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> One cannot lawfully copy them, neither for resale nor give-away.

Yes you can if the copyright has expired.

> the publisher is entitled to enjoy the profits of a work for a time.

FTFY.

1. It was publishers who FIRST invented copyright to stop other publishers from "illegal" printing and profitting! It was NEVER about the author - that came hundreds of years later.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H... [wikipedia.org]

"The history of copyright law starts with early privileges and monopolies granted to printers of books. The British Statute of Anne 1710, full title "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned", was the first copyright statute. Initially copyright law only applied to the copying of books."

and

"Pope Alexander VI issued a bull in 1501 against the unlicensed printing of books and in 1559 the Index Expurgatorius, or List of Prohibited Books, was issued for the first time."

and

"The first copyright privilege in England bears date 1518 and was issued to Richard Pynson, King's Printer, the successor to William Caxton. The privilege gives a monopoly for the term of two years. The date is 15 years later than that of the first privilege issued in France. Early copyright privileges were called "monopolies," ...

and

"In England the printers, known as stationers, formed a collective organisation, known as the Stationers' Company. In the 16th century the Stationers' Company was given the power to require all lawfully printed books to be entered into its register. Only members of the Stationers' Company could enter books into the register. This meant that the Stationers' Company achieved a dominant position over publishing in 17th century England"

2. The problems of long duration of Copyright was debated back in 1841 byThomas Babbington Macaulay

"The easiest form of parochialism to fall into is to assume that we are smarter than the past generations, that our thinking is necessarily more sophisticated. This may be true in science and technology, but not necessarily so in wisdom."

Since the source article is long gone ...

* http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/... .. here is a mirror

- - - 8< - - -

Macaulay on copyright law by Eric Flint September 1, 2001

These are two speeches given by Thomas Macaulay in Parliament in 1841, when the issue of copyright was being hammered out. They are, no other word for it, brilliant -- and cover everything fundamental which is involved in the issue. (For those not familiar with him, Macaulay would eventually become one of the foremost British historians of the 19th century. His History of England remains in print to this day, as do many of his other writings.)

I strongly urge people to read them. Yes, they're long -- almost 10,000 words -- and, yes, Macaulay's oratorical style is that of an earlier era. (Although, I've got to say, I'm partial to it. Macaulay orated before the era of "sound bytes." Thank God.)

But contained herein is all wisdom on the subject, an immense learning -- and plenty of wit. So relax, pour yourself some coffee (or whatever beverage of your choice) (or whatever, preferably not hallucinogenic), and take the time to read it. The "oh-so-modern" subject of "electronic piracy" contains no problems which Macaulay didn't already address, at least in essence, more than a century and a half ago.

I should note that Macaulay's position, slightly modified, did become the basis of copyright law in the English speaking world. And remained so (at l

> it was better than Slashdot and had features that Slashdot still doesn't have.

Agreed, aside from the hard-to-type domain name.

One of my favorite Kuro5hin articles was this one:

Macaulay on dangers of Copyright in 1841

"The easiest form of parochialism to fall into is to assume that we are smarter than the past generations, that our thinking is necessarily more sophisticated. This may be true in science and technology, but not necessarily so in wisdom."

* http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/...

RIP

No, I think he's definitely correct... the wealthy hoard their wealth and try to extract as much as possible from everyone else, always has been and always will be that way. Some things are finite (or practically so), and will remain that way.

With automation comes the possibility that a few elite owners of capital (who will own all the worlds robots and AI) will come to rule the world with everyone else starving... ie, the robots will serve only the few who will lord it over the rest of us, as they no longer need us in any way.

A free market solutions cannot solve this problem, as the wealthy will not willingly give up their wealth in the form of a tax, so the solution must be by force... however, at this time, they also own the media, and therefore consensus, and so the government, who have the monopoly on force to demand this tax... so, it's unlikely that this solution can be passed "democratically" either...

