but the reality is that the Sparrow is being sold right now
Er, no it isn't. The article summary:
Myers Motors will begin selling an upgraded version this summer . ..
And from the mfg website:
Soon, you will be able to purchase your Sparrow Classic on-line through our secure ecommerce connection. In the meantime, you can secure your place in our production and delivery schedule by reserving your Sparrow Classic now!
A press release and a website, even on the fron page of/., do not a delivery make.
And a long document it is (funny placeholder images though.) Here's the conclusions for the impatient but interested in a little more than the summary:
Supervised spam filters are effective tools for attenuating spam. The best-performing
filters reduced the volume of incoming spam from about 150 messages per day to
about 2 messages per day. The corresponding risk of mail loss, while minimal, is
difficult to quantify. The best-performing filters misclassified a handful of spam
messages early in the test suite; none within the second half (25,000 messages).
A larger study will be necessary to distinguish the asymptotic probability of ham
misclassification from zero.
Most misclassified ham messages are advertising, news digests, mailing list messages,
or the results of electronic transactions. From this observation, and the fact
that such messages represent a small fraction of incoming mail, we may conclude
that the filters find them more difficult to classify. On the other hand, the small
number of misclassifications suggests that the filter rapidly learns the characteristics
of each advertiser, news service, mailing list, or on-line service from which the
recipient wishes to receive messages. We might also conjecture that these misclassifications
are more likely to occur soon after subscribing to the particular service
(or soon after starting to use the filter), a time at which the user would be more
likely to notice, should the message go astray, and retrieve it from the spam file. In
contrast, the best filters misclassified no personal messages, and no delivery error
messages, which comprise the largest and most critical fraction of ham.
A supervised filter contributes significantly to the effectiveness of Spamassassin's
static component, as measured by both ham and spam misclassification probabilities.
Two unsupervised configurations also improved the static component, but by
a smaller margin. The supervised filter alone performed better than than the static
rules alone, but not as well as the combination of the two.
The choice of threshold parameters dominates the observed differences in performance
among the four filters implementing methods derived from Graham's and
Robinson's proposals. Each shows a different tradeoff between ham accuracy and
spam accuracy. ROC analysis shows that the differences not accountable to threshold
setting, if any, are small and observable only when the ham misclassification
probability is low (i.e. hm
CRM-114 and DSPAM exhibit substantially inferior performance to the other filters,
regardless of threshold setting. Both exhibit substantial learning throughout
the email stream, leading us to conjecture that their performance might asymptotically
approach that of the other filters. From a practical standpoint, this learning
rate would be too slow for personal email filtering as it would take several years at
the observed rate to achieve the same misclassification rates as the other systems.
Both these systems were designed to be used in a train on error configuration,
and do not self-train. This configuration could account for a slow learning rate
as each system avails itself of the information in only about 1,000 of the 50,000
test messages. In an effort to ensure that we had not misinterpreted the installation
instructions, we ran CRM-114 in a train-on-everything configuration and, as
predicted by the author, the result was substantially worse.
Spam filter designers should incorporate interfaces making them amenable for
testing and deployment in the supervised configuration (figure 4). We propose the
three interface functions used in algorithm 1 - filterinit, filtereval, and filtertrain
- as a standardized interface. Systems that self-train should provide an option to
self-train on everything (subject to correction via filtertrain) as in algorithm 2.
Ham and spam misclassification proportions should be reported separately. Accuracy,
weighted accuracy, and precision should be avoided as primary evaluation
measures as th
This is not flamebait, but though I'll probably get modded down it has to be said:
a) That's not a "strategy," it's a rationalization.
b) Bully for you!
Seriously -- should anything happen, you're either going to settle and never have a chance to pitch that story, or you'll go to court and never have a chance to pitch that story. It doesn't help anyone else out very much either.:)
I do love the Lewis Carroll quote, but other than in the trivial sense that the "name" of a song is changing in your "plan" (the meaning is not so trivial in the Carroll quote, as I'm sure you realize), I don't see how that could have been much inspiration. But I digress.
Most importantly, I think it might be hard to sue someone for downloading a file for which you own the rights and which you're intentionally sharing to the world. That's why, I assume, when the RIAA baits downloaders, they use a proxy that can't be linked back to them readily (especially by those who settle out of court and agree to all sorts of nonsense.)
Maybe I'm just trying to justify the mods in my mind, but perhaps you do bring up an interesting point. How do I know if I'm downloading a copyrighted work that the owner wants me to download or not?
