Slashdot Mirror

http://www.wired.com/news/mp3/0,1285,60650,00.html

"Technology giveth and it taketh away, and the industry knows this," Chuck D said. "The horseshoe makers probably got upset at the train manufacturers because (the new industry) took away their transport dominance, just as the train manufacturers probably got mad at the airline industry."

"I think this expands artistry and it's about adjustment," he said.

"As an artist representing an 80-year period of black musicianship, I never felt that my copyrights were protected anyway," Chuck D said. "I've been spending most of my career ducking lawyers, accountants and business executives who have basically been more blasphemous than file sharers and P2P. I trust the consumer more than I trust the people who have been at the helm of these companies.

"The record industry is hypocritical and the domination has to be shared. P2P to me means 'power to the people,'" Chuck D said. "And let's get this to a balance, and that's what we're talking about."

Well it was not a dead joke to me , I had never heard of him before .
Kind of like the band that the story is about .No idea who they are either .
I am assuming the moderator also had not heard the joke and/or of .50 before .

But if you insist on a new joke ... .50 cents obviously has 1/20th the skill of Luciano Pavarotti*
Stale jokes get stale because they are funny and people repeat them .

To stay a bit more on topic for a second(and to avoid a second post) , www.foetus.org has a few songs and videos available for download, about 11 tracks (though off various albums ) , all the tracks are By Foetus himself , he just uses different names occasionally .

http://www.wired.com/news/mp3/0,1285,60650,00.html I found a new respect for public enemy after reading this article and a few more of Chuck D's writings .
http://www.shutemdown.com/pebtn2000.htm Full public enemy (unreleased) albums available for download here
I got the link from the official public enemy site , so it is legit AFAIK

*tenner is UK slang for 10GBP (Pavarotti is a tenor ) in case anyone was wondering why that makes no sense

I'm not as enthusiastic about _Wired_, though.

There have been some diamonds in that sea of coal. As you mention later on, the article "Mother Earth Motherboard" was possibly the greatest technical/historical article ever written. Here's Wired's copy. Here's another. And another.

How can you not be stoked about Wired. After all, they were totally prescient about push media. They predicted that Castanet and Active X would RULE

They're not about hype. They're all about keepin' it real!

I read an article a while back that hybrid mileage isn't as good as the sticker says.

http://www.wired.com/news/autotech/0,2554,63413,00 .html

Did you find that to be the case, or was the mileage really as good as you expected? I'm genuinely curious.

...mentions, among other things, Ruby on Rails.

Seems like Rails is turning up everywhere. One thing's for sure, it's one of the main reasons that RubyForge now has (and needs) five file mirrors!

I'm working on a Rails app now that has both an XML-RPC front end and a web front end; it's been pretty fun to learn all the little ways Rails reduces the amount of scaffolding code in an application. Good times!

The Long Tail (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.htm l)

If you want complete control do not publish your work. Then you have complete control.

It's not really clear that tightly controlled distribution leads to more revenue. For many books that become bestsellers it's the word of mouth of the readers can increase the sales of the book. You, the author, have no control of that.

You should read the Long Tail article, to see how things line Google Print can help the authors.

Wired article from 1999:

(...)
"A Jini-enabled device works by announcing itself to the network, which will immediately be able to understand what kind of device was just plugged in, what kind of software drivers are necessary, and the capabilities of the device."
(...)

]]Only a small percentage of Java/C# libraries have Free implementations.

What are you talking about? You're free to use all of the standard java libraries without paying a dime.

This kind of free. (Don't read Slashdot much, do you?) Kinda lame to spend thousands of man-hours building a Free desktop only to have it depend on non-Free software, no?

]]Qt does multi-platform at least as well as Java.

ROFLMAO! Good one!

Glad I gave you a laugh, but I was actually serious. Java is riddled with platform- and VM-specific issues that pretty well kill the "write once, run anywhere" mantra. Qt generally ports pretty well.

]]STOP DRINKING MS AND SUN'S KOOL-AID.

SUN's Kool-Aid is great! Drink up!

For philosophical reasons, I only drink Free beer.

(Also, Sun is clinging to a failed business model and would be dead already if it didn't have so much cash in the bank. If it's board had any sense, they'd dissolve the company, sell off the assets, and return the money to investors. Their kool-aid sucks.)

