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In the very announcement they link to the FCC broadband page about how to build out your own community gigabit municipal fiber network. You don't have to wait for Google. They would rather you didn't.

What FCC broadband page would that be? The only FCC page I found linked to is WCB Announces Workshop on Gigabit Community Broadband Networks but it does not say how to build gigabit fiber. It may be in the video on the page, but that is more than 5 hours long. Searching FCC how to build gigabit municipal fiber networks doesn't return the how to either in the first five pages of results. Only the first result is an FCC link.

Falcon

Should there be a Law?

What is justice? What is right or is corrected. Eliminate many of the laws on the books. For instance victimless crime laws. The War on Drugs? A big waste of tyme, money, and resources. Laws against prostitution? Where are the victims? Laws against fornication? Against sodomy? Against oral sex? Where are the victims? Getting rid of these laws will dramatically reduce the need for a justice system. Laws and law enforcement should be working on the harm personal acts afflict on the unwilling. Should there be a Law? is an excellent flowchart depicting the flow of reason that should occur in deciding what laws there will be.

I'd rather have power wielded by a democratic government - which I can influence - than corporations (which I can't).

I will handle this in two different ways. The first one being who gives corporations their power? Government does. If corporations have too much power it's because government gave them that power. Thirty years after Thomas Jefferson drafted the "Declaration of Independence" he wrote this warning:
“I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country."
However there was a reason the first corporate charters were granted, yes they are granted by government. The first businesses to be granted a charter was the British East India Company in 1600 and the Dutch East India Company in 1602. Both were shipping companies, as hinted by their names, but shipping was a risky business. If either cargo, crew, or passengers were lost the ship's owners were liable. If pirates captured the ship killing people, or just stole the cargo, the owners had to pay for their loss. The same with sinkings such as caused by hurricanes. So if I as a small investor wanted to and had the money to invest in a ship, if that ship was lost I would be financially liable. Not only would I lose the money I invested but I could lose my home and everything I owned. So the British and Dutch crowns decided to grant some businesses a corporate charter giving investors limited liability. With these charters I could invest money in a ship and if the ship was lost all I'd lose was the money I invested. This allows society and many people to benefit, international trade is a common or public good.

I could go on but you should now have a clear idea why corporations exist. Now onto the second way. So you trust government more than businesses? Has any business, or group of businesses, killed as many people as governments have? The greatest number of deaths all at once I know of was Union Carbide's Bhopal Disaster in India. The estimate with the highest number of deaths from it is 15,000, with an estimate of less than 600,000 injured.

Now how many people have governments killed or violated the rights of? NAZI Germany, over 600,000. Stalin's Russia, 20,000,000. Mao's China, 50,000,000. The US isn't guilt free either. The US, and state governments, have killed people and violated many more people's rights. Those in US prisons for non-violent drug offenses, and the US has the world's largest prison population? Their rights are violated on a daily basis. Throughout it's history the US massacred American Indian tribes. Up through the 1970s the US government's Indian Health Service had doctors sterilize Native American Women, forcefully and

Premeditation is your guess at what the person was thinking. So it doesn't show anything other than that you are guessing, and using that guess to modify your punishment regime. You can't read minds (at least, not yet); hence, unless the person tells you they planned something out - in which case they're admitting to assault anyway and the maximum penalty should apply - you really don't know. That's why premeditation "because they own a firearm" or any other external factor is nonsensical.

There are many valid reasons to own firearms. Hunting. Martial arts. Reserve or active military status. Olympic style shooting. As a signal to your government, as encoded in the US constitution. Or, in the end, as a means to leverage the replacement of your government, as encoded in the US declaration of independence. As a collector. As a means of self- and familial-defense. None of these signal any premeditation of ending any person's life.

I would like to direct you here; it's a lesson in thinking about liberty in chart form:

http://www.ideaspike.com/law_nolaw.shtml#tent33

That's why laws should change according to pressure from citizens (environment), which is what often, but not always, happens :)

Should there be a law?

Falcon

Unless they provide a full & accurate report as to what information was collected on you(and how it was used), it shouldn't even be happening.

Like we need another reason for big government. NOT!!!

I don't like the idea of employers using such services as this, but if one does then it's one I do not want to work for.

Should there be a Law?

Falcon

The EU defines devices that can record 30 minutes or more of continuous video as "camcorders", and subjects them to special taxation. This is the reason for the 29:59 limit on SD.

Stupid laws like this, actually almost all laws, should be stricken from the law books. Here's a good guide on this: Should there be a Law?

I notice your link says that an EU law is why 29 minute, 59 seconds is the limit of the the Panasonic Lumix GH1 for recording there. However it says the rest of the world does not have that limit, so it should not apply elsewhere, like here in the US.

Falcon

Well, no. Homebrew started with PD; a model where anyone can do anything with the design, or code. GPL is far more restrictive.

I still use the PD model. I'd rather my code was used by anyone who found it convenient, and I have no love for lawyers whatsoever, my entire goal in life is to avoid them completely.

Seems like they were given enough chances to respond, it would've been the same with proprietary software.

But... it wouldn't have been the same with PD software (like this), which is actually free, as opposed to "we will ruin your life with lawyers if you use it any way but how we tell you", which is a summary of GPL-poisoned software.

The GPL is a travesty foisted off on the programming community - it is anti-progress and a wasteful time sink and anti-freedom and court fodder and lawyer bait. Other than that, of course, it's just great. :/

This device could drive large numbers of companies out of business, companies who invested a lot of money in those businesses.

