I've been planning on writing someting about just this subject for a while. This is the natural situation, if you think about creativity.
How does creative stuff happen? Some author or musician or whatever really digs something, and feels inspired, and writes something that features all the stuff he digs.
You might create a ripping bluegrass tune in the style of Flatt and Scrugs, or if you're Mr. Bungle, mix surf music with death metal. If you're a writer, maybe you will create an epic like the great Finnish epics, only set in a world of your own creation, or maybe a world where the ancient Greek gods are all immortal personifications, updated for the modern age. Maybe you'll write a story where refugees from Troy found the Roman empire. Maybe you'll write a story about a nerdy boy who becomes a great magician, but who doesn't fight the demon Barbatos and an evil possible future version of himself.
In the days before oppressive copyright, this was the norm. The world of fiction was a big pot of cool stuff and everyone worked out of it. To this day, the rich mythical history of past civilizations shape our current world.
Terry Pratchett said this, and I think it's interesting:
'Books in a genre may well remind you of other books in that genre. This is allowed. If it wasn't, H G Wells would have been the only person permitted to write about time machines. Being a fantasy writer is like being allowed to sit around a big bubbling pot, a stew made up of everything that's gone before. You're allowed to take a certain amount of stuff out, and you don't object if it turns out that you're putting stuff in, too. And so the stew bubbles on. There are only two crimes: one is to claim that the pot is yours, and that the other is to claim that there is no pot.'
He wasn't talking about taking specifics like Harry Potter's name and rough history, but such distinctions are slight and, in my opinion, completely unimportant.
So maybe we get a commercial Nielsens where they learn what are good ads and what are bad ads, and they'll stop producing long boring ads that people want to skip.
Any appeal to intelligence of marketers and advertisers is dumb, but nevertheless, it is definitely possible to create advertising that people don't have the urge to skip.
Take me for example. I hate ads. If I've taped a show, I'll fast forward. If I'm watching live TV, I mute the TV and ignore the TV until commercials are over. I go months at a time without seeing a single commercial, and when it happens, it's by accident.
But I watch anime fansubs. No one ever cuts out the little bits at the beginning where they say, "this show was brought to you by the following sponosrs," and yet I never fast forward past the advertisement. It's only 5 seconds, and not annoying, so why bother?
You know what that is? It's an advertisement that gets watched, almost every time, by one of the most anti-advertising people around. It's the television version of Google text ads, and if advertisers adopted a strategy like this, watching TV would become a much less of a painful experience.
However, it will not happen. Advertisers will instead try to make ads even more irritating, to try and get people to pay attention out of shock value. I mean, did TV shows get any better when ratings were introduced?
I can understand spending the disk/cpu for lossless compression on, say, a 96khz classical recording, but most of what comes out of a live mix (or even a commercial rock studio recording) is just not worth the system resources. for live recordings, ogg at 256 or mp3 at 320 is more than enough, and small pipes and short CPUs are much happier.
Trust me, live shows need to be lossless more than well-done studio recordings. Or at least, live shows need to not be mp3. It doesn't show up much on high-quality soundboard recordings, but when you combine the crappy snare/cymbal/voice sound found in some audience recordings with the inherent swishiness of mp3, it doesn't matter how many mp3 bits you throw at it. The recording can be otherwise fine, but certain frequencies are gak. You just end up with a huge 320kbps file with swishy cymbals.
That said, I don't have the resources to download lossless shows, either bandwidth or disk space, both of which cost more than buying the show on CD. But there are times I hate mp3 and lossless is a good way to go.
If it's copy-protected, then We should not extend copyright-protection to it.
That's a really good idea. In other words, if someone chooses to take the law into his own hands, he should be prepared to take responsibility for managing said law, and not run to the government if he fails.
There are lots of things wrong with copyright law, but this addition would at least keep it from crippling technology as well as culture.
Mailblocks Inc.... is pursuing this legal action to ensure its survival, says Mailblocks CEO Phil Goldman.
If I worked for a company whose very survival was based on patenting obvious things and suing other companies for using obvious things, instead of a software company, I would be very sad. I would be sad to find that I'm not competing with TMDA, but PanIP.
