Schneier addresses one important point here. That the intelligence community is created in it's present form as a means to fight the cold war. It was made as an conventional army fighting another conventional army (the GRU and KGB) and the sigint operations was hand-tailored to this kind of war. But what has happened since is that the enemy has changed. The guerrilla tactics of terrorism is a sigint nightmare, and scaling it to perverse and antidemocratic level isn't helping at all. Every time I hear about the needle and the haystack I can't but wonder how these dinosaurs have come to pull this Jurassic stunt on us.
The reality is that what works is not sigint. It is not more computers. What seems to be working is classic infiltration. Please think about that Dianne Feinstein before you use more American tax-money on your Silicon Valley pets.
It is valid, but always brought up in a context, where the discussion is not about "who should sell", but "is alcohol bad." This discussion is about Norway serving rye flatbread once a week to their soldiers while their state-owned oil company is selling fossil fuel. I know many pushers and when they start saying: "If it was not me..." they are pressed for arguments.
None the less - this bad analogy shows how irrational we conceive the world. There is a reason that it is used to make people aware of the threat, because people fear fictitious brown persons overacting in Hollywood-movies more than an abstract scientific risk-calculi. It says more about our ridiculous way of thinking that we need an evil, human face to take a warning serious.
The fact that modern democracies have these grey-shaded institutions and make use of them to spy on each other is something that we probably will have to live with, and maybe even appreciate. As long as the targets for the espionage is large centralized power centres, like government, the military or organized, violent groups. In some way I think that we need, as in Iain Banks culrure-books, someone to step in in "special circumstances." Assassination, revolt or similar should of course rather NOT be the job of our intelligence services. Think if MI6 and CIA hadn't instigated a coup in Iran in 1953 against one of the regions first democratic government? How would the middle east have looked today?
But the really big wrong that Snowden has revealed is mass-surveillance of the entire population. This kind of technological spying can only be used for one thing: anti-democratic, cost-heavy practises, targeted against the press, grass-root and the very population that the system was intended to protect.
When I first saw the Snowden-film from Hong Kong I thought: "damn! he has forfeited his life and nobody will care. And now this! Not only has he shaken the political world-society, he has also aroused the tech-world and made it possible to make some major changes. Hope I will be running this new protocol by next year and be able to send super-secret Christmas-cards to the select few who is also using it!
In Sweden the radical-feminist ideology has made similar intrusions in the free scientific research. This is not an American-only problem.
Watch from ca. 1:39:00 or thereabout. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yn3cHsHnUPM
The program was made by Swedens state television by a Iraqi-Swedish female journalist and she came close to leading Swedish politicians and feminist lobbyists only because of their overly positive PR stance towards women from third-world countries.
This discussion is awfully American and to a Dane like me it seems that most the people posting here (I haven't had the time to read it all) is ignoring that other countries, amongst them my own, has a lot of experience with minimizing the risk of bicycling.
It goes without saying that bicycle-riders, like pedestrians, are vulnerable to a moving ton of steel like a car, but for pedestrians you have side-walks. In Denmark a lot of the bicycle lanes are elevated just like a side-walk and this is definitely making it safer to ride in the city. Bicycle-lanes is working for millions of Dutch and Danish bicycle-riders, so I think that the whole discussion is more about culture and the difficulties to adopt new infrastructural concepts than anything else.
Footage from Copenhagen : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXw_t172BKY and this is a video posted by another dude further up the posts also from Copenhagen. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbXIXQGQVZM
You are right, still XML is a hard hitting buzz word that has the attention of the politicians. XML and open formats have been synonymous at least in my country (Denmark) where open formats is something no politicians talk against (as opposed to open source).
The political system is, in its way of making decisions, very far from the way you makes decisions in IT departments, small and big (there is of course a certain political influence even here). But for politicians it is not about having the most efficient system. It doesn't matter if it is expensive as long as you have control and can avoid scandals. MS offers exactly the kind of control that politicians like. With MS they talk to people in suits that can be manipulated economically. This is preferable to Idealist.
