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Not only should they not change these laws, they should use them across the board, not on just cable!

That's because it's ridiculous to make privacy laws based on the medium. If I send an e-mail over copper wire, over fiber, over the airwaves, whatever, I still just sent an e-mail. And that should have the same privacy protections, (even though sending it UNENCRYPTED over the airwaves is phenomenally stupid as well...) because I did the same thing. I just sent an e-mail.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

PostScript is a good counter-example here. Remember, PDF is gzipped postscript beaten with an ugly stick.

Text will compress better, and after it has been converted into an internal format, the uncompressed text can be discarded too. Also, if a description language for vector graphics is used correctly, the files shouldn't be that much bigger anyhow.

I'd trust it a lot more than a binary format, too; at least here I can tell if the source is clean, or clean it up myself if I have to. The flexibility text adds is not to be denied.

Of course, there's nothing wrong with making a binary format *too*... That's why we have converters. What sorts of vector graphics formats are out there? Coreldraw, Flash, .wmf? I haven't been keeping up with it.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I think there should be a limit on court costs based on the fine, like maybe a percentage.

I can't understand how, if I got a ticket and didn't contest it, the court costs could easily be EIGHT TIMES the size of the fee, and still generate revenue for anyone.

How about making sure the court costs are less-than-or-equal-to the fee, and making the fee $40 or something? Same sort of money, but at least we know what we're getting. 'Cause if anyone tried to pull a fee like that on me, government or not, you'd bet I'd contest it!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Release it when you have at least a proof-of-concept, and a good design.

...and tell us more! I want to hear about a model where we can take control of our personal information. Heck, I'd like to be able to allow and disallow people myself, and update it sometimes, too, and have recourse against people who sell it without my permission, and...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I was noticing the same thing, actually. I've been modded up a couple of times, but I'm stuck at 350 at the moment.

...so is this Offtopic? I'm following the thread, honest! ;)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Fred Moody is to Jesse Berst as a court jester is to a soulless accountant.

That is to say, exactly why do we care, again?

However, it is funny that Moody can't even get his statistics right. ...so it doesn't even matter that his argument was flawed.

I guess he was just being Moody about it...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Sure you can. You can define something as intensely personal as feelings through somethign as crude and impersonal as words. They'll be able to write an algorithm that will contain what's different about X piece of music from Y piece of music. Do that for a while, and do it well, and you'll have a lot of useful and interesting data to correlate.

You can reduce a piece of music to a generic set of characteristics by writing it out in SHEET MUSIC. It isn't that hard. I doubt that an algorithm would always categorize things the same way as you would, but I bet it could still do a good job, or come up with some insights.

For any further dissenters: the "humans are intrinsically superior because we are human" crowd said the same thing about chess. Where are they now? Oh, they just jumped to a new topic.

Jeez. If you're not going to contribute, but just want to sit on the sidelines and talk about how people shouldn't be able to do WHAT THEY ARE DOING, shut the hell up and go somewhere else.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

If you can classify music with fractals, and you can generate music with fractals...

Could you fuse categories of music as well?

That is, if you can detect the unique patterns of, say, hip-hop, or classical music, could you feed that back into a program and get some really funky classical music? :)

This is all pure speculation on my part, mind you. I'd love to help program something like this, but I wouldn't know where to start. I know something about fractals, but very little about music.

(or at least I'm not any good--whatever program I came up with would compose better than I would!)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Here's a link to the actual Tivo FAQ instead of that crap they linked to...

I think the *only* reason for this device would be to hack it; after all, there isn't anything decent on TV anymore. ...and I can watch "Survivor" every Wednesday all by myself. :)

Actually, I need a device that notifies me if there's *ever* anything worth watching on TV. If that happens, I'll drop everything, see what it is, and run back home. Beating the end of the world by about 3 seconds, I'm sure.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Hmm. That second challenge sounds more interesting; I know that there is a free flash player for linux, but the only realplayer code I ever found really sucked. It could decode older streams at 14.4 and 28.8, I believe. Using the vendor-supplied versions would bloat things, but it's possible; just find the oldest version. For web browser/mail client/java, well, it's time to hack mozilla, since it has components that can be removed...

