it seemed to be only half about going to Mars. The other half seemed to be another diatribe against the space station. Maybe I didn't read far enough, but I haven't thrown the book away, only set it aside. Zubrin seemed to have as big an anti-space-station blindspot as those he accused of having a must-use-space-station blindspot.
My frequent watchword in my posts is, "Be careful what you ask for," and I invoke it here, too. If the space station is declared a success, and then de-orbited in less than 10 years, everyone will see the truth just like they saw that Nixon's "Peace with honor" was nothing but bugging out of Viet Nam. (I'm not debating what we should have done, just trying to properly name what we did.)
Whether you like it or not, we're into the ISS for a pile of money, and it's reputation is going to rub off on all manned spaceflight. Shutdown and deorbit the ISS in less than 10 years, and you may as well shut down manned space in the USA.
Some of you applaud that goal, thinking robot science is better. Well, there's little point in running a NASA-like organization for robot science. If NASA manned space is shut down, I suspect NASA itself would be effectively shut down, and then we'd wander for the better part of a decade trying to figure out a way to do robot space science. Not that it's that hard, but that we don't have mechanisms or organizations in place to do it.
Besides, you won't energize generations of kids to go into science based on robot missions.
I'd rather see us find more sensible missions for the ISS we have up there, and adapt it to them. For instance, why do we constantly fold our robot science probes up into tiny cylinders, and then get mad when they don't unfold right. (Antennas, anyone?) Imagine taking a standard B-size truss, bolting a standard outer-planet antenna on it, bolt one of a standard series of engines on, bolt on the custom science package, give it a dynamics test (spin-test for balance, essentially) and GO. Zubrin wanted direct launch to Mars, bypassing the space station. But it's THERE, and is no longer a serial expense, so why not use it? That doesn't mean orbital assembly necessarily. But I suspect we could go a long way toward assembling a Mars mission built out of a few smaller spacecraft docked together, using near-ISS as a staging place. Perhaps the ISS isn't the best orbit for this, but at least it's not polar.
>BTW> It "should" be impossible for the RIAA, MPAA, Microsoft, AOL, or anyone to really change the dynamic of the internet so that all
>individuals recieve service where they can not accept connections. This would represent a fundamental change to the nature of the internet in a VERY
>bad way and would essentually "instantly" turn it into one big TV network. I do not think anyone would stand for that after they have seen it working the right way.
I believe RIAA, MPAA, Microsoft, etc want very BADLY to turn the Internet into a big broadcast network. There are two models at work here, broadcast vs superhighway. The former allows 'them' to keep the control they had prior to the Internet, and allows their current revenue model to continue and grow. The latter is what we like.
Ironically, Microsoft is in the odd position here. The superhighway model helped them grow to where they are. But now that they've essentially saturated the market, they are moving to become a 'software broadcaster', and are moving in a common direction with the other big players you mention.
Did you catch the thing about non-standard pinouts on the power connectors?
BLAST IT!
As the owner of two Tyan (mid Rev4 Tomcat I, later Trinity 1590S) boards, they really $%^& this one up. Non-standard PS2 mouse connectors, non-standard serial port connectors, non-standard USB connectors.
With these connectors it's not too bad, because the Tyan-pinout ones aren't much more, or it's not difficult to modify a standard one. But to mess up on the power supply connector...
I still haven't been able to get DMA running on the 1590S, on either stock Redhat kernels or using the Jumbo IDE patch. At some level, others have their MVP3's running DMA.
I have been pleased with the stability of Tyan boards, but between connector issues and the DMA troubles I've been having, it no longer feels safe as a 'default' decision.
But somewhere you still need the ability to accept connections, even if you're tunnelling and effectively reversing the direction.
I'm on cable, and as far as I can tell, NO cable allows you to accept connections. My specific TOS says 'run no servers for the use of others'. I run SSHD, and justify it because it's a server for my own use, not others. I know the restriction stinks, but it's the only way I can get a high-speed connection. I have grudgingly traded accepting connections for bandwidth. If/when DSL ever becomes available to me (43,000 ft from CO) I'll revisit that tradeoff, but not before I review the DSL TOS, too.
The ability to accept a connection is the new chokepoint.
