I can't mod the parent post up, so I'll expand on his comment a little bit.
Hgames (hentai games), are a huge industry in Japan. The range of sexual themes covered by these games is extremely diverse... everything from the standard smut, to bondage, bestiality, scat/piss, big-breasts (big as in beach-ball big.. there's a name for this fetish, I don't know what it is), and rape.
The article author doesn't know what he's talking about. This industry has been vibrant and successful in japan for a long time. The games aren't coy about their subject matter, either. They're unapologetically explicit.
-Laxitive (and before I submit: this is a pre-emptive stfu to anybody thinking of making some cheesy joke about my handle... er.. nickname).
I've been running on debian unstable for about the last 7 or 8 months - at home and at work. It is exceptionally solid.
Debian unstable for me has been more stable than either Fedora (both 2 and 3), and Mandrake. Dunno about other distros.
Debian packages break a lot less frequently than packages for most other distributions I've played with (slak, RH, Mandrake). Also, the scope of debian's package system is unmatched.
I was amazed when I was trying to install 'bioperl' at work (a somewhat esoteric perl library for handling biology data). I was just joking around and typed 'apt-get install bioperl', thinking to myself "if only life could be that nice". I couldn't beleive my eyes when I realized that bioperl was actually in the package repos. It blew me away.
So yeah. Don't complain about stable being old. Use testing, or even unstable. They're all very good distributions.
I write this to inform you of a grave danger to you and your loved ones. I speak of "electronic mail", also known as "email" and sometimes simply referred to as "mail" in current street culture.
This growing threat, innocuous as it may sound, stands poised to subvert your very way of life. Even if you are wise enough to stay away from this terrible affliction disguised as techno-panacea, your spouse, children, parents, and all you love are still at risk.
"Electronic mail", a sub-project of the larger "Internet" project, is the result of several years of secret development by the US military several decades ago. Once released to the public, it was quickly recognized and began to be used in the mainstream. Academics were the first to be affected - a test population chosen by the defense department to examine the effects of this "technology" on an unsuspecting, well-educated individuals.
The technology quickly spun out of control, and even the military project that spawned it could not control it.
Millions of Americans are now plagued by this disease. Consumers of email are generally referred to as "users". You might be a user yourself. If you are not, your husband or wife might be one. Or your children. This evil is easily accessible even through public institutions such as schools and libraries. It has infiltrated our society to the core, and we shall face many tribulations along the path of extracting ourselves from the mess we have so naively gotten ourselves into.
E-mail addiction is NOT a joke. It is a serious problem, and it needs to be solved.
Before ending my communication, however, I shall inform you of common symptoms of electronic mail "users", so that you may easily tell if those that are close to you are affected.
If brought into daylight, email "users" squint and become disoriented. This is due to inordinate amount of time spent in front of a computer monitor, consuming electronic mail. Users' eyes become unhealthy, and weak - accustomed to low-light environments - and are unable to cope with the flood of stimulus provided by normal daylight.
Electronic mail users also become irritable, but otherwise unresponsive when taken away from a networked computer. Their mind, usually trained by the addiction to respond only to social stimulus through a digital networked medium, will stop recognizing normal, casual, face-to-face social stimulation.
Usage of common electronic mail slang by an individual in normal speech is a very good indication that he or she is a user. Some common slang words are 'lol', 'rofful', and 'rottilfamao'. These are strange translations of our normal laugh stimulus into the electronic mail medium. Many users even forget how to laugh, remembering only how to vocalize these alien words to express amusement or happiness.
If confronted, many users will deny that they have a problem. This is common characteristic of any addiction, and it's no different with those addicted to electronic mail. Visit our web-site for details on concrete actions you can take to help the user and place them back on the path of a normal life.
YOU CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE.
This problem affects ALL OF US.
Stopthespread is also promoting legislative solutions to curb this growing menace. Please call your local representative and encourage them to take this issue seriously.
If you ever decide that you do want to use those buttons.. you might want to look at 'hotkeys'. Not sure about the homepage, but it's an apt-get away in debian.
Most of these fancy button keyboards generally end up mapping their special keys to specific keycodes in X. So all you have to do is trap those keycodes in X and map them to run a command of your choosing. Thankfully, hotkeys does most of the hard work for this (interfacing with X, binding to keycodes). All you have to do is give it an XML file describing what keycodes map to what keys.
Hotkeys comes with pre-specified xml files for several keyboards, but I generally roll my own. You can use 'xev' and a corresponding terminal to grab the keycodes for the buttons you care about. The 'userdef' xml tag in the config file lets you map arbitrary keycodes to commands. I tend to structure it so that for every special button, hotkeys runs:/usr/local/bin/hotkeys-handler BUTTON-NAME.
Then, I can just edit the hotkeys-handler script as I wish, and the changes are reflected immediately. Now, couple that with a couple of handy tools like the command line 'dcop' (I'm a kde user).. and 'osd_cat', and I can get some fancy shit going.