If my friend tells me about a great band named "the mead dilkmen" that gives away their music/mp3s for free, but I accidentally get "the dead milkmen" because of my dyslexia, am I responsible?
My guess is the RIAA avoids these sorts of problems by going after those sharing assloads of files, all clearly infringing. Were this not the case and they were hitting the occasional sampler/downloader, I bet we'd see some awesome, clever defenses.
There are eleven instances of the word "electric" in the article, none of which match your description. I could find no reference to back up your claim in the article. Can you cite a page?
I'd especially like to read about the EMPs with the 25-mile impact radius you're OP implies.
All kinds of funny in the replies (I read them all at +1 -- pity me), but not much serious.
For example -- even the first generation railguns have a muzzle velocity (intentionally limited) of 2.5 km/s (which is Mach 7.5, presumably at sea-level pressure -- the article doesn't say). That's awesome for aiming, time-of-flight, and kinetic energy delivery so great you don't even need messy exposives.
But, what about the sonic boom? I mean, even a small thing crossing the speed barrier makes a noise (ref: a bullwhip) -- how loud will it be on deck with n of these things breaking the sound barrier every 10 seconds?
Will they enclose them in something, build a sound baffle of some kind, or just issue really good hearing protection devices for those working in the vicinity?
Sorry to be serious and all, but I'm just curious:)
Seriously though, someone else managed to link them fine, so I'm not sure how you failed it, but I'm going to take a guess and say you're trying to make the link text be the same as the link url, as in:
<a href=http://foo.com>http://foo.com</a>
If so, FYI: the first "http://foo.com" is the link, and the 2nd one is the displayed text. So if the URL is long just do:
<a href=http://really.long.url.at.foo.com> link </a>
Replace "link" with anything; it will still work fine.
Hmm, yours is the only post I saw (I'm reading at +1) supporting the rumor. Yet I count 12 posts above yours claiming that invites made it to Hotmail (and the desired user) without problem. One of the 12 said the invite went to bulk mail due to the spam filter, but it didn't "disappear into the ether." All others claim that both emails from gmail accounts and invites were not blocked, lost, torn, mutilated, or otherwise hindered by Hotmail.
So, that's interesting. Was it only the invite that was "lost" or regular emails from gmail users too?
I hear what you're saying but, in all honesty, we can just not go to ogrish.com or otherwise seek out the info. Just hearing about it from someone who has seen the offensive material is adequate; but some knowledge of the yuckiness that is is important, even critical, for everyone to have. IMHO. Even simple knowledge that those spewing "hate-sites" exist and the basics of what they say is important. People should know about that stuff, not have it hidden from them so they can pretend no one thinks that way.
That sort of ignorant bliss is dangerous and requires yielding too much power to government.
And there's no valid public safety argument to be made either -- you can let the hate sites exist and bring down the law when/if one crosses the line in to criminal activity (inciting or doing) as Bryuant says:
U.S. Assistant Attorney General Dan Bryant acknowledged the American approach differs from that of other countries.
"We believe that government efforts to regulate bias-motivated speech on the Internet are fundamentally mistaken," Bryant said. "At the same time, however, the United States has not stood and will not stand idly by, when individuals cross the line from protected speech to criminal conduct."
Hm. Makes sense to me. Heckk, it probably even makes it easier to keep an eye on these nuts since their news sites and forums are public. I guess forcing them deeper underground (IRC and such) would hamper monitoring. But France and some of the EU thinks it's worth it:
"Will this put the (Ku Klux Klan) out of business? No. They will be able to find some way of getting their messages back online," he said. "But it will put a crimp in that subculture on the Internet."
This, however, smacks of futile, misdirected, token effort to me. Not to mention a hassle and a fat inroad for EU governments to hassle those who espouse unpopular ideas (read: anti-government.)
The thing that always scares me in these "well-intentioned" efforts to protect people from ideas is that someone gets to choose what's bad and what's good, and that someone will always be less well-equipped to do that for me than I.
BTW -- huh? How can the Berg video be taken or used that way? If anything, it incited me to a firmer resolve. Same with dozens of friends and coworkers.
That's the first time I've seen it, and it's not bad. Unfortunately, the author repeatedly spells have as half. Maybe I'm nitpicking, but I found that very distracting from the (valid) message.
I could find no link to comment or email. If you know the author, please consider asking him or her to s/half/have/g that article and re-post it.
Some people are complete evil. I just wish sometimes that I had a statement from the lord that i can slay every evil person on earth. Make it a better place. That would be so kool.
That guy is about to snap. Read the rest; it gets worse. And, ominously, the last entry is April 20th, 2004. Urameshia!!!!
