It is all about visibility. I seem to remember some article in a local publication talking about piracy, and the growth of an Internet "underground" operating using a system known only as "FTP". They were really sounding like FTP was something that a cracker cobbled together in their basement six months ago to swap copies of that dangerous "Doom" game with. Casual users (and most of the casual technology news media) do not drift through FTP sites, but they can wander around on the web until they find something. The profile and ease of use of Gnutella and Napster are the only thing that have made them cause a stir.
If you look at the article, you see that this document refers to the coup against Prime Minister Mossadeq, a nationalistic politician in Iran that Washington was afraid would play to the Communists, since Russia had had a lot of influence in Iran ever since the days of the Cossak Brigade, and those long, romantic evenings when British and Russian officials would stay up late, carving up the national resources and self-determination of what is now modern Iran. Mossadeq had made moves that seemed to suggest that he wanted to nationalize the oil industry in Iran, removing the monopoly held by the British, who had bought the rights to all of Iran's oil reserves for a handful of glass beads some years before. Amusingly, this oil monopoly was the precursor to the modern petrolium company named BP. Think about that the next time you stop at their pumps. Basically, the CIA paid people in the streets of Tehran to protest against Mossadeq, in order to give the Shah good cover for having him dismissed. Mossadeq had a lot of popular appeal, and the Shah was afraid of what might happen if he removed him from office.
But to the point; I agree that this action was irresponsable. I think the correct move would have been to notify the Times, as he did, make sure the oversite got corrected, and then drop it. Maybe write an article. But there is no need to personally reveal these names, once the nature of the security problem had been made public. If this had been some other document, there might be hell to pay here. If it had been some other document. But Mossadeq had absolutely nothing to do with the regime instituted by revolutionaries in 1978-79 under the influence of Ayatollah Khomeini. Therefore, it is kind of questionable who these people's lives would be in danger from. Mossadeq was part of the dynasty that was swept away by Khomeini and his ilk; he was a secularist of sorts, who advocated Iran taking control of its own affairs, but was not interested in the establishment of an Islamic republic. I am not sure what the view of Mossadeq inside the Iran of today is, but I doubt that there are many strong supporters of him around to make any moves against those who plotted against him. Also, keep in mind that the names of those on the CIA side involved in the operation have been available for years, people like Kermit Rosevelt, who was out in the streets of Tehran handing people 20 dollar bills to go protest against Mossadeq. So I doubt that this document is going to make any revelations that will inspire action on the part of the Iranian people. For them, it will just be one more document proving that the United States can't be trusted. Like they neeed more proof.
There is definately a point to that. Setting up or renovating a store is a hellish business, made worse when manufacturers decide that *their* box is more special than all the rest, and so needs to be shaped like a possum, or be 6" taller than all the rest. Getting software makers to scale back their boxes would also involve convincing retailers to lay out a lot of money to refit shelves, hire merchandisers to swap things around, take a loss in sales because of the chaos and inconvenience, and juggle existing inventory.
I recall that some analysts explained that Toshiba settled because they were, afraid of the potential of a runaway lawsuit that could have produced far greater losses (which boggles the imagination). That's a damn intersting strategy right there, because it is the dead opposite of what every other company does. Most companies fight suits, even goofy ones, even though it frequently costs more to fight and win suits than it does to settle them. They do this because settling with one group opens the door for others to press suits in hope of making similar gains. Making a huge settlement over a (by most reports) relatively minor problem, the throw open the door for other individuals and corporations(like oh, I don't know, Rambus?) to press their luck in sicking their lawyers on Toshiba. There is either some very subtle straregy going on here ("let's hemmorage cash to distract our enemies while we crush them!"), or someone in Toshiba legal is smoking crack.
I have one of the Mavicas with MPEG support. The movie feature is worse than useless. The maximum length movie you can take on mine is 15 seconds, and that eats a goodly portion of the floppy disk storage. What in the hell am I supposed to do with 15 seconds of video? Pass on my memories to people with short attention spans? The only thing that it's good for is party games, like "Film the drunkie" or "wait 'til his wife sees this". Those are fun.
I think the best description I ever heard of the effect of a haiku compared it to a spark plug. It might have been in D.T Suzuki, but I can't recall. The first two lines and the bottom line form the two terminals of the electrode. The experience or realization that comes of it is the spark that jumps between the gap. So the last line often seems at best tangentially related to the first two (certainly not a continuation of the idea). The whole field of haiku is very tightly bound with the Zen tradition; great for starting the ubiquitous flame wars about who's enlightened on alt.zen.
On the one side, you've got student-critical functionality.
Uh, actually, no. Someone mentioned earlier that the other public terms on the first floor of the science center were left up and running. They're all Macs too. The ones that were off were sitting right in the middle of the exhibits. Secondly, there are two labs full of Macs in the basement, as well as IBM's and Alpha stations, all of which do everything that the iMacs do, and more. There is also another lab and the tech showcase on the first floor, right around the corner. No Harvard students suffered because of this, save for those two lazy to take the very nearly 15 stairs down to the basement (where there are chairs, unlike the kiosks upstairs). At most, it was a minor inconvenience, not a chilling threat to students ability to get connected. Comperable to when a dignitary visits, and we have to walk a block over or not shortcut through a yard because security has it locked down. I think that what Intel did was bad PR, but I think it's been blown way out of proportion.
Well, one reason that FASCS submitted to Intel's requests is that FASCS is not the might of Harvard University. They didn't ask on-the-way-out-the-door president Neal Rudenstein if they could cover the iMacs, they asked the guys who man the help desk in the science center. Is it worth your job to tweak the nose of the worlds largest chip maker while you're on the job? I would have probably done the same thing, in their shoes. I'm pleased that HASCS put up the fight it did. I do have one question: What the hell did they do with the two labs full of Alphas and Macs in the basement? They're clearly visable from the main level if you take the trouble to look down. Did they black the windows out, or just firebomb the whole lower floor? I mean, god forbid someone catch sight of someone checking their E-mail on a Unix box. ..
