Thursday, July 22, 2010
一分鐘破陳致中 疑召妓案
既然有召妓的時間和打到應召站的電話通話記錄, 用通連記錄來追查不是馬上水落石出嗎? You might be interested in reading a related true story on the same blog: Alibi everywhere.
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Can we rely on Google for critical missions?
- In the last post, I mentioned that my Google site [I Love Taiwan] Google Group stopped working for about a month now. Repeated requests to Google Inc for help produced no useful response. A friend asked:
Do you have any idea what they think you did, or why they think they are justified in cutting off service?
Nope. I am confident the site became inaccessible not because of the content of the site, or anything I have done.
For the near term, I think you need to come up with a good, clear, concise explanation of what happened leading up to the suspension of service, and why Google might have suspended your account. Then explain why Google was wrong to do what they did. Finally, you should lay into Google for being unresponsive and stonewalling, in apparent violation of their prime directive not be be evil.
Nothing I can think of can justify disability of my Google site; it just happened out of the blue. Google is not suspending my account. In fact, all of my Google apps continue to work perfectly except my existing Google sites. A far-fetched speculation is that China made Google Inc disable my site because one of its subsite is Taiwan is not a part of China. If this is true, then Google Inc is helping China silence people and the whole world should be prepared to fight not just China, but also Google Inc.
- Consider an even more serious disruption of Google service, and even more serious loss of years of historical data for Taiwan. The following is copied from http://taiwanyes.com/tvfilm_201007.php; The most shocking is that an youTube (a Google company) account twyes2 has been eliminated. As a result, so went all the videos Taiwan Yes 2 had uploaded to youTube over the years. These include many years of the recordings of the daily talk shows 大話新聞 and 新台灣論壇 that constitutes a faithful recording of the history of Taiwanese' struggle for democracy.
7/13/2010 - 在 Youtube 的 twyes2 帳戶被 Youtube 刪除了，所以連帶其他節目也被刪除了。而且另一帳戶 twyes 也收到 Youtube 的第一次通知 。
還有不知是否與下列新聞有關 「蘇麗 媚搶進中國 公開迎合馬英九 有線電視買賣大戰引關注」7/12/2010 - 今天收到 Youtube 的第二次通知
"...這是他人第二次對您的帳戶提出版權抗議。只要有人再次對您的帳戶提出申訴，我們就會終止您的帳戶。...(按此看內容)"
看來我必須把舊的三立電視節目從Youtube刪除了。7/11/2010 - 貼出別的Youtube網友上載的大話新聞。
7/6/2010 - 由於收到如下Youtube和三立電視通知 "侵權聲明 您所上傳的影片已侵害三立電視之權利，例如大話新聞....，請立即下架避免觸法！" 所以不再上載三立電視之節目。
Friday, July 9, 2010
When Google messes up your life
and ignores your request for help
Google has become a very important part of my life. For example, I count on Google to make sure my Google site [I Love Taiwan] Google Group work smoothly 24/7. When an important Google service stops working and Google would not help fixing it, it is a very serious problem.
Here is an example. For more then three weeks now, my Google Sites have become disabled while all other Google Apps continue to work. I wrote many times to ask for assistance, getting no useful response, and the Sites continues to be disabled.
When we rely on Google for important services such as Email, Sites, Calendar, Blogs, Google Apple Engine, etc., any disruption of these services is a disruption to our lives. Google Inc must be sensitive to users' needs. Internet users should ask Google Inc whether they can rely on its services.
Here is an example. For more then three weeks now, my Google Sites have become disabled while all other Google Apps continue to work. I wrote many times to ask for assistance, getting no useful response, and the Sites continues to be disabled.
When we rely on Google for important services such as Email, Sites, Calendar, Blogs, Google Apple Engine, etc., any disruption of these services is a disruption to our lives. Google Inc must be sensitive to users' needs. Internet users should ask Google Inc whether they can rely on its services.
