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Exposing the Happy Birthday Story

Exposing the Happy Birthday Story

Well said. I disagree equally with both the Democrats and Republicans on some of the most important issues to me. Even within one party they often hold such self contridictory positions that I don't really understand how anyone can agree with the platform enough to consider themselves really represented unless, as you say, it comes down to people preferring to not have to form their own opinions anymore. I'd much rather have something like liquid democracy.

If everyone started downloading legal music instead, we would make short work of the RIAA, because people would start buying CDs from indie bands, and seeing their shows, instead of enriching the major labels every time you buy a Britney or New Kids CD. The RIAA would also have no cause to complain - these music downloads are not copyright violations because the artists give you permission to download them.

Probably the best known site for downloading MP3s is of course MP3.com . See especially their genre index . Click the link. You will be quite astounded at how many genres there are.

Unfortunately the website usability of MP3.com is atrocious, and their streaming audio seems to be buggy - I can't get it to work in either Explorer or Mozilla. To get an MP3 file to download to your hard drive, you have to register, which I'm sure will result in merciless spamming. May I suggest registering with a throwaway email address from spamgourmet ?

The Open Directory Project has Bands and Artists and Styles indices. Not all the artists offer downloads, but the site says they list 48,000 artists and I imagine many of them offer downloads.

There are better sites for hosting MP3s than MP3.com. Some of them allow you to buy the band's CD from the same page as the MP3 download. Among them are The Internet Underground Music Archives, CDBaby, Epitonic.com, Lulu, SoundClick, Matador Records and insound .

Monotonik provides BitTorrents with zip files containing 60 to 100 MP3s apiece available here.

If you prefer the higher quality, patent-free Ogg Vorbis files you can find several download sites here . Ogg Vorbis players are available for many platforms - WinAmp will play them on Windows, and I understand iTunes on Mac OS X supports Ogg now. There are open source Linux ogg players and encoders, even an open source fixed-point decoders for embedded applications where the CPU doesn't have floating point hardware.

There are also peer-to-peer applications for distributing legal music. See Furthur Network and konspire[2b] .

Unfortunately, musicians are often not very good website designers, so poor usability is a significant obstacle to getting music directly from artists' websites. If you're a musician, and you'd like to know how you can improve your website so more people will download your music, please read my article If Indie Musicians Wanted Their Music Heard....

Finally, there is the problem of finding the music that's actually worth listening to. The labels do serve the (somewhat) legitimate purpose of picking out the good from the bad. But we can do that ourselves with legal downloads by using collaborative filtering, for example by downloading our music with iRATE, which you'll find at

• Is This the America I Love?
• Impeach Bush
• DeCSS - Content Scrambling System Decryption

I'm getting ready to move to Canada by the way. I can do that because my wife is a Canadian citizen. When I get there, I'm going to make it a priority to move somewhere I can get broadband - it's much more widely available there than in the U.S. When I do, I'm going to set up a FreeNet node and give it a 80 gig hard drive or so.

And sometime soon I should be mirroring my essays at a server physically located in Holland. Or Sealand if I can find someone who will host a small site - I can't afford their charge for a colo.

The goal might be different, but the methods seem largely the same; an eternal war that can't be won against a foe with a constantly changing face, surveillance of citizens in the name of this war [...]

At any rate, it was about then that we started the whole "War on Drugs" movement. I knew as it was being started that it was completely unwinnable; people have various reasons for altering their consciousness and nobody will ever be able to remove all of those reasons (I mean, children spin around until they fall down dizzy -- how can you eliminate that?).

You hit the nail on the head -- an eternal war with constant casualties on both sides which is completely unwinnable, consuming more and more resources because we MUST "think of the children."

Changing the subject slightly, we are in for an incredible conflict when nanotechnology becomes a reality: we truly will no longer need the "ruling class" and there will be one hell of a class struggle. I am looking forward to the technological aspects (physical items will be "free" just as music and movies are currently "free", although frowned upon; IA (intelligence amplification) will be possible and most probably required (the government mandates vaccines...)) -- however, I am most definitely not looking forward to the social aspects of the singularity, because things will be changing too fast for people to keep up, and people will start to revolt. We truly live in interesting times.

PS A great book on facing and traveling through the singularity is The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect which was mentioned here several months ago.

