Seriously, how many really good TV shows are there on TV now? CNN- and MSNBC-type info can all be gotten online. This leaves local news (read the paper) and fiction. OK, so you want to spend how much money to be able to watch Buffy, X-Files, Angel, StarCrap, et al.? I'm leaving asides sports games, but for me this is a total non-issue. Hmmm, movie playback... Unless you spend $100K on your home theater, it's better on the big screen (and if your memory is good it's pretty pointless to watch
something more than once).
From the advertising industry pov, there are only so many Lexus commercials that they can usefully air. They need to sell things like second mortages, Tide, PineSol, and Doritos on there too. They need to sell monster truck show ads. Point being, the market does not involve only those people who make enough money to spend $300 on a tv set.
A tv set is something that should be, like a radio, low threshhold of entry into the market. You should be able to get a shitty tv at the tag sale and be able to watch broadcast shows on it.
If everything is mediated through expensive digital cables, there will be an even greater media divide than there is right now. Broadcast tv does some useful stuff, like telling people where to vote, what the weather will be, and where the traffic jams are. Many of these people don't have the time or the resources to look anywhere else. Usually, even the poorest family has access to a tv set, not the internet or even the newspaper.
Advertisers, wanting to reach all markets, value the broadcast TV market and hopefully should resist any attempt to exclude poorer markets from watching television.
The point is, however, when you invite lawyers into a situation like this, a lawsuit could easily follow.
If I take my car to a mechanic, the mechanic's likely to add on additional work for himself. A lawyer's involvement is unlikely to stop at a simple letter, because he or she operates under the same principle the mechanic would use.
You might say that the company can control it's lawyers, stopping at the letter. But, in this day and age, how much of a company's behavior is actually controlled by the lawyers?
Lawyers follow money, it's true. But lawsuits like these are so widely percieved as absurd that I don't see how so many lawyers are taking the risk of bringing up these cases.
Please inform me! Is this similar to what can often happen in technical fields, when some buzzword or management strategy breezes through the magazine circut like a typhus epidemic, causing thousands of lawyers to chase trademark, copyright and patent cases all at once?
Or is there some movement in lawyers' organizations to protect people's rights, something like a jurisprudential EFF?
You know, I worked out by Sandia for a while and the type of people there are not hip leet computer builders who want to make this thing for the same reason people climb Everest and real investigative science happens.
They want the government to determine the course of genetic research, or at least the course of the distribution of information produced by genome research.
They don't care about the petaflop. Petaflops will be designed in many forms. And one that takes this many processors is not industrially replicable, anyway. So Compaq gets some advanced r&d but very little salable out of this collaboration.
Instead, 2600 Magazine was found liable for publishing a technology that might someday be used by someone to access a movie without the "authority" of the copyright owner. The District Court acknowledged that the published material, the text of a computer program called DeCSS that decrypts the data on DVDs, has substantial noninfringing uses, including scholarly study of cryptography, enabling fair use of copyrighted movies, and development of competing DVD players.
Copyright owners have never had the right to prevent such uses. The District Court's interpretation of Sect. 1201, however, now gives them this right.
1) If I write a program for a nuclear reaction in a science textbook, derived from the Hiroshima bomb, for study of physics, chemistry, or epidemiology, am I guilty of violating the terrorism laws?
2) The people who jump onto DeCSS posts are motivated primarily by a profit incentive and seem to think that this right to profit abrogrates our First Amendment rights.
3) The fair use agreement, which is something I use all the time as a journalist, gives me the right to use whatever tool I want, including an open-source tool written by a gifted private individual instead of a corporation which catalogs and reports your every use of their technology to marketing departments and federal agencies.
Oh that stupid cliche, Information wants to be free. It's true. Information is a valuable commodity like everything else under capitalism, and the only principled stand being taken against 2600 is not a protection of artists, but a protection of profit. Many artists have spoken out in support of this freedom.
Spherical motors could also be used to create omni-directional gears, even tactile sensations. For example, a computer trackball that uses a spherical motor could actually provide resistance against pushing fingers to create the impression of raised braille dots. "You could create the sensation of bumping into a wall in a maze game, or even the feeling of a ball hitting a racket in a game of computer Pong," says Chirikjian, whose basic science research was funded by the National Science Foundation.
This is, theoretically, the solution to the technical gap betwen us and realistic movement.
But is realism, the mimicry of non-motorized movement, where we want to go?
