Unless we're talking about RECORDABLE discs for computer use, this won't go anywhere for a while. And the Toshiba one will be most likely, since any drive will have to be compatible with as many options as possible to be competetive.
Frankly, with 8mm backup tapes going for $50.00 a pop and 100GB/200GB LTO tapes costing $100.00 a pop, with all of the headaches associated with tape backups, something like this would be a godsend for the tech industry.
We already backup to DVD-R where it makes sense (database dumps, etc), and having daily archives on a stable medium that go back years (CD-R) has come in very, very handy more than once.
Imagine being able to backup and archive your entire fileserver that way.
That is what interests me in the 100GB optical media we keep being promised, or even the 27 GB media these folks are promising us. The ability to backup every night to a stable, randomly accessible medium from which restores are trivial, fast, and accessible for each day going back as far as we need to.
The day we can replace tape backup with inexpensive optical backup, a la today's DVD-R or CD-R media, is the day this sort of thing will have a very wide market in the computer industry, irrespective of what the entertainment industry wants or needs.
"We will lose the Internet if we don't save it." and "civil society" has broken down online... probably not it's just that people know that they can currently get away with doing stuff, and the net still being in its relavtive infancy, people know that they'll be able to do whatever they want until push comes to shove and the governments themselves catch up with technology.
And what if "governments themselves catching up with technology" amounts to taking that technology out of the hands of the citzenry and reserving it for themselves?
The rhetoric now emerging and being bandied about by the talking heads of hollywood isn't new. It was a precursor to prohibition back in the early 20th century, it was a precursor to the War on Drugs in the late 20th century, which continues to this day (now financing terrorism where previously it merely financed crime lords and thugs), in short, it has been a precursor to every act of government which has taken freedom from the people in the name of 'civil society', 'common decency,' and other such tripe. Indeed, whenever anyone hears the words 'common decency' they should look around and determine where the next attack on their civil liberties is going to come from, since what is commonly decent recreation to one person is commonly indecent to another, and any effort to put such terms into legislation by definition means someone's notion of commonly decent is about to trample someone elses.
The government cannot take the internet away from the people outright and publicly admit that they are doing so to prop up the profit margins of dinasaur entities such as the MPAA and the RIAA, nor can they admit that they'd like us all to shut up and get back on the couch, where they can conviniently spoonfeed us what they'd like us to think without the annoying backtalk.
Does this mean they don't plan to take the internet away from us (or do so effectively by reducing it to just another home shopping network)? Hardly.
What it does mean is that they need to manipulate the popular perception of the internet, until they can build up sufficient support, particularly in the easy-to-manipulate and already-well-organized religious right, until such a point where they can point to some kind of popular demand to take away the internet as we know it "for our own moral good."
That is what this rhetoric is all about. It is a precursor, and an opening salvo, in the effort to institute digital prohibition in America. It frankly amazes me that no one on slashdot, where we've seen all the pieces of this puzzle presented to us time and time again vis-a-vis the lobbying of Hollywood, Microsoft, and the Recording industry to restrict our digital rights, can see this coming.
It is all about information, and the government would like to control that information. Dealing with entrenched media oligarchies, while imperfect, facilitates this. The Internet on the other hand will never be ameanable to this sort of thing, unless is it changed radically, or eliminated altogether.
Indeed, the government's lust to do so grows with their beligerence in foreign military theaters. But to be fair it isn't only the government that lusts after such control: most large businesses do likewise (how better to quiet criticism of a new product or a profitable business model that may not be so optimal, like say, Monsanto dumping toxic chemicals into the groundwater of a small southern US town).
Couple that with the desire of four very strong entities (the RIAA, the MPAA, Microsoft, and, lest we forget, the baby bells who fear VoIP more than anything) to cripple and control the internet or, failing that, do away with it altogether, and you have a very strong group with the will, and the power, to take away our digital freedom.
The only problem is how to make such a power grab into our personal lives palitable to the majority of Americans. How fortuitious for them that the educational level of America has declined so much over the last four decades, and that by playing the morality card they'll have a large portion of the population on board with nary a thought about the underlying issues, or very real consiquences, of such a move.
Indeed, policymakers already know this works. It allowed them to gut the most potent civil protections of the constitution in their persuit of their War on Drugs, and to continue doing so even after failure upon failure. Should it be of any surprise to any of us to see them doing it again as they try to put the digital genie back in the bottle and deny us our digital freedoms?
is why they're trying legal (as in using the law) approaches to technical problems, something that normally cannot be done. Technical problems need technical solutions.
Because if they went after technical solutions to technical problems, they would be paying a computer consultant $90-$150/hour, rather than billing out $500/hour for a lawyer to waste the court's time with this nonsense.
Since the law and most of the court system is of, by, and for lawyers (and this is doubly true for so-called 'intellectual property' law and lawyers), is anyone really surprised to see $500/hour lawyers on both sides billing out time, when a 5 minute modification to an apache server by a $150/hour computer jockey would have sufficed?
It really has almost gotten to the point where the only viable solution to this particular societal ill is going to become the Shakespearian solution: hang all the lawyers.
Wouldn't a better CPU benchmarks be taken by using the chipmakers' own compilers?
No.
The chipmaker would simply then optimize their compiler for the benchmark(s) in question, rather than for code more generally. In other words, what you suggest would still allow the chipmaker to cheat.
In order to have complete transparency in the benchmarking, both the benchmarks and the compiler should be open source (ideally free software, so that anyone can run and verify the benchmarks as well, allowing repeatable experimentation in the broadest scientific sense). If the chip maker wishes to submit optimizations to such a compiler they would be free to do so, since any such optimizations would in turn be open source (or free software) and subject to peer review.
A good candidate would be gcc, which runs on numerous platforms, and on several operating systems on AMD and Intel hardware.
Cheating would be much harder in this case, perhaps even impossible, something we need given the sordid history of benchmarking by all parties involved (except perhaps AMD? Can anyone recall an instance where AMD has cooked results? I ask because their current chip rating system is extremely conservative... almost the antithes of what Intel is trying to do. Has this been a longstanding strategy on AMD's part?).
I was a little young then, so could you enlighten me on how Ross Perot's 20% in 1992 influenced the two parties (other than taking the majority of that 20% from the Pubs)? Not being a smartass -- it's a serious question.
1. Ross Perot did not take the majority away from the Republicans. One of the very interesting things about his campaign was that roughly as many democrats voted for him as republicans. He didn't cost George Bush Senior the election, George Bush Senior cost himself the election, by being completely and utterly out of touch with America, to the point that when he visited a grocery store and saw the laser scanning bar code reader he commented on that remarkable technology that was 'making America more effecient'... a technology that had been around for a decade or two by then and was familiar to anyone who ever bothered to go out and shop for themselves.
2. Ross Perot influenced both parties thusly:
Democrats would discuss balancing the budget, but state that certain programs (mostly social and educational) were a higher priority.
Republicans would discuss balancing the budget, but state that certain programs (mostly defense and drug war) were a higher priority.
Ross Perot came along and discussed balancing the budget in his famous "it's time to pay the piper" manner, and stated in terms everyone could understand that nothing was more important than getting our fiscal house in order.
Although he likely wouldn't have made a very good president, he was right. And many agreed, so many that he won 20% of the vote in a two party system where voting for a third party is widely (and erroneously) equated with "wasting your vote."
It shocked both the democrats and the republicans, both of which fell over each other trying (and succeeding) in balancing the budget. The budget remained balanced until George W. Bush took office, cut taxes in a manner which was widely considered to be fiscally irresponsible, followed the events of 9/11 which led to increased spending and, and further exacerbated by the numerous corporate scandals and subsequent short-circuiting of the economic recovery which reduced revinue even more.
