The US brand of content censorship is more about truth-in-labeling than anything else. Offensive material isn't totally prohibited, just limited to be exhibited where kids and people who would perfer not to see it won't stumble into it. You'd have to try very hard to get access to the Playboy Channel without knowing what you're doing...
It's a cat-and-mouse game. The Chinese will block any server being used to coordinate anti-government activities of any type. They're always a step behind, but this leads those who oppose the government to constantly be looking for new ways to communicate. Then, once they start communicating over a government honeypot site, they send the spooks and that person is never heard from again.
It seems as if the United States has taken a policy of "selective enforcement" when it comes to known human rights violators. Iraq's unquestionable human rights violations were used as part of the justification for the present war, yet China's human rights violations keep getting swept under the rugs.
Of course, I'm not sure what the current position on basic human rights violations by the USA is right now...
Remember, China blocked Google for a time out of fears that they could find anti-government info there...
So, it seems any site that lets somebody post infomation without has got to go. It won't be long until they decide Slashdot is not something they should let their people see.
Sounds like FCC / Howard Stern to me.. Congrats FCC, you are now offically, on par with Chinese Commi quality filtering.
Stern's complaint is that he's being forced into moving his show onto a subscription-based satellite radio service. However, if he moves there the FCC won't have any abilty to complain about what he says anymore.
Meanwhile, the Chinese are filtering out any negative-to-the-government information of any kind from all forms of media. That's much more serious.
However, it's very trivial to firewall out specific sites so long as you have control of all paths between the user and the site. The Chinese have such firewalls installed at every ISP that leaves the country.
Q: Why are the chinese communists so afraid of free exchange of ideas and criticism? A: They're afraid they'll have to give up power and find real jobs.
That's exactly why communism looks great on chalkboards but never pans out in reality. It becomes hard to avoid eventual corruption in the leadership... a stable government requires a way to overthrow the leaders with a fair election.
This is just the latest front in China's attempt to try to stamp out any form of anti-government speech. Say what you want about the present US Governemnt, the fact that you're allowed to say it here is something that makes us very different from them...
Really, this could turn into Google's answer to avoid "link spam" to unrelated sites. By asking the user in advance what categories their query is going to be about, it's a way of being able to declare all offtopic sites offtopic and therefore disqualified from the results.
The ideal web search shouldn't produce 30 million hits... it should do the work of determining the one hit you really wanted to see, with a small handful of few runner ups to confirm the info on the first site.
Google seems to registered has registered 466453.com for Google Number Service on cell phones. The idea is that users just send the numbers on a phone keypad for their serarch query, with Google doing the magic of figuring out what you meant. The number 466453 was selected because it's the number you get if you type out "Google" that way.
1. False redundancy: Although the NYC system has a backup central offices and call centers, it apparently routes all calls from the affected area through a single Verizon subsystem. Their system is fully redundant except where its not.
No, the calls always have multiple paths they can travel. The problem came when all of the routers were given the same mis-information. No number of redundant routers can protect from that.
Heh... in order for this original flaw to be exploited, the terrorists would have to get their bad guy into a trusted position at Verizon. Now, they'll need to compromise two different people...
American law sets out very tight restrictions on what our doctors can do with our private records, and there are stiff penalties for any individual who violates trust with this data. Could sending these tasks overseas cause there to be less-strict laws regulating the handling of private medical info?
The political types saying that they don't have a good enough backup 911 system failed to understand the root cause of this failure.
A Verizon tech who was re-routing a customer's numbers accidently made a numerical error that ended up re-routing lines that were meant to go to 911 to a bank. Therefore, the backup system never got a chance to kick in, people were being routed to a very poor selection for a primary destination.
The safety valve that I'm sure is being installed now is requiring a higher degree of password to change the routing instructions for the 911 lines... because this tech should not have been able to mess with them, and didn't mean to, he just typoed the numbers he was supposed to type in. He at least should have seen a "You're trying to reroute 911! Are you sure you want to do that? N" prompt.
