Anti-Semitic Advertisements on Google
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Google Juice
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· Score: 4, Interesting
A warning to those considering using Google's page ranking service (which tracks your surfing habits, which isn't a problem since it is very upfront about it.) Overall, it works pretty well and it has found several pages of genuine interest to me that I would not have found otherwise. Also, I have no reason to think that they're doing anthing sinister with the information (and I don't care.)
However, since I like slashdot so much (I assume that is why) it's been serving up advertisements for other projects that link to SourceForge whenever I run google searches; for example, the white supremacist publication the Free Occident, which is powered by SourceForge.
Now, I'm not one of those people who thinks Google should try and filter hate speech from search results. Likewise, I don't think that the Free Occident should somehow be prevented from using SourceForge's software - open source means open, Voltaire was right, etc. However, I think google should draw the line at serving advertisements for articles about how "If you hear about a 100-million-dollar swindle, then you know that it has to be a Jew."
I've dumped a copy of the html for the search result in my journal - paste the Extrans into an html file to see it in close-to original format. It appears from the first version in my journal that the ad appears ABOVE the search results - this is not the case.
Free Occident is a web log, but I find it far more worrisome that they've purchased an ad on google than if they were trying to blog some search term, like "White Power," or even "Occident."
The atomic weight of the most common isotope of carbon is defined as exactly 12; no, naturally occuring carbon doesn't weigh that much, because of the natural abundance of C-13 and C-14.
Re:Element names work well for a small low-order n
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Server Naming Conventions?
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I'm sure that he meant atomic number, since atomic weights are non-integer, except for Carbon.
Personally, I favor naming them after scientists - this is what 95% of the world's laboratories in every field do. The two computers in my dad's lab are Watson and Crick (he doesn't even work with DNA). Substitute other sorts of famous people; presidents, athletes, whatever.
The anime characters are good, if that's what people in your group can remember. One lab I was in that had a lot of computers used deities; Linux were Hindu deities, NT were Greek, and Irix were Egyptian. We added a Mac (OS X) which I named Arawn (Welsh deity).
With 200 machines, you're gonna run out of pet names really fast, so I think you'd need to assign a whole new category of names to each busines, so Joe's Delivery could get Rolling Stones songs, and John's Delicatessen could get war criminals. That would be cool, and that way any administrative subdivisions could use naming conventions that they were good at remembering.
Oh! I have an idea, you could assign each company a word (Winter and Dog, say) and name every computer associated with that company that word, in a different language. All of the web-servers could be french (Hiver and Chien?), the POP servers spanish (Invierno and Perro) and so forth.
Writers and other creative types usually work from home.
What if all of these - salaries, sales, and so forth - take place in communities outside of the reach of the locale where the actual programming facility exists?
The point is - the facility uses community resources, so it should contribute tax revenue to the community. If that means levying a tax on the act of generating commercial code itself, well, that's less than preferable but it is clearly within the purview of the city.
A software company makes use of community services - Fire Departments, Public Transportation and so forth. It should pay to support them, just like any other business should support the infrastructure of the economy in which it operates.
Software companies may be more or less subject to the various pressures imposed by such taxation on other forms of manufacturing activity - including the tendency to move their operations overseas. However, software shouldn't be any-more-exempt for these reasons than any other business.
Identity theft happens anyway. A well-run system of such cards (I know, how likely is that?) would make such theft less likely, not more. Now, at present, if somone pretends to be you and fools people, you aren't liable for what they do - the individuals CONNED have to eat the loss, by and large; I know there are exceptions, and it can be a pain to deal with, but this is already the fact of life for the 95% of the population who chooses to have credit cards and otherwise participate in the 21st century. IF these ID cards came packaged with legislation to make you liable for anything anyone did with a fake card, that would be a problem.
The government already has your photograph, dude. Even if they don't yet have it, if they're computer-recording the faces of people at demonstrations they can just store them and match them later.
The genetic discrimination paranoia is not really germane. This becomes a problem if the government sequences your entire genome. The markers they would need to, for example, ID your eyelashes, blood, spit and semen are not disease markers, and cannot be used to effectively predict your lifespan or anything else. Yes, insurance industry spies could sneak into government offices, and check your blood samples for disease markers. This would be far easier at the hospital which is on your insurance companies payroll. Nothing to do with ID cards.
The government already makes thumbprinting a functional condition of participation in modern society. You need to give thumbprints to get driver's licenses or state ID cards already, in every state as far as I know (feel free to correct me.)
Every time I say this I get modded down as flamebait, but - there are certain things that you don't want the government to know b/c they compromise your anonymous expression. Your photograph, for example. In the case of the photo, this issue is settled, which is unfortunate in some respects but so far it has not worked out badly. Crooks also want to keep these things secret, and we have to tolerate that as the price of our freedom.
Then, there are certain things that you don't want the government to know b/c you're a crook, and they don't provide protection for people's anonymity of expression. Your thumbprint is one of them. This makes certain forms of civil disobedience more difficult, and I have some civil disobedience running in the other window right now, but we can't structure our society based on the criterion "the government shouldn't do things that make it hard to break the law". In fact, since they're going to keep track of this information ANYWAY, we are better protected, in terms of our civil liberties, if it is tracked in the open.