To be on your side for a moment, now we need to invent a new protocol. TCP is great, but that blasted SYN packet just sticks out like a sore thumb. We need to move our hiding down to a lower level. (Actually, I'm completely on your side, just a bit more pessimistic.)
The US Constitution...
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American Gods
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· Score: 3
I think the US Constitution is a big part of what makes America what it is. Having Law is neat, but even the Law is made by men, and subject to whims of men, and their short-term (and long-term) insanities.
As a response, everyone seems to want something Above The Law. In some countries, it's a King, in others, religion. These things become a core part of the Tradition of that country, which brings this back to topic.
In the US, as we weaned ourselves from our European traditions, we attached it instead to the Constitution. With that Uber-Law behind the Law, we gained an extra element of faith in ourselves, which perhaps leads to the work ethic mentioned on another response on this subthread.
Unfortunately, of late it seems that even the Uber-Law is powerless against Sufficient Application of Money, witness the RIAA and DMCA. The twisting of 'limited' in the Constitution, where it provides for patents and copyrights, is downright obscene.
You state the most common argument from the free software camp. Philosophically, I agree with you. Practically, I think we're both being naive.
For most of us, ISPs constitute choke points. Threaten enough legal action, and I can forsee filters not at every ISP, but enough to reduce P2P below the critical mass necessary to threaten the RIAA/MPAA business model. An yes, we can always come up with ways to weasel P2P around those filters and chokes. But in order to remain beyond RIAA/MPAA ability to block with lawsuit-inspired filters, etc, they probably remain beyond the average Win-user's ability to install and use. The net effect is the same.
And I can agree with you that in the long run, they will fail. I guess I don't really want them to fail, I just want them trimmed down to size. After all, in my post I did recognize their 'editorial' value. Content is not free to create, after all. Plus there is truly editorial value, in the classic sense, in filtering the quality before it goes out. (One might look at the summer movie lineup, or at TV in general, and argue that they've failed miserably at this.)
But I'd rather they be trimmed down to size in my lifetime, preferably within the next decade. After all, Rome was around for over a millennium, and the Catholic church still has quite a bit of power after longer than that. I'd rather not think the RIAA/MPAA chokepoints have that long to go.
I'll refer to two pieces of science fiction, as harbingers of the future war of which we're seeing the first battles.
For the first, I forget the title. But it was about an unspecified era in which aliens try to 'help' us by giving us replicators. First there are attempts to control access to the replicators. But of course, someone manages to replicate the replicator, and it's all out of the bag. Along the way, someone speculates that the aliens were really out to ruin us by destroying our economy, which is based on scarcity. Finally, the 'hero' of the story realizes that by controlling the originals, he can still be rich. Economy of scarcity is maintained, only at the 'manuscript' level.
In Joe Haldeman's "The Forever Peace", the United States invents the NanoForge, essentially a nanotech-based replicator. Then they nuke the lab that the prototype was in, telling the world that the NanoForge exploded, so it's established as *physically dangerous* technology. (It's really not physically dangerous, just politically and economically.) Thereafter, some dozen NanoForges are government-run at high cost, with some public access, because they're just too dangerous any other way. Once again, economy of scarcity is maintained.
This is it. The Internet enables an economy of abundance based on exchange of information. Bits are bits, and from a technological perspective, they can be copied for near-zero cost. But information exchange is not a new business. Prior to Internet and electronic exchange, it was done on dead trees and discs. (First laquer, then vinyl, then CDs.)
The publishing industries arose in order to disseminate information. They made their livlihood doing so, and grew into empires. Ironically, they are now threatened by more efficient means of dissemination, and are fighting for their continued existence by *restricting* those newer means.
From another perspective, there are (at least) two aspects of publication, be it music, movies, or print, editorial and duplication. While the editorial aspect is still necessary and valuable, the duplication is becoming obsolete. Yet in common perception, the editorial value has faded and the duplication dominates. So someone downloads music, and wonders what value the record company contributes.
We were headed toward a world with wide, free spread of information. It had some problems, in that it didn't recognize the editorial value of the current publishing industries. Now, as a result of RIAA and MPAA actions, we are headed toward Joe Haldeman's world, where a potential economy of abundance is being thrown away, in favor of information and access control. I don't like this at all.
But *they* have more money, and more influence in the courts and congress than *we* do. We can fight the good fight it's a sad reflection on "Justice" in the USA that I expect us to get beaten down every step of the way. Rather cynical for a Friday, I know.
