if this is followed by news that Iran just OMG WTF SANK ALL UR CARRIERS DOOD! FOR NO REASONZ! MARTIAL LAW! WAR IS NOW WITH YOU!
_then_ we know what happened, and the missing data is "after an unprovoked strike at Iran, probably by Special Ops coordinated out of SOCOM in Tampa, Florida" which is apparently out of contact with the Internet as we speak. Specifically, vortechosting is black, you can get through to Miami but there's major and continuing internet outage right around where CENTCOM and SOCOM are. Something's happening, guys.
The router that's dead is vortechosting, but someone from Miami was posting. Who's familiar with the network topology in Florida? What I'm wondering is whether vortechosting being dead cuts off Tampa from the internet.
Can you have connectivity to Miami but have Tampa still be black?
That would be significant because Tampa is CENTCOM and SOCOM (aka Special Ops). Is there anyone in Tampa who can still post or is Tampa really black? Because if Tampa is black that could mean SOCOM is where the attack is coming FROM and there are things happening in Tampa that aren't supposed to get out.
Cool beans. So, are you noticing flight after flight of nuclear bombers suddenly departing for somewhere?:P
Dude, the ability of the Internet to route around outages (intentional or unintentional) is not in question. The fact that you can get through is just proof that the Internet works. I'm more interested in why I saw a total blackout for SOME sort of Florida connectivity.
You're in Miami, right? It would be Tampa that was dark. Is it in fact Tampa that's black? That's CENTCOM and SOCOM.
Forgot to post something- remember this? Nuclear weapons mysteriously 'lost' and sent across the country without orders- which does not happen- for reasons that were never really explained?
I don't think creepy quite says it. "Did Cheney manage to get a nuclear weapon into the hands of Special Ops?" is more the question.
The commander of SOCOM is Eric Olson, who was appointed only July of 2007. In September, Cheney made a speech to CENTCOM and SOCOM, in Tampa, saying among other things: "The terrorists have been at war with the United States for a long time. And after 9/11 this nation made a decision: We are at war with them. This is a long-term commitment, not a passing issue. There will be no running, or relenting, until the problem has been dealt with -- decisively, systematically, and permanently."
"We've gone on the offensive, destroying safe havens, targeting their leadership, restricting their movements, closing off their money channels, infiltrating their operations, monitoring their communications, and working in dead earnest to stop the proliferation of catastrophic weapons. This new imperative has laid some very important work on many shoulders, from homeland security, to intelligence operations, to law enforcement. But no one carries a heavier burden than the war fighter, who engages the enemy on his own ground and slugs it out in tough conditions for the sake of freedom and the sake of our security here at home."
"As the prime target of the terrorists, America has also enforced a doctrine that is essential to our own safety, and to eventual victory in this struggle. It is simple to state and understood by all: Governments that support or harbor terrorists are complicit in the murder of the innocent, and they must be held to account."
I'd sure like to know what they're doing in Tampa right now. We're not necessarily talking about a provocation to Iran executed by regular military attack. We might be talking about a provocation executed by Special Ops....for political reasons, and using our supercarriers as the bait for Sunburn missiles, risking complete obliteration of our navy's effectiveness.
I do NOT LIKE the fact that Florida's black. WTF is happening?
I don't think there's any chance of the USA doing this to covertly tap any cables, because I don't believe the White House actually wants any information. They never have before, why would they now?
Occam's razor suggests to me that somebody wants to have more dramatic warlike actions.
Right now my theory is somebody whose name rhymes with 'insaney' wants to hear 'Communications out of Iran are all down, sir!' so they can order "Drop lots of bombs on them, and move the supercarriers closer!"
Because Iran can take out carriers with Sunburn missiles- and if we bomb Iran as Cheney has so wanted to do, but there is NO news of that, and then Iran sinks all our carriers and there's OMG WTF BBQ! news of that 24/7, it's as if they had attacked us.
Right?
Nothing may happen- Iran isn't likely to sink our carriers as a random outburst, and our military might not be taking orders blindly from Cheney. I hope not. But if we hear about our carriers being SUNK (after all the effort to play up a threat to them, notice?) you can be sure that Cheney found a way to bomb, without Congressional approval. I still think he was behind the mysterious clearing of a nuclear weapon that almost got flown across the country to a staging airbase for the Middle East.
The supercarriers thing concerns me because if the Iranian's Sunburn missiles are all they're supposed to be, those supercarriers are bait. They could all be destroyed if things got nasty.
I'm trying hard to sort out what's going on (if anything) and being reminded of following 9/11 on Slashdot as that unfolded. So far what I have is:
We've had an incident where a nuclear weapon was flying across the country to a staging area for overseas operations and got stopped at the last minute- it was called a mistake, but mistakes don't really happen with those, it's a suspicious mistake- theory, someone was trying to go outside the usual chain of command.
We've had a lot of talk, especially early on, about how 'we create history, we act and others follow along and write up what happened'.
