One of the big problems with the music industry is that it is held in a stranglehold by massive media companies. These companies attempt to manipulate demand, but these days are simply failing. There are other ways music can work though. I live in Louisiana, where we have our own unique vibrant musical culture. Although a few acts have deals with big labels, many record their own CDs and sell than at their gigs. This way all the money goes to the artists. Whereas in the rest of the country music is manipulated by lawyers and suits, here music is in the hands of the musicians and the audience. It is a much better way to do business! The only problem we face is that the small independent record shops keep being put out of business by the chains like Best Buy. This is a shame. The system still works pretty well though. Also, it makes for a much freer musical culture -- musicians frequently sit in on each others CDs and even at each others gigs. Everybody knows who is good, who is hot, and who is not. We don't need music reviews. This is the way things SHOULD be done. The RIAA have totally the wrong idea. As an example, some time ago I was overseas and I played a CD of a local artist for a friend of mine. She liked it so much that I burnt her a copy of the CD. The next time the artist played in town, I gave him the money for the CD. With this kind of approach everyone wins. With the antics of the RIAA and Sony, only the lawyers win.
Are there any other really old netizens still around? Those who have been on-line way too long will remeber something similar quite a few years ago. Back in the late 80s when the word went out that the NSA was packet-dipping network and e-mail traffic. I think this was one of the first paranoid conspiracy theories to hit the net. All sorts of wild evidence was cited to 'prove' this rumour. Anyhow, as a result of this story a fashion arose for people to put things like 'Bomb', 'President', 'Drugs' etc. etc. automatically into their.signature files. The idea was to try and trigger the NSA into recording all sorts of silly and trivial e-mails. The fashion did not last long. Of course, if people were to try to do this these days, they would no doubt be 'disappeared' to Guantanamo. There is one thing though that puzzles me: If supposed enemies of the nation (i.e. anyone who opposes Bush or Haliburton) are the target of this snooping, then how are they handling the State of Louisiana these days? Everybody in Louisiana hates Bush and Co. for their pathetic response to our Hurricane problems (they still want to charge the State $3.7 Billion for the money that FEMA workers are wasting in 4 star hotels). Do they really have the resources....opps, there is a knock on the door...men in suits...ARRGGHHH!;)
I live in Louisiana, though I am not originally from here. The comments about the corruption in this State are not fair. The Feds want to deny us reasonable help, on the basis of such slander. Slashdot should be able to do better. Bellsouth are not exactly the most ethical company, especially when their monopolies are challenged. I refuse to do business with them, since before the Hurricanes. They seem to be acting badly again, so boycott them. However, please do not slander Louisiana. Remember, most of the 'hurricane relief' around here has been done by regular people helping others. The Feds have been useless. In a town a bit North of where I live a shelter had 3000 people in it at one point, with no government aid whatsoever. It was entirely supported by donations by locals. In the town of Lafayette, where I live, Bellsouth is fighting the local, city owned, utility system, because it wants to lay fiber to every home. The utility will do a better and cheaper job than Bellsouth, so Bellsouth are upset. So, feel free to be mean about Bellsouth, but do not slader Louisiana, unless you know what you are talking about. We are down, but do not deserve to be kicked. Kick Bellsouth and the moron in the Whitehouse and his useless cronies instead.
Bellsouth already have some rather 'dubious' business practices. For instance, the City in which I live has proposed that our local (City owned) utility company will provide fiber in the home to all our residents. Bellsouth have been raising every type of spurious legal claim possible to try and block this measure, even though it was widely supported in a referendum (forced by Bellsouth!). Currently, Bellsouth provides DSL service in this area and Cox provides cable. It is a basic duopoly. Needless to say, the rates are much higher than elsewhere. Earthlink does provide cheaper service. However, one can only use Earthlink if one has local telephone service from...you guessed it,...Bellsouth. My phone service is provided by AT and T. They cannot provide DSL service, because it is blocked by...you guessed it, Bellsouth. I complained about this situation to the FCC. However, the day after I lodged my complaint, the FCC made a ruling saying it was just fine for Bellsouth to behave this way. So, these new 'ideas' from Bellsouth appear to be part of their on-going plans to hold on to their near monopoly situation. I think that it stinks. I cannot wait for the city fiber to arrive at my house.