Basically, his publishing company was either a) gonna reprint the book (at Michael's expense) with more PC language or b) sit on it forever. There was nothing he could do about it, legally speaking. A letter writing campaign by a bunch of librarians (and the promise of considerable bad press) evidently forced Harper Collins to capitulate.
As regards the argument that the publisher was right, and that the book was fundamentally flawed, the onion seems to agree. I am not saying that the Onion would condone censoring it on that basis, merely that they agree with the substantive portions of the publisher's complaints, and that POV deserves to be aired, as well.
I'm think that Michael Moore would agree that it his notoriety that saved his book, and that a less-well-known author would have had no such recourse, since their reamed-being would not have made a splash in the press.
the challenge is differentiating "good" content from "bad" content.... The challenge there is differentiating "good" (safe) speakers from "bad" (dangerous) speakers.
I agree with all else you say - including that the government has the resources to come up with new approaches to the problem - but I don't think that this challenge is really different from distinguishing between good and bad content. In so far as the government is trying to do what it shouldn't even remotely be doing, using this technology to identify subvsersives, you are right. However, in so far as carnivore might *actually* be used to intercept a criminal communique, I think that the challenge is very similar to what is faced by google.
Suppose that Inoccuous260@hotmail.com only ever sends one message, from some terminal in a public library, and it is the delivery schedule for a nuclear weapon. The best, most morally (if not legally) defensible use of Carnivore would be to intercept this message and hand it over to the Feds. If the Feds can do this, even once, Carnivore will be with us forever, however else it may be abused, b/c you will never rally the public will to end use of such a tool. The problem of identifying that message, and I don't want to brainstorm ideas here, but I'm sure we could come up with several, is very similar to the problem of picking out a biographical sketch of Allen Turing among all the sci-fi and hoopla, which Google can do using characterisation by links, and which the government would be hard-pressed to do without that human resource.
So, the author raises a fair point about the limitations on the "legitimate", let us say intended, use of carnivore. However, the unintended/illegitimate use, simple identification of dissidents, could indeed be carried out by a clever 10 year old, and is plenty worrisome even if Carnivore never does what it was supposedly intended to do.
Space Ghost episodes don't circulate for months on the internet before cartoon network airs them.
In any case, 90% of what CN broadcasts are reruns; I'm sure that viewership of reruns is where cartoon network gets most of its ad revenue - even for CN original programming. Space Ghost and Dexter's Lab, although available from Kazaa, haven't yet reached the penetrance of Tenchi Muyo, so I'm not tempted to just watch downloaded versions instead.
Obviously, to the extent that people have a fetishistic preference for television over downloaded viewing, that will provide a boost to TV even should the computer read your mind and fetch whatever you want to watch days before you know you want to see it.
Personally, however, p2p really has damped my interest in CN anime offerings - pretty much completely. For shows that I like but don't feel the need to watch as soon as they're newly broadcast - Space Ghost is a prime example - I'd prefer p2p as well, if they were widely available. I think this is a trend.
re: value added- CN's editing - I prefer no editing at all - is "value added", if you like it. Services that CN does for society generally by broadcasting anime don't count as value added because they don't enrich the experience at the particular time that I watch the anime. To the extent that my friends might watch the same episode, whereupon we have something to talk about, I suppose that that qualifies as value added. I don't think that it is going to compete with p2p as technology improves, suffice to say.
Legal = value added? I'll just disagree philosophically. Sticking it to the man = value added;)
I only bring this up because I woke up this morning to four hours of fresh anime that had arrived overnight. I have more of it than I have time or inclination to watch.
I can get all the cartoons I want by p2p. In the case of "the Simpsons", I can see a new episode sooner if I turn on the boob tube (well, my tuner card, anyway) but I already see most of these toons (the ones I actually want to watch) subtitled by fans long before cartoon network gets around to rebroadcasting them sans anything raunchy and with lousy voice talent.
It isn't even that much trouble - taken as a total, turning on whatever software and running it overnight is less time than I would spend watching commercials if I watched them on TV. Why would I ever?
Seriously; what value added does Cartoon Network provide?
I think that US anime is a coal-mine-canary for the whole audio-visual-content industry; which is an appreciable slice of the boysenberry pie which is world economic output. That which is a minor annoyance for dedicated geeks to do today will be routine for any consumer no more than ten years hence. So - are video pirates like me (Yar!) going to appreciably sour the audience for Cartoon Network's anime? Or, is it nothing but good fan recruitment for anime generally?
Hard numbers would sure be nice, if some blessed sould has them - searches on google spit back mostly links to slashdot:)
Obviously, in this case, the DMCA couldn't prevent anyone from distributing cracking tools - unless every java development environment under the sun is a circumvention tool. Also, I have a question - what happens if you convert one of these MW-books to post-script? Does pdf2ps fail? I don't really know anything about the pdf standard.
I think that what Don MacAskill is saying can be interpreted as a very sensible statement: that people don't generally bother to steal cars, because the relationship between the difficulty to get a stolen car, and the amount you have to pay to get a car, and the extra utility you get from a car you actually own, is such that few people bother.
So, extending that analogy, stealing copyrighted content has to be difficult enough that, given how useful and easy-to-acquire non-stolen content is, most people will purchase the non-stolen content.
