Given that, and the parental "obligation" to give the best they can for their children, doesn't that obligation extend to making sure they're as smart/strong/ueber as possible?
So what makes the uberkinder? You want your kid to be really tall, after all we know that bigger is better and it's been shown that tall men get the women, never mind that tall men don't live as long. You want your kid to be well-behaved, never mind what links there might be between independent and creative thought and non-conformity.
Even if we assume parents will usually make good decisions in these matters, where it really gets ugly is when the state decides what constitutes the master race.
I think the best uses of this would be to eliminate genetic traits that we can all agree are undesirable - I think it would be good if my (purely hypothetical) children didn't have to have the sort of orthodontic work I did, or have my high cholesterol. But I'm not at all sure I would interevene to make them taller, or smarter.
What I really look forward to is complete physical and genetic modification of exisiting persons - get some heavy-duty nanotech and gene therapy going and let me choose for myself how tall and how smart I want to be. That's much further off.
This sounds perfectly logical to me. You cant watch TV, surf a page drive down the street etc. without getting spammed. Why should cell phones be any different.
Did you ever stop to think that life might be nicer if you could watch TV, surf, drive down the street, etcetera, without being spammed?
We will just mentally tune the cell ads out just like we do on television. Hopefully lower prices will be the end result.
In the big picture, advertising does not lower prices.
Let's look at an example. Say you've got one of these cellphones with targeted advertising and discount net access. You're walking by the candy aisle of the supermarket when it lights up with an ad for M & Ms, which you happen to see.
Now, before you saw that ad, you didn't want M & Ms - if you did, they'd already be in your cart, right? You know that they'll help rot your teeth, raise your blood sugar, and add to that spare tire around your middle. But now you have been influenced by that ad, you figure the sweet, sweet taste of chocolate is worth it. The M & Ms go into the shopping cart.
("But I don't let ads influence me!" you cry. That's what they all say, chief, and yet advertising is effective. It's influencing somebody.)
Up at the cashier, you pay for your junk food. And included in the price is a markup that's part of the Mars corporations advertising budget - you just paid for part of your phone's net access.
But you'll be paying more, of course: at the dentist's office, to treat the cavity that you wouldn't have gotten if you hadn't bought those M & Ms -and you wouldn't have bought them without the ad on your cell phone.
Let's get it straight, my friends: 90 percent of advertising wants to influence you into making unhealthy and wasteful choices. It is your enemy.
Think I'm parnoid? Read a few issues of Adbusters to find out what really goes on in the world of advertising, then decide if exposing yourself to more ads is really a good idea.
Pretty language, but what is he saying that he couldn't say in two sentences?
I'll bet you're a lot of fun when people read Hamlet : "Dude, what's all this `To be or not to be' speech? What can't he just say, `Maybe I'll kill myself, but maybe not, 'cause I'm kinda scared of dying.'"
Yes, brevity and consise expression have their place. But so to detail, metaphor, and simile.
we wouldn't want the producers to know anything about the consumers would we? After all, they might try to sell us stuff we're interested in. If you're already interested in it, odds are good you already know about it and don't need advertising. The purpose of most advertising is to get you to buy stuff that you're not interested in.
"Doesn't work on me, I make up my own mind!" you shout. My friend, everyone says that advertising doesn't effect their decisions, but yet advertising does effect sales. Subtle indeed are the ways of manipulation; you can bet there's even a target demographic for "people who think they're too smart for advertising to affect them."
Do you want to empower those who wish to influence and manipulate you, or do you want to maintain your privacy and independence?
If I want you to sell me something, I'll tell you what I want, thank you very much, I don't need you snooping on me.
The person interviewed for the article states that they "don't filter everything." This means that they do filter something.... How is it that when this school filters it's OK, but when other institutions filter it's bad?
