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I think they are not working at that level, but at a deeper level. The concept of intellectual property is a fairly new one - maybe a few hundred years old, but some would say even more recent.

I'd say it came out of three streams. The first is the idea of acedemic honesty, the second commercial copyright, and the third European property theory.

Academic honesty is most often encountered when it is breached, in cases of plagurism. The idea is simple - people that come up with ideas should be credited, and it is wrong to claim other's ideas as your own. That's why research papers include the authors, why Newton and Leibniz fought over who invented the calculus, and why plagurist who get A's get kicked out of college faster than those who honestly get F's. Acedemic honesty is based on giving credit where credit is due, not on ownership of ideas.

Copyright is a business proposition, to allow an author to enter into a contract with a publisher, and have the law enforce that only those the author has contracts with can publish the works. It prevents McPublisher from copying the text and making copies without entering into a contract with the author. It simply recognizes a political fact: authors and artists create works, but others are good at publishing and distrubiting, and the two should be allowed to enter into a mutually benefical contract, and prevent others from nullifing the benefits of that contract. Still, there's no real property changing hands - rights are given, other's rights are defined, and the contract may just happen to include money changing hands, and restrictions for the two parties. It doesn't have to be exclusive or costly - the GNU copyright is an example of one that is not costly, but restrictive, and public domain is neither costly nor restrictive.

Property, in many ways, is a European concept, that justifies the actions of the powerful and allows for some interesting innovations. Property implies ownership and legal facts, which means that the government , by force, will defend those "facts". "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property" means that the government has to recognize that property is a basic right, and can't seize that property without being in the wrong. It only has effect when being are willing to fight for their "right to property".

I agree with all these, in isolation. It's when they come together to make "Intellectual Property" that I start getting a little tense. Ideas aren't really property, in that when I give some away, I have as much as I started with. Even the strict requirements of academic honesty are met simply by acknowledging who came up with the idea. What about copyright? If I "take" an idea, then publish it and make money off of it, I'm clearly in the wrong. But if I simply use it for myself? Is Newton any poorer because I learned the calculus? Is Jefferson any poorer because every American History book has a copy of the Declaration of Independance? Is Metalica any poorer because I have a copy of a song I wouldn't have paid for, anyway?

I don't buy the arguement "code = factories". The manufacturer has real property in factory equipment with a real dollar value, gets a real electric bill at the end of the month, and has to pay real money for employees. I have a similar situation. My computer is real property, with a (rapidly declining) value, I get a real electricity bill at the end of the month, and I donate my "expertise" to operate my computer, as a hobby. At work, they pay me to do a similar thing with their equipment. Code Factory Equipment, Computers = Factory Equipment.

I've rambled for too long, without really making a point. Basically, property is a good thing, but I'm not sure if "Intellectual Property" really fits in the scheme of "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness / Property" that I would fight and die for. I think this is a distinction that needs to be made, before my company starts worrying about their "air property" that I'm consuming without compensating them.

http://www.angelfire.com/geek/qdata/index.html

A guy named Keith Irwin published a high level process for attacking HDCP a few weeks back and it sounds much the same (i.e. number of required devices, etc.)

See the links below for his whitepaper as well as a previous discussion regarding this on a popular HDTV forum...

http://www.angelfire.com/realm/keithirwin/HDCPAtta cks.html
http://www.avsforum.com/ubb/Forum11/HTML/015261.ht ml

Once again, x-thousand other webcomics got passed over, too... many of them better than Sluggy et al, but not so long-lived or well-hyped. Comics like Irritability and Zebra Girl are pretty much unheard-of, but are quality stuff. Unfortunately, they aren't as media-friendly as Sluggy or User Friendly.

So, with all due respect, quit yer complainin'. ;-) There are a lot of webcomics being "forgotten," not just your favourites.

JOSH.

This is the fucking WWW! You can't tell me what I can and can't link to! People who do that don't understand the way the web works. And if you think they'll prevail in court, THINK AGAIN!

Yep. Did you get a look at the thin tube steel he made the cart out of? That kind of stuff you can bend over your knee. I'd make a real cart to begin with, or even better get one of those old Honda Odyssey four-wheel RV things (not the new soccer-mom Odyssey - see here) with the full roll cage and work from there.

And his newer verison with the high-mounted engine? Where's the reinforcement? If he's lucky the engine won't bend that tube forward and snap his legs off like a mouse trap. But only if he's lucky.

