Pretty close to the only one. Despite all of the whining and moaning, it still manages to get most of the worthwhile stories (amusing or otherwise) faster than almost anywhere else and presents them in a simple, flat format. How many other places get entries about hostage situations posted by people in the affected building while it happens? (Chicago, recently)
It's not cheating, everyone on the first page of every google search you do that could possibly lead to a sale of any kind has paid a consultant to be there.
Im in the top 3-4 results for a number of searches and, in some cases, beat out well known and well funded commercial organizations. Yet, I havent paid a consultant to be there. I just have good solid content related to the search, basic meta data, and links to my site from others who think the content is solid as well.
Website page layout (specifically those using CMS or Blog software that does any kind of templating) has a huge huge impact (my unscientific observations)on google rankings...
You certainly read some sarcasm in my post, but it wasn't cynical - just realistic. If you're in your reps perceived voting base, they'll pay attention - but then at that point they probably already know your demographics opinions - esp about bush/cheney/iraq/etc and a letter writing campaign most likely wont tell them something new and so wont change their actions.
If you're not perceived as someone likely to vote for them, then it doesnt matter one way or another what you think and so a letter writing campaign wont change their actions
The only two scenarios other than those two where your opinion would count is 1) in the very unlikely event that your rep was considerably out of touch with his or her constituency and his core base writes en masse to say something new or 2) You send them money
That was a horribly long way of saying: The need for low latency, trusted, contextualized information sources and the associated societal bandwidth for them is increasing dramatically, and the volume of information increas at rates unprecedented in human history. Our national culture, government institutions, education, and infrastructure are not keeping up with those needs in ways that allow for national discourse, cohesion, and informed participation in government and the mechanisms of "informed people guiding a government" are suffering as a natural result.
We weren't discussing how well the average person was doing. We were talking about the US government being captainless, so to speak.
First, I didn't claim people were less informed about the world or less well off and somehow that affected the government. They are definitely better informed individually and definitely better off.
Second, when you reference google, etc. - those are small groups of people organizing information. That is different a) than a nation doing it together (even at low participation rates and b) The information is NOT contextualized well at all. People still rely and word of mouth for their confidence in information...and for nonlocal things, word of mouth is the media and the net. If youve ever dealt with the media at all (and even if not), you'll recognize how inaccurate and oversimplified that information stream can be about complex subjects. And the net...how do you get any sort of confidence factor in your information source? Right now, you can't. Wikipedia has proven that - just because lots of people say it's true doesn't mean it is.
Most importantly, though, what I did suggest is that the feedback mechanism too and from the people and the government is what's broken. People need to understand what's going on in Iraq and the Middle East to make informed decisions, but they dont. They COULD, but they don't. Same goes for technological issues that affect the coutnry and them (Net Neutrality, for example, will potentially affect the future of everyone in the country, but very few people even know about the debate)
Too much information is available and they only have the time/interest in keeping up with issues that affect them locally. The "interest locally" isnt new, but the immediate affect of remote systems IS. So you have lots of people, largely uneducated about and lacking context for issues that affect them and the country. We also have school systems that largely fail to teach children about these relationships.
Combine that with the fact that the centralized "trusted" dicussion forum of old (MSMedia) is inaccurate and oversimplified...and the detailed feedback mechanism (the net) has no real way of providing a confidence factor in the information it's providing other than word of mouth (which is easily spoofed on the net), real debate about national issues and real leadership from the people gets lost or doesn't happen at all.
Since we're a nation that's largely run by the people, you don't obviously see the breakdown of the government every day. (ie, commerce still happens and products are still available). It's a big machine, it will keep -going- for awhile. But without leadership and control by the people (ie force), the system will and already is decaying into randomness.
Just spend a few weeks in any government office and watch how decisions are made. Barring a consensus directive from the people, those decisions are typically made to keep things running (or thats the idea, heh) and lack a larger cohesive strategic direction.
Without that direction - from the people - the machine moves away from rule of law and instead becomes almoste completely situationally reactive....and Im sure you know how far that kind of approach to problems will get you (and will get us).
What special thing happened aftwr WWII that made the system "driverless"?
Easy.
Statement 1: Governments - Democracy, Socialism, Dictatorships (yes, theres overlap, the differences arent the point here..just that there are different economic/political matrixes) - all have different ways of passing and acting on information in the interests of maintaining control and cohesion.
