Sounds to me like they don't want anyone forking it. Read it again. The members can't fork the development. Non-members can. They're just trying to prevent the situation where, 5 years down the line, NTT says "thanks for all the hard work Google, but now that we've achieved brand loyalty, we're going to stop working on our competitor's OS." The idea is to make the cell phone OS a commodity and let cell phone makers focus on higher level features that will work on any phone.
Correct. Most of what's secret about Google's algorithm are the fine-tuning aspects. How much weight do they put on external links pointing to a site? How much on their random sampling of clicks from their searches? etc.
He said he was involved in creating the internet, which had already been created years before his "initiative". Ah... no. Try again.
In the early-to-mid 1980s when the Internet as we know it was evolving out of the ARPANet, Gore was on the floor of Congress yammering on about how this crazy new tech was going to be important, and the U.S. had to be there first. He argued for vastly more funding to the NSF than anyone thought the Internet needed (it's just some computer geeks linking research databases, right?) I remember reading about his efforts on Usenet back in the late 80s and wondering, "I know why this is important, but how they heck does a politician know?!" In the end, of course, it was more important than either the geeks or the politicians could have predicted.
Go read the Congressional Record for his speeches about the Internet. The funding for the development of all of those low-number RFCs like DNS and SMTP came from projects that Gore pushed as if he actually knew why they were important. Did he? I have no clue, but if I don't give props to the one politician to see the value in the Internet from the start, I'll never convince any politician that doing right by technology is going to help their careers. We have enough of the, "the Senator from Disney," types already, and I'd rather not have more.
If your electronic mail is not encrypted, then one might argue that it is unreasonable to expect privacy. Ah, but if the ISPs succeed in excluding non-ISP mail traffic in the name of preventing spam, and don't do TLS encryption because it presents more load to their servers, then you're forced into a world where that expectation of privacy is stripped from you.
I don't take extraordinary measures to hide my mail. I just put it in an envelope which anyone could open, but the feds still need a warrant to open it. My phone voice traffic is routed over IP unencrypted, but it's still against the law to tap it without a warrant.
Now ask yourself if getting paid $5 to steal Mrs. Smith's gradebook and change a grade is worth 20 years in jail. Does it become worth a longer sentence if you have to be smarter to accomplish the same task?
As others have stated before me, its really not the act of changing the grades thats so bad. Its the methods employed in doing so. Yes, and the methods employed involved breaking into the school's computer. It's no different from picking the lock on the school teacher's desk drawer, and I can't see anyone getting out the pitchforks and torches over that either. Sure, it's a crime. Sure, you make an example of the kids because they tried to make money off of this. No, you do not trash their lives over the mistake.
Alarmist? Here's what he said:
What is important in this case is not the ultimate resolution of that narrow issue, but the position that the United States government is taking on the entire issue of electronic privacy. That position, if accepted, may mean that the government can read anybody's e-mail at any time without a warrant. This seems to be a fairly reasonable assessment of the situation. The assertion in this case is that electronic mail has no reasonable expectation of privacy. If that's upheld, then the 4th amendment doesn't apply.
Your comment about "followers" of Security Focus is way off base. Outside of the world of artificially constructed arguments on TV, people aren't "followers" of news outlets. We are readers or subscribers or viewers, but we're not "followers." You might want to re-evaluate how you select and scrutinize your news.
PS: I'll note that I've been saying for years that it's imperative for stand-alone personal MTAs to remain viable, and this is why. Routine, passive end-to-end encryption is the way that we make this impractical.
First off, Schneier for President! Seriously, we could do much worse than hiring someone for the job that has spent his entire life understanding risk assessment.
Second, I don't think your idea works. The planes that hit NY (ignoring the one that hit the Pentagon, which no one seems to talk about, but was in many ways a more strategically sound target), killed 3000 people. You're talking about a mere 100 or so. Order of magnitude less bang for the buck.
This is why targets like the Golden Gate Bridge have been attempted in the past. They have not only a large number of people, but represent a significant symbolic target.
Importance is not dictated by the number of people who listen. Extremely important information and opinions can go unheard. Free speech protection and various rights, privileges, and related laws help ensure opinions are not silenced. Let's get our Bill of Rights freedom's straight, here. We're talking about freedom of the press, not speech. The press and everyone else is free to speak (or publish that speech) however they like within the constraints that the rest of the constitution explicitly and implicitly imposes, but the fact that we single out freedom of the press means that we value the press as an entity within our society.
