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Good ideas. I think we all need to take responsibility for our money, and just because it is in a bank doesn't mean that we should run around giving information about it to everyone just because it has in the past been protected.

The amazing thing is that these scheme actually work... and that there are people out there willing to give their account information to somebody they don't know in a country half way around the world because that person says they have some money to throw at them. Perhaps they need to offer seminars online or something that the government can give out to its citizen to make them aware of this kind of thing.

The responsibility for these sort of things though should fall upon the customer if they fail to act responsibly. On the other hand, if somebody breaks into your house and steals your information from your account information from your filing system, well.. a bank should do its best to cover that loss.

Anyways, good heads up about checking that on future banks.

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http://hatchedeggs.blogspot.com/

I really think it is a great idea to limit the locations of PCs in a house. My wife and I will have one each in our offices... but when we have kids some day there will be a central location as well. Obviously it would be impossible for us to have all of our computers inthe same room (as seperate offices), but we will make te environment less of a double standard by always keeping our office doors open so that they can see that we follow our own rules.

I've known people that have allowed kids to have their own PCs in their bedrooms, and from what I have seen of that it has always resulted in additional problems. There are enough problems floating around on the internet as is without totally removing all barriers from it.

People that say they do not believe in forcing their children to do something aren't really doing them a favor... and certainly aren't acting responsibly as parents. It is a parents main purpose to raise a child, not just to birth them.

Anyways, I agree 100% with your statement.

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http://hatchedeggs.blogspot.com/

Wouldn't it be nice if customers and banks alike used secure email?

maybe not in the united states, but CC has been showing up in court.

http://technollama.blogspot.com/2006/03/creative-c ommons-enforced-in-court.html

Some people have jumped on the guy who posted this thread a bit... and some of that is understandable.

However, I think that as everything continues more "Average" users will gravitate towards power users position. Not so much asbe completely entralled by every last detail of a computer, but enough so that perhaps updating hardware without purchasing a whole new system will be a bit more common place.

So yeah, that design does work well for quite a few people right now. Later on in the future though when nearly everybody has grown up in a generation of computing being the de facto standard... then it might be a different story. Thats not so far away either.

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http://hatchedeggs.blogspot.com/

Whats the deal with mentioning the amazing pen and not showing a pic of it?

C'mon guys, get it together. Now I have to go do a search on it...

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http://hatchedeggs.blogspot.com/

Nas

Yes, maybe this explains why many people think that PHP sucks?

That said, I still like to use PHP for the 'quick hack' weekend projects as much as the next guy, but I really wouldn't recommend building serious applications with it. Although it certainly can be done, it's much more of a pain to build well-designed software using PHP than, well, basically any other programming language I could come up with (except Visual Basic or Brainfuck maybe ;)

Holmes Roberts & Owen, LLP. Their contact information is on their web site and in some of the litigation documents on my blog, Recording Industry vs. The People. See especially letters of Richard Gabriel.

Sounds good to me... I'm pretty impressed by its performance and features overall.

It has a heck of a heat sink on it, and no whirring fans to add to the rest of the noise from your case. Which is just fine by me.

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http://hatchedeggs.blogspot.com/

• [Rabinovich] now points to online articles that he believes supports his position, such as Eric Schnell's and Jason Rumney's blogs.

  Eric Schnell got the whole thing backwards. He thinks that Jin has an A/V module, which IChessU decided not to use and thus do not publish its source code. From his blog:

  From I can make out, Jin's creator Alexander Maryanovsky's problem with IChessU is that while IChessU has utilized Jin's code, they are not distributing Jin's entire source code. An A/V module in Jin is not being used by IChessU and therefore the source code is not included.

  I've tried to respond to his blog, but his captcha seems to be broken. I've emailed him but got no response so far.

  I couldn't find anything related on Jason Rumney's blog, even with a google search.

• "All the articles were produced only by Maryanovsky people/fans," [Rabinovich] says, "which is fine because they are published in developer's magazines/sites..

  Where would Rabinovich have GPL violation related articles posted? A cooking magazine? Are Slashdot, Yediot Ahronot and Arstechnica all my fans? I didn't know I was that popular.

• "He also said," Maryanovsky writes, "that they are planning to wrap Jin in a layer that would allow it to be controlled via a socket. I told [Rabinovitch] that I believe this would still, most likely, be violating the GPL." Despite this opinion, IChessU proceeded with its plan [snip]

  That's wrong. As I mention on my page, they abandonded that idea and proceeded to use Jin in a straightforward manner.

