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Er, I did.

Back in the day (crikey was that really 8 years ago???) I wrote PSTab, a guitar tablature typesetter, in postscript. I'd been downloading tab for songs from the (defunct?) OLGA, and wanted to print some for use at home. However, ascii tab looked crap and took lots of space on the page; if you tried to shrink it to use less paper it just left blank space at the sides.

We had an old Apple II laserwriter on the corridor, and I had written simple EPS diagramming tools for my thesis in awk (copy and paste programming)... so armed with borrowed copies of the red, green & blue books, I learned PS properly and wrote a typesetter that you could use as a header on simple input files (I'd spotted this was how the windows PS driver worked). Once I got to the stage I could wrap ascii-tab up to make *nice* output pages my itch was scratched[1].

Best thing about it was getting an email from a guy in NZ who used it to produce camera-ready copy for a book of banjo music - there wasnt anything else out there that could handle 5-stringed instruments :) . And that the unplayable example song getting a life of its own in the GuitarTeX manual!

-Baz

[1] I know there are bugs. Some of these didnt show up until I saw the output on a higher quality printer. Bah.

And check out ibiblio while you're at it. If you don't recognize the name, you may have known them as Sunsite or Metalab.

This is plain ludicrous. The 85th percentile speed (i.e., the
speed 85% of people go less than) will rise if you raise the speed
limit, as has been tested repeatedly.

This is a myth. See the US DOT study. This study determined that changing speed limits did not significantly affect the speed of the average driver or the fastest drivers, only the slowest drivers. It also determined that the effect of raising speed limits was inconclusive but tended to lower accidents, while the effect of lowering speed limits was likewise inconclusive but tended to raise the accident rate. Even if your scheme actually caused people to drive slower, the odds are that all that would accomplish is to make the roads less safe. It is also a fact that the fastest drivers have significantly fewer accidents per mile than the slowest drivers.

Speeding does not cause accidents. It makes accidents caused by other behaviors more severe. Given this, it is those other behaviors (including, but not limited to: alcohol, weaving through traffic, tailgating, and refusing to move right for faster traffic) which should be ticketed. But what are the majority of tickets given out for? Speeding.

Repeat offenders never do, for any crime.

Neither do people who violate unjust laws. Speeders fall into the second category. Why should I feel guilty? You never bothered to explain that. As to your crack-brained schemes, how about we just set the speed limits to levels which are reasonable, rather than turning the majority of the country into criminals for the sake of funding the police departments?

Your entire post is based on the premise that travelling faster than the speed limit is inherently unsafe and should be prevented. You have not proved this premise. Please do so if you expect anyone to treat you seriously.

And even now, people STILL don't believe me. MicroBlogger wouldn't have suffered from this sort of problem, gang. And never will.

MicroBlogger -- You Don't Suck, So Why Should Your Blog?

Cheers,
Abe.

This is why I use microblogger. Don't have to rely on anyone else's fsck-ups.

Absolutely. exp(pi*sqrt(163)) is right. As you can find out from reading the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton was _opposed_ to the idea of a Bill of Rights. His reason was that stating that, for example, the press _ought_ to be free does nothing to increase freedom of the press. It's just the same as saying there _ought_ to be no slavery, and that the government _ought_ to derive its powers from the people.

My mom has been running Debian for almost two years, and aside from a few calls early on of the "how do I do X under Linux" type, I haven't had to field any calls at all (none within the last year. None).

I may still be living when it's perfectly legal to stand in front of the Lincoln Memorial and recite the "I Have a Dream" speech without permission from MLK's decendents.

You can today; Project Gutenberg has it as dream10.txt.
According to Michael Hart:

This speech has been through years of court cases to determine,
in various jurisdictions, whether it was ever copyrighted, and
the United States court system recently laid down their rulings
that this speech had never been copyrighted, since at that time
it was required to post a copyright notice on printed copies to
be distributed, and this speech was distributed without such an
extra (C) Copyright notice as was then required in the US. The
US revised this law in 1989, an no longer requires such notice.

It's not much of a collection right now, but the quality level is high. Especially good is 'How to Think Like a Computer Scientist', a good introduction to programming that lives up to the title. It covers several languages.