I took an interest in Diebold's software, particularly GEMS, a while ago. I took the opportunity to have a play with it and found some quite scarey results. I wrote these results up and posted them on a webpage that includes photos. See http://www.ucs.louisiana.edu/~isb9112/election/
The short version is that it is incredibly easy to switch votes from one candidate to another. Rest assured, this is not just some wierdo crank thing, I am a real professor. I have even had a paper based on this work accepted at refereed academic conference which took place at UC Berkeley. Problems such as those illustrated are almost certainly the reason why Diebold doesn't want to release its code, other technical difficulties notwithstanding.
This is a bit off-topic, but this discussion is timely. This afternoon, we received a draft of a memo for comment. The gist of the memo is that, due to State budget cuts, as a result of the Hurricanes (I am in Louisiana), the suits have had the bright idea of having all sys admins shut down their machines when they are not in use. The suggestion was that machines should go to standby mode after 15 mins and power off after two hours of inactivity. Ages ago, I remember a debate on the topic of whether or not it was better to leave a computer running, or switch it off, at least at night. My recollection is that the conclusion was that it was better to leave machines running, due to wear and tear on the hardware from booting up. I did some Googling on the topic, but did not find anything too concrete (like real research). If anyone reading this knows of some empirical studies, I would be very grateful. It would be a real shame if, to save a few $ on Watts, we ended up costing ourselves a bomb in trashed hardware (which we currently cannot afford to replace). Please post replies here. Many thanks!
As I sit here in my office, I am typing in Suse Linux. I have three Linux desktop machines also in the office and an old laptop running Windows 2k. However, I am listening to the iPod my brother gave me as a birthday gift. Does this mean I have been 'converted'? Does this mean that if I buy a cake at the Baptist bake sale, I become a Baptist too? Don't they call this 'slamming' when the phone companies do it? We should be told!;)
At our local shelter, the Cajundome, the IE6 FEMA problem was major too. Although intially some machines were loaded with a Linux distro (I don't know which), this issue prevented them from being used. Fortunately, some guy walked in and offered a bunch of Win2k machines, that we could get IE 6 to run on. Once we had them up and running though, the FEMA site tanked.
In the discussion section, some people have argued that net connectivity is less important than food and shelter. This is true. However, the web site was the only way for most people to get registered with FEMA. As this is one of the most important tasks, once basic needs are met, network connections should not be under estimated. A good word should also be given to Yahoo, for providing free e-mail accounts. Last time I used this system (ages ago), they required a referring e-mail address. They no longer require this. This was crucial, as FEMA require an e-mail address to complete the registration process. That being said, it is a shame that FEMA (known in these parts as 'The Finally, Eventually Made-it Agency) has otherwise been so damn useless.
There was another lab where people could have more general net access. There many people seemed to find a huge sense of relief in being able to see their houses on google, even when the houses were under water. One older man I helped was totally blown away at the idea of seeing the Ninth ward of N.O from space. He wept when he saw that his house still had a roof, and then started making jokes about how the fishing would be good from his porch! For a person who has lost everything, anything that can bring a bit of joy is very valuable indeed.
Another point needs to be raised in the context of this liveCD discussion. This is the fact that on many older machines (I know this, as I have alot of practice with these), the CD drive is one of the first things to fry. This is a problem.
One final point, in the article, there is a discussion of the role of M$ in the disaster relief in this State. The current 'official' State operating system is Win2k. So, they will have been especially motivated to assist a good customer. However, from time to time we hear rumours that the State is going to make M$ software mandatory (I work for a State of Louisiana institution). Fortunately, this hasn't happened yet.