I for one would not care for Data the android, whose humanlike motions can now be created with these motors. I want robots that perform a task well and are kept separate from human intellectual, athletic and creative work.
No basketball playing robot.
No ballerina robot.
The Braille application is the sort I support. Use the third dimension to convey more information in computerized systems, instead of using it to conform technological devices to human standards.
I am definitely for government addressing inequities in resource distribution, opportunity, and the restrictions of democratic rights. I am not for a government using its federal funds to control workplace activity to the point where the first amendment is either broached completely, or the interpretation of the first amendment is put into the hands of commercial surf-protection software concerns.
The only hope here is resistance by anyone who has a principled stand on freedom of speech, i.e. the people. The librarians here are of course an example of such resistance. They are using the judicial system to challenge a (constitutionally) unfair regulatory infringement on their civil rights.
However, the government will eventually push this far enough that it is better to seek funding from alternative sources. Eventually, the government will not be a viable source of funding for the best artists and social programs- the ones that are decidedly politically incorrect.
This can lead to a degradation of those agencies that receive such funding, but I hope that private and charitable sources can step in, without restricting the freedoms of those who they presume to help.
As I posted earlier, for Linux to benefit more people need to use it. This box is yet another option for to find a useful, widely popular application for Linux.
In other words, a reason for someone who isn't necessarily a "geek" to get a Linux box.
I linked this PDF because one way to promote the widespread use of the thing is to make games for it.
Linux isn't unpopular because it's supposedly hard to learn! It is not cool. (Cool is a marketing term that means "my hip friends haven't found a use for it yet.")
What makes Linux cool (popularly usable) to the masses? A Web appliance whose software is mostly open source and free, whose programmers are somewhat accessible/responsible to user feedback, and the ability to upgrade and update without repeatedly paying fees and buying licenses.
The appliance's low price may be the key to introducing people to the advantages of Linux.
let us look at it this way. I use Lexis.com all the time. It did not produce any of its content- the content there comes from state houses, law books and newspapers. It is a pay site (boy howdy is it) but I am happy to pay this because hundreds of people worked to construct the database- assembling the data and creating its indexing and search functions, which are better than Google even for first time accuracy.
AltaVista has a right to protect the work that it put into a unique indexing system and a unique set of research that cannot be replicated. I find it ironic that it is AltaVista doing this and not one of the better search engines, because the premier services would have a better case and a better chance of winning a legal battle for the patents.
I don't think patenting is the best way to protect this work, but there isn't currently a better way.
I have never once seen satisfactory blending between digital and real environments and the integration of actors.. only in Titan A.E. have I seen realistic environments created this way, and that was a cartoon!
Even the slightest falsehood in lighting, texture or movement destroys the experience and makes me long evern more for the day when a fantastic, alien environment can truly be created digitally.
The problem with the pencil and paper is that it is expensive. You can only hire so many people to count, and if you hire them at too low of a salary they could conceivably be susceptible to election fraud.
Furthermore, a simple vote procedure should be backed up by a strong computerized system, in order to ensure the rapid tabulation of results. Or would you have us go back to the time when it took weeks to figure out the election, every election?
Furthermore, electronic voting, if it can be perfected, is a good way to extend the direct initiative and referendum on more issues to citizens. Technologies like the internet enable us to expand the realm of direct democracy and shrink the role of government.
Fortunately, searching for signals in a data stream from a radio telescope is an easily distributed task. We can break up data from an observation into frequency bands that are essentially independent of one another. In addition, an observation of one portion of the sky is essentially independent of an observation of another part. This lets us divide a large dataset into small chunks that a personal computer can analyze comparatively quickly. In this way, we can distribute the work to people willing to donate their spare CPU cycles.
Yes, this will catch most signals directed at us. But, what if aliens are sending a composite signal from several stars? Also, what if the aliens are sending a signal whose principle is as yet unknown here, and it occupies nonconsecutive frequencies?
The point being the data should be examined for more than one kind of pattern, and patterns introduced and/or obliterated by the distribution network should be accounted for.
Under the treaty, an online store could be liable under laws in any of the 48 member-countries of the Hague conference. That is why the American government is opposing, among other things, a clause that would ensure that consumers could sue businesses in the courts of the country where the consumer lives.
Instead, the Department of Commerce and e-commerce firms are pushing for a different solution: in effect, a new system of private laws, which would avoid the requirement to abide by the laws of the countries where their customers live. As in the Safe Harbour agreement, web firms could seek a certification that they follow certain minimum rules of consumer protection and privacy.Conflicts would be resolved by so-called "alternative dispute resolution".