At present, and I can speak only for myself, I use "stolen" content - and I will go ahead and use the semantics of the content "owners" even though I disagree philosophically with the principle of owning abstractions - because it is, overall, easier to get (price aside) and more useful. If content owners reverse THAT relationship, in which ease-of-theft is a factor but not an overwhelming one, they can get people to buy their content.
... digital distribution of content would really catch on.
Now, THIS really bust my gut. Only copyrighted content counts? Slashdot's thousands of hits per day (millions? I don't know) don't count as content distribution?
Content distribution HAS caught on, just not among the sector of people who expect to make money from conditions imposed by scarcity.
It's even more fun to do this to the movie industry.
Here's a list of instructions, much like the ones you just gave, although they are written in a context-free language so that they can be interpreted directly by a computer as well as a person, to unencrypt the contents of a DVD - ugh, my head.
THE POSTER'S BRAIN CONTAINS THOUGHTS WHICH QUALIFY AS CIRCUMVENTION DEVICES UNDER THE DMCA. THEREFORE, IT HAS BEEN ERASED. - YOUR FRIENDS, THE MPAA.
What was I talking about? Oh, 40 days and 40 nights was such a great movie!
Just in case no-one does moderate him up, I'm reposting his link with my bonus. I can't be whoring because I'm capped:). All credit due to the guy I'm responding to.
I believe that Morpheus is telling the truth, since my personal experiences back them up. I will ramble now:
Okay, silly man that I am, I had both Morpheus and Kazaa installed on my machine (even though, until recently, they were exactly the same.)
So, last week, Kazaa, which is what I ordinarily used since I have a sick attraction to the color yellow, stops working well. The number of hits I get for searches drops by about a quarter, when I search successfully at all; for some reason I keep getting booted from the network and having to reconnect. "That's odd" I say to myself. Also, it proceeds to ignore the "maximum uploads" setting in my preferences, which I keep low so that other broadband users can get my files in reasonable time. Personally, I suspect that Kazaa installed some "upgrades" for itself without prompting me (or I clicked through the prompt without noticing, always a possibility); I should probably check timestamps and see. I have it set to prompt before auto-updates, but since it's ignoring some of my preferences I don't know how much I trust that.
Out of curiosity, I start Morpheus; and I get the message about being unable to connect to the network. So, Morpheus' failure to connect seems to coincide with Kazaa's service collapse - which is exactly what I'd expect given that 90% of the users within four hops of me (New York City) use Morpheus instead of Kazaa.
Now, I don't know about these DOS attacks / advertisement hacks. I tried to connect to Morpheus several times during this period, and none of my regsitry keys have been fiddled with, at least as far as I can tell. Ad-aware doesn't find anything wrong.
Okay, back to the conspiracy theory. I assume that the Aussie company that bought Kazaa is trying to crowd Morpheus out. While you and I know this is stupid, to them this must make sense; they think they can get all of Morpheus' old users to switch to Kazaa, boosting their add revenues.
Given this sort of despicable behavior on their part, I am willing to give Morpheus' the benefit of the doubt: the implication of Morpheus' comments is that someone involved in the Kazaa stack - that is to say, this Australian company that bought Kazaa - is behind whatever attacks occured.
Personally, I want to see the contract that Morpheus entered into with Kazaa for use of their network/software.
Re:Hope its better than the "New Math"
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The New Chemistry
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· Score: 2
Okay, children, instead of starting you with the chemistry of things you encounter in everyday life, we'll teach you chemistry from the ground up, starting with first principles. Who can tell me how to transform this wave function to be time independent?
Lisa: Finally, a chance to use my linear algebra.
Ralph: Ms. Hoover, I'm scared of the ocean.
P.S. For those of you who weren't around back in the day, there was a movement called the "New Math" where elementary school kids would be taught set & number theory, and other mostly theoretical stuff, before being taught algebra. Please note that I covered my ass and said mostly theoretical.
P.P.S. I haven't read the book myself, but I've heard nothing but excellent things from my chemist friends (I am a comp. biologist) so I ordered it.
There's a skill you must have to enjoy investing yourself in a complicated, demanding, intellectual job - and I wish I had advice for developing this skill, but I don't - you have to be able to tell who's a competent, visionary administrator (yes, such people do exist, god bless them) and who is, to be frank, an idiot (lots of those, as I'm sure you've all noticed.)
So, before you take a job, go and meet the management. Even if it means taking a pay cut, my advice is to work for smart people, and enjoy your work.
If you don't have the luxury (I'm a computational biologist, so I do) of choosing your employer / PI (that's what a scientist's boss is called) / project manager / what have you, then, well, you can't expect to be happy at your job. Most people are in the position of taking whatever job they can get, and they're unhappy with what they end up with. So, if you're one of the few people with the luxury of choosing where to work, get your priorities straight and at least consider the competence (to say nothing of worthiness) of the prospective co-workers, in addition to the economics.
Blizzard is a big player in the PC videogame industry, but Slashdots million (?) readers are still an important slice of market pie for blizzard. Those half a million copies of Diablo II we bought (you know you did, even though Lord British's disembodied head came to you in a dream and told you not to; that the game was stupid and had no plot) brought them over 10 million dollars of pure profit - cash money to swim in, through up in the air and let it rain down on their heads.
