If, for example, you've got two cars, each with their own garage door opener remote, and the remote uses code hopping, how does the 2nd remote know what code to use after the last time the 1st remote was used?
(obviously, it can't "know," which is the problem).
Do these things use some kind of challenge/response system, with a different challenge each time?
Or are you simply stuck with only being able to use one remote for any given device? (door, car, etc.)
I'm using a competitive carrier (CLEC, for those of us who've been fighting the DSL wars), and their prices are pretty good. But they're still way too expensive. I was looking at last month's bill the other day:
Service - $12 Taxes - $15 Features (CID, call waiting, etc.) - $9 Long ditance (via the CLEC, $.07/min) - $8 TOTAL: $44
Not too bad, since with Verizon/MCI I'd been paying close to $60 a month, every month.
The only downside is the inevitable problems associated with a CLEC dealing with Verizon. They even have a 768k SDSL bundle that's $75 a month, INCLUDING your full POTS service. I'm still trying to figure out whether I qualify for that. If you live in Verizon territory (I think they're in PA, MD, DC, VA, and maybe NY), check out Cavalier Telephone. Yes, they have an "independent agent" program to drum up business. No, I'm not one of those agents.:)
But to return to the subject at hand... I pay something like $15 a month (that's $180 a year!) in local, state, and federal taxes, including the "Universal Service Fund" fee, wire fees, 911/TTY taxes, etc., on my land line.
My cell phone bill, however (and here I'm still with Evil Verizon, please don't start:) ), looks more like this:
Service (for two phones on one bill) - $55 Taxes - $4
So, it's like $27 per phone, which is about $6 more than the actual services + features cost of my landline, but then again I get to take it in the car, so it's worth the 6 bucks. Plus, I get something like 300 minutes or so, decent LD costs (though I can't remember how much), and national no-romaing service.
But what's scary is the taxes and such -- only $4, or 2 bucks a phone! Why on earth should my landline taxes be so bloody expensive, and cell phones so cheap? I'm convinced that this is why so many people are moving to cell phones -- not because of the cost of service, but because of the taxes inflating the cost so much. Or at least that's my rant for this morning.
Anyway, can anyone in Europe (or Japan or Australia or any other G-7-type country) give a similar breakdown? I'm curious if we're really as screwed up as we think. (Given how much we complain about high gas costs, it's nothing compared to Europe, for example).
> If you have a phone in Europe it has a special dial code (07 something)
It helps to understand that, from what I've seen, most European (or is it most non-North American Numbering Plan countries?) have flexible phone number structures.
That is, where NANP phone numbers are (xxx) xxx-xxxx, european phone numbers can be of any length. I'm not quite sure how it works, at a numbering-plan level, but I know I saw toll-free numbers, in Germany, that were only 4 or 5 digits long. "Call 5-2000 now!" Was very cool.
I haven't really investigated how it all works, but sometimes I wonder if a more flexible numbering system might have helped us to avoid our current number space issues, what with overlays, splits, and some nearly empty exchanges.
Plus, you get the cool "it's a cell phone" prefix.
Firstly, the assertion that deleting the email was "like tampering with the US Mail" is a bit inaccurate. Corporate email is a corporate asset, and many companies try to make that very clear to their employees (with disclaimers, usage agreements, and the like). The CEO asking you to remove an email is certainly within the bounds of the company's rights.
Is it ethical? Strictly, one would like someone to own up to their own mistakes, so, no. However, if it was an envelope sitting in the mailroom, waiting to be delivered, most people would agree it would be ethical to retrieve the envelope. Even if it had made it to the employee's mailroom pigenhole, I think most would allow the sender to ethically remove it. This situation is just an electronic extension of inter-office mail.
I'd say that people have the ethical right to recall something they've sent out under certain circumstances, and to keep the almost-recipient of their mistaken wrath from receiving the message, especially if they came to their senses right after dropping the message off -- have you ever called someone to chew them out and then hung up right after they picked up the phone? I'd argue that this could be interpreted, ethically, like that.
In fact, some mail systems (Exchange, for example) even let the users themselves recall an email that's been sent out. If the recipient has not yet read it, they never know it was recalled. If they have read it, then I'm not sure what happens -- I think if it's still in their inbox, it gets deleted (and I'm not sure if a placeholder saying "message recalled" is created or not). If it's been copied to another mailbox (particularly to a local folder), it might be missed. I know I've made copies of sensitive messages I've received, on the off chance the sender might try to recall them.:)
Beyond the ethics, though, is the scary thought that voicing your unease hurt you.
Did this really lead to your being fired? I'd like to think the CEO admired you for standing up to what you believed, and also for ending up helping him out in spite of that, "for the good of the company." On the other hand, maybe he was just a real jerk. (did the firing happen soon after, or years later?)
When I was a sysadmin, I'd been asked to do a couple things that I wasn't entirely comfortable with, ethically, but they were all certainly legally permissable (their network, after all), and my job wasn't to be morals cop, it was to be a good sysadmin. In these cases, I had a good enough relationship with the person making the request that I could voice my concerns, and know that he'd understand them and appreciate my opinion, without fear of recrimination. And, again, I think my ability to show that I had at least considered the ethical implications of what I had been asked to do, coupled with the fact that I was still a good employee and did what was best for the company, strenthened the trust between me and that particular upper-level-manager. So it was a win-win.
It depends on the boss, though, that's for sure.
So, I'd say that it was right for you to raise a concern, in principle, though my *personal* opinion is that you were perhaps oversensitive in this instance. It was also right for you to do what you were told (it is your job, after all). If it really lead to your being fired, then you're better off working for someone who can appreciate your moral compass.
(Note that I'm ignoring cases where the ethical issues are more severe and clear-cut, like a CEO asking someone to do something that, while legal and within his rights, might end up hurting someone else's career or something. Then it becomes MUCH more grey).
Get a TiVo (you know you want one anyway), start watching the game, pause for six seconds to fill its buffer, then resume watching, happily in sync with the radio.
I'd laugh, if it weren't for the fact that I catch myself starting to do this *almost every week*, before I remember, dammit, it doesn't work this way!
My current solution (which I haven't even begun to work on yet) is to:
* Get an FM radio card * Hook it to a linux box in the basement * Get streaming shoutcast working * Point my Rio Receiver at it
Somewhere in there I'm going to have to add a delay, either at the shoutcast level, or (if necessary) as a separate process in the FM->shoutcast pipeline. Extra points awarded if I can make it easily variable (and controllable from the Rio), but that's even lower on the priority scale.
Of course, until the Redskins start winning again, I won't have much enthusiasm for this.
LONG-term plan? Replace the single FM card with one of those cool high-end A/D converters and get GNUradio running, so I can select any of my favorite off-air radio stations on the fly, and listen to 2-4 of them at once.:)
It was originally a one paragraph bill to delay the CARP rates for 6 months, and was widely supported in its original form by the webcasting community. After the RIAA rewrote it, it turned into 30-page monstrosity that had no relation to the original bill. It has already passed in the House.
Okay, lessee... thomas.loc.gov... H-5469.. Two versions... first version -- huh. doesn't do anything, just delays stuff. (The entire text of first version: The determination by the Librarian of Congress of July 8, 2002, of rates and terms for the digital performance of sound recordings and ephemeral recordings, pursuant to section 112 and section 114 of title 17, United States Code, shall not apply during the 6-month period beginning on October 20, 2002.)