I'll leave the solution to this problem as an exercise for the reader... however, history has many examples where the wealthy ignored this problem, and it doesn't usually end so well for them... unfortunately, it doesn't generally go all that great for anyone else either. So, there is hope that they might accept this type of solution before it gets to that point, out of self preservation... but they might have other solutions too that won't be so palatable (bread, circuses and FEMA camps).

"Root causes" are not hard to understand given a background in evolutionary psychology.

Why do chimps and prestate people fight? It's over scares resources or a pending shortages. Humans were selected in the stone age for a behavior switch and to detect conditions where it was advantageous to their genes to switch into "war mode." For background:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/... (Peer reviewed version behind a paywall)

How do you move the behavior switch to "peace mode" or keep it there? Steady or rising income per capita seems to do the job. Remember the IRA? The model notes that the Irish women cut the number of kids they had to about replacement. Economic growth got ahead of population growth and rising income per capital shut off the population support for the IRA. Due to their one child policy and rising standard of living, China is very unlikely to start a war. Iran has reached 2 children per woman and should become a reasonably peaceful country.

Prospects are not good for the rest of the Arab world. It's not just the high birth rates and low economic growth, it's the difficulty in changing either one either from inside Arab culture or outside it.

If you have any ideas, please email me. hkeithhenson at gmail dot com

... as that would show the absolutely low quality of their code

What is directly known about Microsoft code doesn't support your argument. For example, after the Windows 2000 code leak several people did their own analysis of the code. For example, kuro5hin concluded:

In short, there is nothing really surprising in this leak. Microsoft does not steal open-source code. Their older code is flaky, their modern code excellent. Their programmers are skilled and enthusiastic. Problems are generally due to a trade-off of current quality against vast hardware, software and backward compatibility.

Note that last sentence: Problems are generally due to a trade-off of current quality against vast hardware, software and backward compatibility.

More recently, static code analysis was done on the legally released Word for Windows 1.1a by PVS-Studio. They concluded:

I have found very few strange fragments. There are two reasons for that. Firstly, I found the code to be skillfully and clearly written. Secondly, the analysis had to be incomplete, while teaching the analyzer the specifics of the old C language wouldn't be of any use.

In short, there may be many reasons not to pay for Microsoft's software. Your perception of the quality of their code is not one.

circletimessquare is the Time Cube guy

By Timo Laine in Timo Laine's Diary
Sun Sep 07, 2003 at 05:15:24 AM EST
Tags: (all tags)

It's so obvious. I wonder why I didn't see it before.

Timo Laine is the Time Cube guy

By circletimessquare in circletimessquare's Diary
Mon Sep 08, 2003 at 03:55:13 PM EST
Tags: (all tags)

Recently I was the subject of a diary entry by Timo Laine. His entry was actually pretty funny, as he successfully drew a parallel between my trollish ways and the obtuse themes and writing style of the famous Time Cube Guy.

However, as flattering as that comparison was, I have recently discovered that, in fact, Timo Laine is the Time Cube Guy.

circletimessquare is the Time Cube guy

By Timo Laine in Timo Laine's Diary
Sun Sep 07, 2003 at 05:15:24 AM EST
Tags: (all tags)

It's so obvious. I wonder why I didn't see it before.

Timo Laine is the Time Cube guy

By circletimessquare in circletimessquare's Diary
Mon Sep 08, 2003 at 03:55:13 PM EST
Tags: (all tags)

Recently I was the subject of a diary entry by Timo Laine. His entry was actually pretty funny, as he successfully drew a parallel between my trollish ways and the obtuse themes and writing style of the famous Time Cube Guy.

However, as flattering as that comparison was, I have recently discovered that, in fact, Timo Laine is the Time Cube Guy.

Ahh... I see... Well, it's no fun once you admint to being a troll. Ironic that you post faux anti-sexism comments here after your diary entry about "meet[ing] chicks". You know it's sexist to call them chicks, right?

