Hmmm...large scale community web site with user journals that is feature-rich, skinnable and has minimal downtime (503 Service Unavailable? What's that?) - built using Open Source Software. Who knew?
Something the Slashdot coders could learn from, perhaps?
Abstract: Somebody did some actual research into the typewriters available in 1973 and found that the document isn't a hoax.
Turns out Football Guy did a bit of resizing/shrinking/nudging to get things to line up...regardless, of course the Times New Roman font looks the same as a 1973 typewriter font - where do you think MS/Apple/Adobe/whoever got their font designs from?!
Of course, as the linked article points out, the various characters in the document look similar to MS Word Times New Roman, but many are distinctly _different_.
One by one, each of the "hoax" claims are being refuted on their face. In 1973, proportinal fonts existed, superscript th existed, etc. etc. etc.
As always it's "villify what you can't deny." Unfortunately, once again the "liberal" media is getting bamboozled by some rightwing bloggers - anyone remember Kerry's "Intern Scandal?" (Drudge: "Developing...")
Meanwhile, the Right Wing Press (NY Post, Washington Times), which dismissed the relevancy of blogs when they were driving Dean's candidacy, is now lauding the "wonderful blogonaughts."
In short, the repairs hurt MUCH more than the injury.
First they make a small incision and spread the ribs apart. Then take a blunt probe and S L O W L Y punch through the lining inside your chest cavity (pericadium?). No scapel allowed - it might damage delicate tissue.
Suffice to say, right before they performed the procedure (the tube insertion, to be exact), the doctor encouraged me to scream as loudly as I wanted (they didn't put me under because anaesthesia is too dangerous for this type of "minor" procedure).
The aftermath is that for a couple days you have a rubber hose coming out of your side that slowly sucks air out, thus re-inflating your lung. Not a lot of fun.
Moral of the Story: Turn down that music you darn kids!:P
I just got back from a brief excursion into Manhattan...saw a protest march in progress going down 6th Avenue.
The first thing I saw were the 40 or so police on scooters, then I noticed about 80 on foot, in ranks 2-deep (might have had riot-gear, couldn't see).
"Buried" within this sea of blue were about 30 or so protesters - the one at the front was holding a sign that said something like "Keep Our Earth Green."
So basically peaceful evironmentalists were outnumbered 4-1 by Police Officers.
In short, the Right to Peacably Assemble is alive and well. Horray!
It's been a while! I had wondered if had left town...
IIRC, you still owe me $5 for that jellyfish platter when the three of us went to Evergreen Shanghai on Mott Street three years ago for a post-layoff lunch. (j/k)
Glad to see you're still doing kewl stuff...send me an email sometime, we'll catch up.
Oddly enough, when you delete entries from your "media library," the application keeps reminding - via pop-up dialogs - that "The actual file won't be deleted."
So not only did they delete my files, they lied about it too...
Funny to see this under Apple...it should be filed under YRO. (Those who aren't interested in reading a mini-rant should check out this +5 Informative article: Real Proof - Apple users should be scared as f*** of letting real anywhere near their computers).
The reason I say this is because I just had a "fun" experience ove the weekend where Real One player deleted songs off my computer. I have a large inventory of mp3's that I legally ripped from CDs that I own. I recently bought a Palm T3 handheld, which comes with Real Player pre-installed.
I figured "why not" and installed Real One player. Made sure to un-check all the "Please contact me with special messages" and "please update me automatically" options...
Everything went great...for about 10 minutes. I was playing an mp3 and the sound was kind of fuzzy. So I stopped the playback to check some settings. When I went back to continue playing the songs, I received the dialog box "the song file you're requesting cannot be found!"
Ummm...wtf? I was just listening to it 30 seconds ago. I browsed to my network share where I keep my mp3's...it was gone. So, I jumped up to check actual server itself...it was for real...the file had disappeared from the harddrive! (incidentally, it's a RH 9 box running a samba share - maybe its some sort of bug in samba? Probably not (read on)).
Now, keep in mind that I had been playing these mp3s WinAmp and even Windos Media for over a year with no problem.
I lost 3 songs of which I had legally ripped from my own CDs, plus about 10 j-pop songs that I had downloaded only because they're not available in the US yet...something fishy is going on here.
The sad thing is that I actually prefer using their plugin for watching video clips, but now I'm thinking of switching to Windows Media...:(
Funny you should ask that question, because Rambam addressed it in his speech.