No, it means your DNS cache is hosed or something -- the link works fine for me.
Blogging pioneer Dave Winer unexpectedly closed Weblogs.com, his free blog-hosting service, on Sunday, leaving thousands of bloggers without access to their blogs.
Blogs affected by the shutdown now redirect to a generic message posted by Winer.
Wireless Hot Spot Directory
Today's the Day. Some bloggers are screaming that the shutdown is a serial "blog murder." Other bloggers slammed the people whose blogs have vanished from the Internet, saying that no one should expect continuity from a free service.
"Oh boo hoo... if you forked over the money for hosting like any serious site owner, you wouldn't now be pissing and moaning about 'blog murder,'" one comment read. "Putting your site on a CentralizedShinyWidget like weblogs.com or blogger.com is like moving into a house built of sugar cubes in the tropics, and then crying foul when the monsoon comes."
"So because it's free, people should bite their tongues about having their content wiped off the face of the earth with no warning?" responded another blogger, posting anonymously. "He couldn't even give them 30 minutes' notice to back stuff up?"
And many bloggers simply posted messages thanking Winer for the memories and politely requested a copy of their blog's contents.
In an audio message posted late Monday explaining his reasons for the shutdown, Winer cited the financial costs of hosting the sites, technical difficulties in moving the blogs to a new server, stress and personal health issues as the reasons for the sudden shutdown.
Winer, who has offered free hosting to bloggers for the past four years, has promised to make exportable copies of blog contents available to the blogs' owners at their request. He says it will take at least two weeks to provide copies of the blogs' contents.
Meanwhile, the affected bloggers cannot access their work, a situation that angers many, who said they believed they should have been given advance notice that the Weblogs service would be terminated before their sites became inaccessible.
"The transition for the bloggers and the readers would have been far smoother and less painful if they had been warned," wrote David Weinberger, author of the Cluetrain Manifesto, on his blog. "(But) Dave's point in his audio blog is that the transition wouldn't have been smooth from the host's point of view, and that a sudden cut-off was necessary.
"Second, why the two-week wait? That's going to be painful for the thousands of bloggers, many of whom are my friends," Weinberger continued. "Again, I assume that Dave is correctly estimating the amount of work it will take to package up several thousand sites. If I thought he were either incompetent or making people wait out of meanness, I'd flame him."
"I just did the best I could," said Winer, in his audio message. "This is not a company here... this is a person. To expect company-type service... that's just not going to happen."
Winer also added in his audio message that he believed no matter how he had handled the shutdown, people would have complained.
"On the Internet... it hardly matters how well you do something, certain things happen and people will jump up and down. Just accept that," Winer said.
But some bloggers said that a little advance notice was all they asked of Winer.
"This can't be a sudden whim, Dave had to know this was in the works." said blogger Nancy Velton. "I'd have appreciated a chance to make copies of my material, and move my blog to another service. My entire life is in that blog."
Winer, a founder of Userland software, a provider of website and weblog publishing tools for organizations and individuals, had been hosting the blogs on Userland's servers. He left the company several years ago. After a recent change of management, U
Hey "Defunkt" (wink wink!) -- it's been a while since I heard from you! How's that new uber-low/.-id treating you? Listen, I emailed you about the problem with your paypal transfer, but I haven't heard back from you. We really need to talk. Email me or I'll have to give you bad feedback on ebay. You wouldn't want that, so I'm sure you'll get in touch:)
You know, it's funny; I thought I'd miss the "prestige" of the low-id, but no one seems to give a shit. Go figure.
Is this a cruel joke? The site instantly went down -- I tried it before even the FP. Grrr. No love from the wayback machine or google cache either. sigh.
. . . but the practice test page is down (./'ed already?) so here's a copy courtesy of the wayback machine (the last link is an index to several versions of that practice page.)
Maybe I missed it, but I didn't see a mention of these facts or power specs anywhere at old-computers.com or in the links from the post:
- The UNIVAC became famous when it was use by the US Census Bureau to calculate the results of the 1952 presidential election.
- The number of vacuum tubes was reduced fmor about 19,000 to 5,000, therefore reducing the power consumption from 175 kilowatts to 100 kilowatts (!), and also reducing the size and weight. (In comparison, your PC probably has a 200-500Watt power supply -- this thing needed about 200x as much power!)
- The machines cost about $1Million, so most customers wanted to lease them rather than buy outright.
Oversaturation is a big issue. WiFi shouldn't be painting a whole city in places where it wasn't asked for.
