Yes they should pick and choose. That is what responsible journalistic discretion is about.
Responsible newspapers don't publish every rumor or sensitive piece of information. They realize that that would have terrible consequences.
If you want to position yourself in the manner Wikileaks has, you need to accept the burden of journalistic integrity and discretion. It might not be the easiest deal, but no is forcing them to take this job.
I would argue, that like nearly all "blame the victim" arguments it is misplaced. You are probably right that the military should have tighter security protocols in-place. However, that isn't the question at hand. Whether or not the US should have tighter security in-place doesn't address the issue of Wikileaks' moral culpability.
The typical "blame the victim" scenario can be aptly applied here: a rape victim deserved to be raped because of her dress choices. In the same way the rapist is *wrong* and morally culpable, Wikileaks is also wrong and culpable.
If I leave my door unlocked that does not entitle you to ransack my home and rob me at gun point in the middle of the night. The argument, "you should have locked your door" is simply insufficient.
So, let's bring the issue back to the uncomfortable nature of what wikileaks actually did. What wikileaks did was damaging to American interests, to the interests of free Western democracies, and to the interests of anyone living under a government where they have the freedom to engage in this online discussion. Let's be clear: what wikileaks did is traitorous and does not advance the ideal of an open, free, accountable society/government. All it does is set us back and advance our enemies.
After considering that stark reality, no amount of victim blaming can provide consolation enough to offset the actions of Wikileaks.
Wikileaks only "leaks" what is given to them. They aren't a fucking espionage agency that infiltrates foreign governments and steals classified documents.
I chafe under this silly denial of culpability argument. It is without a doubt false and silly.
I perfectly accept the denial of culpability of someone like Verizon or another ISP who provide the infrastructure for viewing wikileaks. But, Wikileaks.org actively promulgates the dissemination of secret material.
Assange isn't running some kind of passive conduit which allows anyone to post whatever they want. No, what he does is promote the material, call the New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel demonstrating his editorial control. He has created an actively managed platform for traitorous leaks.
Assange is an attention seeker motivated by his own self-interests. I very much doubt he's interested in changing the course of Western policy, at least not in a manner most would consider fair or democratic.
Frankly, even if wikileaks.org was a passive conduit, which it's not, I wouldn't feel comfortable with it being used in this manner, and I would question its utility. When wikileaks first appeared, I was optimistic that it could provide a good platform for whistle-blowers in overlooked areas such as specific industries or countries lacking a strong, independent press. Wikileaks has strayed from that original ambition.
The perfect representation of this point is the fact that there is *nothing* Wikileaks has done with regard to national security which could not be done better by the New York Times. Nothing at all.
If Wikileaks turned its focus to those areas which do not benefit from the services of strong institutions like the New York Times, the world would likely be a better place. Most of the world suffers from great injustice and corruption. Wikileaks could shine a bright, disinfecting light on the failures of local governments and very large countries which have incredible human rights violations and repression of a free press to match.
President Bush was wrong to invade Iraq under such spurious claims/evidence. Wikileaks is wrong to expose state secrets which have precisely 0% probability of changing American policy but a 100% probability of endangering Americans, American allies, and damaging interests.
Playing the moral equivalence game with the policies of George W. Bush, a reckless, irresponsible President, is a poor starting point.
Agreed. If they were publishing leaks about outright corruption in Africa (or the US for that matter) I would be impressed with them as a force for good. It seems that they just want to air out state secrets in public, consequences and safety be damned.
Your attitude is naive and idiotic. Regardless of your feelings, there are dangerous and evil men in the world. Overall, The United States is the greatest force for good in this world. The free press has traditionally been an excellent force to keep American voters informed and hold politicians accountable for their actions/policies.
Wikileaks does none of these things. All that Wikileaks does is undermine the efforts of the United States and the West to safeguard and make the world a better place. Make no mistake, these actions strengthen those who stand opposed to us who would like to see their own personal fortunes/power grow at the expense of democratic/free nations.
