Only the building, with its altar and pews, will be virtual. The preacher, congregation and prayers will be real....
This makes real sense.
I mean, they're worshipping a deity who isn't real, in order to gain admission to a place, Heaven, that isn't real and avoid being sent by their unreal but supposedly loving God to another place, Hell, that isn't real, where they would be tortured for eternity by an entity, Satan, who isn't real.
How can content creators prevent their entire domain from being blacklisted because of a small amount of controversial content?
Put the possibly objectionable content in one subdomain (e.g., naughty-bits.mamohanraj.com) and the rest in the www subdomain (e.g., www.mamohanraj.com/).
This is of course purely a guess, I've never had the misfortune of going through a content filter.
You asked what the site can do; of course the site's (would-be) visitor can go through a web proxy , or vnc to his own machine at home and run the browser on the remote box (yes, pictures won't come through as well, but wanking is mostly about the imagination, so you'd probably have a better time at it anyway), or ssh to his home box and wget from the home box and then ftp back to the office, or html tunnel through his home box to the site.
Convince the destructive little buggers that if the learn the principles of building it from you, you'll give them the materials to build their own trebuchet.
After they've learnt enough engineering to build it, then let them learn enough ballistics to accurately destroy stuff.
(Yes, I'm emphasizing engineering over science; tinkering and getting one's hands dirty cements the memory a lot better than simply trying to remember something. More fundamentally, most people and nearly all kids learn to value science for what it can do for them. Valuing knowledge for knowledge's sake alone is the province of a tiny and despised minority of really annoying poindexters like myself.)
Yeah, I have a system. I make sure I hit porn site after porn site, everyday, several times a day.
In that deluge of.jpegs,.movs,.asfes, downloaded mpegs, and even the occasional.txt for the old-time virginal 2400m baud BBS feel, my real surfing habits are barely detectable.
Indeed, most people who know me say, "does he do anything other than surf Internet porn all day? Ahem, I mean, other than the obvious other thing?"
Actually, the lack of a vowel circumlocution in Hebrew can be circumvented since the "true" name of G-d is not often (almost never) used in written form (outside of the Bible). There are many other names that represent Him (like Hashem which literally means "The Name" or any of a great variety of other reference words.
Sorry, my knowledge of all this is rather abstract and theoretical.
You see, I'm actually an -th--st.
(Or I guess we're supposed to call ourselves br-ghts now.)
You know, I'm really getting irritated over the outrage I'm seeing against VOLUNTARY web services. Personally I don't have a problem with using Gmail when it's available, nor do I care of Amazon tracks my searches if it makes for a better and more efficient web experience.
Well, of course you're right. No one is being forced to use GMail or A9. And presumably the astute (and paranoid) will read the privacy notices and avoid selling their privacy for a mess of pottage -- I mean, services.
One problem with the Libertarian Capitalistic outlook -- much as I'm sympathetic to Libertarianism, and see great values in Capitalism -- is that it requires all actors to be rational, and to have roughly the same knowledge of the "playing field". (this is why, for instance, insider trading is banned -- because it undermines the level playing field that must exist for the free market to work.)
But we have corporations that employee literally hundreds of psychologists and marketing and advertising professionals who make it their lives' work to figure out how to get disarm or misdirect our ability to be rational economic actors. And these corporations also employee lawyers and economists and lobbyists, so that the corporation, as an entity, has much more knowledge than the individual can ever hoe to have.
A small case in point: their are widespread allegations that many companies, cellular phone companies especially, intentionally overcharge customers. They idea is that many customers won't notice or won't be willing to spend hours on hold with Customer Disservice to correct the bill. And even those customers willing to pay the additional (time) cost to get their bills corrected will be giving the company interest on the mis-billed money. The interest for one little customer is miniscule, but for the company teat small bit of interest over millions of customer accounts means a significant additional revenue.
So we have people who -- according to the traditional laissez faire capitalist treatment -- are supposed to be rational economic actors, and yet we know damned well that they won't be because the companies planned ahead of time to make sure they couldn't be.
What's the damage? Well, look at AOL. Nobody was forced to use AOL, and savvy, computer literate people knew better than to pay inflated rates for substandard dial-up with a plethora of additional, in-your-face ads. So AOL got the noobs and the boobs. No skin off our elite asses, right?
Wrong! AOL's massive and massively uninformed user base hit Usenet like a tidal wave in '96, and Usenet has not to this day regained its former wit, conviviality, or usefulness. Entire 'net communities were wiped out, never to be seen again.
Or consider Gator and File-Sharing products filled with spyware. Those of us on Slashdot are savvy enough to get a GPL'd version of whatever we want on sourceforge, or to at least run AdAware after installing dome piece of crap that brings along 97 pieces of spyware and adware with it. So again, our elite asses aren't getting skinned, are they?
Wrong again! That spyware not only clogs the noobs' computers, it allows them to be compromised and turned into vectors of Trojans and engines of spamming. And we "elite" get the spam and get DDOSed and get bombarded with Trojans knocking on our ports as much as any noob.
It's sort of like keeping the environment clean: it's my vested interest to keep this environment clean, because I have to live in this environment. If the whole net, or a significant portion, is buying into something dubious, I know that sooner or later I'll feel the consequences too.
Maybe Gmail is not a threat to privacy; but if it is, I want to know that before I'm one of a handful of cranky holdouts, and all the email I get comes from, and all the email I send goes to, GMail. Because at that point, I am part of the system, whether I like it or not.
And, on a completely unrelated note, what is the G-d thing?