Then you said:
I think the key to oversaturation isn't to stop people to making these cities 100% covered. If I am reading you correctly, I infer that you are saying that you don't want to be sitting if you house and having the free connection overlapping your DSL or Cable Modem.
Well if you set your WAP up with WEP encryption, you won't have this problem.
And that's where you were wrong. I'm sure the OP knows how to select the SSID -- that's not the problem. The problem is the nagative perfomance impact of collisions from loads of wifi signals overlapping, especially high-bandwidth "g" networks, and new implementations that reduce the number of channels available to improve bandwidth on one link at the expense of everyone in the area.
Your post flat-out said WEP would eliminate the problem. It doesn't. Hence the (well-deserved) +4 Informative.
You do realize that WEP can't magically remove interfering signals, right? It will prevent you from connecting to them, but it can't remove the impact of the interference (collisions, reduced bandwidth, and in extreme circumstances, no bandwidth.)
Oh, and I think other OSes support WEP as well. Not just windows:)
Two obvious requirements for a fair election are that voters should have complete confidence about their ballots' being counted accurately and that everyone, including the disabled, should have access to the polls. It is hard to imagine advocates for those two goals fighting, but lately that seems to be what's happening.
Yes, indeed. And even after reading every linked article I still don't understand how, exactly, that requiring paper trails for electronic voting machines could in any way impede equal access to polls (for the disabled or anyone.) A little help here -- please?
The issue is whether electronic voting machines should provide a "paper trail" -- receipts that could be checked by voters and used in recounts. There has been a rising demand around the country for this critical safeguard, but the move to provide paper trails is being fought by a handful of influential advocates for the disabled, who complain that requiring verifiable paper records will slow the adoption of accessible electronic voting machines.
OK, here's a stab at it -- "requiring verifiable paper records will slow the adoption of accessible electronic voting machines." But, er, why would it slow anything? And, if it does, can't we just use the "old way" (traditional polls) until the "new way" (electronic polls) is made more reliable and secure? I'll try again:
Leaders said paperless terminals, which about 30 percent of the electorate will use in the November election, were reliable.
Er, OK, but this is both tangential and arguable. I still don't see how requiring verifyable paper trails impedes anyone's access to the polls.
They had "no reason to believe" computer terminals would "steal your vote," the league said officially.
Well, there is some reason to believe that they'll make a mistake or be susceptible to fraud. See linked articles. Again, why do paper trails impede the disabled from voting? I'f I'm in the League of Women voters, it seems that, not only am I not going to get a straight answer to that, but I must support the position publicly (or at least not oppose it) -- yikes!:
League bylaws stipulate that local chapters must act "in conformity" with the national organization's stances. Individuals who take contrary positions cannot identify themselves publicly as league members.
League president Kay Maxwell says paperless computers, which can be equipped with headsets and programmed in multiple languages, make voting easier for the blind and illiterate, and for people who don't speak English.
OK, most computers are "paperless." Generally, it's the printers that have the paper in them. And, in my experience, most (all?) computers may have a printer connected without much trouble. Kay seems to imply that connecting a printer will break headset or multilanguage support -- wha? I'm still confused.
Furthermore, she said, demanding a paper trail so close to the presidential election would require hundreds of counties that have installed electronic systems to spend millions of dollars on printers, paper and technical upgrades at the last minute.
Well, I guess they should have done a little more due dilligence before sinking time and money into an insecure voting system. Why should we all have to pay for that stupidity?
For current members, Maxwell said, voter registration problems and dismal turnout -- particularly among minorities -- should be bigger worries than potential hackers.
These aims are not opposing -- it's possible to address security without impeding the ability of minorities to vote. I can't even see how the issues are related. Sounds like smoke and mirrors to misdirect attention away from the payola they're taking in from Diebold. Sad, really.
"From a voting rights perspective, we care a great deal about the openness of the system and access to the system, tha
And I could probably use Skype,... But I would still run a serious risk of failure, because Skype doesn't ask for a duplicate password when you set it up. So, if you mistype it, you'll never know what it was.
The other complaints range from are valid (they don't work), to dubious (confirmation email never arrived), to the downright persnickety, such as that quoted above.
I guess now I should make some pithy or snide comment about the acronyms in the article title, but I think it's OK. The answer is "no", BTW.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, super evidence, may I reprint it here? Hope so:
:)
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I'm convinced
but the reality is that the Sparrow is being sold right now
.
/., do not a delivery make.
Er, no it isn't. The article summary:
Myers Motors will begin selling an upgraded version this summer . .
