... with contextually sensitive ads they would vbe related to the pages they appear on (in theory) it would be useful and profitable.
Maybe, maybe not. I've helped a few people set up adsense on their sites, and most of them do return enough money to make it worthwhile. But I have two such sites that, out of around 10,000 hits per day, get an average of about 1/2 ad click per day. Looking at the "context sensitive ads" makes it clear why. They're "music" sites, and most of the ads are related to music. However, they're sites whose users are all practicing musicians (amateur and pro). It's obvious to a human that these people aren't going to respond to ads for ring tones or commercial pop- or rock-music recordings. The problem is, though, that music terminology is rather confused, illogical, and ambiguous. Thus, there's no clear way in English to distinguish the "music" that you put on your music stand and read from the "music" that comes out of a speaker and you listen to. The keywords all come out the same. As a result, adsense can't detect the interests of these sites' users, and can't deliver many ads of interest to this audience.
Digging into adsense's help stuff doesn't help much. They mostly just suggest having more ads per page, which isn't very helpful when the delivered ads are a poor match to the audience. But given the huge market for commercial music recordings, adsense just can't separate out a niche like "musician" from the glare of the larger topic. Not even with "musician" as a keyword in a <META> tag.
This is mostly a problem with sites having a specialized user base, of course. This may not be true for wikipedia, where most pages probably do contain keywords that are good clues to the interests of the readers.
One of my favorite anecdotes about keyword searches dates from the late 1990s, when a biological researcher reported a huge number of hits on a research paper he'd just put online. It was about biochemistry of an obscure species of insect. The paper's popularity was explained when a colleague told him to go to any of the big search sites and type in "explicit sex images". Sure enough, his paper showed up at the top of the list. The paper did contain those three words - in three different paragraphs. And it actually did have explicit sex-related images - of microscopic structures inside the insects' reproductive organs. I can just imagine the results if he'd used adsense to add ads to downloads of this paper.
Actually, I think it would be interesting if wikipedia would try adsense. If they could collect and publish data on the click rates for the ads on various pages, we (and google) might find the results useful. Adsense is an interesting approach, and it does seem to work fairly well for a lot of sites. But it could obviously be improved, and wikipedia could provide some good "stress tests" for adsense's algorithms.
I'd also predict that we'd see a lot of really funny juxtapositions of wiki articles with wildly inappropriate ads...
A law that isn't enforceable is totally pointless.
That's not true at all. Such laws are used all the time. They come in very handy if there's someone you want to harrass. Hold them in jail for a day or three, then say "Sorry, it looks like we can't actually try you in this jurisdiction for violating that law. Have a nice day", and escort them out to the street. Where they're promptly arrested again, if the local authorities so wish.
The common term is "nuisance law", and they're almost universal. It's very difficult to get a law annulled unless someone is actually charged and tried for violating it.
A similar principle applies to "violating a suspect's rights". In a town where I once lived, there was a protest in which a lot of people were arrested and held in the town jail overnight. They were denied any communication, not even the standard "one call to your lawyer". The next day they were all released. The explanation was simple: The local authorities didn't want to take anyone to court; that would have been a huge political (and probably legal) disaster for them. Since the arrestees rights had been violated, the police couldn't be forced by local officials to press charges. As for the arrestees pressing charges, the police's response was simple: "Who are you? We have no record that you've ever been in this town before. Can you prove you were here and were arrested?"
I knew a bunch of people who learned a valuable lesson that day about how the legal system actually works. (I was just an onlooker, but I knew a number of the people involved. If asked, I could have testified that they'd been in town that day, but I couldn't testify that I'd personally seen any of them arrested.;-)
Well, sure; but the point of the "refactoring" approach would be to change the nature of the discussion. It would let you divert a demand to delete a page and convert it into the question of where would be best to classify it. You don't delete articles; you move them to their best places in a flock of interrelated wikis. Granted, this wouldn't satisfy the most irrational. But it should defuse a lot of disagreements, as the article would still be in "the wiki system", just not in the "encyclopedia" portion.
It could also make sense to try to divert the admin discussion by saying that the best people to decide such questions are the experts in the topic. Thus, if you have a bunch of overly-detailed World-of-Warcraft pages that you don't think are "encyclopedic", you wouldn't say you want them deleted. You'd go to the keepers of the World_of_Warcraft wiki, and ask them to decide. Chances are that they'd be happy to take control of any pages on their topic, leaving behind only a few top-level pages in wikipedia.
The result, if done right, could be that these detailed pages would about as easy to find as they are now. They would just have a different URL. This is what I often see with wiktionary, for example. I'll get a "not found" page from wikipedia, with the usual list of related pages and relevance estimates, and find that the top entry is to the wiktionary page for the main word that I'd typed. And I often think "Duh; I should have gone straight to wiktionary for that one."
One of the main challenges to the wiki crowd comes from the people who suggest that reference information should be edited by the experts in the topic. This is one way that this could be added to a wiki that has grown too large. Split it up into sub-wikis, each maintained by some gang of experts. (Either that, or by people who want control of the info on a topic. We do have some bugs to work out.)
In any case, I suppose I don't really expect such issues to be worked out any time soon. Human organizations rarely run very well, and assignment of responsibility/power is one of the things they do rather poorly. Even when the issue is assigning control over something that most people consider insignificant.
Perhaps a good approach is something that seems to have already started. To use some current jargon, they could "refactor" wikipedia.org into a series of differently-named sites to cover topics that aren't "encyclopedic", but to some people are worth keeping around.
For example, the Pokemon and World of Warcraft articles, mentioned by others as obviously not appropriate. But to a cultural historian, they are well worth saving. Just not in a general encyclopedia. Instead of deleting the articles that some people put a bunch of time into, why not work closely with the people interested in such things, and move their articles onto another server with another name? Wikipedia itself could have some summary pages on the topics, with links to the other sites.
I've been making a lot of use of one of them that exists: wiktionary.org. Now, it's quite obvious that documenting every obscure word in every obscure language is utterly inappropriate for wikipedia, or any other encyclopedia for that matter. Traditionally, a books that does that is called "dictionary", not "encyclopedia". Wiktionary is an interesting take on this idea, organized as one big interlocking dictionary of all the world's languages.
It's pretty clear that wiktionary is the start of something very useful (though it's rather incomplete and in need of a lot of help from a lot of people). It's also clear that its material doesn't belong in wikipedia, except maybe for a few summary articles. There's also a lot of cross-linking between wikipedia and wiktionary. So I'd list this as a successful case of splitting off a significant chunk of human knowledge, kicking it out of wikipedia, and reorganizing it as a successful wiki in its own right.
As an amusing example of wiktionary's usefulness, a few weeks ago I noticed an apparent anomaly in the use of a 2-char Chinese word that I probably can't include here, but it's pronounced ai4ren2 in Mandarin and aijin in Japanese. Using the classical characters, wiktionary has an article giving the Japanese, Mandarin (and Min Nan) meanings of the word. They show two rather different interpretations of the characters whose basic meanings are "love" and "person". This could be a nice example of how a single writing system doesn't always make it possible for people who speak different languages to communicate in writing. In this case, they just might miscommunicate some significant information. You won't often find this problem mentioned in a typical single-language dictionary, but wiktionary's format makes for easy comparison of such borrowings.
Rather than just deleting articles from wikipedia because they're not "notable" (whatever the hell that might mean to the deleter), we could cool down the fuss by saying that they're more information on the topic than is appropriate for wikipedia, and should be moved to wikiX, for some appropriate X.