For example, when I press the 'pause' button, hotkeys-handler runs a script that: checks the status of juk (kde jukebox), and if it's playing, pauses it using dcop. If juk is not playing, it checks the process list for any mpg123 or ogg123 processes owned by my user, and if one exists, it sends the process a SIGSTOP, and records the PID (the 'play' script uses the recorded pid to identify which process to send SIGCONT to). How's that for functionality? One-stop pause button. If it's playing on your computer, it gets paused:) (Well, if you use other apps for music playing as well, it's easy enough to extend the script to handle that, as long as the hooks exist for play/pause/stop/next/previous etc.)
The play/pause/stop/next/previous buttons all check the current playing song, the current progress and display all that info using osd_cat.
The only problem is volume up/down. Turns out that turning the knob a few clicks causes hotkeys_handler to get run about 5 times in a second, and the handler script's osd_cat that displays the volume bar gets run that many times, and the output gets a little bit messed up because all the osd_cats write on top of each other. I think I can fix this with some judicious SIGINTs and some basic IPC between the different instances of the pause scripts.
Anyway.. there are TONS of options for these kinds of keyboards, especially if you know a little bit about programming and are willing to dig around. I love 'em.
-Laxitive
Re:Great, here come the CP trolls
on
Revamping Freenet
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Well, I also have the right to express MY viewpoints. And I sure as hell have the right to decide that any computer equipment I own will NEVER help the spread of child pornography.
Odd, I don't remember saying that you didn't have the right to express your viewpoints. In fact, I kind of took your right to express your viewpoints for granted. Get off your goddamn persecution complex.
I have the right to express that everytime freenet comes up. I have the right to let as many people I know understand that if they run a freenet node, they ARE aiding in the spread of child porn, that they are helping the worlds worst monsters commit their crimes. Most sensible people understand that.
In the same way that if they live in and support a society that has free speech, they're aiding in NAMBLA's ability to claim that it's ok to have sex with little boys.
It's why bittorrent is huge and fast, and freenet is slow. With BT, I can decide that I have no moral objection to spreading last nights episode of the Simpsons, with FreeNet (and others like it), I don't get the same choice.
If you have a moral objection to a truly censorship-free network, then you have the option of not running that network. And it seems you've taken this option, so what are you complaining bout?
I have the right to mention that videos and still images of real children being raped is NOT FREE SPEECH.
Yes, you indeed have a right to make complete non-sequiturs. I don't think CP falls under the purview of free speech either. Just like slander, libel, and blackmail don't fall under the purview of free speech. But a system that's designed to offer an environment free of censorship using anonymity as a tool will NECESSARILY support such activities. There is no way to get around it.
NAMBLA expresses their "viewpoints" on the regular internet.
If you choose to support Freenet, and it's userbase, it represents a tacit approval of the material it's used to dissiminate.
Just like if you support free speech, and those who are allowed to exercise it, it represents a tacit approval for all the messages and viewpoints they express using it?
Or does it represent your commitment to a higher-level principle, and your conscious decision that the value of that higher-level principle outweighs the ill-effects of those who use it to acheive questionable and despicable ends.
And I can say that all I want, and encourage anyone who feels the same to absolutely bury any discussion of Freenet with similar posts.
I'm just asking you to be honest about it. I'm asking you to say: "I don't beleive in a censorship-free medium" if you want to oppose Freenet on the grounds that it allows CP.
And Zonk can go right ahead and ban me again.
Who the fuck is Zonk?
hate assholes like you who basically tell everyone to "shut up" because of someone elses "freedom of speech". It works both ways.
I am perfectly capable of understanding that it works both ways. In fact, I've reconciled the idea of allowing people to disseminate information that disgusts me to the core. That's a hell of a lot more difficult to do than reconciling a few misrepresented arguments on slashdot.
No, I don't believe in freenet, and I don't believe in your "truly censorship-free" information system.
See, that wasn't so hard, was it? All I'm asking is for people to be honest with their assessment of why they don't like Freenet. If you think the ill effects of dissemination of CP on Freenet outweighs the benefits of a complete lack of censorship, that's fine. I can disagree, but it's a position I can respect. Thing is, people here seem to like the idea of 'no censorship', and will try to avoid speaking out against it.. but still speak against Freenet because of the CP hotbutton issue.
A little intellectual honesty is all I'm asking for.
The therapy was working.. I had almost blotted out the existence of Nachos altogether. Now it's all coming back. Why do you feel the need to hurt me so? *sob*
-Laxitive
Great, here come the CP trolls
on
Revamping Freenet
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Every time there's a freenet article on/., the usual comments about child pornography and other "bad stuff" are bandied about.
Personally, I see Freenet as an experiment in what's possible. There's an abstract problem statement: how do you share data anonymously? And Freenet attempts to provide a solution to that problem. There are many valid uses for a solution to that particular problem. The canonical example is "dissidents in ". But it goes beyond that. Everything from corporate and government whistleblowers even in relatively free countries, to those who want to expose sensitive information they might be privy to without giving themselves away.
The problem is that such a system, by design, is necessarily going to be useful for people that organize activities and spread information that has little redeeming value. If dissidents and whistleblowers can obtain anonymity when sharing information, then so can child pornographers and terrorists and gangsters and whoever else.
This dilemma occurs with many systems based on an ideology of freedom and opposition to censorship. The US constitution's first amendment guarantees the right of NAMBLA to express their views on a public webpage.
