The best way to ensure that something like 9/11 never happens again is to (drum-roll) turn American foreign policy on its ear. Stop invading other countries, stop overthrowing other countries governments, stop murdering their leaders, stop stealing their natural resources.
To a large degree I happen to agree with you. America is fairly well insulated from the conflicts in the world and if we withdrew from them we would much safer. We would probably have even have more influence (though less power) as an example rather than as a meddling power.
HOWEVER, It is not America or it's foreign policy or colonialism, capitalism, communism, fascism or any other "ism" that causes human conflict, hate or cruelty. It is humans and human nature. While some "isms" may exacerbate and some may mitigate against those human traits none are the cause of, nor the panacea against, them.
That being the case even with a safer and more reserved (and more sane) foreign policy we would still need a few "jackbooted thugs" (to use your term) and to spy on people (even on occasion citizens) It is unfortunately not the case that meaning no one else harm is proof against someone meaning YOU harm.
There is even a strong case to be made that withdrawing our (invading, overthrowing, murdering and stealing) presense from the stage of world events would lead to MORE of all the those bad things happening. In historical terms the USA has been remarkably underachieving in all those activities considering it's economic, technological and military dominance. Most nations in our position have been far more efficient and effective at them. Also, the result of a power vaccuum is often far worse than even the most cruel of empires. Of course such vaccuums are only temporary, they last only as until one of the invading-overthrowing-murdering-stealing contestants ends up on top. Any attempt on our part to prevent someone else from invading-overthrowing-murdering-stealing (as they inevitably will) leads us right back to where we are now, forced by the situation to do such things ourselves if only to prevent those that would likely be better at it than we are.
Still, that is not an argument to pursue power to prevent it's abuse by others (even if we had such pure motives). We should content ourselves to secure our own safety and ours alone - we should be "the friends of liberty everywhere but the guardians only of our own" any course more ambitious leads us to the inevitable moral comprimises and involvement in other's conflicts that tempt them (more than they normally would be) to fly jumbo jets into our office buildings.
Sheer idiocy: "... 95 percent (by volume in gigabytes)..." (If it's a percentage, then why does the unit matter?)
I'm pretty sure I agree but I'm trying to be charitable and come up with a reason why this makes sense... To be fair he could be saying it that way to make it clear exactly what is being measured. 95% by volume (in bits, bytes, etc.) is different from 95% by time. For instance it might be that in 2012 we spend 40% of our time computer input time using the sylus on our PDA and 20% of our time using voice recognition to talk to our home entertainment system but still 95% of the input by *volume of data* using keyboard and mouse.
LOL, That is EXACTLY the way I read it too. I had to re-read it once before figuring out that he wasn't testing his banks security features or something.
Fair enough, and Apple isn't paying for the "advertisements" though I'd imagine they'd be willing to put their banner ads up on that particular page. The Amazon links are sort-of advertising. Amazon will pay/. a commission on any sales generated by those links.
All of which is fine in my view. The Amazon link is performing a useful purpose, if the review is honestly positive and I want to buy the book It's a service to me that I have the ability to buy it right there and I don't mind that the reviewer gets paid for providing the link. BUT, the danger is there is now a financial incentive to be less than honest - review bigger ticket items & give them more positive reviews to drive higher ticket sales that go straight into the reviewers pocket.
That's not exactly comparable, because you're obfuscating the intent of the "advertisement" inside the text of your post.
That's true. But to some extent that is exactly what Google does - the text ads at the top of the search results are easy to mistake for search results, perhaps even the *best* results. To be fair, on Google they ARE on topic unlike the link in my post;)
Unfortunately for the advertisers people just ignore their ads and "obfuscated" advertising is more effective. I'm sure the amazon affiliate links on a/. book review are more effective than the banner ads. Nothing wrong with that - it is information that the user actually wants and that Amazon is willing to pay a commision for.
Maybe then again it IS a new form factor for the PC - A stylus is NOT that good of an input device for most applications*, so it's basically a computer for applications that are mostly about output - accessing existing information. Surfing the web, watching DVD's, listening to music, using as an oversized PDA. But more and more PC's are being used as a way to simply access data rather than to input or manipulate data so perhaps such a machine will find a market.
* One exception, tablets are great for artists, actually drawing on the screen would be cool. Wacom has a pressure sensitive tablet w/LCD screen (as well as a TabletPC). The problem I noticed playing around with it was that there was a delay between what you did and what happened on the screen. So the "paint" was following along a bit behind what you are doing - you don't notice this when the tablet and the screen are seperate but it is very noticable and distracting when you are drawing right on the screen. I played around with one a while ago so maybe advances in technology have advanced to where this is no longer such a big problem.