Of course, sometimes the classification is a bit fuzzy. Consider, for example, the word "truthiness", which has good articles in both wikipedia and wiktionary. Each article is (at least for the present) well written for its site. In particular, the wiktionary article gives 19th-century citations for the word's use, and also goes into its etymology, appropriately for a dictionary site. OTOH, the wikipedia article is nearly as funny as Colbert's introduction of the word, and includes links to related topics such as "big lie", "noble lie", and "consensus reality".
It's a pretty good example of how to handle a borderline case.
Verizon has the option to force you over to FIOS in areas where they offer it. You'll probably have to switch sooner or later.
Interesting. I note that Verizon's FIOS TOS states explicitly that servers are not allowed, and you can't get a fixed IP address. We currently have Internet service via speakeasy, which allows servers and gives us a fixed IP address (for less money than Verizon's minimal FIOS contract). So if Verizon forces us to change, we'll lose an important capability and the fixed IP address, and we'll have to pay more. And, of course, speakeasy has excellent customer support (and even likes linux users;-), while Verizon is notorious for crappy support.
This is legal?
I think I'll have to start asking some lawyer friends what recourse we may have when Verizon forces us over to FIOS.
I also wonder about the 911 thing. How well does it work during a power outage? We've verified that our DSL line and its phone service does work then (with the help of a UPS box). A couple of neighbors who've switched to FIOS have reported that their phone is dead when the power goes out.
So those reassuring claims that 911 service still works during power outages were just lies...
Well, yeah, but I thought that enough readers might not be familiar with the effect that a link to the wikipedia page would be useful. And that page makes mention of the famous Daniella Cicarelli sex video, which will further divert/. readers for the 10 minutes or so that it'll take to find it, download it and watch it.
Fun stuff.
(Besides, whoever reads article titles? Isn't that as bad as reading the articles?)
Every TSA Employee hassling a Taxpayer is one less welfare check which needs to be cut.
Well, maybe, but the welfare recipient isn't spending his/her day actively interfering with the efficiency of the population's travel. I'd argue that we're all better off putting the TSA employees on the dole, and then the rest of us can go about our lives without the hassle.
Of course, considering their nature, some of them would have "hobbies" that are equally damaging to society. Some of them might even run for office.
Though many people might have thought this was facetious, it's actually a practical idea that many people and companies have figured out. Starting in Oct 2001, I started reading and hearing news stories about the sudden boom in sales of small jets to "air taxi" services. It turns out that the price tradeoff is typically around 2 to 4 seats, at which point the small jet is cheaper than the same number of "business rate" seats on most commercial flights. These services will generally fly you to anywhere within range, and can arrange multiple flights for longer trips. They'll also arrange for a rental car for you at the other end. You can leave from and arrive at about 10 times as many airports, and usually they're closer to your departure and destination addresses than the big airports. And there's no dumb TSA security screening for them, you just walk in, show your identification, hand over your luggage, and climb aboard.
The manufacturers of small jets have done very good business in the last 6 years. They must be hoping that the TSA has a long life, because such pseudo-security blundering is great advertising for the small air taxi services.
It's not a menu bar. It's a bookmarks bar, and Firefox and every other browser have it.
If so, why is the first item a menu?;-)
Of course, it's fairly common for such "bars" at the top of windows to have a mixture of menus, buttons, info widgets, and other such things. In fact, the top-of-screen bar on my Mac PB has a number of widgets that aren't menus. At the rightmost end of my bar is the little blue circle with a white 'Q' that produces the Spotlight data-entry window, but no menu. And there's the speaker icon that produces the volume adjustment slider, which is also not a menu. For a confusing example, the "amphitheater" icon that shows wifi strength also produces a menu if you hold down the mouse button, but most of the time it shows the changing signal strength. I also have the Activity Monitor's CPU usage widget displayed in the top-of-screen bar, and it's obviously not a menu.
That's four non-menu items in that "menu bar" right now. So if having non-menu items makes a bar not a "menu bar", then my top-of-screen bar isn't a menu bar. If it is a menu bar despite the presence of non-menu items, then so is that bar below Safari's title bar, because it contains both menu and non-menu items. In my case, there's also a third and fourth such bar in the Safari window. The second is the tab bar, and the third is the google news top bar, which contains a couple of things that produce menus, among a lot of simple links.
It's all a rather silly nomenclature game. We probably should just say "widget bar" or something like that, because all the WIMP packages I know of have allowed mixtures of widget types in all such bars. And these "bars" really aren't at all special; they are just ordinary frames that happen to have just one row of items. The term "bar" is just a conceptual convenience, because people like certain kinds of data to be laid out that way. But we could call them "menu frames" or "mixed-usage linear frames" if we wanted to be technically more accurate.
I think I'll continue to call them menu bars. People know what you mean, and they don't expect such things to contain only menus, so the term's good enough.
Before this takedown notice no one really gave two shits about the video. Now, EVERYONE wants to see it to see what the deal is.
Nowadays, the popular term for this phenomenon is "Streisand Effect", after what happened when Barbara Streisand sued researchers who were photographing the entire California coastline to document coastal erosion. The ensuing fuss led to copies of the photo of her house appearing all over the Internet.
I wonder if anyone copied this video? Has it appeared on any servers outside the US yet? Not that I really want to view it myself, at least not without being fortified by several cups of coffee to stay awake. But it would be fun if this ham-handed attempt at censorship were to backfire.
Now that the Mac is overrun with terrible ports of Java apps with... menus at the top of windows instead of in the menubar
People seriously do that?
Heh. Apple's own "native" apps do it.
For example, I have a Safari window next to this SeaMonkey window that I'm typing into. When I click on the Safari window, the usual "Safari" menus appear in the top-of-screen menubar. But the Safari window has a number of bars across the top. One of them (I don't know what it's called) starts with "Google News", and when I click on it, I get a menu. So Safari has at least one menu bar in its window, in addition to the top-of-screen menubar.
This isn't at all unusual. I've seen quite a few windows from Apple apps that use both the top-of-screen menu bar and also a per-window menu bar. I can't tell you offhand exactly which apps do that, but I've noticed a lot of them. It's funny that the mozilla apps don't seem to do this, while the Apple apps do. BICBW (But I could be wrong.)
I've been somewhat bemused by the simplistic arguments for the single top-of-screen menu bar, while seeing that Apple's own developers apparently don't quite agree. Or maybe they see a use for both, and put different kinds of things in the different menu bars.
My main comment on the top-of-screen menu bar is that on a large screen, it makes use of the menus rather time consuming. Others have observed the same thing. OTOH, I haven't seen too many comments on the other main problem that it causes: If you're working with several apps simultaneously (e.g., an a code editor, a debug package, and editors for various input and debug-output files), switching rapidly between windows becomes a real time waster when you need a background app's menus. You have to find the app's window, click on it, move to the top-of-screen menu bar, click on it, select a menu item, click on it, then find the original app's window, click on it to bring it to the foreground, and on and on.
The top-of-window menu bar may be demonstrably efficient for a single app on a small screen. That's fine for users who never do anything else. But the time-and-motion people don't seem to have studied the sort of things that software developers and other "power users" do all the time, that involve a lot of windows run by multiple apps. In that scenario. the top-of-window menu bar is a time waster, because it is only shown for the top app in the stack. Accessing other apps' menus involves a lot of extra motions and clicks to make the menu bar you need visible.
Not that I expect Apple or anyone else to pay attention to the needs of developers and power users. (Well, except for those FOSS geeks, who do it solely for their own selfish purposes, y'know.;-)
It's restrictions like this, and the locking in general, that are why I quickly decided to not waste my money on an iPhone, attractive as it might be.