The point is, freedom to any extent in the public commons will, necessarily, support both good and bad uses of that freedom. The question people have to ask themselves is wether their belief in the ideology behind that freedom is worth the tradeoff or not.
If you believe that the "bad guys" should be kept off of Freenet, then you don't believe in Freenet, or any other truly censorship-free information sharing system.
I'll add one to that: writing your first serious application.
I annotated my entire collection which I traded on IRC. Since many fserves wanted certain things, and not others (no low-qual pics, no b&w pics, only lesbians, etc.).
I wrote an app in python that parsed a manifest file that described all the files in a particular directory, and then let you trawl it using arbitrary boolean queries over boolean, integer, and string fields.
The exact usage of the app went like this: reset (reset the set of working files to all files) men = 0 (remove any pic with men) women >= 2 (remove any pic with less than 2 women) hc = true (remove softcore pics) dump (dump working set to screen and pipe it through more)
That's how you searched for HC lesbian pics:) You could also use 'or' to delimit multiple queries on the same line. No 'and's, though, since you could just simulate that by typing out the queries on successive lines.
Oh man. I was so proud of myself when I got that written. I was 15 years old, just learning python. It was the first time I had programmed something that was of actual use to me.. that helped me in some real, tangible, immediate way. My IRC fserve efficiency went up an order of magnitude after that. Porn is a more powerful motivator than you can ever imagine. Especially for 15 year old boys with a lot of time on their hands. Ah, good times... good times.
"Like a baby, we won't really appreciate its value until it's matured a bit."
Seriously, this is why I don't appreciate babies. At least after about 4 or 5 years, they're useful for mild manual labour. Sure they'll complain and cry, but all you gotta do is tie their dishwashing to the number of fish heads they're allotted that week. Works pretty well, I gotta say. Anyway, at least they're not a net productivity drain like babies are.
Anyway, what I mean to say is: from your description, it looks like I'll be staying away from GCC 4 for a while, too. Goddamn babies.
Uhm, sorry, do you even know what the hell you're talking about?
Let's dissect this piece by piece.
>> "So this guy Tim Bray is one of the people we have to thank for replacing compact, binary config files"
Who the hell said anything about config files?
And we have tools to make things "compact" for us. It's called "compression".
>> "with 'human-readible', resource-intensive XML, that needs specialized libraries to make sense of it? "
Yes. Human readable. I'm a human. I can read it. Thus: Human readable. I don't understand what the quotes were for. Or your misspelling of "readable".
And "specialized libraries"? Oh, right.. I forgot. Binary formats don't NEED libraries to parse. Yep. Dunno why libjpeg62 even exists, when it's patently obvious you can just dump jpeg data straight to video memory. Oh yeah, who needs Microsoft Word. I just "cat resume.doc >/dev/lp" to print my documents. Cause it's binary you see. I don't need a library to parse it.
>> "Thanks Tim, the world owes you one!
But okay you're right, you gotta use those CPU cycles for something... "
No shit sherlock. Using CPU cycles to strictly check the type-validity of self-describing documents seems pretty worthwhile to me.
The metric system isn't something groundbreakingly new, but an evolutionary improvement on older measurement systems. The argument is not nullified because one of the big advantages of the metric system is that a large portion of the world HAS switched to it. So as far as being a standard goes, it does better than the english system. And standards are useful. The only thing stopping the change is inertia, and some silly, misguided sense of measurement system nationalism.
It's interesting because for some of us, the ability to tinker offers possibilities that might be more compelling than the original capabilities of the device.
I have an ipod mini.. which I might like Linux on (not sure if it works on minis yet though). Why? I dunno, because then I can explore ideas about what I can do with a little device with 5 buttons and a scroll wheel. I can imagine little ways in which I can tweak it to suit MY tastes, and not apple's decision about common denominator tastes.
Not to knock Apple's UI for the ipod or anything: it's a very nice interface - but the idea of being able to tweak it for my own purposes is very exciting. It's a tinkerer thing. It doesn't have to be useful to the general population - it only has to be useful to me.
Technically, ASCII is binary, too. 'A' is 65, which is 01000001. Binary XML will not do away with parsing. The tags will still be there, the content will still be there. Only the restriction that the tags must be an alphanumeric string will be lifted.
Making things "binary" doesn't magically remove the burden of parsing. You know the binary executables you run? The system loader loads it.. and parses it, and arranges it in memory the way it needs to be arranged, and tells the cpu "ok, start executing the code located here". Anything with structure needs to be parsed if you want to manipulate and query that structure in any meaningful way.. and XML is all about structure.
What the hell is wrong with just gzipping it? It's just another encoding that happens to be source-language agnostic and provide redundancy elimination.
You have no problem with the overhead of parsing binary XML, but dictionary lookups and tree rotations involved in decoding a compressed file.. that's out of the question?
Not to mention the added benefit that a standard compression layer shrinks not just the tags, but the content as well.
Look, stop thinking of gzip (or bzip, or whatever), as a "compression" scheme. Just think of it as a input-language agnostic encoding mechanism which has the added bonus of eliminating redundancy.
