You would not use TV cards for this, you would use digitial video cameras, such as cheap USB cameras or USB video digitizers. You would only use TV cards to record OTA TV signals I think, otherwise much too expensive.
The Tivo and similar boxes really change that. There is _always_ something decent on the box. I just find so little desire to re-watch something I have already seen if there is something decent and new on the hard disk.
I know children are different so if I had those I could see having recordings for them, or more hard disk space on a networked box.
Everybody seemed to have the same question. If that's the case, you should explain the reason because it will help people come up with an answer.
In this case, of course you are going to have to do custom work because so few people would seem to need it. I could I could imagine a campus dorm, but even then 16 tuners would be too many.
(One reason for that is that so many of the shows you watch these days are repeated many times. Since with a PVR you don't care when you watch, many 'conflicts' aren't really conflicts, though the software could be better about this. In fact, only the major networks seem not to repeat a lot.)
Now a more interesting project would be to build a receiver that could record all the closed captioning from all the channels. While you could do that with tons of tuner cards, it seems that there should be an easier way to do it since all you really want is that low bitrate VBR.
I wonder if you could do something with GNU Radio to get those VBR data streams from multiple channels at once? With enough CPU you could use GNU Radio or other software radio to do the multiple channel recording too.
While I see the occasional need for 2 tuners, frankly sometimes even that sounds like overkill. I find when there are two shows on at once it's a subtle message from the TV gods that I shouldn't watch so much TV.
I've also never figured out why you need the DVD burner. With so much disk in my Tivo, there is always stuff to watch, and my need for archiving stuff to watch again later is so small as to be unimportant. If I _really_ need it, a lot of it is at the video store for rent.
Is the 16 tuners so you could have a box shared by a whole LAN of people? I guess if you have the bandwidth that would make sense.
Right now the public thinks PVRs are too complex, so the big vendors will probably be working to make them simpler rather than more complex.
What we really need is a component architecture, with lots of little pieces, all with 100mbit ethernet (firewire and USB 2.0 are too "smart" for their own good. ether is the way to go.)
Then just add what you need. Tuner boxes (OTA, digital or satellite as needed.) Decoders, mounted right on the inputs of the TV that plug in ethernet and spit out component video or NTSC. The ethernet of course leads you to drives running NFS or SMB, and an always on processor to control it all that's simple.
That way you can start simple, with just a tuner, a decoder and a controller (these 3 might be in the same box) and a networked drive or a drive-in-a-box, and add what you want.
Certs cost money because they are trying to certify things like "This key belongs to real representatives of Microsoft corporation, which is really the incorporated company headquartered in Redmond, WA, etc. etc."
And as we all know, even Verisign goofed on their efforts to confirm this for somebody who came in wanting an MS Cert.
The reason they cost too much is we're asking them, in many cases, to certify too much.
When it comes to SSL certs for a browser, all that we're really testing is that the web server we are talking to really is the one at domain foo.com and ip address a.b.c.d. We never check to see if foo.com is really owned by Foo Industries. We can ask to see the certificate, and find out that it says that, but in practice this is never done.
We could have free certificates that certify that the holder, at the time of issue, controlled the domain foo.com, was able to get mail at postmaster@foo.com and at the time of issue, foo.com resolved to a.b.c.d. That would prevent man in the middle attacks on SSL that are done later, at web connection time.
However, they would not prevent MITM attacks done at the time of certification. ie. if I can spoof the DNS server of the certificate authority, I can convince it that I own yourbank.com, for example. Then later I can spoof yours, so that when you ask for yourbank.com, you get my evil machine, and my machine has a cert that confirms it is microsoft.com, and the golden lock appears.
To get around that, somebody has to verify that you own the domain with a means outside the internet. That's the part that's hard to figure out how to do for free. Ideas include certifying the caller ID (except anybody with a SIP phone can set that to whatever they want.)
There are some tricks you might be able to pull, like having the CA have secure connections to a wide array of distributed net entry points, or a secure connection to the root servers for the major TLDs it is certifying in.
Remember that prior to this, the default in most cities is that motorized vehicles of any kind (except the powered wheelchairs of the disabled) are not allowed on sidewalks. In some cases vehicles of any kind are by default banned, usually bikes and often rollerblades and even skateboards.