Internet advertising will come into its own only when they realize that the best approach is to count eyeballs, just like magazines sell ads based on circulation and TV sells them based on viewership.
Some internet advertising IS sold this way. Still, just like in magazines advertisers will be willing to pay more for larger more noticable ads.
Glad that they thought of the consumer when they invented these new sizes.
What you aren't understanding is that they DID think of the consumer. You are NOT the consumer of a publication, you are the PRODUCT. The publication is selling your "eyes", or click-throughs to their customers, their consumers, the advertiser. They have to strike a balance between having enough content nicely displayed to harvest the raw product (you) with the need to sell the product as "click through's". If they oversell the product (to much advertising per page) we leave in irritation but it does them no good to harvest the product and then not sell it. Also the more efficiently they can convert the raw product into it's refined salable form (click-through's) the better they do.
These new ads are yet another attempt to find the right balance, your individual feelings are immaterial to both the advertiser and the publication, they only care about the aggregate result. If the new ads are irritating enough that the amount of raw product harvested decreases (people stay away) but are more effective at converting the remaining product into it's salable form (more of the remaining readers actually click the ads) it may still be a win for both the publication and for the advertiser.
But I will smolder in Hell before I ever buy one because of their obnoxious advertising.. So who -is- buying them?
Thousands of horny teenagers. So if you are unethical and want to sell this product who do you want to sell it to, a few dozen geeks with a practical use or a signicantly larger percentage of the population - horny males (including the geeks).
Besides the "dumb" marketing guys probably have a second brand-name for the product that is focused on the non-voyeur, legitimate side of the market. A brand marketted to legitimate security applications or geeks tinkering with the thing. There is no reason why they cannot have their cake, and eat it to.
It was an IBM ad though for what exactly I don't know. The irony that the ad was so large that it pushed the comments "below the fold" made me notice more than I would otherwise.
To be "fair" the new super-large, super-annoying, in-line ads are so big and right in the middle of the content you are trying to look at you can't help noticing them. A better test would be to compare how many remember what the obnoxious ad in the middle of the page was for to how many remember what the banner at the top was for. I would bet that the obnoxious ad is slightly more effective.
However I do agree with you that the most effective would be *content* that is really advertising - the online equivalent of product placement. Arguably/. is already doing this gratis for some companies (there is an entire section devoted to Apple) and every link in a book review is an Amazon.com affiliate link - probably those are their most effective advertising links.
For some reason advertisers never come up with new, smaller advertising formats.
Yet ironically in some contexts it is the smaller ads that are more effective. Google does far better with those tiny text-only ads at the top and right side of their search results than the other search engines did with the traditional banners at the top of the page.
Setting a detector off, especially setting a detector off that is known to go off for perfectly innocent people, is no reason to have one's rights tossed in the dumpster. If it is, well I hear that terrorists exhale carbon dioxide. I think we should detect for that too.;)... They are worse than useless if the cops are too busy strip searching the innocent to catch the terrorist
I think you are vastly overstating the number of false positives these detectors are producing. I was just at Penn Station and the security guys did not appear to be swamped by cancer patients setting off alarms. Unlike exhaling CO2 only a very, very, very few people are actively radioactive. Of course there is a much smaller number of people that are radioactive for not-so-innocent reasons. Still I think we have a much better chance of catching that one potential bad guy with the unhealthy glow that comes from smuggling a leaky suitcase nuke from Kazakstan or stealing nuclear waste from an insecure container somewhere if we are searching the few dozens glowing subway passengers rather than having to search all 7 million NY residents because you think it is wrong to even be *suspicious* of anyone until their guilt can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. How we could ever investigate anyone to get that proof without at least starting at the stage where we are merely suspicious & willing to act on those suspicious is an interesting problem.
Dirty bombers would prefer large open habitats of great civic value with high human populations (like ye old baseball stadium).
Ah, but how do they get them there? They just might take the subway. They might even just be taking the subway just to go out for diner after a night of packing radioactive material into a bomb casing. Or to get from the port where they left their suitcase nuke to the apartment of their local contact.
