It is a natural human tendency to pull together with those who share similar interests -- we are a 'series of tribes,' said the governor. Getting those 'tribes,' previously fragmented by geography, to co-exist, is something we have never had to address before now.
were of particular interest. One of the greatest powers of the internet is to bring people together but this is true for both people of mainstream thought and people of fringe thought. This can be vary dangerous, however I wouldn't think that the internet is solely to blame for this trend.
Modern media is extremely diverse in it's offerings. People can now get news of any type and/or political bent they wish. Religous fenatics can get religous news; geeks can get geek news. Groups on the fringe can reinforce their beliefs by reading, viewing and absorbing only information that conforms with their world view. It's important that e recognize though, that these risks are the cost of doing business; table stakes for enhancing societal efficiency and value threough ease of access to information.
In order to justify it's positions, the ACLU uses an argunent that is vary simple to articulate but vary difficult to defend - that being, the Slippery Slope Argument.
Slippery slope arguments are notoriously difficult to make. In order to justify your actions using a slippery slope argument you must defend any and all instances of the situation you propose to protect. While I support the ACLU, you have to realize why their support doesn't have a much broader base than it does. I believe that support for civil liberties runs far deeper that one can see by looking at supporters of the ACLU because they have chosen to use this simplistic principle to articulate justification for their actions. They have created for themselves a political policy cul-de-sac from which they have yet to emrge. They find themselves defending the most morally reprehensible instances and people who find their civil liberties infringed upon. Potential supporters then look upon these actions and can't seperate them from the vary laudable goals of the organization as a whole.
While Slippery Slope arguments are common in civil liberties discussions, it is important that they don't act to drive away potential supporters of the overall set of principles.
I've scoured the DOJ website and the wire services but can't find any response from the DOJ. Granted this is overshadowed by other issues they're focusing on atthe moment but surely they have a response...
Anyone wnow what or where it is?
There has been a vary interesting ongoing debate about the role of online access in publishing original scientific research that has been hosted by the journal Nature. It features articles by some vary high profile contributors (from our circles) such as Tim Berners-Lee, Richard Stallman and Tim O'Reilly although far more interesting are the opinions from members of the scientific communities directly effected by this issue.
While the covert HMD is a really neat spiffy product, the bariers to entry into the hardware market are quite high. In order to compete you'll need to be able to finance production operations (the easy part) and incur substancial legal expenses to insure that none of the many wearable computing patents - mentioned as being held by large players in this market - apply to your hardware, and in the event that some can ce construed to apply, you'll need to handle licensing which will probably be at great expense as well. Furthermore, although the SSSCA will probably not add requirements to your hardware but given the current legislative enviroment, similar legislation that would apply, might appear at any moment. As we all know - the wearable computer maker has not reached mass aceptance yet so without sufficient customer base for the computing hardware, the market for the display hardware - normally some percentage of the market for the compute platform - will be extremely small, regardless of how cool the hardware is. For these reasons I'd recommend considering licensing your hardware to a larger player in the market. While you won't derive nearly as much revenue as if you marketed the product yourself, the revenue you collect will be predictable and will be recieved within a timeframe (and I'm making an assumption about Anubis Enterprises) acceptable for small businesses to maintain solvency.
The question answered by the ruling does not directly address digital content as such. It simply highlights a weakness in local zoning law.
The position that no offer of adult entertainment for public consumption at the dorm where video is being shot, suggests that anyone may situate video production facilities for pornographic movies within this area without penalty.
The next logical question is: Are the videos transfered to digital media for distribution at that loction (aparently not) or another location and would that other location (for the purposes of zoning) be considered to be offering entertainment of an adult nature - becaue it's vary likely the location of the hosting facility is zoned for light industry. Perhaps, alternatively the court is suggesting that the service is being offered at the point of consumption, since it is cinsidering 'cyberspace' to be a distinct location. It's disappointing that this clarification wasn't made in the ruling.