Segway worked hard to get laws passed to declare their device a special case, not like an ordinary motorized vehicle. Some cities resisted, said, "no, we are not going to make a special exception for your new device. It gets classed like any other motorized vehicle, and as always, it's banned from the sidewalks."
Where Kamen goofed is he got broader laws passed declaring the Segway to not be a vehicle and thus, according to state and national laws IT IS NOT ALLOWED ON THE ROADS. So in places where it is banned on the sidewalk, it is also, unless they say otherwise, also not allowed on the roads either. I don't think this will be enforced, though.
I do agree they should see if the device is a danger before deciding where it should go. But realize that the current default is what SF did. What other cities who are "not banning" it have done is to change their rules to allow this one motorized vehicle on their sidewalks.
You measure fuel economy by weight, not by volume.
Ie. km/kg of hydrogen (or metres/gram, it would be the same!)
I always found it annoying that metric fuel economies were done in a reciprocal fashion, liters/100km. Aside from reversing everybody's sense of things making it more difficult to head convert, people like "larger number is better" most of the time.
It's often cited as a PVR feature because it's easy to explain. But PVR owners know the truth -- they hardly ever use that feature, because they hardly ever watch live TV any more. That's the real change.
I do see heavy VCR users saying they don't think they need a PVR or listing data. But, I have yet to see sombody say they got a PVR and then got rid of it. In spite of all you think you know about them, you really don't understand what they do until you get one.
I know. I thought I knew what it would do, and I'm usually very good at predicting such things, often better than their own designers, but I was just as surprised.
They will take over, to the same extent CDs took over from vinyl, and as DVDs are taking over from VHS because the difference is even more dramatic.
They will get better user interfaces. In fact, today, they could put a mic on the remote control so you don't even push buttons, you just hold it up and say "Record Every Matlock". Even Grandma can handle that.
So they will cause every home to buy 200gb of disk space, and that will be good for HD makers, though they won't want to pay a lot for that 200gb of space.
But there's already too much about me on my own web site to keep them busy. This goes way back before google. And there are other nastier tools. For example, I once dated a woman and used alta vista to find links to her page. It uncovered a page inside he own site, now disconnected from it, but still on the server, about her past boyfriend.
You can find similar things in the wayback machine at archive.org about people, things they may have thought erased. Takes the mystery out of it. Good thing I haven't dated for 5 years.
After last year's Leonids, it's hard to go out
on
Geminid Meteor Shower
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I used to go out regularly for showers, usually the Perseids. It's usually too cold for the Geminids.
But after last year's Leonids, where I got a 7,000/hour rate -- 2 per second for a sustained 15 minutes -- in Japan, it's hard to go out for the regular showers again, where even witha claimed rate of 75/hour you are likely to see fewer without the best conditions.
Even this year's show, which got up to 600/hour at the peak,and thus the 2nd best show in my experience, was a letdown.
Of course, I missed the 1966 show, being too young. Joe Haldeman saw it and told me it was like standing on the bridge of the Enterprise and watching the stars go by. He said for the first time he really could understand how he was standing on a planet moving in space.
But that was an estimated 70,000 per hour rate.
We won't see that again from the Leonids for about 97 years, if we see it then. It is possible another surprise show could come now that they are getting better at predicting, but I doubt it.
So yes, the past few years have shown an abundance of good shows. There was also a good Perseids show in the mid 90s, about 300/hour just after its comet went by. But the show is over for now, and I doubt the Geminids rate a/. headline.
The author cites at the start of his paper, my own article on this concept. Many people have come up with this idea independently, and while I was one of the earlier ones, proposing it at USENIX in 1996, it has earlier roots as well in places like AMIX and others.
In fact, I seem to get a mail every week from somebody who has just thought up this idea!
However, since being an early proponent, I have decided it's not so good an idea after all, though it can form one component of an anti-spam strategy, particularly for dealing with how to continue to allow anonymous mail in the anti-spam world.
At the heart of it, spam is the abuse of bulk mail, so solutions should attack the cause, not the symptoms. Undesired non-bulk mail is still undesired but it is not in any remote way a critical problem worthy of a complex solution, and we have decided as a socity you should not have any right not to be annoyed, though you can have a right to not have your mailbox overwhelmed. (Just as a ping is not on offence, but a ping-flood is.)
Duh. But what I said was that the cost of building a home for unknown reasons goes up in places where the land is valuable.
