Amazon.com must have incredible infrastructure, as not only do they have an increasing amount of views, especially on Cyber Monday, but they are serving out more data than ever. The amount of Javascript on Amazon these days is insane: every listing has product image galleries, recommendation galleries, recently viewed galleries, etc. Sure, maybe they've calculated that all those dynamic features make for better sales, but as an individual using a netbook, I find it a frustrating experience to shop when browsing is so sluggish.
and you fire tanks and bombs into fully built-up and barricaded (by you) residential areas (effectively an open-air prison or, if you will, a ghetto) without letting people flee
Gaza does not share a border solely with Israel. If the Palestinians are not able to flee, it is because Egypt has chosen to keep its border closed.
Twitter can of course take it down on their own as they dont have to adhere to the US Constitution in this matter, but our government should NOT be involved in requesting that a individuals ( or group ) speech to be curtailed.
For groups designated as terrorist organization, "free speech" doesn't apply. It is illegal to provide a channel for such groups to communicate. Governments are not targeting the content of their speech per se (Hamas could be tweeting about cute little puppies and they would still be shut down) but rather are trying to disrupt these groups' ability to coordinate in any way.
Such strictures are nothing new. When the Soviet Union was around, importing Soviet publications into the US involved jumping through some hoops. Courts have mainly ruled that an inviable right to free speech does not extend to persons outside the United States anyway.
The only effect will be that they'll start communicating in other channels - which will make it more difficult to spy on their future intentions.
Twitter is not a useful source of learning about Hamas's "future intentions". There's nothing secret or unexpected there. It's one of several channels for distributing propaganda, that are also distributed in other ways. It's ridiculous to think that Western governments are dependent on #hamas to keep abreast with developments.
Furthermore, I suspect that the Twitter account is managed by Hamas's international representatives, who don't always have a good relationship with Hamas leadership inside Gaza, so it's all the less useful for predicting conflict with Israel.
My experience was late 1990s, early millennium. By that time, Carter's attempts to limit interception of American communications had long since passed away (that they had more of a free rein in recent years nonetheless did not stop the aforementioned chiefs from rueing his memory).
I was very happy to see that the European Parliament's ECHELON report, which appeared right about the time I left the military and the United States in 2001, brought some troubling developments to public knowledge, but sadly the events of September 11 pushed it under the radar entirely. After September 11, I have no faith at all that the US is not pursuing interception of everyone and everything. And from keeping in touch with some of my shipmates who signed for another hitch or two after me, I can only assume from their attitudes that the privacy of Americans is less respected than ever.
I have a number of friends who are spooks and they are the last defense against political appointees who try to engage in all kinds of prohibited activities.
My anecdotal experience contradicts yours. I trained as a Cryptologic Technician - Interpretative in the Navy (one of the SIGINT positions that ties into NSA). My fellow sailors considered protection of Americans' privacy to be a nuisance to their job, not a principle to uphold, and they felt it was OK to violate it as long as no one got caught. A few chiefs who had been in for a long time (some of whom had completed a tour at Ft. Meade) would grumble about how Jimmy Carter just because he tried to institute more strictures against such surveillance.
In case you don't get the parent post's literary allusion, he's talking about David Brin's Uplift series which starts with the novel Sundiver. It's a science fiction work based on the idea that human intelligence is due to ancient interference by a mysterious alien race. I re-read it recently; enjoyable stuff and much less dated than one would expect.
In retrospect, the fate of the Science-Fiction Channel/Sci-Fi/Syfy was inevitable. Attractive science fiction television is expensive to produce and there's no way a channel could have all its programming at the level of even a ST: TNG. What the channel ended up showing were science-fiction shows and television movies with shoestring budgets that often drew disgust. It's no suprise that the channel started moving to more sensationalistic fare that might have drawn it away from science-fiction, but drew it towards greater profitability.
Yes, good science-fiction can be made with low production values. Tarkovsky's Stalker is, among other things, one of the greatest science-fiction achievements in cinema, yet it shows no intricate machinery or massive on-screen violation of the laws of physics. But when scaled to a channel's entire programming, that sort of thing cannot grab and hold on to an audience.
