Don't suppose the No Nukes freaks will apologize
on
Pluto Probe Launches
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Any comment from the "OMG! Plutonium powered space probes are evil!" people that were hanging little origami birds on a fence outside the launch site? They seemed certain that launching this craft was going to be a disaster. Damn! Now they're going to have to wait for the next one, since neither Cassini nor this new launch have obliged them by crashing into an old growth redwood grove or a daycare center.
Well, not very. But I'm very protective of my annoyingly-non-groupthink perspectives. Why, I've earned my own small group of freaks! It makes me warm and fuzzy. But apparently at least a few people think like me on at least a few topics.
I dunno... You lost me.
My point is that the current administration, as silly as they (and all others) are about some things, do tend to walk away from some pointless pieces of federal nonsense. As a guy who owns a few guns, I'll cite the example of the "assault weapons" ban. Totally pointless, completely ineffective, and not worth the trouble to chase once again through the renewal process. It's gone now. Good riddance.
We'll see how successful they are on some tax issues, but that's sort of the same thing. Unecessarily complex or confiscatory taxes (say, on the family farm when Dad dies) don't serve a meaningful purpose, and even if they only impact a small part of the population, are appropriately on the list of things that they'd like to torpedo.
I'm thinking that someone in DoJ, spending some time actually understanding the nature of search and surfing online, will come to understand that the nation's online resources are better not burdened with the compliance crap - it's a tax, essentially, and something that the conservatives will come to recognize as such. The regulatory efforts and funds should be spent, instead, on more traditional law enforcement pursuit of the actual bad guys who wreck kids' lives.
Why would MSN, Yahoo, and AOL be so eager to cooperate?
First, why do assume that "cooperating" is the same as "eager to cooperate"?
I can't believe that these corporations care one way or the other about people viewing porn.
That's probably a neutral issue. They care, of course, about it being done on their own network, because it opens them up to all sorts of "sexually charged environment" law suits, not to mention the time-wasting aspect.
Are they hoping that by cooperating they get some special favors later, or do they fear recrimination by the Bush administration if they refuse?
Has it occurred to you that they looked at the nature of the request, saw that there are no privacy issues involved in any way, and decided that the more educated the DoJ is, the more rational their policy decisions will be? Again: there is no private or IP-address type information changing hands, here. They're looking for aggregate stats to see if they're even looking at the situation from the right perspective. The COPA law (which is what's being argued about here, and was signed into law by Clinton, back in 1998) is ridiculous on the face of it, so hopefully the current administration will look at the aggregate search stats and recognize the futility of prior restraint.
More importantly, there's communications with customers. Especially in the web world, where the web site is part of the customer's communication with the rest of the world. People helping craft a web app and content need to be aware or cultural idioms, have smoothess of language use (written and spoken) - that contributes to the customer's comfort that their project, which is facing their customers/users - will feel like a natural extension of the company into the market that it serves. If design/review meetings have to include remedial English (or whatever) so that the people working on the project (no matter HOW good their dev chops) can "get" the way things need to look/feel/read - well, that just pisses off the paying customer.
I'm speaking, of course, of consulting-type gigs - but similar issues show up in other settings, too. For what it's worth, I'd be a terrible asset to a team building content for Chinese consumption. It's a two-way street.
Because only the UN is above the politics and special-interest pushing and pulling that might cause a domain record to yanked for making someone upset.
No, I'm pointing out that every administration reacts to the clear presence of bad guys by trying to do something about them. Are you really telling my that you think having no warrant while snooping around Aldrich Aimes' house was in keeping with what most people here preach as the spirit of the Constitution? Who cares what FISA did or dit not bring to bear on that case (nothing, really). The point is that the counter-intel people did what they thought was right (and it was). But if exactly the same set of circumstances were being discussed here, and the administration was Bush's (or any non-Democratic one), the general tone here would exactly the opposite of that regarding the real Aimes case.
You got me. Clearly capitalism is to blame. There's no chance that basic human incompetance, which could never rear it's ugly head under a government-run/socialized telecom, could have a bearing on this. Must be the free market!
I'm sure the contract to lay that fiber went to the lowest bidder. Good ol' capitalism at work.
