I am saying that candidate Palin could become president Palin and Democrats would have noone but themselves to blame.
Though, as others have already pointed out, we don't seem to have any actual evidence that any Democrats are behind this "crowdsourcing" thing. We don't really know anything about who might be organizing it. As far as we can tell so far, it's just a prank perpetrated by some satirist who is sitting on the sidelines chuckling at all the people who take it seriously. Even if that person turns out to be registered as a Democrat, that doesn't mean that the Democratic Party is involved in the prank.
It's just as likely to be an "agent provocateur" (q.v.), though I'd think a prankster is more likely.
Maybe we'll eventually read that it was done by the Stewart/Colbert crowd, or by some people at The Onion.
Or it might turn out to be a straightforward campaign by a group of Republicans.
Next thing you'll know, Republicans and Democrats will just appoint our "choices" for us.
Um, I have bad news for you...
Though when you think about it, what other reason is there for a political party? Isn't appointing candidates (and helping organize the collecting of "contributions" for their campaigns), what do political parties mainly do?
... there's a world of difference between humming a song to yourself and performing (in public)...
Ah, but the kids aren't likely to be humming the songs to themselves. They'll be singing the songs loudly (and out of tune) in a very public setting (the school room). It was only a matter of time before the publishing and recording industries began to "think of the children", and classify this situation as a public performance. A few years ago, we were laughing at the suggestion that such things would eventually become illegal unless the people involved have paid for a license. Now it's "eventually", and while it may be funny in a sick sense, few of us are probably laughing as they read this.
(Actually, I did laugh. I guess that tells you what a sicko I am.;-)
How long now until someone walking down the sidewalk humming a tune is arrested and charged with unlicensed public performance of copyrighted material? Will this first happen to an adult or a child? Should we be setting up a site for the public to bet on this?
While "full" pinyin, with the tone symbols (which/. doesn't allow;-) may be easy to learn and use, most pinyin you see lacks the tones. The resulting language has so damned many homophones that it's exceedingly difficult to understand without extensive study. Nearly every syllable is a valid word on its own, typically with dozens or hundreds of unrelated meanings, and two-syllable words add many more possible meanings. Without the tones, it takes real fluency in the language to pick the correct meanings out of the huge number of possibilities. If we could persuade people to include the tones, a lot more people might like to learn a bit of Mandarin. But without the tones, pinyin isn't really usable by non-experts.
It also helps if spaces are used to separate words, and you don't always see that. Runningthewordstogethercanmakeithardtounderstand.
(Of course, you can always use the tone numbers instead of the symbols above the vowels. But nearly everyone except linguists consider this unaesthetic, so they don't do it.;-)
Chinese grammar is simpler than English grammar. But it's not quite as simple as some might like to believe.
The French have tried to purify their language for centuries. They even have a committee to determine what words can and cannot be added.... and yet despite the language that sparked the term being kept very pure indeed, it is hardly spoken today.
A few years back, I read a interesting article by a French researcher, explaining why he published all his papers in English. His main reason wasn't the importance of English. He started by explaining that if he published in French (and wanted his papers read and referenced in France), he would have to submit them to l/Académie française for vetting, to ensure that he used proper French words, and not borrowed words from English or other languages. Using "improper" French terminology in a paper could endanger his scientific career.
Then he observed that in English, there is no equivalent non-scientific control. In English, scientists and mathematicians are free to define their words as they like, invent new words, or borrow them from any other language that has the right term already. He went on to explain that a significant part of his subject matter, as with all fields of science, involve discussing terminology, and making sure that terms are defined precisely, in a way that's scientifically correct. In English this is easy, and each scientific field can work out its own "jargon" in a way that's suitable for their subject. In French, l'Académie française can veto a scientist's terms or definitions; if there is no French term for a concept, it can't legally be written about until l'Académie française gives them the proper French term, which may take years, or may never happen at all.
So he and his colleagues all publish primarily in English, where they can publicly work out the proper definitions (for their specialty) of all the words they need to use, and where they can invent or borrow new words as needed.
It's easy to find examples of this phenomenon in scientific histories. One textbook example: Back when Isaac Newton was working on his revision of physics, the two terms "impetus" and "momentum" were used, with slightly different definitions. The distinction would have been meaningless to most non-physicists, including government bureaucrats, but it was important to physics. One of Newton's achievements was demonstrating that momentum was the correct concept, i.e., it was the one that the universe implemented. Impetus was slowly dropped from physicists' terminology, as they accepted Newton's results. This was easy for them to do in England, because they were free to work out the terminology issue on strictly scientific grounds. In France and many other countries, this was much more difficult, due to interference from protectors of the language.