New York has to assume that if some terrorist does have a radiological, or far worse, a nuclear weapon they are likely to be the target. And neither is that far fetched. A crude radiological weapon is not that hard to build, probably well within the capabilities of a well financed and organized terrorist organization. A suitcase nuke isn't even that hard if you manage to have money and the luck to find someone willing to sell one of those that are believed to be missing from the former USSR's arsenal. (It's not terribly comforting that the main reasons Matthew Bunn thinks General Lebed is wrong and there are NOT ~100 missing suitcase nukes is that Soviet paperwork is so screwed up he could *think* they are missing when they really still there) Sure they are only 1-kiloton but that would still make a pretty big crater in the center of Manhattan.
yeah, i'm serious, i know nothing of the publishing industry.
All design for publishing is done using pretty much just three programs (or four if you count the text that was provided in MS Word format): Adobe Photoshop for bitmap images (photo's, paintings etc.). Adobe Illustrator (sometimes Macromedia Freehand) for vector drawings, and Quark XPress to arrange it all together on a page and to format the text.
Of all those programs Quark is perhaps the most indispensible. They benefit from exactly the same kind of dynamics that Microsoft Word benefits from - EVERYBODY uses Quark & expects Quark files and has a hard time if they recieve anything other than Quark files. Adobe (which you might have noticed produces the other 2 software packages used by designers) is trying to move people to their new competing product InDesign but Quark is so well entrenched Adobe is finding it difficult despite enormous advantages. Adobe has immense credibility, they're made of money, produce the two other essential software packages as well as most of the industry standard file formats like PostScript, EPS and PDF, and InDesign is available on MacOS X the newest and best OS from the computer company that still dominates the publishing industry - and Adobe is still having a hard time breaking in on Quark's business.
As a side note: Quark is actually the name of the company - the software is actually named XPress or "Quark XPress" like "Adobe Photoshop" but since Quark unlike Adobe only has that one product everybody calls the software "Quark"
I don't know what articles you read, but I have never seen that argument on/..
Oh, come on, every relevant story has a large number of "score 5" posts saying that the hacker (cracker, whatever) is being unjustly persecuted for mere curiosity and that the sysadmin is *entirely* at fault - that if you don't lock down your system then it is my perogative, my right, perhaps even my duty to exploit that hole in your security. It is an open door and it is not breaking and entering to go right in and rummage through the place to satisfy my curiosity.
Yes, *some* posts are arguing that the sysadmin is guilty of negligence in failing to do due diligence to stop someone from getting into the system. That is a perfectly fine argument. BUT, there is a large body of sentiment on this site that feels that the hacker is *perfectly* innocent and within his rights.
If you are suprised by this you haven't been on/. very long. This is the same logic modded up to a 5 in every conversation about a hacker conviction - that the hacker is innocent because the sysadmin should have had better security. Well, the dept. of Homeland Security has bought the/. party line that the perpetrator of bad acts isn't responsible, the sysadmin with poor security is. Well if the sysadmin is the responsible party in the case of a hacker breaking into his system then he can be held responsible if his negligence facilitates a terrorist act. I don't buy it in either case - crappy security is a bad thing but the person taking advantage of that crappy security is the one criminally responsible.
I will be fair and admit that no matter how you view the responsiblity of network administrators that the position of the Dept. of Homeland Sec. is silly and a huge overreach - especially if they are talking about mere access to the internet.
Being as charitable as possible towards the Dept. of Homeland Security I could assume they are (vastly) overstating their case to publicise a security issue that in the cases of *some* networks does have broader national security implications. Not because terrorists could get access to the internet but access to someones internal network that has either very sensitive information or actual control of important systems - a case where I certainly could see holding a negligent network administrator criminally responsible.
And if they did make a "dirty" bomb, why the fuck would they set it off in the subway?
They might not, the subway is just a convenient bottleneck where you can screen people. I would imagine the guy that is assembling the dirty bomb in his apartment, the guy transporting the materials for it, the guy taking it uptown to the target or in our worst nightmare the guy who carried the suitcase nuke from Belarus are all going to set off these detectors. The cancer patient setting this thing off is getting strip searched, apologized to and sent on his way - I'd imagine a perfectly healthy Egyptian with a recent visit to Kazahstan on his passport is going to get much closer scrutiny.
Try consider it a priority of known threats vs. theoretical threats. Or a case for balance. Or a rearrangeing of order of operations, as a gaping present day vulnerability is apparent.
But there are other important considerations that should go into arranging the order of operations.
First, the extent of the threat. A conventional bomb can kill a few dozen, maybe a few hundred if the terrorist picks the right target and is really lucky. A nuke is the least likely theoretical threat but could kill MILLIONS.