I just got out of college a few months back. And it made me chuckle.. "heh, now I can go back and play a virtual version of what I suffered through for five years".
The more I thought, the more this whole idea seems vaguely.. disturbing. You have this game (which is a very nice game, I admit), which is being constantly tweaked to become a closer and closer approximation to actual IRL social life.
What's the point of playing a game, whose whole point is to simulate real life to better and better degree?
I'll take a stab at it: The Sims provides an arena where you can simulate social interactions which are not possible, or are hard in the real world. You can create a character and make him be a doctor.. and it might take two weeks of play in the game.. but it would take 5 years, lots of money, and hundreds of sleepless nights in real life.
But the thing I've noticed with these games is.. to get anywhere significant, you need to invest valuable time. So you're taking time away from your real world interactions, to put into virtual interactions. But these aren't just any virtual interactions.. they're virtual interactions whose main appeal is that they model, in a close a way as is currently feasible, real social interactions.
This loop-de-loop, the whole snake-eating-it-own-tail imagery that it evokes, somehow just doesn't sit right with me.
Or maybe I'm completely wrong about this observation. Maybe the REAL appeal is the ability to play god. Maybe it's actually more like interactive storytelling (To me, storytelling is essentially a way of playing god - you script a literary universe, and its laws, each time you create a story).
You create your own story, and that story's characters, those characters' interactions, all with a little bit of graphical help. That interpretation of the Sims' attraction seems a lot less sinister than my first interpretation.
I still havn't decided. But I think it's very interesting to think about how these games relate to society, social interactions, as well as what kind of effect they will have on the real-life interactions between people.
Anyway, I don't have an argument to make.. but I'd like to invite people to post their thoughts about this.
The lesson here is clear: If you are a nation that the US may not like, and you don't have nuclear weapons, then you are vulnerable to attack and occupation by the US. They will, if they wish to, invent lies about you having said weapons, and attack you, with or without a general concensus from the rest of the civilized world.
So if you want to protect yourself, get WMDs, and get them fast.
Hmm, somebody is full of themselves.. but it doesn't seem to be RMS.
A bit of reading comprehension and critical analysis would go a long way, you know.
As is amply clear from the article, RMS doesn't see his major contribution to be code. He has coded, and he enjoys coding, but his cause is not to produce code - it is to spread the free software ideology. Now, you might agree with that ideology, or you might not, but to intentionally misread somebody's words in an attempt to characterize them as 'full of themselves' is arrogant, small-minded, and spiteful.
For what RMS considers important (the promotion of the Free Software ideology), he IS indispensable. There is no-one else that is as well-known, respected, and staunchly committed to the FS movement as Stallman is. And that's what he cares about, so he is correct when he calls himself 'indispensable'.
You might scoff at the 'respected' comment, but trust me when I say that there are a lot of people (including me), that are not in complete agreement with his philosophy, who still respect him - because he acts in good faith, has good intentions, and makes his intentions clear. RMS is the fucking ephitamy of a straight shooter. And that's a lot more than you can say about most people.
Since it seems to be all the rage nowadays, I too, am joining the fun.
Within the coming month, we shall see the release of my latest creative efforts: EMTALinux and DPPRFLinux. Now, these aren't just two arbitrary linux distributions, with the usual selection of software from the medley merry-go-round of Linux installers, desktop environments, and package managers.
No sir. These distributions serve a distinct purpose.
EMTALinux is a linux distribution specially optimized for expatriate Moldavian trapeze artists, while DPPRFLinux services the woefully ignored dyslexic post-punk rock fan demographic.
If you are an expatriate Moldavian trapeze artist, or a dyslexic post-punk rock fan.. these are exciting times for you! Do not despair, the linux community has not ignored you!
Stay tuned for more information.
-Laxitive
Re:A Games CD for Linux on BitTorrent ... mmm..
on
Games Knoppix
·
· Score: 1
Yet another victim of the lameness filter. Please consider clicking on my sig link, and try to do something (if only a small something) to get this infernal, oppressive, arbitrary piece of code removed.
The last time I ran afoul of the lameness filter.. I reacted less.. elegantly.. than you:)
Some GNU utilities such as df and du do not follow the POSIX spec unless you set the environment variable POSIXLY_CORRECT. Normally GNU df and du print disk space figures in units of k. POSIX says to print disk space figures in units of 512 bytes. If you set POSIXLY_CORRECT, GNU df and du do that. (My original plan was to name it POSIX_ME_HARDER.) I would guess that very very few users set POSIXLY_CORRECT.
Good to see RMS has a sense of humour. I got a nice chuckle out of that comment:)
Slashdot Mirror
I can't mod the parent post up, so I'll expand on his comment a little bit.
Hgames (hentai games), are a huge industry in Japan. The range of sexual themes covered by these games is extremely diverse... everything from the standard smut, to bondage, bestiality, scat/piss, big-breasts (big as in beach-ball big.. there's a name for this fetish, I don't know what it is), and rape.
The article author doesn't know what he's talking about. This industry has been vibrant and successful in japan for a long time. The games aren't coy about their subject matter, either. They're unapologetically explicit.
