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Color 35mm film (not to mention 70 mm) is generally considered to be equivalent to roughly 4,000 x 5,300 pixels, which is way more than even 1,920 x 1,080. More info.

This means that any TV show shot on film (vs. videotape) is a candidate for a New! High Definition Version! Can't wait to see teh Soup Nazi in HD.

First ever spam email sent. It was in 1978!

DIGITAL WILL BE GIVING A PRODUCT PRESENTATION OF THE NEWEST MEMBERS OF THE
DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY; THE DECSYSTEM-2020, 2020T, 2060, AND 2060T. THE
DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY OF COMPUTERS HAS EVOLVED FROM THE TENEX OPERATING SYSTEM
AND THE DECSYSTEM-10 COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE. BOTH THE DECSYSTEM-2060T
AND 2020T OFFER FULL ARPANET SUPPORT UNDER THE TOPS-20 OPERATING SYSTEM.
THE DECSYSTEM-2060 IS AN UPWARD EXTENSION OF THE CURRENT DECSYSTEM 2040
AND 2050 FAMILY. THE DECSYSTEM-2020 IS A NEW LOW END MEMBER OF THE
DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY AND FULLY SOFTWARE COMPATIBLE WITH ALL OF THE OTHER
DECSYSTEM-20 MODELS.


WE INVITE YOU TO COME SEE THE 2020 AND HEAR ABOUT THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY
AT THE TWO PRODUCT PRESENTATIONS WE WILL BE GIVING IN CALIFORNIA THIS
MONTH. THE LOCATIONS WILL BE:

TUESDAY, MAY 9, 1978 - 2 PM
HYATT HOUSE (NEAR THE L.A. AIRPORT)
LOS ANGELES, CA


THURSDAY, MAY 11, 1978 - 2 PM
DUNFEY'S ROYAL COACH
SAN MATEO, CA
(4 MILES SOUTH OF S.F. AIRPORT AT BAYSHORE, RT 101 AND RT 92)


A 2020 WILL BE THERE FOR YOU TO VIEW. ALSO TERMINALS ON-LINE TO OTHER
DECSYSTEM-20 SYSTEMS THROUGH THE ARPANET. IF YOU ARE UNABLE TO ATTEND,
PLEASE FEEL FREE TO CONTACT THE NEAREST DEC OFFICE
FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE EXCITING DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY.



Source http://www.templetons.com/brad/spamreact.html

First spam email in 1978?
http://www.templetons.com/brad/spamreact.html

Why is this post getting modded up?

2 seconds of searching may lead you to http://pic.templetons.com/brad/photo/pixels.html. That page, and several pages that link off it, sum up pretty well the quality and resolution of analog vs digital cameras.

It is quite clear that only the most high end digital cameras are in the same league as a good 35mm.

Digital cameras are rapidly improving, but they are not quite there yet.

The reasons for the rise to prominence of digital photography are cost and ease of use, not quality.

Sorry, but you're mistaken. Keep your LameJokeGuy name.

Since you seem to think that Rockwell is not a good source, here's a few different ones:


"The very short answer is that there are around 20 million "quality" pixels in a top-quality 35mm shot."

-http://pic.templetons.com/brad/photo/pixels.html


"A 35mm film frame is approximately 24mm x 36 mm. Thus, to get an approximate pixel equivalent you'd multiply 24mm x lines/mm x 36mm x lines/mm for equivalent data. (This is then multiplied by 3 for 8-bit RGB color to get the uncompressed file size for the resulting image.)

Reala & Superia 100

24mm x 60 x 36mm x 60 = 3,110,400 pixels (equivalent) or about an 8.9 MB file

Velvia

24mm x 160 x 36mm x 160 = 22,118,400 pixels (equivalent.) or about a 63.3 MB file

Compare this to the advertised performance of professional digital cameras such as:
Nikon D1x (5,327,776 pixels)
Canon EOS 10D (6,518,336 pixels)
Canon EOS 1Ds (10,989.056 pixels)
Kodak DCS 14n (13,898,880 pixels) "

-http://www.vrphotography.com/data/pages/askexpert s/pano/filmvdigpanos.html

copyright all your personal information.

And, no, you can't copyright your name either.

