Exactly. The only people watching tv after such an outage is those that thought ahead and had their own source of power available. During an emergency you might not have enough power to run your fridge but kicking on a radio or laptop to get some emergency coverage is very possible. If your Internet goes down because of poor disaster planning then obviously your SOL for the later method. Storms are good evidence of why having your own power source is a good thing. They could make quite the case for a city-wide wireless network (MAN).
Myself I like resources to have a digital signature produced with standard encyption methods (PGP/GPG) with a standardized lookup server. Some P2P protocols use that for finding resources and it seems to work pretty well.
DNS is sort of past it's usefulness. As you said it's impossible to keep all the addresses straight so the majority of people just use a search engine to find the site they want. What signatures does is keep an abstraction layer between the address used by the application and the actual ip - pretty much what DNS does for us now. Since it uses encryption sigs they are hard to fake and there is no need to bicker over them. Random numbers are hardly trademark-disputable items.
This reminds me, a few years ago we had an ice storm that knocked the utility electricity off for a week. I was very amussed to see the local tv station broadcasting a 'If you do not have power please call us at..' line on the bottom of the screen. Lots of people without power obviously are watching tv.
I've been working on moving my computers towards more energy effecient technology and using alternatie energy to offset the utilty bill. It's amazing how your utility bill drops if you do something as simple as move your lan to solar/wind power. It also makes your network more stable as it isn't often you have outages of public utilities, sunlight, and wind all at once.
Talk about your extreme examples - but okay I'll bite. In a democratic system it is the governments job to do what the people want. In the case of your Germans yes it would indeed be the governments job to kill all the Jews. It's not a matter of right or wrong; it's just the government. From my own moral perspective everyone that voted for Hitler was just as guilty of this sin as Hitler himself. By the same token everyone that voted for Bush is guilty for every innocent death caused by his actions as our President (no I didn't vote Al either).
People that drive the speed limit when everyone else are going 90mph are putting everyone else at risk. Crash into another car at 70mph and you're just as dead as if you do it at 90mph. If you're the only one going 70mph your the one most likely to cause a wreck.
Stealing is a matter of opinion and law. You only think old ladies copying songs is stealing. Legally you are correct. In our democracy you should not be legally correct because most people do it. Therefore there is something not-right with the government. From a moral standpoint it probably isn't stealing for most people. From my moral standpoint companies aren't people and therefore can't own anything and obviously if they can't own anything nobody can steal from them. Also data is not property. Information wants to be free by it's very nature. Try moving it or using it without copying it and see what I mean. It's not nearly as useful that way eh?
You really think people stop and think about their actions before doing things so that they can evaluate if something is right or wrong or legal or whatever? Making things illegal just makes people who want to do them try to do a better job (or get stoned so they don't care). Always remember the golden rule, "It's not illegal if you don't get caught."
Ever tried FreeNet? They freak if you suggest you're going to dump gigabytes of data onto their network besides terabytes. It's really not designed for content hosting as much as privacy. As far as P2P intergrated with the web browser though.. yeah I guess so.:)
Get a good digital video camera and you can take snapshots and movies. Perfect for shooting porn or whatever you like. I like to film random objects and people sort of like that creepy guy in American Beauty (only I've never had a teenage girl jump me for it.. darn) and it's really very fun. It provides lots of files too so you can enjoy using hdd space very quickly. Get used to buying a new 100+ Gb hdd with every paycheck.
I have the files everybody wants but you have to know the hash key to find anything. To get the hash key you either have to have the file already or know somebody that does that's willing to tell you the hash.
You can access these files by P2P or via web. I'm working on requiring that anyone accessing my fileservers do so through a large cachine proxy network to reduce my own bandwidth. One of the goals is to have all these files on my server such that anyone can include them in their websites. As the address of the file would remain a constant there'd be less duplication in the caches leading to better caching. I'd like to make it so anyone can feed a new file into the server and if it matches a desirable mime type the file will be stored and the submitting user given the hash key.
I'm not really sure why anyone would want to fill 150Gb of space with files nobody wants though unless they are useful in some way.
Very true. I've long said that people do, or don't do, things based on their own morals and sensabilities - not because of laws.
