I wonder if indexing MP3s is actually easier than indexing HTML. Web pages link to one another, so there's a lot of human indexing that happens there. MP3s don't, so there might be other problems. I certainly don't think the file-sharing search problem is anywhere near solved. For example, there are a lot of mislabeled MP3s -- either the tags are "Unknown Artist / Track 8" or they're completely misspelled. Or you sometimes get the annoying thing where they're ripped from a compilation and the tags reflect that: the author is "Greatest Dance Hits" or even "Pottery Barn"...
Another need is that you might know a few lyrics of a song but not know who it's by or what it's called. My friend a while ago couldn't find that Bob Dylan song that goes "Everybody must get stoned" -- I had to tell him that it's called "Rainy Day Women #12 & #35."
Google has a bunch of smart people working for it, but I don't know if they'd necessarily have a head start on this problem. It's not the same as indexing the web.
This may have been a bad move, but it can't possibly be a surprise for Apple management. Apple is a big company with tons of lawyers whose full-time job is to think about the stuff that you and I only think about for 30 seconds before we make a/. comment. I'm sure they were apprising management of the risks involved ever since the iPod was ever conceived.
Probably what management decided was that the risk was worth it, given the long-term importance of the iPod and the AppleMusic store for the company's direction. Probably they figured that Apple Records might not sue, or that the case might not go very far in court.
Or, if things get bad enough, they could probably just pay Apple Records to change their name forever. Apple Computer does have $4 billion in cash, you know.
The problem with the indy comic (or sometimes called comix) are that there is a huge amount of shit.
As opposed to the world of mainstream comics, full of pandering fanboys, artists with no understanding of form & anatomy, writers with no interest in human motivation, and publishers who treat their customers with contempt?
Comics in general have quality problems. People who've grown up in the superhero world (i.e. most Slashdotters) don't realize exactly how narrow of a genre superhero comics are, but it's got its own blind spots, just like the indies. It's not the sort of thing that's easy to get started in.
The recent upsurge in superhero movies don't change things very much; if anything, how they change their storylines to suit a mainstream audience should be quite instructive to comics fans. Look at the first X-Men movie and how streamlined the narrative was, compared to the dense soap-operatic narratives of the actual books. If you need to draw charts to explain crossover chronology you're never going to break out of the ghetto.
Quality problems are everywhere. But me, I'll take Acme Novelty Library over the Death of Superman any day.
If you're trying to break into superheroes, then, yes, this sort of contest is a pretty good break. However, you should be prepared to submit a character you have no emotional investment in. Marvel's ownership of your character isn't simply a financial matter; it has very real creative ramifications. If some high-up editor decides you need to do lots of crossover with other characters you think are stupid, or to do attention-grabbing stories (The Death of the Origin of the Marriage of Superman, etc.) just for the sake of a small spike in sales, remember that you will have little-to-no ability to say no. And if you don't like it, they can fire you at a moment's notice; after all, there are a hundred people waiting behind you. And you already signed away the only leverage you had -- ownership.
So, yeah, it's a good opportunity, but take it with a grain of salt.
I wrote about this for the dearly departed Feed magazine -- I still have my own copy of the article. In cryptographic terms, this is a "trusted client" problem: If you send data to a machine that somebody else controls, you can't reliably grant them just partial access to it, since a determined user can use that partial access to gain full access. Game designers try to make it annoying to hack their games, but they can't really make it impossible. (One day, I suppose, bandwidth could be so high that game servers won't set clients any data other than a video feed, but that's not a solution today.)
So it's hard to imagine such a enterprise gaining much traction. This could be routed around by forcing players to play in controlled settings, where some sort of centralized authority would certify that the players aren't cheating... but at that point you're almost getting into the realm of virtual pro sports, and not just some simple website...
It's not because the phone companies are evil. It's because they're big, and fat, and it's way too easy for them to perpetuate the status quo.
