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"i believe that if the 'creative commons attribution share-alike non-commercial' was the default license that creative works would be released under; and people had to register for 'copyright, all rights reserved', we would all be much better off."

It would need to be 'creative commons attribution share-alike' or there would be very little change from what we have today. The NC you suggest would bring back the need for permission.

But I think you are looking at interesting angles. See:

http://zotzbro.blogspot.com/2007/04/some-thoughts-on-copyright-offensive.html

all the best,

drew

all the best,

drew

I make a point of not letting them cut in front of me. I'm legally entitled to the area of space my vehicle ocupies (plus a buffer zone in front and behind sufficiently large to prevent fender benders no less). Yet these cheats are *demanding* (with screams and threatening gestures at times) that I *sacrifice my rights* for their momentary convenience.

Traffic would flow faster for everyone, including yourself, if you stopped doing that.

Optimal lane merging
Curing lane-merge traffic jams and FAQ

To whom it may concern,

Recently a new .gov domain name was registered. The name of this domain was http://www.change.gov./ This appears to be a violation of the Domain Naming Conventions Summary located at https://www.dotgov.gov/dnc.aspx. The domain does not appear to meet the criteria outlined on that page. It is my belief that the name was granted without the proper review, due to the current political climate and may in fact have been a political favor which is a clear violation of federal law.

What is the process to file a complaint regarding improper use of the .gov TLD?

Thank you for your time and cooperation.

This may or may not have any result whatsoever. We shall see.

This isn't one that I use every day, but I find it enormously handy when I do need it:

(defun for-each (begin end place start stop step)
    "Copy the active region and replace a placeholder string with a number."
    (interactive "r\nsPlaceholder: \nn Start: \nn Stop: \nn Step: ")
    (let ((template (buffer-substring begin end))
                (count (1+ (/ (- stop start) step))))
        (delete-region begin end)
        (dotimes (time count)
            (let ((value (number-to-string (+ start (* time step))))
                        (expansion template))
                (while (string-match place expansion)
                    (setq expansion (replace-match value nil t expansion)))
                (insert expansion)))))

Select a region, do M-x for-each and then give it a placeholder in the region, starting and stopping numbers and an increment. For example, selecting a region with:

"% bottles of beer on the wall.
% bottles of beer on the wall, % bottles of beer.
Take one down, pass it around, "

and giving it % as the placeholder, 99 as the start value, 1 as the end value, and -1 as the increment will instantly expand it to most of the body of the old song:

"99 bottles of beer on the wall.
99 bottles of beer on the wall, 99 bottles of beer.
Take one down, pass it around, 98 bottles of beer on the wall.
98 bottles of beer on the wall, 98 bottles of beer.
Take one down, pass it around, 97 bottles of beer on the wall.
97 bottles of beer on the wall, 97 bottles of beer.
Take one down, pass it around, 96 bottles of beer on the wall. ..."

You can use multiple placeholders and apply it N times in succession to do N-dimensional expansions as well. I suspect that it has often saved me from what very likely could have been some nasty cut-and-paste errors.

My favorite new-to-me trick by the way, is \, for Elisp code in regexp replacements, as described by Steve Yegge. I've only known about it for a few weeks now and I've already found a ton of handy uses: selectively deleting numbers from a list, converting hh:mm:ss to seconds, etc.

Here's a link directly from the horse's mouth:

http://neinuclearnotes.blogspot.com/2008/05/barack-obama-on-nuclear-energy.html

[W]hat we've got to figure out is can we store the material properly? Can we make sure that they're secure? Can we deal with the expense? Because the problem is, is that a lot of our nuclear industry, it reinvents the wheel. Each nuclear power plant that is proposed has a new design, has--it, it has all kinds of changes, there are all sorts of cost overruns. So it has not been an effective option.

I'm hoping it's possible to swing his opinion toward strong support for nuclear energy. Because most of the issues he raises have already been solved, but are blocked by outdated and ineffective government regulation.

On the other hand, the in-built sound system (some Intel chipset) on my home box is complete pain in the ass under Linux. I've never got the mike input to work properly.

