Hemos: THANK YOU for your words urging restraint. There'll be plenty of time to work out who did it and bring them to justice in the following months.
major parts of European cities, Britain in particular are being shutdown,
I'm two miles from the House of Commons (central London) and, as far as I'm aware, Hemos is mistaken. (Source?) Specific buioldings such as Lloyds, the Nat West tower, Canary Wharf and so on are evacuated, but Londoners are used to that sort of thing: we had an IRA bombing campaign (and still do, of a sort) and there are plenty of false alarms and practice drills.
This is what frightens me about the US response. On past performance, there's a tendency to keep the great American moron^w public happy by randomly attacking Muslims, or Arabs. The people celebrating are Palestinians, who been on the end of activity that, were it performed by any other nation, would be condemned as warcrimes. Israel routinely kills non-combatant civilians in retaliation for attacks. This is not the way to stop people who already hate your guts, stop hating you! There is NO MILITARY SOLUTION to this.
Those of you (Americans) who try to be thoughtful about this,/PLEASE/ try to avoid knee-jerk "It's the ay-rabs!" jingoism. I realise that revenge must be the first thought in many people's minds. Try to remember, the people who did this WERE ON THE PLANES and they're ALREADY DEAD. Modulo Bin Laden or whoever.
Anyone know about construction details of the WTC? How the hell could they collapse?? Clearly it was the fire that caused it... surely it would have been fire-rated to, like, NOT collapse in the event of a fire?? Anyone shed any light on this?
BTW, big thanks to Slashdot: Taco, you did the right thing.
We (the US) are now COMPELLED to go totally hardline
That won't solve anything. I have family in Ireland, and we well know the result of that kind of an attitude. The right way forward is much harder than just bombing the crap out of a random Islamic country. It's down to GWB to do the right thing.
Regarding airline security: this is the result of the US having had it so EASY for the last 40 years. As a friend said, none of us (Euros) would have been surprised for something like this to have happened at any time, virtually, since the 1982 massacres in Beirut at least. Not to mention the many, many, many other countries around the war that the US has picked on to protect their trade interests, or to prop up some dictatorship.
> I may be a frequent critic of W., but today, I'm behind him 100%
"My country right or wrong" is an understandable first response; but I just hope you realise that bombing the crap out of Eygptian babyfood factories (as you did after the African bombings) is NOT the way forward.
The net seems to be holding up pretty well, considering there's a major IX on 55 Broadway (I believe?) - traceroutes are going round the houses a little, but apart from the major news sites being knocked down for an hour or so, it seems to be coping pretty well.
At the risk of stating the obvious, if you're in the area, stay off the phone unless it's a vital call.
Hate to say this, but perhaps this will bring home to the average American that (a) the world doesn't end at the Atlantic/Pacific, and (b) not eveyone in the world is necessarily a big fan of America, and their foreign policies in particular. Live by the sword...
I have an old Onion InfoGraphic on my wall here - I had to have it there, for when my Aibo-owning sucker^w^w techno-obsessive friend comes round - "Why is Aibo so goddam popular?"
I'd link but there's no URL on it and I can't find it at t'Onion...
Keeps all those goddam robot cats out of the yard
Crude, mechanical simulations of love and affection prepare children for the adult world
Marks territory with streams of caustic battery acid
Hoping to teach it to say "Rastro"
Doesn't vomit batteries back up like real dog
No need to drown it in brick-filled sack to shut it up
Hoping to train it to tuck in baby from airport videophone
Kids kept nagging for a cold, metallic object to hug
Won't bite the faces off children unless specifically programmed to
Euro MPs defy Nato and seek ban on DU:
The European Parliament called for a suspension of the use of depleted uranium (DU) munitions yesterday, rejecting safety assurances from Nato and heightening pressure for a formal moratorium.
Where the streets are littered with DU shells
The snow clings to the burnt rafters of the old military factory at Hadjici and slithers off the fir trees that survived Nato's 1995 bombing.
Please note these are REPUTABLE, mainstream sources: I haven't even DARED
to look at Indymedia.
The thing that makes me really sad is how certain most of the replies
to my original post were that I was trolling, or talking shit. Your
first instincts were: "It's our army, and we're the GOODIES for heaven's sake!