From the context, it's not at all clear that they do any filtering; they rely on supervision and teaching a sense of appropriate use. From the interview:
Clearly, porn is not allowed at Beacon, but we don't try to filter out every site. Rather than trying to filter everything, we really work to teach the kids what is and isn't appropriate for school. We also have supervision in the open labs, by both teachers and students, so that there is an expectation of appropriate use.
If they are doing any filtering, it would seem that they themselves are choosing a small set of sites to filter, rather than purchasing a large, flawed pre-packaged blocklist.
The article say that companies will be prohibited from registering their own names under such a domain, but how can that be enforced?
The same way any other law is, by armed agents of the state. (Duh.) You might recall how, near the start of.com mania, they busted people who tried to register things like mcdonalds.com; I see no problem in busting McDonalds is they try to register mcdonalds.sucks. OTOH, there's already mcspotlight.org.
It goes against some very basic laws that give a company the right to control what happens to its name (a la eToys).
The whole idea is to change those laws, and reserve space so that citizens can voice complaints about these companies.
Is it necessary? I don't know. I'm certainly sympathetic to the general idea, but I think restriciting domain squatting, multiple TLD registration, and trademark abuse would be the better solution.
And how difficult would it be for servers to implement on a technical level? I see it as no worse than the.com subdomain is already being successfully handled (for now, inagine as *.com with the.com simply dropped).
Seems like what your idea really maps to is a "null" TLD. Name servers would have to look at "apple.records" or "joe.apple",recognize them as "apple.records.null" and ""joe.apple.null", and query one of the the null root server. So we run right back into the hierarchical nature of the DNS: who owns (i.e., is responsible for name service for) records.null, or apple.null?
Sounds like you'd need to come up with a whole new name resolution paradigm - no easy task.
It's the Open Source Militia! Cool, where do I sign up?
"A well debugged code base, being necessary to the security of a free operating system, the right of the people to use and modify source code, shall not be infringed."
I have no stories that support the presence of physical pain or ones own death experienced in dreams.
I've died in dreams, and experieced pain as well. Higher up in the thread are about a dozen other posts from people who've died in dreams. I don't understand why there's such a mystique around it, it doesn't seem that uncommon.
I'm with you on all except HTML - so long as we're talking straight HTML sans scripting, objects, or applets, I don't see a danger in rendering simple text markup in e-mail messages.
Also, turning off Javascript turns off style sheets; that may or may not justify leaving it on, depending on your browsing habits. Javascript is, I belive, less of a risk than Java, and orders of magnitude less of a risk than ActiveX.
3. Never open any message unless you...
Know the person sending it
Expect the message
Good advice for attachments, but for plain text or HTML formatted (assuming scripting, objects, and applets off) e-mail messages there's no danger. Otherwise you're getting so paranoid that the net becomes useless.
6. Don't give out your email address unless it's REALLY NECESSARY.
Again, I think that's overly paranoid. I want people to be able to reach me: for/.ers to praise or flame my posts, for headhunters to talk to me about job opportunities after reading my resume, for beautiful women to read about me and fall lovingly at my feet (a man can dream, can't he?)
I take a few anti-spam precautions. My address above is given in a spam-proof fashion, and so is the one on my web site (interestingly, it appears that many spambots read only the text of the page and don't parse the contents of a "mailto" URL). When I do get spam, I usually send it to the appropriate postmasters and the account is revoked within hours. And I use slocal (part of MH) to filter incoming mail and autobounce a few rouge domains.(Although now that I'm running my own genuine domain instead of a forwarded virtual one, I can make sendmail do the work.)
I'd be surprised if they didn't get a few more customers from this.
I'd be surprised if they don't get their asses sued into total and complete bankruptcy over this, on top of any charges for computer crimes. (Actually, after reading the Wired article, this looks like a one-man operation - replace "they" with "he" in the sentance above.)
A whole host of specialized developements without military application. MRI, radiation therapy, Silly Putty, lay-flat binding, espresso. Wide ranging, not all practical exactly, but certainly not military.