Second, the ease with which you can gaurd against the threat - a gieger counter is a realatively easy and cheap way to guard against that theoretical threat. Bomb sniffing equipement or dogs are much more difficult and expensive solution to the known threat.
In this situation it doesn't strike me as irrational to implement the system that you CAN and is effective against the most extremely severe threat - even if that threat is also the least likely to occur.
I'm all for setting these things so that cancer patients don't set them off but...
Those patients have rights! They should not be stripped searched because they are receiving treatment for a terminal illness.
No, they should be strip searched because they set of a radiation detector. That is an important distinction. If these "false positives" can be eliminated by adjusting the sensors then we should do so. BUT the idea that we face no threats worth occasional inconveniences to guard against is a hopelessly naive and borderline suicidal attitude.
If a dirty bomb was properly shielded, it wouldn't give a true positive
True, but radiation sensors raise the bar and afford one more place where a potential terrorist can screw up and get caught. Any security measure in any field can be overcome, that does not mean that therefore all security measures are useless.
As for the mean terrorists: if they play with nuclear fire, they are gonna get burned, big time. That's what the Red Bamboo found out in 1966, the hard way.
Well I don't know if we should be using movies starring King Kong and Mothra as the basis for our security decisions.
Well it really is just one story that has been somewhat arbitrarily broken into three sections. Tolkien originally wanted it to be on *big* book but the publisher insisted, rightly IMO, that it wouldn't sell if it wasn't in more digestible chunks.
That being said each of the six 'books' (each book in the trilogy is divided into a pair of 'books') has *some* resolution though sometimes an unhappy one and for obvious reasons usually a "cliffhanger"). At the end of the first book they make it to Rivendell, at the end of the second (the end of FOTR) the fellowship is broken, etc. By ganging up two 'books' into one book or movie you sort of dilute the feeling of resolution because half of the FOTR takes place before the fellowhip is even formed so it's disolution is less satisfying as an (cliffhanger) ending. Which makes me wonder if they could have pulled it off as six two-hour movies. Each movie would feel a little more complete on it's own by telling a smaller but more satisfyingly resolved story. They certainly seemed to have enough footage and even though I really liked FOTR I have to say 3.5 hours for the director's cut starts to get overwhelming/tedious. From a mercenary standpoint for the studio that is twice as many movie tickets/DVD/merchandise sales.
...but the politics are exactly the same. Every one of the characters is an archetype that we can see in the world around us - maybe not someone we can give a name to, but someone we could say, "yeah, my mayor acts just like that guy." The science doesn't unbalance what is really a story about politics.
I posted elsewhere a
poem that C.S. Lewis wrote where he essentially disagree's with you. He was frustrated with SciFi writers that write stories that don't need to be SciFi - Spy stories, political stories, love stories etc. that are just using the SciFi elements as elaborate window dressing (or perhaps as a distraction to cover up failures in storytelling).
Lewis has a point but I don't entirely agree with him. There are good reasons sometimes to use scifi to abstract your story from the "real world" - For instnace to make a political point universal rather than particular or to get away with pointed commentary yet still win a favorable hearing from those you would otherwise offend. Still many sci-fi writers are just using sci-fi as cheap and easy window dressing to otherwise mundane stories. It's easier to write in a sci-fi world - who's to tell you you have made a mistake or have a tin-ear when the entire world you are writing about is made up. In art school you draw the human figure because it's so familiar it's easy for everyone to see you've messed it up (and aren't really that good an artist) if you are drawing imaginary creatures who's to say the way you drew it's head was "wrong" It's similar with writing, it's easier to make everything up than to convincingly portray something your reader will be familiar with.
An Expostulation Against too many writers of Science Fiction
Why did you lure us on like this,
Light-year on light year, through the abyss,
Building (as though we cared for size!)
Empires that cover galaxies,
If at the journey's end we find
The same old stuff we left behind,
Well-worn Tellurian stories of
Crooks, spies, conspiritors, or love,
Whose setting might as well have been
The Bronx, Montmarte, or Bethnal Green?
Why should I leave this green-floored cell,
Roofed with blue air, in which we dwell,
Unless, outside its guarded gates,
Long, long desired, the Unearthly waits,
Strangeness that moves us more than fear,
Beauty that stabs with tingling spear,
Or WOnder, laying on one's heart
That finger-tip at which we start
As if some thought too swift and shy
For reason's grasp had just come by?