He's probably Jewish; Jewish religious law prohibits writing the L-rd's name, so the euphemism "G-d" is used instead. (Ironically, since the Hebrew language has no vowels, so presumably this circumlocution wouldn't work in G-d's "own" language."
It's very standard and not at all a personal idiosyncrasy of the poster.
As to the rest of your comment: spot on!
As a society, the U.S. (less so Europe) has acquiesced in giving up our privacy piecemeal: until lately, we suffered telemarketers to phone us in the sanctity of our homes, and we're now allowing businesses to track us as well, in order to get a "discount" on products already artificially marked up. And we allow banks and credit card companies to collect marketing data based on our purchases, without the pretense of a discount.
Hey, business isn't collecting this information on a lark, folks.
It's far from free to hand out millions of "loyalty card" and put together tracking systems and computers and databases data mining.
("Loyalty" cards? When I was a kid, you were loyal to your country and your family. Now I'm supposed to be "loyal" to a fucking supermarket? Did I mis-read the story of the minutemen? Did they lay down their lives for Safeway and 5% off assorted frozen dinners?)
So I think we can safely assume that, given the cost of all this tracking, the companies doing it have assured themselves that they'll make much more money by doing it, than it costs them to do it.
Now, since these companies are (mostly) in the business of selling products to "end-users" -- that's you, the person being tracked, or selling your data to other companies that want to market to "end users" -- again, that's you with the bar code figuratively tattooed on your ass (or for readers of the Christian Bible's Revelations, the forehead), where, exactly do you think all that money is going to come from?
Yeah, that;s right: the companies are tracking you because they mean to squeeze more -- much more, given the costs of tracking -- out of you. Either the company tracking you extracts it themselves, or the company that bought the data has to jack up their consumer prices to cover the cost of buying the data.
So in the end, after you've sold your birthright of freedom and privacy for a mess of pottage that's 20% off for "loyalty card members", after you've been tracked from mall to market to mortgage payment like a tagged animal in a biologist's field research project, after all that in the long term, you're not really going to be saving anything.
Quick, check the card they assigned you, and see if the name on it isn't "Sucker".
ClearChannel is whining to the FCC about XM Radio's recent foray into localized traffic and weather reports."
Clear Channel contends that patiotism demands that traffic reports only recommend right turns and not any of those pro-Dixie Chicks, gay marriage-ing, terr'ist aiding lefty turns.
Yeah, I know, when I was writing it I hoped that point would be glossed over -- Bonhoeffer (and the rest of the Confessional Church, Bonhoffer's and Niemöller's answer to Hitler's paganistic Reich Church) was harassed long before he joined the plot.
So in my defense, it makes the point that even if right now you're an upstanding member of society (like a Lutheran theologian in Germany) and even if right mow you have no need to hide anything, it could be that in a few years the situation will have changed and somebody will be awfully interested in see what, and to whom, you wrote email.
But in truth, yeah, I wanted someone more clearly "unimpeachably innocent" (much as I hate to call anyone who sought to kill Hitler "guilty", under the laws of Das Dritte Reich as you point out, he certainly was), but more importantly for my purposes, I wanted an example of someone was got killed. That ruled out Niemöller, even though he was unimpeachable and as a bonus was initially pro-Hitler. It also ruled out my first choice, German Jewish pianist Artur Schnabel.
In retrospect, I should have gone with Anne Frank, and her innocence and untimely youthful death would have nicely mirrored Matthew Shepard. And I'd have been able to get a in a nudge for gay rights by equating exterminating her for being Jewish with exterminating Shepard for being gay, without minimizing the horror of the Holocaust.
So my real defense is, it was four in the morning and, synchronized with the clock, I was working on beer number four.
...I'm not to concerned about my mail privacy. I'm pretty open about my life because I have nothing to hide.... It's hard to have your privacy violated electronically when you don't leave much hidden.... in reality there is nothing to worry about for the majority of potential users [of Gmail].
Jesus Christ on a pogo stick!
Do they not teach history at all any more?
I'm Alexander Ivanovich Ladyzhenski. I have nothing to hide; despite my noble origins, I'm just interested in my job, teaching mathematics, in my native land of Russian. In 1937, Ladyzhenskaya was arrested in one of Stalin's purges and in a show trial convicted, for his family's status as minor nobility, an "enemy of the Russian people" and sentenced to death.
I'm Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I have nothing to hide; I'm a minister and a theology professor. I'm just interested in being a good Christian, and keeping Christianity from being taken over by pagan practices in my native land of Germany. In 1943, Dr. Bonhoeffer was arrested by the Gestapo after his opposition to Hitler's racial policies and attempt to take over the German Church lead him to join a plot to assassinate Hitler. He was executed just three weeks before the Allied victory over Germany in 1945.
I'm Matthew Shepard. I have nothing to hide; well, except I'm gay, but I'll confide that to these two nice fellows I'm having drinks with in this bar. The two men Shepard was talking with, Aaron James McKinney and Russel (sic) Arthur Henderson, lured Shepard into leaving with them in their car. They then robbed, brutally beat, and tied Shepard to a fence, leaving him for dead. Found eighteen hours later, Shepard survived five more days before dying of his injuries.
The graveyards are full of people who "had nothing to hide" until a change in government or an encounter with thugs meant they suddenly found themselves outsiders and victims, members of some group considered "ok" to brutalize and oppress.
But of course, this is America, and it can't happen here, right? Matthew Shepard was just an exception, right?
