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If it's OK for the media lobbies to steal our public domain works from us in perpetuity, then by all means let's even the score.

Once more into the breach for Baron Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1841 & 1842:

I will only say this, that if the measure before us should pass, and should produce one-tenth part of the evil which it is calculated to produce, and which I fully expect it to produce, there will soon be a remedy, though of a very objectionable kind. Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers. At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot.

You'll find a commentary on the first speech with references on Kuro5hin.

And in a final bit of irony you can buy these 160 year old public-domain speeches printed in a paperback book for $21.24 from Amazon.com. So there is even no need for long onerous copyright if there's profit to be made in public domain works.

Assume I've been blind from birth. Explain the color red to me. It's inexplicable; there is no referent, no common ground. This may help explain it.

I first explain light, eyes, wavelengths, and create a small device with a camera, which vibrates or makes sounds or whatever in accordance with the colour the camera is seeing - this would allow the blind person to identify that Red exists. This would give a reproducable way for them to tell that it exists. Just as I can't see infra-red light I can still test that exists. Give me your test for God.

No, it's not a matter of religion. If you told me you were at McMurtry Station, I would tend to believe you despite the fact that since so few are there, odds are you aren't either, but since I know of no reason to lie about where you are, I would accept the statement so long as there was no proof to the contrary.

Religion only exists if you believe in it. Why should it be treated differently? Would you believe me if I told you I was on the moon? How about in a magical land where everything was perfect all the time?

Religion doesn't just ask you to accept something without adequate proof, it asks you to accept something which contradicts our reality and makes vast claims, all without any proof.

I love the vague terminology - God touched you? Explain exactly what that means.

Assume I've been blind from birth. Explain the color red to me. It's inexplicable; there is no referent, no common ground. This may help explain it.

If you expect me to treat it differently because it's religion, or suspend logic for no reason, then no.

No, it's not a matter of religion. If you told me you were at McMurtry Station, I would tend to believe you despite the fact that since so few are there, odds are you aren't either, but since I know of no reason to lie about where you are, I would accept the statement so long as there was no proof to the contrary.

Prgmr.com owner Luke Crawford has some diary entries at k5 where he talks about his business...

I've been happy customer of his for the past 2 years, so this comment is a vote for Luke.

That depends, is OpenBSD backdoored?

If so, how far does the 'taint' run throughout the open source community? I recall another incident with Fedora and some suspected tampering by a possibly compromised person with a 'conflict of interest', so to speak. Of course I'm just voicing opinionated speculation here, nothing more.

It's true. My gasoline-powered cars catch fire all the time.

I've only had one catch fire, and it wasn't even in a wreck. The difference between gasoline cars catching fire after a wreck and electric cars catching fire after a wreck is that the gas car will burn immediately, while it will take a week for the electric car. Nobody has died in an electric car fire (yet), but a lot of people have died in gasoline fires. Look at Pintos and Crown Voctorias.

The creep who posted the parent comment is most likely Kuro5hin's modus, who has been stalking me over the Internet for two or three years.

The reason he knows that I am mentally ill is that I devote a great deal of time and effort to educating the public about mental illness, my own as well as that of others.

For some reason that I am as yet unable to fathom, my colleagues at Kuro5hin feel that it is flatly impossible for me to work as a self-employed software engineer, despite the fact that I persisted with coding as a career because I found that it accomodates my condition far better than my original career choice of Physics did.

I was never actually hospitalized for fixating on, threatening or stalking anyone at all.

The single mother with a sick child happens to be one of my oldest and closest friends. I am just about the only real friend that poor woman has ever had in her entire life.

We met in 1986 or so. At the time she introduced herself to me as "Crystal". I had the idea that her nickname was due to her being quite strikingly beautiful and amazingly talented, as well as being one of the most intelligent people I have ever met in my entire life.

A year or so later I happened to refer to her as Crystal, but she asked me not to do so anymore as her nick was short for "Crystal Methamphetamine", to which she was horribly addicted for many years.

She was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder when she was in high school. I have ADHD too, and so I have to take a completely legal, prescription form of Amphetamine with the brand name of Adderall to have any hope of providing for myself.

I've known a whole lot of drug addicts over the years, and so am quite vividly aware of what would eventually become of me if I ever yielded to the quite tempting impulse to take more than my psychiatrist's recommended dosage of three ten milligram tablets per day.

But because Crystal was, when diagnosed with ADHD, quite addicted to Cocaine, she was completely unable to find a doctor willing to prescribe any manner of stimulant medication for her condition.

There is an antidepressant-like medicine called Strattera that is licensed for ADHD now, but it had not yet been developed when Crystal was in high school.