Although the letter does not threaten direct law enforcement action, it does let open relayers know that they have been noticed and warned.
I guess I should put OBVIOUS tags around this comment, I'm pretty sure no one will care. Most of my open-relay spam comes from China, Korea, Russia, and so forth. I doubt admins in those countries care about what a US organization has to say.
Their open relays have been reported, almost definitely, by someone. The relays are still open. They don't care. They make it onto open-relay blacklists. The relays are still open. They don't care.
They get a letter? They care? The FTC expects something different to happen. Ha. I know every little bit helps, but if even one admin closes his open relay, I'll be surprised.
Using this same logic you could conclude that snail mail (normal postal mail) is a failure.
It is. At least, it is for me. Junk mail consistently clogs my mailbox, sometimes to the point where I almost need a prybar to get the stuff out. I'm sure all the junk mail slated for me is delivered.
On the other hand, these days important mail is not. That is, one bill a month (on average) is never delivered, or arrives 2-3 months late. If I have to constantly monitor the calendar to make sure that I've paid all the bills that were never delivered, then snail mail is a failure.
If you'll read the article, you'll see that 1984 parallels don't really work.
Those quarantined "will be called at random intervals daily and requested to turn on the camera and present themselves in front of the camera to show their presence," the ministry said.
The cameras stay off until the person turns it on. It's no more intrusive than someone knocking on your door and requesting to see that you're there (which is intrusive, but not frightingly so). Since the camera is under the control of the person under quarantine, this is more similar to being a video phone than 1984-type constant surveillance.
Just involving technology doesn't make something dystopian; how technology is used does. (The tracking wrist band for lawbreakers, something we do in the USA for people under house arrest, is a bit greyer.)
So, basically, three years ago he donated 10k to a charity.... And now he can be held indefinitely without charging him with a crime?
The moral of the story? In America, don't give money to charities. It's not just a good idea, it's the (unwritten, secret) law. Really, though, while half of the US government has been busy trying to make every American into a criminal by default, while the other half realized that arresting only criminals is inefficient.
Since the government doesn't need a reason to arrest you, the only way to stay out of solitary is to hope they don't notice you. Don't do anything to stand out and be like everyone else, and maybe you can stay out of prison.
Funnily enough, that's the same lesson I was taught as I was growing up, but now it has some teeth. Thank you Mr. Ashmodai.
Is it possible to make a real life living in a virtual economy?
I'm sure it's no more difficult than making a real life living in a real economy. Now pardon me, I have to get back to collecting aluminium cans to turn in so I can afford a packet of instant ramen.
At our company we now have multiple college graduates working for under $10/hour.
That seems about right the way things in IT are turning out. I'd like to see, well, even $9/hour would be nicer.
But all through our youth, we were told how cool computers were. I fell prey to it. I could have stuck with my first love, astronomy, and have a fine career doing... something....
And because everyone went into computers, a company gets hundreds of applications for every position, so they no longer have to pay as much as in the fast food or manufacturing industries. What corporation could resist the HR equivalent of buying a stereo from a crack addict?
I blame Commodore, Atari, and Tandy for ruining my life. There's a lawsuit in this, I bet. Are any of those companies still around to sue?
Maybe make the Slashdot mirror only for subscribers?
That would miss the point. The point of Slashdot mirroring content is not a service to the Slashdot readers, but to the poor sites that get linked. Limiting the Slashdot mirror to a small number of people wouldn't help at all.
There is a more or less loosely Nethack-based webcomic somewhere out there.
I don't know of the comic you speak of, but I'll take this time to plug "Final Fantasy @," an eight panel doujinshi (fan comic) for Final Fantasy X, done in the roguelike style. I'm not particularly fond of the game, but there are so many Final Fantasy doujins out there, I couldn't resist.
It's not that good, but the juxtaposition of the expensive FMV of FF being replaced by ASCII amuses me.
College is not about the lessons you take in class, but the lessons you learn in life. These students have learned the financial benefits of being a whore to shady business interests.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the future of the United States Congress. [applause]
All spammers would have to (by law) query the "national do-no-email" database before sending out their crap.
That's a great idea. It would really cut down on the spam. I think the entire database should be stored on a drivespaced 286 behind a 300 baud modem. One query per connection, please.