I'm an ex-pat who's lived outside the U.S. for twenty years (this year). It's been fascinating to watch the transformation of America from a distance over the past decade.
America transformed into a snooping society well over a decade ago. Did you not read the European Parliament's ECHELON investigation in 2001 (a sensation sadly forgotten after the infinitely bigger press sensation of September 11th)? All that infrastructure was in place in the 1990s, and it was President Clinton who favoured intercepting foreign business correspondence in order to "level the playing field".
It couldn't be because our countr(y/ies) was(were) meddling in their affairs, causing them harm, taking things from them, and fundementally in disagreement with their way of life?
Only the last is really true. The current wave of Islamist violence, and hatred of the United States in particular, is traceable in large part to the writings of Sayyid Qutb. He visited the United States in the late 1940s and condemned it for its culture (e.g. its sexual openness, or at least its perceived sexual openness), not for meddling foreign policy. America's interventions in the Middle East certainly added fuel to the fire, but the fire was burning before them.
Slashdot has already featured at least one story recently about ELI. I can only assume that we're seeing this again because the possibility of shark jokes leads to more page views, which in turn generated more profits from advertising for this site's avarice-drunk proprietors.
TeX is an unsatisfactory half-measure between a visual formatting free-for-all and truly semantic markup. Even within the TeX community, it's now common to see publishers maintaining manuscripts in e.g. DocBook XML, only converting the data to TeX via XSLT when they want to produce final print output.
You don't seem to be aware that SSH keys are typically encrypted, and still require a password to unlock. Yes, some people foolishly enable passwordless use of SSH keys, but that does not reflect on the principle of SSH key login in general.
And as an addendum to my last post, I should mention that Christianity that came to the Subcontinent early on took on many Hindu customs, such as the caste system. I wouldn't be surprised if there were restrictions against meat-eating among some of the Syrians there.
Since when do Christians, Jews or Muslims abstain from meat? Or teach that meat makes you wicked?
Until fairly recently, fasting rules for Christians in the East and West had them abstaining from meat and dairy for about half the year altogether. Western Christians have mainly lost that tradition, but the East maintains it in principle. And monastics (at least in the East) don't ever eat meat at all, pointing to patristic literature that credits meat with stirring up passions. While it is true that historical Christianity believes that eating meat is not immoral or ritually impure, it is not necessary desirable.
So, the poetry of a violent, war-like culture is similar to rap?
Except the Kyrgyz were not a violent, war-like culture. At the time that the Manas tradition evolved, the Kyrgyz were a pretty peaceful nomadic pastoral society surrounded by great empires who were changing the borders all around them by force.
I'm sure this thread will have lots of blather about how hip hop lyrics are valid artistic expressions. I used to have the same prejudice, until I started studying epic poetry of Central Asia. Much of the Kyrgyz epic Manas, acclaimed by scholars in the West upon its discovery a century ago, is comparable to most hip hop artists: badly strung together recitations of how the hero has got lots of bling and bitches, and whoops the ass of his enemies.
The University has no right to infringe upon the civil rights of duly credentialed press members who are there legally and with permission.
It says right there in the Slashdot summary that this is a threat to "revoke the credentials of journalists". It says nothing about hassling the journalists after they have entered the venue. Get over yourself.
I imagine that the many science fiction fans in this nerd community will remember the opening of Larry Niven's The Ringworld Engineers. The protagonist Louis Wu has given up his friends, appetite for food and water and basically his whole life, content to sit still with an electrode delivering current straight to the pleasure centre of his brain. It's the ultimate addiction. Sure, this technology will probably bring myriad benefits, but doesn't it seem like there's some disquieting potential for misuse?
Difference tones are a psychoacoustic phenomenon. They have no physical reality that can be captured on a recording. Only if the playback equipment is able to produce the original two frequencies will listeners hear them.
