With this project, it says people write articles, and edit other peoples work
"The original poster was miffed and insisted it was the correct spelling (it wasn't...) and changed it back. Sounds like a recipe for disaster if you ask me."
Actually, with Wikipedia, some people write the encyclopedia, but it's those who don't do the writing who run Wikipedia.
For example, right now, one "admin" does little else but to run off the project people he dislikes. He's currently trying to run off an editor who makes lots of edits, most of them the complete grunt work of minor corrections of typos or grammatical errors. Since it's those sorts of errors that determine how a reader judges Wikipedia, I'd argue those are important edits.
In the same period of time that that prolific but endangered editor has made 10000 edits, the admin who wants to get rid of him has made about 1500 edits.
But that's not what is most interesting.
Wikipedia is divided into three main areas: the actual encyclopedia, discussion of the encyclopedia, and discussion of Wikipedia itself, including policies and personalties.
Of the prolific editor's edits, a full 92% have been to the encyclopedia itself, 3% to discussion of what should be in the articles, and 5% to Wikipedia and its internal politics.
But of the 1500-some edits by the admin who rid of this editor, only 21% have been to the encyclopedia itself, 17% to discussion of articles, and a full 62% of his edits have been to Wikipedia's internal politics.
But it gets worse.
Of the 22% of edits the admin has made to actual articles, nearly 34% of those -- about a third -- have been reverts or removals of additions by another editor that admin is trying to run off. Another 24% of the admin's edits to actual articles consisted of nothing more than removing a "stub" marker -- necessary work but nothing that really improves the encyclopedia's content.
Not to say that the 62% of his time spent on Wikipedia politics isn't work: this admin apparently spends most of his time checking other's edits and compiling lists of their "infractions".
(I should note that I can't vouch for these numbers myself; they were contained in a email I received on the matter. And I am a bit biased -- I had my own run-ins with this particular admin when I was active on Wikipedia, in particular over his desire to sanction another editor for, among other things, voting against the admin. What I can personally vouch for can be seen in greater detail here and here; the second link is particularly interesting, as it recounts how the admin in question decided to appoint himself Wikipedia's "District Attorney", or as he was pleased to title himself -- his self-selected title, not mine -- "Dictator".)
So we're left, one the one hand, with an editor who has made 10000 edits, almost all of them improving Wikipedia, often doing the most tedious work possible, and on the other hand with someone who spends at most about 11% of his edits on the encyclopedia, and the rest on pursuing vendettas.
But as things currently stand, that admin is likely to some succeed in having the editor, who does so much grunt-work, banned from Wikipedia. Already, the editor has been temporarily banned for 100 days by the admin, and is no longer allowed to speak on the Wikipedia IRC chat channel for "backtalking" the admin.
So before you decide to give of your valuable time editing Wikipedia, consider that it's the people who do the least work there who get to run the site and take credit for it.
I heard about it, I even used it, but frankly, meetup.com makes some of the same old tired mistakes too many websites make.
The site isn't transparently easy to navigate. There's no way (or I didn't see one) to search by meet-up time or day. ("Hey I'm free Tuesdays, what's going on Tuesdays.")
To see the people or the number of people signed-up for a particular meet-up, you had to register with meet-up.com, then "join" that meet-up. Since meet-ups were canceled when fewer than three people signed up, you couldn't effectively browse for what looked like it was really going to happen without first signing up. Pain in the ass.
You can't indicate, for a meet-up you are interested in, that the meet-up time doesn't work. You can vote for a location, but there's no easy way to indicate what sort of locations work for you: "I don't like smoky bars; I can do in the city but not the 'burbs; near the subway". And once you did sign up for a meet-up, you kept getting annoying email asking that you confirm.
Some of these things make sense, but much of it was the typical website desire to control and constrain its users, probably at the behest of marketeers who wanted to "track" everything and everybody.
And the irony is, if by registering, a user could make a profile of what works and doesn't work for him for a meet-up, the marketeers could have mined a hell of a lot more information, information that users would have willingly given.
But since the site was a pain in the ass to use, without that pain benefiting me in any way, I stopped using it.
Websites need to realize that people aren't going to change their lives to conform to what's easiest for marketeers to track. When they do realize that -- like craigslist -- they become popular. When they don't -- well, it's time to start charging fees and finding cheaper offices.
"Nothing about this system, as far as I can see, changes the nature of the criminal justice process and system at all. It just facilitates part of the detective work."
Ho hum. "It just facilitates part of the detective work."
In many cases, [police]
turned a valuable crime-fighting tool into a personal search engine for home addresses, for driving records and for criminal files of love interests, colleagues, bosses or rivals. . . .. Part-time Memphis police officer Scott Woods.... [used the database] to find out personal information about a woman he met on the Internet.... . . .. Woods later told the woman he had followed her home the night before, according to police records. He called her by her middle name, which she had not told him. He described her height and weight. And he went on to call her at home and work up to three times a day, according to police and sheriff's records.
But there are laws in place to prevent these abuses.
[Orange County, Florida, Sheriff Kevin] Beary was so upset by [a critical Letter to the Editor] that he had his staff look up [the letter writer's] address using driver's license records and fired off a letter to her.
"I never in any way sent that letter to you with the intent of intimidating you. Please know that I am confident I was within the purview of the Florida Public Records Law when I obtained your mailing address. I sincerely regret the fact that my letter upset you," Beary wrote.
Violators of the driver's privacy act can be sued in U.S. District Court for damages of at least $2,500, punitive damages, attorney's fees and all other relief the court determines to be appropriate.