• Rabinovitch, however, writes [snip] The guy is hurt

  Gee, I wonder why I'd be hurt? Could it be because Rabinovich stole my work?

• Rabinovitch rejects the charge of bad faith negotiations because it is made without any explanation or evidence.

  As I explained to him in my response, there's was no need to explain anything or bring evidence. The letter was to him - he already knows all the evidence! He was there at the negotiations!

• Writing to NewsForge, Rabinovitch states that all source code was posted to the IChessU site, including that for the audio-visual module -- a claim that cannot be substantiated, since all code has now been removed from the IChessU site. He characterizes the audio/voice module as a separate program that "has nothing in common with the original Jin (it is even written in a different computer language!).".

  So if the source code to the A/V module was released under the GPL, as required, why argue that it's a separate program? Not that it makes any difference, as that is exactly the point of the GPL - even unrelated code becomes "infected", as long as it's part of the same application. If I didn't want unrelated code infected, I'd release Jin under the LGPL. That is the whole difference between the GPL and the LGPL!

• What if we integrated into Jin a Microsoft Word button -- would Mr. Maryanovsky then claim that we should publish the Microsoft source code as well?

  No, I would then claim that they cannot publish the resulting application at all, as the GPL clearly states:

  If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all.

  As has been pointed out many times - you do not have any rights to a GPLed application except for the rights that the GPL gives you. The GPL does not give you the right to add a "Microsoft Word button" to Jin (excep

I have to cringe when someone wants to go back to Windows...

Do you really want to do online banking using Windows?

We're trying to make linux easy-to-use for the ordinary person that mainly wants to surf the web.
Today that means making on-line purchases, and next up is visiting your credit card website, make a payment, or go to your bank's website, and see if those checks cleared.

I have a lot of people tell me they are happy doing that with OSX, they can afford Apple machines and they are easy to use. Still a hard drive installation, however.

I tried Ubuntu, did not like it for a couple of reasons. 1. Would not run on older PC's, and 2. Asks too many questions at bootup.

I have a livecd linux, see the screenshots in signature, below. Having had my say about security, I went out on a limb and put Mozilla Firefox 2.0b2 in the CD yesterday, mainly because they finally fixed the tab close (X) so it's on the tab and not down on the right end. Opera has gotten this right for a while now, Firefox needed to do that, almost all websites look correct in Firefox, not all in Opera 9. (a shame).

What follows, however is not for the average user, but does result in a neat setup for a secure livecd linux:

I get around the need to enter "knoppix cheatcodes" at bootup by using loadlin and a MSDOS batch file with all the necessary cheatcodes for a particular box provided in the loadlin command line. So, I don't run it as a livecd on any particular box that I will be using all the time, I copy the /knoppix folder to a hard drive partition and go from there with the msdos menu/loadlin setup. The menu runs off Windows 98 dos, and gives lots of choices, such as booting into KDE, or Fluxbox and others. I default to IceWM, and pick up a restoration tarball so things like Thunderbird mail settings, dial-up settings are ready to go with no cheatcode to enter by hand. One machine does not have a CDROM drive, so using the CD (livecd) is not an option. Used a "backpack" cdrom drive to get that set up.

None of that is "part of the CD", it has to be custom-configured using files on a floppy, and using the CD to get some of the required components. If one has a CDROM drive, however, using the livecd is easiest and gives immediate results, all the other procedures are on the to-do list for someone booting up the machine every day.

I do target older Windows 98 machines, however, for my livecd linux. 128 MB of RAM is fine, processor speed 266 mhz will do nicely. I run on a 200 MMX every day, plenty fast enough to handle Firefox 2.0b2.
The 2.4 kernel does the trick, I'm based on Knoppix 3.4.

My blog is here, Getting Started Guide is here.

-- Rapidweather

1) Before the election it's quite common for Diebold representatives to come in and upgrade the software on the device. As the Princeton researchers show, if one of the machines to be upgraded is infected with something like their boot-loader virus plus a malware payload, it's easy to infect the memory card used by the representative. Then upgrading the rest of the machines transfers the virus and the malicious payload. This would happen well in advance of the seals being affixed.

2) After reading Avi Rubin's blog entry about his experiences in Maryland, I wouldn't place too much faith in seals.