Slashdot Mirror
In case anyone wants to subsidize my Amazon.com christmas shopping ;)
Ghost in the Shell
Urusei Yatsura 2:Beautiful Dreamer
Patlabor 1
Patlabor 2
Urusei Yatsura - Vol. 1 (Episodes 1-4)
Urusei Yatsura - Vol. 2 (Episodes 5-8) (1982)
Urusei Yatsura - Vol. 3 (Episodes 9-12) (1982)
Urusei Yatsura - Vol. 4 (Episodes 13-16) (1982)
The best way to ensure that something like 9/11 never happens again is to (drum-roll) turn American foreign policy on its ear. Stop invading other countries, stop overthrowing other countries governments, stop murdering their leaders, stop stealing their natural resources.
To a large degree I happen to agree with you. America is fairly well insulated from the conflicts in the world and if we withdrew from them we would much safer. We would probably have even have more influence (though less power) as an example rather than as a meddling power.
HOWEVER, It is not America or it's foreign policy or colonialism, capitalism, communism, fascism or any other "ism" that causes human conflict, hate or cruelty. It is humans and human nature. While some "isms" may exacerbate and some may mitigate against those human traits none are the cause of, nor the panacea against, them.
That being the case even with a safer and more reserved (and more sane) foreign policy we would still need a few "jackbooted thugs" (to use your term) and to spy on people (even on occasion citizens) It is unfortunately not the case that meaning no one else harm is proof against someone meaning YOU harm.
There is even a strong case to be made that withdrawing our (invading, overthrowing, murdering and stealing) presense from the stage of world events would lead to MORE of all the those bad things happening. In historical terms the USA has been remarkably underachieving in all those activities considering it's economic, technological and military dominance. Most nations in our position have been far more efficient and effective at them. Also, the result of a power vaccuum is often far worse than even the most cruel of empires. Of course such vaccuums are only temporary, they last only as until one of the invading-overthrowing-murdering-stealing contestants ends up on top. Any attempt on our part to prevent someone else from invading-overthrowing-murdering-stealing (as they inevitably will) leads us right back to where we are now, forced by the situation to do such things ourselves if only to prevent those that would likely be better at it than we are.
Still, that is not an argument to pursue power to prevent it's abuse by others (even if we had such pure motives). We should content ourselves to secure our own safety and ours alone - we should be "the friends of liberty everywhere but the guardians only of our own" any course more ambitious leads us to the inevitable moral comprimises and involvement in other's conflicts that tempt them (more than they normally would be) to fly jumbo jets into our office buildings.
Sheer idiocy: "... 95 percent (by volume in gigabytes) ..." (If it's a percentage, then why does the unit matter?)
I'm pretty sure I agree but I'm trying to be charitable and come up with a reason why this makes sense... To be fair he could be saying it that way to make it clear exactly what is being measured. 95% by volume (in bits, bytes, etc.) is different from 95% by time. For instance it might be that in 2012 we spend 40% of our time computer input time using the sylus on our PDA and 20% of our time using voice recognition to talk to our home entertainment system but still 95% of the input by *volume of data* using keyboard and mouse.
LOL, That is EXACTLY the way I read it too. I had to re-read it once before figuring out that he wasn't testing his banks security features or something.
Fair enough, and Apple isn't paying for the "advertisements" though I'd imagine they'd be willing to put their banner ads up on that particular page. The Amazon links are sort-of advertising. Amazon will pay /. a commission on any sales generated by those links.
All of which is fine in my view. The Amazon link is performing a useful purpose, if the review is honestly positive and I want to buy the book It's a service to me that I have the ability to buy it right there and I don't mind that the reviewer gets paid for providing the link. BUT, the danger is there is now a financial incentive to be less than honest - review bigger ticket items & give them more positive reviews to drive higher ticket sales that go straight into the reviewers pocket.
That's not exactly comparable, because you're obfuscating the intent of the "advertisement" inside the text of your post.
;)
/. book review are more effective than the banner ads. Nothing wrong with that - it is information that the user actually wants and that Amazon is willing to pay a commision for.
That's true. But to some extent that is exactly what Google does - the text ads at the top of the search results are easy to mistake for search results, perhaps even the *best* results. To be fair, on Google they ARE on topic unlike the link in my post
Unfortunately for the advertisers people just ignore their ads and "obfuscated" advertising is more effective. I'm sure the amazon affiliate links on a
My bad I just saw that link under their "products" section and didn't read it through.