In the real world of this disaster, the FEMA IE thing has been a real issue. The town in which I live is about 130 miles West of New Orleans and as a consequence, has a large number of evacuees. Last week I went down to our local shelter to volunteer. When I saw that they needed help with computers, I joined up. The shelter had a bunch of old machines donated by a school board. They were a mixed bag, but all had been converted to Linux and seemed to work. Then the FEMA issue was discovered. Fortunately, some guy with a company showed up and on the spot offered us a bunch of Win 2k machines. We were able to get these up and running and patched and we were good to go for FEMA registration. However, this was a huge pain and it was a problem that was only sorted due to the generosity of one person. Needless to say, once we were ready to start registering people, the entire FEMA site crapped out. Most of the people in the shelter couldn't care less about OS issues, or browser preferences, they just need help. The FEMA choice made it harder for them to apply for that help. So, it sucks. By the way, now in Louisiana we believe that FEMA stands for Finally, Eventually Made-it Agency!
Please contribute to a Katrina relief fund. The need is huge and the support (at least from the Feds) so far has been minimal.
I have run into a similar kind of set of problems, as I run an on-line philosophy journal (see http://ejap.louisiana.edu).
The solution I found was to convert the documents down into RTF format as an intemediate step. There are a number of shareware RTF-to-HTML converters available. Unfortunatly, I cannot find the name of the program I usually use at the moment, or a link for it, but googling for "RTF to HTML" shareware produces quite a few likely candidates. This system worksjust fine for me. What I like best about the program I have is that it puts the HTML codes in in French! If you look at the source code for the most recent edition of my journal, you can see the system in action.
The timing on this is interesting. Over the weekend, I took the plunge and sgined up for Earthlink DSL. To my surprise, they called back and told me that they could not provide service, as my local phone company is AT and T, not BellSouth (BellSouth is the major player locally). I talked to AT and T and they told me that they could not offer me DSL service, unless I was a BellSouth customer! It seems that in this market, one has to be a BellSouth customer to get DSL. BellSouths own DSL offering is a joke -- nearly $40 for a 256k connection. The local cable company is about the same. By contrast, Earthlink AT and T offer around 1.5M for half the price. I am annoyed by this. I got rid of BellSouth a while ago, due to bad service and excessive charges. AT and T are much cheaper. Not being one to take this sort of nastyness, just yesterday, I filed a complaint against BellSouth with both the FCC and the FTC. It seems that the BellSouth game is to refuse cooperative agreements.
Of course, there is good news. We just had an election in which approval was given to our local city owned utility company to lay fiber to the home. Needless to say, BellSouth fought this hard and, having lost, keep sueing the utility company. I believe that more people should complain to the FCC etc. to get such abuse of monopolies stopped, and to prevent proposals such as the one under discussion here from even being considered.
During the whole election process in November I was able to study the tabulating machine software. What I found scared the hell out of me. I have put up an account, along with photos of a real election databased being rigged. It is available at http://www.ucs.ull.edu/~isb9112/election/
I for one was not surprised that the exit polls didn't match the recorded values. Any steps which can be taken to reduce the possibility of such cheating should be applauded.
Well, I think this whole thing is great. Now all I need is the transcripts from these hearings and I will have all the examples I need to teach my Critical Thinking class! These creationist types appear to commit every fallacy in the book. What makes it even better is that they use exactly the argumentation strategies the Martin Gardener identifies as being diagnostic of cranks in his book
Fads and Fallacies. For those who want some intellectual entertainment, you might try comparing the so-called 'reasoning' offered here with this rather good
Guide to The Logical Fallacies.
This is like shooting fish in a barrel. It is just a shame that so many people are too brainwashed to see this for the silliness that it is.
Wait a moment here. Just because this fool was from Louisiana doesn't really justify all the Louisiana jokes. As a Brit who has lived in this State for 8 years and taught in a University, I can tell you that not everone here is dumb. Not only that, of any State I have been to Louisiana is one of the most interesting. We have Cajun food, Cajun music, Zydeco music and Creole music. We have amazing festivals, many of which are completely free (see http://www.festivalinternational.com -- the site sucks, but the festival rocks). OK, the place is a bit ferral and rough at the edges and our politics can be a little 'interesting' (as the saying goes, 'We have the best politicians money can buy'), but that helps make this a unique State. It sure beats the strip mall culture that you find elsewhere. On our campus, we have 'gators -- this is wild and wierd. Perhaps some of you should come visit. But please do not insult a place you do not know because of one fool.