New version... modifies USC 17-112(e).. Hm... Findlaw.com... er, hm. Inserts sentence--Hey! Does anyone have a version of patch (1) that works on the US Code?... Okay, it's complicated, and confusing. But it seems to me that the simple "1-paragraph bill" did absoultely nothing except delay everything for 6 months (as mentioned in the article above but glossed over by many posters), and the "30-page RIAA-sponsored monstrosity" actually attemts to present a solution.
I'm sure other people have done a much better job of summarizing the bill's actuall effect, but it looks to me that, for small webcasters, it:
Sets retroactive rates (1998-2002) at 8% of revenue or 5% of expenses, whichever is greater
Sets 2003/2004 royalty rates to 10% of 1st $250,000 in revenue, and 12% of revenue above that
Allows for three equal payments over 12 months for back royalties
Sets minimum back-royalty payments for 1998-2002 of $500 to $2000 (or up to $5000 if you make a lot of money)
Allows for election of alternate (.02 cents per performance) royalty structure
Now, I'm not a webcaster, so these numbers don't mean too much to me. It looks like a "small webcaster" is someone who didn't make more than $1,000,000 from 1998-2002, who isn't expected to make more than $500,000 in 2003, and isn't expected to make more than $1.25 million in 2004. That's pretty big, for a "small" webcaster.
So what I don't understand is this:
DMCA is passed. Provision is made for LoC to set royalty rates.
Library of Congress sets said rates.
Everybody hates those rates.
Bill is introduced that doesn't fix rates, but simply delays them for six months, giving people half a year to figure out how to shut down without going into bankruptcy court
New bill is introduced that actually addresses the rate issue in reasonable fashion
Webcasters support new bill
Register article comes out saying that new bill screws people over, give us back the old bill (which, remember, didn't do anything
Slashdot picks up Register article (imagine that!) and 90% of posters agree with Register's FUD
Okay, I've glanced at the boxes in the article, and here's a quick run-down of what they look like, and why they still don't solve all the problems:
EZ Hangup - an annual-fee "opt-out" list, and a single-point device that tells telemarketers to fuck off
The Phone Butler - a device that lets you, from any phone in the house, tell telemarketers to "piss off" (British accent, donchaknow)
TriVOX - call screening device that requests callers to enter a code to "ring through" to the hosue
Screen Machine - not quite sure, looks similar to TriVOX. The linked site (and the manufacturer's site) are pretty skimpy on info.
These are not, of course, the only solutions to the problem. Some other approaches (discussed here and elsewhere):
Do Not Call Lists - State, Federal, Industry, and Company-specific -- a list of numbers wishing to be left alone
Interrupt tone generators - The idea is to generate the "booo-dee-dweep" sort of sound you get when you call a number that's out of service, and the belief is that telemarketer dialers will hear that and remove your number from their DB. Nobody knows how many call-generating systems actually do this (it's probably a small number).
Call Screening with an Answering Machine - you still have to run downstairs to listen to the machine, and many telemarketers will just hang up and try again later
Caller-ID Rejection - Most telemarkters don't pass CID information (thanks, FCC, for dropping that requirement!), some legitimate organizations (some college dorms, for example) don't pass the info, and other telemarketers deliberately pass "appealing" names to entice you to answer.
And what list of potential solutions would be complete without a list of why they all suck?
Opt-Out Systems - They still have to call you once so you can tell them to leave you alone. Not all telemarketers follow the rules, and fighting back is difficult. Not all telemarketers are even bound by the rules (there are a lot of exceptions). Not all subscribe to industry-based lists (like the Direct Marketing Association). Proposed national Federal "opt-out" lists are riddled with exceptions, too, and still rely on callers actually bothering to obey the law. It's difficult to tell a recorded message (illegal, by the way) to place you on a do not call list.
CID, Interrupt tones, answering machine screening, etc. - discussed above
EZ Hangup - see #1, plus you gotta run to the phone where the EZ Hangup box lives
Phone Butler - see #1
TriVOX - Would be nice to have the ability to manually place numbers on the system so that friends, family, etc., calling from recognizable numbers can ring straight through
Screen Machine - ??? Probably similar to #5.
Of all these possible solutions, the TriVOX comes closest to what I've been hoping to find for about the last 10 years. The ideal solution, for me, would be:
Hardware solution that sits in my basement, between the outside world and all my inside extensions
Connects to a computer for inbound CID logging and configuration (including setup of whitelist and blacklist phone numbers)
Passes whitelist numbers straight through to internal extensions
Blocks blacklist numbers immediately with "do not call" request
Interrupts unrecognized numbers, before ringing inside the house, with user-recorded announcement giving callers the option to "hit 1" to ring through.
Tone-sensor to allow any extension in the house to interrupt a caller who has rung through and is still a telemarketer (ala Phone Butler)
(optional): capability to do multi-extension ringing ("hit 1 for david") or multi-mailbox voicemail (extra credit: record voicemail to computer and make available for software to include in email or web interface)
I've always thought that this would make a great open source hardware project -- complex enough that it doesn't already exist, simple enough to be within the reach of hobbyist hackers.
Like I said, the TriVOX comes VERY close to this, but is missing some key features (like the ability to whitelist friends and family). It is, however, very encouraging that we're finally getting close to being able to truly solve the problem. At least as well as can ever be done.
There is no federal law that I'm aware of requiring telemarketers to have a DNC (telemarketerspeak: DNC=Do Not Call list).
There certainly is! And they're REQUIRED to put you on it IMMEDIATELY! (none of this "it'll take a few weeks to get your number into the list" BS).
Of course, most of the calls we get today are either from organizations exempt from the laws (political candidates, banks or phone companies, surveys, charitable organizations), or they're simply recorded messages (which are, actually, illegal as well).
I've got "put me on your do not call list immediately" as part of my answering machine message -- one of these days I'll start tracking the messages that people leave me and sue them for ignoring my request (if they can leave me a message with an automated machine, I can request to be put on the DNC with an automated message).
Unfortunately, even having state-sponsored do not call lists won't help. As I've said before, laws are only as effective as their enforcement. Until we decide to actually give some police organization real authority to prosecute these people, unscrupulous telemarketers will just ignore whatever "opt-out" laws there are and call you, anyway. What have they got to lose? Maybe.01% of the people they piss off actually haul them to court, and half those cases they get out of on a technicality?
Anyway, I'm rambling.
So, yes, there is a federal law requiring telemarketers to maintain a "do not call" list, but telemarketers' adherence to the law is spotty, and consumers' recourse against people ignoring the law is cumbersome. So they prosper, and we fume.
Absolutely! I used a Palm Personal (with 1 meg of ram) for, like, 2 years (if I recall correctly). Worked like a champ. Lots of notes, appointments, several 3rd party apps (games, organizers, shopping databases, etc). It did everything I needed, at the time.
For $100, it's great. The target audience for the Zire doesn't want flash storage, MP3 playback, or video cameras. (at least, they don't *yet* know they want it). For people who want to keep all their addresses nearby, appointments handy, and christmas lists up-to-date year-round, this is perfect.
Let's look at this another way: The original Palm only had 512k of RAM -- and enough people thought those were useful that they spawned a whole new industry. Now they've got the same sort of system, with 4 times the memory, for something like a third of the price. Won't a whole new class of people find it just as useful as all the early adopters of the US-Robotics PalmPilots did?
the U.S. Constitution provides for suspension of habeas corpus in cases of "in cases of rebellion or invasion."