Despite my never having been addicted to anything, the use of stimulants for the treatment is quite unfairly stigmatized, so I sometimes have trouble obtaining the Adderall which a nationally recognized expert on Adult ADHD was completely convinced I needed to take. This I was on Stattera for a few months earlier this year, but it was not effective in any way whatsoever. I did not notice any effect from it of any sort. I did give it some time to take effect; then my p-doc put me back on Adderall after I complained that if I had to stay on Strattera, I'd be homeless in no time at all.

While I met Crystal at UC Santa Cruz, she had also been accepted to study pre-medicine at Yale, with the intention of becoming a surgeon. At UCSC, she graduated with Thesis Honors in Microbiology.

I've know this poor woman since 1986. She has to be the most fucked-up, miserable dysfunctional human being I have ever met in my whole entire life. Having been in a whole bunch of mental hospitals over the years, I've met quite a few crazy people, but Crystal tops them all.

Crystal knew very well that there was no way she could survive UCSC's Microbiology course, let alone do well in her studies, unless she could get medication for her ADHD. It happens that Methamphetamine works even better than Adderall for ADHD, and in fact is available in prescription form, completely legally. Provided you keep a lid on the dosage, Methamphetamine - the very same chemical compound that Crystal Meth is composed of - really is the best treatment there is for ADHD.

Crystal's family was once quite wealthy, but for reasons I won't go into, things didn't work out well for her father's business

Some guy over at Kuro5hin who I know only as modus got the idea that I am some manner of dangerous criminal psychopath because I was so inconsiderate of his easily-wounded feeling to point out that, after two decades of working as a coder, I was weary of the work and wanted to change careers by going back to school to learn how to compose symphonies.

If you look at his comment and diary history at his user info page I linked above, you'll find that the vast majority of them are focussed entirely on me, quite commonly telling all manner of bald-faced lies about me.

He want to all manner of trouble and expense in hopes of making me completely unemployable, by running Google AdWords Select ads that pointed to the rather sarcastic diary I posted in which I requested that my colleagues at Kuro5hin stop giving me crap for not having ever shipped a Free Software product I've been tinkering with over the years. I have always made it crystal-clear that the real value of Ogg Frog was its website, because of its informative articles as well as its opinion pieces, with the Ogg Frog software being meant mainly to attract readers to those articles.

I wrote them all in 2005 and 2006, so I cannot possibly imagine why anyone would have cause to complain. I won't release Ogg Frog because it has some severe bugs in it; because the product is targeted towards naive music fans, I don't want to subject them to the usability problems, crashes, and end-user data loss that are so commonly found in Open Source products that are "Released Early, Released Often".

While I can see the value of having my code inspected by "Many Eyeballs", the two I have are sufficient.

I don't have a problem with some troll being so obsessed with me that he has nothing better to do with his sorry existence than lie about me from the basement of his mother's house.

What I do have a problem with is that this guy devotes vast quantities of effort to discovering where I live or what company I am consulting for. Whenever he is able to figure either of those out, he blasts news of his incredible discovery All Over God's Creation.

For this reason, for a couple of years now I've been very quiet about where I live, and I never, ever mention anywhere who I am working for. When he pointed out that he was following my updates to my resume on my website, I removed my resume entirely then replaced it with a redirect to a general description of my company's consulting services.

He has the idea that he's just being funny in the way so many Internet trolls think they are. If he had not, at this point, kept this crap up for two or three years I might believe him. But by now I feel I really do have reason to be concerned that this crime I committed by pointing out that I want to follow my passion rather than working as a corporate whore anymore is so serious, that if he knew how to physically locate me, he might come after me with a gun.

Don't think I'm just being paranoid. That kind of thing happens All The God Damn Time. I recall as if it were yesterday the incident in which some Silicon Valley engineer for reasons I don't recall brought a gun to work one day and slaughtered seven of his colleagues.

It was at one time possible to obtain personal information from the California Department of Motor Vehicles database. I don't think it was public record, exactly, but somehow some stalker was able to get his victim's home address from the DMV, then showed up at her place and murdered her.

This of course made headlines all over Creation, so now the California DMV database is locked down much more tightly, but I would not be at all surprised if all of the other government databases which have not yet been used to obtain the street address of your next murder victim are not so secure.

In the US, banks, credit card companies and the like use the account holder's mother's maiden name as a form of identification. Given the divorce rate in the state, as wel

It was covered at Kuro5hin. A Slashdot editor was modding the post down in spite of positive user moderations, and anyone who replied to it was flagged (I don't remember the name of the flag in Slashcode). People started referring to it as "The Post." In all these years, I've never seen the moderation controls on Slashdot because I've never gotten mod points (not that I care to).

Yeah, because Microsoft hasn't been caught threatening OEMs over selling non-Windows equipped PCs... oh, wait.