And from the mfg website:
Soon, you will be able to purchase your Sparrow Classic on-line through our secure ecommerce connection. In the meantime, you can secure your place in our production and delivery schedule by reserving your Sparrow Classic now!
A press release and a website, even on the fron page of
And a long document it is (funny placeholder images though.) Here's the conclusions for the impatient but interested in a little more than the summary:
Supervised spam filters are effective tools for attenuating spam. The best-performing filters reduced the volume of incoming spam from about 150 messages per day to about 2 messages per day. The corresponding risk of mail loss, while minimal, is difficult to quantify. The best-performing filters misclassified a handful of spam messages early in the test suite; none within the second half (25,000 messages). A larger study will be necessary to distinguish the asymptotic probability of ham misclassification from zero.
Most misclassified ham messages are advertising, news digests, mailing list messages, or the results of electronic transactions. From this observation, and the fact that such messages represent a small fraction of incoming mail, we may conclude that the filters find them more difficult to classify. On the other hand, the small number of misclassifications suggests that the filter rapidly learns the characteristics of each advertiser, news service, mailing list, or on-line service from which the recipient wishes to receive messages. We might also conjecture that these misclassifications are more likely to occur soon after subscribing to the particular service (or soon after starting to use the filter), a time at which the user would be more likely to notice, should the message go astray, and retrieve it from the spam file. In contrast, the best filters misclassified no personal messages, and no delivery error messages, which comprise the largest and most critical fraction of ham.
A supervised filter contributes significantly to the effectiveness of Spamassassin's static component, as measured by both ham and spam misclassification probabilities. Two unsupervised configurations also improved the static component, but by a smaller margin. The supervised filter alone performed better than than the static rules alone, but not as well as the combination of the two.
The choice of threshold parameters dominates the observed differences in performance among the four filters implementing methods derived from Graham's and Robinson's proposals. Each shows a different tradeoff between ham accuracy and spam accuracy. ROC analysis shows that the differences not accountable to threshold setting, if any, are small and observable only when the ham misclassification probability is low (i.e. hm
CRM-114 and DSPAM exhibit substantially inferior performance to the other filters, regardless of threshold setting. Both exhibit substantial learning throughout the email stream, leading us to conjecture that their performance might asymptotically approach that of the other filters. From a practical standpoint, this learning rate would be too slow for personal email filtering as it would take several years at the observed rate to achieve the same misclassification rates as the other systems. Both these systems were designed to be used in a train on error configuration, and do not self-train. This configuration could account for a slow learning rate as each system avails itself of the information in only about 1,000 of the 50,000 test messages. In an effort to ensure that we had not misinterpreted the installation instructions, we ran CRM-114 in a train-on-everything configuration and, as predicted by the author, the result was substantially worse.
Spam filter designers should incorporate interfaces making them amenable for testing and deployment in the supervised configuration (figure 4). We propose the three interface functions used in algorithm 1 - filterinit, filtereval, and filtertrain - as a standardized interface. Systems that self-train should provide an option to self-train on everything (subject to correction via filtertrain) as in algorithm 2.
Ham and spam misclassification proportions should be reported separately. Accuracy, weighted accuracy, and precision should be avoided as primary evaluation measures as th
This is not flamebait, but though I'll probably get modded down it has to be said:
:)
a) That's not a "strategy," it's a rationalization.
b) Bully for you!
Seriously -- should anything happen, you're either going to settle and never have a chance to pitch that story, or you'll go to court and never have a chance to pitch that story. It doesn't help anyone else out very much either.
I do love the Lewis Carroll quote, but other than in the trivial sense that the "name" of a song is changing in your "plan" (the meaning is not so trivial in the Carroll quote, as I'm sure you realize), I don't see how that could have been much inspiration. But I digress.
Most importantly, I think it might be hard to sue someone for downloading a file for which you own the rights and which you're intentionally sharing to the world. That's why, I assume, when the RIAA baits downloaders, they use a proxy that can't be linked back to them readily (especially by those who settle out of court and agree to all sorts of nonsense.)
Maybe I'm just trying to justify the mods in my mind, but perhaps you do bring up an interesting point. How do I know if I'm downloading a copyrighted work that the owner wants me to download or not?
If my friend tells me about a great band named "the mead dilkmen" that gives away their music/mp3s for free, but I accidentally get "the dead milkmen" because of my dyslexia, am I responsible?
My guess is the RIAA avoids these sorts of problems by going after those sharing assloads of files, all clearly infringing. Were this not the case and they were hitting the occasional sampler/downloader, I bet we'd see some awesome, clever defenses.