Where, exactly? I did a quick skim through the Presidential and Judicial Articles, and saw nothing of the sort. The best I could find in the Legislative article (Article I, Section 8) stated that Congress shall have the power "To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions". Didn't see anything there about suspending rights, simply using "the Militia" (and what does that mean? Army, or National Guard?") to "execute the Laws" (which might mean be judge, jury, and executioner, or simply might mean they're empowered as policemen).
From what I've read (check out FindLaw for past court decisions), almost every time a president has tried to suspend civil liberties in "times of war", it's been later struck down as unconstitutional.
The most telling case, if I recall correctly, was in the territory of Hawaii in 1942. We'd just been attacked, and the territorial governer imposed some kind of martial law (including, for one, suspending the normal judicial system in favor of a military panel). Okay, so you've got a clear "time of war" (Pearl Harbor), and you've got a territory that isn't even a state. If there was ever a time that martial law could reasonably be introduced, this would be it. And the Supreme Court later struck it all down, saying it was unconstitutional.
Of course, the ruling came years after it was all over.
I challenge anyone out there to prove that such suspensions of civil liberties is authorized, and has been allowed to stand. Then, I'd like to see what a definition of "war" is, and whether we're actually in it (the Congress very specifically did NOT declare war on Afghanistan / The Taliban / Al Qaeda).
I may be wrong (after all, I Am Not A Constitutional Scholar), but I've simply never been able to find anything that supports any of these assertions about suspension of civil liberties....
That said, the illegitimate son of George I has exceeded his constitutional authority in this case.
I'll most heartily agree with this -- if the power to suspend habeous corpus (and other rights) exists, it lies with Congress, not with the President or the Attorney General. At least, that's how it appears to me. It's frustrating that the Judicial system takes so long to figure these things out, but I'm confident that, eventually, people's rights will be upheld. I just wish that we didn't have to go through this every time there's a national emergency, and live with 2-5 years of diminished rights before the courts step in and set things straight (or not).
Nowhere do you mention a picture of the DRIVER. Who are they accusing me or my car. So I am put in the position of proving my innocence
Most jurisdictions, for this reason, don't assess points against the owner's license for such violations. They simply have to swear an oath that they weren't driving, and they get out of the fine, in many cases.
Personally, I think the laws should be written (interpreted?) as being "a fine against the owner of the vehicle for allowing it to be used to run a red light."
If it was a buddy of yours driving, fine, either get him to fess up to the crime, or get him to repay you after you've paid it. But your car was still used, and you are still, somewhat, liable.
(yes, I know assigning liability like this is a very grey area -- especially once you start talking about guns and stuff. But owning and operating a car is a privelege, not a right, and that privelege can come with specific restrictions, like agreeing to be held liable for a fine if anyone using your car runs a red light. Don't like the restriction, fine, don't register your car in this state. At least, that's the way I see that they could do it.)
Of course, the law only supports consumers as far as they're willing to pay their lawyers.
Remember DeCCS? That utility that would crack DVDs. Remember how 2600 lost a case because they posted it on their site?
That's what I meant about the law only being as good as your lawyers -- in the end, it doesn't matter what the law *says*, what matters is what you're able to get away with. And, if someone challenges you on that, it matters that you have better lawyers than they do.
The MPAA had better lawyers than 2600. That doesn't mean it can't be appealed elsewhere, or on other grounds (as it was a district-level ruling).
One thing I'd like to qualify further is, I'm not saying that they have every right under law x section y subsection z to shut down Lik Sang. I'm saying that it's entirely within their right as a company to make whatever moves they want, within the established laws, to stonewall mod chip manufacturers -- be that as an ad campaign against it, or buying out the whole company and dissolving it.
I'll agree with all that, certainly. It seems, though, that they may have taken a legal approach here (or used strongarm tactics, like muscling Lik Sang's ISP, maybe) to shut it down. The article was, unfortunately, unclear on how exactly MS "shut" them down.
I always chuckle when people complain (like earlier this week) that a manufacturer has changed their hardware to "thwart" mod chip makers. That's a legitimate, and easy way, to deal with the problem. Driving people out of business isn't.
I really like the "buy them out and close the shop" approach -- how do I get in on that scam?
However, take that hack and turn it into a business for yourself by manufacturing hardware and selling it IS what they will move against. In my opinion, they have every right to do that, and it has nothing to do with a monopoly on anything.
I'm curious why you think MS has a right to stop a legitimate business from trying to turn a profit.
Mod chips are, protests to the contrary, legal. The only ground MS might have to contest them on would be through the DMCA, as a chip could be used to run a pirated copy of a game. However, the DMCA also makes allowances for circumvention with "significant non-infringing uses", which a mod chip certainly has (seeing as how many people here want to run Linux on it). Of course, the law only supports consumers as far as they're willing to pay their lawyers.
MS didn't license the Xbox to anyone, as anyone who owns one will tell you. People bought it outright, they can do whatever they want to it. People can sell hardware, software, instructions, whatever they want to help people modify their box.
Some people have taken the opinion that MS is only attacking those things which might threaten their profitability (such as giving people the ability to write/distribute their own, unsigned games). Okay, then why don't they go after aftermarket controller manufacturers, since they obviously compete with MS controllers?
This whole thing really irks me, and I'm not sure what bothers me more -- them getting away with it, or people believeing that MS has some kind of right to protect their flawed business model. Okay, maybe MS isn't making much money on hardware (as we all seem to believe). And we then assume they make that money back in development fees. So? I don't recall signing a piece of paper, when I bought my Xbox, that said I'd support Microsoft's business plan. Their plan is their own business. Lik Sang's business plan is, similarly, their business, and no one else's. They saw a need, and filled it. Sure, it's possible that mod chips might cut into a small fraction of game sales. Again, that's not my problem.
If chipping cuts into a significant fraction of sales, and people stop making games, and the platform dies, then, well, that is my problem, and I'll be disappointed. O h, well, too bad, maybe next time. I'll still have gotten my $300 worth of fun out of the box. But, again, that's how the market works.
This is capitalism at its best.
I find it ironic that it's China that has the strongest support of capitalism, and the US that has the strongest implicit government support of illegal monopolies.
I'm surprised (or maybe I shouldn't be) that nobody's mentioned that the anti-EULA section of the bill explicitly excludes computer software:
"(b) When a digital work is distributed to the public subject to non-negotiable license terms, such terms shall not be enforceable under the common laws or statutes of any State to the extent that they restrict or limit any of the limitations on exclusive rights under this title.
"(c) As used in this section, the following terms have the following meanings: A 'digital work' is any literary (except a computer program), sound recording or musical work, or dramatic, motion picture or other audiovisual work, in whole or in part in a digital or other non-analog format.
It looks like the right to copy/archive/circumvent does not exclude computer software, though -- this seems to be the only explicit exclusion. Of course, one really needs to actually patch the relevant code with the proposed diff:) to see what's *really* being introduced.
Okay, before we all predictably get up-in-arms about how this violates the 1st amendment and all that, let's take a moment to review what we actually know about the situation:
1) The article cites the portion of the PATRIOT act regarding "providing material support to terrorists." It's not clear to me from that snippet what "material support" means. So there might be something to fight on these grounds -- but I'd bet that 90% of us aren't familiar enough with the act or pertinent case law to answer the question.
2) They're not actually providing FARC info, just a link. So they're at least not "acting" as a terrorist group, they're just telling people where you can find 'em. Which might or might not constitute some kind of support -- if the link said "can you believe these jerks?", you might be able to argue that it's actually anti-FARC, but I doubt the context of the link was such as that.