It wasn't the people that layed the fiber that were the problem, it was the people to later work, with a backhoe, in the same place, that didn't use the utility marking system to know where they shouldn't dig.
Capitalism at work? I supposed you're comparing the use of contractors to the fabulous infrastructure work done by, say, the Soviet Union? Why, East Berlin was the very picture of sound, robust, aesthetically pleasing telecommunications and power cabling.
Though maybe you are saying that Clinton IS solely to blame for setting the scene to begin with, so to speak. I can see that too, but still dislike what Bush is doing with it
I'm mostly mad at Clinton, I guess, for giving this thing any sort of life in the first place. He and his highly educated internet-savvy VP should have been smarter than to think that the legislation he signed was either workable or ethically appropriate. But the courts said it was too much, and it got sidelined - great. The problem is that any subsequent administration that deliberately walks away from any follow-up on the original effort is going to get pilloried (by some people) in the press for "not caring about the children" blahditty blah blah. So, they do something slightly hamfisted, which is to ask the 800 pound gorilla of search engines for some stats about the traffic/results in the area in question (not YOUR traffic, mind you). Hopefully, their research will show them exactly what we're all hoping it will - that the situation can't be fixed by something framed along the lines of the COPA from 1998. I wish that, in this case, Bush's team had the backbone (in the face of the soccer moms, etc) to just acknowledge the nature of the problem and be the conservatives that I'd prefer them to be: the ones that say the responsibility is with the parents. I don't think, if this thing hadn't been simmering/rotting since the last administration, that it would have been brought up now, again, with everything else that's on the administration's plate.
I don't seem to recall Clinton authorizing extraconstitutional NSA activities, either, come to think of it. Funny thing.
Nope just extraconstitutional warrentless wiretaps and searches of US citizens. And the end did justify those means, because, for example, it trapped a person actively doing serious harm to the country. Could he have been trapped with a warrant? Maybe... but the leaks surrounding those have also proven to be problematic. Regardless: the Justice Department, under Clinton, sure as hell didn't avoid those type of actions, and Gore (among others) is being a stunning hypocrit when he conveniently forgets those little operational details that occured on his watch.
The Clinton administration isn't pressuring Google, the Bush administration is.
Right. All Clinton wanted to do was crush the life out of the hugely growing, vital thing that is the web - all so that he could look good protecting The Children with a completely useless law that would only impact legitimate site operators anyway. You're really going to let Clinton of the hook on this? Any administration is going to feel obligated to push the envelope on controlling what can kids see/do/get drawn into. In this case, Clinton's administration pushed first. It's a bad law, and was from the beginning. Asking Google for stats to illustrate whether it IS or not may actually be a good thing, in that it will show the futility of prior restraint in communcations (something that should have been obvious to Reno originally, but oddly wasn't).
(The parent poster missed the distinction between the law that was passed and the overreaching attempt to get Google's records, of course.)
Hi, "parent poster" here. No, I didn't miss it. I don't think the law - in its original conception, in the Clinton administration's attempts to defend it, or in the current administration's attempt to defend/revive it, makes any sense regardless. I'm just scratching my head at the number of "Bush is teh nazi" comments that don't seem to have any comprehension of who first trumpeted and signed this thing into existence in the first place. Google wasn't even a meaningful player in 1998, so asking them for stats wouldn't even have come up. I think the whole thing should be dropped, and that discussions about it should include the complete context/origins.
US Government wanting *all* search records to check to see who is looking at pornography and how.
From the actual material being reported, how did you draw that conclusion? I'm not sure how illuminating the reqested data will be, regardless, but it's not about "who," rather about "what" and "how often." Doesn't matter, because even if the same law from 1998 gets trotted back out in some variation, the courts will find as they did before. Prior restraint against free speech is nonsense, obviously.
political opposition
I'll be really interested in your evidence along those lines.
Why is this modded as interesting and informative? Could you not go to ANY state where a large portion of the population would be "impressed" with such a system?
You're right. I have no idea why my comment got modded up... other than that it sheds some light on how sheltered (from averageness) most slashdot users are. A lot.
I'll bet a couple of nerds in WV are shitting themselves right now.
Think you mean "both of the nerds in WV." Sometimes there are three, though (for less than an hour), depending on if I'm driving through on my way from the skinny part of Maryland south on 81.
a tower with dvd decryptor and a couple hundred gigs of avis and mp3's is now a vast piracy setup. that's funny.