I'm Fred Hampton. I have nothing to hide; I'm a member of the Black Panther Party fighting for civil rights and to end gang violence in Chicago. In 1969, asm part of is COINTELPRO program to suppress leftist dissent, the FBI provided the Chicago Police Department with the floor plan of Hampton's apartment. On December 4, police raided Hampton's apartment, firing automatic weapons. Hampton was found in his bed wounded by the police gunfire and possibly drugged by a police informant. From Wikipedia:
Two officers found him wounded in the shoulder, and the following exchange took place:
That's Fred Hampton
Is he dead?... Bring him out
He's barely alive; he'll make it.
Two shots were heard, which were fired point blank in Hampton's head. One officer then said:
He's good and dead now.
Hampton's body was dragged into the doorway of bedroom and left in a pool of blood.
A later investigation found that of the one hundred bullets fired in the raid, the police had fired ninety-nine; the single bullet fired by a Black Panther had been fired in a reflex spasm as the man died.
It's not about whether I trust Google's intentions. So long as Google is an American company, or more precisely so long as its headquarters exist in *any* country, there's a danger that the government of said country can bully them into giving up all the information they have on anybody.
I haven't had mod points since December (despite two years and 1204 comments).
But if I did have mod points, mine would go to the parent.
So should yours.
Putting all your eggs in one basket, as the cliche notes, is bad policy.
Putting all your information in the hands of one company invites extensive profiling of you.
But even in such a perfect world, it would take one disgruntled Google employee or one corporate spy or one hacker to make all your data public.
The question isn't "is Google trustworthy"; the question is, given that you backup your data for the day your hard drive inevitably dies, given that you use an UPS because you know that even the best power company has blackouts, why you rush to put all your data in any one set of hands?
Can you upload your own life and let it run a simulation to see how you will end up in life? This would be interesting to see when your 40, 60, or 80 years old.
Age 40:
You move out of your mother's basement.
Pursue a relationship with Heidi?
Heidi rejects you, complaining posting to Slashdot is not a social life.
Age 42:
You move back in with your Mom.
Age 50:
Pursue a relationship with Jennifer?
Jennifer rejects you, complaining posting to Slashdot is not a social life.
Age 58:
You die of heart disease brought about by too much TV watching and excessive consumption of Doritos and Mountain Dew.
It's interesting that the 4 times I set myself up as a gifted student in america 3 out of 4 times I was pulled from school and ended dying of starvation... Doesn't really seem to fit the statistics.
The one time I actually made it through graduating with a phd in medicine the best job I could find was as a pottery maker.... Sigh
Oh, sorry, our fault. The version you downloaded was compiled with
-D OUTSOURCING_CONTINUES_AT_2004_PACE and
-D GW_BUSH_RELECTED
This leads to the AMERICA_BECOMES_FEUDAL_THEOCRACY branch point being taken, and endemic neo-peasantry. At that point only the children of CEOs survive past the age of thirty.
For a successful game, please download the "India" module and select the "full scholarship to I.T.T." branch point.
Imagine how difficult it would be to capture details like that in a major city such as NYC? I don't really need directions to find my way around Cambridge city center as you could almost throw a rock from the center and hit just about every building around, but London, Washington, Houston etc... are another story and the data required from their approach would require massive computational infrastructure.
And I fear that there won't be enough "lost tourists" to make this a paying proposition.
But how much would it be worth to professional historians -- or to Hollywood, or just to you personally -- to be able to "walk" through a virtual representation of New York circa 1890?
Or London in Holbein's time?
This is one of those projects -- much like something called ARPANET, which had to rely on government handouts but later made some guy named Steve Case a fortune -- that will never fund itself but will be of literally incalculable value to posterity.
Let's be realistic -- physics and fanaticism not being mutually incompatible, eventually "freedom fighters" -- whether named Atta, McVeigh, or Patrick Magee -- will make bee-lines for our biggest cities, carrying suitcase filled with two precisely machined hemispheres of plutonium. And everything but the maps of those cities will be lost.
Hopefully the Cambridge researchers will by then have completed their -- apparently -- quixotic project, and we will at least have, in redundant storage, a rather precise picture of what will be lost to radioactive ruin, a snapshot of urban life in the twenty-first century.
Also, please don't confuse JavaScript (client-side) with Java Server Pages (Java on the server-side).
I'm not confusing the two; I've written code in both.
My issue with A9.com is that they are using javascript to determine if they're displaying the final result page, in order to suppress the "next page" link, even though the "next page" link is generated by a JSP. The javascript code comment explains this as motivated to accommodate browsers without javascript, although why showing a spurious "next page" link in any browser, with or without javascript, is a good thing isn't explained.
If I'd written the JSP, I'd have had it take care of showing or not showing the "next" link (indeed, I did write a very similar JSP that showed search results, and did precisely that -- no client side javascript required).
Yeah, the fact that they don't provide direct links to the pages also throws my paranoia into overdrive
I was going to give you a Proxomitron script to convert these nosey links into real links; in doing do, I took a look at the page source for Amazon's search.
I found a few very interesting things:
var newloc = "/-/search/loadHist" + search; openInHiddenIframe(newloc, document.getElementById("histContent"));
It look as if one's private search history is sent, in the clear (without SSL encryption) to a hidden frame. Good luck keeping it private if someone else administers the proxy server you use.
Consider that you log in to Amazon's search: will logging into Amazon search from work mean that the IT guys at work get to see the searches ("gay tentacle anime") you made at home?
Other goodies from the page source: function loadDeferredImages(). I don't know what this is, but is a deferred image anything like a pop-under? It uses NoSetTimeOut-->NoNoSetTimeOut-->NoNoSetTimeOut-->N oNoSetTimeOut-->NoNoSetTimeOut-->NoNoSetTimeOut--> NoNoSetTimeOut-->NoNoSetTimeOut to do the deferred load.