I would have liked to have seen some information about what triggered the different behaviours in response to the light. It is a little odd to respond to the same stimuli three different ways, especially with such a small selection of nerve tissue. What was the frequency of response, and in which manner? Without that sort of information, the sophisticated behaviour could be nothing more than a neuron misfiring, the cybernetic equivalent of a post-mortem twitch. I've seen fish swim with their heads cut off and their guts and sides removed; the tailfin moves in the same complex manner it does to move a whole fish. Doesn't mean that the fish's remaining nerve cells are responding in a complex way, just that they are firing in the same manner that they usually do, and it is being interpreted by the muscalature of the fish. The same way, the lamprey cells could be random firing in response to the stimuli, and the robot body, programmed to translate the nerve impulses into motion, responds in a predetermined way. A lot more info would make this story much more useful for evaluation. Still, whatever the details, it is interesting as a sort of "proof of concept".
The problem with a lot of CS programs is that they teach Computer Science. What does that mean? It means that they teach the big, complex problems of fundamental compuation and not the practical details of coding in modern languages. The Honest Truth of it is that you need both. There seems to be no middle ground right now between superficial programs that teach how to write a GUI in a certain language and leave you high and dry in the area of general knowledge of principles of programming and the theories that underly the field, and Big Science programs that work from the assumption that everyone is going to spend the rest of their life writing compilers, designing languages, and proving problems NP complete. The program that I am in right now leans towards the latter, and there are some advantages to that. Yeah, they won't teach me Visual Basic, but frankly, there are all kinds of books out there to teach you visual basic. I learned C on my own from a book, I figure I can do it again with most other languages. True, I didn't really understand C until I started writing projects in it, but I think that is really the primary value of programs that teach language specific classes comes in. It isn't important to learn the concept of a particular language in order to know it; there are very few conceptual programming models. What makes you learn a language is using it, and playing with it. So frankly, I'd rather learnt he general principles behind various Things in the computer field (general ideas about computation and complexity, models and abstractions, network concepts etc.) and then learn what I need to know in the world on the fly than be locked into taking classes that teach me a language and not the underpinings of the field. The problem that a lot of theory programs have, however, is that they do a poor job of making the study of theory relevant to the lives of students, and they let themselves get a little too out of date in their obsession with 'big ideas'. A widely used (and poorly written) book on Computational Theory written by a dean at my school makes it seem that the only reason to study theories of intractability is that someday, your boss might ask you to solve an NP-complete problem effeciently, and you want to be able to show that it won't work. Yeah, a lot of people I know lie awake at night worrying that their next web page design is going to be for a guy who wants a web page that solves the satisfiability problem. At the same time, my entire school has not a single class that acknowledges the existance of a graphical interface. Yes, opening and closing windows on a desktop is not a timeless model of computing, but it is the dominant paradigm for user interface at the moment, and has been for a while. There is one class on 'Human/Computer Interaction', but it deals with speach recognition and optical recognition, because those are more 'algorythmically interesting.' Bottom line is only this: we need neither more trade schools, nor more ivory towers. Producing a lot of 'programmers' that only know how to throw up a webpage with blinking mouseovers or how to plug in values in VisBac 6.0 isn't going to advance the field very much. At the same time, where the new pressures and problems are is in the real world, the world of business and commerce. Despite the resurgance of fundamental number theory as a job skill in lite of renewed interest in cryptography, more theoreticians that don't know what the hell #include means isn't going to give much of a boost either. If anything though, I think that a lot of the imbalance right now lies in teh direction of 'Programmer in a Box/Get Rich Quick' programs that emphasize bare competancy in a single area or language as being all you need to be a succesful programmer. If only for depth of character, I think a little more is called for. In the long term, no single language or program can stay current; only the knowledge of the concepts and theories underlying the field can, but only if they seem relevant enough to keep people in the classes.
in the business sector. This is exactly the sort of development that is needed in order to push the US into dropping restrictions on the use of strong crypto. The US govt. has limited concern for the demands of lone privacy advocates and crypto-lovers, but it has a hard time ignoring the concerns of big business, particularly now with the spotlight being on the one's and zero's industry. From the look of the article, a lot of the motivation behind the EU changing these restrictions was economic; companies that have to wait 6-8 months every time they want to sell products containing encryption to someone in another telephone exchange are less competative than those that don't. So this change makes European cryptography exporters (which could include a very wide range of products now a days, not just PGP style personal crypto managers, but also products with embedded protection) more competative. US businesses don't like being less competative than there overseas counterparts. It leads to the creation of "buy American" commercials (in this case, "Encrypt Americans". ..) and general bitching and moaning on the part of industry lobbyists to Congress. Eventually, Congress will have to make amends or risk continuing flack and re-election problems from companies who feel that their interests are being hurt by the current crypto laws. The recent reforms in the crypto laws in the US were a nice, if ambiguous start, but this development may be the flahspoint for a nice, unambigous movement of encryption technology out of the sphere of 'restricted munitions', and back into the hands of people who would like to prevent everyone in the world from reading everything they own.