The philosophical war began in music and movies, and is moving to the print world. There are signs that it would like to move into software, though we have a good, strong beachhead here. I wonder where else it will try to go.
To be more positive, we first need to recognize the *editorial* value of the publishing industries. The bar for publishing on the web is low, and there are a lot of clunkers out there as a result. We need some way other than a few portals and hit-based Google searches to recognize good content. If we want to take the battle for music and movies to a different front, we need to grow the alternative - free (or at least non-RIAA/MPAA) content. We need to make it known where it is, and how to sort the wheat from the chaff.
Even after the first few battles, most of us don't recognize the breadth of the War. This is a wholesale societal change for the better that we're letting slip out of our grasp.
Fortunately, my area isn't slated for getting cubed. Hopefully by the time they do any floorspace reorganization on my floor, the VP who pushed cubes into the site will have moved on, and his/her successor will come up with a nifty new productivity improvement idea - move from cubes to offices.
I recently found that my new boss is a reformed Doom addict. I'm trying to figure a way to recast a whole-department deathmatch into a morale/teambuilding exercise.
Re:Lets not do anything cause it could get worse?
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Legitimacy Of ICANN?
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· Score: 2
Then I'll have to tweak my statement, and simply say. "Be careful what you do, because it may get worse." So often the call against ICANN is, "Throw it away and start over!"
I assert that where we see a vacuum of competence and fairness, others see a vacuum of power and revenue. In any throw-it-away-and-start-over model, the 'others' will most likely win.
Sure, ICANN needs to change. Perhaps the way to change it is through government intervention, perhaps by inciting industry leaders. Perhaps boycotts. But bumbling incompetence is better to deal with than raw malevolence. That's my point, not that we shouldn't try to change.
I know people get upset over ICANN, but things could be a LOT worse. At least ICANN pretends to be doing the right thing.
Instead, how about if domains were handled like frequencies, or any other semi-commercial venture. You know, auction off domain names to the highest bidder, trademarks be #$%&ed. Who needs.org anyway, when we're talking about commercializing the Internet and can't make anything but pr0n pay? Bunch of freeloaders!
As bad as ICANN may be, it can clearly get worse.
The Guys At Work were griping about their offices and furniture a few weeks back. I suggested they not gripe too hard, because the OBVIOUS solution to their office/furniture problems would be.... cubicles.
I heard the report on this a few weeks back on NPR. At first blush, it sounds like a great idea. But I remember thinking this at the time, and now I see the word "chiseled" in their report.
I worry about NOTHING people write with chalk, or erase, etc.
I worry about what they PAINT, and what they CHISEL.
That makes the statement that we Americans just can't handle free speech anymore, and perhaps we just plain don't deserve it, either. Sad day when the first permanent mark goes up on the monument.
The MPAA may not be able to own tracks and data, but they may well have enough clout to make sure that writable DVDs never get widespread marketing until they have "appropriate content protection" measures built-in. If that happens to screw everyone over who wants to do home movies or back up computer data......oops.
Just look at the DAT drives and media crowding the shelves for an example.
It's not about technical capability or elegance.
It's not about right or wrong.
It's only marginally about legality
It's ALL about keeping all the marbles in their own sandbox.
But then, we've got to remember that Leahy is also apparently on the wrong side of the fence on copyright law. I am remiss in my duty as a citizen for not writing to one of the senators of the state I live in about this. It's on my list of things to do, but I know it needs to be done well, or not at all.
I would think more in terms of changing line lenght and white space. The problem with that is that you just can't send many bits in a typical joke. That's why I suggest html. Once you're there, there are all sorts of opportunities to make gassy html, and more opportunity to hide more bits in the gas.
I wonder how much internet bandwidth is chewed up with joke forwards. The only saving grace is that jokes are usually passed around in text format. Even at that, they're usually 1/3 headers, 1/3 repetitive '>' quotations, and maybe 1/3 joke content.
At this, the average joke couldn't send around many bits of information. But make it like tcp/ip, and distribute your content into several packets, otherwise known as jokes. Fun thing is, you don't even have to send directly to the recipient, as long as you know he/she is reliably in the redistribution path.