3) We'd all like to think that there is some kind of due process available here. The group should be able to appeal to someone who can make a review of whether the information being linked to is truly covered by the act. Of course, this being on (to my understanding) institutionally-owned hardware, the school's own internet policies may trump that kind of review, even though it's a public institution.
and, MOST IMPORTANTLY,
4) We have not yet established that linking is protected. At least as far as I can recall, some people won in the "linking to DeCSS" case, and some people lost, in different districts, and it hasn't hit the Supreme Court. So, everyone who is so damned sure that this is an illegal restriction of free speech, well, you can't really say that, 'cause it hasn't been decided yet. (though I think that one of the pro-"linking-as-speech" decisions was in California, so they'd be bound by that decision). Morally, I'd agree that it should be protected, but legally, nobody can say for certain.
Anyway, I just thought I'd point these things out up front, before everyone starts posting their own defiant links to FARC and complaining about the bill of rights being trampled and armchair lawyers trying to sound smart by summarizing the whole complex issue in four bullet points.
Cool, I may have to change my default shell to tcsh, then.
I cringe when I see awk/shell/perl scripts fired off for each and every prompt... I mean, yes, computers are fast, but... yeech.;)
I never noticed much of a slowdown when I was doing this. And that was on NeXT Turbo hardware (33 MHz 68040 chip). So today's systems oughta handle it with no problem.
Re:I did enjoy this part of the article:
on
Flirting With Mac OS X
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· Score: 3, Interesting
So if you cd'd to this directory.../export/home/sandyd/cvs/mozilla/xpcom/tools/regist ry/macbuild/CVS...you'd like that to appear in your prompt?
I had my prompt set to a wacky little awk script that parsed out the last three components of a path, so I'd have something like:
[root@anywhere...registry/macbuild/CVS] #
as my prompt. Worked pretty well. Damned if I know where the code is anymore, though, I've never customized my Linux environments as much as I did the NeXT I used 5-10 years ago.
Also, in NS 3.3+, a special escape code could change the titlebar of the Terminal.app window. So I eventually dropped the path in the prompt and stuck it up in the titlebar instead. Was very nice.
Okay, I've been trying to figure out how they managed to get past the second door. They didn't. The article blurb implies that the third door was behind the second, but it's in a different shaft.
Briefly: There are two shafts. The southern shaft is very straight and has a door blocking it, discovered in 1993. They inserted a fiber-optic camera through a hole in the door and found another door behind it. The northern shaft has twists and turns, and they just now were finally able to get to the end of that with the new robot. That shaft, too, is blocked by a door.
Wouldn't mind seeing Larry Niven's Ringworld or Footfall made into a movie. They both have basic plots that an average audience can comprehend (shipwrecked and alien invasion) but would have great visuals
Footfall. Ugh. That was just The Stand meets... er... I don't know what.
I loved Ringworld, mostly liked The Mote in God's Eye and still occasionally confuse people by saying "...on the gripping hand, though...", but Footfall and Lucifer's Hammer just dragged on and on.
It's not the story idea that bothers me, so much as I've had my fill of being introduced to 25 different characters over the first 100 pages of a novel, scattered all across the cosmos, only to see them all coincidentally come together in the last 30 pages of the book. It worked, somehow, in The Stand (maybe because of the supernatural aspects of the drawing together), but in the other two, well, I just didn't like it.
Then I read the next two Ringworld books. Shoulda been only one (just like Highlander:) ) (or, for that matter, Rama, but now I'm *really* digressing).
But I would love to see Ringworld visuals (or Rama, too). Especially now that people have played Halo -- you want a Ring? I'll give you a ring!
I've looked high and low for a good home modeling program, and just haven't found it.
I've got something (at home, though, so I can't tell you right offhand what it is -- it uses a.psh extension) that's not too bad. But problems I've run into (with this, and with other demos I've played with):
* Very difficult to draw the floor plan -- snaps when I don't want it to, doesn't when I do; sometimes walls get totally screwed up; difficult to draw angled walls * Limitations to the built-in objects -- doors, windows, etc, are "take it or leave it" -- use the ones they've got, and if it's the wrong size, you *might* be able to stretch it to fit. * SLOW * difficult to switch between floors * 3-D walkthrough is a "through walls" flythrough that's difficult to use -- you choose FOV, and direction, and then sort of move your pointer around and you kinda walk through
All in all, good enough to play with, but I gave up trying to put in my new house after two weeks of frustration.
Why we can't have a simple floor-plan editor that's as easy as Visio (or easier, since Visio suffers some problems, too), with a game-engine walkthrough so you can actually, well, WALK through (and go up stairs, etc), is beyond me.
I'm going to try out some of the other packages suggested in this thread, but I'm not holding my breath....
I've run into the same problem with "home CAD" stuff. The home design program I described above also does landscaping and simple furniture design, but it (like other "home cad" software I've tried) is extremely difficult to use. CAD software all seems to be based on volumes, simple shapes, and kinda-sorta managing to manipulate those items in a 3-D space.
I'd like to find a "Wood CAD" program that lets me grab a 6' 2x4 from a pallette, chop a foot off the end, nail it to another, etc., etc. -- so that I'm not only 'building' something that starts with standard dimensional lumber components, but it'd be within the realm of possibility for the software to produce, based on what I started with and what I ended up with, a step-by-step set of assembly instructions.
I've got a lot of woodworking I have to do for the new house (finishing a basement, shelves and desks for a server room, closet organizers, etc.), and I'm going to be doing all the design the way my father did -- on quadrille paper with a sharp pencil. At least it'll look professional, even if I can't do a realtime 3-D rotation on the paper.
Okay, so I've got about half my 300-CD collection ripped. Some is ripped with 128k MusicMatch (with crappy joint stereo artifacts and pumping), some with 160k LAME, and more recent stuff with 160-256k LAME. I want to finish ripping everything, and re-do all the old stuff, at once (I even found an old 18-CD SCSI jukebox to help automate it just a little).
So, if I'm going to go through all this trouble, I'd better rip it to as good a format as possible. I'm generally happy with 160+ LAME, but if OGG can give better quality with smaller size, then I'm all for that. I briefly considered a lossless format (like FLAC), but the idea of a half-terabyte array for music, while cool in an uber-geeky way, doesn't sit well with my bank account right now.
I need to retain some kind of MP3 compatibility, for small portables (64k Nomad) and my "long trip" portable (20G Rio Riot), not to mention my three Rio Receivers (though we've got 3rd party software supporting FLAC and some OGG at this point).
My question, then, is this: If I rip everything to ogg at quality 6 or 7 (it's sounding like 6 would be 'best' for my purposes -- I'll never own a super-audiophile tube amp with 20-pound speaker magnets:) ), can I then transcode to MP3 at a lower quality (96 to 128 or so) without significant artifacts? Or will the simple fact of combining two lossy compression steps totally hose me? (sort of like re-compressing a JPEG image)
I understand why you can't take a decent mp3 and encode it to a 'better' ogg, the information simply isn't there. But if the output of a q7 ogg decoding is a near-perfect wav file, can't I then encode that at a lower bitrate without any significant differences from an original mp3 rip? Or will inaudible artifacts and/or the resultant lossy frequency spectrum coming out of the ogg decoder confuse the MP3 encoder?
Now if someone can just make a VERY SMALL ppc chip-and-io-driver emulator for Intel PCs, I can use that as my boot-sector image and have it run MacOS X. Presto! Jaguar on a Dell!