If you look at the propoganda and imagery created by the Nazi's during their stint in power, it reveals quite a bit about the way in which they constructed a mythology around the party in order to rally people around them. Nazism is a great big ball of weird psuedo-occult-ism, borrowed Christian symbolism (The swastika, in addition to being an Indian symbol, was taken from a Christian sect from days of yore that used a crooked cross as its symbol), and militarism. Everything from the uniforms, to the posters, to the choreography of their mass rallies was designed to create loyalty and fear. Hitler had probably the most powerful cult of personality in existence, as evidenced by the fact that 50 years later there are still some people (educated people, mind you, if you consider anyone in the US educated) that advocate his beliefs and immitate his mannerisms and dress. The draw of Nazism for the average German was the image that it created. It was one part religion, one part army, and one part patriarchy. Only by studying what was produced by this group can we ever understand the particularities of their symbolism of power, and the way in which they manipulated public sentiment to get great masses of people to support unconscionable things and repulsive doctrines based on psudeo-science and psuedo-history (the idea of the 'Arian' race and people; the Arians are a Persian tribe, much of which migrated into India. Modern 'Arians' can be seen in the northern Indian population, and among the remaining Zoroastrian community in Iran. Probably not what Hitler meant.) So the insight is the understanding of how the Nazis engineered their rise to power that a historian might gain from examining these artifacts. Now, is Yahoo auction the best place for such things? Debatable. But the effort to get rid of them has a generally restrictive effect on investiagations of this sort everywhere, and particularly in France. Certainly, there will be some people who will use scholarship as a shield for anti-Semitism, as modern 'scholars' of Holocaust denial attempt to do. But I don't think that justifies across the board attempts to stop people from studying what remains of the Nazi era.
You are right that the Indian svastika was usually depicted in a manner different from that of the German one. But like anything in Indian art and mythology, there are significant variations on it to be found; I have seen non-curved swastikas in some Indian art that would be, to most people, indistinguishable from a Nazi swastika. As such, it would seem that there would be plently of people attempting to block certain pieces of Indian art out of ignorance of the symbols involved.
As for the French and their history. . . I have no doubt that there are reminders of their history around. Which first of all raises the question of why they are so eager to get rid of this particular reminder. If they are truly engaged in recalling all the events of their history, than one more reminder of the Nazi era should be no different than the other reminders that are part of a real investigation into history. Secondly, whatever there attitude towards their own history, there is significant scholarly work that can be done by cultural historians using Nazi artifacts. The greatest question of World War II is still, for the most part, unanswered. Why did one of the most educated nations in the world (Germany, which had more PHD's per capita than any other nation) go along with the plans of a delusional failed art school student? Nazi memorabilia gives us great insight into the culture that the Nazi's created. Understanding that helps us understand how the rise of Naziism happened, and how something similar could be prevented.
The precedent that French can made won't be to interdict anything that can hurt people, but anything that can led to imprescriptible crimes.
Why does it follow that ownership of Nazi artifacts will lead to a repetition of the crimes of the Holocaust? I think revisionists that try and claim that the event never happened are perpetrating a great crime- but frankly I'd like to read there book. Why? Because for one, if we don't understand such people, we'll never be able to get rid of the racist views that they propagate. Secondly, because I'd like to see the arguments that they use to "prove" the Holocaust didn't happen, just so if faced with someone like them, I'd know how to take their arguments apart in advance. I would say that the precident of extending the laws of one nation is still significant; it isn't right when the US does it, and it isn't any more right when the French do it.
I can agree with what you say, but there are big problems with the precident that it sets. I would be interested to know if this memorabilia had actually been sold to buyers inside France, and delivered. That would constitute clear violation of the law; you're introducing a banned substance into a country that outlaws it, tantamount to weapons or drug smuggling in the US. But if France simply objects to the listings being present at all, that creates a very bad and very chilling precident. It would mean that nothing could be posted on the Internet that violated the definition of decencey/legality in any country in the world. Because if France can stop the posting of things related to Nazism, Iran can stop posts defamatory to Islam. Israel can demand anything criticizing Judaism or advocating Palestinian militancy be removed. The Australian government can sue sights containing nudity wherever they sit for violating their new anti-pornography laws. It would amount to making the internet the jurisdiction of every country in the world, making it the most restricted medium in the world. It is the equivalent of saying that no book can be published that offends anyone, anywhere, because someone from there might see it. Not a good precident to set. There are, of course, considerations of the need for Yahoo to respect French law inside of France, but the way the article was worded it seemd that there had been very little that could be construed as a direct violation of the law. Respecting democracy does mean allowing nations to run their own affairs as they please, even if their values don't agree with ours. But respect for democracy must go both ways, and that gets hairy when dealing with asymetric situations. The US and Yahoo owe the French that respect, but France also is obligated to honor the laws and customs of the US- which in this case hold Yahoo blameless.
3. There is little practical reason to own a swastika or other Nazi or neo-Nazi symbol. Chances are about 99.99999999% that if you own such a symbol, you're a hate-mongering, jew/black/gay beating fascism-loving jerk.
You forget that the swastika was stolen by the Nazis. It is an ancient and sacred symbol for Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains. So I own pictures that contain swastikas, not because I am a Nazi, but because I am Buddhist. Maybe I should tell my Jewish roomate, and my Chinese roomate, and my Thai girlfriend to watch their backs because I might become a "jew/black/gay beating facism-loving jerk" at any moment, but my incling is that this is not a real danger.
Secondly, there is every reason to own Nazi artifacts if you are a historian. There is no substitute for a primary source, and the propaganda and imagery created by the Nazis is a very important cultural artifact. I believe the saying is something along the lines of "Those who forget (or attempt to push away) the past are doomed to repeat its mistakes." The Nazi era is a time I would just as soon not repeat; as such, I am very interested in remembering.
I think that Outlook has some good features outside of the sexy graphical interface. For one thing, it does what good programs should do- it automates simple, repetitious tasks without making you jump through hoops. Outlook collects email addresses that I reply to, so that if I need to write someone that I don't know the email address for off the top of my head, I have it without any work. Outlook also does a pretty good job of building several useful features into one program- the calander, contact manager, task list, and mail client. Sometimes it is good to keep things like that seperate, but in this case I have found it to be beneficial. It also connects with my Palm Pilot and syncs everything automatically, which is useful since I use both of them to keep track of things. And as for accessing email from anywhere, it's easy to just tell outlook to leave your messages on the server. So when I am at home, I can use outlook for whatever I want. When I'm elsewhere, I telnet into my unix account and read mail with pine. There's no need of only using one or the other. They both serve their purpose.