And before you start ranting, no, I'm not a lawyer, I'm actually an electrician. (My sister is a lawyer, though, and was recently involved in a case where the plaintiff attempted to copyright his name & address, and then sue her employers for copyright infringement.)

Everybody who goes to BM tries to capture it, which is not really possible, but the best I've been able to do has resulted in my project of giant panoramas, some of the larger ones in the world that get displayed there.

You can see some of them at Brad's Burning Man Site at lower resolution of course.

I do notice the negative comments here are from people who have not gone, and the positive ones from people who have. Jamie's negative comments are about the BMOrg, not the event, which like the rest of us, he loves. That should tell you something about what it is.

I salute you! Actually, it sounds like something I would do. That sounds almost as funny as moving the "pay" phone around Burning Man (linky-poo). You're used to seeing it bolted down, but having a user talking on the phone as you just lift it up and start walking is just awesome.

Including of course, those who were around for the original definition of the term, based on the endless repetition of "spam, spam, spam, spam..." in the MP sketch. From the start it was always the volume of messages that was the issue.

This is in fact however an issue of much debate, with many people on both sides, sometimes called the UBE side and the UCE side. I'm on the UBE side (in fact I think the best and simplest definition for spam is 'bulk mail from a stranger') and there are many on that side.

The truth is it's not hard to show mathematically that non-bulk mail, even of the most annoying kind, won't ever become a problem worth spending much worry on. Since we want to be sure we protect individual person to person mail from any collateral damage in the fight against spam, it seems misplaced to worry about more than bulk mail.

Some essays relating to that question:

http://www.templetons.com/brad/spam/2camps.html

http://www.templetons.com/brad/spam/define.html

Including of course, those who were around for the original definition of the term, based on the endless repetition of "spam, spam, spam, spam..." in the MP sketch. From the start it was always the volume of messages that was the issue.

This is in fact however an issue of much debate, with many people on both sides, sometimes called the UBE side and the UCE side. I'm on the UBE side (in fact I think the best and simplest definition for spam is 'bulk mail from a stranger') and there are many on that side.

The truth is it's not hard to show mathematically that non-bulk mail, even of the most annoying kind, won't ever become a problem worth spending much worry on. Since we want to be sure we protect individual person to person mail from any collateral damage in the fight against spam, it seems misplaced to worry about more than bulk mail.

Some essays relating to that question:

http://www.templetons.com/brad/spam/2camps.html

http://www.templetons.com/brad/spam/define.html

Average point and shoot resolution on average 400ASA film is nowhere near 22MP, except under ideal conditions, which you won't get with point and shoot cameras in the first place. Above about 4-6MP seems to me to be a good enough compromise for anything below A4 size prints or serious art exhibitions, according to the site linked previously whose author seems to sound like he knows what he's talking about.

The big advantage of digital is that you can take multiple exposures on a tripod and blend them very easily indeed : Max Lyons has some impressive images on his site of digital panoramics using stitching, and multiple exposures blended in Photoshop to give high contrast scenes a lower contrast rendering and the results look very nice indeed.

As for your question, I think the country-code TLDs are important (i.e. .ca, .fr, .de) and can make a lot of sense, especially for non-English sites. Actually, even corporate-owned sites can benefit from the different TLDs to put the proper locale spin on their sites.

Yes. I'm a firm believer in country TLDs because they mean something. I wish they were universally used, even in the United States. Its frustrating searching for something and getting English pound prices from a company in england. Its more frustrating when they have a .com TLD.

There's no doubt that .com is a desirable domain. But there's also the fact that it's hard to find a good, short .com domain (witness mine!) these days.

So, that is why you opted for the short non .com domain eh?

Having the same name on different TLDs does nothing for clarity or understanding for people at all. In fact, its very common for people to buy all of the common TLDs that goes with their .com.

A more comprehensive and coherent discussion of these new TLDs can be found here.

This guy appears to be one of a few that agrees with me about the uselessness of these TLDs.

Odd coincidence, just today I put up a set of pages derived from a database of the coordinates of all 788 of the Unesco World Heirtage sites, which includes many interesting landmarks.

Here is the page of Google Maps for World Heritage Sites, and there is also a blog entry for comments and corrections. Many can be zoomed in on. Enjoy.