For several years it was Ross Perot's single campaign plank, balance the budget, that drove the agendas of both major parties, almost entirely as a result of his winning 20% of the votes and shocking both parties deeply, to the core.
Of course, after the Republican's attack dog Bucchanon sabataged and destroyed the third party Ross Perot founded we are now largely back to business as usual, with another segment of the electorate that, for a brief time, thought they could actually effect change, having joined the growing ranks of the disillusioned.
The theory/hypothesis statements were perfect - the last statement is a bit over the top.
And I know this Athiest believes aliens could have seeded the Earth with proto-human life, but until I see some sensible evidence indicating that such might be the case, I'm not going to pay the notion much heed.
Equating that statement with the previous statement is really quite weak - one is falsifiable (aliens), one is not (God). One statement is specific (aliens seeding Earth) one is not (God isn't even defined...).
Well, that less sentence was intended to be tounge in cheeck. I could phrase it so that it is non-falsifiable if you prefer (an athiests faith-based notion, if you will):
"Invisible aliens have had a hand in directing our development from a dimension beyond our ken. They have been with us since the primordial soup, they will continue their subtle interventions until we cease to be."
No matter how little evidence there is for my 'aliens', their existence cannot be disproven, any more than the existence of God can be disproven.
I do think you give me a little too much credit when you say
Or, put slightly differently, one is philosophical (God) and one is scientific (aliens). You can argue against aliens in a rigorous manner, but you can't argue against God in any rigorous manner.
My definition (and contention) of aliens is no more scientific than another's definition and contention of God... indeed the latter is often equated with the former in several fringe religions, and sometimes even by theologens affiliated with mainstream religions. Go figure.
As you point out, the ability to argue against the existence of God depends on your definition (most definitions include more than just "that which created the universe", such as sapience and quite frequently omiscience and omnipotence, for example, and in the case of most of Christianity a male gender and IIRC in the case of some sects, including the Mormons, a humanoid physique). While I cannot argue sensibly against any arbitrary definition of God (indeed, no one can argue sensibly against any arbitrary definition of anything) I can, and frequently do, argue very sensibly against the specific definitions offered by the world's three major monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam).
Be that as it may, evolution (the observed fact) and evolution (the scientific theory) are orthogonal to the existence of some sort of God. All it does is disprove one aspect of Christian Myth (the liternal interpretation of Genesis), it makes no statement pro or con on the existence of divinity itself.
However, as with my aliens, until I see some sensible evidence that divinity does exist, I will continue to pay the notion little heed.
I know of three people who did get fired for buying Microsoft.
A friend of mine is now providing consulting to the companies in question. Two are running Twig on Linux servers, the other has their old non-ms, non-unix server back up and working (again) while they slowly transition to Linux.
Despite all the "I'll sound wise and neutral if I make out to be 'admitting' free software's flaws and giving Microsoft its due" commentary one sees here on slashdot as either an effort at karma whoring, or an effort at pro-Microsoft propoganda and astroturfing, the fact remains that there are really very few shops that cannot do without Microsoft, and many that actually benefit from running other platforms.
What is very interesting is the number of non-technical people who are coming to realize that, and while they don't necessarilly embrace free software in general, or GNU/Linux in particular, they are beginning to recognize just what a financial, technical, and time drain Microsoft and their products have become to their enterprises, and they are looking for ways out.
Even to the point where, now, people are starting to get fired for blindly purchasing Microsoft, and treating MS propoganda as a substitute for technical research and savvy.
I know it's nitpicky but evolution is a scientific "possibility". It is still regarded as a theory after all.
All things short of a methematical 'proof' in science is theory, including gravitation and even cause-and-effect itself. The word 'theory' in science has an entirely different connotation to what it has in common parlence, and in particular to the way you use it here.
In the American vernacular, "theory" often means "imperfect fact" - part of a hierarchy of confidence running downhill from fact to theory to hypothesis to guess.
Well evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape-like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered.
In science "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional consent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
Evolutionists have been very clear about this distinction of fact and theory from the very beginning, if only because we have always acknowledged how far we are from completely understanding the mechanisms (theory) by which evolution (fact) occurred.
-- Stephen J. Gould, "Evolution as Fact and Theory"; Discover, May 1981
What you are equating evolution with is a hypothesis, not a theory, and the two are very different. Or, put another way,
A few words need to be said about the "theory of evolution," which most people take to mean the proposition that organisms have evolved from common ancestors. In everyday speech, "theory" often means a hypothesis or even a mere speculation. But in science, "theory" means "a statement of what are held to be the general laws, principles, or causes of something known or observed", as the Oxford English Dictionary defines it. [-- Douglas J. Futuyma]
The theory is not did evolution happen. We already know evolution did and does happen, there is a mountain of factual data underscoring that point. What is theoretical and debated (by scientists) is what the mechanism is by which primates became human and dinasaurs became birds. The fact that it happened is denied only by those with a religious agenda, whose fragile beliefs are challenged by the factual data collected by thousands of researches all over the face of the planet.
And I know this non-fundamental Christian believes God could have used evolution to create us.
And I know this Athiest believes aliens could have seeded the Earth with proto-human life, but until I see some sensible evidence indicating that such might be the case, I'm not going to pay the notion much heed.
While I agree with you that a load of shit is going on around the world (and always has been): it's imperative that you clean things up in your own house, regardless of what the neighborhood looks like.
Very well said.
It should be pointed out that the 3,000 deaths in New York, while tragic, are hardly a blip in the population.
We have had more than 50,000 people die in car accidents since then. All horribly mutilated, some burned beyond recognition, others decapitated, some crushed within the tin can that became their automobile, some crushed beneath the wheels of an oncoming car, and so on and so forth, ad nauseum. In short, each death was horrible, left behind it a wake of trajedy and grieving, and each represents a life that ended much sooner that it should have.
Yet we live with this stark reality every year, and few if any of us fear to climb into an automobile and drive to work.
The terrorists can scare us, can knock down a couple of buildings (as can a 5.0 richter earth quake, a big forest fire, or a wopping hurricane, and we get a lot more of those than we do terrorist attacks), but they cannot do us any real, significant harm!
Even the economic damage the fear they create is minimal. The markets had recovered virtually all of their 9/11 losses and the economy was on the upswing, until Enron, WorldCom, and a whole slew of other corrupt American executives and CEOs were caught with their hands in the life savings of the middle class, pilfering the nation's wealth for their own miserly gains. In the wake of such criminal behavior the markets and the economy tanked as every thinking person recognized and chose to avoid further opportunity for the wealthy to defraud them, and as a result of this behavior, and our governments neglect in regulating and preventing it, the economy now shows no signs of recovering, an unpleasant event that is entirely self-inflicted by greedy, rich CEOs and executives whose ethics died shortly after the umbelical was cut, and the tame politicians they've had in their pockets for the last twenty years. Such subhuman filth, who represent the highest, most priveleged economic class in America, are responsible for most of our economic troubles and hardships, not Osama and his flea-ridden, filthy followers.
Indeed, the terrorists, in contrast to our own corrupt officials, aren't even relevant.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't go around the world eradicating them and their followers wherever we find them, nor does it mean bin Laden's head wouldn't look good on a pike.
It does mean we shouldn't allow Aschcroft and his cronies to ride roughshod over the constitution, and that we shouldn't allow Bush Junior to use the country's military and spend our strength fighting Daddy's unfinished, and unrelated, battles a la Iraq.