You definately have a point. Someone is yet to do ease-of-use correctly- that is, in such a way that it preserves the power and robustness of an OS. A lot of the bastardized results of earlier attempts come out harder to use and less powerful. And there is the related issue of how easy it is to do powerful things. That's the place where Windows really dies for me. But one of the advantages that Linux has right now is that there is a big community pushing to keep the power in the system, while there are commercial developers feeling the market pressure to make it easier to use. I think that's where the best chance of finding a balance lies.
Evil has absolutely nothing to do with this. It is about the law, which states not that it is morally wrong to leverage monopoly power, but that it is an unfair restraint on competition to leverage monopoly power. You're right there are other OS's, and an OEM could pre-load any of them that they want if they so feel; however, there is also the realities of the market to contend with. Whatever the benefits of an alternate OS, a company that cannot sell Windows on their machines does not survive. Saying that Dell or anyone else still has a choice is a technically true, but realistic simply does not play out. And there is nothing inherantly wrong with that. But it is incorrect to say that they still have a choice. You yourself say that it could lead to their certain demise, but it is still their choice. What sort of choice is that? "Hm, don't really like this licensing agreement. Guess I'll just go bankrupt." This is not how business operates. As such, Microsoft's actions amount to taking away Dell's right to chose what software they bundle on a sysytem. As for your point on two, I never say there that there is anything wrong with Microsoft seeking licensing fees from OEM's. That also is perfectly legit. But the crux of my argument, and the basis of the DOJ's beef with MS, is that collusion between these two legal elements creates an illegal restraint on competition. That is what the anti-monopoly laws are designed to fight. No one has a right to buy Windows at whatever price they want, but by the same token, according to the laws of the US that Microsoft has to abide by, MS has to act fairly and in good faith with companies that it deals with. It has been ampley demonstrated that MS used underhanded techniques that hinged on their dominance of the OS market to get their software onto the desktops of users across the world. This is not beneficial for consumers, because it artificially restrains consumer choice. The idea in this case is that dominance in one area of the market should not gaurantee dominance in other areas. Yeah, in a strictly hands-off capitalist society, MS would have the right to push every advantage they have for all that it is worth. But the US has made a conscious decision to value ensuring consumer choice and a more level playing field over pure free market. We place restraints on large companies to prevent any single group from controlling en toto all of any area of the economy. That's what the US system with respect to monopoly is built on. There is no moral judgement in there, that what MS has done is 'good' or 'evil'; rather, what the suit says, correctly is that there are regulations in this country concerning trade, and Microsoft has violated them. As such, the government is entitled to take what steps it sees fit to restore balance in this area of the market. This lawsuit is not about the rights of man; it is about the behaviour of a corporation in the context of US law.
I think you're mistaking the issue here. The problem before the cort is not that Microsoft is using its power to keep Little Johnny from changing OS's; as you say, anyone with the skills to do so can blank their HD and load any Linux distro of their choice, or write their own OS for that matter. What the Justice Department gets interested in is the use of monopoly power to restrict competition at the top level- it isn't that the end user can't switch OS's, its that large companies that need Microsoft's favor in order to survive can't. From what I recall from the initial finding of fact, the issue was along the lines of this: 1)PC's need to ship with Windows in order to be competitive. Period. If the average consumer is shopping at dell.com and can't find a PC that comes pre-loaded with the worlds most widely used OS, they shop elsewhere. Dell sinks. 2)Miscrosoft has an interest in selling its non-OS software- Office, Internet Explorer, Encarta, etc. Interested not so much in selling to individuals, but in raking in big liscensing fees from OEM's like Gateway, Compaq, and Dell. 3)Microsoft is the only source for Windows. So what happens is this: Microsoft says to OEM's "Sell PC's with Office pre-installed, rather than Lotus or WordPerfect. If you don't, we give you a crappy deal on licensing Windows, or don't let you license it at all." So the OEM's have to capitulate, and Microsoft gaurantees itself income from its non-OS software, in addition to the money it makes by owning the dominant OS. Netscape is the canonical example; MS makes IE, which is getting the tar knocked out of it by Navigator. Result: MS forces OEM's to pre-load IE by making it difficult to remove from the system, thereby getting it in front of a huge audience, and cutting of Netscape at the source. They also keep companies from pre-loading Navigator, using the licensing terms for the OS as a nice, big stick to keep the OEM's in line.
This is the real issue of monopoly. It is not that Microsoft is supressing other operating systems; they already have dominance in the OS market, and despite their paranoid moves to the countrary (i.e the Kerberos tweak), could maintain that position, legally, based solely on the installed base, the amount of existing software written for Windows, and the number of legacy systems using Windows/DOS compatible software and data. What ammounts to monopoly is using that OS dominance to unfairly gain an advantage in the non-OS software area. So the issue has nothing to do with stopping people from installing Linux(they can't), or even really wether they used illegal means to obtain their current position as the dominant OS (which is definately arguable). It's about non-OS software, and the tactics used to keep it on the desktops of PC's being shipped from OEM's.
Well, to me the underlying assumption that ease of use eliminates power is a flawed one. I think that a more complex model for a system other than just (UI) xor (text config) would make it possible to keep the power and configurability of Linux while allowing more users to actually use it. Give newbies a nice set of click-driven menu boxes and wizards that present them with a sub-set of the available options. Let power users dig down, fiddle with text-based configuration scripts and recompile to their hearts delight.