I now see the logic. If I want to keep my copy of M$ software updated, I must run it on a Windoze machine. After all, Micro$oft now tells me that they are cheaper at the level of the TCO and more secure. So, it is bye-bye Linux, bye-bye OpenOffice, bye-bye Nvu, bye-bye Mozilla, bye-bye Firefox. Now I know that I need Windoze Fisher Price (XP). Now I know I need M$ Office. Now I know I need FrontPage. Now I know I need Outlook. Now I know I need IE. How could I have been so stupid? How could I have not seen this before? Praise the Lord! Bill, can I have your babies too? [Would someone please pass the Soma!]
In the posts here, there is some confusion between the notion of a Turing machine simpliciter, and the notion of a Universal Turing machine. For all the technical details including the relationship between Turing machines and finite state automata, people should refer to Hopcroft, J. and Ulman, J. (1969), Formal Languages and Their Relation to Automata, Addison-Wesley, and Hopcroft, J. and Ulman, J. (1979) Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages and Computation,. Also of note is McCulloch, W. and Pitts, W. (1943), "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity" in Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics, 5/115.
There has been quite alot of spleen vented on this topic. However, it is important to realise that altered facts are not a new issue. For instance, Paul Feyerbend in his book Against Method describes in some detail how Galileo's claims were not really supported by the evidence he cited. He was issuing propoganda, but turned out to be largely correct.
This being said, science in the public domain is one of those areas where the 'adjusting' of facts can be especially pernicious. As a society, we need to make the smartest choices we can. In order to do this, we should base our inferences on the best evidence available. It is in this respect that this report is especially troubling.
What is perhaps worse is that the manipulation of truth seems to be a common strategy by the current administration. This is decidedly Orwellian. The site truthout.org continues to raise excamples. What worries me the most is that there is some evidence that the entire democratic process may have been under attack in the recent elections. I did some research myself on this issue, and was horrified by the conclusions (see http://www.ucs.louisiana.edu/~isb9112/election/).
I may not be an American, but I am a scientist. When it is so easy to smell a rat, it amazes me that so many normal people and folks in the (allegedly 'liberal') media can swallow the utter rubbish they are told. Hopefully, the folks at/. are smart enough and well educated enough to see how dangerous these trends are.
At the end of this post it is claimed that "[CogVis is] not a blackbox model, as in say Neural Networks,..." This view is sadly very out of date. This criticism of Artificial neural networks goes back to around 1991 (see for example McCloskey, M. "Networks and Theories: The Place of Connectionism in Cognitive Science" in Psychological Science,, 2/6). The kind of connection between the rules developed by a connectionist system and logical rules was demonstrated in the mid-90s. See Berkeley, I., Dawson, M., Medler, D. and Schopflocher (1995), "Density Plots of Hidden Unit Activations Reveal Interpretable Bands" in Connection Science 7/2. It is clear from this paper that neural networks are very far from being 'black boxes'. A more recent discussion of these issues can be found in Berkeley, I. and Gunay, C. (2004) "Conducting Banding Analysis with Trained Networks of Sigmoid Units" in Connecttion Science , 16/2. See also Dawson, M. (2004) Minds and Machines, Blackwells.
I saw this stuff yesterday. It looked amusing, but with all the stuff about murders, the CIA and the like, it looked like a tin foil hat number. Who knows. However, the is a real issue that hasn't got much attention. This concerns how easy it is to swap vote counts on certain tabulator machines, whilst leaving no trace at all in the logs. The technique is illustrated and discussed at http://www.ucs.louisiana.edu/~isb9112/election/.
THIS is much more of a concern.
The advice here is sound. There are all sorts of evil things that can be done with javascript. I know how to do some of them and I am one of the 'good guys'. Goodness knows what can be done by those who are less well intentioned. I always run with javascript disabled, simnple as that. Not only does this prevent the problem of pop-ups, it also keeps one safe from many other dangers. If a site requires javascript, then either I will simply not use it, or I will briefly enable javascript only as necessary. One of the reasons I do not own a Subaru, is due to their love of javascript, even though their cars are great. So, webmasters be aware, your choices can influence consumer habits!