This guy MUST be talking thru' his arse." It seems that's the only
way for you to resolve the cognitive dissonance. The NATO armies
are mostly composed of the citizens of those countries. Where do you think
the expression "cannon fodder" comes from?
I wonder whether an apology is too much to ask for?
I can't remember the last time I got this angry after reading something
on Slashdot. I'm trying not to resort to name-calling because I want to
believe that some of you are intelligent and open-minded enough to admit
that you were, at the very least, gullible to parrot the
official line pedalled by the (US) mass media. We all know how committed
THEY are to truth and justice, right? Oh, so long as it doesn't conflict
with government wishes. Which means corporate interests.
Right, I'm done ranting now. If that hasn't got me a Special Branch
file, I want my taxes back;)
Some links (I went to the Independent and Guardian newspaper sites first
because one of them - the Gruaniad I think - ran a massive front page
lead feature on "the cover-up and scandal of the Kosovan war". We in
the UK have been "lucky" enough to have found out about a whole string of
Govt. coverups in the last few years, from BSE/CJD, foot & mouth, arms to
Iraq (which only broke thanks to Ollie North being a moron)... we tend to
be a bit sceptical when they assure us that there's nothing to worry about
and everything's under control.
Nato brings out big guns to kill off cancer scare:
"Nato yesterday launched a massive damage limitation exercise it hopes will defuse growing concern that its use of armour-piercing depleted uranium-tipped shells in Kosovo may be the cause of unexplained cases of cancer among its troops."
These are all from UK quality broadsheet newspapers.
Full disclosure: my girlfriend is Serbian; however she (and I) have no sympathy
for, and place less than zero credibility in, anything coming from the Milosevic regime (indeed, she was teargassed by them in '91 & forced into exile.)
The people mostly dying of cancer, apart from the NATO PBI (poor bloody infantry), are mostly Kosovan civilians.
It might come as a shock, folks, but YOUR GOVERNMENT IS LYING TO YOU. Why is this
so hard to grasp when it happens in an area unconnected with IP, computers or the Internet? '"Here's American Gladiators. Here's 500 channels of this shit.
Go back to sleep America, your government is in control." And oh the light of
the TVs glow through millions of American windows... ' (Bill Hicks.)
When NATO decided to try preventing Milosevic exterminating the non-Serb inhabitants of Kosovo by bombing them with depleted uranium, the results were pretty horrendous. Not only did the cream of hi-tech weaponry utterly fail to hit their targets (when the Serb forces pulled out, military intelligence were astonished to see hundreds of tanks and APCs popping up out apparently of nowhere and queueing up at the border), but the cancer rates have shot up. Of course, (a) there's no question of any sort of enquiry or admission of fault, and (b) the people who are dying (horribly, with very little in the way of medical facilities except black market diamorphine to ease the pain) are the very people who "we" were trying to save.
Someone commented in the earlier story about Passport security that "they'll probably tie it up with ENUM, which links DNS info to phone numbers." I subscribe to the cock-up theory of history - which is not to say that governments don't engage in conspiracies, but rather that they tend to cock it up when they do. The possibilities for cockups with this seem rather immense, though... and what on earth will the "UN Black Helicopters / CIA / They're Tryin' to Take Our God-given right to carry guns away / It's the End Times" brigade make of it? Not that they need an excuse, but it seems silly to give them free *cough* ammunition...
...hats are on heads and ice-creams are in cornets.
(with apologies to Brian Cant.)
Re:Web Services: How different from the Web?
on
Shirky On P2P
·
· Score: 2
OK, some good points. I'm certainly not arguing that enterprises have no need to exchange structured data, or that XML isn't a Good Thing that is being widely used already and will grow. As you say, in the real world, [ very expensive but highly reliable and available] systems such as EDI, or the UK BACS cheque clearing system (interbank funds reconciliations) etc are used. And, at the other end of the spectrum, there are Slashboxes and probably 'some' similar uses.
This certainly does/not/ mean that a significant number of/web sites/ need to share data. Commercial partners: yes. Web sites? nah. EDI is expensive partly because it doesn't run over the internet - let alone over HTTP. There are very good reasons for this...