And then the tech that the military wanted but couldn't put to a good use. You're looking at one of them. Hardly profound, but DARPAnet was originally a military project.
Actually, Silly Putty falls into that last category too. It was developed from military research into rubber substitutes.
One of the email programs that I use stores everything in a database file. Short of saving messages to files, one at a time, there is no way to extract the messages from the database.
Proprietary data formats are evil. Not only do they introduce the threat of software obsolecence, they prevent you from working with the information with any tools other than the creating software.
I use MH to handle my mail. I can use all the standard MH tools as well as nice front ends like exmh, and they give a reasonable amount of power; but better yet is that, since MH stores one message per file in a plain format, I can use find, grep, perl, emacs, and all our other friends to manage my messages. I write my documents and correspondance in HTML and/or LaTeX (often via LyX) for the same reason. If it's supposed to have written-language content and I can't grep it, it sucks.
Many of the earlyist mission datasets from the 60s and 70s are unrecoverable due to media degradation and format incompatibility.
...including, IIRC, a bunch of old Landsat data. "So what?" I hear you ask."If the data were important, it would have been accessed more often and ended up being transcribed and preserved."
Problem is, it's entirely possible for us to not understand the importance of a data collection for years. That old Landsat data would be a great baseline for information about global climate change.
I long ago gave up on the local daily paper (the Sun) not just because it's been surplanted by the Web and CNN but because it sucks. The lack of competition among local papers (Baltimore had three dailies when I was a kid) allowed quality to slide. While I'll pick one up if it's lying around, I haven't bought a copy in two or three years - I even forgot to pick one up when they had a big photo of me and an interview in their "Plugged In" section. (This was about the OLGA/Harry Fox Agency copyright battle.)
However, I find the local "alternative" weekly City Paper to be useful; local news, event calendars, etcetera. Unlike the daily, it's not full of sections I have no interest in (sports, travel, "society", and the like). And when I'm done reading, the dogs get to pee on it.
The future? I'd like to see customizable newpapers. Assuming better quality than today's dreck, I might subscribe if I could say "Send me the comics, world news headlines, local news, and don't bother burying me in dead trees for the rest - I don't give a damn who won the football game and I get my tech news from/. so don't bother with you wimpy little PC column. Oh, and something above an eighth grade reading level, please."
A word processor is intended to be easy to use and to give you an integrated environment to do fancy stuff with your text. If you want raw power, use TeX or LaTeX.
Why compromise when you can have both? Use LyX - its LaTeX engine is powerful enough to typeset a book, while its GUI is easy enough to fire off a quick letter. Its output files are human-readable, machine-searchable, and revision-controllable. (I think AbiWord uses XML and so would also qualify on these points.) And it's faster and lighter than your typical word processor because it doesn't try to implement the misguided notion of WYSIWYG.
My friends, it's time to stop using programs that turn your computer into a glorified typewriter. You need the power of a document typesetting system, you want the ease of use of a GUI interface, you can have it all - LyX.
I remember hearing that the planet was running out of fossil fuels faster than it was producing them. I also remember hear the inverse of that later on.
Putting aside some fringe theories about how the Earth is just naturally full of hydrocarbons, the planet's not producing a significant amount of fossil fuels now. You need to have lot of biomass trapped in sedimentary rock for a few million years to get coal, natural gas, or oil.
What is happening is that extraction techniques are becoming more extreme, both in the depth of drilling and in where we're willing to drill, so that we're extracting fossil fuels from previously inaccessable reserves.
Of course, even if fossil fuels were unlimited, they're not practical as fuels in the long term because of the greenhouse effect. Only fusion - directly from a reactor on Earth, or indirectly through sunlight into photovoltatics, weather phenomenea (wind, hydro, OTECs), or biomass - is a practical long-term energy source.
The basketball team helps support the school, the football team helps support the school...
While apologists for college athletics often make this claim, it's just not true. Almost every college has to charge students to fund athletic programs, because sports programs don't make money. Nor should they; it's long past time to stop using our colleges as minor leagues for football and basketball, damn it.
