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I spent August 1973 to August 1974 in Utapao AFB in Thailand. Utapao was a short boat ride away from Phuket (pronounced "fuck it"; the Thais have a different alphabet than we do) At the time, Thailand was then a third world country. Utapao was in the southern part of the country, and there was no electricity nor running water nor natural gas in homes. The roads were unpaved. The business districts of Saddaheep and Bong Chong to the south of Utapao had electricity, but not the houses.

We had a Thai intern at work a few years ago, and from her account Thailand has industrialized and is no longer a third world country.

Once while riding a bhat bus (so called because it cost one bhat to ride; a bhat equaled five American pennies. The "bus" was a Japanese pickup truck with benches in the bed) flashing lights came up behind us, the driver skidded to a halt and took off running. I cursed and started to get out. "No!" a fellow passenger insisted, "Day keel you!" She was right; I watched in horror as Thai police shot the driver as he ran across the field.

I attributed it to the fact that Thaland was closer to Vietnam than St Louis is to Chicago, and the war was going on, but it appears that even though they may no longer be a third world country, their government is still authoritarian.

What's troublesome is my government, USA, seems to have been headed more and more towards authoritarianism and less free as time has gone on. So I fear that the answer to the question posed in TFS is "yes".

I wrote two K5 diaries about my Thailand experiences a few years ago, Gecko Poker and War and Sex if anyone is interested in hearing about the place.

While I was there I thought that a visit to Mars couldn't be stranger. Nothing was the same as here, even the dirt was a different color, the hills were a different shape, the vegetation was completely different. But the world seems to becoming more homogenous as time goes on.

Thats roughly true. Red states are socialist, and the blue ones pay for their programs. If the GOP is anything its a wealth redistribution system that would make the old soviets drool.

there is a subset of us Christians who came to faith because it made sense

There is another subset who came to faith by being baptized in blood. Some people won't accept witness or any other proof.

We tend to be ashamed of the Christians that are most often portrayed in the media.

Never trust a preacher who wears a five thousand dollar suit. Pat Robertson has converted more Christians to athiesm than all the slashdot athiests combined. He is one of the "wolves in sheep's clothing" Christ warned you about; so is Bush. They worship not God, but mammon. Their church is the bank and their priest is the economist. These people believe that priceless==worthless. Beware of them.

Forget not the humble 8-track tape!

The eight track is a format best forgotten, as I said in Good Riddance to Bad Tech a few years ago.

yes, it was blatantly off-topic. i was replying to GP, who quoted his post on old tech. just that. so look no more, the quote was from the quoted post, not his original comment. sorry?

Forget not the humble 8-track tape!

The eight track is a format best forgotten, as I said in Good Riddance to Bad Tech a few years ago.

The 8-track tape
This sorry piece of crap is proof positive of American stupidity. The cassette - the (now obsolete) four track, two-spindle, 1/8th inch, 1 /78 IPS shirt pocket sized tape cassette was produced before the 8-track. The four track cassette was originally made as a dictation device, but advances in tape manufacture and head design soon gave them a frequency response that came close to human hearing's limit, signal to noise ratio low enough that you had to turn it up very loud to hear the hiss, and inaudible harmonic distortion which made them ideal for music.

Nevertheless, the 8-track was born anyway. With its transport speed at twice the 4-track cassette's speed, it should have been audibly superior. However, the "powers that be" decided that 8-tracks were going to be for automobiles, which at the time were not as well insulated from outside sounds and wind as today's cars, and with the auto's horrible acoustics, it was OK for a car's music to sound like effluent.

But the deliberately bad sound wasn't bad enough. The eight track tape had a single spindle, a very clever design where the tape fed from the center of the spindle, around a capstain roller inside the housing and back to the outside of the roll of tape. This made for an expensive setup, and one that was prone to wow and flutter, as well as having the tape get "eaten" by the tape player. And unlike a cassette, if your 8-track got ate, you might as well throw it in the trash.

But wait, there's more! This thing was deemed to be for the car, while cassettes were going to be (by about 1970 or so) for the home.

This made no sense whatever, since the "portable" eight track took up as much space as four cassettes, without being able to play any longer than a cassette. In fact, you could buy a longer playing cassette than 8-track.