Over the past few centuries, it has worked out that this lack of any official body to enforce the English language is a major advantage of English in scientific research. Common spoken English may be somewhat a mess of a language, but its language enforcers have been kept crippled, so specialists have been mostly free to hone their jargons to a higher technical precision than is possible with outside interference with government agencies that don't understand the specialty. When governments in English-speaking countries have agencies that deal with the language, they typically work like most weights-and-measures agencies: They don't decree what units of measurement must be used; rather, they take the approach "You can use whatever units you prefer, but if you use any of the following list of terms, you must use the current scientific definitions, as listed below...." The agencies then hire scientists and engineers to keep the official definitions up to date. If the specialists decide a term needs a new definition, in English it is simply published, without consulting any language historians.
If the Chinese government succeeds in their attempt to maintain the "purity" of Mandarin (or maybe I should s
I also wouldn't consider a tablet running Windows Mobile xx (or Windows Mobile CE) a real computer anymore than my phone (which is not a real computer).
Heh. You have your right to think that way, but technically speaking, you're wrong. The new-fangled phones these days contain a real, functional computer processor chip and real memory. They're real computers, more powerful than the "mainframe" computers from the 1970s. They just don't seem like real computers because the vendors (i.e., the phone companies) have locked you out of most of their capabilities, and crippled them to the point that they seem like little more than a comm device. This is merely antagonism (against you and me) on the part of the phone companies, who want to keep control of your phone for their own nefarious purposes.
At its heart, your phone contains a very real computer that wants to get out and do some real computing. Maybe we need a "phone computer liberation front" or some such organizations to free the poor little victimized things. (But we need a better name, with a pronounceable acronym.;-)
Also, don't lawmakers ever consult a real technical person when it comes to stuff like this? The Android and Apple mobile OSes and the devices they run on ARE computers. Sheesh.
Actually, it could just be a case of an old and well-documented attitude in the computer market: it's only a real computer if it comes from IBM or Microsoft. Everything else is a toy used only by academics and techies.
It could also be an example of a phenomenon that's now rampant in the US, and may be starting to infect Europe: The richer you are, the lower your taxes are. Actually, that may not be a very new phenonenon. The change may be that now in the US, the right-wing part of the political spectrum openly advocates this policy, rather than implementing it on the sly while pretending to be friends of "ordinary people".
Myself, I'd wonder who got paid off for this policy decision, and how much money changed hands. Anyone have any data on this? Since the 2000 elections here in the US, Microsoft has been among the top political campaign contributors. Do we have numbers on this in the EU?
Liberals usually work incrementally. It starts with simple net neutrality rules. Then later on, they add some more rules. And more. And more. A Killswitch and some hate-crimes legislation later and before you know the government is all up in your intarwebs.
Except in this case, the actual history is pretty much backwards from that.
The Internet started with 100% US government (military, actually) funding for and control of the ARPAnet, back in the 1960s. The initial design was a massively multiply-connected system, so that no matter what "the enemy" did, the network would find a route around the damage and get the data through.
In our situation, "the enemy" can be read as "the ISPs and comm companies that supply the connectivity". Some ISPs have implemented "kill switches" that block certain kinds of data and some entire sites. We've had several discussions here about Comcast doing this, but it's actually fairly widespread now.
The final result (so far) is your first step: A public call for "net neutrality", to undo the damage to the open Internet that was specified in the Internet's official specs, and built by government-funded projects. And to get back to your first word, the initial construction of the Internet was done almost entirely in Academia, which is a hard-core liberal part of our society that the "conservatives" have never much liked.
So what we're doing could be described as trying to reverse the actual Internet history and restoring the original design.
We should also note that an important motive for the initial design was that the US military was using more and more electronic comm equipment, and was finding that it had a serious problem: Devices purchased from different manufacturers would rarely interoperate. Even when built to DoD "standards", the manufacturers were quite good at finding interpretations of the standards that would make devices incompatible with devices from competitors. The ARPA folks decided that fixing this was hopeless; the only workable solution was an "interface" device that would talk to device X, translate its messages to a standard format, send that to the interface device at device Y, where it would be translated into Y's language. These interface devices (Interface Message Processors, or IMPs) were the early form of Internet routers, and were designed from the start to have multiple comm ports so they could use any comm equipment that was available -- and so that they could provide multiple paths from X to Y, in case any "enemy" tried to block communication between X and Y.
This situation is exactly the same as the current problems that have led to the proposed "net neutrality" rules. The only difference is that 45 years ago, ARPA was thinking of military opponents attempting to interfere with communication. Now we have commercial opponents trying to interfere with communication. But other than what we call these enemies of communication, the technical aspects of the problem are the same as they've ever been. And "net neutrality" is just a new name for the decades-old solution.
(The technical part of the solution has changed a lot. It's no longer a desk-size IMP machine; it's a single card, sometimes a single chip, plus a small chunk of code in memory. But this doesn't change the fact that it's dealing with an old problem, or that the commercial world was and is a major part of the problem. What we've wanted from the start is efficient communication with whoever we want to communicate with. The commercial world is openly opposed to this, even if it's what we're paying them for. History says that government is the only organization that is willing and able to fix the basic problem. Of course, government brings along its own problems, but that was also true 65 years ago.)
I know "government is the problem, not the solution" has been an axiom of the far right since <whenever>...
