I don't understand why. Applicants would have to be professional and knowledgeable about both journalism and the topic of the slashdot section. There may even be slashdot readers who would like that job if it paid a salary, though my guess is someone from O'Reilly who also knows something about gathering people and companies together for conferences, books, sponsorship, etc. might be useful.
Fact is there are a huge number of people in the U.S. alone who would sympathize with what slashdotters think about some of these issues if they knew about them and understood them, and the kind of money involved could pay for not only journalists but maybe even some open source projects. The interviews slashdot has are often interesting too, and journalists also do interviews.
The point is to make things more professional, more aggressive, and not to compete with slashdotters but to provide things they can't, like journalistic focus, professional editing, networking with other groups, more neat interviews, etc. God forbid we ever had a photo of the people being interviewed either! How about some research into why there are so few women programmers, this issue parallels the flap the president of Harvard made recently.
Here are some topics a journalist could investigate that might be worth something:
What would it take organizationally, financially, scientifically, technically, politically and timewise, to actually develop secure, auditable, open voting machines? Is low-tech the only valid solution? This could be a series and the journalist would stay interested in it (unlike slashdotters) and try to follow the story, ultimately possibly finding out a monetary sum, likely sponsors, and likely teams.
How come there are more female cosmologists than female physicists? Do movies like Contact have anything to do with it, or what? Another series, and one that should try to shine light on potential causes and solutions. Are there more women using Perl than Cobol or C? Would an easier path to bringing in documentation writers increase the number of both men and women involved in open source? and other theses.
Is it possible to get funding for an open source project on your own so you can work on it full time?
On TV they always have things like build your own house and so on. Are there other fields where open source concepts could be useful to people besides software?
Slashdotters could suggest topics as well. Journalists could sift through these and find interesting ones. More tech-savvy journalists or perhaps programmers with some training in writing could do similar things. I'd like to get a journalist to follow up between Alan Kay and Larry Wall, to get to the bottom of what Kay wants and why Perl 6 isn't going to do it. (Or is it? Sounded that way to me...)
Anyway these kinds of things are exciting, important issues and the idea of having thousands of captive smart people being stuck with unprofessional, passive editors like slashdot's is nearly criminal. It is worth paying someone to pay attention.
This was I believe reported by Yahoo news on Jan. 29. Today is Feb. 12!
I believe/. should be able to hire professional journalists and editors. Especially for the "your rights online" section, though I think all sections (science anyone?) would benefit.
Imagine investigating a story, reporting on an event before anyone else, even getting articles placed in other papers! It could be a dream job with people lining up to fund it. PLEASE consider what/. should be to this community and to the world in the 21st century. The interesting things going on in the world that readers submit (the core of/. I know) tend to deflect attention from the dessication that makes slashdot unfortunately resemble a fossil and not a very interesting one at that.
Caveat, this coming from someone who just got a post rejected last week, but still there are a hundred geeks out there wanking on about two week old news and it's kinda dumb. Why not actually contact some congressional staffers and find out what's happening BEFORE the news breaks elsewhere? Like, news? You know?
This is the weak point of slashdot's dependence on user submissions. There aren't any journalist users who are going to submit first to slashdot. Solve for x.
Thanks for the reply. I started with Fortran on a key punch machine, then Integer Basic and Pascal on an Apple II, and didn't get a taste of Oberon until I had a Macintosh (I think a 512K SE). Couldn't say I "know" Oberon exactly but it was extremely, extremely cool. Almost head bursting in fact but I was shielded from it by some cluelessness.
I really liked the end of the interview and copied it to read again a few times. But felt a bit disappointed in that Kay is boosting Squeak and Lisp, dissing Perl, and yet seems to promote many ideas that are becoming mantra by perl people.
Given that the interior of Perl is (at least used to, I don't know about now or Parrot) ugly, scary stuff, I would have liked to hear Kay's take on what Larry Wall and some other pretty bright people are trying to do with perl and parrot now, and whether he thinks their philosophies are great or slumbering. Might be a flame war to end all flame wars, but relatively untutored (well Niklaus Wirth's book was my beginning at a young age and according to Kay I've probably been damaged by it) I was excited to see all the ideas that were being stolen and discussed from other languages for Perl 6. Late typing, rebuilding the language from inside at a "meta" level, these all sound great. I'm also interested time and again with Haskell and perhaps it is because I subconsciously have an urge for cleanliness like the 1/2 page of Lisp.
Would parrot written in Lisp be better? I've liked Perl and the libraries of course, but if I could do without them I wonder if Kay would recommend Squeak, something like Erlang (?), or what. The talk of the ancient computer that had 1000 times better "lost" technology than today was intriguing but there was too little about it, and it seemed to talk almost about the Cell processor there.
I feel a great amount of warmth and wisdom from Kay and it is probably too much to ask him to light the way, but if he is going to go shooting down most of the world, even people who are seriously wanting something better and trying to build it, I think he has some responsibility to address it, or at least to mention how Squeak can solve all our problems. Well I guess I have a week of surfing to find my own answers. When I looked at Squeak the last couple of times a while ago I had to turn away from it (down the dark path?) but at the very least I'd like to be intelligent about my choices.
To me perl and the people at perlmonks.org are interested in a language that assists creativity and the wild Larry juggernaught and the wizards involved in Perl 6 deserve more than Kay handed out. I hope this is not his last parting shot but the first of many challenging, wonderful discussions by Kay about how we can get to the next level.
The Europeans have Galileo, their own GPS, but that can also get turned off presumably for similar reasons as the U.S. one might. One might imagine a lighthouse transmitting at another wavelength in addition to visible light so that airborne objects could automatically find out where they are. But wait isn't that what aircraft normally use to navigate by? So maybe radio beacons and lighthouses could merge, but lighthouses would also provide socially and environmentally useful tasks (safety and observations as others have posted). If the lighthouse was tall enough a ship at sea could see it (in some wavelength) and so you might want to consider kites or weather balloons as providing lighthouse-like tasks, at least in an emergency. Don't go too high though or you'll end up a (presumably GPS) satellite..
Well they may be going out of business for a good reason but it seems silly to let the small number of lighthouses disappear when they could play such an important role in navigation especially in the event of damage to the GPS network, intentional or not.
As a frazzled Dell customer I can tell you this is one of my grievances with them (based on my past experiences, I no longer go there). I started out loving my Inspiron 7.5K laptop (450MHz with linux) but not only would Dell refuse to give me a local copy of Windows, or fix it in Japan quickly, I was also told there would soon be a giant hard disk I could put in an extra bay (never materialized) and to go to the website. Okay website, you don't know which link to take even though prices are different, I figured small businesses or home users would be the cheapskates so used those. Then you have to search for products using a search engine that sucks. The interminable pages of search results are neither usefully sorted nor navigable, and half the listings are dubious yet expensive used and refurbished parts. Oh, and the battery conked out so it can't sleep, and it has limited RAM upgradability, and they stopped linux support (or did they start that up again?) and I would like a linux driver for the touchpad, etc. Perhaps 3-4 years is a long time to use the same machine even if it was computer of the year Dell sells some cheap computers especially for businesses but I don't really trust them. For instant satisfaction I found the best thing was to take the box to a shop that sells all kinds of hardware parts and get them to check it while I wait. So Dell's fine so long as you don't need to hang on to the machine for too long, and you don't need any support. I find their website to detract from their products. Wish they'd fix it.
