...more recent posts
Does it really make sense to put (RARE!) in an mp3 title if you are sharing it with the rest of the world on gnutella? No it doesn't.
You might think you're having a fun day, but I'm downloading a 44 megabyte file I'm not sure I want over a 2 KB/s connection. That's excitement. Much like the pitch drop experiment I found on metafilter.
I read the Times most mornings when I go for coffee. There's usually a copy lying around by the time I get there. But I don't read it so much for the news. I've always already heard all the big stories the day before on the web. But I'm still interested in how they report things.
Anyway, today there is a short story about the FBI's computer systems. I hadn't heard this one, but I simply cannot believe it. Who's in charge here? Apparently agents don't enter their reports in digital form! They just enter a summary of the reports and provide a few key words. So the way it is set up there is no way to search the body of all those reports. You can only search on the keywords!
Well that's the whole freakin' problem right there. What do they expect. Are they trying to do a shitty job? Everybody at the top should be fired immediately if this is true (I'm sure they'll get right on that now that my feelings are known.)
Let me repeat: FBI agents can not search on the full text of other FBI agents reports. Yet google can index the full text of the entire internet and provide advanced search capabilities to millions of users a day for free. Why isn't there a greater outrage about this? I think you could safely assume that 9/11 would not have happened if this problem had been fixed. Agents were aware (and suspicious) that lots of muslim men were taking flight courses well beforehand. But they couldn't put their information together. Can somebody up there please call google? You know, like before the next attack.
My digitalmediatree email accounts are flakey today. No doubt that was curcial information for your day.
I was mentioning this crazy scheme last night to Alex, so here's the link for documentation:
The White List (or "clean list") is proposed policy which will extend government and corporate control over the possession, importation and movement of anything that is alive - plants, animals, fungi, microorganisms, everything.In other words, it's not obnoxious enough to make certain plants illegal, they want to make everything a priori illegal, and then make exceptions for just certain plants.
The Plant Protection and Quarantine Safeguarding Review recommends that the United States Department of Agriculture "Consider adopting a modified 'clean list' approach for propagative material, specifying what is permissible subsequent to risk assessment, rather than the current 'dirty list' that prohibits or restricts specific articles only."The cover is that this legislation will protect us from evil invasive species, but you'd have to be pretty dim to think this is trying to protect anything except unbridled profiteering. Look who's behind it:
"Monsanto, DowElanco, American Cyanamid, Zeneca, Dow AgroSciences, SePro, Helena and other herbicide manufactures and "life patent" corporations have funded tremendous propaganda in recent years hyping a spurious "invasive species" threat to natural ecosystems in order to sell more herbicides.(via ethel)