Now, maybe this is all benign, and it's just bad programming (apparently they're using JSPs) that inefficiently does work on the client using javascript. But I'd rather be skeptical now than find my search history being used to market to me.
Oh, the Proxomitron script to convert these links to straightforward links; note that it exempts Google and wikipedia.
Name = "Un-Prefix URLs (RK modified) and leave original too" Active = TRUE URL = "(^www.google.com|groups.google.com|*.wikipedia.or g)" Bounds = "<a *>" Limit = 256 Match = "<a (*href=)\0("|)\1(*(/|\?)*)\2(('|)http(%3A|:)(%2F|/ )+)\3([^&;=>"*]+)\4\5("|)>" Replace = "<a \0\1\2\3\4\5\1><font size=1 color=red>[orig]</font></a>\r\n" &nb s p; "<a $UESC(\0\1\3\4\1)>"
You don't have to be among the tin-foil hat crowd to have a low regard for this "feature". There are just some searches that you *don't* want to remember.
You make a very good point.
And note that the Amazon page carefully says that you can "hide" an entry -- not that you can delete it.
But please remember that Google already logs your IP address and search terms; so presumably thus means that now both Google and Amazon will be keeping tabs on you.
Re:Bill Bryson covered this nicely.
on
Happy Spamiversary!
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Bill Bryson covered this nicely.... It's in his latest book, 'A Short History of Nearly Everything'.
That's not as much of a coincidence as it seems, because, now that you mention it, I'm related to Bill Bryson.
I'm actually descended of English royalty (and they killed the king at the time) and can trace that side of my family back to 660AD (base 10).
Being able to trace your ancestry back 1400 years is rare indeed.
But being descended from royalty almost certainly isn't.
Consider: you have two parents. That's one generation back -- and let's assume that each generation averages 25 years -- it's actually a bit less, but we'll say 25 to keep things simple. Two generations back, 50 years back, you have 4 grandparents. Three generations back -- 75 years ago -- you have 8 great grandparents.
At this point anyone who's ever used base 2 can see where this is going: number of ancestors is 2 to the power of generations ago, and years ago is generations ago times 25.
So ten generations back is 250 years ago, at which point we need to find 2^10 = 1024 ancestors of that generation.
Twenty generations back, around 1500 CE, we need 2^20 ancestors. That's 1,048,576, or somewhat more than one million.
Thirty generations back, in 1250, we need 2^30 or over a a billion ancestors, just for you. But the estimated world population -- even including those peoples in Australia the Americas not in contact with Europe -- in 1250 is only 400 million. We're "short" more than 600 million people.
How do we account for the "missing" ancestors? It's simple really: in the thirtieth generation back, you indeed had to have had those billion ancestors, but they needn't have been one billion unique ancestors.
Consider: Bob have whatever number of ancestors in generation N that Bob has. Alice also has some number of ancestors in generation N. If Bob and Alice have a child, Chris, together, Chris's ancestors in generation N+1 are simply the union of Bob's ancestors in generation N and Alice's ancestors in generation N. For example's sake, let's set N=2, the generation of Bob and Alice's grandparents. Bob has four grandparents, Alice has four grandparents. So Chris has eight great-grandparents. But if Bob and Alice are cousins, they share two grandparents, and while Chris still has eight great-grandparents (in a manner of speaking) he has only six unique grandparents.
So we can account for those "missing" 673 million ancestors by assuming that there's quite a bit of overlap in everybody's family trees. And indeed, when we consider that breeding most often takes place in a local area -- no Danes were having kids with Australians in 600 CE, and indeed few Frenchmen were crossing the channel to mate with the English, the overlap must be even greater.
Add to this that of the enduring perquisites of success for males -- indeed, for the Darwinist, the only measure of success -- has been access to females, we can assume that a monarch's sexual access was in most cases extensive. Historians tells us that in pre-Columbian America, sometimes a whole village's "crop" of virgin girls would be set aside exclusively for the solely for the Aztec king, on pain of death.
Or consider Moulay Ismail ("the Bloodthirsty") Moroccan Emperor from 1672 to 1727; he's said to have sired eight-hundred eighty eight children on the 500 women of his harem.
While we know of no European monarch this audacious, the tradition of droit du seigneur and the ready availability of "wet-nurses" in royal nurseries attests that kings would be men even in Christendom.
Given this Darwinian competition for sexual access, and the necessary overlapping of family trees, it seems probable that anyone alive today can proudly claim descent from at least one, if not several monarchs -- and our all being "princes of the blood" is, ironically, as good an argument for democracy as any.
In fact, all of Face the Facts (770331)'s comments are stolen (although most are stolen via the anti-slash.org "database tool".
I actually thought for a moment that Face the Facts (770331) might have an ounce of his own creativity given the above rant -- how reassuring it was to find this was just another copy and paste job.
Slashdot Mirror
Only the building, with its altar and pews, will be virtual. The preacher, congregation and prayers will be real....
This makes real sense.
I mean, they're worshipping a deity who isn't real, in order to gain admission to a place, Heaven, that isn't real and avoid being sent by their unreal but supposedly loving God to another place, Hell, that isn't real, where they would be tortured for eternity by an entity, Satan, who isn't real.
How can content creators prevent their entire domain from being blacklisted because of a small amount of controversial content?
Put the possibly objectionable content in one subdomain (e.g., naughty-bits.mamohanraj.com) and the rest in the www subdomain (e.g., www.mamohanraj.com/).