A poster above mentioned IRC, but that doesn't specify a game server like in the patent. But surely something in the MUD/MOO genre would cover it, a MUD server interacting with an IRC server?
Also I do not see any reason why this must be about games. Any similar system even not meant for gaming could shoot down the patent. For example I am thinking about the huge text-based world that was online networking before the advent of Mosaic, in particular services provided by large companies on Prime mainframes like the Source, or Compuserve/Niftyserve. It seems likely that one server would have been used to manage online accounts and messaging while others provided online chat or game services.
The key here seems to be the ability to join a multiuser session after discovering a the identity of a member of the session.
I also have a question, would not science fiction also provide prior art, if it described technology in the patent? Thinking of William Gibson works. And Snowcrash.
I guess there might be two cool uses for it. But they are such weenies they are scared to come right out and say it!
1) They do briefly mention the third dimension. It seems to me that any arbitrarily length (divisible by 3) alphanumeric string could be an address in 3D space. But you would have to know how long the string is first. So if you have a stream of text coming at you (subtract spaces and punctuation) you will never know where in space it points to. Is it 21 digits long, or 36 digits long? So it can function as a DMCA-friendly codec for any arbitrary data stream to encode an arbitrary location.
2) It can also function as an unlimited addressing space, a la ipv6. In this case you don't have to worry about allotting companies class A addresses, just pick the geographical coordinates of their head office! Just keep adding digits as necessary, as long as you keep the total number divisible by 3. The company's entire addressing space (well spacetime if we use 4 coordinates) could fit inside a desk drawer between 1 am and midnight on February 14, 2005. Or maybe February 29, 2004 if they want to be more evil. Bigger companies with more real estate and floorspace could encode all of it, achieving a couple digits more compression which would be suitably Darwinian. The secretive can pick irrational numbers, the miserly can pick fractal dimensions. Oh wait I see a patent calling to me, better stop here!
Say you have a geographical coordinate like
39.2670N, 141.6000E. If N,E are treated as positive integers this could become:
0392670 and 1416000, seven digits each. You concatenate them together in a base-N alphabet. So if in base ten you have 03926701416000, nothing gained except I would like to know what is at that digit of pi maybe but no real use regarding the patent.
You could use a websafe alphabet (like I use when encrypting form data between one page and the next, based on a public CPAN module.. encryptform or some such) or a little bigger alphabet that would be MIME or Base64.
From item 8 they are dropping accuracy in order to encode in less characters. Um. Well yes you can shorten numbers to lose accuracy. If you write the numbers using letters instead, like in base 16 or some substitution alphabet it may look like you are shortening a word but really it is just dropping decimal places. Microsoft claims they are unique at being able to go back and forth between string length and allowable error. They have a patented subroutine that you feed say a floating point latitude, number of characters to use, the number of characters in the alphabet (i.e. the base) and required accuracy, and it will spit back something like "KXW" maybe.
Likewise you can feed another patented subroutine "KXWCMY" and it will give you back something like "39.3N, 142E" (well higher res than that really, it doesn't seem that useful unless you are measuring GPS coords to the inch). Perhaps this is the code a mobile device will shout whenever it can triangulate its location from a few known wifi points.:)
Well I just skimmed the end of it but it seems this is for use when you really don't want to use all those decimal places (8 digits for meter resolution). Needless to say 32 bits is enough to handle it but it looks so *long*! So instead of just lopping off the last few digits, they want to compress it (okay so far) but then they tell the compression algorithm how compressed they want the string to be, how much they are willing to give up (I would think in decimal places but ultimately in meters I suppose).
They then talk about personal info managers and map display programs on pdas, and the bs starts to pile up real fast. They start talking about nonvolatile memory, video tape, scanners, joysticks, office environments, what have you.
There is mention of an URL (301) that 'contains a geographic parameter "mapcoord", which has a parameter value "ry7cx4tp95"'. There is some talk about users inputting information which sounds interesting, until you realize that in the end this is really a quintessential rot13 for the 21st century, written by a corporation that does not care if users cannot decipher the codes or tell how accurate it is at a glance, or find it on a globe or non-M$ map, that assumes every gps manufacturer will liscense the patent, who cares if you don't have alpha input on your keypad etc. Someone should tell them you could do it all in just a couple characters on a kanji-equipped Japanese phone. While it gets more seductive as you read more and more, it also hits you with a sledgehammer that you have to have a calculator with the patented subroutines built into it, just to understand what codes your are typing.. it can only ever be useful among a weenies who have been brainwashed to think in corporate speak and that is the problem with Microsoft and Windows. If they just published it for free openly most people would forget it (it seems neat maybe but in the end it's just too much trouble unless it is an accepted standard like geo8 for an 8 letter string.. and even then). As it is I think it is utterly disgusting. Also it is probably beaten by error checking code, lossy image compression code, and the CPAN module I mentioned. Yuck!
I have not been to Africa myself. But I've supported a project which builds schools and uses computers for medical and other communication in Cambodia. I also was involved in a project called Science and Technology in Society Forum last November which brought together politicians, businesspeople, and scientists from around the world - a very influential crowd - to try to solve global issues like those discussed here.
In the e-society session, everyone except me and a bright Intel VP thought politicians would solve all the problems, we thought engineers would. Then a man from Nigeria stood up. It took him 2 days to get to Kyoto. He said he appreciated everyone's enthusiam, but you know there are problems like where to get firewood. A major problem is smart people leaving the villages. In the Cambodian projects I know, political problems and human, ground level problems are like an axe taken to bright slashdotesque suggestions (I have offered plenty believe me), and the number of people working full time with insight into what it takes are very few.
I have been a volunteer helping a website that asks people to buy mosquito nets for Cambodia. It is very cheap to buy a net that can keep malaria away when you sleep. A couple days ago Sharon Stone raised a million dollars for these nets and that was a stunner. Wow. I think she said something like, "People are dying in your country now and that is not okay with me now" and started with a 10,000 bucks donation.
The ex-Newsweek journalist I have worked with on Cambodia (Bernard Krisher) has gotten companies and individuals to donate 10,000 dollars each to build a school with their name on it (matched by the World Bank). A little more for solar panels that could drive a computer. Negroponte's media lab has been involved in these projects too - in fact maybe it is all connected.
I think computing definitely is useful. But I think we need more people who know what is going on there. I feel that there are lots more technological solutions out there but not enough knowledgeable people networked together to converge on solving specific problems. For example you may remember the story about LAN on a motorcycle that drives through Cambodian villages to exchange email and maybe take someone to a hospital (Krisher's Motoman project). I have wondered if ham radio or satellite radio might not be better but am not trained in it, and the reality is it takes someone who is really tough to get things done. If it is done at a primitive level with minimal technology and a lot of stubbornness, people on the ground and some sponsorship, it has a chance at working it seems.
But I wonder about the physicist in Rhode Island (mentioned on slashdot?) I heard of who developed a new kind of antenna that could provide the same output as a massive tower. I know there is packet ham radio which can go around the world. Satellites are passing overhead all the time probably. But where is the discussion by the physicists, ham fanatics, solar power geeks, and satellite geeks? How to plug it in to participation by the people who know the ground and what works?