This is completely wrong. Unauthorized derivative works (including fan fiction, remakes, etc) are a very clear case of copyright infringement. Profit is irrelevant.

Please see 10 Big Myths about copyright explained

Larry offered the DB for free!!

I know that this is going to start a religious flame war. And I apologize in advance. But since I started using challenge/response (specifically TMDA) I just don't care. I give anyone my email whenever they want. I register on websites with an address that expires. So it works for long enough for them to send whatever it is that I need from them and then stops working after that.

Do I still get spam? Yes. The 419 scammers can get through. I see one of them once every 6 months or so. I just blacklist them. 2 spams a year is much easier to deal with than 12000. Do I see automated spam? Nope. Haven't seen one of those in my mailbox since 2001.

IMHO, C/R is the best tool that I've seen to allow me to not worry about giving out my email address to others. I wish there was a way in which we could create a small experiment on the internet in which everyone used C/R, and see what happened to spam. My prediction: it would disappear. And when that happened, no one would be afraid to give out their email address. No one would be worried about companies leaking their email addresses. This story would not be interesting enough to make the front page of /.

(FWIW, I fully understand the argument that says that C/R is bad. I do not agree with it's accuracy nor it's validity. I'm happy to argue about the merits of C/R, but recognize that a lot of these arguments have been addressed by TMDA and other well behaved C/R.)

"That's why we have copyright...to create that scarcity. We can travel to virtually any spot on the planet within 24 hours, but getting the permits can take years. It's insane. We make everything so difficult for the benefit of a tiny minority. Why do you all suppose that is?"

Let me point out something EVERYONE keeps forgetting. The scarcity isn't in IDEAS (we all have plenty of those). The scarcity isn't in the final output (illegal file traders prove that every day). The scarcity is in those capable of converting IDEAS into useful PRODUCTS or SERVICES. Copyright helps protect THAT aspect. You may have the same ideas as me (as Thomas Jefferson mentioned), but that doesn't make you capable of putting it into a useful form (note copyright protects the expression of an idea).

While it's not a great idea, it's a fairly obvious one. Papers on this go back decades. I was one of the earliest to propose it in the Unix community almost a decade ago, but later denounced my own ideas.

But what amazes me is that like clockwork, somebody will publish an article on this "great new idea" for dealing with spam, several times a year it seems. They have clearly read none of the spam literature, nor done a search. And on top of that, journals and magazines also think it's new and publish the items, even slashdot publishes them.

What gives?

I've been collecting all the different answers to how to have an economy of creative works after the old business models fail. It's apropos to this discussion. I include both things that I think are good and those that I think are bad, and I welcome other people who have heard of or thought of different alternatives to mail me to add to the list.

It can be found at Solutions to the Copyright Crisis.

Disclaimer: This post is an 'Advertorial' with a relevant, one line ad for myself at the very bottom of this post. If you hate ALL ads--even if preceded by GENUINELY, useful content--then read no further. By including this disclaimer, I expect this post to avoid downmods from readers who would feel 'hoodwinked' into reading ANY useful content that contains ANY form of advertising whatsoever.

has just been laid off from the Greenock plant, where he was involved in manufacturing for 20 or so years. He's now working in a call centre handling mortgage applications... :(

This pardigm shift happened decades ago in the USA--possibly around the time of the entrance of the IBM PC personal computer to the market (how ironic). Briefly, the US economy has moved away from making things (industrial economy) to playing with money (financial services) and bits (information technologies and telecommunications) with the instrumental help of mass computerization. As a result, most of the real jobs left in the USA are in the service and retail industries--infamous 'McJobs' at large, giant, impersonal, 'low-balling', retail and service/hospitality chains such as Wal-Mart, McDonald's, and Hilton.

Don't belive me?

Look at how the terrible events of 2001-09-11 in the USA crippled the financial services industry world wide and changed global air travel procedures for good. Note that just recently, billionaire investor Kirk Kerkorian's offer to buy 5% of GM "sent GM shares and the Dow Jones industrial average flying Wednesday [2005-05-04]." according to a news article in the Kansas City Star. (Note: Registration may be required to view this article -- I saw it for free once via this Google link.)