This post is not a solicitation of legal advice

Then I'm sorry but we at Slashdot, being all professional lawyers, are therefore unable to help you. As we pride ourselves on our ability to carefully consider and dispense legal advice, surely you can see that by straying outside our field of expertise we would be doing you a disservice.

If you were asking for legal advice, then I'm sure you would have received 100 replies to your story by now.

Might I direct you to other places worthy or your questions, like kuro5hin?

NITV, run by zia ataby, has been jammed before by the iranian government. There has been massive civil unrest there lately. On K5 there was a story a month ago about some legislation to actually support NITV.

I highly doubt America had anything to do with it.

I call bullshit on this one. Sorry, but I think you are either exagerating are are a liar. I don't know were you got you're so called stats from but they are all wrong. If you were truely an Addict, which I doubt, then you are very lucky indead, to acheive sobriaty without support.

Can't fathom that someone is able to do something for themselves, eh? I got news for ya, pal - I'm dead serious. I ain't exaggerating, nor am I lying. And don't claim to be 'sorry' while insulting my person in the same sentence. As you said, drug usage can be a life and death matter -- in my case, it was that at worst, and at best contrast between darkness and pain, and a shot at a healthy contented existence at the other. So you can see the stakes were high enough for me to act. And luck had shit to do with it. I chose to act to better my lot, OK? I had all the so called 'support' in the world, it meant nothing. What am I supposed to do, call up my highly-uncredentialed counselor or AA kid sponsor when I get a "craving" and "talk it out"? I want to drive this point home. No one else quits for you. You can BS all day long to your 'support group' and sponsor, and family, and program, and group, and talk the ins and outs of successful sobriety and techniques -- but at the end of the day, when you come home from that BS, if you really want a toke or a drink, you are either going to do give in, or you have decided yourself and have the strength to resist for yourself. As for your definition of addict, whatever. I'd qualify any definition I could possibly think of -- daily use, drug abuse, rehabs, ODs, institutionalizations, you get the picture. On top of that, I had recovery zealots like yourself tell me OVER and OVER I'm an addict. I did everything short of shooting up H or snorting coke, which is pretty much just an image and not as terrible as certain groups would have you believe. Yeah, so if you're ready, take a look at my recent post on this matter on kuro5hin.org. If you'd like additional details, I'd be happy to oblige.

It's quite telling how militant you are about this that you're resorting to personal insults. Well, I may not be any Darryl Strawberry, but I've been around the block. And I'm not going to discount AA's benefits because although I know the program is difficult, you can reap benefits. I've done it. But don't buy into the idea that it's necessary and the only way. It sure as hell ain't. And AAers aren't the voice of God. And some people don't believe in God, or want to change his life and remove all their 'character flaws,' which are poorly defined, or replace their ideas to those of the group. (And I have had some odd experiences and advice from AA but that's another post). Hell, some might even be willing to for temporary or permanent relief from their drug abuse ("we decided we wanted what AA has and were willing to go to any lengths to get it"), but they should NOT be led to believe it is the only choice, as AA says it is if you are a "true" alcoholic or addict.

As for the stats -- what can I say, it's reality. If you can't accept that your treatment model isn't the most effective method out there, that's one thing, but don't go telling others that they may or may not be responsible for people's deaths when their ideas have been shown to be more effective. Now, back to those stats. The one I gave you is true. My rehab told us it has a 3.5% success rate. People are more likely to quit drugs successfully without treatment that has its basis in dubious scientific theories. My experience backs this up (add a notch to the stats). IMO, probably because it's a personal, life choice that they're capable of making on their own. In addition, 30% of people who have smoked in the United States have quit, 95% did it by themselves. AA has a 5% success rate for those who pass through its doors. At my meetings I saw maybe three or four faces out of a room of 20-4

he knew that, if the people got together and realized that others had the same idea, the recognition of agreement could cause the people to refuse to act like sheep.

Sounds good, in theory, but there are numerous counterexamples that prove it false. And if you look around, you can probably find more proof.

BUT that didn't stop RUSTY from Gh3y5 patending his famouse ONE-DICK patent.

Looking at this guy's username, his taste should match most of /. readers.

Read the F.A.Q. , the answer to your question is kuro5hin

I personally don't like it very much. It's not instantaneous, because it doesn't actually load the nested content until you expand the thread, but it works. For, opening new tabs in blogs works best.