Well, X *is* a framebuffer; the windowing is optional; therefore, it should be exactly as good at 160x160 graphics as everything else--that part just depends on the pixels you push. Heck, play crappy movies fullscreen with DGA. :)

Now, X might be somewhat large and cumbersome for a handheld, but the remote display options and the compatibility would still be cool...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Well, I'd hope they had a separate .c file for driver-specific code. Any changes they made that get folded back would have to be more general.

However, there are lots of good examples of how this can happen: check out rxvt, for example. It's a reimplementation of xterm, without some features that apparently no one uses. As one of the original X applications, I'm sure that xterm has suffered a lot from bloat, maybe even more than xclock and xload. :)

And yes, I have yet to use an XFree86 server on my machine that can take up, say, less than a megabyte. Maybe after this, we'll be able to really take the QNX challenge!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

What are you talking about? Most games designed for the IBM PC Jr. should look just *fine* even reduced to 160x100! Why, I bet Leisure Suit Larry I would still look excellent. ;)

The only issue I can think of here would be cost, which is probably why they did it that way originally. But I'm sure a vendor would want to sell the coolest little handheld ever, for however much they can charge, so I'd love to know what the other issues are... Anyone? Power consumption?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Amen to that, brother.

I have yet to see *any* emulator get either one right. I can get further in Ultima 7, though.

Second Reality probably does some nasty stuff with protected mode (if I know future crew) and also has some severe timing issues. It's incredibly slow on DosEMU, and of course sound doesn't work either.

Ultima VII does its own memory management, which was annoying even on native DOS; I had a special configuration that rebooted into Ultima VII even back then.

I'll probably install DOS again on my old P133, *just* so I can run all that stuff correctly again. If anyone finds an x86 emulator that runs these correctly on x86, let me know!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

X really is that bloated.

It's scary to think that a reimplemented version of X for a hand-held computer would be equivalently functional and so much less bloated to warrant folding it back into X.

...I guess no one has wanted to rewrite some of that code for a long time, and I can't say I blame them.

Of course, I'll laugh my ass off when I find out that "Windows 2005" is actually "Windows CE 5.0"... ;)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Yes, that would be much better.

It just annoys me when people talk about cool graphics and computer stuff, and then move to movie special effects instead of demos. Shows how lame SIGGRAPH is. :)

I'm sure I can't make it, but I do love to d/l the demos. I've seen some reasonable demos written in Java of all things. I guess that emulates the speed of a 386 well... ;)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Animation Festivals are cool and all, but...

...can't we have a demo competition instead?

I mean, really: games, graphics, cool special effects....

DEMOS! IN ASSEMBLER! x86, C64, Linux, Amiga, Amiga Linux, I don't care, as long as it looks cool!

Oh, and sounds good too. PC speakers need not apply. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Will it run on a Crusoe chip?

Scratch that; a better question would be "WHEN will we see anything that will run on a Crusoe chip?"

Embedded Linux sounds like a great idea for a lot of applications, and so do portable low-power devices with pretty flat screens.

(but I want an Oompa Loompa NOW!)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Break out the ol' black arm-bands, and print that three-line perl script to encrypt all our data, because the nerds are back...

Maybe eventually we can get rid of "programming patents", since all programming is expressible as a discrete system, and therefore can be formalized as math, and math cannot be patented.

However, any piece of digital information can be expressed as, say, one big number, and that can't be patented either. But tell that to the MPAA/RIAA...

Actually, I'd love to post, say, an mpeg of "The Matrix" in base 10. See if anyone bothers to download it and convert it, *or* tries to sue me. ;)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I agree; every version of netscape 4.x has sucked worse than the previous one. I was a big fan of Netscape 2.0 because it didn't know about plug-ins. However, lately I've been using Mozilla. But...

If you have a working windows install, try running IE under Wine. Okay, IE crashes a lot for me as well, but if its more stable for you, then try it out. I've successfully installed and used IE 3.0 for Windows 3.1 under Wine, and I've successfully used IE 4.0 (for '95) under Wine, but couldn't install it fresh, (the network installer breaks under Wine) so only try IE>3.x if you have an existing Windows installation.

