Plenty of nations other than America, like Canada and Western Europe, had good reason to be apprehensive, and I imagine everyone would have felt some awe. But I doubt the Soviets or the Soviet sphere would have been apprehensive at all, and places like India and China could rest comfortably knowing they weren't in the line of fire.
The space race was so loaded with contradictions it's hard to know where to begin. There were the supposedly internationalist Communists turning into flag-waving patriots, the supposedly internationalist American scientific community quietly scooping up cash from rabid American supremacist politicians, and the whole thing was a supposedly vital struggle that looks a lot more like a symbolic one from outside the two competing countries. All in all, I bet the politicians are glad that by the February 1980 they had switched to the Olympics. They're cheaper, safer, more reliably fixed, and full of athletes who don't ask nearly as many awkward questions as scientists and engineers about whether competition for its own sake is really a good idea, whether the competing nations aren't more similar than different, how the money's flowing, whose interests are being served, whether the press is being realistic and honest, and so on. Can't wait for the Beijing Bird's Nest Stadium show in Summer 08.
It's unnecessary and would have been better to leave out, but if they were all 18 50 years ago, they're all at least 68 today, and as relatively straightforward statements of fact go, it sure seems to have struck a nerve here at slashdot. Calling them "the men" instead of "the people" didn't really raise alarm bells, and I bet "the Russian men" wouldn't either. What are/.'s demographics, anyway?
Whoops! You are exactly right, and I should have tarred the tyranny of Stalinism or Soviet Communism, not Stalin himself, who I'd mistakenly thought lived past Sputnik.
"If you have any idea of what is involved in designing, building and launching space vehicles, you already know that in this business nothing happens by accident. Not even accidents."
On the one hand, all things are complex and connected, and very visibly so in the field of rocket science, so perhaps you're arguing for a determinist worldview where everything all fits together in an inevitable single possible pattern, which is an unpopular idea since quantum physics, but still a defensible one if you believe in nonlocal effects or the many worlds interpretation. On the other hand, that sounds more like the kind of paranoid superstition that overtakes engineers who live in mortal terror of a mistake on the scale of the Challenger explosion.
Oh, and speaking of paranoia, bad juju, and mad science, is there some drug I can take that will erase the mental image of that Politboro dance?
"Italy for thirty years under the Borgias had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed, but produced Michelangelo, DaVinci, and the Renaissance. And Switzerland had brotherly love and five hundred years of democracy and peace. And what did they produce? The cuckoo clock." -Orson Welles from the 1949 picture "The Third Man"
This is a really fantastic movie speech, and it's a damn shame that it's just a bunch of horseshit. It is true that public research funding for areas other than defense has weakened greatly, which sucks, and left corporations and hobbyists to pick up the slack, but the NSF is still doing a hell of a lot more than any public institution in Tesla's day.
As to lack of conflict breeding lack of innovation, this is precisely where you are wrong. Wars and other great pressures push inventions into the public eye-- how many people rode in an airplane before WWII compared to during?-- but inventors prefer to work when there aren't any bombs falling around them. I could belabor the point with examples, but I'm not even going to bother. Just look at anyone who's done anything at all with computers in the last half century. For starters.
Furthermore, the pace of technological progress and its impact on people's lives continues to accelerate. Plastic surgery, cell phones, commercial rocket flights, myspace. And we do have hero scientists and engineers, a trend that increased massively during the dotcom boom and never completely reversed, and was ironically led by Bill Gates, who is not a hero to most scientists and engineers, but was popularly portrayed as a hero engineer until about 1998 or so when the antitrust lawsuits really kicked in.
Finally, as to it being sad to see China becoming capitalistic, I would rather have a humane culture than an innovative one, but since America has been leading the world in both, it's a false opposition. And as to it being sad to see China becoming democratic, well, that rather remains to be seen.
A humble patch submission, to make the poem sound decent: "There once was a user who whined / his current OS was unkind / so he tried to crack / the glorious Mac / but found that his hardware declined."
But "actively looking to test and confirm" is much better...