Dispute resolution by who? This is the same kind of self-policing that gives business the advantage over the consumer in other global trade agreements. Who will create the forums for alternative dispute resolution?
It is essential for the consumer to enjoy protection of some set of laws when he or she uses the internet in business. as more individuals use it to maintain their livelihoods, states actually have MORE legitimate right to police fraudulent business practices on the "global" Internet.
There must be some kind of democratically legitimate constructuion of relief for consumers under a global system. If not the laws in the state where the consumer has citizenship, then perhaps some other global body such as the United Nations should step in the fray. If it can start an international criminal court to seek genocidal leaders and try them, it can try consumer fraud.
Don't let the businesses entirely police themselves.
as to why Kuro5hin has been linked to Slashdot's front page, yet AGAIN?
I found out about it from a slightly more difficult to find sid on slashdot than the TOP article on the FRONT page..I am of the belief that it is best to let people hunt a little bit for such a site, rather than repeatedly subjecting it to the whole panoply of lusers that could possibly be accessing the front page of Slashdot.
First of all, Indymedia is, perhaps even more terrifyingly to your p.o.v., a website that is produced by hundreds of people and read by thousands more. It's all Open Source, too. Indymedia started at the WTO protest in seattle and it got more hits that week than CNN did, thank you very much.
Secondly, De Beers certainly can see if it is using conflict diamonds. It is a diamond consortium (read trust) and has a lot of control over sources. That is why everyone is so nice to them when they graciously offer to do some sort of analysis that will enable them to see where their cut gemstones come from. Nice try guys but you really can't. You have to have personal knowledge of where they came from in your organization.
Thirdly, I voted for Nader thank you very much. Gore sucks as much as Bush does in my opinion. Go read my K5 diary, it has lots of stuff about the story I have been working on for the past month for national publication, it is about a coal mine that spilt 250 million gallons of coal sludge in 2 river systems, this company is owned by a company that is owned by Fluor Corp which gave half a Million to al gore the so called Environmentalist.
Fourthly, I think that people SHOULD be evenhanded. I would never write anything nearly as biased as what you will find on indymedia for the print publications off of which I make my living. I will however read indymedia as an antidote for the equally strong biases of the corporate media, which it openly tries to combat.
They have said that they do not use conflict diamonds, which are diamonds that have been bought from human rights abusing governments and insurgencies in Africa. I.e. in order to get the mine where your diamond was mined, child soldiers may have been used, civilians killed and tortured, etc.
Not really, though. They allow themselves to be tricked, and their diamond reserves in London, Frankfurt and Tel Aviv are of course full of conflict diamonds.
You can only prevent the use of conflict diamonds in 2 ways. 1 make the diamonds yourself, and 2 get the diamonds from sources you control and make open to the public.
I prefer the first way, really.
We do not need to be mining natural diamonds for gem or other purposes anymore.
Is it because Gates fears what will happen if people begin to use many Windows power'd computers in applications even more mission-critical than what's in their desktops- their CARS??
A stable system that will not cost hundreds to upgrade every few years, that can be customized to the level of security required by the customer?
Linux.
p.s. that car is beautiful. Taco, can you auction that off instead of the slashdot cruiser?
I like micropayments. They work on a similar system to microCREDIT, which is a model that allows small loans to allow poor people to start cottage industries, hence inducing economic growth in a third world area or in a poor US community.
A successful micropayment system, like microcredit, would have to be based on community trust and enforcement of honesty; the payments are too small to be enforced by, say, MasterCard, who would not make enough of a profit on an online transaction of twenty-five cents.
All of the scifi versions of the Net, in Gibson et al, have been based on such a pay for content system, which allows "market forces" to vet the quality of content as well as eliminating the need to build a community of users, then sell that community to advertisers. A much more honest method imho.
I will note that the artist's way of putting his content in comic form is cool but prevents me from cutting and pasting a relevant quote from his strip into my slashdot post. How's that for content control?;)
The Undernet was a place that I was able to use like the proverbial Roman agora, shaping a lot of my political arguments and testing them against people who otherwise would not have dealt with me.
I was 15 years old and an over-bright geek girl when I discovered #debate on Undernet, which I had joined due to my recent accession to the Debate Team at highschool. I, a new anarchist, met some of the great folks who were making up the famous and oft-mirrored The Anarchist FAQ . Some of the issues I discussed -- and was forced to research at a level far higher than would have been required at school -- included prisons and imprisonment, the decentralization of utilities, and other supposedly "boring" questions of public policy that I learned, early on, were fascinating to me. Like other geeks I specialized early and Undernet was my venue to this specialization.