An anecdote: A few years back I worked on a project in which we investigated making some of our apps available on various smartphones. The main app that I worked on was remote access to medical databases, and we thought it could be very useful if, for example, emergency medical workers could have wireless access to their databases from an accident scene. We had a lot of good stuff working in the hospitals; now could we make it work wirelessly? Various developers volunteered to get different smartphones and try to port the code. My phone was a blackberry model which was widely advertised as being capable of wireless Internet access, and whose software is mostly in java. I had java versions of a lot of our programs, but was totally unsuccessful at porting them to the BB. I spent time with the AT&T Wireless support folks, but they were remarkably uncommunicative about the problems. A couple of years later, after the contract had run out, one of the support guys casually told me that, although that model did have the capabilities we needed, they had locked them out, and the support people were forbidden to tell customers how to get around the lock. You could almost hear the snickering "Ha, ha; we got your money and you failed."
Meanwhile, the other guys with other smartphones from other cell providers all had similar problems. We eventually gave up, and stuck with wired access. Since then, I've read hints that others are working on similar capabilities. Some of them are working for bigger corporations that have a lot more clout, so they may succeed. We were a small independent software house, so we had no clout with cell providers, and they could con us however they liked. Of course, this means that when such wireless access to medical info does come out, it'll be from a big, bureaucratic developer, not from a smaller shop.
Myself, when I get my hands on a google phone, I may personally try again. I'm also looking at openmoko, and wondering if I should pay out the money for one. But after you've been burnt a few times by the companies that control the wireless system, you might understandably be a bit shy about betting your own money that this time you'll succeed at making something work despite their ability to lock you out.
Bittorrent is not efficient - far from it. What this shows is that if you push your costs onto the end users (in the form of increased ISP bills to cover the bandwidth used by the torrenters) then you can save money on your own bottom line.
Bittorrent is indeed efficent as it scales far better than http or ftp.
People do seem to throw around words like "efficient" without saying how they're actually measuring it.
One meaning of "efficient" could be the amount of bandwidth, in which case you want to measure the average number of hops needed for end users to get the content. I just used traceroute to tell me the number of hops from cbs.com and nbc.com, and they came out to 13 and 12 respectively. So the total byte count when I get data from them should be multiplied by about 12 to get the total bandwidth used. Bittorrent cuts this total down significantly by redirecting my download to other, hopefully closer sites. I've never seen any data on the actual bandwidth saving that results. I wonder if anyone has credible statistics?
Another meaning of "efficient" is the delay at the end user's machine before content can be seen. A major problem with mass-market sites is saturation due to too many downloads (the "slashdot effect", if you like). If you're the only one downloading a show from a server, you might get it quickly, but if 10 million people are trying to get it at the same time, even the best server farms today will still produce serious delays. This is the main problem that bittorrent was designed to solve (or at least alleviate). I've also never seen any credible data on this topic. Anyone have a good estimate of how good bittorrent really is at speeding up delivery of a popular file?
Bittorrent may help with both of these kinds of efficiency, but there's also an argument that efficiency really isn't the issue. From a content producer's viewpoint, the major problem is the cost of distribution. For the current TV system, this is a huge operation, with crowds of people working to maintain the distribution system. Keeping this running is a major cost for TV producers, as they ultimately need to deal with every little local cable/broadcast company in the world. You could call this an "efficiency" problem, where what you're measuring us human labor. An advantage of the Internet is that it's a global distributed distribution system, and all the costs are reduced to a single connection fee plus your local people to maintain the servers. You don't have to negotiate with distributors like cable companies; you just talk to your ISP.
The main barrier to a total move to the Internet is that the Internet wasn't designed to efficiently (whatever that means) distribute a single file to 10 million people simultaneously. That's what bittorrent and the other P2P packages are designed to do. If we can get top management over their natural fear of anything new, and look at P2P as a cost-saving distribution technology, they'll probably jump onto it. What we're seeing with this story is one small content producer finally realizing this, and looking at it from a sensible business viewpoint.
In another few decades, the big TV producers might even come to their senses and take a similar approach. Of course, for it to work, it'll take widespread enforcement of "net neutrality", under whatever name the marketers have renamed it by then. If an ISP can block your content until you pay their extra fee, you're right back with the current problem of needing to maintain a huge system to oversee your dealings with every ISP in the world. But maybe once the big guys realize this, they might even jump on the "net neutrality" bandwagon, and demand a system in which they need only pay a single fee to a single ISP to access the Internet.
It's gonna take years to work it all out. Stay tuned...
My idea of capitalism means that I get to buy what I want, not what the rest of the market forces me to buy because of some bogus compatability barrier.
Well, that may be your idea of capitalism. But the capitalists' idea is rather different: They go through the usual process of mergers, acquisition, and hostile takeovers, until there's only one MegaCorp left. It then tells you what you are allowed to buy, and if you don't like it, you can move to another planet where what you want is available.
The primary purpose of a "compatibility barrier", i.e., an industry standard, is work as one of many barriers in the way of the natural tendency toward a monopoly, by forcing current vendors to be compatible with each other. This enables at least a bit of competition on quality, by eliminating the sort of big-vendor lockin that blocks new startups.
Not that it always works that well, as it's usually possible to make nonstandard that look standard to the regulators. Or just loudly proclaim "Our product is standard" and challenge others to prove otherwise in court. But standards do often have a bit of the desired effect of easing entry of newcomers to the market.
I own a piece of land and the house on top. If somebody were to make a copy of it so they could live in it, seriously what kind of arse hole would I be to complain.
You might be an architect.;-)
Architectural designs very often are copyrighted these days. If someone were to copy your house, maybe you wouldn't have a legal case against them, but it's entirely possible that the architectural firm that produced the original blueprint could take them to court and win.
This is more likely if you have an unusual house. The typical house in the 'burbs isn't likely to be challenged this way. But it is a possibility, and the law supports it.
if they are arguing property is property no matter what,...
One of the more elegant explanations of the difference:
| If you have an apple, and I have an apple, and we exchange | apples, you and I will still only have one apple. But if you | have an idea and I have an idea, and we exchange ideas, then | each of us will have two ideas. -- George Bernard Shaw
This is also tied into another misconception: Copyright really isn't about control of property; it's about control of information. Everyone knows the old saying "Knowledge is power". Copyright is about control of the flow of information and knowledge. Whoever controls that controls everything else.
Control of information very often trumps control of property. For instance, if I control the information about your property, the titles and deeds registered at your local government office, I can simply "lose" your ownership and replace it with documents stating that someone else owns your property. If I can block access to that data, I can prevent anyone from learning who owns your property, and I can prevent you from proving that you own it. If I control the right to copy that information, you no longer own anything unless I say you do.
If you think this is all hypothetical nonsense, you haven't been following the changes to copyright law in recent years. All sorts of things that used to be "fair use" are now illegal, and we can expect this process to continue. Copyright is even being used to control which machines we can use to display or "play" copyrighted files, something that would have been absurd not many years ago.
Before today you would have thought "Government Seeks Warrant to Search the Internet" was a headline from The Onion.
It just illustrates a common complain from satirists: It's a difficult job, because no matter how outrageous you exaggerate, the real world keeps trumping your satire with something real that's more extreme than anything you'd dare to publish.
Actually, I'd start by asking them why they don't just use google. It's funny how much private stuff can be found by just googling it. We've even seen a number of reports recently of identity thieves using google to collect the data they're looking for. I'd wonder how much of the information that various government spy agencies want about their own citizens could be found with a simple google search.