I'm doing my part, so I think I've earned the right to spout. I donate more than a couple craptops worth of cash to Heifer each year. I like Heifer's approach, which emphasizes agricultural sustainability.

I'm not the only one that thinks laptops are a poor way to address poverty. In 2000, Bill Gates put a damper on the Digital Divide conference in Seattle with a similar message. When, as the article states, 80% of the world's population lives on less than a dollar a day, desiging them a $100 laptop is frivolous. If someone gave me a laptop worth three months of my salary, I'd put it on eBay in an instant and buy something I really needed.

Look at it this way. With $20, you could give a family a flock of chicks that could lay hundreds of eggs a year, providing them with additional protein and a source of trade income. For another $30, you can get two packs of Micropur tablets, which will treat 30 liters of water each. The tablets last for 3 years, so they can be saved for when it isn't possible to boil water. Another $30 could go to seed, rice, or lentils to give the family a little reserve. Then, spend the final $20 on whatever texts the kids need for their elementary school. $100 goes a lot farther when you're not spending it on computers.

The technological community has come up with much more creative ways to address poverty. I liked the clay pot refridgeration system for storing food that was mentioned on /. a while back. I read in Spectrum about a guy wiring villages in South America with solar-powered LED lighting so families wouldn't have to use kerosene lamps. The lamps are dangerous, the fuel is expensive, and the smoke causes searious health problems. I'd like to see more attention given to people with geniunely helpful ideas and less to Negroponte's schemes.

how do you do it to recorded calls?

You made me think of a wired article a read a long time ago on this very subject. Here it is: (scroll to the bottom) http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.11/start.htm l?pg=9
I personally haven't tried it since I rarely get calls now thanks to the DNC list.

It's looking like there should be quite a bit of competition soon in human orbital spaceflight. Here are the
various competitors I can think of off-hand:
 
* USA: Shuttle-derived system, probably with a CEV capsule on top. There's several downsides to a shuttle-derived system, but it keeps the constituencies happy and should have enough government momentum to keep on going.
 
* Russia and Europe: Kliper's been searching around for financial support for a while, and it looks like they finally got at least -some- funding from Europe.
 
* China: various iterations of Shenzhou spacecraft
 
In the private sector:
 
* t/Space: The (Rutan-affiliated?) company just completed a parachute drop test and water landing of a full-scale model of their proposed CXV space capsule. It's uncertain if they'll get more funding from NASA, but their concept seems sound and may get private investment. Oh, and their web page has some really spiffy videos.
 
* SpaceX: They've already announced their intent to compete for Bigelow's
orbital prize, and their upcoming man-rated Falcon V will be large enough to carry a Gemini-style capsule.
 
Now what about destinations? Besides the ISS, we've got Robert Bigelow's inflatable space station modules, which should be up and operational by 2010, with several prototype launches before then. He's planning on selling these modules to various groups and countries, so hopefully we'll have several different space stations up there.
 
Between Shenzhou 8 and 9 China is planning on launching a small orbital laboratory, which Shenzhou 9 will be docking with. Various members of the Chinese space program have also been visiting Bigelow's facility, so perhaps we'll see them doing something with his modules.
 
The future should be interesting.

That is, until the MPAA and RIAA suceed on making it a federal felony offense, along with skiping commercials on TV and DVDs that you paid for. See http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,62830,00 .html and more

The Super Network Why Yahoo! will be the center of the million-channel universe

e.

Sure, if you use ad blocking software in your browser.

" A yahoo "is a crude or brutish person". Lesson: Don't trust programmers to name a company. Programmers will invent a name that sounds to them like a great intelligent joke, but causes problems later. How many people who aren't computer professionals know that the joke is "Yet Another Hierarchically Ordered Oracle"? "

How many people total associate the word "Yahoo" with the definition you quoted? To most people it is just an exclamation, and even to those who know the other meaning generally associate it with the exclamation.

Despite these "PR blunders", Yahoo isn't doing all that bad compared to Google.

Airheaded teenage girls are welcome to post to Apple threads on /. -- it's part of the package.

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,65772, 00.html

It's some research which shows that porn addiction (via the internet) can be worse than crack. That roaring sound is the tidal wave of ignorance and self-righteousness that's about to completely overtake common sense. Look for the FBI to use whatever means they now have at their disposal, including those provided by our beloved imPatriot Act (specifically, National Security Letter). I'm willing to bet that the new Supreme Court justices will have some interesting impact on this, as cases being prosecuted may wind up there for further legal clarification.