The good thing is that their fear of scandal can be used and that is what have happened, recently. The politicians worst nightmare is to look like a crafty bureaucrat and therefore they actually respond to the public pointing out the inconsistency of their arguments. We will see lots of this kind of things in the near future and that is a good thing. This whole slashdot story is about somebody trying to sneak MS in the backdoor. Five years ago nobody would have noticed.
Have been tried many times, it creates chaos. Take Iraq. You remove the Baath party and everything collapses.
Not to be cynical, but it seems what civilisation is all about is.. Bureaucracy. It is not like evolution or liberalism etc. has removed it. We have as much as the Romans did and even more.
Where is there and here? I guess what you are talking about is typical for all modern democracies, but still..
When I have discussed open source with Danish officials, they are always very conservative. They would choose to go for a more expensive, but known solution any day. If the known solution is on a discount they would not think about it for a minute. Civil servants are not like politicians at all. They aren't supposed to take any decisions (ideally), but to make everything work on a day to day basis. This make them shun risk at any cost, even if trying something new could bring big savings, more efficiency or the like. They live in a political world but opposed to the politicians their objective isn't to have a profile but to avoid making mistakes. They are as far as you come from an entrepreneur.
Europeans don't need to be multilingual. They only need to speak English to get along. Knowing more languages than English and their native tongue would be called well educated.
When I used the term cultured it was because of the irritating ethnocentric view of the parent post. I am not equating cultered and multilingual. I am equating cultered and sad hick. If everybody was thinking the same way, nobody would be able to talk to each other. I have nothing against English as an international language but English haven't won anything. Its simply the result of British colonial politics and some other occurrences in world history. We could be writing in French or in Spanish now for my sake (if only I was more fluent in those languages, of course..:) )
If you really think that you won something because English is the preferred international language, why are you participating in a discussion about a dictionary? You wont need it anyway. Keep on using your winning language on finnish and icelandic newsboards where people are cultured enough to know more than one language and will be able to answer you in your native tongue.
Still, they might need an online dictionary that is not based on English as backbone language, so they will be able to express themselves clearly in English./p
That English should be a severe screwed up language as opposed to Esperanto is rubbish. But it is true that English is not neutral.
Every language even the synthetic or the dead ones (Esperanto, Latin) has words that could be translated into multiple other words in other languages. A word like cat used in the example normally only has one meaning and is therefore good to showcase. But what about a word like the French "ennui". I am from Denmark and in my dictionary i get the following words: bekymring, bryderi, ærgelse; kedsomhed, kedsommelighed; lede (which about translates to: worry, trouble, vexation; Boredom, tedium; disgust)
I have great difficulty to see that you could make a really good database based on one table. The following quote from the project webpage illustrates just one problem
People from sci.lang google group have already discovered possible problems of this concept. For example table with English backbone descriptions will not allow adding of words which cannot be translated with one English word. There will be more tables. One English backbone descriptions > all languages and one for other direction. The new concept will also allow translating of thematic groups of words.
I can see the good things about using a backbone language, a fast database, easy maintenance etc. But to create a real dictionary you will have to design a more complex relational database. The drawback are of course the search time, that you will have to create more tools to oversee and maintain the project etc. but in the end wouldn't it be worthwhile?
None the less.. I am looking forward to see what this evolves into. If a global free database could be founded it would be a great step forward. I can't wait to have my Slashdot misspellings corrected by a plug-in in my browser..
Swahili is spoken by more than 40 million people (in some form or another)
The world changes quickly these years and Open Office can only be glad to support these people, even if most of them don't have acces to computers.
