I am a firm believer in the Open Source philosophy so proprietary software is not on my radar.
I stopped reading right there. Setting up a computer lab is a good question for Ask Slashdot. Setting up a philosophical/religious indoctrination center is not.
It's possible that he's not just thinking about his high school but, in the long run, maintaining downloads for the rest of his country's schools so that everything is configured for their locality, language, needs and hardware. Perhaps by "philosophy" they meant the ability to redistribute software without facing arcane legal proceedings?
I mean, the costs drop dramatically when you can provide very simple commands and you don't need to enter a product key or worry about updates from a company but rather it can be all administered by one smart kid/staff at the school? When I read that, it wasn't about indoctrination so much as "I'm not even going to try to figure out ways around the costs, litigation and maintenance of proprietary software." Especially not when he knows Edubuntu and how simple it is to update that.
If this model works for his school, he could make his own distro and be on his way to baiting other companies looking to get rid of old machines that they can write off as good will. Proprietary software would surely gunk up that dream.
Latter Day Voyager One-ist: "I respect your beliefs but I must disagree. Two thousand years ago, Voyager One did not exit the solar system on the 35th year of our Lord 12,980 days after His Holy Launch. It would not be until..." Reformed Good Gamma Rays Church of the Accurate Voyager One-ist: "HERESY! Where I come from, we have reserved black holes for the likes of your foul and vile lie spreading mouth. Prepare for battle and death..." Latter Day Voyager One-ist: "But I am merely repeating the preachings of Voyager One's one true manager, Edward Stone, who is one and the same with Voyager One!" Reformed Good Gamma Rays Church of the Accurate Voyager One-ist: "Your Edward Stone was a false prophet and copycat of the original true manager that is lost to the ages!" Latter Day Voyager One-ist: "Impossible, it was written that the oracle confirmed His information before being unplugged." Reformed Good Gamma Rays Church of the Accurate Voyager One-ist: "How dare you bear false witness against the Wayback Machine (Voyager rest its all knowing soul)?!" Latter Day Voyager One-ist: "Ask any Unified Voyager Two-ist, they agree with our views..." Unified Voyager Two-ist: "Okay, everybody, drink your kool-aid now... the ghost of Voyager Two should be passing by this space station in the next few minutes. We will ride it all to that great ground control center in deep space!!!"
I looked in the article to see what fine entrepreneurs this company had helped out:
Brandon Chicotsky, an upstart educated at UT-Austin and NYU, is the founder of an “animate social marketing” business, BaldLogo.com, that offers advertisers the chance to emblazon their logos on the heads of bald men like himself. He’s using the $15,000 he raised on Upstart to wipe out half of his student debt, and says his backers have helped him review pitch decks and sent offers of future business partnerships.
Emphasis mine. Hey, good luck with that. I don't want anything to do with this. I have never lived beyond my means and while I've had to work my ass off these past ten years to pay off all of my student loans in two years, I've also saved up enough money to start a business. I'm waiting and testing the waters for customers because that money was really hard to earn so right now it's just $50 a year on a VPS and some slick coding on the side. Personally I feel this is a healthier safer model that will prevent me from flushing money down the drain but you're free to spend your money where you want. If I ever get revenue too large for me to handle on my own, I'll seek backing. I didn't even know "pitch decks" still existed... I thought that was something they brought back for a TV show.
Have fun when that novelty wears off and it's synonymous with "douche" to turn yourself into a walking billboard (I thought we were past this, people, time to bust out my Member's Only jacket).
this is my exact beef with the raspberry pi.... it's not really a $25/$35, it's a >$100 solution that is hard to obtain. Once the supply chain issues are fixed this may be more interesting. But at this point it's main attractive feature - price -.
I'm a software developer. I have 8 of them. I have so many of them I sell them to friends at cost instead of turning around and gouging on eBay like a prick. I have four of them in my room so I can do the cambridge distributed processing experiments.
How did I do it? Who's knob did I slobber? Nobody's. Remember back when orders were opened up on (assuming you're in the US) Newark and Allied? I put in three separate orders for each site for one each. It would be 3-4 months before the first arrived. They identified me as a repeat orderer so they simply reset my orders each time they shipped one. How much money did I have to front? $35 * 6 = $210 + S&H. Lotta money, right? Except, I looked at this just like I would some gaming console and it wasn't. Yes, it requires patience but put in an order and in 6 to 14 weeks you'll probably have a Raspberry Pi from either of the sites above. Totally worth the wait. If you're super American and can't wait a month to get something, go get gouged. Oh, just don't get upset when the 1GB models ship later this year -- it'll probably be good to have at least one 512MB to test for backwards compatibility.
How did I know to do this? Was it the hundreds of Slashdot posts by geeks saying "I don't want to hurt anybody but I would kill a dude in front of his own mother to get a Raspberry Pi" or perhaps the fact that learning institutions were putting money down for millions of them? It doesn't take an oracle to figure that out...
renders it closer to vapourware than anything else
A product so successful it's Slashdotted into "vaporware?" Come on, there are many good criticisms of the Raspberry Pi -- this is not one of them.
The translate API was axed because it was too popular.
I think there's a serious fiscal-minded disconnect between Google and Google fans/consumers. Google appeared to give several services for free to users. The first being search. And when they monetized big time on ads by selling users' eyeballs, only the businessmen and engineers seemed to realize that.
Now, when they find they cannot monetize on an decent implementation of a news reader or an API of translation tools (surprise, surprise) they do a cost benefit analysis and decide that they are losing money and -- like any business -- pull the plug. People bitch and moan (myself at the front of the line) but you have to realize that what's good for the consumer isn't always good for the business. If Starbucks offers free 12 oz coffee day or 7 Eleven does a free 32 oz slurpee day, you can't go back the next day and scream in outrage that they have baited you in and now switched it on you and discontinued your favorite product (that was conveniently free)... likewise you can say how great something was for the end user all you want. It doesn't mean it's going to survive. There is an old notion that good products survive because they sell and while that still applies to physical products, people are having a hard time transitioning that notion to software. Because it's not true when you think about it like Google's cash cows.
I found the Google Reader petition particularly amusing... where, in the petition, was the promise to pay a nominal yearly fee to use Reader? Or are we stupid enough to petition for publicly traded businesses to lose money? Where is the petition to have banks hand out $1 each time you visit them?
Of course there's this weird notion on Slashdot that ad based revenue on the internet is a very bad thing and that the internet was better before it and there's some mythical better revenue model. And here we are on Slashdot, a site that (as far as I can tell) makes its money/breaks even on ads...
I think this question should be "What acceptable revenue model would have saved these services or turned them into cash cows?" Keep in mind that if tracking your users is part of maximizing your profit to offer these services then you're facing pitchforks and torches -- I mean look at the stupid "scroogled" Microsoft mud slinging ads.
I'd suggest paying a lot of money to Blue Coat to do deep packet inspection so none of that content sneaks by.
Or, perhaps, sitting down with your users and discussing with them how to surf intelligently and safely.
And you all know about browser addons like noscript & adblock. But where is the 'proper' place for such content blocking?
If you're talking about adblocking, the 'proper' place is at your visual cortex where images are processed -- and I know I'm alone in that unpopular view. Blocking ads is like throwing a soda can out a car window in that if one person does it, it's not a problem and it appears to benefit them modestly. But if everyone does it, it ruins the very thing you're enjoying. I can understand why you'd do it if the ad was a massive flash blob but many ads by Google or just images aren't resource intensive.