Now we have the greatest reason for moving from clear text to html for email and news. It puts more chaff and volume into what were once very compact communications. All that chaff means more opportunity for steganographic bits. Consider the variety in valid html.
But then what happens when you attempt to read a new joke distributed as html from a new Microsoft product? What if there was no hidden message, but it ends up looking like one out of chance and MS-ness. No doubt it would say, "Paul is dead."
The mind boggles.
Problem is, I don't know if I'm being serious, or attempting humor.
...and society is still trying to figure out what the fsck is up. This applies to scientific journals, music, and movies.
Once upon a time, publishing was exclusively done with dead trees, and was 'hard'. Therefore publishers came into being, so that they could become good at it. They do the hard part of publishing for me, putting it on dead trees. We do the hard part of content creation for them, giving them something to put on their dead trees. A wonderfully synergistic relationship that worked for hundreds of years.
But now we're moving away from dead trees. Publishing has quit being 'hard', and we don't need many aspects of those publishing specialists as much as we used to. But these people have a big chunk of turf, and don't want to lose it.
At present, as copyright assignees, publishers, be it books, music, movies, etc, are licensed government monopolies. Whether that's the only thing keeping them in business is anyone's guess. At present, I would argue that we have a counter-productive situation.
I don't advocate getting rid of publishers alltogether, merely that we attempt to refine the meaning of publishing and IP as they relate to an electronic age. Today legislation is trying to extend the past. Besides merely condemning SBCA and DMCA, we should try to arrive at sensible counterproposals. Ones that allow the publishing industries a decent continued existance are more likely to get a hearing.
It's pretty much accepted that we're all made of dead stars. What I hadn't realized is that mere supernovas don't readily explain the relative abundance of heavy metals we seem to have in the solar system.
Yesterday on NPR they had a piece about a researcher who has apparently determined that the more abundant heavy metals come from a collision between neutron stars. The elemental distribution we enjoy in our solar system requires both previous supernovas and neutron star collisions in order to exist. At least according to this researcher.
Makes you wonder about SETI. Also makes you wonder if the more abundant heavier elements are necessary for life, for advanced life, for intelligent life, or for technology-using (maybe intelligent too, unlike Earth) life.
Any reader of Poul Anderson's Gateway series knows about the Heechee investigating black holes and the cosmological constant, not to mention the unmentionables hiding out in the Kugelblitz at the edge of the galaxy. Now THEY know that energy can be massive.
Now you've hit the nail on the head. Obviously, "The Programmable Machine" must die. The first step is to key the BIOS and OS together, so it only boots the One True OS, Windows. Then come up with copy-protected and access-controlled media. Then how about Windows-only peripherals, network connections, etc. Once you've taken The Programmable Machine and made it fully Windows-bound, you've got a set of deep pockets available to sue, and Microsoft will make sure that machine won't be usable for illegal copying.
The Programmable Machine can be dead and gone within our lifetime.
is of questionable value, when you're submitting a job that takes overnight or several days to run. We also had some good programs for viewing job output.
A lot of this depends on the legacy of where you work, and what software is installed in what place. I was on TSO when it was the workhorse, and there wasn't a VM installation.
I was also the first user on VM in my area. I don't remember if I started with CMS 1 or 2, but I remember CMS3 coming in.
IMHO the 8.8.1 filesystem namespace stunk. Maclibs were a poorly-supported, gassy pain to use. At least with the 44(+8 with PDS) filespace of MVS, nearly all applications recognized the '.' and you could pretend you had hierarchy. I guess later versions of VM/CMS added a true hierarchical filesystem, but by that time I was headed to Unix, and didn't care.
How dare you criticize it. Nothing GUI about it, at all. No steenking Windows, no Mice, no Icons, no Pointers, not even any clicking, except for the old tactile-feedback keyboards.
Seriously, I used TSO for years. Even after VM came along, it was mostly for office or network use. The serious engineering used batch simulation jobs on TSO, and our interactive graphics applications ran on MVS. (though not TSO)
Today, engineering happens on Unix, and office stuff on Windows. Kind of like the old MVS/VM roles, except that Windows doesn't carry the network role.
You seem to discount that maybe 134k has simply been out of touch with virtuality for a few months, because of real-world work, and this was a much faster way to get a clue than actually doing any digging. Laziness has its place.
