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This reminds me of the Conversation of Eiros and Charmion, for some reason.

Orwell said it much better than i ever could. Read the essay at http://eserver.org/langs/politics-english-language .txt

Or better yet read Edgar Poe's The Gold Bug and follow the recipe :)

Here Legrand, having re-heated the parchment, submitted It my inspection. The following characters were rudely traced, in a red tint, between the death's-head and the goat:

53++!305))6*;4826)4+.)4+);806*;48!8`60))85;]8*:+ *8 !83(88)5*!;

46(;88*96*?;8)*+(;485);5*!2:*+(;4956*2(5*-4)8`8* ; 4069285);)6

!8)4++;1(+9;48081;8:8+1;48!85;4)485!528806*81(+9 ;4 8;(88;4(+?3

4;48)4+;161;:188;+?;

...

"And you really solved it?"

"Readily; I have solved others of an abstruseness ten thousand times greater. Circumstances, and a certain bias of mind, have led me to take interest in such riddles, and it may well be doubted whether human ingenuity can construct an enigma of the kind which human ingenuity may not, by proper application, resolve. In fact, having once established connected and legible characters, I scarcely gave a thought to the mere difficulty of developing their import.

"In the present case --indeed in all cases of secret writing --the first question regards the language of the cipher; for the principles of solution, so far, especially, as the more simple ciphers are concerned, depend on, and are varied by, the genius of the particular idiom. In general, there is no alternative but experiment (directed by probabilities) of every tongue known to him who attempts the solution, until the true one be attained. But, with the cipher now before us, all difficulty is removed by the signature. The pun on the word 'Kidd' is appreciable in no other language than the English. But for this consideration I should have begun my attempts with the Spanish and French, as the tongues in which a secret of this kind would most naturally have been written by a pirate of the Spanish main. As it was, I assumed the cryptograph to be English.

...

Give it a read. Great stuff, especially considering Poe lived in first half of 19th century.

It's not

Might as well post a link to some handy denver boot removal advice. Some boots are so poorly constructed that a hammer and chisel can dislodge the various spot welds.

Fact is: Since pictures of abused childs are aviable on the web, the number of childs killed in abuses has dropped remarkably in Germany. From 40 per year in the Eighties down to six last year. That's 34 children rescued.

Although it can be difficult to isolate all the separate trends that can influence the outcome of such statistics, the conclusion that the availibility of child porn on the internet actually reduced the number of child sexual homicides is believable.

In the US, we banned alcohol and violent crime doubled. We cracked down on illegal drugs and violent crime increased again. Studies in many countries have shown no increase in rape after removing censorship, including Denmark, Sweden, and West Germany. In the US (where censorship is still a grey area), rape has increased over the last 40 years but said increases track the increases in non-sexual violent crimes very accurately.

The aggregate data on rape and other violent or sexual offences from four countres where pornography, including aggressive varieties, has become widely and easiliy available duringthe period we have dealt with would seem to exclude, beyond any reasonable doubt, that this availibility has had any detrimental effects in teh form of increased sexual violence.

Advocates of the link between pornography and violence usually cite the highly biased Meese Commision report which conflicted with the results of the 1970 commission which had funded eighty independant studies of porn.

If people do not have healthy outlets for their sexuality and keep it pent up until they lose control, socially harmful behavior is the likely result. Often when we hear about people actually sexually abusing children it is the most repressed people (who contribute to other's repression) like televangelists or catholic priests, people incapable of moderation.

"Fantasies have no morality; Actions do."

People have all kinds of sexual interests and for any given sexual interest there seem to be many people who are able to fulfil their interest in a healthy way and there are a few bad apples that may harm other people. Some people who fantasize about blondes may harm blondes. Some people who fantasize about women with big breasts may harm people with big breasts. This does not mean that all people who fantasize about blonds or big breasted women are criminals or that there is anything inherently wrong with those fantasies. Lots of people fantasize about killing their bosses, that doesn't make them murderers.

I don't care if people fantasize about sex with children as long as the actions are merely autoerotic or involve only consenting adults (i.e. age players). There are safe outlets for virtually any fantasy. I am not in favor of paid distribution of pornographic materials produced by exploiting actual children. But in 1996, the US banned "synthetic" child porn - i.e. images which no child was harmed to produce. It occurs to me that the availibilty of child porn on the net may actually serve to undercut the market for new pornography created by exploiting children.