There IS hope.

Thanks to the Internet, individuals can become full or part-time entrepreneurs by offering specialized goods and services for sale to others in small, niche markets not being serviced by large corporations because it is inefficient or outright unprofitable for them to do so. While the purists denouce the (over)commercialization of the Internet, this trend began as least as early as 1978

I am a part-time Internet entrepreneur, how about you?

But beware, clicking on this link may make you scream.

Quake in fear at Darth-Darth Binks

The resolution isn't quite enough to tell you if we're looking at the burn platform being built or cleaned up, though the uniformity of colour of what you see does indeed suggest it's being built. The temple, as you say, might not have the same crew on it. The clues will be obvious to those who have been there at tear-down or before, since things like the cafe are not built up the same way they are torn down. I was just surprised to see not just the roads, but many other ad-hoc paths so well defined just from the watering and dragging.

If you look at my own aerial photographs of burning man you can see the roads are in many cases not much more defined during the event.

I think he has

One of the reasons for the failure path of advertising is that free, advertising-supported TV is a terrible deal for the viewer.

Common CPM for TV ads is $10, meaning one cent per viewer. The network gets a penny to show you a 30 second ad. If you watch 5 hours of TV, you will see an hour of those ads, and they get $1.20.

In other words, you get $1.20 worth of programming for watching an hour of advertising. $1.20 per hour is an illegal wage by a long margin in most places these days, and a terrible deal. It's no wonder we want to reject it.

The other big mistake the TV industry has made was in thinking the grail was full video on demand. Tivo and Netflix have shown that delayed-gratification video is more than satisfactory, and a lot cheaper to produce.

Some of these ideas are explored in my essay on the future of TV advertising and Poor Man's Video on Demand, which you may want to read.

One of the reasons for the failure path of advertising is that free, advertising-supported TV is a terrible deal for the viewer.

Common CPM for TV ads is $10, meaning one cent per viewer. The network gets a penny to show you a 30 second ad. If you watch 5 hours of TV, you will see an hour of those ads, and they get $1.20.

In other words, you get $1.20 worth of programming for watching an hour of advertising. $1.20 per hour is an illegal wage by a long margin in most places these days, and a terrible deal. It's no wonder we want to reject it.

The other big mistake the TV industry has made was in thinking the grail was full video on demand. Tivo and Netflix have shown that delayed-gratification video is more than satisfactory, and a lot cheaper to produce.

Some of these ideas are explored in my essay on the future of TV advertising and Poor Man's Video on Demand, which you may want to read.

We should probably have some more TLDs

I take this opportunity to do a shameless repost from my blog (sundae.se).. It's mostly just a random thought, and would probably not work in real life. But still an intersting idea, I think. (By the way, there seem to be other people having some similar ideas.) Ok, here goes:

I'm having an idea about how to get an almost endless resource of domain names available on the internet. I'm pretty sure I read something similar on Slashdot, but I lost the reference a long time ago.

Anyway, the idea is to allow anyone to register a top level domain (like .com, .net, .se) - but you can't use it directly. So whenever a top level domain is created, you have to register a second level domain (like sundae.se) under it to make use of it. Also, it's free for everyone to make use of the newly created top level domain. This system would allow people and companies to share the same second level domain to a much larger degree than now. Just like people have the same surnames, but have different street addresses, which makes them distinguishable. One example would be: apple.rec, apple.comp, apple.fruit.

However, this system also opens up a door for scammers and other not-so-nice people, because it's easy to get confused about if the domain really belongs to the company it claims to do. And we don't want people to get tricked into fake online banking sites, do we? Some kind of certificate (which you would get when registering your domain) integrated with the DNS would maybe solve this problem. The browser could then compare the certificate with the one on the web server and display the results quite visible, for every address the user visits. Also, some kind of machine learning technology could be used to monitor the certificates and warn the user if something is wrong. To discourage the use of disposable, throw away domains (that would make spammers really happy), there would still have be some kind of fee to register a domain.

35mm digital pixel equivalent

At Burning Man there was a VoIP telephone booth that used Black Rock City's wireless net to Satellite uplink. The latency wasn't too bad. I used it myself.
http://www.templetons.com/pq/
The site is pretty complete as far as how they did it and problems they faced.
Still, might want to ask your superior if something _like_ it is ok.