Maybe we should be making more of a point that we have no choice in whether we have a government; we can only choose what kind of government. After all, if anarchy were declared in some area and all governments agreed to keep away from it, we all know what would happen: Within hours, the local thugs would be running things, and they would constitute a new local government. This is pretty much how all human societies before the past couple of centuries were run, though the thugs characterized themselves as the "aristocracy". The development of democracies/republics/whatever recently has basically been a semi-successful way of giving the general population some control over the thugs that are at so often the top of the pecking order.
So the old joke about "If X doesn't work, you need more X" is somewhat true of governments. In particular, we humans need governments that are strong enough to regulate themselves and reign in the people who manage to position themselves as our rulers. The one thing we haven't quite figured out is how to prevent the thugs from taking control of the government's self-regulatory mechanism, as has been happening in the US for the past few decades, and making themselves exempt from the laws. (In the US, they've successfully made themselves exempt from most taxes.;-)
Actually, I suspect that much of the US's "far right" understands this to some degree. How else would you explain their constant campaigning against "big government" while trying so hard to be the ones in control, and when they get control, they do nothing to make it smaller? Anyone smart enough to understand what it takes to get in power has to be smart enough to understand the contradiction in this.
You don't get to claim you didn't see the stop sign when there have been "stop ahead" signs with the distance indicated for the last 10 miles.
Of course, if you see a "stop ahead 1/2 mile" every quarter mile but still haven't seen the stop sign after 10 miles, you learn to ignore those signs.
A couple of weeks ago, I was driving along a stretch of highway which had a "no parking next 1/4 mile" every 1/10 mile or so. After a while, we were joking about it, along the lines of "Why don't they just put up a few signs saying 'no parking on this highway ever' every half mile or so? It'd be a lot fewer signs."
All the years of "OMG we're gonna run out of interweb addresses next month!!!" warning sorta led to the old "crying wolf" phenomenon. This shouldn't have been a surprise. We have always had a bit of a problem of an ignorant media that overhypes such things and gets most of its numbers badly wrong. Good luck trying to solve this problem.
... was the bit in the Mail Online story saying that Julian "... begs judges not to reveal his address".
So I fed "Ellingham Hall, Norfolk, UK" (from the story) to google maps, and it instantly showed me how to get to Ellingham Hall, on Hall Road, a mile or so west of Kirby Row. Except it gave the address as in Suffolk instead of Norfolk, but the English do some funny things with their addressing system, y'know.
It looks like a nice place to be stuck for a while. But I've heard the weather there is somewhat frightful right now.
Hey, you're right! It's there at the end of the 2nd paragraph, where it refers to " ()", or "svobodnoye PO (SPO)" if/. does its usual thing of trashing non-Latin1 characters. So it really said "free" as in speech.
Actually, I suspect that some of the other comments are relevant here: This looks a lot like the usual ploy that governments use to get a huge discount from Microsoft, by announcing a switch to linux. It's especially interesting in this case due to the earlier story about the friction between MS and the Russian government over MS's desire to get a crackdown on pirated MS software in Russia, and the government's desire for MS's aid in fingering some kinds of political activity. So all of this stuff may be the real story, and this announcement may well be just a play in the game.
I would wonder why the Russian government would even consider using Windows, especially after the story recently about Windows doing automatic upgrades to parts of "the system" even if auto updates are disabled by the user. MS even admitted publicly that this feature has been in Windows since NT. MS can install any software they want in your machine (any time it's connected to the network), and you won't even know about it. I'd expect any government to respond to this story with an instant ban on the use of MS Windows. I wonder why this hasn't happened? Or is it happening, and they're all just being secretive about it?;-)
Do we actually have the Russian version somewhere? Russian doesn't confuse the two senses of "free" the same way that English does. The "free" in "free speech" is "svoboda"; in "free beer" it's "besplatnoye". So which adjective did he use to say "free software"?
(Not that I'd trust his speech to be especially honest, y'know.;-)
Next to come: using Linux will be considered anti-American.
Huh? I've heard that from various managerial types for years. Linux started in Finland, after all, and everyone knows what socialists those Finns are. Or was it the Swedes? Oh, well; there's no difference between them. They all think that governments are supposed to make life better for their people; how much more socialist can you get than that?
Yeah; I think that's one of the seminal papers of the subject area. It mentions the sort algorithm that generates permutations and tests each one for being sorted. But it's more general, addressing the problem of solving a problem as reluctantly as possible, while demonstrably making progress with each step.
There are suspicions that various commercial products were written by adherents of this school of software algorithms...
by linking to the pdf of the thesis, Slashdot is effectively publishing said thesis D:
And I suppose you're also going to tell us that by listing a book's author, publisher and ISDN, a library or bookseller's catalog is also "publishing" the book.
Both are equally nonsense. Publishing is done by the publisher (the university in this case), not by someone who merely tells you where to find the publication.