But sheriff's officials said that it was legal to look up Gawronski's address on the driver's database. Sheriff's spokesman Jim Solomons said responding to a resident's concern is well within Beary's official duties.
Ok, so maybe those laws have loopholes. But all he did was send her an intimidating letter. Cops would never use databases to do worse.
Prosecutor's Office Uses Database to Smear Prosecutor's Political Opponent, Police Lieutenant Charged With Abusing Database to Influence Elections Cop Uses Database to Find Woman's Unlisted Phone Number -- Gives It to Woman's Ex
A few bad apples. The databases wouldn't be used to frame political opponents.
But we all know that those Earth Firsters are, essentially, terrorists. Why should terrorists be protected by laws? The FBI doesn't frame peaceful protesters!
More ominously,
the FBI suggested that "legal" efforts to deal with [Martin Luther] King [Jr.] might not be enough. "It may be unrealistic," the memorandum went on, to limit ourselves as we have been doing to legalistic proofs or definitely conclusive evidence that would stand up in testimony in court or before Congressional Committees... . . .. [FBI officials] agreed to use "all available investigative techniques" to develop information for use "to discredit" King. Proposals discussed included using ministers, "disgruntled" acquaintances, "aggress
"When will you folks learn. In the US, our reps won't listen unless there's a huge PAC donation included with your letter."
Yes, it's hard to compete with PACs. But remember that PAC dollars are used to buy, for the most part, TV ad time. And those ads are used to get votes.
Rather than give up, let's get off our asses and organize and get ready for the next election.
Don't just write your Congressman that you think it's a pathetic joke that a TIA supporter his chair of the DHS Privacy Board -- get the signature of nine other people^W voters on your letter, and then send it.
And then keep those other nine voters aware of the latest on privacy. No form letters, no mass mailing, just call or email or have a beer with your friends, and keep them up to date. Especially as we get closer to elections.
You're a Slashdotter -- so in all likelihood you've set up computers for friends and family, and you've told them to use Firefox to protect against viruses and exploits. Next time you're doing that for somebody, tell them about these Federal exploits too.
Head down to your local Democratic Party office -- yes, yes, the Democrats have been bad on privacy too, but with the Republicans in control of the Presidency and the Congress, with the Republicans nominating guys like this, it's not the Democrats you have to worry about now -- and volunteer your technical services. Once you've met the local Democratic leaders, as a very useful volunteer, explain to them what brought you there was your worries about privacy, and your hope that the Democratic Party shares your concerns.
Do something. Posting to Slashdot is fine, but as long as politicians think that all you're doing is posting to Slashdot, they won't give a damn. Get up, get out, and get organized.
To paraphrase Franklin: America is your republic -- if you can keep it.
(I'll be posting more about this in my Slashdot Journal in the near future; look for it, and think about other ways we can stand up to Washington's follies.)
No, it won't. Not to Americans anyway. Not with NASA's already paltry budget being cut to fund more Pentagon spending.
It might be a problem for the Chinese, but as long as we can keep buying cheap Chinese make consumer products at Wal*Mart, America won't give a damn.
Wake up America! Your birthright is being sold to Halliburton. Your schools have been hi-jacked by Christian Fundamentalists who believe that their Creation story ought to be taught in biology classes, and Florida is about to pass a law allowing college professors to be sued for offending Fundamentalist students by ignoring Creationism.
A Republican Congressman, Sennsenbrenner wants to enact criminal penalties -- that is, jail time -- for broadcasters who violate his idea of "decency", and Republican Senator Ted Stevens, wants to expand existing decency laws to cover cable and satellite broadcasts that people can't even see without subscribing.
Your President wants to outlaw medical research because he considers a two-day-old, 16-cell, unimplanted embryo a human life. His executive agencies are quizzing scientists about who they voted for as part of the hiring process, and suppressing research that his corporate backers don't want to see.
Wake up! Science in America is under siege -- not only are we not going back to the Moon, we're headed straight for the Dark Ages.
"The government is readying a plan to spend more than $2 billion on a routine 10-year overhaul to extend the life of the aging warheads. At the same time, some weapons scientists say the warheads have a fundamental design flaw...."
but I guess basic science
"The shift away from basic research is alarming many leading computer scientists and electrical engineers, who warn that there will be long-term consequences for the nation's economy."
"Led by twenty Nobel laureates, the scientists say Bush's government has systematically distorted and undermined scientific information in pursuit of political objectives."
"I read a lot of books (several a week) on my Sharp Zaurus SL-5600"
Seconded. Not so good for PDF (although a PDF reader is available for the Zaurus), but great for Plucker. For plucker or raw HTML or Palm.doc (not MS-Word), get Opie Reader and the Georgia font. One great thing about Opie Reader is that it allows you to easily change the font size on the fly: go smaller for fewer page "turning" or larger when your eyes are tired. And page turning is as simple as pushing a button, so you can read with one hand and eat a sandwich with another.
(If you really want to read MS-Word.docs, Zaurus comes with a Word clone too.)
If you're really careful, you can put the Zaurus in a ziploc baggie, thread the earphones out, and read book and listen to MP3s in the hottub. Or with a Wifi card, you can IRC chat or read Slashdot out of the tub, reclining on your sofa.
For me, the perfect machine would be a little bigger than a Zaurus, with a harddrive.
