Heh, on a related note: I just picked up a book called "Cultures of War" by John Dower, a historian who's most famous for a book about the occupation of postwar Japan. Apparently all the comparisons people made to Japan and Germany during the start of the Iraq war made him look into the Iraq war and the planning that went into it.
"Researchers accustomed to sifting through the old-fashioned typescript and carbon-copy documents of World War II era encounter a conspicuous time warp when it comes to the fragmentary accessible documentation of planning "regime change" in Iraq. There are indeed cogent reports and papers. There is also an addiction to "bullet point" list making that reflects both the technical advances of a PowerPoint age and the scattershot thinking that too often accompanies this, confusing inventories of discrete "points" and queries with careful deliberation and clear conclusions. Lists, memos, working papers, and endless rounds of PowerPoint and slide presentations do not in themselves consititute coherent policy formulation."
That sounds like a Hackerspace. The one I go to does not have coffee, but it does have a soldering iron and a pinball machine they fixed. And we are in the process of trying to get a 3D printer.
If you're seriously interested in that kind of stuff, I suggest you check them out.
Awesome, I really have been here for more than 10 years, and I got the first post for the first time!
Ah, I remember the days before 4chan, when Slashdot was the place antisocial youths spent their free trolltime and things such as Goatse and First Post spam caused the changes like the moderation system that make Slashdot what it is today...
We're still fighting a war here. No, we are not, unless you mean 'war' as a metaphor for struggle.
A war to free the remaining peoples of the world who live under totalitarianism (real totalitarianism). Again, no we are not. In fact we are trying to not have to fight North Korea at the moment.
On that front, the U.S., the EU, Wikileaks, and people like you and me are on the same side. No, we are not. The U.S. is on the U.S. side and the E.U. is on the E.U. side, and Wikileaks is on the ideal of transparency side and you and me are not doing anything at all. While the U.S. and E.U. like to push for freedom in other countries, they are first and foremost looking out for their own interests, as that is the job of the respective governments. They are not charities or
Look, well before the cable leaks it was well known that the U.S. heavily supports some unfree regimes because we prefer them to other unfree regimes. We should not be pretending that the U.S. in on a crusade for freedom. Bush tried that in Iraq(I honestly think he was driven by right-wing idealism as much as cynical warmongering), and we saw how that turned out. So now we are back to backing unfree states like Egypt or Saudi Arabia as long as they keep regional stability. And we are concerned about Iran not because of their lack of freedom, but because of the instability and external danger they pose to the region.
I also do not see this leak as helping unfree regimes, since the fundamental fact of their unfreeness is not in dispute by most people. You can go look at the Press Freedom Index or Transparency International's site, and the bottom tier has not changed due to the leak.
I may be a bit late to this discussion, but I was wondering if anyone could fill me in on the technical side of Wikileaks, instead of the politics.
- Why is it called Wikileaks when it's not a wiki? - How do they ensure confidentiality of leaker's identities? - I know they have a group of volunteers working around the world, how do they communicate securely? - How hard would it be for the US/Other.gov to compromise wikileaks, and ferret out the informers/insert wrong data/track down Julian?
Look, I actually have to be studying for a Native American anthropology course, so I'll elaborate on just a few points.
I live in southern California where gambling is illegal, unless you live on an Indian reservation. This is a gigantic boon to Indians and they make tens of millions of dollars thru their special treatment though the law. Can you explain to me how this fits with "All men are created equal".
Same reason Nevada can have legal gambling, or Mexico can have lower drinking age, and it's not violating "All men are created equal". It's called jurisdiction and sovereignty, different places have different rules. Those reservations are not considered part of California for the purposes of gambling laws.
If Californians wanted the "tens of millions of dollars" gambling brings, they can legalize it in their state, just as others have done.
Just out of curiosity, what would be the potential legal implications of releasing something like the Colonel's secret blend of herbs and spices or the Coca-Cola recipe?
No, they really haven't done the job admirably. WWI and WWII were almost entirely European wars.
WWI maybe, but those "European" powers controlled a vast amount of the world. Go look at the map of the world circa 1914 sometime. And yes, units from those colonies fought and died both in Europe and the colonial areas. http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/1907powr.htm
It wasn't until Japan attacked the U.S. that WWII became global by an stretch. Until then, it was just a regional conflict in Europe and a second one between Japan and China.
FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUU So it was a global war that became global? Jesus Christ man. The Chinese front was just as brutal as anything in Europe or the southern Pacific. The Japanese, Germans and Italians were allied well before the start of hostilities, they simply did not coordinate as well as the western allies because of geography.
And the rest of your post simply ignores the whole goddamn Soviet Union and the Cold War, you are looking only at the small 'hot' wars that happened at the periphery of the greater east-west conflict.
Wow, so many/.ers going off on something they have no experience with...
Sharp sells their computers in Japan, so most of you might not know this, but they sold(and maybe still sell until stocks run out) an Ubuntu-based ultraportable called the Netwalker. One has a touchscreen, the other has an optical trackpad-type thing and keyboard.
As far as I could tell when I saw it, it was a stock Ubuntu Japanese install, with no proprietary crap saddled on top of it. They even kept the Ubuntu logo instead of slapping their own on it.
I wonder if the Chinese gov't (or other regimes) have thought of just using Facebook to track down the networks of friends and acquaintences of dissidents, instead of banning it.
During the Cultural Revolution, they said "Let a thousand flowers bloom", meaning they let dissident and anti-regime opinions flow unrestricted, suddenly free of censorship. But instead of listening to those ideas and implementing them, after a short period of freedom they cracked down and jailed those who had raised 'bad' opinions after they had revealed themselves. The promise of free speech had been a trap. I wonder if the same sort of thing could happen with online social media?
People in the west talk about privacy violations of Facebook, but imagine if a bad gov't got its hands on all that data and data mined it...
Sorry it took me a while to reply, I did not notice your post until now.
Oh, yes, THAT makes you an expert and an authority. Carry on.
I was pointing out that I knew a language with a radically different character set, as most English-speakers who know a different language know a western European one with Latin characters and a few modifiers. I am trying to point out the difficulties most people would have with very different character sets, and ICANN also approved use of Japanese addresses so I think it was relevant.
What kind of a firewall do you have that you requires you to type domain names? Apart from the fact that you could likely just copy and paste, anyway, the firewalls I have dealt with usually take IP addresses/address ranges instead.
You don't really know much about these things, do you?
I was trying to use an example of when you would need to work with domain names with a non-Latin character set. I agree that firewall was not the best example, but when I do something like traceroute the domain name will be displayed as well as IP. There are many places where domain name will be used instead of IP addresses, not just going to websites.
I imagine that if I was in a situation where I'd get email from an address like that, then yes.
You've never gotten spam from China? They are one of the major sources of spam.
yes, there are absolutely no use cases where it's OK for a service to be "for Japanese only" (or "for Japanese and those foreigners who know how to copy and paste only"), actually. Every last Japanese website matters to you, right?
If websites want to be in Japanese or Chinese only, they could do that already. However, domain names should be in a format that as many people as possible can understand. Since the Latin character set is the most widely understood character set around the world (including many Chinese and most Japanese), that is what should be used. And you know that foreign words can be spelled out in the Latin characters, right? See asahi.com for example.
I think there is a difference in philosophy here regarding what domain names are. Many sites use the domain name the same way a product name, logo, or trademark is used - in order to advertise the site, to identify it to the public. But a domain name is not just trademark, but a part of the network. Yes, DNS is technically separate from the underlying IP network, but it is something that network administrators across the world will have to work with. We should be using address names that admins across the world can use, instead of introducing thousands of characters most people can't read.
As a person who can read/write Japanese(similar to, but a bit different from Chinese) characters, I don't know why ICANN thought this was a good idea. It's not like the actual contents of pages had to be in Latin characters, so "Allowing use of other languages" is not really an issue. Only the address had to be in Latin characters.
Having all internet users use the 26 (x2 for capitals) letters of the Latin charset and 10 numbers is a much, much simpler than having everyone try to learn all the letters of all the character sets out there.
This is going to make administration harder.
If you started getting hacking attacks from.com, would you even know how to type that into your firewall? If you got an email from @.com, do you think you could describe the address over the phone to a colleague? From the preview, it appears Slashdot is filtering out Japanese characters I used for the addresses. The above examples would be tokyo.com and shujin@osaka.com if they were forced to be in latin. And that's something that's usable by both Japanese and foreigners, whereas the Japanese-character addresses are for 'Japanese only'.