I argued with long time anarchist theorists as well as libertarians, Democrats, Republicans, and government employees and politicians with decades of experience in politics and policy. Nobody gave a shit- or knew, without a lot of work- that I was young, Jewish, Yankee, and female. It taught me that mentality was key and that I could do anything.
I then joined up in #politics, which is slanted much further to the right and is often very silly and vapid- but still often contains some of the best and most informed argument on the Net from time to time. People have discussed foreign policy, economics, ecology, cryopreservation, and lots of other issues in there.
I have gotten jobs and close friends through Undernet. I will be a lifelong inhabitant of #politics as long as it exists and isn't overwhelmed by script kiddies or other idiots.
My congratulations to IRC's staff for keeping it up so long and my hopes that Slashdotters can help them, loan them the brains, time and other resources necessary to fend off this idiotic attack.
With apologies to Blair et al, there is a third option regarding "Internet vetting." I will preface this by saying that I agree with the author that there should be some kind of system to rate and interpret information. Although the raters would have some kind of control, this kind of system would allow for people who are not independent experts to get first time information from the Internet, rather than just confirming things read in far more exclusive venues of knowledge.
Ok, here is the third alternative between government and corporate control:
Popular control.
The reason we have government and corporations fighting over the domination of the Internet is most easily illustrated by imagining two lion prides fighting over a water hole while antelopes and zebras die of thirst. Although everyone, including the lions, would benefit from free access to the water for the zebras, only the lions are strong enough to wage the war.
In the case of information on the Internet, the entire system is organized towards marketing; the most valuable information, such as that on Lexis, is for pay. But, as many slashdotters are aware, freedom of information would encourage innovation.
How do we do it?
Michael Albert and others have outlined models of participatory economics (parecon) which rightly puts a high premium on knowledge, and the organization of knowledge, as something which is of very high value and is very political.
It also requires that experts abandon intellectual property and the exclusive rights accorded thereby, instead making propsperity dependent on free and easily accessible information for all people.
The model of educated, democratic input works on a small or a large scale, in capitalist or socialist economic systems, or as an economic system.
Sorry for the overly theoretical response, but I do not know enough about indexing, databases, or networks to be technical on this issue.
Consider for a moment that, when perusing most media-- be it a magazine or your snail mail- you are accustomed to advertising in many forms. As a matter of fact, many new media are created for the very purpose of bringing ads to your eyes and ears.
They created 3-d vision and smellovision in the movies because movie theaters, at that time, were major purveyors of advertising. Radio shows were sponsored by advertisers and all of their content was, in that sense, a form of spam.
Why do we get angry when an ingenious marketer slips in an intrusive, but fundamentally harmless, web-bug? If the spam were a virus and crashed a system or deleted data, it would be counterproductive to the spammer's purpose, marketing.
The freedom of advertising IS the freedom of the press. Advertisers brought us magazines, daily newspapers, radio theater, and many other aspects of our culture that have become highbrow, in some way BEYOND advertising. Give spammers respect- and a bit of freedom-- don't threaten them with punishing lawsuits and jail time! Otherwise, very few people without previously existing monolithic web presences will choose to do business on the Web. Remember, spam is the tool of the small business, the underdog- he who cannot afford the banner ads and other less obtrusive forms of advertising.
Excuse me for being a bit controversial here, but what is the point of discouraging repeat submissions?
The entire concept of "newness" on/. is pretty silly. the relevance of an article has little to do with its breaking-news quotient. Many times, someone submits something too fast only to find out that they misinterpreted the meaning of the story.
This goes for Slashdot Editors, too.
A three-month old story may have gathered enough analytical moss to be useful to slashdot readers. Why not post a story along with all its analysis- all the links that agree with, disagree with, analyze, correct, or update a story?
I would find such "old news" valuable. How about an "old news" section on slashdot? We could even make a graphic of a crumbling newspaper, or something.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, how many really good TV shows are there on TV now? CNN- and MSNBC-type info can all be gotten online. This leaves local news (read the paper) and fiction. OK, so you want to spend how much money to be able to watch Buffy, X-Files, Angel, StarCrap, et al.? I'm leaving asides sports games, but for me this is a total non-issue. Hmmm, movie playback... Unless you spend $100K on your home theater, it's better on the big screen (and if your memory is good it's pretty pointless to watch
something more than once).