Frankly, if the choice I'm given is between freedom with a 3,000 death/year terrorist pricetag, and an Orwellian society that maybe, perhaps, reduces that number to a few hundred, or even to zero, I'll take the three thousand deaths per year and keep my freedom thankyou very much. My car is far more likely to kill me than some towel-head Saudi fanatic hiding out with his donkey in some dirty cave in Afghanistan or Pakistan, and I'm not about to stop driving because of it.
But I won't work on Windows computers in my free time, which means I will not help them fix their windows computers if and when they break.
Period.
Of course, my mom prefers GNU/Linux and hates her Windows box at work (her home Linux box works, and works well).
My sister's husband, on the other hand, prefers Windows. Fine. Their computer is broken alot and they have trouble finding anyone to help them fix it. *shrug*
I have been feeling very bitter of late, watching the slide of America from democracy to corporate oligarchy and, finally toward corporate faschism.
So much so that I have been seriously considering emigration, and have been giving a lot of thought to what metric I would use to determine the "drop dead" (ie. okay, no more delays, time to go) moment.
But this ruling is a rare breath of fresh air, and restores some of my faith in our tattered civil institutions. Not a great deal, mind you, but some. It is freightening to have two of the three branches of governmetn (legislative and executive) willfully and knowingly ignore the constitution in the persuit of their goals (howerver laudable [the eradication of terrorism] or despicable [the introduction of digital prohibition to prop up the media and copyright cartels]), but not nearly as freightening as it would be if all three branches had chosen to shred that venerable document... something all too many lower courts have seemed to be willing to do in any case regarding the aformentioned media cartels. Like you, I think of Judge Kaplan, or the supreme court's repayment of political debts to The Shrub in the last election, and my moment of optomism fades.
Nevertheless, this was a courageous and important act. A few more like this and we might actually save and reclaim our democracy. The odds are long, mind you, but the goal well worth persuing anyway.
The install process is too complicated (and doesn't work), and OpenOffice will faceplant (won't run, install or uninstall) if a Java environment is installed after it is.
If you are running a source based distro like Source Mage or Gentoo, openoffice is trivial to install:
(If you are using gcc 3.1 or greater and wish to compile with optimizations local to your hardware)
emerge openoffice
(If you are using gcc 2.95, you'll have to install the precompiled binary)
emerge openoffice-bin
The second command exists analogously for Debian, using apt-get. It doesn't get any easier than that.
Any program that segfaults is broken. Period. End of story.
Agreed. You should submit a bug report. I have not experienced any of the seg faults you are describing. Was your binary compiled against a slightly different set of library versions (that is one of the huge disadvantages of binary distributions, and one of the reasons those of us who have switched to source based distros such as Gentoo will never go back).
Me wonders who is in control of the government. The people or big business!
How on earth could you possibly wonder.
It has been obvious for years, and stated again and again on this forum and others, with solid evidence to back it up, that corporations have bought and paid for our government, and have been doing so in every election since the Supreme Court aborigated the constitution and ruled that corporate $$$ == Human Speech.
In short, stop wondering. Corporations have usurped the will of the people and taken over our government. If that wasn't obvious to you in the 2000 election, what does it take. A visitation from God elucidating the fact?
It is obvious that anyone with hiring expertise, such as human resource specialists, can most effectively hire potential candidates by insuring that they have MCSE (Microsoft) or Red Hat (Linux) certifications.
This removes the requirement for the interviewer to ask intelligent questions, and for the interviewee to provide intelligent answers, streamlining the entire interview process completely.
After all, how else is an interviewer going to be able to BS a potential candidate into believing they know what they are asking about, and how else is a potential candidate going to BS an interviewer that they know what they are talking about?
As Microsoft and Apple have been pushing for on the desktop for years now, it is time we removed the expertise and knowledge from the entire process altogether, thereby "enabling" and "facilitating" the hiring process.
I may be spoiled by Mac OS X (ok, ok, I KNOW I'm spoiled by Mac OS X), but I think KDE is still an ugly interface. What's up with that? They could make it purty,,,why don't they?
Apple owns a patent on the "Attractive Eye Candy for the Computationally Illiterate" interface, while Microsoft owns a patent on the "Eternally Broken, Never Secure, but marginally easy to use for a few minutes before it crashes" interface.
Alas, that only leaves the "Relatively Spartant Trimmings, But Rock Solid Performance" interface available to free software developers, so that is what we are stuck with.
[/humor]
Seriously, though, KDE and Gnome both support themes, so in answer to your question
"They could make it purty,,,why don't they?"
the answer is "Why don't you?" No one knows your aesthetic preferences better than you, and you have all of the tools available to make it as purty, according to whatever those aesthetic preferences may be, as you wish. The KDE folks meanwhile will concentrate on what is important and aesthetic to them, but do not forget that they have thoughtfully made it possible for you to create your own theme, and make KDE as purty as you wish.
Regulation doesn't have to take the form of FCC licenses, fees, under-the-table bribes to FCC beurocrats, etc. The fact that things work that way is more a result of government and petty beurocrats seizing an opportunity to accumulate power, influence, and a revinue stream more than an inherent "inevitable" consiquence of needed regulation.
An alternative approach could have been a regulatory regime that allowed anyone to use whichever frequencie(s) they like, with perhaps
(1) a limit on wattage (2) a limit on the number of frequencies used (3) a requirement that the broadcast not interfere with other broadcasts, as defined by some measurable metric
and perhaps a few other, similiar constraints.
The upshot: as long as you adhere to such rules, you would be free to broadcast anything, anywhere.
Of course, then the censorous religious right wouldn't have a vehicle for imposing their brand of puritanism upon the rest of us (banning foul language, certain subjects, etc.), and cartels would be more difficult to form, so those with the power and authority to do so chose another way of doing one, one that serves them rather than the public at large. That is unfortunate in the extreme, and our culture has paid a very high price ("[tv | radion] is a vast cultural wasteland" may be a cliche, but it is a true one, and it didn't have to be that way), but that doesn't mean that complete lack of regulation and resulting chaos is any more preferable.
An ISP that blocks or restricts RIAA use of the net is legitimizing the practice they purport to oppose. This is not the way to fight this particular battle.
Nonsense. They are restricting system crackers from attacking their networks, and their customers. This is a longstanding policy for most ISPs, who blacklist SPAMmers and other neferious crackers who are looking to steal information (e.g. credit cards) or damage people's systems out of pure maliciousness.
The RIAA has chosen to become one of the above, and announced their intention to do so publicly. The ISP is responding in a responsible manner, both in terms of immediate security and in terms of long-term economic viability.
Think about it. If the RIAA and the MPAA are allowed to crack, and possibly destroy machines on the internet, or succeed in their more modest objective of turning the internet from an interactive publishing medium everyone can be hard on into a more-or-less one way, glorified interactive shopping network channel, how many people are going to be willing to spend $40/month or more for access?
Virtually no one, which means all of the ISPs in question essentially go out of business, or become a niche market. Either way, they lose.
AOL, Sprint, AT&T, and other large broadband players had better stand up to this as well... if they do not, they are likely to see the underlying reason for why people are willing to pay for internet access go away, and with it their entire market dry up to virtually nothing.
That would serve the purposes of the MPAA, the RIAA, and other copyright cartels, but it would be devistating to the tech industry, the internet, and very directly to the ISPs in question.
It looks like one ISP has actually thought the consiquences through, and chosen the best alternative for dealing with it. I suspect any ISPs capable of reading the writing on the wall, and interested in projected earnings beyond the next couple of quarters, will likely reach similar conclusions.
Perhaps not AOL, which has come to be dominated by their media-cartel half, Time-Warner, but certainly AT&T and others should seriously be considering similiar measures to protect their networks, their customers, and ultimately their business.
In a world of one-sided analysis and opinions, I find Declan's two-sided coverage of this issue refreshing.