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Taiwan president's office: we will not watch youTube videos for fear of getting virus
拒連民眾陳情網址 馬政府：怕中毒 【7/6 18:39】
竹南大埔自救會成員代表下田把遭怪手輾倒的稻子扶起，並高喊 「反對徵收、農民團結」。（記者彭健禮攝）
竹南大埔自救會成員被警方與國安局人員組成的人牆隔離。（記者 彭健禮攝）
苗栗縣竹南大埔自救會不滿縣府強徵民地，且侵權施工，再度攔阻 施工，警方擔心發生衝突，圍起人牆將自救會成員與施工人員隔離。（記者彭健禮攝）
〔本報訊〕馬總統到底有沒有苦民所苦？還是認為眼不見為淨呢？苗栗縣先前發生的的大埔農地徵收事件，就有網友寄e-mail向馬政府陳情，當中附上一段 youtube的陳情相關網址，但府方看到後居然回信表示，為防止駭客入侵或擔憂電腦中毒，因此無法連結不明網站。許多網友知道後，直呼太誇張！
這段youtube影片內容是，政府為了徵收大埔農地將怪手無情的開入並毀壞農田的影片。有網友將這段影片上傳至youtube，並將網址寄給府方，希 望馬總統能看到也能夠正視這個問題。
而府方收到後回信表示，由於網路病毒與駭客惡意攻擊層出不窮，為了維護總統府工務電腦的安全，故無法連結至提供網站。
總統府發言人羅智強表示，從民進黨執政時期開始，基於治安考量，總統府所受理的信件，原則上不擷取所附之連結，若民眾有意見，總統府會再與相關人士做進 一步研究。
有網友們聽到後直呼這真是太扯了，因為不止總統府網站本身在youtube就有連結，youtube也是全球最大的影音分享平台，怎麼會是來路不明的網 站呢？有網友直接表示說，現在全球的政府紛紛與社群網站接軌，馬政府不想看就算了，怎麼可以說網站有毒呢？雖然府方事後回應，即便是知名網站，都有資訊安 全的疑慮，但不排除未來以更彈性的處理方式。但馬政府面對民眾陳情的處理態度，不免令人質疑是不是謹慎過了頭呢？
相關影音檔請見：
苗栗縣政府不等府院裁定 硬挖大埔稻田
怪手開進農田大肆破壞
這段youtube影片內容是，政府為了徵收大埔農地將怪手無情的開入並毀壞農田的影片。有網友將這段影片上傳至youtube，並將網址寄給府方，希 望馬總統能看到也能夠正視這個問題。
而府方收到後回信表示，由於網路病毒與駭客惡意攻擊層出不窮，為了維護總統府工務電腦的安全，故無法連結至提供網站。
總統府發言人羅智強表示，從民進黨執政時期開始，基於治安考量，總統府所受理的信件，原則上不擷取所附之連結，若民眾有意見，總統府會再與相關人士做進 一步研究。
有網友們聽到後直呼這真是太扯了，因為不止總統府網站本身在youtube就有連結，youtube也是全球最大的影音分享平台，怎麼會是來路不明的網 站呢？有網友直接表示說，現在全球的政府紛紛與社群網站接軌，馬政府不想看就算了，怎麼可以說網站有毒呢？雖然府方事後回應，即便是知名網站，都有資訊安 全的疑慮，但不排除未來以更彈性的處理方式。但馬政府面對民眾陳情的處理態度，不免令人質疑是不是謹慎過了頭呢？
相關影音檔請見：
苗栗縣政府不等府院裁定 硬挖大埔稻田
怪手開進農田大肆破壞
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
High school math education can be harmful
Every time I teach Calculus, I am pained by how students are so successfully trained by their high school math teachers to use slope-intercept form for finding equations of lines, even when point-slope equation should be used, such as in the typical problem of finding the tangent line of a curve y=f(x) at x=x0.
Some students continue to use slope-intercept form in such context during the final.
Some students continue to use slope-intercept form in such context during the final.
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Everybody, including Nobel Laureates, should blog
Please read
How Chinese KMT media fabricate news; 李遠哲：台灣應歡迎陸生
to learn that
How Chinese KMT media fabricate news; 李遠哲：台灣應歡迎陸生
to learn that
... 管碧玲昨天在自己的噗浪上PO訊息說，「李遠哲來電告訴小英主席，說他有關應歡迎中國學生的報導，是 被聯合報和中國時報斷章取義的」。管碧玲質疑「媒體怎麼可以這樣？」If 李遠哲 is willing, he could blog on this. It would take him just seconds to tell the whole world what actually happened.
US military: We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint
The damage caused by an atomic bomb is instantly appreciated. The damage caused by calculators and PowerPoint are hotly debated, but calculators and PowerPoint are potentially more dangerous than atomic bombs because they destroy many minds of a few generations.
WASHINGTON — Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti.
“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter.
The slide has since bounced around the Internet as an example of a military tool that has spun out of control. Like an insurgency, PowerPoint has crept into the daily lives of military commanders and reached the level of near obsession. The amount of time expended on PowerPoint, the Microsoft presentation program of computer-generated charts, graphs and bullet points, has made it a running joke in the Pentagon and in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.
“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”
In General McMaster’s view, PowerPoint’s worst offense is not a chart like the spaghetti graphic, which was first uncovered by NBC’s Richard Engel, but rigid lists of bullet points (in, say, a presentation on a conflict’s causes) that take no account of interconnected political, economic and ethnic forces. “If you divorce war from all of that, it becomes a targeting exercise,” General McMaster said.