As to why Linux should go to the trouble of being more user-friendly, or free software generally. . . to me, a lot of the promise of this movement, and something that is present in the rhetoric of people that are advocates(just look at sections of this article) is the potential for free software to aid in the digital divide that is disenfranchising people who can't afford to stay current in modern software and hardware. Free software is a great solution for that; but, not if they can't use it. People who can't afford to buy a Win98 computer probably also cannot afford the traininga nd familiarity necesary to use free software/Linux as it stands now. I have friends who work in international development who know of schools in the third world and impoverished areas of the developed world that would love to be running a free software setup, but the technical knowledge isn't available for them. And while slapping a better GUI wouldn't do enough to fix this problem, it would be a useful step in lowering the bar for people who might not otherwise have access to computers.
Re:Silly mechanical engineers
on
NASA Snake-Bots
·
· Score: 3
If you read through to the end of the article, they mentioned that the eventual hope is to replace the current system with something that uses a sort of electrical muscle substance. Some sort of thin, metal coated plastic that would deform in response to small electrical currents being placed through it, in much the same way as animal muscle works. Additional bonus over something that responds to PH is that your mechanical snake doesn't have a seizure if it wanders into some sort of natural acid/base deposit/
Slashdot Mirror
It is all about visibility. I seem to remember some article in a local publication talking about piracy, and the growth of an Internet "underground" operating using a system known only as "FTP". They were really sounding like FTP was something that a cracker cobbled together in their basement six months ago to swap copies of that dangerous "Doom" game with. Casual users (and most of the casual technology news media) do not drift through FTP sites, but they can wander around on the web until they find something. The profile and ease of use of Gnutella and Napster are the only thing that have made them cause a stir.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
If you look at the article, you see that this document refers to the coup against Prime Minister Mossadeq, a nationalistic politician in Iran that Washington was afraid would play to the Communists, since Russia had had a lot of influence in Iran ever since the days of the Cossak Brigade, and those long, romantic evenings when British and Russian officials would stay up late, carving up the national resources and self-determination of what is now modern Iran. Mossadeq had made moves that seemed to suggest that he wanted to nationalize the oil industry in Iran, removing the monopoly held by the British, who had bought the rights to all of Iran's oil reserves for a handful of glass beads some years before. Amusingly, this oil monopoly was the precursor to the modern petrolium company named BP. Think about that the next time you stop at their pumps. Basically, the CIA paid people in the streets of Tehran to protest against Mossadeq, in order to give the Shah good cover for having him dismissed. Mossadeq had a lot of popular appeal, and the Shah was afraid of what might happen if he removed him from office.
But to the point; I agree that this action was irresponsable. I think the correct move would have been to notify the Times, as he did, make sure the oversite got corrected, and then drop it. Maybe write an article. But there is no need to personally reveal these names, once the nature of the security problem had been made public. If this had been some other document, there might be hell to pay here. If it had been some other document. But Mossadeq had absolutely nothing to do with the regime instituted by revolutionaries in 1978-79 under the influence of Ayatollah Khomeini. Therefore, it is kind of questionable who these people's lives would be in danger from. Mossadeq was part of the dynasty that was swept away by Khomeini and his ilk; he was a secularist of sorts, who advocated Iran taking control of its own affairs, but was not interested in the establishment of an Islamic republic. I am not sure what the view of Mossadeq inside the Iran of today is, but I doubt that there are many strong supporters of him around to make any moves against those who plotted against him. Also, keep in mind that the names of those on the CIA side involved in the operation have been available for years, people like Kermit Rosevelt, who was out in the streets of Tehran handing people 20 dollar bills to go protest against Mossadeq.
So I doubt that this document is going to make any revelations that will inspire action on the part of the Iranian people. For them, it will just be one more document proving that the United States can't be trusted. Like they neeed more proof.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
((are you right .)
(is LISP (language (better much) introductory))
(has it (syntax (intuitive very)))
(for beginners perfect))
Anyone ever wonder if Yoda wrote Lisp?
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
There is definately a point to that. Setting up or renovating a store is a hellish business, made worse when manufacturers decide that *their* box is more special than all the rest, and so needs to be shaped like a possum, or be 6" taller than all the rest. Getting software makers to scale back their boxes would also involve convincing retailers to lay out a lot of money to refit shelves, hire merchandisers to swap things around, take a loss in sales because of the chaos and inconvenience, and juggle existing inventory.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
I recall that some analysts explained that Toshiba settled because they were, afraid of the potential of a runaway lawsuit that could have produced far greater losses (which boggles the imagination).
That's a damn intersting strategy right there, because it is the dead opposite of what every other company does. Most companies fight suits, even goofy ones, even though it frequently costs more to fight and win suits than it does to settle them. They do this because settling with one group opens the door for others to press suits in hope of making similar gains. Making a huge settlement over a (by most reports) relatively minor problem, the throw open the door for other individuals and corporations(like oh, I don't know, Rambus?) to press their luck in sicking their lawyers on Toshiba. There is either some very subtle straregy going on here ("let's hemmorage cash to distract our enemies while we crush them!"), or someone in Toshiba legal is smoking crack.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
I have one of the Mavicas with MPEG support. The movie feature is worse than useless. The maximum length movie you can take on mine is 15 seconds, and that eats a goodly portion of the floppy disk storage. What in the hell am I supposed to do with 15 seconds of video? Pass on my memories to people with short attention spans? The only thing that it's good for is party games, like "Film the drunkie" or "wait 'til his wife sees this". Those are fun.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
I think the best description I ever heard of the effect of a haiku compared it to a spark plug. It might have been in D.T Suzuki, but I can't recall. The first two lines and the bottom line form the two terminals of the electrode. The experience or realization that comes of it is the spark that jumps between the gap. So the last line often seems at best tangentially related to the first two (certainly not a continuation of the idea). The whole field of haiku is very tightly bound with the Zen tradition; great for starting the ubiquitous flame wars about who's enlightened on alt.zen.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
On the one side, you've got student-critical functionality.