Were it not for his past behavior, and his willingness to damage and even destroy people for his own personal gain, I would probably agree.
But having been witness to his willingness to sacrifice others for his own personal benefit, and seeing the damage he is now causing to those trying to resist the revocation of our digital freedoms by the media and copyright cartels, I am forced to conclude that his shift is nothing more than a cynical adjustment in his career strategy.
As the the legitimacy of his "analysis" of the DMCA, others on this site have more thoroughly debunked that, and anything I say would be very redundant.
But I guess you'll have to take my opinion with a grain of salt, since my karma has been reduced to zero.
Karma is meaningless, and I for one do not dismiss your opinion. You sound like a reasonable, thoughtful person who, I believe, has been misled by Declan's legendary charm. Most people who are tend to remain so, until they themselves feel the knife stabbing in their back.
As for the LiViD issue, I refer you to the archives, where you can make your own judgement as to the events (you will also note that I defended Declan on that list, something I have long regretted in retrospect)
Sure he did. He spewed invective at these people, and suggested that such people be treated in a way consistent with that spiteful invective.
Social pressure and indeed the maintenance of the social contract, and society in general, only work if there is a stick as well as a carrot. In this case, since there is no law preventing anti-social behavior that causes great economic damage and destroys the lives of thousands (sometimes quite literally), the only alternative is 'spiteful,' 'hateful,' rejection of the persons engaging in such behavior, in short, a general, widespread social rejection and ostrocizing of people who behave so despicably, regardless of the legality of their actions.
I'm not saying that nothing should be done, I'm saying that there are processes for effecting change, and obnoxious, antisocial behaviour, and hateful rhetoric has a very poor track record in bringing about positive social changes.
I agree with that, to a point. Treating the wrongdoers we are talking about as human filth in a political or judicial sense would have tremendous negative effects. Instead, the behavior they engaged in should be outlawed, so that others may not follow in their steps.
However, greating those jackasses as the human filth that they are on the personal level, ie. general and pervasive social rejection of the type O.J. Simpson often laments about, is IMHO very justified, very warranted, and can effect positive social change, in that the next guy to consider such an ignoble way of obtaining wealth may well think twice, knowing that by doing so he or she will become a social pariah.
Which is precisely what these sorts of executives should become, forthwith.
Correct. The NSA shouldn't be telling anyone what to do. Their mandate is to collect information and provide security advice to other agencies and, where authorized, the private sector. They are not a governing body. Ditto on the last sentence for the FBI, the CIA, and various other black-op agencies running around grabbing people out of their homes in the middle of the night and confiscating their material wealth without due process in the name of the ongoing War on [insert your favorite cause here].
On who pays the fiddler orders the tune..
Only partially correct. If we truly believe in democracy and "one person, one vote", then the amount of influence we wield on our government should be proportional to the number of people we represent, not the amount of taxes we pay or, more commonly, the quantity of bribes, relabelled "campaign contributions" we stuff into the pockets of our so-called representatives.
But, even if it were 100% correct that the amount of taxes we pay should dictate the amoutn of influence we wield on our government, it should be pointed out that Microsoft almost never declares a profit on their tax returns (last year it was a 19 cent/share loss IIRC, as for tax purposes they do report those stock options which, conviniently, don't appear on the SEC filings), so Microsoft actually doesn't pay any taxes at all.
Given your reasoning, I should have much more influence on the NSA than Microsoft does. Unfortunately, that is not the case and one of the main reasons, perhaps the main reason, that democracy in the United States is falling to pieces.
I'm a pilot too. I have recently flown approximately 360 hours with a cel phone turned on in my pocket just a couple feet from the radio stack and have never noticed a problem.
I too have forgotten to turn my cell phone off a time or two, and it didn't cause a problem.
Nevertheless, the "anectdote" I described is very real. If you dismiss the experience of other pilots as anectdotes you are doing yourself a real disservice... you will learn a great deal more about safety from "hangar talk" and the experiences of others than you ever will from reading a book, no matter how 'official' the printed word may seem to your, or how comforting a reference with page number and paragraph citation may be to you.
If you do feel the need for more technical background, I suggest you begin your studies by referencing radio harmonics, radio interference, jamming techniques, as well as basic electromagetic refraction and reflection. (HINT: radios on vastly different frequencies can and do jam one another on occasion, when conditions are right. It is a myth that, to jam a signal, the jamming signal needs to be on or near the same frequency. That is the easiest, most common scenerio, but by no means the only one).
Declan is not inherently a friend of free software, a foe of the DMCA, or indeed a friend of freedom at all.
He is a friend of Declan, and he will do whatever it takes to advance his career, irrespective of how many people he harms in the process.
In the early days of LiViD (the first group to get a semi-working software DVD player under GNU/Linux) Declan McCullagh hung out on the livid mailing list. After he had a very good idea what was going on (work to create a DVD player under GNU/Linux) he published, in WiReD, a hysterical article about hackers writing software to enable rampant DVD piracy. The story was carried here on/. and elsewhere.
As a result, several lead developers in the project were threatened with legal and criminal action (though no crime had been committed) and had to withdraw from the project. While others took over their responsibilities, this probably delayed the development of a working DVD player for GNU/Linux by a couple of months, and nearly wrecked the lives of several software volunteers.
Thanks to Declan, who never once admitted any wrongdoing (despite the flagrant yellow journalism that precipitated the problem, and likely led to the entire DeCSS fiasco as well), never once apologized, and remained quite arrogant during his entire tenure on the mailing list.
Later he passed himself off as a "friend" of freedom and an anti-DMCA activist/journalist. It gained him widespread popularity in some circles and some degree of recognition.
Now, clearly, he has determined that he can advance his carreer by toning down, perhaps even reversing, his stance on the DMCA. Hardly surprising, since, as a "journalist" he works for a publisher which is, almost by definition, a member of the very copyright cartel that is pushing the DMCA and similiar legislation.
Declan is a friend of Declan, the rest of us are tools to be used and discarded as needed to advance his own career.
Being stabbed in the back by such a person, given his history of behavior, should come as no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention.
Re:Space Travel, Internet Changing the Nation-Stat
on
Man Conquers Space
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· Score: 2
It is dismaying that so many posters here, and also in response to similar stories, criticize and deny the need for space travel (it is as natural and necessary as humanity's migration from th Great Rift Valley). Their imaginations and aspirations seem bounded by the limits on their credit cards.
I am a pilot who flies a small, single engine aircraft and does so very, very frequently, and often for very long distances (coast to coast, etc.).
Cell Phones can and occasionally do interfere with the NAV-COM radios, but most of the time they do not. However, I recall one time when a friend hadn't turned off his phone and I couldn't hear the tower as a result, despite the fact that I was sitting on the ramp only three hundred yards/meters away. As soon as he turned his cell off, reception was fine, so it can and does interefere rather catopstrophically at times, when conditions are right.
I haven't measured VOR-DME deviations due to cell phones, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if they didn't interfere with navigational signals as well, when conditions are right. That could potentially be catastrophic during flight in IMC (instrument) conditions, particularly if there were terrain nearby.
In any event, alll that is rare. Most of the time cell phones will at most add a little static to the transmission or reception, and often they won't interfere noticably at all.
That is only half the picture, however.
The FCC has made it illegal to use cell phones in the air because one phone call can occupy a slot in several cells at the same time, vastly decreasing the call capacity of the system.
Two hundred people on a jumbo jet using cell phones could well equal 20,000 people on the ground. It clobbers the cellular system, and is sufficiently bad that the FCC has made a regulation against using such phones in flight. The FAAs regulation is basically "obey the FCC regulation."