You may be opposed to specific US/Western policies but, frankly, it's the best we have. Your protests remind me of the Churchill quote: "democracy is the worst form of government except for all of the others".
This attitude is beyond reprehensible. Firstly, people *are* put at risk. You can't publish the names of civilian informants and think it doesn't effect our national security now and ability to recruit future informants.
Secondly, your fears are misplaced. If you don't like the federal government then you should vote them out; or run for public office yourself. On the other hand, you have absolutely no recourse to rein in an irresponsible wikileaks. What would you do if you felt wikileaks *was* irresponsible? Nothing.
1. An Echange replacement. Not 8 things I can lash up to work but a single system that is easy to install that offers all the features of Exchange with none of the pain. Oh and it must work with Outlook and should have a good client that does everything Outlook does plus a good web interface.
I use gscan2pdf for my Linux desktop. I find it's incredibly simple and convenient.
It just does *everything* I need. It takes scans from scanner, it processes it with OCR, it allows me to delete or insert pages.....it's just very simple and does the job well.
For OCR, gscan2pdf works with 4 OCR programs currently:
GOCR
Tesseract
Ocropus
Cuneiform
Ocropus is developed with funding/support from Google. It uses tesseract as a backend to do a lot of the work. In simple terms, Ocropus is awesome. I find it does a stellar job at OCR. It's absolutely open source and great software.
For liberal arts (or anything strongly language based, like law) typing your notes in class is fine.
But law is the exception for technical subjects. For most others, you need a pen and paper. There are simply too many symbols which take too long to type into a qwerty keyboard, or there are too many diagrams.
I have terrible handwriting and used a pen and paper throughout engineering school, and my girlfriend is doing the exact same thing in medical school now.
The LGPL change for Qt is a very big deal. It means that you can write quality, cross-platform, mobile phone ready applications in any language with Qt bindings. That's a big deal. It's what java,.NET, etc. have been looking for for a long time.
I think Nokia doing it this way, where you can use whatever cross-platform language you like (Python, Ruby, Java, C++, C#) and can tap into Qt library power will be a real win.
Economically, I think there's a lot of opportunity in this space too. As much as I think that the web is the *new* development platform of choice, there are limitations. And the web/browser will probably never have the same amount of power or control as something like Qt can provide even if Google develops offline stuff like gears, and amazing graphical toolkits/javascript wrappers like Google web toolkit
The real question is how this will all effect KDE. KDE might turn out to be a huge beneficiary, or maybe people will just run their Qt applications on Gnome, Windows, Mac, and their cell phones and not much will change.
I think the entire notion of rich user interaction in browser is a significant barrier.
No one will argue that with the exception of the most AJAXy websites (gmail, google maps, etc.) desktop user interface is far superior to web user interface.
CSS and HTML (maybe 5?) don't seem sufficient. That's why we've seen non-standard solutions emerge: Flash, silverlight, etc...
I tend to think the issue of rich web interface to rival desktop UI is a completely separate, but very relevant issue.
For the last few years Google's strategy has been to make the browser the platform of choice. That would make the whole Windows, Linux, Mac, mobile whatever choice irrelevant.
Making Firefox act more like a real operating system, each "application" runs in its own process is another step in that direction. It means that my gmail browser window won't crash if I surf to some buggy website. And it means that I can run a lot of browser based application faster and more stably.
This is the next logical step for people to start using Google word processor running in firefox instead of Word or OpenOffice. Once there's a stable browser based platform for browser applications to run in, a whole world of possibilities begins to opens up.
Why would you not want to make a more robust browser? You have to first accept that the application will never be perfect, will always have *something* wrong. Then it's an easy decision to choose to build a robust browser which can fail elegantly and minimize the effects of flaws.
Right now, as others have noted, threading is hard and complex. Shared memory is tricky. In the shared memory threading model, one thread can modify data, while another thread is completely unaware that the data it is operating on has actually just changed! It's a very tricky model and can introduce all sorts of tricky, difficult to track bugs.