Note that audio in general is not completely mature yet. Apparently OSS is deprecated, ALSA has no documentation, and neither is mature enough to provide what everybody wants to get the needful done. It's kind of a sore spot. IMHO, and from what I understand of X's architecture, it could be integrated into in the X server:

• Audio is a human-interface concept, like video and user interfaces
• Streaming audio to a thin X client makes sense with modern networks
• Separating the device-dependent part from a common device-independent request protocol is something OSS and ALSA are already trying to do
• Nearly all Linux systems that would have a human in front of them much of the time are running X
• Network transparency comes for free as part of the X protocol
• Multiplexing and sequencing different client requests onto one piece of hardware is already part of the X architecture
• The window manager could then lower the volume of an X client when it was pushed into the background, and mute a window when minimizing it

Even if it wasn't integrated into the X server directly, I'd think it would make sense to tightly couple it, as audio is a per-'application' (as understood under a windowing systems) concept.

Why? Is Obama really that much better than McCain? Would McCain have been worse than Bush?

Yes

Interesting idea, actually. (Although some Americans here claim the US is not a democracy but a republic, so would it even qualify?)

But does this idea make him so much worse than Bush? Sounds like international cooperation at least, instead of starting wars on his own.

http://verizonmath.blogspot.com/2006/12/verizon-doesnt-know-dollars-from-cents.html

We will start getting ugly on these people soon! http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com/

Actually, Houdini pulled it off


...the lengths some people will go to for a laugh...

I was thinking the exact same thing. I didn't realize that men and women have different genomes. According to this page

"Surprisingly, a male genome is not the same as a female genome â" and it even appears that genomes may be engaged in a genetic 'tug of war' within a developing embryo."

It continues saying

"An example is the insulin-like growth factor system, which has a strong influence on the size of a baby. The logic is that the paternal genome works to maximise the growth of the offspring, to give it the best chance of survival when it is born. The maternal genome, though, protects the mother, so she can go through further pregnancies. Male and female genomes may be constantly battling with one another, driven by evolutionary pressures to ensure that their genes survive and spread."

Additionally, I found this blog post and I quote

"Willard and Carrel's work has focused largely on x chromosome inactivation, and the way in which this expresses itself in between-and-within sex phenotypes. Hotz quotes Willard: "In essence, there is not one human genome, but two: male and female."
As discussed in a previous post, Steven Pinker (2005) theorizes that there is greater variation in ability in males; basically, that males are the guinea pigs for evolutionary change. This is part of Pinker's explanation of why men are overrepresented at the highest levels of achievement. Critics such as Chabris and Glickman (2006) have attempted to disprove this using examples such as chess achievement, but Hotz suggests that Willard and Carrel's research may have found genetic evidence to the contrary: "Females can differ from each other almost as much as they do from males in the way many genes at the heart of sexual identity behave."

One last article, I promise :) But I find this stuff pretty interesting as I never realized there was a difference:

"Analysis of the "X" chromosome - the female sex chromosome - has revealed that women are genetically more complicated than men. The findings reveal that men have taken a genetic battering that has dwindled the size of their own "Y" chromosome.
The battle of the sexes has its roots in a 300-million-year struggle between the X and the Y chromosomes which have vied with each other for influence over successive generations of males and females. Scientists showed yesterday that the X chromosome has retained its physical integrity while the Y of men has dwindled in size and power to become a shadow of its former self."

Now I am definitely oversimplifying this, but it seems the X and Y chromosome play a pretty big part in the difference. Odd how I never put 2 and 2 together. But if this has been known for so long, why hasn't anyone taken the time to map out a female genome before? Breast cancer is a pretty obvious female specific disease, so it strikes me odd that if the human genome has been mapped out since 2003 that no one has done this before.

They called and want to use Halo! http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com/

It just got more awesome for me today because I learned that screen
can be used instead of minicom for talking on a serial port/modem:

http://bryan-murdock.blogspot.com/2008/02/screen-as-serial-terminal.html

98% of virii/malware etc need ADMIN to succeed... and very few application on windows, save a very small percentage actually need admin. The User Group is good enough for the wife/kids and my sales staff, lowers TCO even for M$. We don't use installed AV clients, we scan remotely nightly, run proxy+av along with snort, no issues. Users can use runas http://xinn.org/RunasVBS.html if need be, but they probably won't need to. Anti-Admin VS Anti-Virus, and AA wins! http://richrumble.blogspot.com/2006/08/anti-admin-vs-anti-virus.html -rich

From Behold The Power of Pipe

Tar and compress a set of files or directories shoot them over the network and decompress on the target machine using the target machine's CPU for decompression...

tar -czf - [list of dirs and files] | \
        ssh [user]@[server] "cd /path/to/place/files; tar -xzf -"

that McCain is the rasist here?