What does that mean?
It means that you can't go around telling newspapers and other "press" what they can print, and by extension (here's where it's not the same as speech), they must be given access to information as a proxy for the people to whom they report. A blogger who is widely read is a reporter in this sense, but it may take us a decade or two to get that understanding moved through the courts. That's not all bad. Ultimately, these protections guarantee that the people are informed without having to invite everyone into the press room at the white house, or (perhaps more importantly), without allowing everyone to bring a camcorder into the State of the Union speech.
That's why I use windows. So I don't have to wonder who the culprit is Oh? Then you've never been caught in the "it's the graphics driver, no it's the motherboard, no it's the OS, no it's the graphics driver," loop.
Comcast is really pissing me off. But what's my other option: Qwest DSL. Thankfully, I had RCN as an option. I pay them $20 extra per month for a static IP and run my home Web server and mail gateway there. I've never had a problem downloading Ubuntu or Fedora distributions with BitTorrent; Web traffic incoming or outgoing; or... well, anything.
Call your city. Ask them to re-evaluate Comcast as the local Cable provider or do what my town did: offer RCN as a competing provider.
I agree, this is a non-story really. I disagree. This is a non-story to non-geeks. For the rest of us, the impact of language-specific heuristics for search weighting is very interesting. We would like to think that relevance can be assessed by looking at the structure of the Web, but as these results show, that may not be true... then again, there may be other, less technical reasons for regional success. It's an interesting thing, and IMHO, only someone who looks at this as a mainstream headline would not be intrigued.
Please try to stop letting your idealogical position getting in the way of facts.
From the ACLU:
This program is commonly known as "extraordinary rendition."
The current policy traces its roots to the administration of former President Bill Clinton.
I'd suggest that you do the same. Re-read what you quoted. The phrase, "traces its roots" is key here.
Rendition was the practice of extraditing non-U.S. citizens to their countries of origin for interrogation. It was a questionable policy and one of Clinton's gravest policy mistakes IMHO, but nothing like extraordinary rendition which expands the program to exporting anyone we feel like to any destination country we think will torture them sufficiently.
The controversy arose when it became clear that we were exporting prisoners of war to Syria, Egypt and anyone else that was willing to wield a cattle-prod in our name. As someone who grew up liberal but has become increasingly conservative as I grow older, I find the defense of this practice by Republicans who don't want to break ranks with the President to be abhorrent. This is a violation of what the Republican party used to stand for, and Bush et al. should be jettisoned from the party for it. Not everything that a Republican administration does should be beyond the reproach of the party.
Right. But because the proceedings of this secret court are closed, the public can't really know whether a particular warrant was, in fact, issued "upon probable cause," unlike in an ordinary court. There's no oversight, so how would anyone involved be prosecuted for perjury? Once again, you're looking at the wrong end of the process. When a warrant is issued by a secret court, you don't go to jail. You go to jail when a jury of your peers hears the case, and your defense attorney is more than welcome to ask what probable cause lead to the evidence gathered against you.
Oversight of FISA itself is performed by the U.S. Congress. If that's not sufficient oversight for you, then I'd suggest you come up with a way that the NSA and FBI can reasonably perform surveillance on suspected criminals (in the NSA's case, foreign threats, acting in the U.S. and in the FBI's case mostly domestic criminals). I don't think it's reasonable to simply say that there should never be wiretaps, since they are an important tool of criminal justice.
The big problem is that the current administration thinks that in most cases it would be OK to circumvent the FISA court.
My GP insists that my CTS has nothing to do with my years of computer use, and that in fact it will be good post-op physio. This seems reasonable. I've always thought that it seemed odd that, of the dozens of geeks that I know of who type constantly, only a small fraction develop RSI or CTS, and yet we blame it on the typing. I think it's more reasonable to blame it on the fact that not all humans are well suited to typing.
Actually (though I realize you're being sarcastic), GNU/Linux is inappropriate here.
Linspire calls itself a Linux distribution. If they wanted to call themselves a Frobnitzer distribution, that's their call. Debian calls themselves GNU/Linux. That's fine too. Names are the domain of the namer, not the public at large, nor even RMS. Some folks seem to think that naming is some sort of credit-giving game. It's not, unless the namer feels that it should be. Again, their call. I prefer to think of my OS as "AT&T / Bell Labs Unix derivative soup," but no one seems to like that one.
