Hi, this is Danny off of NTK and, nowadays, STAND, our new cyberrights site. I also helped set up Fax Your MP.
Please, please, please don't send a form letter via Fax Your MP. It does more harm than good - any MP receiving more than one copy will ignore both, and it gives the impression that Fax Your MP is some kind of spam engine.
Here's the (slightly) longer explanation as to why this gives us at FYMP the willies (and sometimes means we have to killfile certain form letters). If you'd like to write your own letter, I've thrown the resources that you need onto the new STAND site.
By all means use mocktor's excellent letter as a starting point for your own. But using your own words is so much more effective.
Nope. *Parody* (using a song's form to mock it's creator) is fair use in the US, in the sense that you don't need permission. Weird Al has to obtain the rights for any of his songs that don't specifically target their creators (e.g. "Eat It" isn't about Michael Jackson, so he has to pay).
"Perhaps the greatest feat came from the group at one kiosk who discovered and disabled the piece of software that Dr Mitra had installed on the machine so as to monitor their activity and relay it back to him. They sent him a message (in Hindi) that read: 'We have found and closed the thing you watch us with.'"
Sadly, its time is already passed: I coded haiku last week, guffawing evilly that no-one would have *anything* like that. And yesterday three people sent in wwww.headlinehaikus.com as a meme.
Ach, I can't resist. If you're playing around with Python 2.2, you can find 5-7-5 "summaries" in plaintext for yourself using haiku. Great for summarising spam.
> Speaking of which, where's that joke page for him > that displayed articles from him, where he > (Warwick, I mean) was a time traveller who went > back in time to figure out "what went wrong"? > That was classic.
We covered this back in Febuary: Jason Kitcat applied under the Freedom of Information Act for more details. The government's e-envoy has also funded a research project into providing Free Software support for their PKI. If you've got some expertise, I'm sure the project leaders would appreciate your assistance.
I don't actually think that the IE exclusion is the most damaging part of this story. The tacit support by the government for a handful of commercial authentication services (at least one of which, Chambersign, appears to involve private key escrow) looks to be more pernicious.
Troll or not, I think there's an important point here. People's impression (and use) of a language is *hugely* influenced by the tutorials they use.
I think that most people's impression that Perl's OOP features are a bit convoluted comes from their slightly tacked-on explanation (in terms of previous Perl features) in the Camel books. Given that most approaches to large-scale projects revolve around OOP these days, that leads
to people using the wrong techniques with Perl, and getting unmanageable stacks of steaming subs.
Damian Conway's Object-Oriented Perl, on the other hand, is so good that it won me back to Perl from Python. Conway's explanations show you the subset of "ways to do it" that include "ways that scale".
It was a bit of a relief, to be honest, because while programming Python felt very worthy and clean, it was not fun. I wonder how much that had to do with how I learnt it too?
...that Cringely makes a huge gaffe throughout this piece. The RSA512 story ran in The Times, not the Sunday Times, which is a separate publication with its own staff. He wastes a healthy few hundred words criticising the wrong paper.
I can see where he made this error: the URL that was run in Slashdot (and previously, in NTK) had Sunday Times in the address. Both papers share the same Website.The implication here is that Cringely, knowingly or not, has been picking his up his news stories from the "nerderati" themselves. It seems odd that Cringely would take advantage of Websites distributing tips like this, but decline to use the parallel error-checking mechanisms that sit alongside them.
I understand what he means about being able to state your opinion without worrying about censure: but discovering the facts to wrap your opinion around is still a scalable art.
I'm standing by our original story [NTK 1999-06-11] that BT will begin rolling out ADSL for 50UKP from September. There have been rumblings that BT are considering backing out of this plan following Oftel's unexpectedly militant "free the local loop" stance, but I reckon that's just sour grapes.
They may be BT, but they know which way the wind's blowing. If you act like a monopoly a moment longer than you *have* a monopoly, you're in trouble.
More info we've gleaned: it starts third week in September, roll-out begins in Westminster, finishes in Northern Ireland by Sept. 2000. They haven't got enough engineers, and I bet they've underestimated the demand.
No, it's better than journalism: it's training in thinking for yourself.
No journalist can be impartial. The most they can do is express their prejudice in way that allows you to divine the truth as reflected in their point of view. The sort of impartiality we've grown to accept from our media hides a whole bundle of prejudices that we're so accustomed to, many would deny they existed at all.
And sure, that's probably more effort than we've been expected, as readers, to exercise for quite a while. But it's not hard, and it will be necessary. When a new Internet user learns to ignore a "Good News" virus warning, they're developing the kind of scepticism we bred in our journalists in order to project our own innocence. In a world where news and rumours can come from any angle, I think we're better off without that innocence.
Slashdot Mirror
Please, please, please don't send a form letter via Fax Your MP. It does more harm than good - any MP receiving more than one copy will ignore both, and it gives the impression that Fax Your MP is some kind of spam engine.
