Hey, thanks for that link. I was amazed on several levels.
First, the camera setup and the scrolling text at the bottom reminded me of CNN or Fox News, or whatever. I was expecting the content would match my expectations. But, instead of a bunch of people speaking in sound bites and talking over one another, I saw a rational human being giving a reasoned, articulate perspective. Even though that perspective was found to be repulsive by the interviewer (he calls her a heretic and that her opinion does not matter), she was allowed to continue speaking. This would never happen on CNN.
Second, I was impressed by the amount of knowledge she (and the interviewer) have about things that to most Americans would seem subtle. She talked for a while about a 'clash of civilizations', a term made popular by Huntington's book. (I recommend you look for it if you don't know what I'm talking about). At the end she said something that reminded me of JFK's famous "ask not" quote. She said, "the Muslims must ask themselves what they can do for humankind, before they demand that humankind respect them."
This reminds me of MouseHaus, a collaborative pedestrian simulation environment. Here's a video -- the pedestrian simulation stuff is about 2/3 into it. http://code.arc.cmu.edu/lab/html/video59.html
After he wins his case and gets his money back, he should consider an institution that upholds certain concepts like freedom of speech and independent thinking.
It seems that Valdosta State does have an understanding of free speech, though.
From the article:
FIRE is simultaneously pressuring Valdosta State to reverse its "free speech area" policy, which is unusually rigid in restricting student expression to a single stage on the 168-acre campus, only between the hours of 12 and 1 p.m. and 5 and 6 p.m., with prior registration.
I've never really tried the Newton or Ink, so I can't really comment on the quality. But according to http://www.beanblossom.in.us/larryy/ANHR.html the Ink project is based on the Newton.
From what I understand, the handwriting recognition is based on adaptive neural networks, and with regular single-user interaction they get insanely good over time. There's still a sizable community that won't part with their aging Newtons due to it's supernatural ability to recognize their own handwriting.
Back to the thread, I hope and pray that Apple really is doing a tablet, and that Jobs hasn't killed it due to this leak. I also hope and pray that they pay attention to research in pen/sketch computing and don't simply give people a WIMP-oriented UI and expect a pen to work well.
I was in the 10th row, or so. The talk was given in the biggest auditorium on campus, with overflow locations in other big rooms watching it onscreen. I have to say that this really was one of the most moving, intense moments I've ever experienced. This was compounded by the sense that it was being shared with thousands of other people laughing, thinking, and occasionally crying together. At the close of his talk he received a standing ovation that did not even begin to wane after what seemed like ten minutes, until Randy Bryant (in my opinion somewhat rudely) brought it to an end. For that hour, all of CMU was on the same page. In the days since then I've had conversations with several people who were there, and my sense is that people will remember the talk and Randy Pausch's message for the rest of their lives. I know I will. Especially since he's a nerdy smartass just like me.
Perhaps I am inclined to think things like this because everybody around me has an infection for which the only antidote is "robots", but... Robots!
We should send a massive fleet of robots down and they can build a runway of some sort. Once they've finished that, they can also build a little village complete with a bar. That way when people go to mars, they have a place to land, and then they can get a drink and maybe some munchies.
Beats the hell out of me. I like it here too. The people that bitch about/. seem to fall into a few categories. You've got the pro troll, whose sole job is to talk shit everywhere, so he can be easily ignored. You've got the old-timers who got pissed off when this site grew from a chummy little linux hangout into what is is now. These people can safely be ignored as well. While you can easily argue that/. has changed, it's a lot harder to say whether or not the 2007 edition is any better or worse than the '97 version.
Speaking as a crotchety old-timer, from my perspective the 2007 version is basically just like the 1997 version. The distribution of trolls, nubes, people-who-spell-Microsoft-with-a-dollar-sign, Linux freaks, Apple Fanbois, physics nerds, Star Wars fans,... ad nauseum (and I love you all, don't ever change) (except for trolls, who can bite me), seems basically the same. The only thing that has really changed is the sheer number of people involved. Fortunately, the quality of the filtering system has (in my opinion) grown with the popularity of the site. I use the friend-or-foe system along with a heavily parameterized moderation filter, so I generally get to read comments that I either agree with, or if I don't agree with, are at least well-reasoned.