There are eleven instances of the word "electric" in the article, none of which match your description. I could find no reference to back up your claim in the article. Can you cite a page?
I'd especially like to read about the EMPs with the 25-mile impact radius you're OP implies.
If you could create your perfect office how would it work?
Without me.
That is, by itself.
Alone.
I'll stop by to pick up the bags of cash weekly.
You might stop airliner, and every other electric device within 25 miles.
Huh? You realize that the ships that will deploy these use electric devices? I mean, it's a railgun, not an EMP!
All kinds of funny in the replies (I read them all at +1 -- pity me), but not much serious.
:)
For example -- even the first generation railguns have a muzzle velocity (intentionally limited) of 2.5 km/s (which is Mach 7.5, presumably at sea-level pressure -- the article doesn't say). That's awesome for aiming, time-of-flight, and kinetic energy delivery so great you don't even need messy exposives.
But, what about the sonic boom? I mean, even a small thing crossing the speed barrier makes a noise (ref: a bullwhip) -- how loud will it be on deck with n of these things breaking the sound barrier every 10 seconds?
Will they enclose them in something, build a sound baffle of some kind, or just issue really good hearing protection devices for those working in the vicinity?
Sorry to be serious and all, but I'm just curious
Er, you fail it then ;)
Seriously though, someone else managed to link them fine, so I'm not sure how you failed it, but I'm going to take a guess and say you're trying to make the link text be the same as the link url, as in:
<a href=http://foo.com>http://foo.com</a>
If so, FYI: the first "http://foo.com" is the link, and the 2nd one is the displayed text. So if the URL is long just do:
<a href=http://really.long.url.at.foo.com> link </a>
Replace "link" with anything; it will still work fine.
Hmm, yours is the only post I saw (I'm reading at +1) supporting the rumor. Yet I count 12 posts above yours claiming that invites made it to Hotmail (and the desired user) without problem. One of the 12 said the invite went to bulk mail due to the spam filter, but it didn't "disappear into the ether." All others claim that both emails from gmail accounts and invites were not blocked, lost, torn, mutilated, or otherwise hindered by Hotmail.
So, that's interesting. Was it only the invite that was "lost" or regular emails from gmail users too?
I hear what you're saying but, in all honesty, we can just not go to ogrish.com or otherwise seek out the info. Just hearing about it from someone who has seen the offensive material is adequate; but some knowledge of the yuckiness that is is important, even critical, for everyone to have. IMHO. Even simple knowledge that those spewing "hate-sites" exist and the basics of what they say is important. People should know about that stuff, not have it hidden from them so they can pretend no one thinks that way.
That sort of ignorant bliss is dangerous and requires yielding too much power to government.
And there's no valid public safety argument to be made either -- you can let the hate sites exist and bring down the law when/if one crosses the line in to criminal activity (inciting or doing) as Bryuant says:
U.S. Assistant Attorney General Dan Bryant acknowledged the American approach differs from that of other countries.
"We believe that government efforts to regulate bias-motivated speech on the Internet are fundamentally mistaken," Bryant said. "At the same time, however, the United States has not stood and will not stand idly by, when individuals cross the line from protected speech to criminal conduct."
Hm. Makes sense to me. Heckk, it probably even makes it easier to keep an eye on these nuts since their news sites and forums are public. I guess forcing them deeper underground (IRC and such) would hamper monitoring. But France and some of the EU thinks it's worth it:
"Will this put the (Ku Klux Klan) out of business? No. They will be able to find some way of getting their messages back online," he said. "But it will put a crimp in that subculture on the Internet."
This, however, smacks of futile, misdirected, token effort to me. Not to mention a hassle and a fat inroad for EU governments to hassle those who espouse unpopular ideas (read: anti-government.)
The thing that always scares me in these "well-intentioned" efforts to protect people from ideas is that someone gets to choose what's bad and what's good, and that someone will always be less well-equipped to do that for me than I.
BTW -- huh? How can the Berg video be taken or used that way? If anything, it incited me to a firmer resolve. Same with dozens of friends and coworkers.
Thank you for the follow-up, and for not taking offense.
I hear grammar nazi's aren't usually very welcome around these parts, but proper presentation is key to getting a point across.
That's the first time I've seen it, and it's not bad. Unfortunately, the author repeatedly spells have as half. Maybe I'm nitpicking, but I found that very distracting from the (valid) message.
I could find no link to comment or email. If you know the author, please consider asking him or her to s/half/have/g that article and re-post it.
Yikes, I hope not:
Some people are complete evil. I just wish sometimes that I had a statement from the lord that i can slay every evil person on earth. Make it a better place. That would be so kool.