These proposals have been around since at least June 2001, when the W3C published their Requirements document for what was then called XML Blueberry and has since become XML 1.1.

And the complaints date from then as well... Elliote Rusty Harold complained almost as soon as the Requirements document and the first Working Draft were published. He makes a number of good points that highlight just how unnecessary XML 1.1 actually is. This link is actually him quoting himself for the time - the original post is probably available on the W3C forums, but I'm far too lazy to look.

now all we need are 1/10 scale drivers

You'll find plenty in Lilliput.

Almost, but not quite, like Project Gutenberg, in fact.

Your point about copyright is still valid, but Project Gutenberg is making the rest possible.

I worked on a project to digitise every book in the French National Library (EBPF, or Every P****** Book in France, as our overworked scanner operators used to call it. A worthwhile thing - not only did it allow multiple people to look at the same book simultaneously, but it also allowed rare books to be preserved - they weren't handled anymore, so they weren't damaged.

how many people actually visit libraries outside of schooling these days?

Quick question - are you a parent? If not, I can understand this question. If you are, then I'd be surprised if your kid didn't use the library in some form. I used to as a kid, and even though our daughter is currently only eight months' old, we go to the library and pick out baby books for her. This works well - she gets bored of things really quickly, so being able to return the books and pick new ones is a big bonus.

Cheers,
Ian

I think everyone agrees that the XML standards should be backwards-compatible, but you seem to be asserting the idea that it should be FORWARD-compatible and that a parser written today must correctly handle all future revisions that might ever be made, which is ludicrous.

No, I'm not saying that parsers should be forwards-compatible. I'm saying that there is very little call by any actual users for a new version of XML with these features. I'll defer to Rusty for details.

here's the rest...

You think that the end of EULAs won't affect GPL software?...There are EULA's for the major Linux distros (RH, Mandrake, etc). They are more complex than "just the GPL, please".

You are seriously overstating this. I looked up the Redhat 8.0 EULA and it is not more complex than the GPL. It is actually quite a bit simpler. It basically states that all of Redhat's brand names and logos are not GPL'ed, they are protected by trademark. This obviously has nothing to do with the GPL software which they distribute. They then have the standard disclaimer denying responsibility for damages, etc. This sort of language is in the GPL as well. Again, no big deal.

The only related problem I can see GPL'ed software having is if the aforementioned disclaimer is thrown out in court. Leaving programmers (many of them hobbyists) open to damages in lawsuits would be disastrous to our ability to freely trade code.

How about an installation CD that also plays Unreal Tournament 2003?

Texstar has some "Freecurve" RPMs for Mandrake 9.0 up as well, for Mandrake users who want a taste of Red Hat's new theme.

Nope, I wasn't aware that accidents and fatal accidents decreased when speed limits increased. Statistics can prove anything, 40% of all people know that. But seriously, I would appreciate a link to the factual data that you quote above.

Can't get to Google, so I can't find any links.

However, check out an NHTSA study indicating that indicates that traffic finds a safe speed at which it flows regardless of speed limits, and that speed limits are 5-15 MPH below this safe speed. In addition, it determined that raising speed limits caused accidents to decrease slightly and lowering them caused them to increase slightly. While it doesn't claim that the accident rate changes are conclusive, it does conclude that raising speed limits doesn't increase accident rates.

Your claims of traffic flow rates and red-light camera accidents--if true, I'll assume for now that they are--are at most flaws in a system we agree are necessary in our society. We should address these problems in the system instead of criticising the errors as inherent.

Linked to in a Slashdot story on red light cameras last week

Red light cameras are not an integral part of the traffic light system. There is agreement that the traffic light system needs to exist, there is no such agreement on red light cameras. These aren't flaws in the system. They're unnecessary modifications to the system, intended to profit the police and the camera manufacturers, that are causing an increase in accidents rather than the decrease that was promised.