Have you ever worked at a big company? I've worked at a few, and my personal experience is that in really large companies (say, more than 1000 employees) this very particular organizational rot sets in... When the people making the decisions are so removed from their customers, they just stop caring. And if there is no competition to make them care, they'll just get fat and sleepy, and their customers will fall behind.
Residential DSL is the perfect example. Here in NYC, Verizon owns the phone lines, so all residential DSL has to go through them. In theory, they're supposed to allow equal access to all res-DSL companies, whether they're Verizon residential DSL or their own competition.
But I know dozens of people here who have DSL -- and nobody I knew was able to get DSL from a company other than Verizon. More than one person told me they tried to go with a smaller company, but the installation experience was really difficult: The other company couldn't do anything 'til Verizon flipped that switch, and somehow non-Verizon customers seem to get lower priority than Verizon customers. Curious, that.
A company doesn't have to be evil to screw you. Often, complacency is enough.
Milberg Weiss isn't just quibbling over small beans. MW is the country's biggest class-action law firm, and they know how the accounting works: One firm gets assigned to head the plaintiff's effort, and that firm earns almost all the fees associated with the case. How big are these fees? Well, with regards to the Enron case, MW's fees were:
8 percent of the first $1 billion in damages
9 percent of the second $1 billion
10 percent on anything more
... those fees pay for a lot of expense-account lunches.
Clearly MW (which also represents the lead plaintiff in the Dynegy class-action suit) sees its complaints as up-front research done in order to bolster its position as representing the lead plaintiff, and is nervous that other firms cribbing its research will piggyback on its work. Clearly they're misusing copyright. (Well, they are lawyers.)
One would hope that such a misuse would be unnecessary. Ideally MW would be able to go the judge and say "Your Honor, look at all the complaints we've filed, and look at all the subsequent complaints other firms have filed, and how much of their complaints use our arguments." Whether such an argument works in practice, who's to say?
In school I studied both computer science and fine arts, and I consider the two extremely different. The biggest, most obvious difference is that in programming, you have a very good sense of when you're done. If your specs (either from your client, or your programming assignment) are relatively clear, you can write your code and be more-or-less satisfied that you've met them. You can write automated regression tests if you want to really make sure. (These days I almost always write automated tests.)
But for art? Forget about it. I can't tell you how many hours I spent agonizing in front of a painting or sculpture or comic book page, wondering if it was finished, if it had enough marks or not...
The two are very different. Not that one is necessarily better than the other, but they're very different.
I think comments like Gabriel's often stem for a desire to get more respect for programming. Gabriel probably compared the respect that artists get, vs. the respect that programmers get, and decided that the way to get more respect for programming is to try to convince everybody that's a sort of art.
His intentions are good, but you end up muddying the waters too much that way... If everybody did programming the way artists do art, programming would be even more buggy and expensive, which doesn't do anything good for respect for the craft. The way to get more respect for programming is to figure out ways to make us all better programmers. Anything else is just a distraction.
I don't know if anyone has noticed, but to me the weather the past few years hasn't seemed quite normal to begin with. Floods and heavy rain where it normally doesn't rain much, tornados in odd parts of the country, lack of snow where there's usually plenty...
Very possibly due in part to global warming. I've read in a few places that global warming doesn't just lead to hotter climates, but also to increasingly tempestuous weather. Somewhere somebody explained it to me like this: "Don't think of it like the planet getting hotter overall. Think of it like a lot more energy being dumped into the ecosystem in the form of heat. That ecosystem has to do what it can to seek equilibrium, and with more energy around, the extremes are going to be more pronounced."
So you could theoretically get global warming leading not just to the obvious stuff (floods) but also other extreme weather conditions: Hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, etc. I don't think this is necessarily considered a hard scientific fact, yet, though. Just a strong theory.
This is off-topic, but of interest: Drug dealers don't hang around in parks anymore, and technology is part of the reason. Why? Because pagers are cheap.
These days most dealers run their businesses out of their cars, not their streetcorners: You page them and they deliver to your home. (Or, um, so I've heard.) Sure beats hanging around on a street corner in the middle of the night with drugs and cash in your pocket. Some believe that this is part of the reason violent crime dropped in the mid-90s nationwide: Less crack dealers on the corner, less people trying to rob crack dealers.