Separates processes are a lot simpler since each process has its own unshared memory. As of today, I don't believe there are enough tools to make managing concurrency simple.
People on slashdot (and elsewhere) keep on saying "a lot of programs won't benefit because they're sequential". Most program execution time is spent inside loops: do work on one thing then do work on the next thing. These can be run in parallel very easily. All we need are the right tools to make it simple.
We're starting to build the necessary tools. They're not there yet to make concurrency a "no thought necessary" free lunch. But, look at the tools that have already emerged (and are still quite young): the entire functional programming-inspired stack map/reduce etc, CUDA, and languages like Erlang and Haskell, etc...
A few years ago when I was looking for Python libraries to do concurrent programming it was quite difficult. Now the multiprocessing module is in the standard library of Python 2.6; that is a major step forward that makes multicore processing significantly simpler.
I think that big, high profile projects like this will encourage the necessary innovation to develop those tools: necessity is the mother of invention. When big open source projects hit new problem requiring new tools the broader community tends to benefit.
I use Ubuntu Intrepid on all my machines now.
The only thing I go into windows for anymore is excel and a browser with java pluging (the 64 bit plugin for firefox doesn't come in Intrepid repositories and is a pain to install).
Occasionally, I've run into weird web things that need IE or need something else weird for a presentation. Maybe WebEx or something. But in general, I have very few issues where I need windows. I have the windows virtual machine setup in case I need it. But it's very rare.
We have much more complex ballots in the United States than elsewhere.
In Canada, voters only have 1 decision: their representative for parliament.
In the United States, ballots can have, literally, dozens of choices. Presidential, senate, house of representatives, propositions, and various local elected officials. All of which adds up to dozens of options.
Hand counting so many options would be much more complex than in a country like Canada.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes they should pick and choose. That is what responsible journalistic discretion is about.
Responsible newspapers don't publish every rumor or sensitive piece of information. They realize that that would have terrible consequences.
If you want to position yourself in the manner Wikileaks has, you need to accept the burden of journalistic integrity and discretion. It might not be the easiest deal, but no is forcing them to take this job.
You're using a "blame the victim" type of argument here.
I would argue, that like nearly all "blame the victim" arguments it is misplaced. You are probably right that the military should have tighter security protocols in-place. However, that isn't the question at hand. Whether or not the US should have tighter security in-place doesn't address the issue of Wikileaks' moral culpability.
The typical "blame the victim" scenario can be aptly applied here: a rape victim deserved to be raped because of her dress choices. In the same way the rapist is *wrong* and morally culpable, Wikileaks is also wrong and culpable.
If I leave my door unlocked that does not entitle you to ransack my home and rob me at gun point in the middle of the night. The argument, "you should have locked your door" is simply insufficient.
So, let's bring the issue back to the uncomfortable nature of what wikileaks actually did. What wikileaks did was damaging to American interests, to the interests of free Western democracies, and to the interests of anyone living under a government where they have the freedom to engage in this online discussion. Let's be clear: what wikileaks did is traitorous and does not advance the ideal of an open, free, accountable society/government. All it does is set us back and advance our enemies.
After considering that stark reality, no amount of victim blaming can provide consolation enough to offset the actions of Wikileaks.
Wikileaks only "leaks" what is given to them. They aren't a fucking espionage agency that infiltrates foreign governments and steals classified documents.
I chafe under this silly denial of culpability argument. It is without a doubt false and silly.
I perfectly accept the denial of culpability of someone like Verizon or another ISP who provide the infrastructure for viewing wikileaks. But, Wikileaks.org actively promulgates the dissemination of secret material.
Assange isn't running some kind of passive conduit which allows anyone to post whatever they want. No, what he does is promote the material, call the New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel demonstrating his editorial control. He has created an actively managed platform for traitorous leaks.
Assange is an attention seeker motivated by his own self-interests. I very much doubt he's interested in changing the course of Western policy, at least not in a manner most would consider fair or democratic.