Avi Ruben also has an interesting blog article on his experiences as a poll worker in the recent Maryland election.

Sweet, just like Luke Skywalker has. I can't wait until these are available for elective surgery (hey Doc, just lop off righty and give me the super-bionic arm). Add this to my Chiba City shopping list, along with the brain implant so I can jack in to the Metaverse.

Cool links.

I am STUNNED that a conservative thought on /. was modded down!

Creative Commons

Defective by Design's List of DRM-Free Music Sites

dmusic

Electronic Frontier Foundation List of "Artists Online"

emusic.com

Fading Ways Records

FreeCulture.org

harveydanger.com

Janis Ian.com

last.fm

Lime Light Radio

live365.com free downloads

MagnaTune

myspace.com

Nettwerk Download Store

R.evolution I.n P.rogress

RIAARadar.com

uncoolcentral.com

Vision Metal Records

I keep a list on my blog and welcome more suggestions.

The reason I ask is for the last 6 months a fax company has been cold-dialing people, many of whom like myself claim to be on the DNC list, often at ungodly hours of the morning. Full details:

http://enemiesblog.blogspot.com/2006/03/hot-lead-c o-818-638-8049.html

1) Repeal the core requirement of FISA that its procedures and the criminal Wiretap Act (Title III) "shall be the exlusive means" for conducting electronic surveillance. The bill essentially makes FISA optional overall, by explicitly deferring to the President's "inherent" constitutional authority instead.

2) Authorize (but not require) the President to submit the current NSA surveillance program to review and blessing by the FISA courts. This review effectively would be limited to Fourth Amendment issues. The separation-of-powers issues deriving from FISA itself would not be reviewed, because Congress already would have capitulated in Step 1) above.

3) Refer all third-party court challenges to intelligence-surveillance programs to the FISA courts, instead of the ordinary District Courts such as those of Judge Taylor in Detroit, Judge Lynch in New York or Judge Walker in San Francisco, which now have several cases before them. I am uncertain of what effect this would have on Judge Taylor's case, since she already has ruled against the program and issued an injunction.

4) Make some fundamental changes to the definitions within FISA, most importantly removing the current provision that makes FISA apply to any intelligence surveillance acquired within the United States, regardless of who the target is. This apparently would have the effect of authorizing warrantless surveillance beyond that now reported to take place under the NSA program.

I am a parent of a 10 year old boy and 7 year old girl. My son and I coded our first BASIC stamp robot (Parallax Boe-Bot) last year. He has since taken an interest in his 300-in-1 electronics kit, and modifying the games he plays on his Knoppix for Kids distribution (he often runs that over the Fedora and Ubuntu distros also available in the house). A few days ago he asked me how a web site works, so I am going to teach him a little html this weekend.

My daughter plays the piano and has access to a MIDI keyboard. She and I have had a couple conversations about MIDI and was fascinated by the paper pipe organ we built. I just started designing a small, networked, pipe organ with the hope of demonstrating some programming and networking concepts to her.

We have also built rockets, a trebuchet, and even kept bees together. I plan on dusting off my homebrew equipment soon.

Children are never bored by the possibilities of technology. They need only to be exposed to something more than closed and highly polished consumer products. Even THAT is a wonderful lesson in repurposing if there is a hack around who cares to show them.

It was fryed during a storm by a power peak. Batches didn't change so fast that days so at a friend's shop we were able to find a suitable controller. We did the change and the drive is yet working today.

It was fryed during a storm by a power peak. Batches didn't change so fast that days so at a friend's shop we were able to find a suitable controller. We did the change and the drive is yet working today.

Your thesis: creative people only create for financial gain.

Counter: there are creative people who create regardless of financial gain.

Examples: Wikipedia, Slashdot (originally), amateur photographers, amateur musicians (e.g. http://ghostnotes.blogspot.com/), Linux, Monster Island, etc.

Of course financial gain in some of these cases is a bonus, it was not the primary impetus for their creation.

Maybe they could get a backdrop of the glowing fire from a pile of books being burned too!

And now that you know that it's gaming, you're not stunned that they found 100?

Cool links.

I ranted about this a while back in my blog. Basically using laptops in airports has 2 problems. Power and internet access. Neither of these has a good solution.