The exception still seems to be Washington Square Park, which from what I've heard is still an alright place to score. I'd suspect that it's because WSP has lots of tourists and college kids who are new in town.
There's a point past which you have to stop feeling bad for people who make certain decisions. Microsoft has a well-established history of being terrible with security, of treating it as a P.R. problem that can be fixed with lies as opposed to an engineering problem that can be fixed with quality programming. This is not an obscure fact known only to Linux kernel hackers. This is the news we're getting now on CNN and other mainstream news sources.
So if you're using a Windows box, I've got to assume one of three things is happening:
You're ready to have a hair-trigger response to the constant stream of security patches and updates you'll need to use. You probably have up-to-date virus protection software, and you probably work in an office with really paranoid, on-the-ball IT staff.
For whatever reason, you don't care that your files could get mangled, erased, and resent: Maybe nothing's that critical, maybe you're just playing around, maybe you make constant backups.
You're completely irresponsible.
And, yes, it would be different if this were Linux, or BSD, or even MacOS. All those operating systems come with companies or communities who take security seriously, and they respect their users enough to not foist insecure features on them. You can have the reasonable expectation that running any of those OSes let you worry about security a lot less than running a Windoze variant.
If you had a nice apartment in the middle of New York, and you constantly left the front door unlocked, and then one day somebody walked in stole your stereo, I'd feel bad for you. But, you know, not too bad.
Maxivision48 means you've got twice as much film stock to distribute, so I don't see it succeeding.
From the article:
"Goodhill says the Maxivision48 is a logical investment for theater owners since the projectors are "backwards compatible" in that they can be slowed down to the current 24 frames per second movie standard. That means theater owners who invest in the technology now will still be able to show any of the current movies while waiting for studios to convert over to the new faster 48-frame-per-second format."
Can we stop a bit to consider the impact of these things, please? Yes, it's a cool engineering feat, and I'm sure the scientists are nice guys. But who's going to use this? I have friends who are very active in anti-globalization protests -- they don't break anything, they just march very loudly -- and I don't relish hearing stories from them about falling and breaking bones because SWAT teams hosed them down with slippery goo.
Technology has consequences, and sometimes those consequences are awful. Take, for example, recent engineering advances in weapons design. It used to be that because of how much a gun weighed and how much kick it gave when you fired it, you probably had to be at least a teenager to use it. U.S. gun manufacturers saw a market opportunity, so they told their engineers to design guns that were simpler to maintain, less mass, and less kick. Engineers succeeded, through their earnest ingenuity and resourcefulness. And now the streets of Sierra Leone are full of 8-year-old children who have been pulled away from their families and forcefully recruited into fighting a civil war. Hooray for science!
I don't mean to say we should go back to living in caves, or to say that those engineers were evil people. But we shouldn't blindly accept everything in the name of progress. An advanced way of killing or incapacitating another human being doesn't seem like progress to me.
Re:Manual length and Macs vs. PC
on
Macintosh Clustering
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· Score: 3, Redundant
First things first: I'm a big Mac fan -- when it comes to using Macs as client machines.
But I really do have to agree here. Short documentation doesn't necessarily mean a simpler product -- it could just mean bad documentation. In the case of Apple, unfortunately, that's very likely to be true; I've always found that their products come with unbearably flimsy documentation addressed to the most newbie user. Of course, this works most of the time, since their market is largely made-up of newbie users, and since many of their products are, in fact, much easier to use than their Windows/Linux counterpart. But when you're doing something like clustering, well, you know, I'd rather have a big manual, thanks.
Damn, I could've sworn it was just yesterday that I posted this article to another discussion here on/.
Everyone who's praising the German government on being all tech-savvy and forward-thinking and blah-blah-blah should first read Bruce Schneier's thoughts on the subject: Why Digital Signatures Are Not Signatures.