This is a terrible example, because this *particular* example relieves the need for anyone to run a company, work at a company, or buy anything from a company. Food, clothing, people, pets, shelter, medicine... anything could be duplicated. No one would need money (and if they did, they could duplicate it.)

Such a machine would reset our entire society -- and it should.

The only reason anyone needs to make money is because money is the machine of "matter duplication", speaking very loosely; it allows you to get "your copy" of the food, property, etc. The only reason this in itself is the process is because things are, relatively speaking, scarce and expensive. Your machine would eliminate both issues.

The potential for a literal utopia would loom. Most likely to be destroyed immediately by massive duplication of weapons, but still, the potential would have been there.

The actual issue with intangible property is that by taking it and not complying with the terms of the rights owners, in the process reducing or eliminating return from said property, the motivation for the rights owners to continue to produce these things for society is damaged, and consequently, society is damaged (and will inevitably develop a means of recourse.) All the excuses in the world cannot get around this; and that is why it is wrong. It does real harm. Directly to the property owner, and indirectly, but very broadly, to the rest of society.

If you (not you in particular, but those reading this that think taking software without the rights/property owner's stipulated recompense is somehow ok) want free software, find some software that someone offers for free, because supporting themselves isn't the motive.

There's plenty of it, too. Like my free tiny database software, here. Or this massive, feature-heavy - yet still free - database package, here.

But if you elect to take property / rights that is offered in exchange for some fee or service you decline to provide, you're an antisocial, simple-minded scumbag. It's exactly as simple as that. And it doesn't matter a flying fuck if the software has a free variant or not, or if you "need" it, or if you "want" it.

People who create - music, art, software - are of much greater value to society than people who steal, and they always will be. And society will always come down on their side for that very reason. And that's just how it should be.

I'd go so far as to say that in a society where the above machine existed, people who create new things would be the most respected members of all. Because duplication is not invention, and invention can, and often does, improve everyone's lot. And what would that get them? Attention, appreciation, and to some degree, power - because people will wish to please them. They'd be rock stars.

Public domain is literally in the public domain. It doesn't need a license of any kind. Once it's there, anyone can use it for any purpose at all. They can change it, add a license to the new thang, sell it, whatever they want. That's the point. As it stands when released to PD, it belongs to the public. Yours (and everyone else's) to use any way you like. You can't copyright it or limit the use of the public domain item itself, because it belongs to the public, but you can certainly pop it into your code, change it (or not) and then not tell anyone, or sell it, or give it away, or pretty much whatever.

For instance, here is a database I wrote. It's PD. Take it and do anything you'd like with it. You'll never hear from a lawyer, or be told that whatever you're using it for is somehow unacceptable, or be charged a fee by the author, or be dinged because you didn't credit the author. I wrote it from scratch, using no one else's libraries or code, and I now give it to you. And everyone else. See how easy that is? See how free that is?

...and with everyone a criminal, it is just a matter of how much "they" like you, as to whether or not they come after you for a violation.

Some laws are "right", they proscribe a behavior most would agree is wrong. However, some laws claim to prevent a crime, after all, "the law's the law"; But, they're really nothing more than a "Thought Crime", IMHO.

As you suggest, possession of a shotgun, for example, that is "too short" (Say 16" instead of 18.5") is, in and of itself, a "crime". I'd rather have every law abiding citizen own such a weapon against than a single criminal legally owning the 18.5" model. Of course if either group used either weapon in a crime they should be punished in a like manner. After all, if one of your loved ones were criminally assaulted, would you really want the penalty to be any different if they perpetrated the crime with one weapon over another?

There doesn't appear to be any easy way for average folk to get around the law like the privileged can, by simply bowing to the "spirit" of the law. We are stuck with the "letter" of the law...

Also, for reference, here is something I saw recently that seems like a reasonable idea.

Remember, kids, it's not about big scary guns... someday, in a jurisdiction near you, mere possession of strong encryption may mark you as a publisher of child pornography just as much as the possession of brass knuckles makes one a thug.

Because as a general rule, things ought to be permitted by default and banned only for a damn good reason. Who are you to judge what's worthwhile?

These are the people that write stories about raping little boys and argue that since no one was hurt, these stories should be perfectly legal. Isn't that your exact argument?

Yes.

How about if I go to the mall and take pictures up little girl's skirts as they ride up the escalator?

You can simply that to "How about if I go to the mall and take pictures up skirts?". That's illegal because the act violates the privacy of the person photographed. A fictional character has no privacy rights to infringe.

How about if I take video of a 3-yr-old's ballet recital and post them on the web...

Don't parents do this, perfectly legitimately too? Are you proposing that we ban all pictures of children in case one might titillate a pedophile?

The fact remains that child porn is illegal whether a child was harmed in making it or not....Now, please tell me how banning that is somehow not bad for society but banning cartoon rape pics of children is.

That's a good issue to raise.

Actually, the bans on both types of work are bad for society. The former is only tolerable because it has a clear a net benefit for society: 1) the ban is very limited in scope, 2) relatively unambitious in what's banned and what isn't, and 3) eliminates commercial justification for the production of child pornography. The ban on real child pornography is still on shakier ground than banning of the production, but I (and most people) think it's still a net win, so long as massive censorship infrastructure isn't built to enforce it, as that censorship infrastructure can also be used to ban anything targeted by the moral panic du jour.