(okay, so I need a little better detail in the "miracle occurs" portion of my plan. But it'd be cool, no?)
Re:Where, exactly, is modding prohibited?
on
XBox Linux HOWTOs
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· Score: 2
Modding isn't prohibited, because it can't be prohibited.
I agree, but that hasn't stopped Microsoft from putting other theoretically or morally unenforcable terms into their software EULAs.
And it hasn't stopped them from really pushing hard to close down modding-related sites.
I was just curious if MS had even tried to prohibit modding, at the consumer-purchase-agreement level...
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Here's a question I've never seen addressed:
What if you have multiple remotes?
If, for example, you've got two cars, each with their own garage door opener remote, and the remote uses code hopping, how does the 2nd remote know what code to use after the last time the 1st remote was used?
(obviously, it can't "know," which is the problem).
Do these things use some kind of challenge/response system, with a different challenge each time?
Or are you simply stuck with only being able to use one remote for any given device? (door, car, etc.)
I'm using a competitive carrier (CLEC, for those of us who've been fighting the DSL wars), and their prices are pretty good. But they're still way too expensive. I was looking at last month's bill the other day:
:)
:) ), looks more like this:
Service - $12
Taxes - $15
Features (CID, call waiting, etc.) - $9
Long ditance (via the CLEC, $.07/min) - $8
TOTAL: $44
Not too bad, since with Verizon/MCI I'd been paying close to $60 a month, every month.
The only downside is the inevitable problems associated with a CLEC dealing with Verizon. They even have a 768k SDSL bundle that's $75 a month, INCLUDING your full POTS service. I'm still trying to figure out whether I qualify for that. If you live in Verizon territory (I think they're in PA, MD, DC, VA, and maybe NY), check out Cavalier Telephone. Yes, they have an "independent agent" program to drum up business. No, I'm not one of those agents.
But to return to the subject at hand... I pay something like $15 a month (that's $180 a year!) in local, state, and federal taxes, including the "Universal Service Fund" fee, wire fees, 911/TTY taxes, etc., on my land line.
My cell phone bill, however (and here I'm still with Evil Verizon, please don't start
Service (for two phones on one bill) - $55
Taxes - $4
So, it's like $27 per phone, which is about $6 more than the actual services + features cost of my landline, but then again I get to take it in the car, so it's worth the 6 bucks. Plus, I get something like 300 minutes or so, decent LD costs (though I can't remember how much), and national no-romaing service.
But what's scary is the taxes and such -- only $4, or 2 bucks a phone! Why on earth should my landline taxes be so bloody expensive, and cell phones so cheap? I'm convinced that this is why so many people are moving to cell phones -- not because of the cost of service, but because of the taxes inflating the cost so much. Or at least that's my rant for this morning.
Anyway, can anyone in Europe (or Japan or Australia or any other G-7-type country) give a similar breakdown? I'm curious if we're really as screwed up as we think. (Given how much we complain about high gas costs, it's nothing compared to Europe, for example).
> If you have a phone in Europe it has a special dial code (07 something)
It helps to understand that, from what I've seen, most European (or is it most non-North American Numbering Plan countries?) have flexible phone number structures.
That is, where NANP phone numbers are (xxx) xxx-xxxx, european phone numbers can be of any length. I'm not quite sure how it works, at a numbering-plan level, but I know I saw toll-free numbers, in Germany, that were only 4 or 5 digits long. "Call 5-2000 now!" Was very cool.
I haven't really investigated how it all works, but sometimes I wonder if a more flexible numbering system might have helped us to avoid our current number space issues, what with overlays, splits, and some nearly empty exchanges.
Plus, you get the cool "it's a cell phone" prefix.
Firstly, the assertion that deleting the email was "like tampering with the US Mail" is a bit inaccurate. Corporate email is a corporate asset, and many companies try to make that very clear to their employees (with disclaimers, usage agreements, and the like). The CEO asking you to remove an email is certainly within the bounds of the company's rights.
:)
Is it ethical? Strictly, one would like someone to own up to their own mistakes, so, no. However, if it was an envelope sitting in the mailroom, waiting to be delivered, most people would agree it would be ethical to retrieve the envelope. Even if it had made it to the employee's mailroom pigenhole, I think most would allow the sender to ethically remove it. This situation is just an electronic extension of inter-office mail.
I'd say that people have the ethical right to recall something they've sent out under certain circumstances, and to keep the almost-recipient of their mistaken wrath from receiving the message, especially if they came to their senses right after dropping the message off -- have you ever called someone to chew them out and then hung up right after they picked up the phone? I'd argue that this could be interpreted, ethically, like that.
In fact, some mail systems (Exchange, for example) even let the users themselves recall an email that's been sent out. If the recipient has not yet read it, they never know it was recalled. If they have read it, then I'm not sure what happens -- I think if it's still in their inbox, it gets deleted (and I'm not sure if a placeholder saying "message recalled" is created or not). If it's been copied to another mailbox (particularly to a local folder), it might be missed. I know I've made copies of sensitive messages I've received, on the off chance the sender might try to recall them.
Beyond the ethics, though, is the scary thought that voicing your unease hurt you.
Did this really lead to your being fired? I'd like to think the CEO admired you for standing up to what you believed, and also for ending up helping him out in spite of that, "for the good of the company." On the other hand, maybe he was just a real jerk. (did the firing happen soon after, or years later?)
When I was a sysadmin, I'd been asked to do a couple things that I wasn't entirely comfortable with, ethically, but they were all certainly legally permissable (their network, after all), and my job wasn't to be morals cop, it was to be a good sysadmin. In these cases, I had a good enough relationship with the person making the request that I could voice my concerns, and know that he'd understand them and appreciate my opinion, without fear of recrimination. And, again, I think my ability to show that I had at least considered the ethical implications of what I had been asked to do, coupled with the fact that I was still a good employee and did what was best for the company, strenthened the trust between me and that particular upper-level-manager. So it was a win-win.
It depends on the boss, though, that's for sure.
So, I'd say that it was right for you to raise a concern, in principle, though my *personal* opinion is that you were perhaps oversensitive in this instance. It was also right for you to do what you were told (it is your job, after all). If it really lead to your being fired, then you're better off working for someone who can appreciate your moral compass.
(Note that I'm ignoring cases where the ethical issues are more severe and clear-cut, like a CEO asking someone to do something that, while legal and within his rights, might end up hurting someone else's career or something. Then it becomes MUCH more grey).
Get a TiVo (you know you want one anyway), start watching the game, pause for six seconds to fill its buffer, then resume watching, happily in sync with the radio.
:)
I'd laugh, if it weren't for the fact that I catch myself starting to do this *almost every week*, before I remember, dammit, it doesn't work this way!
My current solution (which I haven't even begun to work on yet) is to:
* Get an FM radio card
* Hook it to a linux box in the basement
* Get streaming shoutcast working
* Point my Rio Receiver at it
Somewhere in there I'm going to have to add a delay, either at the shoutcast level, or (if necessary) as a separate process in the FM->shoutcast pipeline. Extra points awarded if I can make it easily variable (and controllable from the Rio), but that's even lower on the priority scale.
Of course, until the Redskins start winning again, I won't have much enthusiasm for this.
LONG-term plan? Replace the single FM card with one of those cool high-end A/D converters and get GNUradio running, so I can select any of my favorite off-air radio stations on the fly, and listen to 2-4 of them at once.