VRML wasn't purely marketing driven. Everyone who jumped aboard the bandwagon had an angle on how it was going to be great, including many intelligent dedicated code hackers and highly technical people. In the same way, I think the 'web services' meme clicks with a lot of developers who've had to reinvent the wheel over and over again. I fail to see how this can drive it's use, though; companies stay prosper or file chapter 11 on other criteria than whether the developers have a fun time building the systems.
Perhaps I have misunderstood what is meant by "web services". A backend database replication or stock updating system is nothing to do with the web except that the data/may/ end up used on a site. But that's nothing new: how does Slashdot (or ZDNet, for that matter) get their content? How does Amazon get it's content?
A Microsoft lawyer was interviewed on BBC Radio 4 this morning and he came out with this classic:
"We have by far the most open system!"
John Franks, Head of EU law, Microsoft.
Re:Web Services: How different from the Web?
on
Shirky On P2P
·
· Score: 2
It's the discussion that refuses to die;)
I'll address your points in order.
Firstly,
I/am/ a fairly typical end-user, and I do what 95% of end-users do: I have a small number of username/passwords which I have been recycling for the past four or five years. Obviously you don't want to do this for anything super-sensitive, but who in their right minds entrusts super-sensitive personal data to a third party?
Secondly: if I'm selling something on the web, then my specifications and pricing data are/already/ as widely distributed as possible (routing glitches permitting.) That's what the first two "W"s in "WWW" stand for! I definitely wouldn't want third parties snarfing product data from my site and selling on to consumers: I'd be losing all that interesting marketing and demographic data. If "DigitalCameraNews.com" o whatever wants to link to my site, fine, I'm delighted.
Slashboxes? Does anyone actually use them? I don't. Perhaps I'm not that typical an end-user after all... my preferred sources of news are not a subset the given slashboxes: slashboxes are all very kewl, but they don't really scale very well.
Realtime product availability data comes from the vendors own stoick control systems. You really think Argos (a typical UK consumer goods reseller) are going to entrust their stock control to manufacturers? I just don't think it's going to happen on any significant scale.
Returning to my VRML example: were you around when VRML was being hyped as the future of the Net? Just because something is technically possible, doesn't mean it'll work in the real world. (See WAP for another example: if you want to make pots of money, short stocks of telcos who spent a fortune on 3G licenses now, cos they'll be bankrupt or taken over within five years. )
Lots of time and money was put into demonstrating that the whole idea just wasn't going to fly. I'm open to the remote possibility that I'm wrong about this;) but I'm not holding my breath. I guess only time will tell.
Re:Web Services: How different from the Web?
on
Shirky On P2P
·
· Score: 2
But... forgive me if I appear dense... why should we want web sites to be interoperable? I guess this is the reason I'm so baffled by this 'web services' thing: I just don't understand what they're needed for. OK, Microsoft would like Expedia to be able to share user data with, say, Hotmail - perhaps so they can implement a single sign-on, perhaps so that they can make sure they rotate the banner ads you see. Whatever. But why should the sites I use (to take a random example) need to interoperate? Slashdot, NASA Space Science, The Register, BBC News, Security Focus. Hmmmm. Single sign-on isn't going to save me much time there. Is this some sort of eCommerce thing? And if so, why should competitors want to share customer data?
Sorry, I just don't see it. I think it's marchitecture designed by people who took Wired magazine a little too seriously. "Experiments with application-to-application traffic"? Do me a favour! It smells like a dead duck, it looks like a dead duck, and frankly it quacks like one, too.
Time will tell - personally, I reckon this is the first 'VRML' of the 21st Century.
Re:Web services my arse
on
Shirky On P2P
·
· Score: 2
I'm following up on these comments waaay to late to be read, but wtf:)
lash stopped being just a news/discussion web app and started being a web service when they proffered xml so that automated agents can query & filter stories so that by the time it gets to the human, the experience is easily customized according to your rules and does what you need it. That's what a web service is.
