Hekmati "admitted" this while he was in Iranian custody - as reported by the Tehran Times. Given the history of the Iranian regime (they seem to arrest people for spying for Israel or the US every couple of weeks) I think we should take this with a grain of salt. Considering that making video games and infiltrating a foreign country require completely different skill sets, I find it hard to believe that the CIA would send their video game developer deep into Iranian territory. (According to the NY Times, he was visiting his Iranian grandparents.)
My grandfather was an aerospace engineer and a lifelong New Deal Democrat. He grew up poor in the depression, worked in the tobacco fields when he was about 13, put himself through college by selling blood, etc. He understood that government had helped him and a lot of people of his generation to become middle class.
On the other hand I know a lot of engineers who grew up under Soviet communism and are super right-wing. They had a very bad experience with government persecution and they tend to view all government activity through the lens of restricting their rights.
There's no way that Ubik could be filmed for a mainstream audience. The plot features telepaths and anti-telepaths, communication with the dead, time travel, coin-operated apartment front doors, people who suddenly turn into dust, a bomb blast that may or may not have killed all of the characters, and the usual questions about the nature of reality. Just figuring out a way to explain what the hell is going on will be a pretty big challenge.
During the whole course of the plot, time is flowing backwards, so the filmmakers would have to build not just a static version of New York City, but one where all the artifacts are gradually transforming into their more primitive forms. If they can pull this off, it will be amazing, but its hard to imagine anyone tackling it without a big budget, and the eccentricities of the plot seem to preclude that.
Its a wildly imaginative and thought-provoking book, and I hope someone makes it into an amazing film, I just don't expect it to ever happen. The one Dick book that I'm surprised hasn't been filmed is The Man in the High Castle, which has a much more conventional plot (by comparison) and would be more accessible to a mass audience.
If the frat boys are showing up because they have an agenda or they are generally interested in a topic than thats fine. I wouldn't even have minded if Comcast employees had shown up en masse, but paying people who are going to sleep through the event is despicable since it prevents members of the public who have a legitimate interest in participating in government from attending.
My colleague and I run free wireless networks in housing projects. We both schlepped to attend this event and we were both turned away by Harvard cops because there was no room. It really drives me crazy that people whose livelihood is effected by net neutrality couldn't get in because comcast paid to pack the room.
The event was run by the Berkman Center and even people who identified themselves as working for Berkman were turned away. Even a reporter who just wanted to stand in the back and take photos was hassled by the cops - I didn't stay long enough to see if they let him in. There were a lot of people who arrived around the time I did (fifteen minutes early) and insisted that someone was holding their seat, so maybe there is some truth to the part about the people holding seats for Comcast employees - but - the Harvard cops wouldn't let these people by unless they called the person holding the seat and that person came out, so unless Comcast provided their employees with the cell numbers of the seat fillers they wouldn't have gotten in anyway.
I'm so mad about this that I want to tell everyone I know to cancel their comcast service, but because of the telecom duopoly most of the people I know who have comcast would probably have to pay a lot more to switch.
I've heard Ronald D. Moore (the show's executive producer) say that his team does not own the film rights to Battlestar Galactica. The guys who owned the rights to the crappy 70s show sold off the TV rights but held on to the film rights for some reason. As a result RDM has publicly ruled out the possibility of making a BSG film in the past. I don't know if this applies to Direct to Video films, but if it does it makes this story unlikely.
Merom is named after Meron, a town in Israel, where Intel designs and builds some of its mobile processors, such as the Core Duo and (I believe) Pentium M. Other mobile processor codenames include Dothan and Yonah, which are also Israeli. Intel has been active in Israel for a very long time, it was the location of their first overseas fab and they recently invested something like $5 billion in the country. Interestingly enough, Meron is in the Upper Galillee, and currently being shelled by Hezbollah. Two people were killed there on July, 14th by rockets.