When I say it works is because we've done it. In fact you can buy this as a commercial service Oh, there are plenty of commercial services that do this. They're all wrong, however. The benefit that they have is that they tend to come up with results that, for the most part, agree with each other, so the incorrectness of their results have become accepted degrees of inaccuracy.
That doesn't make them true, however, and the two examples that I gave pretty concretely prove that.
Re:Not Any Time Soon
on
Cracking Go
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Playing Go is more than just searching a lot of positions. The game is _very_ subtle. This is provably incorrect. Searching a lot of positions gets you a solution to the game. The problem is that "a lot" is defined as 10^60, which though it looks like a nice, friendly number isn't even remotely manageable. To give you a sense, the current U.S. national debt is around 9 trillion dollars. That's on the order of 10^12. That's a huge number, but the number of go positions is 1,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000,000, 000,000 times larger than that!
This is an incomprehensibly large number, and the evaluation of each position alone is not trivial.
Trust me when I say that it's near impossible to get even a passable degree of accuracy.
This is assuming you try to ID the location from a single place. If you probe the IP from ten different geographic locations you can get within 100 miles of the actual destination and quite often a lot closer than that. Just two data-points for you to consider:
1) Many multinational corporations have points of presence for their Internet access in one or a small number of countries, shunting users to those countries from their satellite offices. That means that that hit from Thailand could easily be originating in Australia.
2) Many dialup users in the EU, South America and Africa cross national boundaries between the dialup POP that they use and the point of presence that they appear to originate from.
That's just two examples off the top of my head, but pretty much blows any attempt to map the net out of the water. Multinationals account for a huge fraction of the business users out there. Similarly, countries in which users might use an ISP that's not POPed in their country are all over the globe.
Penn & Teller's "Bullshit" [...] "Mythbusters" [...] I like both shows, but really they are no more trustworthy than TV wrestling.
Urm... no.
TV Wrestling (the WWF sort) is mock-combat in which the actors pretend to fight, but are actually just performing a series of well-rehearsed stunts. This is the sort of lie that we accept because it is presented as entertainment.
Exactly like PTB, in which every interview is staged, every presentation edited, and every data point carefully selected to eliminate any semblance of a valid opposition viewpoint.
Point 1: staged... well, yes, there's a stage involved in many such interviews. What's you're point. Do you mean that the interviews aren't impromptu events with people they just happened upon? I guess you're right, but I'm not sure I see a point.
Point 2: edited... You're out on a deep limb here. Major network news, tabloid gossip shows and everyone in between edits interviews into the ground. They re-shoot all of the questions on a stage with an actor filling in for the "stunt head". This is almost always the way everyone shoots interviews. You can't call P&T:B dishonest for doing this alone. Now, if you want to throw rocks at the practice as a whole and start with the big boys, then I'm 100% behind you!
Point 3: carefully selected data... what part of my previous post did you not read such that this seemed like a unique point? It's a political show about Penn Jillette's political ideas. It's not a news show. Of course, he's picking the points he wishes to introduce carefully. Why would he not?
P&T's Bullshit! is an advocacy show that attempts to promote Penn Jillette's arguably libertarian political and social ideas. It's honest about what it presents, and has never sought to present itself as news or anything of the sort.
Although everything Penn Gillette is involved in does serve as a vehicle for his oil-industry sponsored right-wing views
HUH WHAT?
Penn Jillette is right wing now?! He'll be shocked!
You're really losing me here. This man is more libertarian than anyone I've ever met. I'd also love to see a source for your funding claims.
Mythbusters is a reality show of sorts about a group of technical, but scientifically relatively untrained people attempting to validate or debunk urban legends. Again, the show has never pretended to be anything that it isn't, and for the most part they get their mythbusting right. Occasionally they take on a topic that has more hidden complexity than they realize (I recall frozen chickens hitting windshields being an example), but they certainly know more about basic engineering and physics than their average viewer.
Which is the problem, in a nutshell. They make an entertaining show, but unless you know more than they do about engineering, physics, and history than they do (which actually isn't too hard - they mostly know about machining and crafting) you should assume that anything you see on their show has the same validity as TV wrestling.