Let's say you are a registerd republican, you own a subscription to Guns and Ammo, and you drive a Chevey Pickup (they'll know all this about you, by the way). They can't know exactly who you voted for...but within 95% accuracy they can guess.
Of course, Diebold may change that refise that number upwards very shortly...
A few weeks ago I attended the Fifth HOPE conferenece in New York City. While I was there, I saw Steven Rambam, a private investigator and former federal agent, give a presentation entitled "Privacy: It Ain't What It Used to Be." A better title would have been "Privacy is Already Dead."
He started out by asking if anybody in the room (about 200+ tin-foil-hat wearing hackers) had ever heard of Seisent. Not a single hand went up, and he seemed to be genuinely suprised and disturbed by this.
He made a very good point repeatedly throughout his presentation: we shouldn't be worried because Government has this data on us; no, we should be terrified because private corporations that don't even answer to the government have this data. And it's not just limited to name, address and telephone number: criminal records, addresses of residence, education, employers, telephone calls, magazine subscriptions, travel records, television viewing habits (if you have cable), internet downloads, gun ownership and voting records. Yes voting records - they know if you voted and what party you registered under.
Suffice to say, these guys should be the household name, not the RIAA. Why does the media focus on the MPAA et al and their paltry lawsuits and not these guys?!?
So I changed my sig to read "What is Seisint?" and I tell everyone I know about them.
Some have responded to me with ambivalence. "What's the big deal?" "Meh, they have the data, there's nothing we can do about it." I'm not sure how to respond to people like that except with "the dumber you are the happier you are" or something.
What could they do with that data? Use your imagination, stupid.
Rambam finished by giving a live demonstration of a smaller database of individual information that he owns (derived mostly public records). He demonstrated how quickly you could compile information on any random person with just their SSN - as it turned out, the "victim" he took from the audience was already a real victim of identity theft. The query took less that 10 seconds. It was pretty amazing / disturbing.
During the Q&A portion of the presentation, several audience members asked what they could do to "get out" of the database. Rambam replied that there was nothing we could do: the data was now the property of this one private company - even the data that was collected from State governments (Aside from being one of the egregiou privacy invasions in human history, it was also one of the most gernerous corporate subsidizations ever).
Rambam did say one thing we could do: "Vote, vote, vote." Private corporations have too many protections and powers compared to individuals, and Government is the only way to change that.
The final questioner for the session had a very +5 Insightful comment on what everyone in the audience should do just in case the voting didn't work out:
"Buy, and learn how to use, a rifle."
The audience response to this comment was, of course, thunderous applause.
They just released at the conference. a double-disk, no-region version of Freedom Downtime with subtitles in 30 different languages. Supposedly packed with extras, deleted footage, easter-eggs, etc. etc. With all these features it almost sounds like a prank but Emmanuel et. al. discussed it during the live Off the Hook broadcast, and I saw it selling for $30 USD at the 2600 table.
I haven't seen it yet, tho...waiting to rent it from Blockbuster:)
A few weeks ago, ESPN.com's Page 2 published an article asking the controversial question "Which sport is most difficult?"
A panel of Experts ranked a variety of professional and Olympic sports based on several criteria, with boxing coming out on top which quasi-sports like billiards and fishing were at the bottom. This led me to wonder: Where would Online Gaming fall in the ranking?
Originally, I came up with the following analysis:
ENDURANCE - Gamers are known to 10-12 hours without going to the bathroom. That takes a bladder of steel. Score: 2
STRENGTH - Hefting that PC to the LAN party: 0.5
POWER - Clicking a mouse repeatedly requires strength of a ten-year old. Score: 0
SPEED- Players sit in one position, motionless, often for hours or days at a time. Score: 0
AGILITY - Uhhhh...right. Score: 0
FLEXIBILITY - Gimme another score: 0
NERVE - Chances of being fragged at least during a typical FPS game: 100%. Courage required to face those odds: 0.
DURABILITY - Back strain, stressed bladder, possible carpal tunnel syndrome after several years. Score: 1
HAND-EYE COORDINATION - Studies have shown that playing hours of games will improve this skill. However, lining up a crosshair with your mouse is not the same as hitting a 95mph curveball. Score: 3.5
ANALYTIC APTITUDE - Ok, I think it is fair to say that this deserves a high score. Let's say 7.5
GRAND TOTAL: 14.5 RANKING: A tie with Fishing! Woo!