Boycotting China would make the point to everyone that China's lack of free speech is a problem. As it is, google is towing the party line that a little censorship is no big deal, and actively helping China censor information, and I'm amazed to see slashdotters looking for reasons to agree and approve! It's easy to be cavalier while you sit outside of China, but if your internet access was being filtered and monitored for any disagreement with or disrespect for your typically corrupt, boneheaded management and government, I think you'd have a different opinion. Slashdotters have a deep, profound desire to resolve political problems by explaining why they're not really problems, and that crude shortcut works worse and worse the less cushy and pampered your nation is.
And WHY does S Korea need police robots? For the massive annual student riots! I thought this was because the US was hypocritically propping up an evil dictatorship there, but as it turns out that apparently sort of faded after the 1980s, S Korea really is a multiparty democracy now, and the riots are just a tradition. An interesting intersection of culture and technological research, though. Links: Swans explains the shift, and an amused 1998 article from Salon about how oddly unpolitical they've gotten.
It might be faster, easier, less glue-y, and even a trifle less geeky to toss the whole wallet into a foil-lined freezer bag, then fold that up and put it in your pocket. I think Ziploc makes them.
"Businesses [...] are too afraid of running afoul of the 'open source community' and sometimes make decisions that are not in their financial interests."
I read the whole article, and never understood what he was talking about there. Any ideas?
Sorry kid, but you've got to be careful when you're arguing with an academic researcher, even on slashdot. They do tend to sneer at dolts who can't speak properly, and frankly even though I'm a coder who will probably never have more than a Bachelor's degree, I do too. Spellcheck is your friend.
"Will slashdot ever drag itself into the year 2005 and provide the ability to edit posts?"
Sorry this is an offtopic reply to your.sig, but I can see why/. doesn't allow post editing. It would let people say something informative, then replace it with an ad after it's modded up. Or they could say something stupid, wait for people to argue, then replace it with something else, so the replies make no sense. It's better to "edit" by putting corrections in new posts.
They're selling the search bar, home page, and resolution of incorrect URLs! Anything entered into the firefox address bar that doesn't resolve as a URL will be treated as an "I'm Feeling Lucky" Google search. A poster above makes a good point about how this does give Google power to shape internet traffic. And of course being on the home page and the search bar helps drive up traffic too. Google and the other companies on the search bar are all perfectly reasonable defaults. But the Firefox team should make these decisions solely on the basis of what will help the users, and they certainly shouldn't accept bribes from the companies who benefit!
They also mention selling "modifications" for companies that want to use firefox; anyone know of an example or two?
(Incidentally, I use the blank page as my home page, and instead of the search toolbar I use Firefox's great built-in bookmark keyword tool. It lets me type "i the incredibles" in the address bar for an imdb search, "g Austin movies" for a google search, w for wikipedia, e for everything2, and so on, and I can add any other site that offers searching.)
Of course, it is copyleft. If the ads get bad, fork it.:)
This is EXACTLY the answer. I live in Texas and I've been watching the Texas case. The incumbent phone companies have never revealed the actual phone number that "911" is routed to in each area, since it wouldn't have provided a benefit and would have allowed various forms of sabotage and pranks. Now that VOIP are trying to compete, they do need to know the numbers, but the incumbents are trying to stifle competition by not playing ball. This ruling is a smack down on the old phonecos, not the VOIP companies.
As the posters said, this is a spending policy, not real protectionism.
However, it's a grave oversimplification and misrepresentation that "protectionism is a Bad Thing." This kind of thoughtless libertarian rhetoric has a deep foothold in the geek crowd, spearheaded by Wired magazine, but it just isn't true.
Look at Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore, all of which fostered local tech companies against foreign competitors with protectionism, growing their tech firms into global dominance. Or look at the way the US and all the rest of the first world protect their steel, textile, and food industries to maintain things like a minimum wage, worker safety laws, and the right to unionize.
Thank you very much for the info; this could be quite useful. But I'm afraid you lost me in step 4. Could you please give a little more detail on how to link 2 proxies with ssh, or link to a site that does?
"ChoicePoint has no way of knowing whether anyone's personal information actually has been accessed"
In the absence of legislation, paying Watchers get privacy protections, and deadbeat Watchees like you and me don't. Want to spy on an ex-girlfriend? Fork over the cash and you're golden. Want to know who's been spying on you? No can do.