There was a funny news story back in the 70s, about a US government grant to a couple of college profs to study what could be learned about US military installations from public sources. It seems that when they submitted the report, with all the data taken from publicly-available sources, it was immediately classified top secret. I'd bet that such a study would be much easier today.
Somehow I'm having a hard time imagining a bunch of people running a crime family sitting around deciding if they need stronger encryption, or different protocols, or using hidden volumes.
Of course this is silly. The people running a crime family are like the people running any other business. They make the high-level decisions. The mundane details are handled by the people hired to take care of such things. If you've got a few geek kids in the family, it's not hard to develop an appropriate IT operation. Your business data needs aren't really any different from any other business, and you can use the same software as everyone else.
How many CEOs have any clue about computers? Most of them never even touch a keyboard. Such things are for the hired help. It's no different with crime organizations. In fact, aside from externalities like the legality of their business, there's not really any difference to speak of.
Ratzinger goes so far as to invoke Relativity to claim that heliocentrism and geocentrism are (paraphrasing) "effectively equal," and that heliocentrism is merely a mathematical convenience.
Actually, it is fairly standard in scientific and engineering circles to point out that this is in fact correct. Of course, if your model has the Earth stationary at the (0,0,0) point, your math becomes increasing more difficult as you attempt to model the behavior of objects at greater distances. Even the nearest start are orbiting the Earth at velocities much greater than the speed of light. And the orbital equations are effectively unique for every object in the universe.
However, if you're modeling the part of the Earth in which (for example) the airlines operate, the geocentric model is quite effective. It allows you to ignore forces like the Coriolis effect, and the gravitational pulls of the moon and sun, which are inconsequential in flight calculations. You even ignore the Earth's rotation, and consider the sun to be in orbit around the Earth, because this greatly simplifies your equations.
Part of such an approach is recognizing that you're not really dealing with "the Truth" in any philosophical sense. Rather, you are dealing with the equations, and including in your model only the motions and forces that are required to explain the parts of the system that you're dealing with.
Similarly, in scientific study of the molecular mechanics of our bodies (medicine), the orbits of the earth, moon, etc. are rarely if ever mentioned. Their effects are unmeasurable at the molecular level, so there's no point in taking them into account.
Everyone knows about the structure of the solar system, of course, and they also mostly know quite a bit about the structure of the galaxy. But whether they're part of your equations depends strongly on just what your equations are modeling.
Now if we could only get the religious folks to realize that molecular, aviational, and celestial mechanics really aren't very relevant to moral and ethical calculations...
Ironically enough, the Big Bang was first resisted by several scientists because it implied a beginning, which can be troublesome for those with atheistic sensibilities.
Actually, while that may have been the motive of some scientists, more generally the major objection was that it was contrary to the "uniformitarian" approach (which almost but not quite qualified as a doctrine) that most fields of science adopted about 200 years ago. Uniformitarianism was an important topic in the 1800s, up to the 1960s or so, and has only recently faded somewhat. Part of the reason was the ongoing problem with harrassment from religious people. We still see nearly every new scientific result on the topic widely touted in the media as "proof" of the bible or some other religious belief. It was very useful for a couple centuries to try to ignore this religious pressure, and work primarily from the viewpoint that the world and the universe was ongoing and relatively constant. That produced much better results than working from the "catastropic" viewpoint, with its baggage of special creation by an intelligent deity. It's clear that most of the world's geological strata, even the volcanic fields, were laid down slowly over long time periods.
Of course, along the way, many examples of catastrophic changes did turn up. Recently we've all read about the asteroid impact 65 million years ago, which produced the K/T extinction event. There are several hundred impact craters on the planet, some of them a few hundred km across. We know about the Thera/Santorini eruption around 1500 BC, as well as what Vesuvius did to its environs in 79 AD and the world-wide effects of the Tambora eruption in 1815.
There are several examples of flood-carved terrain, the most spectacular of which may be the Columbia Basin in the US state of Washington. In this area, there was a large lake (Lake Missoula) in the Montana Rockies that formed repeatedly as glaciers blocked the end of its valley. At least a dozen times, water broke through the ice dam, the lake emptied over a couple weeks, and the land to the west was torn up by the resulting floods. We've also recently read of the evidence for a major flood in the lands around the Black Sea, as rising waters broke through the Bosporus and let in Mediterranean water some thousands of years ago. Several other similar events are known. (The Black Sea flood is conjectured to be the origin of the biblical flood story, but the evidence is weak, and there's at least one other competitor for the title.)
But despite all this, most of the world's geological strata record long periods of nearly constant conditions, with such catastrophes happening very rarely. So uniformitarianism is still the basic plan that scientists work from. As the threats from religious people have slowly receded, it has become easier to openly discuss the occasional exceptions when major catastrophes occurred. Recent texts have taught the uniformitarian schema as the main explanation for our geology, punctuated by occasional catastrophes. And scientists have learned to ignore the silliness of the media's attempts to tie it all in with religion.
An especially interesting one is the discussion of the apparent extinction event that's happening right now, caused primarily by the (geologically) sudden appearance of an intelligent, tool-using species that is rapidly wiping out species at a far greater rate than is usual for our planet. There are conjectures that some earlier extinction events were similarly due to a new species with unprecedented killing ability, but it's hard to get good evidence to support such scenarios hundreds of millions of years ago. Evidence for the current extinction event is easily available and quite well documented, however.
Not really. The OLPC's mesh sounds suspiciously like the "chaosnet" that has been in use on the MIT campus since some time in the 1970s. That, too, was decentralized, with each node forwarding packets for its neighbors. I've wondered whether it was sheer coincidence that the OLPC's mesh was developed at MIT. But so far, I haven't run across any comments on the topic.
It isn't especially surprising that this sort of technology hasn't been available commercially. It does sorta shoot down the central control that the commercial guys like to have. It's a lot easier to keep your customers in line (and cooperate with the feds' demands) if all traffic has to go through a single chokepoint, and you have control of that chokepoint.
It'll be interesting to see if the US government and comm companies permit this sort of network to be deployed widely within the US.
Sure, but this is way too much of a honeypot to even think you could get away with any shinangans.
How so? The Diebold electronic-voting scandal has been with us for about a decode now, and I don't seem to have read of any indictments. Even Wally O'Dell's infamous promise in writing to deliver Ohio to the Republican got no obvious attention from the legal system. There don't seem to be much more than a few small-scale, local investigations so far, and the Justice Dept seems supremely uninterested in the topic.
I'd bet (and a lot of investors will bet) that they'll continue to get away with it for a very long time. After all, the people in a position to investigate them are working for politicians, many of whom were elected with the help of Diebold equipment. And there are preliminary reports that Diebold has branched out to helping Democrats in the current primaries.
Maybe the investigators are just managing to keep a really low profile. But a better bet would be that they aren't doing much serious investigating at all.
Many companies are known (or infamous) for a small subset of their business. Diebold is no exception, especially when they have been all over Slashdot for their voting machines for the last few years. So, of course those who read Slashdot are going to talk about that. A banking board will likely be talking about the atms.
Sorta like slashdot, actually. How many of the readers here, other than the minority of software developers, know anything at all about SourceForge's other "products"? How many readers have even noticed those occasional notes about/. being part of SourceForge? And note that/. has become a "news site" known, quoted and linked to by many other online news sites. I've even seen a few references to it in print publications.
It's a rather common story in the merger/buyout-oriented corporate world.
Slashdot Mirror
... with contextually sensitive ads they would vbe related to the pages they appear on (in theory) it would be useful and profitable.