For clarity, are you arguing that because traffic flows faster than the posted limits, we should abolish speed limits entirely? Or instead, increase the limits themselves

I actually do feel that that's a good idea. Replace speed limits with posted speed guides, and only ticket speeding when it's fast enough to constitute reckless driving. Let's have the police ticket people who are tailgating, weaving through traffic, refusing to move right out of the passing lane, and the other behaviors that, unlike speeding, actually do cause accidents. That's not going to happen, but speed limits badly need to be increased by 10-15 MPH in the US. (See the NHTSA study referenced above.)

Let me ask YOU: when compliance with a law is so rare that it is actually considered probable cause of illegal activity in at least than one state, isn't it pretty damn likely that the law is the problem? (Drug transporters have begun scrupulously obeying traffic laws in order to avoid police having an excuse to pull them over. The cops have, therefore, begun pulling over people who are driving the speed limit. As I recall, the Florida state Supreme Court upheld at least one conviction, which means that obeying the law is now legally considered probable cause of illegal activity in Florida.)

Incidentially, three teens in my community died this summer when the drunk-driver of the car (travelling 80mph in a 35mph zone) ran a red light, slid under a semi-trailer, and ran into a Bank. I believe that if we had red light cameras in our town for the last five years or so, we may have prevented something like this from happening. Wouldn't people be more careful of getting caught?

Are you trolling? The guy was drunk, doing almost triple the speed limit, and you think he would've stopped because of a red light camera? That suggestion is, to be honest with you, utterly absurd.

I guess I care more that peoples lives are saved than worrying if people have to fight unfair speeding or "menial" traffic violations.

And I guess I care more about ensuring that people are allowed to keep their hard earned money instead of funding corrupt police departments, and ensuring that the Fourth and Fifth Amendments still apply to people who choose to drive rather than moving the US even farther toward a police state. Aren't red herrings fun?

No SQL, No PHP, No CGI? ... No Problem!

Written in 100% self-regulating Bash script:

MicroBlogger 1.7

Cheers,
Bowie

A live CD like Knoppix or DemoLinux will work well, but you are stuck with the cd and have limitations like slow cdrom access. LTSP or Kiosk Linux work well, though they necisitate(sp?) a good network connection.

You could also load a full distro on the HD. With utils like kudzu, Linux handles multiple hardware from one image alot more gracefully then other OS's. Choose a smaller distro like Vector Linux. It was designed to be used on older hardware and has version even for 486 machines. Others have suggested IceWM. That is a good choice as it is liteweight and has similiar interface to Windows. For Browsers, I suggest Galeon (GTK+) if you have room for the GNOME libraries and Mozilla to be installed, another decent choice is Pheonix, though that is kinda new. For email, something lite like Sylpheed (GTK+ again) or Kmail (QT) is good. For Office, Abiword adn Gnumeric (GTK+) is excellent for the Lite stuff. If table support is necessary, then use OpenOffice (and maybe still use gnumeric). A normal install for Vector runs about 300mb, so most any machine should have the space for it.

For the documentation I think your a little off. The problem is it's unlike that everyone will decide that ONE formate is the best. Eg. HTML is a great for apache documentation but isn't very usefull as documentation for ls (for ls man is great).

That being said you might be interested in this.
http://scrollkeeper.sourceforge.net/
http://www.ibiblio.org/osrt/omf/

Basically what it will do is enable you to have documentation in any format but have a single interface to it.

For those of us under 50, here's some history of the granddaddy of all high-level programming languages.

• [Slightly OT] A BRIEF HISTORY OF FORTRAN/Fortran (very brief)
• Cambridge University Dep't of Engineering's brief history of Fortran

IIRC, my former graduate advisor and professor was on the team that wrote a very early Fortran compilers at MIT in the late 50s, written entirely on punch cards. We've come a long way in ~50 years.

1) Create a self signed root cert, the one you publish and give to everyone
2) Use that root cert to sign your other certs

As long as your root cert is trusted, the rest of your certs that are signed by the root will be trusted as well.

SSL Certificates HOWTO

I can't see what's so ugly about the bluecurve theme. Of course it looks a bit like teletubby-land, but it's not as bad as XP. And then the blue corners of the window frames are a good idea - it looks as though they might be sort of interactive ;-)

The xmms theme is ugly _but_ it's one of the very few themes with clearly visible buttons for playlist/equalizer/shuffle/repeat. What bothers me most is them calling the thing "media player" making users believe it might do a lot of things it probably doesn't (like playing avis, dvds or calling home).