"I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Pope John Paul II was found dead in his Vatican City apartment this afternoon"
You humorless, compassionless bastards. The Pope was a great man who deserves veneration, and the Stephen King troll is a venerable Slashdot tradition. I'd have posted it myself, if the AC hadn't gotten to it first.
"Here's what I don't understand. Why can't both the THEORY of evolution and the THEORY of intelligent design both be taught in schools?"
Because all the theory of "Intelligent Design" says, is, "since I don't understand how this could have evolved, it must have be designed, not evolved." For at least two hundred years, the "perfection" of the eye was given as evidence of design, until computer models should how easy it is for eyes to evolve, and molecular biology showed us eyes have separately evolved at least forty times.
Now the "Intelligent Design" proponents having had the eye explained, talk about freely rotating flagella in certain bacteria. They hang their "theory" in the contention that since "half a rotation" isn't useful, organisms with "half a rotation" could not have ben favored by evolution, and so a freely rotating flagellum could not evolve. But it turns out several of the components of that wheel are the same as components of a "needle" used by parasitic bacteria to inject chemicals into host cells, a so-called Type Three Secretory Apparatus.
All "Intelligent Design" is not a useful theory, in the sense that science uses the word "theory", because all it is able to do is say "I can't figure this out". It has no explanatory or predictive power.
Compare the "theory" of Intelligent Design to Boyle's law: a physicist on being told about changing temperature in
a room full of some gas, knows there's a relation between temperature
and pressure because Boyle's law predicts it. The physicist doesn't
have to go to the room himself, or ask what mechanism is responsible
for the temperature change, or in what direction the temperature is
changing, or really even what kind of gas in the room -- the physicist
can with confidence predict that pressure and temperature are dependent
on one another.
It's not just that evolution is consistent with what we know, it's also
consistent with what we don't know.
It has predictive and explanatory power: using evolution, we are able
to say, "assuming evolution is correct, we ought to see this", and then
when we do look, we see what evolution predicts.
We say, evolution tells us that meiosis helps to keep each paired
chromosome like its opposite pair, because genes are exchanged in
meiosis. Because meiosis only takes place in sexual reproduction, this
allows us to predict that in asexual reproduction, paired chromosomes
will diverge. when we look at bdelloid rotifers, we see what was
predicted: their chromosomes do diverge, and we can even compare the chromosome divergence between
pairs against the to the total mutational change in the entire bdelloid
rotifer genome, to come up with a good idea of how long bdelloid
rotifers have been reproducing asexually: abut 80 million years.
We say, evolution predicts that, since workers bees born to a queen
with only one mate share more genes, on average, with their haploid
nephews -- that is, males born to other workers -- than with their
diploid brothers born to the queen, the workers will favor their
nephews. And the prediction turns out to be true. We can also predict,
using Trivers' work, that if the queen mated with more than one male, a
nephew isn't necessarily more related, so the workers in that case
won't favor nephews. And that also turns out to be true. (Bee examples
from here).
Note that in the bee example, we don't know what mechanism allows a
worker to "know" how many mates her mother the queen has had, or the
mechanism that, given that "knowledge" allows the worker to modify her
behavior. We just know that the worker behaves "as if" she understood
the genetic math involved, and knew the mating history. Of course, bees
don't do genetics or math and probably don't even remember matings --
but we don't need to see the mechanism to predict that it and the
behavior must be there: evolutionary theory predicted that bees would
act like "as if" geneticis
Yeah, it disappoints me too, that every web site doesn't prominently display quotations from Mao's Little Red Book.
(And I hear Tom delay wants every site to include the Ten Commandments.)
"Zhao, a former government official in China's Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications">/i>
The same China that censors the internet and its own people, in order to keep a totalitarian stranglehold on teh country? That China?
Well, this is a biiiiig surprise.
Leave government the role of making sure the wires stay connected and the signal goes through and no company monopolizes access to the net. And keep government's sticky fingers out of teh regulation of content.
Re:My problem with this.
on
VoIP Wiretapping
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
"Personally, I don't have a problem with the security thing. It's just for the police, and I personally don't have anything to hide from them."
It includes such charming cop activities as "Prosecutor's Office Uses Database to Smear Prosecutor's Political Opponent", "Police Lieutenant Charged With Abusing Database to Influence Elections", and "Cop Uses Database to Find Woman's Unlisted Phone Number -- Gives It to Woman's Ex"
But that's just local cops you say? We can trust the FBI, you say? Well, Martin Luther King couldn't.
You, know, mostly I let the links speak for themselves. I'm going to deviate from that this time, and I'll get modded down for it, but sometimes you just have to say it.
You don't deserve to vote. You don't deserve the nation created by Jefferson and Madison and Washington. You don't deserve to inherit the legacy of the brave men and women who sacrificed their lives to make America (more or less) free.
YOU DON'T DESERVE TO BE AN AMERICAN.
It's one thing if you realize that government is always a threat to liberty, and weighing the alternatives, reluctantly decide to cede more power to the government.
But you aren't doing that. With the whole frigging internet at your finger-tips -- much more than Thomas Jefferson ever had -- you can't even be bothered to type into Google "police surveillance abuse" and read the fucking history of your own fucking country.
Instead, you just blithely assume that since what you're doing isn't illegal yet that since you're not on a watch-list yet that the color your skin or your accent or your politics aren't "suspicious" yet, you can sit back fat and happy without giving thought to how this might affect others or even -- governments and laws do change -- yourself in the future.
And yet you get to go into a voting booth and pull the lever because of people who did know better and who made the hard choices and who often die
"Any type of attack nowadays will be labeled terroristic."