We have George Bush apparently looking unusually bad just the other day- didn't see that myself. He didn't look good on 9/11 either, he doesn't actually LIKE huge warlike events. obSnark: someone get that man 'My Pet Goat', stat!
And now we have Iran off the Internet, which does not mean it's unable to communicate (hello, satellite, radio, shortwave?) but some people might be dumb enough to think that if 'news' can't get out of Iran nobody will know what goes on there. I am convinced that the White House believes that if Iran is off the internet and no reporters are allowed in it, it's 'off the radar' w.r.t. public and world opinion, and they'll have an opportunity to make up a story to their liking later.
You're absolutely right that this is about provocation rather than intelligent warfare or intelligence-gathering. The question is, what next, if anything? Cheney can't tuck an atom bomb between his legs, flap his arms real hard, fly over Iran and drop it. Anything that happens must depend on a lot of other people implementing it. Right now I'm a little skeptical that anyone in the White House could take any really dramatic action, but I sure want to hear about it if they do.
Any slashdotters in the military noticing anything? Do we have anyone who can send reports from inside Iran if anything happens? Basically we're talking about the possibility of a totally rogue White House operating without Congressional authority. That's unconstitutional and the military should not be playing along with anything like that- and probably are not- but this is potentially a very big deal.
I'm with you Zeinfeld- this has rattled me bigtime. It's reminding me of how I followed 9/11 on slashdot because that was where all the reports came together quickest.
I don't believe for a second that the US is going to attempt to invade, but I am very, very suspicious that someone in the White House is attempting to make our military bomb Iran to produce chaos within which they can cling to power. This doesn't mean it will succeed- these guys don't plan and their track record for succeeding longterm is terrible- but I think they are trying to strike at Iran without the approval of Congress (or indeed the american people). That is totally not funny on a lot of levels.
First, such an act would be a horrific war crime beyond anything my country has done, which is already a lot.
Second, you're absolutely right that it would be suicidal. My understanding is that the Iranian Sunburn missiles can rather easily take out our supercarriers. Don't we just happen to have three right there in striking range? Is the idea that we get Iran to take out our supercarriers to JUSTIFY the ceaseless war and kick it up a notch? Apart from the war crimes thing, there's a problem if the plan is to destroy our own military to prove we weren't wrong in using it. That's a horrible idea. What if we need to have military force sometime in the future?
But we're not talking about what _I_ want, we're talking about whether the people running the country I'm in are in the process of flipping out and doing something completely stupid. These are not people who give a shit about monitoring things. They ignored the intelligence reports they had. They talk about creating history (or did) but they are not serious people, they don't work at things or lay reasonable plans.
So my question still very much is, "does somebody actually think that if you cut off communications, you can bomb Iran without approval of Congress or the American people, and more than that, do they think they would somehow WIN by such a 'retreat-forward' maneuver?"
I disagree respectfully with you- I think the most likely explanation is that it is an attempt to blind us to what might happen within Iran. It's to stop information getting out, in my opinion.
It's a STUPID move, which is why that explanation seems wrong as you- it can't really work, and we have no proof that it's actually being followed up on in any way. My hope is that it will remain mysterious because other proposed actions (like bombing the hell out of Iran) will not make it through the chain of command of the US Military. I suspect that the screw-up with nuclear weapons earlier was a matter of the civilian command trying to get things to happen without following proper procedure. I think this is more of the same and there's no telling how far it will actually go- perhaps not that far.
The question quickly becomes: is anyone actually retarded enough to think that if you cut off the internotz to Iran, you can secretly bomb them and nobody will notice? Or, not notice in a timely fashion?
The trouble is, engineering isn't always straightforward. I'm wrestling with that right now with days of work on an animation helper program's interface. The job is to 'rig' a character and move it into whatever poses you want to then keyframe. This could be done in the rawest possible way, typing values in for everything, but it would be incredibly cumbersome and slow.
As soon as you try to cut that down, you get into judgement calls. Suppose you're rotating the model around an axis, or you can nod its head up and down. The way it's set up, if you've rotated it sideways, if you're still 'up and downing' the same thing you were, it's now tilting side-to-side instead of nodding- you have to transition from one axis to another in order to still have 'up and down' mean something that looks natural at all, and then you ask- if I'm on the side of the model pushing up, did I actually WANT some tilting in there?
It's all "do what I mean", and the trouble with that is that your understanding of a system alters with context.
With Firefox, for a while I had the 'warn me if I'm closing lots of tabs' warning on. It was a fair point to make, I sometimes went 'oh yeah, I didn't actually mean to leave THAT page, my thought was to quit out of THIS page'. Eventually I got more blithe about ignoring open tabs, and shut off the warning- the context changed. Technically, if I was researching something important and had a lot of new, never-visited pages open, it might make sense not to quit out of them- so you could have a 'warn me if I'm closing a tab that has nothing to do with anything in my bookmarks or history', with the idea that if the page was that original it was 'special', and my usual bookmarked pages wouldn't count. "Do what I mean".