Maybe then again it IS a new form factor for the PC - A stylus is NOT that good of an input device for most applications*, so it's basically a computer for applications that are mostly about output - accessing existing information. Surfing the web, watching DVD's, listening to music, using as an oversized PDA. But more and more PC's are being used as a way to simply access data rather than to input or manipulate data so perhaps such a machine will find a market.
* One exception, tablets are great for artists, actually drawing on the screen would be cool. Wacom has a pressure sensitive tablet w/LCD screen (as well as a TabletPC). The problem I noticed playing around with it was that there was a delay between what you did and what happened on the screen. So the "paint" was following along a bit behind what you are doing - you don't notice this when the tablet and the screen are seperate but it is very noticable and distracting when you are drawing right on the screen. I played around with one a while ago so maybe advances in technology have advanced to where this is no longer such a big problem.
Well Eddi Bauer is the designer not so much a celebrity
Internet advertising will come into its own only when they realize that the best approach is to count eyeballs, just like magazines sell ads based on circulation and TV sells them based on viewership.
Some internet advertising IS sold this way. Still, just like in magazines advertisers will be willing to pay more for larger more noticable ads.
Glad that they thought of the consumer when they invented these new sizes.
What you aren't understanding is that they DID think of the consumer. You are NOT the consumer of a publication, you are the PRODUCT. The publication is selling your "eyes", or click-throughs to their customers, their consumers, the advertiser. They have to strike a balance between having enough content nicely displayed to harvest the raw product (you) with the need to sell the product as "click through's". If they oversell the product (to much advertising per page) we leave in irritation but it does them no good to harvest the product and then not sell it. Also the more efficiently they can convert the raw product into it's refined salable form (click-through's) the better they do.
These new ads are yet another attempt to find the right balance, your individual feelings are immaterial to both the advertiser and the publication, they only care about the aggregate result. If the new ads are irritating enough that the amount of raw product harvested decreases (people stay away) but are more effective at converting the remaining product into it's salable form (more of the remaining readers actually click the ads) it may still be a win for both the publication and for the advertiser.
But I will smolder in Hell before I ever buy one because of their obnoxious advertising.. So who -is- buying them?
Thousands of horny teenagers. So if you are unethical and want to sell this product who do you want to sell it to, a few dozen geeks with a practical use or a signicantly larger percentage of the population - horny males (including the geeks).
Besides the "dumb" marketing guys probably have a second brand-name for the product that is focused on the non-voyeur, legitimate side of the market. A brand marketted to legitimate security applications or geeks tinkering with the thing. There is no reason why they cannot have their cake, and eat it to.
It was an IBM ad though for what exactly I don't know. The irony that the ad was so large that it pushed the comments "below the fold" made me notice more than I would otherwise.
/. is already doing this gratis for some companies (there is an entire section devoted to Apple) and every link in a book review is an Amazon.com affiliate link - probably those are their most effective advertising links.
To be "fair" the new super-large, super-annoying, in-line ads are so big and right in the middle of the content you are trying to look at you can't help noticing them. A better test would be to compare how many remember what the obnoxious ad in the middle of the page was for to how many remember what the banner at the top was for. I would bet that the obnoxious ad is slightly more effective.
However I do agree with you that the most effective would be *content* that is really advertising - the online equivalent of product placement. Arguably
For some reason advertisers never come up with new, smaller advertising formats.
;)
Yet ironically in some contexts it is the smaller ads that are more effective. Google does far better with those tiny text-only ads at the top and right side of their search results than the other search engines did with the traditional banners at the top of the page.
Just to test my theory I wonder how this text link to The Lord of the Rings - The Fellowship... buried in the text does compared to the banner at the top
Setting a detector off, especially setting a detector off that is known to go off for perfectly innocent people, is no reason to have one's rights tossed in the dumpster. If it is, well I hear that terrorists exhale carbon dioxide. I think we should detect for that too. ;)... They are worse than useless if the cops are too busy strip searching the innocent to catch the terrorist
I think you are vastly overstating the number of false positives these detectors are producing. I was just at Penn Station and the security guys did not appear to be swamped by cancer patients setting off alarms. Unlike exhaling CO2 only a very, very, very few people are actively radioactive. Of course there is a much smaller number of people that are radioactive for not-so-innocent reasons. Still I think we have a much better chance of catching that one potential bad guy with the unhealthy glow that comes from smuggling a leaky suitcase nuke from Kazakstan or stealing nuclear waste from an insecure container somewhere if we are searching the few dozens glowing subway passengers rather than having to search all 7 million NY residents because you think it is wrong to even be *suspicious* of anyone until their guilt can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. How we could ever investigate anyone to get that proof without at least starting at the stage where we are merely suspicious & willing to act on those suspicious is an interesting problem.