Here you go again with the absurd hyperbole. How can you even suggest that you could compare the two? There's orders of magnitude more CORRECT information delivered in one episode of Mythbusters than in a season of Pro Westling, and let's not talk about the amount of outright FICTION in a single episode of such a spectacle (in which you are routinely asked to believe that Newtonian Physics is suspended by the application of an elastic rope). This is beyond meaningless as a comparison.
Mythbusters is no Scientific American Frontiers, but they do a damned good job.
You seem to have some serious hangups about TV science and politics. I suggest you take a deep breath and remember that a) people who disagree with you are allowed to have TV shows too b) people who get a lot of s
I've worked on trying to identify geographical locations based on IP, reverse mapping, and a number of other measures. Trust me when I say that it's near impossible to get even a passable degree of accuracy. DIMES does the best they can with what they have, but I would not put too much stock in it.
I did too, but I didn't remember it very well. Here in New England we had a show called Creature Double Feature that was just a Saturday afternoon double movie on a UHF station that was usually a 1950s-1970s horror or scifi lineup. It showed a lot of stuff like that, and they all started to blend together at some point.
Penn & Teller's "Bullshit" [...] "Mythbusters" [...] I like both shows, but really they are no more trustworthy than TV wrestling. Urm... no.
TV Wrestling (the WWF sort) is mock-combat in which the actors pretend to fight, but are actually just performing a series of well-rehearsed stunts. This is the sort of lie that we accept because it is presented as entertainment.
P&T's Bullshit! is an advocacy show that attempts to promote Penn Jillette's arguably libertarian political and social ideas. It's honest about what it presents, and has never sought to present itself as news or anything of the sort.
Mythbusters is a reality show of sorts about a group of technical, but scientifically relatively untrained people attempting to validate or debunk urban legends. Again, the show has never pretended to be anything that it isn't, and for the most part they get their mythbusting right. Occasionally they take on a topic that has more hidden complexity than they realize (I recall frozen chickens hitting windshields being an example), but they certainly know more about basic engineering and physics than their average viewer.
It seems to me that Randi, despite being overhyped and rather entertaining, is more than just a sideshow; he's actually willing to rigorously apply the scientific method and he allows his detractors the opportunity to try to prove their claims. I'd generally agree with this.
My college buddy's ferret [...] became super-intelligent and built an interociter [...] Glad to see MST3K isn't dead. Speaking of which, have any of the Film Crew DVDs been any better than the first one (which made myself and my co-workers want to claw our own eyes out)?
Slashdot Mirror
Correct. Most of what's secret about Google's algorithm are the fine-tuning aspects. How much weight do they put on external links pointing to a site? How much on their random sampling of clicks from their searches? etc.
In the early-to-mid 1980s when the Internet as we know it was evolving out of the ARPANet, Gore was on the floor of Congress yammering on about how this crazy new tech was going to be important, and the U.S. had to be there first. He argued for vastly more funding to the NSF than anyone thought the Internet needed (it's just some computer geeks linking research databases, right?) I remember reading about his efforts on Usenet back in the late 80s and wondering, "I know why this is important, but how they heck does a politician know?!" In the end, of course, it was more important than either the geeks or the politicians could have predicted.
Go read the Congressional Record for his speeches about the Internet. The funding for the development of all of those low-number RFCs like DNS and SMTP came from projects that Gore pushed as if he actually knew why they were important. Did he? I have no clue, but if I don't give props to the one politician to see the value in the Internet from the start, I'll never convince any politician that doing right by technology is going to help their careers. We have enough of the, "the Senator from Disney," types already, and I'd rather not have more.
I don't take extraordinary measures to hide my mail. I just put it in an envelope which anyone could open, but the feds still need a warrant to open it. My phone voice traffic is routed over IP unencrypted, but it's still against the law to tap it without a warrant.
What makes email unique?
As others have stated before me, its really not the act of changing the grades thats so bad. Its the methods employed in doing so. Yes, and the methods employed involved breaking into the school's computer. It's no different from picking the lock on the school teacher's desk drawer, and I can't see anyone getting out the pitchforks and torches over that either. Sure, it's a crime. Sure, you make an example of the kids because they tried to make money off of this. No, you do not trash their lives over the mistake.
Crime + computer != worse crime
Your comment about "followers" of Security Focus is way off base. Outside of the world of artificially constructed arguments on TV, people aren't "followers" of news outlets. We are readers or subscribers or viewers, but we're not "followers." You might want to re-evaluate how you select and scrutinize your news.