On the other hand, banning fictional work satisfies none of the above three criteria, and almost certainly does nothing to actually protect children, all the while still incurring the costs of censorship.

You seem to think that the point is the harm done to the kids in making the porn. No, as I've pointed out, that is not why it is illegal.

The potential harm to children, direct or indirect, is the sole tenable justification for banning child pornography. If you support a ban on certain fiction too, you need to couch it in terms of potential harm. (Which you do below.)

There will be a time in [a pedophile's] life when he tires of the cartoons and sees the opportunity for the real thing.

If I can restate your point a bit, your premise here is that fictional crime causes real crime. If child pornography is somehow special and that premise applies only to it, then I'd like to see some data on that. I've seen absolutely no claim this is true in the special case of child pornography. If it turns out to be the case (which I highly doubt), then I'll reconsider my position.

The other possibility is your premise, fictional crime causes real crime, applies to all crime. In that case, wouldn't it be fair to apply it to all creative works? If we accept this premise, we should ban adult rape pornography, bank robbery films, war movies, drug movies, and many other works. But if we did that, we would have to remove quite a few works literature (granted, the loss wouldn't be great in most cases), but don't you agree that literature depicting crime has been a net boon for society?

I thought net neutrality was supposed to treat everyone's comparable traffic that same and not to charge extra for preferred delivery of packets.

I think that's what Richard Bennett, TFA writer, is missing about net neutrality. Nowhere does he address the possibility of ISPs demanding one content provider, such as Google, pay them not to slow their traffic.

It sounds like "I feel bad, therefore we should pass a law".

Generally I don't like, I actually oppose, new laws however what TFA writer misses besides what I say above is free speech. Say PHB at cableco X is a conservative and hates liberals so he has his engineers slow down connections to Daily Kos whereas PHB at cableco Y hates conservatives and slows down traffic from Free Republic. Both websites deliver html but their politics are different. Another thing he misses is that the government has given more than $200 billion of taxpayer money to buildout the broadband infrastructure, which for the most part they have not done.

Falcon

So call me compulsive. dbtxt 1.1 is posted, and now supports editable binary and floating point types. There are some other improvements as well.

My point is that as long as there are legitimate uses for something it shouldn't be blocked or outlawed.

And as for laws there's a good flowchart on "Should there be a law".

Can't be Java... well, how about Python?

Here is a completely free (PD, not GPL-style "you're free to do as we tell you") database engine that will do what you have described thus far.

The database engine is about 19k bytes (not a typo), has no dependencies (other than Python itself), supports a useful subset of SQL so you can actually create flexible queries that produce well-sorted results from your database, and it works everywhere Python does, which is to say, it works pretty much everywhere. It's just as happy operating on a command line as it is on a web server. The results (the actual databases) are 100% portable from OS to OS. I use it on various linuxes, OS X, and Windows for tasks very similar to yours.

Comes with tutorial examples, sample databases and extensive docs. In a 13k (not a typo) archive.

:-)

Well, in fairness, unless you know what you're doing, that moonshine could cause organ failure, blindness, or death.

In which case you're harming yourself if you drink it. Government should not be making victimless crimes, such as making it illegal to smoke a joint in your own home and drinking your own liquor while relaxing. Here's a good flowchart on "Should There Be A Law?".

Your first paragraph extols "PD" (the public domain?) over the GPL (and does so unfairly, IMHO).

In order for that part of your comment to be meaningful, you need to say why you think my characterization was unfair. I have reasons for what I said (and I've laid them out, but I'm prepared to be more specific as required.)

In your second paragraph, you sound more like a copyright holder embittered by piracy on one hand and by the GPL on the other than like a big contributor to the PD.

As far as my feelings about the GPL go, I'm both a PD and a commercial author embittered by the GPL. In both cases, the GPL has done things ranging from what I'd call merely "cramping my style" to forcing me to write huge chunks of code, work that, were it not for the GPL, I could have avoided in favor of something more rationally characterizable as productive. Work that had already been done by others, was available in public to others, but not to me, because I had the temerity to presume that some of my work product was actually an appropriate thing to request payment for, or even simply wish to distribute without incurring additional obligations. It sneaks around and annoys me from surprising directions. For instance, midnight commander won't compile on my Apple; One might ask, why is that? It turns out that in the final analysis, it's specifically because of the GPL. Apple can't ship what they need to so that MC will compile and run. Instead, I have to get a huge pile of crap (the "Fink" project) and cobble up a mostly-working copy from that.

Pirates, frankly, don't make me bitter. Quite the opposite. They've been very good to me. It's just free exposure for the commercial software; it isn't like they were going to buy it anyway. And they can't "steal" PD software, now can they? I can count the number of times a non-purchasing person came looking for support for our commercial software and didn't buy it when told we only support purchasers on one hand in 23 years of selling commercial software. On the other hand, I could not possibly count the number of sales made to people who ran into non-purchasing folks using my stuff.