You mean like Republican Majority Leader Tom DeLay calling removing brain-dead Terry Schiavo's feeding tube medical terrorism?
(The link is to Delay's own site: he's proud of invoking the spectre of terrorism to justify unprecedented government intrusion into personal medical decisions. DeLay also threatened to hold a judge in contempt of Congress for quashing a Congressional subpoena issued to compel the brain dead woman to testify. (Since removed form a conservative web site).
Now, before some winger decides to mod this off-topic, let me spell out what has this to do with IT security.
Very simple: our current "leaders" have shown they'll label anything -- even the legally uncontroversial, medically backed decisions of US judges -- as "terrorism", just in order to win points with their core fundamentalist Christian constituency.
If they'll do it about the private medical decisions of a family, they'll sure as hell do it about IT, if they think they can gain something by so doing. And they've shown that even if that "terrorism" label is obviously bunkum of the first order, they'll go ahead and use it.
Hey, it worked to get us into a pointless war in Iraq: remember when we were told about WMDs and Saddams "ties" to terrorists?
Like the boy who cried wolf, it should be clear by now that when a leading politician (and Delay is only one step away from being Speaker of the House of Representatives, the third in line of presidential succession, he's no fringe politician ) calls something "terrorism", we need to understand he's doing it to whip up our fears -- not to make us safer, but to get what he wants.
Even if AllOfMp3 is legal, by buying our albums offshore, we take away the jobs of hard-working Americans in the recording industry, little people who toil for as little as 70 or 100 thousand dollars a year.
It's willful moral blindness to rationalize this kind of assault on the American worker as "watching the bottom line" or "getting lean and mean" or as "fiduciary responsibility" to your shareholders -- especially when almost all of the your savings on albums (as much as $15 per CD) goes into your own pocket and the pockets of your close cronies in the form of 'executive benefits', 'bonuses' and 'golden parachutes'.
Can you imagine the hue and cry if an American company did the sort of thing you're doing by buying from AllOfMp3.com? If an American company did business overseas just because that was cheaper, and put most of the savings into top executives" salaries and benefits, while at the same time causing American jobs to be lost?
Why that sort of thing wouldn't be tolerated for an instant, not by anyone who truly loves America! Congress would pass all sorts of new "Intellectual Property" laws to put an end to it, and the FCC would mandate that all TVs sold to the American public be modified to include hardware to prevent such theft. Because our leaders truly care about the little guy!
So for shame! Stop your overseas out sourcing of your entertainment budget, and remember we don't do that sort of things to our fellow Americans!
Proxomitron regexes can be written to get around this.
While I don't have one that does exactly this, I do have one for the more common "send the real url as a GET parameter" -- Fark.com and yahoo.com like to do this. An example from fark:
So rather than go directly to the NYPost, you hit Fark first, and Fark get to tell its advertisers, look at all the clicks on our links. It also means most clicks take a good long time, to hit fark and be redirected.
The Proxomitron regex not only makes the url the real url, it adds an "[orig]" link in a small red font, just in case it really is necessary (as on Yahoo) to go via the redirecting link.
The nice thing about Proxomitron is that I not only don't get pop-ups, I also don't even get many embedded adds.
For example: on Washingtonpost.com's front page, I see only text adds. Bypassing Proxomitron (it's done with a bookmark) shows me three additional ads in Firefox, but even bypassed I don't see many, as I have a second proxy behind Proxomitron to filter out the "always bad" sites like doubleclick.
From where I sit, the web is a calm place with no pop-ups, no annoying ads, no distractions.
What better for that then a Biosphere literally hermetically sealed from the rest of the world. Perhaps it's even sealed tightly enough to hold in the shame Americans should feel for what's being perpetuated in their names.
Yes, I'm proud to be an American: after getting to the moon in 1969, 35 years later the closest we've come to a manned landing on Mars is a "Biosphere" in the Arizona desert. Meanwhile, "land of the free" is using medieval tortures on innocent men and proposing to jail them for life without any evidence.
Here's to you, Mr. Jefferson! Here's to you Mr. Adams!
If 80% aren't spherical one must ask why the other 20% are NOT.
Why even bother to ask why? If you come across something and you can't figure out how it could have occurred, just claim the event or process is the product of Intelligent Design.
Why spend year after tedious year engaging in reductionist scientific inquiry when you can just bail out immediately with an answer that cannot be falsified: Intelligent Design.
Worried that your invisible sky-ghost or imaginary all-powerful personal friend isn't getting the deferential worship He deserves in this age of secular humanism? Sneak your sky-ghost back into the schools and indoctrinate another generation of devout sheep with Intelligent Design.
Remember the "Argument from Personal Incredulity": if you're too thick to figure out how something works, it must be because no one can figure it out! Don't sweat it! Just explain it away by saying it was caused personally God^H^H^H an Intelligent Designer!
Don't waste time asking question or doing science! Just give credit to an Intelligent Designer and go back to sleep!
Slashdot Mirror
With this project, it says people write articles, and edit other peoples work
"The original poster was miffed and insisted it was the correct spelling (it wasn't...) and changed it back. Sounds like a recipe for disaster if you ask me."
Actually, with Wikipedia, some people write the encyclopedia, but it's those who don't do the writing who run Wikipedia.
For example, right now, one "admin" does little else but to run off the project people he dislikes. He's currently trying to run off an editor who makes lots of edits, most of them the complete grunt work of minor corrections of typos or grammatical errors. Since it's those sorts of errors that determine how a reader judges Wikipedia, I'd argue those are important edits.