I've clicked on ads and purchased something twice in my life from ads on a site. Once it was cheap shirts with funny designs on them (I needed new gym shirts) and the other was an eBay auction with a Buy It Now price lower than what I was looking at on that site (not sure how that works). I consider myself a pretty sophisticated person who is "above" advertising but anecdote-wise it's worked on me twice that I can think of. Removing that rare occurrence completely ruins the revenue model.
who would buy a shitload of used solar panels, a pair of red shoes of a specific size, or etc?
I can't tell if you're serious or trolling so I'll try to keep this short. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. In our day of capitalism, the more capital you have the more inherent power you have based on what you can buy with it. All that gold and gilded shit in the Vatican? That could certainly be sold to collectors and the power structure could make do with a modest monastery in the middle of nowhere.
To say that an auction on ebay wouldn't absolutely blow up with bidding on The Pope's used shoes shows you are either unintelligent or disturbingly apologetic to the insane amount of power and influence the pope has and continues to try to hold on to. It is staggering to hear someone say that.
The solar panels? Fine. But you could sell a lot of vatican stuff and put that money to good use helping the poor. They don't and they still ask for donations instead -- often from the poor. As someone who grew up Catholic below the poverty line watching 10% of my parents income go to a man in a magic castle with better digs than anyone else in the world, I can tell you he is further from Jesus than the homeless man on the street. The Bible will tell you it's harder for a rich man to enter heaven than a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. And yet the top leaders live in gilded opulence. Fitting for Italy I guess.
Although the newly appointed Pope Francis I has proven himself technologically savvy enough to use Twitter, the Vatican dropped the ball when it came to quickly registering a domain name for the pontiff after his appointment earlier this month
Well, you've put me in the awkward position of defending papal technology. None of this really matters considering Vatican City has its own TLD of.va so it would be a waste of money and resources to try to accumulate every other TLD. I believe.va is tightly regulated to include only 1990s era website technology. The last pope's virtual dedication was done in comic sans as seen here.
Funny, if the pope was more like the humble carpenter Jesus of Nazareth and less like an enshrined emperor he wouldn't have this problem as there'd be no financial gain to drive extortion. Keep paying your tithes so the Vatican has deep pockets... or would that be a Louis Vuitton to match his Prada shoes?
Not quite 'sickness', but my aunt lives on the side of a large hill overlooking a pretty valley... Her balcony used to be a nice place to sit and relax. Now her down-hill neighbor (approximately 2km away) has a wind turbine in his yard and the low frequency periodic noise from it has transformed her balcony into an annoying place to be and she can no longer sleep with the windows open. She's not claiming sickness, she's merely claiming annoyance..
Okay so let's say that from right up in front of the thing you experience 105 dB of sound. Now let's use some basic math to compute what 105 dB at 0.5 meters away sounds like when you're 2,000 meters away. 32.958 dB should be the intense ear splitting result at the balcony. Does your neighbor have some super noisy form of wind turbine or does your aunt go insane inside a kitchen when the refrigerator is running? Does she have to turn her air conditioning and refrigerator off in order to sleep? Because according to every resource out there, physics put that noise at sub 40 dB. Even if we bump it up to rock concert levels (120 dB) it should be 48 dB at 2 km and that's about as loud as an AC unit.
Now, how loud is acceptable at the edge of someone's property before you think the authorities should be involved? And think carefully about people who like to use air condition/compressors, mow their lawns, have yard parties with music, drive motorcycles and do any good patriotic non-save-the-rainforest stuff before you answer.
I wish that, when people are frickin' stupid like this, folks would just roll their eyes at them rather than take them seriously.
People seem to come up with the dumbest reasons they think they're ill. I know it can be frustrating to feel badly and not know why, but come on. Use some science.
Well for as stupid as it sounds, it gets modded up on Slashdot (disclaimer: I am the submitter).
I know I'll be modded down by the religious right just like during the questions part but this was a huge disappointment and quite depressing. Dr. Robert Baker appears to cling to a handful of incidences where intelligent people made some progress in the field of paleontology and somehow that alleviates all the other problems organized religions have presented to science. I wonder which part of Augustine's and Edward Hitchcock's work lead to their scientific contributions? It seems you think it was reading religious texts and allowing God to work through them? Not actually excavations, logical thinking and their daring to challenge the status quo?
Did religious folks help? Of course.
Yes, but not as much as they hurt. I still encounter Christians today who are certain that dinosaur bones were put in place by lawyers and the devil or that the world is only thousands of years old.
Would progress in science have been faster if all the contributors were anti-religion?
Quite likely. After all, it was the refusal of allowing religious texts to explain the unknown that allowed people to move forward in discovering and stealing that "forbidden knowledge of good and evil" from religious texts and doctrines.
Would Isaac Newton have been a better physicist if he had been Richard Dawkins?
Who knows? I can say for certain they were two men who dared to question as much as they possibly could -- something that is often frowned upon and punished internally when you question religions. Let's turn that question around: Would we have physics today if Isaac Newton had been Cotton Mather?
Would Galileo have had more success with his telescope if he had been Christopher Hitchens?
Why do you pick Christopher Hitchens and not Neil deGrasse Tyson? I think we can all agree there are very intelligent men today that have been freed from having to answer to some lethargic and backwards power structure such as The Pope or fear a lynching for contradicting a 2,000 year old text. And I think we can safely say that if the church wasn't allowed to shove its nose into and intimidate people with telescopes back during Galileo's time, we would be far better off today.
Would Christianity have been more pro-science if Augustine had the mindset of Daniel Dennett?
Here's a better question: Would Augustine have been a saint or would he have been excommunicated/burned at the stake if he had the mindset of Daniel Dennett?
Silly questions. The culture of science developed in the real historical context of society. Give credit where credit is due.
Yeah. Yeah, that's really depressing to know that someone can have a doctorate from Yale and Harvard and cling to this idea that science owes its existence to religion. It's even more disgusting that you restrict your examples specifically to Christianity and not Hindi or Muslim contributions.
You save yourself a lot of time and it allows you cast off the burdensome chore of having to parse The Bible and reason out why one part is metaphorical while another part needs to be literally followed. And then at the end of the day someone else is still calling you a sinner and your science is hobbled by what is and isn't taboo to explore.
A lot of scientists working on the V-1 and V-2 campaigns would later expand human capabilities into space... that didn't mean that their ideologies at the time were right. Likewise, because a Reverend could use evidence to come to the correct conclusion that dinosaurs were more like birds doesn't present one shred of evidence to me that Christianity is right, let alone reconcilable with science.
I thought Manning shopped it around to all the big existing media and they didn't want to know, it was only after Wikileaks picked it up that THEN they came back.
Did you read the article? That's exactly what they said in the article:
In his statement to the military court, Manning said that before he fell in with the antisecrecy guerrillas at WikiLeaks, he tried to deliver his trove of stolen documents to The Washington Post and The New York Times. At The Post, he was put off when a reporter told him that before she could commit to anything she’d have to get a senior editor involved. At The Times, Manning said, he left a message on voice mail but never got a call back.
The only problem with this NY Times article is that the author is completely ignorant of why a whistleblower would use something like only payphones and not e-mail to make contacts for divulging this information:
It’s puzzling to me that a skilled techie capable of managing one of the most monumental leaks ever couldn’t figure out how to get an e-mail or phone message to an editor or a reporter at The Times, a feat scores of readers manage every day.