Commanders say that behind all the PowerPoint jokes are serious concerns that the program stifles discussion, critical thinking and thoughtful decision-making. Not least, it ties up junior officers — referred to as PowerPoint Rangers — in the daily preparation of slides, be it for a Joint Staff meeting in Washington or for a platoon leader’s pre-mission combat briefing in a remote pocket of Afghanistan.
Last year when a military Web site, Company Command, asked an Army platoon leader in Iraq, Lt. Sam Nuxoll, how he spent most of his time, he responded, “Making PowerPoint slides.” When pressed, he said he was serious.
“I have to make a storyboard complete with digital pictures, diagrams and text summaries on just about anything that happens,” Lieutenant Nuxoll told the Web site. “Conduct a key leader engagement? Make a storyboard. Award a microgrant? Make a storyboard.”
Despite such tales, “death by PowerPoint,” the phrase used to described the numbing sensation that accompanies a 30-slide briefing, seems here to stay. The program, which first went on sale in 1987 and was acquired by Microsoft soon afterward, is deeply embedded in a military culture that has come to rely on PowerPoint’s hierarchical ordering of a confused world.
“There’s a lot of PowerPoint backlash, but I don’t see it going away anytime soon,” said Capt. Crispin Burke, an Army operations officer at Fort Drum, N.Y., who under the name Starbuck wrote an essay about PowerPoint on the Web site Small Wars Journal that cited Lieutenant Nuxoll’s comment.
In a daytime telephone conversation, he estimated that he spent an hour each day making PowerPoint slides. In an initial e-mail message responding to the request for an interview, he wrote, “I would be free tonight, but unfortunately, I work kind of late (sadly enough, making PPT slides).”
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates reviews printed-out PowerPoint slides at his morning staff meeting, although he insists on getting them the night before so he can read ahead and cut back the briefing time.
Gen. David H. Petraeus, who oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and says that sitting through some PowerPoint briefings is “just agony,” nonetheless likes the program for the display of maps and statistics showing trends. He has also conducted more than a few PowerPoint presentations himself.
General McChrystal gets two PowerPoint briefings in Kabul per day, plus three more during the week. General Mattis, despite his dim view of the program, said a third of his briefings are by PowerPoint.
Richard C. Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, was given PowerPoint briefings during a trip to Afghanistan last summer at each of three stops — Kandahar, Mazar-i-Sharif and Bagram Air Base. At a fourth stop, Herat, the Italian forces there not only provided Mr. Holbrooke with a PowerPoint briefing, but accompanied it with swelling orchestral music.
President Obama was shown PowerPoint slides, mostly maps and charts, in the White House Situation Room during the Afghan strategy review last fall.
Commanders say that the slides impart less information than a five-page paper can hold, and that they relieve the briefer of the need to polish writing to convey an analytic, persuasive point. Imagine lawyers presenting arguments before the Supreme Court in slides instead of legal briefs.
Captain Burke’s essay in the Small Wars Journal also cited a widely read attack on PowerPoint in Armed Forces Journal last summer by Thomas X. Hammes, a retired Marine colonel, whose title, “Dumb-Dumb Bullets,” underscored criticism of fuzzy bullet points; “accelerate the introduction of new weapons,” for instance, does not actually say who should do so.
No one is suggesting that PowerPoint is to blame for mistakes in the current wars, but the program did become notorious during the prelude to the invasion of Iraq. As recounted in the book “Fiasco” by Thomas E. Ricks (Penguin Press, 2006), Lt. Gen. David D. McKiernan, who led the allied ground forces in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, grew frustrated when he could not get Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the commander at the time of American forces in the Persian Gulf region, to issue orders that stated explicitly how he wanted the invasion conducted, and why. Instead, General Franks just passed on to General McKiernan the vague PowerPoint slides that he had already shown to Donald H. Rumsfeld, the defense secretary at the time.
Senior officers say the program does come in handy when the goal is not imparting information, as in briefings for reporters.
The news media sessions often last 25 minutes, with 5 minutes left at the end for questions from anyone still awake. Those types of PowerPoint presentations, Dr. Hammes said, are known as “hypnotizing chickens.”
Helene Cooper contributed reporting.
We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint
A PowerPoint diagram meant to portray the complexity of American strategy in Afghanistan certainly succeeded in that aim.
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
Published: April 26, 2010
WASHINGTON — Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti.
“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter.
The slide has since bounced around the Internet as an example of a military tool that has spun out of control. Like an insurgency, PowerPoint has crept into the daily lives of military commanders and reached the level of near obsession. The amount of time expended on PowerPoint, the Microsoft presentation program of computer-generated charts, graphs and bullet points, has made it a running joke in the Pentagon and in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.