As it happens I think one issue that used to be a big worry (maybe no more) in Cambodia when I started 10 years ago was that radio use would draw fire from the military. Oh well. Is that still true? I doubt it.
So my conclusion. I think Sharon Stone is wonderful and anything that can have similar effects is good, provided the money is used well. So an English documentary on the conditions on the ground might be good, anything that makes it more transparent to the media-saturated world and gets visible to the people with resources and heart. Certainly open source, technology, and ad hoc networking is useful there. I also think more attention and support needs to be given to the people who are actually doing things, to help them, learn lessons, and accelerate aid. Networking might be useful to get people who have left the town to talk to peop
Haven't read the article. But it seems that someone better invest heavily in some fabulous PR company to explain the word chimera and what is being done.
Or else the scientists may have to worry about their lives. The backlash could be worse than against abortion clinics.
Would it be enough to run one of these?
Its spec is 20mA at 3.7V (it typically runs off a car lighter or on 3 AAA batteries). I hate buying batteries but this would be great!
It is always so dark under desks where you have to do all the wiring changes periodically, and no matter how many times I vow to put all wires high on a wall I always seem to end up under desks tracing wires. It would be pretty useful if I had one of these led flashlights on the end of 10m of ethernet that I could plug into a hub for whatever reason.
I'd recommend one of those ribbon ethernets on a selfwinding spool but the cheapo one I had broke pretty quickly.
Cameras are going to be one heck of a lot smaller than that. How about when every *thing* has cameras embedded in it with passive circuits that can be queried by the nearest wifi-enabled smidgen of chip logic? No way to go home.
Personally I hate it. I especially hate it if I can see the cameras, if it is there in the name of security when it isn't really, when it is some misguided fratboy marketdroid corpspeak lobbylaws that are doing this to people who just want to get on with their lives, use services paid for by their own taxes, etc.
I suspect this is mainly just to increase the number of government accessible eyes, just in case. Probably between now and 10 years from now all digital photo and video cameras in public areas will routinely go through a round of pattern matching, which will mainly catch people with evil smirks and maybe a felon or two.
But you never know, it may very well be that statistically these kiosks were positioned to take the place of a major security risk. But I doubt it, the camera was added because they could. Brin I believe suggests you cannot escape this future, and geezers with online cameras will add to the video matrix. Would it be freer if anybody could view the signal from any government camera over the net? That is even scarier to me in a way.
I was thinking there could be an easy exploit that would get middle eastern men in trouble but that is probably not even worth talking about. What frustrates me is that when I tried to explain this sort of thing to my Dad a few times his attitude was "so what, I have nothing to hide". So somewhere between his generation and mine, a lot more people are feeling marginalized and scared about surveillance. Does it make you a crook if you are doing nothing wrong but it makes you feel edgy anyway? I don't have an answer except a few observations and a proposal:
1) This is not the most effective use of your homeland security tax money. The most likely purpose is so that IBM can quietly demonstrate automated profiling of the public to the U.S. government to sell them an expensive system that ties into it seamlessly, running on a Blue Gene/L system with an interface that ought to be much sexier. 2) Other countries could do this without causing as much ruckus, but they will do it after they see it works in the U.S. 3) It would be interesting to develop an interface to surf all available video angles in a hotspot vicinity 4) Every time a surveillance system is added, it is being done by people who think it's a good idea but are very quiet about how it is used 5) Government officials tend to get tired of surveillance just like ordinary citizens cynical about the government, when the cameras are turned on them. 6) There are a lot of surveillance equipment manufacturers but there are also a lot of open source programmers, and there are way many more people working in dull jobs with an internet connection and time on their hands 7) The U.S. doesn not have a privacy law like say, Japan. It also has much more "bloodyminded" government types than say, Canada. 8) The new Japanese Prime Minister's building was recently revealed to have parallel hallways between executive offices not visible to the public hallways monitored by journalists, so as to enable bureaucrats to deny they were meeting each other.
Conclusion: Open source community should consider making an open surveillance hardware and software system with a sexy interface, el cheapo hardware, wifi, rfid, and velcro. Solar power optional. These can be placed anywhere you like. If the cost is lower and the only tradeoff is publicity, wouldn't people go with the cheap one that is accessible online by anyone? I would not like it at all but I object to people in power having all the cards. I wouldn't mind so much probably if politicians didn't lie through their teeth all the time. More public eyes on officials might even have a small chance at a law being passed on surveillance before the cameras get way too small to consider.
is ALC, apparently this is based on contributions from the public. (It is Japanese English.)
It is the best choice in many situations because it has a lot of compound words and word senses used in contemporary business. For example it may have a whole list of financial terms including a financial word you give it. However it sometimes will have Japanese-style bad English so it is not totally trustworthy. It also does not show phonetic spelling of characters, does not cross reference all words, does not provide the authoritative information a dictionary usually does, etc. So I would recommend you take a look at it (even if you don't understand Japanese, just enter an English word, and paste the Japanese you get back in) to get an idea of what this project might look like when it goes live.
The neatest things about it are 1) it often has exactly the term I needed, and I can (usually) tell if the result is questionable; 2) you can enter Japanese or English into a single input field and hit return, that's it. It figures out which dictionary to use; and 3) it's free.
But, you can't download it as far as I can tell (tell me I'm wrong!). It is sponsored by a company.
Personally I am using xjdic_sa which is a shell client for edict, and with wine the Windows client since it has a graphical kanji lookup interface. They don't have enough words - a lot but not all.
I usually try to copy words I look up in a study file separately but like right now I have a thousand lines of xterm history I can scroll up to and I'd like to copy it all to a file (any way how?). So what I would recommend is that you build online and offline clients for this new system that save the words you look up and notify the dictionary (if you agree, say once per invocation or per day) when you didn't find what you wanted. This way you will be able to get users to tell the dictionary what they need and you can vet submissions more easily.
The project sounds interesting but seems not to care about how to look up and input characters in Asian languages. For me, that is part of what I use a dictionary for usually. If you could include a study and testing function it would be quite useful.
I've been getting into wxPerl as I've decided it's gained critical mass and you can do real things with it. Of course some functions are still getting filled out but it has a great mailing list and it is fun.
Seems to me it would be really interesting if there was a wxRuby and a way to package the wxRuby app. Perhaps when parrot is finished this will be a ring to bind them?
Yes, I understand XML though I don't like it. I agree with you but would prefer to put the metadata in a plain text colon separated header at the top.
The first line without a colon is the beginning of the body. That way it doesn't break your eyes. Things that must be XML could be embedded in the document, so the document would not have to begin and end with an XML header (or put the XML header info at the end of the document where it doesn't bother anyone). That way it will work fine with the zillion other readers out there. So I think an abbreviated, more typographically helpful version of XML would be nice.