For power, there are nowhere near enough outlets. What little outlets you can find, are always either taken, or otherwise have people sitting around them blocking your access. This is the most annoying problem of all, since what you really want to do at an airport is top off your battery before the flight. Why? Well, even though some morons say "all airplanes now have DC power jacks", the truth is that almost none of them do. (the last time I found one was on an Orlando->Atlanta flight, which is under an hour, and pointless, and found none on the trans-atlantic flight that followed)

For internet access, everyone wants to nickel and dime you for service. This really bugs me, because while $6.95/day may seem like a fair price, I'm only there for an hour or two. (and the extended plans are useless unless I frequent the same exact trip regularly) All I really want is a quick E-Mail check, and maybe an IM or two. Thankfully, I can do that with my cell phone now. By the time I get lunch/dinner, get my laptop out, find power, discover their blocked access points, it's 20 minutes until boarding.

Who reads the articles? Really, a quick skim of the summary is all that anyone needs to make gross assumptions about the content and meaning of the article.

Cool links.

To stop some bastard from reading the spec and patenting it.

This has happened to me a very large number of times. I am told there are roughly 100 US patents on work I have done filed by other people after the work was published.

So now I patent ideas aggresively as the only way to keep them open.

I do not worship at the shrine of RMS. I do not beleive that software patents are always a bad thing. The RSA and Diffie-Hellman patents were clearly for publishing innovative work.

I think that 95% of the issues open source has with software patents would be solved if the USPTO stopped handing them out like smarties to anyone who asks. Software is not the only area where the USPTO is causing serious problems. I wrote an essay proposing reforms.

Interesting, but you can already do this with or without the xmlhttprequest object. The technique is old, it's called slow load or comet. Basically you open a connection to the server, and have the server sit on it until it has something to send you. As soon as it sends its reply, that connection terminates and fires off a new one, continuing the cycle. Real-time feedback between client and server, without the need to poll or eat up bandwidth. I created a proof of concept of this using ajax here. You can build a full-fledged application like this with very low latency that looks just like a regular socket-using network app, in a web browser. The code in this posting has been revised, you need to spawn the thread off of the web server's hands to the CLR in this instance so as not to tie up web requests, and you can probably just do a thread.suspend and reawaken it instead of looping on the server, but it gets the idea across...

3 minutes and no posts. First post!!

Cool links.

You should check out the discussion going on at ReadWriteWeb. Ebrahim Ezzy's post is interesting, as are the comments. There's also more followup from industry as they bring Web 2.0 products to market. SharpCast, TeamDirection and x-port. Hopefully with such interesting ideas, Web 2.0 won't implode like Web 1.0 did.

Additionally, the premise that kids are not as imaginative today as they were "in the good old days" is a complete crock! I have a 9 year old girl, and she is just as imaginative as I was when I was her age... and lots of her imagination comes from her exposure to all of the forms of entertainment we have these days. She invents and draws incredibly original characters, much more original than when I used to do the same thing. She's even learning how to program and create her own video games because of electronic entertainment.

The Crown Royal bag full of dice is already standard issue geek equipment, isn't it?

Cool links.

It is going to be awesome watching these clowns cry like babies as PS3s fly off the shelves in November.

To be fair, though, in technical terms the Common Language Infrastructure/Runtime was designed from the ground up with far more emphasis on language interoperability. The fact that this is having influence upon the Java creators is a good thing, and should not be dismissed so easily. The Java system itself is currently being changed to have better support for dynamically-typed languages and scripting languages in general, which is clearly the effect of the outside popularity of these types of language.

.NET (CLR/CLI/whatever) is a very similar project to Java, with slightly different (technical) goals which means that it can influence the evolution of Java by competing more closely with it. I seriously doubt that JRuby is a manifestation of this, but there has been positive developments, which competition of this sort will usually if not always bring, such as a proposal for Java closures (giving an equivalent to function types and .NET's delegate types).

I agree that .NET will not kill Java, of course. In fact, my belief is that it'll do nothing but bolster it, by forcing it to evolve beyond the rut which it was beginning to be stuck in. .NET's language flexibility is something else that Java would do well to learn from, and it looks like it is. :)

Another problem with reporters ... some (like china) just plainly lie. I was quite surprised to find this blog report.

What does one trust ? It's a hard question these days.

I swear nobody ever bothers to check google before posting.

Once you adapted beyond the single celled organism strong electromagnets in the cartridge would active drawing together a Beowulf cluster of gameboys. This multi cellular organism would then continue to grow evolving and adapting to the body parts of hundreds of children per organism.

is here Contrary Brin.

the cost of care and benefits to the disabled, not just the monthly benefit checks. This includes health care, VA hospitals, mobility programs, vocational rehabilitation, etc.