People have an incredibly wide range of sexual fantasies and there is almost always a way to excercise them without harm, even those activities that are quite disturbing to people who lack open minds. When kids play, their play often includes superficial resemblences to harmful activities (think of "cops and robbers" and "cowboys and indians"). When consenting adults play, their play also can have superficial resemblances to harmful activities (rape, slavery, abuse, assault, pirates, etc.). These forms of play do not condone or encourage these harmful activities and may even be a form of cathartic refuge from the many forms of harm which trouble us.

Since I don't share their interest and no-one has admitted an inter

What screws it up is that the States use the same names - pound, ton - but they have different values and hence metric conversion rates. So it seems the Americans really do have to do things their own way!

Here's some links from Google, so that I can be a karmawhore.

Columbia Encylcopedia entry

World History Wiki entry

Cooking unit conversions (I always wondered what the hell a 'cup' was)

Gender has more than one proper English usage.

Gender and sex are generally considered to be two separate (related) topics.

For those not in a reading mood, your sex generally considered to be what your chromosomes and organs say (assuming they agree, which they don't always), while your gender refers to learned social roles.

"[When] ... and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army."

Thoreau, Civil Disobedience, Part 1

Does that sound like any Mesopotamian situation of the present day?

to say that breaking the law is a valid method of protest is to advocate anarchy and chaos.

Personally, I'm with Robert Heinlein: No service, no vote.

So long as we understand "service" properly:

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others, as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders, serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God. A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it. -- Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau

Never confuse serving the state with serving your country.

I sit at the gateway for every rogue, and ask: Who wisheth to deceive me?

This is my first manly prudence, that I allow myself to be deceived, so as not to be on my guard against deceivers.

Ah, if I were on my guard against man, how could man be an anchor to my ball! Too easily would I be pulled upwards and away!

This providence is over my fate, that I have to be without foresight.

And he who would not languish amongst men, must learn to drink out of all glasses; and he who would keep clean amongst men, must know how to wash himself even with dirty water.

And thus spake I often to myself for consolation: "Courage! Cheer up! old heart! An unhappiness hath failed to befall thee: enjoy that as thy- happiness!"

Although she's been writing for the Guardian for a while, she's been writing, at least occasionally, on geek subjects/the web since Bad Subjects, 1995. If you want to fault /. for posting it, why bother commenting on how, presumably as a 'true' geek, that you're completely and utterly unimpressed with Newitz's writings/geek credentials?

Man, for all of your talk about peace and love and "can't we all just get along", you leftists sure show a callous disregard for other's lives.

There you go again, claiming it's all for the good of humanity. You really believe that, don't you? Come on, listen to your fellow Anonymous Cowards in this thread: the US should not be, and is probably not, spending taxpayer dollars for the benefit of us foreigners. My opinion: your war-making efforts, including this space thing, are not about fighting "communism," are not about "terrorism," and certainly are not about "concern for others' lives."

Why is that our problem? First of all, read a frickin history book.

Well, I've been doing just that, and quoting from them. Have you? Anyway, reading books is very healthy indeed, so, is there any particular title you'd like to point me to? I'd point you to "The History of the Peloponnesian War", by Thucydides, 431 BC. You should be able to find a copy in almost any library, and there is a translation by Richard Crawley available online. It may give you some insight on this topic, and its relevance to the current situation of your country, and one possible outcome of it all, may surprise you. You may even experiment an odd deja vu feeling while reading this thing.

Secondly, do you really want to live in a world where psychos like Kim Jong Ill and Saddam Hussein have free reign to do whatever they want to however many millions of people they want to?

Of course not, don't waste rethoric on me. It's just that your "solutions" don't seem to me all that humane and effective as you seem to want me to believe.

Guess what- we've tried that solution before. The result? 6 million Jews died and we ended up getting involved in the war anyway.

Which is terribly sad, indeed. Your response, however, was killing your own millions of German and Japanese civilians, and nearly half a million of your own citizens. Now, I'm not questioning that you did what you had to do. What I'm questioning is that, far from relying on such destruction as a very last resource, once you've been hopelessly and inevitably dragged into a conflict, you are actually going all over the world to play war with all sorts of people, for the oddest reasons, sometimes even triggering wars that would not have come to be. I mean, it used to be a bit better disguised, like Nicaragua or, more recently, Venezuela. But now you're "preemptively," as your president would put it, turning countries into parking lots.