For example:
Title: The Weapon Shops Of Isher Author: Van Vogt, A.E. Date: 1951 Publisher: ace books
The Weapon Shops of Isher PROLOGUE I MAGICIAN BELIEVED TO HAVE HYPNOTIZED CROWD
June 11, 1951-Police and newspapermen believe that Middle City will shortly be advertised as the next stopping place of a master magician and they are prepared to extend him a hearty welcome if he will condescend to explain exactly how he fooled hundreds of people into believing they saw a strange building, apparently a kind of gun-shop./* image: gunshop.jpg */
The building seemed to appear on the space formerly, and still, occupied by Aunt Sally's Lunch and Patterson Tailors. Only employees were inside the two aforementioned shops, and none noticed any untoward event. A large, brightly shining sign featured the front of the gunshop, which had been so miraculously conjured out of nothingness; and the sign constituted the first evidence that the entire scene was nothing but a masterly illusion. For from whichever angle one gazed at it, one seemed to be staring straight at the words, which read: FINE WEAPONS THE RIGHT TO BUY WEAPONS IS THE RIGHT TO BE FREE
Having read a lot of ebook text I so far have not found anything much better than ascii and jpegs, in the end. HTML is also good if you have good software for it. (By good I mean you can view embedded images and zoom/pan them on a small screen, slow cpu; you can transparently copy, save and search plain text without worrying about html tags; you can easily view and convert formatting with free tools, etc. Anyway ascii is best so far.
The major problem I see is how to store, index, and search when you have a lot of ebooks from many different publishers. For example there are no standard filename formats to include author and title information, and limitations on filenames also mean you basically want to have some metadata at the head of the document. So a simple standard for an ascii header at the top of a file would be good. This problem is of course much worse if you have different file/reader/compression formats so I am just thinking of ASCII here.
I've bought the same book several times over from my favorite authors over the years. That is dumb but even now my apartment is full of paperbacks and I keep tying them up with string into bundles which I can't get into anymore. I hate throwing away books but it is nuts. So I would like to get credit when I buy something from an author, so I can get a digital file when I buy the book and a copy any time thereafter for free. If I want a printed copy I pay the printing cost. But I should not have to pay 2 or 3 times for the copyright, and I should be able to store and manipulate electronically the text. I should be able to email or post on the web quotations from it, or put passages from it into my word processor.
When I was studying writing in school, I heard that one well known writer (maybe Kurt Vonnegut?) typed the entire text of his favorite writers on his typewriter, to learn how to write well. That seems like a really excellent way to train.
My opinion is that writers are writing for a couple reasons, one maybe is money (though 99% of the time not for more than making a living at it) and the other is to get what you want to say out. Maybe another reason (Heinlein says) is because you are infected with the writer's bug and cannot stop. (Luckily I stopped before I caught it, as you can see by my long, winding posts).
So I think the brief blurb on the inside cover of printed books about how this work may not be electronically copied etc. is complete anachronism and insulting. The point is, in the 21st century you should be able to do that. You should even be able to trade with friends, like you do with books. The part about not publishing it yourself and stealing profit from writers is a separate consideration which is important maybe but not the most important message writers want to send to their readers. So it may not be a popular opinion, but I think that writers should (and some are beginning to) embrace the Net as a way to get more people to know them, and trust their readers. In general this has already I believe been proven to work.
To me, I am most worried about how to maintain a well-organized, perpetual store for my personal digital library, which will not fall apart or become inaccessible as I move between operating systems and computers , will allow me to have both ascii and dvd together, will have some security maybe via an online backup, will let me trade with friends, will let me discover new works, will let me reimburse authors I like, will save me money so I don't have to repurchase dead tree copies, and will let me carry around a few hundred ascii books on my palm's memory stick.
Also I need a good book reader for linux, that is another perpetual quest but the most important thing I think is to achieve some open least common denominator standards and to create open text archives. Authors who don't want to participate can stay out of it, but there are a lot of books not in the bookstore and a lot of authors probably would like to become better known. Personally I have used an ol
Well, I have a story from 1995 in Japan when I started one of the first couple of ISPs in Japan. One guy who didn't understand the net came into our tiny humming office and said he wanted us to build a "missile" that he could use to shoot at other people (well I guess computers) through the net. I gave up talking to him and showed him the door. Is Tenet asking for manufacturers to voluntarily provide the keys and a blind eye to give the government the ability to do this sort of thing? Say to shut down a spam zombie computer or to get the street address of any node on the net? Well.. aside from that anecdote I think this calls for the following analysis.
In the following excerpt by the past head of the CIA,
line 1 is either (a) silly, (b) evil, or (c) intelligent depending on your point of view. Silly because it sounds like sticking your finger in a hole in a dike; evil because it could mean anything draconian; intelligent in case it happens to be only talking about companies running critical infrastructure, who would maybe have to take rigorous security audits or not be allowed to have those facilities online. (c) makes sense but is the lowest probability, since the talk was made intentionally very vague and without press.
Line 2 similarly is (a) silly or (b) evil if talking about anybody not running sensitive infrastructure, and (c) intelligent if talking about the critical facilities.
Line 3 sounds like he wants software companies to be more careful about security. Sounds like a good thing but then again what the CIA calls security is smoke and mirrors for ulterior motives, control, and punitive damage (until recently only outside U.S. borders), whereas most other people would call building strong personal firewalls and encryption security because it keeps the individual owner safe. No stomach for multiple choice here. Perhaps he has an occupational disease which prevents him from saying anything clearly and putting himself on the line? No chance of rehabilitation for this guy. Even if he was I guess the successor of the President's father or something like that. Maybe he should take up skydiving?
My analysis is that this is a retired professional scary guy trying to be relevant but incapable of doing anything but sounding silly or scary to anyone with a brain. People without brains generally think he's smart, etc. Which is too bad because if he could learn to speak more clearly he would be more effective and might have something useful to say about dealing with cyber-security threats (though I'd rather hear from the NSA's linux team about it than from a failed spymaster). This is why businesspeople in the real world never listen to government types. They can never say anything useful about anything directly, it is always vague scariness about vapor policies with a hint of powerplay behind it. BORING 90s SHIT!
Access to networks like the World Wide Web might need to be limited to those who can show they take security seriously, he said.
Mr. Tenet called for industry to lead the way by "establishing and enforcing" security standards.
Products need to be delivered to government and private-sector customers "with a new level of security and risk management already built in."
This is just being silly. Obviously if it has no impact on spammers then it is useless, and if it does have an impact (stealing resources from the spammer) then a spammer can in many countries fight back legally.
Lycos can 1) just swallow any legal claims and call it a PR expense, 2) do (1) and settle for cash with them without telling people, or 3) intentionally play a gray-area game with a slight tendency to go overboard, hence the impact on 3 spammers. This last game option attempts to maximimize PR impact (which requires at least 1 or 2 spammers be shut down temporarily) while minimizing legal costs.
It is not clear whether "throttling" actually means Lycos throws away some of your interaction to make it easier for some spammers.
It is also not clear whether any real hardship is borne by spammers and whether it has any real impact on the number of emails in the mailboxes of participants and the general public.
The problems with this are 1) you have to have a lot of people continually using this for as long as you want spammers out of commission, 2) it is hard to measure whether a given spammer is really out of business, 3) it is either too little or too much. The only clear winner is lycos.
If net vigilantism is allowed then you will get certain religious and political groupings doing the same thing. And spammers could go after Lycos! Or after individual users, y'know?
Now if you are of the legal opinion that this is fully justified due to 1) established business relationship, 2) they are denying me service, 3) the net routes around obstacles and the net is my karma, or 4) pry my fiber out of my cold dead hands (well that sounds like 3 a little), just put an updated list of spammers' IPs on a site I think you would get a much nicer DDoS in no time with less liability.