You've never actually been on a drive through West Virginia, have you? Mind you, it's beautiful (the part that isn't up on blocks). For a state that's got a lot of territory just a short drive from the nation's capital, it's a funny mix of demographics. But yes, a rig set up (however modestly) to crank out physical copies of pirated media probably is a big deal to a lot of the locals.
The Trial of the Pyx, which forms part of the plot, exists, and has been carried out ever since 1282.
What a great read those three books were. Only Stephenson could make a totally wonky, nerdy process like a metallurgical examination of currency actually thrilling. I highly, highly recommend The Baroque Cycle. Really.
You do realize that announcements written by the Sanger Institute are not written for Slashdot readers, right?
I do. But in some ways, I think my point is even more appropriate for the lay audience. Meaning, again, how is someone supposed to picture text wrapping around the planet 250 times? Isn't that just another way of saying "more than you can really get your head around" anyway? Most analogies like that aren't really helpful to anyone. Is text going around the planet 100 times really a lot less in your mind that that going around 250 times? Sure, it's 100/250.. but it's not like it makes the number of genetic records in the discussed database more comprehensible to anyone, regardless. Obviously I'm talking about how this type of presentation is used througout semi-scientific news coverage of any topic, not just in this press release.
If we stacked up all of the useless length metaphors/comparisons from end to end, they'd still add up to a non-useful mental image of a billion genetic records.
I mean, "printed out as a single line of text, it would stretch around the world more than 250 times" means what, in terms of helping us picture this? I take it that we're not supposed to be able to imagine a billion records, but we can all clearly picture some text wrapped around the planet 250 times? Ah, that's much more helpful!
Now, I just got done re-indexing 10 million records in a database, and I can sort of picture 100 times that much work. This is slashdot! More nerdly examples, please.
Of course, this means that you can't write a book for a wider audience, but maybe that's what you really need to do.
1) "Understanding Computers: For people who live through The Great Depression"
2) "Understanding Computers: For people who have always had one at work"
3) "Understanding Computers: The extra stuff you need to know to help your parents"
and so on. My point is that most people understand complex things best when they see it in terms of something they're already comfortable with. That's why we get "horseless carriages" and "wireless phones" and "paint programs."
But someone in their fifties, for example, might be best helped along with the library analogy. Or, when people say it's too hard to tell one behavior from another, remind them that they already know the difference between the phone ringing, the doorbell, and the smoke alarm going off, and that they just need to take their time.
A typical consumer machine has more moving parts (so to speak) than all the other stuff in the household combined. Sooth some nerves by saying that you wouldn't expect someone from 100 years ago to be able to walk into your house and immediately know how to use the stove, the thermostat, the alarm, the phones... let alone know which pieces of postal mail that show up in the box are worth reading and which are best thrown away. But even 50-year-old computer-phobes tackle that sort of complexity in other forms all the time - they just need to break it down into pieces, like everything else they've learned.
Umm you mean adwords. Adsense is for content providers, adwords is for advertisers
I use "both" of them. They're really just two faces of the same engine, so the truth is I tend to conflate them when I talk, in general terms, about Google as an advertising vehicle. I should just say "Google Ads" and be done with it. The two different back ends (facing the advertiser, and facing the publisher) are just suited to their appropriate audiences - and I actually find it a little frustrating that Google gave them two different names. Unless, of course, they're thinking that one day they might use one or the other as a conduit for tied-in services they're not directly running. Who knows. Thanks for the correction, but I hope you'll still understand my point.
Muddling these issues together under the combined term Intellectual Property is a poor choice of words at best, and at worst it is intentionally misleading, and a staple for straw-man arguments.m
I agree, and hence my response. The guy who cited Franklin's decision not to claim a patent on his stove design might have been interesting or not all by itself... but he was a famous and prolific (and wealthy because of it) publisher, so I couldn't let the implication slide. Yes, it's too muddled, and that muddle is (poorly) used by finger-waggers on all sides of these issues.