So, that's 2 for a boycott. No more blizzard games for me, until they disavow this bullshit in writing. Also, I need to knock off the red wine and sharp cheddar before going to sleep.
Re:disinfo.com is nice, but...
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Disinformation.com
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· Score: 1, Insightful
When Fox News says "fair", they mean "left"? "Fair and Balanced" they continuously declare. You find similar statements on "creation science" webpages.
As a radical leftist, I am more likely to describe leftist politics as "good". Leftists say someone has "good politics", rightists say someone is "fair" or "reasonable" or "impartial."
Fair, balanced or impartial are adjectives usually used by someone who wants to put forward the idea that what they are saying is at the political center (or inherently obvious and not subjective in nature). This is much more common among rightists - at least in the states, there is a common misconception by those on the right about where the political center of this country really is. Now, by international standards, the US is a right wing country, it's true. Elsewhere in the world, I'm sure there are countries where people on the left are deluded into thinking that the majority of the population agrees with them, because enough people are on the far left that they can get away with it.
In the states, however, no-one thinks that leftists are in the majority! There are people who sincerely believe that Bush Jr. is a centrist.
This is actually a point of some contention - the US military still maintains that the nuclear tests on Bikini Atoll didn't cause the cancer spike in the repopulated residents. There used to be an article on either greenpeace or the union of concerned scientists about fallout from neutron bombs, but now I can't find it.
There are people who insist that that level of radiation isn't harmful in the short term (hah.) Suffice to say that *I* wouldn't want to live in such a place a hundred years later.
I'm not a bomb designer either, I'm a biologist. The problem with neutron bombs isn't nixing real estate (which generally goes uninhabited after being bombed to snot, anyway) but releasing radioactive isotopes into the upper atmosphere -> everywhere. They're not nearly as bad as conventional hydrogen bombs, which are a disaster. Two tactical neutron bombs, once per decade, I'd think we could get away with; at a certain point, every neutron bomb you set off kills hundreds+ innocent people, somewhere in the world, from increased incidence of random leukemia (and other forms of cancer). You're never going to know who would have gotten leukemia anyway, of course, but the rate goes up.
The US Military releases a great deal of, frankly lies, about the characteristics of our nuclear arsenal, for both good reasons (necesarry secrecy) and bad (PR). A lot of the sources you read are just quoting the US Military, which has an abysmal record in terms of agreeing with the assessments of independent investigators.
Of course, this isn't why we refrain from using neutron bombs. The Space Shuttles are probably killing hundreds of people from the ozone they deplete ("only" 1% of the total loss, according to this one NASA guy I talked with) and no one cares. The nuclear boogeyman is why we don't use them; but there are good reasons, as well. Now that the non-proliferation treaty is basically dead, though, our best reason for restraint is pretty much nixed.
The Neutron Bomb releases considerably LESS radioactive material than the first generation of fusion bomb; it also produces a smaller shockwave, given the amount of light/heat/rads it emits. However, they still release far more radioisotopes than anyone-but-the-french considers acceptable; and areas hit by neutron bombs are still uninhabitable for long periods of time.
The laser itself can be re-used; so can the launch tube that fires a Cruise Missile. However, when all maintanence costs for these things - including replacing the chemical cells every time they are fired - is taken into account, I am absolutely certain that these lasers will cost more per shot.
I'm not arguing that the R&D dollars were poorly spent - I'm saying that the money to actually build these things would be poorly spent. Even so, I can think of a LOT of things I'd rather see our tax dollars spent on.
We don't refrain from using nukes because they are "efficient". If we could mount conventional warheads with the explosive power of a tacnuke, but without the radioactive fallout, we'd use them in a second.
Unless there is some good reason to use a less efficient weapon system - as is the case with conventional explosives over nukes - we should use the most efficient means to kill people.
I am very nearly a pacifist - however, if you are going to fight a war, you should use the most powerful, effective tools you have to end the conflict swiftly and decisively, with a minimum of collateral damage. These means-
Cruise Missiles Good
Nukes Bad (collateral damage)
Lasers, Chainsaws, Voltron
Bad (inefficient)
No, look, it is NOT faster because you have to mount it on an aircraft. If these lasers had enough RANGE that you could fire them from ground turrets then, yes, you could shoot down missiles with them.
However, they do not. You have to get in an airplane, and play space invaders with it.
I'm not raising moral objections here, but practical ones.
Yes, okay, we now have a laser which really can be used to blow something up. Yippee, us.
The people who spent truckloads of money to develop this turkey naturally want us to deploy it.
Ask yourself: Does it have any advantages over a missile? Well, it's bigger, it doesn't go as far, it inflicts less damage, and it costs more. But it is a Laser (therefore the weapon of the future) and it does work at all.
We could also outfit our ground forces with supersonic vibrating swords. This would work, you could kill people with them. Likewise, giant robots as were discussed in a previous slashdot article.
However, the fact remains that all of these technologies, while Cool, are very much NOT the most effective means of achieving military objectives!
These laser weapons are nothing but a white elephant for defense contractors, who have seen the end of the cold war erode their profits.
The idea of using one of these things to shoot down a missile - which is a very difficult feat even using inherently practical weapons systems - is absurd.