There is the same sort of waste (if not worse) in every program that you mentioned, and more that you didn't. Here is one prime example.

Computers, however, are machines that, unless malfunctioning due to a defect in their hardware (rare), do not make mistakes. They cannot and do not, however, rectify problems caused by garbage: garbage programming, garbage systems planning, garbage leadership by people whose understanding of the complexities of healthcare are garbage, garbage assumptions and underestimations, garbage conflicts of interest, and garbage accountability and penalties for screw ups of this magnitude.

and

Who, exactly, were the government computing "experts", private contractors, private payor IT personnel, the IS "let's outsource-this-to-India-to-save-a-few-bucks" leaders, and other "healthcare information technology experts" responsible for this debacle? How many sweetheart deals with vendors with poor track records were done? How much participation was there from the people most affected by this debacle, i.e., clinicians, pharmacists, and patients? Who is going to be held accountable? Why do these debacles go on and on, such as this Veterans Administration deposit of nearly $500 million directly to the garbage can, without much of an apparent learning curve?

Some damn good questions!

Thanks god for them grammer polise.

Cool links.

Relate 'plasma arcs' to 'Tropicana Orange Juice'. Can be played with any industrial process and any consumer foodstuff. http://rcbullock.blogspot.com/2006/09/six-degrees- of-kevin-bacon-but-with.html

As far as your comment about whoever has enough money for this fridge doesn't deserve that money you have no grounds to say that.

Go here http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Debt/USAi d.asp and scroll down to the chart for Official Development Assistance and see what you find for the year 2005 in billions of dollars:

1) USA 27,457
2) Japan 13,101
3) UK 10,754
4) France 10,059
5) Germany 9,915

From the comments you make I get the feeling you are one of those poor people that are jealous of people who have lots of money even though they worked their ass off for it compared to being lazy.

Let me clue you in, pal... if everyone abstained from credit cards whose income was highly vulnerable, the economy would tank and your comfortable, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps universe would collapse anyway. Our economy lives and dies by consumer credit card spending: it is that huge a factor.

Ah yes, the fabled "consumer economy". Mainstream Media tells us that it's alright that the other half of the economic equation, production, has mostly moved to China in recent decades (... due to mismanagement of the economy by the Federal Reserve, but that's another post). They say this transfer of production is alright because we now have a "service economy".

The main problem, as I see it, is that China doesn't much need our "services", and the U.S. economy is now in the process of collapsing (beginning with the housing bubble). There are consequences for record budget and trade deficits, you know.

The collapse of Ford and General Motors will mark the acceleration of the trend, as hundreds of thousands of Americans depend on those two giants for their paychecks. General Watch also chronicles the decline and fall of General Motors.

Other sites whose economic analysis I've come to appreciate include The Daily Reckoning and Mish's Global Economic Analysis.

I myself am slowly running up the balance on my credit cards. Used to pay 'em off every month, but I'll need supplies for when the banking system goes, and there will be so many "bad debts" that I expect no one will come collecting. I'm not buying frivolous crap, mind you, just some bulk food items and other "stuff" I think will be useful.

You know, I saw a refrigerator at Best Buy that has a TV and LCD control panel built in; it blew my mind, and it only costs 3.5 grand. Now, I like cool gadgets as much as the next guy, but I can't shake the feeling that whoever has the money to spend on a fridge like that (and not getting something industrial sized) probably doesn't deserve that much money to begin with -- give some of your money to UNICEF, don't buy a TV fridge. When I see this kind of wastefulness it really helps me understand why so much of the world has contempt for America -- the land of plenty!

Cool links.

Now I operate my own businesses and I will never descriminate against someone because of their credit record. The poor in this country have enough obstacles in front of them, not the least of which are elitist fucktards who don't understand why they don't just magically make more money or can't understand why being poor would make you more likely to have bad credit(and not vice versa).

Better put on your tinfoil hat, I think the CIA's brain control waves are starting to affect you again.

Is that a black helicopter?

Cool links.

The military doesn't think so.

There's
...
Degaussing (MilStd 5200 28-M)

Rats, you beat me to it! Another example of video games predicting the future.

Cool links.

You mean like downloading a book from Project Gutenberg?

And Google Book Search has free downloads as well. Read the blog entry about it.