Well, I for one am a bit sceptical about the 30 year claim. Presumably such a device would need some kind of software. Software typically likes to reside on an operating system. Whilst many versions of *nix are quite stable, I doubt even they could last 30 years. Worse yet, what if they used a Micro$oft product? I think 30 years without a blue screen of death is too much to ask for. Of course, under such a scenario, the blue screen might well spell death for those around;)
Although this news is probably bad for YRO issues, there may be an upside. If the NSA is packet-sniffing e-mail traffic, then maybe they will be motivated to find a way of reducing the amount of Nigerean printer cartridge enlargement spam messages. If we are really lucky, they may even share the solution with us all. Of course, it is also possible that the guys at the NSA may all suddenly become hung like donkeys, NOT!
If the goal is to 'harness the potential of knowledge and technology' and to 'find effective and innovative ways to put this potential at the service of development for all.', then there is something very curious about worrying about intellectual property rights and profits. As anyone in Economics 101 knows, one of the functions of a pricing mechanism is to ration commodities. The wide scope quantifier in the phrase 'for all' suggests that any rationing is contrary to the stated goal. I'd love to hear the reasoning for why a person in a developing country needs to spend $100+ dollars on a Micro$oft product, rather than use an Open Source alternative (N.B. it was earlier reported that some folks in India make as little as $35 per month!). It sounds to me like the legal logicians from SCO must have had a hand in coming up with this!
Slashdot Mirror
One of the big problems with the music industry is that it is held in a stranglehold by massive media companies. These companies attempt to manipulate demand, but these days are simply failing. There are other ways music can work though. I live in Louisiana, where we have our own unique vibrant musical culture. Although a few acts have deals with big labels, many record their own CDs and sell than at their gigs. This way all the money goes to the artists. Whereas in the rest of the country music is manipulated by lawyers and suits, here music is in the hands of the musicians and the audience. It is a much better way to do business! The only problem we face is that the small independent record shops keep being put out of business by the chains like Best Buy. This is a shame. The system still works pretty well though. Also, it makes for a much freer musical culture -- musicians frequently sit in on each others CDs and even at each others gigs. Everybody knows who is good, who is hot, and who is not. We don't need music reviews. This is the way things SHOULD be done. The RIAA have totally the wrong idea. As an example, some time ago I was overseas and I played a CD of a local artist for a friend of mine. She liked it so much that I burnt her a copy of the CD. The next time the artist played in town, I gave him the money for the CD. With this kind of approach everyone wins. With the antics of the RIAA and Sony, only the lawyers win.
Are there any other really old netizens still around? Those who have been on-line way too long will remeber something similar quite a few years ago. Back in the late 80s when the word went out that the NSA was packet-dipping network and e-mail traffic. I think this was one of the first paranoid conspiracy theories to hit the net. All sorts of wild evidence was cited to 'prove' this rumour. Anyhow, as a result of this story a fashion arose for people to put things like 'Bomb', 'President', 'Drugs' etc. etc. automatically into their .signature files. The idea was to try and trigger the NSA into recording all sorts of silly and trivial e-mails. The fashion did not last long. Of course, if people were to try to do this these days, they would no doubt be 'disappeared' to Guantanamo. There is one thing though that puzzles me: If supposed enemies of the nation (i.e. anyone who opposes Bush or Haliburton) are the target of this snooping, then how are they handling the State of Louisiana these days? Everybody in Louisiana hates Bush and Co. for their pathetic response to our Hurricane problems (they still want to charge the State $3.7 Billion for the money that FEMA workers are wasting in 4 star hotels). Do they really have the resources....opps, there is a knock on the door...men in suits...ARRGGHHH! ;)
I live in Louisiana, though I am not originally from here. The comments about the corruption in this State are not fair. The Feds want to deny us reasonable help, on the basis of such slander. Slashdot should be able to do better. Bellsouth are not exactly the most ethical company, especially when their monopolies are challenged. I refuse to do business with them, since before the Hurricanes. They seem to be acting badly again, so boycott them. However, please do not slander Louisiana. Remember, most of the 'hurricane relief' around here has been done by regular people helping others. The Feds have been useless. In a town a bit North of where I live a shelter had 3000 people in it at one point, with no government aid whatsoever. It was entirely supported by donations by locals. In the town of Lafayette, where I live, Bellsouth is fighting the local, city owned, utility system, because it wants to lay fiber to every home. The utility will do a better and cheaper job than Bellsouth, so Bellsouth are upset. So, feel free to be mean about Bellsouth, but do not slader Louisiana, unless you know what you are talking about. We are down, but do not deserve to be kicked. Kick Bellsouth and the moron in the Whitehouse and his useless cronies instead.