Of course, if it is an emergency, FAA regulations clearly state that any (FAA) rule may be violated if the saftey of the flight requires doing so. The FCC might not be as flexible, but in a true emergency I for one wouldn't worry about it, and use the damn thing anyway if I needed to.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless we're talking about RECORDABLE discs for computer use, this won't go anywhere for a while. And the Toshiba one will be most likely, since any drive will have to be compatible with as many options as possible to be competetive.
Frankly, with 8mm backup tapes going for $50.00 a pop and 100GB/200GB LTO tapes costing $100.00 a pop, with all of the headaches associated with tape backups, something like this would be a godsend for the tech industry.
We already backup to DVD-R where it makes sense (database dumps, etc), and having daily archives on a stable medium that go back years (CD-R) has come in very, very handy more than once.
Imagine being able to backup and archive your entire fileserver that way.
That is what interests me in the 100GB optical media we keep being promised, or even the 27 GB media these folks are promising us. The ability to backup every night to a stable, randomly accessible medium from which restores are trivial, fast, and accessible for each day going back as far as we need to.
The day we can replace tape backup with inexpensive optical backup, a la today's DVD-R or CD-R media, is the day this sort of thing will have a very wide market in the computer industry, irrespective of what the entertainment industry wants or needs.
"We will lose the Internet if we don't save it." and "civil society" has broken down online... probably not it's just that people know that they can currently get away with doing stuff, and the net still being in its relavtive infancy, people know that they'll be able to do whatever they want until push comes to shove and the governments themselves catch up with technology.
And what if "governments themselves catching up with technology" amounts to taking that technology out of the hands of the citzenry and reserving it for themselves?
The rhetoric now emerging and being bandied about by the talking heads of hollywood isn't new. It was a precursor to prohibition back in the early 20th century, it was a precursor to the War on Drugs in the late 20th century, which continues to this day (now financing terrorism where previously it merely financed crime lords and thugs), in short, it has been a precursor to every act of government which has taken freedom from the people in the name of 'civil society', 'common decency,' and other such tripe. Indeed, whenever anyone hears the words 'common decency' they should look around and determine where the next attack on their civil liberties is going to come from, since what is commonly decent recreation to one person is commonly indecent to another, and any effort to put such terms into legislation by definition means someone's notion of commonly decent is about to trample someone elses.
The government cannot take the internet away from the people outright and publicly admit that they are doing so to prop up the profit margins of dinasaur entities such as the MPAA and the RIAA, nor can they admit that they'd like us all to shut up and get back on the couch, where they can conviniently spoonfeed us what they'd like us to think without the annoying backtalk.
Does this mean they don't plan to take the internet away from us (or do so effectively by reducing it to just another home shopping network)? Hardly.
What it does mean is that they need to manipulate the popular perception of the internet, until they can build up sufficient support, particularly in the easy-to-manipulate and already-well-organized religious right, until such a point where they can point to some kind of popular demand to take away the internet as we know it "for our own moral good."
That is what this rhetoric is all about. It is a precursor, and an opening salvo, in the effort to institute digital prohibition in America. It frankly amazes me that no one on slashdot, where we've seen all the pieces of this puzzle presented to us time and time again vis-a-vis the lobbying of Hollywood, Microsoft, and the Recording industry to restrict our digital rights, can see this coming.
It is all about information, and the government would like to control that information. Dealing with entrenched media oligarchies, while imperfect, facilitates this. The Internet on the other hand will never be ameanable to this sort of thing, unless is it changed radically, or eliminated altogether.
Indeed, the government's lust to do so grows with their beligerence in foreign military theaters. But to be fair it isn't only the government that lusts after such control: most large businesses do likewise (how better to quiet criticism of a new product or a profitable business model that may not be so optimal, like say, Monsanto dumping toxic chemicals into the groundwater of a small southern US town).
Couple that with the desire of four very strong entities (the RIAA, the MPAA, Microsoft, and, lest we forget, the baby bells who fear VoIP more than anything) to cripple and control the internet or, failing that, do away with it altogether, and you have a very strong group with the will, and the power, to take away our digital freedom.
The only problem is how to make such a power grab into our personal lives palitable to the majority of Americans. How fortuitious for them that the educational level of America has declined so much over the last four decades, and that by playing the morality card they'll have a large portion of the population on board with nary a thought about the underlying issues, or very real consiquences, of such a move.
Indeed, policymakers already know this works. It allowed them to gut the most potent civil protections of the constitution in their persuit of their War on Drugs, and to continue doing so even after failure upon failure. Should it be of any surprise to any of us to see them doing it again as they try to put the digital genie back in the bottle and deny us our digital freedoms?
is why they're trying legal (as in using the law) approaches to technical problems, something that normally cannot be done. Technical problems need technical solutions.
Because if they went after technical solutions to technical problems, they would be paying a computer consultant $90-$150/hour, rather than billing out $500/hour for a lawyer to waste the court's time with this nonsense.
Since the law and most of the court system is of, by, and for lawyers (and this is doubly true for so-called 'intellectual property' law and lawyers), is anyone really surprised to see $500/hour lawyers on both sides billing out time, when a 5 minute modification to an apache server by a $150/hour computer jockey would have sufficed?
It really has almost gotten to the point where the only viable solution to this particular societal ill is going to become the Shakespearian solution: hang all the lawyers.
Wouldn't a better CPU benchmarks be taken by using the chipmakers' own compilers?
... almost the antithes of what Intel is trying to do. Has this been a longstanding strategy on AMD's part?).
No.
The chipmaker would simply then optimize their compiler for the benchmark(s) in question, rather than for code more generally. In other words, what you suggest would still allow the chipmaker to cheat.
In order to have complete transparency in the benchmarking, both the benchmarks and the compiler should be open source (ideally free software, so that anyone can run and verify the benchmarks as well, allowing repeatable experimentation in the broadest scientific sense). If the chip maker wishes to submit optimizations to such a compiler they would be free to do so, since any such optimizations would in turn be open source (or free software) and subject to peer review.
A good candidate would be gcc, which runs on numerous platforms, and on several operating systems on AMD and Intel hardware.
Cheating would be much harder in this case, perhaps even impossible, something we need given the sordid history of benchmarking by all parties involved (except perhaps AMD? Can anyone recall an instance where AMD has cooked results? I ask because their current chip rating system is extremely conservative
I was a little young then, so could you enlighten me on how Ross Perot's 20% in 1992 influenced the two parties (other than taking the majority of that 20% from the Pubs)? Not being a smartass -- it's a serious question.
... a technology that had been around for a decade or two by then and was familiar to anyone who ever bothered to go out and shop for themselves.
1. Ross Perot did not take the majority away from the Republicans. One of the very interesting things about his campaign was that roughly as many democrats voted for him as republicans. He didn't cost George Bush Senior the election, George Bush Senior cost himself the election, by being completely and utterly out of touch with America, to the point that when he visited a grocery store and saw the laser scanning bar code reader he commented on that remarkable technology that was 'making America more effecient'
2. Ross Perot influenced both parties thusly:
Democrats would discuss balancing the budget, but state that certain programs (mostly social and educational) were a higher priority.
Republicans would discuss balancing the budget, but state that certain programs (mostly defense and drug war) were a higher priority.
Ross Perot came along and discussed balancing the budget in his famous "it's time to pay the piper" manner, and stated in terms everyone could understand that nothing was more important than getting our fiscal house in order.
Although he likely wouldn't have made a very good president, he was right. And many agreed, so many that he won 20% of the vote in a two party system where voting for a third party is widely (and erroneously) equated with "wasting your vote."