In the same period of time that that prolific but endangered editor has made 10000 edits, the admin who wants to get rid of him has made about 1500 edits.
But that's not what is most interesting.
Wikipedia is divided into three main areas: the actual encyclopedia, discussion of the encyclopedia, and discussion of Wikipedia itself, including policies and personalties.
Of the prolific editor's edits, a full 92% have been to the encyclopedia itself, 3% to discussion of what should be in the articles, and 5% to Wikipedia and its internal politics.
But of the 1500-some edits by the admin who rid of this editor, only 21% have been to the encyclopedia itself, 17% to discussion of articles, and a full 62% of his edits have been to Wikipedia's internal politics.
But it gets worse.
Of the 22% of edits the admin has made to actual articles, nearly 34% of those -- about a third -- have been reverts or removals of additions by another editor that admin is trying to run off. Another 24% of the admin's edits to actual articles consisted of nothing more than removing a "stub" marker -- necessary work but nothing that really improves the encyclopedia's content.
Not to say that the 62% of his time spent on Wikipedia politics isn't work: this admin apparently spends most of his time checking other's edits and compiling lists of their "infractions".
(I should note that I can't vouch for these numbers myself; they were contained in a email I received on the matter. And I am a bit biased -- I had my own run-ins with this particular admin when I was active on Wikipedia, in particular over his desire to sanction another editor for, among other things, voting against the admin. What I can personally vouch for can be seen in greater detail here and here; the second link is particularly interesting, as it recounts how the admin in question decided to appoint himself Wikipedia's "District Attorney", or as he was pleased to title himself -- his self-selected title, not mine -- "Dictator".)
So we're left, one the one hand, with an editor who has made 10000 edits, almost all of them improving Wikipedia, often doing the most tedious work possible, and on the other hand with someone who spends at most about 11% of his edits on the encyclopedia, and the rest on pursuing vendettas.
But as things currently stand, that admin is likely to some succeed in having the editor, who does so much grunt-work, banned from Wikipedia. Already, the editor has been temporarily banned for 100 days by the admin, and is no longer allowed to speak on the Wikipedia IRC chat channel for "backtalking" the admin.
So before you decide to give of your valuable time editing Wikipedia, consider that it's the people who do the least work there who get to run the site and take credit for it.
"Who never heard of this website?"
I heard about it, I even used it, but frankly, meetup.com makes some of the same old tired mistakes too many websites make.
The site isn't transparently easy to navigate. There's no way (or I didn't see one) to search by meet-up time or day. ("Hey I'm free Tuesdays, what's going on Tuesdays.")
To see the people or the number of people signed-up for a particular meet-up, you had to register with meet-up.com, then "join" that meet-up. Since meet-ups were canceled when fewer than three people signed up, you couldn't effectively browse for what looked like it was really going to happen without first signing up. Pain in the ass.
You can't indicate, for a meet-up you are interested in, that the meet-up time doesn't work. You can vote for a location, but there's no easy way to indicate what sort of locations work for you: "I don't like smoky bars; I can do in the city but not the 'burbs; near the subway". And once you did sign up for a meet-up, you kept getting annoying email asking that you confirm.
Some of these things make sense, but much of it was the typical website desire to control and constrain its users, probably at the behest of marketeers who wanted to "track" everything and everybody.
And the irony is, if by registering, a user could make a profile of what works and doesn't work for him for a meet-up, the marketeers could have mined a hell of a lot more information, information that users would have willingly given.
But since the site was a pain in the ass to use, without that pain benefiting me in any way, I stopped using it.
Websites need to realize that people aren't going to change their lives to conform to what's easiest for marketeers to track. When they do realize that -- like craigslist -- they become popular. When they don't -- well, it's time to start charging fees and finding cheaper offices.
What about Galatica's Petty Officer Second Dualla?
She doesn't check in the Olympic Carrier when its disappearance is being used by Number Six to test Baltar's faith in the Cylon monotheistic god.
She has a romance with President Roslin's aide Billy, which each uses for "back-channel" between their respective bosses, Adama and Roslin.
And she's ideally situated on the bridge.
Ho hum. "It just facilitates part of the detective work."
But there are laws in place to prevent these abuses.
Ok, so maybe those laws have loopholes. But all he did was send her an intimidating letter. Cops would never use databases to do worse.
A few bad apples. The databases wouldn't be used to frame political opponents.
But we all know that those Earth Firsters are, essentially, terrorists. Why should terrorists be protected by laws? The FBI doesn't frame peaceful protesters!
"When will you folks learn. In the US, our reps won't listen unless there's a huge PAC donation included with your letter."
Yes, it's hard to compete with PACs. But remember that PAC dollars are used to buy, for the most part, TV ad time. And those ads are used to get votes.
Rather than give up, let's get off our asses and organize and get ready for the next election.
Don't just write your Congressman that you think it's a pathetic joke that a TIA supporter his chair of the DHS Privacy Board -- get the signature of nine other people^W voters on your letter, and then send it.
And then keep those other nine voters aware of the latest on privacy. No form letters, no mass mailing, just call or email or have a beer with your friends, and keep them up to date. Especially as we get closer to elections.
You're a Slashdotter -- so in all likelihood you've set up computers for friends and family, and you've told them to use Firefox to protect against viruses and exploits. Next time you're doing that for somebody, tell them about these Federal exploits too.