Yup, well guessed!
Bellsouth already have some rather 'dubious' business practices. For instance, the City in which I live has proposed that our local (City owned) utility company will provide fiber in the home to all our residents. Bellsouth have been raising every type of spurious legal claim possible to try and block this measure, even though it was widely supported in a referendum (forced by Bellsouth!). Currently, Bellsouth provides DSL service in this area and Cox provides cable. It is a basic duopoly. Needless to say, the rates are much higher than elsewhere. Earthlink does provide cheaper service. However, one can only use Earthlink if one has local telephone service from...you guessed it,...Bellsouth. My phone service is provided by AT and T. They cannot provide DSL service, because it is blocked by...you guessed it, Bellsouth. I complained about this situation to the FCC. However, the day after I lodged my complaint, the FCC made a ruling saying it was just fine for Bellsouth to behave this way. So, these new 'ideas' from Bellsouth appear to be part of their on-going plans to hold on to their near monopoly situation. I think that it stinks. I cannot wait for the city fiber to arrive at my house.
I took an interest in Diebold's software, particularly GEMS, a while ago. I took the opportunity to have a play with it and found some quite scarey results. I wrote these results up and posted them on a webpage that includes photos. See http://www.ucs.louisiana.edu/~isb9112/election/ The short version is that it is incredibly easy to switch votes from one candidate to another. Rest assured, this is not just some wierdo crank thing, I am a real professor. I have even had a paper based on this work accepted at refereed academic conference which took place at UC Berkeley. Problems such as those illustrated are almost certainly the reason why Diebold doesn't want to release its code, other technical difficulties notwithstanding.
This is a bit off-topic, but this discussion is timely. This afternoon, we received a draft of a memo for comment. The gist of the memo is that, due to State budget cuts, as a result of the Hurricanes (I am in Louisiana), the suits have had the bright idea of having all sys admins shut down their machines when they are not in use. The suggestion was that machines should go to standby mode after 15 mins and power off after two hours of inactivity. Ages ago, I remember a debate on the topic of whether or not it was better to leave a computer running, or switch it off, at least at night. My recollection is that the conclusion was that it was better to leave machines running, due to wear and tear on the hardware from booting up. I did some Googling on the topic, but did not find anything too concrete (like real research). If anyone reading this knows of some empirical studies, I would be very grateful. It would be a real shame if, to save a few $ on Watts, we ended up costing ourselves a bomb in trashed hardware (which we currently cannot afford to replace). Please post replies here. Many thanks!
As I sit here in my office, I am typing in Suse Linux. I have three Linux desktop machines also in the office and an old laptop running Windows 2k. However, I am listening to the iPod my brother gave me as a birthday gift. Does this mean I have been 'converted'? Does this mean that if I buy a cake at the Baptist bake sale, I become a Baptist too? Don't they call this 'slamming' when the phone companies do it? We should be told! ;)
In the discussion section, some people have argued that net connectivity is less important than food and shelter. This is true. However, the web site was the only way for most people to get registered with FEMA. As this is one of the most important tasks, once basic needs are met, network connections should not be under estimated. A good word should also be given to Yahoo, for providing free e-mail accounts. Last time I used this system (ages ago), they required a referring e-mail address. They no longer require this. This was crucial, as FEMA require an e-mail address to complete the registration process. That being said, it is a shame that FEMA (known in these parts as 'The Finally, Eventually Made-it Agency) has otherwise been so damn useless.
There was another lab where people could have more general net access. There many people seemed to find a huge sense of relief in being able to see their houses on google, even when the houses were under water. One older man I helped was totally blown away at the idea of seeing the Ninth ward of N.O from space. He wept when he saw that his house still had a roof, and then started making jokes about how the fishing would be good from his porch! For a person who has lost everything, anything that can bring a bit of joy is very valuable indeed.