...
Maybe, maybe not. I've helped a few people set up adsense on their sites, and most of them do return enough money to make it worthwhile. But I have two such sites that, out of around 10,000 hits per day, get an average of about 1/2 ad click per day. Looking at the "context sensitive ads" makes it clear why. They're "music" sites, and most of the ads are related to music. However, they're sites whose users are all practicing musicians (amateur and pro). It's obvious to a human that these people aren't going to respond to ads for ring tones or commercial pop- or rock-music recordings. The problem is, though, that music terminology is rather confused, illogical, and ambiguous. Thus, there's no clear way in English to distinguish the "music" that you put on your music stand and read from the "music" that comes out of a speaker and you listen to. The keywords all come out the same. As a result, adsense can't detect the interests of these sites' users, and can't deliver many ads of interest to this audience.
Digging into adsense's help stuff doesn't help much. They mostly just suggest having more ads per page, which isn't very helpful when the delivered ads are a poor match to the audience. But given the huge market for commercial music recordings, adsense just can't separate out a niche like "musician" from the glare of the larger topic. Not even with "musician" as a keyword in a <META> tag.
This is mostly a problem with sites having a specialized user base, of course. This may not be true for wikipedia, where most pages probably do contain keywords that are good clues to the interests of the readers.
One of my favorite anecdotes about keyword searches dates from the late 1990s, when a biological researcher reported a huge number of hits on a research paper he'd just put online. It was about biochemistry of an obscure species of insect. The paper's popularity was explained when a colleague told him to go to any of the big search sites and type in "explicit sex images". Sure enough, his paper showed up at the top of the list. The paper did contain those three words - in three different paragraphs. And it actually did have explicit sex-related images - of microscopic structures inside the insects' reproductive organs. I can just imagine the results if he'd used adsense to add ads to downloads of this paper.
Actually, I think it would be interesting if wikipedia would try adsense. If they could collect and publish data on the click rates for the ads on various pages, we (and google) might find the results useful. Adsense is an interesting approach, and it does seem to work fairly well for a lot of sites. But it could obviously be improved, and wikipedia could provide some good "stress tests" for adsense's algorithms.
I'd also predict that we'd see a lot of really funny juxtapositions of wiki articles with wildly inappropriate ads
A law that isn't enforceable is totally pointless.
;-)
That's not true at all. Such laws are used all the time. They come in very handy if there's someone you want to harrass. Hold them in jail for a day or three, then say "Sorry, it looks like we can't actually try you in this jurisdiction for violating that law. Have a nice day", and escort them out to the street. Where they're promptly arrested again, if the local authorities so wish.
The common term is "nuisance law", and they're almost universal. It's very difficult to get a law annulled unless someone is actually charged and tried for violating it.
A similar principle applies to "violating a suspect's rights". In a town where I once lived, there was a protest in which a lot of people were arrested and held in the town jail overnight. They were denied any communication, not even the standard "one call to your lawyer". The next day they were all released. The explanation was simple: The local authorities didn't want to take anyone to court; that would have been a huge political (and probably legal) disaster for them. Since the arrestees rights had been violated, the police couldn't be forced by local officials to press charges. As for the arrestees pressing charges, the police's response was simple: "Who are you? We have no record that you've ever been in this town before. Can you prove you were here and were arrested?"
I knew a bunch of people who learned a valuable lesson that day about how the legal system actually works. (I was just an onlooker, but I knew a number of the people involved. If asked, I could have testified that they'd been in town that day, but I couldn't testify that I'd personally seen any of them arrested.
Well, sure; but the point of the "refactoring" approach would be to change the nature of the discussion. It would let you divert a demand to delete a page and convert it into the question of where would be best to classify it. You don't delete articles; you move them to their best places in a flock of interrelated wikis. Granted, this wouldn't satisfy the most irrational. But it should defuse a lot of disagreements, as the article would still be in "the wiki system", just not in the "encyclopedia" portion.
It could also make sense to try to divert the admin discussion by saying that the best people to decide such questions are the experts in the topic. Thus, if you have a bunch of overly-detailed World-of-Warcraft pages that you don't think are "encyclopedic", you wouldn't say you want them deleted. You'd go to the keepers of the World_of_Warcraft wiki, and ask them to decide. Chances are that they'd be happy to take control of any pages on their topic, leaving behind only a few top-level pages in wikipedia.
The result, if done right, could be that these detailed pages would about as easy to find as they are now. They would just have a different URL. This is what I often see with wiktionary, for example. I'll get a "not found" page from wikipedia, with the usual list of related pages and relevance estimates, and find that the top entry is to the wiktionary page for the main word that I'd typed. And I often think "Duh; I should have gone straight to wiktionary for that one."
One of the main challenges to the wiki crowd comes from the people who suggest that reference information should be edited by the experts in the topic. This is one way that this could be added to a wiki that has grown too large. Split it up into sub-wikis, each maintained by some gang of experts. (Either that, or by people who want control of the info on a topic. We do have some bugs to work out.)
In any case, I suppose I don't really expect such issues to be worked out any time soon. Human organizations rarely run very well, and assignment of responsibility/power is one of the things they do rather poorly. Even when the issue is assigning control over something that most people consider insignificant.
Perhaps a good approach is something that seems to have already started. To use some current jargon, they could "refactor" wikipedia.org into a series of differently-named sites to cover topics that aren't "encyclopedic", but to some people are worth keeping around.
For example, the Pokemon and World of Warcraft articles, mentioned by others as obviously not appropriate. But to a cultural historian, they are well worth saving. Just not in a general encyclopedia. Instead of deleting the articles that some people put a bunch of time into, why not work closely with the people interested in such things, and move their articles onto another server with another name? Wikipedia itself could have some summary pages on the topics, with links to the other sites.
I've been making a lot of use of one of them that exists: wiktionary.org. Now, it's quite obvious that documenting every obscure word in every obscure language is utterly inappropriate for wikipedia, or any other encyclopedia for that matter. Traditionally, a books that does that is called "dictionary", not "encyclopedia". Wiktionary is an interesting take on this idea, organized as one big interlocking dictionary of all the world's languages.
It's pretty clear that wiktionary is the start of something very useful (though it's rather incomplete and in need of a lot of help from a lot of people). It's also clear that its material doesn't belong in wikipedia, except maybe for a few summary articles. There's also a lot of cross-linking between wikipedia and wiktionary. So I'd list this as a successful case of splitting off a significant chunk of human knowledge, kicking it out of wikipedia, and reorganizing it as a successful wiki in its own right.
As an amusing example of wiktionary's usefulness, a few weeks ago I noticed an apparent anomaly in the use of a 2-char Chinese word that I probably can't include here, but it's pronounced ai4ren2 in Mandarin and aijin in Japanese. Using the classical characters, wiktionary has an article giving the Japanese, Mandarin (and Min Nan) meanings of the word. They show two rather different interpretations of the characters whose basic meanings are "love" and "person". This could be a nice example of how a single writing system doesn't always make it possible for people who speak different languages to communicate in writing. In this case, they just might miscommunicate some significant information. You won't often find this problem mentioned in a typical single-language dictionary, but wiktionary's format makes for easy comparison of such borrowings.
Rather than just deleting articles from wikipedia because they're not "notable" (whatever the hell that might mean to the deleter), we could cool down the fuss by saying that they're more information on the topic than is appropriate for wikipedia, and should be moved to wikiX, for some appropriate X.