It works like this. As a region heats up, the existing homes might double in price. A $200K home that was a $150K home on a $50K piece of land becomes a $400K home. But it is not, as it turns out, a $150K home on a $250K piece of land. It's not exact, but it's more like now a $250K home on a $150K piece of land. For unknown reasons the house itself is worth more, even though there has not been anything to cause a doubling in the cost of homebuilding.
And if you go to a region with cheap land, lo, you can build that same house for $150K.
Anyway, why are you replying to a day old/. thread? Nobody reads these after they vanish from the main page.
Don't forget the corruption in the housing trades
on
Open Source Housing
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· Score: 2
The housing industry is one of the world's largest, and the people who run it like that homes cost so much, the money is going to them.
Normally competition would stop this but somehow it doesn't. It's too regionalized. It can cost $500K to build a house on a lot in silicon valley when you could get the whole house and land for $250K elsewhere. Makes no sense but it happens.
Part of the reason is corruption, a strong and nasty resistence to something that would end the gravy train.
Since this is a day-old/. thread (which very few people read) let me just say I understand some of your points but not all. As I noted, the CDTPA animation was donated so I don't see much point in complaining others could have done it better after complaining it was a waste of resources.
As for online forums, it's also an issue of our own bandwidth to manage this. The EFF is perhaps not as large as you think, around 15 highly overworked staff, so perhaps it is a testament to their work that you think we can just snap our fingers and do all the things you suggest. I have a higher opinion of how Cory's doing than you do,I guess.
And the truth is that while we do speak out about laws before they pass, in most cases small orgs have little influence then. The courts pay much more attention.
As noted, since this is a day old/. thread, no point in continuing debate here. Send e-mail if you prefer.
And I still like USENET over most of the web boards, because it has two things I can't do without -- fast response from a local server, and tracking what I have read and haven't read.
Nazi references are appropriate, Mike notwithstanding, when the subject matter at hand is free speech organizations defending principles which result in giving free speech rights to despicable parties. The Nazi march in Skokie is the archetypical case here. The ACLU lost members over that (in particular a lot of Jews are in the ACLU) but a lot of other donors, including myself, applaud their devotion to principle.
The EFF fights for free speech rights for everybody, even scum. If that shuts off some avenues of attack against spammers, then other avenues have to be found.
People who decide that anybody who isn't ready to do, in your words "anything" must be "spam supporters" don't help the cause much at all I fear. You can be the Judean People's Front and we'll be the People's front of Judea.
However, it's close to impossible that anybody would agree with 100% of what the EFF does, and definitely not 100% of what EFF people like John Gilmore do on their own. Nor do we, as a free speech org, muzzle such personal actions and opinions. If you can find somebody who is doing more for the causes you agree with, and less on the causes you don't, then by all means pick them to donate to instead of the EFF.
This seems like "If you're not 100% for us, you must be against us."
The EFF does not in any way support spammers, any more than the ACLU is a Nazi-supporting organization because they defended their right to march in Skokie. The EFF defends principles, and thinks that government regulation of E-mail and vigilante justice are not the best answers to spam. I get 230 spams a day personally. Trust me, I hate it even more than you do.
What's the big deal on the Tinsel Town club video? It was just a lark, a fun project a couple of staffers wanted to do, and as far as I know the animation and singing were all volunteer/donated efforts. You seem to dislike it because it looked too good to be the simple fun side project that it was?
Parody is actually one of the most effective tools available in political debate, to boot. The reason we sent it out as an alert in the new grass roots system was we needed something decent but not critically important to test it for the first time.
The EFF had a discussion area (comp.org.eff.talk) from the very beginning but it became clear that it was not cost-effective to have staff spend the amount of time that would be necessary to even read the flamewars (and EFF topics do engender flamewars) let alone have an official position there. Instead it's better to listen directly to the specifically addressed comments from members and the public, and surf more casually the many discussion areas that cover the same topics, from slashdot, to greplaw, to 100 blogs.
(Our outreach coordinator, Cory Doctorow, runs one of the most popular blogs, and has run some for the EFF directly.)
The EFF is not acting like a traditional lobbying organization, in fact, we're not permitted by law to be a lobbying organization. Most of our budget goes into court cases and research, the rest into public education, attending committees and planning for the future.
Larry's message is a good one. Let me add to it. What are you actually doing to protect the rights that are important to you? It's great to speak out about things, and give verbal support to the good causes. But in the end, you have a duty to also DO something about it.