Frankly, even if wikileaks.org was a passive conduit, which it's not, I wouldn't feel comfortable with it being used in this manner, and I would question its utility. When wikileaks first appeared, I was optimistic that it could provide a good platform for whistle-blowers in overlooked areas such as specific industries or countries lacking a strong, independent press. Wikileaks has strayed from that original ambition.
The perfect representation of this point is the fact that there is *nothing* Wikileaks has done with regard to national security which could not be done better by the New York Times. Nothing at all.
If Wikileaks turned its focus to those areas which do not benefit from the services of strong institutions like the New York Times, the world would likely be a better place. Most of the world suffers from great injustice and corruption. Wikileaks could shine a bright, disinfecting light on the failures of local governments and very large countries which have incredible human rights violations and repression of a free press to match.
Nice ad hominem.
Two wrongs don't make a right.
President Bush was wrong to invade Iraq under such spurious claims/evidence. Wikileaks is wrong to expose state secrets which have precisely 0% probability of changing American policy but a 100% probability of endangering Americans, American allies, and damaging interests.
Playing the moral equivalence game with the policies of George W. Bush, a reckless, irresponsible President, is a poor starting point.
Agreed. If they were publishing leaks about outright corruption in Africa (or the US for that matter) I would be impressed with them as a force for good. It seems that they just want to air out state secrets in public, consequences and safety be damned.
Your attitude is naive and idiotic. Regardless of your feelings, there are dangerous and evil men in the world. Overall, The United States is the greatest force for good in this world. The free press has traditionally been an excellent force to keep American voters informed and hold politicians accountable for their actions/policies.
Wikileaks does none of these things. All that Wikileaks does is undermine the efforts of the United States and the West to safeguard and make the world a better place. Make no mistake, these actions strengthen those who stand opposed to us who would like to see their own personal fortunes/power grow at the expense of democratic/free nations.
You may be opposed to specific US/Western policies but, frankly, it's the best we have. Your protests remind me of the Churchill quote: "democracy is the worst form of government except for all of the others".
This attitude is beyond reprehensible. Firstly, people *are* put at risk. You can't publish the names of civilian informants and think it doesn't effect our national security now and ability to recruit future informants.
Secondly, your fears are misplaced. If you don't like the federal government then you should vote them out; or run for public office yourself. On the other hand, you have absolutely no recourse to rein in an irresponsible wikileaks. What would you do if you felt wikileaks *was* irresponsible? Nothing.
1. An Echange replacement. Not 8 things I can lash up to work but a single system that is easy to install that offers all the features of Exchange with none of the pain. Oh and it must work with Outlook and should have a good client that does everything Outlook does plus a good web interface.
Try Zimbra for exchange replacement.
See economics of agglomeration
It just does *everything* I need. It takes scans from scanner, it processes it with OCR, it allows me to delete or insert pages.....it's just very simple and does the job well.
For OCR, gscan2pdf works with 4 OCR programs currently:
Ocropus is developed with funding/support from Google. It uses tesseract as a backend to do a lot of the work. In simple terms, Ocropus is awesome. I find it does a stellar job at OCR. It's absolutely open source and great software.
Why? Apache is a more liberal license.
For liberal arts (or anything strongly language based, like law) typing your notes in class is fine.
But law is the exception for technical subjects. For most others, you need a pen and paper. There are simply too many symbols which take too long to type into a qwerty keyboard, or there are too many diagrams.
I have terrible handwriting and used a pen and paper throughout engineering school, and my girlfriend is doing the exact same thing in medical school now.
Use the right tool for the job.
I think Nokia support will be a very big deal.
.NET, etc. have been looking for for a long time.
The LGPL change for Qt is a very big deal. It means that you can write quality, cross-platform, mobile phone ready applications in any language with Qt bindings. That's a big deal. It's what java,
I think Nokia doing it this way, where you can use whatever cross-platform language you like (Python, Ruby, Java, C++, C#) and can tap into Qt library power will be a real win.