Another point needs to be raised in the context of this liveCD discussion. This is the fact that on many older machines (I know this, as I have alot of practice with these), the CD drive is one of the first things to fry. This is a problem.
One final point, in the article, there is a discussion of the role of M$ in the disaster relief in this State. The current 'official' State operating system is Win2k. So, they will have been especially motivated to assist a good customer. However, from time to time we hear rumours that the State is going to make M$ software mandatory (I work for a State of Louisiana institution). Fortunately, this hasn't happened yet.
Just my 2 cents.
Please contribute to a Katrina relief fund. The need is huge and the support (at least from the Feds) so far has been minimal.
I have run into a similar kind of set of problems, as I run an on-line philosophy journal (see http://ejap.louisiana.edu). The solution I found was to convert the documents down into RTF format as an intemediate step. There are a number of shareware RTF-to-HTML converters available. Unfortunatly, I cannot find the name of the program I usually use at the moment, or a link for it, but googling for "RTF to HTML" shareware produces quite a few likely candidates. This system worksjust fine for me. What I like best about the program I have is that it puts the HTML codes in in French! If you look at the source code for the most recent edition of my journal, you can see the system in action.
Of course, there is good news. We just had an election in which approval was given to our local city owned utility company to lay fiber to the home. Needless to say, BellSouth fought this hard and, having lost, keep sueing the utility company. I believe that more people should complain to the FCC etc. to get such abuse of monopolies stopped, and to prevent proposals such as the one under discussion here from even being considered.
During the whole election process in November I was able to study the tabulating machine software. What I found scared the hell out of me. I have put up an account, along with photos of a real election databased being rigged. It is available at http://www.ucs.ull.edu/~isb9112/election/ I for one was not surprised that the exit polls didn't match the recorded values. Any steps which can be taken to reduce the possibility of such cheating should be applauded.
This is like shooting fish in a barrel. It is just a shame that so many people are too brainwashed to see this for the silliness that it is.
Wait a moment here. Just because this fool was from Louisiana doesn't really justify all the Louisiana jokes. As a Brit who has lived in this State for 8 years and taught in a University, I can tell you that not everone here is dumb. Not only that, of any State I have been to Louisiana is one of the most interesting. We have Cajun food, Cajun music, Zydeco music and Creole music. We have amazing festivals, many of which are completely free (see http://www.festivalinternational.com -- the site sucks, but the festival rocks). OK, the place is a bit ferral and rough at the edges and our politics can be a little 'interesting' (as the saying goes, 'We have the best politicians money can buy'), but that helps make this a unique State. It sure beats the strip mall culture that you find elsewhere. On our campus, we have 'gators -- this is wild and wierd. Perhaps some of you should come visit. But please do not insult a place you do not know because of one fool.
I now see the logic. If I want to keep my copy of M$ software updated, I must run it on a Windoze machine. After all, Micro$oft now tells me that they are cheaper at the level of the TCO and more secure. So, it is bye-bye Linux, bye-bye OpenOffice, bye-bye Nvu, bye-bye Mozilla, bye-bye Firefox. Now I know that I need Windoze Fisher Price (XP). Now I know I need M$ Office. Now I know I need FrontPage. Now I know I need Outlook. Now I know I need IE. How could I have been so stupid? How could I have not seen this before? Praise the Lord! Bill, can I have your babies too? [Would someone please pass the Soma!]
In the posts here, there is some confusion between the notion of a Turing machine simpliciter, and the notion of a Universal Turing machine. For all the technical details including the relationship between Turing machines and finite state automata, people should refer to Hopcroft, J. and Ulman, J. (1969), Formal Languages and Their Relation to Automata, Addison-Wesley, and Hopcroft, J. and Ulman, J. (1979) Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages and Computation,. Also of note is McCulloch, W. and Pitts, W. (1943), "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity" in Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics, 5/115.