You can do this yourself, or you can outsource it to groups that will take your money and apply it for you to direct action. The EFF does that. It has several lawyers on staff who do the scutwork on all sorts of cases. Some we lose -- that's the way of things -- and others we win. Right now we have laywers on a wide variety of cases, from the MusicCity/Streamcast case, to several DVD cases, to anonymity cases, free speech cases, the ReplayTV commercial-skip case and many others listed on our web site.
We do more than send out legal briefs though. We've got people attending committee meetings for things like the broadcast flag and others. And we have people reading and analysing the nasty new and proposed new laws like the CDTPA, the Homeland Security Bill and Poindexter's new Total Information Awareness System. We helped create the chilling effects project to stop censorship through the fake threat of legal action.
I could go on and on about what we have done and will keep doing. While nobody will agree with 100% of it (even those inside) if you agree with most of it, you should consider if we can be your proxy for your obligation (if you think you have one) to actually do something about these causes.
Trust me, we need that money. This has been a very down year in the economy. All our donors are hurting financially and can't give as much as before. We know that includes you, but as Larry says, if you can afford to give $800 to telecom and media monopolies, perhaps you can afford to take action with a similar amount?
Or maybe you don't feel you have any duty to do more than just speak out on/. about it. That's your decision to make.
Well, actually tanks are fairly easy to build, but yes, this would be for factories mostly.
And being able to design buildings in CAD, and then just push a button and have the building rise out of your tank with no labour would be a revolutionary principle.
Or any other structure. No labour, just software turned into structure.
Could this technique be used to take building blocks that have been tuned to be neutrally boyant, and then assemble them into structures using sound in the water, then slowly lower the water and weld each layer as it comes out of the water?
Of course neutrally boyant requires no gasses in the objects that can be compressed, though I could imagine you might have metal building blocks with a gas bladder inside that can be filled by computer controlled pump to make it neutrally boyant to some degree.
Imagine building the frame of a house in a big tank.
It just has de facto power because every nameserver in the world is configured to point at ICANN's set of root servers, and it is that way because the name servers all come configured that way out of the box.
There is a good reason for this, we don't want a fractured net where different people get different answers to a DNS query.
At the same time, if we truly have the will to dump ICANN, and we all do it at once (or at least the most commonly used nameservers do it at once) their power can be totally stripped from them.
What I really want is for somebody to get a bank of these, and some cheap labour (teenagers or overseas or whatever) to just slot floppies into them. With a nice program that would read the floppy, figure out what type it was, and copy it to hard disk.
I would love to be able to ship my many hundreds of old floppies off to such a service and get back some CDs with all the data. Duplicates removed, ideally.
There are probably business services which will do this for dollars a floppy, which is too high, but if all you need is a teenager who can insert 200 floppy disks an hour for $6/hour, you can do it cheap, and I would happily pay 50 cents/floppy to get that stuff read.
I have a lot of formats though. Every type of PC floppy. Commodore PET and C64 disks. Atari 800 disks. Atari ST disks. Apple ][ disks. Disks hard written from Xenix with tar and cpio archives in 720K format as well as 1.2MB format. Lots and lots.
To put in a plug (though I no longer have any ownership interest in it) one of the things about ClariNet is that it can handle any load.
Because it feeds out news in USENET format from the major wire services, the load is placed on the local server. ClariNet's servers never even feel increased demand. Even highly saturated internet pipes would only slow things slightly, USENET doesn't care about the latency of the pipe.
And all this using 20 year old technology, oddly enough. People always talk about the news sites failing during things like the Olympics, Sept. 11 etc. but the distributed technology never has that problem.
On top of that, USENET is designed for serial news, so that it shows you what's new. You don't have to sit there constantly refereshing a page to see if there is new material, you only see the new material. We even had a system so that urgent stories could be fed directly to your screen, and it's not a polling style of "push" like PointCast was.
Generally the newsreader is, surprise surprise, a great way to read news. What surprises me is that all these years later -- ClariNet was the first of the dot-com companies -- nobody has done the same. I sold it 5 years ago, but it's still running, if a bit shrunk from the economy.
Slashdot Mirror
You would not use TV cards for this, you would use digitial video cameras, such as cheap USB cameras or USB video digitizers. You would only use TV cards to record OTA TV signals I think, otherwise much too expensive.