Err...

Sorry, in the immortal words of Lewis Black " I had to remind myself to breathe " after reading your comment.

I mean, "mono-racial"? Caucasian mother and grand-parents, African father? Indonesian step-father? Indonesian/Caucasian half-brothers and sisters? "Mono"-racial?

Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight...

Oh, and just so you know, most geneticist estimate there is only one human race, and that we all come from, you know, somewhere in Africa. So we all are "mono-racial" in a certain way, right? Like, we are all the same inside? Ebony and Ivory? Kumbaya, Oh Lord, Kumbaya?

*slaps forehead*

Oh wait! I forgot: you probably wearn white sheets with holes over the eyes and burn crosses at night as a past-time, right?

Sorry, never mind me. Carry on.

Why? Is Obama really that much better than McCain? Would McCain have been worse than Bush?

Yes

All of you cheap music stealing thieves out there make my skin crawl! You constantly come up with all types of stupid justifications for stealing other peoples content, intellectual property, music, .... Why don't you people use some of all that welfare money I send to the government for you and actually pay for your entertainment once in a while! Now you trailer people make up a logo! SHEESH! http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com/

You should be asking, "Should I make architectural decisions before or after I collect all the requirements." But you know the answer to that one.

Yes. "Not at all".

Steve Yegge: Business Requirements are Bullshit.

Worth a read.

Watch the Linux and Mac freaks fill up the entire thing with porn! http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com/

To quote Kristian Hogsberg's blog:

They got the headline wrong, though, it's not a new X server, it's a tiny display server + compositing manager. And it's a very young project with a lot of FIXMEs and hand waving.

and

The core idea is that all windows are redirected, we can do all rendering client side and pass a buffer handle to the server and the compositing manager runs in the display server. One of the goals is to get an X server running on Wayland, first in a full screen window (like Xnest), then rootless, since X just isn't going aways anytime soon. Many more details in the NOTES file of the project.

<video src="my_video.ogg">

This then gets rewritten to java cortado for IE clients. Or if you don't like cortado and would prefer flash fallback:

<video>
<source type="video/ogg" src="mymovie.ogg" />
<source type="video/x-flv" src="mymovie.flv" />
</video>

Or if you want to make the video accessible with multiple downloadable video formats and multiple timed text tracks (annotations, multiple subtitle languages and what have you) all pulled from xml via JSON request (to support remote embedding) all auto-scrolled/updated with javascript based on whatever underlining playback system your browser supports:

<video roe="my_roe_file.xml">

(uses ROE for the xml format) presently in use in blogs such as this one

Don't spread your FUD here without backing it up.

http://www.nowpublic.com/world/obama-campaign-disabled-credit-card-address-verification-donors
http://michellemalkin.com/2008/10/14/report-credit-card-fraud-for-obama/
http://www.pjtv.com/?cmd=video&video-id=684
http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2008/10/obama-campaigns-massive-credit-card.html
http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2008/10/official-acorn-employment-application.html
There, fixed that for you.

Ok, the last one was just for fun.

Don't spread your FUD here without backing it up.

http://www.nowpublic.com/world/obama-campaign-disabled-credit-card-address-verification-donors
http://michellemalkin.com/2008/10/14/report-credit-card-fraud-for-obama/
http://www.pjtv.com/?cmd=video&video-id=684
http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2008/10/obama-campaigns-massive-credit-card.html
http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2008/10/official-acorn-employment-application.html
There, fixed that for you.

Ok, the last one was just for fun.

A few months ago Google claimed it could impose its legal terms on the public just by publishing the terms. Maybe members of the public can impose their own terms of privacy protection on Google just by publishing those terms! A person might -- for example -- say in her published privacy terms that analytics engines cannot keep records of her activities longer than a week. --Ben http://hack-igations.blogspot.com/2008/05/google-privacy-policy-terms-of-service.html My ideas are not legal advice for any particular situation, just fodder for public discussion.

A few months ago Google claimed it could impose its legal terms on the public just by publishing the terms. Maybe members of the public can impose their own terms of privacy protection on Google just by publishing those terms! A person might -- for example -- say in her published privacy terms that analytics engines cannot keep records of her activities longer than a week. --Ben http://hack-igations.blogspot.com/2008/05/google-privacy-policy-terms-of-service.html My ideas are not legal advice for any particular situation, just fodder for public discussion.