DUR, well, I guess if you can't figure out why he didn't want a paper trail or electronic message then he shouldn't have given you the information after all! Did the voice mail start with "I'm calling from a payphone with a physical disc in my possession... "? Because unless he wanted to be easily caught, I'd guess that'd be the way to go.
Well, as the submitter I guess I'm the only person to read the article so I guess I have to collect only the bits you're interested in (emphases for your benefit):
Twitter launched its own transparency report in July 2012. It focuses on user data requests by governments (the United States made the most requests) and on content removal requests by governments or copyright holders. Twitter has also undertaken to leave a “Tweet withheld” message whenever a Tweet is removed in response to a complaint from a copyright holder and to send a copy of each takedown notice to the Chilling Effects website.
Opponents of the proposed Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2011 (CISPA) say it will allow privacy to be violated in order to protect cyber-security. Although it seemed to have broad support in the US Congress, it caused such an outcry that substantial revisions were made to increase protection for privacy, the White House threatened a veto and a sizeable number of representatives ended up voting against it. A new version of CISPA was resubmitted in January 2013 and could come before Congress as early as April 2013.
United States
The proposed "Stop Online Piracy Act" (SOPA) and "Protect IP Act" (PIPA) elicited a great deal of domestic and international criticism of the danger of unprecedented Internet censorship. Their opponents said they would prejudice countless Internet users who had never violated intellectual property by forcing websites to block access to other sites accused of vaguely defined copyright violations. The bills were finally shelved, but for how long?
Trial of WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning
US Army Private Bradley Manning confessed before a court martial on 28 February 2013 that he passed military and diplomatic files to WikiLeaks, including US embassy cables, the files of Guantanamo detainees and videos of air strikes in which civilians were killed, in particular the “Collateral Murder” video that showed a US helicopter crew killing Reuters journalists.
He said his motive was to enlighten the public about what goes on and to “spark a debate about foreign policy.” He explained that he initially tried to give the files to the New York Times andWashington Post but could not find anyone who seemed interested. He also claimed that he chose the material with care in order to ensure that it would not cause any harm.
Manning is facing up to 20 years in prison. Many NGOs have criticized the conditions in which he was being held as humiliating.
The European Union and many member countries were criticized as well but you can just read the report instead of having me repost the entire thing. Also, I find your logic laughable:
While I realize that censorship and monitoring are nowhere nearly as bad in the U.S. and Europe as they are in the included countries (though perhaps more insidious for its subtlety and secrecy)
By this logic, it is the Government of Antarctica that we truly have to watch out for. Their efforts of censorship are not nearly as bad as the U.S. and Europe (though perhaps even more insidious for its subtlety and secrecy since no one even knows they exist). Every time the US or EU attempts to censor something, it makes Slashdot's front page. Are you really so naive as to think they're so much more sophisticated than China that we can't detect the worst things they're doing? In China they have to rent access to the internet from the Chinese government! In the United States, if Comcast inserts a popup into a browser to notify users, it makes Slashdot's front page! How can you even compare the two or call the US more insidious? Hyperbole much?
Why achieve 'consensus' when we could let the fork fester, and have two virtual currencies floating wildly against one another as well as USD?
In fact, why not introduce Bitcoin-0 through Bitcoint-Aleph and let them fight it out? I'll bring popcorn!
BitCoin Bailey: No, no, no, everybody remain calm. We'll get through this together. You're thinking of this virtual currency all wrong. As if I had the BitCoins back in a safe. The money's not here. Your money's on Bill's computer, and Fred's computer... Angry BitCoin User: Hey Fred, what the hell you doin' with my BitCoins?! *a run on MtGox ensues*
Dude, this isn't Hollywood. Even at the incredible speed at which global warming is occuring, we're still talking about something that's happening at a speed unlikely to significantly change the environment you're living in within your lifetime. When I say significant, I mean "I lived in a lush forest when I was born, and now it's an apocalyptic desert where no rain falls."
What about "When I was born everyone ate beef for every meal but as I got older the cost of meat made it a once a week thing"? No true patriot is going to care about water wars and death in Africa. You're better off to let supply and demand (no subsidies!) ruin America's constant burger consumption. Then they'll finally cry foul. Look at Texas, they aren't just losing cattle. Trees, money, water, wildlife... not quite "apocalyptic" desert yet...
Warming is good for life. You might not be acclimated to it but the reality is when we have periods of cooling we have die offs and when we have periods of warming there is an expansion of species, of biodiversity. The Earth has been much warmer in the past and that was good for life.
Well, clearly you have all the answers so let me ask you: how rapid can the warming occur in order for an "expansion of species, of biodiversity"? Because something that concerns me is that the larger species -- especially those we depend on for food -- have a hard time rapidly evolving within a few hundred years. Those high points of warming happened an order of magnitude or two slower than the rate we're moving at. The bacteria and cockroaches will flourish but the humans, plants and meat sources are going to have a really bad time. In this case, the rate of change or "derivative" is what should be concerning you.
Keep embracing accelerated global warming though. Let me know when the water wars near the equator and famines start to cause you concern.
Six minutes ago it was announced the new sanctions are approved. To those of you still following or interested in this, Reuters even updated one of the links in my original comment that you can now find here to read:
UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The U.N. Security Council has voted unanimously for tough new sanctions to punish North Korea for its latest nuclear test, a move that sparked a furious Pyongyang to threaten a nuclear strike against the United States.
The vote Thursday by the U.N.'s most powerful body on a resolution drafted by North Korea's closest ally, China, and the United States sends a powerful message to North Korea that the international community condemns its ballistic missile and nuclear tests — and its repeated violation of Security Council resolutions.
The new sanctions are aimed at making it more difficult for North Korea to finance and obtain material for its weapons programs.
I apologize for making it sound like the United States was the sole proposer of the new resolution -- I actually got that vibe from the DPRK press releases. I didn't know until I read this that China (at least is reported to have) co-authored them with the US.
I didn't see any quotes from DPRK in the article so... They're trying to influence a UN vote that happens today on the new set of sanctions (harshest yet) that the US has proposed and will most certainly be ushered in days after they were proposed. North Korea's statement:
The statement said North Korea "strongly warns the U.N. Security Council not to make another big blunder like the one in the past when it earned the inveterate grudge of the Korean nation by acting as a war servant for the U.S. in 1950."
"Since the United States is about to ignite a nuclear war, we will be exercising our right to a preemptive nuclear attack against the headquarters of the aggressor in order to protect our supreme interest," said the statement carried by the official KCNA news agency.
And I'm pretty much done with any Slashdot discussion on this since the apologists and "MAD is good" folks have been mighty thick on these past few news stories. We have entered into the era of "Hey everybody, we have nuclear weapons now do what we say or we will nuke you!" Like a teenage gang member who found his first handgun...
Hey, thanks for calling me an "old-school folk" but I'll have you know that I have studied artificial intelligence both academically and professionally and -- always amusing -- is the delta between how far along people think we are with AI and where we really are with AI. I mean, people are talking like all you have to do is show Watson a problem set and then solutions abound! Your assertion that it's just "a couple spaces" thrown into the mix that's stopping us is laughably outdated. For example: Applying a negative modifier to a positive statement can occur in so many ways, I couldn't even list them all right here right now. And we're just supposed to automatically code for that?
Seriously, there seems to be a great oversight among certain old-school folks that computers can do this kind of mass searching in support of oppression perfectly fine.