Every step that you take to model a user's mind state to 'do what he/she means' is more complication for the programmer or designer. It's this tradeoff where you can have things elegant on the inside which require learning to use, or things which are very complicated on the inside but are totally elegant to use FOR SOME USERS. Then it's just a matter of picking which users.
I'm trying to get the developer of 'Pencil' to make the default behavior of dragging selected image to be- copy, create new keyframe, move to new keyframe, paste into the new keyframe, keep selected so you can repeat the process. This would be absolutely crazy for a normal image editor, but in an animation program it enables you to create moving imagery and a sequence of animated frames by just drag-drag-drag-drag-drag... it's hard to get more elegant than that, the question is, how important is that behavior compared to working WITHIN a frame as if it was normal editing tools?
The really elegant response to a situation is very likely not the most elegant implementation as a software algorithm. It's probably all complicated with special cases and attempts to sort out what the user actually needs to happen. But in use, it's nice to have stuff that just does what you meant it to do.
Hyneman's gripe with software stems from the assumption, "What our users mean to do is have every possible option at their fingertips available to do with the very least number of steps". Hence, short-cut hell. If you assume that it's not about the number of steps, but about identifying user work states and having coherent options within those states, things can get less horrible:)
This is also why you can make movies basically about tools and some people will still watch them.
Make a movie about a electric generator sitting there generating, and it's totally boring.
Make a movie about a person rushing about desperately only through a car or podracer- or a person chopping other people, only through a lightsaber- and suddenly you'll find a lot of people consider it interesting!
Just because a thing exists in the real world doesn't stop it being an effective fantasy-extension of human ability, and the more character you get into it the better. Witness the people-racing-cars movie fad. Swords and lightsabers also have more character than projectile weapons, but there's something to be said for just raw pointless energy blasts from the hands:D NO sense, just emotion and character.
Sounds great to me. I'm using a Qt-based animation program (named Pencil) and it's terrific and also permits for the lead developer to respond very quickly to new ideas coming in. If that's what KDE has to bring, let's have it:)
OK, I think I need to toss a post out (to the wolves!) because the way I make my living is deeply enmeshed in the whole DRM chaos. I've got an unusual approach (well- for the business I'm in) and it's worth explaining how it specifically works because it violates some assumptions and makes others.
I make a living selling copyable software which has no DRM or copy protection, so I'm taking a bunch of time to explain how I'm doing that in the hopes Slashdot minds will find it interesting. This isn't hypothetical, it pays my bills. I'm betting it will continue to do so...
The software is mostly plugins for Logic etc. (Audio Unit format) but I'm also getting some other tools together like an animation program. This isn't free software- I'll talk pretty freely about how I do what I do but I don't distribute the code, and I pick some software products to give away at no cost and other products to sell, never for more than $60 before VAT etc. (lots of my sales are overseas, I'm in the USA)
Almost every (every?) commercial plug-in maker uses DRM, sometimes insanely intrusive stuff. There's stuff that has to dial home in order to be 'authorized' and you only get 3 or 4 goes before it is shut off, there's stuff that uses one of several dongles (iLok is the most common but there are others), etc.
I use NOTHING- once you have the plugin, I expect you to use it, back it up for safe keeping, use it on whichever computers you need it, including the new Logic nodes for DAW clustering that Apple's come up with. There isn't a line of code in there to take the plugin away from you, ever. It's a matter of principle.
At the same time, I expect people not to copy these to their friends, put them on websites, anything like that. You are only supposed to get them from me. It's done through a variation on DRM by Kagi Shareware, who are my store-runners: they have a thing they'd like to see people use more, called Kagi's Digital Download Service. This could be open source if people wanted one like it- how it works is, a purchaser is given a temporary download URL. It's open for X downloads or X days and then it's no longer valid, so if someone posted one of these somewhere it would go dead quickly. The neat thing is, if there's a problem and someone emails me I can check my copies of the Kagi receipts, and see if a sale went through. If it did- the reply email contains a copy of the thing they bought- I don't have to wait for Kagi's systems to be fixed, because the customer only needs the plugin, not access to some authorization server.
This brings me to my point about DRM, one I take very seriously- I've been thinking about this for some time having been a Slashdotter from way back. (that's easily proved, at any rate;) )
There are two ways you can get a person to do something- push them or entice them. DRM is strictly push-ville. The big assumption you make there is that the enticement is basically infinite- the person MUST buy your thing, or steal it, so it's all about getting really tough with them to compel them not to steal it.
I make a different assumption, and it's paying my mortgage. I may not be putting out lots of open source code (though anyone from an OSS project wishing audio tips is welcome to talk with me endlessly) but I assume the person must CHOOSE to buy your thing or steal it.