In a nutshell, he says this: Cryptography can do quite a bit to guarantee that a given signature came from a given computer. It can do absolutely nothing to guarantee that that signature represents the person it purports to represent. To quote Schneier: "The mathematics of cryptography, no matter how strong, cannot bridge the gap between me and my computer."
It's all good and well for governments to embrace new technology, but only if they don't cause major fuckups in the process.
This review is nice and informative, but I can't help but scoff at the sentence (on the first page) pointing out the "fatal flaw in the iPod design": It only works for MacOS.
"Fatal flaw in the iPod design"? Give me a fucking break. "Pain in the ass for Linux and Windows users", sure. But to imply that it's a design flaw would be to say that somehow Mac exclusivity was not in the designer's plans. I think it's fairly bloody obvious why Apple would design a cool peripheral that could only be used with its own OS. It's not by accident, or by poor design. It's 100% intentional.
That's like saying "Puccini's Turandot is a great opera; its fatal flaw is that it's not in English".
In real life there are plenty of arbitration systems where both parties have a say. Just a quick google search reveals:
The Federal Mediation Conciliation service (which appears to settle labor disputes) takes suggestions from both parties, then picks an arbitrator based on those suggestions.
CAP-MPT (apparently a malpractice insurer in California) has both parties pick one arbitrator, and then they decide on a neutral arbitrator, and all three choices form an arbitration panel.
... and if I can find these on my free-time at work, surely someone at ICANN could've found them, too. Why the ICANN rules are the way they are is beyond me.
The biggest problem is that under ICANN rules, only the person filing the complaint has any say as to which arbitrator is selected. The person defending against the complaint has no power whatsoever in deciding who the arbitrator is. So the complainant will pick an arbitrator with a history of favoring complainants.
Well, duh. Of course if you give only one side the ability to choose the adjudicator, then the odds will be completely skewed. A sixth-grader could design a more fair system.
In the story, Ellison is quoted as saying: "There is cooperation (among government agencies). But there's a lot of data fragmentation."
Of course, one of the biggest reasons for the data fragmentation is that that intelligence agencies don't cooperate -- if anything, they're notorious for their turf wars. Ellison is downplaying the organizational battles in order to pitch his technical solution.
One of the causes of the turf war is that the intelligence agencies are poorly defined and poorly monitored. Once an intelligence agency is created, it tends to have a life of its own. Case in point: The CIA was originally chartered to help the U.S. fight the Cold War, something it did with laughable incompetence at times. But when the Cold War ended -- an event which took the agency entirely by surprise -- nobody at the CIA thought "Since our job is done, let's tell Congress to shut us down so we can be unemployed." No, of course, they looked around for other threats to pitch to the White House. With terrorism, they seem to have found it.
Except for the fact that much of the anti-terrorism work will be domestic, and that therefore it falls under the aegis of the FBI, instead. But can you imagine the CIA bosses, always anxious about Congressional funding and eager to get into the anti-terrorism spotlight, staying out of the fray? Forget about it.
I think I'll design a desktop theme called "The Bedazzler". And basically what it will do, is it'll show the same windows and widgets that we've all been stuck with for twenty fucking years, only they'll be covered in rhinestones and glitter! You'll be able to customize your own rhinestone patterns, to say things like "Groovy!" and "Fan-tastic!"
And this is how we'll enter the brave new era of computing: Not by actually designing and using tools to make our lives more productive, convenient, and satisfying, but by slumping in our chairs and staring at useless eye-candy while we touch ourselves. I can't wait for the future.
Everyone interested in this subject should read Bruce Schneier's piece on the subject: Why Digital Signatures Aren't Signatures. The gist of his article is that although cryptography came verify that a document can from a given computer, it cannot verify that it came from a given person, or even that that person intended to sign that document. "The mathematics of cryptography, no matter how strong," he writes, "cannot bridge the gap between me and my computer."
It looks like this has already been retracted. Still, it's interesting to imagine the possible ramifications.
If a country implemented DNS blocking like this as a long-standing policy, it's easy to imagine people trying all sorts of technical fixes to get around it. People would set up their own "All Hate DNS", or maybe they'd distribute.hosts files with lists of blocked domains...