Some might say the harm had already been done.

On a more serious note, I don't like this one bit. As a person, especially a male, who has an Internet connection and some free time, I have obviously looked at porn in the past, sometimes from curiosity and sometimes for gratification. I don't generally do that anymore. I have studying to get done, and /. articles to read.

Okay, I think I've sufficently prefaced my comments.

I do not trust the FBI to police the "wild frontier" that is the Internet. Their track record shows a lot of sloppy work:

1. Operation Sundevil, where the GURPS Cyberpunk sourcebook and other materials were confiscated as "manuals for computer crime".
2. Operation Candyman, in which many suspects pled guilty to not only consuming but distributing child pronography in order to avoid publicity.
3. Not to mention certain other incidents that we're eminently familiar with.

I think it might be interesting to watch the FBI's employment statistics for a little while, now that they're paying some of their agents to surf for porn. Will there be a ban on hankies and picture-phones in the archives room now?

For optical media, it's very easy... assuming the media actually survives, it's the same way this guy plays vynil LP's using a flatbed scanner:

http://wired-vig.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,57 769,00.html

Obviously, in the future, ultra-high resolution optical input will put the current scanning/video technology to shame; they will just need to scan the thing in and run a program against the data to get the contents of the media back.

Yeah we saw much of this before in the InsLaw case

So, this program roots through your computer killing any p2p app and any music files it finds. They say it will only kill "illegal" ones, but I bet it presumes them all illegal. That sounds like a worm to me. It seems like a watered down version of Senator Orrin Hatch's idea to destroy file traders' computers.

1. It's hard to pin down how many Linux installations there are, let alone users (or desktop installs.) But, people are trying.
   
   
2. It's hard to find the fraction of Linux users that play games. Some work can be done to estimate that.
   
   
3. Given some (probably unreasonable) estimates of the above, however, you can figure it out yourself.
   
   
4. Whatever the customer base for a Linux WoW, it has come a long way.
   

Actually, I think the FCC indends to auction off the entire analog TV spectrum. But they've run into a couple bumps:

http://www.usatoday.com/money/media/2005-07-12-dig ital-tv-usat_x.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_television#An alog_switch-off
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,68091,00 .html

Everything fits. Today scanning and OCRing books is difficult, because you either need expensive equipment (thousands of $$$), or you need tedious manual work. But in a few years it would 1) be possible to use a camera (webcam or camcorder) to convert book to ebook just by flipping the pages or 2) use desktop manufacturing to make a robotic scanning system and mass-convert books automatically. By 2015 someone will make all books available online for free. Of course, the transition to the future of unlimited accessible knowledge will not be smooth, but only because it makes sense to start as early as possible! Google is betting that it can be the first, it's willing to take a risk and it may fail. If not they, the Europeans will charge ahead with their project... We don't know how exactly it will happen, but we know the end result.

See digital libraries a bit at the Future Wiki. Feel free to contribute.

Defenders of movie ticket price increases point out that while prices have increased in recent years -- to an average of $5.66 in 2001, according to the Motion Picture Association of America and the National Association of Theater Owners -- they long lagged behind inflation.
 
Although the average movie ticket price rose from 47 cents in 1951 to $1.65 in 1971, to $4.21 in 1991, the picture changes when the prices are stated in constant dollars. Using 2001 dollars, the price rose from $3.20 in 1951 to $7.22 in 1971, but then fell to $5.47 in 1991, and even dropped below $5 in 1994 and 1996.

Not to mention soon to be released Flock (http://www.flock.com/ http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,68823, 00.html Bound to change browsing nature significantly.

1. A very targetted voting anomaly, sufficient to swing the election.
2. A broad voting-pattern discrepancy between counties that used Diebold machines, and counties that used paper ballots.

1. It would require the participation, flawless execution, and total silence of thousands of people, - officials in every county in which voter fraud was attempted. And not just the ones who pulled off this nationwide fraud, but also those who were "approached" to do so, and refused. Not one of them could make a mistake, get caught, or speak out. Not one.
2. It would require the non-involved local officials be completely unaware of fraud going on under their nose.
3. By the end of the day, the exit polls ended up being very close to the actual election outcome. In addition, most polls prior to the election showed Bush winning by between 1-5 points. A vast voter fraud effort would require we believe the pre-election polls, exit polls and election outcome were all wrong...despite being almost exactly the same.