MS will be to late if Kenya or Tanzania the two countrys with swahili as official languages take OO for their administration. Both countrys need to get their shit together, but it still matters.. I think
I forgot the tags and more importantly forgot to mention where some of the text was taken from. This is how it should have looked:
" Linux is a trademark owned by William R. Della Croce, an individual, and previously owned by Linus Torvalds, the originator of the GNU code of the same name."
wrong!
"The Linux Trademark suit (1996-1997) Though this has been tried again in other countries, the definitive case over the trademark on "Linux" happenned after an individual named William R Della Croce, Jr of Massachussets fraudulently trademarked the name "Linux", claiming he had made the first use of the name in 1994. Nobody noticed until he sent threatening letters to WGS of Aurora, CO (Linux Mall), Yggdrasil of San Jose, CA (first maker of a Linux distribution on CD) and others. The Linux community provided ample evidence that this was not true. The resulting lawsuit was settled with the trademark being assigned to Linus Torvalds."
" Linux is a trademark owned by William R. Della Croce, an individual, and previously owned by Linus Torvalds, the originator of the GNU code of the same name."
wrong!
The Linux Trademark suit (1996-1997)
Though this has been tried again in other countries, the definitive case over the trademark on "Linux" happenned after an individual named William R Della Croce, Jr of Massachussets fraudulently trademarked the name "Linux", claiming he had made the first use of the name in 1994. Nobody noticed until he sent threatening letters to WGS of Aurora, CO (Linux Mall), Yggdrasil of San Jose, CA (first maker of a Linux distribution on CD) and others. The Linux community provided ample evidence that this was not true. The resulting lawsuit was settled with the trademark being assigned to Linus Torvalds.
Right!
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. That:) Still, the government are providing them with a few weeks of adrenalin-boosted excitement as compensation, before they incarcerate them.
Schneier addresses one important point here. That the intelligence community is created in it's present form as a means to fight the cold war. It was made as an conventional army fighting another conventional army (the GRU and KGB) and the sigint operations was hand-tailored to this kind of war. But what has happened since is that the enemy has changed. The guerrilla tactics of terrorism is a sigint nightmare, and scaling it to perverse and antidemocratic level isn't helping at all. Every time I hear about the needle and the haystack I can't but wonder how these dinosaurs have come to pull this Jurassic stunt on us. The reality is that what works is not sigint. It is not more computers. What seems to be working is classic infiltration. Please think about that Dianne Feinstein before you use more American tax-money on your Silicon Valley pets.
So am I. I wrote "fictitious brown persons." to refer to Hollywood-stereotypes, not to offend sensitive people. English is not my first language.
It is valid, but always brought up in a context, where the discussion is not about "who should sell", but "is alcohol bad." This discussion is about Norway serving rye flatbread once a week to their soldiers while their state-owned oil company is selling fossil fuel. I know many pushers and when they start saying: "If it was not me..." they are pressed for arguments.
Never said it wasn't valid :)
None the less - this bad analogy shows how irrational we conceive the world. There is a reason that it is used to make people aware of the threat, because people fear fictitious brown persons overacting in Hollywood-movies more than an abstract scientific risk-calculi. It says more about our ridiculous way of thinking that we need an evil, human face to take a warning serious.
Who said that the pusher wasn't telling the truth? You are just elaborating my point.
The classical pusher-argument. If I didn't sell smack someone way more evil than me would.
The fact that modern democracies have these grey-shaded institutions and make use of them to spy on each other is something that we probably will have to live with, and maybe even appreciate. As long as the targets for the espionage is large centralized power centres, like government, the military or organized, violent groups. In some way I think that we need, as in Iain Banks culrure-books, someone to step in in "special circumstances." Assassination, revolt or similar should of course rather NOT be the job of our intelligence services. Think if MI6 and CIA hadn't instigated a coup in Iran in 1953 against one of the regions first democratic government? How would the middle east have looked today?
But the really big wrong that Snowden has revealed is mass-surveillance of the entire population. This kind of technological spying can only be used for one thing: anti-democratic, cost-heavy practises, targeted against the press, grass-root and the very population that the system was intended to protect.