Except that since then we've seen the largest computer manufacturers in the world ship Linux-based PCs, Dell did it (and then canned it for lackluster sales), Best Buy tried it as well and even HP have recently announced that all of their desktop PCs will have the ability to run a webOS variant. So nice try, but that's the past, not the present.

Better terms (or perhaps any terms) for OEMs who wish to sell PCs pre-installed with Windows.

So what about all of the motherboard manufacturers, you know the ones who actually control the secureboot feature, you think MS are going to pay off every motherboard manufacturer?

Yes, Microsoft can, has, and will either pay manufacturers, or threaten and coerce them, to forbid any viable competition in the PC desktop OS market. They've done it before. It has been shown to work. The paltry fines they incur when they get caught indicate that it will continue to work, and the legal aspects simply become a financial aspect to "doing business as usual".

That has happened with some major OEMs, but do you actually think they could do such a thing to the entire PC market and then the entire motherboard market?

So none of those in congress grew up with computers or really understand those who did.

You don't have to grow up with a thing to understand it. I didn't grow up with computers, computers grew up with me. Yes, since I'm a nerd I had a computer in 1982 when I could finally afford a cheap one, but computers and the internet have been pretty much a part of most people's lives for over a decade now. Most of today's geezers are every bit as comfortable with computers as you kids are.

It's just that politicians are in it for the campaign contribution bribery. They're not ignorant, they're dishonest.

Why is that unlkely?

Because it could have been done (much easier, since Microsoft's influence over the hardware vendors was far greater) twenty years ago and wasn't.

Because it's an additional layer of complexity and support for hardware manufacturers and vendors, for little to no benefit.

Because it would fall afoul of the same antitrust law that got them into trouble with per-PC licensing of DOS & Windows in the '80s and '90s.

Why do you trust these people?

I trust hardware vendors to not go out of their way actively preventing sales of their product, for little to no benefit.

It was done in the past, and it is currently being done. Microsoft has gotten sneakier about not letting anyone in on their little secret, but Microsoft requires OEMs to install Windows as the only OS on any PC with Windows pre-installed.

The hardware vendors don't have an option, because not bending over for Microsoft would (as you put it) "actively prevent sales of their products". If they don't do what Microsoft says, then their license to sell Microsoft products goes away... and Microsoft still owns the vast majority of the market.

Why is that unlikely?

Because there's no reason to believe it would be done.

Yeah, because Microsoft hasn't been caught threatening OEMs over selling non-Windows equipped PCs... oh, wait.

What makes you think Microsoft won't offer better terms to companies who refuse to let other operating systems run on their hardware?

Why do you trust these people?

Better terms to companies for what? And what companies?

Better terms (or perhaps any terms) for OEMs who wish to sell PCs pre-installed with Windows.

You think Microsoft is going to pay all manufacturers to lock out competitors and that this is going to be seen as legal in anti-trust law?

Yes, Microsoft can, has, and will either pay manufacturers, or threaten and coerce them, to forbid any viable competition in the PC desktop OS market. They've done it before. It has been shown to work. The paltry fines they incur when they get caught indicate that it will continue to work, and the legal aspects simply become a financial aspect to "doing business as usual".

Nice conspiracy theory, bit too light on any kind of basis though.

It's not a conspiracy theory, it's established fact.

Breed with the cheerleader (football captain). That is all.

FTFY. "Fuck and leave" works best if you are male—just ask Genghis Khan.

and only for drugs on the market for less than half the average human lifetime.

That'd be like extending patents from the current 20 years to 40 years. Did Cher tell you to do this?

Indeed. I documented our lack of what were formerly our rights six years ago.

False, though there is a grain of truth to what you say. The BSDL dates from 1988, MS Winsock dates from 1990 and does in fact include BSD licensed code. However, you are correct in that MS paid to license the code. It's just that some of the code they licensed from Spider was built on BSD licensed code. By 1994 MS had rewritten Winsock from scratch and it no longer included BSD licensed code, however there was no reason to rewrite the associated utilities like ftp, rcp and rsh so to this day, MS still ships BSD licensed code.

And the first things we'd recognize as computers were analog/mechanical devices. ... unless you count abacuses, of course.

Er, the first things we'd recognize as computers were really primitive -- they used vacuum tubes (discounting abacuses, slide rules, and mechanical calculators).

I didn't grow up with computers, computers grew up with me.

Considering that the Univac had 5,000 vacuum tubes that did 1,000 calculations per second, that's pretty impressive. A musical Hallmark card has more computing power.

If ENIAC was a computer (and I posit that by today's standards, it wasn't) then my first computer was a slide rule.