Actually, these new documents seem to change his public image for the better. He used to be known as a completely uninvolved and irresponsible father, but these documents show that at least later in life he really cared about his second wife and one of his kids.
People change as they get older. Einstein certainly wouldn't have signed the famous letter to Roosevelt advocating the development of the atomic bomb after the war - although one could certainly argue about whether that means anything.
Netflix has been very good to me, I bought the stock at about $10 and now its at $27. However, with good video on demand coming soon I have to wonder if NetFlix has a future. I doubt that Netflix could compete with the likes of Apple and Google when it comes to video on demand. I'm very curious to hear whether Slashdotters have abandoned their Netflix accounts in favor of services such as Comcast's OnDemand and would you prefer a download service to NetFlix?
I suspect that the problem with airport security is dealing with the sheer number of people who move through the airports. Israel is probably so effective because they only really have one major international airport to screen, so they can afford to watch people from the time they park their car to the time they get off the plane at their destination. In the US we can't watch nearly that many people so we need a preliminary filter that will let TSA determine who to watch. If you consider this device as a filter that you would use in combination with other things than its a good idea. If you RTF you'll see that it only takes seconds to carry out this test. Lets say you run everyone through the metal detector first. Then you run everyone through this machine. People who fail this test are met by a TSA officer who is trained to ask questions very casually and to determine whether the reason you failed this test is due to the fact that, for example, you don't fly very often and you're a little afraid of it. If you RTFA it implies that the machine has a 12% rate of false positives. If chatting for five minutes with a TSA officer eliminates two-thirds of them than you only have to pay attention to 3% of passengers. If you combine that with the metal detector, and searching every checked bag and pulling aside people whose behavior is suspicious (e.g. buying a one way ticket the day before) then you may have a much more efficient system than what we have now.
The brief description of this article on slashdot as well as the article itself are a bit alarmist. The article does say that the number of secrecy orders on NSA patents has increased (nine in '05, as opposed to five in '04 and none in the previous three years), but the number of secrecy orders on private inventors has been cut nearly in half, from 61 to 32. This indicates that in some ways the USPTO is being less secretive, not more. It is possible that the small change in NSA patents is due to a different bureaucratic mechanism for screening patents, perhaps the NSA itself has gotten less stringent so the USPTO and the Pentagon have had to become more sensitive in order to compromise, and it is even possible that the change is statistically meaningless due to the small sample size, but it is harder to account for the larger drop (numerically) in the secrecy of the patents of private inventors.
Aspyr just announced today that it will be publishing Civ 3 Complete and Civ 4. Civ 3 has been on the Mac for awhile now and this looks like just a new edition which includes the two expansion packs. Civ 4 unfortunately won't be available until early 2006.
Announcment at MacCentral
Basically NCSA's method assumes that if a search engine indexes twice the number of pages, than it will return twice the number of results for a given search. However, in order for this to be the case, the 10 billion+ more pages that yahoo indexes would have to be roughly equivalent to the pages that google indexes. If Yahoo is indexing 20 billion pages, but ten billion of those are in mandarin, than searching for random combinations of english words (which NCSA is doing) won't tell us which search engine indexes more pages. In order to trust NCSA's methodology we would have to know exactly WHAT the billions of pages that Yahoo knows about but Google does not are. Surely the web didn't double in size overnight, Yahoo must be searching somewhere Google doesn't search if their claims mean anything (which they may not).
Apple has found a clever solution to this problem. The Mighty Mouse has a built in speaker that produces tiny clicks when you press, apparently similar to the speaker on the iPod which is very effective.
Ummm... no
The people who ran Battle School were smart and though out the consequences of their actions.
The people who run this high school are idiots
I got out of high school two years ago and I have good and bad news about what's changed:
The Bad News: School administrators are still morons
The Good News: At least they've learned to pick better passwords. In my day all the passwords were things like "staff" or "teacher" or (my favorite) "inspire"
When your country is run by a bunch of egomaniacal psychopathic nutjobs who are rapidly developing intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching your shores it doesn't really matter whether they have.0001 or 10000 times more nukes than you.