Slashdot Mirror
it seemed to be only half about going to Mars. The other half seemed to be another diatribe against the space station. Maybe I didn't read far enough, but I haven't thrown the book away, only set it aside. Zubrin seemed to have as big an anti-space-station blindspot as those he accused of having a must-use-space-station blindspot.
My frequent watchword in my posts is, "Be careful what you ask for," and I invoke it here, too. If the space station is declared a success, and then de-orbited in less than 10 years, everyone will see the truth just like they saw that Nixon's "Peace with honor" was nothing but bugging out of Viet Nam. (I'm not debating what we should have done, just trying to properly name what we did.)
Whether you like it or not, we're into the ISS for a pile of money, and it's reputation is going to rub off on all manned spaceflight. Shutdown and deorbit the ISS in less than 10 years, and you may as well shut down manned space in the USA.
Some of you applaud that goal, thinking robot science is better. Well, there's little point in running a NASA-like organization for robot science. If NASA manned space is shut down, I suspect NASA itself would be effectively shut down, and then we'd wander for the better part of a decade trying to figure out a way to do robot space science. Not that it's that hard, but that we don't have mechanisms or organizations in place to do it.
Besides, you won't energize generations of kids to go into science based on robot missions.
I'd rather see us find more sensible missions for the ISS we have up there, and adapt it to them. For instance, why do we constantly fold our robot science probes up into tiny cylinders, and then get mad when they don't unfold right. (Antennas, anyone?) Imagine taking a standard B-size truss, bolting a standard outer-planet antenna on it, bolt one of a standard series of engines on, bolt on the custom science package, give it a dynamics test (spin-test for balance, essentially) and GO. Zubrin wanted direct launch to Mars, bypassing the space station. But it's THERE, and is no longer a serial expense, so why not use it? That doesn't mean orbital assembly necessarily. But I suspect we could go a long way toward assembling a Mars mission built out of a few smaller spacecraft docked together, using near-ISS as a staging place. Perhaps the ISS isn't the best orbit for this, but at least it's not polar.
>BTW> It "should" be impossible for the RIAA, MPAA, Microsoft, AOL, or anyone to really change the dynamic of the internet so that all
>individuals recieve service where they can not accept connections. This would represent a fundamental change to the nature of the internet in a VERY
>bad way and would essentually "instantly" turn it into one big TV network. I do not think anyone would stand for that after they have seen it working the right way.
I believe RIAA, MPAA, Microsoft, etc want very BADLY to turn the Internet into a big broadcast network. There are two models at work here, broadcast vs superhighway. The former allows 'them' to keep the control they had prior to the Internet, and allows their current revenue model to continue and grow. The latter is what we like.
Ironically, Microsoft is in the odd position here. The superhighway model helped them grow to where they are. But now that they've essentially saturated the market, they are moving to become a 'software broadcaster', and are moving in a common direction with the other big players you mention.
Did you catch the thing about non-standard pinouts on the power connectors?
BLAST IT!
As the owner of two Tyan (mid Rev4 Tomcat I, later Trinity 1590S) boards, they really $%^& this one up. Non-standard PS2 mouse connectors, non-standard serial port connectors, non-standard USB connectors.
With these connectors it's not too bad, because the Tyan-pinout ones aren't much more, or it's not difficult to modify a standard one. But to mess up on the power supply connector...
I still haven't been able to get DMA running on the 1590S, on either stock Redhat kernels or using the Jumbo IDE patch. At some level, others have their MVP3's running DMA.
I have been pleased with the stability of Tyan boards, but between connector issues and the DMA troubles I've been having, it no longer feels safe as a 'default' decision.
But somewhere you still need the ability to accept connections, even if you're tunnelling and effectively reversing the direction.
I'm on cable, and as far as I can tell, NO cable allows you to accept connections. My specific TOS says 'run no servers for the use of others'. I run SSHD, and justify it because it's a server for my own use, not others. I know the restriction stinks, but it's the only way I can get a high-speed connection. I have grudgingly traded accepting connections for bandwidth. If/when DSL ever becomes available to me (43,000 ft from CO) I'll revisit that tradeoff, but not before I review the DSL TOS, too.
The ability to accept a connection is the new chokepoint.