But the one thing more than anything else that made 8-tracks suck like a Hoover was the fact that it had to change tracks four times during an album. This usually necessitated at least one song and usually more being interrupted in the middle!

Folks finally, after about ten years, started figuring this stuff out for themselves and replaced their 8-track cartriges with 4 track cassettes. Me? I never had an 8-track, although all my friends did. I, the geek, used the far more logical cassettes since about 1966 or 7. Hah! The geek gets the last laugh again!

Oh, btw I am old!

Eventually the new, from scratch TCP/IP stack was done and shipped with NT 3.5 (the second version, despite the number) in late 1994. The same stack was also included with Windows 95. However, it looks like some of those Unix utilities were never rewritten. If you look at the executables, you can still see the copyright notice from the regents of the University of California (BSD is short for Berkeley Software Distrubution, Berkeley being a branch of the University of California, for some reason referred to as "Berkeley" on the East Coast and "California" on the West Coast...and "Berkeley" is one of those words that starts to look real funny if you stare at it too long - but I digress). Keep in mind there is no reason to rewrite that code. If your ftp client works fine (no comments from the peanut gallery!) then why change it? Microsoft has other fish to fry. And the software was licensed perfectly legally, since the inclusion of the copyright notice satisfied the BSD license.

A little history: Before ENIAC was engineered, a "computer" was a human being whose job was to do math, e.g. making ballistics tables for artillery, etc.

During WWII the military employed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of human computers.

Frank herbert called them "Mentats".

BTW and OT, the black on dark green on this screen is unreadable to geezers (and possibly to young people as well). I really wish you guys would fix that, thx.

Once I've seen an elephant there is no argument nor logic you can put forth to make me not believe in elephants. By the same token, once one experiences God there is no wat to talk him out of his faith.

I have faith that elephants exist. There is no way you can shake that faith.

Cool. I haven't been to http://www.kuro5hin.org/ for a while. Nice to see you've brought it here to Slashdot.

Seriously, aren't there enough dicks on the internet already?

How can we expect to continue to get respectable, intelligent people willing to answer questions for Slashdot interviews if the site starts getting filled with "LOLWUT" nonsense like this?

What purpose does this serve? I never would have heard of the guy if it weren't for this posting. If the book is so bad, why are you promoting it?

There's no such thing as bad publicity.

And on top of all that, now I need to teach my Feed reader to ignore "idle" submissions.

Sorry about the time taken to reply - I've been ill.

Hope it wasn't bad.

"I will make the argument the lack of copyright can cost lives, without copyright an artist may not be able to feed their family." - I agree with you here, that not having copyright might cause an artist to not be able to feed his or her family, and true it might cost lives in that scenario. My counter would have to be that the artist decided to be an artist, it was not forced on them - they made the choice to starve

So only the rich can be artists then.

If X works in another industry that does not require copyrights to exist then lack of copyright would mean nothing. But what if that industry was actively harmed by copyright, then copyright would cause that person to not be able to feed their family.

And what industry is that? One that freeloads?

My contention is that copyright does help some people, yes, but it harms others in order to help those people.

I've asked before, who is harmed by copyrights?

Numerous IT employees are shafted in their job seeking ability due to the fact that the area they've spent years gaining experience in they can't work in, because they've seen the source code of a competitor...

And who are these people, other than those who signed an NDA, Non Disclosure Agree, or a non compeat agreement? Perhaps someone who was paid by one business then took what they wrote to another?

You don't actually believe that copyright is victimless?

I do believe copyrights don't harm anyone other than freeloaders, and no one has convinced me otherwise. Even though I've asked, you're free to try. I agree too long of a copyright term does cause harm but not copyright themselves. I think this copyright term of life plus 50, or 70 or whatever, is very bad. But I can't see how a 14 year term, or 7 years today, harms anyone.

even if you don't agree with them you have to accept that they do receive harm - anything else is not being honest.

They caused harm first. Ah, I see. A person shouldn't be locked up when they kill someone because it causes them harm.

The reason I assumed you were talking about patents

All along this has been about copyrights, I just mentioned patents as an aside not as the main point. I wrote a bunch of sentences about copyright but only one or two about patents.

I do not believe that copyright has done anything to promote progress. I gave reasons for this

What reasons have you given? I don;t recall any.

unfortunately you've not yet provided counter arguments to how copyright promotes progress.