Statement 2: Roughly mid century, not only the amount of information people receive was increasing dramatically, but the rate at which that increase increased (its late, give me a break on the wording:) ) was also going up much much faster than before (technology)
Statement 3: We have seen, time and again through history, that there is a limit to the details that a group of people can process and discuss effectively, especially as the size of the group gets larger. As such, with a lot more people and a lot more information to handle, the discussion gets progressively more simplified.
Statement 4: As technology has improved, the connectedness between action and reaction over geographical distance has grown temporaly shorter and the relationship substantially stronger and the effect distance has gone from usually local to easily global.
Statement 5: The media is profit driven and so has a tendency to report only what its viewers/readers can effectively consume (ie, information is simplified to the level of discussion, not vice versa)
The Math: A significantly larger group of people than in the past, faced with the need to make significantly more complex decisions about their lives and the government requiring a large amount of information not readily available first-hand siphoned through information sharing mechanisms without sufficient badnwidth (or interest in providing the bandwidth), Americans (and a good chunk of the rest of the world) have had to simplify or have declined to participate in altogether the discourse required to run and maintain a government which derives its power from the will of the governed.
Said Slightly Differently:
Its a bigger world, the decisions are more complex, the rate of complexity increase has far outstripped peoples wildest imaginations 50 years ago, the key criteria to make those decisions are less readily available, generic information floods out real information, and the size of groups needing to reach consensus have gotten so large the finer details get lost. That yields a democratic government without anyone effectively at the wheel.
Hope that made some sense.
We pretend to have a democratic system where the little guy has equal footing but in reality it is just propaganda to keep us docile.
Don't mistake incompetence (of the people taking part in the system through action or those taking part through their votes/lack thereof) for some active attempt to keep you docile. Most people don't care, don't pay attention, don't want to know, and don't participate, and would probably be so uneducated about the subject at hand that their input would be random anyway.
The system isn't out to get you, it's just randomly knocking things over since the its drivers left the building sometime after WWII.
I dont like that phrasing...I think teenagers need to HAVE a voice. So much in our society right now is geared to making people FEEL LIKE they have a voice/choice while all the awhile guiding them down a preset path along which theyve unknowingly given away their choices and their say.
Passive in that the entertainment content is thought of, created, and delivered to you...vs Second Life where you generate the content.
Or, said another way, video games tend to supply a plot or a plot framework. In Second Life, you supply your own or collaborate on one.
(As an aside, I dont think the entertainment value is really applicable to a conversation about Second Life anyway...I think it's value is in providing an associative social context for collaborative interaction with information. Ie, you remember and process things usually mostly in the context of their surroundings and other things. Second Life does a much better job than the web or text or tv or irc or ____ in providing the human social components of context and so experience and learning tend to be much more valuable there than in the other mediums)
As do we all...we need to eat and live. I think making a buck running something like SL is far more socially valuable than, say, making a buck selling dvd rentals. It encourages creative social participation and shared content.
The community has far too big of an ego, too.
So, it's like Slashdot?;)
the largely negative, undesired crowds got into it first, and that society in general isn't quite ready, nor are computers
Thats an interesting statement. Given the history of the internet in general...and how closely it looks like Second Life's history (from a social perspective)...It seems to me that the "largely negative, undesired crowds" are, the, uhm, majority of people.
Society really does expect to be spoon fed, it really isn't creative, and it really does like suburbia, sex, money, and kinks - no matter how much it tries to pretend otherwise on tv.
Because some of us have more patience than the typical myspace (or, apparently, some slashdot) users. Walk out onto a random downtown street in NYC or another big city and the chances of you having the exact same experience there as you described Second Life's initial moments as being (minus the offline bit) are pretty high. There is plenty of really worthwhile content there, but it's not going to be served up to you as you apparently expect it to be. If you want to be passively entertained, get a video game or drown your brain with tv.
This is like dropping into Times Square in the middle of rush hour and saying "gosh, how can anyone live here?!?!"
There are plenty of gorgeous, useful places in SL (the arts community, for example, is wonderful)...but like in any real "big city", you cant just drop down randomly and expect entertainment to come to you.
This is the worst thread Ive ever read on Slashdot
on
Pthreads vs Win32 threads
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
What happens when you run into people you stiffed earlier by quitting so early? You can switch jobs all you want, but you won't be making friends doing it. Just keep in mind that you might someday need friends in your industry and location. Good luck with that if you've only stayed at your previous jobs for four months.