--CTH
Re:Change is good
on
Apocalypse 3
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
In responding to the previous poster my first inclination was to defend my perl programming prowess but instead of descending into such a ridiculous debate of an issue that would only be of interest to my clients and myself, I'll just clarify my point which was more that I have never found anything that I wasn't able to do in perl more easily than I could have done in C and that I wasn't able to find any specific single item in Larry's article that would make my use of perl significantly more convenient or effective. That's not to say that I'm against making changes to perl. If it can be improved, so much the better.
Here's some history on this case. It features articles from various stages in the case. Has anyone found the text of the complaint or injunction? still looking...
Let there be no question about it. This is a victory for spammers. I hope MAPS elects to keep a list of companies which they are unable to block through their service. Then I could grok the list and be happy once again.
--CTH
As I sheepishly back away...
on
Apocalypse 3
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I never really thought about how valuable perl really is. I use it constantly. I use it based on the syntactic rules set fourth in the cammel book. I never considered evaluating changes to the language (well, not to any great degree anyway. While I find Larry Wall's series of articles interesting, I just can't get excited about changing the language in it's next incarnation. It works. It's an effective tool. That's good enough to me. I'm not saying don't change it, so much as in it's role as a tool I find it valuable, but when given the opportunity to provide feedback on how to change it I'm at a loss.
Now, I consider my job to be 'Intranet Systems Arhitect' as distinct from 'Programmer'. Perhaps that's why I can't get excited about changing a tool I've come to depend on in it's current form. Perhaps true programmers might find the prospect fascinating. perhaps you could liken it to the difference between an army officer and a gunsmith. While both make use of guns at various times, only the gunsmith is inclined to take the gun apart, examine it and make a better one.
Or perhaps I'm just not showing the proper community spirit, and I should dive in and offer my two cents on how to make the language better. Maybe I'm just lazy (then again, isn't that why perl is such a great language...)
OK, so this behavior appears to be configurable, but why wouldn't you set the default to the more secure alternative? Does Microsoft really think so poorly of their users that they honestly believe having to click one more 'OK' button would cause them to loose a significant market share? This is rediculous. What possible benefit is there in establishing an insecure default setting?
These seem like reasonable goals. Whatever happened to our good friends Ponds and Fleishman who said they had discovered a methodology for managing cold fusion over a decade ago? I wonder if the scientists in this article took their circumstances into consideration when setting out the timeframe in the article... The thing was remarkably light on details...
A new kids toy B.I.O Bugs was first advertised on the premier of the new Star Trek series. These BEAM robot toys seek out IR signals to 'feed' on, but there are other such experimental robots that convert sugar to electricity. Consider a toy of this sort with thermolytic batteries where it seeks out body heat to 'feed' on. I can see it now. "Jonny, don't let that bug shove his antena up your..." Oh, damn!
OK, this technology has potential but it could also make for some really creepy toys.
And you thought falling into a frozen lake was a health hazard before... just wait until you have an artificial heart run by your body heat.
Even after the EMTs pull you from the lake they couldn't restart your heart for at least half an hour until your body temperature increased. Bad news.
Seriously, it doesn't mention what's the minimum temperature the device requires.
--CTH
They're beautiful, but are these maps useful?
on
Charting Virtual Worlds
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
They're nice to look at but is it really useful to represent the internet in this way? Surely there is a more meaningful representation that is of equal or greater esthetic value. Perhaps a rendering similar to the constructs associated with Everything2. This could be achieved through analysis and visualization of the relevence data used by Google and Teoma to generate their results, where significant material is emphesized. Granted this would not produce a network map, but rather a contant map, ilustrating regional housing of particularly meaningful or valuable content. It would however, include content available using any protocol for which there is a URL representation.
Granted content pamming is not what they were going for, but it would have the side effect of displaying network topology with respect to relitive routing and bandwith capacities (utilization anyway).