I will now. Do you think George Lucas would have spend millions of dollars to make "Star Wars" without copyrights? Or Steven King write all his books? Or Margaret Mitchell write "Gone With The Wind"? I bet most of what's been written, books, movies, and songs, never would have been written without copyrights. It's the rare individual who will spend years and millions of dollars to write something of they didn't think they could make money.

Thanks for looking up the quote fron the US constitution, I half remembered it but couldn't find it easily.

I recall the url but even if I didn't I've still got it bookmarked, along with hundreds of others. Actually that one rather easy to recall, www.usconstitution.gov.

useful arts would be items around science and engineering, right?

It does say writings and discoveries not just discoveries. Like you Thomas Jefferson opposed copyrights. However corresponding with his friend James Madison he eventually came to believe copyrights could help progress. Once he was convinced he calculated they should last 14 years, which was the original copyright term, with one 14 year extension possible.

providing a legal mechanism to create a market where no ma

An interesting aspect to this is that many of the fundamental MPEG patents have expired, and more will expire soon. I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice, but you could probably implement a MPEG-1 encoder and player with Layer II audio patent-free (at least in the US) right now.

Given that the MP3 spec was published in 1991, and that in the US filing have to occur within 1 year of the date of publication, then you could argue that any relevant MP3 patents should expire by 2012. Apparently, some of the patent holders disagree...

But still, are they that much more difficult to work on than computers?

Computers are easy; my car otoh, well, I took it to a certified machanic to find out why my engine light was on, and even he couldn't figure it out. He reset it, two weeks later it came back on. Now I'm just ignoring it until I have to have it towed back.

I never skinned my knuckles working on a computer (knock on wood). From Good Riddance to Bad Tech (yeah, it's mine)

The automobile distributor and points
Unless you are a classic car collector, or a geezer, you have no idea how much of a pain in the butt these things were. About every oil change or two, your car's performance and gas mileage would go down, and you would need a tuneup.

To tune your car, you could simply hire someone. That is, if you were a sissy.

A real man changed his own oil and tuned his own car up. You could tell a real man by the scars and scabs on his knuckles from working on his car.

First you had to change all eight of your spark plugs. What? You only have six? Pussy! Make sure you don't get the wires on wrong, or if your car will start at all, it will lurch and backfire and run like crap.

Then you had to take off the distributor cap, usually held on by two clips that would cut your fingers and were harder than a rubic cube solution to get clipped back on.

Under the distributor cap was the contact points. These had to be replaced. Then you had to adjust the gap on the points. Oh shit, I forgot to adjust the gaps on the spark plugs... do that all over again...

Now that the plugs are gapped and the points are replaced and gapped, you put the new distributor cap on... Come on... SHIT... GOD DAMNED PIECE OF SHI... ok, there it goes. Good. Gimme a bandaid, would ya?

Now you have to set the points' dwell. What's "dwell?" Beats the hell out of me, maybe it's the amount of time the points are closed. But you have to set it with a dwell meter or your car will run like it's powered by gerbils and will suck gas like Bush sucks at being President.

Then you have to get out your strobe and set the timing. You loosen the distributor, point your strobe at the mark on the... wait a minute... I can't see the damned mark. Stop the engine, would you?

Damn, it's all rusty and... to hell with it, start it back up and I'll time the God damned thing by ear, piece of shit...

Thank God and modern electronics for electronic ignition!

You never know when you might get a visit from your local federal branch for such innovative commentary ...

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/12/20/211923/84

there is no real technical reason for vinyl to sound better

Sorry, but your link is woefully ignorant and has some really bad inaccuracies. For instance, "The vinyl surface is heated to several hundred degrees on playback, and repeat play of the same track should wait at least several hours until the vinyl has cooled". That is just utter bullshit. Not everything in that article is wrong, but there is much wefully inaccurate information in it.

The 44k samples per second of the CD limits the upper frequencies to 22kHz. Yes, that's higher than you can hear, but all the high frequency harmonics are gone. Those harmonics color the frequencies you CAN hear. Plus, the closer you get to that 22k, the more aliasing you have.

Analog mastering introduces noise, but digital mastering introduces rounding errors and aliasing.