That's why it takes five to ten minutes? Yeah? I don't know what sort of improvements you've made on top of latent semantic analysis or if you've completely scrapped that and revolutionized natural language parsing but, by all means, publish your work so the rest of us can bask in your divine glory. A job at Google should be the least of your goals -- usurping Google as an advertising giant would flow naturally from being able to automatically "understand" with a high recall and accuracy rate what people are writing in microblogs.
The argument that "it would take a huge army of men to do all that surveillance" does not hold water anymore.
On the other hand, Card seems to have kept his personal views out of his fiction,
Well, I can think of four or five times this has come up on Slashdot. Here's one and another. And from that comment by MozeeToby:
It isn't so much about 'preachy-ness' as it is about 'propaganda-ness'. In the Shadow series, for instance, we have the homosexual character of Anton. He is not in any way evil, Card doesn't ask us to fear or hate him as you might expect from a right wing writer.
Instead (and arguably worse), when we are first introduced to Anton we are asked to pity him. He is given a ludicrously strong cognitive dissonance to ham handedly symbolize the dissonance that Card assumes the man must have because of his lifestyle. He is utterly lonely and unhappy, and it is heavily implied that he has considered suicide as the only option to end his suffering.
Later in the story, Anton has *gasp* married. No, not to a man, but to a woman. In fact he is going to be a father. He is happy, talkative, and engaging. He mentions in passing that his homosexual tendancies have made his marriage harder but that with work they are able to get through it and live a full and happy life.
In my opinion, this is a more disgusting attack on gay rights than any violent diatrabe could ever be.
That probably bears repeating to address your "keeps it out of his fiction" comment.
Frankly, I've given up on Card. I've been chided about this very issue before on Slashdot (several times actually) but I stand by my opinion: You're free to say or believe in anything you want. But if you're an actor, author, musician, developer, athlete or any profession that tries to use their own popularity to further a belief or statement that I find reprehensible, I will actively and vocally make it known that I will no longer patronize you with funds or admiration.
I wish him the best of luck as one human being to another but I will not spend one more cent to him if he's going to use his position as an author to vocally oppose two people of the same sex who are in love with each other. If you think I'm wrong in doing this, then ask yourself this simple question: Would he have such a large podium if he wasn't a renowned author? The answer is: No, he would just be another raving lunatic. So I'm no longer giving him the reverence or publicity that a world renowned author should have.
Boggles my goddamned mind that he could write wonderful novels decrying xenocide and turn around and say such crap. Once again the power of religion blasts the doors right off of any sensible logic.
I didn’t know anything the prosecution cared about, and I thought that maybe I could talk Steve [Heymann, the lead prosecutor] out of the prosecution, or at least into not being so harsh. This was so obviously a ridiculous application of justice, I thought. If I just had the chance to explain, maybe this would all go away. My lawyers told me this was possible. They nursed this idea. They told me Steve wanted to meet me, and they wanted me to meet him. They wanted to set up something called a proffer — a kind of chat with the prosecution.
Perhaps you should have spoken with Aaron's lawyers?
The anarchist dictum when it comes to grand juries, explains Salon's Natasha Lennard, is a simple one: 'No one talks, everyone walks.'
Isn't this just called "The Prisoner's Dilemma"? Or will I be downmodded for using the word "prisoner" -- too harsh for the Aaron Swartz case?
In a moment Norton describes as “profoundly foolish” she told the grand jury that Swartz had co-authored a blog post advocating for open data. As we now know, his Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto was used by prosecutors as evidence that the technologist had “malicious intent in downloading documents on a massive scale.”
So did he write it or not? I mean, he was twenty six years old and at some point you have to start being responsible for your actions. Norton is blaming herself for telling someone about something that Swartz wrote? I mean, at what point was he going to stand up and say proudly "This is my cause and I'm not afraid to stand up for it"? Yeah, if you write stuff that talks about breaking the law and then you are investigated for breaking such laws -- that of course is going to be used as motive!
Political activism is apparently not for people who are clinically depressed. What is supposed to change here? Are prosecutors not supposed to seek a motive when they have a suspect? When someone we do want to go to jail like an embezzler writes an e-mail to his wife about his embezzlement, are prosecutors not supposed to turn the screws on her to get that information? I don't get it! What is Norton blaming herself for? Why write it if you don't believe it and why break the laws that you think are unjust if you're not prepared to challenge them in court?
Did he write it? Was it pertinent to the case? Then what's the problem here? Who betrayed who? Would you rather have prosecutors with hands tied when they need to prove that someone planned to break a law by discovering what they were writing prior to their alleged crimes? Is that not his name at the bottom of the manifesto?
I'm sorry he decided to take his own life and it sickens me that the Slashdot group think is that doing so was his only logical choice. But at some point you have to take the mittens off and stop beating up other people for Aaron Swartz's own words and actions. Political activism is not a place for fragile people who can't handle a book being thrown at them. We celebrate those who stood up to and challenged the governments and did so without resorting to taking their own lives or others'.
I nominate this for nerd meme of 2013. If slashdot was battletoads. If the republican national convention was battletoads. If shopping at Wal-Mart was battletoads. And then all those of us who never played it will have to make friends with gamefaqs all over again to understand WTF everyone is talking about.
There hasn't been a Battletoads game released since 1994 but recently Battletoads has seen reemergence on boards like 4chan and Reddit. It has been used by Anonymous to prank scientology.
I'd imagine he could have included that in there to try to make himself look like an average guy who's in on all the jokes (not the reality). It has also been used for trolling -- perhaps he was trolling? Put up a screenshot of Battletoads and ask "Is this Battletoads?"
And then there's also the possibility that he really likes the game, wants to see a sequel and therefore decides that he can give it a ton of publicity by mentioning it in his farewell e-mail.
Who knows or cares at this point?
I found this hilarious from the article:
In addition, Mason also has support on the eight-member board — director and former AOL exec Ted Leonsis has always been a key mentor to him, for example.
Make no mistake about it, the music industry still DREAMS of going back to the days when they could charge you $15 for a CD that you had to buy just to listen to one lousy song. Turn your back on them, and they WILL try to go back to a similar model.
The people who once wanted to charge you $15 for a CD still want to charge you $15 for a CD. If you actually read the article, it's not the "big five" or any of the RIAA members that they're talking about movin' on up. Instead it's distributors like Apple’s iTunes Music Service, Amazon MP3, Spotify, Rhapsody and Muve Music. Google will join them eventually. But you're not going to see UMG, Warner, Sony/BMG, etc because they're still fighting these models. It's just turning into a really slow and long and painful turnover process as the money changes hands. Singer songwriters and performers are learning they don't need big labels as their music will pretty much advertise itself on social media and YouTube. That means the only big guys feeding off them are the distributors listed in the article. Time will tell if the distributors will hang around or continue to undercut each other (since it doesn't appear to be contractual and exclusive like label contracts). But one thing is for sure: more money is making it into the hands of a more diverse group of musicians. And the industry is more diverse and healthier because of that.