This is alarming, although it's hard to formulate a good fix. "All" personal data being copyrighted is absurd, since this data is vitally important to criminal trials and investigative journalism, to toss out a couple of public-interest examples that spring to mind immediately.
Instead, how about: (1) Data concerning transactions between parties (ie J Smith and VISA, or Smith and an insurance company) must be provided free to these parties. (2) Database sellers like VISA or ChoicePoint must prove or delete challenged records.
So ChoicePoint can still buy info from VISA and sell to Smith's prospective employer, but Smith can check it, and correct it.
There will need to be strict time limits and heavy fines on both of these rules, so ChoicePoint doesn't drag its feet.
The FACT Act and annualcreditreport.com are an EXCELLENT start, and ChoicePoint's site has similar options. They couldn't verify my identity and send me my report online, but in fairness I'm a college student who's used 8 addresses in the last 8 years (3 parent homes, 1 parent PO Box, 4 dorm & apartment addresses). ACR.com will become available to Texas on June 1, and then I plan to use it and see what ChoicePoint has on me while I'm at it, probably using the 1-800 number instead of just the web.
Or there's the non-legal solution: both VISA and Smith keep receipts of each transaction, including "total balance" and "credit rating" and so forth. Then Smith can prove to his prospective employer that ChoicePoint is wrong. Receipts could use public-key encryption, and be electronic.
"I believe most of these large data repositories have shockingly poor secuirty procedures, I'm shocked there aren't more thefts like this one happening on a regular basis."
I believe you mean "escape route" or "pressure valve," and I believe you should adjust your medication. IP will continue to be a rich/poor battleground, as it has been for generations, but paranoia of your caliber deserves a bigger object of fixation. I'd suggest the War On Drugs at the very least, and more likely an international banking conspiracy of some kind, or perhaps something involving plagues and/or famine.
Not that Sweden doesn't have various technological edges over the US, but this is a cultural and legal matter instead. The banking industry is more separate from the government here than in Sweden, and privacy is a bigger deal, because USians are historically wary of large institutions amassing power. Swedes are fairly comfortable with a larger, more paternalist government. The net result, as far as I can see, is that Americans struggle through bureaucracy that can be stiflingly ill-designed, and avaricious as in this case; whereas the Swedes have to contend with the occasional slip-up that can delete someone's bank account a bit more easily.
"Why the BoingBoing submitter and Mr. Doctorow are so upset about this I don't know; when you buy software that's dependent on a for-profit company to keep working, what do you expect?"
You really expect most users to understand that, despite the fact that it hasn't happened in any visible, widespread way yet? You must be shitting me.
Besides, proprietary competitors (TaxCut, MS Money, Moneydance) are quite capable of competing by building a reputation for long-term support.
Intuit is unusually sleazy; remember the TurboTax activation debacle.
>would Slashdot have an easier time in the world if it were run by a mental health group?
Hah, they'd never put up with us; we're less interesting than pedophiles.
Seriously, though, this gets into the question of whether pedophilia is a "disease." Disease, to me, is a good term for infection or organ failure, but usually not for mental problems. Some depression may be a failure in serotonin production, just as liver failure is a treatable chemical malfunction; but for the moment we'll assume pedophilia is in another class.
I do think that resolving the desire to have sex with children with the desire not to is a "mental problem," but please don't take that as a harsh moral judgment. Strictly speaking, every decision from which kind of dessert to whether to confess to having dead people in your freezer is a "mental problem."
Anger is about throttling some bastard who probably deserves it, or not, and pedophilia is about having sex with underage people, or not. Psychologists are those who try to help people to make decisions like these when they have trouble, and to be calm and happy afterwards. Some of the best help is self-help, such as your forums, but so is some of the worst. Liking science and technology doesn't involve a decision.
And although no one seems to have control over their sexual orientation yet, I am curious whether a technique will eventually be perfected. I don't feel the need, but some people do. I know people whose orientation relative to men versus women has changed on its own, and neurology is advancing.
Obviously the forums are yours, and turning them over to anyone else would be entirely your decision.