Now that is beyond stupid as a defense and peacekeeping strategy. So please don't blame us for not actually buying the story that you're doing it for the sake of humanity.

Just say that it is all for power and money, that you're busy building and keeping an empire, and be done with it. Not that that's pretty at all, but at least is believable. And a bit of honesty from your side would be quite refreshing. And read that Thucydides, too, for the history of a once glorious empire.

So does that mean that Milli Vanilli is forgiven? Didn't think so. :^P

This seems to be the right time to link to The Awful German Language by Mark Twain (no copyright issues here, it's public).

Very interesting read, especially in the context of this thread where many slashdotters said they learned English grammar in German classes.

Twain, on the other hand,obviously had a hard time with German, but nevertheless learned it.

Him who now turneth sick, the evil overtaketh which is now the evil: he seeketh to cause pain with that which causeth him pain. But there have been other ages, and another evil and good.

Once was doubt evil, and the will to Self. Then the invalid became a heretic or sorcerer; as heretic or sorcerer he suffered, and sought to cause suffering.

only $28.12 and 1/2 cent See economy

To be fair, it could have been longer, someone paid his tax during that night. Even so it seems unfair to hold him up as though he endured much in his civil disobedience when the RIAA seems to be pursuing monetary awards that strike me as equivalent to life with the possibility of parole.
And last I heard, prison has gotten less collegial.

See Life without principle for what I believe to be his best example of truly free thinking.

I have had the page online for quite some time now, yet am quite surprised to have yet to receive a DMCA notice about. My hosting service hasn't received one either. It's especially surprising considering that the page places in the first page of results at Google for a search for content scrambling system. I get a few referrals from queries for "decss" as well, although the page doesn't rank so highly for it.

Perhaps an explanation for this phenomenon can be found in the following quote from another notorious criminal, which appears prominently on my page:

one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.

-- Martin Luther King, Letter from Birmingham Jail

I have written more recent piece called Practice Civil Disobedience that you may enjoy reading.

Absolutely everybody though, should read Henry David Thoreau's Civil Disobedience. I understand that it inspired not only King and Gandhi, but also the Dutch resistance under the Nazis.

It's not long, being just twenty pages or so in dead tree form. Here's a Spanish translation.

It's not hard at all to find in paperback. My local used bookstore had editions from two different publishers that also included Walden for just three bucks apiece.

I read somewhere that Senator Joseph McCarthy, who instigated the infamous "witch trial" hearings by the Senate Committee on Unamerican Activities, was appalled to discover that Civil Disobedience, being considered a classic work of American literature, was standard issue for the libraries that the U.S. government operates around the world, I guess for overseas servicemen. He got all the copies removed.

I have had the page online for quite some time now, yet am quite surprised to have yet to receive a DMCA notice about. My hosting service hasn't received one either. It's especially surprising considering that the page places in the first page of results at Google for a search for content scrambling system. I get a few referrals from queries for "decss" as well, although the page doesn't rank so highly for it.

Perhaps an explanation for this phenomenon can be found in the following quote from another notorious criminal, which appears prominently on my page:

one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.

-- Martin Luther King, Letter from Birmingham Jail

I have written more recent piece called Practice Civil Disobedience that you may enjoy reading.

Absolutely everybody though, should read Henry David Thoreau's Civil Disobedience. I understand that it inspired not only King and Gandhi, but also the Dutch resistance under the Nazis.

It's not long, being just twenty pages or so in dead tree form. Here's a Spanish translation.

It's not hard at all to find in paperback. My local used bookstore had editions from two different publishers that also included Walden for just three bucks apiece.

I read somewhere that Senator Joseph McCarthy, who instigated the infamous "witch trial" hearings by the Senate Committee on Unamerican Activities, was appalled to discover that Civil Disobedience, being considered a classic work of American literature, was standard issue for the libraries that the U.S. government operates around the world, I guess for overseas servicemen. He got all the copies removed.

Oh jeez. It was Portia who said the "quality of mercy" stuff. This ought to settle it in, ahem, any case. hehehe

It's fairly safe in that the lethal dose is several times the effective dose, and for people with tolerance, it's many times the ED.