Slashdot Mirror
Any comment from the "OMG! Plutonium powered space probes are evil!" people that were hanging little origami birds on a fence outside the launch site? They seemed certain that launching this craft was going to be a disaster. Damn! Now they're going to have to wait for the next one, since neither Cassini nor this new launch have obliged them by crashing into an old growth redwood grove or a daycare center.
Now, you CAN'T be new here...
Well, not very. But I'm very protective of my annoyingly-non-groupthink perspectives. Why, I've earned my own small group of freaks! It makes me warm and fuzzy. But apparently at least a few people think like me on at least a few topics.
I dunno... You lost me.
My point is that the current administration, as silly as they (and all others) are about some things, do tend to walk away from some pointless pieces of federal nonsense. As a guy who owns a few guns, I'll cite the example of the "assault weapons" ban. Totally pointless, completely ineffective, and not worth the trouble to chase once again through the renewal process. It's gone now. Good riddance.
We'll see how successful they are on some tax issues, but that's sort of the same thing. Unecessarily complex or confiscatory taxes (say, on the family farm when Dad dies) don't serve a meaningful purpose, and even if they only impact a small part of the population, are appropriately on the list of things that they'd like to torpedo.
I'm thinking that someone in DoJ, spending some time actually understanding the nature of search and surfing online, will come to understand that the nation's online resources are better not burdened with the compliance crap - it's a tax, essentially, and something that the conservatives will come to recognize as such. The regulatory efforts and funds should be spent, instead, on more traditional law enforcement pursuit of the actual bad guys who wreck kids' lives.
Why would MSN, Yahoo, and AOL be so eager to cooperate?
First, why do assume that "cooperating" is the same as "eager to cooperate"?
I can't believe that these corporations care one way or the other about people viewing porn.
That's probably a neutral issue. They care, of course, about it being done on their own network, because it opens them up to all sorts of "sexually charged environment" law suits, not to mention the time-wasting aspect.
Are they hoping that by cooperating they get some special favors later, or do they fear recrimination by the Bush administration if they refuse?
Has it occurred to you that they looked at the nature of the request, saw that there are no privacy issues involved in any way, and decided that the more educated the DoJ is, the more rational their policy decisions will be? Again: there is no private or IP-address type information changing hands, here. They're looking for aggregate stats to see if they're even looking at the situation from the right perspective. The COPA law (which is what's being argued about here, and was signed into law by Clinton, back in 1998) is ridiculous on the face of it, so hopefully the current administration will look at the aggregate search stats and recognize the futility of prior restraint.
More importantly, there's communications with customers. Especially in the web world, where the web site is part of the customer's communication with the rest of the world. People helping craft a web app and content need to be aware or cultural idioms, have smoothess of language use (written and spoken) - that contributes to the customer's comfort that their project, which is facing their customers/users - will feel like a natural extension of the company into the market that it serves. If design/review meetings have to include remedial English (or whatever) so that the people working on the project (no matter HOW good their dev chops) can "get" the way things need to look/feel/read - well, that just pisses off the paying customer.
I'm speaking, of course, of consulting-type gigs - but similar issues show up in other settings, too. For what it's worth, I'd be a terrible asset to a team building content for Chinese consumption. It's a two-way street.
Because only the UN is above the politics and special-interest pushing and pulling that might cause a domain record to yanked for making someone upset.
You're repeating talking points
No, I'm pointing out that every administration reacts to the clear presence of bad guys by trying to do something about them. Are you really telling my that you think having no warrant while snooping around Aldrich Aimes' house was in keeping with what most people here preach as the spirit of the Constitution? Who cares what FISA did or dit not bring to bear on that case (nothing, really). The point is that the counter-intel people did what they thought was right (and it was). But if exactly the same set of circumstances were being discussed here, and the administration was Bush's (or any non-Democratic one), the general tone here would exactly the opposite of that regarding the real Aimes case.
You got me. Clearly capitalism is to blame. There's no chance that basic human incompetance, which could never rear it's ugly head under a government-run/socialized telecom, could have a bearing on this. Must be the free market!
That was NOT a troll.
I'm sure the contract to lay that fiber went to the lowest bidder. Good ol' capitalism at work.
It wasn't the people that layed the fiber that were the problem, it was the people to later work, with a backhoe, in the same place, that didn't use the utility marking system to know where they shouldn't dig.