I believe another reason it would rather go after sharers is because they generally can only sue you for damage to the commercial value of the work you illegally copied. In other words, if you have an illegal copy of a $15 CD on your hard drive, they can only get you for $15. However, if they can show you distributed 1,000 copies of the CD, they can get you for $15,000.

I'm not an attorney, so I could be wrong, but this copyright attorney's web page seems to say roughly the same thing.

Some time ago I worked up some ideas for how I would build an all IP based digital A/V system.

They are at The ideal A/V system but of course the products don't exist yet.

But I do know a lot of people who feel the same way and are interested in perhaps making a company to build this stuff, even some funders. I don't have time to do a lot myself. But someday, somebody will build this and it will take over.

Then Monster can sell gold plated twisted pair for your walls to run ethernet over them.

Feeding the conspricy theorists is so much fun!

I'm glad so many people are pointing out this giant flaw which makes sysadmin so hard.

I've been working on a solution, and for now will point to my original essay on whofig even though I have been in the progress of building a much more expanded set of essays.

Roughly, the realization I've come to is we should try to organize our OS not simpy around "what" the files are for but moreso around "who" is reponsible for them.

In your role as sysadmin, you would have one file tree that belongs to you, which encapsulates all your customizations of the system. The only time you ever touch other file trees is to install them (such as the file tree of a software package, which is itself changed only by the owner/developers of that package.)

Package owners, OS distribution packagers, sysadmins (at many levels -- system, network, company, imported) and users all make their changes in their own area, the rest is all read-only. (And can, other than for install, be physically read only.)

Thus to backup your customizations is trivial, and to move them to other roughly compatible systems is trivial, and upgrade is, well, perhaps not trivial but a lot easier. In theory it's just replace the trees of the OS distribution and the various packages.

Such a system needs a OS wide database which merges all customizations from all sources into one source that programs can use to read their own configuration and data, and a few other things, but in spite of the effort needed it's a way to go.

gobolinux is a good start, but it still has a program install in its file tree and then I go and modify its configuration, instead of building additional/modifying information in my own area. Down with /etc/foo.conf

Maybe we can solicit an "Ask Slashdot" question about alternatives to the TLD problem? What alternatives do you see as being feasible, practicable, and easy on the average end user?

Dictionaries do fit the criteria. They owe their existence to previous dictionaries

Counterproposal: I'm about to create a very small, very abridged dictionary here :

Doug's 2004 Dictionary

Dictionary: a book that contains words and short summaries about what each word means.

Thesaurus: a book that contains words, and then lists of words that have similar meanings to the first word.

Clueless: lacking clue.

Clue: could mean `a bit of knowledge', or it has come to mean `overall knowledge, either about a specific field or about everything'.

Shizzle: a relatively new word, made up by some rapper. It's hard to tell what it means, but I suspect it means either `sure' or `sh*t'.
(c) 2004 by Doug

Ok, that's my dictionary. I've just created it, just now. It's automatically protected by copyright as soon as I write it, registered or not. The (c) 2004 bit is not required for it to be copyrighted, but I'll include it just so there's no question.

If you feel that my dictionary is not covered by copyright, this is where you need to prove your point. If you feel that it's existance is based on a previous dictionary, then you'll need to be specific about which one. Certainly, I did not consult any other texts while writing it, and do not have an edietic memory. Also, I don't recall ever looking up any of these words in a dictionary. And consider that the word `shizzle' is very new, and not likely to be found in any dictionary more than 10 years old (and therefore all would still be covered by their copyrights, unless explictly put into the public domain.)

As another counter example, consider this -- a slang dictionary ... do you feel that he's not entitled to the copyright on his work? Certainly, he does.

Another counterexample -- these people seem to think that you keep the copyright of definitions that you add to the project. If individual definitions are protected by copyrighted, would not the whole thing also be similarly protected?

Really, you've come up with a position that's pretty difficult to support.

Claiming copyright and actually having a copyrightable right are two different things, as SCO is finding out.

Wireless PC speakers sounds fun (they still need power) but what we really want is a generalized IP based speaker architecture for the whole house, so all speakers can be sent a digital stream from any audio source. The current wired PC speakers woudl actually be the easiest ones to first bring into this system.