For those of you interested in the social process of doing science, you may want to check out Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It is a rigorous account of how communities of scientists frequently stick to tribalism (e.g. "the string theory camp" or "the Heliocentric camp" or "the natural selection camp") and how this tribalism structures how science is done. Kuhn's story seems to be reflected in this slashdot story.
(Kuhn didn't use the term tribalism, that's just how I think of it)
Up is down, black is white, war is peace. Everything has been turned completely upside down.
Most of the focus is on the high-level government types. But none of this would be possible if the guys who actually did the door-kicking would grow a spine and do what's right. These government organizations like the FBI, the TSA, and even your local police departments who are also complicit in the upside-down-ishness -- they are all composed of the people you went to high school with. They came from the same place we did. We spend a lot of energy trying to pin the blame on certain people, and I think there are individual people who are more to blame than others. But in the end, it takes a village to raise the flag of authoritarianism.
This now becomes political, especially with Google where it is on the net-neutrality issues. Say the government forces Google to do something that adversely impacts these members of myspace. Voices begin to be heard, and these people will be voting soon.
As long as I'm posting -- is this Ted Stevens "tubes" stuff not becoming as annoying as flying spaghetti and chair throwing references? It's not like more than a handful of those smarmy dweebs could actually explain to you how IP or Ethernet really does work.
Maybe it is losing its entertainment value. So from that perspective, I suppose it is getting annoying. However, entertainment value isn't the metric that we should really be looking at. The fact of the matter is that Stevens is one of the people who is in a position to draft and vote on legislation concerning the series of tubes. And from his statements on the senate floor seem to indicate, the guy knows nothing about the industry that he is proposing to regulate.
It's quite possible to take your comment differently than you meant it, so this might not apply to you. I see a trend that the large majority of people let their opinions and beliefs be shaped by entertainment as opposed to objective fact. For example, the situation in Iraq continues to be completely out of control, but the American public is getting bored by it and have lost interest in following events. Yesterday I pointed a friend of mine to an article about the sad state of electronic voting machines and election fraud. His response was: "Meh. I read about that months ago.". He was essentially acting as though I had introduced him to a band that he already knew about and cooly dismissed them as so 2005.
Linus was right. We're moving into the Entertainment Age.
I wonder if somebody was able to get a call in to a lawyer to quickly show up and "observe" if the cop would behave himself. You could distribute little flyers: "In case of harrassment by The Man, call this lawyer for protection from the police..."
I wonder if this means no more ATI cards in Macintosh computers, seeing as how Apple uses Intel now? Or, even more interesting, could it mean Apple switching over to AMD?
I had the same thought. Once the acquisition settles down and A[MD|TI] can start using this to their benefit, I bet PC vendors will be able to get price breaks for going with both the CPU and the graphics chipsets/cards. If that would make Apple's hardware cheaper, that would be great for me. I'm po', you know?
I completely agree that these people (government types) play this childish "nyaaa-nyaaah I know something you don't know!" game. I don't know if things are more likely to be redacted now than before 9/11, but it's been crazy for a long time. A long time.
Yesterday, I was just curious what one had to do in order for the FBI to start a
file on you (something that I aspire to have at some point), so I
googled for "How do I get an FBI file?"
The second hit is the John Lennon FBI Files, which is hilarious and frightening at the same time. In
particular: The Parrot Story was at first given to a researcher in a completely redacted form. Only after going through a court battle over this and other redacted documents did the true, criminally horrifying nature of the Parrot Story become clear. John Lennon had been harboring "Linda", who owned a parrot:
THE PARROT STORY
The informer's report written by Julie Maynard about her trip from
Madison to New York in March 1972 continues with a story about "a girl
there named Linda" who has a parrot that "interjects 'Right On'
whenever the conversation gets rousing" (NY-88 page 5). That story was
featured in news reports on the settlement as an example of the
trivial information the FBI had been collecting in 1972, information
to which the FBI devoted substantial resources to keep secret through
ensuing decades. This page includes a variety of other movement gossip
and information, none of which describes plans for criminal activity.
This page was withheld in its entirety for fourteen years as
confidential and then released as part of the 1997 settlement.
Remember, that ENTIRE STORY had been redacted, and remained so until after a court forced the FBI to reveal what the page contained. Not only did the federal government spend American tax dollars collecting the story, they spent money, time, and legal resources depending their goal of keeping it secret.