To be on your side for a moment, now we need to invent a new protocol. TCP is great, but that blasted SYN packet just sticks out like a sore thumb. We need to move our hiding down to a lower level. (Actually, I'm completely on your side, just a bit more pessimistic.)
I think the US Constitution is a big part of what makes America what it is. Having Law is neat, but even the Law is made by men, and subject to whims of men, and their short-term (and long-term) insanities.
As a response, everyone seems to want something Above The Law. In some countries, it's a King, in others, religion. These things become a core part of the Tradition of that country, which brings this back to topic.
In the US, as we weaned ourselves from our European traditions, we attached it instead to the Constitution. With that Uber-Law behind the Law, we gained an extra element of faith in ourselves, which perhaps leads to the work ethic mentioned on another response on this subthread.
Unfortunately, of late it seems that even the Uber-Law is powerless against Sufficient Application of Money, witness the RIAA and DMCA. The twisting of 'limited' in the Constitution, where it provides for patents and copyrights, is downright obscene.
It casts a chill on my faith in America.
I read it in Tomorrow, Inc. Thanks.
You state the most common argument from the free software camp. Philosophically, I agree with you. Practically, I think we're both being naive.
For most of us, ISPs constitute choke points. Threaten enough legal action, and I can forsee filters not at every ISP, but enough to reduce P2P below the critical mass necessary to threaten the RIAA/MPAA business model. An yes, we can always come up with ways to weasel P2P around those filters and chokes. But in order to remain beyond RIAA/MPAA ability to block with lawsuit-inspired filters, etc, they probably remain beyond the average Win-user's ability to install and use. The net effect is the same.
And I can agree with you that in the long run, they will fail. I guess I don't really want them to fail, I just want them trimmed down to size. After all, in my post I did recognize their 'editorial' value. Content is not free to create, after all. Plus there is truly editorial value, in the classic sense, in filtering the quality before it goes out. (One might look at the summer movie lineup, or at TV in general, and argue that they've failed miserably at this.)
But I'd rather they be trimmed down to size in my lifetime, preferably within the next decade. After all, Rome was around for over a millennium, and the Catholic church still has quite a bit of power after longer than that. I'd rather not think the RIAA/MPAA chokepoints have that long to go.
I'll refer to two pieces of science fiction, as harbingers of the future war of which we're seeing the first battles.
For the first, I forget the title. But it was about an unspecified era in which aliens try to 'help' us by giving us replicators. First there are attempts to control access to the replicators. But of course, someone manages to replicate the replicator, and it's all out of the bag. Along the way, someone speculates that the aliens were really out to ruin us by destroying our economy, which is based on scarcity. Finally, the 'hero' of the story realizes that by controlling the originals, he can still be rich. Economy of scarcity is maintained, only at the 'manuscript' level.
In Joe Haldeman's "The Forever Peace", the United States invents the NanoForge, essentially a nanotech-based replicator. Then they nuke the lab that the prototype was in, telling the world that the NanoForge exploded, so it's established as *physically dangerous* technology. (It's really not physically dangerous, just politically and economically.) Thereafter, some dozen NanoForges are government-run at high cost, with some public access, because they're just too dangerous any other way. Once again, economy of scarcity is maintained.
This is it. The Internet enables an economy of abundance based on exchange of information. Bits are bits, and from a technological perspective, they can be copied for near-zero cost. But information exchange is not a new business. Prior to Internet and electronic exchange, it was done on dead trees and discs. (First laquer, then vinyl, then CDs.)
The publishing industries arose in order to disseminate information. They made their livlihood doing so, and grew into empires. Ironically, they are now threatened by more efficient means of dissemination, and are fighting for their continued existence by *restricting* those newer means.
From another perspective, there are (at least) two aspects of publication, be it music, movies, or print, editorial and duplication. While the editorial aspect is still necessary and valuable, the duplication is becoming obsolete. Yet in common perception, the editorial value has faded and the duplication dominates. So someone downloads music, and wonders what value the record company contributes.
We were headed toward a world with wide, free spread of information. It had some problems, in that it didn't recognize the editorial value of the current publishing industries. Now, as a result of RIAA and MPAA actions, we are headed toward Joe Haldeman's world, where a potential economy of abundance is being thrown away, in favor of information and access control. I don't like this at all.
