Donate your speech for a GPL speech data collection so they can do better recognition.
Includes seperate instructions for windows and linux users. (Wonder if there will be any significant differences in the quality of the data based on OS...)
I don't know why the mistake in the article, but earlier this year Congress gave the Defense Intelligence Agency exemption from FOIA requests regarding files that "document the conduct of foreign intelligence or counterintelligence operations."
According to this article about it, the head of George Washington U's National Security Archive said
[T]hese exemptions... create a black hole into which the bureaucracy can drive just about any kind of information it wants to. And you can bet that Guantánamo, Abu-Ghraib-style information is what DIA and others would want to hide.
This is the 5th agency to receive such an exemption from the Freedom of Information Act.
Secret closed government is the enemy of liberty. True conservatives should understand this.
Is that the Daily show comes with a large dose of cynicism.
One could argue that the real difference is that broadcast news is cynical and doesn't know it.
Why? Because while I find the cynicism of Stewart and especially Colbert to be quite corrosive, it's seeing bullsh*t delivered with a straight face on the network news that makes me really cynical. Having Stewart call them on it reminds me that sanity is not completely lost.
Research funding is tight at universities. So we're seeing folks re-purpose their research to target grants from Homeland Security. It's a reverse of all those defense labs trying to find non-military uses for their stuff at the end of the cold war.
I'm all for more funding for university research. But this particular use is silly. For one thing, CIA analysts already perform this task, evaluating the press within their regions of expertise. They will need to keep doing this no matter what.
And since nobody listens to them anyway, let me unveil my new natural language processing program which will do the same job for just pennies on the tax dollar:
1. cat foreign_press >/dev/null 2. stick fingers in ear and say "la la la la" really loud 3. assign Karen Hughes to make Arabic radio spots that say "America is Krumbelievable!" 4. profit!
At which point, I suspect something will come along that will randomize your MAC address during every reboot. Just like there are privacy tools today that keep cookies off of your system.
Maybe you can rescue your own anonymity by being careful and tricky, but you'll be throwing grandma to the sharks. I think this whole "I'll just change the MAC address" approach is head-in-the-sand.
As an aside, I have an Atheros-based wifi card with the madwifi driver for Linux. A known issue in the current release notes: "MAC address changing currently unsupported (#323) and unstable (#716)".
As an aside to the aside, the manufacturer offered a rebate that required submitting the MAC address along with the sales receipt.
People who think they can preserve anonymity by playing with the MAC address are kidding themselves and abandoning their grandmothers' privacy.
Just think about it like an anonymous email address. Once you use it to buy something online (thus revealing your identity), you have to change it for the next website in order to preserve anonymity.
As for reuse, this about as much a non-issue as reuse of telephone and social security numbers. Individual numbers are not recycled fast enough to remove their salience. They were intended to be globally unique, and for practical purposes, they are.
MAC addresses don't go outside of the broadcast domain, dimwit.
Actually, your MAC address, which is a globally unique identifier, forms half of your IPV6 address unless you do something unusual to avoid that. So it is a very valid privacy concern.
The AOL search data episode showed how easy it is to unmask anonymity when all you have is a bunch of URLs coming from the same unique anonymous identifier. IPV6 increases the risk of this kind of aggregation of supposedly anonymous activity.
When IPV6 is here, Choicepoint will probably pay for your MAC address. And everyone else will pay Choicepoint to know who the "anonymous" person is visiting their website.
As a bonus, NSA will find it easier to know exactly who is using the free public wifi at the library.
Exactly correct. To which I'll add Ford, GM, and ITT as American bastions of capitalism that were more than happy to do business with the Nazis and profit from both sides of the war.
Aside from the idea that capitalism is amoral, I agree with nothing the grandparent said. Comparing China to Nazi Germany is laughable.
Even President Reagan's assistant secretary of defense says [PDF] we could cut some of these nuclear weapons and not harm our national security.
And Robert McNamara (of Vietnam War fame) is now saying that the US should urgently confront the dangers of it's nuclear weapons policies to avoid another Cuban missile crisis scenario.
Although voltage conversion would still take place on the PC motherboard, the simpler design of the new power supply would make it easier to achieve higher overall efficiencies.
Clearly, the Google engineers are aiming for efficiency on the desktop, and they think single-voltage helps that effort.
Huh?? Why would you think higher-efficiency single voltage PSUs are not a good idea for the desktop? They aren't talking about having 12V distributed to your home, if that's what you were thinking.