Dear friend, how on earth am I supposed to see what's so great about that font in OpenOffice.org? Couldn't you have scaled it up a little? Oh, and if you want to demonstrate the nice antialiased look of fonts, you shouldn't use a lossy image format like jpeg...

One last thing: psyche has both KDE's kontrol center and nautilus system settings. What I'd like to know is how well those two cooperate as far as system-wide settings (i.e. settings that are not specific for either KDE or gnome) are concerned.

I can't see what's so ugly about the bluecurve theme. Of course it looks a bit like teletubby-land, but it's not as bad as XP. And then the blue corners of the window frames are a good idea - it looks as though they might be sort of interactive ;-)

The xmms theme is ugly _but_ it's one of the very few themes with clearly visible buttons for playlist/equalizer/shuffle/repeat. What bothers me most is them calling the thing "media player" making users believe it might do a lot of things it probably doesn't (like playing avis, dvds or calling home).

Dear friend, how on earth am I supposed to see what's so great about that font in OpenOffice.org? Couldn't you have scaled it up a little? Oh, and if you want to demonstrate the nice antialiased look of fonts, you shouldn't use a lossy image format like jpeg...

One last thing: psyche has both KDE's kontrol center and nautilus system settings. What I'd like to know is how well those two cooperate as far as system-wide settings (i.e. settings that are not specific for either KDE or gnome) are concerned.

My OpenOffice font is barely legible in comparison to this.

So, what is it that makes their fonts look so nice? Seriously, I'm considering switching to Red Hat if for no other reason than the fonts alone ;).

So, what is it that makes their fonts look so nice? Seriously, I'm considering switching to Red Hat if for no other reason than the fonts alone ;).

So, what is it that makes their fonts look so nice? Seriously, I'm considering switching to Red Hat if for no other reason than the fonts alone ;).

After losing eight hours of editing work during a botched backup attempt, I heard about a utility called safedelete. I can't find much on it, but here it is from Ibiblio. Interestingly, the person that told me about this utility (which sets up a trash directory with timed expiration and a system of aliases for rm and related commands) was an old Unix hand, and only secondarily a Linux user. The program works fine in Debian, I can report.

And I don't get these people saying they are too smart to need an undelete capability. Must be nice!

For older machines, the "minimalist" or "mini" distributions are the way to go. Thanks for the advice: if VectorLinux turns out not to work (X is playing it's games again, and I couldn't reuse XF86Config from the previous install because now it is a 4.1.0 version), I will give FreeBSD a shot. (first thought of NetBSD myself) Network install is not an option: the dongle of the PCMCIA network card I have is broken. :-( Everything must go over CD.

"They aren't the ones creating newspeak, everyone who doesn't call the operating system by it's correct name is."

Puts me in mind of the following dialogue from "Through the Looking Glass"

Alice could only look puzzled: she was thinking of the pudding.

`You are sad,' the Knight said in an anxious tone: `let me sing
you a song to comfort you.'

`Is it very long?' Alice asked, for she had heard a good deal
of poetry that day.

`It's long,' said the Knight, `but very, VERY beautiful.
Everybody that hears me sing it--either it brings the TEARS
into their eyes, or else--'

`Or else what?' said Alice, for the Knight had made a sudden
pause.

`Or else it doesn't, you know. The name of the song is called
"HADDOCKS' EYES."'

`Oh, that's the name of the song, is it?' Alice said, trying to
feel interested.

`No, you don't understand,' the Knight said, looking a little
vexed. `That's what the name is CALLED. The name really IS "THE
AGED AGED MAN."'

`Then I ought to have said "That's what the SONG is called"?'
Alice corrected herself.

`No, you oughtn't: that's quite another thing! The SONG is
called "WAYS AND MEANS": but that's only what it's CALLED, you
know!'

`Well, what IS the song, then?' said Alice, who was by this
time completely bewildered.

`I was coming to that,' the Knight said. `The song really IS
"A-SITTING ON A GATE": and the tune's my own invention.'