If you have an analog medium from a digital master, or a digital medium from an analog master, you have the worst of both worlds, with th edisadvantages of both and the advantages of neither. The LP of Led Zeppelin's Presence will sound better than the CD (provided your turntable is good enough), while the CD of Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit will sound better than an LP version no matter how good your turntable is.

Digital has a far larger dynamic range than analog, but oddly the only place you see those dynamics is in the movies, and they're done badly there. I've wished for a "dynamics compression" module so I could watch a movie where the music wasn't thundering while the speech is berely audible. CDs, OTOH, almost never use the dynamic range they are capable of. I can NOT for the life of me figure out why the LP version of Boston's first album has so much more dynamics than the CD version; technically, the CD should have more dynamics. It's just a matter of bad remastering.

I got a few things wrong in Digital vs. analog- which is better? (tape speed for one), but whoever wrote that wiki you linked should read it.

Also if you want to digitize your own vinyl, read How to rip from vinyl or tape. I should have more strongly stressed in both articles that with analog, the quality of the playback device is of utmost importance for fidelity. Usually with analog equipment (although not always) the more you pay, the better it will sound, even to untrained old ears.

there is no real technical reason for vinyl to sound better

Sorry, but your link is woefully ignorant and has some really bad inaccuracies. For instance, "The vinyl surface is heated to several hundred degrees on playback, and repeat play of the same track should wait at least several hours until the vinyl has cooled". That is just utter bullshit. Not everything in that article is wrong, but there is much wefully inaccurate information in it.

The 44k samples per second of the CD limits the upper frequencies to 22kHz. Yes, that's higher than you can hear, but all the high frequency harmonics are gone. Those harmonics color the frequencies you CAN hear. Plus, the closer you get to that 22k, the more aliasing you have.

Analog mastering introduces noise, but digital mastering introduces rounding errors and aliasing.

If you have an analog medium from a digital master, or a digital medium from an analog master, you have the worst of both worlds, with th edisadvantages of both and the advantages of neither. The LP of Led Zeppelin's Presence will sound better than the CD (provided your turntable is good enough), while the CD of Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit will sound better than an LP version no matter how good your turntable is.

Digital has a far larger dynamic range than analog, but oddly the only place you see those dynamics is in the movies, and they're done badly there. I've wished for a "dynamics compression" module so I could watch a movie where the music wasn't thundering while the speech is berely audible. CDs, OTOH, almost never use the dynamic range they are capable of. I can NOT for the life of me figure out why the LP version of Boston's first album has so much more dynamics than the CD version; technically, the CD should have more dynamics. It's just a matter of bad remastering.

I got a few things wrong in Digital vs. analog- which is better? (tape speed for one), but whoever wrote that wiki you linked should read it.

Also if you want to digitize your own vinyl, read How to rip from vinyl or tape. I should have more strongly stressed in both articles that with analog, the quality of the playback device is of utmost importance for fidelity. Usually with analog equipment (although not always) the more you pay, the better it will sound, even to untrained old ears.

But apparently that is not something you'll let stop you from having opinions on it?

Why does that seem apparent? I'm ignorant of Tibetians, and gave no opinion of Tibetian Bhuddism, but I'm not ignorant of Thai Bhuddists.

And just because a religion teaches righteous behavior, that is no guarantee that those ideals will actually be followed

That's true, but the Bhuddists I knew did in fact follow those ideals, although I'm sure there were a lot who didn't; I just didn't witness it. I wrote a K5 diary entry about one particular encounter with a devout Bhuddist.

As to power corrupting, I'm not sure if that's accurate. I think power attracts the corruptable. That said, Pat Robertson has converted more Christians to athiesm than all the athiests at slashdot combined. People often do use religion for their own gain, even if they don't believe iin its teachings.

Massive 911 coincidence? My life is full of coincidences. From a five year old K5 diary

I smelled gasoline, and started looking for a good place to check things out. As I started eyeing the shoulder, a "WOOMP!!" sound came out from under the hood, along with thick black smoke. The engine died at the same time, and I wrestled the car to the side of the road.

Power steering and power brakes are great... until you have no power.

There were flames licking around the hood, and I tossed the thermos out and got an old coat from the trunk to try and beat the flames out. I pulled the hood release- and it came out by a foot. I ran around to the front and started beating at the flames with the old coat.