Now as to the benefits of opiate use, it's whatever floats your boat. If you like trippiness, you might try opium, also oral opiates tend to be more cognitive and visual. Injected opiates really just tend towards a rush. Opiates can be a source of inspiration. Coleridge's Xanadu for instance. Sometimes the perfect peace and clarity of an opiate high can be enlightening, a place to reflect, respite from the confusing tumult of sobriety. But remember, they are addicting, so be careful with them.

Civil disobediance is not causing trouble to people whose practiced you disagree with or to bring attention to your cause. It is the purposeful disobeying of laws you believe to be unjust. Like refusing to go to the back of the bus.

With the civics lesson over, I hope these guys get CREAMED 'cause I hate them.

But it's not Civil Disobedience.

Such as Seymour Hersh, for example. One of the pillars of what remains of US investigative journalism, his exposé in last week's New Yorker examined how Defense Policy Board chair Richard Perle -- the architect of the war on Iraq -- stands to personally profit from the war through business dealings. Nice work if you can get it! Asked about this matter last weekend on CNN, Perle went berserk and told Wolf Blitzer that Hersh is "the closest thing in US journalism to a terrorist."

It should go without saying that real terrorism is a vile and deplorable act of violence against the innocent, and that muddying or diluting the definition makes the word (and, in fact, the world) less honest. Orwell explained all this to us more than fifty years ago.

But such is our present discourse, dragged into the gutter of constant, effortless accusation by the right wing, that the term is being debased and distorted when our future very well may depend upon our being clear, honest and just today. The new McCarthyism has shown its willingness to brand anyone who crosses the wishes of the Bush regime (or its flunkies) as a terrorist or terrorist ally. In such a climate, can you blame industry hacks at the MPAA or Microsoft for merely cashing in on the reigning ignorance? You, for instance. You, running that DRM-free PC -- why, you...terrorist!

Nope, American measures such as the Gallon are different to Imperial.

Americans need to come up with their own name for their own measurement system. Or just go metric and stop crashing so many spacecraft.

Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.

He said to his friend, "If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch
Of the North Church tower as a signal light,--
One if by land, and two if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country folk to be up and to arm."

..."communist thieves" is an oxymoron"...

I would just love to hear an explanation of that one.

A communist thief is an oxymoron because a communist does not belive in private property.

I can't believe they don't teach this stuff in school, or were you just not paying attention?

If you want to bash communsm, read the communist manifesto.
You will probably find it more interresting to disagree with them if you know what they are actually saying? no?

Please do not equate civil disobedience and P2P. Civil disobedience is essentially something you do in the open with the intention of getting caught and possibly prosecuted.

If you want to learn about what civil disobedience really is, check this or this out.

If you think that the Internet is the most active battlefield today, you need to visit a few places.

Once upon a time, that's how militaries were run. Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade is a particularly poignant reminder.

In a modern professional military, such as that of the US, troops are trained to think for themselves and given relatively wide latitude. Your hypothetical 4-star General might order an attack from one, two, or more fronts - but he'd leave it up to lower ranking officers to accomplish the various subtasks of taking airstrips, villages, and maintaining lines of supply and communications.

> Private Jon Doe, realizes where the ambushes keep happening, and tries to speak up, to prevent more losses. But, the General doesn't want to look bad, so therefore Private Jon Doe is court-marshalled.

In the real world - Pvt. Doe tells his squad leader - and his squad leader says "OK, guys, we're gonna take out that nest of snipers on the top of the hill. Other squads will be the main assault. We have to take out the snipers first or it'll be like yesterday, which sucked ass. Remember - the Colonel said he wanted the town taken, but not how, and the General doesn't even know this town exists. So it's up to us - let's get to work!"

And last but not least - even a 4-star General is answerable to the Commander-in-Chief. High-ranking Generals have been sacked from their positions both for failing to meet their objectives, and for overstepping their bounds.

Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy was very cool, if implausible. A ninteenth-century author's vision of a twentieth century utopia is bound to be chock full of accidental anachronisms.