Those of us who are old enough remember the "portions copyright the regents of the University of California Berkeley" (or words to that effect) that used to be part of the Windows legal declarations from 95 onward. It has been considered common knowledge that their pre-Vista TCP/IP stack was taken from BSD, as was their FTP executable

The "common knowledge" here is an euphemism for myth. Back in Windows NT 3.1 (!) MS licensed a TCP/IP stack from Spider. That *may* have been based partially or entirely on the BSD stack of the time. However, as of Windows NT 3.5 and Windows 95 that stack had been replaced by Microsofts own stack. Some of the utilities (ftp client, ping?) were still the original BSD utilities, or based on them. The network stack has not been BSD since Windows NT 3.1.

If you're going to claim otherwise, you should offer some citations please.

here you go: https://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2001/6/19/05641/7357

Nope, the "from the ground up" rewrite was for Vista, although they had previously partially rewritten the stack for Win 2K and for XP I believe.

Incorrect, it had been previously rewritten for Windows NT 3.5. See above.

But if you were paying attention back during the interminable Vista beta process, you would've remembered the noise about those old TCP/IP vulnerabilities, solved long ago, that Microsoft re-introduced with their new stack.

Citation? or should I write

If you're going to claim otherwise, you should offer some citations please"

Stupid typo!

https://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2001/6/19/05641/7357

Virtually every other OS out there, including Windows NT, just adopted the BSD stack,

Nope, never did, never will. First it was a port of the Spider Systems stack and then it was replaced with something homegrown. FWIW, I know the Spider stack pretty well from a long-defunct HPC unix variant I used to support (actually, I've tried hard to forget it, Spider was a real PITA).

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/6/19/05641/7357

Is that you, Zombie Tyler Durden?

the answer was done to perfection before:

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/4/25/1345/03329

None of the bill of rights are.

Well, I know I'm a whole lot more sucessful with the ladies than when I was young. As to fashion, when I was a teenager with my short hair and glasses, I wasn't the least bit sucessful. Back then, few young people wore glasses. Mostly, young people didn't wear glasses and old people did. These days, almost all the young folks have specs, but the geezers have had cataract surgery that negates the need. With the new implants you don't even need reading glasses.

I attribute the myopia to too much reading at too young an age. Today's young people grew up with computers, while computers grew up with me.

If nerds aren't fashionable, why do so many here seem be nerd wannabes?

Two hints to success with the ladies -- self confidence and eye contact. a decent haircut and a goatee don't hurt, either.

As to technology, it was always fashionable. The difference between now and then is just that the technology was a lot more primitive, but everybody wanted a big twenty five inch color TV and a good stereo.

I think what you have then is kuro5hin.org.

Unless you calculate a extremely big income or a absurdly low interest

As I understand the model, the desire to keep the exclusive rights to adaptations in media developed after the work was first published does make the interest absurdly low. For example, even if a book was written before video games existed, an author('s estate) might still expect exclusive rights to video game adaptations. See Dr. Seuss Enterprises' pro-Bono amicus brief.

Suppose you could get 25% more water pumped for the same amount of electricity, or generate 25% more electricity with the same amount of steam?

That's not much of a saving. And it probably is not petroleum powered.

The benefits add up.

An engine is a pump is a compressor. MYT-pump uses 25% less electricity to send water to a power plant, MYT-steam-expander (replaces turbines) generates 25% more electricity with the same amount of steam, MYT-compressors on the millions of business and home AC units use 25% less electricity to cool the same amount of space, and each of the millions of refridgerator compressors everywhere use 25% less power.

For the record, I made up "25%" (pulled it out of my..., if you prefer). I did ask Mr. Morgado 1-2 years ago if he had any numbers about how much better his invention was as a pump that other currently-available technology, but he didn't have numbers for that application.

But they have said a MYT-engine would power a car for well over 80+ miles on a gallon of gas, and that the design approaches the maximum theoretical efficiency for an engine.

Supply never exceeds demand for very long in an oil market. Where would the oil be stored?

I should have said "production capacity" instead of "supply". If demand suddenly falls, the oil will be stored exactly where it is: in the ground.

(p.s. good to see that you're still alive. :)

Kuro5hin, once touted as a Slashdot alternative, was a pretty big name in social news and communal blogging back around 2000. (I was interested of the site because I'm fairly interested of the intersection of tech and politics. Then 9/11 happened, and as time went by, K5 became more about politics and less about tech. Yawn.) Basically, people could submit stories to sections, and they could be voted by registered users. If they get enough +1's to go past the threshold, they get posted. With enough "+1 FP" votes, the posts also go to the front page.

Academics can contribute plenty of general subject knowledge that isn't original research. And they're unlikely to want to contribute original research, because they'd rather get it published in a journal, where it counts for boosting their career. Once it's published there, it can be cited, so it's fair game for Wikipedia.