The Tivo and similar boxes really change that. There is _always_ something decent on the box. I just find so little desire to re-watch something I have already seen if there is something decent and new on the hard disk.
I know children are different so if I had those I could see having recordings for them, or more hard disk space on a networked box.
Everybody seemed to have the same question. If that's the case, you should explain the reason because it will help people come up with an answer.
In this case, of course you are going to have to do custom work because so few people would seem to need it. I could I could imagine a campus dorm, but even then 16 tuners would be too many.
(One reason for that is that so many of the shows you watch these days are repeated many times. Since with a PVR you don't care when you watch, many 'conflicts' aren't really conflicts, though the software could be better about this.
In fact, only the major networks seem not to repeat a lot.)
Now a more interesting project would be to build a receiver that could record all the closed captioning from all the channels. While you could do that with tons of tuner cards, it seems that there should be an easier way to do it since all you really want is that low bitrate VBR.
I wonder if you could do something with GNU Radio to get those VBR data streams from multiple channels at once? With enough CPU you could use GNU Radio or other software radio to do the multiple channel recording too.
While I see the occasional need for 2 tuners, frankly sometimes even that sounds like overkill. I find when there are two shows on at once it's a subtle message from the TV gods that I shouldn't watch so much TV.
I've also never figured out why you need the DVD burner. With so much disk in my Tivo, there is always stuff to watch, and my need for archiving stuff to watch again later is so small as to be unimportant. If I _really_ need it, a lot of it is at the video store for rent.
Is the 16 tuners so you could have a box shared by a whole LAN of people? I guess if you have the bandwidth that would make sense.
Right now the public thinks PVRs are too complex, so the big vendors will probably be working to make them simpler rather than more complex.
What we really need is a component architecture, with lots of little pieces, all with 100mbit ethernet (firewire and USB 2.0 are too "smart" for their own good. ether is the
way to go.)
Then just add what you need. Tuner boxes (OTA, digital or satellite as needed.) Decoders, mounted right on the inputs of the TV that plug in ethernet and spit out component video or NTSC. The ethernet of course leads you to drives running NFS or SMB, and an always on processor to control it all that's simple.
That way you can start simple, with just a tuner, a decoder and a controller (these 3 might be in the same box) and a networked drive or a drive-in-a-box, and add what you want.
Certs cost money because they are trying to certify things like "This key belongs to real representatives of Microsoft corporation, which is really the incorporated company headquartered in Redmond, WA, etc. etc."
And as we all know, even Verisign goofed on their efforts to confirm this for somebody who came in wanting an MS Cert.
The reason they cost too much is we're asking them, in many cases, to certify too much.
When it comes to SSL certs for a browser, all that we're really testing is that the web server we are talking to really is the one at domain foo.com and ip address a.b.c.d.
We never check to see if foo.com is really owned by Foo Industries. We can ask to see the certificate, and find out that it says that, but in practice this is never done.
We could have free certificates that certify that the holder, at the time of issue, controlled the domain foo.com, was able to get mail at postmaster@foo.com and at the time of issue, foo.com resolved to a.b.c.d. That would prevent man in the middle attacks on SSL that are done later, at web connection time.
However, they would not prevent MITM attacks done at the time of certification. ie. if I can spoof the DNS server of the certificate authority, I can convince it that I own yourbank.com, for example. Then later I can spoof yours, so that when you ask for yourbank.com, you get my evil machine, and my machine has a cert that confirms it is microsoft.com, and the golden lock appears.
To get around that, somebody has to verify that you own the domain with a means outside the internet. That's the part that's hard to figure out how to do for free. Ideas include certifying the caller ID (except anybody with a SIP phone can set that to whatever they want.)
There are some tricks you might be able to pull, like having the CA have secure connections to a wide array of distributed net entry points, or a secure connection to the root servers for the major TLDs it is certifying in.
All sounds harder to do for free.
Remember that prior to this, the default in most cities is that motorized vehicles of any kind (except the powered wheelchairs of the disabled) are not allowed on sidewalks.
In some cases vehicles of any kind are by default banned, usually bikes and often rollerblades and even skateboards.
Segway worked hard to get laws passed to declare their device a special case, not like an ordinary motorized vehicle. Some cities resisted, said, "no, we are not going to make a special exception for your new device. It gets classed like any other motorized vehicle, and as always, it's banned from the sidewalks."