Slashdot Mirror
Plenty of nations other than America, like Canada and Western Europe, had good reason to be apprehensive, and I imagine everyone would have felt some awe. But I doubt the Soviets or the Soviet sphere would have been apprehensive at all, and places like India and China could rest comfortably knowing they weren't in the line of fire.
We do have cloning.
Wait a minute. Am I feeding the troll?
The space race was so loaded with contradictions it's hard to know where to begin. There were the supposedly internationalist Communists turning into flag-waving patriots, the supposedly internationalist American scientific community quietly scooping up cash from rabid American supremacist politicians, and the whole thing was a supposedly vital struggle that looks a lot more like a symbolic one from outside the two competing countries. All in all, I bet the politicians are glad that by the February 1980 they had switched to the Olympics. They're cheaper, safer, more reliably fixed, and full of athletes who don't ask nearly as many awkward questions as scientists and engineers about whether competition for its own sake is really a good idea, whether the competing nations aren't more similar than different, how the money's flowing, whose interests are being served, whether the press is being realistic and honest, and so on. Can't wait for the Beijing Bird's Nest Stadium show in Summer 08.
It's unnecessary and would have been better to leave out, but if they were all 18 50 years ago, they're all at least 68 today, and as relatively straightforward statements of fact go, it sure seems to have struck a nerve here at slashdot. Calling them "the men" instead of "the people" didn't really raise alarm bells, and I bet "the Russian men" wouldn't either. What are /.'s demographics, anyway?
Whoops! You are exactly right, and I should have tarred the tyranny of Stalinism or Soviet Communism, not Stalin himself, who I'd mistakenly thought lived past Sputnik.
"If you have any idea of what is involved in designing, building and launching space vehicles, you already know that in this business nothing happens by accident. Not even accidents."
On the one hand, all things are complex and connected, and very visibly so in the field of rocket science, so perhaps you're arguing for a determinist worldview where everything all fits together in an inevitable single possible pattern, which is an unpopular idea since quantum physics, but still a defensible one if you believe in nonlocal effects or the many worlds interpretation. On the other hand, that sounds more like the kind of paranoid superstition that overtakes engineers who live in mortal terror of a mistake on the scale of the Challenger explosion.
Oh, and speaking of paranoia, bad juju, and mad science, is there some drug I can take that will erase the mental image of that Politboro dance?
"Italy for thirty years under the Borgias had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed, but produced Michelangelo, DaVinci, and the Renaissance. And Switzerland had brotherly love and five hundred years of democracy and peace. And what did they produce? The cuckoo clock." -Orson Welles from the 1949 picture "The Third Man"
This is a really fantastic movie speech, and it's a damn shame that it's just a bunch of horseshit. It is true that public research funding for areas other than defense has weakened greatly, which sucks, and left corporations and hobbyists to pick up the slack, but the NSF is still doing a hell of a lot more than any public institution in Tesla's day.
As to lack of conflict breeding lack of innovation, this is precisely where you are wrong. Wars and other great pressures push inventions into the public eye-- how many people rode in an airplane before WWII compared to during?-- but inventors prefer to work when there aren't any bombs falling around them. I could belabor the point with examples, but I'm not even going to bother. Just look at anyone who's done anything at all with computers in the last half century. For starters.
Furthermore, the pace of technological progress and its impact on people's lives continues to accelerate. Plastic surgery, cell phones, commercial rocket flights, myspace. And we do have hero scientists and engineers, a trend that increased massively during the dotcom boom and never completely reversed, and was ironically led by Bill Gates, who is not a hero to most scientists and engineers, but was popularly portrayed as a hero engineer until about 1998 or so when the antitrust lawsuits really kicked in.
Finally, as to it being sad to see China becoming capitalistic, I would rather have a humane culture than an innovative one, but since America has been leading the world in both, it's a false opposition. And as to it being sad to see China becoming democratic, well, that rather remains to be seen.
A humble patch submission, to make the poem sound decent: "There once was a user who whined / his current OS was unkind / so he tried to crack / the glorious Mac / but found that his hardware declined."
But "actively looking to test and confirm" is much better...