I also move that Lycos add this to their list of community services. They break the list into three sections: Active Spammers, Spam-supporting ISPs, and Spam Purchasers.
If you run your own company you can justify almost anything IT as being part of your job.. Non-IT things that generate cash would include:
Freelance translation Producer for other company to help them design new product
However I am coming to the thinking that as there is a limit to the number of hours in a day, the best thing is probably to create an IT product of your own. Which I am designing now (but then it won't be a quote side job anymore)
Things I do on the side that are IT but not for pay: Bug testing for oss projects (mainly HCI) NPO support websites for family
Thanks for the reply. You may be right on both counts.
Thinking about what you said, it may be that business can solve the problem where governments are unable to do so with enough finesse and speed. A consortium of businesses spanning the world - starting with ISPs maybe but depending mainly on megacorps that lose productivity due to spam - might be a useful foundation. That could provide an investigative, reporting, and funding structure. But something tells me lycos knows a good deal more about spam and spyware organizations, just because of the business they are in, and could do a bit more. Certainly it is possible to make a list of U.S. companies selling services through spam. More difficult for fly by night operations. Just a thought.
As you were saying about my fiber line (in Tokyo) I attempted to post a followup but had to wait and scrapped it. Specifically that I was wondering why I get only 250KB/s to my managed host at globalservers.com. Certainly there is a lot clogging the net and lycos' attempts will only exacerbate it. Thank god nobody is sending video spam yet (I think!)
Slashdot Mirror
Fact is there are a huge number of people in the U.S. alone who would sympathize with what slashdotters think about some of these issues if they knew about them and understood them, and the kind of money involved could pay for not only journalists but maybe even some open source projects. The interviews slashdot has are often interesting too, and journalists also do interviews.
The point is to make things more professional, more aggressive, and not to compete with slashdotters but to provide things they can't, like journalistic focus, professional editing, networking with other groups, more neat interviews, etc. God forbid we ever had a photo of the people being interviewed either! How about some research into why there are so few women programmers, this issue parallels the flap the president of Harvard made recently.
Here are some topics a journalist could investigate that might be worth something:
What would it take organizationally, financially, scientifically, technically, politically and timewise, to actually develop secure, auditable, open voting machines? Is low-tech the only valid solution? This could be a series and the journalist would stay interested in it (unlike slashdotters) and try to follow the story, ultimately possibly finding out a monetary sum, likely sponsors, and likely teams.
How come there are more female cosmologists than female physicists? Do movies like Contact have anything to do with it, or what? Another series, and one that should try to shine light on potential causes and solutions. Are there more women using Perl than Cobol or C? Would an easier path to bringing in documentation writers increase the number of both men and women involved in open source? and other theses.
Is it possible to get funding for an open source project on your own so you can work on it full time?
On TV they always have things like build your own house and so on. Are there other fields where open source concepts could be useful to people besides software?
Slashdotters could suggest topics as well. Journalists could sift through these and find interesting ones. More tech-savvy journalists or perhaps programmers with some training in writing could do similar things. I'd like to get a journalist to follow up between Alan Kay and Larry Wall, to get to the bottom of what Kay wants and why Perl 6 isn't going to do it. (Or is it? Sounded that way to me...)
Anyway these kinds of things are exciting, important issues and the idea of having thousands of captive smart people being stuck with unprofessional, passive editors like slashdot's is nearly criminal. It is worth paying someone to pay attention.
I believe
Imagine investigating a story, reporting on an event before anyone else, even getting articles placed in other papers! It could be a dream job with people lining up to fund it. PLEASE consider what
Caveat, this coming from someone who just got a post rejected last week, but still there are a hundred geeks out there wanking on about two week old news and it's kinda dumb. Why not actually contact some congressional staffers and find out what's happening BEFORE the news breaks elsewhere? Like, news? You know?
This is the weak point of slashdot's dependence on user submissions. There aren't any journalist users who are going to submit first to slashdot. Solve for x.
Hi!
Thanks for the reply. I started with Fortran on a key punch machine, then Integer Basic and Pascal on an Apple II, and didn't get a taste of Oberon until I had a Macintosh (I think a 512K SE). Couldn't say I "know" Oberon exactly but it was extremely, extremely cool. Almost head bursting in fact but I was shielded from it by some cluelessness.
Hmm maybe I'll look for it on linux.
Best,
Matt
I really liked the end of the interview and copied it to read again a few times. But felt a bit disappointed in that Kay is boosting Squeak and Lisp, dissing Perl, and yet seems to promote many ideas that are becoming mantra by perl people.
Given that the interior of Perl is (at least used to, I don't know about now or Parrot) ugly, scary stuff, I would have liked to hear Kay's take on what Larry Wall and some other pretty bright people are trying to do with perl and parrot now, and whether he thinks their philosophies are great or slumbering. Might be a flame war to end all flame wars, but relatively untutored (well Niklaus Wirth's book was my beginning at a young age and according to Kay I've probably been damaged by it) I was excited to see all the ideas that were being stolen and discussed from other languages for Perl 6. Late typing, rebuilding the language from inside at a "meta" level, these all sound great. I'm also interested time and again with Haskell and perhaps it is because I subconsciously have an urge for cleanliness like the 1/2 page of Lisp.
Would parrot written in Lisp be better? I've liked Perl and the libraries of course, but if I could do without them I wonder if Kay would recommend Squeak, something like Erlang (?), or what. The talk of the ancient computer that had 1000 times better "lost" technology than today was intriguing but there was too little about it, and it seemed to talk almost about the Cell processor there.
I feel a great amount of warmth and wisdom from Kay and it is probably too much to ask him to light the way, but if he is going to go shooting down most of the world, even people who are seriously wanting something better and trying to build it, I think he has some responsibility to address it, or at least to mention how Squeak can solve all our problems. Well I guess I have a week of surfing to find my own answers. When I looked at Squeak the last couple of times a while ago I had to turn away from it (down the dark path?) but at the very least I'd like to be intelligent about my choices.
To me perl and the people at perlmonks.org are interested in a language that assists creativity and the wild Larry juggernaught and the wizards involved in Perl 6 deserve more than Kay handed out. I hope this is not his last parting shot but the first of many challenging, wonderful discussions by Kay about how we can get to the next level.
The Europeans have Galileo, their own GPS, but that can also get turned off presumably for similar reasons as the U.S. one might. One might imagine a lighthouse transmitting at another wavelength in addition to visible light so that airborne objects could automatically find out where they are. But wait isn't that what aircraft normally use to navigate by? So maybe radio beacons and lighthouses could merge, but lighthouses would also provide socially and environmentally useful tasks (safety and observations as others have posted). If the lighthouse was tall enough a ship at sea could see it (in some wavelength) and so you might want to consider kites or weather balloons as providing lighthouse-like tasks, at least in an emergency. Don't go too high though or you'll end up a (presumably GPS) satellite..
Well they may be going out of business for a good reason but it seems silly to let the small number of lighthouses disappear when they could play such an important role in navigation especially in the event of damage to the GPS network, intentional or not.