[And why is the referenced Google paper called "High-Efficiency Power Supplies for Home Computers and Servers"?]
Unfortunate, yes, but there isn't any inherent legal obligation for a 3rd party to hold information you give them in confidence (with certain specific exceptions, like healthcare workers, grand juries, etc, of which AOL is none).
According to TFA, the lawsuit "alleges violations of the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act and California consumer-protection laws."
That doesn't rule out an argument relating to whether AOL broke their own privacy policy, but it's definitely not the only thing in play here.
BTW, did anyone else hear something like a giant shoe dropping?
Actually I wish people in government would learn from what HP has done in response to the scandal. Yeah it has been mostly damage control instead of real accountability, but in the end Patricia Dunn is OUT, because HP were forced to respond. And Hurd's position is far from secure. (Not appointing an interim Chair, are you serious?)
Yet scandal after scandal unrolls at the whitehouse and all we see from congress is appeasement. They just made torture retroactively legal to '97. Absolutely un-fucking-believable.
That's much better than the prototype I saw, where the robot arm disembowels the customer and spills their entrails all over the linoleum./blockquote Whiner. What part of "you have 30 seconds to comply" did he not understand?
Sorry, no. Congress did not force Clinton to balance the budget. His own cabinet (Bentsen and Rubin) convinced him that unless they kept Wall Street happy by doing what Greenspan has consistently recommended (cut that deficit), then they would not have the tax revenue available to invest in social programs.
Read Robert Reich's memoir (called something like "Locked in the Cabinet"), and better yet "The Agenda" by Bob Woodward.
But you are right that the Rebublican Congress got greedier under Bush, and they did away with bugetary constraints like pay-go rules, over the lengthly objections of Democrats.
These various posts that say "that's life and anything else would be a Commie Dictatorship" are just way overstated.
Consider this: If someone complains to your phone company about something you do with your phone line, 99.9% of the time the phone company will shrug it off and tell them to call the police if a crime has been committed. They will not shut off your phone service or otherwise respond to threats of lawsuits on the basis of what you do with your phone. It's just not their problem.
That's both pro-liberty (phones don't get shut off arbitrarily), and pro-business (no legal liability for customers actions).
Why shouldn't it be exactly the same for ISPs and DNS registrars?
A broadly-worded TOS is the way that ISPs in countries like America perform censorship.
We ostensibly have freedom of speech, and don't legally ban things like hate speech as they do in France, for example. Instead we use our corporations to enforce the same kinds of restrictions against "offensive content" and such.
In this case, GoDaddy's TOS includes this gem:
Go Daddy reserves the right to terminate Services if Your usage of the Services results in, or is the subject of, legal action or threatened legal action, against Go Daddy or any of its affiliates or partners, without consideration for whether such legal action or threatened legal action is eventually determined to be with or without merit.
So any jackass could shut you down by threatening to sue GoDaddy. Niiiice.
"Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one."
[TOS = "Terms of Service", you know -- the huge page of small print that you scroll past in order to click the "I agree" button.]
Claiming that Democrats can be "trusted with" it shows how little you understand the way the federal government handles deficit spending, and how long deficit spending has been going on. Face facts, man. They're all a bunch of bastards up there.
You would have to be deliberately ignorant of recent history to make that claim. Look at what Clinton did with the deficit during his years. Then look at what the Republican controlled Congress and White House have done under G.W. Now try to tell me with a straight face that there's no difference on deficit spending between the two parties.
Also, does the word "lockbox" ring any kind of a bell?
[...]the big institutions usually vote for the boards.
Patricia Dunn came from one of the biggest institutions. She ran Barclays Global Investors, which manages epic amounts of money on behalf of large corporations and governments.
I guess she translated that into a position on HP's board. I was also under the impression that she had a hand in getting her friend Carly Fiorina put in the top slot. I'd be interested to know what involvement she had in getting Fiorina replaced.
..since most of these shoddy patents get through because the patent examiner doesn't realize the applicant has just fancied up something obvious, another major improvement would be to require patent summaries to be easily readable.
That's an interesting premise, and I'd support clarity in any case, but I think it's not the root problem.
The patent office has no disincentive to allowing a patent. (Quite the opposite, since USPTO gets paid fees by applicants.) If they get it wrong, big companies can just use their legal departments to sort things out, so who cares?