Don't even get me started on the brakes. OK, he can use a lathe - but machinist != engineer...

Barney: Hey Fred!
Fred: What?!
Barney: Give me your Cocoa Pebbles!
Fred: No!
Barney: No? Ohhhhhh, Freeeeeed!
(barney gets hit by an arrow in the back)
Fred: Barney!
(a light appears behind Fred)
Barney: Yes, Fred?
Fred: You...you're an angel!
Barney: Your selfishness sent me to the great beyond.
(we see birds holding Barney on ropes and holding a flashlight over him)
Fred: Forgive me! Have my Cocoa Pebbles! Have them all!
Barney: Heavenly! Chocolatiest cereal in Bedrock!
(birds lick their lips and let go of the ropes)
Fred: Barney! You're no angel!
(Barney plummets into a glacier)
Barney: The devil made me do it!

thanks to

So I can take the KJV cut out all the bits I don't like, add in some interesting new commandments etc and no one can stop me.

Jefferson did that.

Anyway, there are a few modern translations which have (among others) the goal of avoiding copyright difficulties: the World English Bible (WEB) (which I prefer) and the New English Translation (NET), for example.

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Um, no. The ACLU will defend your religious civil liberties as well. The cases where they seem anti-religion are those which involve separation of church and state -- an important distinction which protects against exactly the sort of things the Afghan government has been imposing on its citizens. Keeping Christianity out of schools and local government may seem unfair to you, but in the long run it preserves the option of following the faith you choose. What if, at the founding of the country, Thomas Jefferson's edited Bible
had been declared the only acceptable version, and those who had different Christian beliefs forced
to discard them?

In the computer world, in the 1960s the most widely available output device was a "line printer". This was a printer which printed up to 132 characters on each line of 11x17 paper. The printer could be told to stay on the same line, so text could be printer over other previously printed text. There were a large number of images developed to be printed out, including ones which were printed in several columns which had to be joined side-to-side (such as an image of a jet flying over the Golden Gate bridge). Both simple printing and overprinting were used. Here is an example circa 1973; it was such a popular technique that even self-portraits were done with it.

There were programs available for creating "printer art". You'd give the program a two-dimensional matrix of integers with the gray scale value desired for each pixel. The programs simply translated the gray scale numbers to the character (or characters) used for the nearest shade of gray. The programs were particularly convenient if you were one of the few people with some sort of image scanning device.

When ASCII became popular, with Teletypes and 72-80 character timesharing terminals becoming common, the same technology was used there. Some artists preferred to (or didn't know about the programs) manually create the art with text editors (or tools like a 1987 program for creating printer art). Some of the same images appeared on terminals.

Obviously, text characters were used simply for their gray-scale pixel value. The same technology can be used for images, by selecting component images based on brightness and color values.

There are now many ASCII Art sites on the Web. This Conversion Programs information is from this ASCII Art FAQ. An online example of a conversion program is GIF2TXT, which converts any online image -- try giving it that Slashdot logo at the upper left of this page. If you don't get enough ASCII Art links here, try the ASCII Art WebRing.

Well, I don't know about the sites hosted on sourceforge, but I do happen to know what Taco and Hemos will do.

As long as C programs have to be written in ASCII

Supporting UTF-8 variable names as an extension to C and to C++ would not break any standard because, by definition of UTF-8, any valid ASCII string equals its UTF-8 representation.

english will be the standard

Programming languages use English as the standard for keywords because more programming language designers can speak English than any other language.

Limit use of 'to be' verbs to add power to your English.

However, that's not to say that Mac OS X is truly uncrashable. (Yet.) We appear to be somewhat lucky on the stability end, whereas some other hapless customers are not. For instance, take Tony Smith over at The Register; the poor man nearly reached his wit's end trying to keep his Mac OS X-loaded blue and white G3 from taking frequent and unplanned trips to Crashville. (Spookily enough, Tony's crashes left him with "nothing but a blank, mid-blue screen"-- is Apple hard at work reverse-engineering Microsoft's Blue Screen of Death?) After multiple reinstalls, he eventually figured out what was causing his grief: an aftermarket PCI ATI Radeon graphics card, which he determined was not supported. Replacing it with his original OEM Rage 128 card left his system solid as a rock. Or so he thought.