As a frazzled Dell customer I can tell you this is one of my grievances with them (based on my past experiences, I no longer go there). I started out loving my Inspiron 7.5K laptop (450MHz with linux) but not only would Dell refuse to give me a local copy of Windows, or fix it in Japan quickly, I was also told there would soon be a giant hard disk I could put in an extra bay (never materialized) and to go to the website. Okay website, you don't know which link to take even though prices are different, I figured small businesses or home users would be the cheapskates so used those. Then you have to search for products using a search engine that sucks. The interminable pages of search results are neither usefully sorted nor navigable, and half the listings are dubious yet expensive used and refurbished parts. Oh, and the battery conked out so it can't sleep, and it has limited RAM upgradability, and they stopped linux support (or did they start that up again?) and I would like a linux driver for the touchpad, etc. Perhaps 3-4 years is a long time to use the same machine even if it was computer of the year
Dell sells some cheap computers especially for businesses but I don't really trust them. For instant satisfaction I found the best thing was to take the box to a shop that sells all kinds of hardware parts and get them to check it while I wait. So Dell's fine so long as you don't need to hang on to the machine for too long, and you don't need any support. I find their website to detract from their products. Wish they'd fix it.
Also I do not see any reason why this must be about games. Any similar system even not meant for gaming could shoot down the patent. For example I am thinking about the huge text-based world that was online networking before the advent of Mosaic, in particular services provided by large companies on Prime mainframes like the Source, or Compuserve/Niftyserve. It seems likely that one server would have been used to manage online accounts and messaging while others provided online chat or game services.
The key here seems to be the ability to join a multiuser session after discovering a the identity of a member of the session.
I also have a question, would not science fiction also provide prior art, if it described technology in the patent? Thinking of William Gibson works. And Snowcrash.
1) They do briefly mention the third dimension. It seems to me that any arbitrarily length (divisible by 3) alphanumeric string could be an address in 3D space. But you would have to know how long the string is first. So if you have a stream of text coming at you (subtract spaces and punctuation) you will never know where in space it points to. Is it 21 digits long, or 36 digits long? So it can function as a DMCA-friendly codec for any arbitrary data stream to encode an arbitrary location.
2) It can also function as an unlimited addressing space, a la ipv6. In this case you don't have to worry about allotting companies class A addresses, just pick the geographical coordinates of their head office! Just keep adding digits as necessary, as long as you keep the total number divisible by 3. The company's entire addressing space (well spacetime if we use 4 coordinates) could fit inside a desk drawer between 1 am and midnight on February 14, 2005. Or maybe February 29, 2004 if they want to be more evil. Bigger companies with more real estate and floorspace could encode all of it, achieving a couple digits more compression which would be suitably Darwinian. The secretive can pick irrational numbers, the miserly can pick fractal dimensions. Oh wait I see a patent calling to me, better stop here!
0392670 and 1416000, seven digits each. You concatenate them together in a base-N alphabet. So if in base ten you have 03926701416000, nothing gained except I would like to know what is at that digit of pi maybe but no real use regarding the patent.
You could use a websafe alphabet (like I use when encrypting form data between one page and the next, based on a public CPAN module.. encryptform or some such) or a little bigger alphabet that would be MIME or Base64.
From item 8 they are dropping accuracy in order to encode in less characters. Um. Well yes you can shorten numbers to lose accuracy. If you write the numbers using letters instead, like in base 16 or some substitution alphabet it may look like you are shortening a word but really it is just dropping decimal places. Microsoft claims they are unique at being able to go back and forth between string length and allowable error. They have a patented subroutine that you feed say a floating point latitude, number of characters to use, the number of characters in the alphabet (i.e. the base) and required accuracy, and it will spit back something like "KXW" maybe.
Likewise you can feed another patented subroutine "KXWCMY" and it will give you back something like "39.3N, 142E" (well higher res than that really, it doesn't seem that useful unless you are measuring GPS coords to the inch). Perhaps this is the code a mobile device will shout whenever it can triangulate its location from a few known wifi points. :)
Well I just skimmed the end of it but it seems this is for use when you really don't want to use all those decimal places (8 digits for meter resolution). Needless to say 32 bits is enough to handle it but it looks so *long*! So instead of just lopping off the last few digits, they want to compress it (okay so far) but then they tell the compression algorithm how compressed they want the string to be, how much they are willing to give up (I would think in decimal places but ultimately in meters I suppose).
They then talk about personal info managers and map display programs on pdas, and the bs starts to pile up real fast. They start talking about nonvolatile memory, video tape, scanners, joysticks, office environments, what have you.
There is mention of an URL (301) that 'contains a geographic parameter "mapcoord", which has a parameter value "ry7cx4tp95"'. There is some talk about users inputting information which sounds interesting, until you realize that in the end this is really a quintessential rot13 for the 21st century, written by a corporation that does not care if users cannot decipher the codes or tell how accurate it is at a glance, or find it on a globe or non-M$ map, that assumes every gps manufacturer will liscense the patent, who cares if you don't have alpha input on your keypad etc. Someone should tell them you could do it all in just a couple characters on a kanji-equipped Japanese phone. While it gets more seductive as you read more and more, it also hits you with a sledgehammer that you have to have a calculator with the patented subroutines built into it, just to understand what codes your are typing.. it can only ever be useful among a weenies who have been brainwashed to think in corporate speak and that is the problem with Microsoft and Windows. If they just published it for free openly most people would forget it (it seems neat maybe but in the end it's just too much trouble unless it is an accepted standard like geo8 for an 8 letter string.. and even then). As it is I think it is utterly disgusting. Also it is probably beaten by error checking code, lossy image compression code, and the CPAN module I mentioned. Yuck!
In the e-society session, everyone except me and a bright Intel VP thought politicians would solve all the problems, we thought engineers would. Then a man from Nigeria stood up. It took him 2 days to get to Kyoto. He said he appreciated everyone's enthusiam, but you know there are problems like where to get firewood. A major problem is smart people leaving the villages. In the Cambodian projects I know, political problems and human, ground level problems are like an axe taken to bright slashdotesque suggestions (I have offered plenty believe me), and the number of people working full time with insight into what it takes are very few.
I have been a volunteer helping a website that asks people to buy mosquito nets for Cambodia. It is very cheap to buy a net that can keep malaria away when you sleep. A couple days ago Sharon Stone raised a million dollars for these nets and that was a stunner. Wow. I think she said something like, "People are dying in your country now and that is not okay with me now" and started with a 10,000 bucks donation.
The ex-Newsweek journalist I have worked with on Cambodia (Bernard Krisher) has gotten companies and individuals to donate 10,000 dollars each to build a school with their name on it (matched by the World Bank). A little more for solar panels that could drive a computer. Negroponte's media lab has been involved in these projects too - in fact maybe it is all connected.
I think computing definitely is useful. But I think we need more people who know what is going on there. I feel that there are lots more technological solutions out there but not enough knowledgeable people networked together to converge on solving specific problems. For example you may remember the story about LAN on a motorcycle that drives through Cambodian villages to exchange email and maybe take someone to a hospital (Krisher's Motoman project). I have wondered if ham radio or satellite radio might not be better but am not trained in it, and the reality is it takes someone who is really tough to get things done. If it is done at a primitive level with minimal technology and a lot of stubbornness, people on the ground and some sponsorship, it has a chance at working it seems.
But I wonder about the physicist in Rhode Island (mentioned on slashdot?) I heard of who developed a new kind of antenna that could provide the same output as a massive tower. I know there is packet ham radio which can go around the world. Satellites are passing overhead all the time probably. But where is the discussion by the physicists, ham fanatics, solar power geeks, and satellite geeks? How to plug it in to participation by the people who know the ground and what works?