While only dogs can hear the tones themselves, the beats produced by those high-frequency sounds against lower--frequency sounds are audible to humans. Besides simply providing a feeling of fullness to music one hears in a hall that may seem missing from a recording, the concept has even been used to musical effect. For example, there's a dramatic passage in Per Norgard's Symphony No. 5 where one of the percussionists is instructed to blow through a pair of dog whistles, challenging the pure intonation of the strings.
Cite? I've only read stories about artists happy to move from another label to ECM in order to get that ECM sound. It would be interesting to read the stories of dissenters.
Slashdot Mirror
Amazon.com must have incredible infrastructure, as not only do they have an increasing amount of views, especially on Cyber Monday, but they are serving out more data than ever. The amount of Javascript on Amazon these days is insane: every listing has product image galleries, recommendation galleries, recently viewed galleries, etc. Sure, maybe they've calculated that all those dynamic features make for better sales, but as an individual using a netbook, I find it a frustrating experience to shop when browsing is so sluggish.
Gaza does not share a border solely with Israel. If the Palestinians are not able to flee, it is because Egypt has chosen to keep its border closed.
I meant to write "an inviolable right".
For groups designated as terrorist organization, "free speech" doesn't apply. It is illegal to provide a channel for such groups to communicate. Governments are not targeting the content of their speech per se (Hamas could be tweeting about cute little puppies and they would still be shut down) but rather are trying to disrupt these groups' ability to coordinate in any way.
Such strictures are nothing new. When the Soviet Union was around, importing Soviet publications into the US involved jumping through some hoops. Courts have mainly ruled that an inviable right to free speech does not extend to persons outside the United States anyway.
Twitter is not a useful source of learning about Hamas's "future intentions". There's nothing secret or unexpected there. It's one of several channels for distributing propaganda, that are also distributed in other ways. It's ridiculous to think that Western governments are dependent on #hamas to keep abreast with developments.
Furthermore, I suspect that the Twitter account is managed by Hamas's international representatives, who don't always have a good relationship with Hamas leadership inside Gaza, so it's all the less useful for predicting conflict with Israel.
My experience was late 1990s, early millennium. By that time, Carter's attempts to limit interception of American communications had long since passed away (that they had more of a free rein in recent years nonetheless did not stop the aforementioned chiefs from rueing his memory).
I was very happy to see that the European Parliament's ECHELON report, which appeared right about the time I left the military and the United States in 2001, brought some troubling developments to public knowledge, but sadly the events of September 11 pushed it under the radar entirely. After September 11, I have no faith at all that the US is not pursuing interception of everyone and everything. And from keeping in touch with some of my shipmates who signed for another hitch or two after me, I can only assume from their attitudes that the privacy of Americans is less respected than ever.
My anecdotal experience contradicts yours. I trained as a Cryptologic Technician - Interpretative in the Navy (one of the SIGINT positions that ties into NSA). My fellow sailors considered protection of Americans' privacy to be a nuisance to their job, not a principle to uphold, and they felt it was OK to violate it as long as no one got caught. A few chiefs who had been in for a long time (some of whom had completed a tour at Ft. Meade) would grumble about how Jimmy Carter just because he tried to institute more strictures against such surveillance.
In case you don't get the parent post's literary allusion, he's talking about David Brin's Uplift series which starts with the novel Sundiver . It's a science fiction work based on the idea that human intelligence is due to ancient interference by a mysterious alien race. I re-read it recently; enjoyable stuff and much less dated than one would expect.
In retrospect, the fate of the Science-Fiction Channel/Sci-Fi/Syfy was inevitable. Attractive science fiction television is expensive to produce and there's no way a channel could have all its programming at the level of even a ST: TNG. What the channel ended up showing were science-fiction shows and television movies with shoestring budgets that often drew disgust. It's no suprise that the channel started moving to more sensationalistic fare that might have drawn it away from science-fiction, but drew it towards greater profitability.
Yes, good science-fiction can be made with low production values. Tarkovsky's Stalker is, among other things, one of the greatest science-fiction achievements in cinema, yet it shows no intricate machinery or massive on-screen violation of the laws of physics. But when scaled to a channel's entire programming, that sort of thing cannot grab and hold on to an audience.