The statement of "and a Pony too" is usually tacked on to make fun of an outragious request being made... as this "proposal" by Bush seems to be at this point. He's not saying all Americans will have broadband by 2007, he's just saying they should. He's also not giving out any plan for just how more Americans will get broadband, or promising to see to it that more Americans get access to broadband.
So, making a statement that "All Americans ought to have broadband." is something that nobody's goign to disagree with, and is not something he can be called for not following through on. More or less, he's said nothing newsworthy at all... he's just trying to get the geek vote without offering much in return.
Bush is complaining about a lack of jobs, but he's failing to connect the homeland issues that are painfully understaffed to the funding that allows peopel to be hired. For example, more effective security barriers could be built along the Mexican border to help make sure everybody who wants to enter the USA is going through a checkpoint like they're supposed to, but Bush doesn't exactly seem like he's interested in even trying to solve that issue. In fact, MSNBC reported last week that the all three parts of the Dept. of Homeland Security are presently in a hiring freeze... it's not like there's a lack of work in that department, just a lack of funding to pay people to do that work.
If the Iraq war is the only government-funded project he can come up with, we've got a serious problem...
Is this anything like a certain other organization stating that everyone "ought to have" universal health care, without saying how, or who's going to pay for it, etc? This is a normal function of politicians, folks, nothing to see here.
Exactly. There's a big difference between a "policy" and a "plan" coming out of a political type. Saying that you'd like to see something doesn't quite get as much done as proposing a specific law that would cause that something to get done.
And this is an equal opportunity problem that afflicts the left and right equally...
If we're going to have "Universial Service" for Internet access, we first need to determine what level of service is going to be considered the universial level.
For example, lets consider phones... The USF for telephone service assures that everybody can get access to POTS. But, it's exactly Plain Old Telephone Service, a dialtone. Any advanced services are not included in the subsidized rates, so customers are on their own if they want Caller ID, Call Waiting, or Three Way Calling to work. Cellular customers have to pay into the USF fund because they are connecting to the phone network, but they get no subsidies out because cell service is most definitely above the universial level of service. However, this also means that cell network operators are not responsible for getting their networks extended into areas where they don't think it would be profitable to operate.
The other key thing about phone service is that it only costs about $5 to get the hardware you need to fully enjoy all of the features of Plain Old Telephone Service. Sure, there are more expensive telephones are the market, but those all ofter additional features beyond what it takes to interface with the telephone network. It's not an unfair burden to expect somebody to be able to afford to buy their own phone hardware. But, just what is the minimum feature set of a computer to enjoy the Internet? Is Lynx a good enough browser, or do we have to assure that the subsidized level of service can deliver Mozilla?
And, just what technical definition of "broadband" will the subsidized service use? Afterall, DSL and Cable Models come in various speeds of upload and download last-mile links, and how congested the network is after you get off the last mile is also variable and hard-to-quantify. The debate as to what would be defined as "Plain Old Broadband Internet Service" is far from settled.
Bush is giving off a nice thought for an election year proposal... but it seems like this is so lacking in details it can't exactly be taken seriously yet.
It's a classic suckers bet. You'll run out of money or hit the table limit eventually. This is where probability theory comes in handy.
But at most casinos, those with enough money can simply move to higher limit tables if their dobuling strategy runs out of money.
And for the common player, the doubling strategy over a domain of a small number of plays is highly likely to result in the player getting ahead at some early point at the game, since the situation where they run out of money before they win for the first time would require an incredible run of bad luck. Once the player is ahead, they can lower their bets and be "playing with house money" for the remainder of the night.
Most of the interactive games broadcast on GSN (the network that used to call itself Game Show Network) are sync'ed to TV shows that are replayed more than once a night, and then again when the limited cycle of episodes is completed. One just simply needs to have recored the outcomes of a past airing TV show to make the right gameplay decisions leading to a perfect score.
However, this is why GSN never awards any prize greater than on-air display of your screenname for high scores. Any time they have had prizes to give away, they have done so on the basis of awarding one entry to anybody who manages to score at least one point in the game, and no additional entries based on any further scoring. Therefore, this tactic has no influence on who gets the prizes.