Ah, so we should toss the baby out with the bathwater simply because you dislike _his_ work flow. Riiight.

/sarcasm I guess no one else got the memo that we ALL should follow _your_ divine workflow and use _only_ the software that you "bless" as being "valid". Who die and made you king again?

Philosophy doesn't depend on technology. It is about how it can/should be used.

It would behoove you to study history.

"The easiest form of parochialism to fall into is to assume that we are smarter than the past generations, that our thinking is necessarily more sophisticated. This may be true in science and technology, but not necessarily so in wisdom."

Macaulay on dangers of Copyright in 1841

You can't just give everyone cryptocoins (effectively tokens) and expect them to get value... at the heart, a basic income is welfare, and requires wealth redistribution. The value has to come from somewhere.

I found and copied an article about a possible implementation that solves this issue. It's hidden in discordian bullshit, but I think the theory is sound... if somewhat dangerous.

If anything, Wikipedia is the encyclopedia that Kuro5hin built.

Yes, the ridiculous length is indeed a problem.

The "evils" of copyright was debated back in 1841 !!

"The easiest form of parochialism to fall into is to assume that we are smarter than the past generations, that our thinking is necessarily more sophisticated. This may be true in science and technology, but not necessarily so in wisdom."
  -- "Macaulay on Copyright"

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/...

Two articles that I wrote about this:

The Software Construction Analogy is Broken

and

Technical Push-Back

I don't have a lot of patience with the profession since it's built on a fatally flawed analogy and all software architects ever do is waste and overhead from a lean perspective.

Your dismissal of my evidence is itself an example of cherry-picking. Here's another typical example of business stifling speech: http://www.whas11.com/home/12-...

"According to a 2009 study by Internet security firm Proofpoint, 8 percent of companies with more than 1,000 employees have fired someone for social media actions -- a figure that is double what was reported in 2008."

Business is built upon the idea that hoarding is good. Non-disclosure agreements, trade secrets, copyrights all serve to censor the free and open transmission of knowledge. Maybe biz will finally get it, that open exchange is better for progress. But how much will I suffer meanwhile?

Capitalism and slavery are intimately connected. I wrote an essay on this subject, for the History of Capitalism MOOC: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/...

Why do wars accelerate technological innovation? Because govt funds research. Why not invest in disruptive innovation all the time? The market is too short-sighted: see http://depts.washington.edu/uw...

"Itâ(TM)s common for business people to point to the 1990sâ"specifically, to the 1995 Netscape IPOâ"as the âoebeginning of the Internet.â This claim is unsupported by fact. The Internet was âoebornâ in 1968, more than 25 years earlier. Internet pioneers, such as Bob Taylor, in interviews express frustration at how slowly business came to realize the importance of a collection of technologies that we now consider extremely valuable. Internet pioneers worked hard to prove the value of the new technologies, but business took a very long time to âoeget it.â"

Govt's greatest potential is in creating money to free individuals from having to do what "little Napoleon" bosses tell them to do. So get rid of government bureaucracies, leave the private sector alone (to fail), but provide an opt-in robust unconditional safety net. Stimulate innovation with challenges.

I'm not a people person. People make me depressed. I prefer to go out in nature and communicate with animals. I try to limit human contact to the internet.

Why should I suffer a lifestyle below the poverty line, because I don't sell? I produce things that no one wants to buy (and I just give away anyway because I hate selling), but someone who produces the same thing gets rich and rewarded, because he knows how to communicate non-verbally. That's the fickleness of the market.

Back in 2003, there was a similar system called the Policy Analysis Market (PAM) that was close to being implemented. It got deep-sixed by some world-class idiots from Congress (see my opinion then). It's too bad that we have to go to a somewhat contrived surveying/polling system rather than use something that we know works.

For example, I think a PAM system would have given us (and I mean everyone not just US policy makers) insight into how the events of the Arab Spring revolutions would evolve even if it couldn't have predicted the original flash point.