I own way too many CDs personally, and stopped buying music until discovering Bandcamp and easy lossless downloads rekindled my desire to find new stuff
Yes, I've commented on bandcamp many times on Slashdot and have been using it for years now. Actually when this article came up I was listening to an album released on 06 February 2013 by a relatively unknown artist half a continent away. They're asking $7 for a 6 track album which I find to be a little pricey but the music is good. I think I'll listen to it a few more times before I decide if I want to buy it. That's something you'll never find the RIAA doing and although I'd found bands that did it on their sites and a few independent labels do it but Bandcamp centralizes it. I've seen independent labels just dump their whole catalog on Bandcamp so it must do something for sales (Boston's Top Shelf Records just did it and I've been enamored with Slingshot Dakota who I had never heard of before).
I think Bandcamp is close to how an ideal music market should operate. Their selection algorithms and rating listings needs serious work but everyone can play and you select your quality when you download.
Slashdot Mirror
I am a firm believer in the Open Source philosophy so proprietary software is not on my radar.
I stopped reading right there. Setting up a computer lab is a good question for Ask Slashdot. Setting up a philosophical/religious indoctrination center is not.
It's possible that he's not just thinking about his high school but, in the long run, maintaining downloads for the rest of his country's schools so that everything is configured for their locality, language, needs and hardware. Perhaps by "philosophy" they meant the ability to redistribute software without facing arcane legal proceedings?
I mean, the costs drop dramatically when you can provide very simple commands and you don't need to enter a product key or worry about updates from a company but rather it can be all administered by one smart kid/staff at the school? When I read that, it wasn't about indoctrination so much as "I'm not even going to try to figure out ways around the costs, litigation and maintenance of proprietary software." Especially not when he knows Edubuntu and how simple it is to update that.
If this model works for his school, he could make his own distro and be on his way to baiting other companies looking to get rid of old machines that they can write off as good will. Proprietary software would surely gunk up that dream.
Latter Day Voyager One-ist: "I respect your beliefs but I must disagree. Two thousand years ago, Voyager One did not exit the solar system on the 35th year of our Lord 12,980 days after His Holy Launch. It would not be until ..." ..." ..." ... the ghost of Voyager Two should be passing by this space station in the next few minutes. We will ride it all to that great ground control center in deep space!!!"
Reformed Good Gamma Rays Church of the Accurate Voyager One-ist: "HERESY! Where I come from, we have reserved black holes for the likes of your foul and vile lie spreading mouth. Prepare for battle and death
Latter Day Voyager One-ist: "But I am merely repeating the preachings of Voyager One's one true manager, Edward Stone, who is one and the same with Voyager One!"
Reformed Good Gamma Rays Church of the Accurate Voyager One-ist: "Your Edward Stone was a false prophet and copycat of the original true manager that is lost to the ages!"
Latter Day Voyager One-ist: "Impossible, it was written that the oracle confirmed His information before being unplugged."
Reformed Good Gamma Rays Church of the Accurate Voyager One-ist: "How dare you bear false witness against the Wayback Machine (Voyager rest its all knowing soul)?!"
Latter Day Voyager One-ist: "Ask any Unified Voyager Two-ist, they agree with our views
Unified Voyager Two-ist: "Okay, everybody, drink your kool-aid now
Brandon Chicotsky, an upstart educated at UT-Austin and NYU, is the founder of an “animate social marketing” business, BaldLogo.com, that offers advertisers the chance to emblazon their logos on the heads of bald men like himself. He’s using the $15,000 he raised on Upstart to wipe out half of his student debt, and says his backers have helped him review pitch decks and sent offers of future business partnerships.
Emphasis mine. Hey, good luck with that. I don't want anything to do with this. I have never lived beyond my means and while I've had to work my ass off these past ten years to pay off all of my student loans in two years, I've also saved up enough money to start a business. I'm waiting and testing the waters for customers because that money was really hard to earn so right now it's just $50 a year on a VPS and some slick coding on the side. Personally I feel this is a healthier safer model that will prevent me from flushing money down the drain but you're free to spend your money where you want. If I ever get revenue too large for me to handle on my own, I'll seek backing. I didn't even know "pitch decks" still existed ... I thought that was something they brought back for a TV show.
Have fun when that novelty wears off and it's synonymous with "douche" to turn yourself into a walking billboard (I thought we were past this, people, time to bust out my Member's Only jacket).
this is my exact beef with the raspberry pi.... it's not really a $25/$35, it's a >$100 solution that is hard to obtain. Once the supply chain issues are fixed this may be more interesting. But at this point it's main attractive feature - price - .
I'm a software developer. I have 8 of them. I have so many of them I sell them to friends at cost instead of turning around and gouging on eBay like a prick. I have four of them in my room so I can do the cambridge distributed processing experiments.
...
How did I do it? Who's knob did I slobber? Nobody's. Remember back when orders were opened up on (assuming you're in the US) Newark and Allied? I put in three separate orders for each site for one each. It would be 3-4 months before the first arrived. They identified me as a repeat orderer so they simply reset my orders each time they shipped one. How much money did I have to front? $35 * 6 = $210 + S&H. Lotta money, right? Except, I looked at this just like I would some gaming console and it wasn't. Yes, it requires patience but put in an order and in 6 to 14 weeks you'll probably have a Raspberry Pi from either of the sites above. Totally worth the wait. If you're super American and can't wait a month to get something, go get gouged. Oh, just don't get upset when the 1GB models ship later this year -- it'll probably be good to have at least one 512MB to test for backwards compatibility.
How did I know to do this? Was it the hundreds of Slashdot posts by geeks saying "I don't want to hurt anybody but I would kill a dude in front of his own mother to get a Raspberry Pi" or perhaps the fact that learning institutions were putting money down for millions of them? It doesn't take an oracle to figure that out
renders it closer to vapourware than anything else
A product so successful it's Slashdotted into "vaporware?" Come on, there are many good criticisms of the Raspberry Pi -- this is not one of them.
The translate API was axed because it was too popular.
I think there's a serious fiscal-minded disconnect between Google and Google fans/consumers. Google appeared to give several services for free to users. The first being search. And when they monetized big time on ads by selling users' eyeballs, only the businessmen and engineers seemed to realize that.
... likewise you can say how great something was for the end user all you want. It doesn't mean it's going to survive. There is an old notion that good products survive because they sell and while that still applies to physical products, people are having a hard time transitioning that notion to software. Because it's not true when you think about it like Google's cash cows.
... where, in the petition, was the promise to pay a nominal yearly fee to use Reader? Or are we stupid enough to petition for publicly traded businesses to lose money? Where is the petition to have banks hand out $1 each time you visit them?
...
Now, when they find they cannot monetize on an decent implementation of a news reader or an API of translation tools (surprise, surprise) they do a cost benefit analysis and decide that they are losing money and -- like any business -- pull the plug. People bitch and moan (myself at the front of the line) but you have to realize that what's good for the consumer isn't always good for the business. If Starbucks offers free 12 oz coffee day or 7 Eleven does a free 32 oz slurpee day, you can't go back the next day and scream in outrage that they have baited you in and now switched it on you and discontinued your favorite product (that was conveniently free)
I found the Google Reader petition particularly amusing
Of course there's this weird notion on Slashdot that ad based revenue on the internet is a very bad thing and that the internet was better before it and there's some mythical better revenue model. And here we are on Slashdot, a site that (as far as I can tell) makes its money/breaks even on ads
I think this question should be "What acceptable revenue model would have saved these services or turned them into cash cows?" Keep in mind that if tracking your users is part of maximizing your profit to offer these services then you're facing pitchforks and torches -- I mean look at the stupid "scroogled" Microsoft mud slinging ads.
Or, perhaps, sitting down with your users and discussing with them how to surf intelligently and safely.