People drive 90MPH down the highway although the speed limit is 70MPH. The same people drive 20MPH down the highway in bad weather although the minimum speed limit is 45MPH. People copy music, movies, etc because they feel that they have the right to do so. Even old ladies are cranking out copies of songs for the gals in their church choir. In a democracy what the majority of the public wants is what the public should get. If people disobey a law in large numbers or obey only out of fear (or cus they don't know how to break the law - copy protection) then it's a stupid law. Laws exists to give our judical system guidelines about who to punish and how - not to tell people what is right or wrong.
While I'll agree with others that this is truely sad and that if there was something preventable we should be careful not to let it happen again. What really strikes me as sad though is that there will be many people who will use this to try to take away what little exploration we are still doing.
NASA has it's faults but who else does mankind have to lead our exploration? We've pretty much got this planet wrapped up. Our only places we can still explore is space and the ocean depths. If we don't explore we'll peak as a species and go straight down the crapper.
As you said exploration is dangerous but they are already to cautious IMO. If they were less cautious we may have had a mars colony by now. Sure people would die but progress would be made. I'm sure a lot of people died during the exploration of the Americas.
I'm glad that I disregard the law and make backups anyway. I have countless cd's that I would have had to replace if not for backups to my hdd and now that I've ripped my dvd collection I'm sure it'll save me a lot of bucks on replacements also. Keep my disks duplicated so that a hdd dying won't harm things and I'm pretty much set. Just keep adding/replacing hdd's as needed.
I've considered opening a movie rental store. If otherwise good discs suffered this kind of problem I'd be tempted just to burn off a new copy and keep the original as proof of ownership. I'd like to see them take me to court for that. They couldn't do it without publizing that their discs were rotting.
My mother bought this book and ever since the clerk at the bookstore has been avoiding her. It's sort of funny.
I'd have to agree that for marine systems composting is a pretty good idea if you are going to port and unload it frequently. If not it could add quite a bit of weight over the 'pissing over the rail' approach. I'd also be careful how you placed a long-term system. It does generate heat and depending on how well your composting system is designed you might not want it near things that explode when they get warm.
Who said I was scared of them? It just annoys me when good movies have a 'fuck' addiction. Every third word is 'fuck' for no useful reason. The movie True Lies comes to mind in this category. I like the show but the language just doesn't feel right for the show.
I for one use Ximian's Gnome because it's the best version I've seen. I'd guess most people using Red Carpet use Ximian Gnome because it's just as easy to install and it sucks much less than the version that comes with most distros.
I actually like some tv-cleaned versions of movies better because they remove excessive use of language. I'd be mad if they only offered the edited version to me but if the DVD offered 'cleaned' English language version I'd sometimes use it. No new technology required.:)
I'd like to see support for some of these features in Xine, MPlayer, etc. It'd be pretty cool to have language and video masks made for and by a community site. For language just a set of start/stop marks to skip certain channels and for video start/stop/x/y/size data so you could blur objectable spots. Maybe some way to skip scenes or portions of scenese too. MovieBlipsXML?;)
Crazy Taxi
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Advergames
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· Score: 3, Informative
Crazy Taxi is full of advertisements but it actually helps game play. A Pizza Hut building is easier to spot than Joe's Pizza Place would be. As long as advertising doesn't hurt the game I really don't care if they include it. The same rules as with movies, tv, and magazines really.
Example of advertising that was to much: Inspector Gadget the movie. The movie was already pretty bad and the advertising just broke the camels back.
Where do you think waste water goes? Back into the drinking water! Sure they run it though a filtering process when they make it drinking water again but the process probably isn't a lot different except these guys probably don't add as many nasty chemicals. If it were me I wouldn't even bother telling my customers. I'd run a monthly (weekly?) test to make sure my filters were doing their job and just go on about my business.
I've been a student and have worked in several schools doing IT type work dealing with from Preschool to PhD level users. I'd still suggest donating to developers before schools because it will benefit a lot more people to get that code out there.
I'd suggest donating to schools and community centers and let the programmers have access to those machines for programming and testing tasks but somehow I can't see many schools that'd go for that. I have a big interest in community centers especially as they are open to the general public and not just students. I'd love to be able to set up and manage a community computing center. Hardware is less of an issue than having a rent/utils covered by donatations. I can put very nice, full multimedia, computers in for around $300-$400 each including monitor. It isn't hard to get a community business or organization to donate that much.