It's important that prescident setting cases of this sort are tried by the best available trial atourneys, such that the prescident that will be set can be looked upon as binding, regardless of which way the case goes. I'm suprised that more nationally renowned defense atourneys weren't all over this case from the start. It's nice to have good news in this case once in a while
not anticipating the decline as the dot.com bubble burst
Every economist I know knew the.com bouble was going to burst. Granted no one knew when, but whatever happened to the general principle of 'Don't debt-finance a tech company' because revenues were not predictible. Granted 14 consecutrive quarters of sequential growth might appear predictable, but that's no excuse to abandon basic business principles.
I know everyone did it, but if your friend jumped off a bridge, would you... (you get the point).
On the bright side, content providers will need to upgrade the quality of their content as they increae the level of annoyance experienced by users in accessing it. This means less content will be subscrption only. Users will demand more and higher quality content from providers who insist on iritating their users with this garbage.
Sites who adopt this advertising strategy, who have previously been confident in their levels of content quality and associated user loyalty might be in for a shock as their viewership plummets through the floor - or at least I hope users will be able to voice their discontent this way.
There are many cases where licenses are non-transferable, particularly in the case of corporate licenses of intellectual property, but I believe (IANAL) most licenses are transferable by default, unless specifically stipulated otherwise. As I recall some states require consumer product licenses to be transferable (stating that non-transfer clauses are not enforcable within that state). I'm just not certain in which states this is true. The UCITA makes ajustments to the transferability rules, but the site I'm referencing here is not an even-handed analysis of that legislation (primarily because I don't have time to look for a better analysis). If you find what's written there to be disturbing, remember that it's decidedly pro-UTICA so an even handed analysys would be even more disturbing.
Hackers, come register at your nearest recruiting station, where you will be interogated and evaluated to determine thay you are not a terrorist, since J. 'McCarthy' Ashcroft's proposed legislation states that hacksrs are terrorists unless proven innocent.
Seriously though, the slippery slope arguent with regard to civil liberties is vary difficult to make, since based on that argument, organizations such as the ACLU and other organizations have had to defend all sorts of morally reprehensible (yet still legal) activities/things/people, to such a degree as to alienate a large portion of the population. This effect of having to act based on the slippery slope argument, has resulted in members of the news media recently making statements such as those on the ABC sunday discussion program This Week, which were to the effect (and not an exact quote):
There are some internet users who are concerned about the loss of the use of certain arcane privlages like the use of certain types of cryptography but most Americans won't be concerned with this.
These light treatments by the news media, of the civil liberties issues around the right to privacy, as manifested by the ability to use cryptographic mechanisms in communication, are inexcusable. Unfortunately, here I suppose I'm preaching to the choir.
Yay, yet another way to be tracked on the Internet.
But I submit it's better to be tracked by a system to which you know the inner workings, and if you wish, based on that knowlege, you may avoid being tracked by it (is so far as it tracks things, which of course is not it's primary purpose).
As a science steganography is vary old. One of the first book on the subject steganographica was written by Gaspari Schotti in 1665. It has however been a subject of limited public interest until vary recently. This is not to say that various steganographic techniques haven't been used ovar the years. On the contrary, many intelligence agencies have uses steganographic techniques to smuggle secrets our of various countries throughout the cold war and before. One of the best known ancient uses of Steganography was in the book Hypnerotomachia Poliphili published in 1499. The point is, it's been around for a vary long time, there just hasn't been any public interest.
Now I can model the water flow down the shower drain (fluid dynamics). Cool. But can it model the flow of $$$ down the drain that would occur if I purchased it?
I'm all for new and spiffy hardware, but some things are just too much. I woner what the margin on one of these things is... I'm having trouble seeing how they expect to sell enough of these to cover the R&D costs... Maybe they'll sell them to the NSA so that agency can be brought into the 21st century...
--CTH
EFF as a lobying organization - needs funding
on
Slashdot in Politics?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The EFF makes a wonderful contribution with respect to the legal issues of interest to the technically inclined (read: Geek) comunity, and it's admirable how they spech most of their resources in these pursuits, but honestly, they should take a page from the playbook of the NRA with respect to fund raising if they want to compete with the powerful political action committees that live inside the Washington beltway.