That guy is about to snap. Read the rest; it gets worse. And, ominously, the last entry is April 20th, 2004. Urameshia!!!!
Ouch. That is the most disturbing site I've ever seen.
I've gotta go weep for the future.
Seriously.
No, it means your DNS cache is hosed or something -- the link works fine for me.
... if you forked over the money for hosting like any serious site owner, you wouldn't now be pissing and moaning about 'blog murder,'" one comment read. "Putting your site on a CentralizedShinyWidget like weblogs.com or blogger.com is like moving into a house built of sugar cubes in the tropics, and then crying foul when the monsoon comes."
... this is a person. To expect company-type service ... that's just not going to happen."
... it hardly matters how well you do something, certain things happen and people will jump up and down. Just accept that," Winer said.
Blogging pioneer Dave Winer unexpectedly closed Weblogs.com, his free blog-hosting service, on Sunday, leaving thousands of bloggers without access to their blogs.
Blogs affected by the shutdown now redirect to a generic message posted by Winer.
Wireless Hot Spot Directory
Today's the Day. Some bloggers are screaming that the shutdown is a serial "blog murder." Other bloggers slammed the people whose blogs have vanished from the Internet, saying that no one should expect continuity from a free service.
"Oh boo hoo
"So because it's free, people should bite their tongues about having their content wiped off the face of the earth with no warning?" responded another blogger, posting anonymously. "He couldn't even give them 30 minutes' notice to back stuff up?"
And many bloggers simply posted messages thanking Winer for the memories and politely requested a copy of their blog's contents.
In an audio message posted late Monday explaining his reasons for the shutdown, Winer cited the financial costs of hosting the sites, technical difficulties in moving the blogs to a new server, stress and personal health issues as the reasons for the sudden shutdown.
Winer, who has offered free hosting to bloggers for the past four years, has promised to make exportable copies of blog contents available to the blogs' owners at their request. He says it will take at least two weeks to provide copies of the blogs' contents.
Meanwhile, the affected bloggers cannot access their work, a situation that angers many, who said they believed they should have been given advance notice that the Weblogs service would be terminated before their sites became inaccessible.
"The transition for the bloggers and the readers would have been far smoother and less painful if they had been warned," wrote David Weinberger, author of the Cluetrain Manifesto, on his blog. "(But) Dave's point in his audio blog is that the transition wouldn't have been smooth from the host's point of view, and that a sudden cut-off was necessary.
"Second, why the two-week wait? That's going to be painful for the thousands of bloggers, many of whom are my friends," Weinberger continued. "Again, I assume that Dave is correctly estimating the amount of work it will take to package up several thousand sites. If I thought he were either incompetent or making people wait out of meanness, I'd flame him."
"I just did the best I could," said Winer, in his audio message. "This is not a company here
Winer also added in his audio message that he believed no matter how he had handled the shutdown, people would have complained.
"On the Internet
But some bloggers said that a little advance notice was all they asked of Winer.
"This can't be a sudden whim, Dave had to know this was in the works." said blogger Nancy Velton. "I'd have appreciated a chance to make copies of my material, and move my blog to another service. My entire life is in that blog."
Winer, a founder of Userland software, a provider of website and weblog publishing tools for organizations and individuals, had been hosting the blogs on Userland's servers. He left the company several years ago. After a recent change of management, U
Hey "Defunkt" (wink wink!) -- it's been a while since I heard from you! How's that new uber-low /.-id treating you? Listen, I emailed you about the problem with your paypal transfer, but I haven't heard back from you. We really need to talk. Email me or I'll have to give you bad feedback on ebay. You wouldn't want that, so I'm sure you'll get in touch :)
You know, it's funny; I thought I'd miss the "prestige" of the low-id, but no one seems to give a shit. Go figure.
Is this a cruel joke? The site instantly went down -- I tried it before even the FP. Grrr. No love from the wayback machine or google cache either. sigh.
. . . but the practice test page is down (./'ed already?) so here's a copy courtesy of the wayback machine (the last link is an index to several versions of that practice page.)
Good luck all.
Maybe I missed it, but I didn't see a mention of these facts or power specs anywhere at old-computers.com or in the links from the post:
- The UNIVAC became famous when it was use by the US Census Bureau to calculate the results of the 1952 presidential election.
- The number of vacuum tubes was reduced fmor about 19,000 to 5,000, therefore reducing the power consumption from 175 kilowatts to 100 kilowatts (!), and also reducing the size and weight. (In comparison, your PC probably has a 200-500Watt power supply -- this thing needed about 200x as much power!)