A lot of programmers are working on educational software - myself included. Edutainment type software is one of the growing hotspots of interest. Myself I develop in Python w/ Pygame or wxPython as it makes the software portable between Windows, Linux, Mac, etc which IMO is a good thing. If you have a specific interest in donating to educational software check out seul.org/edu/ for some possible recipients.
I agree. If not for people that have helped me out along the way I'd probably have been a janitor and the world would be short several fairly cool bits of software and even hardware.
Seriously, if you run opensource software and aren't giving back code of your own, documentation, or something worthwhile then the least you could do is donate $10 or a mobo or something to one of the projects you use. Not having to spend $500 for your software should be worth that $10.:)
Re:Better place sto donate
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Adopt a KDE Geek
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Donate to the opensource programmers today and children of tomorrow won't have to throw their educational dollars away on constant computer upgrades and expensive commercial programs. I've been an out-of-work programmer and it's great to spend some of that free time giving back to the community but it's hard when you can't pay rent let alone buy the hardware you need to test so and so feature against. Now that I'm working I'm certainly not rich but I try to give a little here and there towards projects I like.
Just thinking of that great genius of our time - Willy Wonka - and thinking of musical locks. Could you use something like this to take a fingerprint of the player so that you could encrypt or sign files? It sounds like it'll have a high-quality stream so you could possibly get a better sample than you could get from a cd or recording? It'd be interesting to see a digital music file with a musical signature that only the original artist can duplicate.
One of my biggest complaints with it being illegal to copy my own music and movies is that it makes it hard to make these things accessable to my handicapped sister. While she enjoys these things she is unable to handle discs, tapes, etc. She can't always have somebody there to manage these items for her and even if she could it takes away from her freedom and privacy.
I've ripped hundreds of gigs of these items to the computer and have been developing an interface she can use to access these items. My understanding is that this is a criminal act because it involves breaking CSS and various other stupid technologies. This software could help others but it's probably illegal to share.
Somehow I worry more about my little sister then I do as to if rich media companies manage to squeeze an extra penny out here and there.
I would never run an OS anywhere in my business where users could add/remove their own software. It always bothers me to see each user with their own added programs. One guy has ICQ, some lady a little kitty cat program, the next guy some porno game. I've nothing against any of these programs but if they haven't been tested they are a security problem. Email programs are high on my list of shitability. I'd never let a user run Outlook on their desktop because it is easy to email people programs that do nice things like hide in the background and email out logs of daily keypresses. I've tried it (it was my job) at places I've worked and I could use that method to break into otherwise secured databases and such. A script kiddie could easily steal millions of credit card numbers that way. Try emailing someone on your network a program that installs vncserver and runs it in the background and see if it ends up installed.;)
It's easy to use flash media as the storage in a computer. You can buy a decent bootable flash reader and media enough to install a minimal Linux/BSD gateway/firewall/server/whatever for $50 - $100 depending how much space you need. Take something like a mini-itx 533Mhz board which has everything fully intergrated (including the processor) and is fanless and you have a pretty reliable little server for around $200. The biggest benefit IMO is that since you can use the same basic hardware/software for all the servers you want to run like this somebody trained to handle one of them can easily adapt to handle any of them.
The funny thing to me is that people often seem to think we need the government to take this money and spend it for us. Why can't we spend it for ourselves? Are we toddlers or adults? Just some thoughts..
We have to pay gas taxes (among other things) to pay for roads. If people are using the roads why can't they be toll roads? If people aren't using the roads then hell why build a road? For that matter why can't unemployed people who's unemployment runs out build and maintain the roads for some money? It'd cut down on welfare and give people some pride. I for one find it really frustrating to go begging when I'm perfectly willing and able to work. Make it an option at least.
Welfare is a joke as is unemployment. Maybe if we didn't have to pay so many damn taxes it'd actually be possible to live off our paychecks and put some money in savings for a rainy day. Who else has used these services at some point? For me they made it a real pain in the ass to get back money that'd came from me in the first place.
Public schools are very mixed and money doesn't seem to be the issue. I've seen poor schools that did very well and rich schools that spent all the money on crap. I do think public schools are something worth taxing for but the current system just doesn't work.