As it happens I think one issue that used to be a big worry (maybe no more) in Cambodia when I started 10 years ago was that radio use would draw fire from the military. Oh well. Is that still true? I doubt it.
So my conclusion. I think Sharon Stone is wonderful and anything that can have similar effects is good, provided the money is used well. So an English documentary on the conditions on the ground might be good, anything that makes it more transparent to the media-saturated world and gets visible to the people with resources and heart. Certainly open source, technology, and ad hoc networking is useful there. I also think more attention and support needs to be given to the people who are actually doing things, to help them, learn lessons, and accelerate aid. Networking might be useful to get people who have left the town to talk to peop
SimTunes and many other works by Toshio Iwai?
A fun drawing program in which tone is determined by pixel color.
Haven't read the article. But it seems that someone better invest heavily in some fabulous PR company to explain the word chimera and what is being done.
Or else the scientists may have to worry about their lives. The backlash could be worse than against abortion clinics.
> I'd like to see how they plan on monitoring ..by adding a chip to your keyboard?
> my mage as it talks to your cleric
It is always so dark under desks where you have to do all the wiring changes periodically, and no matter how many times I vow to put all wires high on a wall I always seem to end up under desks tracing wires. It would be pretty useful if I had one of these led flashlights on the end of 10m of ethernet that I could plug into a hub for whatever reason.
I'd recommend one of those ribbon ethernets on a selfwinding spool but the cheapo one I had broke pretty quickly.
Cameras are going to be one heck of a lot smaller than that. How about when every *thing* has cameras embedded in it with passive circuits that can be queried by the nearest wifi-enabled smidgen of chip logic? No way to go home.
Personally I hate it. I especially hate it if I can see the cameras, if it is there in the name of security when it isn't really, when it is some misguided fratboy marketdroid corpspeak lobbylaws that are doing this to people who just want to get on with their lives, use services paid for by their own taxes, etc.
I suspect this is mainly just to increase the number of government accessible eyes, just in case. Probably between now and 10 years from now all digital photo and video cameras in public areas will routinely go through a round of pattern matching, which will mainly catch people with evil smirks and maybe a felon or two.
But you never know, it may very well be that statistically these kiosks were positioned to take the place of a major security risk. But I doubt it, the camera was added because they could. Brin I believe suggests you cannot escape this future, and geezers with online cameras will add to the video matrix. Would it be freer if anybody could view the signal from any government camera over the net? That is even scarier to me in a way.
I was thinking there could be an easy exploit that would get middle eastern men in trouble but that is probably not even worth talking about. What frustrates me is that when I tried to explain this sort of thing to my Dad a few times his attitude was "so what, I have nothing to hide". So somewhere between his generation and mine, a lot more people are feeling marginalized and scared about surveillance. Does it make you a crook if you are doing nothing wrong but it makes you feel edgy anyway? I don't have an answer except a few observations and a proposal:
1) This is not the most effective use of your homeland security tax money. The most likely purpose is so that IBM can quietly demonstrate automated profiling of the public to the U.S. government to sell them an expensive system that ties into it seamlessly, running on a Blue Gene/L system with an interface that ought to be much sexier.
2) Other countries could do this without causing as much ruckus, but they will do it after they see it works in the U.S.
3) It would be interesting to develop an interface to surf all available video angles in a hotspot vicinity
4) Every time a surveillance system is added, it is being done by people who think it's a good idea but are very quiet about how it is used
5) Government officials tend to get tired of surveillance just like ordinary citizens cynical about the government, when the cameras are turned on them.
6) There are a lot of surveillance equipment manufacturers but there are also a lot of open source programmers, and there are way many more people working in dull jobs with an internet connection and time on their hands
7) The U.S. doesn not have a privacy law like say, Japan. It also has much more "bloodyminded" government types than say, Canada.
8) The new Japanese Prime Minister's building was recently revealed to have parallel hallways between executive offices not visible to the public hallways monitored by journalists, so as to enable bureaucrats to deny they were meeting each other.
Conclusion:
Open source community should consider making an open surveillance hardware and software system with a sexy interface, el cheapo hardware, wifi, rfid, and velcro. Solar power optional. These can be placed anywhere you like. If the cost is lower and the only tradeoff is publicity, wouldn't people go with the cheap one that is accessible online by anyone? I would not like it at all but I object to people in power having all the cards. I wouldn't mind so much probably if politicians didn't lie through their teeth all the time. More public eyes on officials might even have a small chance at a law being passed on surveillance before the cameras get way too small to consider.
Are the libraries transmitting works digitally between libraries?
Are the libraries allowing themselves a certain number of copies per work to be in circulation?
If so, are there restrictions on becoming a library?
And how about a similar system for the non-handicapped?
It is the best choice in many situations because it has a lot of compound words and word senses used in contemporary business. For example it may have a whole list of financial terms including a financial word you give it. However it sometimes will have Japanese-style bad English so it is not totally trustworthy. It also does not show phonetic spelling of characters, does not cross reference all words, does not provide the authoritative information a dictionary usually does, etc. So I would recommend you take a look at it (even if you don't understand Japanese, just enter an English word, and paste the Japanese you get back in) to get an idea of what this project might look like when it goes live. The neatest things about it are 1) it often has exactly the term I needed, and I can (usually) tell if the result is questionable; 2) you can enter Japanese or English into a single input field and hit return, that's it. It figures out which dictionary to use; and 3) it's free.
But, you can't download it as far as I can tell (tell me I'm wrong!). It is sponsored by a company.
Personally I am using xjdic_sa which is a shell client for edict, and with wine the Windows client since it has a graphical kanji lookup interface. They don't have enough words - a lot but not all.
I usually try to copy words I look up in a study file separately but like right now I have a thousand lines of xterm history I can scroll up to and I'd like to copy it all to a file (any way how?). So what I would recommend is that you build online and offline clients for this new system that save the words you look up and notify the dictionary (if you agree, say once per invocation or per day) when you didn't find what you wanted. This way you will be able to get users to tell the dictionary what they need and you can vet submissions more easily.
The project sounds interesting but seems not to care about how to look up and input characters in Asian languages. For me, that is part of what I use a dictionary for usually. If you could include a study and testing function it would be quite useful.
I've been getting into wxPerl as I've decided it's gained critical mass and you can do real things with it. Of course some functions are still getting filled out but it has a great mailing list and it is fun.
Seems to me it would be really interesting if there was a wxRuby and a way to package the wxRuby app. Perhaps when parrot is finished this will be a ring to bind them?
Yes, I understand XML though I don't like it. I agree with you but would prefer to put the metadata in a plain text colon separated header at the top.
The first line without a colon is the beginning of the body. That way it doesn't break your eyes. Things that must be XML could be embedded in the document, so the document would not have to begin and end with an XML header (or put the XML header info at the end of the document where it doesn't bother anyone). That way it will work fine with the zillion other readers out there. So I think an abbreviated, more typographically helpful version of XML would be nice.
For example:
Having read a lot of ebook text I so far have not found anything much better than ascii and jpegs, in the end. HTML is also good if you have good software for it. (By good I mean you can view embedded images and zoom/pan them on a small screen, slow cpu; you can transparently copy, save and search plain text without worrying about html tags; you can easily view and convert formatting with free tools, etc. Anyway ascii is best so far.
