What surprises me is that more people aren't speaking up like Schneier. It seems to me that the role of the press and politicians in promoting terror is very much like that of oxygen and fuel in promoting fire.
If you don't feed the spark, it goes out.
If you doubt this, look at other, more important issues (affecting much more than a few thousand people) that routinely die out in the press because they're ignored.
Not to hijack the thread, I'll give a tiny sample, and ask politely that you don't reply to the examples, just to the general principle
* Voting machine irregularities and bad faith at Diebold * Retraction of whistleblower protections in the US Federal Government * Increasing exemptions to the US FOIA * FCC regulation changes making it possible for 2 media giants to completely control any given local market.
The impact of these little stories is far more interesting than which 10 or 100 people will be killed by a terrorist attack someday. As someone just recently put it, more people are killed every year by peanut allergies than by global terrorism.
Yep. Just like "intellectual".
Don't worry, there's plenty of good precedent for that. "Intellectual" has been a bad word many times, in lots of regimes the US would be proud to emulate, such as:
If it cost you 50 times as much every time you logged onto the net, you too might waste less time contributing to a free encyclopedia. Even if you weren't poorer, which most Africans likely are.
Re:It's harder than you might at first think
on
Diebold Flops in Alaska
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I'm part of the Open Voting Consortium and we've been proposing a system in which the voter uses a machine to produce a paper ballot. That ballot *is* the ballot, not some copy, not some receipt, but the actual ballot. And it isn't good until stuffed into a ballot box.
We have such a machine in Canada. It works very very well. It's called a number 2 pencil.
Could actually be a bit of both. Running for a position when your heart isn't in it can lead to losing that position. Or getting booted off your own board can help you see that you really haven't been prioritizing it.
The one difference between them is that I would feel comfortable citing EB in a paper (of low scholarly weight), but not the WP, for the simple reason that WP may not say tomorrow what I quoted as saying today!
My wife's in university now. Her web references are treated as valid, when accompanied by the date she accessed them. Just as periodical references need issue number and date.
At least on Wikipedia, you can use the History tab to SEE the version from that previous date. Very few websites give that option... So from that point of view, Wikipedia references are MORE citable than other web site references.
This rather paranoid-looking but, in my opinion, believeable web page has been documenting the NSA's relationship to Orkut for 2 years now. http://www.infiltrated.net/orkut.php
And yes people lie on web pages, but they also use social networking pages to socially network. Therefore the core data (who talks to whom) is fairly reliable and rather scary to give to the NSA.
Perhaps the service model has advantages to the customers too. Since software depreciates almost instantly, you're spending quite a lot for something you're going to toss in 3-4 years max. Why is ownership so great again?
For example, my $900 copy of Microsoft Office 2000 has pretty much no resale value now. Did I get $150 per year's use out of it?
Chances are that I only used 2 of the 8 programs, and those I used a lot. But did I use them enough to pay $150 a year for them? Doubt it.
Actually I think it's just great! It's essentially a form of radio-on-demand, supported by ads.
It solves a problem I had despaired of solving -- when I (or my girlfriend and I) get nostalgic and want to hear some long-forgotten song again, which maybe I don't have in my library, I can now head over to Napster.com, download it and listen at radio-quality a couple of times, and feel good.
If I really like it I can buy it, but sometimes I just wanted to hear it again. Or settle a bet. Or remind someone that a song exists.
Or just dance to it with my favorite girl and toss it.
Actually I think it's just great! It's essentially a form of radio-on-demand, supported by ads.
It solves a problem I had despaired of solving -- when I (or my girlfriend and I) get nostalgic and want to hear some long-forgotten song again, which maybe I don't have in my library, I can now head over to Napster.com, download it and listen at radio-quality a couple of times, and feel good.
If I really like it I can buy it, but sometimes I just wanted to hear it again. Or settle a bet. Or remind someone that a song exists.
If I really like it and I want it for myself and I don't want to buy it, well, we have a word for people like that. Anyone complaining bitterly that they can't get any full-quality product they want for free forever should complain to Adam Smith, not to Napster.