As for being a "big" contributor to PD, the whole point is you don't know what I've contributed because there's no requirement to keep my name associated, nor is there any particular motivation on my part to put it there in the first place. I don't do it for fame and recognition, I don't concern myself with such things. I do it to help out, that's all. In terms of lines of code, I'm a consistent, long-term contributor. Also of PD hardware designs and things like PD analog AFSK mode designs. You can find my name in the ARRL handbook, numerous programs of various types, and even some of the Orion blue books if you try hard enough. Heck, I even try to always give out the critical details when I take a photo so others can learn and emulate if they so desire, instead of playing "I know something you don't know, nyah-nyah." In terms of do you know me... no, probably not. Do I care? No, probably not. :-)

Your web site doesn't mention the PD at all (please post a link if I'm wrong about that).

Black Belt Systems is a commercial operation of mine; it has nothing in particular to do with producing PD software. I, as an individual on the other hand, do. For the sake of an example, here is a PD database app I wrote in Python (with docs, and sample databases, and database processing examples); I've been writing software since my first Altair computer; my first PD software was published in the 1977 issue of Kilobaud; there have been many more such since then.

However, since you were digging around on the BBS site, did you manage to come across the terms of re-distribution for WinIm

MS Says:

Nobody develops software for charity

Nonsense. Neither the commercial urge nor the recognition grabbing need have spread to cover 100% of those people producing software. Here is a database system in python that I wrote for my own reasons, and give away for free. No "GPL" or other pseudo-free restrictions, just free. PD. Take it. Do anything you like with it. Or not. Don't care. Not looking for money, not looking for recognition, not looking to promote free stuff over commercial stuff or vice versa, no requirements of any kind. Repost it anywhere, take my name off it, whatever you like. It's just... free. What do I get out of it? It works for me, that's all. Doesn't hurt me or compromise me in any way to give it away, so I do.

What Microsoft - and the GPL-fans, for that matter - have oh-so-conveniently forgotten is the mechanism of PD software. Write it, share it, go on with your life. The more people do that, the more useful things will get created. Personally, I find the GPL just as corrosive as software patents, and for very similar reasons. I try to stay away from both. But that's just me.

What you are describing here as privacy is actually what the blurb more correctly labels as anonymity.

No. You fundamentally misunderstand privacy. Privacy is not "being alone."

Privacy is the existence of social boundaries that we (generally) agree not to cross.

Examples: I invade a lady's privacy when I look up her skirts without her permission. I invade your privacy if I open your mail without your permission. I invade your privacy if I read your medical records without your permission. All of this can happen with you, me and the issue in question all out in the public space.

These are things we can do, but we agree not to do, because we recognize the fundamental right to privacy as existing in open society, not just in the home or when we are alone. Private means that you retain control by social convention over information which relates to your existence, and in turn, were I to obtain access by any means without your permission, I would have crossed the social boundary for that issue. That is the very core of "violating someone's privacy."

Anonymity is another social boundary. We have -- in the past -- recognized that others have the right to proceed about their day without having to inform others who they are and what they are doing. This boundary, like any other social boundary, can be crossed (violated, more like) by simple, easy actions on the part of invaders of privacy. But anonymity is not a thing unto itself, it is simply another facet of privacy.

The following should help you develop a better understanding of what privacy actually is: More on privacy.

Now that you have all these libraries have you considered releasing them under an open source license?

They aren't libraries. They're built right into the application. They could be released as libraries with a little work, as they certainly are highly modular, but generally speaking, code that goes into my commercial work stays there. Should I release something, it'd be using public domain, not a restrictive mechanism. Like this.

TFA talks about Sterling engines as a partial power source. They work on heat differences. I was thinking about that, and it occurred to me that you should be able to get a significant heat difference in a moving vehicle on a sunny day by (a) putting the hot end of the SE in a glass-enclosed bubble on top of the car and (b) putting the cold end of the SE on a heat sink that is a set of fins inside a duct that transits the car from front to back, using front to back air flow to carry heat away. The output of the SE would feed the car's electrical storage system, either batteries or ultracaps, which I expect will replace batteries before very long.

It would work best, by far, in a moving vehicle, and only in the daylight, but that covers a large fraction of when people travel.

Big fossil fuel generating plants are more efficient, and that's one factor, but also, a considerable amount of energy is produced by sources like hydro, nuclear and to a lesser extent, solar, wind and so forth. All of these are non-polluting. Further, we have the ability (if not the collective intelligence) to build more nuclear plants. Solar is becoming more efficient. As the grid moves from fossil fuels to non-polluting sources, these types of vehicles will continue to be close to zero impact (they'll still need lubricants and so on, but they won't expel them into the atmosphere.) In addition, electricity transport doesn't require tankers and is non-polluting itself.

One thing about the summary, though — in the end, it won't be batteries, it'll be ultracaps running these things. Batteries - frankly - haven't got a lot to recommend them. They are extreme polluters, hugely difficult to dispose of, expensive and complicated to recycle, charge slowly, can't deliver much power at once, and perform worse and worse as they get older (and not a lot older, for that matter.) I look forward with great anticipation to the day I can say "no more batteries." I'd say that day is about ten years off at most based on the rate that ultracaps have been advancing the last three years.

The prediction overlooks far too many inconveniences that technology hasn't yet resolved.

The need to regularly plug in the laptop. Poor battery lifetime and recharge cycle performance (but see ultracapacitors for the impending doom of the battery industry.) The need to plug in various I/O devices (hard drives, scanners, various others for various needs.) The wearing out of laptop clamshell hinges. The low quality of laptop keyboards as compared to the awesome stand-alone keyboards available. The need for mice and drawing pads. The limited screen size of a laptop (you can of course make an ultra-large screen laptop, but then it doesn't fit in your lap very well.) The room inside a desktop for various hardware add-ons, such as PCI bus hardware, or highly accelerated graphics engines. Room for multiple drives.