This would be simple silliness if it weren't for the fact that organizations (companies and governments) have been known to file charges against web sites that merely link to some infringing material. Google and other search sites have been hit with this, and it's the basis of the bogus charges against piratebay. So we should be objecting publicly to the attempts to blur the distinction between actually publishing something and merely telling people where the publishers or distributors can be found.
All that Federal law does is ban the use of the social security card as ID.
And what do you think they do with your SSN? Right; they use it as one of their "secrets" to IDentify you.
Well, ok; some of them also want it as part of the ID information about you that they sell to other companies. But their primary excuse for wanting it is always so they can ask for the number (e.g. on the phone) to help verify that a caller is you.
It's rather ineffective as an ID number, of course, since anyone with access to the customer records of any company or school you've given it to could use the number to impersonate you. But still, asking you for it to verify who you claim to be is called "identification", and they're using your SSN as an ID number, which is a violation of federal law unless they're dealing with Social Security information.
You won't go to jail for not giving them your SSN.
Yeah, you're right. But you probably won't go to college there, either.
That's the problem with a lot of setups like this. Yes, you have a right to privacy. But they also have a right to not let you on their private property if you don't hand over the information they want.
We see this pointed out on/. all the time. The most common is the auto example: You don't have to hand over information like SSN to get a driver's license. But they also don't have to give you a driver's license. In the state I live in (which one isn't relevant here since lots have done this) the US government cracked down a few years back and ordered them to stop using SSNs as part of the driver's license number. Before this, mere citizens couldn't refuse to tell them the SSN, because this would mean that you couldn't legally drive in the state (or in any other, actually).
Ultimately, this sort of "forced" giving up of ID numbers is the reason we're having more and more problems with identity theft. Nearly anything you want to do to live normally in society requires that you give your id number to lots of organizations, who keep it in insecure computer systems. We're reaching the point that all the numbers needed for me to pretend I'm you are available for a reasonable price from lots of corporations, because you've "voluntarily" given them your numbers (and they've shared them with each other).
Now while our algorithms might be getting better our programmers definitely are not.
Sometimes this is intentional. One of the more fun software competitions I've run across is to write the slowest sorting algorithm. Trivial programming tricks such as do-nothing loops that just run a counter to use time disqualify you, obviously. The judging is solely on the algorithm, by comparing the O(N) functions. One of the winners in the early years was a sort that generated a random permutation of the data, and tested it for sortedness, repeating if it wasn't sorted. And it turns out that there are several progressively worse variants of this, depending on how ridiculous your random-permutation algorithm is.
I should go find this contest again, and see what sorting atrocities they've come up with in the past couple years...
(I did once read a suggestion that such contests not be widely publicised, out of fear that managers will find them and declare the winning algorithms the new company standards.;-)
I actually saw a school application online that asked you to enter your SSN without a secure connection.
I've seen any number of people point out that US law forbids the use of the SSN for any purpose not related to the Social Security system. Unless the application is for a job at the school, requiring the SSN is almost certainly illegal.
Of course, the school's answer is the standard one: You don't have to supply your SSN, but we also don't have to accept your application. Lots of luck trying to get us to change this; by the time you've spent a few million dollars to appeal it all the way to the Supreme Court (where you'll probably win), you'll probably be retired and using your SSN to collect your Social Security checks.
Nah; we'll still have email for a long time. The only thing is that it'll be called by lots of different names. This is one of the standard marketing tricks to convince the suckers^Wcustomers that you have something new.
For example, SMS, IM, and their ilk are crippled, nonstandard implementations email, repackaged with a different name so you'll think they're something new. Intentionally not making them interoperate with existing email systems is further "proof" that they're not really email; they're something that spelled entirely differently. But that (and their character limit) is about the only material difference. And the fact that you have to pay a lot more for email that's not called "email".
It's one of the oldest propaganda tricks in the book. It's sorta like saying "We didn't kill him; we just Terminated him With Extreme Prejudice." (Remember that one?;-) If you make up a new name for something, people will often believe that you haven't done the something that you're not naming; you've done something else entirely new that isn't yet covered by and laws, rules, or regulations. (The people who used that TWEP euphemism still haven't been tried for their crimes.;-)
But back to email; if you have a good email package installed, you may find that it also knows how to talk to most of those nonstandard "not-email" message-passing systems. It's not all that different for a message package to have a set of modules that interface to different message systems, whatever they call themselves. It's all the same job; you just format the headers differently.
Except that sometimes you have to truncate messages, because some of the non-email email systems have byte-count limits. Not much you can do about that idiocy except complain.
You print out your application, check to see if it truncates, and fix it if it does....
That's easy enough if you know the font and font size they'll use. Does the application give that information? If not, how might an applicant learn the font name/size?
Slashdot Mirror
I am saying that candidate Palin could become president Palin and Democrats would have noone but themselves to blame.
Though, as others have already pointed out, we don't seem to have any actual evidence that any Democrats are behind this "crowdsourcing" thing. We don't really know anything about who might be organizing it. As far as we can tell so far, it's just a prank perpetrated by some satirist who is sitting on the sidelines chuckling at all the people who take it seriously. Even if that person turns out to be registered as a Democrat, that doesn't mean that the Democratic Party is involved in the prank.