This being said, science in the public domain is one of those areas where the 'adjusting' of facts can be especially pernicious. As a society, we need to make the smartest choices we can. In order to do this, we should base our inferences on the best evidence available. It is in this respect that this report is especially troubling.
What is perhaps worse is that the manipulation of truth seems to be a common strategy by the current administration. This is decidedly Orwellian. The site truthout.org continues to raise excamples. What worries me the most is that there is some evidence that the entire democratic process may have been under attack in the recent elections. I did some research myself on this issue, and was horrified by the conclusions (see http://www.ucs.louisiana.edu/~isb9112/election/). I may not be an American, but I am a scientist. When it is so easy to smell a rat, it amazes me that so many normal people and folks in the (allegedly 'liberal') media can swallow the utter rubbish they are told. Hopefully, the folks at /. are smart enough and well educated enough to see how dangerous these trends are.
Will be the first to produce the Blue Pill of death? [Sorry, couldn't resist]
At the end of this post it is claimed that "[CogVis is] not a blackbox model, as in say Neural Networks, ..." This view is sadly very out of date. This criticism of Artificial neural networks goes back to around 1991 (see for example McCloskey, M. "Networks and Theories: The Place of Connectionism in Cognitive Science" in Psychological Science,, 2/6). The kind of connection between the rules developed by a connectionist system and logical rules was demonstrated in the mid-90s. See Berkeley, I., Dawson, M., Medler, D. and Schopflocher (1995), "Density Plots of Hidden Unit Activations Reveal Interpretable Bands" in Connection Science 7/2. It is clear from this paper that neural networks are very far from being 'black boxes'. A more recent discussion of these issues can be found in Berkeley, I. and Gunay, C. (2004) "Conducting Banding Analysis with Trained Networks of Sigmoid Units" in Connecttion Science , 16/2. See also Dawson, M. (2004) Minds and Machines, Blackwells.
I saw this stuff yesterday. It looked amusing, but with all the stuff about murders, the CIA and the like, it looked like a tin foil hat number. Who knows. However, the is a real issue that hasn't got much attention. This concerns how easy it is to swap vote counts on certain tabulator machines, whilst leaving no trace at all in the logs. The technique is illustrated and discussed at http://www.ucs.louisiana.edu/~isb9112/election/. THIS is much more of a concern.
The advice here is sound. There are all sorts of evil things that can be done with javascript. I know how to do some of them and I am one of the 'good guys'. Goodness knows what can be done by those who are less well intentioned. I always run with javascript disabled, simnple as that. Not only does this prevent the problem of pop-ups, it also keeps one safe from many other dangers. If a site requires javascript, then either I will simply not use it, or I will briefly enable javascript only as necessary. One of the reasons I do not own a Subaru, is due to their love of javascript, even though their cars are great. So, webmasters be aware, your choices can influence consumer habits!
Well, I for one am a bit sceptical about the 30 year claim. Presumably such a device would need some kind of software. Software typically likes to reside on an operating system. Whilst many versions of *nix are quite stable, I doubt even they could last 30 years. Worse yet, what if they used a Micro$oft product? I think 30 years without a blue screen of death is too much to ask for. Of course, under such a scenario, the blue screen might well spell death for those around ;)
Although this news is probably bad for YRO issues, there may be an upside. If the NSA is packet-sniffing e-mail traffic, then maybe they will be motivated to find a way of reducing the amount of Nigerean printer cartridge enlargement spam messages. If we are really lucky, they may even share the solution with us all. Of course, it is also possible that the guys at the NSA may all suddenly become hung like donkeys, NOT!
If the goal is to 'harness the potential of knowledge and technology' and to 'find effective and innovative ways to put this potential at the service of development for all.', then there is something very curious about worrying about intellectual property rights and profits. As anyone in Economics 101 knows, one of the functions of a pricing mechanism is to ration commodities. The wide scope quantifier in the phrase 'for all' suggests that any rationing is contrary to the stated goal. I'd love to hear the reasoning for why a person in a developing country needs to spend $100+ dollars on a Micro$oft product, rather than use an Open Source alternative (N.B. it was earlier reported that some folks in India make as little as $35 per month!). It sounds to me like the legal logicians from SCO must have had a hand in coming up with this!