I suspect the reason the government does this is similar to the reason that the RIAA or commercial software publishers might corrupt peer-to-peer networks with corrupted versions of files. In both the redaction and peer-to-peer cases, The Man is introducing noise into the medium and frustrates efforts of users to get at the content they are looking for.
Maybe the sequel to the Freedom of Information Act should be the Freedom from Redactions act.
the obligatory "Related Work" section
on
MIT Media Lab Fashions
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I should probably submit a shameless plug for some of the related work that our collaborators in Colorado are working on:
A couple months ago I wrote up proposed legislation that would have gone far beyond what this law would do. Under my bill, each national-ID-card-carrying citizen would be required to spend 50% of their waking life spying on other people, recording everything they ate, everybody they interacted with, and every store they might walk into. No, I am afraid that simply watching what people do online is insufficient for creating Planet Nerf, where everything is soft, safe, and votes for Jesus. This is because the offline world still provides too much opportunity for non-observed interaction between consenting adults.
If you want a copy of my (oddly rejected) legislation, drop me a line, I know I have it here somewhere.../sarcasm
Finally, you have to put Schwartz's blog in context. It was written as a tribute to McNealy, his mentor. The original letter, paraphrased from two years ago, was written to cheer up his mentor when Sun's fortunes were sinking and the Wall Street boys were savaging McNealy. I'm willing to give Schwartz a bit of leeway on the hyperbole.
I agree, and I'd like to take that one step further. This is leadership change in a large, influential company. Having talked to some Sun people this last weekend, I get the feeling that they don't have a clear picture of what this means for them and their lives. And that might translate into a lack of trust, or a belief that the senior management is confused.
Schwartz was posting as much for the rank-and-file Sun employee and investor as he was for his mentor. He has to show that he's a team player and that he's not just grabbing the reins from somebody who he thought was an idiot. If the rest of Sun believes that the guy at the top thinks the last X years under McNealy has been a waste, then what does that say about their OWN work and sense of worth?
OT: I don't know anything about what unanimocracy's web site is all about, but I have to say that the four images at the top of that page are f*&#@ng hilarious.
Well said. I that Slashdotters tend to forget (or probably more accurately: use their anonymnity as an excuse to ignore) that the guys who run Slashdot are not only OG's (original geeks) but they're actual human beings as well. I've been reading Slashdot since day one, and I've seen the site go from the project of a couple of college students to an internationally known hotspot for all things nerdy. "To Slashdot" is as much a verb in nerd circles as "To Google". Usually when success finds people, it changes them and changes their creation. But given the tremendous success of Slashdot, I think it is downright amazing that it hasn't been sold off to (or infiltrated by) some sort of evil media/marketing concern that truly does use it as a pulpit to peddle wares. They could do that. I would be shocked to find out that nobody has approached Rob and Hemos with piles of cash offering to take the reins. Sure, OSDN is Slashdot's parent company, but the OG's are still running the show.
Slashdot is a wonderful, nerdy, frequently childish place (even reading at +5). But it is honest, or at least as honest as you're going to find these days. It pains me to see people leveling anonymous insults and complaints at the guys who are keeping Slashdot in the hands of the geeks. Seriously, if you really have such strong feelings or concerns of conspiracy theories, start your own massively popular news site for nerds. Maybe you could report back on how easy it is to placate a half million active users, once you've got them.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, thanks for that link. I was amazed on several levels.
First, the camera setup and the scrolling text at the bottom reminded me of CNN or Fox News, or whatever. I was expecting the content would match my expectations. But, instead of a bunch of people speaking in sound bites and talking over one another, I saw a rational human being giving a reasoned, articulate perspective. Even though that perspective was found to be repulsive by the interviewer (he calls her a heretic and that her opinion does not matter), she was allowed to continue speaking. This would never happen on CNN.
Second, I was impressed by the amount of knowledge she (and the interviewer) have about things that to most Americans would seem subtle. She talked for a while about a 'clash of civilizations', a term made popular by Huntington's book. (I recommend you look for it if you don't know what I'm talking about). At the end she said something that reminded me of JFK's famous "ask not" quote. She said, "the Muslims must ask themselves what they can do for humankind, before they demand that humankind respect them."
Not if the client is chained to their desk.
This reminds me of MouseHaus, a collaborative pedestrian simulation environment. Here's a video -- the pedestrian simulation stuff is about 2/3 into it. http://code.arc.cmu.edu/lab/html/video59.html
It was done by collaborators of my advisor.