But FOSS isn't usually backed by the kind of money it takes to get justice in the "grant 'em ALL and let God sort 'em out" approach.
So maybe we need to disincent USPTO from granting marginal patents, as well as enabling them to better understand what is bogus like you suggested.
We have to earn their trust each and every day and with each and every action we take," AOL Chief Executive Jonathan Miller wrote in a separate memo obtained by Reuters.
Did AOL axe Govern because they are serious about earning trust? Or did they do this just to head off regulation?
Without further steps this is only symbolic.
Here's the real problem:
AOL currently stores search data that can identify users for 30 days. Anonymous search data, the kind divulged by AOL in early August, is stored indefinitely, the source said.
Slashdot Mirror
So long as there is no IceWeasel for Windows to detract from Firefox, it's all good.
P.S. -- Attention Debian, please tell your weasel to stop humping my leg.
Record Your Speech and Submit it to VoxForge
Donate your speech for a GPL speech data collection so they can do better recognition.
Includes seperate instructions for windows and linux users. (Wonder if there will be any significant differences in the quality of the data based on OS...)
According to this article about it, the head of George Washington U's National Security Archive said
This is the 5th agency to receive such an exemption from the Freedom of Information Act.
Secret closed government is the enemy of liberty. True conservatives should understand this.
One could argue that the real difference is that broadcast news is cynical and doesn't know it.
Why? Because while I find the cynicism of Stewart and especially Colbert to be quite corrosive, it's seeing bullsh*t delivered with a straight face on the network news that makes me really cynical. Having Stewart call them on it reminds me that sanity is not completely lost.
Research funding is tight at universities. So we're seeing folks re-purpose their research to target grants from Homeland Security. It's a reverse of all those defense labs trying to find non-military uses for their stuff at the end of the cold war.
/dev/null
I'm all for more funding for university research. But this particular use is silly. For one thing, CIA analysts already perform this task, evaluating the press within their regions of expertise. They will need to keep doing this no matter what.
And since nobody listens to them anyway, let me unveil my new natural language processing program which will do the same job for just pennies on the tax dollar:
1. cat foreign_press >
2. stick fingers in ear and say "la la la la" really loud
3. assign Karen Hughes to make Arabic radio spots that say "America is Krumbelievable!"
4. profit!
At which point, I suspect something will come along that will randomize your MAC address during every reboot. Just like there are privacy tools today that keep cookies off of your system.
Maybe you can rescue your own anonymity by being careful and tricky, but you'll be throwing grandma to the sharks. I think this whole "I'll just change the MAC address" approach is head-in-the-sand.
As an aside, I have an Atheros-based wifi card with the madwifi driver for Linux. A known issue in the current release notes: "MAC address changing currently unsupported (#323) and unstable (#716)".
As an aside to the aside, the manufacturer offered a rebate that required submitting the MAC address along with the sales receipt.
People who think they can preserve anonymity by playing with the MAC address are kidding themselves and abandoning their grandmothers' privacy.
Just think about it like an anonymous email address. Once you use it to buy something online (thus revealing your identity), you have to change it for the next website in order to preserve anonymity.
As for reuse, this about as much a non-issue as reuse of telephone and social security numbers. Individual numbers are not recycled fast enough to remove their salience. They were intended to be globally unique, and for practical purposes, they are.
Actually, your MAC address, which is a globally unique identifier, forms half of your IPV6 address unless you do something unusual to avoid that. So it is a very valid privacy concern.
The AOL search data episode showed how easy it is to unmask anonymity when all you have is a bunch of URLs coming from the same unique anonymous identifier. IPV6 increases the risk of this kind of aggregation of supposedly anonymous activity.
When IPV6 is here, Choicepoint will probably pay for your MAC address. And everyone else will pay Choicepoint to know who the "anonymous" person is visiting their website.
As a bonus, NSA will find it easier to know exactly who is using the free public wifi at the library.
Exactly correct. To which I'll add Ford, GM, and ITT as American bastions of capitalism that were more than happy to do business with the Nazis and profit from both sides of the war.
Aside from the idea that capitalism is amoral, I agree with nothing the grandparent said. Comparing China to Nazi Germany is laughable.
I don't know about 23 years ago, but here's real data on how global attitudes towards the US have changed in the past several years.
Here's a video of Ben Cohen (of Ben & Jerry's ice cream fame) that puts the size of the US nuclear arsenal in perspective.