Head down to your local Democratic Party office -- yes, yes, the Democrats have been bad on privacy too, but with the Republicans in control of the Presidency and the Congress, with the Republicans nominating guys like this, it's not the Democrats you have to worry about now -- and volunteer your technical services. Once you've met the local Democratic leaders, as a very useful volunteer, explain to them what brought you there was your worries about privacy, and your hope that the Democratic Party shares your concerns.
Do something. Posting to Slashdot is fine, but as long as politicians think that all you're doing is posting to Slashdot, they won't give a damn. Get up, get out, and get organized.
To paraphrase Franklin: America is your republic -- if you can keep it.
(I'll be posting more about this in my Slashdot Journal in the near future; look for it, and think about other ways we can stand up to Washington's follies.)
"It won't happen again."
No, it won't. Not to Americans anyway. Not with NASA's already paltry budget being cut to fund more Pentagon spending.
It might be a problem for the Chinese, but as long as we can keep buying cheap Chinese make consumer products at Wal*Mart, America won't give a damn.
Wake up America! Your birthright is being sold to Halliburton. Your schools have been hi-jacked by Christian Fundamentalists who believe that their Creation story ought to be taught in biology classes, and Florida is about to pass a law allowing college professors to be sued for offending Fundamentalist students by ignoring Creationism.
A Republican Congressman, Sennsenbrenner wants to enact criminal penalties -- that is, jail time -- for broadcasters who violate his idea of "decency", and Republican Senator Ted Stevens, wants to expand existing decency laws to cover cable and satellite broadcasts that people can't even see without subscribing.
Your President wants to outlaw medical research because he considers a two-day-old, 16-cell, unimplanted embryo a human life. His executive agencies are quizzing scientists about who they voted for as part of the hiring process, and suppressing research that his corporate backers don't want to see.
Wake up! Science in America is under siege -- not only are we not going back to the Moon, we're headed straight for the Dark Ages.
to save HubbleI wish we had the money
but I guess basic science
never did
us any
good.
"I'm sure glad people like you aren't in charge. I bet you live in your parent's basement, don't you?"
I bet you post as Anonymous Coward because you can talk the talk but you can't walk the walk.
"I read a lot of books (several a week) on my Sharp Zaurus SL-5600"
.doc (not MS-Word), get Opie Reader and the Georgia font. One great thing about Opie Reader is that it allows you to easily change the font size on the fly: go smaller for fewer page "turning" or larger when your eyes are tired. And page turning is as simple as pushing a button, so you can read with one hand and eat a sandwich with another.
.docs, Zaurus comes with a Word clone too.)
Seconded. Not so good for PDF (although a PDF reader is available for the Zaurus), but great for Plucker. For plucker or raw HTML or Palm
(If you really want to read MS-Word
If you're really careful, you can put the Zaurus in a ziploc baggie, thread the earphones out, and read book and listen to MP3s in the hottub. Or with a Wifi card, you can IRC chat or read Slashdot out of the tub, reclining on your sofa.
For me, the perfect machine would be a little bigger than a Zaurus, with a harddrive.
"How much of the crap that happened in the USSR was thanks to people having to fight off the USA instead of working together on more useful stuff?"
Tell it to 20 million murdered Kulaks.
"I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Pope John Paul II was found dead in his Vatican City apartment this afternoon"
You humorless, compassionless bastards. The Pope was a great man who deserves veneration, and the Stephen King troll is a venerable Slashdot tradition. I'd have posted it myself, if the AC hadn't gotten to it first.
Mod parent up.
Because all the theory of "Intelligent Design" says, is, "since I don't understand how this could have evolved, it must have be designed, not evolved." For at least two hundred years, the "perfection" of the eye was given as evidence of design, until computer models should how easy it is for eyes to evolve, and molecular biology showed us eyes have separately evolved at least forty times.
Now the "Intelligent Design" proponents having had the eye explained, talk about freely rotating flagella in certain bacteria. They hang their "theory" in the contention that since "half a rotation" isn't useful, organisms with "half a rotation" could not have ben favored by evolution, and so a freely rotating flagellum could not evolve. But it turns out several of the components of that wheel are the same as components of a "needle" used by parasitic bacteria to inject chemicals into host cells, a so-called Type Three Secretory Apparatus.
All "Intelligent Design" is not a useful theory, in the sense that science uses the word "theory", because all it is able to do is say "I can't figure this out". It has no explanatory or predictive power.
Compare the "theory" of Intelligent Design to Boyle's law: a physicist on being told about changing temperature in a room full of some gas, knows there's a relation between temperature and pressure because Boyle's law predicts it. The physicist doesn't have to go to the room himself, or ask what mechanism is responsible for the temperature change, or in what direction the temperature is changing, or really even what kind of gas in the room -- the physicist can with confidence predict that pressure and temperature are dependent on one another.
It's not just that evolution is consistent with what we know, it's also consistent with what we don't know.
It has predictive and explanatory power: using evolution, we are able to say, "assuming evolution is correct, we ought to see this", and then when we do look, we see what evolution predicts.
We say, evolution tells us that meiosis helps to keep each paired chromosome like its opposite pair, because genes are exchanged in meiosis. Because meiosis only takes place in sexual reproduction, this allows us to predict that in asexual reproduction, paired chromosomes will diverge. when we look at bdelloid rotifers, we see what was predicted: their chromosomes do diverge, and we can even compare the chromosome divergence between pairs against the to the total mutational change in the entire bdelloid rotifer genome, to come up with a good idea of how long bdelloid rotifers have been reproducing asexually: abut 80 million years.
