Think about spam as being equivalent to pollution -- it's that an enterprise is able to shift its market burden to others. In the case of a polluting buisness, the government has to pay for clean up; in the case of a spammer, ISPs have to pay for more bandwidth, larger storage on their servers, and it wastes people's time; of course, the ISPs pass these expenses onto their customers, and the government pass it onto taxpayers. Both of these are fundementally unfair to the customers/taxpayers, and that's why the government needs to regulate it.
As I write this, our developers are switiching the entire site over to Mediawiki 1.5 (from 1.4), and most of the changes will make it run faster. So we're lowering the per-transaction cost of the software and increasing the server capacity -- this is a good thing.
. I doubt that neither allied or enemy soldiers would consent to having remotely readable GPS units attached to their person
Actually, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if US soldiers had GPS trackers on their person trasmitting their individual locations (all encrypted, of course) - it's the kind of thing that the people in HQ 30 miles away could use to direct a battle.
That's right, we got AIDS out there. You think they're gonna cure AIDS? No. They can't even cure athlete's foot. They ain't curing AIDS, shit. They ain't never curing AIDS. Don't even think about that shit. They ain't curing AIDS because there ain't no money in the cure. The money's in the medicine. That's how you get paid, on the cutback. That's how a drug dealer makes his money, on the cut-back. -- Chris Rock, Bigger and Blacker, 0:29:32-0:31:02
Suspension of disbelief... Suspension of disbelief...Suspension of disbelief... Suspension of disbelief...
Yes, FTL travel as we traditionally think of it (as opposed to using wormholes) is probably impossible. On the other hand, since most people *aren't* terribly well versed in the underlying relativistic mechanics necessarily to know this, it's not hard to suspend disbelief, and it makes for some good stories. When it takes 2,000 years to travel between stars, it makes it very hard to craft belivable Space Opera-type stories.
Umm... no. There's tons of money in a cure, thanks not only to the force of drug patents, but thanks also to funds set up specifically to grant big bucks to the first to find a cure. There is no cure for aids; there are treatments. And for the record, AZT (which was the first treatment for AIDS) was developed 20 years before the spread of AIDS to combat cancer (based on the now-disproven theory that cancer was caused by a virus).
Even the most optomistic AIDS researchers only hope that it can eventually become some kind of chronic thing, where you take a medicine for the rest of your life. (e.g., an anti-retroviaral against which HIV cannot adapt). Ditto for cancer. While everyone is looking, and we constantly hear about these magic bullets that can target cancer but leave everything else intact, the truth is that we have the same options against cancer that we have had for decades -- killing large numbers of cells (cancerous or not) using surgery, radiation, or chemcials.
I'm reminded of the Chris Rock sketch where he talks about doctors finding cures for diseases. He asks when was the last time you heard about doctors finding a cure for a disease. It's been a long time. Why? Because there isn't any money in the cure.
In my undergraduate electromagnetics class, the professor was adamant that he would never allow calculators on his exams, but he'd generiously allow anyone to use a slide rule (assuming we could find them and learn how to operate them).
"It might not be a bad idea to remind the WIPO of the origins of copyright law, as a limites-time monopoly in exchange for the creation and publication of new works"
Wrong. Copyright originated in England as a way for the Monarchy to break up the power of the printing guilds, who held author's works in perpetutity. As a side benefit, it was used to great effect to censor criticism of the monarchy.
(Speaking as a Wikipedia contributor) The fact that that discussion page, which exists only to help them destroy fair use rights, comes from my beloved Wikipedia --- well, it makes my skin crawl.
If you retroactively apply the privacy policy (which makes no mention of being retroactive), AND you ignore the fact that this user left before the policy was even formulated, then one user (out of 109) might have had his privacy violated by telling everybody his hash matched another user's. And this merits a slashdot front-page story?
Please show me where in the privacy policy it says that it was meant to be retroactive. The policy *does* say that: Where the user has been vandalising articles or persistently behaving in a disruptive way, data may be released to assist in the targeting of IP blocks, or to assist in the formulation of a complaint to relevant Internet Service Providers If this policy had existed in July when Tim made this list, things would have been much different. The list would, in all liklihood, have been sent to the arbitration committee (via the arbcom's private mailing list).
"That still doesn't excuse overly broad and public dragnets that will invariably catch some innocent people at the same time."
Would you care to identify a single innnocent person caught up in this? I thought not. I'll let you get back to your baseless inflammatory ranting now.