Police/fire/medical protection? The police are largely a joke. My experience has been that they cause as many problems as they fix. Firefighters I've actually found to do a somewhat good job in most communities I've lived in including those with volunteer fire departments. They deserve some support but again I'm not sure if taxes are the best way. I'd rather see volunteer firefighters and community donations to provide firetrucks etc. If people don't care enough to donate than tough shit if their homes burn down. We really don't have free medical help in this country or at least no where that I've lived. If an ambulance comes to your house your billed for it. Go to the doctor and they charge you out the ass for every little thing. It seems to me that medical protection for everyone is a basic item that should be provided by the taxes we pay but we sure don't get it. Not sure how you could provide fully volunteer trained medical care. Going to med school is kind of expensive (refer back to how public education sucks).
Military protection.. how much is enough.. how much is to much? I always want to compalin that we spend to much money on the military but on the other hand we don't have Mexico invading us all the time so maybe the costs are justified? I'd like them to spend more on paychecks and benefits for soldiers and less on fancy bomber planes. If NASA can send probes into space on a newer tighter budget shouldn't the military be able to attack Iraq for a more reasonable cost? I can slap together a nice robot that can attack things for $500. Sure the enemy can fuck with them but you can send a lot of them at the bad guys for the cost of one bomber. Besides they're the military so I'd hope they can build better toys for the same $500.
#1 evil... ding ding ding.. legistlators paychecks. Why should these monkeys make more than a cop, firefighter, schoolteacher, soldier, or other working stiffs? I'm not against paying them for their time but really should they make so much more the average guy? Are these guys really so smart that their expertise is worth this much? I can't imagine they do much heavy labor so you can't really say it's all hazard pay. I think we should pay these guys minimum wage for their time. It'd A.) make them think more about the poor stiffs working for minwage and B.) make them get stuff done in as little time as needed so they could spend more time on real jobs and C.) make a career of politics and not causing waves to seem a lot less cool.
Property taxes, food taxes, utility taxes, etc really piss me off. They make it so that it is nearly impossible to mind your own business, provide for yourself, and not have to either be on welfare or be a slave wage. Unless your wealthy you can't just buy a bit of dirt and build your own house, grow your own food, etc. No in this country that is illegal (try it, if you have kids many states will take them from you for living like that). Sucks eh?
You didn't read my whole suggestion. I did suggest that a smart company would poor all such income into assets that would remain halfway stable such as gold.
Do you actually think the US has their currency fully backed by gold or anything more than paper and a pipe dream? Besides that what is backing up the value of gold other than it's shiny and humans have the intellegence of raccoons (they'll die to hold onto something shiny)? The real value of a currency is in maintaining flow between users of that currency so products and services keep coming. Digital cash has some major benefits in that it flows easier than outdated paper money. The stock market is more similar to digital money than is a national currency.
Also your assuming that because 5% of the population actually thinks that banks and the US government know how to manage money that the rest of the people of the world wouldn't use digital cash. Checks, gift certificates, credit cards, etc are all forms of currency. The only difference between those and full digital cash is that those things aren't easily transferable between individuals (they have a merchant-customer relation).
And yes a good many digital cash companies would probably be swindles and/or bomb but like any merchant those who do the best job at convincing customers in the long term will survive. In this age corporations are often more stable than many nations.
Don't think people would use it? Look at how many people send money (a lot of money) to total strangers on EBay without any proof that they'll get anything back. Look at how many customers do use PayPal and similar services. People will use it if it is easy and free. People don't care about stable, secure, insured, etc. Look how many people use Windows.
I've transfered thousands of dollars back and forth using PayPal since their inception and have had no major problems and they answered my questions far better than most of the banks I've had. Most of the complaints I've seen has been because of PayPal's growing pains or stupid shit like "I used my name for my password and someone stole my money.". They are easier to use, more reliable, and deliver higher interest payments than any of the banks I've used. I've used banks all over this country and for the most part they've all been pains in the ass and all managed to rip me off or lose my money at some point. Something PayPal has yet to do. My ony real complaint with PayPal is that I have to keep another bank account in order to cash my paychecks and transfer the funds to PayPal. Simply because my current employer's accountant didn't feel comfortable sending paychecks with PayPal.