It's just as likely to be an "agent provocateur" (q.v.), though I'd think a prankster is more likely.
Maybe we'll eventually read that it was done by the Stewart/Colbert crowd, or by some people at The Onion.
Or it might turn out to be a straightforward campaign by a group of Republicans.
Next thing you'll know, Republicans and Democrats will just appoint our "choices" for us.
Um, I have bad news for you...
Though when you think about it, what other reason is there for a political party? Isn't appointing candidates (and helping organize the collecting of "contributions" for their campaigns), what do political parties mainly do?
... there's a world of difference between humming a song to yourself and performing (in public) ...
Ah, but the kids aren't likely to be humming the songs to themselves. They'll be singing the songs loudly (and out of tune) in a very public setting (the school room). It was only a matter of time before the publishing and recording industries began to "think of the children", and classify this situation as a public performance. A few years ago, we were laughing at the suggestion that such things would eventually become illegal unless the people involved have paid for a license. Now it's "eventually", and while it may be funny in a sick sense, few of us are probably laughing as they read this.
(Actually, I did laugh. I guess that tells you what a sicko I am. ;-)
How long now until someone walking down the sidewalk humming a tune is arrested and charged with unlicensed public performance of copyrighted material? Will this first happen to an adult or a child? Should we be setting up a site for the public to bet on this?
While "full" pinyin, with the tone symbols (which /. doesn't allow ;-) may be easy to learn and use, most pinyin you see lacks the tones. The resulting language has so damned many homophones that it's exceedingly difficult to understand without extensive study. Nearly every syllable is a valid word on its own, typically with dozens or hundreds of unrelated meanings, and two-syllable words add many more possible meanings. Without the tones, it takes real fluency in the language to pick the correct meanings out of the huge number of possibilities. If we could persuade people to include the tones, a lot more people might like to learn a bit of Mandarin. But without the tones, pinyin isn't really usable by non-experts.
It also helps if spaces are used to separate words, and you don't always see that. Runningthewordstogethercanmakeithardtounderstand.
(Of course, you can always use the tone numbers instead of the symbols above the vowels. But nearly everyone except linguists consider this unaesthetic, so they don't do it. ;-)
Chinese grammar is simpler than English grammar. But it's not quite as simple as some might like to believe.
The French have tried to purify their language for centuries. They even have a committee to determine what words can and cannot be added. ... and yet despite the language that sparked the term being kept very pure indeed, it is hardly spoken today.
A few years back, I read a interesting article by a French researcher, explaining why he published all his papers in English. His main reason wasn't the importance of English. He started by explaining that if he published in French (and wanted his papers read and referenced in France), he would have to submit them to l/Académie française for vetting, to ensure that he used proper French words, and not borrowed words from English or other languages. Using "improper" French terminology in a paper could endanger his scientific career.
Then he observed that in English, there is no equivalent non-scientific control. In English, scientists and mathematicians are free to define their words as they like, invent new words, or borrow them from any other language that has the right term already. He went on to explain that a significant part of his subject matter, as with all fields of science, involve discussing terminology, and making sure that terms are defined precisely, in a way that's scientifically correct. In English this is easy, and each scientific field can work out its own "jargon" in a way that's suitable for their subject. In French, l'Académie française can veto a scientist's terms or definitions; if there is no French term for a concept, it can't legally be written about until l'Académie française gives them the proper French term, which may take years, or may never happen at all.
So he and his colleagues all publish primarily in English, where they can publicly work out the proper definitions (for their specialty) of all the words they need to use, and where they can invent or borrow new words as needed.
It's easy to find examples of this phenomenon in scientific histories. One textbook example: Back when Isaac Newton was working on his revision of physics, the two terms "impetus" and "momentum" were used, with slightly different definitions. The distinction would have been meaningless to most non-physicists, including government bureaucrats, but it was important to physics. One of Newton's achievements was demonstrating that momentum was the correct concept, i.e., it was the one that the universe implemented. Impetus was slowly dropped from physicists' terminology, as they accepted Newton's results. This was easy for them to do in England, because they were free to work out the terminology issue on strictly scientific grounds. In France and many other countries, this was much more difficult, due to interference from protectors of the language.
Over the past few centuries, it has worked out that this lack of any official body to enforce the English language is a major advantage of English in scientific research. Common spoken English may be somewhat a mess of a language, but its language enforcers have been kept crippled, so specialists have been mostly free to hone their jargons to a higher technical precision than is possible with outside interference with government agencies that don't understand the specialty. When governments in English-speaking countries have agencies that deal with the language, they typically work like most weights-and-measures agencies: They don't decree what units of measurement must be used; rather, they take the approach "You can use whatever units you prefer, but if you use any of the following list of terms, you must use the current scientific definitions, as listed below...." The agencies then hire scientists and engineers to keep the official definitions up to date. If the specialists decide a term needs a new definition, in English it is simply published, without consulting any language historians.