-Laxitive
(and before I submit: this is a pre-emptive stfu to anybody thinking of making some cheesy joke about my handle... er.. nickname).
I've been running on debian unstable for about the last 7 or 8 months - at home and at work. It is exceptionally solid.
Debian unstable for me has been more stable than either Fedora (both 2 and 3), and Mandrake. Dunno about other distros.
Debian packages break a lot less frequently than packages for most other distributions I've played with (slak, RH, Mandrake). Also, the scope of debian's package system is unmatched.
I was amazed when I was trying to install 'bioperl' at work (a somewhat esoteric perl library for handling biology data). I was just joking around and typed 'apt-get install bioperl', thinking to myself "if only life could be that nice". I couldn't beleive my eyes when I realized that bioperl was actually in the package repos. It blew me away.
So yeah. Don't complain about stable being old. Use testing, or even unstable. They're all very good distributions.
-Laxitive
Dear friends,
. org
I write this to inform you of a grave danger to you and your loved ones. I speak of "electronic mail", also known as "email" and sometimes simply referred to as "mail" in current street culture.
This growing threat, innocuous as it may sound, stands poised to subvert your very way of life. Even if you are wise enough to stay away from this terrible affliction disguised as techno-panacea, your spouse, children, parents, and all you love are still at risk.
"Electronic mail", a sub-project of the larger "Internet" project, is the result of several years of secret development by the US military several decades ago. Once released to the public, it was quickly recognized and began to be used in the mainstream. Academics were the first to be affected - a test population chosen by the defense department to examine the effects of this "technology" on an unsuspecting, well-educated individuals.
The technology quickly spun out of control, and even the military project that spawned it could not control it.
Millions of Americans are now plagued by this disease. Consumers of email are generally referred to as "users". You might be a user yourself. If you are not, your husband or wife might be one. Or your children. This evil is easily accessible even through public institutions such as schools and libraries. It has infiltrated our society to the core, and we shall face many tribulations along the path of extracting ourselves from the mess we have so naively gotten ourselves into.
E-mail addiction is NOT a joke. It is a serious problem, and it needs to be solved.
Please visit http://www.stopthespread.org/ to find out if you could be affected, and how you can help.
Before ending my communication, however, I shall inform you of common symptoms of electronic mail "users", so that you may easily tell if those that are close to you are affected.
If brought into daylight, email "users" squint and become disoriented. This is due to inordinate amount of time spent in front of a computer monitor, consuming electronic mail. Users' eyes become unhealthy, and weak - accustomed to low-light environments - and are unable to cope with the flood of stimulus provided by normal daylight.
Electronic mail users also become irritable, but otherwise unresponsive when taken away from a networked computer. Their mind, usually trained by the addiction to respond only to social stimulus through a digital networked medium, will stop recognizing normal, casual, face-to-face social stimulation.
Usage of common electronic mail slang by an individual in normal speech is a very good indication that he or she is a user. Some common slang words are 'lol', 'rofful', and 'rottilfamao'. These are strange translations of our normal laugh stimulus into the electronic mail medium. Many users even forget how to laugh, remembering only how to vocalize these alien words to express amusement or happiness.
If confronted, many users will deny that they have a problem. This is common characteristic of any addiction, and it's no different with those addicted to electronic mail. Visit our web-site for details on concrete actions you can take to help the user and place them back on the path of a normal life.
YOU CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE.
This problem affects ALL OF US.
Stopthespread is also promoting legislative solutions to curb this growing menace. Please call your local representative and encourage them to take this issue seriously.
Yours Sincerely,
Laxitive
Spokesperson
Stopthespread
If you ever decide that you do want to use those buttons.. you might want to look at 'hotkeys'. Not sure about the homepage, but it's an apt-get away in debian.
/usr/local/bin/hotkeys-handler BUTTON-NAME.
:) (Well, if you use other apps for music playing as well, it's easy enough to extend the script to handle that, as long as the hooks exist for play/pause/stop/next/previous etc.)
Most of these fancy button keyboards generally end up mapping their special keys to specific keycodes in X. So all you have to do is trap those keycodes in X and map them to run a command of your choosing. Thankfully, hotkeys does most of the hard work for this (interfacing with X, binding to keycodes). All you have to do is give it an XML file describing what keycodes map to what keys.
Hotkeys comes with pre-specified xml files for several keyboards, but I generally roll my own. You can use 'xev' and a corresponding terminal to grab the keycodes for the buttons you care about. The 'userdef' xml tag in the config file lets you map arbitrary keycodes to commands. I tend to structure it so that for every special button, hotkeys runs:
Then, I can just edit the hotkeys-handler script as I wish, and the changes are reflected immediately. Now, couple that with a couple of handy tools like the command line 'dcop' (I'm a kde user).. and 'osd_cat', and I can get some fancy shit going.
For example, when I press the 'pause' button, hotkeys-handler runs a script that:
checks the status of juk (kde jukebox), and if it's playing, pauses it using dcop. If juk is not playing, it checks the process list for any mpg123 or ogg123 processes owned by my user, and if one exists, it sends the process a SIGSTOP, and records the PID (the 'play' script uses the recorded pid to identify which process to send SIGCONT to). How's that for functionality? One-stop pause button. If it's playing on your computer, it gets paused
The play/pause/stop/next/previous buttons all check the current playing song, the current progress and display all that info using osd_cat.