> And, 5% daily swings in a market that only makes an average of 5 to 10% forward progress per year isn't just a gambler's opportunity, it's also a gambler's risk. Invest for 10 years, but, depending on whether or not you got lucky on the day of investment and the day of withdrawal, you might get 11 years worth of planned returns, or 9. I thought that Las Vegas was the place to gamble....

And if you actually knew about investment you could profit everyday from the 5% daily swing... AND play a small role in dampening that swing...AND do better than just the base growth rate.

You need to learn Modern Portfolio Theory.

> Circle back to the French Revolution, if you bothered to pay attention in classes like History.

> Big money dumps a whole lot more than 'two shits' on the little people, and sooner or later, the sheer number of little people who are getting dumped on tips the balance against the small number of people who are holding the big money.

> If big money can present at least a reasonable illusion of fairness, the backlash can be forestalled. When the masses of people are told "work all you lives, save money in the market where it can grow" and then see how their money shrinks in the market while big money grows...

BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH...

Yes, the rich get richer, the poor get the picture...

These are problems with WEALTH INEQUALITY... you deal with that problem DIRECTLY... but not by making markets less efficient.

Let markets do their job, solve wealth inequality (free markets can't solve this... it requires political will)... the free market is a distributed information signalling system... let it do its job.

I'm saying you're complaining about the wrong problem.

There is actually good reason from evolution to think these models are correct.

I wrote about this some years ago. Evolutionary Psychology, Memes and the Origin of War. It was published in an academic journal, but this version,

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/...

is not behind a paywall.

So did my old Chevy. Citation: "Car Bombs" from The Paxil Diaries (in print soon).

When I went to uni, more years ago than I care to remember, I would return home from time to time at the weekend, and go out with the lads on a Saturday night. As it was a rural area, we'd drive to the nearest big town, visit a pub and then go on clubbing.

We'd usually visit the same pub, but every few months the pub we went to would change.

Why?

We didn't go to the pub with the best beer, the best music, the best seats. No, we just went to the "place where everyone else went". From time to time, everyone in town would get bored with one place and move on somewhere else which then became the new "place where everyone went". That made it (for us, at that time) the place with the best atmosphere.

What Dice needs to realise is that all that Slashdot is is one of the "places where everyone goes" for computer / techie discussion (OK, so it's not the only one, but you get my drift). This site has no value, other than being the "place where everyone goes".

It won't be at all difficult for someone to set up Dashslot, or Slushdirt or whatever, with the same formula as traditional Slashdot, and once word gets around that new site will be the "place where everyone goes" instead of here. Slashdot will become the new Kuro5hin, a steep and tragic decline from former glories.

And that new site might even have decent editing and Unicode support.

It's a sad reality that even a community as big and stable as Slashdot (generating constant ad revenue) is still too small/niche to satisfy their money-lost.

Kind of a pitfall of the corporate ownership structure I guess. It's interesting to compare Kuro5hin, which once had considerable community overlap with Slashdot, but more or less withered until the point where good new content completely stopped appearing. Yet oddly from a purely formal perspective the site actually works, its archives are readable, and it will probably continue to work for a while. It makes enough ad revenue to pay for its upkeep, and since it's owned by just one guy who doesn't need to send quarterly reports to shareholders, there's no particular reason to kill even a modest revenue source that's on autopilot. Meanwhile a more successful site seems desperate to revamp itself...

For those building slashdot alternatives

Might I remind my fellow posters, that the last time a mass user-base fork occurred, we ended up with Kuro5hin?

Ewww...

There are NO "beta addicts"

The community has universally spoken against the new look. I have not seen one post that has been in favor of it. In over twenty years of being on the Internet, that is a first for me.