After this story, and one yesterday aboutt he size of drinks cups also in ounces, I've looked up the conversion rates to see what you're all talking about

from this web site :

1 American fluid ounce = 29.57 millilitres.
1 British fluid ounce = 28.41 millilitres

So the American 8oz cup is just under a quarter litre (or around halfway between a 1/3 and a 1/2 English pint, if that's more your kind of reference size....)

Arguably, an individual has a duty to disobey a bad law.

Unless I've missed it, nobody's meantioned Henry David Thoreau's classic essay, "Civil Disobedience" (originally "Resistance to Civil Government"). Worth reading.

To boil it down: breaking the law will not convince them you are right.

Civil Disobedience - You may want to read up on that before you decide that breaking the law and doing something immoral are one and the same.

It does have it's place. Just ask Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi.

Civil disobedience is not a choice, but a *duty*, to demonstrate against unfair and oppresive laws.

And to demonstrate, I observe my right of fair-use:
"I HEARTILY ACCEPT the motto,--That government is best which governs least" -- Henry David Thoreau

You're american, right?

Your generalization is out of date. After some legal changes the American beer landscape changed.

I think the movie succeeded in doing what the book was meant to do - it sparks the imagination! What IS the world going to be like in 800,000 years? I can't even imagine the changes that will come in the next 50! ... Let's put aside our petty concerns for a minute and remember what an important time this is to the evolution of technology.

As regards technological evolution, I note that in Wells' original, it was the Morlock's love of machines and enslavement to the idea of "mechanical progress" that led them at last to cannibalism and moral degeneracy.

The film fails, as the Pal version did in the 1960s, by dropping the key theme of Well's book: the time traveller discovers the end result of class warfare. The proles won by letting the rich think they'd won because they enjoy a life of luxury, but instead they are just cattle being fattened.

Wells was a Fabian Socialist with a huge sense of irony and these influences informed all his work. But socialism and irony is apparently too dangerous for Hollywood. Instead, Pal's film changed it into a metaphor about nuclear warfare and survivalism, and Wells Jr changes it into a metaphor about the perils of leisure development. What a crock.

The Time Machine is here. The end-of-the-earth chapter, which seems to give Katz the willies, is a perfect little End-Of-Colonialism piece, very typical of the time. Hodgson's House on the Borderland , Night Land , and Stapledon's Last and First Men are more of the same, but with their own charms.

`I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide. It had set itself steadfastly towards comfort and ease, a balanced society with security and permanency as its watchword, it had attained its hopes -- to come to this at last. Once, life and property must have reached almost absolute safety. The rich had been assured of his wealth and comfort, the toiler assured of his life and work. No doubt in that perfect world there had been no unemployed problem, no social question left unsolved. And a great quiet had followed.

`It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers.

`So, as I see it, the Upper-world man had drifted towards his feeble prettiness, and the Under-world to mere mechanical industry. But that perfect state had lacked one thing even for mechanical perfection -- absolute permanency. Apparently as time went on, the feeding of the Under-world, however it was effected, had become disjointed. Mother Necessity, who had been staved off for a few thousand years, came back again, and she began below. The Under-world being in contact with machinery, which, however perfect, still needs some little thought outside habit, had probably retained perforce rather more initiative, if less of every other human character, than the Upper. And when other meat failed them, they turned to what old habit had hitherto forbidden.

I think the movie succeeded in doing what the book was meant to do - it sparks the imagination! What IS the world going to be like in 800,000 years? I can't even imagine the changes that will come in the next 50! ... Let's put aside our petty concerns for a minute and remember what an important time this is to the evolution of technology.

As regards technological evolution, I note that in Wells' original, it was the Morlock's love of machines and enslavement to the idea of "mechanical progress" that led them at last to cannibalism and moral degeneracy.

The film fails, as the Pal version did in the 1960s, by dropping the key theme of Well's book: the time traveller discovers the end result of class warfare. The proles won by letting the rich think they'd won because they enjoy a life of luxury, but instead they are just cattle being fattened.

Wells was a Fabian Socialist with a huge sense of irony and these influences informed all his work. But socialism and irony is apparently too dangerous for Hollywood. Instead, Pal's film changed it into a metaphor about nuclear warfare and survivalism, and Wells Jr changes it into a metaphor about the perils of leisure development. What a crock.

