I am in the exact same boat. I never really was in to TV and never had cable. I can't stand commericals. I used to just watch VHS, then DVDs, Blu-Rays, etc. Now I use netflix streaming and am discovering that maybe I did miss a few good shows over the years. Of course, I still pay ComCast a ton of money to get my high-speed net access so I am not sure if I am saving any money...

Hmm, if I remember corectly, the philosophy would be that it is too bad if you don't want someone to link to your text, that should not be your decision to make. That it is ethically wrong to limit linking or quoting. That a link or an edit is an independent creation that has its own identity and rights. I think the example he gives is that I should be able to take your book, quote the whole thing, change one word, and repost it as a new version. Then if someone read my text instead of yours, 99.995% of the royalty would go to you, and .0005 would go to me. Something like that, I forget the details.

In terms of how you implement the linking, it is just a data structure that has two range pointers - the source range and destination range. There are two parts that make it harder. First you need an address system that is extensible and can reference at an arbirtary level of detail. You could use Nelson's own tumbler addressing, although that is not super efficient, or you could create some other system. Then you need a repository to hold and find these links, so that when I am looking at a document, I can see all of the links going to or fromt that. Our friends at Google (or Bing if you prefer) already maintain these link indices so it isn't like it is an unsolved problem. Some of the toolbars available will surface this information for you today.

Can it be that there is a generation of people who love tech and read slashdot every day but don't know who Ted Nelson is? Can you even understand the phrase "free software is like free love, not free beer" if you don't know anything about history? Wow.

I've heard Ted Nelson speak and even met him on a few occasions back in the day - I think it was around 1987. Ted Nelson is not a crackpot by any means - he is the real deal. He wrote a truly fantastic book called "Computer Lib" back in 1974 or so, advocating open and free personal computing long before the Apple I was invented. His vision of "HyperText" has two parts - one is an underlying philosophy that all information should be accessible and usable for whatever people want. The second is some technological solutions and implementation ideas on how to do this.

I think Dr. Nelson has a pretty good track record on the philosophy side. For instance, he discussed that links embedded into documents are a bad idea because they get broken and can only be placed there by the owner of the document. He discusses that links should always be two-way. That links should have known ownership. That the amount of linking (and nth-order linking) can be seen as a judgement of the value of a document. These are all spot-on. In fact, you could argue that Google's entire technology is based on applying a subset of Nelson's ideas to HTML.

HyperText (and HyperMedia) philosophy also is foretells the entire debate now on digital music and digital media, and DRM in general. This is again all written about two decades before we did QuickTime at Apple.

It is too bad that he has become more of a Cassandra these days.

My favorite quote from him is from a talk he was giving on computers and education. He starts by drawing a child and then a garden of delight that represents learning. Then he says "this is the teacher", and draws a brick wall between then. Then he says "Putting computers in the classroom changed all this" and he erases the word "teacher" under the brick wall and writes "computers". So true...

In somewhat plain English:

We might imagine the universe is starting with a very large amount of energy compressed into singularity and then it starts expanding by inflating dimensions. You can assume that there are as many dimensions as you want, but that they are very small; not infinitely small, but small enough so that a complete circuit of the dimension is much smaller than a Planck length. The dimensions are expanding to create a place to put all that energy, so we might expect that one dimension would inflate significantly before it runs out of space - literally - and the next one would start to inflate in earnest. So to expand out and get the three big dimensions we have now, you would naturally pass through a stage where we have 1 and then 2 dimensions. If this happened, we should be able to see the tell-tale signs still imprinted in the make-up of the current universe. For instance, events that happened at very high energies (from early universe), should look today like they all happened in a line or plane instead of in 3D space. That is what the paper is about - more ways to check for this..

BTW, the reason inflation mostly stops after 3 dimensions is that three dimensions is the lowest number of dimensions where randomly distributed items are no longer on top of each other. (e.g., a 1d or 2d random walk will always return to its origin, but in 3D you can get lost for good). You can also hypothesize that a few more dimensions also expanded a little in the process, but not by very much. This is (very) basically what string theory holds.

Many people have trouble understanding the relationship between how many dimensions you have, how much you can hold, and the energy levels involved. Here is a simple thought experiment that anyone can do with just a pen and paper or maybe a string. We will use the paper for space and the string for energy. Draw a 1" line. How long of a piece of string can it "hold"? Only an 1" of course. Now draw a 1"x1" box. How long of a piece of string can it hold? About 1.4", if you stretch it from corner to corner. Now make a 1"x1"x1" box. How long of a piece of string can it hold now?

You can actually stick the Empire State Building into a 1" n-dimensional cube, as long as n is sufficiently large (I think around 225 million should do it... :-) ).

In the next patch, they will just slow down all competing web browsers!

I guess ICAAN is helping put the STD in the sTLD!