I hope ICANN reconsiders and returns to latin+numbers only addresses.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh, on a related note: I just picked up a book called "Cultures of War" by John Dower, a historian who's most famous for a book about the occupation of postwar Japan. Apparently all the comparisons people made to Japan and Germany during the start of the Iraq war made him look into the Iraq war and the planning that went into it.
"Researchers accustomed to sifting through the old-fashioned typescript and carbon-copy documents of World War II era encounter a conspicuous time warp when it comes to the fragmentary accessible documentation of planning "regime change" in Iraq. There are indeed cogent reports and papers. There is also an addiction to "bullet point" list making that reflects both the technical advances of a PowerPoint age and the scattershot thinking that too often accompanies this, confusing inventories of discrete "points" and queries with careful deliberation and clear conclusions. Lists, memos, working papers, and endless rounds of PowerPoint and slide presentations do not in themselves consititute coherent policy formulation."
I guess it's true even in the White House.
I think I preferred the Tolkien/CS Lewis slash fiction.
Kids these days gore up everything, it's because of 4chan isn't it?
Well, it's ZDNet. It's quite possible he IS a rapist and hitman-hireer.
That sounds like a Hackerspace. The one I go to does not have coffee, but it does have a soldering iron and a pinball machine they fixed. And we are in the process of trying to get a 3D printer.
If you're seriously interested in that kind of stuff, I suggest you check them out.
There just might be one near you!
Actually, I'd say that it IS proof of his manhood; after all, do you ever hear of women doing these stupid stunts?
Awesome, I really have been here for more than 10 years, and I got the first post for the first time!
Ah, I remember the days before 4chan, when Slashdot was the place antisocial youths spent their free trolltime and things such as Goatse and First Post spam caused the changes like the moderation system that make Slashdot what it is today...
First post for first time in 10 years
With all this talk of railguns, vectors and accelerators, I am dissapointed that no one has posted Mikoto Misaka.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iv2v6WpuUG0
Is no one here a Raildex fan?
Oh come on, I love the pic they used for this story, it makes him look like he's enjoying the governments scrambling to cover their ass.
I think it should be the official icon for wikileaks, who's with me?
We're still fighting a war here.
No, we are not, unless you mean 'war' as a metaphor for struggle.
A war to free the remaining peoples of the world who live under totalitarianism (real totalitarianism).
Again, no we are not. In fact we are trying to not have to fight North Korea at the moment.
On that front, the U.S., the EU, Wikileaks, and people like you and me are on the same side.
No, we are not. The U.S. is on the U.S. side and the E.U. is on the E.U. side, and Wikileaks is on the ideal of transparency side and you and me are not doing anything at all. While the U.S. and E.U. like to push for freedom in other countries, they are first and foremost looking out for their own interests, as that is the job of the respective governments. They are not charities or
Look, well before the cable leaks it was well known that the U.S. heavily supports some unfree regimes because we prefer them to other unfree regimes. We should not be pretending that the U.S. in on a crusade for freedom. Bush tried that in Iraq(I honestly think he was driven by right-wing idealism as much as cynical warmongering), and we saw how that turned out. So now we are back to backing unfree states like Egypt or Saudi Arabia as long as they keep regional stability. And we are concerned about Iran not because of their lack of freedom, but because of the instability and external danger they pose to the region.
I also do not see this leak as helping unfree regimes, since the fundamental fact of their unfreeness is not in dispute by most people. You can go look at the Press Freedom Index or Transparency International's site, and the bottom tier has not changed due to the leak.
I may be a bit late to this discussion, but I was wondering if anyone could fill me in on the technical side of Wikileaks, instead of the politics.
- Why is it called Wikileaks when it's not a wiki? .gov to compromise wikileaks, and ferret out the informers/insert wrong data/track down Julian?
- How do they ensure confidentiality of leaker's identities?
- I know they have a group of volunteers working around the world, how do they communicate securely?
- How hard would it be for the US/Other
Are you me?
Sorry, that story just sounded so familiar...
Look, I actually have to be studying for a Native American anthropology course, so I'll elaborate on just a few points.
I live in southern California where gambling is illegal, unless you live on an Indian reservation. This is a gigantic boon to Indians and they make tens of millions of dollars thru their special treatment though the law. Can you explain to me how this fits with "All men are created equal".
Same reason Nevada can have legal gambling, or Mexico can have lower drinking age, and it's not violating "All men are created equal". It's called jurisdiction and sovereignty, different places have different rules. Those reservations are not considered part of California for the purposes of gambling laws.