Once he got around to reinstalling his third-party fonts, his crashes came back. And so, by adding one font at a time, he was eventually able to isolate the real cause of all his woes: "a single Star Trek symbol font... OS X doesn't like it one little bit." So while Mac OS X is able to use his zippy Radeon card after all, Tony will sadly have to boot back into Mac OS 9 whenever he wants to stick the Starfleet Insignia into one of his party invitations. Now that's a problem that Apple's really going to have to fix before Mac OS X will ever catch on as a mainstream operating system.

In fairness to OS X, I think it was actually application crashes -- the font wasn't bringing the system down.

Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.

Don't forget DHMO and cheese.
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Well I was going for intent, and I was following the Christian commandments. No 10 is stated here, and in the context of licenses I think it is analogous.

When I scribbled down a note, I knew I would have to re-enter it into my Mac (yes, Mac) later on. Otherwise, if I ever lost it, I'd have no backup.

Now I have a Palm V. I have a backup of all my contacts. I only have to enter a weekly event once.

When I'm stuck with nothing to do, I have half a dozen books loaded up. When I have too much to do, I've got reference guides for Perl, HTML, Unix, and Windows. I've got a database of 50 of my favorite restaraunts, and directions how to get there.

Many of these are the same tasks my DayRunner did before. Palm just does them much better. And I have Tetris.

The Palm Pilot is a tool. If all you want is a tip calculator, it's the coolest $400 tip calculator there is. If, however, you want the mythical "Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy", it's here.

Palm is simply having the same problems as every high-tech company: the economy's in the dumper. Give it a year.

Meh. You were saying?

No disrespect intended, but I'm not sure you know what you're dealing with. As an R/C modeler, I can tell you that the incredibe tensile strength of stretched, bonded mylar that we coat our planes in combines very well with the compressive and torsional strength of balsa to create some really sturdy aircraft. I've flown balsa gliders into precision landings in winds gusting up to 50mph.

Lindbergh's plane was cloth over wood!

As far as mounting telemetry in these suckers... yawn? Yes, they make a perfect delivery system for a terrorist. Zero cross section on radar, silent, incredibly hard to see, and they can carry a decent payload.

The big holdup has always been the telemetry, which is quite different than a robotic aircraft. Robotic R/C planes, if perfected and made cheap, would be... a law enforcement nightmare.

My guess is that they (law encforcement) have already thought about this for a while.

http://jamesthornton.com/acs/benchmarks-ora817-pg7 03.html

So much for "openness", although if you look hard enough you and draw your own conclusion about the name of a "leading proprietary database application" is you can see PostgreSQL can perform impressively:

http://www.angelfire.com/nv/aldev/pgsql/GreatBridg e.html

And they are known for dirty marketing tricks, where once they lock you in they jack up the price:

http://pub13.ezboard.com/fiwetheydatabases.showMes sage?topicID=76.topic&index=1

People do that now. They're called Mary Kay consultants.
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I'm not sure the Net was ever really revolutionary. In the early days, the Connected Internet(AKA Darpanet or NSF Net depending on year)was the private domain of academic institutions and the only people online were scientists, engineers and other educated weirdos. These people used Net to the greatest advantage due to their technical and intellectual sophistication. The majority of discussions at least seemed to be weighty and erudite, but that might just be nostalgia. Let's be honest here. alt.lemurs and alt.sex.bondage.particle-physics were two of my favorite usenet groups in those bygone days, but I can't say the discussions there were revolutionary or even relevant. Silly, yes, relevant no. And how many bull sessions on the early muds and mucks were about nothing more than the relative merits of Vaxes vs Unix. The important stuff in the early days was all work related, like exhcanging data, or sending commands to a polar radar station. Yeah, there was a lot of interesting social stuff going on the murkier corners of gopher space and in the Mud/Muck world, but that was all very experimental. It also a very elite crowd of people, who despite their individual personalities, tended to be cut from the same socio-economic cloth.