The only problem is volume up/down. Turns out that turning the knob a few clicks causes hotkeys_handler to get run about 5 times in a second, and the handler script's osd_cat that displays the volume bar gets run that many times, and the output gets a little bit messed up because all the osd_cats write on top of each other. I think I can fix this with some judicious SIGINTs and some basic IPC between the different instances of the pause scripts.
Anyway.. there are TONS of options for these kinds of keyboards, especially if you know a little bit about programming and are willing to dig around. I love 'em.
-Laxitive
Well, I also have the right to express MY viewpoints. And I sure as hell have the right to decide that any computer equipment I own will NEVER help the spread of child pornography.
Odd, I don't remember saying that you didn't have the right to express your viewpoints. In fact, I kind of took your right to express your viewpoints for granted. Get off your goddamn persecution complex.
I have the right to express that everytime freenet comes up. I have the right to let as many people I know understand that if they run a freenet node, they ARE aiding in the spread of child porn, that they are helping the worlds worst monsters commit their crimes. Most sensible people understand that.
In the same way that if they live in and support a society that has free speech, they're aiding in NAMBLA's ability to claim that it's ok to have sex with little boys.
It's why bittorrent is huge and fast, and freenet is slow. With BT, I can decide that I have no moral objection to spreading last nights episode of the Simpsons, with FreeNet (and others like it), I don't get the same choice.
If you have a moral objection to a truly censorship-free network, then you have the option of not running that network. And it seems you've taken this option, so what are you complaining bout?
I have the right to mention that videos and still images of real children being raped is NOT FREE SPEECH.
Yes, you indeed have a right to make complete non-sequiturs. I don't think CP falls under the purview of free speech either. Just like slander, libel, and blackmail don't fall under the purview of free speech. But a system that's designed to offer an environment free of censorship using anonymity as a tool will NECESSARILY support such activities. There is no way to get around it.
NAMBLA expresses their "viewpoints" on the regular internet.
If you choose to support Freenet, and it's userbase, it represents a tacit approval of the material it's used to dissiminate.
Just like if you support free speech, and those who are allowed to exercise it, it represents a tacit approval for all the messages and viewpoints they express using it?
Or does it represent your commitment to a higher-level principle, and your conscious decision that the value of that higher-level principle outweighs the ill-effects of those who use it to acheive questionable and despicable ends.
And I can say that all I want, and encourage anyone who feels the same to absolutely bury any discussion of Freenet with similar posts.
I'm just asking you to be honest about it. I'm asking you to say: "I don't beleive in a censorship-free medium" if you want to oppose Freenet on the grounds that it allows CP.
And Zonk can go right ahead and ban me again.
Who the fuck is Zonk?
hate assholes like you who basically tell everyone to "shut up" because of someone elses "freedom of speech". It works both ways.
I am perfectly capable of understanding that it works both ways. In fact, I've reconciled the idea of allowing people to disseminate information that disgusts me to the core. That's a hell of a lot more difficult to do than reconciling a few misrepresented arguments on slashdot.
No, I don't believe in freenet, and I don't believe in your "truly censorship-free" information system.
See, that wasn't so hard, was it? All I'm asking is for people to be honest with their assessment of why they don't like Freenet. If you think the ill effects of dissemination of CP on Freenet outweighs the benefits of a complete lack of censorship, that's fine. I can disagree, but it's a position I can respect. Thing is, people here seem to like the idea of 'no censorship', and will try to avoid speaking out against it.. but still speak against Freenet because of the CP hotbutton issue.
A little intellectual honesty is all I'm asking for.
-Laxitive
WHY? WHY DID YOU HAVE TO REMIND ME?
The therapy was working.. I had almost blotted out the existence of Nachos altogether. Now it's all coming back. Why do you feel the need to hurt me so? *sob*
-Laxitive
Every time there's a freenet article on
Personally, I see Freenet as an experiment in what's possible. There's an abstract problem statement: how do you share data anonymously? And Freenet attempts to provide a solution to that problem. There are many valid uses for a solution to that particular problem. The canonical example is "dissidents in ". But it goes beyond that. Everything from corporate and government whistleblowers even in relatively free countries, to those who want to expose sensitive information they might be privy to without giving themselves away.
The problem is that such a system, by design, is necessarily going to be useful for people that organize activities and spread information that has little redeeming value. If dissidents and whistleblowers can obtain anonymity when sharing information, then so can child pornographers and terrorists and gangsters and whoever else.
This dilemma occurs with many systems based on an ideology of freedom and opposition to censorship. The US constitution's first amendment guarantees the right of NAMBLA to express their views on a public webpage.
The point is, freedom to any extent in the public commons will, necessarily, support both good and bad uses of that freedom. The question people have to ask themselves is wether their belief in the ideology behind that freedom is worth the tradeoff or not.
If you believe that the "bad guys" should be kept off of Freenet, then you don't believe in Freenet, or any other truly censorship-free information sharing system.