However, after reading that article, I have to say I have a newfound respect for Professional Gamers. 650-moves-per minute? Is that even possible?!? Also, it sounds like your average teenager has better odds of making it as a professional basketball player than as a Gamer. Conclusion - the people who can make it in the GPL must be *really* gifted.
I would definitely revise-upwards the scores for ANALYTIC APTITUDE and HAND-EYE COORDINATION up to 9.5 and 8.5, respectively.
And they could add a few points to the Endurance score by having the gamers take an electric shock every time one of their units is destroyed (or something...)
One recently discovered variation of schizophrenia causes the sufferer to experience bizarre delusions of property-ownership, as well as the paranoid belief that an international conglomerate of shadow agents - and their masses of followers - are trying to steal aforementioned property and subvert the sufferer's day-to-day life.
Doctors are starting to refer to it as "McBride Disorder."
You know, I was really was starting to take seriously the "delayed gratification" justfication for offshore outsourcing...until I saw this article yesterday:
Lesson of the Day: US workers have to endure unemployment lines and dry lectures about enduring short-term pain for (nebulous) future prosperity - but CEOs get to reward themselves right now with an unprecedented pay raise! Horray!
[Yes, I realize that CEO pay is largely determined by their Board of Directors...of course, who do you think sits on those Boards? If you said "other CEOs" - dingdingdingding!]
And check out that Flash animation on their homepage: it emphasizes the embarrassing nature Blue Screens and Windows System Errors on public displays! I guess I'm not crazy after all...
The funny thing about it is that 80% of the time, the desktop looks mangled and the only thing legible is a couple of KDE error popups.
Desktop? It's not a kiosk if you can see a desktop.
Plus it is a single machine thrown together by a volunteer for academic purposes. Hardly comparable to professional, commercial kiosks that presumedly have cost their organization many $10k's to implement.
The Windows error messages I've seen are on kiosks that have zero human interactivity. Basically glorified message boards. Why are they encountering Invalid Page Faults on what is essentially a glorified billboard? Seems a bit ridiculous.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm...large scale community web site with user journals that is feature-rich, skinnable and has minimal downtime (503 Service Unavailable? What's that?) - built using Open Source Software. Who knew?
Something the Slashdot coders could learn from, perhaps?
Daily Kos: TANG Typewriter Follies; Wingnuts Wrong
Abstract: Somebody did some actual research into the typewriters available in 1973 and found that the document isn't a hoax.
Turns out Football Guy did a bit of resizing/shrinking/nudging to get things to line up...regardless, of course the Times New Roman font looks the same as a 1973 typewriter font - where do you think MS/Apple/Adobe/whoever got their font designs from?!
Of course, as the linked article points out, the various characters in the document look similar to MS Word Times New Roman, but many are distinctly _different_.
One by one, each of the "hoax" claims are being refuted on their face. In 1973, proportinal fonts existed, superscript th existed, etc. etc. etc.
As always it's "villify what you can't deny." Unfortunately, once again the "liberal" media is getting bamboozled by some rightwing bloggers - anyone remember Kerry's "Intern Scandal?" (Drudge: "Developing...")
Meanwhile, the Right Wing Press (NY Post, Washington Times), which dismissed the relevancy of blogs when they were driving Dean's candidacy, is now lauding the "wonderful blogonaughts."
What a joke.
Prepare yourself for the Star Wars Ewok Adventures
I wonder just how he expects me to "prepare myself?"
Prepare yourself for the Star Wars Ewok Adventures
I wonder just wonder how he expects me to "prepare myself?"
In short, the repairs hurt MUCH more than the injury.
:P
First they make a small incision and spread the ribs apart. Then take a blunt probe and S L O W L Y punch through the lining inside your chest cavity (pericadium?). No scapel allowed - it might damage delicate tissue.
Suffice to say, right before they performed the procedure (the tube insertion, to be exact), the doctor encouraged me to scream as loudly as I wanted (they didn't put me under because anaesthesia is too dangerous for this type of "minor" procedure).
The aftermath is that for a couple days you have a rubber hose coming out of your side that slowly sucks air out, thus re-inflating your lung. Not a lot of fun.
Moral of the Story: Turn down that music you darn kids!
Yeah, that'll do the trick
Nope, still "Excellent"
Why don't you go play somewhere else, loser?