This is of course purely a guess, I've never had the misfortune of going through a content filter.
You asked what the site can do; of course the site's (would-be) visitor can go through a web proxy , or vnc to his own machine at home and run the browser on the remote box (yes, pictures won't come through as well, but wanking is mostly about the imagination, so you'd probably have a better time at it anyway), or ssh to his home box and wget from the home box and then ftp back to the office, or html tunnel through his home box to the site.
Convince the destructive little buggers that if the learn the principles of building it from you, you'll give them the materials to build their own trebuchet.
After they've learnt enough engineering to build it, then let them learn enough ballistics to accurately destroy stuff.
(Yes, I'm emphasizing engineering over science; tinkering and getting one's hands dirty cements the memory a lot better than simply trying to remember something. More fundamentally, most people and nearly all kids learn to value science for what it can do for them. Valuing knowledge for knowledge's sake alone is the province of a tiny and despised minority of really annoying poindexters like myself.)
as if your ISP doesn't know your browsing history
.jpegs, .movs, .asfes, downloaded mpegs, and even the occasional .txt for the old-time virginal 2400m baud BBS feel, my real surfing habits are barely detectable.
Oh, Jerry, I've got them fooled at the ISP.
Yeah, I have a system. I make sure I hit porn site after porn site, everyday, several times a day.
In that deluge of
Indeed, most people who know me say, "does he do anything other than surf Internet porn all day? Ahem, I mean, other than the obvious other thing?"
Pretty smart, huh, Jerr?
My system is foolproof!
Actually, the lack of a vowel circumlocution in Hebrew can be circumvented since the "true" name of G-d is not often (almost never) used in written form (outside of the Bible). There are many other names that represent Him (like Hashem which literally means "The Name" or any of a great variety of other reference words.
Sorry, my knowledge of all this is rather abstract and theoretical.
You see, I'm actually an -th--st.
(Or I guess we're supposed to call ourselves br-ghts now.)
You know, I'm really getting irritated over the outrage I'm seeing against VOLUNTARY web services. Personally I don't have a problem with using Gmail when it's available, nor do I care of Amazon tracks my searches if it makes for a better and more efficient web experience.
Well, of course you're right. No one is being forced to use GMail or A9. And presumably the astute (and paranoid) will read the privacy notices and avoid selling their privacy for a mess of pottage -- I mean, services.
One problem with the Libertarian Capitalistic outlook -- much as I'm sympathetic to Libertarianism, and see great values in Capitalism -- is that it requires all actors to be rational, and to have roughly the same knowledge of the "playing field". (this is why, for instance, insider trading is banned -- because it undermines the level playing field that must exist for the free market to work.)
But we have corporations that employee literally hundreds of psychologists and marketing and advertising professionals who make it their lives' work to figure out how to get disarm or misdirect our ability to be rational economic actors. And these corporations also employee lawyers and economists and lobbyists, so that the corporation, as an entity, has much more knowledge than the individual can ever hoe to have.
A small case in point: their are widespread allegations that many companies, cellular phone companies especially, intentionally overcharge customers. They idea is that many customers won't notice or won't be willing to spend hours on hold with Customer Disservice to correct the bill. And even those customers willing to pay the additional (time) cost to get their bills corrected will be giving the company interest on the mis-billed money. The interest for one little customer is miniscule, but for the company teat small bit of interest over millions of customer accounts means a significant additional revenue.
So we have people who -- according to the traditional laissez faire capitalist treatment -- are supposed to be rational economic actors, and yet we know damned well that they won't be because the companies planned ahead of time to make sure they couldn't be.
What's the damage? Well, look at AOL. Nobody was forced to use AOL, and savvy, computer literate people knew better than to pay inflated rates for substandard dial-up with a plethora of additional, in-your-face ads. So AOL got the noobs and the boobs. No skin off our elite asses, right?
Wrong! AOL's massive and massively uninformed user base hit Usenet like a tidal wave in '96, and Usenet has not to this day regained its former wit, conviviality, or usefulness. Entire 'net communities were wiped out, never to be seen again.
Or consider Gator and File-Sharing products filled with spyware. Those of us on Slashdot are savvy enough to get a GPL'd version of whatever we want on sourceforge, or to at least run AdAware after installing dome piece of crap that brings along 97 pieces of spyware and adware with it. So again, our elite asses aren't getting skinned, are they?
Wrong again! That spyware not only clogs the noobs' computers, it allows them to be compromised and turned into vectors of Trojans and engines of spamming. And we "elite" get the spam and get DDOSed and get bombarded with Trojans knocking on our ports as much as any noob.
It's sort of like keeping the environment clean: it's my vested interest to keep this environment clean, because I have to live in this environment. If the whole net, or a significant portion, is buying into something dubious, I know that sooner or later I'll feel the consequences too.
Maybe Gmail is not a threat to privacy; but if it is, I want to know that before I'm one of a handful of cranky holdouts, and all the email I get comes from, and all the email I send goes to, GMail. Because at that point, I am part of the system, whether I like it or not.
And, on a completely unrelated note, what is the G-d thing?
He's probably Jewish; Jewish religious law prohibits writing the L-rd's name, so the euphemism "G-d" is used instead. (Ironically, since the Hebrew language has no vowels, so presumably this circumlocution wouldn't work in G-d's "own" language."
It's very standard and not at all a personal idiosyncrasy of the poster.
As to the rest of your comment: spot on!
As a society, the U.S. (less so Europe) has acquiesced in giving up our privacy piecemeal: until lately, we suffered telemarketers to phone us in the sanctity of our homes, and we're now allowing businesses to track us as well, in order to get a "discount" on products already artificially marked up. And we allow banks and credit card companies to collect marketing data based on our purchases, without the pretense of a discount.