The Time Machine is here. The end-of-the-earth chapter, which seems to give Katz the willies, is a perfect little End-Of-Colonialism piece, very typical of the time. Hodgson's House on the Borderland , Night Land , and Stapledon's Last and First Men are more of the same, but with their own charms.

`I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide. It had set itself steadfastly towards comfort and ease, a balanced society with security and permanency as its watchword, it had attained its hopes -- to come to this at last. Once, life and property must have reached almost absolute safety. The rich had been assured of his wealth and comfort, the toiler assured of his life and work. No doubt in that perfect world there had been no unemployed problem, no social question left unsolved. And a great quiet had followed.

`It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers.

`So, as I see it, the Upper-world man had drifted towards his feeble prettiness, and the Under-world to mere mechanical industry. But that perfect state had lacked one thing even for mechanical perfection -- absolute permanency. Apparently as time went on, the feeding of the Under-world, however it was effected, had become disjointed. Mother Necessity, who had been staved off for a few thousand years, came back again, and she began below. The Under-world being in contact with machinery, which, however perfect, still needs some little thought outside habit, had probably retained perforce rather more initiative, if less of every other human character, than the Upper. And when other meat failed them, they turned to what old habit had hitherto forbidden.

Windows 95 can be a major problem when working with a newbie who still thinks that the mouse is a "foot pedal" like that on a sewing machine (yes it's true, I actually had a call like that). (emphasis added)

I don't believe you. I've heard the same story from many people who claimed it happened to them when they worked the support lines. This is almost a urban legend of sorts. A search on Google turns up the same story all over the place.

http://www.cyberspaceplace.com/nightbeforepgrm.htm l
http://www.mathstat.usouthal.edu/humor.html
http://eserver.org/cyber/befuddle.txt
http://www.laughnet.net/archive/compute/helpme.htm
http://www.auricular.com/TST/tst1.html
http://www.elsop.com/wrc/humor/truetech.htm

Written in 1881, predicted streaming music over telephone lines. It's online, do a 'find in page' on chapter 11 for the word telephone. (Hmmm. chapter 11 (bankruptcy), streaming media, riaa, theres some irony in here somewhere. i can feel it.)

Written in 1881, predicted streaming music over telephone lines. It's online, do a 'find in page' on chapter 11 for the word telephone. (Hmmm. chapter 11 (bankruptcy), streaming media, riaa, theres some irony in here somewhere. i can feel it.)

It's just the next step in making the usage of a computer more "user friendly" and thereby utterly inefficient. Typing vi kane/rosebud.text is so much faster than double-clicking on the folder kane and then on the file rosebud.text, and by far faster than saying "Show Speakable commands. Open folder Kane. Open folder Kane. Open folder Kane. Finally! Open file Rosebud dot text. Open file Rosebud dot text. Open file Rosebud period text..." Now, if you don't even use real language but only grunts, it becomes even worse. Talking about "Disneyfication"! Or rather, alienation of the work process.

I'd rather they send the same message Jack Webb did in Dragnet years ago: "We live in a democracy, a nation of laws. And when you don't like the laws, you don't break the laws. You work within the system to change the laws."

Given the choice between Dragnet and Henry Thoreau, I know who I trust.

I'd just as soon try to memorize the Charge of the Light Brigade as that bizarre poem. It ain't exactly "Thirty days hath September."

But I think I could manage to make four paper strips and fold them around a pencil, or build this cardboard contraption, or even try tattooing this stuff on various body parts like the guy in Memento.

I might try this interactive calendar to find the Doomsday to start the algorithm process, but then I wouldn't need to remember the algorithm, would I? I would be most likely to consult my desk copy of Farmer's Almanac, then the only thing I would have to remember is where I put it.

Resisting the urge to shout "How are you, gentlemen?" every time I pass the "gentlemen's room" at work.

There's a lot of information on the subject in the Copyright FAQ that's floating around. What you said seems to tally with this: in most countries, including the UK and the US, you have copyright in programs simply by creating them. BUT there are legal advantages in the US in registering your copyright.

IANAL.

You can read the full text of the Berne Convention, if you like.

In terms of upload/download I think the following applies:

From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.
Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme

My dictionary of quotations coyly appends: cf Bakunin, Jesus of Nazareth.

OK, P2P technologies aren't really Marxist technologies, any more than they are socialist ones or libertarian ones or whatever. They are "social" technologies though.