Won't last once the Telcos tier the internet
on
ThinkFree Online Review
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· Score: 4, Insightful
An evil company plays zero-sum games (loss for you = gain for us) with its own customers.
So, by that definition, the movie biz, the recoding biz, Sony, and SCO are all evil companies/industries.
Correct?
My definition of an evil company is a little different, but Microsoft certainly fits it.
An evil company plays zero-sum games (loss for you = gain for us) with its own customers.
Playing zero-sum with your competitors is standard; no problem.
Playing zero-sum with your partners, distribution chain, and potential aquisitions is rather scummy, and Microsoft is one of the few companies that does this routinely and isn't blackballed.
But playing zero-sum with your customers, the ones who pay your bills, shows you have a position so powerful that you can afford to tell your own customers to sit on it and spin, and still win.
To me that is evil.
I don't need to give examples here (I hope) of the times when Microsoft has deliberately screwed its own customer base over for its own benefit; I'm sure you can think of plenty. But they are all, to my mind, evidence of abuse of monopoly, and also evil.
Re:Missing features wishlist
on
Google Calendar
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· Score: 1
"Wrong" doesn't really apply. Nice for you that you can use an "all day event" as a to-do, but that's like using a heavy wrench as a hammer.
More importantly, if I'm importing all my to-do's for the week from Outlook or Sunbird, and they all get converted into all-day events for today, I'll be severely annoyed.
Wouldn't you be?
I think to-do's with "due dates" but no actual start/end times or days (as implemented in Outlook and Sunbird) are a necessity, expecially for importing between the standards.
Missing features wishlist
on
Google Calendar
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
First thing I missed, which will make it impossible to import existing calendars:
* No to-do's. All events must have a start and end time.
Because some people think there are more important things, like curing/controlling AIDS, building infrastructure, and enabling access to clean water.
> All things that can be done by outsiders, yes, or by the people themselves, > once they are properly educated.
Exactly. It's the "give a man a fish, he eats for a day; give a man a $100 laptop, he learns to buy fishing equipment on eBay" philosophy. You can't be a sugar daddy for developing nations forever. One day, you have to educate them to do it for themselves...
I took part in a computer trade show early this month in Germany, and Microsoft was showing Vista, and the Microsoft fans were saying it looks like OS X (Apple wasn't there). Apple is on a roll, and we've just given them enough time to get the next version of OS X out the door (whatever animal name it is going to be). And we can guess right now what their marketing push will be: Stop waiting for those guys who can't even copy our old stuff in time. Get the original from us -- we ship on time, we're shipping right now.
Yeah I like Apple's OS, always have. But I use Windows and Linux more than Mac at the moment, and XP is quite usable. Nice copy of Apple's ideas, too bad it's a monolithic OS, back-compatible with DOS, with all the GUI still in the kernel.
I read through the bunch of them and saw a couple I liked, but here's my favorite:
>The migration to Vista will be a passive one, as someone else previously mentioned; appearing on new computers bought by companies.
>The same for home users; a lot of people do not know enough to figure out what hardware upgrades they need ; so again, it will appear on new computers.
Is this what Windows has become? An upgrade no one wants, forced upon them because the new hardware they're buying doesn't support anything less?
Compare this to OS X, where people fall all over themselves trying to get the newest version running on their old hardware because there's actual value in the new features.
So Vista has its guts ripped out, slips, and we wait another 5 years for a potentially insipring version of Windows, meanwhile Apple ships another 3 updates to OS X.
I hope to God Office 12 steps up and kicks some ass.
Slashdot Mirror
What surprises me is that more people aren't speaking up like Schneier. It seems to me that the role of the press and politicians in promoting terror is very much like that of oxygen and fuel in promoting fire.
If you don't feed the spark, it goes out.
If you doubt this, look at other, more important issues (affecting much more than a few thousand people) that routinely die out in the press because they're ignored.
Not to hijack the thread, I'll give a tiny sample, and ask politely that you don't reply to the examples, just to the general principle
* Voting machine irregularities and bad faith at Diebold
* Retraction of whistleblower protections in the US Federal Government
* Increasing exemptions to the US FOIA
* FCC regulation changes making it possible for 2 media giants to completely control any given local market.