Uh, actually, no. Someone mentioned earlier that the other public terms on the first floor of the science center were left up and running. They're all Macs too. The ones that were off were sitting right in the middle of the exhibits. Secondly, there are two labs full of Macs in the basement, as well as IBM's and Alpha stations, all of which do everything that the iMacs do, and more. There is also another lab and the tech showcase on the first floor, right around the corner. No Harvard students suffered because of this, save for those two lazy to take the very nearly 15 stairs down to the basement (where there are chairs, unlike the kiosks upstairs). At most, it was a minor inconvenience, not a chilling threat to students ability to get connected. Comperable to when a dignitary visits, and we have to walk a block over or not shortcut through a yard because security has it locked down. I think that what Intel did was bad PR, but I think it's been blown way out of proportion.
Well, one reason that FASCS submitted to Intel's requests is that FASCS is not the might of Harvard University. They didn't ask on-the-way-out-the-door president Neal Rudenstein if they could cover the iMacs, they asked the guys who man the help desk in the science center. Is it worth your job to tweak the nose of the worlds largest chip maker while you're on the job? I would have probably done the same thing, in their shoes. I'm pleased that HASCS put up the fight it did. I do have one question: What the hell did they do with the two labs full of Alphas and Macs in the basement? They're clearly visable from the main level if you take the trouble to look down. Did they black the windows out, or just firebomb the whole lower floor? I mean, god forbid someone catch sight of someone checking their E-mail on a Unix box. . .
I would have liked to have seen some information about what triggered the different behaviours in response to the light. It is a little odd to respond to the same stimuli three different ways, especially with such a small selection of nerve tissue. What was the frequency of response, and in which manner? Without that sort of information, the sophisticated behaviour could be nothing more than a neuron misfiring, the cybernetic equivalent of a post-mortem twitch. I've seen fish swim with their heads cut off and their guts and sides removed; the tailfin moves in the same complex manner it does to move a whole fish. Doesn't mean that the fish's remaining nerve cells are responding in a complex way, just that they are firing in the same manner that they usually do, and it is being interpreted by the muscalature of the fish. The same way, the lamprey cells could be random firing in response to the stimuli, and the robot body, programmed to translate the nerve impulses into motion, responds in a predetermined way. A lot more info would make this story much more useful for evaluation. Still, whatever the details, it is interesting as a sort of "proof of concept".
The problem with a lot of CS programs is that they teach Computer Science. What does that mean? It means that they teach the big, complex problems of fundamental compuation and not the practical details of coding in modern languages. The Honest Truth of it is that you need both. There seems to be no middle ground right now between superficial programs that teach how to write a GUI in a certain language and leave you high and dry in the area of general knowledge of principles of programming and the theories that underly the field, and Big Science programs that work from the assumption that everyone is going to spend the rest of their life writing compilers, designing languages, and proving problems NP complete.
The program that I am in right now leans towards the latter, and there are some advantages to that. Yeah, they won't teach me Visual Basic, but frankly, there are all kinds of books out there to teach you visual basic. I learned C on my own from a book, I figure I can do it again with most other languages. True, I didn't really understand C until I started writing projects in it, but I think that is really the primary value of programs that teach language specific classes comes in. It isn't important to learn the concept of a particular language in order to know it; there are very few conceptual programming models. What makes you learn a language is using it, and playing with it. So frankly, I'd rather learnt he general principles behind various Things in the computer field (general ideas about computation and complexity, models and abstractions, network concepts etc.) and then learn what I need to know in the world on the fly than be locked into taking classes that teach me a language and not the underpinings of the field.
The problem that a lot of theory programs have, however, is that they do a poor job of making the study of theory relevant to the lives of students, and they let themselves get a little too out of date in their obsession with 'big ideas'. A widely used (and poorly written) book on Computational Theory written by a dean at my school makes it seem that the only reason to study theories of intractability is that someday, your boss might ask you to solve an NP-complete problem effeciently, and you want to be able to show that it won't work. Yeah, a lot of people I know lie awake at night worrying that their next web page design is going to be for a guy who wants a web page that solves the satisfiability problem. At the same time, my entire school has not a single class that acknowledges the existance of a graphical interface. Yes, opening and closing windows on a desktop is not a timeless model of computing, but it is the dominant paradigm for user interface at the moment, and has been for a while. There is one class on 'Human/Computer Interaction', but it deals with speach recognition and optical recognition, because those are more 'algorythmically interesting.'
Bottom line is only this: we need neither more trade schools, nor more ivory towers. Producing a lot of 'programmers' that only know how to throw up a webpage with blinking mouseovers or how to plug in values in VisBac 6.0 isn't going to advance the field very much. At the same time, where the new pressures and problems are is in the real world, the world of business and commerce. Despite the resurgance of fundamental number theory as a job skill in lite of renewed interest in cryptography, more theoreticians that don't know what the hell #include means isn't going to give much of a boost either. If anything though, I think that a lot of the imbalance right now lies in teh direction of 'Programmer in a Box/Get Rich Quick' programs that emphasize bare competancy in a single area or language as being all you need to be a succesful programmer. If only for depth of character, I think a little more is called for. In the long term, no single language or program can stay current; only the knowledge of the concepts and theories underlying the field can, but only if they seem relevant enough to keep people in the classes.
in the business sector. .) and general bitching and moaning on the part of industry lobbyists to Congress. Eventually, Congress will have to make amends or risk continuing flack and re-election problems from companies who feel that their interests are being hurt by the current crypto laws. The recent reforms in the crypto laws in the US were a nice, if ambiguous start, but this development may be the flahspoint for a nice, unambigous movement of encryption technology out of the sphere of 'restricted munitions', and back into the hands of people who would like to prevent everyone in the world from reading everything they own.