So saying, he stopped his horse and let the reins fall on its
neck: then, slowly beating time with one hand, and with a faint
smile lighting up his gentle foolish face, as if he enjoyed the
music of his song, he began.

Of all the strange things that Alice saw in her journey Through
The Looking-Glass, this was the one that she always remembered
most clearly. Years afterwards she could bring the whole scene
back again, as if it had been only yesterday--the mild blue
eyes and kindly smile of the Knight--the setting sun gleaming
through his hair, and shining on his armour in a blaze of light
that quite dazzled her--the horse quietly moving about, with
the reins hanging loose on his neck, cropping the grass at her
feet--and the black shadows of the forest behind--all this
she took in like a picture, as, with one hand shading her eyes,
she leant against a tree, watching the strange pair, and
listening, in a half dream, to the melancholy music of the song.

`But the tune ISN'T his own invention,' she said to herself:
`it's "I GIVE THEE ALL, I CAN NO MORE."' She stood and listened
very attentively, but no tears came into her eyes.

1. http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/ctg000.htm
   "I think that the old arguments that will come up at the (UCLA) conference and have come up over and over is everybody is claiming responsibility for everything at this point," says [Lawrence] Roberts, who was the designer and developer of ARPANET.
   
   But one thing all agree on is that the Internet was not conceived as a fail-safe communications tool in case of nuclear war, a much-promulgated myth over the years. The Rand Research Institute was developing a study shortly after ARPANET's birth that has been confused with the research-oriented ARPANET and subsequent developments.
   
   Nuclear war "wasn't the reason we did anything," Roberts says. "That story is just wrong."
   
2. http://www2.aus.us.mids.org/mn/1002/myth.html[In 1999], Alex McKenzie (BBN 1967-1976) posted the following:
   
   While it is true that the design of the ARPANET was not at all influenced by concerns about surviving a nuclear attack, it is also true that the designers of the ARPANET and other ARPA-sponsored networks were always concerned about "robustness", which means the ability to keep operating in spite of failures in individual nodes or the circuits connecting them.
   
3. http://www.ibiblio.org/pioneers/
   The architecture of the ARPANET relied heavily on the ideas of Paul Baran who co-invented a new system known as packet-switching.( A British computer scientist, Donald Davies, independently came up with his own theories of packet-switching). Baran also suggested that the network be designed as a distributed network. This design, which included a high level of redundancy, would make the network more robust in the case of a nuclear attack. This is probably where the myth that the Internet was created as a communications network for the event of a nuclear war comes from. As a distributed network the ARPANET definitely was robust, and possibly could have withstood a nuclear attack, but the chief goal of its creators was to facilitate normal communications between researchers.

Ah, you see, Scientology is not like other religions, that's what they admit themselves. But the real reason why they're different is how they publish information.

Other religions give their religious texts away free of charge, but Scientology decided to give it away through losing a number of court cases, accidentally giving away the the documents freely as part of legal paperwork. Other religions spread the word by choice, this religion spreads the word by shooting themselves to the foot all the time.

only animal with a fully-sequenced genome
I believe that the human genome project also has a complete sequence of our genome as well.

I dunno what'll happen. Scalia's on their side, hence the focus on harm to the public in Larry's final briefs. You will find many who share your viewpoint, of course.

But it was while surfing sites like LawMeme, GrepLaw, and Copyfight, among others that I thought about what might be the worst development to come out of this, from a copyright holder's standpoint.

You've got a whole generation of law students following along, rooting for Larry, and sharing his belief that copyright as currently constructed, only benefitting the holders, is wrong (Michael Hart's too-easily dismissed manifestoes, as the reporter condescendingly put it, echo this view).

And that same generation of law students may very well find a lot of other ways to beat up on the publishing industry (hint here: the industry's biggest market is schools, while prices are set rather high by a few players). It's quite possible that industry types will win the Eldred battle but lose the war.

We'll know soon enough.

Go get 'em, Larry.

When I grow up, I want to be a Karma Whore.

Speaking of digital freedom, today's Doctor Fun is quite topical.