If Californians wanted the "tens of millions of dollars" gambling brings, they can legalize it in their state, just as others have done.
I think the preferred term around here would be Chaotic Good.
Just out of curiosity, what would be the potential legal implications of releasing something like the Colonel's secret blend of herbs and spices or the Coca-Cola recipe?
What. What. WHAT.
WWI maybe, but those "European" powers controlled a vast amount of the world. Go look at the map of the world circa 1914 sometime. And yes, units from those colonies fought and died both in Europe and the colonial areas.
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/1907powr.htm
FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUU
So it was a global war that became global? Jesus Christ man. The Chinese front was just as brutal as anything in Europe or the southern Pacific. The Japanese, Germans and Italians were allied well before the start of hostilities, they simply did not coordinate as well as the western allies because of geography.
And the rest of your post simply ignores the whole goddamn Soviet Union and the Cold War, you are looking only at the small 'hot' wars that happened at the periphery of the greater east-west conflict.
Wow, so many /.ers going off on something they have no experience with...
Sharp sells their computers in Japan, so most of you might not know this, but they sold(and maybe still sell until stocks run out) an Ubuntu-based ultraportable called the Netwalker. One has a touchscreen, the other has an optical trackpad-type thing and keyboard.
As far as I could tell when I saw it, it was a stock Ubuntu Japanese install, with no proprietary crap saddled on top of it. They even kept the Ubuntu logo instead of slapping their own on it.
http://www.sharp.co.jp/netwalker/
I'd say that's pretty far from proprietary.
Of course, all of their 'regular' notebooks and PCs ran Windows.
I imagine Paul Hogan saying, "You call that an iPod? THIS" - pulls out a Zune - "is an iPod!"
that Roman Polanski is both a child-abusing rapist and a great filmmaker
Well, his films are terrible, so I suppose it's possible that he's not a child-abusing rapist as well.
Go ahead and joke all you want, I'm not coming out of the basement until it's proven that sunlight won't pound you into the pavement.
Bing uses open standards?! o_O I guess Microsoft has changed....
I wonder if the Chinese gov't (or other regimes) have thought of just using Facebook to track down the networks of friends and acquaintences of dissidents, instead of banning it.
During the Cultural Revolution, they said "Let a thousand flowers bloom", meaning they let dissident and anti-regime opinions flow unrestricted, suddenly free of censorship. But instead of listening to those ideas and implementing them, after a short period of freedom they cracked down and jailed those who had raised 'bad' opinions after they had revealed themselves. The promise of free speech had been a trap. I wonder if the same sort of thing could happen with online social media?
People in the west talk about privacy violations of Facebook, but imagine if a bad gov't got its hands on all that data and data mined it...
Sorry it took me a while to reply, I did not notice your post until now.
I was pointing out that I knew a language with a radically different character set, as most English-speakers who know a different language know a western European one with Latin characters and a few modifiers. I am trying to point out the difficulties most people would have with very different character sets, and ICANN also approved use of Japanese addresses so I think it was relevant.
I was trying to use an example of when you would need to work with domain names with a non-Latin character set. I agree that firewall was not the best example, but when I do something like traceroute the domain name will be displayed as well as IP. There are many places where domain name will be used instead of IP addresses, not just going to websites.
You've never gotten spam from China? They are one of the major sources of spam.
This is nearly as bad as the JAXA scandal!
Just curious, what scandal is that?
As a person who can read/write Japanese(similar to, but a bit different from Chinese) characters, I don't know why ICANN thought this was a good idea. It's not like the actual contents of pages had to be in Latin characters, so "Allowing use of other languages" is not really an issue. Only the address had to be in Latin characters.
Having all internet users use the 26 (x2 for capitals) letters of the Latin charset and 10 numbers is a much, much simpler than having everyone try to learn all the letters of all the character sets out there.
This is going to make administration harder.
If you started getting hacking attacks from .com, would you even know how to type that into your firewall? If you got an email from @.com, do you think you could describe the address over the phone to a colleague? From the preview, it appears Slashdot is filtering out Japanese characters I used for the addresses. The above examples would be tokyo.com and shujin@osaka.com if they were forced to be in latin. And that's something that's usable by both Japanese and foreigners, whereas the Japanese-character addresses are for 'Japanese only'.
I hope ICANN reconsiders and returns to latin+numbers only addresses.