] I was reminded of that wisdom this week after the
] National Institutes of Health, in a fit of ethical
] repurification, announced that it would no longer allow
] its researchers to hold significant financial interests
] in, receive consulting fees from, give paid speeches to
] or exchange bodily fluids with employees of any drug or
] biotech companies.

Science Needs A Profit Motive (washingtonpost.com)

] Researchers who receive grant money from the National
] Institutes of Health will be "asked" to submit their
] results to a public Web site within a year after they are
] published in a scientific journal, under a new and
] controversial NIH policy announced yesterday.

Haven't ya'll heard of a library?

NIH Grant Recipients Are 'Asked' to Post Data (washingtonpost.com)

adam wrote:
]
]
] ] Do you think that the British government does nothing about
] ] the IRA because they feel like they can't stop it?
]
] Numerous British Governments have tried very hard and used
] various more or less draconian measures to "win" the war. We
] saw the Anti-terrorism law, Diplock courts and internment.
] Nobody could say that Margaret Thatcher didn't vigorously
] pursue the war especially after the IRA murdered her close
] friend and confidant Airey Neave, a man who escaped from
] Colditz.
] However as to when a British Government last thought it could
] win militarily is a difficult question. We call it the Long
] War and it isn't over yet note the very latest troubles in the
] peace process after the IRA was alledged by senior Northern
] Irish policemen of being deeply involved in one the biggest
] bank robberies in British history.
] But and it is a major but the British Government wasn't in a
] position to cut off the "support network". The IRA was
] largely funded through an organisation called Noraid, funded
] by US citizens and though racketeering in Northern Ireland.
] Also the British Government couldn't invade Eire where the IRA
] had training camps.
] It would be usuful to know more about the support networks for
] Eta the Spanish Basque separatists.
] Having said that I remain unconvinced that the war on
] terrorism can be won militarily.

You make a strong arguement. Is there an example of a non-state terrorist organization that has lost and gone away?

RE: Iraqis crowd the polls | csmonitor.com

] WILLIAMSBURG DOESN'T NEED A SPACE ELEVATOR! The Space
] Elevator Will Mean: Less Parking, Weird Ribbon Thing,
] Constant Loud Whirring Noise, Increased Space Elevator
] Truck Traffic. Developers have submitted plans to build a
] massive space elevator in Williamsburg!

Awesome NIMBY punk.

Boing Boing: Brooklyn residents: just say no to space elevators!

People are strange.

((O)) Pet's Mobility

] This is the homepage of the Shape Contexts based approach
] to break Gimpy, the CAPTCHA test used at Yahoo! to screen
] out bots. Our method can successfully pass that test 92%
] of the time. See EZ-Gimpy in action at Yahoo! The
] approach we take uses general purpose algorithms that
] have been designed for generic object recognition. The
] same basic ideas have been applied to finding people in
] images, matching handwritten digits, and recognizing 3D
] objects.

Nice.

So, any technological effort to prevent bot attacks is going to be easy to defeat. This may actually push demand for a federated identity system for the internet. The people managing systems will be responsible for verifying that their users are real people. An easy way to do this is to require telephone authentication (the way GeoTrust does for their personal SSL certificates) and not offer more then 10 addresses per phone number.

There are also interesting questions here about reputation carrying over between communities. You might need to gain a large audience on, say, MemeStreams before you are allowed to join another community with a more controlled atmosphere...

Breaking a Visual CAPTCHA

Hrm. This article puts quite a spin on the data. This conclusion is not entirely supported even by the information they cut out and presented in the sidebar. The real title ought to be "Students only concerned with their 1st amendment rights, and not of others." This is typical of any group in society. Students are far more likely then teachers to support the independence of their school newspaper and far more likely then teachers to support "offensive" rock music. They care about their personal freedoms and not freedoms in general. Its hard to fault them when their teachers, parents, etc aren't any better.

What's up with that? Well follow the link at the end of the article and you'll see that the study is sponsored by a group that seeks to promote journalism classes in high schools. Its obviously to their benefit to create a "crisis" in student's knowledge of the first amendment which they are ready and willing to address. Plus, no one knows more about using the media to promote an agenda then journalists themselves.

Students say First Amendment Rights NO BIG DEAL

] Defying fears of suicide bombings, mortar attacks, and
] insurgent threats to kill every voter, Iraqis Sunday
] lined up in greater numbers than expected to cast ballots
] in historic elections.

It sounds like the elections went well.

Iraqis crowd the polls | csmonitor.com

] A U.S. district court in Seattle Friday sentenced a
] 19-year-old Minnesota teen to 18 months in prison for
] unleashing a variant of the MSBlast worm.

This is probably a reasonable end to this story. I still think the sentence is too long, but its not the 10 years they were talking about. Look for "hangem high" sysadmin types who don't know anything about the justice system to scream about this not being a deterent.

Enterprise Security Today (Online Security): NewsFactor Network - Viruses & Worms - Teen Convicted for Distributing Blaster Worm

My Tivo says this is playing again on the 12th of Feb!

PBS - Austin City Limits - The Pixies Live