It shocked both the democrats and the republicans, both of which fell over each other trying (and succeeding) in balancing the budget. The budget remained balanced until George W. Bush took office, cut taxes in a manner which was widely considered to be fiscally irresponsible, followed the events of 9/11 which led to increased spending and, and further exacerbated by the numerous corporate scandals and subsequent short-circuiting of the economic recovery which reduced revinue even more.
For several years it was Ross Perot's single campaign plank, balance the budget, that drove the agendas of both major parties, almost entirely as a result of his winning 20% of the votes and shocking both parties deeply, to the core.
Of course, after the Republican's attack dog Bucchanon sabataged and destroyed the third party Ross Perot founded we are now largely back to business as usual, with another segment of the electorate that, for a brief time, thought they could actually effect change, having joined the growing ranks of the disillusioned.
The theory/hypothesis statements were perfect - the last statement is a bit over the top.
... indeed the latter is often equated with the former in several fringe religions, and sometimes even by theologens affiliated with mainstream religions. Go figure.
And I know this Athiest believes aliens could have seeded the Earth with proto-human life, but until I see some sensible evidence indicating that such might be the case, I'm not going to pay the notion much heed.
Equating that statement with the previous statement is really quite weak - one is falsifiable (aliens), one is not (God). One statement is specific (aliens seeding Earth) one is not (God isn't even defined...).
Well, that less sentence was intended to be tounge in cheeck. I could phrase it so that it is non-falsifiable if you prefer (an athiests faith-based notion, if you will):
"Invisible aliens have had a hand in directing our development from a dimension beyond our ken. They have been with us since the primordial soup, they will continue their subtle interventions until we cease to be."
No matter how little evidence there is for my 'aliens', their existence cannot be disproven, any more than the existence of God can be disproven.
I do think you give me a little too much credit when you say
Or, put slightly differently, one is philosophical (God) and one is scientific (aliens). You can argue against aliens in a rigorous manner, but you can't argue against God in any rigorous manner.
My definition (and contention) of aliens is no more scientific than another's definition and contention of God
As you point out, the ability to argue against the existence of God depends on your definition (most definitions include more than just "that which created the universe", such as sapience and quite frequently omiscience and omnipotence, for example, and in the case of most of Christianity a male gender and IIRC in the case of some sects, including the Mormons, a humanoid physique). While I cannot argue sensibly against any arbitrary definition of God (indeed, no one can argue sensibly against any arbitrary definition of anything) I can, and frequently do, argue very sensibly against the specific definitions offered by the world's three major monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam).
Be that as it may, evolution (the observed fact) and evolution (the scientific theory) are orthogonal to the existence of some sort of God. All it does is disprove one aspect of Christian Myth (the liternal interpretation of Genesis), it makes no statement pro or con on the existence of divinity itself.
However, as with my aliens, until I see some sensible evidence that divinity does exist, I will continue to pay the notion little heed.
Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft.
I know of three people who did get fired for buying Microsoft.
A friend of mine is now providing consulting to the companies in question. Two are running Twig on Linux servers, the other has their old non-ms, non-unix server back up and working (again) while they slowly transition to Linux.
Despite all the "I'll sound wise and neutral if I make out to be 'admitting' free software's flaws and giving Microsoft its due" commentary one sees here on slashdot as either an effort at karma whoring, or an effort at pro-Microsoft propoganda and astroturfing, the fact remains that there are really very few shops that cannot do without Microsoft, and many that actually benefit from running other platforms.
What is very interesting is the number of non-technical people who are coming to realize that, and while they don't necessarilly embrace free software in general, or GNU/Linux in particular, they are beginning to recognize just what a financial, technical, and time drain Microsoft and their products have become to their enterprises, and they are looking for ways out.
Even to the point where, now, people are starting to get fired for blindly purchasing Microsoft, and treating MS propoganda as a substitute for technical research and savvy.
Its a rather refreshing change, actually.
All things short of a methematical 'proof' in science is theory, including gravitation and even cause-and-effect itself. The word 'theory' in science has an entirely different connotation to what it has in common parlence, and in particular to the way you use it here.
What you are equating evolution with is a hypothesis, not a theory, and the two are very different. Or, put another way,
The theory is not did evolution happen. We already know evolution did and does happen, there is a mountain of factual data underscoring that point. What is theoretical and debated (by scientists) is what the mechanism is by which primates became human and dinasaurs became birds. The fact that it happened is denied only by those with a religious agenda, whose fragile beliefs are challenged by the factual data collected by thousands of researches all over the face of the planet.
And I know this non-fundamental Christian believes God could have used evolution to create us.
And I know this Athiest believes aliens could have seeded the Earth with proto-human life, but until I see some sensible evidence indicating that such might be the case, I'm not going to pay the notion much heed.
While I agree with you that a load of shit is going on around the world (and always has been): it's imperative that you clean things up in your own house, regardless of what the neighborhood looks like.
Very well said.
It should be pointed out that the 3,000 deaths in New York, while tragic, are hardly a blip in the population.
We have had more than 50,000 people die in car accidents since then. All horribly mutilated, some burned beyond recognition, others decapitated, some crushed within the tin can that became their automobile, some crushed beneath the wheels of an oncoming car, and so on and so forth, ad nauseum. In short, each death was horrible, left behind it a wake of trajedy and grieving, and each represents a life that ended much sooner that it should have.
Yet we live with this stark reality every year, and few if any of us fear to climb into an automobile and drive to work.
The terrorists can scare us, can knock down a couple of buildings (as can a 5.0 richter earth quake, a big forest fire, or a wopping hurricane, and we get a lot more of those than we do terrorist attacks), but they cannot do us any real, significant harm!
Even the economic damage the fear they create is minimal. The markets had recovered virtually all of their 9/11 losses and the economy was on the upswing, until Enron, WorldCom, and a whole slew of other corrupt American executives and CEOs were caught with their hands in the life savings of the middle class, pilfering the nation's wealth for their own miserly gains. In the wake of such criminal behavior the markets and the economy tanked as every thinking person recognized and chose to avoid further opportunity for the wealthy to defraud them, and as a result of this behavior, and our governments neglect in regulating and preventing it, the economy now shows no signs of recovering, an unpleasant event that is entirely self-inflicted by greedy, rich CEOs and executives whose ethics died shortly after the umbelical was cut, and the tame politicians they've had in their pockets for the last twenty years. Such subhuman filth, who represent the highest, most priveleged economic class in America, are responsible for most of our economic troubles and hardships, not Osama and his flea-ridden, filthy followers.
Indeed, the terrorists, in contrast to our own corrupt officials, aren't even relevant.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't go around the world eradicating them and their followers wherever we find them, nor does it mean bin Laden's head wouldn't look good on a pike.
It does mean we shouldn't allow Aschcroft and his cronies to ride roughshod over the constitution, and that we shouldn't allow Bush Junior to use the country's military and spend our strength fighting Daddy's unfinished, and unrelated, battles a la Iraq.
Frankly, if the choice I'm given is between freedom with a 3,000 death/year terrorist pricetag, and an Orwellian society that maybe, perhaps, reduces that number to a few hundred, or even to zero, I'll take the three thousand deaths per year and keep my freedom thankyou very much. My car is far more likely to kill me than some towel-head Saudi fanatic hiding out with his donkey in some dirty cave in Afghanistan or Pakistan, and I'm not about to stop driving because of it.
But I won't work on Windows computers in my free time, which means I will not help them fix their windows computers if and when they break.
Period.
Of course, my mom prefers GNU/Linux and hates her Windows box at work (her home Linux box works, and works well).
My sister's husband, on the other hand, prefers Windows. Fine. Their computer is broken alot and they have trouble finding anyone to help them fix it. *shrug*
I have been feeling very bitter of late, watching the slide of America from democracy to corporate oligarchy and, finally toward corporate faschism.