But I gotta mow the lawn, first.
Okay, lessee... thomas.loc.gov... H-5469.. Two versions... first version -- huh. doesn't do anything, just delays stuff. (The entire text of first version: The determination by the Librarian of Congress of July 8, 2002, of rates and terms for the digital performance of sound recordings and ephemeral recordings, pursuant to section 112 and section 114 of title 17, United States Code, shall not apply during the 6-month period beginning on October 20, 2002.)
New version... modifies USC 17-112(e).. Hm... Findlaw.com... er, hm. Inserts sentence--Hey! Does anyone have a version of patch (1) that works on the US Code?
I'm sure other people have done a much better job of summarizing the bill's actuall effect, but it looks to me that, for small webcasters, it:
- Sets retroactive rates (1998-2002) at 8% of revenue or 5% of expenses, whichever is greater
- Sets 2003/2004 royalty rates to 10% of 1st $250,000 in revenue, and 12% of revenue above that
- Allows for three equal payments over 12 months for back royalties
- Sets minimum back-royalty payments for 1998-2002 of $500 to $2000 (or up to $5000 if you make a lot of money)
- Allows for election of alternate (.02 cents per performance) royalty structure
Now, I'm not a webcaster, so these numbers don't mean too much to me. It looks like a "small webcaster" is someone who didn't make more than $1,000,000 from 1998-2002, who isn't expected to make more than $500,000 in 2003, and isn't expected to make more than $1.25 million in 2004. That's pretty big, for a "small" webcaster.So what I don't understand is this:
- DMCA is passed. Provision is made for LoC to set royalty rates.
- Library of Congress sets said rates.
- Everybody hates those rates.
- Bill is introduced that doesn't fix rates, but simply delays them for six months, giving people half a year to figure out how to shut down without going into bankruptcy court
- New bill is introduced that actually addresses the rate issue in reasonable fashion
- Webcasters support new bill
- Register article comes out saying that new bill screws people over, give us back the old bill (which, remember, didn't do anything
- Slashdot picks up Register article (imagine that!) and 90% of posters agree with Register's FUD
I just don't get it.- EZ Hangup - an annual-fee "opt-out" list, and a single-point device that tells telemarketers to fuck off
- The Phone Butler - a device that lets you, from any phone in the house, tell telemarketers to "piss off" (British accent, donchaknow)
- TriVOX - call screening device that requests callers to enter a code to "ring through" to the hosue
- Screen Machine - not quite sure, looks similar to TriVOX. The linked site (and the manufacturer's site) are pretty skimpy on info.
These are not, of course, the only solutions to the problem. Some other approaches (discussed here and elsewhere):- Do Not Call Lists - State, Federal, Industry, and Company-specific -- a list of numbers wishing to be left alone
- Interrupt tone generators - The idea is to generate the "booo-dee-dweep" sort of sound you get when you call a number that's out of service, and the belief is that telemarketer dialers will hear that and remove your number from their DB. Nobody knows how many call-generating systems actually do this (it's probably a small number).
- Call Screening with an Answering Machine - you still have to run downstairs to listen to the machine, and many telemarketers will just hang up and try again later
- Caller-ID Rejection - Most telemarkters don't pass CID information (thanks, FCC, for dropping that requirement!), some legitimate organizations (some college dorms, for example) don't pass the info, and other telemarketers deliberately pass "appealing" names to entice you to answer.
And what list of potential solutions would be complete without a list of why they all suck?- Opt-Out Systems - They still have to call you once so you can tell them to leave you alone. Not all telemarketers follow the rules, and fighting back is difficult. Not all telemarketers are even bound by the rules (there are a lot of exceptions). Not all subscribe to industry-based lists (like the Direct Marketing Association). Proposed national Federal "opt-out" lists are riddled with exceptions, too, and still rely on callers actually bothering to obey the law. It's difficult to tell a recorded message (illegal, by the way) to place you on a do not call list.
- CID, Interrupt tones, answering machine screening, etc. - discussed above
- EZ Hangup - see #1, plus you gotta run to the phone where the EZ Hangup box lives
- Phone Butler - see #1
- TriVOX - Would be nice to have the ability to manually place numbers on the system so that friends, family, etc., calling from recognizable numbers can ring straight through
- Screen Machine - ??? Probably similar to #5.
Of all these possible solutions, the TriVOX comes closest to what I've been hoping to find for about the last 10 years. The ideal solution, for me, would be:- Hardware solution that sits in my basement, between the outside world and all my inside extensions
- Connects to a computer for inbound CID logging and configuration (including setup of whitelist and blacklist phone numbers)
- Passes whitelist numbers straight through to internal extensions
- Blocks blacklist numbers immediately with "do not call" request
- Interrupts unrecognized numbers, before ringing inside the house, with user-recorded announcement giving callers the option to "hit 1" to ring through.
- Tone-sensor to allow any extension in the house to interrupt a caller who has rung through and is still a telemarketer (ala Phone Butler)
- (optional): capability to do multi-extension ringing ("hit 1 for david") or multi-mailbox voicemail (extra credit: record voicemail to computer and make available for software to include in email or web interface)
I've always thought that this would make a great open source hardware project -- complex enough that it doesn't already exist, simple enough to be within the reach of hobbyist hackers.Like I said, the TriVOX comes VERY close to this, but is missing some key features (like the ability to whitelist friends and family). It is, however, very encouraging that we're finally getting close to being able to truly solve the problem. At least as well as can ever be done.
There is no federal law that I'm aware of requiring telemarketers to have a DNC (telemarketerspeak: DNC=Do Not Call list).
.01% of the people they piss off actually haul them to court, and half those cases they get out of on a technicality?
There certainly is! And they're REQUIRED to put you on it IMMEDIATELY! (none of this "it'll take a few weeks to get your number into the list" BS).
Of course, most of the calls we get today are either from organizations exempt from the laws (political candidates, banks or phone companies, surveys, charitable organizations), or they're simply recorded messages (which are, actually, illegal as well).
I've got "put me on your do not call list immediately" as part of my answering machine message -- one of these days I'll start tracking the messages that people leave me and sue them for ignoring my request (if they can leave me a message with an automated machine, I can request to be put on the DNC with an automated message).
Unfortunately, even having state-sponsored do not call lists won't help. As I've said before, laws are only as effective as their enforcement. Until we decide to actually give some police organization real authority to prosecute these people, unscrupulous telemarketers will just ignore whatever "opt-out" laws there are and call you, anyway. What have they got to lose? Maybe
Anyway, I'm rambling.
So, yes, there is a federal law requiring telemarketers to maintain a "do not call" list, but telemarketers' adherence to the law is spotty, and consumers' recourse against people ignoring the law is cumbersome. So they prosper, and we fume.
2MB on a Palm will hold a lot of functionality.
Absolutely! I used a Palm Personal (with 1 meg of ram) for, like, 2 years (if I recall correctly). Worked like a champ. Lots of notes, appointments, several 3rd party apps (games, organizers, shopping databases, etc). It did everything I needed, at the time.
For $100, it's great. The target audience for the Zire doesn't want flash storage, MP3 playback, or video cameras. (at least, they don't *yet* know they want it). For people who want to keep all their addresses nearby, appointments handy, and christmas lists up-to-date year-round, this is perfect.