Boycotting China would make the point to everyone that China's lack of free speech is a problem. As it is, google is towing the party line that a little censorship is no big deal, and actively helping China censor information, and I'm amazed to see slashdotters looking for reasons to agree and approve! It's easy to be cavalier while you sit outside of China, but if your internet access was being filtered and monitored for any disagreement with or disrespect for your typically corrupt, boneheaded management and government, I think you'd have a different opinion. Slashdotters have a deep, profound desire to resolve political problems by explaining why they're not really problems, and that crude shortcut works worse and worse the less cushy and pampered your nation is.
And WHY does S Korea need police robots? For the massive annual student riots! I thought this was because the US was hypocritically propping up an evil dictatorship there, but as it turns out that apparently sort of faded after the 1980s, S Korea really is a multiparty democracy now, and the riots are just a tradition. An interesting intersection of culture and technological research, though. Links: Swans explains the shift, and an amused 1998 article from Salon about how oddly unpolitical they've gotten.
It might be faster, easier, less glue-y, and even a trifle less geeky to toss the whole wallet into a foil-lined freezer bag, then fold that up and put it in your pocket. I think Ziploc makes them.
"Businesses [...] are too afraid of running afoul of the 'open source community' and sometimes make decisions that are not in their financial interests."
I read the whole article, and never understood what he was talking about there. Any ideas?
Sorry kid, but you've got to be careful when you're arguing with an academic researcher, even on slashdot. They do tend to sneer at dolts who can't speak properly, and frankly even though I'm a coder who will probably never have more than a Bachelor's degree, I do too. Spellcheck is your friend.
"Will slashdot ever drag itself into the year 2005 and provide the ability to edit posts?"
.sig, but I can see why /. doesn't allow post editing. It would let people say something informative, then replace it with an ad after it's modded up. Or they could say something stupid, wait for people to argue, then replace it with something else, so the replies make no sense. It's better to "edit" by putting corrections in new posts.
Sorry this is an offtopic reply to your
They're selling the search bar, home page, and resolution of incorrect URLs! Anything entered into the firefox address bar that doesn't resolve as a URL will be treated as an "I'm Feeling Lucky" Google search. A poster above makes a good point about how this does give Google power to shape internet traffic. And of course being on the home page and the search bar helps drive up traffic too. Google and the other companies on the search bar are all perfectly reasonable defaults. But the Firefox team should make these decisions solely on the basis of what will help the users, and they certainly shouldn't accept bribes from the companies who benefit!
:)
They also mention selling "modifications" for companies that want to use firefox; anyone know of an example or two?
(Incidentally, I use the blank page as my home page, and instead of the search toolbar I use Firefox's great built-in bookmark keyword tool. It lets me type "i the incredibles" in the address bar for an imdb search, "g Austin movies" for a google search, w for wikipedia, e for everything2, and so on, and I can add any other site that offers searching.)
Of course, it is copyleft. If the ads get bad, fork it.
This is EXACTLY the answer. I live in Texas and I've been watching the Texas case. The incumbent phone companies have never revealed the actual phone number that "911" is routed to in each area, since it wouldn't have provided a benefit and would have allowed various forms of sabotage and pranks. Now that VOIP are trying to compete, they do need to know the numbers, but the incumbents are trying to stifle competition by not playing ball. This ruling is a smack down on the old phonecos, not the VOIP companies.
As the posters said, this is a spending policy, not real protectionism.
However, it's a grave oversimplification and misrepresentation that "protectionism is a Bad Thing." This kind of thoughtless libertarian rhetoric has a deep foothold in the geek crowd, spearheaded by Wired magazine, but it just isn't true.
Look at Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore, all of which fostered local tech companies against foreign competitors with protectionism, growing their tech firms into global dominance. Or look at the way the US and all the rest of the first world protect their steel, textile, and food industries to maintain things like a minimum wage, worker safety laws, and the right to unionize.
Thank you very much for the info; this could be quite useful. But I'm afraid you lost me in step 4. Could you please give a little more detail on how to link 2 proxies with ssh, or link to a site that does?
"ChoicePoint has no way of knowing whether anyone's personal information actually has been accessed"
In the absence of legislation, paying Watchers get privacy protections, and deadbeat Watchees like you and me don't. Want to spy on an ex-girlfriend? Fork over the cash and you're golden. Want to know who's been spying on you? No can do.