Of course, sometimes the classification is a bit fuzzy. Consider, for example, the word "truthiness", which has good articles in both wikipedia and wiktionary. Each article is (at least for the present) well written for its site. In particular, the wiktionary article gives 19th-century citations for the word's use, and also goes into its etymology, appropriately for a dictionary site. OTOH, the wikipedia article is nearly as funny as Colbert's introduction of the word, and includes links to related topics such as "big lie", "noble lie", and "consensus reality".
It's a pretty good example of how to handle a borderline case.
Verizon has the option to force you over to FIOS in areas where they offer it. You'll probably have to switch sooner or later.
;-), while Verizon is notorious for crappy support.
...
Interesting. I note that Verizon's FIOS TOS states explicitly that servers are not allowed, and you can't get a fixed IP address. We currently have Internet service via speakeasy, which allows servers and gives us a fixed IP address (for less money than Verizon's minimal FIOS contract). So if Verizon forces us to change, we'll lose an important capability and the fixed IP address, and we'll have to pay more. And, of course, speakeasy has excellent customer support (and even likes linux users
This is legal?
I think I'll have to start asking some lawyer friends what recourse we may have when Verizon forces us over to FIOS.
I also wonder about the 911 thing. How well does it work during a power outage? We've verified that our DSL line and its phone service does work then (with the help of a UPS box). A couple of neighbors who've switched to FIOS have reported that their phone is dead when the power goes out.
So those reassuring claims that 911 service still works during power outages were just lies
Well, yeah, but I thought that enough readers might not be familiar with the effect that a link to the wikipedia page would be useful. And that page makes mention of the famous Daniella Cicarelli sex video, which will further divert /. readers for the 10 minutes or so that it'll take to find it, download it and watch it.
Fun stuff.
(Besides, whoever reads article titles? Isn't that as bad as reading the articles?)
Every TSA Employee hassling a Taxpayer is one less welfare check which needs to be cut.
Well, maybe, but the welfare recipient isn't spending his/her day actively interfering with the efficiency of the population's travel. I'd argue that we're all better off putting the TSA employees on the dole, and then the rest of us can go about our lives without the hassle.
Of course, considering their nature, some of them would have "hobbies" that are equally damaging to society. Some of them might even run for office.
Have your company buy/rent a private jet.
Though many people might have thought this was facetious, it's actually a practical idea that many people and companies have figured out. Starting in Oct 2001, I started reading and hearing news stories about the sudden boom in sales of small jets to "air taxi" services. It turns out that the price tradeoff is typically around 2 to 4 seats, at which point the small jet is cheaper than the same number of "business rate" seats on most commercial flights. These services will generally fly you to anywhere within range, and can arrange multiple flights for longer trips. They'll also arrange for a rental car for you at the other end. You can leave from and arrive at about 10 times as many airports, and usually they're closer to your departure and destination addresses than the big airports. And there's no dumb TSA security screening for them, you just walk in, show your identification, hand over your luggage, and climb aboard.
The manufacturers of small jets have done very good business in the last 6 years. They must be hoping that the TSA has a long life, because such pseudo-security blundering is great advertising for the small air taxi services.
It's not a menu bar. It's a bookmarks bar, and Firefox and every other browser have it.
;-)
If so, why is the first item a menu?
Of course, it's fairly common for such "bars" at the top of windows to have a mixture of menus, buttons, info widgets, and other such things. In fact, the top-of-screen bar on my Mac PB has a number of widgets that aren't menus. At the rightmost end of my bar is the little blue circle with a white 'Q' that produces the Spotlight data-entry window, but no menu. And there's the speaker icon that produces the volume adjustment slider, which is also not a menu. For a confusing example, the "amphitheater" icon that shows wifi strength also produces a menu if you hold down the mouse button, but most of the time it shows the changing signal strength. I also have the Activity Monitor's CPU usage widget displayed in the top-of-screen bar, and it's obviously not a menu.
That's four non-menu items in that "menu bar" right now. So if having non-menu items makes a bar not a "menu bar", then my top-of-screen bar isn't a menu bar. If it is a menu bar despite the presence of non-menu items, then so is that bar below Safari's title bar, because it contains both menu and non-menu items. In my case, there's also a third and fourth such bar in the Safari window. The second is the tab bar, and the third is the google news top bar, which contains a couple of things that produce menus, among a lot of simple links.
It's all a rather silly nomenclature game. We probably should just say "widget bar" or something like that, because all the WIMP packages I know of have allowed mixtures of widget types in all such bars. And these "bars" really aren't at all special; they are just ordinary frames that happen to have just one row of items. The term "bar" is just a conceptual convenience, because people like certain kinds of data to be laid out that way. But we could call them "menu frames" or "mixed-usage linear frames" if we wanted to be technically more accurate.
I think I'll continue to call them menu bars. People know what you mean, and they don't expect such things to contain only menus, so the term's good enough.
Before this takedown notice no one really gave two shits about the video. Now, EVERYONE wants to see it to see what the deal is.
Nowadays, the popular term for this phenomenon is "Streisand Effect", after what happened when Barbara Streisand sued researchers who were photographing the entire California coastline to document coastal erosion. The ensuing fuss led to copies of the photo of her house appearing all over the Internet.
I wonder if anyone copied this video? Has it appeared on any servers outside the US yet? Not that I really want to view it myself, at least not without being fortified by several cups of coffee to stay awake. But it would be fun if this ham-handed attempt at censorship were to backfire.
Heh. Apple's own "native" apps do it.
For example, I have a Safari window next to this SeaMonkey window that I'm typing into. When I click on the Safari window, the usual "Safari" menus appear in the top-of-screen menubar. But the Safari window has a number of bars across the top. One of them (I don't know what it's called) starts with "Google News", and when I click on it, I get a menu. So Safari has at least one menu bar in its window, in addition to the top-of-screen menubar.
This isn't at all unusual. I've seen quite a few windows from Apple apps that use both the top-of-screen menu bar and also a per-window menu bar. I can't tell you offhand exactly which apps do that, but I've noticed a lot of them. It's funny that the mozilla apps don't seem to do this, while the Apple apps do. BICBW (But I could be wrong.)
I've been somewhat bemused by the simplistic arguments for the single top-of-screen menu bar, while seeing that Apple's own developers apparently don't quite agree. Or maybe they see a use for both, and put different kinds of things in the different menu bars.
My main comment on the top-of-screen menu bar is that on a large screen, it makes use of the menus rather time consuming. Others have observed the same thing. OTOH, I haven't seen too many comments on the other main problem that it causes: If you're working with several apps simultaneously (e.g., an a code editor, a debug package, and editors for various input and debug-output files), switching rapidly between windows becomes a real time waster when you need a background app's menus. You have to find the app's window, click on it, move to the top-of-screen menu bar, click on it, select a menu item, click on it, then find the original app's window, click on it to bring it to the foreground, and on and on.
The top-of-window menu bar may be demonstrably efficient for a single app on a small screen. That's fine for users who never do anything else. But the time-and-motion people don't seem to have studied the sort of things that software developers and other "power users" do all the time, that involve a lot of windows run by multiple apps. In that scenario. the top-of-window menu bar is a time waster, because it is only shown for the top app in the stack. Accessing other apps' menus involves a lot of extra motions and clicks to make the menu bar you need visible.
Not that I expect Apple or anyone else to pay attention to the needs of developers and power users. (Well, except for those FOSS geeks, who do it solely for their own selfish purposes, y'know.
It's restrictions like this, and the locking in general, that are why I quickly decided to not waste my money on an iPhone, attractive as it might be.