No matter who it is, they still must choose. It doesn't matter if they're 14, have never bought something before, and have found my stuff on an FTP site somewhere- even if the choice seems compellingly obvious, people CHOOSE to copy stuff that's not intended to be copied. (to use the non-thief terminology)
I get to make choices as well. For instance, current law is very friendly to me talking to such an FTP site and telling them, please remove those files now. It's easy to monitor, they'd have no real leg to stand on, and I'd be entitled to want that done since it's my stuff.
The site itself CHOOSES to include my stuff (if they can get it) or not to bother- or
I like this- I've written one of these into a book. I had it powered by a broadcast infrared beam aimed at it, and a character fools with it by blocking the beam, causes it to falter, and then is embarrassed because he was caught interfering with it while it was working:)
If the surveillance culture thing bothers you, keep working on cracker tech so we can always tap into the wireless signal and decode it. Information restriction is going to be impossible. Information parity is where it's at (though it's not going to be a gift- it's probably always going to be a captured prize.) This will tend to create an 'information serf class' which gets lied to by people who are confident they won't be able to sort out the truth.
Oh wait, got that. I mean in fields like medici.. oh wait. Well... more so:)
I thought for awhile that ALL the positive buzz on the intarwebs was astroturf. Some of it seemed obvious.
Then I snarked sarcastically at someone on another site who said it was the most awesome movie she'd ever seen.
Turns out she was born in 1990. She's 17. I'd said, awesome? Try 'Blade Runner' (I just got a copy of the 4-disc version, which is why that came to mind)
She'd never heard of it.
I'm guessing part of the problem is how many people don't even know what they're missing. Alright, so cheesey action hero stuff is lame, understood. Do you really need to have NO point and nothing beyond people fleeing and getting pwned? I can see that's more postmodern and less pretentious than the cheesey action hero stuff, but is that honestly the best you can do? Can't you want more?
You'd think so, but check out Iggy's remaster of Raw Power.
I do mastering, and I can fairly easily go from 3 to 6 db hotter than the stuff people are already complaining about. The catch is that there is hideous distortion, like putting the music through a guitar amp. However, it is possible, so at some point you have to make a choice about where to trade off.
I want to see the terms of the deal. If Rupert already owns rights to the content, nobody needs to come sign anybody.
I want to see who gets rights to what, and I want to see the conditions under which the terms can be unilaterally changed. That's what happened to mp3.com- it's not that the contract suddenly said 'we 0wn j00', it's that it said 'this can be changed at any time, we will post any changes at thus-and-so web page, if you don't opt out you consent ahead of time to whatever the change is'. Making it your job to police the page or automatically consent to whatever they come up with.
I made a couple hundred dollars this way, and actually got checks. It was entirely off downloads, meaning that their system was to pay artists a tiny bit for each free download, hoping to make it back on advertising. It didn't work, and it won't work for myspace either- what will happen is people will only download the free stuff and you'll have bands with 1274871 friends and 3 sales.
You need to have a dotcommy company that's trying to pay artists for people's free downloads to come up with big numbers like that. There's also another problem- some mp3.com acts like Analog Pussy found that the company trumped up reasons not to pay them. Finally, the terms of the deal started to get more shady and confusing, and I got out because I thought it was becoming possible for the company to grab rights to the content.
If you think about it, they can give you all the download monies you want if you become a internet meme like Numa Numa Guy and they get to sell your content to Sony for a super bowl commercial... paying you nothing, I might add. Any maneuver like that well compensates the company for paying you $376 for 37,600 downloads. You have to watch the terms of the deal and see who gets the rights.
The question becomes, why make the user aware of this additional information?
Expectation is that the user will apparently go, "OH! I may be boring you with my account of the history of left handed widgets! All of a sudden I don't want to finish my thought, and it mysteriously no longer matters that I haven't given you the gift of the entire intellectual structure, neatly composed with no details left out, so you can wholly share this idea that I think is the coolest thing!"...
I have an alternate suggestion. We should make these things so that instead of actuating a vibrating motor, the alert thing operates a small robot arm attached to a light, non damaging foam bat. When the person shows signs of boredom, the robot arm actuates the bat and whacks the listener upside the head, curing their lapse of attention and saving me the trouble.:D
Surely this is a much more sensible approach, given that boredom is neither a virtue or considered to be a social advantage? We can teach those socially disadvantaged NTs to be socially polite even when the conversation ranges beyond 'kiddy pool' levels.
(Disclaimer- yes, I have Aspergers, and yes, I am joking... I think;) should I be?)
Slashdot Mirror
Let me fix that for you:
if this is followed by news that Iran just OMG WTF SANK ALL UR CARRIERS DOOD! FOR NO REASONZ! MARTIAL LAW! WAR IS NOW WITH YOU!
_then_ we know what happened, and the missing data is "after an unprovoked strike at Iran, probably by Special Ops coordinated out of SOCOM in Tampa, Florida" which is apparently out of contact with the Internet as we speak. Specifically, vortechosting is black, you can get through to Miami but there's major and continuing internet outage right around where CENTCOM and SOCOM are. Something's happening, guys.