Okay, perhaps the word outrage was incorrect. Certainly Patterson is quoted as being "worried and depressed" and other computer scientists also express frustration, both at the loss of funding and at the change in DARPA's policies. Maybe I chose the wrong word, but I certainly felt a tinge of outrage from those quoted. I apologize if I was mistaken.
As for myself, I'm not outraged (nor do I have a CS degree). As far as I am concerned this is simply a wrongheaded change of policy. Certainly during a time of conflict we need to rush as many useful technologies to the battlefield as possible, but there are many organizations within the defense establishment other than DARPA designed to do this and we are pouring money into them. DARPA's job, as I understand it, isn't to win the current war, but to give us an edge for the next one. It seems foolish to me to throw away the really innovative open-ended research projects on which our economy depends for short term benefits.
I'm somewhat surprised that you call my possible miswording "slander" and then spend two paragraphs telling me why what you believe I feel is wrong. I don't feel entitled to a research job and I don't feel that my financial future will be threatened by this decision. I do, however, feel entitled to comment on my country's defense strategy.
The mission is NOT named after the movie, the project manager claims that they came up with the name independently at around the same time. However, members of the team also served as consultants on the movie.
I don't know where you are located in the country (or the world), but many states have agencies designed to help solve these problems. I am visually impaired and I had a case worker from Connecticut Board of Education Services for the Blind throughout school who helped me with these issues. They have assistive technology consultants as well as people who can deal with the often public school administrators. Other states have similar agencies as well. Middle school can be absolutely hellish so it can be very helpful to have someone on your side. Even if this isn't an option make sure he has an IEP (or equivalent) so that the school has written records of his disability and a formal plan for dealing with it. If you've got all of this on file than its much easier to get individual teachers or administrators to help out, and even possibly pay for a special equipment and large print books.
I actually was really good at geography as a kid, (national geography bee state finalist way back when) but I suspect that was because I really liked puzzling over maps and trying to figure them out. However, I know that geography bee national finalists have been completely blind in the past.
To be honest if the tests he has to take are entirely the questions that you listed than they need to be modified, but geography is more than capitals and directions. A good question might be something like "What do Mindenao, Correigidor, and Luzon have in common" you don't need to know anything about the shape of the Philippines to answer that one, all you need to have done is maybe read a little about WWII or current events etc. I doubt that I could draw a map of the world better than a 5 year old but I can assure you I know much more geography than the average american. The truth of the matter is that this kid might not be able to give you directions from a little roadmap on the highway without a lot of help, but that doesn't mean he isn't capable of understanding the nature of the world around him. I suspect that the best thing for him to do is to read as much as possible and to try to absorb information and visualize it. That worked for me anyway.
This might not be a popular opinion here, but this house looks so cold and engineered and artificial. There's something to be said for the aesthetics of a lawn that isn't astroturf and a house that hasn't been built entirely around the principle of energy (and everything else) efficiency. Of course I'm not currently living in a drafty two-hundred year old monstrosity with leaky plumbing, I might change my mind if I was, but I get the feeling that such a house would be infinitely more livable than this thing.
Neal Stephenson really needs to learn how to shut up.
I put about 2 months into reading Quicksilver, and I absolutely loved the characters, the individual scenes and even some of the subplots. But the main plot of the book was such a pointless, endless and rambling mess that I never had the desire to stay up until 4AM reading it. The historical detail was wonderful, and this was a great book to geek out on, but I felt like I was reading an ancient, endless tome and there's only so much of that one can take. This is one series where it might be wise to invest in the abridged audiobook, I did that with Snow Crash and it was fantastic.
And what's the deal with kidney stones? I mean, I know they were a frequent cause of death at the time but do we have to hear about them CONSTANTLY!