... something all too many lower courts have seemed to be willing to do in any case regarding the aformentioned media cartels. Like you, I think of Judge Kaplan, or the supreme court's repayment of political debts to The Shrub in the last election, and my moment of optomism fades.
So much so that I have been seriously considering emigration, and have been giving a lot of thought to what metric I would use to determine the "drop dead" (ie. okay, no more delays, time to go) moment.
But this ruling is a rare breath of fresh air, and restores some of my faith in our tattered civil institutions. Not a great deal, mind you, but some. It is freightening to have two of the three branches of governmetn (legislative and executive) willfully and knowingly ignore the constitution in the persuit of their goals (howerver laudable [the eradication of terrorism] or despicable [the introduction of digital prohibition to prop up the media and copyright cartels]), but not nearly as freightening as it would be if all three branches had chosen to shred that venerable document
Nevertheless, this was a courageous and important act. A few more like this and we might actually save and reclaim our democracy. The odds are long, mind you, but the goal well worth persuing anyway.
The install process is too complicated (and doesn't work), and OpenOffice will faceplant (won't run, install or uninstall) if a Java environment is installed after it is.
If you are running a source based distro like Source Mage or Gentoo, openoffice is trivial to install:
(If you are using gcc 3.1 or greater and wish to compile with optimizations local to your hardware)
emerge openoffice
(If you are using gcc 2.95, you'll have to install the precompiled binary)
emerge openoffice-bin
The second command exists analogously for Debian, using apt-get. It doesn't get any easier than that.
Any program that segfaults is broken. Period. End of story.
Agreed. You should submit a bug report. I have not experienced any of the seg faults you are describing. Was your binary compiled against a slightly different set of library versions (that is one of the huge disadvantages of binary distributions, and one of the reasons those of us who have switched to source based distros such as Gentoo will never go back).
Me wonders who is in control of the government. The people or big business!
How on earth could you possibly wonder.
It has been obvious for years, and stated again and again on this forum and others, with solid evidence to back it up, that corporations have bought and paid for our government, and have been doing so in every election since the Supreme Court aborigated the constitution and ruled that corporate $$$ == Human Speech.
In short, stop wondering. Corporations have usurped the will of the people and taken over our government. If that wasn't obvious to you in the 2000 election, what does it take. A visitation from God elucidating the fact?
[humor]
It is obvious that anyone with hiring expertise, such as human resource specialists, can most effectively hire potential candidates by insuring that they have MCSE (Microsoft) or Red Hat (Linux) certifications.
This removes the requirement for the interviewer to ask intelligent questions, and for the interviewee to provide intelligent answers, streamlining the entire interview process completely.
After all, how else is an interviewer going to be able to BS a potential candidate into believing they know what they are asking about, and how else is a potential candidate going to BS an interviewer that they know what they are talking about?
As Microsoft and Apple have been pushing for on the desktop for years now, it is time we removed the expertise and knowledge from the entire process altogether, thereby "enabling" and "facilitating" the hiring process.
[/humor]
I may be spoiled by Mac OS X (ok, ok, I KNOW I'm spoiled by Mac OS X), but I think KDE is still an ugly interface. What's up with that? They could make it purty,,,why don't they?
Apple owns a patent on the "Attractive Eye Candy for the Computationally Illiterate" interface, while Microsoft owns a patent on the "Eternally Broken, Never Secure, but marginally easy to use for a few minutes before it crashes" interface.
Alas, that only leaves the "Relatively Spartant Trimmings, But Rock Solid Performance" interface available to free software developers, so that is what we are stuck with.
[/humor]
Seriously, though, KDE and Gnome both support themes, so in answer to your question
"They could make it purty,,,why don't they?"
the answer is "Why don't you?" No one knows your aesthetic preferences better than you, and you have all of the tools available to make it as purty, according to whatever those aesthetic preferences may be, as you wish. The KDE folks meanwhile will concentrate on what is important and aesthetic to them, but do not forget that they have thoughtfully made it possible for you to create your own theme, and make KDE as purty as you wish.
Ditto for Gnome, for that matter.
Hmm... just in time for the new caps on downloads from our broadband providors... BLOODY HELL!
Download caps? Dump your providor.
Regulation doesn't have to take the form of FCC licenses, fees, under-the-table bribes to FCC beurocrats, etc. The fact that things work that way is more a result of government and petty beurocrats seizing an opportunity to accumulate power, influence, and a revinue stream more than an inherent "inevitable" consiquence of needed regulation.
An alternative approach could have been a regulatory regime that allowed anyone to use whichever frequencie(s) they like, with perhaps
(1) a limit on wattage
(2) a limit on the number of frequencies used
(3) a requirement that the broadcast not interfere with other broadcasts, as defined by some measurable metric
and perhaps a few other, similiar constraints.
The upshot: as long as you adhere to such rules, you would be free to broadcast anything, anywhere.
Of course, then the censorous religious right wouldn't have a vehicle for imposing their brand of puritanism upon the rest of us (banning foul language, certain subjects, etc.), and cartels would be more difficult to form, so those with the power and authority to do so chose another way of doing one, one that serves them rather than the public at large. That is unfortunate in the extreme, and our culture has paid a very high price ("[tv | radion] is a vast cultural wasteland" may be a cliche, but it is a true one, and it didn't have to be that way), but that doesn't mean that complete lack of regulation and resulting chaos is any more preferable.
An ISP that blocks or restricts RIAA use of the net is legitimizing the practice they purport to oppose. This is not the way to fight this particular battle.
... if they do not, they are likely to see the underlying reason for why people are willing to pay for internet access go away, and with it their entire market dry up to virtually nothing.
Nonsense. They are restricting system crackers from attacking their networks, and their customers. This is a longstanding policy for most ISPs, who blacklist SPAMmers and other neferious crackers who are looking to steal information (e.g. credit cards) or damage people's systems out of pure maliciousness.
The RIAA has chosen to become one of the above, and announced their intention to do so publicly. The ISP is responding in a responsible manner, both in terms of immediate security and in terms of long-term economic viability.
Think about it. If the RIAA and the MPAA are allowed to crack, and possibly destroy machines on the internet, or succeed in their more modest objective of turning the internet from an interactive publishing medium everyone can be hard on into a more-or-less one way, glorified interactive shopping network channel, how many people are going to be willing to spend $40/month or more for access?
Virtually no one, which means all of the ISPs in question essentially go out of business, or become a niche market. Either way, they lose.
AOL, Sprint, AT&T, and other large broadband players had better stand up to this as well
That would serve the purposes of the MPAA, the RIAA, and other copyright cartels, but it would be devistating to the tech industry, the internet, and very directly to the ISPs in question.
It looks like one ISP has actually thought the consiquences through, and chosen the best alternative for dealing with it. I suspect any ISPs capable of reading the writing on the wall, and interested in projected earnings beyond the next couple of quarters, will likely reach similar conclusions.
Perhaps not AOL, which has come to be dominated by their media-cartel half, Time-Warner, but certainly AT&T and others should seriously be considering similiar measures to protect their networks, their customers, and ultimately their business.
In a world of one-sided analysis and opinions, I find Declan's two-sided coverage of this issue refreshing.
n .openprojects.net/pipermail/livid-dev/1999-Novembe r/001074.html
n .openprojects.net/pipermail/livid-dev/1999-Novembe r/001408.html
Were it not for his past behavior, and his willingness to damage and even destroy people for his own personal gain, I would probably agree.
But having been witness to his willingness to sacrifice others for his own personal benefit, and seeing the damage he is now causing to those trying to resist the revocation of our digital freedoms by the media and copyright cartels, I am forced to conclude that his shift is nothing more than a cynical adjustment in his career strategy.