But once you're doing that, why even use the old domain name? If you had www.killalljews.com resolving through the "All Hate DNS", wouldn't you also want www.killalljews.hate, and www.finalsolution.now, and everything else?
It introduces the possibility of a conflicting, though smaller, namespace, being overlaid on the DNS -- one more step towards fragmenting the namespace. Not that such fragmentation is necessarily a good thing, but it sure would be interesting to watch...
Anti-hate-speech laws, whether in Germany or Francs or the U.S., seem to be predicated on the idea that the speech itself has some sort of magical power over people's minds. I think that's very wrong, and it distracts attention from where it's needed most.
A number of different groups would have you believe that the swastika was this magical symbol that automatically turned rational people into genocidal creatures: All you do is hide the swastikas and everything's okay. Remember that the Holocaust had a very specific economic and political context: For a number of reasons, the German people had endured one of the worst economic declines ever to be suffered by an industrialized nation, and they were terrified and desperate. This does not excuse what happens, but it gives a much more sensible explanation than what normally passes for historical analysis -- "We need to keep the images of swastikas away from impressionable white kids", or "Germans are just a racist people", or similar pap.
So now Germany has a problem with skinheads (though it tends to get blown way out of proportion because the rest of the world watches the country very carefully). So why is that? Is that because German teenagers can get their hands on albums by talentless oi-skinhead bands? Or maybe, just maybe, it's because the reunification of Germany has been fraught with all sorts of economic and political stresses, and there are too many scared, uneducated, hopeless Germans who are looking for a scapegoat.
Of course, when it comes to what a politician can do about it, there's really no option at all, is there? Either he can stand up and say "We should work hard to make sure that everybody has good economic opportunities" -- and be branded as some stuck-in-the-past Marxist -- or he can point fingers and say "Let's keep Nazi images off the internet!"
... and although another court will decide what remedy is necessary in this case, that other court could also decide Microsoft should be split up. It simply gives MS at not being split up, but in the end this appeal may have no effect.
You think techies are the only people to think about these problems? Check out the National Writers Union's site -- particularly the link to the Publication Rights Clearinghouse. It allows a writer to sign up and allow the PRC to act in proxy for that writer's works. In theory, this kind of thing should save a lot of paperwork for both publishers and authors, though since this is just getting started, there will inevitably be kinks to be worked out.
As an occasional freelance journalist (an index of my writing can be found on my homepage,) I'm a member of this union, and I'm actually quite proud of that.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if indexing MP3s is actually easier than indexing HTML. Web pages link to one another, so there's a lot of human indexing that happens there. MP3s don't, so there might be other problems. I certainly don't think the file-sharing search problem is anywhere near solved. For example, there are a lot of mislabeled MP3s -- either the tags are "Unknown Artist / Track 8" or they're completely misspelled. Or you sometimes get the annoying thing where they're ripped from a compilation and the tags reflect that: the author is "Greatest Dance Hits" or even "Pottery Barn" ...
Another need is that you might know a few lyrics of a song but not know who it's by or what it's called. My friend a while ago couldn't find that Bob Dylan song that goes "Everybody must get stoned" -- I had to tell him that it's called "Rainy Day Women #12 & #35."
Google has a bunch of smart people working for it, but I don't know if they'd necessarily have a head start on this problem. It's not the same as indexing the web.
This may have been a bad move, but it can't possibly be a surprise for Apple management. Apple is a big company with tons of lawyers whose full-time job is to think about the stuff that you and I only think about for 30 seconds before we make a /. comment. I'm sure they were apprising management of the risks involved ever since the iPod was ever conceived.
Probably what management decided was that the risk was worth it, given the long-term importance of the iPod and the AppleMusic store for the company's direction. Probably they figured that Apple Records might not sue, or that the case might not go very far in court.
Or, if things get bad enough, they could probably just pay Apple Records to change their name forever. Apple Computer does have $4 billion in cash, you know.
