more money off trilogies than standalone novels. But I fear that it is destroying the art of good storytelling. Snow Crash (a single novel) was intense. Quicksilver was glacial.
Once upon a time, you needed millions of dollars and specialized hardware to crack 56-bit DES. Now it can be done with commodity hardware and a little time. Moore's Law is relentless. Today's TERA NOVA is tomorrow's PDA.
Microsoft hasnt written a windows.forms implementation under Linux - they are not playing 'catch up', they are implementing something that doesnt yet exist.
Actually, it does. DotGNU Portable.NET has had a native implementation of SWF for over a year now. We discarded Wine as a viable option from day one.
DotGNU Web Site.
The 3.5 months is due to history, not complexity. In the late 1700's and early 1800's, running a national election was a very difficult thing to do. There were no telegraphs and so results had to be carried from the states to Washington by horse and cart. This took time.
The electoral college system, fixed voting days, and delayed results is a holdover from this period. It makes no sense in an era of instant world-wide communication.
As an Australian, who lived for a few years in the US, I just shake my head every time the US holds an election. You're sticking to a voting system that is out of date and has virtully no checks and balances to prevent corruption.
None of this would be required if the MPAA and DVD/CCA had a modicum of common sense. It's just data! I should not need a license to transform 1's and 0's into viewable images, skip the ads, watch it in a different country, or create a backup.
Those are normal uses required to properly enjoy the work. If you cannot perform normal uses, then what is the point of the exercise?
One of the early lessons that programmers learn is that algorithms and data are separable issues. Properly formatted and standardised data can be read by any compatible algorithm. What the MPAA and friends want to do is to make it illegal to write certain algorithms, even though there is no technical reason why those algorithms won't work.
Depends on wether or not Florida has it's shit together this time.
Florida will be squeaky clean this time around, because all the world's attention will be focused on it. You should instead be keeping an eye on other states, particularly those with Diebold machines and the like.
After Farenheit 9/11, the only way Bush can win is either (a) massive terrorist strike just before the election causing rally around the flag patriotic nonsense, or (b) vote rigging. My money is on (b).
Rubbish. Photographers already have the "I must eat" angle well and truly covered. They do quite well from charging for their time at studio sittings, "glamour" shoots, weddings, etc.
The amount of money that they make from these is far more than they could ever collect in royalties on family portraits and wedding photos exchanged via e-mail.
Only a very small number of photos ever reach iconic status within a culture. The rest should fall into the public domain almost immediately. Which is Lessig's point: too much protection is being given to things that don't need any.
It's bad enough tracking down the umpteen libraries that an open source program depends upon now. Now we have to track "Bob's special compiler" as well?
Besides, we already have compiler "plugins" for extending the syntax. They have names like bison and flex. Anyone can layer new functionality on a language through meta-translation, if there is a reason to do so. But you better have a reason!
Of course free software is attractive to governments in Asia, South America, Africa, etc, etc, etc. Every dollar saved on the cost of a desktop OS or database server is a dollar that can be spent on health care, education, etc. You know - those pesky issues that ordinary people care about more than "How much richer is Bill today?".
Microsoft seems to be operating under the delusion that the only thing a government should care about is growing a local software industry. Heaven forbid that they have other priorities.