I found this article very helpful as far as general information on shipping stuff.

The simple truth of the matter, is that Linux is all but uninstallable on anything but a computer. Anyone who claims that they installed Linux on a computer is quite simply lying. This is due to a number of facts, including the legacy support of i386 processors. Newer chipsets, such as the SCO and Macintosh video cards, have workarounds and can achieve a subtle increase in gaydar rankings, but you'll never see Linux running on anything with a reasonable amount of RAM.

To its credit, however, Linux is quite capable of running a watch, or similar sub-complex hardware. This is because it does its job very well, that is, keeping time. In fact, it will waste cycles maintaining its own clock, discarding the perfectly useful CMOS clock found in most post-1975 computers.

As a response to the smelly teenager who insists on wearing his favourite t-shirt 5 days a week to your workplace, simply ask him (when he next shouts at you blathering on about freedom of choice) about which VM you should use... the one that crashes all the time, or the really slow one?

Try this one too:

Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect

VA Software CEO/Founder Larry Augustin Dead at 39, Apparent Suicide

by ASSOCIATED PRESS

VA Software (LNUX) CEO, president and founder Larry Augustin was found dead in his home in Fremont, Calif. early this morning. The death was an apparent suicide, caused by a close-range shotgun blast to the face and head. He was 39 years old.

Police reports indicate that strewn about the room in which Augustin carried out his fate were empty cartons of ramen noodles and discount bulk oat bags. His house was bare of any furniture or furnishings of any worth, and his garage which once held several classic cars was emptied. An autopsy revealed several thousand VA Software stock certificates, neatly rolled and bundled, in Augustin's rectum. Police are investigating how the five-inch-wide bundle appeared in Augustin's lower intestine unlubricated without any sign of strain on his anal sphincter. Also discovered was an abnormally high concentration of dye in Augustin's bloodstream, which was determined to be the main component of "ledger red" ink.

VA Software, which at different times has been called VA Linux Systems, VA Linux and VA Systems, has seen financial difficulties of late. Most likely to be soon delisted from NASDAQ, the company shares a struggle for profitability with many other dot-bomb era corporations whose business plans include the line "???" directly before "PROFIT !!". VA Software child companies, such as geek weblog Slashdot.org and Star Wars fan site Sourceforge have felt the pinch of the economic downturn.

Augustin is survived by his domestic partner and two adopted children.

T'is very true. If I point a CEO or CTO to my article on Kuro5hin, they'll just yawn and walk away. On the other hand, if I point them to the same article signed by a lawyer and law professor, they're a bit more likely to sit up, take notice and possibly even sell their inflated SCO stocks.

If I say "Let's go to war against North Korea", people talk about putting me in a psyche ward.

If Bush says "Let's go to war against North Korea", people go and buy duct tape and plastic(!).

The difference is not the words, it's who says it and how people listen to them that counts.q1

There is money to be made, but it's an odd business model.

I can understand spending the disk/cpu for lossless compression on, say, a 96khz classical recording, but most of what comes out of a live mix (or even a commercial rock studio recording) is just not worth the system resources. for live recordings, ogg at 256 or mp3 at 320 is more than enough, and small pipes and short CPUs are much happier.

Because we're talking about audiophiles here (who else would *complain* about the previous audio format on the Phish site). You know. These are the people who think they can hear the difference between a CD and a CD with green ink on it. The same people who insist that vinyl has higher fidelity than CD. The same people who compare the dry tonality of different digital interconnects.

Even supposedly decent sites make so many mistakes when discussing digital audio that they'd fail an undergrads signals course. "No information is lost" my arse. And what sort of nonsense is that idiot trying to pass off as a digital signal; don't these "experts" know what low-pass filtering means?

Audiophilia. It's a disease. Kill it before it spreads.

I agree, and there isn't much we can do about them--I would have voted Nader in the last election, if my state had been counting those votes. But no candidate has the sort of support needed to break that corporate stranglehold, and I don't think that any of them are likely to in the near future.

I understand your concerns about your children, but there are better ways to try to fix this than a one-size-fits-all solution. Several others have suggested tying access to library cards in some fashion. You could also allow logins for uncensored (or less censored) access, because obviously what might be appropriate for your son might not be appropriate for your daughter. Maybe one day biometrics will be cheap and reliable as well--and could be used as a login option, or used to assess your physical age--but it isn't there yet.