Slashdot Mirror
A warning to those considering using Google's page ranking service (which tracks your surfing habits, which isn't a problem since it is very upfront about it.) Overall, it works pretty well and it has found several pages of genuine interest to me that I would not have found otherwise. Also, I have no reason to think that they're doing anthing sinister with the information (and I don't care.)
However, since I like slashdot so much (I assume that is why) it's been serving up advertisements for other projects that link to SourceForge whenever I run google searches; for example, the white supremacist publication the Free Occident, which is powered by SourceForge.
Now, I'm not one of those people who thinks Google should try and filter hate speech from search results. Likewise, I don't think that the Free Occident should somehow be prevented from using SourceForge's software - open source means open, Voltaire was right, etc. However, I think google should draw the line at serving advertisements for articles about how "If you hear about a 100-million-dollar swindle, then you know that it has to be a Jew."
I've dumped a copy of the html for the search result in my journal - paste the Extrans into an html file to see it in close-to original format. It appears from the first version in my journal that the ad appears ABOVE the search results - this is not the case.
Free Occident is a web log, but I find it far more worrisome that they've purchased an ad on google than if they were trying to blog some search term, like "White Power," or even "Occident."
Yes, I'm Jewish.
The atomic weight of the most common isotope of carbon is defined as exactly 12; no, naturally occuring carbon doesn't weigh that much, because of the natural abundance of C-13 and C-14.
I'm sure that he meant atomic number, since atomic weights are non-integer, except for Carbon.
Personally, I favor naming them after scientists - this is what 95% of the world's laboratories in every field do. The two computers in my dad's lab are Watson and Crick (he doesn't even work with DNA). Substitute other sorts of famous people; presidents, athletes, whatever.
The anime characters are good, if that's what people in your group can remember. One lab I was in that had a lot of computers used deities; Linux were Hindu deities, NT were Greek, and Irix were Egyptian. We added a Mac (OS X) which I named Arawn (Welsh deity).
With 200 machines, you're gonna run out of pet names really fast, so I think you'd need to assign a whole new category of names to each busines, so Joe's Delivery could get Rolling Stones songs, and John's Delicatessen could get war criminals. That would be cool, and that way any administrative subdivisions could use naming conventions that they were good at remembering.
Oh! I have an idea, you could assign each company a word (Winter and Dog, say) and name every computer associated with that company that word, in a different language. All of the web-servers could be french (Hiver and Chien?), the POP servers spanish (Invierno and Perro) and so forth.
Writers and other creative types usually work from home.
What if all of these - salaries, sales, and so forth - take place in communities outside of the reach of the locale where the actual programming facility exists?
The point is - the facility uses community resources, so it should contribute tax revenue to the community. If that means levying a tax on the act of generating commercial code itself, well, that's less than preferable but it is clearly within the purview of the city.
A software company makes use of community services - Fire Departments, Public Transportation and so forth. It should pay to support them, just like any other business should support the infrastructure of the economy in which it operates.
Software companies may be more or less subject to the various pressures imposed by such taxation on other forms of manufacturing activity - including the tendency to move their operations overseas. However, software shouldn't be any-more-exempt for these reasons than any other business.
Identity theft happens anyway. A well-run system of such cards (I know, how likely is that?) would make such theft less likely, not more. Now, at present, if somone pretends to be you and fools people, you aren't liable for what they do - the individuals CONNED have to eat the loss, by and large; I know there are exceptions, and it can be a pain to deal with, but this is already the fact of life for the 95% of the population who chooses to have credit cards and otherwise participate in the 21st century. IF these ID cards came packaged with legislation to make you liable for anything anyone did with a fake card, that would be a problem.
The government already has your photograph, dude. Even if they don't yet have it, if they're computer-recording the faces of people at demonstrations they can just store them and match them later.
The genetic discrimination paranoia is not really germane. This becomes a problem if the government sequences your entire genome. The markers they would need to, for example, ID your eyelashes, blood, spit and semen are not disease markers, and cannot be used to effectively predict your lifespan or anything else. Yes, insurance industry spies could sneak into government offices, and check your blood samples for disease markers. This would be far easier at the hospital which is on your insurance companies payroll. Nothing to do with ID cards.
The government already makes thumbprinting a functional condition of participation in modern society. You need to give thumbprints to get driver's licenses or state ID cards already, in every state as far as I know (feel free to correct me.)
Every time I say this I get modded down as flamebait, but - there are certain things that you don't want the government to know b/c they compromise your anonymous expression. Your photograph, for example. In the case of the photo, this issue is settled, which is unfortunate in some respects but so far it has not worked out badly. Crooks also want to keep these things secret, and we have to tolerate that as the price of our freedom.
Then, there are certain things that you don't want the government to know b/c you're a crook, and they don't provide protection for people's anonymity of expression. Your thumbprint is one of them. This makes certain forms of civil disobedience more difficult, and I have some civil disobedience running in the other window right now, but we can't structure our society based on the criterion "the government shouldn't do things that make it hard to break the law". In fact, since they're going to keep track of this information ANYWAY, we are better protected, in terms of our civil liberties, if it is tracked in the open.
They're in the firmware of the card-readers, where they are immune to the depradations of all but the brightest 12 year olds.
There's a long story on Michael Moore's page about how he managed to get his book in print in spite of the best efforts of his publisher.