That search yields ust 6 hits, one of which is an eWeek article on the same topic - "do a search for #### visa on Google."
Navel-gazing, anyone?
Or maybe it was a slow news day, so they created their own story...
Try doing a search for password type:*.txt. The results are a bit more interesting.
See ya' in the M2 ;P
I just got back from a brief excursion into Manhattan...saw a protest march in progress going down 6th Avenue.
The first thing I saw were the 40 or so police on scooters, then I noticed about 80 on foot, in ranks 2-deep (might have had riot-gear, couldn't see).
"Buried" within this sea of blue were about 30 or so protesters - the one at the front was holding a sign that said something like "Keep Our Earth Green."
So basically peaceful evironmentalists were outnumbered 4-1 by Police Officers.
In short, the Right to Peacably Assemble is alive and well. Horray!
It's been a while! I had wondered if had left town...
IIRC, you still owe me $5 for that jellyfish platter when the three of us went to Evergreen Shanghai on Mott Street three years ago for a post-layoff lunch. (j/k)
Glad to see you're still doing kewl stuff...send me an email sometime, we'll catch up.
...nothing like this ever happens on slashdot?
RIGHT???
Oddly enough, when you delete entries from your "media library," the application keeps reminding - via pop-up dialogs - that "The actual file won't be deleted."
So not only did they delete my files, they lied about it too...
Funny to see this under Apple...it should be filed under YRO. (Those who aren't interested in reading a mini-rant should check out this +5 Informative article:
:(
Real Proof - Apple users should be scared as f*** of letting real anywhere near their computers).
The reason I say this is because I just had a "fun" experience ove the weekend where Real One player deleted songs off my computer. I have a large inventory of mp3's that I legally ripped from CDs that I own. I recently bought a Palm T3 handheld, which comes with Real Player pre-installed.
I figured "why not" and installed Real One player. Made sure to un-check all the "Please contact me with special messages" and "please update me automatically" options...
Everything went great...for about 10 minutes. I was playing an mp3 and the sound was kind of fuzzy. So I stopped the playback to check some settings. When I went back to continue playing the songs, I received the dialog box "the song file you're requesting cannot be found!"
Ummm...wtf? I was just listening to it 30 seconds ago. I browsed to my network share where I keep my mp3's...it was gone. So, I jumped up to check actual server itself...it was for real...the file had disappeared from the harddrive! (incidentally, it's a RH 9 box running a samba share - maybe its some sort of bug in samba? Probably not (read on)).
Now, keep in mind that I had been playing these mp3s WinAmp and even Windos Media for over a year with no problem.
I lost 3 songs of which I had legally ripped from my own CDs, plus about 10 j-pop songs that I had downloaded only because they're not available in the US yet...something fishy is going on here.
The sad thing is that I actually prefer using their plugin for watching video clips, but now I'm thinking of switching to Windows Media...
I've got the site for you.
Funny you should ask that question, because Rambam addressed it in his speech.
Let's say you are a registerd republican, you own a subscription to Guns and Ammo, and you drive a Chevey Pickup (they'll know all this about you, by the way). They can't know exactly who you voted for...but within 95% accuracy they can guess.
Of course, Diebold may change that refise that number upwards very shortly...
A few weeks ago I attended the Fifth HOPE conferenece in New York City. While I was there, I saw Steven Rambam, a private investigator and former federal agent, give a presentation entitled "Privacy: It Ain't What It Used to Be." A better title would have been "Privacy is Already Dead."
He started out by asking if anybody in the room (about 200+ tin-foil-hat wearing hackers) had ever heard of Seisent. Not a single hand went up, and he seemed to be genuinely suprised and disturbed by this.
He made a very good point repeatedly throughout his presentation: we shouldn't be worried because Government has this data on us; no, we should be terrified because private corporations that don't even answer to the government have this data. And it's not just limited to name, address and telephone number: criminal records, addresses of residence, education, employers, telephone calls, magazine subscriptions, travel records, television viewing habits (if you have cable), internet downloads, gun ownership and voting records. Yes voting records - they know if you voted and what party you registered under.
Suffice to say, these guys should be the household name, not the RIAA. Why does the media focus on the MPAA et al and their paltry lawsuits and not these guys?!?
So I changed my sig to read "What is Seisint?" and I tell everyone I know about them.
