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Comment Re:I suspect the US Government is doing something (Score 1) 126

> The cops have every right to remove someone disruptive from a private event like that.

Clinton was in the middle of a speech -- of a sentence! -- demanding that foreign governments allow their citizens the freedom of expression. If you don't see the hypocrisy in that, can you at least appreciate the irony? Did she mean expression should only be protected if it is not disruptive to anybody?

And in this case "disruptive" would have to be defined as standing silently (admittedly this is according to McGovern himself, though it is largely corroborated by the video as the mic had no problem picking up the noise once he started struggling with the police).

You find it suspicious that no one else at the event has publicly corroborated McGovern's story -- but it is also notable that no one else has contradicted it (including the camera).

I don't know what you mean when you say the police had 'every right', but if you mean legal right then I agree. But that is exactly the hypocrisy the whole fiasco makes apparent: when a public official speaks at a private university about the importance of protecting the freedom of expression, the police can and will repress peaceful protesters!

If you meant moral rights, I disagree (based on the facts as best as I can discern them) that the police had any right to remove McGovern the way they did.

Anyway, I think you have healthy skepticism and appreciate your desire not to jump to inaccurate conclusions. I just think the evidence is fairly convincing in this case... and it fits with my pre-conceived notion that governments are prone to hypocrisy :)

Comment Re:I suspect the US Government is doing something (Score 1) 126

> He's a 911 "truther". [911truth.org] He may have been a good CIA analyst, but he's either playing up the nutjobs for money or he is one himself.

I understand your skepticism, but to dismiss him as a "nutjob" because he holds to theories that you and I find incredible is a rather black-and-white approach to assessing the credibility of the story. Dan Ellsberg is on the list in the link you posted; does that give you serious doubts about the validity of the Pentagon Papers?

> At the very least, you should be skeptical when literally the only account you can find of an event in a room full of people comes from one man

I agree, and I wish I could find more accounts of the event. It seems that Amy Goodman and Democracy Now was the most mainstream program to cover it. Though much of it was captured on video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-Vy8fFnz18

Comment Re:I suspect the US Government is doing something (Score 1) 126

Ray McGovern is also the guy who stood up to Rumsfeld in 2006:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1FTmuhynaw

The internets have jaded me to the point that whenever I see someone written off as "a total nut-job" (as the GP did to McGovern) I almost automatically read it as "a principled person who I disagree with."

Comment FOAF+SSL (Score 1) 363

But Facebook allows you to have a list of friends, which you can use to grant granular access control to information.

A decentralized, RESTful solution exists as FOAF+SSL.

What would be awesome is if popular social sites like Facebook would generate a FOAF file/Web ID for their users automatically. Then users of those sites would also be part of the open social graph (you know, the World Wide Web) and they would still look at the ads on facebook when they update their statuses or whatever you do on facebook. Win-win.

It's funny.  Laugh.

Bill Gates' Plan To Destroy Music, Note By Note 659

theodp writes "Remember Mr. Microphone? If you thought music couldn't get worse, think again. Perhaps with the help of R&D tax credits, Microsoft Research has spawned Songsmith, software that automatically creates a tinny, childish background track for your singing. And as bad as the pseudo-infomercial was, the use of the product in the wild is likely to be even scarier, as evidenced by these Songsmith'ed remakes of music by The Beatles, The Police, and The Notorious B.I.G.."
Image

Teens Arrested For Motorized Office Chair 338

German police have confiscated the world's fastest office chair and arrested its 17-year-old inventors. The duo added a lawnmower engine, brakes and a metal frame to the office chair and were reported to be driving it all over the streets of Gross-Zimmern. Police did not comment on the chair's handling or acceleration but I look forward to it being profiled on Top Gear.
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Bottom of the Barrel Book Reviews — The Lost Blogs 235

We get a lot of books for review here at Slashdot. Most are sent out to users on our reviewer list within a few weeks. Others become part of an impressive wall of books on my desk before they find a home. There are a choice few however that are doomed to never see the inside of a Fedex box. This is mostly due to the complete and utter stupidity or absurdness of their subject matter. I've decided to give these failed intellectual endeavors a chance and explore just how big a waste of time a book can be. We start scraping the bottom of the barrel with a little number written by Paul Davidson called, The Lost Blogs. Read below to find out just how bad it got.
The Internet

Visualizing Searches Over Time 56

An anonymous reader writes "Chris Harrison has built a visualization that explores what people are doing online over time. He explains, 'Search engines are the gateway to the internet for most people, and so search queries provide insight into what people are doing and thinking. In order to examine millions of search queries, I built a simple, cyclical, clock-like visualization that displays the top search terms over a 24-hour period.' Interesting to see that the masses online have fairly coherent and consistent search behaviors. He also investigates the notorious AOL dataset."

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