As opposed to the world of mainstream comics, full of pandering fanboys, artists with no understanding of form & anatomy, writers with no interest in human motivation, and publishers who treat their customers with contempt?
Comics in general have quality problems. People who've grown up in the superhero world (i.e. most Slashdotters) don't realize exactly how narrow of a genre superhero comics are, but it's got its own blind spots, just like the indies. It's not the sort of thing that's easy to get started in.
The recent upsurge in superhero movies don't change things very much; if anything, how they change their storylines to suit a mainstream audience should be quite instructive to comics fans. Look at the first X-Men movie and how streamlined the narrative was, compared to the dense soap-operatic narratives of the actual books. If you need to draw charts to explain crossover chronology you're never going to break out of the ghetto.
Quality problems are everywhere. But me, I'll take Acme Novelty Library over the Death of Superman any day.
So, yeah, it's a good opportunity, but take it with a grain of salt.
So it's hard to imagine such a enterprise gaining much traction. This could be routed around by forcing players to play in controlled settings, where some sort of centralized authority would certify that the players aren't cheating ... but at that point you're almost getting into the realm of virtual pro sports, and not just some simple website ...
Have you ever worked at a big company? I've worked at a few, and my personal experience is that in really large companies (say, more than 1000 employees) this very particular organizational rot sets in ... When the people making the decisions are so removed from their customers, they just stop caring. And if there is no competition to make them care, they'll just get fat and sleepy, and their customers will fall behind.
Residential DSL is the perfect example. Here in NYC, Verizon owns the phone lines, so all residential DSL has to go through them. In theory, they're supposed to allow equal access to all res-DSL companies, whether they're Verizon residential DSL or their own competition.
But I know dozens of people here who have DSL -- and nobody I knew was able to get DSL from a company other than Verizon. More than one person told me they tried to go with a smaller company, but the installation experience was really difficult: The other company couldn't do anything 'til Verizon flipped that switch, and somehow non-Verizon customers seem to get lower priority than Verizon customers. Curious, that.
A company doesn't have to be evil to screw you. Often, complacency is enough.
Clearly MW (which also represents the lead plaintiff in the Dynegy class-action suit) sees its complaints as up-front research done in order to bolster its position as representing the lead plaintiff, and is nervous that other firms cribbing its research will piggyback on its work. Clearly they're misusing copyright. (Well, they are lawyers.)
One would hope that such a misuse would be unnecessary. Ideally MW would be able to go the judge and say "Your Honor, look at all the complaints we've filed, and look at all the subsequent complaints other firms have filed, and how much of their complaints use our arguments." Whether such an argument works in practice, who's to say?
In school I studied both computer science and fine arts, and I consider the two extremely different. The biggest, most obvious difference is that in programming, you have a very good sense of when you're done. If your specs (either from your client, or your programming assignment) are relatively clear, you can write your code and be more-or-less satisfied that you've met them. You can write automated regression tests if you want to really make sure. (These days I almost always write automated tests.)
...
... If everybody did programming the way artists do art, programming would be even more buggy and expensive, which doesn't do anything good for respect for the craft. The way to get more respect for programming is to figure out ways to make us all better programmers. Anything else is just a distraction.
But for art? Forget about it. I can't tell you how many hours I spent agonizing in front of a painting or sculpture or comic book page, wondering if it was finished, if it had enough marks or not
The two are very different. Not that one is necessarily better than the other, but they're very different.
I think comments like Gabriel's often stem for a desire to get more respect for programming. Gabriel probably compared the respect that artists get, vs. the respect that programmers get, and decided that the way to get more respect for programming is to try to convince everybody that's a sort of art.
His intentions are good, but you end up muddying the waters too much that way
So you could theoretically get global warming leading not just to the obvious stuff (floods) but also other extreme weather conditions: Hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, etc. I don't think this is necessarily considered a hard scientific fact, yet, though. Just a strong theory.
This is off-topic, but of interest: Drug dealers don't hang around in parks anymore, and technology is part of the reason. Why? Because pagers are cheap.