I think this is absolutely the case. All this discussion about publish-or-perish or rewards is completely disngenuous. Sure, academics want their own work published, and they couldn't get past Wikipedia's original work prohibition, but academics want correct information out there just as much as anybody and hate seeing stubs or bad info and would happily contribute.

A much more plausible explanation is simply that academia moves slowly and ponderously, and won't really change to accommodate anything new until long after it's established in society at large. The generation that has grown up with the internet are still mostly undergrads and PhD students (like me). Come back in a decade or two, and I think there'll be a lot more experts contributing to Wikipedia.

I think just about all these people have retired.

No the real problem with wikipedia is that they have ALWAYS been hostile to contributions by experts, like Fox News repelling climatogists. TFA mentions Citizenpedia, remember Wikipedia had TWO founders, one of whom got so disgusted with the anti-expert atmosphere he forked the project. His project didn't become popular, probably because 1) Wikipedia is always at the top of Google's searches, 2) Wikipedia is full of the cruft the public demands, like Anime, American Idol, and the aforementioned professional wrestlers which even the editors want to get rid of but can't keep up, and 3) because of 2), see 1) again.

Citizenpedia failed, but Wikipedia's still broken. So we get Scholarpedia. And then it's still broken. So we get Knol. And Wikipedia is still broken, people know it's broken, but it's at the top of the searches. The only reliable way to get an expert to contribute to an article and have it not get reverted is for an editor to plaster a "This topic needs attention from an expert" which doesn't happen that often. And even then, the expert's contribution will be "fixed" and "improved" until it's as factually accurate as your typical newspaper's sci/med reporting i.e. wrong (see any reporting in the last month about radiation).

Wikipedia will never improve it's reliability until Jimmy Wales and his cabal of editors who treat it as their own personal sandbox are given the heave-ho. Which isn't going to happen, because it IS their own personal sandbox.

What, citation needed? Anything from Sanger will do. Here's one from the relevant era: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/30/142458/25

The list of highly questionable if not outright illegal activities is very long:

You can start here with "A History of Anticompetitive Behavior and Consumer Harm"
http://www.ecis.eu/documents/Finalversion_Consumerchoicepaper.pdf

and then move on to a catalog of their attacks on standards:
http://www.grokdoc.net/index.php/Dirty_Tricks_history

and then any of these:
Illegal tying: http://www.ecis.eu/documents/ECISPressStatementonOperaSO1.pdf
Unethical marketing: http://www.nearsoft.com/blog/MS-test.html
Antitrust: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/600488.stm

Or these:
http://slashdot.org/story/00/05/02/158204/Kerberos-PACs-And-Microsofts-Dirty-Tricks
http://www.technologyevangelist.com/2007/02/microsoft_dirty_tric_1.html
http://techrights.org/2008/12/01/leaked-oem-vista-ad-incentives/
http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/57261/index.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/368660.stm
http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=2005010107100653
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/06/08/23/1251210/Microsoft-Admonished-by-US-District-Court-Judge
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-tried-to-muck-with-anti-linux-facts/235
http://www.zdnet.com/news/fact-and-fiction-in-the-microsoft-sco-relationship/139743
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/10/23/13219/110
http://lproven.livejournal.com/102128.html
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7654

the first one was cool for the 1990's when computers were still kind of new

Bullshit. Computers are even older than I am, and the first CGI in a full length Hollywood movie was in 1982. That's probably before you were even born.

I see a lot of ad hominem in your post and zero worthwhile discussion.

Here, I'll give you some more to think about in return:

Larry Sanger on Wikipedia's anti-expert bias and culture via Kuro5hin.

Confession of a former wikipedia gamer (via Archive.org because his website no longer exists).

Journal of a former wikipedia admin - great stuff here documenting how "gaming the system" by non-admins and admins alike works, including how organized groups work very hard to ensure that they pick off or drive off those of differing opinions "one by one" to ensure that "consensus" can never change (see the "Lie #2: Nobody new ever comes to Wikipedia" section).

Cites and Insights carries a long history of articles on the subject.

The underlying flaw with Wikipedia is exactly as Jason Scott posited, your ungrounded ad hominem attacks notwithstanding. It is comprised primarily of, and run by, people who have created an alternate language, an alternate political scheme, and an insular and closed circle into which "breaking in" is a matter of proving that you can waste hours upon hours upon hours of time chasing "edit count", learning to speak the acronym-code, sucking up to the most abusive of people when they do something that anyone else objects to and calling for the objectors to be banned.

Once upon a time, Wikipedia had a bunch of "guilds." Most of them have been cleansed, but ancillary "subpages" remain and are still indexed. Shi'a Guild, Sunni Guild, Israeli Guild, Muslim Guild, Deletionist Guild, Preservationist Guild, Guild of Copy Editors, and on and on. You'll notice most of them have vanished, along with membership pages.