Dirty bombers would prefer large open habitats of great civic value with high human populations (like ye old baseball stadium).
Ah, but how do they get them there? They just might take the subway. They might even just be taking the subway just to go out for diner after a night of packing radioactive material into a bomb casing. Or to get from the port where they left their suitcase nuke to the apartment of their local contact.
New York has to assume that if some terrorist does have a radiological, or far worse, a nuclear weapon they are likely to be the target. And neither is that far fetched. A crude radiological weapon is not that hard to build, probably well within the capabilities of a well financed and organized terrorist organization. A suitcase nuke isn't even that hard if you manage to have money and the luck to find someone willing to sell one of those that are believed to be missing from the former USSR's arsenal. (It's not terribly comforting that the main reasons Matthew Bunn thinks General Lebed is wrong and there are NOT ~100 missing suitcase nukes is that Soviet paperwork is so screwed up he could *think* they are missing when they really still there) Sure they are only 1-kiloton but that would still make a pretty big crater in the center of Manhattan.
yeah, i'm serious, i know nothing of the publishing industry.
All design for publishing is done using pretty much just three programs (or four if you count the text that was provided in MS Word format): Adobe Photoshop for bitmap images (photo's, paintings etc.). Adobe Illustrator (sometimes Macromedia Freehand) for vector drawings, and Quark XPress to arrange it all together on a page and to format the text.
Of all those programs Quark is perhaps the most indispensible. They benefit from exactly the same kind of dynamics that Microsoft Word benefits from - EVERYBODY uses Quark & expects Quark files and has a hard time if they recieve anything other than Quark files. Adobe (which you might have noticed produces the other 2 software packages used by designers) is trying to move people to their new competing product InDesign but Quark is so well entrenched Adobe is finding it difficult despite enormous advantages. Adobe has immense credibility, they're made of money, produce the two other essential software packages as well as most of the industry standard file formats like PostScript, EPS and PDF, and InDesign is available on MacOS X the newest and best OS from the computer company that still dominates the publishing industry - and Adobe is still having a hard time breaking in on Quark's business.
As a side note: Quark is actually the name of the company - the software is actually named XPress or "Quark XPress" like "Adobe Photoshop" but since Quark unlike Adobe only has that one product everybody calls the software "Quark"
I don't know what articles you read, but I have never seen that argument on /..
Oh, come on, every relevant story has a large number of "score 5" posts saying that the hacker (cracker, whatever) is being unjustly persecuted for mere curiosity and that the sysadmin is *entirely* at fault - that if you don't lock down your system then it is my perogative, my right, perhaps even my duty to exploit that hole in your security. It is an open door and it is not breaking and entering to go right in and rummage through the place to satisfy my curiosity.
Yes, *some* posts are arguing that the sysadmin is guilty of negligence in failing to do due diligence to stop someone from getting into the system. That is a perfectly fine argument. BUT, there is a large body of sentiment on this site that feels that the hacker is *perfectly* innocent and within his rights.
Jeez, and your post got a 5?
/. very long. This is the same logic modded up to a 5 in every conversation about a hacker conviction - that the hacker is innocent because the sysadmin should have had better security. Well, the dept. of Homeland Security has bought the /. party line that the perpetrator of bad acts isn't responsible, the sysadmin with poor security is. Well if the sysadmin is the responsible party in the case of a hacker breaking into his system then he can be held responsible if his negligence facilitates a terrorist act. I don't buy it in either case - crappy security is a bad thing but the person taking advantage of that crappy security is the one criminally responsible.
If you are suprised by this you haven't been on
I will be fair and admit that no matter how you view the responsiblity of network administrators that the position of the Dept. of Homeland Sec. is silly and a huge overreach - especially if they are talking about mere access to the internet.
Being as charitable as possible towards the Dept. of Homeland Security I could assume they are (vastly) overstating their case to publicise a security issue that in the cases of *some* networks does have broader national security implications. Not because terrorists could get access to the internet but access to someones internal network that has either very sensitive information or actual control of important systems - a case where I certainly could see holding a negligent network administrator criminally responsible.
And if they did make a "dirty" bomb, why the fuck would they set it off in the subway?