“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”
In General McMaster’s view, PowerPoint’s worst offense is not a chart like the spaghetti graphic, which was first uncovered by NBC’s Richard Engel, but rigid lists of bullet points (in, say, a presentation on a conflict’s causes) that take no account of interconnected political, economic and ethnic forces. “If you divorce war from all of that, it becomes a targeting exercise,” General McMaster said.
Commanders say that behind all the PowerPoint jokes are serious concerns that the program stifles discussion, critical thinking and thoughtful decision-making. Not least, it ties up junior officers — referred to as PowerPoint Rangers — in the daily preparation of slides, be it for a Joint Staff meeting in Washington or for a platoon leader’s pre-mission combat briefing in a remote pocket of Afghanistan.
Last year when a military Web site, Company Command, asked an Army platoon leader in Iraq, Lt. Sam Nuxoll, how he spent most of his time, he responded, “Making PowerPoint slides.” When pressed, he said he was serious.
“I have to make a storyboard complete with digital pictures, diagrams and text summaries on just about anything that happens,” Lieutenant Nuxoll told the Web site. “Conduct a key leader engagement? Make a storyboard. Award a microgrant? Make a storyboard.”
Despite such tales, “death by PowerPoint,” the phrase used to described the numbing sensation that accompanies a 30-slide briefing, seems here to stay. The program, which first went on sale in 1987 and was acquired by Microsoft soon afterward, is deeply embedded in a military culture that has come to rely on PowerPoint’s hierarchical ordering of a confused world.
“There’s a lot of PowerPoint backlash, but I don’t see it going away anytime soon,” said Capt. Crispin Burke, an Army operations officer at Fort Drum, N.Y., who under the name Starbuck wrote an essay about PowerPoint on the Web site Small Wars Journal that cited Lieutenant Nuxoll’s comment.
In a daytime telephone conversation, he estimated that he spent an hour each day making PowerPoint slides. In an initial e-mail message responding to the request for an interview, he wrote, “I would be free tonight, but unfortunately, I work kind of late (sadly enough, making PPT slides).”
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates reviews printed-out PowerPoint slides at his morning staff meeting, although he insists on getting them the night before so he can read ahead and cut back the briefing time.
Gen. David H. Petraeus, who oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and says that sitting through some PowerPoint briefings is “just agony,” nonetheless likes the program for the display of maps and statistics showing trends. He has also conducted more than a few PowerPoint presentations himself.
General McChrystal gets two PowerPoint briefings in Kabul per day, plus three more during the week. General Mattis, despite his dim view of the program, said a third of his briefings are by PowerPoint.
Richard C. Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, was given PowerPoint briefings during a trip to Afghanistan last summer at each of three stops — Kandahar, Mazar-i-Sharif and Bagram Air Base. At a fourth stop, Herat, the Italian forces there not only provided Mr. Holbrooke with a PowerPoint briefing, but accompanied it with swelling orchestral music.
President Obama was shown PowerPoint slides, mostly maps and charts, in the White House Situation Room during the Afghan strategy review last fall.
Commanders say that the slides impart less information than a five-page paper can hold, and that they relieve the briefer of the need to polish writing to convey an analytic, persuasive point. Imagine lawyers presenting arguments before the Supreme Court in slides instead of legal briefs.
Captain Burke’s essay in the Small Wars Journal also cited a widely read attack on PowerPoint in Armed Forces Journal last summer by Thomas X. Hammes, a retired Marine colonel, whose title, “Dumb-Dumb Bullets,” underscored criticism of fuzzy bullet points; “accelerate the introduction of new weapons,” for instance, does not actually say who should do so.
No one is suggesting that PowerPoint is to blame for mistakes in the current wars, but the program did become notorious during the prelude to the invasion of Iraq. As recounted in the book “Fiasco” by Thomas E. Ricks (Penguin Press, 2006), Lt. Gen. David D. McKiernan, who led the allied ground forces in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, grew frustrated when he could not get Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the commander at the time of American forces in the Persian Gulf region, to issue orders that stated explicitly how he wanted the invasion conducted, and why. Instead, General Franks just passed on to General McKiernan the vague PowerPoint slides that he had already shown to Donald H. Rumsfeld, the defense secretary at the time.
Senior officers say the program does come in handy when the goal is not imparting information, as in briefings for reporters.
The news media sessions often last 25 minutes, with 5 minutes left at the end for questions from anyone still awake. Those types of PowerPoint presentations, Dr. Hammes said, are known as “hypnotizing chickens.”
Helene Cooper contributed reporting.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)