...and China has a thiving software blackmarket to rival anyone else's...which means patching isn't nearly as common...which means more boxes are probably compromised...which again relegates the significance back to "meh, depends what the actual data is, the numbers dont mean anything by themselves".
1. Learn to tell the difference between automated blind attacks (the ssh stuff youre talking about) and targeted attacks, which the DoD is referring to.
2. Have you considered that maybe there are legitimate reasons to allow traffic to/from those countries?
3. Were you aware that the DoD owns a few of the root internet DNS servers?
Forgot to add something important: Part of the measurement problem is the tokenization of network "sentences". When you're measuring your traffic - how big are your buckets? What consitutes the start and end of a bucket? How many buckets do you have? Which relationships between which types of traffic are important? Do you measure distribution of DNS traffic against HTTP? All TCP? Why? etc. etc.
These questions just go on and on when you really start getting down to implementing "the patterns of machine network traffic all look similar, so we can look for behavior that falls out of that".)
Having spent time using the data from thousands of systems in multiple large networks (some of them multicontinent) trying to work out threshold rules for classifying anomalous traffic (to guide both human and machine analysis for data reduction and highlighting purposes), I can say that my experience (Yours might vary) is that what you say is true in aggregate on average, but is not reliable enough on a machine by machine basis across all machines for every distinct machine. It DOES work sometimes. But not all the time, and you cant predict when it wont work. That very much limits its usefulness as a solution.
Said another way: yeah....Ive done a ton of visualization work and you're right - the patterns are exceedingly recognizable to the human eye. That doesn't mean it translates to something easily predictable in a numeric fashion. Those patterns have lots of exceptions and the thresholds of normalcy vary significantly by themselves from machine to machine and environment to environment. for example, you say
relatively low-level stream of DNS queries . That's true...but "relatively" is a very difficult word to translate consistently to numbers.
Agreed. But then meteor hits the owner of the soda shop. People need to find a new suitable soda shop with all that that entails (asking around, finding the place, discovering the best route, getting their friends to go there too so theyre not all at different soda shops, etc.)
Slashdot Mirror
That rocked.
I mean...so much of "hacking" involves gathering information...and lately some of the best information is off of the google and etc...
Pretty close to the only one. Despite all of the whining and moaning, it still manages to get most of the worthwhile stories (amusing or otherwise) faster than almost anywhere else and presents them in a simple, flat format. How many other places get entries about hostage situations posted by people in the affected building while it happens? (Chicago, recently)
If you're not perceived as someone likely to vote for them, then it doesnt matter one way or another what you think and so a letter writing campaign wont change their actions
The only two scenarios other than those two where your opinion would count is 1) in the very unlikely event that your rep was considerably out of touch with his or her constituency and his core base writes en masse to say something new or 2) You send them money
That was a horribly long way of saying: The need for low latency, trusted, contextualized information sources and the associated societal bandwidth for them is increasing dramatically, and the volume of information increas at rates unprecedented in human history. Our national culture, government institutions, education, and infrastructure are not keeping up with those needs in ways that allow for national discourse, cohesion, and informed participation in government and the mechanisms of "informed people guiding a government" are suffering as a natural result.
First, I didn't claim people were less informed about the world or less well off and somehow that affected the government. They are definitely better informed individually and definitely better off.
Second, when you reference google, etc. - those are small groups of people organizing information. That is different a) than a nation doing it together (even at low participation rates and b) The information is NOT contextualized well at all. People still rely and word of mouth for their confidence in information...and for nonlocal things, word of mouth is the media and the net. If youve ever dealt with the media at all (and even if not), you'll recognize how inaccurate and oversimplified that information stream can be about complex subjects. And the net...how do you get any sort of confidence factor in your information source? Right now, you can't. Wikipedia has proven that - just because lots of people say it's true doesn't mean it is.
Most importantly, though, what I did suggest is that the feedback mechanism too and from the people and the government is what's broken. People need to understand what's going on in Iraq and the Middle East to make informed decisions, but they dont. They COULD, but they don't. Same goes for technological issues that affect the coutnry and them (Net Neutrality, for example, will potentially affect the future of everyone in the country, but very few people even know about the debate)
Too much information is available and they only have the time/interest in keeping up with issues that affect them locally. The "interest locally" isnt new, but the immediate affect of remote systems IS. So you have lots of people, largely uneducated about and lacking context for issues that affect them and the country. We also have school systems that largely fail to teach children about these relationships.