America transformed into a snooping society well over a decade ago. Did you not read the European Parliament's ECHELON investigation in 2001 (a sensation sadly forgotten after the infinitely bigger press sensation of September 11th)? All that infrastructure was in place in the 1990s, and it was President Clinton who favoured intercepting foreign business correspondence in order to "level the playing field".
Only the last is really true. The current wave of Islamist violence, and hatred of the United States in particular, is traceable in large part to the writings of Sayyid Qutb. He visited the United States in the late 1940s and condemned it for its culture (e.g. its sexual openness, or at least its perceived sexual openness), not for meddling foreign policy. America's interventions in the Middle East certainly added fuel to the fire, but the fire was burning before them.
Slashdot has already featured at least one story recently about ELI. I can only assume that we're seeing this again because the possibility of shark jokes leads to more page views, which in turn generated more profits from advertising for this site's avarice-drunk proprietors.
TeX is an unsatisfactory half-measure between a visual formatting free-for-all and truly semantic markup. Even within the TeX community, it's now common to see publishers maintaining manuscripts in e.g. DocBook XML, only converting the data to TeX via XSLT when they want to produce final print output.
You don't seem to be aware that SSH keys are typically encrypted, and still require a password to unlock. Yes, some people foolishly enable passwordless use of SSH keys, but that does not reflect on the principle of SSH key login in general.
And as an addendum to my last post, I should mention that Christianity that came to the Subcontinent early on took on many Hindu customs, such as the caste system. I wouldn't be surprised if there were restrictions against meat-eating among some of the Syrians there.
Until fairly recently, fasting rules for Christians in the East and West had them abstaining from meat and dairy for about half the year altogether. Western Christians have mainly lost that tradition, but the East maintains it in principle. And monastics (at least in the East) don't ever eat meat at all, pointing to patristic literature that credits meat with stirring up passions. While it is true that historical Christianity believes that eating meat is not immoral or ritually impure, it is not necessary desirable.
Except the Kyrgyz were not a violent, war-like culture. At the time that the Manas tradition evolved, the Kyrgyz were a pretty peaceful nomadic pastoral society surrounded by great empires who were changing the borders all around them by force.
I'm sure this thread will have lots of blather about how hip hop lyrics are valid artistic expressions. I used to have the same prejudice, until I started studying epic poetry of Central Asia. Much of the Kyrgyz epic Manas, acclaimed by scholars in the West upon its discovery a century ago, is comparable to most hip hop artists: badly strung together recitations of how the hero has got lots of bling and bitches, and whoops the ass of his enemies.
Too bad development on DD-WRT has stalled. No updates for my fairly popular router for two years now, not even security updates.
It says right there in the Slashdot summary that this is a threat to "revoke the credentials of journalists". It says nothing about hassling the journalists after they have entered the venue. Get over yourself.
I imagine that the many science fiction fans in this nerd community will remember the opening of Larry Niven's The Ringworld Engineers . The protagonist Louis Wu has given up his friends, appetite for food and water and basically his whole life, content to sit still with an electrode delivering current straight to the pleasure centre of his brain. It's the ultimate addiction. Sure, this technology will probably bring myriad benefits, but doesn't it seem like there's some disquieting potential for misuse?
"A dog bit a child in Topeka, Kansas yesterday," thought the Slashdot editor. "Let's see if we can work that into Your Rights Online somehow."
Difference tones are a psychoacoustic phenomenon. They have no physical reality that can be captured on a recording. Only if the playback equipment is able to produce the original two frequencies will listeners hear them.
While only dogs can hear the tones themselves, the beats produced by those high-frequency sounds against lower--frequency sounds are audible to humans. Besides simply providing a feeling of fullness to music one hears in a hall that may seem missing from a recording, the concept has even been used to musical effect. For example, there's a dramatic passage in Per Norgard's Symphony No. 5 where one of the percussionists is instructed to blow through a pair of dog whistles, challenging the pure intonation of the strings.
Cite? I've only read stories about artists happy to move from another label to ECM in order to get that ECM sound. It would be interesting to read the stories of dissenters.