This is exactly the sort of development that is needed in order to push the US into dropping restrictions on the use of strong crypto. The US govt. has limited concern for the demands of lone privacy advocates and crypto-lovers, but it has a hard time ignoring the concerns of big business, particularly now with the spotlight being on the one's and zero's industry. From the look of the article, a lot of the motivation behind the EU changing these restrictions was economic; companies that have to wait 6-8 months every time they want to sell products containing encryption to someone in another telephone exchange are less competative than those that don't. So this change makes European cryptography exporters (which could include a very wide range of products now a days, not just PGP style personal crypto managers, but also products with embedded protection) more competative. US businesses don't like being less competative than there overseas counterparts. It leads to the creation of "buy American" commercials (in this case, "Encrypt Americans". .
If you look at the propoganda and imagery created by the Nazi's during their stint in power, it reveals quite a bit about the way in which they constructed a mythology around the party in order to rally people around them. Nazism is a great big ball of weird psuedo-occult-ism, borrowed Christian symbolism (The swastika, in addition to being an Indian symbol, was taken from a Christian sect from days of yore that used a crooked cross as its symbol), and militarism. Everything from the uniforms, to the posters, to the choreography of their mass rallies was designed to create loyalty and fear. Hitler had probably the most powerful cult of personality in existence, as evidenced by the fact that 50 years later there are still some people (educated people, mind you, if you consider anyone in the US educated) that advocate his beliefs and immitate his mannerisms and dress. The draw of Nazism for the average German was the image that it created. It was one part religion, one part army, and one part patriarchy. Only by studying what was produced by this group can we ever understand the particularities of their symbolism of power, and the way in which they manipulated public sentiment to get great masses of people to support unconscionable things and repulsive doctrines based on psudeo-science and psuedo-history (the idea of the 'Arian' race and people; the Arians are a Persian tribe, much of which migrated into India. Modern 'Arians' can be seen in the northern Indian population, and among the remaining Zoroastrian community in Iran. Probably not what Hitler meant.) So the insight is the understanding of how the Nazis engineered their rise to power that a historian might gain from examining these artifacts.
Now, is Yahoo auction the best place for such things? Debatable. But the effort to get rid of them has a generally restrictive effect on investiagations of this sort everywhere, and particularly in France. Certainly, there will be some people who will use scholarship as a shield for anti-Semitism, as modern 'scholars' of Holocaust denial attempt to do. But I don't think that justifies across the board attempts to stop people from studying what remains of the Nazi era.
You are right that the Indian svastika was usually depicted in a manner different from that of the German one. But like anything in Indian art and mythology, there are significant variations on it to be found; I have seen non-curved swastikas in some Indian art that would be, to most people, indistinguishable from a Nazi swastika. As such, it would seem that there would be plently of people attempting to block certain pieces of Indian art out of ignorance of the symbols involved.
As for the French and their history. . . I have no doubt that there are reminders of their history around. Which first of all raises the question of why they are so eager to get rid of this particular reminder. If they are truly engaged in recalling all the events of their history, than one more reminder of the Nazi era should be no different than the other reminders that are part of a real investigation into history. Secondly, whatever there attitude towards their own history, there is significant scholarly work that can be done by cultural historians using Nazi artifacts. The greatest question of World War II is still, for the most part, unanswered. Why did one of the most educated nations in the world (Germany, which had more PHD's per capita than any other nation) go along with the plans of a delusional failed art school student? Nazi memorabilia gives us great insight into the culture that the Nazi's created. Understanding that helps us understand how the rise of Naziism happened, and how something similar could be prevented.
The precedent that French can made won't be to interdict anything that can hurt people, but anything that can led to imprescriptible crimes.
Why does it follow that ownership of Nazi artifacts will lead to a repetition of the crimes of the Holocaust? I think revisionists that try and claim that the event never happened are perpetrating a great crime- but frankly I'd like to read there book. Why? Because for one, if we don't understand such people, we'll never be able to get rid of the racist views that they propagate. Secondly, because I'd like to see the arguments that they use to "prove" the Holocaust didn't happen, just so if faced with someone like them, I'd know how to take their arguments apart in advance. I would say that the precident of extending the laws of one nation is still significant; it isn't right when the US does it, and it isn't any more right when the French do it.
I can agree with what you say, but there are big problems with the precident that it sets. I would be interested to know if this memorabilia had actually been sold to buyers inside France, and delivered. That would constitute clear violation of the law; you're introducing a banned substance into a country that outlaws it, tantamount to weapons or drug smuggling in the US. But if France simply objects to the listings being present at all, that creates a very bad and very chilling precident. It would mean that nothing could be posted on the Internet that violated the definition of decencey/legality in any country in the world. Because if France can stop the posting of things related to Nazism, Iran can stop posts defamatory to Islam. Israel can demand anything criticizing Judaism or advocating Palestinian militancy be removed. The Australian government can sue sights containing nudity wherever they sit for violating their new anti-pornography laws. It would amount to making the internet the jurisdiction of every country in the world, making it the most restricted medium in the world. It is the equivalent of saying that no book can be published that offends anyone, anywhere, because someone from there might see it. Not a good precident to set. There are, of course, considerations of the need for Yahoo to respect French law inside of France, but the way the article was worded it seemd that there had been very little that could be construed as a direct violation of the law. Respecting democracy does mean allowing nations to run their own affairs as they please, even if their values don't agree with ours. But respect for democracy must go both ways, and that gets hairy when dealing with asymetric situations. The US and Yahoo owe the French that respect, but France also is obligated to honor the laws and customs of the US- which in this case hold Yahoo blameless.
You forget that the swastika was stolen by the Nazis. It is an ancient and sacred symbol for Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains. So I own pictures that contain swastikas, not because I am a Nazi, but because I am Buddhist. Maybe I should tell my Jewish roomate, and my Chinese roomate, and my Thai girlfriend to watch their backs because I might become a "jew/black/gay beating facism-loving jerk" at any moment, but my incling is that this is not a real danger.