The asertion was made that this outcome bodes well for the future of the GPL. I'm not sure if I see that. No legal prescident was set here; only more evidence of the FSF's ability to bully people into bending to their will. Don't get me wrong, I believe the FSF was right in this case, in insisting on the changes that were mand, but as a matter of law, a third party still has no standing in a license negotiation, and that's probably a good thing - as a matter of law
Slashdot Mirror
Modern media is extremely diverse in it's offerings. People can now get news of any type and/or political bent they wish. Religous fenatics can get religous news; geeks can get geek news. Groups on the fringe can reinforce their beliefs by reading, viewing and absorbing only information that conforms with their world view. It's important that e recognize though, that these risks are the cost of doing business; table stakes for enhancing societal efficiency and value threough ease of access to information.
--CTH
In order to justify it's positions, the ACLU uses an argunent that is vary simple to articulate but vary difficult to defend - that being, the Slippery Slope Argument.
Slippery slope arguments are notoriously difficult to make. In order to justify your actions using a slippery slope argument you must defend any and all instances of the situation you propose to protect. While I support the ACLU, you have to realize why their support doesn't have a much broader base than it does. I believe that support for civil liberties runs far deeper that one can see by looking at supporters of the ACLU because they have chosen to use this simplistic principle to articulate justification for their actions. They have created for themselves a political policy cul-de-sac from which they have yet to emrge. They find themselves defending the most morally reprehensible instances and people who find their civil liberties infringed upon. Potential supporters then look upon these actions and can't seperate them from the vary laudable goals of the organization as a whole.
While Slippery Slope arguments are common in civil liberties discussions, it is important that they don't act to drive away potential supporters of the overall set of principles.
--CTH
I've scoured the DOJ website and the wire services but can't find any response from the DOJ. Granted this is overshadowed by other issues they're focusing on atthe moment but surely they have a response... Anyone wnow what or where it is?
--CTH
There has been a vary interesting ongoing debate about the role of online access in publishing original scientific research that has been hosted by the journal Nature. It features articles by some vary high profile contributors (from our circles) such as Tim Berners-Lee, Richard Stallman and Tim O'Reilly although far more interesting are the opinions from members of the scientific communities directly effected by this issue.
--CTH
While the covert HMD is a really neat spiffy product, the bariers to entry into the hardware market are quite high. In order to compete you'll need to be able to finance production operations (the easy part) and incur substancial legal expenses to insure that none of the many wearable computing patents - mentioned as being held by large players in this market - apply to your hardware, and in the event that some can ce construed to apply, you'll need to handle licensing which will probably be at great expense as well. Furthermore, although the SSSCA will probably not add requirements to your hardware but given the current legislative enviroment, similar legislation that would apply, might appear at any moment. As we all know - the wearable computer maker has not reached mass aceptance yet so without sufficient customer base for the computing hardware, the market for the display hardware - normally some percentage of the market for the compute platform - will be extremely small, regardless of how cool the hardware is. For these reasons I'd recommend considering licensing your hardware to a larger player in the market. While you won't derive nearly as much revenue as if you marketed the product yourself, the revenue you collect will be predictable and will be recieved within a timeframe (and I'm making an assumption about Anubis Enterprises) acceptable for small businesses to maintain solvency.
--CTH
The question answered by the ruling does not directly address digital content as such. It simply highlights a weakness in local zoning law.
The position that no offer of adult entertainment for public consumption at the dorm where video is being shot, suggests that anyone may situate video production facilities for pornographic movies within this area without penalty.
The next logical question is: Are the videos transfered to digital media for distribution at that loction (aparently not) or another location and would that other location (for the purposes of zoning) be considered to be offering entertainment of an adult nature - becaue it's vary likely the location of the hosting facility is zoned for light industry. Perhaps, alternatively the court is suggesting that the service is being offered at the point of consumption, since it is cinsidering 'cyberspace' to be a distinct location. It's disappointing that this clarification wasn't made in the ruling.