From the advertising industry pov, there are only so many Lexus commercials that they can usefully air. They need to sell things like second mortages, Tide, PineSol, and Doritos on there too. They need to sell monster truck show ads. Point being, the market does not involve only those people who make enough money to spend $300 on a tv set.
A tv set is something that should be, like a radio, low threshhold of entry into the market. You should be able to get a shitty tv at the tag sale and be able to watch broadcast shows on it.
If everything is mediated through expensive digital cables, there will be an even greater media divide than there is right now. Broadcast tv does some useful stuff, like telling people where to vote, what the weather will be, and where the traffic jams are. Many of these people don't have the time or the resources to look anywhere else. Usually, even the poorest family has access to a tv set, not the internet or even the newspaper.
Advertisers, wanting to reach all markets, value the broadcast TV market and hopefully should resist any attempt to exclude poorer markets from watching television.
The point is, however, when you invite lawyers into a situation like this, a lawsuit could easily follow.
If I take my car to a mechanic, the mechanic's likely to add on additional work for himself. A lawyer's involvement is unlikely to stop at a simple letter, because he or she operates under the same principle the mechanic would use.
You might say that the company can control it's lawyers, stopping at the letter. But, in this day and age, how much of a company's behavior is actually controlled by the lawyers?
Any LAWYERS in the house?
If so what on earth are you doing about this?
Lawyers follow money, it's true. But lawsuits like these are so widely percieved as absurd that I don't see how so many lawyers are taking the risk of bringing up these cases.
Please inform me! Is this similar to what can often happen in technical fields, when some buzzword or management strategy breezes through the magazine circut like a typhus epidemic, causing thousands of lawyers to chase trademark, copyright and patent cases all at once?
Or is there some movement in lawyers' organizations to protect people's rights, something like a jurisprudential EFF?
You know, I worked out by Sandia for a while and the type of people there are not hip leet computer builders who want to make this thing for the same reason people climb Everest and real investigative science happens.
They want the government to determine the course of genetic research, or at least the course of the distribution of information produced by genome research.
They don't care about the petaflop. Petaflops will be designed in many forms. And one that takes this many processors is not industrially replicable, anyway. So Compaq gets some advanced r&d but very little salable out of this collaboration.
Instead, 2600 Magazine was found liable for publishing a technology that might someday be used by someone to access a movie without the "authority" of the copyright owner. The District Court acknowledged that the published material, the text of a computer program called DeCSS that decrypts the data on DVDs, has substantial noninfringing uses, including scholarly study of cryptography, enabling fair use of copyrighted movies, and development of competing DVD players.
Copyright owners have never had the right to prevent such uses. The District Court's interpretation of Sect. 1201, however, now gives them this right.
1) If I write a program for a nuclear reaction in a science textbook, derived from the Hiroshima bomb, for study of physics, chemistry, or epidemiology, am I guilty of violating the terrorism laws?
2) The people who jump onto DeCSS posts are motivated primarily by a profit incentive and seem to think that this right to profit abrogrates our First Amendment rights.
3) The fair use agreement, which is something I use all the time as a journalist, gives me the right to use whatever tool I want, including an open-source tool written by a gifted private individual instead of a corporation which catalogs and reports your every use of their technology to marketing departments and federal agencies.
Oh that stupid cliche, Information wants to be free. It's true. Information is a valuable commodity like everything else under capitalism, and the only principled stand being taken against 2600 is not a protection of artists, but a protection of profit. Many artists have spoken out in support of this freedom.
Spherical motors could also be used to create omni-directional gears, even tactile sensations. For example, a computer trackball that uses a spherical motor could actually provide resistance against pushing fingers to create the impression of raised braille dots. "You could create the sensation of bumping into a wall in a maze game, or even the feeling of a ball hitting a racket in a game of computer Pong," says Chirikjian, whose basic science research was funded by the National Science Foundation.
This is, theoretically, the solution to the technical gap betwen us and realistic movement.
But is realism, the mimicry of non-motorized movement, where we want to go?
I for one would not care for Data the android, whose humanlike motions can now be created with these motors. I want robots that perform a task well and are kept separate from human intellectual, athletic and creative work.
No basketball playing robot.
No ballerina robot.
The Braille application is the sort I support. Use the third dimension to convey more information in computerized systems, instead of using it to conform technological devices to human standards.
You heard me right.