They have just as much a right to think such issues are important, as we think the issues are important in a different way....There's going to be a lot of different voices, and it is wrong to censor them because they are different.
Yes, everyone has the right to think that different issues are important. That doesn't mean they should be able to get them all on the ballot. You should not be able to get a bill to, say, make fundamentalist Zoroastrianism the state religion onto the ballot - not because Zoroastrian should be censored, but because establishment of religion is not within the legitimate powers of the government.
Neither is it within the rightful purview of the state to decide what its citizens - adults or children - may be permitted to see, hear, or read.
I call Javascript shenannagins on them
on
Full Moon
·
· Score: 1
Could we please shoot the designer of this site? (Whadda mean, Javascript abuse isn't a capital crime yet?)
The site's front page consists of a moon photo with a couple of blinking stars - no links, instructions, icons, or text other than "Full Moon". Neither the "Full Moon" text nor the large moon image are clickable. If you happen to guess that the stars aren't just GIF animations and move your mouse over one, link labels pop up. I hope no-one paid money for this, that it was done by someone's 14-year-old nephew who just read a book or two on HTML and Javascript; but I fear that a "professional" web designer charged lots of money for this travesty.
Arrgghh! It's worse than that! According to a comment in the source, it took two "professional" designers to create this mess.
Please, someone, tell me that this is somehow only because the site is slashdotted, that it's somehow better when not under load.
Some examples, perhaps, of what Brin may have been referring to are Elton John, Prince, Richard Branson, Judge Judy, Howard Stern, Ross Perot, the entire cast of the World Wrestling Federation, and anyone who's ever been on the Jerry Springer show.
Do we really want to mention these people in the same context as Bruno and Franklin? Ok, maybe I could accept Elton John and the Artist Formerly Known As, as possibly having some artistic merit. But the WWF? Jerry Springer?
While you might be eccentric, you probably aren't all that spectacularly flamboyant. Compare yourself to Emperor Norton Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico.
We asked Goddess if She, like God, had an Only Begotten Son. She assured us that She did and gave His name as Emperor Norton I - whom we assumed was probably some Byzantine ruler of Canstantinople. Dilligent research eventually turned up the historical Norton, as we call Him, in the holy city of San Francisco - where He walked his faithful dog along Market Street scarcely more than a century ago.
Gregory Hill has since become the world's foremost authority on Joshua A. Norton who, on September 17th of 1859, crowned Himself the Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico. Just before then, He vanished for a number of days - perhaps into the wilderness where maybe He was tempted by the Devil, probably to organize His life and get His affairs in order.
Certainly they looked like that's what they needed. For on the day before his disappearance Norton, heretofore little more than a successful businessman, cornered the rice market - only to be foiled by the unscheduled arrival of a whole shipload of rice from the Orient. A lesser man would have been thrown out of step by that event which for Him became a step to the throne.
When the U.S. Congress failed to obey His Majesty's Royal Order to assemble in the San Francisco Opera House, Norton fired every last member of that rebellious organization. Thus, the people of San Francisco knew better than to incute His Imperial wrath. His Royal Decrees were printed free of charge in the newspapers, the currency He issued was accepted in the saloons, local shopkeepers paid the modest taxes He occasionally demanded and on at least one occasion a tailor furnished Him with a new set of Royal finery.
Although a madman, Norton wrote letters to Abraham Lincoln and Queen Victoria which they took seriously.
One night a gang of vigilantes gathered for a pogrom against San Francisco's Chinatown. All that stood in their way was the solitary figure of Norton. A sane man would not have been there in the first place. A rational man would have tried to reason with them. A moralist would have scolded them. A man as daft as Norton usually seemd would have loudly ordered them to cease and desist in the name of His Royal Imperial authority. All such tacks would probably have been futile, and Norton resorted to none of them.
He simply bowed His head in silent prayer.
The vigilantes dispersed.