The router that's dead is vortechosting, but someone from Miami was posting. Who's familiar with the network topology in Florida? What I'm wondering is whether vortechosting being dead cuts off Tampa from the internet.
Can you have connectivity to Miami but have Tampa still be black?
That would be significant because Tampa is CENTCOM and SOCOM (aka Special Ops). Is there anyone in Tampa who can still post or is Tampa really black? Because if Tampa is black that could mean SOCOM is where the attack is coming FROM and there are things happening in Tampa that aren't supposed to get out.
Cool beans. So, are you noticing flight after flight of nuclear bombers suddenly departing for somewhere? :P
Dude, the ability of the Internet to route around outages (intentional or unintentional) is not in question. The fact that you can get through is just proof that the Internet works. I'm more interested in why I saw a total blackout for SOME sort of Florida connectivity.
You're in Miami, right? It would be Tampa that was dark. Is it in fact Tampa that's black? That's CENTCOM and SOCOM.
Forgot to post something- remember this? Nuclear weapons mysteriously 'lost' and sent across the country without orders- which does not happen- for reasons that were never really explained?
http://www.nowpublic.com/politics/six-lost-nukes-sent-middle-east-military-cant-seem-keep-track
That is weird. What's in Florida? *google*
...for political reasons, and using our supercarriers as the bait for Sunburn missiles, risking complete obliteration of our navy's effectiveness.
CENTCOM is in Tampa, at MacDill Air Force Base. And SOCOM. Socom is Special Ops. That actually gets my attention more.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Special_Operations_Command Here's what SOCOM does- if they're doing anything now, it's in the middle of an internet blackout that is simultaneous with the Iran internet blackout (whether that is partial or complete).
I don't think creepy quite says it. "Did Cheney manage to get a nuclear weapon into the hands of Special Ops?" is more the question.
The commander of SOCOM is Eric Olson, who was appointed only July of 2007. In September, Cheney made a speech to CENTCOM and SOCOM, in Tampa, saying among other things:
"The terrorists have been at war with the United States for a long time. And after 9/11 this nation made a decision: We are at war with them. This is a long-term commitment, not a passing issue. There will be no running, or relenting, until the problem has been dealt with -- decisively, systematically, and permanently."
"We've gone on the offensive, destroying safe havens, targeting their leadership, restricting their movements, closing off their money channels, infiltrating their operations, monitoring their communications, and working in dead earnest to stop the proliferation of catastrophic weapons. This new imperative has laid some very important work on many shoulders, from homeland security, to intelligence operations, to law enforcement. But no one carries a heavier burden than the war fighter, who engages the enemy on his own ground and slugs it out in tough conditions for the sake of freedom and the sake of our security here at home."
"As the prime target of the terrorists, America has also enforced a doctrine that is essential to our own safety, and to eventual victory in this struggle. It is simple to state and understood by all: Governments that support or harbor terrorists are complicit in the murder of the innocent, and they must be held to account."
I'd sure like to know what they're doing in Tampa right now. We're not necessarily talking about a provocation to Iran executed by regular military attack. We might be talking about a provocation executed by Special Ops.
I do NOT LIKE the fact that Florida's black. WTF is happening?
I don't think there's any chance of the USA doing this to covertly tap any cables, because I don't believe the White House actually wants any information. They never have before, why would they now?
Occam's razor suggests to me that somebody wants to have more dramatic warlike actions.
Right now my theory is somebody whose name rhymes with 'insaney' wants to hear 'Communications out of Iran are all down, sir!' so they can order "Drop lots of bombs on them, and move the supercarriers closer!"
Because Iran can take out carriers with Sunburn missiles- and if we bomb Iran as Cheney has so wanted to do, but there is NO news of that, and then Iran sinks all our carriers and there's OMG WTF BBQ! news of that 24/7, it's as if they had attacked us.
Right?
Nothing may happen- Iran isn't likely to sink our carriers as a random outburst, and our military might not be taking orders blindly from Cheney. I hope not. But if we hear about our carriers being SUNK (after all the effort to play up a threat to them, notice?) you can be sure that Cheney found a way to bomb, without Congressional approval. I still think he was behind the mysterious clearing of a nuclear weapon that almost got flown across the country to a staging airbase for the Middle East.
The supercarriers thing concerns me because if the Iranian's Sunburn missiles are all they're supposed to be, those supercarriers are bait. They could all be destroyed if things got nasty.
I'm trying hard to sort out what's going on (if anything) and being reminded of following 9/11 on Slashdot as that unfolded. So far what I have is:
We've had an incident where a nuclear weapon was flying across the country to a staging area for overseas operations and got stopped at the last minute- it was called a mistake, but mistakes don't really happen with those, it's a suspicious mistake- theory, someone was trying to go outside the usual chain of command.
We've had a lot of talk, especially early on, about how 'we create history, we act and others follow along and write up what happened'.