A guy stopped, and had a fire extinguisher. I emptied it as he called 9-11. Which, the policeman later noted, were the last three digits of my vehicle identification number.

The kurons might like it. Fits right in with the crazy shit there.

Dude, The Station is composed of friends of mine and they ROCK. I blogged at K5 the first time I saw them. Joe Frew introduced me to them later.

Is this the same circletimessquare who called for the "freelance assassination" of the rulers of Burma?

http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2008/7/30/23189/2591/9#9

Why is this moderated overrated and not informative? iBrowse had tabbed browsing in 1999 and is not open source. Mosaic was not open source athough the source code could be obtained for viewing fairly easily. The IP stack was licenced from Spider Systems which was not open source although it contained BSD code.

Mods, are you on crack?

Welcome to Slashdot!

Why is this moderated overrated and not informative? iBrowse had tabbed browsing in 1999 and is not open source. Mosaic was not open source athough the source code could be obtained for viewing fairly easily. The IP stack was licenced from Spider Systems which was not open source although it contained BSD code.

Mods, are you on crack?

The parent post is right, Microsoft has incorporated BSD-derived code into its operating systems.

The web browser and web server were concepts and implementations that originated within the open-source community.

If MS is accusing the open-source community of absconding with its intellectual property, then why no compunction about incorporating same into their products?

Software *ideas* are just that, ideas. They should not be patented, or patentable, but that's just what's happened and has been encouraged by USPTO. Companies like MS (and many others) rode that bandwagon and have patents that one might call dubious.

There was a leak of some archives claiming to contain significant chunks of NT4 and Windows 2000 source code a few years ago.
An analysis of the source code can be found here: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/2/15/71552/7795

MPEG-1 with layer 2 audio is probably pretty patent free, since the near complete draft standard was publicly available as ISO CD 11172 by December 6, 1991. I haven't found anyone claiming that they have patents on it, on the other hand I haven't found anyone claiming that there are no patents on it. My long summary of my search for the MPEG-1 patents is up on kuro5hin.

Folks who have been around for a while may remember the site adequacy.org, whose members were amazingly effective at constructing believable trolling posts. So much so that there's even a dedicated name for this - the "Adequacy Style Troll" (AST).

From my view this was the high point for trolling - carefully-crafted posts that seemed so logical that most of the way through you thought it was for real, and even by the end of a post and its outrageous conclusion you weren't always sure the poster was kidding.

Typically these posts weren't targeted at a specific person, but a general hot-button issue (Christianity, Linux, etc) and would elicit a lot of amusing responses from people who didn't get the joke.

The archive is still on line at www.adequacy.org, and the Wikipedia entry gives a good overview of the approach.

Anyone have any favorite Adequacy posts they'd like to share?

The internet CAN be used for serious purposes, but it can also be used for less serious purposes. The internet is like a baseball bat; you can play games with it, or use it to bash someone with.

From TFA: "Women named Jill and Hillary should be raped."

I'm wondering under what law anybody could be prosecuted for that? Yes, it's beneath contempt, but it's also protected speech. If my bank pisses me off and I say it should be robbed, I should be prosecuted? And if there was no prosecution, why should the trolls' victims be allowed to unmask them?

If I was the pathetic asshole who posted the offending phrase, I'd counter sue for invasion of privacy. I would have posted this anonymously just for effect, but I don't want to wait a "slow down cowboy" hour.

The internet CAN be used for serious purposes, but it can also be used for less serious purposes. The internet is like a baseball bat; you can play games with it, or use it to bash someone with.

From TFA: "Women named Jill and Hillary should be raped."

I'm wondering under what law anybody could be prosecuted for that? Yes, it's beneath contempt, but it's also protected speech. If my bank pisses me off and I say it should be robbed, I should be prosecuted? And if there was no prosecution, why should the trolls' victims be allowed to unmask them?

If I was the pathetic asshole who posted the offending phrase, I'd counter sue for invasion of privacy. I would have posted this anonymously just for effect, but I don't want to wait a "slow down cowboy" hour.

