teeja

Sorry, I forgot this isn't really a forum full of hackers. Just news about hackers. I'll remember not to comment without wearing my tie.

Ah, darnit. I thought you meant the wine.

I think that somebody is the EFF. HTTPS-Everywhere (look to the bottom of the page to DL the latest .xmi) has a LOT (certainly hundreds) in their list ... with qualifiers noted.

https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere

That war drove the rise of -empires- seems no surprise at all (see e.g. Alexander). But is that civilization ("An advanced state of intellectual, cultural, and material development in human society") ?? I'm having trouble decoding the semantics to understand why this isn't trivial.

That's ok, but I was more intrigued recently by

25840^2 + 43776^2 = 2584043776

which led me to Numberopedia. https://sites.google.com/site/numberopedia/

The benefits of modest amounts of exercise are in how you FEEL (energized) more than how you LOOK.

Another benefit is that, because it takes little time, you're much more likely to do it.

Well said!

Absolutely. What makes (non-vocal) music "sad" is not inherent in the scales or harmonies used but in culturally-conditioned responses to them. The sad part is that some people can't enjoy truly beautiful music because of that kind of conditioning.

Well said.

About a year ago I walked into "my" bank (hah!) and a guy pulled me over to his desk and "invited" me to sign a form (he said was mandatory) accepting or rejecting a $35 "overdraft insurance" fee. I "invited" him to check his computer and see how many overdrafts I'd had in the past 10 years ... and that my "insurance" was keeping my checkbook balanced.

Not sure what game was afoot there, but I'd bet that some of the people who were treated to that strong-arm tactic resigned themselves to paying that monthly graft. Vampire squid indeed.

Baj. Jumbug. Their hedrons are only special cases of my 42-dimensional Universahedron, which certifiably and undeniably contains everything, including all possible universes. The proof is too small to publish in this post.

We were building things that we didn’t need to build,” Johnson said at the time. “We were harboring fears that we didn’t need to have.”

Somebody needs to engrave that in huge letters on all that glass covering NSA headquarters.

Goes back quite a ways. There's John Brunner's 1975 classic Shockwave Rider. See also early cyberpunk stuff (Gibson, Sterling et al): http://project.cyberpunk.ru/lib/. More recently, Stephenson Snow Crash, Stross Halting State.

Also thoroughly enjoyed both Cory's works, esp. LB.

I know. It's as if (ex-CIA-case officer) Phil Agee's claim back in the mid-80s that America was about to be Latinized is true.

Healthcare, education, housing ... what's next?

One of the more sensible theories I've heard is that the fluoridation push happened at about the same time as the need to ramp-up uranium hexafluoride use for enrichment processes ... and that the sudden demand for fluoride could be masked by a civilian "decay prevention" program.

See also: Donora death fog. http://www.fluoridation.com/donora.htm

I never heard Robert Young say "fucking sue me" in Father Knows Best. But then fathers don't wear fucking fedoras these days either.

This 'code' reminds me of the gobbledy-gook exchanged between the supercomputers in Colossus - The Forbin Project.

That's because when they do, it often sounds just like a lie.

It's great that someone so attentive to teens is candidly exploring this subject on film. Unfortunate that it seems to be focussed primarily on negatives.

Yes I spend a lot of time on the net: unlike the TV which consumed thousands of passive, scripted hours in my youth, the net is interactive, the outcome within my control. For most of my life, the many things I couldn't learn more about for lack of time or helpful resources were out of reach; the amplification is awesome. For most of my life, I had to imagine being connected with communities of shared interests, never imagining having the focussing luxury of needing to choose from among them.

Those changes in my life are all positives. So while teens are doing teenish things with this tech, they are learning - just as we adults are. And when they become parents, they'll know from experience (just as in the middle ages and in the 1800s and 1950s) the impact of these new things.

The social impact of emergent technologies has always been unpredictable. Luckily humans adapt. And so far, ever since the first piece of flint changed lives, we've muddled on somehow. Not that worry-warting is worthless; reflection is in fact the mother of adaptation.

Health, housing, education. What's the next sector for the relentless blood funnel?

$36,000 / 120 months = $300/mo. If it lasts 10 years, that's a pretty good ROI.

Well, for example compare:

OSM http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=10/51.3825/-68.5375 (I don't see anything on the St. Lawrence River either...)

Mapquest http://mapq.st/18F1XnO

Looking at LARGE bodies of water away from populated regions, I'm seeing very few labels anywhere.

I guess I was thinking of this: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57410234-93/wikipedia-dumps... which was a year ago April (how time flies...)

IIRC before that time GM were thickly populated with WP icons, and that diminished over time.

They're funded through our 'representatives'. And (going by Sensenbrenner's statements lately) they'll have something to say about that when Congress rejoins.

John Gilmore (born 1955)is one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Cypherpunks mailing list, and Cygnus Solutions.

I should be such an 'idiot'.

I noticed the WP layer missing (on the public web maps) quite a long time ago. Very disappointing. (I heard there was a disagreement between WP and Google that may have precipitated that.) Along with that, I believe that the amount of information detail on Google's (public web) maps has been dropping steadily. I've assumed that's because of increased mobile usage necessitating bandwidth-trimming measures. (No hard examples, based on expectations created by prior experience.)

Similar things seem to have been happening at OpenStreetMap ... the gradual fade of a certain kinds of detail. Zoom in on a region and see what kind of luck you have identifying bodies of water. (Same problem at Google.) I've had to switch to the MapQuest version for that.

Perhaps it "was easy" because we took it for granted that it "couldn't happen here".

Maybe that was because too many of the principals in the Manhattan Project were dead. Or, maybe, we don't learn from history, and never will.

I'm pretty sure I got introduced to Fred in one of Groff Conklin's HUGE and GREAT anthologies published back in the 50s. Thanks to a great, open-minded small-town librarian I was already mainlining SF as a young teen.

Fred was very much a pioneer, and if you look through his few-dozen blog posts (93-year-old blogger!) of the last year or so he shares stories about the early SF conventions (#71 just ended).

The end of the article says, "If you're looking for a job, any job, try North Dakota." The article that links to blames the great ND economy on oil. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/08/the-geog...

Energy's partly responsible. But there's a more important reason that NoDak didn't suffer at all during the recession: its publicly-owned State Bank. It remained sane and stable and crime-free while those traits were rare in the other 49 states. Check it.

Perhaps they were rich in sanity. Unlike the 20th century. (Stalins, Hitlers, nuclear brinkmanship, massive pollution, tens of millions killed in war ...)

Sanity alone explains their remarkable success. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. Money is a symptom.

That and (towards the end) a couple of kings who had absolute power. Like ... Stalin.

Another case of overly dramatic science-journalism. The title says "comet collision". Worse yet just before the video it says "The comet appears to explode upon impact but most likely only made it to within touching distance."

Touching distance? This writer clearly does not understand the subject at all. (Or else it's a crappy translation from an ESA item in a foreign language.)