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Exactly. The only people watching tv after such an outage is those that thought ahead and had their own source of power available. During an emergency you might not have enough power to run your fridge but kicking on a radio or laptop to get some emergency coverage is very possible. If your Internet goes down because of poor disaster planning then obviously your SOL for the later method. Storms are good evidence of why having your own power source is a good thing. They could make quite the case for a city-wide wireless network (MAN).
Myself I like resources to have a digital signature produced with standard encyption methods (PGP/GPG) with a standardized lookup server. Some P2P protocols use that for finding resources and it seems to work pretty well.
DNS is sort of past it's usefulness. As you said it's impossible to keep all the addresses straight so the majority of people just use a search engine to find the site they want. What signatures does is keep an abstraction layer between the address used by the application and the actual ip - pretty much what DNS does for us now. Since it uses encryption sigs they are hard to fake and there is no need to bicker over them. Random numbers are hardly trademark-disputable items.
This reminds me, a few years ago we had an ice storm that knocked the utility electricity off for a week. I was very amussed to see the local tv station broadcasting a 'If you do not have power please call us at..' line on the bottom of the screen. Lots of people without power obviously are watching tv.
I've been working on moving my computers towards more energy effecient technology and using alternatie energy to offset the utilty bill. It's amazing how your utility bill drops if you do something as simple as move your lan to solar/wind power. It also makes your network more stable as it isn't often you have outages of public utilities, sunlight, and wind all at once.
Talk about your extreme examples - but okay I'll bite. In a democratic system it is the governments job to do what the people want. In the case of your Germans yes it would indeed be the governments job to kill all the Jews. It's not a matter of right or wrong; it's just the government. From my own moral perspective everyone that voted for Hitler was just as guilty of this sin as Hitler himself. By the same token everyone that voted for Bush is guilty for every innocent death caused by his actions as our President (no I didn't vote Al either).
People that drive the speed limit when everyone else are going 90mph are putting everyone else at risk. Crash into another car at 70mph and you're just as dead as if you do it at 90mph. If you're the only one going 70mph your the one most likely to cause a wreck.
Stealing is a matter of opinion and law. You only think old ladies copying songs is stealing. Legally you are correct. In our democracy you should not be legally correct because most people do it. Therefore there is something not-right with the government. From a moral standpoint it probably isn't stealing for most people. From my moral standpoint companies aren't people and therefore can't own anything and obviously if they can't own anything nobody can steal from them. Also data is not property. Information wants to be free by it's very nature. Try moving it or using it without copying it and see what I mean. It's not nearly as useful that way eh?
You really think people stop and think about their actions before doing things so that they can evaluate if something is right or wrong or legal or whatever? Making things illegal just makes people who want to do them try to do a better job (or get stoned so they don't care). Always remember the golden rule, "It's not illegal if you don't get caught."
Ever tried FreeNet? They freak if you suggest you're going to dump gigabytes of data onto their network besides terabytes. It's really not designed for content hosting as much as privacy. As far as P2P intergrated with the web browser though.. yeah I guess so. :)
Get a good digital video camera and you can take snapshots and movies. Perfect for shooting porn or whatever you like. I like to film random objects and people sort of like that creepy guy in American Beauty (only I've never had a teenage girl jump me for it.. darn) and it's really very fun. It provides lots of files too so you can enjoy using hdd space very quickly. Get used to buying a new 100+ Gb hdd with every paycheck.
I have the files everybody wants but you have to know the hash key to find anything. To get the hash key you either have to have the file already or know somebody that does that's willing to tell you the hash.
You can access these files by P2P or via web. I'm working on requiring that anyone accessing my fileservers do so through a large cachine proxy network to reduce my own bandwidth. One of the goals is to have all these files on my server such that anyone can include them in their websites. As the address of the file would remain a constant there'd be less duplication in the caches leading to better caching. I'd like to make it so anyone can feed a new file into the server and if it matches a desirable mime type the file will be stored and the submitting user given the hash key.
I'm not really sure why anyone would want to fill 150Gb of space with files nobody wants though unless they are useful in some way.
Very true. I've long said that people do, or don't do, things based on their own morals and sensabilities - not because of laws.