We say, evolution predicts that, since workers bees born to a queen with only one mate share more genes, on average, with their haploid nephews -- that is, males born to other workers -- than with their diploid brothers born to the queen, the workers will favor their nephews. And the prediction turns out to be true. We can also predict, using Trivers' work, that if the queen mated with more than one male, a nephew isn't necessarily more related, so the workers in that case won't favor nephews. And that also turns out to be true. (Bee examples from here).
Note that in the bee example, we don't know what mechanism allows a worker to "know" how many mates her mother the queen has had, or the mechanism that, given that "knowledge" allows the worker to modify her behavior. We just know that the worker behaves "as if" she understood the genetic math involved, and knew the mating history. Of course, bees don't do genetics or math and probably don't even remember matings -- but we don't need to see the mechanism to predict that it and the behavior must be there: evolutionary theory predicted that bees would act like "as if" geneticis
"If people start disappearing without due process...."
Like Jose Padilla did?
We sure raised a ruckus about him.
Like all those guys at Guantanamo?
Yeah, it disappoints me too, that every web site doesn't prominently display quotations from Mao's Little Red Book.
(And I hear Tom delay wants every site to include the Ten Commandments.)
"Zhao, a former government official in China's Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications">/i>
The same China that censors the internet and its own people, in order to keep a totalitarian stranglehold on teh country? That China?
Well, this is a biiiiig surprise.
Leave government the role of making sure the wires stay connected and the signal goes through and no company monopolizes access to the net. And keep government's sticky fingers out of teh regulation of content.
"Personally, I don't have a problem with the security thing. It's just for the police, and I personally don't have anything to hide from them."
Presumably you're not a pretty girl, then. Thanks to Safety Cap (253500) for this story of a on-duty cop copying nudie pics for his off-duty enjoyment.
But that's only one cop. Click for the Top 10 List of Police Database Abuses.
It includes such charming cop activities as "Prosecutor's Office Uses Database to Smear Prosecutor's Political Opponent", "Police Lieutenant Charged With Abusing Database to Influence Elections", and "Cop Uses Database to Find Woman's Unlisted Phone Number -- Gives It to Woman's Ex"
But that's just local cops you say? We can trust the FBI, you say? Well, Martin Luther King couldn't.
And the FBI even tried to get the Mafia to silence Dick Gregory when he spoke against narcotic trafficking. And framed environmental activists. Not to mention COINTELPRPO, or the FBI helping Chicago police murder Fred Hampton in cold blood.
But that's all in the past you say? Well, if two years ago is "the past".
But you have nothing to hide, so I guess you're safe.
Tell that to "[m]ost of the 110,000 persons removed for reasons of 'national security' [who] were school-age children, infants and young adults not yet of voting age" forced by the U.S government to move to:
* Manzanar War Relocation Center
* Tule Lake War Relocation Center
* Heart Mountain War Relocation Center
* Minidoka War Relocation Center
* Topaz War Relocation Center
* Poston War Relocation Center
* Gila River War Relocation Center
* Granada War Relocation Center
* Rohwer War Relocation Center
* and Jerome War Relocation Center
You, know, mostly I let the links speak for themselves. I'm going to deviate from that this time, and I'll get modded down for it, but sometimes you just have to say it.
You don't deserve to vote. You don't deserve the nation created by Jefferson and Madison and Washington. You don't deserve to inherit the legacy of the brave men and women who sacrificed their lives to make America (more or less) free.
YOU DON'T DESERVE TO BE AN AMERICAN.
It's one thing if you realize that government is always a threat to liberty, and weighing the alternatives, reluctantly decide to cede more power to the government.
But you aren't doing that. With the whole frigging internet at your finger-tips -- much more than Thomas Jefferson ever had -- you can't even be bothered to type into Google "police surveillance abuse" and read the fucking history of your own fucking country.
Instead, you just blithely assume that since what you're doing isn't illegal yet that since you're not on a watch-list yet that the color your skin or your accent or your politics aren't "suspicious" yet, you can sit back fat and happy without giving thought to how this might affect others or even -- governments and laws do change -- yourself in the future.
And yet you get to go into a voting booth and pull the lever because of people who did know better and who made the hard choices and who often die
"Any type of attack nowadays will be labeled terroristic."
You mean like Republican Majority Leader Tom DeLay calling removing brain-dead Terry Schiavo's feeding tube medical terrorism?
(The link is to Delay's own site: he's proud of invoking the spectre of terrorism to justify unprecedented government intrusion into personal medical decisions. DeLay also threatened to hold a judge in contempt of Congress for quashing a Congressional subpoena issued to compel the brain dead woman to testify. (Since removed form a conservative web site).
Now, before some winger decides to mod this off-topic, let me spell out what has this to do with IT security.
Very simple: our current "leaders" have shown they'll label anything -- even the legally uncontroversial, medically backed decisions of US judges -- as "terrorism", just in order to win points with their core fundamentalist Christian constituency.
If they'll do it about the private medical decisions of a family, they'll sure as hell do it about IT, if they think they can gain something by so doing. And they've shown that even if that "terrorism" label is obviously bunkum of the first order, they'll go ahead and use it.
Hey, it worked to get us into a pointless war in Iraq: remember when we were told about WMDs and Saddams "ties" to terrorists?
Like the boy who cried wolf, it should be clear by now that when a leading politician (and Delay is only one step away from being Speaker of the House of Representatives, the third in line of presidential succession, he's no fringe politician ) calls something "terrorism", we need to understand he's doing it to whip up our fears -- not to make us safer, but to get what he wants.