Nowadays, everyone's getting online, so there's a lot of noise out there, but there's also a lot more signal than there used to be. Yeah we've got more stock tickers and cat pictures out there than we'll ever know what to do with, but there's also a lot more people setting down their thoughts than there ever has been. The web in a way is the greatest collections of 'zines ever put together. For those who have grown up late in the technological boom a 'zine is little self published paper magazine often given away for free at friendly newsstands and bookstores. Even before the web, people were finding ways to promulgate and exchange ideas. However putting together something as simple as a 'zine is not a trivial task and getting it distributed widely is even harder. The web has changed that to some extent. You can not put up something similar for very little money and effort. Getting exposure is more diffiucult, but if you network well, you can get other people of like mind to link to your effort. For those who say that there's nothing worthwhile or challenging on the net, I'll link to two sites I found recently. Agree with them or not, they are windows into a culture that the mainstream does not want to acknowledge. Gangland Express and Sleepy Lagoon. Both of these sites helped illuminate a world that had always been dark to me growing up. And, that's the potential power of the information overload. Anyone can get on and say something. Yeah, there's a lot of noise, but you can use tools to filter the noise and tune in what you want. Tools like search engines. The main difference between the Net and other modern media is that the consumer has to be an active particpant to utilize the Net.

In a way, I'd argue that the revolution has not yet begun. We as a society are still learning to deal with the Net and the sheer volume of information it brings us. Sure the deliurm of the 'new thing' has faded from the Internet, but that does not mean it's going to go away. The Net is undergoing a correction that puts the supply in line with the actual demand. Not biggie there. Contrary to the pundits, the revolution of the Net has not happened, nor will it happen. The Net will be used by people to exchange ideas and to organize. Those people may well engender a revlotion, but that revolution will happen outside of the Net. That revolution will happen in the real world, in the courts, the polls, and even in the streets.

Here's a photograph of the same area taken with an optical telescope (the DSS Sky Survey). Although the poster meant to say too hot for a visual observation (the X-ray emitting material is invisible to the human eye), there are also significant errors on the Harvard CHANDRA page. The main, central elliptical galaxy in Hickson 62 is not NGC 4761, but NGC 4778. NGC 4761 is a fainter nearby spiral (labelled "c"). Also, comparing the CHANDRA image, it would appear that it has accidentally been mirrored right-to-left. NGC 4761 should be the pink blob at about the 2 o'clock position about halfway out in the greenish X-ray cloud.

At magnitude 12.5, the brightest galaxy in this group (NGC 4778) should be visible in a 6-inch telescope under good conditions. An 8- or 10-inch telescope should be capable of showing the brightest 3 galaxies in the group.

Give Internet Explorer a little bit of Everything...

--

And yes, if you want to do limo-LAN, I have a hub, a gateway, and an inverter that'll keep up to 4 laptops charged all the time.

So (yawn) I'm supposed to be impressed with some guy in Boston who has *one* laptop in a lowly stock Mercedes sedan?

- Robin

(for those who Slashdot readers who don't know, I have the "roblimo" nick because I have owned a limo service for many years.)

You wrote: The code in the boot block is copywrited.

I shall present this mysterious, "copywrited" boot code for you: SCEA. That's it. Four letters. I doubt it's possible to copyright four letters.

Have a look here for some modchip details. If you look around you can also find the source code for a number of modchips if you're into doing it yourself. It would be trivially easy to remove the alleged "copywrited" SCEA and distribute the source without it. You then could add any boot code you liked and put it in your own machine. (Obviously only the "SCEA" would make any sense.)

Note that modchips also have a legitimate purpose: allowing you to play import games. Asian consoles look for SCEI, European ones look for SCEE and NA ones look for SCEA. If the modchip is inserting these "codes" then the playstation will play discs from any region. Note that anti-piracy modchips are also possible, by letting through the first three letters from the disc and inserting a fourth. This type of modchip only allows one to play import games, but not CDRs. (Figuring out what SCEA stands for is left as an exercise for the reader.)

wacker/PERISHABILITY OF TECHNOLOGY

Technology has moved us from the age of planned obsolescence to the era of inherent obsolescence, obsolescence hardly confined to software. Consider Motorola's 1998 launch of the world's first digital, global communications system. The technology supported the Irridium launch was obsolete well before the final rocket thruster fired. Fermi Labs had already fired a neutrino 235 miles into the earth, essentially demonstrating that it was possible to send media messages through the earth.

http://www.firstmatter.com/newsletter/1999/10_tech nology/p_of_t.asp

University of Hawaii, Manoa/ET NEUTRINO SPEAK?