The only people who seem interested in the beta seem to be the people at Dice pushing it down at us. There are numerous speculations as to why this is (an earnest belief it improves the site, somebody's reputation on the line, or an attempt to orient the brand at a new demographic). Dice's continued silence on the matter is quite telling, however; it is obvious they are not concerned with what the community thinks about the matter.

At the moment, I am still coming back to Slashdot because the circus and uproar about the beta is just too much fun to miss out on, but like many here I expect that - barring a reversal of intent on Dice's behalf - I eventually will migrate to some other website.

Already some suggestions have been made:

Ars Technica
Alt Slashdot (currently in development)
Subreddit /r/Slashdot
kuro5hin

I am on the lookout for more.

So far, I'm thinking kuro5hin.org is the best hope out there. Most of the other tech news sites just don't have a clue about how to manage comments, a bit like the Slashdot Beta.

I've been reading slashdot since the 90s, but this really is the end. Apart from the godawful beta, we've also had the attempt to convert the stories into slashvertisements en masse, and the Slashdot Polls are really starting to look like Facebook covert demographics research for the Dice marketing dept.

Taco and Hemos were really cool guys, I'm glad they were able to cash in.

Revive http://www.kuro5hin.org/ maybe?

So if the Legislature wishes to encourage the promotion of such activity by preventing fraud and dishonesty in such endeavors, it's certainly a reasonable interpretation.

Sounds like it to me.

One might even take it as an obligation on their part to use all suitable means to do so.

My take on that is a bit different. Once a really powerful party has an moral obligation to fuck with me, it's just going to go downhill from there. Part of the reason, I don't live in California any more.

Even windows wouldn't be here (or at least not on the Internet) if not for open source. BSD/SystemV is not just the base for OSX but also large parts of VMS and subsequently NT as well as the BSD TCP/IP stack and the POSIX layer within NT.

That's a myth.

> It is fascinating that we continue to find artifacts from the ancient world that show far more sophistication that people today generally realize.

Uh, not to be condescending, but try reading more. :-)

"The easiest form of parochialism to fall into is to assume that we are smarter than the past generations, that our thinking is necessarily more sophisticated. This may be true in science and technology, but not necessarily so in wisdom."

That quote is from the introduction to this brilliant essay: "Macaulay on Copyright"
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/4/25/1345/03329

Most of the remaining MPEG LA patents that matter run out in Q1 2014.

That sounds great, but could you please provide a reference or two to support it?

The sources I have seen suggest that it will be after 2020 before all the patents that affect even MPEG-2 will be gone. For example: this kuro5hin article lists 2023 as the year the last MPEG-2 patent runs out. And this page lists 2027 as the year the last H.264 patents run out.

If I'm understanding you correctly, you are saying that the most essential patents are running out, so it should be possible to make a patent-free coder and decoder that would cover a usable subset of the MPEG standards?

Do you predict that a patent-free MPEG-2 decoder capable of playing DVDs would be possible within a year?

I had a look at the link that you gave, but couldn't see any mention about "Putting this in for the Office team" that was apparently one of the big discussions. I did manage to find this, but it doesn't really show a smoking gun for widespread collusion between the Windows and Office development teams, especially because they also mention of specific code for Borland, IBM, and Symantec in that article.

I think that the use of a few vague comments in the Windows source code leak as proof of secret API calls in Office is about as undamning as the focussing on a few instances of terminology in the CRU email leaks when trying to prove climate change is all one big conspiracy. If all the allegations were true, I would have expected to see more specific evidence.

I'm OK with 100 year copyright if after 10 works fall under some FRAND scheme and all the Netflix's of the world get to stream them for a nominal fee.

I'm not. Art is like tech or science, in that what is new builds on what is old. The reason I haven't put The Paxil Diaries in print and for sale is because of a single poem with 24 words written half a century ago by a dead woman. That chapter revolves around the poem and its place in the Illinois State Library. If I publish that book, the dead poet's rich heirs will surely sue the living shit out of me.