The impact of these little stories is far more interesting than which 10 or 100 people will be killed by a terrorist attack someday. As someone just recently put it, more people are killed every year by peanut allergies than by global terrorism.
The War on Peanuts awaits.
- Pol Pot's regime in Cambodia
- the "Cultural Revolution" in China
- ...bunch I can't think of here, and
- of course Orwell's 1984.
Good start, USA.The fact that the average cost of a kb/S in Africa is 4 to 8 USD ( ( http://event-africa-networking.web.cern.ch/event-a frica-networking/cdrom/Joint_Internet2_IEEAF_works hops/EnhancingAfricanResearchandEducationNetworks/ 20050505-AFRICA-STEINER.pdf ) as opposed to about 12 cents in the US, may have a lot to do with the relative
scarcity of African Wikipedists.
If it cost you 50 times as much every time you logged onto the net, you too might waste less time contributing to a free encyclopedia. Even if you weren't poorer, which most Africans likely are.
We have such a machine in Canada. It works very very well. It's called a number 2 pencil.
No joke. Sometimes technology isn't the answer.
And that's precisely why you need to read Tufte's ideas about how to load information onto a slide without packing it into the text.
Smart slide design doesn't mean cramming more tiny text onto the slide. (If that's all it was, why would you need an expert?)
Information can be packed many ways.
Could actually be a bit of both. Running for a position when your heart isn't in it can lead to losing that position. Or getting booted off your own board can help you see that you really haven't been prioritizing it.
My wife's in university now. Her web references are treated as valid, when accompanied by the date she accessed them. Just as periodical references need issue number and date.
At least on Wikipedia, you can use the History tab to SEE the version from that previous date. Very few websites give that option... So from that point of view, Wikipedia references are MORE citable than other web site references.
Glad you mentioned scrolling to the bottom! The colorful kaleidoscope on top of the page looked far more functional than I'd expected! :)
This rather paranoid-looking but, in my opinion, believeable web page has been documenting the NSA's relationship to Orkut for 2 years now. http://www.infiltrated.net/orkut.php
w ww.infiltrated.net/orkut.php+orkut+sil+nsa&hl=en&c t=clnk&cd=10
It lives only in Google's Cache:
http://66.249.93.104/search?q=cache:JMyVq6wjWSYJ:
And yes people lie on web pages, but they also use social networking pages to socially network. Therefore the core data (who talks to whom) is fairly reliable and rather scary to give to the NSA.
Perhaps the service model has advantages to the customers too. Since software depreciates almost instantly, you're spending quite a lot for something you're going to toss in 3-4 years max. Why is ownership so great again?
For example, my $900 copy of Microsoft Office 2000 has pretty much no resale value now. Did I get $150 per year's use out of it?
Chances are that I only used 2 of the 8 programs, and those I used a lot. But did I use them enough to pay $150 a year for them? Doubt it.
Unauthorized redistribution of copyrighted works is in violation of the Berne Convention
I suppose that depends on how you define "redistribution". TPB was not distributing, simply linking to, copyrighted works.
So does Google and every other search engine.
Nice try.
...and the rest of the page mentions the number who have voted -- over 96,600 at this time.
It doesn't matter how safe and convenient hydrogen fuel might become. It still will take more energy to produce it than it will give back when burned.
So someone will still have to find another source of energy for making it.
Hydrogen is just an expensive battery. Now how will we charge it?
Way cool, wsherman! I love this explanation, takes me beyond my high school physics for once.
I always wondered when nanotech would get good enough to find out why (or if) Maxwell's Demon was really impossible.
Now soon we'll know.
Actually I think it's just great! It's essentially a form of radio-on-demand, supported by ads.
It solves a problem I had despaired of solving -- when I (or my girlfriend and I) get nostalgic and want to hear some long-forgotten song again, which maybe I don't have in my library, I can now head over to Napster.com, download it and listen at radio-quality a couple of times, and feel good.
If I really like it I can buy it, but sometimes I just wanted to hear it again. Or settle a bet. Or remind someone that a song exists.
Or just dance to it with my favorite girl and toss it.