A few of these things - such as connectivity, which will probably go entirely wireless - will resolve themselves as technology advances. Most will not. So as an IMHO, but one with a lot of data behind it, I call nonsense on the entire proposition.

Found this in a closed-to-comments earlier slashdot story on Guitar Hero...

Again, no disrespect to Rush (I'd play it), but Zeppelin would be amazing...

...and thought you might enjoy this.

I'm a huge fan of GH, but I do actually play. :-)

What am I missing?

You're not missing anything. 100% electric vehicles are where we're going, and it isn't batteries that are going to get us there, either. Hydrogen is way too hard to transport, store, and generate; ethanol requires the same wasteful tanker from here to there that gasoline does, plus puts an additional load on the food supply. Oil itself is far too useful to put in cars as fuel in any form for any longer than we absolutely have to.

A few years, maybe a decade, and ultracaps will simply crush all competing technologies. The distribution network is already there, local storage becomes practical at the same time as storage in the vehicle does, the efficiency gains of producing energy in large quantities is unbeatable, and for that matter, the gains from nuclear production of energy put all other polluting generation methods to shame. And of course, the non-polluting methods - hydro, solar, tidal, geothermal, wind, coupled with neat tricks like pumped storage... make electric a done deal. And of course, if you're a performance freak, there's no more pollution-free, controllable and easily delivered means to put horsepower to the ground than four electric motors. 1000 HP in a car? No technical reason why not. Other than you smearing yourself all over the landscape, that is. And with all that power available, you can still cruise at 30 HP on the freeway. ;-)

It is not necessary, and not a good idea, to consider congenital defects to be the same as incest.

Congenital genetic defects. It is precisely the same thing; and it is a very good (and accurate) idea to compare them. Your argument about gay marriage is even less sound and I have already destroyed it right here.

Gore? Not even close. Gore is an entitlement vector. Like most from the Democrat side of the spectrum, he wants to take the nerd money (and everyone else's money) and spend it on pork; worse yet, he'd push the mommy government even deeper into it's trend of legislating against consensual, victimless, informed actions. He's your 2nd worst nightmare.

Ron Paul is by far the candidate that not only represents the "nerd", but also the actual basis for the government, the constitution. The only thing a president can really do (legitimately) is fool with foreign policy, and Paul isn't the least interested in making war on anyone - check out his positions. If we could get a congress that had actually read and understood the constitution (not to mention a supreme court), then you'd really have something.

But we all know what's going to happen: Middle america will elect Yet Another Corporate Hack from one of the two Corporate Sets of Well Financed Hacks, and nothing will change. It'll be just like the Democrats "taking over congress". Tons of promises, but are we out of Iraq? No. Are there *any* legislative signs we're going to be? No. Do we have any relief from Bush's illegal wiretapping and "signing statements" and pandering to Haliburton and crew? No.

If you really want improvement, cast your vote for Ron Paul. It won't be wasted, because as the Democrats have just shown us, there are no differences between mainstream moneyed candidates... so it won't make a bit of difference where your vote goes if you vote for anyone else. After all, we can't have Bush again. Unless he makes another illegal executive order, of course.

have you watched Battlefield Earth?

Don't watch it. Read it. Like every movie adaptation that ever came out of hollywood, 99% of the content of the source book was left behind. Never assert a literary opinion based on a movie, because you're not being exposed to the book, you're being exposed to a minor, and probably modified, fraction of it.

Having said that, it's quite a long book, as well written as anything else Hubbard ever did, mildly entertaining in an apocalyptic way, and not so much the basis for scientology as a work that uses scientology as basic principles. Which is about what you'd expect, since scientology came first.

The RIAA and the music stores are competing with an illegal movement.

iTunes is illegal? Online CD sales are illegal? Bands offering free downloads of their work are breaking the law? Bands offering direct sales of their work are breaking the law?

These are what are actually killing the record stores. Of the number of sales to be made, they are taking the lion's share because technically speaking, they have the advantages: More customers; larger inventory; centralized distribution; better pricing; lower overhead; ability to sell the customer what they want, instead of one or two songs they want, and ten that aren't worth the energy it took to blow the craters on the CD's surface. iTunes, with the addition of the non-DRMed EMI catalog, will be a perfect source for digital music; they have the features buyers want - preview, track-specific sales, great search, superb in-computer players and portables - and if DRM comes off the rest of the catalog, that'll be the new paradigm for music mega-stores. I'll be buying from iTunes as soon as the DRM goes away.

Another factor is that frankly, a band that has a moderately technical fellow with a good ear can replace the recording studio, the mastering house, the CD replicator up front. A few more skills, and $35/year and they've got a website and no need for the marketing engine that the record companies (sort of) offer. Plus, now they're not trying to compete with a corrupt industry that pushes pop to the exclusion of anything else - so they can create something in a genre other than pop and still find an audience without having to kowtow to the least common denominator with regard to taste (cough.) They can give out - or sell - their CDs at gigs, or simply to friends over coffee, and not one tiny bit of this is illegal - it is just different and it does not create a hole where middlemen such as the RIAA represent can reside; instead, it removes quite a few of said holes.