Where Kamen goofed is he got broader laws passed declaring the Segway to not be a vehicle and thus, according to state and national laws IT IS NOT ALLOWED ON THE ROADS. So in places where it is banned on the sidewalk, it is also, unless they say otherwise, also not allowed on the roads either. I don't think this will be enforced, though.
I do agree they should see if the device is a danger before deciding where it should go. But realize that the current default is what SF did. What other cities who are "not banning" it have done is to change their rules to allow this one motorized vehicle on their sidewalks.
You measure fuel economy by weight, not by volume.
Ie. km/kg of hydrogen (or metres/gram, it would be the same!)
I always found it annoying that metric fuel economies were done in a reciprocal fashion, liters/100km. Aside from reversing everybody's sense of things making it more difficult to head convert, people like "larger number is better" most of the time.
It's often cited as a PVR feature because it's easy to explain. But PVR owners know the truth -- they hardly ever use that feature, because they hardly ever watch live TV any more. That's the real change.
I do see heavy VCR users saying they don't think they need a PVR or listing data. But, I have yet to see sombody say they got a PVR and then got rid of it. In spite of all you think you know about them, you really don't understand what they do until you get one.
I know. I thought I knew what it would do, and I'm usually very good at predicting such things, often better than their own designers, but I was just as surprised.
They will take over, to the same extent CDs took over from vinyl, and as DVDs are taking over from VHS because the difference is even more dramatic.
They will get better user interfaces. In fact, today, they could put a mic on the remote control so you don't even push buttons, you just hold it up and say "Record Every Matlock". Even Grandma can handle that.
So they will cause every home to buy 200gb of disk space, and that will be good for HD makers, though they won't want to pay a lot for that 200gb of space.
Of course just balancing is not enough. You should send $2 to the EFF for each dollar you give to the RIAA/MPAA :-)
But there's already too much about me on my own web site to keep them busy. This goes way back before google. And there are other nastier tools. For example, I once dated a woman and used alta vista to find links to her page. It uncovered a page inside he own site, now disconnected from it, but still on the server, about her past boyfriend.
You can find similar things in the wayback machine at archive.org about people, things they may have thought erased. Takes the mystery out of it. Good thing I haven't dated for 5 years.
I used to go out regularly for showers, usually the Perseids. It's usually too cold for the Geminids.
/. headline.
But after last year's Leonids, where I got a 7,000/hour rate -- 2 per second for a sustained 15 minutes -- in Japan, it's hard to go out for the regular showers again, where even witha claimed rate of 75/hour you are likely to see fewer without the best conditions.
Pictures are here and here for 2002.
Even this year's show, which got up to 600/hour at the peak,and thus the 2nd best show in my experience, was a letdown.
Of course, I missed the 1966 show, being too young. Joe Haldeman saw it and told me it was like standing on the bridge of the Enterprise and watching the stars go by. He said for the first time he really could understand how he was standing on a planet moving in space.
But that was an estimated 70,000 per hour rate.
We won't see that again from the Leonids for about 97 years, if we see it then. It is possible another surprise show could come now that they are getting better at predicting, but I doubt it.
So yes, the past few years have shown an abundance of good shows. There was also a good Perseids show in the mid 90s, about 300/hour just after its comet went by. But the show is over for now, and I doubt the Geminids rate a
The author cites at the start of his paper, my own article on this concept. Many people have come up with this idea independently, and while I was one of the earlier ones, proposing it at USENIX in 1996, it has earlier roots as well in places like AMIX and others.
In fact, I seem to get a mail every week from somebody who has just thought up this idea!
However, since being an early proponent, I have decided it's not so good an idea after all, though it can form one component of an anti-spam strategy, particularly for dealing with how to continue to allow anonymous mail in the anti-spam world.
At the heart of it, spam is the abuse of bulk mail, so solutions should attack the cause, not the symptoms. Undesired non-bulk mail is still undesired but it is not in any remote way a critical problem worthy of a complex solution, and we have decided as a socity you should not have any right not to be annoyed, though you can have a right to not have your mailbox overwhelmed. (Just as a ping is not on offence, but a ping-flood is.)
As it turns out, while timesharing always seems cheaper from the economic analysis, people tend to pick the PC anyway, under their control.
However, in this case, having the disk at the home makes sense. See my latest essay on this, or what I call Poor Man's Video on Demand
Duh. But what I said was that the cost of building a home for unknown reasons goes up in places where the land is valuable.