And you all know about browser addons like noscript & adblock. But where is the 'proper' place for such content blocking?
If you're talking about adblocking, the 'proper' place is at your visual cortex where images are processed -- and I know I'm alone in that unpopular view. Blocking ads is like throwing a soda can out a car window in that if one person does it, it's not a problem and it appears to benefit them modestly. But if everyone does it, it ruins the very thing you're enjoying. I can understand why you'd do it if the ad was a massive flash blob but many ads by Google or just images aren't resource intensive.
I've clicked on ads and purchased something twice in my life from ads on a site. Once it was cheap shirts with funny designs on them (I needed new gym shirts) and the other was an eBay auction with a Buy It Now price lower than what I was looking at on that site (not sure how that works). I consider myself a pretty sophisticated person who is "above" advertising but anecdote-wise it's worked on me twice that I can think of. Removing that rare occurrence completely ruins the revenue model.
who would buy a shitload of used solar panels, a pair of red shoes of a specific size, or etc?
I can't tell if you're serious or trolling so I'll try to keep this short. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. In our day of capitalism, the more capital you have the more inherent power you have based on what you can buy with it. All that gold and gilded shit in the Vatican? That could certainly be sold to collectors and the power structure could make do with a modest monastery in the middle of nowhere.
To say that an auction on ebay wouldn't absolutely blow up with bidding on The Pope's used shoes shows you are either unintelligent or disturbingly apologetic to the insane amount of power and influence the pope has and continues to try to hold on to. It is staggering to hear someone say that.
The solar panels? Fine. But you could sell a lot of vatican stuff and put that money to good use helping the poor. They don't and they still ask for donations instead -- often from the poor. As someone who grew up Catholic below the poverty line watching 10% of my parents income go to a man in a magic castle with better digs than anyone else in the world, I can tell you he is further from Jesus than the homeless man on the street. The Bible will tell you it's harder for a rich man to enter heaven than a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. And yet the top leaders live in gilded opulence. Fitting for Italy I guess.
It's a shame.
Although the newly appointed Pope Francis I has proven himself technologically savvy enough to use Twitter, the Vatican dropped the ball when it came to quickly registering a domain name for the pontiff after his appointment earlier this month
Well, you've put me in the awkward position of defending papal technology. None of this really matters considering Vatican City has its own TLD of .va so it would be a waste of money and resources to try to accumulate every other TLD. I believe .va is tightly regulated to include only 1990s era website technology. The last pope's virtual dedication was done in comic sans as seen here.
... or would that be a Louis Vuitton to match his Prada shoes?
Funny, if the pope was more like the humble carpenter Jesus of Nazareth and less like an enshrined emperor he wouldn't have this problem as there'd be no financial gain to drive extortion. Keep paying your tithes so the Vatican has deep pockets
Not quite 'sickness', but my aunt lives on the side of a large hill overlooking a pretty valley... Her balcony used to be a nice place to sit and relax. Now her down-hill neighbor (approximately 2km away) has a wind turbine in his yard and the low frequency periodic noise from it has transformed her balcony into an annoying place to be and she can no longer sleep with the windows open. She's not claiming sickness, she's merely claiming annoyance..
Okay so let's say that from right up in front of the thing you experience 105 dB of sound. Now let's use some basic math to compute what 105 dB at 0.5 meters away sounds like when you're 2,000 meters away. 32.958 dB should be the intense ear splitting result at the balcony. Does your neighbor have some super noisy form of wind turbine or does your aunt go insane inside a kitchen when the refrigerator is running? Does she have to turn her air conditioning and refrigerator off in order to sleep? Because according to every resource out there, physics put that noise at sub 40 dB. Even if we bump it up to rock concert levels (120 dB) it should be 48 dB at 2 km and that's about as loud as an AC unit.
Now, how loud is acceptable at the edge of someone's property before you think the authorities should be involved? And think carefully about people who like to use air condition/compressors, mow their lawns, have yard parties with music, drive motorcycles and do any good patriotic non-save-the-rainforest stuff before you answer.
I wish that, when people are frickin' stupid like this, folks would just roll their eyes at them rather than take them seriously.
People seem to come up with the dumbest reasons they think they're ill. I know it can be frustrating to feel badly and not know why, but come on. Use some science.
Well for as stupid as it sounds, it gets modded up on Slashdot (disclaimer: I am the submitter).
Did religious folks help? Of course.
Yes, but not as much as they hurt. I still encounter Christians today who are certain that dinosaur bones were put in place by lawyers and the devil or that the world is only thousands of years old.
Would progress in science have been faster if all the contributors were anti-religion?
Quite likely. After all, it was the refusal of allowing religious texts to explain the unknown that allowed people to move forward in discovering and stealing that "forbidden knowledge of good and evil" from religious texts and doctrines.
Would Isaac Newton have been a better physicist if he had been Richard Dawkins?
Who knows? I can say for certain they were two men who dared to question as much as they possibly could -- something that is often frowned upon and punished internally when you question religions. Let's turn that question around: Would we have physics today if Isaac Newton had been Cotton Mather?
Would Galileo have had more success with his telescope if he had been Christopher Hitchens?
Why do you pick Christopher Hitchens and not Neil deGrasse Tyson? I think we can all agree there are very intelligent men today that have been freed from having to answer to some lethargic and backwards power structure such as The Pope or fear a lynching for contradicting a 2,000 year old text. And I think we can safely say that if the church wasn't allowed to shove its nose into and intimidate people with telescopes back during Galileo's time, we would be far better off today.
Would Christianity have been more pro-science if Augustine had the mindset of Daniel Dennett?
Here's a better question: Would Augustine have been a saint or would he have been excommunicated/burned at the stake if he had the mindset of Daniel Dennett?
Silly questions. The culture of science developed in the real historical context of society. Give credit where credit is due.
Yeah. Yeah, that's really depressing to know that someone can have a doctorate from Yale and Harvard and cling to this idea that science owes its existence to religion. It's even more disgusting that you restrict your examples specifically to Christianity and not Hindi or Muslim contributions.
... that didn't mean that their ideologies at the time were right. Likewise, because a Reverend could use evidence to come to the correct conclusion that dinosaurs were more like birds doesn't present one shred of evidence to me that Christianity is right, let alone reconcilable with science.
You save yourself a lot of time and it allows you cast off the burdensome chore of having to parse The Bible and reason out why one part is metaphorical while another part needs to be literally followed. And then at the end of the day someone else is still calling you a sinner and your science is hobbled by what is and isn't taboo to explore.
A lot of scientists working on the V-1 and V-2 campaigns would later expand human capabilities into space
I thought Manning shopped it around to all the big existing media and they didn't want to know, it was only after Wikileaks picked it up that THEN they came back.
Did you read the article? That's exactly what they said in the article:
In his statement to the military court, Manning said that before he fell in with the antisecrecy guerrillas at WikiLeaks, he tried to deliver his trove of stolen documents to The Washington Post and The New York Times. At The Post, he was put off when a reporter told him that before she could commit to anything she’d have to get a senior editor involved. At The Times, Manning said, he left a message on voice mail but never got a call back.
The only problem with this NY Times article is that the author is completely ignorant of why a whistleblower would use something like only payphones and not e-mail to make contacts for divulging this information:
It’s puzzling to me that a skilled techie capable of managing one of the most monumental leaks ever couldn’t figure out how to get an e-mail or phone message to an editor or a reporter at The Times, a feat scores of readers manage every day.