We have George Bush apparently looking unusually bad just the other day- didn't see that myself. He didn't look good on 9/11 either, he doesn't actually LIKE huge warlike events. obSnark: someone get that man 'My Pet Goat', stat!
And now we have Iran off the Internet, which does not mean it's unable to communicate (hello, satellite, radio, shortwave?) but some people might be dumb enough to think that if 'news' can't get out of Iran nobody will know what goes on there. I am convinced that the White House believes that if Iran is off the internet and no reporters are allowed in it, it's 'off the radar' w.r.t. public and world opinion, and they'll have an opportunity to make up a story to their liking later.
You're absolutely right that this is about provocation rather than intelligent warfare or intelligence-gathering. The question is, what next, if anything? Cheney can't tuck an atom bomb between his legs, flap his arms real hard, fly over Iran and drop it. Anything that happens must depend on a lot of other people implementing it. Right now I'm a little skeptical that anyone in the White House could take any really dramatic action, but I sure want to hear about it if they do.
Any slashdotters in the military noticing anything? Do we have anyone who can send reports from inside Iran if anything happens? Basically we're talking about the possibility of a totally rogue White House operating without Congressional authority. That's unconstitutional and the military should not be playing along with anything like that- and probably are not- but this is potentially a very big deal.
I'm with you Zeinfeld- this has rattled me bigtime. It's reminding me of how I followed 9/11 on slashdot because that was where all the reports came together quickest.
I don't believe for a second that the US is going to attempt to invade, but I am very, very suspicious that someone in the White House is attempting to make our military bomb Iran to produce chaos within which they can cling to power. This doesn't mean it will succeed- these guys don't plan and their track record for succeeding longterm is terrible- but I think they are trying to strike at Iran without the approval of Congress (or indeed the american people). That is totally not funny on a lot of levels.
First, such an act would be a horrific war crime beyond anything my country has done, which is already a lot.
Second, you're absolutely right that it would be suicidal. My understanding is that the Iranian Sunburn missiles can rather easily take out our supercarriers. Don't we just happen to have three right there in striking range? Is the idea that we get Iran to take out our supercarriers to JUSTIFY the ceaseless war and kick it up a notch? Apart from the war crimes thing, there's a problem if the plan is to destroy our own military to prove we weren't wrong in using it. That's a horrible idea. What if we need to have military force sometime in the future?
But we're not talking about what _I_ want, we're talking about whether the people running the country I'm in are in the process of flipping out and doing something completely stupid. These are not people who give a shit about monitoring things. They ignored the intelligence reports they had. They talk about creating history (or did) but they are not serious people, they don't work at things or lay reasonable plans.
So my question still very much is, "does somebody actually think that if you cut off communications, you can bomb Iran without approval of Congress or the American people, and more than that, do they think they would somehow WIN by such a 'retreat-forward' maneuver?"
I disagree respectfully with you- I think the most likely explanation is that it is an attempt to blind us to what might happen within Iran. It's to stop information getting out, in my opinion.
It's a STUPID move, which is why that explanation seems wrong as you- it can't really work, and we have no proof that it's actually being followed up on in any way. My hope is that it will remain mysterious because other proposed actions (like bombing the hell out of Iran) will not make it through the chain of command of the US Military. I suspect that the screw-up with nuclear weapons earlier was a matter of the civilian command trying to get things to happen without following proper procedure. I think this is more of the same and there's no telling how far it will actually go- perhaps not that far.
The question quickly becomes: is anyone actually retarded enough to think that if you cut off the internotz to Iran, you can secretly bomb them and nobody will notice? Or, not notice in a timely fashion?
Definitely the best article yet- sorry you didn't get the attention you wanted, but at least your article is better :)
The trouble is, engineering isn't always straightforward. I'm wrestling with that right now with days of work on an animation helper program's interface. The job is to 'rig' a character and move it into whatever poses you want to then keyframe. This could be done in the rawest possible way, typing values in for everything, but it would be incredibly cumbersome and slow.
:)
As soon as you try to cut that down, you get into judgement calls. Suppose you're rotating the model around an axis, or you can nod its head up and down. The way it's set up, if you've rotated it sideways, if you're still 'up and downing' the same thing you were, it's now tilting side-to-side instead of nodding- you have to transition from one axis to another in order to still have 'up and down' mean something that looks natural at all, and then you ask- if I'm on the side of the model pushing up, did I actually WANT some tilting in there?
It's all "do what I mean", and the trouble with that is that your understanding of a system alters with context.
With Firefox, for a while I had the 'warn me if I'm closing lots of tabs' warning on. It was a fair point to make, I sometimes went 'oh yeah, I didn't actually mean to leave THAT page, my thought was to quit out of THIS page'. Eventually I got more blithe about ignoring open tabs, and shut off the warning- the context changed. Technically, if I was researching something important and had a lot of new, never-visited pages open, it might make sense not to quit out of them- so you could have a 'warn me if I'm closing a tab that has nothing to do with anything in my bookmarks or history', with the idea that if the page was that original it was 'special', and my usual bookmarked pages wouldn't count. "Do what I mean".