Do you think they actually vanished? No. But as per "WP:CANVAS", which forbids "organized" editing, they vanished from Wikipedia. Which is to say, nothing changed except that they now organize in private e-mail lists and IRC channels rather than out in the open. You can still see the same behavior to this day; hit an article one of them is "protecting", and you'll have the rest of the "guild" swarming you in minutes.

The same's true for Wikipedia admins - the more corrupt, the worse. The old Durova hit list affair hasn't slowed them down, because there are at least a dozen (probably more than 25) email lists just like it where administrators "coordinate" their actions behind the scenes. Page 2 of the article does a great job analyzing the paranoid-delusional aspects of a "committed" wikipedia-admin's personality and actions.

Plenty of former wikipedia admins have seen the light.

A St. Louis radio station, KSHE, is the first FM stereo rock station dating back to the late sixties (I don't remember the date, but they became my favorite station the first night they aired as KSHE-95.

From the start they played album sides, whole albums, etc, moreso when they were new than now; the 7th Day show, when they play seven full CDs uncut and uninterrupted on Sundays, is the only remnant.

Years later I was married and going to college and KSHE played Ted Nugent's new album, Stranglehold. I recorded my copy off the air. Mind you, this was decades ago before anything was digital.

My then-wife and I went to a bar in Wood River that always had great bands, cheap drinks, and no cover charge. The band took a break and we went to the car to smoke a joint (again, this was back in the stone age).

I may have been the first person ever to put big speakers in a car, and had the hatchback popped open with Stranglehold blasting.

It attracted the band, who were amazed that I had a copy of this long-awaited album two full weeks before it was available in a record store. The whole damned band piled into my Vega for more pot.

A memorable night. But needless to say, I didn't have to buy a copy of that album, or a lot of other albums that KSHE played before they were available.

I still tape stuff off the radio, only now I use a computer rather than tape. You usually get a better quality rip than you can download, legal or illegal, and the legal piracy is a lot less trouble than the illegal downloads.

If you want top-40 music, just plug your radio into your computer and sample for a couple of hours. You'll usually get the entire 40 songs on the list, and it's a matter of a few minutes to cut them into singles and convert to MP3.

Stupid record lables...

Maybe. In theory you might get a scaled down bare bones Linux to run, but even so you would be hard pressed to run any programs with it. Vaccuum tubes were replaced by transistors in the '50s and '60s, which in turn were largely replaced by ICs in the '60s and '70s. A single vaccuum tube preforms the same functionn as a single transistor. The Z80 CPU chip, which came out in 1976, had 8,000 transistors, more than twice the tubes of this entire computer.

The Z80 processes around 40k instructions per second, compared to EDSAC's 650 IPS. That's sixty times as fast as the EDSAC. Imagine how long it would take just to boot!

As I noted in Growing Up with Computers, UNIVAC, a more powerful computer with 5200 vaccuum tubes that first shipped the year I was born, was less powerful than a Hallmark Greeting card.

The mechanism for pheromones was unknown until recently. Just because Science doesn't currently know how it works doesn't mean that it doesn't exist anyways.

In the end, you build a consensus by presenting enough evidence that no one can argue with.

What's interesting about the ESP experiments are how the experimenters' beliefs influence the experiment. If someone in the room believes that ESP ain't possible, the experiment won't work nearly as well as if the participants are neutral or supportive of the proposition.

This makes it impossible to build a consensus. Those who "don't believe" precognition of any sort is possible do not experience it in their day-to-day lives, whereas those who do experience it regularly.

Most people's future-seeing abilities usually take place in the dream state. Scoffers tend to forget their dreams, and are very good at ignoring their 'gut feelings'. A few months back I had a dream about someone getting a cat. Immediately upon awakening I knew who it was, but then promptly forgot. A week or two later my new girlfriend told me about having a "profound change in her life" over the weekend. Here's the diary I posted:

My friend had gone out hiking/camping by herself over the weekend. At one point in the middle of the high desert she reached a fork in the road, and stopped to decide whether to turn or continue on her path. She got out of the car, and heard a noise from the brush. "Kitty?"

It was so. A little kitten came out of the bush, looked terrified for a second, then ran straight for her. There were no dwellings for miles. She'd been trying to lure in a stray cat from her neighborhood. Kitty found himself a new home - I wonder how he got to be in just the right place at just the right time.

-Prophetic Dreams

People who are interested in precognition would do well to get Ingo Swann's Your Nostradamus Factor. Here's the opening paragraphs:

Your Nostradamus Factor, by Ingo Swann

Chapter 1: Jumping The Time Barrier

Like many others, I've had good reasons during my life to assume that the future can be seen. But if I had any doubt it would have vanished as a result of an astonishing forty-five seconds when I found myself in Detmold, then in West Germany, in the spring of 1988.