Yes, as a matter of fact, it *is* their fault. The people in question used sockpuppet accounts in order to cause harm to Wikipedia in all sorts of unpleasant ways (and then deny any connection to those accounts). Exposing them in the middle of their lies was sweet justice. This list would have never been published if they weren't doing this, as (just so we're clear) now that the cat's out of the bag, this trick won't be useful anymore.
My guess, since you seem so emotionally vested in this (judging by your multiple comments on this thread) is that you are one of the trolls in question. Of course, you already know this, so I'm just mentioning it for the other readers out there.
Amen, brother (--A member of the arbitration committee)
First, this was not a technical flaw - this was one developer intentionally looking for identical password hashes. Second, this is not news - the page in question was created last July as a one time thing to flush out trolls.
Why would we publish a list of account with identical passwords? Because certain trolls are known to register multiple accounts with the same password, and use them to troll, vote stuff, and all sorts of other unpleasant activities. Of course, many times, it is not hard to guess who those accounts belong to based on editing habits, but of course the trolls in question will deny it. But being matched by password was a one-time way to shoot through all their lies. This whole story is old, and the summery is horrible biased.
If you had bothered to check your facts, you would see that Tim Starling's list was made last July, well before the privacy policy was written. Also, the impetus for him doing this was to catch one particularly troublesome user who was known to use sockpuppets accounts like this all the time.
My friends and I were at the 12:05 AM showing. We saw 0 people dressed up for it. Talk about disappointed! What's the point of going to see starwars at 12:05 AM is you don't get to see/make fun of people dressed as imperial stormtroopers?
City dwellers tend to vote democratic. People in rural areas tend to vote republican. I don't mean any disrepect, but is that supposed to be a revalation?
Slashdot Mirror
Think about spam as being equivalent to pollution -- it's that an enterprise is able to shift its market burden to others. In the case of a polluting buisness, the government has to pay for clean up; in the case of a spammer, ISPs have to pay for more bandwidth, larger storage on their servers, and it wastes people's time; of course, the ISPs pass these expenses onto their customers, and the government pass it onto taxpayers. Both of these are fundementally unfair to the customers/taxpayers, and that's why the government needs to regulate it.
As I write this, our developers are switiching the entire site over to Mediawiki 1.5 (from 1.4), and most of the changes will make it run faster. So we're lowering the per-transaction cost of the software and increasing the server capacity -- this is a good thing.
. I doubt that neither allied or enemy soldiers would consent to having remotely readable GPS units attached to their person
Actually, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if US soldiers had GPS trackers on their person trasmitting their individual locations (all encrypted, of course) - it's the kind of thing that the people in HQ 30 miles away could use to direct a battle.
No, it had nothing to do with smallpox.
That's right, we got AIDS out there. You think they're gonna cure AIDS? No. They can't even cure athlete's foot. They ain't curing AIDS, shit. They ain't never curing AIDS. Don't even think about that shit. They ain't curing AIDS because there ain't no money in the cure. The money's in the medicine. That's how you get paid, on the cutback. That's how a drug dealer makes his money, on the cut-back. -- Chris Rock, Bigger and Blacker, 0:29:32-0:31:02
Suspension of disbelief... Suspension of disbelief...Suspension of disbelief... Suspension of disbelief...
Yes, FTL travel as we traditionally think of it (as opposed to using wormholes) is probably impossible. On the other hand, since most people *aren't* terribly well versed in the underlying relativistic mechanics necessarily to know this, it's not hard to suspend disbelief, and it makes for some good stories. When it takes 2,000 years to travel between stars, it makes it very hard to craft belivable Space Opera-type stories.
Umm... no. There's tons of money in a cure, thanks not only to the force of drug patents, but thanks also to funds set up specifically to grant big bucks to the first to find a cure. There is no cure for aids; there are treatments. And for the record, AZT (which was the first treatment for AIDS) was developed 20 years before the spread of AIDS to combat cancer (based on the now-disproven theory that cancer was caused by a virus).
Even the most optomistic AIDS researchers only hope that it can eventually become some kind of chronic thing, where you take a medicine for the rest of your life. (e.g., an anti-retroviaral against which HIV cannot adapt). Ditto for cancer. While everyone is looking, and we constantly hear about these magic bullets that can target cancer but leave everything else intact, the truth is that we have the same options against cancer that we have had for decades -- killing large numbers of cells (cancerous or not) using surgery, radiation, or chemcials.