Calculations showed that the detection of extraterrestrial neutrinos could be achieved with as little as a cubic kilometer of seawater if there is a transmitter within about 3,000 light-years. Any artificial signals should be quite distinctive since the neutrinos would come from a single direction in the sky and have a very well-defined energy. http://www.angelfire.com/on2/daviddarling/neutrino com.htm

These are quite a good (and funny) read.

http://www.primeline-america.com/moon-ldg/
http://www.angelfire.com/ut/aylett/eth69.html
http://batesmotel.8m.com/
http://www.forteantimes.com/artic/97/moon.html

Some people are crazy too, like this guy, who says the MOON is a fake.
------------

Didn't you recognize the guestbook entry by the esteemed ex MIT professor, Dr. Lirpa? Dr. Lirpa has made a great number of breakthroughs, including in the field of hydrodynamics, audiodynamics, political theology, and aerodynamics, among others. Dr. Lirpa is not a force to be trifled with.

"Less well-financed criminal operations" == "a crook who can't afford a used 386 system with a 9600-baud modem"

I think /. folks shouldn't just have a knee-jerk reaction but should try to think of reasonable government encryption regulation.

Reasonable regulation means curtailing, not expanding, the powers of government agencies which establish a clear track record of abuse.
/.

Now I use a Psion 5MX PDA it's a little less convenient, due to the increased size, but still handy.

it is possible to connect two modems together directly and have them communicate. make sure that one is set to dial without checking for a dial-tone, have it dial any number. (not sure if it has to be a number of a certain length or not.) after an appropriate amount of time (appropriate=long enough to have dialed the numbers) have the second modem pick up. they should initiate a connection. go from there.

-:-:-:-:-:-:-
view my life here and bitch at me here

You forgot he ran for mayor of San Franciso, hell he got 3% of the vote. Which is pretty smeggin amazing considering his platform included things like making all business people wear clown suits between the hours of nine and five. He also ran this year for president.

Thing is, though, I'm not sure I'd trust, for example, a pregnancy-safe drug list I just got off some guy's home page...

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Thing is, though, I'm not sure I'd trust, for example, a pregnancy-safe drug list I just got off some guy's home page...

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I recommend the Alarishi Empire. Don't like the government? Make your own! All you need are some class 3 batteries and a small fleet to defend yourself.

I just want to give a big word up to the Atari 2600. I gotta say, I take reservation at the dissing of it in this post. It's alive and well, both in emulation, available roms, and ebay auctions for the systems themselves.

~Voose

script-fu's rule
i just sit there and pretend im l33t by making the tileable textures and sending them to friends saying that i drew this awesome tileable background by hand and impressing them.


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visit my page and help me out with my experiment
details in the 12-11-00 update

now well have ugly gameboy colors?
thats all i use my palm for
games

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Visit my page and visit the forum too

Check it out at my crappy page.

--

i swear that x was in there when i hit submit
damned /. gnomes

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visit and take part in my experiment in the post on 121100
thanks

they keep the prices rather low but with the whole qwest thing we technically have only one phone service.

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click here and read interesting things

that is full of warnings about it being government property and all the fun things that will happen to you if you violate their trust, we are all fully aware of most of said items


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my gay ass life

i guess that ill have to stop diggin in their trash cans in hopes of getting bug reports. of course i wasnt getting much from them anyway as the lines are enormous.

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nothing much and if your smart goto this page and tell me how to get it working.

i guess that ill have to stop diggin in their trash cans in hopes of getting bug reports. of course i wasnt getting much from them anyway as the lines are enormous.

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nothing much and if your smart goto this page and tell me how to get it working.

i have never minded ads as long as they dont interfere with what i am doing. if they're separate popup windows then im not down with that as those do get in the way, but ads integrated into the look and feel of the product i dont really mind

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visit me and dont say hi

that this will never get big, it looks too..... cumbersome always having to hold it and such but what do i know

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http://angelfire.com/mt/streeter vist and email me...

that it looks rather like a grapefruit

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http://angelfire.com/mt/streeter visit and email me...

i saw a keyboard similar to that that you stuck your hand in like this sphere thing with keys under and around your fingers and it spun freely around your wrist
i think that it was called the flower, but im not positive

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http://angelfire.com/mt/streeter visit and email me...

thanks

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http://angelfire.com/mt/streeter

i also enjoyed a book by the name of.....something about a cuckoo's egg
that was a rather good one as well

i get paid today, think ill check it out

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http://angelfire.com/mt/streeter