...and by the way, would you like to listen to one of my free tracks? It is lounge-lizard style guitar noodling. You can download it, stuff it in your music library, give it away, whatever you like. Legally. :-)

Consider a computer: we don't have a specific button for 'launch excel, launch graph wizard, choose scatter chart'. We have to go through menus. That's a *good* thing.

No, actually, I do have a button based interface. I use a Mac; the program comes from the dock. The dock is a series of buttons. I grab tools from an omnipresent tool palette; that's a button based interface. I grab effects from an effects caddy that is a series of buttons that are always there. Direct access all the way, and as a result, I work a good deal faster than anyone who has to go through menus to accomplish the same thing, for instance, in Photoshop or the Gimp. And that, my friend, is what is actually a good thing. Menus are terrible for commonly used operations. Until you've been freed from them, you don't realize how much time they actually cost you.

There are network analyzers and parametric analyzers from the '80's that are just nightmares to use because of the sheer number of buttons they have.

I don't have any trouble with them at all. But then again, I like associating a physical location with a function. Perhaps you just haven't had enough experience with buttons - I've been prodding test gear such as you describe since O-scopes were all tube and 5 MHz was a good upper bandwidth limit for them. :-)

My idea of a perfect interface is my Mackie 32-channel board. Every channel has exactly the same strip of controls; learn one strip, you've learned all 32 channels. That is a lot of real-world controls — over a thousand of them — and one hell of a lot of functionality, and every bit of it is physical - reach, and you have it. To which you can add the controls for the 8 busses and the main section. I've got digital mixers that have what amounts to one (very nice) channel strip and you assign it to the channel you want, but (a) you can't see the settings on any channel but the one that is selected, and (b) there's no physicality to the location of the controls so you can't know "the flute is on channels 1:2 with AUX 3 routed through the 'verb" and look over there and check levels or settings. The cost, of course, is real estate. The Mackie is large; the digital mixers are small. Predictably, given my bias, I make far better recordings with the Mackie.

Menus are better when you don't know what you're doing; they lead you by the nose. And, as you say, they hide things you don't need to see - or at least, people don't think you need to see. My effect caddy based system lets me decide what needs to be in front of me on a button for any one workflow, and that means that to some degree, the interface design is in my hands as an end user - and that's just the way I like it. Other users might prefer something different, and the interface will accommodate them. Predictably, since (as will probably not surprise you) I designed the entire interface system. I don't want my choices to have to be yours, nor do I want yours to have to be mine. I've even got a full set of menus for the button impaired, plus slow old school Select-Then-Apply-Effect modality available. Doesn't hurt to have either one of them, as long as you aren't forced to use them.

Really good interface design can optimize the workflow no matter what you're up to. But a truly optimized workflow won't have you in menu after menu, time after time. Minimal motion, minimal context shifting, physical association with function - these are what make people who use a tool a lot into experts. Ideally, watching someone like that, it should seem like they're flying - bam bam bam bam - through their work, you can't even follow what they're doing. When you consistently see your customers reach that level, you know you've done something right.

G3 (Japan, at least) is available on DVD. Also, HDNET did a G3-ish Satriani / Tony Mcalpine / Eric Johnson concert, which I have locked up in my HD DVR. If you're ever in, or moving through (Amtrack - I'm literally a block from the tracks - or highway #2) the area, you can watch it on my 17 foot diagonal HD system with 7.1 at 130x7.400 watts RMS. I'm in Northeastern Montana. Just use the contact form at blackbeltsystems.com to arrange a visit and I'll "slashdot" your ears, and share it with you - I'm always willing to take an hour off to indulge in some St. Joe. Might even play a Satch cover for you, if you want. There's a studio in the house, too, if you play - I have a decent selection of guitars and basses, and a DTX drumkit. :-)

Nah, projector.

Absolutely agree. No box display can give you even a fraction of the quality a well-planned projection installation can. You go from getting a "that's nice" reaction to your media system to dropped jaws.

There are basically two types of projection systems. One is based on high-temperature, high density LCD panels. The other is based on Texas Instrument's DLP (Digital Light Processing) technology, which places many tiny mirrors on a chip and actually moves them to modulate brightness. Because the mirror can deflect the light entirely off screen, this results in deep, deep blacks. LCDs produce blacks by becoming as opaque as they can, but light still leaks through. Lately, compensating technology in the form of stopping down the lens to aid in darkening the overall projection range in relatively dim scenes has appeared, but this isn't really the same as a system that can actually go from very bright to deep black. Still, LCD projectors look very good, it's just that DLP looks astonishing.

And of course, you'll pay more for DLP — with the better picture, they do charge a premium and no one really has too much to say about it.

Prices seem to be settling at about $3000 for a 1080p system in the coming year; they've been about $5000 during $2006 and $10000 during 2005 for 1920 x 1080, though progressive scan is really just now appearing; 1080i was the top a couple years back.

You can shoot for 720p and really save a huge amount of money, and you still get a fabulous picture. The key here is to find the single largest surface you can dedicate to the projection system and then design around that. My sweetheart and I were looking for a place to remake, so we were looking at old stores, businesses, and so on. We found an 1940's church, and behind the pulpit was a blank wall space that was very close to 16:9 above the chair-rail; to make a long story short, we bought the church, made a home out of it, and we ended up with a display surface that is quite large. Not all projectors will focus on a large surface, so watch out for the spec that tells you how many inches they'll service, in focus. When you see 200 or 300 inches, you know you're good to go.