I am definitely for government addressing inequities in resource distribution, opportunity, and the restrictions of democratic rights. I am not for a government using its federal funds to control workplace activity to the point where the first amendment is either broached completely, or the interpretation of the first amendment is put into the hands of commercial surf-protection software concerns.
The only hope here is resistance by anyone who has a principled stand on freedom of speech, i.e. the people. The librarians here are of course an example of such resistance. They are using the judicial system to challenge a (constitutionally) unfair regulatory infringement on their civil rights.
However, the government will eventually push this far enough that it is better to seek funding from alternative sources. Eventually, the government will not be a viable source of funding for the best artists and social programs- the ones that are decidedly politically incorrect.
This can lead to a degradation of those agencies that receive such funding, but I hope that private and charitable sources can step in, without restricting the freedoms of those who they presume to help.
Nokia needs game developers for the Media Terminal.
As I posted earlier, for Linux to benefit more people need to use it. This box is yet another option for to find a useful, widely popular application for Linux.
In other words, a reason for someone who isn't necessarily a "geek" to get a Linux box.
I linked this PDF because one way to promote the widespread use of the thing is to make games for it.
Thank you, Nokia.
Linux isn't unpopular because it's supposedly hard to learn! It is not cool. (Cool is a marketing term that means "my hip friends haven't found a use for it yet.")
What makes Linux cool (popularly usable) to the masses? A Web appliance whose software is mostly open source and free, whose programmers are somewhat accessible/responsible to user feedback, and the ability to upgrade and update without repeatedly paying fees and buying licenses.
The appliance's low price may be the key to introducing people to the advantages of Linux.
Well,
let us look at it this way. I use Lexis.com all the time. It did not produce any of its content- the content there comes from state houses, law books and newspapers. It is a pay site (boy howdy is it) but I am happy to pay this because hundreds of people worked to construct the database- assembling the data and creating its indexing and search functions, which are better than Google even for first time accuracy.
AltaVista has a right to protect the work that it put into a unique indexing system and a unique set of research that cannot be replicated. I find it ironic that it is AltaVista doing this and not one of the better search engines, because the premier services would have a better case and a better chance of winning a legal battle for the patents.
I don't think patenting is the best way to protect this work, but there isn't currently a better way.
I have never once seen satisfactory blending between digital and real environments and the integration of actors.. only in Titan A.E. have I seen realistic environments created this way, and that was a cartoon!
Even the slightest falsehood in lighting, texture or movement destroys the experience and makes me long evern more for the day when a fantastic, alien environment can truly be created digitally.
The problem with the pencil and paper is that it is expensive. You can only hire so many people to count, and if you hire them at too low of a salary they could conceivably be susceptible to election fraud.
Furthermore, a simple vote procedure should be backed up by a strong computerized system, in order to ensure the rapid tabulation of results. Or would you have us go back to the time when it took weeks to figure out the election, every election?
Furthermore, electronic voting, if it can be perfected, is a good way to extend the direct initiative and referendum on more issues to citizens. Technologies like the internet enable us to expand the realm of direct democracy and shrink the role of government.
Fortunately, searching for signals in a data stream from a radio telescope is an easily distributed task. We can break up data from an observation into frequency bands that are essentially independent of one another. In addition, an observation of one portion of the sky is essentially independent of an observation of another part. This lets us divide a large dataset into small chunks that a personal computer can analyze comparatively quickly. In this way, we can distribute the work to people willing to donate their spare CPU cycles.
Yes, this will catch most signals directed at us. But, what if aliens are sending a composite signal from several stars? Also, what if the aliens are sending a signal whose principle is as yet unknown here, and it occupies nonconsecutive frequencies?
The point being the data should be examined for more than one kind of pattern, and patterns introduced and/or obliterated by the distribution network should be accounted for.
in a court of law is VERY IMPORTANT.
Under the treaty, an online store could be liable under laws in any of the 48 member-countries of the Hague conference. That is why the American government is opposing, among other things, a clause that would ensure that consumers could sue businesses in the courts of the country where the consumer lives.
Instead, the Department of Commerce and e-commerce firms are pushing for a different solution: in effect, a new system of private laws, which would avoid the requirement to abide by the laws of the countries where their customers live. As in the Safe Harbour agreement, web firms could seek a certification that they follow certain minimum rules of consumer protection and privacy.Conflicts would be resolved by so-called "alternative dispute resolution".
Dispute resolution by who? This is the same kind of self-policing that gives business the advantage over the consumer in other global trade agreements. Who will create the forums for alternative dispute resolution?