And yes, VMWare is slow because it hogs RAM. I know why they do it, but I still don't like it, which is why I prefer DOSEmu and Wine, *and* why neither of those projects are nearly as compatible. :(
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I used optical mice on Sun 3's and Sun 4's, and those are ooold computers. But they aren't exactly desktop machines. And besides, they track too slowly for me. That's one thing I like about a mouse ball, they handle velocity a lot better.

You can tell they aren't desktop machines because they have three buttons, too; Apple should be ready to release *that* new and innovative technology in no less than five years from now, if ever--it's just too dangerous and confusing. ;)

I should probably mention here that my girlfriend loves the mouse she has on her PC--it has three regular butttons, two scroll balls, and a thumb button--and she uses them all.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Not so fast. The machines participating in this network are connecting to each other over IP. As a result, they still use the Internet's routing infrastructure. The path between any given pair of clients would be broken up into several legs, depending upon how many of these high-level routing steps are made.

Consider the connection from client A to client C. Suppose A, B, and C are far apart. An insecure connection straight from A to C would be routed directly across the backbone. If the connection were to be anonymized by passing through B, the flow would have to drop from the backbone to B, passing through a slow access network twice, before it got to C. This is quite inefficient; however, it's a price you pay for anonymity.

...........................................
======= backbone ==========================
...|................|..............|.......
...|................|..............|.......
...|................|..............|.......
.. | .............. | ............ | ......
.. A .............. B ............ C ......
...........................................

There was some related academic work in the past. My favorite paper uses the notion of Crowds, where a user wishing to hide her identity "blends into a crowd" of other users who share the same wish. More specifically, when the user connects to some server, her connection is randomly routed via other members of the crowd. The server sees an IP source address which is never the real origin of the connection. The exposed source address can not get in trouble, because it is merely relaying connections for others. The safety of the system is in numbers.

--ac

Protest slashdot not putting their new stories on the main page! :)

Yeah, I think they shouldn't allow just anyone to get a .gov site, but he is a *politician*, after all. I mean, he can sign a letter and just send it if he wants to.

Heck, he should buy up slashdot.gov and yahoo.gov while he's at it! Start selling .gov sites to the lowest bidder, this is America!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Damn! You took the words right out of my mouth!

Someone mod this up...

...well... I thought it was funny.

Maybe it's the caffeine talking. *sob*

Anyhow, what's so surprising about support / lack thereof? I'm amazed Linux has some I2O support, actually.

And wouldn't this be related to USB support?

Oh well, I'll be getting a new computer soon, so I'll probably get to check it out then...

(I'm more interested in DVD Support, though)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Even though that was an excellent answer to my question, it raises yet more questions. However, now I'm pretty excited about Linux NOW, so I guess that's a fair trade.

At my University, like so many others, we use AFS and Kerberos to integrate all the machines. It sorta works, but it's messy and annoying, and sometimes it really lags, too. I'd love to see something better, instead of a bunch of symlinks and mount points stuck together with a bunch of duct tape.

Also, I've configured NFS before; we recently needed to share resources between two machines, and that makes things impossible. If one of them goes down, the other one becomes catatonic. I realize NFS on Linux isn't perfect yet; in fact, it's downright bad.

However, my box at home isn't connected, so until something better comes along, I'll run 'make -j' in a corner on my unclustered, uniprocessor box... :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Heh; a while back, The Wah (I think it was Wah...) was being downright irrational about the whole mp3 / RIAA / Rosen thing, and trying very hard to get his essay and links posted on slashdot, so I got it posted to kuro5hin instead, and I think he kinda liked the place, too.

...anyhow, the point was, I think that article was linked there too, and in any case it's a great insider's view of the industry.

Oh, and sorry about the Rabid Trolls, dude. That does suck. However, it'll take them a while to recover, since their accounts will probably take a beating from their moderation abuse.....
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I stopped buying CDs a long time ago; any CDs I get are gifts / from gift certificates.

That's because I think they're overpriced; therefore, until they get cheaper, I couldn't care less. There's always the radio, and mass distribution of mp3's might serve to bring prices down as well. Someday.

If you use Napster, or a peer-to-peer filesharing method, or whatever to download copyrighted music, there are two people liable: you, and the person at the other end. That's it. That's what peer-to-peer *means*! It is exactly the same as if I called you at your house on my modem, and you said "I've got this cool mp3", and I said "let me download it", and we spent 5 hours using XModem or something.