• Diebold's election-systems division is "run by a registered Democrat"
• Mark Radke--Director of Marketing for Diebold Election Systems--has an exclusively Democratic donation history, having donated close to $10,000 to Democrats since 1995--when he was with Fulbright and Jaworski--including the legal limit of $2000 to John Kerry in the recent campaign. [2000-2004: $4,250] -- [1995-1999: $5,600]

Your face will be removed and replaced with one donated from a cadaver, matched for tissue type, age, sex and skin color. Surgery should last 8 to 10 hours; the hospital stay, 10 to 14 days. Complications could include infections that turn your new face black and require a second transplant or reconstruction with skin grafts. Drugs to prevent rejection will be needed lifelong, and they raise the risk of kidney damage and cancer. After the transplant you might feel remorse, disappointment, or grief or guilt toward the donor. The clinic will try to shield your identity, but the press likely will discover it.

No free lunch...

I'm pretty sure I got this link from slashdot:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.10/fileshare .html

Just yesterday I took a stab at converting the models from MS FlightSim to FlightGear, which is freely available. See the FlightGear thread on Virtualplaya.tribe.net for details.

Personally, I think Burning Man is way too big and is destroying the Playa because of the dust load created. My hope is that Burning Man will move between sites, much like the rainbow gathering. Perhaps a virtual reality component like Virtual Playa will help spawn smaller events in other locations, including cyberspace.

This kid thinking he can beat the bloat of the Mozilla suite by starting his own little spinoff. Seemed like a good idea when he started it, but it still used XPCOM and XUL, making it take up the same amount of RAM that The Suite did and run the same speed. To make matters worse, it had less features. To this day, it still seems to be that way. I fired both of them up (1.0.6 and 1.7.11) navigated to Google and did a search and Firefox actually takes up a bit more memory...

So maybe it looks nicer and has the buttons where you want them, but it caused the Mozilla team to screw up what I thought was a pretty good software engineering process and throw out what was basically not broken.

FireFox only solved a UI design problem by making Mozilla look like a Windows app. It broke just about everything else that was good about Mozilla. I'm glad there are developers out there who think the same way and are doing the SeaMonkey project.

Flock?

(after the ???? should come the profit!)

Even the oil companies aren't that stupid (anymore).

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.04/hydrogen_ pr.html

About halfway down:

"Like the car companies, oil producers have already taken steps toward an oil-free future... They know they could play the same role in a hydrogen economy, which is why Shell and BP have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in hydrogen storage and production technology. Indeed, BP, formerly British Petroleum, has rebranded itself Beyond Petroleum."

And I know it's already been said, but you are so, so wrong about the combustion thing. Good God, do you have any idea what exhaust would smell like if it were full of fuel??

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.02/microsoft .html

Commercial involvment (willing or not) with spying for nation states is alive and well. I know nothing on the topic, but would be very surprised if Microsoft hasn't at least talked to someone from a TLA.

It looks like I *did* confuse this with another case. Here's the contents of a (reprinted from AP) wired story on the matter (don't go to http://wireservice.wired.com/wired/story.asp?secti on=Breaking&storyId=1062025 if you're anti-wired heh):

"Monday, July 11, 2005 6:36 p.m. ET

WACO, Texas (AP) -- A convicted felon who went on profanity-laced tirades in court and told jurors he didn't care if they gave him life in prison was sentenced to 99 years for stealing a cell phone.

Jurors deliberated about 15 minutes before convicting Glenn Alvin Reed of robbery Thursday.

Reed, 31, was convicted as a habitual criminal because he had prior felony convictions for injury to an elderly person and robbery, which bumped the minimum sentence from five to 25 years. He also had 15 misdemeanor convictions dating to 1991.

Reed testified during both phases of the trial, swearing and telling jurors he didn't care if they sent him to prison for life.

"There's things I choose to do, like, if I go in a store and choose to take a Snicker's bar," Reed testified. "If you catch me, you catch me. If not, I'm going to go home and eat it up and go on about my business, dog."

At one point, he made an obscene hand gesture toward a retired Texas Ranger who testified against him. Reed had tried to rob the retired officer four years earlier but was overpowered by him.

In the cell phone incident, the owner had another phone with him and called the missing cell phone's number as he walked up the street. He could hear its distinctive "Aggie War Hymn" ring coming from Reed's pocket, so he followed him and demanded the phone back.