Slashdot Mirror
Hekmati "admitted" this while he was in Iranian custody - as reported by the Tehran Times. Given the history of the Iranian regime (they seem to arrest people for spying for Israel or the US every couple of weeks) I think we should take this with a grain of salt. Considering that making video games and infiltrating a foreign country require completely different skill sets, I find it hard to believe that the CIA would send their video game developer deep into Iranian territory. (According to the NY Times, he was visiting his Iranian grandparents.)
My grandfather was an aerospace engineer and a lifelong New Deal Democrat. He grew up poor in the depression, worked in the tobacco fields when he was about 13, put himself through college by selling blood, etc. He understood that government had helped him and a lot of people of his generation to become middle class.
On the other hand I know a lot of engineers who grew up under Soviet communism and are super right-wing. They had a very bad experience with government persecution and they tend to view all government activity through the lens of restricting their rights.
Out. The running joke was that the main character never had enough money to leave his apartment.
There's no way that Ubik could be filmed for a mainstream audience. The plot features telepaths and anti-telepaths, communication with the dead, time travel, coin-operated apartment front doors, people who suddenly turn into dust, a bomb blast that may or may not have killed all of the characters, and the usual questions about the nature of reality. Just figuring out a way to explain what the hell is going on will be a pretty big challenge. During the whole course of the plot, time is flowing backwards, so the filmmakers would have to build not just a static version of New York City, but one where all the artifacts are gradually transforming into their more primitive forms. If they can pull this off, it will be amazing, but its hard to imagine anyone tackling it without a big budget, and the eccentricities of the plot seem to preclude that. Its a wildly imaginative and thought-provoking book, and I hope someone makes it into an amazing film, I just don't expect it to ever happen. The one Dick book that I'm surprised hasn't been filmed is The Man in the High Castle, which has a much more conventional plot (by comparison) and would be more accessible to a mass audience.
If the frat boys are showing up because they have an agenda or they are generally interested in a topic than thats fine. I wouldn't even have minded if Comcast employees had shown up en masse, but paying people who are going to sleep through the event is despicable since it prevents members of the public who have a legitimate interest in participating in government from attending.
My colleague and I run free wireless networks in housing projects. We both schlepped to attend this event and we were both turned away by Harvard cops because there was no room. It really drives me crazy that people whose livelihood is effected by net neutrality couldn't get in because comcast paid to pack the room.
The event was run by the Berkman Center and even people who identified themselves as working for Berkman were turned away. Even a reporter who just wanted to stand in the back and take photos was hassled by the cops - I didn't stay long enough to see if they let him in. There were a lot of people who arrived around the time I did (fifteen minutes early) and insisted that someone was holding their seat, so maybe there is some truth to the part about the people holding seats for Comcast employees - but - the Harvard cops wouldn't let these people by unless they called the person holding the seat and that person came out, so unless Comcast provided their employees with the cell numbers of the seat fillers they wouldn't have gotten in anyway.
I'm so mad about this that I want to tell everyone I know to cancel their comcast service, but because of the telecom duopoly most of the people I know who have comcast would probably have to pay a lot more to switch.
I've heard Ronald D. Moore (the show's executive producer) say that his team does not own the film rights to Battlestar Galactica. The guys who owned the rights to the crappy 70s show sold off the TV rights but held on to the film rights for some reason. As a result RDM has publicly ruled out the possibility of making a BSG film in the past. I don't know if this applies to Direct to Video films, but if it does it makes this story unlikely.
Merom is named after Meron, a town in Israel, where Intel designs and builds some of its mobile processors, such as the Core Duo and (I believe) Pentium M. Other mobile processor codenames include Dothan and Yonah, which are also Israeli. Intel has been active in Israel for a very long time, it was the location of their first overseas fab and they recently invested something like $5 billion in the country. Interestingly enough, Meron is in the Upper Galillee, and currently being shelled by Hezbollah. Two people were killed there on July, 14th by rockets.