And there's no way the RIAA is going to sue a significant percentage of their customers for this, especially when they're getting so much good media attention and good sales.

Therefore, mp3's and file sharing are here to stay, and they'll have to deal with it.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

If you read the whole thread, you'd see that I mentioned that...

...however, the fact of the matter is, they still only run stories that benefit them, they have content editors and whatnot.

What *I* was referring to was the fact that they are both Microsoft and NBC, or rather the Media arm of a Software Monopoly, which by itself should tell you something. Yeah, I go to Microsoft for all of my unbiased reporting. Especially about macro virii...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Oh, I would *love* to know who's been marking so many *ON-TOPIC* posts as "Off-topic".

At least there are enough real moderators around to fix that, and whoever does this will get absolutely slaughtered in Meta-Moderation...

Hey, moderators: before you waste your points marking this post as "Off-topic", say to yourself: could I use these points to mod someone else up instead? Is this post off-topic, or does it relate somehow to the thread or the discussion forum? Did I read his sig like he asked me to?

And, just to see if you read the whole post... In this Napster article, did that letter to developers sound suspiciously like Bill Gates' "Open Letter to Hobbyists" back in the day? It did to me. Even when they don't mention it, the Microsoft references are still prevalent...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

As a condition of using its software, for example, Napster demands that users agree that they won't "decompile, reverse engineer, or disassemble" the program, which precludes anyone from trying to figure out how it works. The phrase is a standard one at big commercial-software companies such as Microsoft Corp.

Someone should write an article about the two sides of MS-NBC...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

This thing was useless from the start; SETI has had too *many* people processing data for them, to the point that they've complained and sent out false data in the past...

Therefore, a SETI accelerator would be their worst nightmare (unless they could just get one for themselves, and give us all a screensaver that doesn't munch CPU instead... :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Shutting down a site until the quality of discussion goes back up...

...what a great idea!

Now all we need to do is get rid of ads, and portal sites, and frames...

Oh yeah, and find a business model for kuro5hin. They probably have the most innovative web-BBS system I've seen, so I'm sure those guys could make something unique and marketable...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

YOU'RE A PATHETIC SACK OF SHIT AND I FOUND YOU OUT! DID YOU REALLY THINK YOU COULD HIDE THE TRUTH FROM US FOR VERY LONG? WHAT YOU'RE DOING IS PATHETIC. GET A FUCKING LIFE, MOTHERFUCKER. IF FLAMING IS SO IMPORTANT TO YOU, THEN TRY PLAYING DIABLO II INSTEAD OF RUINING THE COMMENT SYSTEM FOR ALL OF US. I HOPE THAT TACO FUCKING BITCHSLAPS YOU.

Excuse me for yelling, but this so fucking pisses me off that there is no way I can say it gently! SLASHDOT IS FALLING PREY TO A LAMER MAFIA

Let's review the facts:

- The new slashdot site allows logins. The intelligent posts are nowhere to be seen... for a while.

- Around the time of the intelligent post's "return", anonymous cowards start first posting.

- Trolls get accounts to harvest karma.

- Anonymous posts are inexplicably moderated up.

- Intelligent posters give up and start trolling and getting karma, since the trolls have hosed the system.

- Slashdot almost admits how lame it has become.

- Enoch Root and Signal 11 stop caring about the karma and just try to post; but the ACs don't let them.

- Weird conspiracy theory references start popping up.

The truth is quite simple:

At some point, the assholes who were posting anonymously initially got tired of getting moderated down, jealous of anyone with a karma in the viscinity of 35 (Judging by their posts.) Realizing this was stupid, they decided to get karma, either on eBay or by posting intelligently (though I have found no trace of this), or on a hidden sid (perhaps Rob can check it out?)

The victim was Signal 11. Signal 11 is now, in effect, his own Lamer magnet! Also vulnerable is the Enoch Root account, who gets as many flames as the Signal 11 account and gets as jealously moderated down whenever possible.

These pathetic excuses for human beings deserve to be bitchslapped for abusing the system like this. Please, Rob, if you're reading this, BITCHSLAP THE ANONYMOUS COWARD, AND IF POSSIBLE, THE TROLLS WITH LOGINS. Everyone else, please flame stupid posters whenever possible for being such pathetic whiny lamers. Finally, mail Rob to tell him that you are as disgusted by this as I am.