-Laxitive
The 'tangible' wasn't meant as a joke. The 'time on their hands' part, however.. yeah. Good catch
-Laxitive
I'll add one to that: writing your first serious application.
:) You could also use 'or' to delimit multiple queries on the same line. No 'and's, though, since you could just simulate that by typing out the queries on successive lines.
I annotated my entire collection which I traded on IRC. Since many fserves wanted certain things, and not others (no low-qual pics, no b&w pics, only lesbians, etc.).
I wrote an app in python that parsed a manifest file that described all the files in a particular directory, and then let you trawl it using arbitrary boolean queries over boolean, integer, and string fields.
The exact usage of the app went like this:
reset (reset the set of working files to all files)
men = 0 (remove any pic with men)
women >= 2 (remove any pic with less than 2 women)
hc = true (remove softcore pics)
dump (dump working set to screen and pipe it through more)
That's how you searched for HC lesbian pics
Oh man. I was so proud of myself when I got that written. I was 15 years old, just learning python. It was the first time I had programmed something that was of actual use to me.. that helped me in some real, tangible, immediate way. My IRC fserve efficiency went up an order of magnitude after that. Porn is a more powerful motivator than you can ever imagine. Especially for 15 year old boys with a lot of time on their hands. Ah, good times... good times.
-Laxitive
"Like a baby, we won't really appreciate its value until it's matured a bit."
Seriously, this is why I don't appreciate babies. At least after about 4 or 5 years, they're useful for mild manual labour. Sure they'll complain and cry, but all you gotta do is tie their dishwashing to the number of fish heads they're allotted that week. Works pretty well, I gotta say. Anyway, at least they're not a net productivity drain like babies are.
Anyway, what I mean to say is: from your description, it looks like I'll be staying away from GCC 4 for a while, too. Goddamn babies.
-Laxitive
Uhm, sorry, do you even know what the hell you're talking about?
Let's dissect this piece by piece.
>> "So this guy Tim Bray is one of the people we have to thank for replacing compact, binary config files"
Who the hell said anything about config files?
And we have tools to make things "compact" for us. It's called "compression".
>> "with 'human-readible', resource-intensive XML, that needs specialized libraries to make sense of it? "
Yes. Human readable. I'm a human. I can read it. Thus: Human readable. I don't understand what the quotes were for. Or your misspelling of "readable".
And "specialized libraries"? Oh, right.. I forgot. Binary formats don't NEED libraries to parse. Yep. Dunno why libjpeg62 even exists, when it's patently obvious you can just dump jpeg data straight to video memory. Oh yeah, who needs Microsoft Word. I just "cat resume.doc >/dev/lp" to print my documents. Cause it's binary you see. I don't need a library to parse it.
>> "Thanks Tim, the world owes you one!
But okay you're right, you gotta use those CPU cycles for something... "
No shit sherlock. Using CPU cycles to strictly check the type-validity of self-describing documents seems pretty worthwhile to me.
-Laxitive
An implementation of Perl 6.. in Haskell?
There is something that feels.. oddly.. wrong about that. I can't put my finger on it.
It's kind of like the feeling I got when I watched a porno with a hot girl and a really hairy guy.
Hrm... I'll have to download this.
-Laxitive
The metric system isn't something groundbreakingly new, but an evolutionary improvement on older measurement systems. The argument is not nullified because one of the big advantages of the metric system is that a large portion of the world HAS switched to it. So as far as being a standard goes, it does better than the english system. And standards are useful. The only thing stopping the change is inertia, and some silly, misguided sense of measurement system nationalism.
-Laxitive
It's interesting because for some of us, the ability to tinker offers possibilities that might be more compelling than the original capabilities of the device.
I have an ipod mini.. which I might like Linux on (not sure if it works on minis yet though). Why? I dunno, because then I can explore ideas about what I can do with a little device with 5 buttons and a scroll wheel. I can imagine little ways in which I can tweak it to suit MY tastes, and not apple's decision about common denominator tastes.
Not to knock Apple's UI for the ipod or anything: it's a very nice interface - but the idea of being able to tweak it for my own purposes is very exciting. It's a tinkerer thing. It doesn't have to be useful to the general population - it only has to be useful to me.
-Laxitive
If a piece of shit flies west at 60 miles per hour, is it going in the wrong direction?
-Laxitive
Uhm, you still need to parse the XML structure.
Technically, ASCII is binary, too. 'A' is 65, which is 01000001. Binary XML will not do away with parsing. The tags will still be there, the content will still be there. Only the restriction that the tags must be an alphanumeric string will be lifted.
Making things "binary" doesn't magically remove the burden of parsing. You know the binary executables you run? The system loader loads it.. and parses it, and arranges it in memory the way it needs to be arranged, and tells the cpu "ok, start executing the code located here". Anything with structure needs to be parsed if you want to manipulate and query that structure in any meaningful way.. and XML is all about structure.
-Laxitive
What the hell is wrong with just gzipping it?
It's just another encoding that happens to be source-language agnostic and provide redundancy elimination.
You have no problem with the overhead of parsing binary XML, but dictionary lookups and tree rotations involved in decoding a compressed file.. that's out of the question?