As the the legitimacy of his "analysis" of the DMCA, others on this site have more thoroughly debunked that, and anything I say would be very redundant.
But I guess you'll have to take my opinion with a grain of salt, since my karma has been reduced to zero.
Karma is meaningless, and I for one do not dismiss your opinion. You sound like a reasonable, thoughtful person who, I believe, has been misled by Declan's legendary charm. Most people who are tend to remain so, until they themselves feel the knife stabbing in their back.
As for the LiViD issue, I refer you to the archives, where you can make your own judgement as to the events (you will also note that I defended Declan on that list, something I have long regretted in retrospect)
LiVid Archives (November 1999)
See also the previous couple of months for more background information, if you are really interested.
Some comments include:
http://web.archive.org/web/20000815215028/livid.o
http://web.archive.org/web/20000817190115/livid.o
Sure he did. He spewed invective at these people, and suggested that such people be treated in a way consistent with that spiteful invective.
Social pressure and indeed the maintenance of the social contract, and society in general, only work if there is a stick as well as a carrot. In this case, since there is no law preventing anti-social behavior that causes great economic damage and destroys the lives of thousands (sometimes quite literally), the only alternative is 'spiteful,' 'hateful,' rejection of the persons engaging in such behavior, in short, a general, widespread social rejection and ostrocizing of people who behave so despicably, regardless of the legality of their actions.
I'm not saying that nothing should be done, I'm saying that there are processes for effecting change, and obnoxious, antisocial behaviour, and hateful rhetoric has a very poor track record in bringing about positive social changes.
I agree with that, to a point. Treating the wrongdoers we are talking about as human filth in a political or judicial sense would have tremendous negative effects. Instead, the behavior they engaged in should be outlawed, so that others may not follow in their steps.
However, greating those jackasses as the human filth that they are on the personal level, ie. general and pervasive social rejection of the type O.J. Simpson often laments about, is IMHO very justified, very warranted, and can effect positive social change, in that the next guy to consider such an ignoble way of obtaining wealth may well think twice, knowing that by doing so he or she will become a social pariah.
Which is precisely what these sorts of executives should become, forthwith.
Shouldn't it be the other way around?
No.
Correct. The NSA shouldn't be telling anyone what to do. Their mandate is to collect information and provide security advice to other agencies and, where authorized, the private sector. They are not a governing body. Ditto on the last sentence for the FBI, the CIA, and various other black-op agencies running around grabbing people out of their homes in the middle of the night and confiscating their material wealth without due process in the name of the ongoing War on [insert your favorite cause here].
On who pays the fiddler orders the tune..
Only partially correct. If we truly believe in democracy and "one person, one vote", then the amount of influence we wield on our government should be proportional to the number of people we represent, not the amount of taxes we pay or, more commonly, the quantity of bribes, relabelled "campaign contributions" we stuff into the pockets of our so-called representatives.
But, even if it were 100% correct that the amount of taxes we pay should dictate the amoutn of influence we wield on our government, it should be pointed out that Microsoft almost never declares a profit on their tax returns (last year it was a 19 cent/share loss IIRC, as for tax purposes they do report those stock options which, conviniently, don't appear on the SEC filings), so Microsoft actually doesn't pay any taxes at all.
Given your reasoning, I should have much more influence on the NSA than Microsoft does. Unfortunately, that is not the case and one of the main reasons, perhaps the main reason, that democracy in the United States is falling to pieces.
I'm a pilot too. I have recently flown approximately 360 hours with a cel phone turned on in my pocket just a couple feet from the radio stack and have never noticed a problem.
... you will learn a great deal more about safety from "hangar talk" and the experiences of others than you ever will from reading a book, no matter how 'official' the printed word may seem to your, or how comforting a reference with page number and paragraph citation may be to you.
I too have forgotten to turn my cell phone off a time or two, and it didn't cause a problem.
Nevertheless, the "anectdote" I described is very real. If you dismiss the experience of other pilots as anectdotes you are doing yourself a real disservice
If you do feel the need for more technical background, I suggest you begin your studies by referencing radio harmonics, radio interference, jamming techniques, as well as basic electromagetic refraction and reflection. (HINT: radios on vastly different frequencies can and do jam one another on occasion, when conditions are right. It is a myth that, to jam a signal, the jamming signal needs to be on or near the same frequency. That is the easiest, most common scenerio, but by no means the only one).
Declan is not inherently a friend of free software, a foe of the DMCA, or indeed a friend of freedom at all.
/. and elsewhere.
He is a friend of Declan, and he will do whatever it takes to advance his career, irrespective of how many people he harms in the process.
In the early days of LiViD (the first group to get a semi-working software DVD player under GNU/Linux) Declan McCullagh hung out on the livid mailing list. After he had a very good idea what was going on (work to create a DVD player under GNU/Linux) he published, in WiReD, a hysterical article about hackers writing software to enable rampant DVD piracy. The story was carried here on
As a result, several lead developers in the project were threatened with legal and criminal action (though no crime had been committed) and had to withdraw from the project. While others took over their responsibilities, this probably delayed the development of a working DVD player for GNU/Linux by a couple of months, and nearly wrecked the lives of several software volunteers.
Thanks to Declan, who never once admitted any wrongdoing (despite the flagrant yellow journalism that precipitated the problem, and likely led to the entire DeCSS fiasco as well), never once apologized, and remained quite arrogant during his entire tenure on the mailing list.
Later he passed himself off as a "friend" of freedom and an anti-DMCA activist/journalist. It gained him widespread popularity in some circles and some degree of recognition.
Now, clearly, he has determined that he can advance his carreer by toning down, perhaps even reversing, his stance on the DMCA. Hardly surprising, since, as a "journalist" he works for a publisher which is, almost by definition, a member of the very copyright cartel that is pushing the DMCA and similiar legislation.
Declan is a friend of Declan, the rest of us are tools to be used and discarded as needed to advance his own career.
Being stabbed in the back by such a person, given his history of behavior, should come as no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention.
It is dismaying that so many posters here, and also in response to similar stories, criticize and deny the need for space travel (it is as natural and necessary as humanity's migration from th Great Rift Valley). Their imaginations and aspirations seem bounded by the limits on their credit cards.
Well said.
I am a pilot who flies a small, single engine aircraft and does so very, very frequently, and often for very long distances (coast to coast, etc.).
Cell Phones can and occasionally do interfere with the NAV-COM radios, but most of the time they do not. However, I recall one time when a friend hadn't turned off his phone and I couldn't hear the tower as a result, despite the fact that I was sitting on the ramp only three hundred yards/meters away. As soon as he turned his cell off, reception was fine, so it can and does interefere rather catopstrophically at times, when conditions are right.
I haven't measured VOR-DME deviations due to cell phones, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if they didn't interfere with navigational signals as well, when conditions are right. That could potentially be catastrophic during flight in IMC (instrument) conditions, particularly if there were terrain nearby.
In any event, alll that is rare. Most of the time cell phones will at most add a little static to the transmission or reception, and often they won't interfere noticably at all.
That is only half the picture, however.
The FCC has made it illegal to use cell phones in the air because one phone call can occupy a slot in several cells at the same time, vastly decreasing the call capacity of the system.
Two hundred people on a jumbo jet using cell phones could well equal 20,000 people on the ground. It clobbers the cellular system, and is sufficiently bad that the FCC has made a regulation against using such phones in flight. The FAAs regulation is basically "obey the FCC regulation."
Of course, if it is an emergency, FAA regulations clearly state that any (FAA) rule may be violated if the saftey of the flight requires doing so. The FCC might not be as flexible, but in a true emergency I for one wouldn't worry about it, and use the damn thing anyway if I needed to.