The major problem I see is how to store, index, and search when you have a lot of ebooks from many different publishers. For example there are no standard filename formats to include author and title information, and limitations on filenames also mean you basically want to have some metadata at the head of the document. So a simple standard for an ascii header at the top of a file would be good. This problem is of course much worse if you have different file/reader/compression formats so I am just thinking of ASCII here.
I've bought the same book several times over from my favorite authors over the years. That is dumb but even now my apartment is full of paperbacks and I keep tying them up with string into bundles which I can't get into anymore. I hate throwing away books but it is nuts. So I would like to get credit when I buy something from an author, so I can get a digital file when I buy the book and a copy any time thereafter for free. If I want a printed copy I pay the printing cost. But I should not have to pay 2 or 3 times for the copyright, and I should be able to store and manipulate electronically the text. I should be able to email or post on the web quotations from it, or put passages from it into my word processor.
When I was studying writing in school, I heard that one well known writer (maybe Kurt Vonnegut?) typed the entire text of his favorite writers on his typewriter, to learn how to write well. That seems like a really excellent way to train.
My opinion is that writers are writing for a couple reasons, one maybe is money (though 99% of the time not for more than making a living at it) and the other is to get what you want to say out. Maybe another reason (Heinlein says) is because you are infected with the writer's bug and cannot stop. (Luckily I stopped before I caught it, as you can see by my long, winding posts).
So I think the brief blurb on the inside cover of printed books about how this work may not be electronically copied etc. is complete anachronism and insulting. The point is, in the 21st century you should be able to do that. You should even be able to trade with friends, like you do with books. The part about not publishing it yourself and stealing profit from writers is a separate consideration which is important maybe but not the most important message writers want to send to their readers. So it may not be a popular opinion, but I think that writers should (and some are beginning to) embrace the Net as a way to get more people to know them, and trust their readers. In general this has already I believe been proven to work.
To me, I am most worried about how to maintain a well-organized, perpetual store for my personal digital library, which will not fall apart or become inaccessible as I move between operating systems and computers , will allow me to have both ascii and dvd together, will have some security maybe via an online backup, will let me trade with friends, will let me discover new works, will let me reimburse authors I like, will save me money so I don't have to repurchase dead tree copies, and will let me carry around a few hundred ascii books on my palm's memory stick.
Also I need a good book reader for linux, that is another perpetual quest but the most important thing I think is to achieve some open least common denominator standards and to create open text archives. Authors who don't want to participate can stay out of it, but there are a lot of books not in the bookstore and a lot of authors probably would like to become better known. Personally I have used an ol
In the following excerpt by the past head of the CIA,
line 1 is either (a) silly, (b) evil, or (c) intelligent depending on your point of view. Silly because it sounds like sticking your finger in a hole in a dike; evil because it could mean anything draconian; intelligent in case it happens to be only talking about companies running critical infrastructure, who would maybe have to take rigorous security audits or not be allowed to have those facilities online. (c) makes sense but is the lowest probability, since the talk was made intentionally very vague and without press.
Line 2 similarly is (a) silly or (b) evil if talking about anybody not running sensitive infrastructure, and (c) intelligent if talking about the critical facilities. Line 3 sounds like he wants software companies to be more careful about security. Sounds like a good thing but then again what the CIA calls security is smoke and mirrors for ulterior motives, control, and punitive damage (until recently only outside U.S. borders), whereas most other people would call building strong personal firewalls and encryption security because it keeps the individual owner safe. No stomach for multiple choice here. Perhaps he has an occupational disease which prevents him from saying anything clearly and putting himself on the line? No chance of rehabilitation for this guy. Even if he was I guess the successor of the President's father or something like that. Maybe he should take up skydiving?
My analysis is that this is a retired professional scary guy trying to be relevant but incapable of doing anything but sounding silly or scary to anyone with a brain. People without brains generally think he's smart, etc. Which is too bad because if he could learn to speak more clearly he would be more effective and might have something useful to say about dealing with cyber-security threats (though I'd rather hear from the NSA's linux team about it than from a failed spymaster). This is why businesspeople in the real world never listen to government types. They can never say anything useful about anything directly, it is always vague scariness about vapor policies with a hint of powerplay behind it. BORING 90s SHIT!
This is just being silly. Obviously if it has no impact on spammers then it is useless, and if it does have an impact (stealing resources from the spammer) then a spammer can in many countries fight back legally.
Lycos can 1) just swallow any legal claims and call it a PR expense, 2) do (1) and settle for cash with them without telling people, or 3) intentionally play a gray-area game with a slight tendency to go overboard, hence the impact on 3 spammers. This last game option attempts to maximimize PR impact (which requires at least 1 or 2 spammers be shut down temporarily) while minimizing legal costs.
It is not clear whether "throttling" actually means Lycos throws away some of your interaction to make it easier for some spammers.
It is also not clear whether any real hardship is borne by spammers and whether it has any real impact on the number of emails in the mailboxes of participants and the general public.
The problems with this are 1) you have to have a lot of people continually using this for as long as you want spammers out of commission, 2) it is hard to measure whether a given spammer is really out of business, 3) it is either too little or too much. The only clear winner is lycos.
If net vigilantism is allowed then you will get certain religious and political groupings doing the same thing. And spammers could go after Lycos! Or after individual users, y'know?
Now if you are of the legal opinion that this is fully justified due to 1) established business relationship, 2) they are denying me service, 3) the net routes around obstacles and the net is my karma, or 4) pry my fiber out of my cold dead hands (well that sounds like 3 a little), just put an updated list of spammers' IPs on a site I think you would get a much nicer DDoS in no time with less liability.
I also move that Lycos add this to their list of community services. They break the list into three sections: Active Spammers, Spam-supporting ISPs, and Spam Purchasers.
Maybe they should just hire the guys who did it wonderfully at Carnegie Mellon 5+ years ago. On the other hand, maybe they have.
If you run your own company you can justify almost anything IT as being part of your job..
Non-IT things that generate cash would include:
Freelance translation
Producer for other company to help them design new product
However I am coming to the thinking that as there is a limit to the number of hours in a day, the best thing is probably to create an IT product of your own. Which I am designing now (but then it won't be a quote side job anymore)
Things I do on the side that are IT but not for pay:
Bug testing for oss projects (mainly HCI)
NPO support
websites for family
Hi!
Thanks for the reply. You may be right on both counts.
Thinking about what you said, it may be that business can solve the problem where governments are unable to do so with enough finesse and speed. A consortium of businesses spanning the world - starting with ISPs maybe but depending mainly on megacorps that lose productivity due to spam - might be a useful foundation. That could provide an investigative, reporting, and funding structure. But something tells me lycos knows a good deal more about spam and spyware organizations, just because of the business they are in, and could do a bit more. Certainly it is possible to make a list of U.S. companies selling services through spam. More difficult for fly by night operations. Just a thought.
As you were saying about my fiber line (in Tokyo) I attempted to post a followup but had to wait and scrapped it. Specifically that I was wondering why I get only 250KB/s to my managed host at globalservers.com. Certainly there is a lot clogging the net and lycos' attempts will only exacerbate it. Thank god nobody is sending video spam yet (I think!)