I'm reminded of the Chris Rock sketch where he talks about doctors finding cures for diseases. He asks when was the last time you heard about doctors finding a cure for a disease. It's been a long time. Why? Because there isn't any money in the cure.
"Something to think about while the gov is pushing for prison for downloading Britney with one hand, while pushing for globalization with the other."
Going to prison for downloading Britney Spears? You make it sound as if that's a bad thing...
If you prove the antipiracy studies' use of bogus assumptions, the pirates WIN!
No no! The pirates are really a front for terrorists. For every pirated copy of Office/Windows/etc, Osama Bin Laden gets $10.
In my undergraduate electromagnetics class, the professor was adamant that he would never allow calculators on his exams, but he'd generiously allow anyone to use a slide rule (assuming we could find them and learn how to operate them).
"It might not be a bad idea to remind the WIPO of the origins of copyright law, as a limites-time monopoly in exchange for the creation and publication of new works"
Wrong. Copyright originated in England as a way for the Monarchy to break up the power of the printing guilds, who held author's works in perpetutity. As a side benefit, it was used to great effect to censor criticism of the monarchy.
"Why not just say no?"
Becase even if he's right, it'll *easily* cost him a million dollars to prove it. How much justice can he afford?
(Speaking as a Wikipedia contributor) The fact that that discussion page, which exists only to help them destroy fair use rights, comes from my beloved Wikipedia --- well, it makes my skin crawl.
If you retroactively apply the privacy policy (which makes no mention of being retroactive), AND you ignore the fact that this user left before the policy was even formulated, then one user (out of 109) might have had his privacy violated by telling everybody his hash matched another user's. And this merits a slashdot front-page story?
Please show me where in the privacy policy it says that it was meant to be retroactive. The policy *does* say that: Where the user has been vandalising articles or persistently behaving in a disruptive way, data may be released to assist in the targeting of IP blocks, or to assist in the formulation of a complaint to relevant Internet Service Providers If this policy had existed in July when Tim made this list, things would have been much different. The list would, in all liklihood, have been sent to the arbitration committee (via the arbcom's private mailing list).
"That still doesn't excuse overly broad and public dragnets that will invariably catch some innocent people at the same time."
Would you care to identify a single innnocent person caught up in this? I thought not. I'll let you get back to your baseless inflammatory ranting now.
Yes, as a matter of fact, it *is* their fault. The people in question used sockpuppet accounts in order to cause harm to Wikipedia in all sorts of unpleasant ways (and then deny any connection to those accounts). Exposing them in the middle of their lies was sweet justice. This list would have never been published if they weren't doing this, as (just so we're clear) now that the cat's out of the bag, this trick won't be useful anymore.
My guess, since you seem so emotionally vested in this (judging by your multiple comments on this thread) is that you are one of the trolls in question. Of course, you already know this, so I'm just mentioning it for the other readers out there.
Amen, brother (--A member of the arbitration committee)
First, this was not a technical flaw - this was one developer intentionally looking for identical password hashes. Second, this is not news - the page in question was created last July as a one time thing to flush out trolls.
Why would we publish a list of account with identical passwords? Because certain trolls are known to register multiple accounts with the same password, and use them to troll, vote stuff, and all sorts of other unpleasant activities. Of course, many times, it is not hard to guess who those accounts belong to based on editing habits, but of course the trolls in question will deny it. But being matched by password was a one-time way to shoot through all their lies. This whole story is old, and the summery is horrible biased.
If you had bothered to check your facts, you would see that Tim Starling's list was made last July, well before the privacy policy was written. Also, the impetus for him doing this was to catch one particularly troublesome user who was known to use sockpuppets accounts like this all the time.
My friends and I were at the 12:05 AM showing. We saw 0 people dressed up for it. Talk about disappointed! What's the point of going to see starwars at 12:05 AM is you don't get to see/make fun of people dressed as imperial stormtroopers?
"Oh no, the dead have risen and they're voting Republican." -- Lisa Simpson
I can't tell you when it started, but I can say that it was already going in the 50's
"I thought I'd have gotten a lot of 'it's crap if it's not built here,' attitude," he said.
Not to start a flamewar, but I'm told by someone knowledgable that IBM's not-built-here mindset is legendary, and second only to the US government.
City dwellers tend to vote democratic. People in rural areas tend to vote republican. I don't mean any disrepect, but is that supposed to be a revalation?