So 'web services' are only of any use to developers? (I'm assuming that that a user who is capable of scripting some sort of RDF parser to pop up the latest/. headlines on their desktop comes under the heading 'developer'.) Users of such applets are still just Users. And let's face it, you don't need a fancy XML framework to enable a script to go grab the latest/. stories: that's what LWP::Simple and regular expressions are for;)
WRT the 'time spent sifting HTTP data' argument... hmmm. Personally, I find that the process of sifting is what the Web experience is all about. Intermediaries such as Slashdot aggregate others' content and provide links and commentary; I trust some more than others, but I don't read every/. story (by any means). I'm more than happy for skilled human editors *cough* to play the part of intermediaries; Slashdot of course allows anyone to submit a story and become an editor themelves./THAT/ is what the web experience is all about: many to many, via an arbitary subset of mediators. I'm sure there's an apposite quotation from The Cluetrain Manifesto at this point, but I don't have the book with me right now...
There was some discussion of "web services" on Perl Advocacy list recently.
I come down on the side that says Apache is all you're ever going to need. Look, Slashdot is technically an application... does that make Slashcode an n-tier application server? Purlease. It's just marketing - web servers are SOOOOO 90s, now we call 'em "web services".
Evil Dead? evil SCHMED! This line is from Judge Death, Dredd's enemy from the Deadworld, in 2000AD! (no, they didn't pull him into the movie... shame!)
Here he is. eeek!!. And the line is:
"You cannot kill that which does not live!"
**PHEAR**!!
Slashdot Mirror
This is what frightens me about the US response. On past performance, there's a tendency to keep the great American moron^w public happy by randomly attacking Muslims, or Arabs. The people celebrating are Palestinians, who been on the end of activity that, were it performed by any other nation, would be condemned as warcrimes. Israel routinely kills non-combatant civilians in retaliation for attacks. This is not the way to stop people who already hate your guts, stop hating you! There is NO MILITARY SOLUTION to this.
Those of you (Americans) who try to be thoughtful about this, /PLEASE/ try to avoid knee-jerk "It's the ay-rabs!" jingoism. I realise that revenge must be the first thought in many people's minds. Try to remember, the people who did this WERE ON THE PLANES and they're ALREADY DEAD. Modulo Bin Laden or whoever.
Now, offing him would get my support...
BTW, big thanks to Slashdot: Taco, you did the right thing.
That won't solve anything. I have family in Ireland, and we well know the result of that kind of an attitude. The right way forward is much harder than just bombing the crap out of a random Islamic country. It's down to GWB to do the right thing.
Regarding airline security: this is the result of the US having had it so EASY for the last 40 years. As a friend said, none of us (Euros) would have been surprised for something like this to have happened at any time, virtually, since the 1982 massacres in Beirut at least. Not to mention the many, many, many other countries around the war that the US has picked on to protect their trade interests, or to prop up some dictatorship.
"My country right or wrong" is an understandable first response; but I just hope you realise that bombing the crap out of Eygptian babyfood factories (as you did after the African bombings) is NOT the way forward.
PLEASE, mod up parent; this is spot on.
At the risk of stating the obvious, if you're in the area, stay off the phone unless it's a vital call.
I can't post any more. Words fail me.
Hate to say this, but perhaps this will bring home to the average American that (a) the world doesn't end at the Atlantic/Pacific, and (b) not eveyone in the world is necessarily a big fan of America, and their foreign policies in particular. Live by the sword...
You're rumbled, my friend...
- Google Directory has an entire section on the topic.
- BBC story: "Alarm grows over cancer deaths"
- BBC: Depleted uranium 'threatens Balkan cancer epidemic':
A British scientist says the Americans' use of depleted uranium weapons in the war with Serbia is likely to cause 10,000 extra deaths from cancer.
-
The Yugoslav President, Vojislav Kostunica, announced yesterday that he would meet the chief prosecutor of the UN war crimes tribunal next week to discuss Nato's use of depleted uranium shells as a war crime against civilians. Note to the clue-impaired: Kostunica is the POST-Milosevic leader who was lead the rebellion against his regime.
- Robert Fisk: In another Bosnian town two small boys lie in their hospital beds. Is this collateral damage? (Note: Robert Fisk is an EXTREMELY respected war correspondent
with over twenty years' experience.)
-
Euro MPs defy Nato and seek ban on DU:
The European Parliament called for a suspension of the use of depleted uranium (DU) munitions yesterday, rejecting safety assurances from Nato and heightening pressure for a formal moratorium.
- Belgrade Law Centre DU archive
- Eighth Italian soldier dies in DU scare
-
Are the governments of Nato guilty of committing a heinous war crime?