If the Chinese government succeeds in their attempt to maintain the "purity" of Mandarin (or maybe I should s
I also wouldn't consider a tablet running Windows Mobile xx (or Windows Mobile CE) a real computer anymore than my phone (which is not a real computer).
Heh. You have your right to think that way, but technically speaking, you're wrong. The new-fangled phones these days contain a real, functional computer processor chip and real memory. They're real computers, more powerful than the "mainframe" computers from the 1970s. They just don't seem like real computers because the vendors (i.e., the phone companies) have locked you out of most of their capabilities, and crippled them to the point that they seem like little more than a comm device. This is merely antagonism (against you and me) on the part of the phone companies, who want to keep control of your phone for their own nefarious purposes.
At its heart, your phone contains a very real computer that wants to get out and do some real computing. Maybe we need a "phone computer liberation front" or some such organizations to free the poor little victimized things. (But we need a better name, with a pronounceable acronym. ;-)
(Everyone hates their phone company, right?)
Also, don't lawmakers ever consult a real technical person when it comes to stuff like this? The Android and Apple mobile OSes and the devices they run on ARE computers. Sheesh.
Actually, it could just be a case of an old and well-documented attitude in the computer market: it's only a real computer if it comes from IBM or Microsoft. Everything else is a toy used only by academics and techies.
It could also be an example of a phenomenon that's now rampant in the US, and may be starting to infect Europe: The richer you are, the lower your taxes are. Actually, that may not be a very new phenonenon. The change may be that now in the US, the right-wing part of the political spectrum openly advocates this policy, rather than implementing it on the sly while pretending to be friends of "ordinary people".
Myself, I'd wonder who got paid off for this policy decision, and how much money changed hands. Anyone have any data on this? Since the 2000 elections here in the US, Microsoft has been among the top political campaign contributors. Do we have numbers on this in the EU?
Liberals usually work incrementally. It starts with simple net neutrality rules. Then later on, they add some more rules. And more. And more. A Killswitch and some hate-crimes legislation later and before you know the government is all up in your intarwebs.
Except in this case, the actual history is pretty much backwards from that.
The Internet started with 100% US government (military, actually) funding for and control of the ARPAnet, back in the 1960s. The initial design was a massively multiply-connected system, so that no matter what "the enemy" did, the network would find a route around the damage and get the data through.
In our situation, "the enemy" can be read as "the ISPs and comm companies that supply the connectivity". Some ISPs have implemented "kill switches" that block certain kinds of data and some entire sites. We've had several discussions here about Comcast doing this, but it's actually fairly widespread now.
The final result (so far) is your first step: A public call for "net neutrality", to undo the damage to the open Internet that was specified in the Internet's official specs, and built by government-funded projects. And to get back to your first word, the initial construction of the Internet was done almost entirely in Academia, which is a hard-core liberal part of our society that the "conservatives" have never much liked.
So what we're doing could be described as trying to reverse the actual Internet history and restoring the original design.
We should also note that an important motive for the initial design was that the US military was using more and more electronic comm equipment, and was finding that it had a serious problem: Devices purchased from different manufacturers would rarely interoperate. Even when built to DoD "standards", the manufacturers were quite good at finding interpretations of the standards that would make devices incompatible with devices from competitors. The ARPA folks decided that fixing this was hopeless; the only workable solution was an "interface" device that would talk to device X, translate its messages to a standard format, send that to the interface device at device Y, where it would be translated into Y's language. These interface devices (Interface Message Processors, or IMPs) were the early form of Internet routers, and were designed from the start to have multiple comm ports so they could use any comm equipment that was available -- and so that they could provide multiple paths from X to Y, in case any "enemy" tried to block communication between X and Y.
This situation is exactly the same as the current problems that have led to the proposed "net neutrality" rules. The only difference is that 45 years ago, ARPA was thinking of military opponents attempting to interfere with communication. Now we have commercial opponents trying to interfere with communication. But other than what we call these enemies of communication, the technical aspects of the problem are the same as they've ever been. And "net neutrality" is just a new name for the decades-old solution.
(The technical part of the solution has changed a lot. It's no longer a desk-size IMP machine; it's a single card, sometimes a single chip, plus a small chunk of code in memory. But this doesn't change the fact that it's dealing with an old problem, or that the commercial world was and is a major part of the problem. What we've wanted from the start is efficient communication with whoever we want to communicate with. The commercial world is openly opposed to this, even if it's what we're paying them for. History says that government is the only organization that is willing and able to fix the basic problem. Of course, government brings along its own problems, but that was also true 65 years ago.)
I know "government is the problem, not the solution" has been an axiom of the far right since <whenever> ...
Maybe we should be making more of a point that we have no choice in whether we have a government; we can only choose what kind of government. After all, if anarchy were declared in some area and all governments agreed to keep away from it, we all know what would happen: Within hours, the local thugs would be running things, and they would constitute a new local government. This is pretty much how all human societies before the past couple of centuries were run, though the thugs characterized themselves as the "aristocracy". The development of democracies/republics/whatever recently has basically been a semi-successful way of giving the general population some control over the thugs that are at so often the top of the pecking order.