From the parent:
It seems that Valdosta State does have an understanding of free speech, though.
From the article:
Truly, an enlightened institution.
It's not bread at oil. In fact I'm oozing one now to white this past.
nice. it took me a second to realize wth you were saying :D
I have a Windows Tablet, and I can't remember the last time I used it in tablet mode because I can't get the handwriting recognition to work at all.
I've never really tried the Newton or Ink, so I can't really comment on the quality. But according to http://www.beanblossom.in.us/larryy/ANHR.html the Ink project is based on the Newton.
From what I understand, the handwriting recognition is based on adaptive neural networks, and with regular single-user interaction they get insanely good over time. There's still a sizable community that won't part with their aging Newtons due to it's supernatural ability to recognize their own handwriting.
Back to the thread, I hope and pray that Apple really is doing a tablet, and that Jobs hasn't killed it due to this leak. I also hope and pray that they pay attention to research in pen/sketch computing and don't simply give people a WIMP-oriented UI and expect a pen to work well.
I was in the 10th row, or so. The talk was given in the biggest auditorium on campus, with overflow locations in other big rooms watching it onscreen. I have to say that this really was one of the most moving, intense moments I've ever experienced. This was compounded by the sense that it was being shared with thousands of other people laughing, thinking, and occasionally crying together. At the close of his talk he received a standing ovation that did not even begin to wane after what seemed like ten minutes, until Randy Bryant (in my opinion somewhat rudely) brought it to an end. For that hour, all of CMU was on the same page. In the days since then I've had conversations with several people who were there, and my sense is that people will remember the talk and Randy Pausch's message for the rest of their lives. I know I will. Especially since he's a nerdy smartass just like me.
hehe ... I'm actually not in the Robotics institute. CMU is basically one big robotics lab, though.
Perhaps I am inclined to think things like this because everybody around me has an infection for which the only antidote is "robots", but... Robots!
We should send a massive fleet of robots down and they can build a runway of some sort. Once they've finished that, they can also build a little village complete with a bar. That way when people go to mars, they have a place to land, and then they can get a drink and maybe some munchies.
For those of you interested in the social process of doing science, you may want to check out Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It is a rigorous account of how communities of scientists frequently stick to tribalism (e.g. "the string theory camp" or "the Heliocentric camp" or "the natural selection camp") and how this tribalism structures how science is done. Kuhn's story seems to be reflected in this slashdot story.
(Kuhn didn't use the term tribalism, that's just how I think of it)
Never in all my years of slashdotting have I seen a first post so coherently written. Well done.
Up is down, black is white, war is peace. Everything has been turned completely upside down.
Most of the focus is on the high-level government types. But none of this would be possible if the guys who actually did the door-kicking would grow a spine and do what's right. These government organizations like the FBI, the TSA, and even your local police departments who are also complicit in the upside-down-ishness -- they are all composed of the people you went to high school with. They came from the same place we did. We spend a lot of energy trying to pin the blame on certain people, and I think there are individual people who are more to blame than others. But in the end, it takes a village to raise the flag of authoritarianism.
Maybe it is losing its entertainment value. So from that perspective, I suppose it is getting annoying. However, entertainment value isn't the metric that we should really be looking at. The fact of the matter is that Stevens is one of the people who is in a position to draft and vote on legislation concerning the series of tubes. And from his statements on the senate floor seem to indicate, the guy knows nothing about the industry that he is proposing to regulate.
It's quite possible to take your comment differently than you meant it, so this might not apply to you. I see a trend that the large majority of people let their opinions and beliefs be shaped by entertainment as opposed to objective fact. For example, the situation in Iraq continues to be completely out of control, but the American public is getting bored by it and have lost interest in following events. Yesterday I pointed a friend of mine to an article about the sad state of electronic voting machines and election fraud. His response was: "Meh. I read about that months ago.". He was essentially acting as though I had introduced him to a band that he already knew about and cooly dismissed them as so 2005.
Linus was right. We're moving into the Entertainment Age.
I wonder if somebody was able to get a call in to a lawyer to quickly show up and "observe" if the cop would behave himself. You could distribute little flyers: "In case of harrassment by The Man, call this lawyer for protection from the police..."