Unfortunately/Thankfully im not American but id vote for Obama because Linus says so: http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/11/black-and-white.html Linus is my president ;) lol

[Phoronix] got the headline wrong, though, it's not a new X server, it's a tiny display server + compositing manager.

So says the developer himself: http://hoegsberg.blogspot.com/2008/11/premature-publicity-is-better-than-no.html

Kernel modesetting is a good thing, but there is no need to put the drivers into the kernel. KMS gets you lots of good things: BSoD (much better than the display freezing with no error message), flicker-free boot, and X could be moved away from needing to run as root.

As far as the drivers themselves, the best thing for them will be the move to the Gallium3D driver model, which will greatly reduce the amount and complexity of code needed to write a new driver. [1][2][3]

Keith Packard talks in his blog [4] about kernel mode drivers, but this seems to be KMS + memory management (GEM or TTM), not having, say, the entire Radeon driver in kernel. I guess it depends on how you define drivers. or maybe the difference between classic 2d drivers and DRM drivers (I have never figured out the details of that)?

>Today's X servers still support all kinds of usermode drivers, just so that 95% of configurations can thunk it all to the kernel.

All X drivers are usermode. There are graphics drivers that are in the kernel (fbdev), but these are unrelated to X.

Note: I am not a X dev or even a real programmer, but I follow X blogs, mailing lists, etc, and I try to learn as much as possible about X. If I am wrong about anything here, please correct me!

[1] http://www.tungstengraphics.com/wiki/index.php/Gallium3D
[2] http://akademy.kde.org/conference/presentation/9.php
[3] http://zrusin.blogspot.com/search/label/Gallium3D
[4] http://keithp.com/blogs/kernel-mode-drivers/

No. The UKian Government has proved beyond doubt it is incapable of looking after sensitive personal data. The Government employs these private companies without any recourse for penalties, with massive rewards for the Boards, and no comeback for us proles who pay their wages. If you're interested, here's some googlewords for you: Devil's Kitchen, LPUK, Guido Fawkes. I understand that Bastard Old Holborn and many others will be taking an interesting walk on the 5th of November.

They'll probably do the same thing they did with X.Org: Circumvent the entire thing.

You are just being selfish and unpatriotic. What, do you hate America?

+5 to everything you said!! Wish I had mod points.

I have lived well within my means for my entire life...right up until we bought the current house :-) In my case, we prioritized having a lot of land without having a 1 hour commute over pretty much everything else. Some people like iPhones, my wife likes having her horses right outside the front door.

Anyway, I also like playing with LEDS (working on battery powered LED lighting for my chicken coop: http://softwarefromthefarm.blogspot.com/ ), do you have a link to pics of your work? I enjoy seeing how creative people get with lighting.

The poor people I know who eat like crap don't do it because they can't afford better. They do it because they have no willpower.

I suspect this is largely true. But in their defense, I also belive there's something to Scott Adams's Pleasure Unit Theory. If you have a crappy apartment and a crappy job and are just barely making ends meet, that Big Mac and fries might represent the most enjoyment you can get all day, and resisting it is much harder.

Calling all class action lawyers out there. As an online merchant (and a Sprint broadband customer) I wonder if we can band together and get suits going against both parties...... http://sprint-cogent.blogspot.com/ BH

perpetual seizure without cause, suppression of journalism ( both professional & citizen -- "hear, you have no right to photograph in public. I'm taking your camera. You are under surveillance! ), etc?

WHAT checks & balances? Retroactive immunity for unconstitutional activities?

Bush's regime INSISTS that no law, not International, not Constitution, not ANYthing limits the President's authority, and has gotten that to stick, more and more.

You haven't been reading about this that is making it less likely that you will have any rights in the future?

This tide of segregation-of-rights (FROM citizens, TO government corporate authority) increases if McCain wins, and slows if Obama wins.

( damn, I wish a coalition of Ron Paul & Obama could'a been )

Try reading http://yro.slashdot.org/ sometime, or subscribing to it on your feed reader.

Try also http://arstechnica.com/law.ars and http://minstrelboy.blogspot.com/

Or do you WANT to be a prisoner "citizen" with millions of others, in less than a single generation ( read about Hitler's up-to-war Germany, and see if you recognize the methods going down now, moving the "rules" endlessly ).

I hope you live a loooong time...