If you can't dedicate a wall, then a drop-down screen is just a couple of hundred bucks and you can easily get them in that price range up to 100 inches with remotes that command them to drop down.

There are downsides. The bulbs for the projector last a few thousand hours, and they dim over time. While life is advertised as 5000 hours or so, you'll probably be thinking about replacing them at closer to about half of that. And they are relatively expensive; typically several hundred dollars. On the other hand, if you put a dime in a jar for every hour you watch, you'll have "bulb money" all ready to go when the time comes. A dime an hour for the best home theater experience I can possibly have isn't too much for me; I don't use it to watch broadcast television more than a couple hours a month. We watch lots of movies and we spend a fair amount of time gaming in hi-def.

Here is a shot of my system with my sweetheart at the lower left for scale. You can see how close the wall space is to 16:9... we totally lucked out.

Stop doing your research in Christian publications (yes, most dictionaries meet that standard... especially English dictionaries.) Do your research in the atheist community. The definitions of Christians applied to atheists are inherently invalid and biased.

Now, instead of the little "sound bites" you get from these dictionaries, do some real work: A good starting point would be if you read George H. Smith's scholarly "Atheism - The case against God", 340 plus-pages of actual research, exposition and background. And of course, this work includes the correct definition of atheism (on page 7.)

Or here, or here, or here (though as usual, in Wikipedia, this article is badly tainted by the opinions and errors of non-atheists... it still lays out the idea and a close approximation of the boundaries), or here, or here, or here, or here, or here. And in tons more, just go google it. On the one hand, you will find the atheist community, repeatedly explaining what the situation actually is. On the other, you will find religionists (and many agnostics), trying to apply a set of outlooks to a set of people who do not agree that they hold said outlook.

You'll note that these sources pretty much all treat the subject in some detail, explaining not only what is, but why. These sources come from the atheist community, and when an atheist tells you what they stand for, you're a lot better off taking them at their word and intent than you are trying to fit some religionist's preconceptions on top of what they actually think. But it is, after all, your call. You certainly won't be alone; religionists (and again, many "agnostics") try really hard to misconstrue the atheist position. it is pretty obvious why they do so. In the case of the religionists, they want to apply the idea of faith to the entire set of atheists, when this only applies to the hard atheist subset. They do this in order to try and demonstrate that "faith" is "required" to take the atheist view, when the actual situation is that this argument only applies to the hard athiests — of whom, by the way, I have met very few. In the case of agnostics, they do this so as to try to stake out an imaginary middle ground between belief and lack of belief. There is no such middle ground, and agnostics are upset by this idea because, I think, they're trying to avoid the issue. This can always be resolved by a simple question: Do you believe in a god or gods, or not? The answer is "I do" or "I don't", and the answer clearly defines one who embraces theism (theist) and one who does not embrace theism (atheist.)

I am atheist. I hold absolutely no belief in a god or gods, nor do I ever expect to, nor do I ever expect to run into any evidence to the contrary that would cause me to embrace the idea that the idea of a god or gods rises above the standard of any other fairy tale. Given the complete and utter lack of evidence made available to me to date, my confidence that the idea of a god or gods is a completely human construct is extremely high. None of this is disbelief. It is lack of belief. I find the cup of evidence to be empty. Like any assertion for which no evidence can be found, asking for belief is asking far too much. Is the idea interesting? Certainly. Is it entertaining? Yes, that too. Is it woven throughout history? Yes. Has it affected the course of human lives? Sure. Should I therefore pay attention to it? Indubitably. Might it affect my own life? Yes indeed. Does any of this make t

Am I the only one who thinks Justin Long seems like a nice kid who plays a good straightman... ?

Yes, I think you might be. Or at least, close. The guy is amazingly annoying, condescending, and not particularly representative of anyone I can think of in this role except himself. He fails to represent the spirit of the machine's users, which is pretty much one of independent thinking and an appreciation of fine design for the most part; and he fails to represent the machine itself in the sense that there is no clue from these commercials that the Mac is truly much easier to use at the top level, yet far more sophisticated, flexible, extensible and secure underneath. PC users can come out of the woodwork and scream about that characterization, and they probably will, but the fact is, it is bang-on true. Windows is so far behind any version of *nix that I can't see it ever catching up in terms of flexibility, no matter how many times they patch it and give it a new name. Now, if you want to argue that Long is prettier than Hodgman, I can't really go there, and I'll have to leave that in your lap, as it were. Guys don't send me "pretty" signals. But Macs do. :)

Maybe Aishwara Rai? Now that is one exotic, beautiful, sexy, and smart human being.

Truly, Apple needs better advertising people. Mac ads are just terrible. I wasn't even remotely sold until I got a Mac in my hands, because the ads transfer no information whatsoever. Just fluff. Which I have no use for. And the Mac is not fluff. Not by any means. Yet that's how they try and sell it. And with Long... they don't even do that very well. :(

And indeed it seems you haven't been convinced - even though someone rose from the dead.

Oh, for Pete's sake. Let's be perfectly clear here. If indeed anyone rose from the dead, it happened about 2000 years ago, didn't happen in front of me, wasn't recorded in any contemporaneous documents of the regime in power at the time, nor by any contemporary historian, and is only described as such by a book that was put together from codexes that date back to about 300 years after the fact. To top it off, we know of no such event, and our knowledge of the universe says it can't happen. This reasonably leads me to the position of doubt. I'm not doubting because I'm just a crank, I'm doubting because there is an extraordinary event here, and no proof any kind, much less extraordinary. If someone rises from the dead in front of me after three days of rigor mortis, putrifaction, and zero life signs of any kind, I will be duly impressed.