- 'Mr Blair, Mr Clinton, Lord Robertson and the rest don't want to know about the dying Serbs of Bosnia'
- Nato calls for DU medical inquiry in all 19 alliance countries
- Ministers of White Noise vie for title of most vacuous public servant
- A Labour MP warned the Government yesterday of his fears over the risks to service personnel who have been exposed to depleted uranium.
Note: Labour is the party of government; this MP just blew his entire career
by making this statement.
- NATO could face a criminal investigation into the use by its forces of depleted uranium ammunition, the chief prosecutor of the UN war crimes tribunal said yesterday.
-
Where the streets are littered with DU shells
-
Sick, bleeding and losing nails: the girl who played with Nato uranium:
Sladjana Sarenac remembers the pieces of a depleted-uranium bomb that she picked up outside her home in Sarajevo.
- The Surgeon-General's office of the US army warned almost eight years ago that military personnel exposed to dust from depleted uranium ammunition risk developing lung and bone cancer.
-
I see 300 graves that could bear the headstone: 'Died of depleted uranium'Robert Fisk in Bratunac, Eastern Bosnia
- Guardian special report
Please note these are REPUTABLE, mainstream sources: I haven't even DARED to look at Indymedia.The snow clings to the burnt rafters of the old military factory at Hadjici and slithers off the fir trees that survived Nato's 1995 bombing.
The thing that makes me really sad is how certain most of the replies to my original post were that I was trolling, or talking shit. Your first instincts were: "It's our army, and we're the GOODIES for heaven's sake! This guy MUST be talking thru' his arse." It seems that's the only way for you to resolve the cognitive dissonance. The NATO armies are mostly composed of the citizens of those countries. Where do you think the expression "cannon fodder" comes from?
I wonder whether an apology is too much to ask for?
I can't remember the last time I got this angry after reading something on Slashdot. I'm trying not to resort to name-calling because I want to believe that some of you are intelligent and open-minded enough to admit that you were, at the very least, gullible to parrot the official line pedalled by the (US) mass media. We all know how committed THEY are to truth and justice, right? Oh, so long as it doesn't conflict with government wishes. Which means corporate interests.
Right, I'm done ranting now. If that hasn't got me a Special Branch file, I want my taxes back ;)
Some links (I went to the Independent and Guardian newspaper sites first because one of them - the Gruaniad I think - ran a massive front page lead feature on "the cover-up and scandal of the Kosovan war". We in the UK have been "lucky" enough to have found out about a whole string of Govt. coverups in the last few years, from BSE/CJD, foot & mouth, arms to Iraq (which only broke thanks to Ollie North being a moron)... we tend to be a bit sceptical when they assure us that there's nothing to worry about and everything's under control.
These are all from UK quality broadsheet newspapers.
Full disclosure: my girlfriend is Serbian; however she (and I) have no sympathy for, and place less than zero credibility in, anything coming from the Milosevic regime (indeed, she was teargassed by them in '91 & forced into exile.) The people mostly dying of cancer, apart from the NATO PBI (poor bloody infantry), are mostly Kosovan civilians.
It might come as a shock, folks, but YOUR GOVERNMENT IS LYING TO YOU. Why is this so hard to grasp when it happens in an area unconnected with IP, computers or the Internet? '"Here's American Gladiators. Here's 500 channels of this shit. Go back to sleep America, your government is in control." And oh the light of the TVs glow through millions of American windows... ' (Bill Hicks.)
This can only be a good thing.
Someone commented in the earlier story about Passport security that "they'll probably tie it up with ENUM, which links DNS info to phone numbers." I subscribe to the cock-up theory of history - which is not to say that governments don't engage in conspiracies, but rather that they tend to cock it up when they do. The possibilities for cockups with this seem rather immense, though... and what on earth will the "UN Black Helicopters / CIA / They're Tryin' to Take Our God-given right to carry guns away / It's the End Times" brigade make of it? Not that they need an excuse, but it seems silly to give them free *cough* ammunition...
this news OLD. Which isn't really what the word 'news' means.
...hats are on heads and ice-creams are in cornets.
(with apologies to Brian Cant.)