--CTH
In responding to the previous poster my first inclination was to defend my perl programming prowess but instead of descending into such a ridiculous debate of an issue that would only be of interest to my clients and myself, I'll just clarify my point which was more that I have never found anything that I wasn't able to do in perl more easily than I could have done in C and that I wasn't able to find any specific single item in Larry's article that would make my use of perl significantly more convenient or effective. That's not to say that I'm against making changes to perl. If it can be improved, so much the better.
--CTH
In the spirit of Karma Whoring :-)
Here's some history on this case. It features articles from various stages in the case. Has anyone found the text of the complaint or injunction? still looking...
--CTH
Let there be no question about it. This is a victory for spammers. I hope MAPS elects to keep a list of companies which they are unable to block through their service. Then I could grok the list and be happy once again.
--CTH
I never really thought about how valuable perl really is. I use it constantly. I use it based on the syntactic rules set fourth in the cammel book. I never considered evaluating changes to the language (well, not to any great degree anyway. While I find Larry Wall's series of articles interesting, I just can't get excited about changing the language in it's next incarnation. It works. It's an effective tool. That's good enough to me. I'm not saying don't change it, so much as in it's role as a tool I find it valuable, but when given the opportunity to provide feedback on how to change it I'm at a loss.
Now, I consider my job to be 'Intranet Systems Arhitect' as distinct from 'Programmer'. Perhaps that's why I can't get excited about changing a tool I've come to depend on in it's current form. Perhaps true programmers might find the prospect fascinating. perhaps you could liken it to the difference between an army officer and a gunsmith. While both make use of guns at various times, only the gunsmith is inclined to take the gun apart, examine it and make a better one.
Or perhaps I'm just not showing the proper community spirit, and I should dive in and offer my two cents on how to make the language better. Maybe I'm just lazy (then again, isn't that why perl is such a great language...)
--CTH
OK, so this behavior appears to be configurable, but why wouldn't you set the default to the more secure alternative? Does Microsoft really think so poorly of their users that they honestly believe having to click one more 'OK' button would cause them to loose a significant market share? This is rediculous. What possible benefit is there in establishing an insecure default setting?
--CTH
These seem like reasonable goals. Whatever happened to our good friends Ponds and Fleishman who said they had discovered a methodology for managing cold fusion over a decade ago? I wonder if the scientists in this article took their circumstances into consideration when setting out the timeframe in the article... The thing was remarkably light on details...
A new kids toy B.I.O Bugs was first advertised on the premier of the new Star Trek series. These BEAM robot toys seek out IR signals to 'feed' on, but there are other such experimental robots that convert sugar to electricity. Consider a toy of this sort with thermolytic batteries where it seeks out body heat to 'feed' on. I can see it now. "Jonny, don't let that bug shove his antena up your..." Oh, damn!
OK, this technology has potential but it could also make for some really creepy toys.
--CTH
And you thought falling into a frozen lake was a health hazard before... just wait until you have an artificial heart run by your body heat.
Even after the EMTs pull you from the lake they couldn't restart your heart for at least half an hour until your body temperature increased. Bad news.
Seriously, it doesn't mention what's the minimum temperature the device requires.
--CTH
They're nice to look at but is it really useful to represent the internet in this way? Surely there is a more meaningful representation that is of equal or greater esthetic value. Perhaps a rendering similar to the constructs associated with Everything2. This could be achieved through analysis and visualization of the relevence data used by Google and Teoma to generate their results, where significant material is emphesized. Granted this would not produce a network map, but rather a contant map, ilustrating regional housing of particularly meaningful or valuable content. It would however, include content available using any protocol for which there is a URL representation.
Granted content pamming is not what they were going for, but it would have the side effect of displaying network topology with respect to relitive routing and bandwith capacities (utilization anyway).