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle says that you're never going to get down to an atomic level of percision in measuring data because you cannot have a perfect measurement of both velocity and location at the same time. However, the further you move away from the atomic level of resolution, the more certainty you can gain in your system.
If you're willing to treat the lotto balls in a bin as individual particles rather than collections of atoms, you're simplifiying the problem to the point that it actually can be solved, as afterall, you don't exactly need to predict the exact atomic location of the winning ball, just which ball will land in the position it takes to be considered "drawn" in time to prevent all of the others from doing so.
One thing about studying the balls as pseudo-particles is you get the chance to turn Heisenberg on its head at the start of the drawing. Before the machine is powered-up, the balls are all at a dead stop. Sure, they're moving at an atomic level (unless the system is at absolute zero, but that'd make for a hard to work in TV studio...), but the whole ball isn't going anywhere. Therefore, it's a perfect chance to observe the location and assign it a momemtum of zero.
In gambling situations, you don't need to predict the result to the atomic level to make a winning bet. You don't even need to predict the exact game outcome, so long as you can predict enough game outcomes that won't be the winning outcome that you can place a bet on all the remaining outcomes and be assured a postive payout result. You don't need quantum-resolution results at all.
Yep, "to use technology X in application Y" is a perfectly valid form of patent. It's an advancement by putting an idea that's already known into a use that nobody on record has thought of yet... patents don't always have to go to groundbreaking things, just novel ideas that haven't been covered yet.
That article linking to by the parent looks like a very big find... it may be the exact reason why Apple is filing this application. See, in order to take a patent infringment case to court, you first have to have your patent registered.
The pPod program is a $20 program for WinCE/PocketPC devices that is a software emulator of an iPod's user interface, right down to the concept of a virtual scroll wheel (by tracking finger movements in the designated circle on the touchscreen) and displaying the user's music files in the same menu structure as an iPod.
The writers of the program are ripping off Apple's design work, and not even trying to hide the fact that they did so. This application may be the forerunner to a court case...
Slashdot Mirror
The US brand of content censorship is more about truth-in-labeling than anything else. Offensive material isn't totally prohibited, just limited to be exhibited where kids and people who would perfer not to see it won't stumble into it. You'd have to try very hard to get access to the Playboy Channel without knowing what you're doing...
It's a cat-and-mouse game. The Chinese will block any server being used to coordinate anti-government activities of any type. They're always a step behind, but this leads those who oppose the government to constantly be looking for new ways to communicate. Then, once they start communicating over a government honeypot site, they send the spooks and that person is never heard from again.
It seems as if the United States has taken a policy of "selective enforcement" when it comes to known human rights violators. Iraq's unquestionable human rights violations were used as part of the justification for the present war, yet China's human rights violations keep getting swept under the rugs.
Of course, I'm not sure what the current position on basic human rights violations by the USA is right now...
Remember, China blocked Google for a time out of fears that they could find anti-government info there...
So, it seems any site that lets somebody post infomation without has got to go. It won't be long until they decide Slashdot is not something they should let their people see.
Sounds like FCC / Howard Stern to me.. Congrats FCC, you are now offically, on par with Chinese Commi quality filtering.
Stern's complaint is that he's being forced into moving his show onto a subscription-based satellite radio service. However, if he moves there the FCC won't have any abilty to complain about what he says anymore.
Meanwhile, the Chinese are filtering out any negative-to-the-government information of any kind from all forms of media. That's much more serious.
However, it's very trivial to firewall out specific sites so long as you have control of all paths between the user and the site. The Chinese have such firewalls installed at every ISP that leaves the country.
Q: Why are the chinese communists so afraid of free exchange of ideas and criticism?
A: They're afraid they'll have to give up power and find real jobs.
That's exactly why communism looks great on chalkboards but never pans out in reality. It becomes hard to avoid eventual corruption in the leadership... a stable government requires a way to overthrow the leaders with a fair election.
This is just the latest front in China's attempt to try to stamp out any form of anti-government speech. Say what you want about the present US Governemnt, the fact that you're allowed to say it here is something that makes us very different from them...