That poem should be in the public domain. Long copyright terms harm culture. There's no valid reason whatever for terms to be as insanely long as they are.

Ever see a car burn? It's awesome.

Yes, and it's not so damned awesome when it's YOUR CAR. It's awful. It started in the engine and took quite a while to immolate the interior; it took Chatham's volunteer fire department a half hour to show up. Fucking aluminum MELTED.

Gasoline is nasty stuff in every way.

http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm

http://peachfront.diaryland.com/enderhitlte.html

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/5/28/22428/7034


And a few other article insunuating that actually the book was a group/commityn produce, which explain the disparity of quality, and style with the follow up book.


My opinion is that Orson scott card was always an asshat, and the whole book was *very* itnentionally a disguised nazi apologia.

They did this for our own good. Note in the link the use of the phrase "verbal KY".

Don’t forget the documentation to match!

HOWTO: write bad documentation that looks good

Where does this myth come from

Since the late 90s there have been mumblings ("Someone I know who works at MS said they knew someone who said...") that code from BSD TCP/IP stack was in Windows but there was never any proof. Some speculated that because they were susceptible to some of the same vulnerabilities they must share common code but there were some vulnerabilities that affected the Windows TCP/IP stack not the BSD one (and vice versa) so this seems unlikely.

In 2001 the FreeBSD folks decided to search for proof but other than utilities nothing much was found. You can even see them correcting the "Windows uses the BSD TCP/IP stack" misconception years later.

Around the same time an article saying Microsoft uses open source code was published in the Wall Street Journal. Here's a quote:

Software connected with the FreeBSD open-source operating system is used in several places deep inside several versions of Microsoft's Windows software, such as in the "TCP/IP" section

This assertion is somewhat broard but it was enough to kick off a new round of speculation and rebuttals with regard to the Windows TCP/IP stack but everyone loves a good tale so the counterclaims are less well known. Perhaps this would qualify as a Snopes urban myth.

[H]ow did it end up being passed of as fact on wikipedia?

Who says Wikipedia only consists of facts? :-) Nothing saves you from having to use critical analysis on sources, especially since anyone can edit Wikipedia but I will note there is a citation needed link further down on that page.

All the above sources were found via a Google Windows/BSD stack query so with these starter links and a quick search you're now well armed to correct Wikipedia and anyone else who repeats this rumour. Welcome to the club!

The best thing about the movie Apollo 13 was the attention to every detail; the old cabinet TV with Walter Cronkite, the clothes, the music... As to the movie "Gravity" I submitted this, which linked Ms. Ivin's full review of the movie. If you see it in the firehose, don't vote it up as it would be a dupe at this point.

Ivin is a self professed sci-fi fan and "one of the original Trekkies".* An engineer and a Trekkie? I'll bet she's lurking here now, probably has a 3 digit UID. A snippet of her review:

My first take was to itemize the errors. The vehicles are in impossible orbits -- wrong altitudes, wrong inclinations. The backpack maneuvering unit has a nearly infinite amount of fuel and comes superchargedâ"but only until the plot requires it suddenly to run out. Space stations seem to retain pressure in their various modules despite coming apart at the seams. You can apparently close an outward opening hatch against exiting pressure with one hand.

She did have a lot of good things to say about it.

If you have a GF this is most likely a movie you can take her to since it's Sandra Bullock and George Clooney.

* Sometimes it's great being a geezer, I got to see TOS when it was brand new and flat screen monitors, "communicators", self-opening doors, etc were just fantasies. A young friend envied me when I described hearing Led Zeppelin for the first time, as John Bonham was dead before he was born.

I live in a science fiction fantasy, except it's all real now. You guys grew up with computers, computers grew up with me.

You guys will see things even science fiction writers haven't thought of.

I was going to post the same comment when I saw this before it was posted when I was at lunch (can't log in here). What struck me was TFS's "is this Tesla's Toyota moment?" More like a Ford moment, or another Ford moment..