Basically, his publishing company was either a) gonna reprint the book (at Michael's expense) with more PC language or b) sit on it forever. There was nothing he could do about it, legally speaking. A letter writing campaign by a bunch of librarians (and the promise of considerable bad press) evidently forced Harper Collins to capitulate.
As regards the argument that the publisher was right, and that the book was fundamentally flawed, the onion seems to agree. I am not saying that the Onion would condone censoring it on that basis, merely that they agree with the substantive portions of the publisher's complaints, and that POV deserves to be aired, as well.
I'm think that Michael Moore would agree that it his notoriety that saved his book, and that a less-well-known author would have had no such recourse, since their reamed-being would not have made a splash in the press.
the challenge is differentiating "good" content from "bad" content. ... The challenge there is differentiating "good" (safe) speakers from "bad" (dangerous) speakers.
I agree with all else you say - including that the government has the resources to come up with new approaches to the problem - but I don't think that this challenge is really different from distinguishing between good and bad content. In so far as the government is trying to do what it shouldn't even remotely be doing, using this technology to identify subvsersives, you are right. However, in so far as carnivore might *actually* be used to intercept a criminal communique, I think that the challenge is very similar to what is faced by google.
Suppose that Inoccuous260@hotmail.com only ever sends one message, from some terminal in a public library, and it is the delivery schedule for a nuclear weapon. The best, most morally (if not legally) defensible use of Carnivore would be to intercept this message and hand it over to the Feds. If the Feds can do this, even once, Carnivore will be with us forever, however else it may be abused, b/c you will never rally the public will to end use of such a tool. The problem of identifying that message, and I don't want to brainstorm ideas here, but I'm sure we could come up with several, is very similar to the problem of picking out a biographical sketch of Allen Turing among all the sci-fi and hoopla, which Google can do using characterisation by links, and which the government would be hard-pressed to do without that human resource.
So, the author raises a fair point about the limitations on the "legitimate", let us say intended, use of carnivore. However, the unintended/illegitimate use, simple identification of dissidents, could indeed be carried out by a clever 10 year old, and is plenty worrisome even if Carnivore never does what it was supposedly intended to do.
Space Ghost episodes don't circulate for months on the internet before cartoon network airs them.
;)
In any case, 90% of what CN broadcasts are reruns; I'm sure that viewership of reruns is where cartoon network gets most of its ad revenue - even for CN original programming. Space Ghost and Dexter's Lab, although available from Kazaa, haven't yet reached the penetrance of Tenchi Muyo, so I'm not tempted to just watch downloaded versions instead.
Obviously, to the extent that people have a fetishistic preference for television over downloaded viewing, that will provide a boost to TV even should the computer read your mind and fetch whatever you want to watch days before you know you want to see it.
Personally, however, p2p really has damped my interest in CN anime offerings - pretty much completely. For shows that I like but don't feel the need to watch as soon as they're newly broadcast - Space Ghost is a prime example - I'd prefer p2p as well, if they were widely available. I think this is a trend.
re: value added-
CN's editing - I prefer no editing at all - is "value added", if you like it. Services that CN does for society generally by broadcasting anime don't count as value added because they don't enrich the experience at the particular time that I watch the anime. To the extent that my friends might watch the same episode, whereupon we have something to talk about, I suppose that that qualifies as value added. I don't think that it is going to compete with p2p as technology improves, suffice to say.
Legal = value added? I'll just disagree philosophically. Sticking it to the man = value added
I only bring this up because I woke up this morning to four hours of fresh anime that had arrived overnight. I have more of it than I have time or inclination to watch.
:)
I can get all the cartoons I want by p2p. In the case of "the Simpsons", I can see a new episode sooner if I turn on the boob tube (well, my tuner card, anyway) but I already see most of these toons (the ones I actually want to watch) subtitled by fans long before cartoon network gets around to rebroadcasting them sans anything raunchy and with lousy voice talent.
It isn't even that much trouble - taken as a total, turning on whatever software and running it overnight is less time than I would spend watching commercials if I watched them on TV. Why would I ever?
Seriously; what value added does Cartoon Network provide?
I think that US anime is a coal-mine-canary for the whole audio-visual-content industry; which is an appreciable slice of the boysenberry pie which is world economic output. That which is a minor annoyance for dedicated geeks to do today will be routine for any consumer no more than ten years hence. So - are video pirates like me (Yar!) going to appreciably sour the audience for Cartoon Network's anime? Or, is it nothing but good fan recruitment for anime generally?
Hard numbers would sure be nice, if some blessed sould has them - searches on google spit back mostly links to slashdot
Obviously, in this case, the DMCA couldn't prevent anyone from distributing cracking tools - unless every java development environment under the sun is a circumvention tool. Also, I have a question - what happens if you convert one of these MW-books to post-script? Does pdf2ps fail? I don't really know anything about the pdf standard.
... digital distribution of content would really catch on.
I think that what Don MacAskill is saying can be interpreted as a very sensible statement: that people don't generally bother to steal cars, because the relationship between the difficulty to get a stolen car, and the amount you have to pay to get a car, and the extra utility you get from a car you actually own, is such that few people bother.
So, extending that analogy, stealing copyrighted content has to be difficult enough that, given how useful and easy-to-acquire non-stolen content is, most people will purchase the non-stolen content.