Perhaps having sent his son to die for you

If the story is true (which I do not believe to be the case), God sent his son to hang about on earth for thirty years, then gave him the best seat in heaven, after having him suffer a few days of moderate-level torture. For just one of many instances: Many Americans have sent their sons to die, where they ended up in the hellholes of Vietnam's POW camps, where those fellows endured being stabbed with dung-encrusted pungi sticks, maimed, beaten, caged, starved, diseased, mentally abused and worse, for years at a stretch. After which these fellows came home (well, those who survived) and were pretty well ignored by both the government and most of their fellow citizens, if they weren't actively reproached for having done what they were told to do. On a scale of one to ten, where let's call prisoner of war service a 7, I'd say Jesus's reported troubles rate about a two. If god wants to impress me with a sacrifice, then he can get down here and clean up some of the messes he's let go on without interference, such as birth defects, tsunmamis, regular failure of the female reproductive tract (with the side effect of killing the mother), Hitler, Cancer, Pol Pot, plagues, Stalin, the Spanish and Papal Inquisitions, the Crusades and so forth.

As a story, god's "sacrifice" of Jesus lands with a dull thud because (a) it was no sacrifice, it was a very short though admittedly annoying interval with a HUGE reward, and (b) human sacrifice dwarfs it on every level. By the numbers, and by intensity, and by the degree of what was hoped to be accomplished by many of the sacrifices made by humans. True story: I had a relative who was burned to death going into a burning home after a little girl's kitten. He tossed the kitten out of an upstairs window, but he didn't make it out himself. He was an atheist; I'd say his sacrifice dwarfs that of Christ's, even if, no especially if, the crucifiction story is true. My relative burned to death and according you and yours, he's going to suffer for all eternity. Christ, in the meantime, is where? At god's right hand.

Well, the sovereign God responds to that with a bit of a poser. He does do some things specially for people on an individual basis [answering prayer] but the catch is you already need to have faith to ask in faith.

I afraid you're ruffling my feathers here, because of all the Christian mythos, this is some of the most offensive tripe that hits the fan.

Your god is too something-or-other to help out, for instance, the most honorable, giving, self-sacrificing atheist who wishes for a child to be saved from cancer (or saves a little girl's kitten, as I related above); but he'll help you out for any random thing because you "have faith." I would not want anything to do with your god. Your god doesn't meet my standards for a decent hu

...my local church is not greedy. In fact, everyone I know is as selfless as you get. Hypocrisy does not occur - everyone practices what they preach.

This is why I prefaced that remark with "various brands of"... I am well aware that each of those factors ranges from 0 to 100% across the spectrum. Any organization that meets the standard you describe (religious or otherwise), has done something at least a bit unusual. Good luck with that.

And nobody exerts political control over me. In fact, no political comment is passed and everyone makes their own mind up.

Hmm. So, no part of your church's teachings or matters discussed as consequences of the sect's various teachings exerts pressure upon your political outlook, that is, how you would force others to behave through political means; you are in no way influenced, for instance, to vote for legislation that would control other's sexuality, ability to marry based on sex, usurp their right to make decisions about their own bodies (I have abortion in mind here, but this extends to many other issues such as recreational drug use, suicide, S&M, contraception, pre-marital sexual activity, polygamy and polyandry), debilitate science curriculums with fact-free supposition masquerading as theory... Is that right?

It bothers me that the Catholic "church" causes other - real - Christians to be reviled so much because of certain decidedly non-Christian actions.

I wouldn't be so quick to lay it all at the doorstep of the Catholics. While certainly a major force for many of these things, lots of other Christian organizations are also highly active, as are other religions entirely (it wasn't Christians that flew into the World Trade Center, for instance, nor was it Christians who dug people's brains out for sacrificial purposes in what is now Mexico and South America... it is no accident that religion is the term used when referring to the source of many of society's problems, past, present, and future.)

In fact, if you want a guideline as to what a real Christian should be like, I suggest you read the first 6 books of the New Testament. You can then compare that to any of the "Christians" you believe to be, from what I gather from your comment, essentially cultists. I'd be extremely surprised if any one of them matches.

Well, as it happens, I'm somewhat of an amateur scholar as regards both Christianity and the new testament. So I'm not all that unskilled at seeing where cult-like behavior arises, and I have read the first six books, as well as the rest and a whole slew of related material, many more than six times.

The problem, as always, is that what you, as a self-identified Christian and member of what you consider to be a strictly Christian group, call Christian behavior is just as likely to be laughed out of town by the next batch of Christians, based on how they define Christian behavior.

There is the confusion that arises by the difference between the old covenant and the new covenant — I can cite you many examples where that or that issue is justified by examples from the OT, rather than the NT; there is the human interpretation of the books to deal with; there is human distortion (both ways) of what the NT says; and of course, there is the very broad set of questions about what is metaphor, what is historical fact, what is outright instruction, and what portion of it all, if any, is fiction... all complicated by a huge misunderstanding among laypersons about the level of certainty we can have based on the lack of an accountable historical audit trail for the text.

In the end, I have decided that religion in general is a very bad influence, and I don't want my kids exposed to new ideas about it while they are still somewhat innocent without my being presen