People drive 90MPH down the highway although the speed limit is 70MPH. The same people drive 20MPH down the highway in bad weather although the minimum speed limit is 45MPH. People copy music, movies, etc because they feel that they have the right to do so. Even old ladies are cranking out copies of songs for the gals in their church choir. In a democracy what the majority of the public wants is what the public should get. If people disobey a law in large numbers or obey only out of fear (or cus they don't know how to break the law - copy protection) then it's a stupid law. Laws exists to give our judical system guidelines about who to punish and how - not to tell people what is right or wrong.
While I'll agree with others that this is truely sad and that if there was something preventable we should be careful not to let it happen again. What really strikes me as sad though is that there will be many people who will use this to try to take away what little exploration we are still doing.
NASA has it's faults but who else does mankind have to lead our exploration? We've pretty much got this planet wrapped up. Our only places we can still explore is space and the ocean depths. If we don't explore we'll peak as a species and go straight down the crapper.
As you said exploration is dangerous but they are already to cautious IMO. If they were less cautious we may have had a mars colony by now. Sure people would die but progress would be made. I'm sure a lot of people died during the exploration of the Americas.
I'm glad that I disregard the law and make backups anyway. I have countless cd's that I would have had to replace if not for backups to my hdd and now that I've ripped my dvd collection I'm sure it'll save me a lot of bucks on replacements also. Keep my disks duplicated so that a hdd dying won't harm things and I'm pretty much set. Just keep adding/replacing hdd's as needed.
I've considered opening a movie rental store. If otherwise good discs suffered this kind of problem I'd be tempted just to burn off a new copy and keep the original as proof of ownership. I'd like to see them take me to court for that. They couldn't do it without publizing that their discs were rotting.
My mother bought this book and ever since the clerk at the bookstore has been avoiding her. It's sort of funny.
I'd have to agree that for marine systems composting is a pretty good idea if you are going to port and unload it frequently. If not it could add quite a bit of weight over the 'pissing over the rail' approach. I'd also be careful how you placed a long-term system. It does generate heat and depending on how well your composting system is designed you might not want it near things that explode when they get warm.
Who said I was scared of them? It just annoys me when good movies have a 'fuck' addiction. Every third word is 'fuck' for no useful reason. The movie True Lies comes to mind in this category. I like the show but the language just doesn't feel right for the show.
I for one use Ximian's Gnome because it's the best version I've seen. I'd guess most people using Red Carpet use Ximian Gnome because it's just as easy to install and it sucks much less than the version that comes with most distros.
I actually like some tv-cleaned versions of movies better because they remove excessive use of language. I'd be mad if they only offered the edited version to me but if the DVD offered 'cleaned' English language version I'd sometimes use it. No new technology required. :)
;)
I'd like to see support for some of these features in Xine, MPlayer, etc. It'd be pretty cool to have language and video masks made for and by a community site. For language just a set of start/stop marks to skip certain channels and for video start/stop/x/y/size data so you could blur objectable spots. Maybe some way to skip scenes or portions of scenese too. MovieBlipsXML?
Crazy Taxi is full of advertisements but it actually helps game play. A Pizza Hut building is easier to spot than Joe's Pizza Place would be. As long as advertising doesn't hurt the game I really don't care if they include it. The same rules as with movies, tv, and magazines really.
Example of advertising that was to much: Inspector Gadget the movie. The movie was already pretty bad and the advertising just broke the camels back.
Where do you think waste water goes? Back into the drinking water! Sure they run it though a filtering process when they make it drinking water again but the process probably isn't a lot different except these guys probably don't add as many nasty chemicals. If it were me I wouldn't even bother telling my customers. I'd run a monthly (weekly?) test to make sure my filters were doing their job and just go on about my business.
I've been a student and have worked in several schools doing IT type work dealing with from Preschool to PhD level users. I'd still suggest donating to developers before schools because it will benefit a lot more people to get that code out there.
I'd suggest donating to schools and community centers and let the programmers have access to those machines for programming and testing tasks but somehow I can't see many schools that'd go for that. I have a big interest in community centers especially as they are open to the general public and not just students. I'd love to be able to set up and manage a community computing center. Hardware is less of an issue than having a rent/utils covered by donatations. I can put very nice, full multimedia, computers in for around $300-$400 each including monitor. It isn't hard to get a community business or organization to donate that much.