Unlike the Pintos and Crown Vics, where many cars burned and killed people, this was ONE incident and no one was injured.

Hell, my old Chevy caught fire ten years ago.

If I may add my 2 cents, one of the trickier parts of Buddha's message seems to be how to live with care, lightness, and compassion, whilst knowing it is all just dust blowing in the wind.

Yes, I learned quite a bit about Buddhism while stationed in Thailand (the B-52s there weren't nuclear-armed). I was once admonished for swatting at a fly. Oddly, the Thai boxers (surely Buddhist, every Thai I met was) had no problem at all with sending Chinese Kung-fu fighters to the hospital. Thais taught me how to use nunchucks. Practicing was good exercise until I hit myself in the funny bone with one.

Some of the priests did some stuff that was unbelievable.

I close my eyes, only for a moment, and the moment's gone
All my dreams, pass before my eyes, a curiosity
Dust in the wind, all they are is dust in the wind
Same old song, just a drop of water in an endless sea
All we do, crumbles to the ground, though we refuse to see

Dust in the wind, All we are is dust in the wind

Don't hang on, nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky
It slips away, all your money won't another minute buy

Dust in the wind, All we are is dust in the wind

-- Kansas

Computers and their connections can be a daunting things, especially if you just didn't grow up with it or have a kid around to teach you and fix things.

Bullshit, I'm 51, computers grew up with ME (no, I don't live in Soviet Russia). I saw my first computer when I was 12, it was the size of a building. The second one was in the Air Force in 1972, it took an entire building as well. I got my first computer at age 30, a TS-1000. I had no idea how it worked or how to use it, so I RTFM and researches at the library.

Now I have one in my pocket that is many times more powerful than the monster I stood inside of.

My 82 year old dad, OTOH, takes the opinion his father-in-law had about indoor plumbing: "I never had a computer or cell phone before and don't need one now." My grandpa refused to use the bathroom my uncle installed in my grandparents' house, continuing to use the outhouse in the back year.

I hope I never get like that.

That was his original user name but his karma is so far in the toilet that an AC who starts at 0 has a better chance of being seen. He puts it there and is laughing at you right now for getting his troll seen. You might want to look at this.

How about the 2-hour/day Uberman sleep schedule?
Some people claim success. That schedule allows you to work two full time jobs, exercise, and even have time left over for hobbies.

If no one had seen evidence that would be rational. If many people spoke of seeing evidence first hand, the only rational position would be to have an open mind.

Your Atheism depends on faith. Agnosticism is the rational answer unless you go through something like this which leaves no doubt.

I don't have to have faith.

The private shuttles don't solve the "last mile" problem that public transit provides, though. For the most part, the company shuttles only have a handful of stops.

To the contrary, they solve the last mile problem quite well with people going right to the business where they work without a lot of irrelevant stops like typical public transportation buses would have.

At any rate, it's not very efficient mass transit to transport people in one direction; it means your buses are empty nearly half the time.

Compared to what? Most transit systems have this sort of problem for the same reason. Most people want to go one way at the start of a work day and the other direction at the end of the work day.

And I'll just note that I have actually traveled on the public transportation systems in the Silicon Valley area. They are relatively good for US public transportation, but still terrible compared to the car.

For example, I took Amtrak from Davis, California to a Stanford University conference a number of years ago. I managed to make it only a few hours later than expected. And I was almost trapped in Sacramento on the return. I have yet to feel the inclination to try something like that again, though it did occupy my time.

If I had done it by car, it might have been a little more expensive due to parking expenses at Stanford, but I would have made it on time, been on the road about half the time (even if I had traveled optimally), and without getting trapped in Sacramento.

What makes you think that the current patents will be allowed to run out? After all, copyrights have been extended forever

The fact that 17 years after grant (or 20 years after filing, which is in practice the same thing given how long a patent takes to issue) has stood for several decades is a large part of why there isn't likely to be a Cher Act any time soon.