/ducks

IANAL, but I did run a Private Investigation firm. A lot of people are in jail because they didn't understand the law about this.

If you exchange anything of value under the pretense of hiring a hitman, then you are guilty of consipiracy to commit murder. For all intents and purposes, the ability or even the intent of the person you "hire" is not relevant, nor is the amount of total value of the exchange. Just like robbing a bank with a gun counts even if the gun was fake/had no bullets/etc.

Merely saying "I wish someone would kill " is a weaker version of "I will give someone $500 to kill " - solicitation. This is where you get into a slipperly slope of how much that resembles an agreement. For instance, if a 9 year says "I will give you a trillion dollars to kill ", that is not very credible. But if a mafia godfather with a track record of hiring killers and rewarding them merely says "Person is annoying me", that might be sufficient.

The real trouble comes when you exchange something of value. I was working a case once where someone was in prison for conspiracy because they asked someone to kill their girlfriend. The "hitman" asked for $1500. The guy told him he was broke. The "hitman" said "yeah, I could do it for free but I would have to leave town." So the person gave him $15 for bus fare. That was enough to show a contract. It turned out his hitman was an undercover cop. Now the guy is serving 15 years.

So in Facebook, if you said "I will be your neighbor in farmville if you kill her", and someone accepts that gift, that would be the same as you paying some stranger $10k.

"la plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu'il n'existe pas!"

Or, as Keyser Söze would put it: "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he didn't exist."

It is classic misdirection- act vaugely bumbling and inept in insignificant matters to distract people from putting serious scrutiny on you.

"There are times when discussing a situation on the radio to a supervisor is not acceptable because of the questions relating to which charges should be filled or what city ordinances may relate to a certain situation."

And those are NOT appropriate for the radio why? That is what a unit-to-unit call is for: rather than the whole talk group hearing it, only the supervisor and the cop here it. AND you get it on the nice multi-track recorder, admissible in court, in case any issues arise.

"I know for fact that every department going doesn't use APCO-25..."

And those departments are upgrading as DHS money becomes available. Moreover, I'm pretty sure California is on APCO-25, since they are buying the equipment to test it, and are testing their radios on that equipment.

"You loose[sic] credibility with me when you make remarks that the police abuse people."
And you "loose" credibility when you assert they don't. I'm not saying ALL cops abuse people, but SOME do - this is a demonstrated and adjudicated fact - and many times they use the cell rather than the radio precisely due to that nice multi-track recorder on the comm center.

The cop has to carry his radio - that's a given. There is no reason for him to have a state paid-for cell phone. Even if he needs to make a phone call pursuant to his duty - again, he can make a PSTN interconnect call on the radio (and again, have the advantage that it is recorded in a nice court admissible format).

Sorry if I touched a nerve, but: it is exactly that mentality - "We are the Thin Blue Line, we must protect our own, no matter what" that is causing people to NOT trust the cops. Rather than saying "Use the radio. Be recorded. If you are doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear. If you ARE doing something wrong, IA will find you and destroy you, and we will all help, because enforcing the LAW is our JOB." you have folks like you saying "It's OK if we hide things, because, well, BECAUSE, citizen."

Considering that I DESIGN the equipment the law enforcement types use to check out the system, I suspect I know quite a bit more about APCO-25, the uses of it within various law enforcement contexts, and the infrastructure than you do, sir. I doubt you could tell an LDU1/LDU2 from a TERMLC or a PDU, or even know what those acronyms are. I seriously doubt you have ever worked with any LEO comms officers, where I was working with the Phoenix/Mesa project on the first deployment of APCO-25 there a decade ago. I've worked with the FBI, the Secret Service, and several state level LEOs.

Again: there is NOTHING a LEO needs to discuss officially that cannot go over the radio, and be more secure than going over the PSTN, let alone any cellular networks.

"Come to think of it there are a lot of state LEOs that carry cellphones so they can discuss matters not suitable for regular 2-way radio...."

And that is bullshit. Most states are now on APCO-25, which supports encryption up to AES-256 (it also supports encryption beyond that, if you get the appropriate crypto modules from No Such Agency). The only reason anybody would use a non-secure cellphone vs a secure radio is that the secure radio is recorded at the dispatch center, making it somewhat difficult to discuss how best to "accidentally" allow the suspect to fall on his face, repeatedly.

A site seems to be missing from the participants, but I just can't put my finger on it /.

"Is Carly Fiorina still available?"

I thing Darl McBride should be freeing up soon....

Call me when they figure out insect bacon. Then we might have a deal...

And YOU need to continue reading down on my post. Had you done so, you might have been able to deduce that I was criticizing the "/.ian" loose/lose confusion in the post, since the the bold font and the [sic] weren't enough of a clue for you.

And so, the English Language gets joined by Reading Comprehension in weeping....