These days most dealers run their businesses out of their cars, not their streetcorners: You page them and they deliver to your home. (Or, um, so I've heard.) Sure beats hanging around on a street corner in the middle of the night with drugs and cash in your pocket. Some believe that this is part of the reason violent crime dropped in the mid-90s nationwide: Less crack dealers on the corner, less people trying to rob crack dealers.
The exception still seems to be Washington Square Park, which from what I've heard is still an alright place to score. I'd suspect that it's because WSP has lots of tourists and college kids who are new in town.
So if you're using a Windows box, I've got to assume one of three things is happening:
And, yes, it would be different if this were Linux, or BSD, or even MacOS. All those operating systems come with companies or communities who take security seriously, and they respect their users enough to not foist insecure features on them. You can have the reasonable expectation that running any of those OSes let you worry about security a lot less than running a Windoze variant.
If you had a nice apartment in the middle of New York, and you constantly left the front door unlocked, and then one day somebody walked in stole your stereo, I'd feel bad for you. But, you know, not too bad.
"Goodhill says the Maxivision48 is a logical investment for theater owners since the projectors are "backwards compatible" in that they can be slowed down to the current 24 frames per second movie standard. That means theater owners who invest in the technology now will still be able to show any of the current movies while waiting for studios to convert over to the new faster 48-frame-per-second format."
Technology has consequences, and sometimes those consequences are awful. Take, for example, recent engineering advances in weapons design. It used to be that because of how much a gun weighed and how much kick it gave when you fired it, you probably had to be at least a teenager to use it. U.S. gun manufacturers saw a market opportunity, so they told their engineers to design guns that were simpler to maintain, less mass, and less kick. Engineers succeeded, through their earnest ingenuity and resourcefulness. And now the streets of Sierra Leone are full of 8-year-old children who have been pulled away from their families and forcefully recruited into fighting a civil war. Hooray for science!
I don't mean to say we should go back to living in caves, or to say that those engineers were evil people. But we shouldn't blindly accept everything in the name of progress. An advanced way of killing or incapacitating another human being doesn't seem like progress to me.
First things first: I'm a big Mac fan -- when it comes to using Macs as client machines.
But I really do have to agree here. Short documentation doesn't necessarily mean a simpler product -- it could just mean bad documentation. In the case of Apple, unfortunately, that's very likely to be true; I've always found that their products come with unbearably flimsy documentation addressed to the most newbie user. Of course, this works most of the time, since their market is largely made-up of newbie users, and since many of their products are, in fact, much easier to use than their Windows/Linux counterpart. But when you're doing something like clustering, well, you know, I'd rather have a big manual, thanks.
Everyone who's praising the German government on being all tech-savvy and forward-thinking and blah-blah-blah should first read Bruce Schneier's thoughts on the subject: Why Digital Signatures Are Not Signatures.
In a nutshell, he says this: Cryptography can do quite a bit to guarantee that a given signature came from a given computer. It can do absolutely nothing to guarantee that that signature represents the person it purports to represent. To quote Schneier: "The mathematics of cryptography, no matter how strong, cannot bridge the gap between me and my computer."
It's all good and well for governments to embrace new technology, but only if they don't cause major fuckups in the process.
This review is nice and informative, but I can't help but scoff at the sentence (on the first page) pointing out the "fatal flaw in the iPod design": It only works for MacOS.
"Fatal flaw in the iPod design"? Give me a fucking break. "Pain in the ass for Linux and Windows users", sure. But to imply that it's a design flaw would be to say that somehow Mac exclusivity was not in the designer's plans. I think it's fairly bloody obvious why Apple would design a cool peripheral that could only be used with its own OS. It's not by accident, or by poor design. It's 100% intentional.
That's like saying "Puccini's Turandot is a great opera; its fatal flaw is that it's not in English".
The biggest problem is that under ICANN rules, only the person filing the complaint has any say as to which arbitrator is selected. The person defending against the complaint has no power whatsoever in deciding who the arbitrator is. So the complainant will pick an arbitrator with a history of favoring complainants.