Not to mention the added benefit that a standard compression layer shrinks not just the tags, but the content as well.
Look, stop thinking of gzip (or bzip, or whatever), as a "compression" scheme. Just think of it as a input-language agnostic encoding mechanism which has the added bonus of eliminating redundancy.
-Laxitive
When I read this post, I started thinking.
I just got out of college a few months back. And it made me chuckle.. "heh, now I can go back and play a virtual version of what I suffered through for five years".
The more I thought, the more this whole idea seems vaguely.. disturbing. You have this game (which is a very nice game, I admit), which is being constantly tweaked to become a closer and closer approximation to actual IRL social life.
What's the point of playing a game, whose whole point is to simulate real life to better and better degree?
I'll take a stab at it: The Sims provides an arena where you can simulate social interactions which are not possible, or are hard in the real world. You can create a character and make him be a doctor.. and it might take two weeks of play in the game.. but it would take 5 years, lots of money, and hundreds of sleepless nights in real life.
But the thing I've noticed with these games is.. to get anywhere significant, you need to invest valuable time. So you're taking time away from your real world interactions, to put into virtual interactions. But these aren't just any virtual interactions.. they're virtual interactions whose main appeal is that they model, in a close a way as is currently feasible, real social interactions.
This loop-de-loop, the whole snake-eating-it-own-tail imagery that it evokes, somehow just doesn't sit right with me.
Or maybe I'm completely wrong about this observation. Maybe the REAL appeal is the ability to play god. Maybe it's actually more like interactive storytelling (To me, storytelling is essentially a way of playing god - you script a literary universe, and its laws, each time you create a story).
You create your own story, and that story's characters, those characters' interactions, all with a little bit of graphical help. That interpretation of the Sims' attraction seems a lot less sinister than my first interpretation.
I still havn't decided. But I think it's very interesting to think about how these games relate to society, social interactions, as well as what kind of effect they will have on the real-life interactions between people.
Anyway, I don't have an argument to make.. but I'd like to invite people to post their thoughts about this.
Thanks.
-Laxitive
The lesson here is clear: If you are a nation that the US may not like, and you don't have nuclear weapons, then you are vulnerable to attack and occupation by the US. They will, if they wish to, invent lies about you having said weapons, and attack you, with or without a general concensus from the rest of the civilized world.
So if you want to protect yourself, get WMDs, and get them fast.
That, my friends, is the moral of this story.
-Laxitive
Hmm, somebody is full of themselves.. but it doesn't seem to be RMS.
A bit of reading comprehension and critical analysis would go a long way, you know.
As is amply clear from the article, RMS doesn't see his major contribution to be code. He has coded, and he enjoys coding, but his cause is not to produce code - it is to spread the free software ideology. Now, you might agree with that ideology, or you might not, but to intentionally misread somebody's words in an attempt to characterize them as 'full of themselves' is arrogant, small-minded, and spiteful.
For what RMS considers important (the promotion of the Free Software ideology), he IS indispensable. There is no-one else that is as well-known, respected, and staunchly committed to the FS movement as Stallman is. And that's what he cares about, so he is correct when he calls himself 'indispensable'.
You might scoff at the 'respected' comment, but trust me when I say that there are a lot of people (including me), that are not in complete agreement with his philosophy, who still respect him - because he acts in good faith, has good intentions, and makes his intentions clear. RMS is the fucking ephitamy of a straight shooter. And that's a lot more than you can say about most people.
-Laxitive
If I had mod points for this article, I'd mod you up.. you black emperor :D
-Laxitive
Since it seems to be all the rage nowadays, I too, am joining the fun.
Within the coming month, we shall see the release of my latest creative efforts: EMTALinux and DPPRFLinux. Now, these aren't just two arbitrary linux distributions, with the usual selection of software from the medley merry-go-round of Linux installers, desktop environments, and package managers.
No sir. These distributions serve a distinct purpose.
EMTALinux is a linux distribution specially optimized for expatriate Moldavian trapeze artists, while DPPRFLinux services the woefully ignored dyslexic post-punk rock fan demographic.
If you are an expatriate Moldavian trapeze artist, or a dyslexic post-punk rock fan.. these are exciting times for you! Do not despair, the linux community has not ignored you!
Stay tuned for more information.
-Laxitive
Yet another victim of the lameness filter.
Please consider clicking on my sig link, and try to do something (if only a small something) to get this infernal, oppressive, arbitrary piece of code removed.
The last time I ran afoul of the lameness filter.. I reacted less.. elegantly.. than you
-Laxitive
Quote:
:)
Some GNU utilities such as df and du do not follow the POSIX spec unless you set the environment variable POSIXLY_CORRECT. Normally GNU df and du print disk space figures in units of k. POSIX says to print disk space figures in units of 512 bytes. If you set POSIXLY_CORRECT, GNU df and du do that. (My original plan was to name it POSIX_ME_HARDER.) I would guess that very very few users set POSIXLY_CORRECT.
Good to see RMS has a sense of humour. I got a nice chuckle out of that comment
-Laxitive
Indeed. We should all switch to PNG porn and save ourselves from visual artifacts...
I'm sorry. Really sorry. It had to be said.
-Laxitive