Detmold is near the beautiful Teutoburger Forest and a famous pre-Christian shrine, Horn-Externstein, which is a pile of towering rocks riddled with sonorous cavbes. Until the time of Charlemagne it is said that Nordic kings came to Horn-Externstein to consult seers about the future.

I was invited to Detmold by Herr Manfred Himmel in April 1988 to give a series of lectures about psi research. This was Herr Himmel's fifth "esoteric" conference, and it was well attended by several hundred people. Herr Himmel was ardent about psychic matters, and the talks of his other spearkers were interesting to me. Some of these speakers were also practicing psychics who were busy giving individual "readings" and making predictions about the future.

I was billed as the famous American superpsychic who had "astonished scientists" since my first formal laboratory experiments in 1970. But I have never given individual "readings," and I never made predictions about the future.

Many of Herr Himmel's conference attendees were visibly disappointed that I did not give the expected readings and did not foresee the future. Although I had studied "prophecy" and predicting for many years and had even experienced some novel insights about it, I was well aware that most predictions turn out to be wrong. I felt I had a scientific reputation to protect, which would be damaged if I accumulated a list of erroneous predictions. Moreover, I didn't view myself as a future-seer in any professional sense, and I tho

Was UNIVAC, the first computer to predict a US Presidential election (in 1952) a computer?

In a few hours on Nov. 4, 1952, Univac altered politics, changed the world's perception of computers and upended the tech industry's status quo. Along the way, it embarrassed CBS long before Dan Rather could do that all by himself.
Computers were the stuff of science fiction and wide-eyed articles about "electric brains." Few people had actually seen one. Only a handful had been built, among them the first computer, ENIAC, created by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1940s.

In summer 1952, a Remington Rand executive approached CBS News chief Sig Mickelson and said the Univac might be able to plot early election-night returns against past voting patterns and spit out a predicted winner. Mickelson and anchor Walter Cronkite thought the claim was a load of baloney but figured it would at least be entertaining to try it on the air.

On election night, the 16,000-pound Univac remained at its home in Philadelphia. In the TV studio, CBS set up a fake computer -- a panel embedded with blinking Christmas lights and a teletype machine. Cronkite sat next to it. Correspondent Charles Collingwood and a camera crew set up in front of the real Univac.

By 8:30 p.m. ET -- long before news organizations of the era knew national election outcomes -- Univac spit out a startling prediction. It said Eisenhower would get 438 electoral votes to Stevenson's 93 -- a landslide victory. Because every poll had said the race would be tight, CBS didn't believe the computer and refused to air the prediction.

Under pressure, Woodbury rejigged the algorithms. Univac then gave Eisenhower 8-to-7 odds over Stevenson. At 9:15 p.m., Cronkite reported that on the air. But Woodbury kept working and found he'd made a mistake. He ran the numbers again and got the original results -- an Eisenhower landslide.

Late that night, as actual results came in, CBS realized Univac had been right. Embarrassed, Collingwood came back on the air and confessed to millions of viewers that Univac had predicted the results hours earlier.

In fact, the official count ended up being 442 electoral votes for Eisenhower and 89 for Stevenson. Univac had been off by less than 1%. It had missed the popular vote results by only 3%. Considering that the Univac had 5,000 vacuum tubes that did 1,000 calculations per second, that's pretty impressive. A musical Hallmark card has more computing power.

Your phone is a computer, and in fact, high end smartphones are more powerful than the most powerful computer that existed in 1970.

According to this article, bits of the NT 3.5 stack had a BSD origin, but those were progressively removed and rewritten in Win95 and post 3.5-NT operating systems. And the stack was thrown out and rewritten from scratch for Vista (partially due to IPv6 related demands). Even by the XP timeframe the remaining BSD code would have boiled down to trivialities.

A thing to keep in mind here is that nobody is complaining because something really important has been left out. It's rather relatively ephemeral things, significant but fail to make it into traditional media, which happens to be the criteria for notability.

A good example are subjects that solely have an internet presence, for example, blogs, web comics, and internet memes and sociology phenonena. They're not terribly important in general, but the issue is that something can be significant, but not be remarked on in traditional media and hence, not notable by Wikipedia standards. So the complaint is something like "My favorite blog/web comic/etc isn't on Wikipedia, but a list of catgirls is."

As indicated above, the disturbing thing is that fairly unimportant stuff can make it into Wikipedia. For example, I have been interviewed for a New York Times story on betting markets and I have published several math physics papers in hard cover journals. With such a presence, I can qualify as notable should I ever feel the desire to primp my ego publicly on Wikipedia. OTOH, there are people who've made long contributions to culture or internet discourse, who wouldn't, merely because they haven't appeared in a newspaper.