Actually, these new documents seem to change his public image for the better. He used to be known as a completely uninvolved and irresponsible father, but these documents show that at least later in life he really cared about his second wife and one of his kids. People change as they get older. Einstein certainly wouldn't have signed the famous letter to Roosevelt advocating the development of the atomic bomb after the war - although one could certainly argue about whether that means anything.
Woohoo! Free porn for everyone!
Netflix has been very good to me, I bought the stock at about $10 and now its at $27. However, with good video on demand coming soon I have to wonder if NetFlix has a future. I doubt that Netflix could compete with the likes of Apple and Google when it comes to video on demand. I'm very curious to hear whether Slashdotters have abandoned their Netflix accounts in favor of services such as Comcast's OnDemand and would you prefer a download service to NetFlix?
I suspect that the problem with airport security is dealing with the sheer number of people who move through the airports. Israel is probably so effective because they only really have one major international airport to screen, so they can afford to watch people from the time they park their car to the time they get off the plane at their destination. In the US we can't watch nearly that many people so we need a preliminary filter that will let TSA determine who to watch. If you consider this device as a filter that you would use in combination with other things than its a good idea. If you RTF you'll see that it only takes seconds to carry out this test. Lets say you run everyone through the metal detector first. Then you run everyone through this machine. People who fail this test are met by a TSA officer who is trained to ask questions very casually and to determine whether the reason you failed this test is due to the fact that, for example, you don't fly very often and you're a little afraid of it. If you RTFA it implies that the machine has a 12% rate of false positives. If chatting for five minutes with a TSA officer eliminates two-thirds of them than you only have to pay attention to 3% of passengers. If you combine that with the metal detector, and searching every checked bag and pulling aside people whose behavior is suspicious (e.g. buying a one way ticket the day before) then you may have a much more efficient system than what we have now.
The brief description of this article on slashdot as well as the article itself are a bit alarmist. The article does say that the number of secrecy orders on NSA patents has increased (nine in '05, as opposed to five in '04 and none in the previous three years), but the number of secrecy orders on private inventors has been cut nearly in half, from 61 to 32. This indicates that in some ways the USPTO is being less secretive, not more. It is possible that the small change in NSA patents is due to a different bureaucratic mechanism for screening patents, perhaps the NSA itself has gotten less stringent so the USPTO and the Pentagon have had to become more sensitive in order to compromise, and it is even possible that the change is statistically meaningless due to the small sample size, but it is harder to account for the larger drop (numerically) in the secrecy of the patents of private inventors.
Aspyr just announced today that it will be publishing Civ 3 Complete and Civ 4. Civ 3 has been on the Mac for awhile now and this looks like just a new edition which includes the two expansion packs. Civ 4 unfortunately won't be available until early 2006. Announcment at MacCentral
If you look at the IBM website it claims 330 linear feet per minute, not 330 ppm. If a page is 11" long than that would be about 360 pages per minute.
Basically NCSA's method assumes that if a search engine indexes twice the number of pages, than it will return twice the number of results for a given search. However, in order for this to be the case, the 10 billion+ more pages that yahoo indexes would have to be roughly equivalent to the pages that google indexes. If Yahoo is indexing 20 billion pages, but ten billion of those are in mandarin, than searching for random combinations of english words (which NCSA is doing) won't tell us which search engine indexes more pages. In order to trust NCSA's methodology we would have to know exactly WHAT the billions of pages that Yahoo knows about but Google does not are. Surely the web didn't double in size overnight, Yahoo must be searching somewhere Google doesn't search if their claims mean anything (which they may not).
Apple has found a clever solution to this problem. The Mighty Mouse has a built in speaker that produces tiny clicks when you press, apparently similar to the speaker on the iPod which is very effective.
Ummm... no
The people who ran Battle School were smart and though out the consequences of their actions.
The people who run this high school are idiots
I got out of high school two years ago and I have good and bad news about what's changed: The Bad News: School administrators are still morons The Good News: At least they've learned to pick better passwords. In my day all the passwords were things like "staff" or "teacher" or (my favorite) "inspire"
When your country is run by a bunch of egomaniacal psychopathic nutjobs who are rapidly developing intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching your shores it doesn't really matter whether they have .0001 or 10000 times more nukes than you.