Not so sure about PDFs as an image format - which is exactly what you have when you use PDF to hold scanned documents. I think the more interesting point is that they feel they have an OCR package good enough to be trustworthy. I wonder if it's based on the Tesseract OCR software that they adopted a while back?

I played with it for a while, and got very poor results from the command line. Even when I made a png or bmp of a full screen single word "HELLO" in 200 pixel font with GIMP (about as perfect as input gets!) I'd often get "HEHO" or "H3H0" or god only knows what else.

Of course, this is when the project relaunch was first announced a year or two ago, I certainly hope it's better now! Looking at their web page, it does appear that there's some significant activity going on. Yay Google!

Maybe I'll try it again, and see if it's worth using yet?

Yeah, because no-one did payroll before clusters of P4s. Those IBM and UNISYS mainframe timetracking apps must have been figments of my imagination. I confess I don't know how many MIPS the mainframes had, but the keyboard I used looked like this.

I worked in a data center with an IBM 370 and it had 32K or RAM...lol, have no idea if it had even 1 MIP. Based on this blog post it probably had 1 MIP or less. The quote in the blog that I saw was

The years was 1979...And with the older IBM 370/158 rated as a 1.0 âoeold styleâ MIPS machine (based on IBMâ(TM)s figures of a cycle time of 115 nanoseconds, which is about 8.7 MHz.), this new one, the 4331 mainframe, rated at about .3 MIP, and its big brother, the 4341, at a shade under 1 MIP â" an incredible price/performance achievement at the time.

In the early 80s I worked with the IBM 4341, 61 and 81s. Back closer to 79 it was an IBM 360, so my guess is we had 1 MIP or less on that 32MB of RAM box.

Thanks for the trip down memory lane...

health care isnt the only issue. Are we moving towards a police state? http://xmplary.blogspot.com/

...looks like the Wheel of Fortune.

Once enough money has been made off the war for certain profiteers, the war will stop. It's not about good and bad anymore. The so called "elected president" will say he is going to pull out the troops on X day, but thats only if his "supporters" allow him to. http://irishdeath.blogspot.com/

I submitted a project similar to, but much better of course ;-), than CueCat for Google's 10 to the 100 challenge...

New punctuation update "~" at the end of a line to indicate sarcasm. http://harns.blogspot.com/

Shouldn't the ~ be at the *beginning* of the line? By the time you get to the end of the line, it is too late: you've already parsed the meme as 'straightforward': it's a waste of cycles to reparse it. ~

Well, in the case of McCain it seems to be (among others) Kevin Hassett, author of "Dow 36000: The New Strategy for Profiting from the Coming Rise in the Stock Market", published in 1999. http://econ4obama.blogspot.com/2008/06/other-list-mccains-economists.html [blogspot.com]

I'm not sure that is an impartial assessment, given the web address.

You can stay in touch with Ray at http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/

I see recent posts referencing Slashdot, so it's probably business as usual.

I don't want any eating or drinking going on during the show.

In fact I want:
http://harns.blogspot.com/2008/08/over-21-cinemas.html

True if we were talking ONE acorn employee. Maybe even 2 could happen in different states. 3 convictions in 3 states for voter fraud by the same organisation is starting to become less "it's just the employees". How many does ACORN have ?

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2003982533_acorn30m.html?syndication=rss one instance, 7 defendants, at least 3 guilty, All ACORN, Seattle
http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2006/10/missouri-acorn-voter-fraud-scandal.html another, 16 defendants, all guilty, All ACORN, Kansas City
http://www.traditionalvalues.org/modules.php?sid=3433 Ohio, 600.000 fake votes

In the conviction (first article) these people state that ACORN management specifically asked them to do this. But don't worry. Obama is giving them "at least 10%" of the $700 billion bailout package. Surely that'll improve their behavior, right ? But it's possible that he just doesn't know, right ?

possible as in "it's possible you get hit by a meteor right now" that is.

I want to be able to just login with my simple username Skapare, not some site name. That's not what OpenID does. And it really isn't going to work very well with billions of people all wanting nice simple names.

Be very careful when anything with a "%" is used in as a ratio, and as the name of a group of people as a way to classify them into that group.

(Meaning, you should be wary of the OP, parent poster, he's trying to pull a fast one, i.e. lying to you.)

Here's a detailed walk through of why;

http://jafiwam.blogspot.com/2005/02/on-taxes.html