Why call it Dark-Mail? Grandma should be able to use... Dark Mail? Like she was a Sith-lord. What about PBP Pretty Better Privacy?
When I first saw the Snowden-film from Hong Kong I thought: "damn! he has forfeited his life and nobody will care. And now this! Not only has he shaken the political world-society, he has also aroused the tech-world and made it possible to make some major changes. Hope I will be running this new protocol by next year and be able to send super-secret Christmas-cards to the select few who is also using it!
In Sweden the radical-feminist ideology has made similar intrusions in the free scientific research. This is not an American-only problem. Watch from ca. 1:39:00 or thereabout. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yn3cHsHnUPM The program was made by Swedens state television by a Iraqi-Swedish female journalist and she came close to leading Swedish politicians and feminist lobbyists only because of their overly positive PR stance towards women from third-world countries.
Sorry ... more propaganda. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyrTx9SXkVI Sorry for the Enya-choir. Cycling in Copenhagen is not THAT Celtic/whaleish.
This discussion is awfully American and to a Dane like me it seems that most the people posting here (I haven't had the time to read it all) is ignoring that other countries, amongst them my own, has a lot of experience with minimizing the risk of bicycling. It goes without saying that bicycle-riders, like pedestrians, are vulnerable to a moving ton of steel like a car, but for pedestrians you have side-walks. In Denmark a lot of the bicycle lanes are elevated just like a side-walk and this is definitely making it safer to ride in the city. Bicycle-lanes is working for millions of Dutch and Danish bicycle-riders, so I think that the whole discussion is more about culture and the difficulties to adopt new infrastructural concepts than anything else. Footage from Copenhagen : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXw_t172BKY and this is a video posted by another dude further up the posts also from Copenhagen. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbXIXQGQVZM
Next time it will be 3.0.. ehm.. right Linus?
You are right, still XML is a hard hitting buzz word that has the attention of the politicians. XML and open formats have been synonymous at least in my country (Denmark) where open formats is something no politicians talk against (as opposed to open source).
The political system is, in its way of making decisions, very far from the way you makes decisions in IT departments, small and big (there is of course a certain political influence even here). But for politicians it is not about having the most efficient system. It doesn't matter if it is expensive as long as you have control and can avoid scandals. MS offers exactly the kind of control that politicians like. With MS they talk to people in suits that can be manipulated economically. This is preferable to Idealist.
The good thing is that their fear of scandal can be used and that is what have happened, recently. The politicians worst nightmare is to look like a crafty bureaucrat and therefore they actually respond to the public pointing out the inconsistency of their arguments. We will see lots of this kind of things in the near future and that is a good thing. This whole slashdot story is about somebody trying to sneak MS in the backdoor. Five years ago nobody would have noticed.
Have been tried many times, it creates chaos. Take Iraq. You remove the Baath party and everything collapses.
Not to be cynical, but it seems what civilisation is all about is.. Bureaucracy. It is not like evolution or liberalism etc. has removed it. We have as much as the Romans did and even more.
Where is there and here? I guess what you are talking about is typical for all modern democracies, but still..
When I have discussed open source with Danish officials, they are always very conservative. They would choose to go for a more expensive, but known solution any day. If the known solution is on a discount they would not think about it for a minute. Civil servants are not like politicians at all. They aren't supposed to take any decisions (ideally), but to make everything work on a day to day basis. This make them shun risk at any cost, even if trying something new could bring big savings, more efficiency or the like. They live in a political world but opposed to the politicians their objective isn't to have a profile but to avoid making mistakes. They are as far as you come from an entrepreneur.
Europeans don't need to be multilingual. They only need to speak English to get along. Knowing more languages than English and their native tongue would be called well educated.