Discordians believe everybody should live like Norton.
I want to make up a bunch of bumper stickers and tee-shirts reading "What Would Emperor Norton Do?"
"born-again" Christians...
I did not know of this. Are you referring to Bush and Gore?
Yep. Gore's been a little more subtle about it, but I saw an interview where he was directly asked if he was "born-again" and answered affirmatively. And Bush stated "When you turn your heart and your life over to Christ, when you accept Christ as the Savior, it changes your heart. It changes your life. And that's what happened to me." (Or, as Maureen Dowd put it: "Translation: You're either in the Christ club or out of it, on the J.C. team or off. This is the same exclusionary attitude, so offensive to those with different beliefs, that he showed in 1993 when he said that you must believe in Jesus Christ to enter heaven. (Mr. Bush has since conceded that only 'God decides who goes to heaven, not George W. Bush.')")
Slashdot Mirror
Even if we assume parents will usually make good decisions in these matters, where it really gets ugly is when the state decides what constitutes the master race.
I think the best uses of this would be to eliminate genetic traits that we can all agree are undesirable - I think it would be good if my (purely hypothetical) children didn't have to have the sort of orthodontic work I did, or have my high cholesterol. But I'm not at all sure I would interevene to make them taller, or smarter.
What I really look forward to is complete physical and genetic modification of exisiting persons - get some heavy-duty nanotech and gene therapy going and let me choose for myself how tall and how smart I want to be. That's much further off.
Let's look at an example. Say you've got one of these cellphones with targeted advertising and discount net access. You're walking by the candy aisle of the supermarket when it lights up with an ad for M & Ms, which you happen to see.
Now, before you saw that ad, you didn't want M & Ms - if you did, they'd already be in your cart, right? You know that they'll help rot your teeth, raise your blood sugar, and add to that spare tire around your middle. But now you have been influenced by that ad, you figure the sweet, sweet taste of chocolate is worth it. The M & Ms go into the shopping cart.
("But I don't let ads influence me!" you cry. That's what they all say, chief, and yet advertising is effective. It's influencing somebody.)
Up at the cashier, you pay for your junk food. And included in the price is a markup that's part of the Mars corporations advertising budget - you just paid for part of your phone's net access.
But you'll be paying more, of course: at the dentist's office, to treat the cavity that you wouldn't have gotten if you hadn't bought those M & Ms -and you wouldn't have bought them without the ad on your cell phone.
Let's get it straight, my friends: 90 percent of advertising wants to influence you into making unhealthy and wasteful choices. It is your enemy.
Think I'm parnoid? Read a few issues of Adbusters to find out what really goes on in the world of advertising, then decide if exposing yourself to more ads is really a good idea.
Yes, brevity and consise expression have their place. But so to detail, metaphor, and simile.
"Doesn't work on me, I make up my own mind!" you shout. My friend, everyone says that advertising doesn't effect their decisions, but yet advertising does effect sales. Subtle indeed are the ways of manipulation; you can bet there's even a target demographic for "people who think they're too smart for advertising to affect them."
Do you want to empower those who wish to influence and manipulate you, or do you want to maintain your privacy and independence?
If I want you to sell me something, I'll tell you what I want, thank you very much, I don't need you snooping on me.
If they are doing any filtering, it would seem that they themselves are choosing a small set of sites to filter, rather than purchasing a large, flawed pre-packaged blocklist.
Is it necessary? I don't know. I'm certainly sympathetic to the general idea, but I think restriciting domain squatting, multiple TLD registration, and trademark abuse would be the better solution.
Sounds like you'd need to come up with a whole new name resolution paradigm - no easy task.
It's the Open Source Militia! Cool, where do I sign up?
"A well debugged code base, being necessary to the security of a free operating system, the right of the people to use and modify source code, shall not be infringed."
Also, turning off Javascript turns off style sheets; that may or may not justify leaving it on, depending on your browsing habits. Javascript is, I belive, less of a risk than Java, and orders of magnitude less of a risk than ActiveX.