I wrote up a description of ethernet speakers and the ideal home A/V setup some time ago mostly to talk about the broadcast flag's effect on the design, but it's still the right way to go.

Just an aside on Brad Templeton - he's the founder of rec.humor.funny and does other stuff, too.

How many does somone or a comany need to buy to "avoid" ambiguity. I mean every slashdot is taken except slashdot.name, and it kills me that slashdot.com gets any hits for the website slashdot.org. Slashdot used to not even redirect or give you a bozo message for accessing slashdot.com, it just threw the contents of slahdot.org at you.

What are the points of TLDs? I thought they were to avoid ambiguity, yet they promote it. Remember the whitehouse.com vs. whitehouse.gov thing? How about the current suprnova.org vs. suprnova.com and suprnova.net? The USPS can't figure out if they are a .gov or a .com. Same with the US Marines. Are they a .mil or a .com. Keep in mind that .com is supposed to be for commercial stuff. I guess the military is the biggest business in the US, but thats another post.

How many "normal" people know more than the .com domain?

I go on these rants from time to time, and I feel as though I'm in the vast minority of people that see no purpose of TLDs, but can anyone give one example of their utility? I have found one guy on the net that agrees with me and the /.er that pointed me out to that page, but otherwise they keep making more of them and making them longer and more silly.

Now, the only useful thing for TLDs is to separate countries. Why? Because countries have different languages and currencies. I get pissed when I do a google search for something and end up at a brittish site. I have nothing against the brits, but its stupid for me to look at buying a $10 trinket from there. Its not too common, but I've ended up at UK .com sites and was not happy. /rant

ALICE Pascalwas the best computer language teaching tool of the day and the inspiration for IDEs that came after it. It would be brilliant if designed today - nevermind 20 years ago when it was developed.

I have finally finished my code example! It is written in Perl instead of C so I won't send it to the contest, but I think it will nicely demonstrate many very important aspects of code obfuscation and subtle errors in the program control flow which can unexpectedly change at run time. I'm sorry that it took so long, it was a lot of work, mostly testing to make it portable, but I think it was worth it. Here it is:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use Acme::Bleach;

(I hope Slashdot will not mess with the whitespace because it is significant just like in Python -- see: perldoc Acme::Bleach by Damian Conway and Proletext by Brad Templeton.)

Comments welcome.

Well, between you, me and Brad Templeton, that's three of us...

> Copyright © 2004, The Associated Press

For those who are contemplating doing the same thing and risking the threat of civil proscecution, you better learn something about copyrights first.

Q. What is the policy on taking pictures?
A. Film and video cameras are forbidden without permission. All video cameras must be registered and tagged. This is to protect the privacy of participants and artists alike. Use Agreement forms for personal video cameras will be available upon arrival at the Gate, the Greeter's Station or Playa Info. If you are considering filming or videotaping for professional purposes, you must have a commercial agreement on file with the Media Team prior to your arrival onsite. Commercial use of images taken at Burning Man without permission is subject to cunning legal action and punishable by death. This includes amateurs and professionals who capture images. Click here for further information.

He's done this before, so he probably got permission for the camera. (He regularly does a panorama, it seems.)

"Please sir, can I have some more?"

Yup - what a pain. According to this Bill is making roughy 14 million a day. and this says (as of this writing) that Bill is worth 60 Billion Dollars. Add to this Microsofts War Chest and we can geusstimate this to be about a total of 110 Billion dollars. At 20 million a day Bill and Microsquish could "only" keep it up for ~5500 days. Now doleing it out only on business days, taking your weekends off, but no real vacation, real this means that Bill could only do it for about 20 years, this is assuming of course that Bill and Microsquish never makes another dime.

Bill was born in 1955, which when the well runs dry in 2024 he will 59 years old, not old, but hardly young anymore. So though it is a stretch, but I think it is possible to argue - that Bill could do this every day for the rest of his life.

(Posting as AC because it's too easy to whore karma with this one - just Google for "first spam") It was the DEC Spam of 1978 from a DEC marketing rep to every Arpanet address on the west coast.