An anecdote: A few years back I worked on a project in which we investigated making some of our apps available on various smartphones. The main app that I worked on was remote access to medical databases, and we thought it could be very useful if, for example, emergency medical workers could have wireless access to their databases from an accident scene. We had a lot of good stuff working in the hospitals; now could we make it work wirelessly? Various developers volunteered to get different smartphones and try to port the code. My phone was a blackberry model which was widely advertised as being capable of wireless Internet access, and whose software is mostly in java. I had java versions of a lot of our programs, but was totally unsuccessful at porting them to the BB. I spent time with the AT&T Wireless support folks, but they were remarkably uncommunicative about the problems. A couple of years later, after the contract had run out, one of the support guys casually told me that, although that model did have the capabilities we needed, they had locked them out, and the support people were forbidden to tell customers how to get around the lock. You could almost hear the snickering "Ha, ha; we got your money and you failed."
Meanwhile, the other guys with other smartphones from other cell providers all had similar problems. We eventually gave up, and stuck with wired access. Since then, I've read hints that others are working on similar capabilities. Some of them are working for bigger corporations that have a lot more clout, so they may succeed. We were a small independent software house, so we had no clout with cell providers, and they could con us however they liked. Of course, this means that when such wireless access to medical info does come out, it'll be from a big, bureaucratic developer, not from a smaller shop.
Myself, when I get my hands on a google phone, I may personally try again. I'm also looking at openmoko, and wondering if I should pay out the money for one. But after you've been burnt a few times by the companies that control the wireless system, you might understandably be a bit shy about betting your own money that this time you'll succeed at making something work despite their ability to lock you out.
People do seem to throw around words like "efficient" without saying how they're actually measuring it.
One meaning of "efficient" could be the amount of bandwidth, in which case you want to measure the average number of hops needed for end users to get the content. I just used traceroute to tell me the number of hops from cbs.com and nbc.com, and they came out to 13 and 12 respectively. So the total byte count when I get data from them should be multiplied by about 12 to get the total bandwidth used. Bittorrent cuts this total down significantly by redirecting my download to other, hopefully closer sites. I've never seen any data on the actual bandwidth saving that results. I wonder if anyone has credible statistics?
Another meaning of "efficient" is the delay at the end user's machine before content can be seen. A major problem with mass-market sites is saturation due to too many downloads (the "slashdot effect", if you like). If you're the only one downloading a show from a server, you might get it quickly, but if 10 million people are trying to get it at the same time, even the best server farms today will still produce serious delays. This is the main problem that bittorrent was designed to solve (or at least alleviate). I've also never seen any credible data on this topic. Anyone have a good estimate of how good bittorrent really is at speeding up delivery of a popular file?
Bittorrent may help with both of these kinds of efficiency, but there's also an argument that efficiency really isn't the issue. From a content producer's viewpoint, the major problem is the cost of distribution. For the current TV system, this is a huge operation, with crowds of people working to maintain the distribution system. Keeping this running is a major cost for TV producers, as they ultimately need to deal with every little local cable/broadcast company in the world. You could call this an "efficiency" problem, where what you're measuring us human labor. An advantage of the Internet is that it's a global distributed distribution system, and all the costs are reduced to a single connection fee plus your local people to maintain the servers. You don't have to negotiate with distributors like cable companies; you just talk to your ISP.
The main barrier to a total move to the Internet is that the Internet wasn't designed to efficiently (whatever that means) distribute a single file to 10 million people simultaneously. That's what bittorrent and the other P2P packages are designed to do. If we can get top management over their natural fear of anything new, and look at P2P as a cost-saving distribution technology, they'll probably jump onto it. What we're seeing with this story is one small content producer finally realizing this, and looking at it from a sensible business viewpoint.
In another few decades, the big TV producers might even come to their senses and take a similar approach. Of course, for it to work, it'll take widespread enforcement of "net neutrality", under whatever name the marketers have renamed it by then. If an ISP can block your content until you pay their extra fee, you're right back with the current problem of needing to maintain a huge system to oversee your dealings with every ISP in the world. But maybe once the big guys realize this, they might even jump on the "net neutrality" bandwagon, and demand a system in which they need only pay a single fee to a single ISP to access the Internet.
It's gonna take years to work it all out. Stay tuned
My idea of capitalism means that I get to buy what I want,
not what the rest of the market forces me to buy because
of some bogus compatability barrier.
Well, that may be your idea of capitalism. But the
capitalists' idea is rather different: They go through the
usual process of mergers, acquisition, and hostile takeovers,
until there's only one MegaCorp left. It then tells you
what you are allowed to buy, and if you don't like it, you
can move to another planet where what you want is available.
The primary purpose of a "compatibility barrier", i.e., an
industry standard, is work as one of many barriers in the way
of the natural tendency toward a monopoly, by forcing current
vendors to be compatible with each other. This enables at
least a bit of competition on quality, by eliminating the
sort of big-vendor lockin that blocks new startups.
Not that it always works that well, as it's usually possible
to make nonstandard that look standard to the regulators. Or
just loudly proclaim "Our product is standard" and challenge
others to prove otherwise in court. But standards do often
have a bit of the desired effect of easing entry of newcomers
to the market.
I own a piece of land and the house on top. If somebody were to make a copy of it so they could live in it, seriously what kind of arse hole would I be to complain.
;-)
You might be an architect.
Architectural designs very often are copyrighted these days.
If someone were to copy your house, maybe you wouldn't have
a legal case against them, but it's entirely possible that
the architectural firm that produced the original blueprint
could take them to court and win.
This is more likely if you have an unusual house. The typical
house in the 'burbs isn't likely to be challenged this way.
But it is a possibility, and the law supports it.
if they are arguing property is property no matter what, ...
One of the more elegant explanations of the difference:
| If you have an apple, and I have an apple, and we exchange
| apples, you and I will still only have one apple. But if you
| have an idea and I have an idea, and we exchange ideas, then
| each of us will have two ideas. -- George Bernard Shaw
This is also tied into another misconception: Copyright really
isn't about control of property; it's about control of
information. Everyone knows the old saying "Knowledge
is power". Copyright is about control of the flow of information
and knowledge. Whoever controls that controls everything else.
Control of information very often trumps control of property.
For instance, if I control the information about your property,
the titles and deeds registered at your local government office,
I can simply "lose" your ownership and replace it with documents
stating that someone else owns your property. If I can block
access to that data, I can prevent anyone from learning who
owns your property, and I can prevent you from proving that
you own it. If I control the right to copy that information,
you no longer own anything unless I say you do.
If you think this is all hypothetical nonsense, you haven't
been following the changes to copyright law in recent years.
All sorts of things that used to be "fair use" are now illegal,
and we can expect this process to continue. Copyright is even
being used to control which machines we can use to display
or "play" copyrighted files, something that would have been
absurd not many years ago.
Before today you would have thought "Government Seeks Warrant to Search the Internet" was a headline from The Onion.
It just illustrates a common complain from satirists: It's a difficult job, because no matter how outrageous you exaggerate, the real world keeps trumping your satire with something real that's more extreme than anything you'd dare to publish.
Actually, I'd start by asking them why they don't just use google. It's funny how much private stuff can be found by just googling it. We've even seen a number of reports recently of identity thieves using google to collect the data they're looking for. I'd wonder how much of the information that various government spy agencies want about their own citizens could be found with a simple google search.
There was a funny news story back in the 70s, about a US government grant to a couple of college profs to study what could be learned about US military installations from public sources. It seems that when they submitted the report, with all the data taken from publicly-available sources, it was immediately classified top secret. I'd bet that such a study would be much easier today.