For every dollar paid in taxes, red state North Dakota gets $2.03 back from the government. The rest of the Top Ten Federal Welfare Queens are New Mexico, Mississippi, Alaska, West Virginia, Montana, Alabama, South Dakota, Arkansas, and Virginia, all red states, all receiving between $1.89 to $1.47 back for every dollar. (To be fair, the District of Columbia is the biggest welfare queen, at $6.17 on the dollar, but it's not really a state, so I'm not going to consider it in my research.)

By contrast, eight of the Top Ten Federal Sugar Daddies (states that get less back in federal money than taxes paid) are blue states. New Jersey only gets 62 back on its one dollar investment. Connecticut, New Hampshire, Illinois, Minnesota, Massachusetts, California, and New York all receive 64 to 81 back for each dollar taxed.

Another interesting analysis may be found here, using data that is available to the public.

There are plenty of studies you can find on this. I don't think anyone is seriously denying that the welfare queens of the union tend to be red states; it's just that the conservatives try really hard not to draw attention to that fact.

Yeah, but you didn't create the IP yet you want to control it by default.

This statement perfectly illustrates the problem we have here: the two sides of the debate are arguing from incompatible assumptions. Right there, you just implicitly assumed that this concept of "IP" exists and was valid. However, people like me disagree on that very point! Therefore, everything you say based on that is useless.

The fundamental question we have to answer here is "does authorship of a work create a property right?" John Locke says yes. Thomas Jefferson says no. But Jefferson wrote the Constitution, so he wins. QED.

you shouldn't be on the Internet in the first place. Bullies control the Internet, but there is really nothing you can do to stop them. If you ban their account, they create a new one. If you ban their IP address they use a proxy server or Tor. If you ban Tor and proxy servers they will use friend's computers, library computers, Internet cafe computers, etc. They will even use viruses to make a victim's computer act as a zombie and can control Botnets of their own.

You just don't want your web site turning into another Kuro5hin type web site. Originally Kuro5hin was a lot like Slashdot, until bullies started to take it over. Then it chased away a lot of loyal users. Whomever remained was either a troll, a bully, or a victim. Then a few victims committed suicide, and recently one victim got admitted to a mental hospital. In order to deal with it the owner made it so new accounts cost $5 to activate, but bullies would gladly pay $5 to keep being bullies and keep control of the web site.

You either deal with them in an effective way, or you give into them, or you shut down your web site, or you just charge $5 to create a new account and let everyone else suffer and get rich off of the misery that bullies cause. If you know of another way to deal with bullies, let the rest of us know.

Actually the Bible is clear on one point: athiests will certainly NOT burn in hell. It says you will simply die, like an animal.

It also says that if you taste death, you will not fear the second death. As someone who died in 1976 I can attest to that. I'm not looking forward to the suffering that acompanies death, however.

He's written like that for a long time (check the date on the comment linked).

I metamoderate daily, troll, I know what's on topic and what isn't. This comment isn't, and neither is yours, although my original comment IS. I'm modding myself down with the "no karma bonus" box and if the mods want to mod it down even further I have no complaint about it. I'll let the mods take care of your offtopic flamebait. Keep it up and your comments will never see the light of day.

Just to let you know, I'm done biting. Bye bye.

I metamoderate daily, troll, I know what's on topic and what isn't. This comment isn't, and neither is yours, although my original comment IS. I'm modding myself down with the "no karma bonus" box and if the mods want to mod it down even further I have no complaint about it. I'll let the mods take care of your offtopic flamebait. Keep it up and your comments will never see the light of day.

Just to let you know, I'm done biting. Bye bye.

If you read my (mostly nsfw; I see you're not at work but I got one poor fellow in trouble for not warning about it; the warning is for the less intoxicated who may stumble on this comment) journals you'll see that I'm a former butthead (gave it up in 1999 after 30 years) who's been smoking pot since 1971. Cocaine's biggest drawback is that it turns its users into total assholes if they snort/smoke/inject it long enough.

The RIAA has been screaming about "radio pirates" for 50 years

Congress wasn't always as dishonest as they are now; or maybe the corporations weren't so generous in their campaign bribes. The Audio Home Recording Act of... I think 1972, maybe it was 1978 (google and wikipedia are failing me, or perhaps I fail it) specifically legalized taping off the radio. Despite this, they still screamed about "radio piracy", and did so incredibly hypocritically.