Really, this could turn into Google's answer to avoid "link spam" to unrelated sites. By asking the user in advance what categories their query is going to be about, it's a way of being able to declare all offtopic sites offtopic and therefore disqualified from the results.
The ideal web search shouldn't produce 30 million hits... it should do the work of determining the one hit you really wanted to see, with a small handful of few runner ups to confirm the info on the first site.
Google seems to registered has registered 466453.com for Google Number Service on cell phones. The idea is that users just send the numbers on a phone keypad for their serarch query, with Google doing the magic of figuring out what you meant. The number 466453 was selected because it's the number you get if you type out "Google" that way.
1. False redundancy: Although the NYC system has a backup central offices and call centers, it apparently routes all calls from the affected area through a single Verizon subsystem. Their system is fully redundant except where its not.
No, the calls always have multiple paths they can travel. The problem came when all of the routers were given the same mis-information. No number of redundant routers can protect from that.
Got any documentation as to where this happened, or is this just an urban myth?
Heh... in order for this original flaw to be exploited, the terrorists would have to get their bad guy into a trusted position at Verizon. Now, they'll need to compromise two different people...
American law sets out very tight restrictions on what our doctors can do with our private records, and there are stiff penalties for any individual who violates trust with this data. Could sending these tasks overseas cause there to be less-strict laws regulating the handling of private medical info?
The political types saying that they don't have a good enough backup 911 system failed to understand the root cause of this failure.
A Verizon tech who was re-routing a customer's numbers accidently made a numerical error that ended up re-routing lines that were meant to go to 911 to a bank. Therefore, the backup system never got a chance to kick in, people were being routed to a very poor selection for a primary destination.
The safety valve that I'm sure is being installed now is requiring a higher degree of password to change the routing instructions for the 911 lines... because this tech should not have been able to mess with them, and didn't mean to, he just typoed the numbers he was supposed to type in. He at least should have seen a "You're trying to reroute 911! Are you sure you want to do that? N" prompt.
The statement of "and a Pony too" is usually tacked on to make fun of an outragious request being made... as this "proposal" by Bush seems to be at this point. He's not saying all Americans will have broadband by 2007, he's just saying they should. He's also not giving out any plan for just how more Americans will get broadband, or promising to see to it that more Americans get access to broadband.
So, making a statement that "All Americans ought to have broadband." is something that nobody's goign to disagree with, and is not something he can be called for not following through on. More or less, he's said nothing newsworthy at all... he's just trying to get the geek vote without offering much in return.
I love politically inspired modding... (Score: 3, Flamebait)
Bush is complaining about a lack of jobs, but he's failing to connect the homeland issues that are painfully understaffed to the funding that allows peopel to be hired. For example, more effective security barriers could be built along the Mexican border to help make sure everybody who wants to enter the USA is going through a checkpoint like they're supposed to, but Bush doesn't exactly seem like he's interested in even trying to solve that issue. In fact, MSNBC reported last week that the all three parts of the Dept. of Homeland Security are presently in a hiring freeze... it's not like there's a lack of work in that department, just a lack of funding to pay people to do that work.
If the Iraq war is the only government-funded project he can come up with, we've got a serious problem...
Is this anything like a certain other organization stating that everyone "ought to have" universal health care, without saying how, or who's going to pay for it, etc? This is a normal function of politicians, folks, nothing to see here.
Exactly. There's a big difference between a "policy" and a "plan" coming out of a political type. Saying that you'd like to see something doesn't quite get as much done as proposing a specific law that would cause that something to get done.
And this is an equal opportunity problem that afflicts the left and right equally...
If we're going to have "Universial Service" for Internet access, we first need to determine what level of service is going to be considered the universial level.
For example, lets consider phones... The USF for telephone service assures that everybody can get access to POTS. But, it's exactly Plain Old Telephone Service, a dialtone. Any advanced services are not included in the subsidized rates, so customers are on their own if they want Caller ID, Call Waiting, or Three Way Calling to work. Cellular customers have to pay into the USF fund because they are connecting to the phone network, but they get no subsidies out because cell service is most definitely above the universial level of service. However, this also means that cell network operators are not responsible for getting their networks extended into areas where they don't think it would be profitable to operate.