Economically, I think there's a lot of opportunity in this space too. As much as I think that the web is the *new* development platform of choice, there are limitations. And the web/browser will probably never have the same amount of power or control as something like Qt can provide even if Google develops offline stuff like gears, and amazing graphical toolkits/javascript wrappers like Google web toolkit
The real question is how this will all effect KDE. KDE might turn out to be a huge beneficiary, or maybe people will just run their Qt applications on Gnome, Windows, Mac, and their cell phones and not much will change.
I think the entire notion of rich user interaction in browser is a significant barrier.
No one will argue that with the exception of the most AJAXy websites (gmail, google maps, etc.) desktop user interface is far superior to web user interface.
CSS and HTML (maybe 5?) don't seem sufficient. That's why we've seen non-standard solutions emerge: Flash, silverlight, etc...
I tend to think the issue of rich web interface to rival desktop UI is a completely separate, but very relevant issue.
For the last few years Google's strategy has been to make the browser the platform of choice. That would make the whole Windows, Linux, Mac, mobile whatever choice irrelevant.
Making Firefox act more like a real operating system, each "application" runs in its own process is another step in that direction. It means that my gmail browser window won't crash if I surf to some buggy website. And it means that I can run a lot of browser based application faster and more stably.
This is the next logical step for people to start using Google word processor running in firefox instead of Word or OpenOffice. Once there's a stable browser based platform for browser applications to run in, a whole world of possibilities begins to opens up.
This seems like a silly argument.
Why would you not want to make a more robust browser? You have to first accept that the application will never be perfect, will always have *something* wrong. Then it's an easy decision to choose to build a robust browser which can fail elegantly and minimize the effects of flaws.
I believe we need better tools.
Right now, as others have noted, threading is hard and complex. Shared memory is tricky. In the shared memory threading model, one thread can modify data, while another thread is completely unaware that the data it is operating on has actually just changed! It's a very tricky model and can introduce all sorts of tricky, difficult to track bugs.
Separates processes are a lot simpler since each process has its own unshared memory. As of today, I don't believe there are enough tools to make managing concurrency simple.
People on slashdot (and elsewhere) keep on saying "a lot of programs won't benefit because they're sequential". Most program execution time is spent inside loops: do work on one thing then do work on the next thing. These can be run in parallel very easily. All we need are the right tools to make it simple.
We're starting to build the necessary tools. They're not there yet to make concurrency a "no thought necessary" free lunch. But, look at the tools that have already emerged (and are still quite young): the entire functional programming-inspired stack map/reduce etc, CUDA, and languages like Erlang and Haskell, etc...
A few years ago when I was looking for Python libraries to do concurrent programming it was quite difficult. Now the multiprocessing module is in the standard library of Python 2.6; that is a major step forward that makes multicore processing significantly simpler.
I think that big, high profile projects like this will encourage the necessary innovation to develop those tools: necessity is the mother of invention. When big open source projects hit new problem requiring new tools the broader community tends to benefit.
I use Ubuntu Intrepid on all my machines now.
The only thing I go into windows for anymore is excel and a browser with java pluging (the 64 bit plugin for firefox doesn't come in Intrepid repositories and is a pain to install).
Occasionally, I've run into weird web things that need IE or need something else weird for a presentation. Maybe WebEx or something. But in general, I have very few issues where I need windows. I have the windows virtual machine setup in case I need it. But it's very rare.
Have you tried WINE for specific applications? I needed good notetaking software and evernote seems to be running great with WINE.
I might try out Excel on WINE next.
We have much more complex ballots in the United States than elsewhere.
In Canada, voters only have 1 decision: their representative for parliament.
In the United States, ballots can have, literally, dozens of choices. Presidential, senate, house of representatives, propositions, and various local elected officials. All of which adds up to dozens of options.
Hand counting so many options would be much more complex than in a country like Canada.
Zestyping (see grandparent) described this in his dissertation: http://zestyping.livejournal.com/234617.html.
Daniel
Your sortsize program seems similar to the knapsack problem. Perhaps you can solve it as a knapsack problem much faster.