Combine that with the fact that the centralized "trusted" dicussion forum of old (MSMedia) is inaccurate and oversimplified...and the detailed feedback mechanism (the net) has no real way of providing a confidence factor in the information it's providing other than word of mouth (which is easily spoofed on the net), real debate about national issues and real leadership from the people gets lost or doesn't happen at all.
Since we're a nation that's largely run by the people, you don't obviously see the breakdown of the government every day. (ie, commerce still happens and products are still available). It's a big machine, it will keep -going- for awhile. But without leadership and control by the people (ie force), the system will and already is decaying into randomness.
Just spend a few weeks in any government office and watch how decisions are made. Barring a consensus directive from the people, those decisions are typically made to keep things running (or thats the idea, heh) and lack a larger cohesive strategic direction.
Without that direction - from the people - the machine moves away from rule of law and instead becomes almoste completely situationally reactive....and Im sure you know how far that kind of approach to problems will get you (and will get us).
The real buzz about something isn't the same as the real value. (Id wager it usually isnt, in fact).
I dont like that phrasing...I think teenagers need to HAVE a voice. So much in our society right now is geared to making people FEEL LIKE they have a voice/choice while all the awhile guiding them down a preset path along which theyve unknowingly given away their choices and their say.
Passive in that the entertainment content is thought of, created, and delivered to you...vs Second Life where you generate the content. Or, said another way, video games tend to supply a plot or a plot framework. In Second Life, you supply your own or collaborate on one. (As an aside, I dont think the entertainment value is really applicable to a conversation about Second Life anyway...I think it's value is in providing an associative social context for collaborative interaction with information. Ie, you remember and process things usually mostly in the context of their surroundings and other things. Second Life does a much better job than the web or text or tv or irc or ____ in providing the human social components of context and so experience and learning tend to be much more valuable there than in the other mediums)
Because some of us have more patience than the typical myspace (or, apparently, some slashdot) users. Walk out onto a random downtown street in NYC or another big city and the chances of you having the exact same experience there as you described Second Life's initial moments as being (minus the offline bit) are pretty high. There is plenty of really worthwhile content there, but it's not going to be served up to you as you apparently expect it to be. If you want to be passively entertained, get a video game or drown your brain with tv.
"Why not go the whole hog and have microphones attached to cameras or embedded in street lights?" ...have patience. 1984 wasnt built in a day!
This is like dropping into Times Square in the middle of rush hour and saying "gosh, how can anyone live here?!?!" There are plenty of gorgeous, useful places in SL (the arts community, for example, is wonderful)...but like in any real "big city", you cant just drop down randomly and expect entertainment to come to you.
Im dumber for having read it. Thanks.
What happens when you run into people you stiffed earlier by quitting so early? You can switch jobs all you want, but you won't be making friends doing it. Just keep in mind that you might someday need friends in your industry and location. Good luck with that if you've only stayed at your previous jobs for four months.
...and China has a thiving software blackmarket to rival anyone else's...which means patching isn't nearly as common...which means more boxes are probably compromised...which again relegates the significance back to "meh, depends what the actual data is, the numbers dont mean anything by themselves".
1. Learn to tell the difference between automated blind attacks (the ssh stuff youre talking about) and targeted attacks, which the DoD is referring to. 2. Have you considered that maybe there are legitimate reasons to allow traffic to/from those countries? 3. Were you aware that the DoD owns a few of the root internet DNS servers?
..and you would attribute these supposed attacks to a specific state sanctioned effort...how?
Forgot to add something important: Part of the measurement problem is the tokenization of network "sentences". When you're measuring your traffic - how big are your buckets? What consitutes the start and end of a bucket? How many buckets do you have? Which relationships between which types of traffic are important? Do you measure distribution of DNS traffic against HTTP? All TCP? Why? etc. etc.
These questions just go on and on when you really start getting down to implementing "the patterns of machine network traffic all look similar, so we can look for behavior that falls out of that".)
Said another way: yeah....Ive done a ton of visualization work and you're right - the patterns are exceedingly recognizable to the human eye. That doesn't mean it translates to something easily predictable in a numeric fashion. Those patterns have lots of exceptions and the thresholds of normalcy vary significantly by themselves from machine to machine and environment to environment. for example, you say relatively low-level stream of DNS queries . That's true...but "relatively" is a very difficult word to translate consistently to numbers.
Agreed. But then meteor hits the owner of the soda shop. People need to find a new suitable soda shop with all that that entails (asking around, finding the place, discovering the best route, getting their friends to go there too so theyre not all at different soda shops, etc.)