It is essential for the consumer to enjoy protection of some set of laws when he or she uses the internet in business. as more individuals use it to maintain their livelihoods, states actually have MORE legitimate right to police fraudulent business practices on the "global" Internet.
There must be some kind of democratically legitimate constructuion of relief for consumers under a global system. If not the laws in the state where the consumer has citizenship, then perhaps some other global body such as the United Nations should step in the fray. If it can start an international criminal court to seek genocidal leaders and try them, it can try consumer fraud.
Don't let the businesses entirely police themselves.
Yes, we should.
*duck*
<disclaimer>I am just kidding.</disclaimer>
Anyway, what I am wondering is WHY would VA arrange in price fixing in their IPO, if they did? and how common is this practice?
perdida
as to why Kuro5hin has been linked to Slashdot's front page, yet AGAIN?
I found out about it from a slightly more difficult to find sid on slashdot than the TOP article on the FRONT page..I am of the belief that it is best to let people hunt a little bit for such a site, rather than repeatedly subjecting it to the whole panoply of lusers that could possibly be accessing the front page of Slashdot.
First of all, Indymedia is, perhaps even more terrifyingly to your p.o.v., a website that is produced by hundreds of people and read by thousands more. It's all Open Source, too. Indymedia started at the WTO protest in seattle and it got more hits that week than CNN did, thank you very much.
Secondly, De Beers certainly can see if it is using conflict diamonds. It is a diamond consortium (read trust) and has a lot of control over sources. That is why everyone is so nice to them when they graciously offer to do some sort of analysis that will enable them to see where their cut gemstones come from. Nice try guys but you really can't. You have to have personal knowledge of where they came from in your organization.
Thirdly, I voted for Nader thank you very much. Gore sucks as much as Bush does in my opinion. Go read my K5 diary, it has lots of stuff about the story I have been working on for the past month for national publication, it is about a coal mine that spilt 250 million gallons of coal sludge in 2 river systems, this company is owned by a company that is owned by Fluor Corp which gave half a Million to al gore the so called Environmentalist.
Fourthly, I think that people SHOULD be evenhanded. I would never write anything nearly as biased as what you will find on indymedia for the print publications off of which I make my living. I will however read indymedia as an antidote for the equally strong biases of the corporate media, which it openly tries to combat.
Thank you for your response, seriously.
(otherwise known as Fsck DeBeers.
They have said that they do not use conflict diamonds, which are diamonds that have been bought from human rights abusing governments and insurgencies in Africa. I.e. in order to get the mine where your diamond was mined, child soldiers may have been used, civilians killed and tortured, etc.
Not really, though. They allow themselves to be tricked, and their diamond reserves in London, Frankfurt and Tel Aviv are of course full of conflict diamonds.
You can only prevent the use of conflict diamonds in 2 ways. 1 make the diamonds yourself, and 2 get the diamonds from sources you control and make open to the public.
I prefer the first way, really.
We do not need to be mining natural diamonds for gem or other purposes anymore.
Why did they choose Linux?
Is it because Gates fears what will happen if people begin to use many Windows power'd computers in applications even more mission-critical than what's in their desktops- their CARS??
A stable system that will not cost hundreds to upgrade every few years, that can be customized to the level of security required by the customer?
Linux.
p.s. that car is beautiful. Taco, can you auction that off instead of the slashdot cruiser?
I like micropayments. They work on a similar system to microCREDIT, which is a model that allows small loans to allow poor people to start cottage industries, hence inducing economic growth in a third world area or in a poor US community.
;)
A successful micropayment system, like microcredit, would have to be based on community trust and enforcement of honesty; the payments are too small to be enforced by, say, MasterCard, who would not make enough of a profit on an online transaction of twenty-five cents.
All of the scifi versions of the Net, in Gibson et al, have been based on such a pay for content system, which allows "market forces" to vet the quality of content as well as eliminating the need to build a community of users, then sell that community to advertisers. A much more honest method imho.
I will note that the artist's way of putting his content in comic form is cool but prevents me from cutting and pasting a relevant quote from his strip into my slashdot post. How's that for content control?
Really, I do.
The Undernet was a place that I was able to use like the proverbial Roman agora, shaping a lot of my political arguments and testing them against people who otherwise would not have dealt with me.