I had the same thought. Once the acquisition settles down and A[MD|TI] can start using this to their benefit, I bet PC vendors will be able to get price breaks for going with both the CPU and the graphics chipsets/cards. If that would make Apple's hardware cheaper, that would be great for me. I'm po', you know?
I completely agree that these people (government types) play this childish "nyaaa-nyaaah I know something you don't know!" game. I don't know if things are more likely to be redacted now than before 9/11, but it's been crazy for a long time. A long time.
Yesterday, I was just curious what one had to do in order for the FBI to start a file on you (something that I aspire to have at some point), so I googled for "How do I get an FBI file?"
The second hit is the John Lennon FBI Files, which is hilarious and frightening at the same time. In particular: The Parrot Story was at first given to a researcher in a completely redacted form. Only after going through a court battle over this and other redacted documents did the true, criminally horrifying nature of the Parrot Story become clear. John Lennon had been harboring "Linda", who owned a parrot:
Remember, that ENTIRE STORY had been redacted, and remained so until after a court forced the FBI to reveal what the page contained. Not only did the federal government spend American tax dollars collecting the story, they spent money, time, and legal resources depending their goal of keeping it secret.
I suspect the reason the government does this is similar to the reason that the RIAA or commercial software publishers might corrupt peer-to-peer networks with corrupted versions of files. In both the redaction and peer-to-peer cases, The Man is introducing noise into the medium and frustrates efforts of users to get at the content they are looking for.
Maybe the sequel to the Freedom of Information Act should be the Freedom from Redactions act.
I should probably submit a shameless plug for some of the related work that our collaborators in Colorado are working on:
An LED tank top playing Conway's Game of Life and an extensive guide on do-it-yourself sewing circuits. Very nerdy, and very cool. The idea here is that you can have computationally enhanced stuff available for people doing craftwork. They have a lot more awesome stuff, but you'll have to click around for it.
A couple months ago I wrote up proposed legislation that would have gone far beyond what this law would do. Under my bill, each national-ID-card-carrying citizen would be required to spend 50% of their waking life spying on other people, recording everything they ate, everybody they interacted with, and every store they might walk into. No, I am afraid that simply watching what people do online is insufficient for creating Planet Nerf, where everything is soft, safe, and votes for Jesus. This is because the offline world still provides too much opportunity for non-observed interaction between consenting adults.
/sarcasm
If you want a copy of my (oddly rejected) legislation, drop me a line, I know I have it here somewhere...
I agree, and I'd like to take that one step further. This is leadership change in a large, influential company. Having talked to some Sun people this last weekend, I get the feeling that they don't have a clear picture of what this means for them and their lives. And that might translate into a lack of trust, or a belief that the senior management is confused.
Schwartz was posting as much for the rank-and-file Sun employee and investor as he was for his mentor. He has to show that he's a team player and that he's not just grabbing the reins from somebody who he thought was an idiot. If the rest of Sun believes that the guy at the top thinks the last X years under McNealy has been a waste, then what does that say about their OWN work and sense of worth?
OT: I don't know anything about what unanimocracy's web site is all about, but I have to say that the four images at the top of that page are f*&#@ng hilarious.
Well said. I that Slashdotters tend to forget (or probably more accurately: use their anonymnity as an excuse to ignore) that the guys who run Slashdot are not only OG's (original geeks) but they're actual human beings as well. I've been reading Slashdot since day one, and I've seen the site go from the project of a couple of college students to an internationally known hotspot for all things nerdy. "To Slashdot" is as much a verb in nerd circles as "To Google". Usually when success finds people, it changes them and changes their creation. But given the tremendous success of Slashdot, I think it is downright amazing that it hasn't been sold off to (or infiltrated by) some sort of evil media/marketing concern that truly does use it as a pulpit to peddle wares. They could do that. I would be shocked to find out that nobody has approached Rob and Hemos with piles of cash offering to take the reins. Sure, OSDN is Slashdot's parent company, but the OG's are still running the show.
Slashdot is a wonderful, nerdy, frequently childish place (even reading at +5). But it is honest, or at least as honest as you're going to find these days. It pains me to see people leveling anonymous insults and complaints at the guys who are keeping Slashdot in the hands of the geeks. Seriously, if you really have such strong feelings or concerns of conspiracy theories, start your own massively popular news site for nerds. Maybe you could report back on how easy it is to placate a half million active users, once you've got them.
the Fifth Element is from 1997, and it's already a "classic?"