And this is good . This is actually what a distribution is supposed to do . Put software together, configure, etc., save the user the hundreds of hours it would take her or him get the damn thing working and looking good. Make it easy to the user to get work done with the damn thing.

Linux is getting better and better. Thank you KDE, thank you GNOME, thank you GNU, kernel folks, RedHat, Mandrake, Debian and so on ...

You can find some right here: Red Hat 'Null' Beta screens.

MicroBlogger...Everything you'll ever need in a blog. Period..

On the other hand, I can bet BLAZEMONGER INC will be interested. I'm pretty sure BLAZEMONGER's lawyers are SO FAST they can hit a TRADEMARK SUITE when the PHBs are just THINKING of using the name... etc.

Wow a slasdot meeting in Raleigh I had no idea.
Let me know when the next one is.

Tylers Speakeasy in Carboro has wireless lan as well and you can get on the UNC-1 network from the front poarch at the Dead Mule in Chapel Hill(Thats where I am sitting right now).

BTW We will be at the Tech Circus.

"If we take a look at a simple, household electrical appliance such as a toaster with a conductive metal case, we can see that there should be no shock hazard when it is operating properly. The wires conducting power to the toaster's heating element are insulated from touching the metal case (and each other) by rubber or plastic. However, if one of the wires inside the toaster were to accidently come in contact with the metal case, the case will be made electrically common to the wire, and touching the case will be just as hazardous as touching the wire bare. Whether or not this presents a shock hazard depends on which wire accidentally touches.

If the "hot" wire contacts the case, it places the user of the toaster in danger. On the other hand, if the neutral wire contacts the case, there is no danger of shock:

To help ensure that the former failure is less likely than the latter, engineers try to design appliances in such a way as to minimize hot conductor contact with the case. Ideally, of course, you don't want either wire accidently coming in contact with the conductive case of the appliance, but there are usually ways to design the layout of the parts to make accidental contact less likely for one wire than for the other. However, this preventative measure is effective only if power plug polarity can be guaranteed. If the plug can be reversed, then the conductor more likely to contact the case might very well be the "hot" one" Full article.

It is an odd situation when a flamer accuses another (non-flamer) of being what he himself (or, she herself, for the gender police), most demonstrably is. Does that make you a troll?

I will contradict your entire argument by quoting from Adam Smith, whom you apparently admire. This is from An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.

Substitute the words producer, director, and stakeholder for butcher, brewer, and baker, and it has the same weight. If you are really a stakeholder in New Line Cinema, you will already be paying close attention to this simple fact.

As for your distributiom model (A), remember that fencing stolen good is also a distribution model. Are you arguing that fencing stolen goods shouldn't be a crime?

The distribution under model (A)... appeal[s] to a select group of high bandwith, tech savy fans who have the money and will to partake in models (B) and (C) anyway.

I agree with you. However, I would argue that stealing when one has the ability to pay is far less excusable than stealing based on need. Is this tech savy crowd really so infested with geek fanboys and fangirls that waiting a few months is, for them, unbearable?

I don't believe that people like you exist. I know that this contradicts all of the best evidence, but I choose to believe (for sanity's sake) that you are a carefully constructed on-line persona whose purpose, though it presently eludes me, I will one day discover.

I am waiting for that day, though not with bated breath.

A linux port can be found at http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/system/network/is ode

Also, if you visit Ibiblio, you'll notice that every new text added to Gutenberg over the last 6 months or so has been a "Project Gutenberg Ebook of"

Then there's still the issue of individual gutenberg titles (most people search, you know, Guy+Boothby+Ebook), where Gtberg never, ever comes up in the top 20.

It was good to know about "free books," though, as I hadn't caught that one.

From the google cache:

Texstar of pclinuxonline, recently posted a bunch of screenshots from Redhat's 3rd beta release known as null. Redhat has made a huge effort via the use of similar icons and themes to make their packaging of GNOME and KDE resemble each other more closely . What do you think?

From the google cache:

Texstar of pclinuxonline, recently posted a bunch of screenshots from Redhat's 3rd beta release known as null. Redhat has made a huge effort via the use of similar icons and themes to make their packaging of GNOME and KDE resemble each other more closely . What do you think?