I was 15 years old and an over-bright geek girl when I discovered #debate on Undernet, which I had joined due to my recent accession to the Debate Team at highschool. I, a new anarchist, met some of the great folks who were making up the famous and oft-mirrored The Anarchist FAQ . Some of the issues I discussed -- and was forced to research at a level far higher than would have been required at school -- included prisons and imprisonment, the decentralization of utilities, and other supposedly "boring" questions of public policy that I learned, early on, were fascinating to me. Like other geeks I specialized early and Undernet was my venue to this specialization.
I argued with long time anarchist theorists as well as libertarians, Democrats, Republicans, and government employees and politicians with decades of experience in politics and policy. Nobody gave a shit- or knew, without a lot of work- that I was young, Jewish, Yankee, and female. It taught me that mentality was key and that I could do anything.
I then joined up in #politics, which is slanted much further to the right and is often very silly and vapid- but still often contains some of the best and most informed argument on the Net from time to time. People have discussed foreign policy, economics, ecology, cryopreservation, and lots of other issues in there.
I have gotten jobs and close friends through Undernet. I will be a lifelong inhabitant of #politics as long as it exists and isn't overwhelmed by script kiddies or other idiots.
My congratulations to IRC's staff for keeping it up so long and my hopes that Slashdotters can help them, loan them the brains, time and other resources necessary to fend off this idiotic attack.
With apologies to Blair et al, there is a third option regarding "Internet vetting." I will preface this by saying that I agree with the author that there should be some kind of system to rate and interpret information. Although the raters would have some kind of control, this kind of system would allow for people who are not independent experts to get first time information from the Internet, rather than just confirming things read in far more exclusive venues of knowledge.
Ok, here is the third alternative between government and corporate control:
Popular control.
The reason we have government and corporations fighting over the domination of the Internet is most easily illustrated by imagining two lion prides fighting over a water hole while antelopes and zebras die of thirst. Although everyone, including the lions, would benefit from free access to the water for the zebras, only the lions are strong enough to wage the war.
In the case of information on the Internet, the entire system is organized towards marketing; the most valuable information, such as that on Lexis, is for pay. But, as many slashdotters are aware, freedom of information would encourage innovation.
How do we do it?
Michael Albert and others have outlined models of participatory economics (parecon) which rightly puts a high premium on knowledge, and the organization of knowledge, as something which is of very high value and is very political.
It also requires that experts abandon intellectual property and the exclusive rights accorded thereby, instead making propsperity dependent on free and easily accessible information for all people.
The model of educated, democratic input works on a small or a large scale, in capitalist or socialist economic systems, or as an economic system.
Sorry for the overly theoretical response, but I do not know enough about indexing, databases, or networks to be technical on this issue.
Consider for a moment that, when perusing most media-- be it a magazine or your snail mail- you are accustomed to advertising in many forms. As a matter of fact, many new media are created for the very purpose of bringing ads to your eyes and ears.
They created 3-d vision and smellovision in the movies because movie theaters, at that time, were major purveyors of advertising. Radio shows were sponsored by advertisers and all of their content was, in that sense, a form of spam.
Why do we get angry when an ingenious marketer slips in an intrusive, but fundamentally harmless, web-bug? If the spam were a virus and crashed a system or deleted data, it would be counterproductive to the spammer's purpose, marketing.
The freedom of advertising IS the freedom of the press. Advertisers brought us magazines, daily newspapers, radio theater, and many other aspects of our culture that have become highbrow, in some way BEYOND advertising. Give spammers respect- and a bit of freedom-- don't threaten them with punishing lawsuits and jail time! Otherwise, very few people without previously existing monolithic web presences will choose to do business on the Web. Remember, spam is the tool of the small business, the underdog- he who cannot afford the banner ads and other less obtrusive forms of advertising.
Excuse me for being a bit controversial here, but what is the point of discouraging repeat submissions?
/. is pretty silly. the relevance of an article has little to do with its breaking-news quotient. Many times, someone submits something too fast only to find out that they misinterpreted the meaning of the story.
The entire concept of "newness" on
This goes for Slashdot Editors, too.
A three-month old story may have gathered enough analytical moss to be useful to slashdot readers. Why not post a story along with all its analysis- all the links that agree with, disagree with, analyze, correct, or update a story?
I would find such "old news" valuable. How about an "old news" section on slashdot? We could even make a graphic of a crumbling newspaper, or something.
All you l33t hax0rs are so very, very dada .
You hack little childrens' toys.. why? to show your friends?
NO! To sneak them back onto the shelves in order to indoctrinate little kids with counter-cultural messages....
right?
PLEASE tell me you are spending all this time with the hopes of doing something USEFUL...
...please??