This certainly does /not/ mean that a significant number of /web sites/ need to share data. Commercial partners: yes. Web sites? nah. EDI is expensive partly because it doesn't run over the internet - let alone over HTTP. There are very good reasons for this...
VRML wasn't purely marketing driven. Everyone who jumped aboard the bandwagon had an angle on how it was going to be great, including many intelligent dedicated code hackers and highly technical people. In the same way, I think the 'web services' meme clicks with a lot of developers who've had to reinvent the wheel over and over again. I fail to see how this can drive it's use, though; companies stay prosper or file chapter 11 on other criteria than whether the developers have a fun time building the systems.
Perhaps I have misunderstood what is meant by "web services". A backend database replication or stock updating system is nothing to do with the web except that the data /may/ end up used on a site. But that's nothing new: how does Slashdot (or ZDNet, for that matter) get their content? How does Amazon get it's content?
I'll address your points in order.
Firstly, I /am/ a fairly typical end-user, and I do what 95% of end-users do: I have a small number of username/passwords which I have been recycling for the past four or five years. Obviously you don't want to do this for anything super-sensitive, but who in their right minds entrusts super-sensitive personal data to a third party?
Secondly: if I'm selling something on the web, then my specifications and pricing data are /already/ as widely distributed as possible (routing glitches permitting.) That's what the first two "W"s in "WWW" stand for! I definitely wouldn't want third parties snarfing product data from my site and selling on to consumers: I'd be losing all that interesting marketing and demographic data. If "DigitalCameraNews.com" o whatever wants to link to my site, fine, I'm delighted.
Slashboxes? Does anyone actually use them? I don't. Perhaps I'm not that typical an end-user after all... my preferred sources of news are not a subset the given slashboxes: slashboxes are all very kewl, but they don't really scale very well.
Realtime product availability data comes from the vendors own stoick control systems. You really think Argos (a typical UK consumer goods reseller) are going to entrust their stock control to manufacturers? I just don't think it's going to happen on any significant scale.
Returning to my VRML example: were you around when VRML was being hyped as the future of the Net? Just because something is technically possible, doesn't mean it'll work in the real world. (See WAP for another example: if you want to make pots of money, short stocks of telcos who spent a fortune on 3G licenses now, cos they'll be bankrupt or taken over within five years. )
Lots of time and money was put into demonstrating that the whole idea just wasn't going to fly. I'm open to the remote possibility that I'm wrong about this ;) but I'm not holding my breath. I guess only time will tell.
Sorry, I just don't see it. I think it's marchitecture designed by people who took Wired magazine a little too seriously. "Experiments with application-to-application traffic"? Do me a favour! It smells like a dead duck, it looks like a dead duck, and frankly it quacks like one, too.
Time will tell - personally, I reckon this is the first 'VRML' of the 21st Century.
So 'web services' are only of any use to developers? (I'm assuming that that a user who is capable of scripting some sort of RDF parser to pop up the latest /. headlines on their desktop comes under the heading 'developer'.) Users of such applets are still just Users. And let's face it, you don't need a fancy XML framework to enable a script to go grab the latest /. stories: that's what LWP::Simple and regular expressions are for ;)
WRT the 'time spent sifting HTTP data' argument... hmmm. Personally, I find that the process of sifting is what the Web experience is all about. Intermediaries such as Slashdot aggregate others' content and provide links and commentary; I trust some more than others, but I don't read every /. story (by any means). I'm more than happy for skilled human editors *cough* to play the part of intermediaries; Slashdot of course allows anyone to submit a story and become an editor themelves. /THAT/ is what the web experience is all about: many to many, via an arbitary subset of mediators. I'm sure there's an apposite quotation from The Cluetrain Manifesto at this point, but I don't have the book with me right now...
There was some discussion of "web services" on Perl Advocacy list recently. I come down on the side that says Apache is all you're ever going to need. Look, Slashdot is technically an application... does that make Slashcode an n-tier application server? Purlease. It's just marketing - web servers are SOOOOO 90s, now we call 'em "web services".
Evil Dead? evil SCHMED! This line is from Judge Death, Dredd's enemy from the Deadworld, in 2000AD! (no, they didn't pull him into the movie... shame!) Here he is. eeek!!. And the line is: "You cannot kill that which does not live!" **PHEAR**!!