The other key thing about phone service is that it only costs about $5 to get the hardware you need to fully enjoy all of the features of Plain Old Telephone Service. Sure, there are more expensive telephones are the market, but those all ofter additional features beyond what it takes to interface with the telephone network. It's not an unfair burden to expect somebody to be able to afford to buy their own phone hardware. But, just what is the minimum feature set of a computer to enjoy the Internet? Is Lynx a good enough browser, or do we have to assure that the subsidized level of service can deliver Mozilla?
And, just what technical definition of "broadband" will the subsidized service use? Afterall, DSL and Cable Models come in various speeds of upload and download last-mile links, and how congested the network is after you get off the last mile is also variable and hard-to-quantify. The debate as to what would be defined as "Plain Old Broadband Internet Service" is far from settled.
Bush is giving off a nice thought for an election year proposal... but it seems like this is so lacking in details it can't exactly be taken seriously yet.
It's a classic suckers bet. You'll run out of money or hit the table limit eventually. This is where probability theory comes in handy.
But at most casinos, those with enough money can simply move to higher limit tables if their dobuling strategy runs out of money.
And for the common player, the doubling strategy over a domain of a small number of plays is highly likely to result in the player getting ahead at some early point at the game, since the situation where they run out of money before they win for the first time would require an incredible run of bad luck. Once the player is ahead, they can lower their bets and be "playing with house money" for the remainder of the night.
Most of the interactive games broadcast on GSN (the network that used to call itself Game Show Network) are sync'ed to TV shows that are replayed more than once a night, and then again when the limited cycle of episodes is completed. One just simply needs to have recored the outcomes of a past airing TV show to make the right gameplay decisions leading to a perfect score.
However, this is why GSN never awards any prize greater than on-air display of your screenname for high scores. Any time they have had prizes to give away, they have done so on the basis of awarding one entry to anybody who manages to score at least one point in the game, and no additional entries based on any further scoring. Therefore, this tactic has no influence on who gets the prizes.
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle says that you're never going to get down to an atomic level of percision in measuring data because you cannot have a perfect measurement of both velocity and location at the same time. However, the further you move away from the atomic level of resolution, the more certainty you can gain in your system.
If you're willing to treat the lotto balls in a bin as individual particles rather than collections of atoms, you're simplifiying the problem to the point that it actually can be solved, as afterall, you don't exactly need to predict the exact atomic location of the winning ball, just which ball will land in the position it takes to be considered "drawn" in time to prevent all of the others from doing so.
One thing about studying the balls as pseudo-particles is you get the chance to turn Heisenberg on its head at the start of the drawing. Before the machine is powered-up, the balls are all at a dead stop. Sure, they're moving at an atomic level (unless the system is at absolute zero, but that'd make for a hard to work in TV studio...), but the whole ball isn't going anywhere. Therefore, it's a perfect chance to observe the location and assign it a momemtum of zero.
In gambling situations, you don't need to predict the result to the atomic level to make a winning bet. You don't even need to predict the exact game outcome, so long as you can predict enough game outcomes that won't be the winning outcome that you can place a bet on all the remaining outcomes and be assured a postive payout result. You don't need quantum-resolution results at all.
Yep, "to use technology X in application Y" is a perfectly valid form of patent. It's an advancement by putting an idea that's already known into a use that nobody on record has thought of yet... patents don't always have to go to groundbreaking things, just novel ideas that haven't been covered yet.
That article linking to by the parent looks like a very big find... it may be the exact reason why Apple is filing this application. See, in order to take a patent infringment case to court, you first have to have your patent registered.
The pPod program is a $20 program for WinCE/PocketPC devices that is a software emulator of an iPod's user interface, right down to the concept of a virtual scroll wheel (by tracking finger movements in the designated circle on the touchscreen) and displaying the user's music files in the same menu structure as an iPod.
The writers of the program are ripping off Apple's design work, and not even trying to hide the fact that they did so. This application may be the forerunner to a court case...