--CTH
It's important that prescident setting cases of this sort are tried by the best available trial atourneys, such that the prescident that will be set can be looked upon as binding, regardless of which way the case goes. I'm suprised that more nationally renowned defense atourneys weren't all over this case from the start. It's nice to have good news in this case once in a while
--CTH
I know everyone did it, but if your friend jumped off a bridge, would you... (you get the point).
--CTH
On the bright side, content providers will need to upgrade the quality of their content as they increae the level of annoyance experienced by users in accessing it. This means less content will be subscrption only. Users will demand more and higher quality content from providers who insist on iritating their users with this garbage.
Sites who adopt this advertising strategy, who have previously been confident in their levels of content quality and associated user loyalty might be in for a shock as their viewership plummets through the floor - or at least I hope users will be able to voice their discontent this way.
--CTH
There are many cases where licenses are non-transferable, particularly in the case of corporate licenses of intellectual property, but I believe (IANAL) most licenses are transferable by default, unless specifically stipulated otherwise. As I recall some states require consumer product licenses to be transferable (stating that non-transfer clauses are not enforcable within that state). I'm just not certain in which states this is true. The UCITA makes ajustments to the transferability rules, but the site I'm referencing here is not an even-handed analysis of that legislation (primarily because I don't have time to look for a better analysis). If you find what's written there to be disturbing, remember that it's decidedly pro-UTICA so an even handed analysys would be even more disturbing.
--CTH
Seriously though, the slippery slope arguent with regard to civil liberties is vary difficult to make, since based on that argument, organizations such as the ACLU and other organizations have had to defend all sorts of morally reprehensible (yet still legal) activities/things/people, to such a degree as to alienate a large portion of the population. This effect of having to act based on the slippery slope argument, has resulted in members of the news media recently making statements such as those on the ABC sunday discussion program This Week, which were to the effect (and not an exact quote):These light treatments by the news media, of the civil liberties issues around the right to privacy, as manifested by the ability to use cryptographic mechanisms in communication, are inexcusable. Unfortunately, here I suppose I'm preaching to the choir.
--CTH
--CTH
As a science steganography is vary old. One of the first book on the subject steganographica was written by Gaspari Schotti in 1665. It has however been a subject of limited public interest until vary recently. This is not to say that various steganographic techniques haven't been used ovar the years. On the contrary, many intelligence agencies have uses steganographic techniques to smuggle secrets our of various countries throughout the cold war and before. One of the best known ancient uses of Steganography was in the book Hypnerotomachia Poliphili published in 1499. The point is, it's been around for a vary long time, there just hasn't been any public interest.
--CTH
Now I can model the water flow down the shower drain (fluid dynamics). Cool. But can it model the flow of $$$ down the drain that would occur if I purchased it?
I'm all for new and spiffy hardware, but some things are just too much. I woner what the margin on one of these things is... I'm having trouble seeing how they expect to sell enough of these to cover the R&D costs... Maybe they'll sell them to the NSA so that agency can be brought into the 21st century...
--CTH
The EFF makes a wonderful contribution with respect to the legal issues of interest to the technically inclined (read: Geek) comunity, and it's admirable how they spech most of their resources in these pursuits, but honestly, they should take a page from the playbook of the NRA with respect to fund raising if they want to compete with the powerful political action committees that live inside the Washington beltway.
/. community.
There are also other organizations which deserve your support (financial or otherwise), such as the Center for Democracy & Technology and the Federation of American Scientists which has a number of projects that would be of interest to the
--CTH
The asertion was made that this outcome bodes well for the future of the GPL. I'm not sure if I see that. No legal prescident was set here; only more evidence of the FSF's ability to bully people into bending to their will. Don't get me wrong, I believe the FSF was right in this case, in insisting on the changes that were mand, but as a matter of law, a third party still has no standing in a license negotiation, and that's probably a good thing - as a matter of law
--CTH