Reed gave back the phone but then hit the owner several times.

Prosecutors had offered Reed a 15-year plea deal before trial, but he rejected it."

Now that the facts are straight, does anyone care to dispute the fairness of the sentence?

• Former TechTV ScreenSavers host Leo Laporte, Patrick Norton, John C. "I get no spam" Dvorak and others are doing TWIT and just announced video is next.
• Former ScreenSavers hosts Alex Albrecht and Kevin Rose at Diggnation are shooting video while they podcast and Kevin Rose is doing SYSTM
• Robert X. Cringley's NerdTV debuts. Now you may be wondering, "So what?". It's IPTV...that's what. There aren't a lot of great examples out there yet, but most of the smart podcasters -- who are mini-celebrities or have something people would like to see -- are simultaneously podcasting and shooting video (many in high definition just in case). Read an article about a new report here.
• Silicon Valley podcaster John Furrier from Podtech is embarking on video to augment his podcasting.

From here.

"They'd have meetings and Steve would be horribly offended he couldn't get to the song he wanted in less than three pushes of a button," Knauss said. "We'd get orders: 'Steve doesn't think it's loud enough, the sharps aren't sharp enough, or the menu's not coming up fast enough.' Every day there were comments from Steve saying where it needed to be."

Knauss said Jobs' influence was sometimes idiosyncratic. For example, the iPod is louder than most MP3 players because Jobs is partly deaf, he said. "They drove the sound up so he could hear it," Knauss said.

Multi-Billion dollar spelunking expeditions in outer space. What could we all POSSIBLY do with billions of dollars right here on Earth to benefit us all right now? Hmmm... alternative energy research? Nah. Cures for debilitating and deadly diseases? Nah. Improving the infrastructures of impovershed nations? Nah. Teaching people how to farm and improving their ability to do so to help keep them from satrving to death? Nah.

Yeah. Stupid NASA.

They've already been doing this for a while with gunshots.

See the last paragraph of the first page of this article on Walt Mossberg in Wired. He returns everything sent to him.

Having been to Singapore many times, it is a VERY "tight" country. If you break the rules, the punishment is quite severe.

Back in 1993 William Gibson wrote an interesting piece on Singapore for Wired magazine: Disneyland With The Death Penalty

The first time every application is launched, I get the dialog. When I install a new application, the first time I run it, I always get the dialog. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with opening a document vs. the application itself.

Whenever I do a fresh clone of my hard drive, and boot off of it to check it, every application gives me the dialog upon attempted launch. Apparently, the file that keeps track of what's been run before is clone-proof.

Do you have any sources for OSX exhibiting this behavior? Aside from my own experience, Wired talks about this update and says "The alert is invoked whenever a disk image is mounted or an application is launched for the first time."

Also, this is unrelated, but I thought I'd mention that Safari now notifies the user for every download that contains an executable, in case you weren't expecting one. I don't use Mail; I'm interested to know if it also warns users about executables in attachments?

Yeah, ok. You can already make Windows look like OS X, not need for an MS add on. Article about people with XP trying to make it like OS X. And Stardock

Do these make XP into OS X? NO! There is so much more beyond the user interface that XP or Windows can't duplicate, especiallly security. Have fun with your AERO interface, I'm talking full OS here.

The answer: it may surprize you.

Well, after recruiting Linus (at least in the alternate reality of WIRED) and trying to get ESR as well, maybe that simply had to happen...

Bill Gates never said that.

Just for some perspective."

For some more perspective ;)

Did Gates Really Say 640K is Enough For Anyone?
Urban Legends Archive

Linus definately has made a few MS exec's wake up screaming "Mommy" more than ESR.

From the office of Linus Torvalds

Date: 10.31.2008
To: BillG
From: Linus
(...)
When you hired me three years ago, you had to realize that I was going to speak my mind, no matter what the consequences. You told me that if I ever hit a wall with Steve or his people, I should let you know.
(...)
Myself, I thought I was making some pretty outrageous demands. I was stunned when you agreed to accept the General Public License mandating that everything you added at the level of the new operating system would remain open. But you've been true to your side of the bargain, and you've won my respect. You never made me alter my goal, which was world domination for Linux. I'll never forget your line: "Come on, Linus, infect the mothership." I still believe that was the best recruiting pitch ever uttered. We both took a lot of criticism from our partisans, but look what we've accomplished. The world is using software that doesn't suck!