Please allow me to highlight the most important part of the article you forgot to include:

Copyright © The Economist Newspaper Limited 2004. All rights reserved.

As you are obviously incapable of understanding rudimentary concepts like copyrights, then I will not explain them to you. Perhaps someone else reading this who might be confused by your flagrant violation of the law will first check out common copyright myths before deciding to emulate you.

I just don't understand why someone would move 12 years of their life into the data warehouse of someone you don't control.

You're right. Re-read Brad Templeton's privacy concerns over Gmail and the prospect of storing the "12 years of your life into the data warehouse of someone you don't control" becomes rather dubious.

However, from a purely technical standpoint there are some real advantages to chucking your mail archives into Gmail. The search feature is second to none (who even needs labels?), the interface beats any webmail (Squirrelmail? come on!) or IMAP reader hands-down, and the conversations feature is a real bonus (Mark Lyon informs me that GMail automatically makes conversations from the messages as they are uploaded with his Gmail loader).

The bottom line is, I don't know whether to upload all my old mail to Gmail yet, and for me the jury's still out until the geeks and the lawyers agree.

• As a Californian it is in my Constitution
• As an American its in Amendments IV, IX and X of the Federal constitution. (no, just because "freedom of thought" isn't listed either doesn't mean IX and X don't cover it. And #I too: can you have freedom of association without privacy?).
• And as an American, I think the Constitution isn't just the law, its a Good Idea to be applied widely to all of life, not just narrowly to federal gov't actions.
• As a Human, I'm covered by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights articles 12 and 13 (including 13 because if you can't travel with privacy, you don't have true freedom of movement, and being able to bicycle across the country doesn't count. Article 20- freedom of association- applies too. Plenty of my associates aren't in driving distance.)
• from A Watched Populace Never Boils: "People often ask why a loss of privacy... is a restriction on freedom. ... Some welcome it, feeling that the extra surveillance will cut down on crime, and provide some increased level of safety or imagined safety. ...invasions of privacy invade our freedoms quite directly. This is true even if the surveillance isn't abused by the watchers, even though history shows that it always is. When we feel watched, we feel less free. We censor ourselves and our actions... Yet the mainstream will never fear monitoring that much, just as it is more comfortable with censorship. What civil rights protect is not the majority, but the fringe. "
• And there's the very important and unfortunately increasingly precient best essay ever on why privacy is a right , which includes a list of very specific harms from lost privacy [ for example the specific harms when mistakes are made (and they always are)]

From his essay- which is even more applicable to the US as we've been losing these rights already: "A popular response is: "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. By that reasoning, of course, we shouldn't mind if the police were free to come into our homes at any time just to look around... if all the protections developed over centuries were swept away...

"The truth is that we all do have something to hide, not because it's criminal or even shameful, but simply because it's private. We carefully calibrate what we reveal about ourselves to others... The right not to be known against our will - indeed, the right to be anonymous except when we choose to identify ourselves - is at the very core of human dignity, autonomy and freedom.

"The Government ... has absolutely no business creating a massive database of personal information about all law-abiding Canadians that is collected without our consent from third parties, not to provide us with any service but simply to have it available to use against us if it ever becomes expedient to do so...

"It is difficult to imagine a more flagrant disregard for the rights of Canadians. This database is legally wrong and morally wrong. If the Government can get away with systematically logging and analyzing all the foreign travel activities of every law-abiding citizen, then no other private activity will long be safe from being included in the same personal dossiers - our shopping, our banking, our communications, our movements within the country...

"[Bill C-55 would give the RCMP and CSIS unrestricted access to the personal information held by airlines] I have raised no objection to the primary purpose of this provision, section 4.82, which is to ena

clambrac (722059): You need a degree to become a paid, hired code monkey for a company.

I don't have a degree.

I was ultimately hired as a computer programmer years ago due to what computer related information I knew at the time and this old MS-DOS program.

Today, I still don't have a degree now yet I wrote the two freeware/shareware programs on this page that solve a major problem that has been plaguing the Internet since May 1, 1978 or March 5, 1994 depending on who is doing the counting.

Now then, what is really more important when hiring your next computer programmer?

A degree and no real-world experience.

or

No degree and lots of real-world experience.

Bryan Taylor
iamcf13@hotpop.com
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