But *they* have more money, and more influence in the courts and congress than *we* do. We can fight the good fight it's a sad reflection on "Justice" in the USA that I expect us to get beaten down every step of the way. Rather cynical for a Friday, I know.
The philosophical war began in music and movies, and is moving to the print world. There are signs that it would like to move into software, though we have a good, strong beachhead here. I wonder where else it will try to go.
To be more positive, we first need to recognize the *editorial* value of the publishing industries. The bar for publishing on the web is low, and there are a lot of clunkers out there as a result. We need some way other than a few portals and hit-based Google searches to recognize good content. If we want to take the battle for music and movies to a different front, we need to grow the alternative - free (or at least non-RIAA/MPAA) content. We need to make it known where it is, and how to sort the wheat from the chaff.
Even after the first few battles, most of us don't recognize the breadth of the War. This is a wholesale societal change for the better that we're letting slip out of our grasp.
Fortunately, my area isn't slated for getting cubed. Hopefully by the time they do any floorspace reorganization on my floor, the VP who pushed cubes into the site will have moved on, and his/her successor will come up with a nifty new productivity improvement idea - move from cubes to offices.
I recently found that my new boss is a reformed Doom addict. I'm trying to figure a way to recast a whole-department deathmatch into a morale/teambuilding exercise.
Then I'll have to tweak my statement, and simply say. "Be careful what you do, because it may get worse." So often the call against ICANN is, "Throw it away and start over!"
I assert that where we see a vacuum of competence and fairness, others see a vacuum of power and revenue. In any throw-it-away-and-start-over model, the 'others' will most likely win.
Sure, ICANN needs to change. Perhaps the way to change it is through government intervention, perhaps by inciting industry leaders. Perhaps boycotts. But bumbling incompetence is better to deal with than raw malevolence. That's my point, not that we shouldn't try to change.
I know people get upset over ICANN, but things could be a LOT worse. At least ICANN pretends to be doing the right thing.
.org anyway, when we're talking about commercializing the Internet and can't make anything but pr0n pay? Bunch of freeloaders!
.... cubicles.
Instead, how about if domains were handled like frequencies, or any other semi-commercial venture. You know, auction off domain names to the highest bidder, trademarks be #$%&ed. Who needs
As bad as ICANN may be, it can clearly get worse.
The Guys At Work were griping about their offices and furniture a few weeks back. I suggested they not gripe too hard, because the OBVIOUS solution to their office/furniture problems would be
I heard the report on this a few weeks back on NPR. At first blush, it sounds like a great idea. But I remember thinking this at the time, and now I see the word "chiseled" in their report.
I worry about NOTHING people write with chalk, or erase, etc.
I worry about what they PAINT, and what they CHISEL.
That makes the statement that we Americans just can't handle free speech anymore, and perhaps we just plain don't deserve it, either. Sad day when the first permanent mark goes up on the monument.
The MPAA may not be able to own tracks and data, but they may well have enough clout to make sure that writable DVDs never get widespread marketing until they have "appropriate content protection" measures built-in. If that happens to screw everyone over who wants to do home movies or back up computer data......oops.
Just look at the DAT drives and media crowding the shelves for an example.
It's not about technical capability or elegance.
It's not about right or wrong.
It's only marginally about legality
It's ALL about keeping all the marbles in their own sandbox.
But then, we've got to remember that Leahy is also apparently on the wrong side of the fence on copyright law. I am remiss in my duty as a citizen for not writing to one of the senators of the state I live in about this. It's on my list of things to do, but I know it needs to be done well, or not at all.
I would think more in terms of changing line lenght and white space. The problem with that is that you just can't send many bits in a typical joke. That's why I suggest html. Once you're there, there are all sorts of opportunities to make gassy html, and more opportunity to hide more bits in the gas.
Obviously how about jokes?
I wonder how much internet bandwidth is chewed up with joke forwards. The only saving grace is that jokes are usually passed around in text format. Even at that, they're usually 1/3 headers, 1/3 repetitive '>' quotations, and maybe 1/3 joke content.
At this, the average joke couldn't send around many bits of information. But make it like tcp/ip, and distribute your content into several packets, otherwise known as jokes. Fun thing is, you don't even have to send directly to the recipient, as long as you know he/she is reliably in the redistribution path.