Hey, business isn't collecting this information on a lark, folks.
It's far from free to hand out millions of "loyalty card" and put together tracking systems and computers and databases data mining.
("Loyalty" cards? When I was a kid, you were loyal to your country and your family. Now I'm supposed to be "loyal" to a fucking supermarket? Did I mis-read the story of the minutemen? Did they lay down their lives for Safeway and 5% off assorted frozen dinners?)
So I think we can safely assume that, given the cost of all this tracking, the companies doing it have assured themselves that they'll make much more money by doing it, than it costs them to do it.
Now, since these companies are (mostly) in the business of selling products to "end-users" -- that's you, the person being tracked, or selling your data to other companies that want to market to "end users" -- again, that's you with the bar code figuratively tattooed on your ass (or for readers of the Christian Bible's Revelations, the forehead), where, exactly do you think all that money is going to come from?
Yeah, that;s right: the companies are tracking you because they mean to squeeze more -- much more, given the costs of tracking -- out of you. Either the company tracking you extracts it themselves, or the company that bought the data has to jack up their consumer prices to cover the cost of buying the data.
So in the end, after you've sold your birthright of freedom and privacy for a mess of pottage that's 20% off for "loyalty card members", after you've been tracked from mall to market to mortgage payment like a tagged animal in a biologist's field research project, after all that in the long term, you're not really going to be saving anything.
Quick, check the card they assigned you, and see if the name on it isn't "Sucker".
ClearChannel is whining to the FCC about XM Radio's recent foray into localized traffic and weather reports."
.
Clear Channel contends that patiotism demands that traffic reports only recommend right turns and not any of those pro-Dixie Chicks, gay marriage-ing, terr'ist aiding lefty turns.
As for the weather, well, Clear Channel says it's sunny days with n'ary a terr'ist in the skies for all God's chilluns under GW Bush, and there'll be pie in the sky when you die , and you that ain't got rich wealthy parents who provide and protect him / And high office relations , you can join the army, if you fail
But I saw you don't need a weather man/ To know which way the wind blows . I say pretty soon it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall
Cause I say the airwaves don't belong to a company in Texas, I say that this land belongs to you and me.
And I hope my playlist here (figurtively) kills Fascists
However, a quibble:
Yeah, I know, when I was writing it I hoped that point would be glossed over -- Bonhoeffer (and the rest of the Confessional Church, Bonhoffer's and Niemöller's answer to Hitler's paganistic Reich Church) was harassed long before he joined the plot.
So in my defense, it makes the point that even if right now you're an upstanding member of society (like a Lutheran theologian in Germany) and even if right mow you have no need to hide anything, it could be that in a few years the situation will have changed and somebody will be awfully interested in see what, and to whom, you wrote email.
But in truth, yeah, I wanted someone more clearly "unimpeachably innocent" (much as I hate to call anyone who sought to kill Hitler "guilty", under the laws of Das Dritte Reich as you point out, he certainly was), but more importantly for my purposes, I wanted an example of someone was got killed. That ruled out Niemöller, even though he was unimpeachable and as a bonus was initially pro-Hitler. It also ruled out my first choice, German Jewish pianist Artur Schnabel.
In retrospect, I should have gone with Anne Frank, and her innocence and untimely youthful death would have nicely mirrored Matthew Shepard. And I'd have been able to get a in a nudge for gay rights by equating exterminating her for being Jewish with exterminating Shepard for being gay, without minimizing the horror of the Holocaust.
So my real defense is, it was four in the morning and, synchronized with the clock, I was working on beer number four.
This is rather obvious, but, since you don't indicate this needs to be portable...
Get her a PC, and run Winamp at its built-in double sized setting on a low resolution monitor.
And then do her a real favor, and rip all her CDs so she doesn't have to bother with changing the CDs.
Jesus Christ on a pogo stick!
Do they not teach history at all any more?
I'm Alexander Ivanovich Ladyzhenski. I have nothing to hide; despite my noble origins, I'm just interested in my job, teaching mathematics, in my native land of Russian. In 1937, Ladyzhenskaya was arrested in one of Stalin's purges and in a show trial convicted, for his family's status as minor nobility, an "enemy of the Russian people" and sentenced to death.
I'm Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I have nothing to hide; I'm a minister and a theology professor. I'm just interested in being a good Christian, and keeping Christianity from being taken over by pagan practices in my native land of Germany. In 1943, Dr. Bonhoeffer was arrested by the Gestapo after his opposition to Hitler's racial policies and attempt to take over the German Church lead him to join a plot to assassinate Hitler. He was executed just three weeks before the Allied victory over Germany in 1945.
I'm Matthew Shepard. I have nothing to hide; well, except I'm gay, but I'll confide that to these two nice fellows I'm having drinks with in this bar. The two men Shepard was talking with, Aaron James McKinney and Russel (sic) Arthur Henderson, lured Shepard into leaving with them in their car. They then robbed, brutally beat, and tied Shepard to a fence, leaving him for dead. Found eighteen hours later, Shepard survived five more days before dying of his injuries.
The graveyards are full of people who "had nothing to hide" until a change in government or an encounter with thugs meant they suddenly found themselves outsiders and victims, members of some group considered "ok" to brutalize and oppress.
But of course, this is America, and it can't happen here, right? Matthew Shepard was just an exception, right?