Every step that you take to model a user's mind state to 'do what he/she means' is more complication for the programmer or designer. It's this tradeoff where you can have things elegant on the inside which require learning to use, or things which are very complicated on the inside but are totally elegant to use FOR SOME USERS. Then it's just a matter of picking which users.
I'm trying to get the developer of 'Pencil' to make the default behavior of dragging selected image to be- copy, create new keyframe, move to new keyframe, paste into the new keyframe, keep selected so you can repeat the process. This would be absolutely crazy for a normal image editor, but in an animation program it enables you to create moving imagery and a sequence of animated frames by just drag-drag-drag-drag-drag... it's hard to get more elegant than that, the question is, how important is that behavior compared to working WITHIN a frame as if it was normal editing tools?
The really elegant response to a situation is very likely not the most elegant implementation as a software algorithm. It's probably all complicated with special cases and attempts to sort out what the user actually needs to happen. But in use, it's nice to have stuff that just does what you meant it to do.
Hyneman's gripe with software stems from the assumption, "What our users mean to do is have every possible option at their fingertips available to do with the very least number of steps". Hence, short-cut hell. If you assume that it's not about the number of steps, but about identifying user work states and having coherent options within those states, things can get less horrible
This is also why you can make movies basically about tools and some people will still watch them.
:D NO sense, just emotion and character.
Make a movie about a electric generator sitting there generating, and it's totally boring.
Make a movie about a person rushing about desperately only through a car or podracer- or a person chopping other people, only through a lightsaber- and suddenly you'll find a lot of people consider it interesting!
Just because a thing exists in the real world doesn't stop it being an effective fantasy-extension of human ability, and the more character you get into it the better. Witness the people-racing-cars movie fad. Swords and lightsabers also have more character than projectile weapons, but there's something to be said for just raw pointless energy blasts from the hands
Sounds great to me. I'm using a Qt-based animation program (named Pencil) and it's terrific and also permits for the lead developer to respond very quickly to new ideas coming in. If that's what KDE has to bring, let's have it :)
OK, I think I need to toss a post out (to the wolves!) because the way I make my living is deeply enmeshed in the whole DRM chaos. I've got an unusual approach (well- for the business I'm in) and it's worth explaining how it specifically works because it violates some assumptions and makes others.
;) )
I make a living selling copyable software which has no DRM or copy protection, so I'm taking a bunch of time to explain how I'm doing that in the hopes Slashdot minds will find it interesting. This isn't hypothetical, it pays my bills. I'm betting it will continue to do so...
The software is mostly plugins for Logic etc. (Audio Unit format) but I'm also getting some other tools together like an animation program. This isn't free software- I'll talk pretty freely about how I do what I do but I don't distribute the code, and I pick some software products to give away at no cost and other products to sell, never for more than $60 before VAT etc. (lots of my sales are overseas, I'm in the USA)
Almost every (every?) commercial plug-in maker uses DRM, sometimes insanely intrusive stuff. There's stuff that has to dial home in order to be 'authorized' and you only get 3 or 4 goes before it is shut off, there's stuff that uses one of several dongles (iLok is the most common but there are others), etc.
I use NOTHING- once you have the plugin, I expect you to use it, back it up for safe keeping, use it on whichever computers you need it, including the new Logic nodes for DAW clustering that Apple's come up with. There isn't a line of code in there to take the plugin away from you, ever. It's a matter of principle.
At the same time, I expect people not to copy these to their friends, put them on websites, anything like that. You are only supposed to get them from me. It's done through a variation on DRM by Kagi Shareware, who are my store-runners: they have a thing they'd like to see people use more, called Kagi's Digital Download Service. This could be open source if people wanted one like it- how it works is, a purchaser is given a temporary download URL. It's open for X downloads or X days and then it's no longer valid, so if someone posted one of these somewhere it would go dead quickly. The neat thing is, if there's a problem and someone emails me I can check my copies of the Kagi receipts, and see if a sale went through. If it did- the reply email contains a copy of the thing they bought- I don't have to wait for Kagi's systems to be fixed, because the customer only needs the plugin, not access to some authorization server.
This brings me to my point about DRM, one I take very seriously- I've been thinking about this for some time having been a Slashdotter from way back. (that's easily proved, at any rate
There are two ways you can get a person to do something- push them or entice them. DRM is strictly push-ville. The big assumption you make there is that the enticement is basically infinite- the person MUST buy your thing, or steal it, so it's all about getting really tough with them to compel them not to steal it.
I make a different assumption, and it's paying my mortgage. I may not be putting out lots of open source code (though anyone from an OSS project wishing audio tips is welcome to talk with me endlessly) but I assume the person must CHOOSE to buy your thing or steal it.