:) )
When I used the term cultured it was because of the irritating ethnocentric view of the parent post. I am not equating cultered and multilingual. I am equating cultered and sad hick. If everybody was thinking the same way, nobody would be able to talk to each other. I have nothing against English as an international language but English haven't won anything. Its simply the result of British colonial politics and some other occurrences in world history. We could be writing in French or in Spanish now for my sake (if only I was more fluent in those languages, of course..
If you really think that you won something because English is the preferred international language, why are you participating in a discussion about a dictionary? You wont need it anyway. Keep on using your winning language on finnish and icelandic newsboards where people are cultured enough to know more than one language and will be able to answer you in your native tongue.
Still, they might need an online dictionary that is not based on English as backbone language, so they will be able to express themselves clearly in English./p
That English should be a severe screwed up language as opposed to Esperanto is rubbish. But it is true that English is not neutral.
Every language even the synthetic or the dead ones (Esperanto, Latin) has words that could be translated into multiple other words in other languages. A word like cat used in the example normally only has one meaning and is therefore good to showcase. But what about a word like the French "ennui". I am from Denmark and in my dictionary i get the following words: bekymring, bryderi, ærgelse; kedsomhed, kedsommelighed; lede (which about translates to: worry, trouble, vexation; Boredom, tedium; disgust)
I have great difficulty to see that you could make a really good database based on one table. The following quote from the project webpage illustrates just one problem
People from sci.lang google group have already discovered possible problems of this concept. For example table with English backbone descriptions will not allow adding of words which cannot be translated with one English word. There will be more tables. One English backbone descriptions > all languages and one for other direction. The new concept will also allow translating of thematic groups of words.
I can see the good things about using a backbone language, a fast database, easy maintenance etc. But to create a real dictionary you will have to design a more complex relational database. The drawback are of course the search time, that you will have to create more tools to oversee and maintain the project etc. but in the end wouldn't it be worthwhile?
None the less.. I am looking forward to see what this evolves into. If a global free database could be founded it would be a great step forward. I can't wait to have my Slashdot misspellings corrected by a plug-in in my browser..
Swahili is spoken by more than 40 million people (in some form or another)
The world changes quickly these years and Open Office can only be glad to support these people, even if most of them don't have acces to computers.
MS will be to late if Kenya or Tanzania the two countrys with swahili as official languages take OO for their administration. Both countrys need to get their shit together, but it still matters.. I think
I forgot the tags and more importantly forgot to mention where some of the text was taken from. This is how it should have looked:
" Linux is a trademark owned by William R. Della Croce, an individual, and previously owned by Linus Torvalds, the originator of the GNU code of the same name."
wrong!
"The Linux Trademark suit (1996-1997) Though this has been tried again in other countries, the definitive case over the trademark on "Linux" happenned after an individual named William R Della Croce, Jr of Massachussets fraudulently trademarked the name "Linux", claiming he had made the first use of the name in 1994. Nobody noticed until he sent threatening letters to WGS of Aurora, CO (Linux Mall), Yggdrasil of San Jose, CA (first maker of a Linux distribution on CD) and others. The Linux community provided ample evidence that this was not true. The resulting lawsuit was settled with the trademark being assigned to Linus Torvalds."
from: http://www.linux10.org/history/
Right!
" Linux is a trademark owned by William R. Della Croce, an individual, and previously owned by Linus Torvalds, the originator of the GNU code of the same name." wrong! The Linux Trademark suit (1996-1997) Though this has been tried again in other countries, the definitive case over the trademark on "Linux" happenned after an individual named William R Della Croce, Jr of Massachussets fraudulently trademarked the name "Linux", claiming he had made the first use of the name in 1994. Nobody noticed until he sent threatening letters to WGS of Aurora, CO (Linux Mall), Yggdrasil of San Jose, CA (first maker of a Linux distribution on CD) and others. The Linux community provided ample evidence that this was not true. The resulting lawsuit was settled with the trademark being assigned to Linus Torvalds. Right!