I am not posting this anonymously, because I actually believe content is worth something on here, and I don't want to lose it all to the Anonymous Troll LAMER MAFIA.

In case you didn't know, moderating posts as 'Overrated' doesn't appear in metamoderation, so is used to confuse newbies who don't know how the system works.

And to the Trolls and the ACs, for doing this: fuck you. All of you. You make me want to puke. You might think this is all a game, and I take Slashdot too seriously. Perhaps. But what you did is still pathetic and very, very sad.

A (rightfully so) Slashdot User
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Don't spend all that time enabling ssh and securing your box, and then just give everyone the password, and let them write all over your web pages? Is that tip in there? :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Actually, I want to know what program they used to *generate* it... :)

I wrote something similar in C (that interfaces with convert; I didn't write any *real* image code if you're wondering :), but my program tends to use two characters/image pixel, just to keep things looking square, and I make sure to use PRE blocks to keep it aligned.

A later version attempted to do sub-pixel anti-aliasing, and optimizing for size by ignoring close colors, but it wasn't incredibly successful. Also, I could probably rewrite the whole thing in Perl now, and it'd be tiny. (and then backport it to C again if I need the speed. ;)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Ah!

That was the crucial detail I was missing.

Thank you very much.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Duh. Of course it has a "Bus", that's the interconnection network. I like hypercubes, I draw them sometimes; it's a simple application of set theory, really...

However, my point was, I can see having 11.2 or 44.8 GB/sec, but *not* 716 GB/sec!

So is *that* a typo? (not 71.6; 716!)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

System Bandwidth
3200: 11.2 Gigabytes/sec
3400: 44.8 GB/sec
3800: 716 GB/sec

...methinks they skipped a decimal point here.

(if not, please explain!)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Steven King bought your account?

So he could post his book at +2?

Now I'm confused...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Nothing beats my NES controller. :)

Find an old Sun mouse; it has a laser.

Play Civ, the *original* strategy game.

Microsoft does nothing original. If it looks original, or even halfway decent, they stole the idea, or bought it from someone else. Look it up.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I'd use ssh; get everyone on the same server in a "safe" country. And be paranoid.

...or if you're the kind of person who keeps all your money stuffed in your bed, you could go the other route, and find a seedy bar somewhere, and talk in a dark corner. Better atmosphere. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

The slashdot crowd will support "The Lone Gunmen", I'm sure.

Even if our kung-fu is better than theirs...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

First, many people write pages to be compliant with 20% market share; just not enough, it seems. There are too many people who think IE *is* "The Internet", for that matter...

Also, Netscape has continually released new browser versions, official and unofficial. There's a 6.0 preview release if you're interested in testing compliance. Many of their releases are buggy and not release-quality yet, but hey, neither is IE or Windows, I can attest to that...

In conclusion, if the webstandards people want to get something done, they should release a competing browser, and gain market share by being better; that's what Netscape did. There's a little project called Mozilla that might be able to help them get started, too. If I just wanted to listen to pointless whining, I'd listen to Jon Katz...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Do you want it standards-compliant, or do you want it now?

For "web standards" people, they sure sound pushy. Don't tell me they think IE 5.5 is compliant just because it's out today!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Heh heh. Excellent example.

I find it funny that many of the same people who are in favor of censorship are also convinced of the necessity of what they call "a test of faith", to prove their loyalty or whatever. Hypocrisy? In religion? Never...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Feel free, dude!

Actually, I have a page or two there about that... To get the full effect, follow the link, too!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Feel free, dude!

Actually, I have a page or two there about that... To get the full effect, follow the link, too!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

AI Bots that can identify and snarf porn for us!

What will those great Censorship people think of next? :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

No, no, no; not that post; THIS POST.

Read my sig, you stupid motherfucker.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Incidentally, won't that stop people from modding it *down* as well?

...and if the code is in Perl, maybe he'll just overflow a floating-point number, or force it into scientific notation...

Of course, by 2003, we'll have perl scripts identify the topic, and replay the top posts from 6 months ago. "Karma Whore Bots", if you will.

...and this wormhole device might be the only way to accurately look at old Slashdot postings, since they'd all be eaten by the database by then.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.