I'm Fred Hampton. I have nothing to hide; I'm a member of the Black Panther Party fighting for civil rights and to end gang violence in Chicago. In 1969, asm part of is COINTELPRO program to suppress leftist dissent, the FBI provided the Chicago Police Department with the floor plan of Hampton's apartment. On December 4, police raided Hampton's apartment, firing automatic weapons. Hampton was found in his bed wounded by the police gunfire and possibly drugged by a police informant. From Wikipedia:
A later investigation found that of the one hundred bullets fired in the raid, the police had fired ninety-nine; the single bullet fired by a Black Panther had been fired in a reflex spasm as the man died.
But you have nothing to hide.
and no future Herbert Hoover ever leads the FBI into another COINTELPRO;
I plead a late night and a good Hefeweizen. Of course that should be J. Edgar Hoover, and yes, I didn't close an anchor tag soon enough either.
As recompense, I'll point you to a recording of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony that sounds a lot like "ambient" music (scroll down for mp3s, avoid the Real Crappy Player stuff up top), because it's been s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d out to last for twenty-four continuous hours. It's uncanny, especially compared to a more normal Ninth, such as the 1942 Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting the Berlin Philharmonic at emusic.com (this during the war, so you almost find yourself listening for air raid sirens while wondering how many top Nazis are in the audience.)
It's not about whether I trust Google's intentions. So long as Google is an American company, or more precisely so long as its headquarters exist in *any* country, there's a danger that the government of said country can bully them into giving up all the information they have on anybody.
I haven't had mod points since December (despite two years and 1204 comments).
But if I did have mod points, mine would go to the parent.
So should yours.
Putting all your eggs in one basket, as the cliche notes, is bad policy.
Putting all your information in the hands of one company invites extensive profiling of you.
It may even be that Google respects your privacy;
it may even be that GW Bush is voted out of office and Ashcroft (slighty NSFW) with him, and contrary to any realistic possibility, the Democratic Party gets rid of Howard Berman is defeated in the Democratic Primary and Fritz Hollings retires and the DMCA is repealed and no future Herbert Hoover ever leads the FBI into another COINTELPRO;
and it may even be that lions lie down with lambs and meat packers lie down with cows.
But even in such a perfect world, it would take one disgruntled Google employee or one corporate spy or one hacker to make all your data public.
The question isn't "is Google trustworthy"; the question is, given that you backup your data for the day your hard drive inevitably dies, given that you use an UPS because you know that even the best power company has blackouts, why you rush to put all your data in any one set of hands?
Apple Rejects RealNetwork's Pleas
... [BUFFERING]."
Actually, the headline here overstates it. Technically, Apple has not yet rejected Real's pleas.
Apple sent the following message to Rob Glaser:
"In response to your request of the 15th, Apple's categorical response is [BUFFERING]
Can you upload your own life and let it run a simulation to see how you will end up in life? This would be interesting to see when your 40, 60, or 80 years old.
Age 40:
You move out of your mother's basement.
Pursue a relationship with Heidi?
Heidi rejects you, complaining posting to Slashdot is not a social life.
Age 42:
You move back in with your Mom.
Age 50:
Pursue a relationship with Jennifer?
Jennifer rejects you, complaining posting to Slashdot is not a social life.
Age 58:
You die of heart disease brought about by too much TV watching and excessive consumption of Doritos and Mountain Dew.
It's interesting that the 4 times I set myself up as a gifted student in america 3 out of 4 times I was pulled from school and ended dying of starvation... Doesn't really seem to fit the statistics.
The one time I actually made it through graduating with a phd in medicine the best job I could find was as a pottery maker.... Sigh
Oh, sorry, our fault. The version you downloaded was compiled with
-D OUTSOURCING_CONTINUES_AT_2004_PACE
and
-D GW_BUSH_RELECTED
This leads to the AMERICA_BECOMES_FEUDAL_THEOCRACY branch point being taken, and endemic neo-peasantry. At that point only the children of CEOs survive past the age of thirty.
For a successful game, please download the "India" module and select the "full scholarship to I.T.T." branch point.
What did you think made your existing fan motors spin, Space Pixies?
WHY MUST YOU destroy our dreams, Mr. Scientist?!
As I was saying to the Easter Bunny just the other day, we don't want your explanations, we want our comforting anthropomorphized mysticism, damnit!
Imagine how difficult it would be to capture details like that in a major city such as NYC? I don't really need directions to find my way around Cambridge city center as you could almost throw a rock from the center and hit just about every building around, but London, Washington, Houston etc... are another story and the data required from their approach would require massive computational infrastructure.
And I fear that there won't be enough "lost tourists" to make this a paying proposition.
But how much would it be worth to professional historians -- or to Hollywood, or just to you personally -- to be able to "walk" through a virtual representation of New York circa 1890?
Or London in Holbein's time?
This is one of those projects -- much like something called ARPANET, which had to rely on government handouts but later made some guy named Steve Case a fortune -- that will never fund itself but will be of literally incalculable value to posterity.
Let's be realistic -- physics and fanaticism not being mutually incompatible, eventually "freedom fighters" -- whether named Atta, McVeigh, or Patrick Magee -- will make bee-lines for our biggest cities, carrying suitcase filled with two precisely machined hemispheres of plutonium. And everything but the maps of those cities will be lost.
Hopefully the Cambridge researchers will by then have completed their -- apparently -- quixotic project, and we will at least have, in redundant storage, a rather precise picture of what will be lost to radioactive ruin, a snapshot of urban life in the twenty-first century.
Also, please don't confuse JavaScript (client-side) with Java Server Pages (Java on the server-side).
I'm not confusing the two; I've written code in both.