Okay, perhaps the word outrage was incorrect. Certainly Patterson is quoted as being "worried and depressed" and other computer scientists also express frustration, both at the loss of funding and at the change in DARPA's policies. Maybe I chose the wrong word, but I certainly felt a tinge of outrage from those quoted. I apologize if I was mistaken. As for myself, I'm not outraged (nor do I have a CS degree). As far as I am concerned this is simply a wrongheaded change of policy. Certainly during a time of conflict we need to rush as many useful technologies to the battlefield as possible, but there are many organizations within the defense establishment other than DARPA designed to do this and we are pouring money into them. DARPA's job, as I understand it, isn't to win the current war, but to give us an edge for the next one. It seems foolish to me to throw away the really innovative open-ended research projects on which our economy depends for short term benefits. I'm somewhat surprised that you call my possible miswording "slander" and then spend two paragraphs telling me why what you believe I feel is wrong. I don't feel entitled to a research job and I don't feel that my financial future will be threatened by this decision. I do, however, feel entitled to comment on my country's defense strategy.
The mission is NOT named after the movie, the project manager claims that they came up with the name independently at around the same time. However, members of the team also served as consultants on the movie.
I don't know where you are located in the country (or the world), but many states have agencies designed to help solve these problems. I am visually impaired and I had a case worker from Connecticut Board of Education Services for the Blind throughout school who helped me with these issues. They have assistive technology consultants as well as people who can deal with the often public school administrators. Other states have similar agencies as well. Middle school can be absolutely hellish so it can be very helpful to have someone on your side. Even if this isn't an option make sure he has an IEP (or equivalent) so that the school has written records of his disability and a formal plan for dealing with it. If you've got all of this on file than its much easier to get individual teachers or administrators to help out, and even possibly pay for a special equipment and large print books. I actually was really good at geography as a kid, (national geography bee state finalist way back when) but I suspect that was because I really liked puzzling over maps and trying to figure them out. However, I know that geography bee national finalists have been completely blind in the past. To be honest if the tests he has to take are entirely the questions that you listed than they need to be modified, but geography is more than capitals and directions. A good question might be something like "What do Mindenao, Correigidor, and Luzon have in common" you don't need to know anything about the shape of the Philippines to answer that one, all you need to have done is maybe read a little about WWII or current events etc. I doubt that I could draw a map of the world better than a 5 year old but I can assure you I know much more geography than the average american. The truth of the matter is that this kid might not be able to give you directions from a little roadmap on the highway without a lot of help, but that doesn't mean he isn't capable of understanding the nature of the world around him. I suspect that the best thing for him to do is to read as much as possible and to try to absorb information and visualize it. That worked for me anyway.
This might not be a popular opinion here, but this house looks so cold and engineered and artificial. There's something to be said for the aesthetics of a lawn that isn't astroturf and a house that hasn't been built entirely around the principle of energy (and everything else) efficiency. Of course I'm not currently living in a drafty two-hundred year old monstrosity with leaky plumbing, I might change my mind if I was, but I get the feeling that such a house would be infinitely more livable than this thing.
Neal Stephenson really needs to learn how to shut up. I put about 2 months into reading Quicksilver, and I absolutely loved the characters, the individual scenes and even some of the subplots. But the main plot of the book was such a pointless, endless and rambling mess that I never had the desire to stay up until 4AM reading it. The historical detail was wonderful, and this was a great book to geek out on, but I felt like I was reading an ancient, endless tome and there's only so much of that one can take. This is one series where it might be wise to invest in the abridged audiobook, I did that with Snow Crash and it was fantastic. And what's the deal with kidney stones? I mean, I know they were a frequent cause of death at the time but do we have to hear about them CONSTANTLY!