So the old joke about "If X doesn't work, you need more X" is somewhat true of governments. In particular, we humans need governments that are strong enough to regulate themselves and reign in the people who manage to position themselves as our rulers. The one thing we haven't quite figured out is how to prevent the thugs from taking control of the government's self-regulatory mechanism, as has been happening in the US for the past few decades, and making themselves exempt from the laws. (In the US, they've successfully made themselves exempt from most taxes. ;-)
Actually, I suspect that much of the US's "far right" understands this to some degree. How else would you explain their constant campaigning against "big government" while trying so hard to be the ones in control, and when they get control, they do nothing to make it smaller? Anyone smart enough to understand what it takes to get in power has to be smart enough to understand the contradiction in this.
You don't get to claim you didn't see the stop sign when there have been "stop ahead" signs with the distance indicated for the last 10 miles.
Of course, if you see a "stop ahead 1/2 mile" every quarter mile but still haven't seen the stop sign after 10 miles, you learn to ignore those signs.
A couple of weeks ago, I was driving along a stretch of highway which had a "no parking next 1/4 mile" every 1/10 mile or so. After a while, we were joking about it, along the lines of "Why don't they just put up a few signs saying 'no parking on this highway ever' every half mile or so? It'd be a lot fewer signs."
All the years of "OMG we're gonna run out of interweb addresses next month!!!" warning sorta led to the old "crying wolf" phenomenon. This shouldn't have been a surprise. We have always had a bit of a problem of an ignorant media that overhypes such things and gets most of its numbers badly wrong. Good luck trying to solve this problem.
Since when does any political "debate" require any knowledge of the topic?
Jeez; someone simply hasn't been paying attention. (But of course this would fit right into the tradition. ;-)
... was the bit in the Mail Online story saying that Julian "... begs judges not to reveal his address".
So I fed "Ellingham Hall, Norfolk, UK" (from the story) to google maps, and it instantly showed me how to get to Ellingham Hall, on Hall Road, a mile or so west of Kirby Row. Except it gave the address as in Suffolk instead of Norfolk, but the English do some funny things with their addressing system, y'know.
It looks like a nice place to be stuck for a while. But I've heard the weather there is somewhat frightful right now.
Hey, you're right! It's there at the end of the 2nd paragraph, where it refers to " ()", or "svobodnoye PO (SPO)" if /. does its usual thing of trashing non-Latin1 characters. So it really said "free" as in speech.
Actually, I suspect that some of the other comments are relevant here: This looks a lot like the usual ploy that governments use to get a huge discount from Microsoft, by announcing a switch to linux. It's especially interesting in this case due to the earlier story about the friction between MS and the Russian government over MS's desire to get a crackdown on pirated MS software in Russia, and the government's desire for MS's aid in fingering some kinds of political activity. So all of this stuff may be the real story, and this announcement may well be just a play in the game.
I would wonder why the Russian government would even consider using Windows, especially after the story recently about Windows doing automatic upgrades to parts of "the system" even if auto updates are disabled by the user. MS even admitted publicly that this feature has been in Windows since NT. MS can install any software they want in your machine (any time it's connected to the network), and you won't even know about it. I'd expect any government to respond to this story with an instant ban on the use of MS Windows. I wonder why this hasn't happened? Or is it happening, and they're all just being secretive about it? ;-)
Do we actually have the Russian version somewhere? Russian doesn't confuse the two senses of "free" the same way that English does. The "free" in "free speech" is "svoboda"; in "free beer" it's "besplatnoye". So which adjective did he use to say "free software"?
(Not that I'd trust his speech to be especially honest, y'know. ;-)
Next to come: using Linux will be considered anti-American.
Huh? I've heard that from various managerial types for years. Linux started in Finland, after all, and everyone knows what socialists those Finns are. Or was it the Swedes? Oh, well; there's no difference between them. They all think that governments are supposed to make life better for their people; how much more socialist can you get than that?
Lesse; do I need a ;-) here? Nah ...
Yeah; I think that's one of the seminal papers of the subject area. It mentions the sort algorithm that generates permutations and tests each one for being sorted. But it's more general, addressing the problem of solving a problem as reluctantly as possible, while demonstrably making progress with each step.
There are suspicions that various commercial products were written by adherents of this school of software algorithms ...
by linking to the pdf of the thesis, Slashdot is effectively publishing said thesis D:
And I suppose you're also going to tell us that by listing a book's author, publisher and ISDN, a library or bookseller's catalog is also "publishing" the book.
Both are equally nonsense. Publishing is done by the publisher (the university in this case), not by someone who merely tells you where to find the publication.