Now we have the greatest reason for moving from clear text to html for email and news. It puts more chaff and volume into what were once very compact communications. All that chaff means more opportunity for steganographic bits. Consider the variety in valid html.
But then what happens when you attempt to read a new joke distributed as html from a new Microsoft product? What if there was no hidden message, but it ends up looking like one out of chance and MS-ness. No doubt it would say, "Paul is dead."
The mind boggles.
Problem is, I don't know if I'm being serious, or attempting humor.
...and society is still trying to figure out what the fsck is up. This applies to scientific journals, music, and movies.
Once upon a time, publishing was exclusively done with dead trees, and was 'hard'. Therefore publishers came into being, so that they could become good at it. They do the hard part of publishing for me, putting it on dead trees. We do the hard part of content creation for them, giving them something to put on their dead trees. A wonderfully synergistic relationship that worked for hundreds of years.
But now we're moving away from dead trees. Publishing has quit being 'hard', and we don't need many aspects of those publishing specialists as much as we used to. But these people have a big chunk of turf, and don't want to lose it.
At present, as copyright assignees, publishers, be it books, music, movies, etc, are licensed government monopolies. Whether that's the only thing keeping them in business is anyone's guess. At present, I would argue that we have a counter-productive situation.
I don't advocate getting rid of publishers alltogether, merely that we attempt to refine the meaning of publishing and IP as they relate to an electronic age. Today legislation is trying to extend the past. Besides merely condemning SBCA and DMCA, we should try to arrive at sensible counterproposals. Ones that allow the publishing industries a decent continued existance are more likely to get a hearing.
It's pretty much accepted that we're all made of dead stars. What I hadn't realized is that mere supernovas don't readily explain the relative abundance of heavy metals we seem to have in the solar system.
Yesterday on NPR they had a piece about a researcher who has apparently determined that the more abundant heavy metals come from a collision between neutron stars. The elemental distribution we enjoy in our solar system requires both previous supernovas and neutron star collisions in order to exist. At least according to this researcher.
Makes you wonder about SETI. Also makes you wonder if the more abundant heavier elements are necessary for life, for advanced life, for intelligent life, or for technology-using (maybe intelligent too, unlike Earth) life.
Darn. I knew it was one of those names kinda like Paul, but not really.
Any reader of Poul Anderson's Gateway series knows about the Heechee investigating black holes and the cosmological constant, not to mention the unmentionables hiding out in the Kugelblitz at the edge of the galaxy. Now THEY know that energy can be massive.
Now you've hit the nail on the head. Obviously, "The Programmable Machine" must die. The first step is to key the BIOS and OS together, so it only boots the One True OS, Windows. Then come up with copy-protected and access-controlled media. Then how about Windows-only peripherals, network connections, etc. Once you've taken The Programmable Machine and made it fully Windows-bound, you've got a set of deep pockets available to sue, and Microsoft will make sure that machine won't be usable for illegal copying.
The Programmable Machine can be dead and gone within our lifetime.
is of questionable value, when you're submitting a job that takes overnight or several days to run. We also had some good programs for viewing job output.
A lot of this depends on the legacy of where you work, and what software is installed in what place. I was on TSO when it was the workhorse, and there wasn't a VM installation.
I was also the first user on VM in my area. I don't remember if I started with CMS 1 or 2, but I remember CMS3 coming in.
IMHO the 8.8.1 filesystem namespace stunk. Maclibs were a poorly-supported, gassy pain to use. At least with the 44(+8 with PDS) filespace of MVS, nearly all applications recognized the '.' and you could pretend you had hierarchy. I guess later versions of VM/CMS added a true hierarchical filesystem, but by that time I was headed to Unix, and didn't care.
How dare you criticize it. Nothing GUI about it, at all. No steenking Windows, no Mice, no Icons, no Pointers, not even any clicking, except for the old tactile-feedback keyboards.
Seriously, I used TSO for years. Even after VM came along, it was mostly for office or network use. The serious engineering used batch simulation jobs on TSO, and our interactive graphics applications ran on MVS. (though not TSO)
Today, engineering happens on Unix, and office stuff on Windows. Kind of like the old MVS/VM roles, except that Windows doesn't carry the network role.
You seem to discount that maybe 134k has simply been out of touch with virtuality for a few months, because of real-world work, and this was a much faster way to get a clue than actually doing any digging. Laziness has its place.