My issue with A9.com is that they are using javascript to determine if they're displaying the final result page, in order to suppress the "next page" link, even though the "next page" link is generated by a JSP. The javascript code comment explains this as motivated to accommodate browsers without javascript, although why showing a spurious "next page" link in any browser, with or without javascript, is a good thing isn't explained.
If I'd written the JSP, I'd have had it take care of showing or not showing the "next" link (indeed, I did write a very similar JSP that showed search results, and did precisely that -- no client side javascript required).
I was going to give you a Proxomitron script to convert these nosey links into real links; in doing do, I took a look at the page source for Amazon's search.
I found a few very interesting things:It look as if one's private search history is sent, in the clear (without SSL encryption) to a hidden frame. Good luck keeping it private if someone else administers the proxy server you use.
Consider that you log in to Amazon's search: will logging into Amazon search from work mean that the IT guys at work get to see the searches ("gay tentacle anime") you made at home?
Other goodies from the page source: function loadDeferredImages(). I don't know what this is, but is a deferred image anything like a pop-under? It uses NoSetTimeOut-->NoNoSetTimeOut-->NoNoSetTimeOut-->
Now, maybe this is all benign, and it's just bad programming (apparently they're using JSPs) that inefficiently does work on the client using javascript. But I'd rather be skeptical now than find my search history being used to market to me.
Oh, the Proxomitron script to convert these links to straightforward links; note that it exempts Google and wikipedia.
You don't have to be among the tin-foil hat crowd to have a low regard for this "feature". There are just some searches that you *don't* want to remember.
You make a very good point.
And note that the Amazon page carefully says that you can "hide" an entry -- not that you can delete it.
But please remember that Google already logs your IP address and search terms; so presumably thus means that now both Google and Amazon will be keeping tabs on you.
Bill Bryson covered this nicely.... It's in his latest book, 'A Short History of Nearly Everything'.
That's not as much of a coincidence as it seems, because, now that you mention it, I'm related to Bill Bryson.
You see, his great-great-great-great-great....
I'm actually descended of English royalty (and they killed the king at the time) and can trace that side of my family back to 660AD (base 10).
Being able to trace your ancestry back 1400 years is rare indeed.
But being descended from royalty almost certainly isn't.
Consider: you have two parents. That's one generation back -- and let's assume that each generation averages 25 years -- it's actually a bit less, but we'll say 25 to keep things simple. Two generations back, 50 years back, you have 4 grandparents. Three generations back -- 75 years ago -- you have 8 great grandparents.
At this point anyone who's ever used base 2 can see where this is going: number of ancestors is 2 to the power of generations ago, and years ago is generations ago times 25.
So ten generations back is 250 years ago, at which point we need to find 2^10 = 1024 ancestors of that generation.
Twenty generations back, around 1500 CE, we need 2^20 ancestors. That's 1,048,576, or somewhat more than one million.
Thirty generations back, in 1250, we need 2^30 or over a a billion ancestors, just for you. But the estimated world population -- even including those peoples in Australia the Americas not in contact with Europe -- in 1250 is only 400 million. We're "short" more than 600 million people.
How do we account for the "missing" ancestors? It's simple really: in the thirtieth generation back, you indeed had to have had those billion ancestors, but they needn't have been one billion unique ancestors.
Consider: Bob have whatever number of ancestors in generation N that Bob has. Alice also has some number of ancestors in generation N. If Bob and Alice have a child, Chris, together, Chris's ancestors in generation N+1 are simply the union of Bob's ancestors in generation N and Alice's ancestors in generation N. For example's sake, let's set N=2, the generation of Bob and Alice's grandparents. Bob has four grandparents, Alice has four grandparents. So Chris has eight great-grandparents. But if Bob and Alice are cousins, they share two grandparents, and while Chris still has eight great-grandparents (in a manner of speaking) he has only six unique grandparents.
So we can account for those "missing" 673 million ancestors by assuming that there's quite a bit of overlap in everybody's family trees. And indeed, when we consider that breeding most often takes place in a local area -- no Danes were having kids with Australians in 600 CE, and indeed few Frenchmen were crossing the channel to mate with the English, the overlap must be even greater.
Add to this that of the enduring perquisites of success for males -- indeed, for the Darwinist, the only measure of success -- has been access to females, we can assume that a monarch's sexual access was in most cases extensive. Historians tells us that in pre-Columbian America, sometimes a whole village's "crop" of virgin girls would be set aside exclusively for the solely for the Aztec king, on pain of death.
Or consider Moulay Ismail ("the Bloodthirsty") Moroccan Emperor from 1672 to 1727; he's said to have sired eight-hundred eighty eight children on the 500 women of his harem.
While we know of no European monarch this audacious, the tradition of droit du seigneur and the ready availability of "wet-nurses" in royal nurseries attests that kings would be men even in Christendom.
Given this Darwinian competition for sexual access, and the necessary overlapping of family trees, it seems probable that anyone alive today can proudly claim descent from at least one, if not several monarchs -- and our all being "princes of the blood" is, ironically, as good an argument for democracy as any.
The above rant was stolen, word-for-word from this Usenet post.
In fact, all of Face the Facts (770331)'s comments are stolen (although most are stolen via the anti-slash.org "database tool".
I actually thought for a moment that Face the Facts (770331) might have an ounce of his own creativity given the above rant -- how reassuring it was to find this was just another copy and paste job.
The parent post is stolen, except for the first paragraph, word-for-word from this post by tchuladdiass (174342).
It was stolen via the anti-slash.org database.
In fact, all of the parent's posts are plagaiarized via teh anti-slash.org database.
Mod parent down.