Yes, one or two might fall down crevases. So what. Get a bunch of 'em.

"And because they are small and numerous, they should be cheap. The entire point of this scenario is to create a new kind of space-probe that is cheap, small, disposable, and numerous: as cheap and disposable as their parent technologies, microchips and video, while taking advantage of new materials like carbon-fiber, fiber-optics, ceramic, and artificial diamond."

Joe Lockard kindly replied to my query if an online version of the article was available:
--
This piece was first published about five years ago under another title, 'Selling Brooklyn Bridge in Cyberspace'. It's in [The E-zine -w] Bad Subjects at: http://eserver.org/bs/18/Lockard.html The essay was revised and republished as "Progressive Politics, Electronic Individualism, and the Myth of Virtual community, in Internet Culture, David Porter [ed.], Routledge, New York (1997), pp. 219-232.
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I believe Joe was partly responding to Howard Rheingold's book "The Virtual Community" which is available in full text at http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/

• Who's running for the school board, and where is my polling station?
• Where's that Taste of the Town food fest being held?
• Where can I find a Unitarian church, and do they have a web page describing themselves?
• Is it true my office is on a toxic waste site? (Yes. Don't lick the dirt.)

• Participants building up individual identities. You know who you're talking to.
• High signal to noise ratio.
• A magic number of posts -- too many drives people away; too few is just an announcement list.
• Enough of a focus that you have something to talk about. I've seen very general lists, like "This is a list for the town of X" on eGroups, that fizzle out for lack of something to say.
• A few alpha-posters that invest time into high-quality posts.

You're the first person who ever responded to my hypothetical. It's not something they'll post as an Ask Slashdot, and I needed to hear why it wouldn't work. Sorry the wording pissed you off, but sometimes it takes a little prodding to get a response...

This is a classic clueless fanboy post.

I'm NOT a BeOS fan, AC. Nor do I read any of their info. I had a bunch of the same PCs lying around at work, installed Win98SE on one, BeOS on the other. I ran the same videos on each one. Then I ran more than one at a time. Mixed a few apps in. Result: BeOS ran the video with nary a flicker. Windows didn't.

Now look at Civ3. A god-game any os can manage (even linux). Watch the little movies pop up when you build a wonder. Watch the video flicker and the mouse skip across the screen under Windows. (Not much better under Linux). What would that be like under BeOS?

Now look at the increasing amount of CG cutscenes used in video games. You think M$ would fix DirectX to handle them? No. Their video continues to trip over their own mouse drivers.

Their sound is good?

I set up the sound card and it worked. Same with Windows and Linux. Can't ask for much more than that.

Their multithreading is good? They support threading primatives just like unix and win32 Perhaps you're refering to the fact that the APIs force you to use a thread per window, even when it doesn't make sense? You can have your app broken up into 1000 threads, but since 99% of the time, one of those threads is doing all the compute bound tasks sequentially, you gain nothing, and lose due to scheduler overhead.

Frightening as it is, AC, I actually get what you're saying here. The threading makes no real difference unless you have multiple chips to spread the threads among, right? Now, if you were some sort of Lord High Quake god, and you had to have the best machine to beat the other Quake gods, and Quake ran multithreaded under the hypothetical BeOS runtime, how many chips would your computer have? As many as you could fit inside. Win2K handles more than one chip, too, right? Who's multithreading is better?

Who would buy a BeOS game OS? who would write games for it? what is the advantage?

It would come with the games, just like the old DOS runtimes, BUT it would install once and then any other games that needed it would run it. The advantage is that you have an environment to run graphics and sound JUST FOR THE GAME. The other advantage is that it would run under PPC, too. Not that I'm a Mac fan, either.

...they need a OS that they can tell to get the fuck out of the way.

But Windows DOESN'T get out of the way. Windows freezes and GPFs all the time while we play games on it. This runtime I'm HYPOTHESIZING would never be in the fucking way in the first place.

Please try to think rationally, and more importantly, know when you're in way over your head technically. You're just making yourself look like an idiot.

You disagreed with me. Fine. You presented technical information to refute what I suggested. Good, I don't mind being wrong, and I've learned more reading this board over the past two years than I could ever teach anyone else.

All the same, there's no call to question my ability to think rationally. It's the one area where I'm never over my head.

-jpowers