It's more than that: Orson Scott Card Has Always Been An Asshat. Kind of funny folks are only now caring. Guess no one reads any more.

Personally I've been boycotting him for nearly a decade at this point. (I believe his most notorious hate-diatribes were in 1990, 2004, and 2007. The latter ones were when I found out about his positions and decided that I would never buy another one of his works.)

It's more than that: Orson Scott Card Has Always Been An Asshat. Kind of funny folks are only now caring. Guess no one reads any more.

My colleagues at Kuro5hin ridiculed me mercilessly when I told them that I was for the very first time prepared to accept the responsibility of being root on a Linux box connected directly to the Internet.

It's not like it's hard to install and configure Linux. What is hard is to ensure that it's not broken into.

I challenged them all to deface so much as one page on any of the sites I serve from that box. It's been a couple years, but none have yet been defaced. While it is possible I've been penetrated, it's been done in a way I cannot detect.

By comparison, I am able to root any Apple A/UX 2.0 box within ten or twenty seconds of it being connected to the same network I have access to. That is, if it's within a firewall, I have to be inside that same firewall. I can also cover up the fact that I'm logged in. I never tried to make myself completely indetectable, say by patching ls, ps and so one, but I know how I could.

My rootkit was maybe fifteen lines of C code. I attached it to a Radar report, then referred it to the A/UX team because I was so pissed off that they did not even know what the CERT advisories even were.

I feared I would be fired, but no, I was enthusiastically invited to play "Capture the Flag" on one of Apple's BSD VAXen. The objective was to alter the file "/flag" in any way whatsoever. At the same it's contents were something like "Kevin Mitnick RUL3Z!". But I was never able to scratch that VAX's security in any way.

My logs on my current server tell me it receives thousands of breakin attempts every single day, the vast majority of them attempts to GET /phpMyAdmin.php, /phpMy-Admin.php and so on. My guess is that some clueless PHP "coders" get the bright idea they can lock down their box rather than changing the password from the default!

But there are lots of other kinds of exploit attempts. The most serious one was a persistent effort to load some URLs that I found to be part of some commercial content management system that had not been updated in five years or so. I'm sorry I don't recall what its name was. I don't use it, but whoever does likely has many well-known, unpatched vulnerabilities.

On the other hand, telephone wardialing is a far, far greater problem than CyberWarfare over the Internet. I'd rather not be too specific as to why, but I've been thinking lately that I would do well to send a registered letter to the Department of Homeland Security.

I personally know how to cause a huge detonation over a telephone modem. That's all I'm going to say about it, that and that it's been long enough that the ignorant mother fucker who is responsible for enabling that detonation has had plenty of time to fix his broken code. I didn't want to put his whole company out of business as in many respects their product has many merits. It's just buggy as all get-out, with many security vulnerabilities being no more than commonplace bugs that enable one to break in - or make something explode - when stimulated in certain ways.

The haters are free to voice their opinions in their own blogs, where they will too be flamed.

I don't disagree with that. My problem with TFA was it looked like he wanted speech like that outlawed. My site didn't have a messageboard but I got a lot of email, and posted much of it and almost all of the negative mail, which I lampooned on the site.

There are plenty of offline trolls, too. Note some of the comments after the story, that's just how things are.

You just told the trolls that they won by publicly bitching about them.

You should be moderated insightful. One of the biggest rules of the internet is Don't feed the trolls.

Help is available for those addicted to feeding the trolls, Biters Anonymous.

The Republican House Speaker called Edward Snowden a traitor. It's a bipartisan police state we now have (this isn't the first time I've said that). I wouldn't doubt if I were on the no-fly list but I haven't been on a plane since you could smoke inflight.

I say Boehner's the traitor, Snowden's a patriot who gave everything but his life (and still may) for his fellow Americans.

If you're against Snowden you're against freedom. That's one brave kid.