This is alarming, although it's hard to formulate a good fix. "All" personal data being copyrighted is absurd, since this data is vitally important to criminal trials and investigative journalism, to toss out a couple of public-interest examples that spring to mind immediately.
Instead, how about:
(1) Data concerning transactions between parties (ie J Smith and VISA, or Smith and an insurance company) must be provided free to these parties.
(2) Database sellers like VISA or ChoicePoint must prove or delete challenged records.
So ChoicePoint can still buy info from VISA and sell to Smith's prospective employer, but Smith can check it, and correct it.
There will need to be strict time limits and heavy fines on both of these rules, so ChoicePoint doesn't drag its feet.
The FACT Act and annualcreditreport.com are an EXCELLENT start, and ChoicePoint's site has similar options. They couldn't verify my identity and send me my report online, but in fairness I'm a college student who's used 8 addresses in the last 8 years (3 parent homes, 1 parent PO Box, 4 dorm & apartment addresses). ACR.com will become available to Texas on June 1, and then I plan to use it and see what ChoicePoint has on me while I'm at it, probably using the 1-800 number instead of just the web.
Or there's the non-legal solution: both VISA and Smith keep receipts of each transaction, including "total balance" and "credit rating" and so forth. Then Smith can prove to his prospective employer that ChoicePoint is wrong. Receipts could use public-key encryption, and be electronic.
"I believe most of these large data repositories have shockingly poor secuirty procedures, I'm shocked there aren't more thefts like this one happening on a regular basis."
How many get reported?
"300k US citizens"..."1 in every 10 US citizens" The US has ~300M people, so that's 1 in 1000.
I believe you mean "escape route" or "pressure valve," and I believe you should adjust your medication. IP will continue to be a rich/poor battleground, as it has been for generations, but paranoia of your caliber deserves a bigger object of fixation. I'd suggest the War On Drugs at the very least, and more likely an international banking conspiracy of some kind, or perhaps something involving plagues and/or famine.
Not that Sweden doesn't have various technological edges over the US, but this is a cultural and legal matter instead. The banking industry is more separate from the government here than in Sweden, and privacy is a bigger deal, because USians are historically wary of large institutions amassing power. Swedes are fairly comfortable with a larger, more paternalist government. The net result, as far as I can see, is that Americans struggle through bureaucracy that can be stiflingly ill-designed, and avaricious as in this case; whereas the Swedes have to contend with the occasional slip-up that can delete someone's bank account a bit more easily.
"Why the BoingBoing submitter and Mr. Doctorow are so upset about this I don't know; when you buy software that's dependent on a for-profit company to keep working, what do you expect?"
You really expect most users to understand that, despite the fact that it hasn't happened in any visible, widespread way yet? You must be shitting me.
Besides, proprietary competitors (TaxCut, MS Money, Moneydance) are quite capable of competing by building a reputation for long-term support.
Intuit is unusually sleazy; remember the TurboTax activation debacle.
>would Slashdot have an easier time in the world if it were run by a mental health group?
Hah, they'd never put up with us; we're less interesting than pedophiles.
Seriously, though, this gets into the question of whether pedophilia is a "disease." Disease, to me, is a good term for infection or organ failure, but usually not for mental problems. Some depression may be a failure in serotonin production, just as liver failure is a treatable chemical malfunction; but for the moment we'll assume pedophilia is in another class.
I do think that resolving the desire to have sex with children with the desire not to is a "mental problem," but please don't take that as a harsh moral judgment. Strictly speaking, every decision from which kind of dessert to whether to confess to having dead people in your freezer is a "mental problem."
Anger is about throttling some bastard who probably deserves it, or not, and pedophilia is about having sex with underage people, or not. Psychologists are those who try to help people to make decisions like these when they have trouble, and to be calm and happy afterwards. Some of the best help is self-help, such as your forums, but so is some of the worst. Liking science and technology doesn't involve a decision.
And although no one seems to have control over their sexual orientation yet, I am curious whether a technique will eventually be perfected. I don't feel the need, but some people do. I know people whose orientation relative to men versus women has changed on its own, and neurology is advancing.
Obviously the forums are yours, and turning them over to anyone else would be entirely your decision.