/. thread? Nobody reads these after they vanish from the main page.
It works like this. As a region heats up, the existing homes might double in price. A $200K home that was a $150K home on a $50K piece of land becomes a $400K home. But it is not, as it turns out, a $150K home on a $250K piece of land. It's not exact, but it's more like now a $250K home on a $150K piece of land. For unknown reasons the house itself is worth more, even though there has not been anything to cause a doubling in the cost of homebuilding.
And if you go to a region with cheap land, lo, you can build that same house for $150K.
Anyway, why are you replying to a day old
The housing industry is one of the world's largest, and the people who run it like that homes cost so much, the money is going to them.
Normally competition would stop this but somehow it doesn't. It's too regionalized. It can cost $500K to build a house on a lot in silicon valley when you could get the whole house and land for $250K elsewhere. Makes no sense but it happens.
Part of the reason is corruption, a strong and nasty resistence to something that would end the gravy train.
Since this is a day-old /. thread (which very few people read) let me just say I understand some of your points but not all. As I noted, the CDTPA animation was donated so I don't see much point in complaining others could have done it better after complaining it was a waste of resources.
/. thread, no point in continuing debate here. Send e-mail if you prefer.
As for online forums, it's also an issue of our own bandwidth to manage this. The EFF is perhaps not as large as you think, around 15 highly overworked staff, so perhaps it is a testament to their work that you think we can just snap our fingers and do all the things you suggest. I have a higher opinion of how Cory's doing than you do,I guess.
And the truth is that while we do speak out about laws before they pass, in most cases small orgs have little influence then. The courts pay much more attention.
As noted, since this is a day old
And I still like USENET over most of the web boards, because it has two things I can't do without -- fast response from a local server, and tracking what I have read and haven't read.
Nazi references are appropriate, Mike notwithstanding, when the subject matter at hand is free speech organizations defending principles which result in giving free speech rights to despicable parties. The Nazi march in Skokie is the archetypical case here. The ACLU lost members over that (in particular a lot of Jews are in the ACLU) but a lot of other donors, including myself, applaud their devotion to principle.
The EFF fights for free speech rights for everybody, even scum. If that shuts off some avenues of attack against spammers, then other avenues have to be found.
People who decide that anybody who isn't ready to do, in your words "anything" must be "spam supporters" don't help the cause much at all I fear. You can be the Judean People's Front and we'll be the People's front of Judea.
However, it's close to impossible that anybody would agree with 100% of what the EFF does, and definitely not 100% of what EFF people like John Gilmore do on their own. Nor do we, as a free speech org, muzzle such personal actions and opinions. If you can find somebody who is doing more for the causes you agree with, and less on the causes you don't, then by all means pick them to donate to instead of the EFF.
This seems like "If you're not 100% for us, you must be against us."
The EFF does not in any way support spammers, any more than the ACLU is a Nazi-supporting organization because they defended their right to march in Skokie. The EFF defends principles, and thinks that government regulation of E-mail and vigilante justice are not the best answers to spam. I get 230 spams a day personally. Trust me, I hate it even more than you do.
Follow this example, one of the winners of the 1991 rec.humor.funny comedy awards
Q&A at Radio Shack
What's the big deal on the Tinsel Town club video? It was just a lark, a fun project a couple of staffers wanted to do, and as far as I know the animation and singing were all volunteer/donated efforts. You seem to dislike it because it looked too good to be the simple fun side project that it was?
/. about it. That's your decision to make.
Parody is actually one of the most effective tools available in political debate, to boot. The reason we sent it out as an alert in the new grass roots system was we needed something decent but not critically important to test it for the first time.
The EFF had a discussion area (comp.org.eff.talk) from the very beginning but it became clear that it was not cost-effective to have staff spend the amount of time that would be necessary to even read the flamewars (and EFF topics do engender flamewars) let alone have an official position there. Instead it's better to listen directly to the specifically addressed comments from members and the public, and surf more casually the many discussion areas that cover the same topics, from slashdot, to greplaw, to 100 blogs.
(Our outreach coordinator, Cory Doctorow, runs one of the most popular blogs, and has run some for the EFF directly.)
The EFF is not acting like a traditional lobbying organization, in fact, we're not permitted by law to be a lobbying organization. Most of our budget goes into court cases and research, the rest into public education, attending committees and planning for the future.