Secondly, there is every reason to own Nazi artifacts if you are a historian. There is no substitute for a primary source, and the propaganda and imagery created by the Nazis is a very important cultural artifact. I believe the saying is something along the lines of "Those who forget (or attempt to push away) the past are doomed to repeat its mistakes." The Nazi era is a time I would just as soon not repeat; as such, I am very interested in remembering.
I hae a sneaking suspicion that they were both named after the trickster god of Norse mythology.
I think that Outlook has some good features outside of the sexy graphical interface. For one thing, it does what good programs should do- it automates simple, repetitious tasks without making you jump through hoops. Outlook collects email addresses that I reply to, so that if I need to write someone that I don't know the email address for off the top of my head, I have it without any work. Outlook also does a pretty good job of building several useful features into one program- the calander, contact manager, task list, and mail client. Sometimes it is good to keep things like that seperate, but in this case I have found it to be beneficial. It also connects with my Palm Pilot and syncs everything automatically, which is useful since I use both of them to keep track of things. And as for accessing email from anywhere, it's easy to just tell outlook to leave your messages on the server. So when I am at home, I can use outlook for whatever I want. When I'm elsewhere, I telnet into my unix account and read mail with pine. There's no need of only using one or the other. They both serve their purpose.
You definately have a point. Someone is yet to do ease-of-use correctly- that is, in such a way that it preserves the power and robustness of an OS. A lot of the bastardized results of earlier attempts come out harder to use and less powerful. And there is the related issue of how easy it is to do powerful things. That's the place where Windows really dies for me. But one of the advantages that Linux has right now is that there is a big community pushing to keep the power in the system, while there are commercial developers feeling the market pressure to make it easier to use. I think that's where the best chance of finding a balance lies.
I just can't see that as evil.
Evil has absolutely nothing to do with this. It is about the law, which states not that it is morally wrong to leverage monopoly power, but that it is an unfair restraint on competition to leverage monopoly power. You're right there are other OS's, and an OEM could pre-load any of them that they want if they so feel; however, there is also the realities of the market to contend with. Whatever the benefits of an alternate OS, a company that cannot sell Windows on their machines does not survive. Saying that Dell or anyone else still has a choice is a technically true, but realistic simply does not play out. And there is nothing inherantly wrong with that. But it is incorrect to say that they still have a choice. You yourself say that it could lead to their certain demise, but it is still their choice. What sort of choice is that? "Hm, don't really like this licensing agreement. Guess I'll just go bankrupt." This is not how business operates. As such, Microsoft's actions amount to taking away Dell's right to chose what software they bundle on a sysytem.
As for your point on two, I never say there that there is anything wrong with Microsoft seeking licensing fees from OEM's. That also is perfectly legit. But the crux of my argument, and the basis of the DOJ's beef with MS, is that collusion between these two legal elements creates an illegal restraint on competition. That is what the anti-monopoly laws are designed to fight. No one has a right to buy Windows at whatever price they want, but by the same token, according to the laws of the US that Microsoft has to abide by, MS has to act fairly and in good faith with companies that it deals with. It has been ampley demonstrated that MS used underhanded techniques that hinged on their dominance of the OS market to get their software onto the desktops of users across the world. This is not beneficial for consumers, because it artificially restrains consumer choice. The idea in this case is that dominance in one area of the market should not gaurantee dominance in other areas. Yeah, in a strictly hands-off capitalist society, MS would have the right to push every advantage they have for all that it is worth. But the US has made a conscious decision to value ensuring consumer choice and a more level playing field over pure free market. We place restraints on large companies to prevent any single group from controlling en toto all of any area of the economy. That's what the US system with respect to monopoly is built on. There is no moral judgement in there, that what MS has done is 'good' or 'evil'; rather, what the suit says, correctly is that there are regulations in this country concerning trade, and Microsoft has violated them. As such, the government is entitled to take what steps it sees fit to restore balance in this area of the market. This lawsuit is not about the rights of man; it is about the behaviour of a corporation in the context of US law.
This is the real issue of monopoly. It is not that Microsoft is supressing other operating systems; they already have dominance in the OS market, and despite their paranoid moves to the countrary (i.e the Kerberos tweak), could maintain that position, legally, based solely on the installed base, the amount of existing software written for Windows, and the number of legacy systems using Windows/DOS compatible software and data. What ammounts to monopoly is using that OS dominance to unfairly gain an advantage in the non-OS software area. So the issue has nothing to do with stopping people from installing Linux(they can't), or even really wether they used illegal means to obtain their current position as the dominant OS (which is definately arguable). It's about non-OS software, and the tactics used to keep it on the desktops of PC's being shipped from OEM's.
As to why Linux should go to the trouble of being more user-friendly, or free software generally. . . to me, a lot of the promise of this movement, and something that is present in the rhetoric of people that are advocates(just look at sections of this article) is the potential for free software to aid in the digital divide that is disenfranchising people who can't afford to stay current in modern software and hardware. Free software is a great solution for that; but, not if they can't use it. People who can't afford to buy a Win98 computer probably also cannot afford the traininga nd familiarity necesary to use free software/Linux as it stands now. I have friends who work in international development who know of schools in the third world and impoverished areas of the developed world that would love to be running a free software setup, but the technical knowledge isn't available for them. And while slapping a better GUI wouldn't do enough to fix this problem, it would be a useful step in lowering the bar for people who might not otherwise have access to computers.
If you read through to the end of the article, they mentioned that the eventual hope is to replace the current system with something that uses a sort of electrical muscle substance. Some sort of thin, metal coated plastic that would deform in response to small electrical currents being placed through it, in much the same way as animal muscle works. Additional bonus over something that responds to PH is that your mechanical snake doesn't have a seizure if it wanders into some sort of natural acid/base deposit/
>Robotic snakes are easier to maintain than space monkeys!
Hey now, I resent that!