Capitalism at work? I supposed you're comparing the use of contractors to the fabulous infrastructure work done by, say, the Soviet Union? Why, East Berlin was the very picture of sound, robust, aesthetically pleasing telecommunications and power cabling.
Though maybe you are saying that Clinton IS solely to blame for setting the scene to begin with, so to speak. I can see that too, but still dislike what Bush is doing with it
I'm mostly mad at Clinton, I guess, for giving this thing any sort of life in the first place. He and his highly educated internet-savvy VP should have been smarter than to think that the legislation he signed was either workable or ethically appropriate. But the courts said it was too much, and it got sidelined - great. The problem is that any subsequent administration that deliberately walks away from any follow-up on the original effort is going to get pilloried (by some people) in the press for "not caring about the children" blahditty blah blah. So, they do something slightly hamfisted, which is to ask the 800 pound gorilla of search engines for some stats about the traffic/results in the area in question (not YOUR traffic, mind you). Hopefully, their research will show them exactly what we're all hoping it will - that the situation can't be fixed by something framed along the lines of the COPA from 1998. I wish that, in this case, Bush's team had the backbone (in the face of the soccer moms, etc) to just acknowledge the nature of the problem and be the conservatives that I'd prefer them to be: the ones that say the responsibility is with the parents. I don't think, if this thing hadn't been simmering/rotting since the last administration, that it would have been brought up now, again, with everything else that's on the administration's plate.
I don't seem to recall Clinton authorizing extraconstitutional NSA activities, either, come to think of it. Funny thing.
Nope just extraconstitutional warrentless wiretaps and searches of US citizens. And the end did justify those means, because, for example, it trapped a person actively doing serious harm to the country. Could he have been trapped with a warrant? Maybe... but the leaks surrounding those have also proven to be problematic. Regardless: the Justice Department, under Clinton, sure as hell didn't avoid those type of actions, and Gore (among others) is being a stunning hypocrit when he conveniently forgets those little operational details that occured on his watch.
The Clinton administration isn't pressuring Google, the Bush administration is.
Right. All Clinton wanted to do was crush the life out of the hugely growing, vital thing that is the web - all so that he could look good protecting The Children with a completely useless law that would only impact legitimate site operators anyway. You're really going to let Clinton of the hook on this? Any administration is going to feel obligated to push the envelope on controlling what can kids see/do/get drawn into. In this case, Clinton's administration pushed first. It's a bad law, and was from the beginning. Asking Google for stats to illustrate whether it IS or not may actually be a good thing, in that it will show the futility of prior restraint in communcations (something that should have been obvious to Reno originally, but oddly wasn't).
(The parent poster missed the distinction between the law that was passed and the overreaching attempt to get Google's records, of course.)
Hi, "parent poster" here. No, I didn't miss it. I don't think the law - in its original conception, in the Clinton administration's attempts to defend it, or in the current administration's attempt to defend/revive it, makes any sense regardless. I'm just scratching my head at the number of "Bush is teh nazi" comments that don't seem to have any comprehension of who first trumpeted and signed this thing into existence in the first place. Google wasn't even a meaningful player in 1998, so asking them for stats wouldn't even have come up. I think the whole thing should be dropped, and that discussions about it should include the complete context/origins.
US Government wanting *all* search records to check to see who is looking at pornography and how.
From the actual material being reported, how did you draw that conclusion? I'm not sure how illuminating the reqested data will be, regardless, but it's not about "who," rather about "what" and "how often." Doesn't matter, because even if the same law from 1998 gets trotted back out in some variation, the courts will find as they did before. Prior restraint against free speech is nonsense, obviously.
political opposition
I'll be really interested in your evidence along those lines.
It was 1998, remember? Janet Reno was singing its praises, and Bill Clinton signed it into law.
Why is this modded as interesting and informative? Could you not go to ANY state where a large portion of the population would be "impressed" with such a system?
You're right. I have no idea why my comment got modded up... other than that it sheds some light on how sheltered (from averageness) most slashdot users are. A lot.
I'll bet a couple of nerds in WV are shitting themselves right now.
Think you mean "both of the nerds in WV." Sometimes there are three, though (for less than an hour), depending on if I'm driving through on my way from the skinny part of Maryland south on 81.
a tower with dvd decryptor and a couple hundred gigs of avis and mp3's is now a vast piracy setup. that's funny.