DUR, well, I guess if you can't figure out why he didn't want a paper trail or electronic message then he shouldn't have given you the information after all! Did the voice mail start with "I'm calling from a payphone with a physical disc in my possession ... "? Because unless he wanted to be easily caught, I'd guess that'd be the way to go.
Twitter launched its own transparency report in July 2012. It focuses on user data requests by governments (the United States made the most requests) and on content removal requests by governments or copyright holders. Twitter has also undertaken to leave a “Tweet withheld” message whenever a Tweet is removed in response to a complaint from a copyright holder and to send a copy of each takedown notice to the Chilling Effects website.
Opponents of the proposed Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2011 (CISPA) say it will allow privacy to be violated in order to protect cyber-security. Although it seemed to have broad support in the US Congress, it caused such an outcry that substantial revisions were made to increase protection for privacy, the White House threatened a veto and a sizeable number of representatives ended up voting against it. A new version of CISPA was resubmitted in January 2013 and could come before Congress as early as April 2013.
United States
The proposed "Stop Online Piracy Act" (SOPA) and "Protect IP Act" (PIPA) elicited a great deal of domestic and international criticism of the danger of unprecedented Internet censorship. Their opponents said they would prejudice countless Internet users who had never violated intellectual property by forcing websites to block access to other sites accused of vaguely defined copyright violations. The bills were finally shelved, but for how long?
Trial of WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning
US Army Private Bradley Manning confessed before a court martial on 28 February 2013 that he passed military and diplomatic files to WikiLeaks, including US embassy cables, the files of Guantanamo detainees and videos of air strikes in which civilians were killed, in particular the “Collateral Murder” video that showed a US helicopter crew killing Reuters journalists. He said his motive was to enlighten the public about what goes on and to “spark a debate about foreign policy.” He explained that he initially tried to give the files to the New York Times andWashington Post but could not find anyone who seemed interested. He also claimed that he chose the material with care in order to ensure that it would not cause any harm. Manning is facing up to 20 years in prison. Many NGOs have criticized the conditions in which he was being held as humiliating.
The European Union and many member countries were criticized as well but you can just read the report instead of having me repost the entire thing. Also, I find your logic laughable:
While I realize that censorship and monitoring are nowhere nearly as bad in the U.S. and Europe as they are in the included countries (though perhaps more insidious for its subtlety and secrecy)
By this logic, it is the Government of Antarctica that we truly have to watch out for. Their efforts of censorship are not nearly as bad as the U.S. and Europe (though perhaps even more insidious for its subtlety and secrecy since no one even knows they exist). Every time the US or EU attempts to censor something, it makes Slashdot's front page. Are you really so naive as to think they're so much more sophisticated than China that we can't detect the worst things they're doing? In China they have to rent access to the internet from the Chinese government! In the United States, if Comcast inserts a popup into a browser to notify users, it makes Slashdot's front page! How can you even compare the two or call the US more insidious? Hyperbole much?
Why achieve 'consensus' when we could let the fork fester, and have two virtual currencies floating wildly against one another as well as USD?
In fact, why not introduce Bitcoin-0 through Bitcoint-Aleph and let them fight it out? I'll bring popcorn!
BitCoin Bailey: No, no, no, everybody remain calm. We'll get through this together. You're thinking of this virtual currency all wrong. As if I had the BitCoins back in a safe. The money's not here. Your money's on Bill's computer, and Fred's computer ...
Angry BitCoin User: Hey Fred, what the hell you doin' with my BitCoins?!
*a run on MtGox ensues*
Dude, this isn't Hollywood. Even at the incredible speed at which global warming is occuring, we're still talking about something that's happening at a speed unlikely to significantly change the environment you're living in within your lifetime. When I say significant, I mean "I lived in a lush forest when I was born, and now it's an apocalyptic desert where no rain falls."
What about "When I was born everyone ate beef for every meal but as I got older the cost of meat made it a once a week thing"? No true patriot is going to care about water wars and death in Africa. You're better off to let supply and demand (no subsidies!) ruin America's constant burger consumption. Then they'll finally cry foul. Look at Texas, they aren't just losing cattle. Trees, money, water, wildlife ... not quite "apocalyptic" desert yet ...
Warming is good for life. You might not be acclimated to it but the reality is when we have periods of cooling we have die offs and when we have periods of warming there is an expansion of species, of biodiversity. The Earth has been much warmer in the past and that was good for life.
Well, clearly you have all the answers so let me ask you: how rapid can the warming occur in order for an "expansion of species, of biodiversity"? Because something that concerns me is that the larger species -- especially those we depend on for food -- have a hard time rapidly evolving within a few hundred years. Those high points of warming happened an order of magnitude or two slower than the rate we're moving at. The bacteria and cockroaches will flourish but the humans, plants and meat sources are going to have a really bad time. In this case, the rate of change or "derivative" is what should be concerning you.
Keep embracing accelerated global warming though. Let me know when the water wars near the equator and famines start to cause you concern.
UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The U.N. Security Council has voted unanimously for tough new sanctions to punish North Korea for its latest nuclear test, a move that sparked a furious Pyongyang to threaten a nuclear strike against the United States.
The vote Thursday by the U.N.'s most powerful body on a resolution drafted by North Korea's closest ally, China, and the United States sends a powerful message to North Korea that the international community condemns its ballistic missile and nuclear tests — and its repeated violation of Security Council resolutions.
The new sanctions are aimed at making it more difficult for North Korea to finance and obtain material for its weapons programs.
I apologize for making it sound like the United States was the sole proposer of the new resolution -- I actually got that vibe from the DPRK press releases. I didn't know until I read this that China (at least is reported to have) co-authored them with the US.
The statement said North Korea "strongly warns the U.N. Security Council not to make another big blunder like the one in the past when it earned the inveterate grudge of the Korean nation by acting as a war servant for the U.S. in 1950."
It's their standard MO and I hope it doesn't affect the UN's resolution. Another quote from North Korea:
"Since the United States is about to ignite a nuclear war, we will be exercising our right to a preemptive nuclear attack against the headquarters of the aggressor in order to protect our supreme interest," said the statement carried by the official KCNA news agency.
More details from reuters on what the new sanctions mean as well as South Korea's push back.
...
And I'm pretty much done with any Slashdot discussion on this since the apologists and "MAD is good" folks have been mighty thick on these past few news stories. We have entered into the era of "Hey everybody, we have nuclear weapons now do what we say or we will nuke you!" Like a teenage gang member who found his first handgun
Seriously, there seems to be a great oversight among certain old-school folks that computers can do this kind of mass searching in support of oppression perfectly fine.
That's why it takes five to ten minutes? Yeah? I don't know what sort of improvements you've made on top of latent semantic analysis or if you've completely scrapped that and revolutionized natural language parsing but, by all means, publish your work so the rest of us can bask in your divine glory. A job at Google should be the least of your goals -- usurping Google as an advertising giant would flow naturally from being able to automatically "understand" with a high recall and accuracy rate what people are writing in microblogs.
The argument that "it would take a huge army of men to do all that surveillance" does not hold water anymore.
It's funny you should use the phrase "hold water" when discussing how viable a large army of mindless internet users would be.