Larry's message is a good one. Let me add to it. What are you actually doing to protect the rights that are important to you? It's great to speak out about things, and give verbal support to the good causes. But in the end, you have a duty to also DO something about it.
You can do this yourself, or you can outsource it to groups that will take your money and apply it for you to direct action. The EFF does that. It has several lawyers on staff who do the scutwork on all sorts of cases. Some we lose -- that's the way of things -- and others we win. Right now we have laywers on a wide variety of cases, from the MusicCity/Streamcast case, to several DVD cases, to anonymity cases, free speech cases, the ReplayTV commercial-skip case and many others listed on our web site.
We do more than send out legal briefs though. We've got people attending committee meetings for things like the broadcast flag and others. And we have people reading and analysing the nasty new and proposed new laws like the CDTPA, the Homeland Security Bill and Poindexter's new Total Information Awareness System. We helped create the chilling effects project to stop censorship through the fake threat of legal action.
I could go on and on about what we have done and will keep doing. While nobody will agree with 100% of it (even those inside) if you agree with most of it, you should consider if we can be your proxy for your obligation (if you think you have one) to actually do something about these causes.
Trust me, we need that money. This has been a very down year in the economy. All our donors are hurting financially and can't give as much as before. We know that includes you, but as Larry says, if you can afford to give $800 to telecom and media monopolies, perhaps you can afford to take action with a similar amount?
Or maybe you don't feel you have any duty to do more than just speak out on
Well, actually tanks are fairly easy to build, but yes, this would be for factories mostly.
And being able to design buildings in CAD, and then just push a button and have the building rise out of your tank with no labour would be a revolutionary principle.
Or any other structure. No labour, just software turned into structure.
Could this technique be used to take building blocks that have been tuned to be neutrally boyant, and then assemble them into structures using sound in the water, then slowly lower the water and weld each layer as it comes out of the water?
Of course neutrally boyant requires no gasses in the objects that can be compressed, though I could imagine you might have metal building blocks with a gas bladder inside that can be filled by computer controlled pump to make it neutrally boyant to some degree.
Imagine building the frame of a house in a big
tank.
Anybody done this?
It just has de facto power because every nameserver in the world is configured to point at ICANN's set of root servers, and it is that way because the name servers all come configured that way out of the box.
There is a good reason for this, we don't want a fractured net where different people get different answers to a DNS query.
At the same time, if we truly have the will to dump ICANN, and we all do it at once (or at least the most commonly used nameservers do it at once) their power can be totally stripped from them.
I outline how at this page
What I really want is for somebody to get a bank of these, and some cheap labour (teenagers or overseas or whatever) to just slot floppies into them. With a nice program that would read the floppy, figure out what type it was, and copy it to hard disk.
I would love to be able to ship my many hundreds of old floppies off to such a service and get back some CDs with all the data. Duplicates removed, ideally.
There are probably business services which will do this for dollars a floppy, which is too high, but if all you need is a teenager who can insert 200 floppy disks an hour for $6/hour, you can do it cheap, and I would happily pay 50 cents/floppy to get that stuff read.
I have a lot of formats though. Every type of PC floppy. Commodore PET and C64 disks. Atari 800 disks. Atari ST disks. Apple ][ disks. Disks hard written from Xenix with tar and cpio archives in 720K format as well as 1.2MB format. Lots and lots.
Anybody going to start up such a service?
To put in a plug (though I no longer have any ownership interest in it) one of the things about
ClariNet is that it can handle any load.
Because it feeds out news in USENET format from the major wire services, the load is placed on the local server. ClariNet's servers never even feel increased demand. Even highly saturated internet pipes would only slow things slightly, USENET doesn't care about the latency of the pipe.
And all this using 20 year old technology, oddly enough. People always talk about the news sites failing during things like the Olympics, Sept. 11 etc. but the distributed technology never has that problem.
On top of that, USENET is designed for serial news, so that it shows you what's new. You don't have to sit there constantly refereshing a page to see if there is new material, you only see the new material. We even had a system so that urgent stories could be fed directly to your screen, and it's not a polling style of "push" like PointCast was.
Generally the newsreader is, surprise surprise, a great way to read news. What surprises me is that all these years later -- ClariNet was the first of the dot-com companies -- nobody has done the same. I sold it 5 years ago, but it's still running, if a bit shrunk from the economy.