At present, and I can speak only for myself, I use "stolen" content - and I will go ahead and use the semantics of the content "owners" even though I disagree philosophically with the principle of owning abstractions - because it is, overall, easier to get (price aside) and more useful. If content owners reverse THAT relationship, in which ease-of-theft is a factor but not an overwhelming one, they can get people to buy their content.
Now, THIS really bust my gut. Only copyrighted content counts? Slashdot's thousands of hits per day (millions? I don't know) don't count as content distribution?
Content distribution HAS caught on, just not among the sector of people who expect to make money from conditions imposed by scarcity.
It's even more fun to do this to the movie industry.
Here's a list of instructions, much like the ones you just gave, although they are written in a context-free language so that they can be interpreted directly by a computer as well as a person, to unencrypt the contents of a DVD - ugh, my head.
THE POSTER'S BRAIN CONTAINS THOUGHTS WHICH QUALIFY AS CIRCUMVENTION DEVICES UNDER THE DMCA. THEREFORE, IT HAS BEEN ERASED. - YOUR FRIENDS, THE MPAA.
What was I talking about? Oh, 40 days and 40 nights was such a great movie!
Moderate that post up!
:). All credit due to the guy I'm responding to.
Just in case no-one does moderate him up, I'm reposting his link with my bonus. I can't be whoring because I'm capped
Excellent journalism here.
I believe that Morpheus is telling the truth, since my personal experiences back them up. I will ramble now:
Okay, silly man that I am, I had both Morpheus and Kazaa installed on my machine (even though, until recently, they were exactly the same.)
So, last week, Kazaa, which is what I ordinarily used since I have a sick attraction to the color yellow, stops working well. The number of hits I get for searches drops by about a quarter, when I search successfully at all; for some reason I keep getting booted from the network and having to reconnect. "That's odd" I say to myself. Also, it proceeds to ignore the "maximum uploads" setting in my preferences, which I keep low so that other broadband users can get my files in reasonable time. Personally, I suspect that Kazaa installed some "upgrades" for itself without prompting me (or I clicked through the prompt without noticing, always a possibility); I should probably check timestamps and see. I have it set to prompt before auto-updates, but since it's ignoring some of my preferences I don't know how much I trust that.
Out of curiosity, I start Morpheus; and I get the message about being unable to connect to the network. So, Morpheus' failure to connect seems to coincide with Kazaa's service collapse - which is exactly what I'd expect given that 90% of the users within four hops of me (New York City) use Morpheus instead of Kazaa.
Now, I don't know about these DOS attacks / advertisement hacks. I tried to connect to Morpheus several times during this period, and none of my regsitry keys have been fiddled with, at least as far as I can tell. Ad-aware doesn't find anything wrong.
Okay, back to the conspiracy theory. I assume that the Aussie company that bought Kazaa is trying to crowd Morpheus out. While you and I know this is stupid, to them this must make sense; they think they can get all of Morpheus' old users to switch to Kazaa, boosting their add revenues.
Given this sort of despicable behavior on their part, I am willing to give Morpheus' the benefit of the doubt: the implication of Morpheus' comments is that someone involved in the Kazaa stack - that is to say, this Australian company that bought Kazaa - is behind whatever attacks occured.
Personally, I want to see the contract that Morpheus entered into with Kazaa for use of their network/software.
Okay, children, instead of starting you with the chemistry of things you encounter in everyday life, we'll teach you chemistry from the ground up, starting with first principles. Who can tell me how to transform this wave function to be time independent?
Lisa: Finally, a chance to use my linear algebra.
Ralph: Ms. Hoover, I'm scared of the ocean.
P.S. For those of you who weren't around back in the day, there was a movement called the "New Math" where elementary school kids would be taught set & number theory, and other mostly theoretical stuff, before being taught algebra. Please note that I covered my ass and said mostly theoretical.
P.P.S. I haven't read the book myself, but I've heard nothing but excellent things from my chemist friends (I am a comp. biologist) so I ordered it.
There's a skill you must have to enjoy investing yourself in a complicated, demanding, intellectual job - and I wish I had advice for developing this skill, but I don't - you have to be able to tell who's a competent, visionary administrator (yes, such people do exist, god bless them) and who is, to be frank, an idiot (lots of those, as I'm sure you've all noticed.)
So, before you take a job, go and meet the management. Even if it means taking a pay cut, my advice is to work for smart people, and enjoy your work.
If you don't have the luxury (I'm a computational biologist, so I do) of choosing your employer / PI (that's what a scientist's boss is called) / project manager / what have you, then, well, you can't expect to be happy at your job. Most people are in the position of taking whatever job they can get, and they're unhappy with what they end up with. So, if you're one of the few people with the luxury of choosing where to work, get your priorities straight and at least consider the competence (to say nothing of worthiness) of the prospective co-workers, in addition to the economics.
I'm happy at my job, by the way.
Blizzard is a big player in the PC videogame industry, but Slashdots million (?) readers are still an important slice of market pie for blizzard. Those half a million copies of Diablo II we bought (you know you did, even though Lord British's disembodied head came to you in a dream and told you not to; that the game was stupid and had no plot) brought them over 10 million dollars of pure profit - cash money to swim in, through up in the air and let it rain down on their heads.