This involves a court case (which is what most of the book is about).
See similarly Robert Heinlein's short story, "Jerry Was a Man"
My whole collection is from there....
STFU album parasite!
Even if AllOfMp3 is legal, by buying our albums offshore, we take away the jobs of hard-working Americans in the recording industry, little people who toil for as little as 70 or 100 thousand dollars a year.
It's willful moral blindness to rationalize this kind of assault on the American worker as "watching the bottom line" or "getting lean and mean" or as "fiduciary responsibility" to your shareholders -- especially when almost all of the your savings on albums (as much as $15 per CD) goes into your own pocket and the pockets of your close cronies in the form of 'executive benefits', 'bonuses' and 'golden parachutes'.
Can you imagine the hue and cry if an American company did the sort of thing you're doing by buying from AllOfMp3.com? If an American company did business overseas just because that was cheaper, and put most of the savings into top executives" salaries and benefits, while at the same time causing American jobs to be lost?
Why that sort of thing wouldn't be tolerated for an instant, not by anyone who truly loves America! Congress would pass all sorts of new "Intellectual Property" laws to put an end to it, and the FCC would mandate that all TVs sold to the American public be modified to include hardware to prevent such theft. Because our leaders truly care about the little guy!
So for shame! Stop your overseas out sourcing of your entertainment budget, and remember we don't do that sort of things to our fellow Americans!
the developer tragically passed away.
I knew the guy had given up development, but passed away?
I wonder if anybody mentioned at his funeral the hours of ad-free joy he brought to people?
Almost makes me feel guilty, and glad that I've given back by releasing my own small coding efforts for free.
Knowing he's dead makes me even more interested in continuing to use Proxomitron, almost as a memorial.
While I don't have one that does exactly this, I do have one for the more common "send the real url as a GET parameter" -- Fark.com and yahoo.com like to do this. An example from fark:
http://go.fark.com/cgi/fark/go.pl?
IDLink=1365
So rather than go directly to the NYPost, you hit Fark first, and Fark get to tell its advertisers, look at all the clicks on our links. It also means most clicks take a good long time, to hit fark and be redirected.
The Proxomitron regex not only makes the url the real url, it adds an "[orig]" link in a small red font, just in case it really is necessary (as on Yahoo) to go via the redirecting link.The nice thing about Proxomitron is that I not only don't get pop-ups, I also don't even get many embedded adds.
For example: on Washingtonpost.com's front page, I see only text adds. Bypassing Proxomitron (it's done with a bookmark) shows me three additional ads in Firefox, but even bypassed I don't see many, as I have a second proxy behind Proxomitron to filter out the "always bad" sites like doubleclick.
From where I sit, the web is a calm place with no pop-ups, no annoying ads, no distractions.
Tiny bit of electricity. Signal reached 546.8 miles away. Likewise, with 1 watt, signal can in theory travel 13,467,980 miles.
/Triumph the Insult Comic Dog
Sort of like a geek's tiny penis in a really fat chick.
In other words, most geek's prom nights!
I keed, I keed! Truly I love you all
Hewlett-Packard To Offer Linux-based Media Hub
Don't we hate HP? I thought that we did...
But not if that Media Hub is designed around Carly Fiorina's head on a stick!
You just tweak her nose to adjust the volume.
Potential uses for the property: a religious college, spa, golf resort or even a technology park."
Or warehousing, for life "enemy combatants" you don't have the evidence to convict, but can't release because they'll hate you forever for torturing them.
What better for that then a Biosphere literally hermetically sealed from the rest of the world. Perhaps it's even sealed tightly enough to hold in the shame Americans should feel for what's being perpetuated in their names.
Yes, I'm proud to be an American: after getting to the moon in 1969, 35 years later the closest we've come to a manned landing on Mars is a "Biosphere" in the Arizona desert. Meanwhile, "land of the free" is using medieval tortures on innocent men and proposing to jail them for life without any evidence.
Here's to you, Mr. Jefferson! Here's to you Mr. Adams!
This is not the future I dreamt of.
I believe that if you are nice to others, even in small ways, that the world gets better.
I agree!1!1!1!1!!
By the way, I'm a little short this month, what with buying Christmas gifts to keep Christ in Christmas and all that.
Would you be nice enough to me, in a small way involving small bills, and make the world a little better by sending me, say, fifty bucks in fives?
'Cause that'll definitely make my world a better place.
Please send your money to:
Orthogonal Ministries
One God's Way
Corpus Christi, Jesusland 32131
If 80% aren't spherical one must ask why the other 20% are NOT.
.
.
.
Why even bother to ask why? If you come across something and you can't figure out how it could have occurred, just claim the event or process is the product of Intelligent Design
Why spend year after tedious year engaging in reductionist scientific inquiry when you can just bail out immediately with an answer that cannot be falsified: Intelligent Design
Worried that your invisible sky-ghost or imaginary all-powerful personal friend isn't getting the deferential worship He deserves in this age of secular humanism? Sneak your sky-ghost back into the schools and indoctrinate another generation of devout sheep with Intelligent Design
Remember the "Argument from Personal Incredulity": if you're too thick to figure out how something works, it must be because no one can figure it out! Don't sweat it! Just explain it away by saying it was caused personally God^H^H^H an Intelligent Designer!
Don't waste time asking question or doing science! Just give credit to an Intelligent Designer and go back to sleep!