However, in my experience, kids will generally pay attention to what appeals to them in the first place. In some ways that should make them less likely to encounter porn, or to be influenced by it. And if they do see something they don't like, they'll probably tell you about it. But I would be in favor of blocking pop-ups and whatnot by default, as they can also hamper web browsing in general. And I have no problems with blocking or restricting access to explicit pornography on library computers--it's just that filtering software these days blocks a lot more than that.

Thank you as well; if you enjoy discussions like this, you might want to take a look at kuro5hin; I think it's better for that sort of thing.

Post an essay topic, let the kids review the submissions with mod points given to your favorite students. Just like Slashdot.

Or better yet, use Scoop and let everybody moderate. Picking favorites is just asking for trouble. I'm sure you could give mod points to everyone in Slashcode as well, but I don't know how much hacking this would involve.

Anyway, both engines are probably excessive for the job at hand. Something along the lines of PHP-Nuke would likely be more than sufficient.

"Note to slashdot editors - a 'soapbox' icon would be very nice... something which allows users to post controversial stories like this whilst having a disclaimer so slashdot can keep its nose clean"

Then we'd be K5.

A kuro5hin post of mine.

Posting the link here, because it shows how those who want software patents are prepared to bend the facts to their advantage. If the case for software patents is so good, why would they need to twist facts like this ?

Would this be of any use in trying to persuade some MEPs that some of those pushing for software patents are behaving in a rather underhand manner ?

As seen on the Kuro5hin article, there are still patents in other countries (Japan, Canada, England, etc.) that don't expire until next year.

Mod this down, it may not be redundant, but at least the other post gives credit.

Go to Sen. Hatch's web site and click on the "MyUtahSearch.com" graphic on the right hand side of the page. It redirects you to a [not safe for work] pr0n site.

[Thanks to The Turd Report for pointing this out on K5.]

k.

i agree- the science and the corporate side of gm must be treated differently.

I say that the proper approach on GM crops is that where there are errors and arrogance, chastise the corporations, and not the tech.

check out my kuro5hin story on this very subject from less than a month ago

check out my kuro5hin article i wrote about this last month

if i am such a thoughtless buffoon, then why did i get a story voted to the front page on this very subject a month ago on kuro5hin? ;-)

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/5/22/51740/5337

i will let kuro5hin speak, in democratic terms with their voting on my thoughts, about what a thoughtless buffoon i am, and ascribe your opinion of me to the fringe of that democratic site

i hope you are happy i have responded to your troll- as in a flaming personal attack, which is what your post is, as opposed to the parent post of mine you are responding too, which is what, +4 right now?

yes, i bear all of the symptoms of trolling indeed

as opposed to you?

you can reason your way to how things really stand i think about who is the troll here ;-)

i wrote an article about this recently on kuro5hin

i actually have a bs in biochem, but hated working in the lab, so switched to IT! ;-P

We will stop doing that when the application are split of.

instead we will report on every 1.0 product that is based on Gecko.

And every 1.0 release on mozdev.

And very dot release of firebird.

And...

are you still there? You could go to the other site

-- Did i mention editors seldom read comments?

A little while ago a fellow named "MichaelCrawford" posted a three part article on Kuro5hin describing his experiences with Schizoaffective Disorder. Some of the symptoms he desribed and some of the lengthes he went to treat them were similer to yours. Anyway here's that article. I hope you find that helpful.

http://kuro5hin.org.....

Hi.

Once upon a time I read this book and posted a review on kuro5hin.org. It was a good book, and it's still on my shelf (meaning I haven't seen myself able to give it away or sell it yet). Keep an eye out for it at your local Half-Price books.

--Robert

I happen to like yaxay.com for images and PHP info. If you're into culture, although sometimes annoying, I like Kuro5hin.org.

9.) Ever thought about publishing all stories in a public bin where the users decide what makes the front page? Like when an article gets 100 "post points" it is then sent to the front page where it's live and ready for commenting on?
You mean like this?

Do you think copyright law is so broken that it cannot be fixed?