So, that's 2 for a boycott. No more blizzard games for me, until they disavow this bullshit in writing. Also, I need to knock off the red wine and sharp cheddar before going to sleep.
When Fox News says "fair", they mean "left"? "Fair and Balanced" they continuously declare. You find similar statements on "creation science" webpages.
As a radical leftist, I am more likely to describe leftist politics as "good". Leftists say someone has "good politics", rightists say someone is "fair" or "reasonable" or "impartial."
Fair, balanced or impartial are adjectives usually used by someone who wants to put forward the idea that what they are saying is at the political center (or inherently obvious and not subjective in nature). This is much more common among rightists - at least in the states, there is a common misconception by those on the right about where the political center of this country really is. Now, by international standards, the US is a right wing country, it's true. Elsewhere in the world, I'm sure there are countries where people on the left are deluded into thinking that the majority of the population agrees with them, because enough people are on the far left that they can get away with it.
In the states, however, no-one thinks that leftists are in the majority! There are people who sincerely believe that Bush Jr. is a centrist.
This is actually a point of some contention - the US military still maintains that the nuclear tests on Bikini Atoll didn't cause the cancer spike in the repopulated residents. There used to be an article on either greenpeace or the union of concerned scientists about fallout from neutron bombs, but now I can't find it.
This which I just found using google says '1/100 of the radioactive fallout' of an "equivalent" fission bomb.
There are people who insist that that level of radiation isn't harmful in the short term (hah.) Suffice to say that *I* wouldn't want to live in such a place a hundred years later.
I'm not a bomb designer either, I'm a biologist. The problem with neutron bombs isn't nixing real estate (which generally goes uninhabited after being bombed to snot, anyway) but releasing radioactive isotopes into the upper atmosphere -> everywhere. They're not nearly as bad as conventional hydrogen bombs, which are a disaster. Two tactical neutron bombs, once per decade, I'd think we could get away with; at a certain point, every neutron bomb you set off kills hundreds+ innocent people, somewhere in the world, from increased incidence of random leukemia (and other forms of cancer). You're never going to know who would have gotten leukemia anyway, of course, but the rate goes up.
The US Military releases a great deal of, frankly lies, about the characteristics of our nuclear arsenal, for both good reasons (necesarry secrecy) and bad (PR). A lot of the sources you read are just quoting the US Military, which has an abysmal record in terms of agreeing with the assessments of independent investigators.
Of course, this isn't why we refrain from using neutron bombs. The Space Shuttles are probably killing hundreds of people from the ozone they deplete ("only" 1% of the total loss, according to this one NASA guy I talked with) and no one cares. The nuclear boogeyman is why we don't use them; but there are good reasons, as well. Now that the non-proliferation treaty is basically dead, though, our best reason for restraint is pretty much nixed.
I'm afraid you're seriously misinformed.
The Neutron Bomb releases considerably LESS radioactive material than the first generation of fusion bomb; it also produces a smaller shockwave, given the amount of light/heat/rads it emits. However, they still release far more radioisotopes than anyone-but-the-french considers acceptable; and areas hit by neutron bombs are still uninhabitable for long periods of time.
The laser itself can be re-used; so can the launch tube that fires a Cruise Missile. However, when all maintanence costs for these things - including replacing the chemical cells every time they are fired - is taken into account, I am absolutely certain that these lasers will cost more per shot.
I'm not arguing that the R&D dollars were poorly spent - I'm saying that the money to actually build these things would be poorly spent. Even so, I can think of a LOT of things I'd rather see our tax dollars spent on.
Oh, please.
We don't refrain from using nukes because they are "efficient". If we could mount conventional warheads with the explosive power of a tacnuke, but without the radioactive fallout, we'd use them in a second.
Unless there is some good reason to use a less efficient weapon system - as is the case with conventional explosives over nukes - we should use the most efficient means to kill people.
I am very nearly a pacifist - however, if you are going to fight a war, you should use the most powerful, effective tools you have to end the conflict swiftly and decisively, with a minimum of collateral damage. These means-
Cruise Missiles Good
Nukes Bad (collateral damage)
Lasers, Chainsaws, Voltron
Bad (inefficient)
No, look, it is NOT faster because you have to mount it on an aircraft. If these lasers had enough RANGE that you could fire them from ground turrets then, yes, you could shoot down missiles with them.
However, they do not. You have to get in an airplane, and play space invaders with it.
This is not a practical solution.
I'm not raising moral objections here, but practical ones.
Yes, okay, we now have a laser which really can be used to blow something up. Yippee, us.
The people who spent truckloads of money to develop this turkey naturally want us to deploy it.
Ask yourself: Does it have any advantages over a missile? Well, it's bigger, it doesn't go as far, it inflicts less damage, and it costs more. But it is a Laser (therefore the weapon of the future) and it does work at all.
We could also outfit our ground forces with supersonic vibrating swords. This would work, you could kill people with them. Likewise, giant robots as were discussed in a previous slashdot article.
However, the fact remains that all of these technologies, while Cool, are very much NOT the most effective means of achieving military objectives!
These laser weapons are nothing but a white elephant for defense contractors, who have seen the end of the cold war erode their profits.
The idea of using one of these things to shoot down a missile - which is a very difficult feat even using inherently practical weapons systems - is absurd.