They might not, the subway is just a convenient bottleneck where you can screen people. I would imagine the guy that is assembling the dirty bomb in his apartment, the guy transporting the materials for it, the guy taking it uptown to the target or in our worst nightmare the guy who carried the suitcase nuke from Belarus are all going to set off these detectors. The cancer patient setting this thing off is getting strip searched, apologized to and sent on his way - I'd imagine a perfectly healthy Egyptian with a recent visit to Kazahstan on his passport is going to get much closer scrutiny.
Try consider it a priority of known threats vs. theoretical threats. Or a case for balance. Or a rearrangeing of order of operations, as a gaping present day vulnerability is apparent.
But there are other important considerations that should go into arranging the order of operations.
First, the extent of the threat. A conventional bomb can kill a few dozen, maybe a few hundred if the terrorist picks the right target and is really lucky. A nuke is the least likely theoretical threat but could kill MILLIONS.
Second, the ease with which you can gaurd against the threat - a gieger counter is a realatively easy and cheap way to guard against that theoretical threat. Bomb sniffing equipement or dogs are much more difficult and expensive solution to the known threat.
In this situation it doesn't strike me as irrational to implement the system that you CAN and is effective against the most extremely severe threat - even if that threat is also the least likely to occur.
I'm all for setting these things so that cancer patients don't set them off but...
Those patients have rights! They should not be stripped searched because they are receiving treatment for a terminal illness.
No, they should be strip searched because they set of a radiation detector. That is an important distinction. If these "false positives" can be eliminated by adjusting the sensors then we should do so. BUT the idea that we face no threats worth occasional inconveniences to guard against is a hopelessly naive and borderline suicidal attitude.
If a dirty bomb was properly shielded, it wouldn't give a true positive
True, but radiation sensors raise the bar and afford one more place where a potential terrorist can screw up and get caught. Any security measure in any field can be overcome, that does not mean that therefore all security measures are useless.
As for the mean terrorists: if they play with nuclear fire, they are gonna get burned, big time. That's what the Red Bamboo found out in 1966, the hard way.
Well I don't know if we should be using movies starring King Kong and Mothra as the basis for our security decisions.
That's funny, there are so many similarly bad reviews out there it took me a while to realize this was a parody site.
Well it really is just one story that has been somewhat arbitrarily broken into three sections. Tolkien originally wanted it to be on *big* book but the publisher insisted, rightly IMO, that it wouldn't sell if it wasn't in more digestible chunks.
That being said each of the six 'books' (each book in the trilogy is divided into a pair of 'books') has *some* resolution though sometimes an unhappy one and for obvious reasons usually a "cliffhanger"). At the end of the first book they make it to Rivendell, at the end of the second (the end of FOTR) the fellowship is broken, etc. By ganging up two 'books' into one book or movie you sort of dilute the feeling of resolution because half of the FOTR takes place before the fellowhip is even formed so it's disolution is less satisfying as an (cliffhanger) ending. Which makes me wonder if they could have pulled it off as six two-hour movies. Each movie would feel a little more complete on it's own by telling a smaller but more satisfyingly resolved story. They certainly seemed to have enough footage and even though I really liked FOTR I have to say 3.5 hours for the director's cut starts to get overwhelming/tedious. From a mercenary standpoint for the studio that is twice as many movie tickets/DVD/merchandise sales.
...but the politics are exactly the same. Every one of the characters is an archetype that we can see in the world around us - maybe not someone we can give a name to, but someone we could say, "yeah, my mayor acts just like that guy." The science doesn't unbalance what is really a story about politics.
I posted elsewhere a poem that C.S. Lewis wrote where he essentially disagree's with you. He was frustrated with SciFi writers that write stories that don't need to be SciFi - Spy stories, political stories, love stories etc. that are just using the SciFi elements as elaborate window dressing (or perhaps as a distraction to cover up failures in storytelling).
Lewis has a point but I don't entirely agree with him. There are good reasons sometimes to use scifi to abstract your story from the "real world" - For instnace to make a political point universal rather than particular or to get away with pointed commentary yet still win a favorable hearing from those you would otherwise offend. Still many sci-fi writers are just using sci-fi as cheap and easy window dressing to otherwise mundane stories. It's easier to write in a sci-fi world - who's to tell you you have made a mistake or have a tin-ear when the entire world you are writing about is made up. In art school you draw the human figure because it's so familiar it's easy for everyone to see you've messed it up (and aren't really that good an artist) if you are drawing imaginary creatures who's to say the way you drew it's head was "wrong" It's similar with writing, it's easier to make everything up than to convincingly portray something your reader will be familiar with.