Let's look at this another way: The original Palm only had 512k of RAM -- and enough people thought those were useful that they spawned a whole new industry. Now they've got the same sort of system, with 4 times the memory, for something like a third of the price. Won't a whole new class of people find it just as useful as all the early adopters of the US-Robotics PalmPilots did?
the U.S. Constitution provides for suspension of habeas corpus in cases of "in cases of rebellion or invasion."
Where, exactly? I did a quick skim through the Presidential and Judicial Articles, and saw nothing of the sort. The best I could find in the Legislative article (Article I, Section 8) stated that Congress shall have the power "To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions". Didn't see anything there about suspending rights, simply using "the Militia" (and what does that mean? Army, or National Guard?") to "execute the Laws" (which might mean be judge, jury, and executioner, or simply might mean they're empowered as policemen).
From what I've read (check out FindLaw for past court decisions), almost every time a president has tried to suspend civil liberties in "times of war", it's been later struck down as unconstitutional.
The most telling case, if I recall correctly, was in the territory of Hawaii in 1942. We'd just been attacked, and the territorial governer imposed some kind of martial law (including, for one, suspending the normal judicial system in favor of a military panel). Okay, so you've got a clear "time of war" (Pearl Harbor), and you've got a territory that isn't even a state. If there was ever a time that martial law could reasonably be introduced, this would be it. And the Supreme Court later struck it all down, saying it was unconstitutional.
Of course, the ruling came years after it was all over.
I challenge anyone out there to prove that such suspensions of civil liberties is authorized, and has been allowed to stand. Then, I'd like to see what a definition of "war" is, and whether we're actually in it (the Congress very specifically did NOT declare war on Afghanistan / The Taliban / Al Qaeda).
I may be wrong (after all, I Am Not A Constitutional Scholar), but I've simply never been able to find anything that supports any of these assertions about suspension of civil liberties....
That said, the illegitimate son of George I has exceeded his constitutional authority in this case.
I'll most heartily agree with this -- if the power to suspend habeous corpus (and other rights) exists, it lies with Congress, not with the President or the Attorney General. At least, that's how it appears to me. It's frustrating that the Judicial system takes so long to figure these things out, but I'm confident that, eventually, people's rights will be upheld. I just wish that we didn't have to go through this every time there's a national emergency, and live with 2-5 years of diminished rights before the courts step in and set things straight (or not).
Nowhere do you mention a picture of the DRIVER. Who are they accusing me or my car. So I am put in the position of proving my innocence
Most jurisdictions, for this reason, don't assess points against the owner's license for such violations. They simply have to swear an oath that they weren't driving, and they get out of the fine, in many cases.
Personally, I think the laws should be written (interpreted?) as being "a fine against the owner of the vehicle for allowing it to be used to run a red light."
If it was a buddy of yours driving, fine, either get him to fess up to the crime, or get him to repay you after you've paid it. But your car was still used, and you are still, somewhat, liable.
(yes, I know assigning liability like this is a very grey area -- especially once you start talking about guns and stuff. But owning and operating a car is a privelege, not a right, and that privelege can come with specific restrictions, like agreeing to be held liable for a fine if anyone using your car runs a red light. Don't like the restriction, fine, don't register your car in this state. At least, that's the way I see that they could do it.)
That's what I meant about the law only being as good as your lawyers -- in the end, it doesn't matter what the law *says*, what matters is what you're able to get away with. And, if someone challenges you on that, it matters that you have better lawyers than they do.
The MPAA had better lawyers than 2600. That doesn't mean it can't be appealed elsewhere, or on other grounds (as it was a district-level ruling).
One thing I'd like to qualify further is, I'm not saying that they have every right under law x section y subsection z to shut down Lik Sang. I'm saying that it's entirely within their right as a company to make whatever moves they want, within the established laws, to stonewall mod chip manufacturers -- be that as an ad campaign against it, or buying out the whole company and dissolving it.
I'll agree with all that, certainly. It seems, though, that they may have taken a legal approach here (or used strongarm tactics, like muscling Lik Sang's ISP, maybe) to shut it down. The article was, unfortunately, unclear on how exactly MS "shut" them down.
I always chuckle when people complain (like earlier this week) that a manufacturer has changed their hardware to "thwart" mod chip makers. That's a legitimate, and easy way, to deal with the problem. Driving people out of business isn't.
I really like the "buy them out and close the shop" approach -- how do I get in on that scam?
However, take that hack and turn it into a business for yourself by manufacturing hardware and selling it IS what they will move against. In my opinion, they have every right to do that, and it has nothing to do with a monopoly on anything.
I'm curious why you think MS has a right to stop a legitimate business from trying to turn a profit.
Mod chips are, protests to the contrary, legal. The only ground MS might have to contest them on would be through the DMCA, as a chip could be used to run a pirated copy of a game. However, the DMCA also makes allowances for circumvention with "significant non-infringing uses", which a mod chip certainly has (seeing as how many people here want to run Linux on it). Of course, the law only supports consumers as far as they're willing to pay their lawyers.
MS didn't license the Xbox to anyone, as anyone who owns one will tell you. People bought it outright, they can do whatever they want to it. People can sell hardware, software, instructions, whatever they want to help people modify their box.
Some people have taken the opinion that MS is only attacking those things which might threaten their profitability (such as giving people the ability to write/distribute their own, unsigned games). Okay, then why don't they go after aftermarket controller manufacturers, since they obviously compete with MS controllers?
This whole thing really irks me, and I'm not sure what bothers me more -- them getting away with it, or people believeing that MS has some kind of right to protect their flawed business model. Okay, maybe MS isn't making much money on hardware (as we all seem to believe). And we then assume they make that money back in development fees. So? I don't recall signing a piece of paper, when I bought my Xbox, that said I'd support Microsoft's business plan. Their plan is their own business. Lik Sang's business plan is, similarly, their business, and no one else's. They saw a need, and filled it. Sure, it's possible that mod chips might cut into a small fraction of game sales. Again, that's not my problem.
If chipping cuts into a significant fraction of sales, and people stop making games, and the platform dies, then, well, that is my problem, and I'll be disappointed. O h, well, too bad, maybe next time. I'll still have gotten my $300 worth of fun out of the box. But, again, that's how the market works.
This is capitalism at its best.
I find it ironic that it's China that has the strongest support of capitalism, and the US that has the strongest implicit government support of illegal monopolies.
-- If it was so, it might be; and it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic. - Lewis Carrol
What is, was. What was, will be. What will be, was, but will be again. -- Arnold Horshack.
Okay, before we all predictably get up-in-arms about how this violates the 1st amendment and all that, let's take a moment to review what we actually know about the situation:
1) The article cites the portion of the PATRIOT act regarding "providing material support to terrorists." It's not clear to me from that snippet what "material support" means. So there might be something to fight on these grounds -- but I'd bet that 90% of us aren't familiar enough with the act or pertinent case law to answer the question.
2) They're not actually providing FARC info, just a link. So they're at least not "acting" as a terrorist group, they're just telling people where you can find 'em. Which might or might not constitute some kind of support -- if the link said "can you believe these jerks?", you might be able to argue that it's actually anti-FARC, but I doubt the context of the link was such as that.
3) We'd all like to think that there is some kind of due process available here. The group should be able to appeal to someone who can make a review of whether the information being linked to is truly covered by the act. Of course, this being on (to my understanding) institutionally-owned hardware, the school's own internet policies may trump that kind of review, even though it's a public institution.
and, MOST IMPORTANTLY,
4) We have not yet established that linking is protected. At least as far as I can recall, some people won in the "linking to DeCSS" case, and some people lost, in different districts, and it hasn't hit the Supreme Court. So, everyone who is so damned sure that this is an illegal restriction of free speech, well, you can't really say that, 'cause it hasn't been decided yet. (though I think that one of the pro-"linking-as-speech" decisions was in California, so they'd be bound by that decision). Morally, I'd agree that it should be protected, but legally, nobody can say for certain.