As I mentioned in a K5 article Birth of a label-sanctioned pirate radio station several years ago, you could record whole albums on cassette. You can still sample whole albums to .wav and convert to .mp3 or ogg.

If you're in St Louis you can still sample KSHE. If you're not within 75 miles of St Louis you can hear whole albums on Sunday nights at KSHE's website; IINM they stream online. I'm not affiliated with them; I grew up in St Louis. I'm just an old listener who tunes in whenever I'm in the area.

I mean "old listener" in both senses of the word; I was 17 when they cam on the air.

The RIAA has been screaming about "radio pirates" for 50 years

Congress wasn't always as dishonest as they are now; or maybe the corporations weren't so generous in their campaign bribes. The Audio Home Recording Act of... I think 1972, maybe it was 1978 (google and wikipedia are failing me, or perhaps I fail it) specifically legalized taping off the radio. Despite this, they still screamed about "radio piracy", and did so incredibly hypocritically.

As I mentioned in a K5 article Birth of a label-sanctioned pirate radio station several years ago, you could record whole albums on cassette. You can still sample whole albums to .wav and convert to .mp3 or ogg.

If you're in St Louis you can still sample KSHE. If you're not within 75 miles of St Louis you can hear whole albums on Sunday nights at KSHE's website; IINM they stream online. I'm not affiliated with them; I grew up in St Louis. I'm just an old listener who tunes in whenever I'm in the area.

I mean "old listener" in both senses of the word; I was 17 when they cam on the air.

I'd gladly have given you my burned Chevy.

How many people even use stereo mix? You record what's playing through your speakers. Any decent sound editing program is going to have some kind of mixer that will combine your recording with whatever you were playing along with.

My friend has a Dell, and for some reason you can't burn CDs with EAC on it. What we wind up doing when we're putting our LPs on CD is burn the .wav to CD as a data CD, then I take it home and burn it as a music CD. Oddly, his Dell will let you copy music CDs with no problem. So ironically, "fair use" is disabled while copyright infringement is not.

And unless by "speakers" you mean your guitar amp, if you are recording your speakers with a microphone you're doing it wrong. See an article I posted on K5 a few years ago, How to rip from vinyl or tape.

Dell is not the only one that distributes drivers that disable stereo mix. Lenovo has these problems too

So if Ford Crown Victorias explode when hit in the rear, it's OK for Chevy to make exploding cars? Your logic is quite faulty there.

When I worked at Disney World in the early 1980s, I had a conversation with a gentleman at Epcot's Chinese pavillion who had only arrived from China a month earlier. He had said something positive about President Reagan, and I set him straight about the doddering old fool that occupied the White House. I blasted his cuts of the Capital Gains Tax, which had unleashed an orgy of corporate takeovers and layoffs. The gentleman was horrified that I would dare say anything against the government, and looked around nervously as if expecting the FBI to appear from nowhere, slap me around and drag me away.

Certainly there are other countries (I can think of a few in the Middle East) with no freedom to speak.

But our own freedom to speak carries such heavy limitations that to think we are better than the Chinese is laughable. You can be arrested for "hate speech." If you badmouth the wrong corporation (and face it, the corporations are the government here, the politicians only being figureheads who do the corporations' bidding) you will be slapped down with a S.L.A.P.P. suit. You won't go to jail, but you will be financially ruined.

2600.org wasn't allowed to link to an algorithm (DeCSS). The courts have held that you have no freedom of speech when writing in a computer language.

Our freedom of speech is illusory.

Religion? Again there's China, and Cuba. However, I don't think that Christianity or Hinduism are illegal in Saudia Arabia.

On the other hand, children have been suspended and even expelled from school for evangelizing. They're being punished both for their speech and their religion.

As to freedom of assembly, that's been gone for quite some time. You want to "petition the government for a redress of grievances" by protesting en masse in front of the statehouse? You're going to go to jail for not having a permit- in short, you must have permission to petition the government by peaceful assembly. Having to ask permission doesn't seem too free to me.

The above was lifted from an old K5 post I wrote, Liberty? What liberty?

the elephants are trying to get rid of the 4th Amendment, of course the jackasses are trying to get rid of the 1st.