Actually I think it's just great! It's essentially a form of radio-on-demand, supported by ads.
It solves a problem I had despaired of solving -- when I (or my girlfriend and I) get nostalgic and want to hear some long-forgotten song again, which maybe I don't have in my library, I can now head over to Napster.com, download it and listen at radio-quality a couple of times, and feel good.
If I really like it I can buy it, but sometimes I just wanted to hear it again. Or settle a bet. Or remind someone that a song exists.
If I really like it and I want it for myself and I don't want to buy it, well, we have a word for people like that. Anyone complaining bitterly that they can't get any full-quality product they want for free forever should complain to Adam Smith, not to Napster.
Once the Telcos own the internet, how long will things like this be convenient to use?
All it takes is a golf game between Gates and a few Telco CEO's, and suddenly ThinkFree has really really low bandwidth. Really low.
I don't know if this is threadjacking or having the insight to connect two apparently unrelated issues. I'll let the mods decide.
Exactly.
My definition of an evil company is a little different, but Microsoft certainly fits it.
An evil company plays zero-sum games (loss for you = gain for us) with its own customers.
Playing zero-sum with your competitors is standard; no problem.
Playing zero-sum with your partners, distribution chain, and potential aquisitions is rather scummy, and Microsoft is one of the few companies that does this routinely and isn't blackballed.
But playing zero-sum with your customers, the ones who pay your bills, shows you have a position so powerful that you can afford to tell your own customers to sit on it and spin, and still win.
To me that is evil.
I don't need to give examples here (I hope) of the times when Microsoft has deliberately screwed its own customer base over for its own benefit; I'm sure you can think of plenty. But they are all, to my mind, evidence of abuse of monopoly, and also evil.
"Wrong" doesn't really apply. Nice for you that you can use an "all day event" as a to-do, but that's like using a heavy wrench as a hammer.
More importantly, if I'm importing all my to-do's for the week from Outlook or Sunbird, and they all get converted into all-day events for today, I'll be severely annoyed.
Wouldn't you be?
I think to-do's with "due dates" but no actual start/end times or days (as implemented in Outlook and Sunbird) are a necessity, expecially for importing between the standards.
First thing I missed, which will make it impossible to import existing calendars:
* No to-do's. All events must have a start and end time.
Anyone else want to add a wish?
Because some people think there are more important things, like curing/controlling AIDS, building infrastructure, and enabling access to clean water.
> All things that can be done by outsiders, yes, or by the people themselves,
> once they are properly educated.
Exactly. It's the "give a man a fish, he eats for a day; give a man a $100 laptop, he learns to buy fishing equipment on eBay" philosophy. You can't be a sugar daddy for developing nations forever. One day, you have to educate them to do it for themselves...
And another that made me laugh:
I took part in a computer trade show early this month in Germany, and Microsoft was showing Vista, and the Microsoft fans were saying it looks like OS X (Apple wasn't there). Apple is on a roll, and we've just given them enough time to get the next version of OS X out the door (whatever animal name it is going to be). And we can guess right now what their marketing push will be: Stop waiting for those guys who can't even copy our old stuff in time. Get the original from us -- we ship on time, we're shipping right now.
Yeah I like Apple's OS, always have. But I use Windows and Linux more than Mac at the moment, and XP is quite usable. Nice copy of Apple's ideas, too bad it's a monolithic OS, back-compatible with DOS, with all the GUI still in the kernel.
I read through the bunch of them and saw a couple I liked, but here's my favorite:
>The migration to Vista will be a passive one, as someone else previously mentioned; appearing on new computers bought by companies.
>The same for home users; a lot of people do not know enough to figure out what hardware upgrades they need ; so again, it will appear on new computers.
Is this what Windows has become? An upgrade no one wants, forced upon them because the new hardware they're buying doesn't support anything less?
Compare this to OS X, where people fall all over themselves trying to get the newest version running on their old hardware because there's actual value in the new features.
So Vista has its guts ripped out, slips, and we wait another 5 years for a potentially insipring version of Windows, meanwhile Apple ships another 3 updates to OS X.
I hope to God Office 12 steps up and kicks some ass.