PS: I'll note that I've been saying for years that it's imperative for stand-alone personal MTAs to remain viable, and this is why. Routine, passive end-to-end encryption is the way that we make this impractical.
First off, Schneier for President! Seriously, we could do much worse than hiring someone for the job that has spent his entire life understanding risk assessment.
Second, I don't think your idea works. The planes that hit NY (ignoring the one that hit the Pentagon, which no one seems to talk about, but was in many ways a more strategically sound target), killed 3000 people. You're talking about a mere 100 or so. Order of magnitude less bang for the buck.
This is why targets like the Golden Gate Bridge have been attempted in the past. They have not only a large number of people, but represent a significant symbolic target.
What does that mean?
It means that you can't go around telling newspapers and other "press" what they can print, and by extension (here's where it's not the same as speech), they must be given access to information as a proxy for the people to whom they report. A blogger who is widely read is a reporter in this sense, but it may take us a decade or two to get that understanding moved through the courts. That's not all bad. Ultimately, these protections guarantee that the people are informed without having to invite everyone into the press room at the white house, or (perhaps more importantly), without allowing everyone to bring a camcorder into the State of the Union speech.
Call your city. Ask them to re-evaluate Comcast as the local Cable provider or do what my town did: offer RCN as a competing provider.
Further detail should it interest you: http://markey.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3136&Itemid=55
From the ACLU: I'd suggest that you do the same. Re-read what you quoted. The phrase, "traces its roots" is key here.
Rendition was the practice of extraditing non-U.S. citizens to their countries of origin for interrogation. It was a questionable policy and one of Clinton's gravest policy mistakes IMHO, but nothing like extraordinary rendition which expands the program to exporting anyone we feel like to any destination country we think will torture them sufficiently.
The controversy arose when it became clear that we were exporting prisoners of war to Syria, Egypt and anyone else that was willing to wield a cattle-prod in our name. As someone who grew up liberal but has become increasingly conservative as I grow older, I find the defense of this practice by Republicans who don't want to break ranks with the President to be abhorrent. This is a violation of what the Republican party used to stand for, and Bush et al. should be jettisoned from the party for it. Not everything that a Republican administration does should be beyond the reproach of the party.
Oversight of FISA itself is performed by the U.S. Congress. If that's not sufficient oversight for you, then I'd suggest you come up with a way that the NSA and FBI can reasonably perform surveillance on suspected criminals (in the NSA's case, foreign threats, acting in the U.S. and in the FBI's case mostly domestic criminals). I don't think it's reasonable to simply say that there should never be wiretaps, since they are an important tool of criminal justice.
The big problem is that the current administration thinks that in most cases it would be OK to circumvent the FISA court.
Actually (though I realize you're being sarcastic), GNU/Linux is inappropriate here.
Linspire calls itself a Linux distribution. If they wanted to call themselves a Frobnitzer distribution, that's their call. Debian calls themselves GNU/Linux. That's fine too. Names are the domain of the namer, not the public at large, nor even RMS. Some folks seem to think that naming is some sort of credit-giving game. It's not, unless the namer feels that it should be. Again, their call. I prefer to think of my OS as "AT&T / Bell Labs Unix derivative soup," but no one seems to like that one.
That doesn't make them true, however, and the two examples that I gave pretty concretely prove that.
This is an incomprehensibly large number, and the evaluation of each position alone is not trivial.
This is assuming you try to ID the location from a single place. If you probe the IP from ten different geographic locations you can get within 100 miles of the actual destination and quite often a lot closer than that. Just two data-points for you to consider:
1) Many multinational corporations have points of presence for their Internet access in one or a small number of countries, shunting users to those countries from their satellite offices. That means that that hit from Thailand could easily be originating in Australia.
2) Many dialup users in the EU, South America and Africa cross national boundaries between the dialup POP that they use and the point of presence that they appear to originate from.
That's just two examples off the top of my head, but pretty much blows any attempt to map the net out of the water. Multinationals account for a huge fraction of the business users out there. Similarly, countries in which users might use an ISP that's not POPed in their country are all over the globe.
Penn & Teller's "Bullshit" [...] "Mythbusters" [...] I like both shows, but really they are no more trustworthy than TV wrestling.
Urm... no.
TV Wrestling (the WWF sort) is mock-combat in which the actors pretend to fight, but are actually just performing a series of well-rehearsed stunts. This is the sort of lie that we accept because it is presented as entertainment.