A lot of programmers are working on educational software - myself included. Edutainment type software is one of the growing hotspots of interest. Myself I develop in Python w/ Pygame or wxPython as it makes the software portable between Windows, Linux, Mac, etc which IMO is a good thing. If you have a specific interest in donating to educational software check out seul.org/edu/ for some possible recipients.
I agree. If not for people that have helped me out along the way I'd probably have been a janitor and the world would be short several fairly cool bits of software and even hardware.
:)
Seriously, if you run opensource software and aren't giving back code of your own, documentation, or something worthwhile then the least you could do is donate $10 or a mobo or something to one of the projects you use. Not having to spend $500 for your software should be worth that $10.
Donate to the opensource programmers today and children of tomorrow won't have to throw their educational dollars away on constant computer upgrades and expensive commercial programs. I've been an out-of-work programmer and it's great to spend some of that free time giving back to the community but it's hard when you can't pay rent let alone buy the hardware you need to test so and so feature against. Now that I'm working I'm certainly not rich but I try to give a little here and there towards projects I like.
Just thinking of that great genius of our time - Willy Wonka - and thinking of musical locks. Could you use something like this to take a fingerprint of the player so that you could encrypt or sign files? It sounds like it'll have a high-quality stream so you could possibly get a better sample than you could get from a cd or recording? It'd be interesting to see a digital music file with a musical signature that only the original artist can duplicate.
One of my biggest complaints with it being illegal to copy my own music and movies is that it makes it hard to make these things accessable to my handicapped sister. While she enjoys these things she is unable to handle discs, tapes, etc. She can't always have somebody there to manage these items for her and even if she could it takes away from her freedom and privacy.
I've ripped hundreds of gigs of these items to the computer and have been developing an interface she can use to access these items. My understanding is that this is a criminal act because it involves breaking CSS and various other stupid technologies. This software could help others but it's probably illegal to share.
Somehow I worry more about my little sister then I do as to if rich media companies manage to squeeze an extra penny out here and there.
I would never run an OS anywhere in my business where users could add/remove their own software. It always bothers me to see each user with their own added programs. One guy has ICQ, some lady a little kitty cat program, the next guy some porno game. I've nothing against any of these programs but if they haven't been tested they are a security problem. Email programs are high on my list of shitability. I'd never let a user run Outlook on their desktop because it is easy to email people programs that do nice things like hide in the background and email out logs of daily keypresses. I've tried it (it was my job) at places I've worked and I could use that method to break into otherwise secured databases and such. A script kiddie could easily steal millions of credit card numbers that way. Try emailing someone on your network a program that installs vncserver and runs it in the background and see if it ends up installed. ;)
It's easy to use flash media as the storage in a computer. You can buy a decent bootable flash reader and media enough to install a minimal Linux/BSD gateway/firewall/server/whatever for $50 - $100 depending how much space you need. Take something like a mini-itx 533Mhz board which has everything fully intergrated (including the processor) and is fanless and you have a pretty reliable little server for around $200. The biggest benefit IMO is that since you can use the same basic hardware/software for all the servers you want to run like this somebody trained to handle one of them can easily adapt to handle any of them.
The funny thing to me is that people often seem to think we need the government to take this money and spend it for us. Why can't we spend it for ourselves? Are we toddlers or adults? Just some thoughts..
We have to pay gas taxes (among other things) to pay for roads. If people are using the roads why can't they be toll roads? If people aren't using the roads then hell why build a road? For that matter why can't unemployed people who's unemployment runs out build and maintain the roads for some money? It'd cut down on welfare and give people some pride. I for one find it really frustrating to go begging when I'm perfectly willing and able to work. Make it an option at least.
Welfare is a joke as is unemployment. Maybe if we didn't have to pay so many damn taxes it'd actually be possible to live off our paychecks and put some money in savings for a rainy day. Who else has used these services at some point? For me they made it a real pain in the ass to get back money that'd came from me in the first place.
Public schools are very mixed and money doesn't seem to be the issue. I've seen poor schools that did very well and rich schools that spent all the money on crap. I do think public schools are something worth taxing for but the current system just doesn't work.