You've never actually been on a drive through West Virginia, have you? Mind you, it's beautiful (the part that isn't up on blocks). For a state that's got a lot of territory just a short drive from the nation's capital, it's a funny mix of demographics. But yes, a rig set up (however modestly) to crank out physical copies of pirated media probably is a big deal to a lot of the locals.
The Trial of the Pyx, which forms part of the plot, exists, and has been carried out ever since 1282.
What a great read those three books were. Only Stephenson could make a totally wonky, nerdy process like a metallurgical examination of currency actually thrilling. I highly, highly recommend The Baroque Cycle. Really.
You do realize that announcements written by the Sanger Institute are not written for Slashdot readers, right?
I do. But in some ways, I think my point is even more appropriate for the lay audience. Meaning, again, how is someone supposed to picture text wrapping around the planet 250 times? Isn't that just another way of saying "more than you can really get your head around" anyway? Most analogies like that aren't really helpful to anyone. Is text going around the planet 100 times really a lot less in your mind that that going around 250 times? Sure, it's 100/250.. but it's not like it makes the number of genetic records in the discussed database more comprehensible to anyone, regardless. Obviously I'm talking about how this type of presentation is used througout semi-scientific news coverage of any topic, not just in this press release.
It would take 400 years to transmit it over a 14.4 kbps modem
See, now that's what I'm talking about. A proper, well-scaled, nerdly example. Except at least half the readers here will say 14.4-whatis-that-now?
If we stacked up all of the useless length metaphors/comparisons from end to end, they'd still add up to a non-useful mental image of a billion genetic records.
I mean, "printed out as a single line of text, it would stretch around the world more than 250 times" means what, in terms of helping us picture this? I take it that we're not supposed to be able to imagine a billion records, but we can all clearly picture some text wrapped around the planet 250 times? Ah, that's much more helpful!
Now, I just got done re-indexing 10 million records in a database, and I can sort of picture 100 times that much work. This is slashdot! More nerdly examples, please.
Of course, this means that you can't write a book for a wider audience, but maybe that's what you really need to do.
1) "Understanding Computers: For people who live through The Great Depression"
2) "Understanding Computers: For people who have always had one at work"
3) "Understanding Computers: The extra stuff you need to know to help your parents"
and so on. My point is that most people understand complex things best when they see it in terms of something they're already comfortable with. That's why we get "horseless carriages" and "wireless phones" and "paint programs."
But someone in their fifties, for example, might be best helped along with the library analogy. Or, when people say it's too hard to tell one behavior from another, remind them that they already know the difference between the phone ringing, the doorbell, and the smoke alarm going off, and that they just need to take their time.
A typical consumer machine has more moving parts (so to speak) than all the other stuff in the household combined. Sooth some nerves by saying that you wouldn't expect someone from 100 years ago to be able to walk into your house and immediately know how to use the stove, the thermostat, the alarm, the phones... let alone know which pieces of postal mail that show up in the box are worth reading and which are best thrown away. But even 50-year-old computer-phobes tackle that sort of complexity in other forms all the time - they just need to break it down into pieces, like everything else they've learned.
Umm you mean adwords. Adsense is for content providers, adwords is for advertisers
I use "both" of them. They're really just two faces of the same engine, so the truth is I tend to conflate them when I talk, in general terms, about Google as an advertising vehicle. I should just say "Google Ads" and be done with it. The two different back ends (facing the advertiser, and facing the publisher) are just suited to their appropriate audiences - and I actually find it a little frustrating that Google gave them two different names. Unless, of course, they're thinking that one day they might use one or the other as a conduit for tied-in services they're not directly running. Who knows. Thanks for the correction, but I hope you'll still understand my point.
Muddling these issues together under the combined term Intellectual Property is a poor choice of words at best, and at worst it is intentionally misleading, and a staple for straw-man arguments.m
I agree, and hence my response. The guy who cited Franklin's decision not to claim a patent on his stove design might have been interesting or not all by itself... but he was a famous and prolific (and wealthy because of it) publisher, so I couldn't let the implication slide. Yes, it's too muddled, and that muddle is (poorly) used by finger-waggers on all sides of these issues.