They've all ten been dead for quite some time. Back in 2005 I wrote a K5 article titled Liberty? What liberty? outlining how they're all pretty much useless. Last year the cops searched my garage on Memorial Day without warant or permission looking for a drunken ex-girlfriend of mine, and a month later searched my car without warrant or permission looking for drugs because of where I parked it. I journaled it, I don't remember if the journal is SFW or not.

The idea is that in the long term, having your code GPL'd WILL cause it to be put into more products.

If this is the idea, we can already be pretty sure that it is wrong. You mention Apple using FreeBSD, but you seem to forget that almost every major TCP stack is BSD derived. Even Microsoft's NT implementation the BSD stack, although it mostly but not entirely rewritten by the present day.

Do you work in the embedded applications industry? I can tell you that Linux is and remains quite toxic to the business community b.c. of the GPL and the perception of substantial legal risk thereof. Cisco for instance is making a push to use a FreeBSD derivate in all of its consumer products--displacing in some cases existing linux based hardware.

BSD has enjoyed tremendous penetration into the commercial marketplace. Linux is included in a handful of devices--decisions attributable to a wave of linux euphoria which has now mostly dissipated. Organizations are now asking which OSS is safest base from which to derive projects rather than associating an OSS base with Linux. The result is a renewed and overwhelming focus on skipping Linux and sticking with BSD derived code.

I don't even know why I bother going to the polls (yet I still do), but if you read a couple of things I wrote, one back in 2005 and one last year you'll see that I've come to believe that the rule of law in the US is a farse. When your rights can be violated on a whim and the courts agree, the rule of law is gone.

The Constitution is plain English, yet the second amendment squeaked through five to four and Chicago's mayor vows to fight it.

We are a plutocracy. In the US, no rich powerful man goes to prison unless a richer, more powerful man wants him there.

This isn't going to result in a police state. Whats going on in Zimbabwe leads to a police state, not what we have here.

What will lead to a police state? The US IS a police state. If you have secret police you have a police state, and it doesn't matter if you call them "secret police" or politically correct euphemisms like "plainclothesmen" or "undercover agents".

Get rid of victimless "crimes" and you have no rational need for secret police.

If this move would damn us, we've already been damned for some time

You think so?

Indeed, Screen is the way to go for text.

"man screen" should get you on your way.
I've found useful the following website:
http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_Using_screen
Near the bottom is a "live" session example.

This one is good too:
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/3/9/16838/14935

I beg to differ.

-mcgrew

I have come down thoroughly on the side of The Cathedral in my development methodology, because I feel that The Bazaar doesn't serve the needs of end-users. It unnecessarily subjects them to buggy, incomplete software.

I can see how The Bazaar would work well for highly technical users, for development tools, text editors and the like, but not for an audio application.

I was up all night last night trying to figure out how to use OpenOffice to print address labels from a database. When I couldn't get it to work, I downloaded the 3.0.0 Beta, only to find that all the same bugs were still there.

It didn't appear to me that the label printing function had been touched by the developers at all between 2.4.0 and 3.0.0, with the exception of a native OS X print job dialog for the Mac version.

Folks, this is a supposedly mature, full-featured and commercial-quality office productivity application, published by one of the world's largest computer companies, yet one cannot do even such a basic task as printing labels from a database?

That's just inexcusible!

I've done quite a lot of work on Ogg Frog, but it's still in a primitive state, and there are lots of bugs. I fear that if I released it, not even the version I have now, but future snapshots, it would get uploaded to all the shareware sites, where it would be downloaded by unsuspecting novice users, who would find it unpleasant to use.

That wouldn't serve their needs, and further, it would give me and my project a bad reputation. Quite likely I wouldn't get a second chance: my wife now flatly refuses to use Free Software, having had such bad experiences herself with Mozilla, The Gimp, and OpenOffice.

I know that I have the greatest chance of success if I wait until I have something rock-solid before I make its first public release.

Now, that doesn't mean the software isn't being tested, or that real end-users aren't giving me feedback. I have a small circle of testers, both end users and other developers, who are testing it for me - privately.

And that's how I think every Free and Open Source Software project ought to be run.

It does mean I get a lot of crap for not releasing yet, as evidenced by Kuro5hin's A Trolled Englishman. But it's a small price to pay for what I am confident will be my ultimate success.

Sometimes I think these article summaries are intentionally worded to get slashdotters cranked up.

YHBT.
HAND.