Somehow I'm having a hard time imagining a bunch of people running a crime family sitting around deciding if they need stronger encryption, or different protocols, or using hidden volumes.
Of course this is silly. The people running a crime family are like the people running any other business. They make the high-level decisions. The mundane details are handled by the people hired to take care of such things. If you've got a few geek kids in the family, it's not hard to develop an appropriate IT operation. Your business data needs aren't really any different from any other business, and you can use the same software as everyone else.
How many CEOs have any clue about computers? Most of them never even touch a keyboard. Such things are for the hired help. It's no different with crime organizations. In fact, aside from externalities like the legality of their business, there's not really any difference to speak of.
Ratzinger goes so far as to invoke Relativity to claim that heliocentrism and geocentrism are (paraphrasing) "effectively equal," and that heliocentrism is merely a mathematical convenience.
...
Actually, it is fairly standard in scientific and engineering circles to point out that this is in fact correct. Of course, if your model has the Earth stationary at the (0,0,0) point, your math becomes increasing more difficult as you attempt to model the behavior of objects at greater distances. Even the nearest start are orbiting the Earth at velocities much greater than the speed of light. And the orbital equations are effectively unique for every object in the universe.
However, if you're modeling the part of the Earth in which (for example) the airlines operate, the geocentric model is quite effective. It allows you to ignore forces like the Coriolis effect, and the gravitational pulls of the moon and sun, which are inconsequential in flight calculations. You even ignore the Earth's rotation, and consider the sun to be in orbit around the Earth, because this greatly simplifies your equations.
Part of such an approach is recognizing that you're not really dealing with "the Truth" in any philosophical sense. Rather, you are dealing with the equations, and including in your model only the motions and forces that are required to explain the parts of the system that you're dealing with.
Similarly, in scientific study of the molecular mechanics of our bodies (medicine), the orbits of the earth, moon, etc. are rarely if ever mentioned. Their effects are unmeasurable at the molecular level, so there's no point in taking them into account.
Everyone knows about the structure of the solar system, of course, and they also mostly know quite a bit about the structure of the galaxy. But whether they're part of your equations depends strongly on just what your equations are modeling.
Now if we could only get the religious folks to realize that molecular, aviational, and celestial mechanics really aren't very relevant to moral and ethical calculations
Ironically enough, the Big Bang was first resisted by several scientists because it implied a beginning, which can be troublesome for those with atheistic sensibilities.
Actually, while that may have been the motive of some scientists, more generally the major objection was that it was contrary to the "uniformitarian" approach (which almost but not quite qualified as a doctrine) that most fields of science adopted about 200 years ago. Uniformitarianism was an important topic in the 1800s, up to the 1960s or so, and has only recently faded somewhat. Part of the reason was the ongoing problem with harrassment from religious people. We still see nearly every new scientific result on the topic widely touted in the media as "proof" of the bible or some other religious belief. It was very useful for a couple centuries to try to ignore this religious pressure, and work primarily from the viewpoint that the world and the universe was ongoing and relatively constant. That produced much better results than working from the "catastropic" viewpoint, with its baggage of special creation by an intelligent deity. It's clear that most of the world's geological strata, even the volcanic fields, were laid down slowly over long time periods.
Of course, along the way, many examples of catastrophic changes did turn up. Recently we've all read about the asteroid impact 65 million years ago, which produced the K/T extinction event. There are several hundred impact craters on the planet, some of them a few hundred km across. We know about the Thera/Santorini eruption around 1500 BC, as well as what Vesuvius did to its environs in 79 AD and the world-wide effects of the Tambora eruption in 1815.
There are several examples of flood-carved terrain, the most spectacular of which may be the Columbia Basin in the US state of Washington. In this area, there was a large lake (Lake Missoula) in the Montana Rockies that formed repeatedly as glaciers blocked the end of its valley. At least a dozen times, water broke through the ice dam, the lake emptied over a couple weeks, and the land to the west was torn up by the resulting floods. We've also recently read of the evidence for a major flood in the lands around the Black Sea, as rising waters broke through the Bosporus and let in Mediterranean water some thousands of years ago. Several other similar events are known. (The Black Sea flood is conjectured to be the origin of the biblical flood story, but the evidence is weak, and there's at least one other competitor for the title.)
But despite all this, most of the world's geological strata record long periods of nearly constant conditions, with such catastrophes happening very rarely. So uniformitarianism is still the basic plan that scientists work from. As the threats from religious people have slowly receded, it has become easier to openly discuss the occasional exceptions when major catastrophes occurred. Recent texts have taught the uniformitarian schema as the main explanation for our geology, punctuated by occasional catastrophes. And scientists have learned to ignore the silliness of the media's attempts to tie it all in with religion.
An especially interesting one is the discussion of the apparent extinction event that's happening right now, caused primarily by the (geologically) sudden appearance of an intelligent, tool-using species that is rapidly wiping out species at a far greater rate than is usual for our planet. There are conjectures that some earlier extinction events were similarly due to a new species with unprecedented killing ability, but it's hard to get good evidence to support such scenarios hundreds of millions of years ago. Evidence for the current extinction event is easily available and quite well documented, however.
olpc was supposed to be an open-source laptop for $100. yea, whatever happened to that?
;-)
Have you been paying attention to what's happened to the US dollar?
I don't believe you'll ever see a $35 solar mesh router.
Sure we will, but it'll be $35 Australian or Canadian.
Mesh is a fairly new technology, ...
Not really. The OLPC's mesh sounds suspiciously like the "chaosnet" that has been in use on the MIT campus since some time in the 1970s. That, too, was decentralized, with each node forwarding packets for its neighbors. I've wondered whether it was sheer coincidence that the OLPC's mesh was developed at MIT. But so far, I haven't run across any comments on the topic.
It isn't especially surprising that this sort of technology hasn't been available commercially. It does sorta shoot down the central control that the commercial guys like to have. It's a lot easier to keep your customers in line (and cooperate with the feds' demands) if all traffic has to go through a single chokepoint, and you have control of that chokepoint.
It'll be interesting to see if the US government and comm companies permit this sort of network to be deployed widely within the US.
linux and OSX drivers would be great too, ...
;-)
Um, I sorta think that there already is a linux driver for the OLPC.
Sure, but this is way too much of a honeypot to even think you could get away with any shinangans.
How so? The Diebold electronic-voting scandal has been with us for about a decode now, and I don't seem to have read of any indictments. Even Wally O'Dell's infamous promise in writing to deliver Ohio to the Republican got no obvious attention from the legal system. There don't seem to be much more than a few small-scale, local investigations so far, and the Justice Dept seems supremely uninterested in the topic.
I'd bet (and a lot of investors will bet) that they'll continue to get away with it for a very long time. After all, the people in a position to investigate them are working for politicians, many of whom were elected with the help of Diebold equipment. And there are preliminary reports that Diebold has branched out to helping Democrats in the current primaries.
Maybe the investigators are just managing to keep a really low profile. But a better bet would be that they aren't doing much serious investigating at all.
Many companies are known (or infamous) for a small subset of their business. Diebold is no exception, especially when they have been all over Slashdot for their voting machines for the last few years. So, of course those who read Slashdot are going to talk about that. A banking board will likely be talking about the atms.
/. being part of SourceForge? And note that /. has become a "news site" known, quoted and linked to by many other online news sites. I've even seen a few references to it in print publications.
Sorta like slashdot, actually. How many of the readers here, other than the minority of software developers, know anything at all about SourceForge's other "products"? How many readers have even noticed those occasional notes about
It's a rather common story in the merger/buyout-oriented corporate world.