I believe copyright reform is possible:

1. Take the strict liability out of copyright. Require at least a demonstration of negligence in the standard for misappropriation. This would handily defeat Bright Tunes.
2. Raise the bar for substantial similarity higher than it was in some of the cases I cite. Four notes are a "short phrase" (17 USC 102), not any substantial expression.
3. Why a copyright should have a term five times as long as a patent has baffled me for years and has sparked satire. Cut the basic copyright term back to 28 years, where the founding fathers put it in the first place. I'd even settle for the 1909 term (56 years).
4. Limit the duration of the Section 1201 circumvention ban to even shorter than that, but keep it in place at least temporarily so that the copyright industry doesn't feel screwed and is more likely to acquiesce to reform.

The macros the article is talking about are Lisp-style macros.

These are not your "shoot self in foot" C macros (i.e. replace text x with text y), but a very powerful and expressive way to have the entire language at your disposal at compile time.

If you've seen the neat tricks you can do with C++ templates (template metaprogramming, etc), you might have an idea of what real macros would be like, when severely watered-down.

Lisp macros make things like Generic programming and OOP very simple to add to a language, as well as almost any other conceivable programming construct.

For instance, with proper macros in Java, you wouldn't ask, "When will templates be added to Java?"; you could add them yourself.

http://www.gnu-darwin.org/packages.shtml
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/x86.shtml

I've written an article which clarifies the relationship of GNU-Darwin to Apple.

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/1/20/191655/929

Yves de Champlain has also written a very helpful article explaining Apple's relationship to open source and free software.

http://www.osxfaq.com/Editorial/open/index.ws

Regards,
proclus
http://www.gnu-darwin.org/

As for the WMD's in Iraq: What does this have to do with the Republicans?

The fact that the evidence they're presenting appears to be largely bullshit. This article is an automated translation from German, but it makes clear that the degree of shovelling was so high that Blix's language wasn't considered suitable for print!

Credit to Elektro Schock at kuro5hin, who posted about this.

Please refute this

Yes. Unfortunately, you won't be able to make such a simulator. The simulator requires a private key which is embedded in the hardware. This is where TCPA comes in*.

Palladium is encrypted using a public key. To decrypt it, you need the private key. The private key is embedded in a tamper-resistant chip (called the trusted platform module. If you try to inspect the chip, it effectively self-destructs). When the machine powers up, it authenticates the BIOS. The BIOS authenticates the boot loader and the kernel. If any of these fail to authenticate, TCPA will refuse to authenticate anything else. Finally, TCPA decrypts the kernel and starts it up.

The kernel authenticates the drivers it uses, and the software it starts up. Not everything has to be authenticated, just stuff that DRM'd software depends on. When you open a DRM'd program, either Palladium decrypts it with a private key, or Palladium sends it to the trusted platform module to decrypt.

As long as Palladium doesn't have any security holes, you will have two options to compromise it. You could somehow acquire the private keys, or you could somehow compromise the hardware (processor, memory, video card, etc).

--------

*Kuro5hin has a good technical analysis of TCPA.

You cannot divide by infinitely (or a quantity that is infinitely large), because it is not a number. All you can say is that as x gets arbitrarily large, 1/x gets arbitrarily small, which is not the same as saying 1/inf = 0, which is convenient shorthand, but not strictly true. You can never get to 0, only arbitrarily close to it.

And I know what a percentage is. A percentage is the ratio of events under consideration to total events multiplied by 100. The only way to make x/y = 0/100 is if x = 0 (as discussed above, x > 0 and "y = inf" is not rigorous). See here for more discussion.

See the recent k5 article for more information on that topic...

Hey losers, read this It's on infinity.

Posters: READ THE GODDAMN ARTICLE! You look like an idiot is you reply based on just the summary. It's pretty ovious a good number of posters haven't read it.

Editors: Stop posting stories with misleading summaries! It confuses the Slashdot community, who likes to post their knee-jerk reactions.

I'm gonna lose my karma for this, so be it. Slashdot sucks more and more every day, with duplicates, misleading summaries, and Ask Slashdots that could be solved by Googling, eopinions.com (Color laser printer), or reading your manual ("broken" V-chip is actually CC text mode). Check out "Not Slashdot", kuro5hin.org

You should get over to Kuro5hin right away, there's an article on the front page aimed specifically at you.

AIX, Solaris, and HPUX should really be higher on that list than either OSX or OpenBSD (based on a sampling of CS in the DoD)

Anyway, that post is a blatant troll. Obviously, its a copy of a theological screed with operating systems substituted for religions. Here's the original on Kuro5hin.