Well, duh. Of course if you give only one side the ability to choose the adjudicator, then the odds will be completely skewed. A sixth-grader could design a more fair system.
Of course, one of the biggest reasons for the data fragmentation is that that intelligence agencies don't cooperate -- if anything, they're notorious for their turf wars. Ellison is downplaying the organizational battles in order to pitch his technical solution.
One of the causes of the turf war is that the intelligence agencies are poorly defined and poorly monitored. Once an intelligence agency is created, it tends to have a life of its own. Case in point: The CIA was originally chartered to help the U.S. fight the Cold War, something it did with laughable incompetence at times. But when the Cold War ended -- an event which took the agency entirely by surprise -- nobody at the CIA thought "Since our job is done, let's tell Congress to shut us down so we can be unemployed." No, of course, they looked around for other threats to pitch to the White House. With terrorism, they seem to have found it.
Except for the fact that much of the anti-terrorism work will be domestic, and that therefore it falls under the aegis of the FBI, instead. But can you imagine the CIA bosses, always anxious about Congressional funding and eager to get into the anti-terrorism spotlight, staying out of the fray? Forget about it.
And this is how we'll enter the brave new era of computing: Not by actually designing and using tools to make our lives more productive, convenient, and satisfying, but by slumping in our chairs and staring at useless eye-candy while we touch ourselves. I can't wait for the future.
Everyone interested in this subject should read Bruce Schneier's piece on the subject: Why Digital Signatures Aren't Signatures. The gist of his article is that although cryptography came verify that a document can from a given computer, it cannot verify that it came from a given person, or even that that person intended to sign that document. "The mathematics of cryptography, no matter how strong," he writes, "cannot bridge the gap between me and my computer."
If a country implemented DNS blocking like this as a long-standing policy, it's easy to imagine people trying all sorts of technical fixes to get around it. People would set up their own "All Hate DNS", or maybe they'd distribute .hosts files with lists of blocked domains ...
But once you're doing that, why even use the old domain name? If you had www.killalljews.com resolving through the "All Hate DNS", wouldn't you also want www.killalljews.hate, and www.finalsolution.now, and everything else?
It introduces the possibility of a conflicting, though smaller, namespace, being overlaid on the DNS -- one more step towards fragmenting the namespace. Not that such fragmentation is necessarily a good thing, but it sure would be interesting to watch ...
Anti-hate-speech laws, whether in Germany or Francs or the U.S., seem to be predicated on the idea that the speech itself has some sort of magical power over people's minds. I think that's very wrong, and it distracts attention from where it's needed most.
A number of different groups would have you believe that the swastika was this magical symbol that automatically turned rational people into genocidal creatures: All you do is hide the swastikas and everything's okay. Remember that the Holocaust had a very specific economic and political context: For a number of reasons, the German people had endured one of the worst economic declines ever to be suffered by an industrialized nation, and they were terrified and desperate. This does not excuse what happens, but it gives a much more sensible explanation than what normally passes for historical analysis -- "We need to keep the images of swastikas away from impressionable white kids", or "Germans are just a racist people", or similar pap.
So now Germany has a problem with skinheads (though it tends to get blown way out of proportion because the rest of the world watches the country very carefully). So why is that? Is that because German teenagers can get their hands on albums by talentless oi-skinhead bands? Or maybe, just maybe, it's because the reunification of Germany has been fraught with all sorts of economic and political stresses, and there are too many scared, uneducated, hopeless Germans who are looking for a scapegoat.
Of course, when it comes to what a politician can do about it, there's really no option at all, is there? Either he can stand up and say "We should work hard to make sure that everybody has good economic opportunities" -- and be branded as some stuck-in-the-past Marxist -- or he can point fingers and say "Let's keep Nazi images off the internet!"
... and although another court will decide what remedy is necessary in this case, that other court could also decide Microsoft should be split up. It simply gives MS at not being split up, but in the end this appeal may have no effect.
As an occasional freelance journalist (an index of my writing can be found on my homepage,) I'm a member of this union, and I'm actually quite proud of that.