It's also worth noting that perhaps my most notable (yet not notable by Wikipedia standards) effort to date is a blog post (that happened to be cited in the betting market literature a few times).

I think Wikipedia's notability standard is flawed at the edges. It's something of a lottery to get enough press attention that you qualify for inclusion into Wikipedia. What I think offends people is the harshness with which articles that fail get treated.

Screw facebook, I dutifully log all of the pointless insipid details of my life to my slashdot journal.

Even stories about drinking in a bar can be interesting if they're not poorly written.

Oh, there's plenty of meatspace trolling; I've journaled about it.
Fun with offline trolls
Trolling for Dollars (and other Springfield nonsense)
Trolling at the Springfield St. Patrick's Day Parade
Trolling at Farley's

Microsoft's entire IP stack is based off the BSD model

It's a very old factoid that became an enduring myth a long time ago. It was really only true back in the days of Windows NT 3.1, the TCP/IP stack for which was a third-party implementation bought by MS. That one was mostly BSD-derived. Since then, however, it was rewritten from scratch (several times, in fact), and NT 3.5 and 95 already included that rewritten version, which is not derived from BSD.

However, the original userland utilities (nslookup, ftp, telnet, a bunch of other stuff) were originally BSD-derived and remain such. That's where the strings "Berkeley" etc (which are usually used as a proof of BSD derivation) come from. So GP is absolutely correct.

Hereis a more detailed treatment of this.

I would recommend that you read this online novel.

http://www.kuro5hin.org/prime-intellect/

Fiat money is a tool for the rich to get richer.

But we don't have "fiat" money, we have debt-based money (which is indeed a tool that enables concentration of wealth). The best explanation I've read involved money and anti-money: there is no $ without debt. Here's the quote:

A dollar is only created when it is loaned to somebody. If you take out a mortgage, the bank has just created money 'out of thin air' as some say, but they couldn't create it until the instant you agreed to borrow it. They didn't create it ex nihilo and wait for someone to borrow it - they can't do that - the loaning and creating are one atomic operation.

For every dollar created, an anti-dollar of debt must also be created. This allows the books to maintain balance.

Anti-dollars rack up interest charges, while ordinary dollars do not. You may imagine that you can invest your dollars wisely and pay back your loan, and perhaps you can, but the dollars your investments yield were created by the same process and have their own anti-dollars associated with them. So even if you can pay it back - overall - in the dollar system, everyone cannot pay back all their debts.

The structure of our system places much of this total debt on the Federal government's books. However, this debt would still be unpayable were it owed by private citizens, and would be just as large. It is an unavoidable consequence of our monetary system.

Lincoln proposed an alternative whereby the Federal government would issue 'greenbacks' directly, pure fiat money willed into existence without the need to any bank to 'loan' it to the Federal government or anybody else. And, well, they shot him. Whoever "they" were.

Fiat money is an alternative to debt money. They both have advantages and disadvantages. They're different from each other.

-http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2010/11/6/112718/926/18#18

While I'm at it, I just read Ellen Brown's explanation of the Fed's recent Quantitative Easing 2. This should be required reading for everyone who's hyperventilating about the Federal Reserve's recent plans to buy another $600 Billion in bonds.

HTH, HAND.

1. Access to the cockpit by the attackers.

This article sheds some light on the difficulties of securing a cockpit door

---Of topic again-- Lets say that someone, in a foreign country (maybe in Canada ) writes articles, or better comments, in sites (forums?) like http://www.kuro5hin.org/ or http://everything2.com/ and slashdot.... - He is using the same alias in all these comments of his - A significant percentage of his comments are strange for 99% of people who read them. Many times he takes advantage of general topics to unfold his ideas about .hmmm lets say fringe concepts. This ideas usually are not understood, people think that they are crap, that he has overreacting imagination, or he is very good at science fiction stories. Many (maybe) are laughing and they just go ahead shaking their heads “O my God he is lunatic”. After all, concepts he is talking about are not of this earth. When this ‘someone’ writes a long comment, often he ends with something like ” As usual, absorb at your own risk” Lets say now, that someone else, in another foreign country (maybe in Greece), after he has read many of this comments, he try (by taking advantage of the communication possibilities internet has to offer), to say hallo and even exchange thoughts.. Things maybe just as simple.and of course there is not always success. Just a thought..

Neither did I, and he's even older than me. See Growing up with computers; computers grew up with ME (and I wasn't even in Soviet Russia).

Hell, I was in South East Asia in the Air Force when the Altair came out. I was thirty when the IBM-PC was released. I did, however, build an analog computer in the 7th grade (it actually worked, too).

But I'm a nerd and he's not. Computers have nothing to do with it.

We knew...

Where is the place that is now what slashdot was?

There is none. See "What Really Killed K5" for some analyses.

CC.

Has it really been nine years??