Good advice for attachments, but for plain text or HTML formatted (assuming scripting, objects, and applets off) e-mail messages there's no danger. Otherwise you're getting so paranoid that the net becomes useless. Again, I think that's overly paranoid. I want people to be able to reach me: forI take a few anti-spam precautions. My address above is given in a spam-proof fashion, and so is the one on my web site (interestingly, it appears that many spambots read only the text of the page and don't parse the contents of a "mailto" URL). When I do get spam, I usually send it to the appropriate postmasters and the account is revoked within hours. And I use slocal (part of MH) to filter incoming mail and autobounce a few rouge domains.(Although now that I'm running my own genuine domain instead of a forwarded virtual one, I can make sendmail do the work.)
I recommend both The Forever War and Forever Peace. Also see if you can find his All My Sins Remembered.
I use MH to handle my mail. I can use all the standard MH tools as well as nice front ends like exmh, and they give a reasonable amount of power; but better yet is that, since MH stores one message per file in a plain format, I can use find, grep, perl, emacs, and all our other friends to manage my messages. I write my documents and correspondance in HTML and/or LaTeX (often via LyX) for the same reason. If it's supposed to have written-language content and I can't grep it, it sucks.
Problem is, it's entirely possible for us to not understand the importance of a data collection for years. That old Landsat data would be a great baseline for information about global climate change.
I long ago gave up on the local daily paper (the Sun ) not just because it's been surplanted by the Web and CNN but because it sucks. The lack of competition among local papers (Baltimore had three dailies when I was a kid) allowed quality to slide. While I'll pick one up if it's lying around, I haven't bought a copy in two or three years - I even forgot to pick one up when they had a big photo of me and an interview in their "Plugged In" section. (This was about the OLGA/Harry Fox Agency copyright battle.)
However, I find the local "alternative" weekly City Paper to be useful; local news, event calendars, etcetera. Unlike the daily, it's not full of sections I have no interest in (sports, travel, "society", and the like). And when I'm done reading, the dogs get to pee on it.
The future? I'd like to see customizable newpapers. Assuming better quality than today's dreck, I might subscribe if I could say "Send me the comics, world news headlines, local news, and don't bother burying me in dead trees for the rest - I don't give a damn who won the football game and I get my tech news from /. so don't bother with you wimpy little PC column. Oh, and something above an eighth grade reading level, please."
My friends, it's time to stop using programs that turn your computer into a glorified typewriter. You need the power of a document typesetting system, you want the ease of use of a GUI interface, you can have it all - LyX.
What is happening is that extraction techniques are becoming more extreme, both in the depth of drilling and in where we're willing to drill, so that we're extracting fossil fuels from previously inaccessable reserves.
Of course, even if fossil fuels were unlimited, they're not practical as fuels in the long term because of the greenhouse effect. Only fusion - directly from a reactor on Earth, or indirectly through sunlight into photovoltatics, weather phenomenea (wind, hydro, OTECs), or biomass - is a practical long-term energy source.
Neither is it within the rightful purview of the state to decide what its citizens - adults or children - may be permitted to see, hear, or read.
Could we please shoot the designer of this site? (Whadda mean, Javascript abuse isn't a capital crime yet?)
The site's front page consists of a moon photo with a couple of blinking stars - no links, instructions, icons, or text other than "Full Moon". Neither the "Full Moon" text nor the large moon image are clickable. If you happen to guess that the stars aren't just GIF animations and move your mouse over one, link labels pop up. I hope no-one paid money for this, that it was done by someone's 14-year-old nephew who just read a book or two on HTML and Javascript; but I fear that a "professional" web designer charged lots of money for this travesty.
Arrgghh! It's worse than that! According to a comment in the source, it took two "professional" designers to create this mess.
Please, someone, tell me that this is somehow only because the site is slashdotted, that it's somehow better when not under load.
(Thus ends today's rant. Sorry.)