This would be simple silliness if it weren't for the fact that organizations (companies and governments) have been known to file charges against web sites that merely link to some infringing material. Google and other search sites have been hit with this, and it's the basis of the bogus charges against piratebay. So we should be objecting publicly to the attempts to blur the distinction between actually publishing something and merely telling people where the publishers or distributors can be found.
So do Canadians make bad word-play jokes about "living in SIN" for when you're getting SI money? ;-)
All that Federal law does is ban the use of the social security card as ID.
And what do you think they do with your SSN? Right; they use it as one of their "secrets" to IDentify you.
Well, ok; some of them also want it as part of the ID information about you that they sell to other companies. But their primary excuse for wanting it is always so they can ask for the number (e.g. on the phone) to help verify that a caller is you.
It's rather ineffective as an ID number, of course, since anyone with access to the customer records of any company or school you've given it to could use the number to impersonate you. But still, asking you for it to verify who you claim to be is called "identification", and they're using your SSN as an ID number, which is a violation of federal law unless they're dealing with Social Security information.
You won't go to jail for not giving them your SSN.
Yeah, you're right. But you probably won't go to college there, either.
That's the problem with a lot of setups like this. Yes, you have a right to privacy. But they also have a right to not let you on their private property if you don't hand over the information they want.
We see this pointed out on /. all the time. The most common is the auto example: You don't have to hand over information like SSN to get a driver's license. But they also don't have to give you a driver's license. In the state I live in (which one isn't relevant here since lots have done this) the US government cracked down a few years back and ordered them to stop using SSNs as part of the driver's license number. Before this, mere citizens couldn't refuse to tell them the SSN, because this would mean that you couldn't legally drive in the state (or in any other, actually).
Ultimately, this sort of "forced" giving up of ID numbers is the reason we're having more and more problems with identity theft. Nearly anything you want to do to live normally in society requires that you give your id number to lots of organizations, who keep it in insecure computer systems. We're reaching the point that all the numbers needed for me to pretend I'm you are available for a reasonable price from lots of corporations, because you've "voluntarily" given them your numbers (and they've shared them with each other).
Now while our algorithms might be getting better our programmers definitely are not.
Sometimes this is intentional. One of the more fun software competitions I've run across is to write the slowest sorting algorithm. Trivial programming tricks such as do-nothing loops that just run a counter to use time disqualify you, obviously. The judging is solely on the algorithm, by comparing the O(N) functions. One of the winners in the early years was a sort that generated a random permutation of the data, and tested it for sortedness, repeating if it wasn't sorted. And it turns out that there are several progressively worse variants of this, depending on how ridiculous your random-permutation algorithm is.
I should go find this contest again, and see what sorting atrocities they've come up with in the past couple years ...
(I did once read a suggestion that such contests not be widely publicised, out of fear that managers will find them and declare the winning algorithms the new company standards. ;-)
I actually saw a school application online that asked you to enter your SSN without a secure connection.
I've seen any number of people point out that US law forbids the use of the SSN for any purpose not related to the Social Security system. Unless the application is for a job at the school, requiring the SSN is almost certainly illegal.
Of course, the school's answer is the standard one: You don't have to supply your SSN, but we also don't have to accept your application. Lots of luck trying to get us to change this; by the time you've spent a few million dollars to appeal it all the way to the Supreme Court (where you'll probably win), you'll probably be retired and using your SSN to collect your Social Security checks.
Nah; we'll still have email for a long time. The only thing is that it'll be called by lots of different names. This is one of the standard marketing tricks to convince the suckers^Wcustomers that you have something new.
For example, SMS, IM, and their ilk are crippled, nonstandard implementations email, repackaged with a different name so you'll think they're something new. Intentionally not making them interoperate with existing email systems is further "proof" that they're not really email; they're something that spelled entirely differently. But that (and their character limit) is about the only material difference. And the fact that you have to pay a lot more for email that's not called "email".
It's one of the oldest propaganda tricks in the book. It's sorta like saying "We didn't kill him; we just Terminated him With Extreme Prejudice." (Remember that one?;-) If you make up a new name for something, people will often believe that you haven't done the something that you're not naming; you've done something else entirely new that isn't yet covered by and laws, rules, or regulations. (The people who used that TWEP euphemism still haven't been tried for their crimes.;-)
But back to email; if you have a good email package installed, you may find that it also knows how to talk to most of those nonstandard "not-email" message-passing systems. It's not all that different for a message package to have a set of modules that interface to different message systems, whatever they call themselves. It's all the same job; you just format the headers differently.
Except that sometimes you have to truncate messages, because some of the non-email email systems have byte-count limits. Not much you can do about that idiocy except complain.
You print out your application, check to see if it truncates, and fix it if it does. ...
That's easy enough if you know the font and font size they'll use. Does the application give that information? If not, how might an applicant learn the font name/size?
... this does give some indication as to why Nancy Pelosi makes so many people uneasy ...
I heard the same joke on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me a few weeks ago, except that the punch line was "That explains Mitt Romney". ;-)
I'd bet we could generate a list of dozens (hundreds?) of famous people that could be plugged into this joke.