No matter who it is, they still must choose. It doesn't matter if they're 14, have never bought something before, and have found my stuff on an FTP site somewhere- even if the choice seems compellingly obvious, people CHOOSE to copy stuff that's not intended to be copied. (to use the non-thief terminology)
I get to make choices as well. For instance, current law is very friendly to me talking to such an FTP site and telling them, please remove those files now. It's easy to monitor, they'd have no real leg to stand on, and I'd be entitled to want that done since it's my stuff.
The site itself CHOOSES to include my stuff (if they can get it) or not to bother- or
I like this- I've written one of these into a book. I had it powered by a broadcast infrared beam aimed at it, and a character fools with it by blocking the beam, causes it to falter, and then is embarrassed because he was caught interfering with it while it was working :)
:)
If the surveillance culture thing bothers you, keep working on cracker tech so we can always tap into the wireless signal and decode it. Information restriction is going to be impossible. Information parity is where it's at (though it's not going to be a gift- it's probably always going to be a captured prize.) This will tend to create an 'information serf class' which gets lied to by people who are confident they won't be able to sort out the truth.
Oh wait, got that. I mean in fields like medici.. oh wait. Well... more so
Medicine isn't a business so much as it is a calling. There are many easier ways to make a living.
I thought for awhile that ALL the positive buzz on the intarwebs was astroturf. Some of it seemed obvious.
;)
Then I snarked sarcastically at someone on another site who said it was the most awesome movie she'd ever seen.
Turns out she was born in 1990. She's 17. I'd said, awesome? Try 'Blade Runner' (I just got a copy of the 4-disc version, which is why that came to mind)
She'd never heard of it.
I'm guessing part of the problem is how many people don't even know what they're missing. Alright, so cheesey action hero stuff is lame, understood. Do you really need to have NO point and nothing beyond people fleeing and getting pwned? I can see that's more postmodern and less pretentious than the cheesey action hero stuff, but is that honestly the best you can do? Can't you want more?
Ah, I'm SUCH an old fart. Depressing.
in b4 'shut up noob'
You'd think so, but check out Iggy's remaster of Raw Power.
I do mastering, and I can fairly easily go from 3 to 6 db hotter than the stuff people are already complaining about. The catch is that there is hideous distortion, like putting the music through a guitar amp. However, it is possible, so at some point you have to make a choice about where to trade off.
I want to see the terms of the deal. If Rupert already owns rights to the content, nobody needs to come sign anybody.
I want to see who gets rights to what, and I want to see the conditions under which the terms can be unilaterally changed. That's what happened to mp3.com- it's not that the contract suddenly said 'we 0wn j00', it's that it said 'this can be changed at any time, we will post any changes at thus-and-so web page, if you don't opt out you consent ahead of time to whatever the change is'. Making it your job to police the page or automatically consent to whatever they come up with.
I made a couple hundred dollars this way, and actually got checks. It was entirely off downloads, meaning that their system was to pay artists a tiny bit for each free download, hoping to make it back on advertising. It didn't work, and it won't work for myspace either- what will happen is people will only download the free stuff and you'll have bands with 1274871 friends and 3 sales.
You need to have a dotcommy company that's trying to pay artists for people's free downloads to come up with big numbers like that. There's also another problem- some mp3.com acts like Analog Pussy found that the company trumped up reasons not to pay them. Finally, the terms of the deal started to get more shady and confusing, and I got out because I thought it was becoming possible for the company to grab rights to the content.
If you think about it, they can give you all the download monies you want if you become a internet meme like Numa Numa Guy and they get to sell your content to Sony for a super bowl commercial... paying you nothing, I might add. Any maneuver like that well compensates the company for paying you $376 for 37,600 downloads. You have to watch the terms of the deal and see who gets the rights.
Ahhhh, spacewar...
I mean, choplifter. And A2-FS1 of course.
What was I saying?
*wheeze, hobble*
The question becomes, why make the user aware of this additional information?
...
:D
;) should I be?)
Expectation is that the user will apparently go, "OH! I may be boring you with my account of the history of left handed widgets! All of a sudden I don't want to finish my thought, and it mysteriously no longer matters that I haven't given you the gift of the entire intellectual structure, neatly composed with no details left out, so you can wholly share this idea that I think is the coolest thing!"
I have an alternate suggestion. We should make these things so that instead of actuating a vibrating motor, the alert thing operates a small robot arm attached to a light, non damaging foam bat. When the person shows signs of boredom, the robot arm actuates the bat and whacks the listener upside the head, curing their lapse of attention and saving me the trouble.
Surely this is a much more sensible approach, given that boredom is neither a virtue or considered to be a social advantage? We can teach those socially disadvantaged NTs to be socially polite even when the conversation ranges beyond 'kiddy pool' levels.
(Disclaimer- yes, I have Aspergers, and yes, I am joking... I think
It's OK- we may not be flying them overseas per se, but the job of controlling them here will be sold to United Arab Emirates :D