Some have responded to me with ambivalence. "What's the big deal?" "Meh, they have the data, there's nothing we can do about it." I'm not sure how to respond to people like that except with "the dumber you are the happier you are" or something.
What could they do with that data? Use your imagination, stupid.
Rambam finished by giving a live demonstration of a smaller database of individual information that he owns (derived mostly public records). He demonstrated how quickly you could compile information on any random person with just their SSN - as it turned out, the "victim" he took from the audience was already a real victim of identity theft. The query took less that 10 seconds. It was pretty amazing / disturbing.
During the Q&A portion of the presentation, several audience members asked what they could do to "get out" of the database. Rambam replied that there was nothing we could do: the data was now the property of this one private company - even the data that was collected from State governments (Aside from being one of the egregiou privacy invasions in human history, it was also one of the most gernerous corporate subsidizations ever).
Rambam did say one thing we could do: "Vote, vote, vote." Private corporations have too many protections and powers compared to individuals, and Government is the only way to change that.
The final questioner for the session had a very +5 Insightful comment on what everyone in the audience should do just in case the voting didn't work out:
"Buy, and learn how to use, a rifle."
The audience response to this comment was, of course, thunderous applause.
Does anybody know of a web site that showcases North Korean propaganda art and movies? The cornier the better.
After reading about their propaganda and 1 million+ person parades here, and this seeing this wicked awesome music video, I'm hungry for more.
WARNING: The linked music video makes frequent use of the "F-Bomb" - possible NSFW.
Just want to say thanks! I'm reading your Brian Steele notes right now. I wanted to stay and watch his presentation, but had to leave.
Check out my journal for notes on the presentations I went to yesterday.
They just released at the conference. a double-disk, no-region version of Freedom Downtime with subtitles in 30 different languages. Supposedly packed with extras, deleted footage, easter-eggs, etc. etc. With all these features it almost sounds like a prank but Emmanuel et. al. discussed it during the live Off the Hook broadcast, and I saw it selling for $30 USD at the 2600 table.
:)
I haven't seen it yet, tho...waiting to rent it from Blockbuster
A panel of Experts ranked a variety of professional and Olympic sports based on several criteria, with boxing coming out on top which quasi-sports like billiards and fishing were at the bottom. This led me to wonder: Where would Online Gaming fall in the ranking?
Originally, I came up with the following analysis:However, after reading that article, I have to say I have a newfound respect for Professional Gamers. 650-moves-per minute? Is that even possible?!? Also, it sounds like your average teenager has better odds of making it as a professional basketball player than as a Gamer. Conclusion - the people who can make it in the GPL must be *really* gifted.
I would definitely revise-upwards the scores for ANALYTIC APTITUDE and HAND-EYE COORDINATION up to 9.5 and 8.5, respectively.
And they could add a few points to the Endurance score by having the gamers take an electric shock every time one of their units is destroyed (or something...)
One recently discovered variation of schizophrenia causes the sufferer to experience bizarre delusions of property-ownership, as well as the paranoid belief that an international conglomerate of shadow agents - and their masses of followers - are trying to steal aforementioned property and subvert the sufferer's day-to-day life.
Doctors are starting to refer to it as "McBride Disorder."
You know, I was really was starting to take seriously the "delayed gratification" justfication for offshore outsourcing...until I saw this article yesterday:
REUTERS: U.S. CEO pay rose 27% in 2003 -- Study
Lesson of the Day: US workers have to endure unemployment lines and dry lectures about enduring short-term pain for (nebulous) future prosperity - but CEOs get to reward themselves right now with an unprecedented pay raise! Horray!
[Yes, I realize that CEO pay is largely determined by their Board of Directors...of course, who do you think sits on those Boards? If you said "other CEOs" - dingdingdingding!]
And check out that Flash animation on their homepage: it emphasizes the embarrassing nature Blue Screens and Windows System Errors on public displays! I guess I'm not crazy after all...
The funny thing about it is that 80% of the time, the desktop looks mangled and the only thing legible is a couple of KDE error popups.
Desktop? It's not a kiosk if you can see a desktop.
Plus it is a single machine thrown together by a volunteer for academic purposes. Hardly comparable to professional, commercial kiosks that presumedly have cost their organization many $10k's to implement.
The Windows error messages I've seen are on kiosks that have zero human interactivity. Basically glorified message boards. Why are they encountering Invalid Page Faults on what is essentially a glorified billboard? Seems a bit ridiculous.