Here's the (slightly) longer explanation as to why this gives us at FYMP the willies (and sometimes means we have to killfile certain form letters). If you'd like to write your own letter, I've thrown the resources that you need onto the new STAND site.
By all means use mocktor's excellent letter as a starting point for your own. But using your own words is so much more effective.
Nope. *Parody* (using a song's form to mock it's creator) is fair use in the US, in the sense that you don't need permission. Weird Al has to obtain the rights for any of his songs that don't specifically target their creators (e.g. "Eat It" isn't about Michael Jackson, so he has to pay).
The EFF's Cory Doctorow discusses fair use and parody in more detail here.
That was my
Sadly, its time is already passed: I coded haiku last week, guffawing evilly that no-one would have *anything* like that. And yesterday three people sent in wwww.headlinehaikus.com as a meme.
It'll all be over by Tuesday.
Ach, I can't resist. If you're playing around with Python 2.2, you can find 5-7-5 "summaries" in plaintext for yourself using
haiku. Great for summarising spam.
> Speaking of which, where's that joke page for him
> that displayed articles from him, where he
> (Warwick, I mean) was a time traveller who went
> back in time to figure out "what went wrong"?
> That was classic.
Ah, you mean Kevin Reading of Warwick University?
That would be Kevin Warwick Watch
We covered this back in Febuary: Jason Kitcat applied under the Freedom of Information Act for more details. The government's e-envoy has also funded a research project into providing Free Software support for their PKI. If you've got some expertise, I'm sure the project leaders would appreciate your assistance.
I don't actually think that the IE exclusion is the most damaging part of this story. The tacit support by the government for a handful of commercial authentication services (at least one of which, Chambersign, appears to involve private key escrow) looks to be more pernicious.
d.
Kitcat's FOIA report
Original report
Follow-up, including mention of the Open Source project, with details of how you can help.
Troll or not, I think there's an important point here. People's impression (and use) of a language is *hugely* influenced by the tutorials they use.
I think that most people's impression that Perl's OOP features are a bit convoluted comes from their slightly tacked-on explanation (in terms of previous Perl features) in the Camel books. Given that most approaches to large-scale projects revolve around OOP these days, that leads
to people using the wrong techniques with Perl, and getting unmanageable stacks of steaming subs.
Damian Conway's Object-Oriented Perl, on the other hand, is so good that it won me back to Perl from Python. Conway's explanations show you the subset of "ways to do it" that include "ways that scale".
It was a bit of a relief, to be honest, because while programming Python felt very worthy and clean, it was not fun. I wonder how much that had to do with how I learnt it too?
What did Stallman do in this situation?
Not only good advice, but a great T-shirt slogan too:
What Would Stallman Do?
...that Cringely makes a huge gaffe throughout this piece. The RSA512 story ran in The Times, not the Sunday Times, which is a separate publication with its own staff. He wastes a healthy few hundred words criticising the wrong paper.
I can see where he made this error: the URL that was run in Slashdot (and previously, in NTK) had Sunday Times in the address. Both papers share the same Website.The implication here is that Cringely, knowingly or not, has been picking his up his news stories from the "nerderati" themselves. It seems odd that Cringely would take advantage of Websites distributing tips like this, but decline to use the parallel error-checking mechanisms that sit alongside them.
I understand what he means about being able to state your opinion without worrying about censure: but discovering the facts to wrap your opinion around is still a scalable art.
HTML(ish) version at
http://www.ntk.net/ecbill/.
d.
I'm standing by our original story
[NTK 1999-06-11] that BT will begin rolling out ADSL for 50UKP from September. There have been rumblings that BT are considering backing out of this plan following Oftel's unexpectedly militant "free the local loop" stance, but I reckon that's just sour grapes.
They may be BT, but they know which way the wind's blowing. If you act like a monopoly a moment longer than you *have* a monopoly, you're in trouble.
More info we've gleaned: it starts third week in September, roll-out begins in Westminster, finishes in Northern Ireland by Sept. 2000. They haven't got enough engineers, and I bet they've underestimated the demand.
No, it's better than journalism: it's training in thinking for yourself.
No journalist can be impartial. The most they can do is express their prejudice in way that allows you to divine the truth as reflected in their point of view. The sort of impartiality we've grown to accept from our media hides a whole bundle of prejudices that we're so accustomed to, many would deny they existed at all.
And sure, that's probably more effort than we've been expected, as readers, to exercise for quite a while. But it's not hard, and it will be necessary. When a new Internet user learns to ignore a "Good News" virus warning, they're developing the kind of scepticism we bred in our journalists in order to project our own innocence. In a world where news and rumours can come from any angle, I think we're better off without that innocence.
> Now I hate to defend Microsoft, but they did have one (1) original idea: BASIC.
*Cough*! Maybe you should tell that to Tom Kurtz and John Kemeny, of Dartmouth University...
For some real history...