- The machines cost about $1Million, so most customers wanted to lease them rather than buy outright.
You still don't get it. OP said:
Oversaturation is a big issue. WiFi shouldn't be painting a whole city in places where it wasn't asked for.
Then you said:
I think the key to oversaturation isn't to stop people to making these cities 100% covered. If I am reading you correctly, I infer that you are saying that you don't want to be sitting if you house and having the free connection overlapping your DSL or Cable Modem. Well if you set your WAP up with WEP encryption, you won't have this problem.
And that's where you were wrong. I'm sure the OP knows how to select the SSID -- that's not the problem. The problem is the nagative perfomance impact of collisions from loads of wifi signals overlapping, especially high-bandwidth "g" networks, and new implementations that reduce the number of channels available to improve bandwidth on one link at the expense of everyone in the area.
Your post flat-out said WEP would eliminate the problem. It doesn't. Hence the (well-deserved) +4 Informative.
You do realize that WEP can't magically remove interfering signals, right? It will prevent you from connecting to them, but it can't remove the impact of the interference (collisions, reduced bandwidth, and in extreme circumstances, no bandwidth.)
:)
Oh, and I think other OSes support WEP as well. Not just windows
Two obvious requirements for a fair election are that voters should have complete confidence about their ballots' being counted accurately and that everyone, including the disabled, should have access to the polls. It is hard to imagine advocates for those two goals fighting, but lately that seems to be what's happening.
Yes, indeed. And even after reading every linked article I still don't understand how, exactly, that requiring paper trails for electronic voting machines could in any way impede equal access to polls (for the disabled or anyone.) A little help here -- please?
The issue is whether electronic voting machines should provide a "paper trail" -- receipts that could be checked by voters and used in recounts. There has been a rising demand around the country for this critical safeguard, but the move to provide paper trails is being fought by a handful of influential advocates for the disabled, who complain that requiring verifiable paper records will slow the adoption of accessible electronic voting machines.
OK, here's a stab at it -- "requiring verifiable paper records will slow the adoption of accessible electronic voting machines." But, er, why would it slow anything? And, if it does, can't we just use the "old way" (traditional polls) until the "new way" (electronic polls) is made more reliable and secure? I'll try again:
Leaders said paperless terminals, which about 30 percent of the electorate will use in the November election, were reliable.
Er, OK, but this is both tangential and arguable. I still don't see how requiring verifyable paper trails impedes anyone's access to the polls.
They had "no reason to believe" computer terminals would "steal your vote," the league said officially.
Well, there is some reason to believe that they'll make a mistake or be susceptible to fraud. See linked articles. Again, why do paper trails impede the disabled from voting? I'f I'm in the League of Women voters, it seems that, not only am I not going to get a straight answer to that, but I must support the position publicly (or at least not oppose it) -- yikes!:
League bylaws stipulate that local chapters must act "in conformity" with the national organization's stances. Individuals who take contrary positions cannot identify themselves publicly as league members.
League president Kay Maxwell says paperless computers, which can be equipped with headsets and programmed in multiple languages, make voting easier for the blind and illiterate, and for people who don't speak English.
OK, most computers are "paperless." Generally, it's the printers that have the paper in them. And, in my experience, most (all?) computers may have a printer connected without much trouble. Kay seems to imply that connecting a printer will break headset or multilanguage support -- wha? I'm still confused.
Furthermore, she said, demanding a paper trail so close to the presidential election would require hundreds of counties that have installed electronic systems to spend millions of dollars on printers, paper and technical upgrades at the last minute.
Well, I guess they should have done a little more due dilligence before sinking time and money into an insecure voting system. Why should we all have to pay for that stupidity?
For current members, Maxwell said, voter registration problems and dismal turnout -- particularly among minorities -- should be bigger worries than potential hackers.
These aims are not opposing -- it's possible to address security without impeding the ability of minorities to vote. I can't even see how the issues are related. Sounds like smoke and mirrors to misdirect attention away from the payola they're taking in from Diebold. Sad, really.
"From a voting rights perspective, we care a great deal about the openness of the system and access to the system, tha
And I could probably use Skype, ... But I would still run a serious risk of failure, because Skype doesn't ask for a duplicate password when you set it up. So, if you mistype it, you'll never know what it was.
The other complaints range from are valid (they don't work), to dubious (confirmation email never arrived), to the downright persnickety, such as that quoted above.
I guess now I should make some pithy or snide comment about the acronyms in the article title, but I think it's OK. The answer is "no", BTW.