Anyway, I just thought I'd point these things out up front, before everyone starts posting their own defiant links to FARC and complaining about the bill of rights being trampled and armchair lawyers trying to sound smart by summarizing the whole complex issue in four bullet points.
Oops. Too late.
Cool, I may have to change my default shell to tcsh, then.
;)
I cringe when I see awk/shell/perl scripts fired off for each and every prompt... I mean, yes, computers are fast, but... yeech.
I never noticed much of a slowdown when I was doing this. And that was on NeXT Turbo hardware (33 MHz 68040 chip). So today's systems oughta handle it with no problem.
So if you cd'd to this directory... /export/home/sandyd/cvs/mozilla/xpcom/tools/regist ry/macbuild/CVS ...you'd like that to appear in your prompt?
...registry/macbuild/CVS] #
I had my prompt set to a wacky little awk script that parsed out the last three components of a path, so I'd have something like:
[root@anywhere
as my prompt. Worked pretty well. Damned if I know where the code is anymore, though, I've never customized my Linux environments as much as I did the NeXT I used 5-10 years ago.
Also, in NS 3.3+, a special escape code could change the titlebar of the Terminal.app window. So I eventually dropped the path in the prompt and stuck it up in the titlebar instead. Was very nice.
Okay, I've been trying to figure out how they managed to get past the second door. They didn't. The article blurb implies that the third door was behind the second, but it's in a different shaft.
Briefly: There are two shafts. The southern shaft is very straight and has a door blocking it, discovered in 1993. They inserted a fiber-optic camera through a hole in the door and found another door behind it. The northern shaft has twists and turns, and they just now were finally able to get to the end of that with the new robot. That shaft, too, is blocked by a door.
National Geographic explains it a little better...
Wouldn't mind seeing Larry Niven's Ringworld or Footfall made into a movie. They both have basic plots that an average audience can comprehend (shipwrecked and alien invasion) but would have great visuals
:) ) (or, for that matter, Rama, but now I'm *really* digressing).
Footfall. Ugh. That was just The Stand meets... er... I don't know what.
I loved Ringworld, mostly liked The Mote in God's Eye and still occasionally confuse people by saying "...on the gripping hand, though...", but Footfall and Lucifer's Hammer just dragged on and on.
It's not the story idea that bothers me, so much as I've had my fill of being introduced to 25 different characters over the first 100 pages of a novel, scattered all across the cosmos, only to see them all coincidentally come together in the last 30 pages of the book. It worked, somehow, in The Stand (maybe because of the supernatural aspects of the drawing together), but in the other two, well, I just didn't like it.
Then I read the next two Ringworld books. Shoulda been only one (just like Highlander
But I would love to see Ringworld visuals (or Rama, too). Especially now that people have played Halo -- you want a Ring? I'll give you a ring!
I've looked high and low for a good home modeling program, and just haven't found it.
.psh extension) that's not too bad. But problems I've run into (with this, and with other demos I've played with):
I've got something (at home, though, so I can't tell you right offhand what it is -- it uses a
* Very difficult to draw the floor plan -- snaps when I don't want it to, doesn't when I do; sometimes walls get totally screwed up; difficult to draw angled walls
* Limitations to the built-in objects -- doors, windows, etc, are "take it or leave it" -- use the ones they've got, and if it's the wrong size, you *might* be able to stretch it to fit.
* SLOW
* difficult to switch between floors
* 3-D walkthrough is a "through walls" flythrough that's difficult to use -- you choose FOV, and direction, and then sort of move your pointer around and you kinda walk through
All in all, good enough to play with, but I gave up trying to put in my new house after two weeks of frustration.
Why we can't have a simple floor-plan editor that's as easy as Visio (or easier, since Visio suffers some problems, too), with a game-engine walkthrough so you can actually, well, WALK through (and go up stairs, etc), is beyond me.
I'm going to try out some of the other packages suggested in this thread, but I'm not holding my breath....
I've run into the same problem with "home CAD" stuff. The home design program I described above also does landscaping and simple furniture design, but it (like other "home cad" software I've tried) is extremely difficult to use. CAD software all seems to be based on volumes, simple shapes, and kinda-sorta managing to manipulate those items in a 3-D space.
I'd like to find a "Wood CAD" program that lets me grab a 6' 2x4 from a pallette, chop a foot off the end, nail it to another, etc., etc. -- so that I'm not only 'building' something that starts with standard dimensional lumber components, but it'd be within the realm of possibility for the software to produce, based on what I started with and what I ended up with, a step-by-step set of assembly instructions.
I've got a lot of woodworking I have to do for the new house (finishing a basement, shelves and desks for a server room, closet organizers, etc.), and I'm going to be doing all the design the way my father did -- on quadrille paper with a sharp pencil. At least it'll look professional, even if I can't do a realtime 3-D rotation on the paper.
Okay, so I've got about half my 300-CD collection ripped. Some is ripped with 128k MusicMatch (with crappy joint stereo artifacts and pumping), some with 160k LAME, and more recent stuff with 160-256k LAME. I want to finish ripping everything, and re-do all the old stuff, at once (I even found an old 18-CD SCSI jukebox to help automate it just a little).
:) ), can I then transcode to MP3 at a lower quality (96 to 128 or so) without significant artifacts? Or will the simple fact of combining two lossy compression steps totally hose me? (sort of like re-compressing a JPEG image)
So, if I'm going to go through all this trouble, I'd better rip it to as good a format as possible. I'm generally happy with 160+ LAME, but if OGG can give better quality with smaller size, then I'm all for that. I briefly considered a lossless format (like FLAC), but the idea of a half-terabyte array for music, while cool in an uber-geeky way, doesn't sit well with my bank account right now.
I need to retain some kind of MP3 compatibility, for small portables (64k Nomad) and my "long trip" portable (20G Rio Riot), not to mention my three Rio Receivers (though we've got 3rd party software supporting FLAC and some OGG at this point).
My question, then, is this: If I rip everything to ogg at quality 6 or 7 (it's sounding like 6 would be 'best' for my purposes -- I'll never own a super-audiophile tube amp with 20-pound speaker magnets
I understand why you can't take a decent mp3 and encode it to a 'better' ogg, the information simply isn't there. But if the output of a q7 ogg decoding is a near-perfect wav file, can't I then encode that at a lower bitrate without any significant differences from an original mp3 rip? Or will inaudible artifacts and/or the resultant lossy frequency spectrum coming out of the ogg decoder confuse the MP3 encoder?
Very cool.
Now if someone can just make a VERY SMALL ppc chip-and-io-driver emulator for Intel PCs, I can use that as my boot-sector image and have it run MacOS X. Presto! Jaguar on a Dell!
(okay, so I need a little better detail in the "miracle occurs" portion of my plan. But it'd be cool, no?)
Modding isn't prohibited, because it can't be prohibited.
I agree, but that hasn't stopped Microsoft from putting other theoretically or morally unenforcable terms into their software EULAs.
And it hasn't stopped them from really pushing hard to close down modding-related sites.
I was just curious if MS had even tried to prohibit modding, at the consumer-purchase-agreement level...