Police/fire/medical protection? The police are largely a joke. My experience has been that they cause as many problems as they fix. Firefighters I've actually found to do a somewhat good job in most communities I've lived in including those with volunteer fire departments. They deserve some support but again I'm not sure if taxes are the best way. I'd rather see volunteer firefighters and community donations to provide firetrucks etc. If people don't care enough to donate than tough shit if their homes burn down. We really don't have free medical help in this country or at least no where that I've lived. If an ambulance comes to your house your billed for it. Go to the doctor and they charge you out the ass for every little thing. It seems to me that medical protection for everyone is a basic item that should be provided by the taxes we pay but we sure don't get it. Not sure how you could provide fully volunteer trained medical care. Going to med school is kind of expensive (refer back to how public education sucks).
Military protection.. how much is enough.. how much is to much? I always want to compalin that we spend to much money on the military but on the other hand we don't have Mexico invading us all the time so maybe the costs are justified? I'd like them to spend more on paychecks and benefits for soldiers and less on fancy bomber planes. If NASA can send probes into space on a newer tighter budget shouldn't the military be able to attack Iraq for a more reasonable cost? I can slap together a nice robot that can attack things for $500. Sure the enemy can fuck with them but you can send a lot of them at the bad guys for the cost of one bomber. Besides they're the military so I'd hope they can build better toys for the same $500.
#1 evil... ding ding ding.. legistlators paychecks. Why should these monkeys make more than a cop, firefighter, schoolteacher, soldier, or other working stiffs? I'm not against paying them for their time but really should they make so much more the average guy? Are these guys really so smart that their expertise is worth this much? I can't imagine they do much heavy labor so you can't really say it's all hazard pay. I think we should pay these guys minimum wage for their time. It'd A.) make them think more about the poor stiffs working for minwage and B.) make them get stuff done in as little time as needed so they could spend more time on real jobs and C.) make a career of politics and not causing waves to seem a lot less cool.
Property taxes, food taxes, utility taxes, etc really piss me off. They make it so that it is nearly impossible to mind your own business, provide for yourself, and not have to either be on welfare or be a slave wage. Unless your wealthy you can't just buy a bit of dirt and build your own house, grow your own food, etc. No in this country that is illegal (try it, if you have kids many states will take them from you for living like that). Sucks eh?
You didn't read my whole suggestion. I did suggest that a smart company would poor all such income into assets that would remain halfway stable such as gold.
Do you actually think the US has their currency fully backed by gold or anything more than paper and a pipe dream? Besides that what is backing up the value of gold other than it's shiny and humans have the intellegence of raccoons (they'll die to hold onto something shiny)? The real value of a currency is in maintaining flow between users of that currency so products and services keep coming. Digital cash has some major benefits in that it flows easier than outdated paper money. The stock market is more similar to digital money than is a national currency.
Also your assuming that because 5% of the population actually thinks that banks and the US government know how to manage money that the rest of the people of the world wouldn't use digital cash. Checks, gift certificates, credit cards, etc are all forms of currency. The only difference between those and full digital cash is that those things aren't easily transferable between individuals (they have a merchant-customer relation).
And yes a good many digital cash companies would probably be swindles and/or bomb but like any merchant those who do the best job at convincing customers in the long term will survive. In this age corporations are often more stable than many nations.
Don't think people would use it? Look at how many people send money (a lot of money) to total strangers on EBay without any proof that they'll get anything back. Look at how many customers do use PayPal and similar services. People will use it if it is easy and free. People don't care about stable, secure, insured, etc. Look how many people use Windows.
I've transfered thousands of dollars back and forth using PayPal since their inception and have had no major problems and they answered my questions far better than most of the banks I've had. Most of the complaints I've seen has been because of PayPal's growing pains or stupid shit like "I used my name for my password and someone stole my money.". They are easier to use, more reliable, and deliver higher interest payments than any of the banks I've used. I've used banks all over this country and for the most part they've all been pains in the ass and all managed to rip me off or lose my money at some point. Something PayPal has yet to do. My ony real complaint with PayPal is that I have to keep another bank account in order to cash my paychecks and transfer the funds to PayPal. Simply because my current employer's accountant didn't feel comfortable sending paychecks with PayPal.