On the other hand, Card seems to have kept his personal views out of his fiction,
Well, I can think of four or five times this has come up on Slashdot. Here's one and another. And from that comment by MozeeToby:
It isn't so much about 'preachy-ness' as it is about 'propaganda-ness'. In the Shadow series, for instance, we have the homosexual character of Anton. He is not in any way evil, Card doesn't ask us to fear or hate him as you might expect from a right wing writer.
Instead (and arguably worse), when we are first introduced to Anton we are asked to pity him. He is given a ludicrously strong cognitive dissonance to ham handedly symbolize the dissonance that Card assumes the man must have because of his lifestyle. He is utterly lonely and unhappy, and it is heavily implied that he has considered suicide as the only option to end his suffering.
Later in the story, Anton has *gasp* married. No, not to a man, but to a woman. In fact he is going to be a father. He is happy, talkative, and engaging. He mentions in passing that his homosexual tendancies have made his marriage harder but that with work they are able to get through it and live a full and happy life.
In my opinion, this is a more disgusting attack on gay rights than any violent diatrabe could ever be.
That probably bears repeating to address your "keeps it out of his fiction" comment.
Frankly, I've given up on Card. I've been chided about this very issue before on Slashdot (several times actually) but I stand by my opinion: You're free to say or believe in anything you want. But if you're an actor, author, musician, developer, athlete or any profession that tries to use their own popularity to further a belief or statement that I find reprehensible, I will actively and vocally make it known that I will no longer patronize you with funds or admiration.
I wish him the best of luck as one human being to another but I will not spend one more cent to him if he's going to use his position as an author to vocally oppose two people of the same sex who are in love with each other. If you think I'm wrong in doing this, then ask yourself this simple question: Would he have such a large podium if he wasn't a renowned author? The answer is: No, he would just be another raving lunatic. So I'm no longer giving him the reverence or publicity that a world renowned author should have.
Boggles my goddamned mind that he could write wonderful novels decrying xenocide and turn around and say such crap. Once again the power of religion blasts the doors right off of any sensible logic.
I didn’t know anything the prosecution cared about, and I thought that maybe I could talk Steve [Heymann, the lead prosecutor] out of the prosecution, or at least into not being so harsh. This was so obviously a ridiculous application of justice, I thought. If I just had the chance to explain, maybe this would all go away. My lawyers told me this was possible. They nursed this idea. They told me Steve wanted to meet me, and they wanted me to meet him. They wanted to set up something called a proffer — a kind of chat with the prosecution.
Perhaps you should have spoken with Aaron's lawyers?
The anarchist dictum when it comes to grand juries, explains Salon's Natasha Lennard, is a simple one: 'No one talks, everyone walks.'
Isn't this just called "The Prisoner's Dilemma"? Or will I be downmodded for using the word "prisoner" -- too harsh for the Aaron Swartz case?
In a moment Norton describes as “profoundly foolish” she told the grand jury that Swartz had co-authored a blog post advocating for open data. As we now know, his Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto was used by prosecutors as evidence that the technologist had “malicious intent in downloading documents on a massive scale.”
So did he write it or not? I mean, he was twenty six years old and at some point you have to start being responsible for your actions. Norton is blaming herself for telling someone about something that Swartz wrote? I mean, at what point was he going to stand up and say proudly "This is my cause and I'm not afraid to stand up for it"? Yeah, if you write stuff that talks about breaking the law and then you are investigated for breaking such laws -- that of course is going to be used as motive!
Political activism is apparently not for people who are clinically depressed. What is supposed to change here? Are prosecutors not supposed to seek a motive when they have a suspect? When someone we do want to go to jail like an embezzler writes an e-mail to his wife about his embezzlement, are prosecutors not supposed to turn the screws on her to get that information? I don't get it! What is Norton blaming herself for? Why write it if you don't believe it and why break the laws that you think are unjust if you're not prepared to challenge them in court?
Did he write it? Was it pertinent to the case? Then what's the problem here? Who betrayed who? Would you rather have prosecutors with hands tied when they need to prove that someone planned to break a law by discovering what they were writing prior to their alleged crimes? Is that not his name at the bottom of the manifesto?
I'm sorry he decided to take his own life and it sickens me that the Slashdot group think is that doing so was his only logical choice. But at some point you have to take the mittens off and stop beating up other people for Aaron Swartz's own words and actions. Political activism is not a place for fragile people who can't handle a book being thrown at them. We celebrate those who stood up to and challenged the governments and did so without resorting to taking their own lives or others'.
I nominate this for nerd meme of 2013. If slashdot was battletoads. If the republican national convention was battletoads. If shopping at Wal-Mart was battletoads. And then all those of us who never played it will have to make friends with gamefaqs all over again to understand WTF everyone is talking about.
There hasn't been a Battletoads game released since 1994 but recently Battletoads has seen reemergence on boards like 4chan and Reddit. It has been used by Anonymous to prank scientology.
I'd imagine he could have included that in there to try to make himself look like an average guy who's in on all the jokes (not the reality). It has also been used for trolling -- perhaps he was trolling? Put up a screenshot of Battletoads and ask "Is this Battletoads?"
And then there's also the possibility that he really likes the game, wants to see a sequel and therefore decides that he can give it a ton of publicity by mentioning it in his farewell e-mail.
Who knows or cares at this point?
I found this hilarious from the article:
In addition, Mason also has support on the eight-member board — director and former AOL exec Ted Leonsis has always been a key mentor to him, for example.
What is this? Game of Thrones?
A far cry from the end of 2011.
And a far cry from the end of 2012!
... on a more serious note (if such a thing is possible with BTC) everything is proceeding according to plan.
Sorry
Make no mistake about it, the music industry still DREAMS of going back to the days when they could charge you $15 for a CD that you had to buy just to listen to one lousy song. Turn your back on them, and they WILL try to go back to a similar model.
The people who once wanted to charge you $15 for a CD still want to charge you $15 for a CD. If you actually read the article, it's not the "big five" or any of the RIAA members that they're talking about movin' on up. Instead it's distributors like Apple’s iTunes Music Service, Amazon MP3, Spotify, Rhapsody and Muve Music. Google will join them eventually. But you're not going to see UMG, Warner, Sony/BMG, etc because they're still fighting these models. It's just turning into a really slow and long and painful turnover process as the money changes hands. Singer songwriters and performers are learning they don't need big labels as their music will pretty much advertise itself on social media and YouTube. That means the only big guys feeding off them are the distributors listed in the article. Time will tell if the distributors will hang around or continue to undercut each other (since it doesn't appear to be contractual and exclusive like label contracts). But one thing is for sure: more money is making it into the hands of a more diverse group of musicians. And the industry is more diverse and healthier because of that.
I own way too many CDs personally, and stopped buying music until discovering Bandcamp and easy lossless downloads rekindled my desire to find new stuff
Yes, I've commented on bandcamp many times on Slashdot and have been using it for years now. Actually when this article came up I was listening to an album released on 06 February 2013 by a relatively unknown artist half a continent away. They're asking $7 for a 6 track album which I find to be a little pricey but the music is good. I think I'll listen to it a few more times before I decide if I want to buy it. That's something you'll never find the RIAA doing and although I'd found bands that did it on their sites and a few independent labels do it but Bandcamp centralizes it. I've seen independent labels just dump their whole catalog on Bandcamp so it must do something for sales (Boston's Top Shelf Records just did it and I've been enamored with Slingshot Dakota who I had never heard of before).
I think Bandcamp is close to how an ideal music market should operate. Their selection algorithms and rating listings needs serious work but everyone can play and you select your quality when you download.