Ben's BBs [flash]
Even President Reagan's assistant secretary of defense says [PDF] we could cut some of these nuclear weapons and not harm our national security.
And Robert McNamara (of Vietnam War fame) is now saying that the US should urgently confront the dangers of it's nuclear weapons policies to avoid another Cuban missile crisis scenario.
My thought exactly. Isn't one of SSL's advantages in not *needing* the infrastructure that IPSec requires (support in your kernel, router, etc.)?
Clearly, the Google engineers are aiming for efficiency on the desktop, and they think single-voltage helps that effort.
Huh?? Why would you think higher-efficiency single voltage PSUs are not a good idea for the desktop? They aren't talking about having 12V distributed to your home, if that's what you were thinking.
[And why is the referenced Google paper called "High-Efficiency Power Supplies for Home Computers and Servers"?]
According to TFA, the lawsuit "alleges violations of the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act and California consumer-protection laws."
That doesn't rule out an argument relating to whether AOL broke their own privacy policy, but it's definitely not the only thing in play here.
BTW, did anyone else hear something like a giant shoe dropping?
MPlayer, eh? One wonders whether they licensed any proprietary codecs for it.
Actually I wish people in government would learn from what HP has done in response to the scandal. Yeah it has been mostly damage control instead of real accountability, but in the end Patricia Dunn is OUT, because HP were forced to respond. And Hurd's position is far from secure. (Not appointing an interim Chair, are you serious?)
Yet scandal after scandal unrolls at the whitehouse and all we see from congress is appeasement. They just made torture retroactively legal to '97. Absolutely un-fucking-believable.
Sorry, no. Congress did not force Clinton to balance the budget. His own cabinet (Bentsen and Rubin) convinced him that unless they kept Wall Street happy by doing what Greenspan has consistently recommended (cut that deficit), then they would not have the tax revenue available to invest in social programs.
Read Robert Reich's memoir (called something like "Locked in the Cabinet"), and better yet "The Agenda" by Bob Woodward.
But you are right that the Rebublican Congress got greedier under Bush, and they did away with bugetary constraints like pay-go rules, over the lengthly objections of Democrats.
These various posts that say "that's life and anything else would be a Commie Dictatorship" are just way overstated.
Consider this: If someone complains to your phone company about something you do with your phone line, 99.9% of the time the phone company will shrug it off and tell them to call the police if a crime has been committed. They will not shut off your phone service or otherwise respond to threats of lawsuits on the basis of what you do with your phone. It's just not their problem.
That's both pro-liberty (phones don't get shut off arbitrarily), and pro-business (no legal liability for customers actions).
Why shouldn't it be exactly the same for ISPs and DNS registrars?
We ostensibly have freedom of speech, and don't legally ban things like hate speech as they do in France, for example. Instead we use our corporations to enforce the same kinds of restrictions against "offensive content" and such.
In this case, GoDaddy's TOS includes this gem:
So any jackass could shut you down by threatening to sue GoDaddy. Niiiice.
"Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one."
[TOS = "Terms of Service", you know -- the huge page of small print that you scroll past in order to click the "I agree" button.]
You would have to be deliberately ignorant of recent history to make that claim. Look at what Clinton did with the deficit during his years. Then look at what the Republican controlled Congress and White House have done under G.W. Now try to tell me with a straight face that there's no difference on deficit spending between the two parties.
Also, does the word "lockbox" ring any kind of a bell?
Patricia Dunn came from one of the biggest institutions. She ran Barclays Global Investors, which manages epic amounts of money on behalf of large corporations and governments.
I guess she translated that into a position on HP's board. I was also under the impression that she had a hand in getting her friend Carly Fiorina put in the top slot. I'd be interested to know what involvement she had in getting Fiorina replaced.
That's an interesting premise, and I'd support clarity in any case, but I think it's not the root problem.
The patent office has no disincentive to allowing a patent. (Quite the opposite, since USPTO gets paid fees by applicants.) If they get it wrong, big companies can just use their legal departments to sort things out, so who cares?
But FOSS isn't usually backed by the kind of money it takes to get justice in the "grant 'em ALL and let God sort 'em out" approach.
So maybe we need to disincent USPTO from granting marginal patents, as well as enabling them to better understand what is bogus like you suggested.
Did AOL axe Govern because they are serious about earning trust? Or did they do this just to head off regulation?
Without further steps this is only symbolic.
Here's the real problem:
What, if anything, will AOL do about this?