Exactly like PTB, in which every interview is staged, every presentation edited, and every data point carefully selected to eliminate any semblance of a valid opposition viewpoint.
Point 1: staged... well, yes, there's a stage involved in many such interviews. What's you're point. Do you mean that the interviews aren't impromptu events with people they just happened upon? I guess you're right, but I'm not sure I see a point.
Point 2: edited... You're out on a deep limb here. Major network news, tabloid gossip shows and everyone in between edits interviews into the ground. They re-shoot all of the questions on a stage with an actor filling in for the "stunt head". This is almost always the way everyone shoots interviews. You can't call P&T:B dishonest for doing this alone. Now, if you want to throw rocks at the practice as a whole and start with the big boys, then I'm 100% behind you!
Point 3: carefully selected data... what part of my previous post did you not read such that this seemed like a unique point? It's a political show about Penn Jillette's political ideas. It's not a news show. Of course, he's picking the points he wishes to introduce carefully. Why would he not?
P&T's Bullshit! is an advocacy show that attempts to promote Penn Jillette's arguably libertarian political and social ideas. It's honest about what it presents, and has never sought to present itself as news or anything of the sort.
Although everything Penn Gillette is involved in does serve as a vehicle for his oil-industry sponsored right-wing views
HUH WHAT?
Penn Jillette is right wing now?! He'll be shocked!
You're really losing me here. This man is more libertarian than anyone I've ever met. I'd also love to see a source for your funding claims.
Mythbusters is a reality show of sorts about a group of technical, but scientifically relatively untrained people attempting to validate or debunk urban legends. Again, the show has never pretended to be anything that it isn't, and for the most part they get their mythbusting right. Occasionally they take on a topic that has more hidden complexity than they realize (I recall frozen chickens hitting windshields being an example), but they certainly know more about basic engineering and physics than their average viewer.
Which is the problem, in a nutshell. They make an entertaining show, but unless you know more than they do about engineering, physics, and history than they do (which actually isn't too hard - they mostly know about machining and crafting) you should assume that anything you see on their show has the same validity as TV wrestling.
Here you go again with the absurd hyperbole. How can you even suggest that you could compare the two? There's orders of magnitude more CORRECT information delivered in one episode of Mythbusters than in a season of Pro Westling, and let's not talk about the amount of outright FICTION in a single episode of such a spectacle (in which you are routinely asked to believe that Newtonian Physics is suspended by the application of an elastic rope). This is beyond meaningless as a comparison.
Mythbusters is no Scientific American Frontiers, but they do a damned good job.
You seem to have some serious hangups about TV science and politics. I suggest you take a deep breath and remember that a) people who disagree with you are allowed to have TV shows too b) people who get a lot of s
I've worked on trying to identify geographical locations based on IP, reverse mapping, and a number of other measures. Trust me when I say that it's near impossible to get even a passable degree of accuracy. DIMES does the best they can with what they have, but I would not put too much stock in it.
I did too, but I didn't remember it very well. Here in New England we had a show called Creature Double Feature that was just a Saturday afternoon double movie on a UHF station that was usually a 1950s-1970s horror or scifi lineup. It showed a lot of stuff like that, and they all started to blend together at some point.
TV Wrestling (the WWF sort) is mock-combat in which the actors pretend to fight, but are actually just performing a series of well-rehearsed stunts. This is the sort of lie that we accept because it is presented as entertainment.
P&T's Bullshit! is an advocacy show that attempts to promote Penn Jillette's arguably libertarian political and social ideas. It's honest about what it presents, and has never sought to present itself as news or anything of the sort.
Mythbusters is a reality show of sorts about a group of technical, but scientifically relatively untrained people attempting to validate or debunk urban legends. Again, the show has never pretended to be anything that it isn't, and for the most part they get their mythbusting right. Occasionally they take on a topic that has more hidden complexity than they realize (I recall frozen chickens hitting windshields being an example), but they certainly know more about basic engineering and physics than their average viewer. It seems to me that Randi, despite being overhyped and rather entertaining, is more than just a sideshow; he's actually willing to rigorously apply the scientific method and he allows his detractors the opportunity to try to prove their claims. I'd generally agree with this.
Note to moderators: just because someone else gave a Wikipedia link doesn't make everything I had to say redundant....