That should cut the delivered spams per day down to under a thousand per day nationwide, I think.
All these cellphone things remind me of the extra episode of the anime "Platonic Chain." This series is made up about little weird snippets of the modern consumer tech world just a little bit into the future.
In "Platonic Chain Web," the extra episode (not exactly part of the series... I don't know if it's a promo or what), people with video cellphones (kind of like this one, sent to a website) go around the city video blogging their daily lives. And guys who consider themselves players video themselves picking up chicks.
Of course, I'd say "buy microsoft, and sell it before 2000; same with AOL; buy RedHat and sell early." Having money is better than poverty.
After telling myself that engineering would be a waste of time, especially since I'm going to get rich on the stock market, I'd tell myself that in 20 years there would be lots of really cool Japanese stuff available in America, and if I don't take a Japanese major, I'd have to depend on ROM hackers, scanslators, and fansub groups, which would suck.
But most importantly, I'd tell myself that in college and beyond, I would have a few opportunities to trust people. DON'T! I'd tell myself to remember that everyone is an enemy and give myself a list of names of people to not even talk to.
Sure, all the thinking jobs are moving overseas, but right now it's impossible to move face-to-face service jobs out of the country. So we're fine. I think Repo Man said it best:
"There's f**'n room to move as a fry cook."
That'll be America. A nation of fast food workers servicing the needs of corporate managers. God bless it.
All you have to do is know your limits. This ends the cycle of materialism. If you start out with well-defined goals of what you want, you don't get the "I need a cool car" syndrome. I want a decent computer. I can't afford one, but if I were to get one, it would be no more than $1000. That's not so hard. I know my limits.
All you have to do is know that people are more trouble than they're worth. This ends the cycle of loneliness. "I need a wife?" Who has time for a wife when you're working 50 hours a week and commuting 15?
All you have to know is that you shouldn't reproduce. This ends the cycle of supporting kids through their life. It also fights the overpopulation problem.
It doesn't take a god, only self-awareness and a realistic outlook.
The requested URL/pub/phoenix/releases/0.3/phoenix-0.3-win32.zip was not found on this server.
(Yes, I AM a windows user.)
But seriously, I really like Phoenix 0.2. It's not as fast and as useful as the version of Opera I use, not by a long shot, but it's small and doesn't force me to use some lame Windows installer/registry timebomb. I doubt I'll use it for a main browser until it's as fast as Opera, but these two features make it perfect as a backup browser, for those commercial sites with broken javascript interfaces.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been planning on writing someting about just this subject for a while. This is the natural situation, if you think about creativity.
How does creative stuff happen? Some author or musician or whatever really digs something, and feels inspired, and writes something that features all the stuff he digs.
You might create a ripping bluegrass tune in the style of Flatt and Scrugs, or if you're Mr. Bungle, mix surf music with death metal. If you're a writer, maybe you will create an epic like the great Finnish epics, only set in a world of your own creation, or maybe a world where the ancient Greek gods are all immortal personifications, updated for the modern age. Maybe you'll write a story where refugees from Troy found the Roman empire. Maybe you'll write a story about a nerdy boy who becomes a great magician, but who doesn't fight the demon Barbatos and an evil possible future version of himself.
In the days before oppressive copyright, this was the norm. The world of fiction was a big pot of cool stuff and everyone worked out of it. To this day, the rich mythical history of past civilizations shape our current world.
Terry Pratchett said this, and I think it's interesting:
'Books in a genre may well remind you of other books in that genre. This is allowed. If it wasn't, H G Wells would have been the only person permitted to write about time machines. Being a fantasy writer is like being allowed to sit around a big bubbling pot, a stew made up of everything that's gone before. You're allowed to take a certain amount of stuff out, and you don't object if it turns out that you're putting stuff in, too. And so the stew bubbles on. There are only two crimes: one is to claim that the pot is yours, and that the other is to claim that there is no pot.'
He wasn't talking about taking specifics like Harry Potter's name and rough history, but such distinctions are slight and, in my opinion, completely unimportant.
So maybe we get a commercial Nielsens where they learn what are good ads and what are bad ads, and they'll stop producing long boring ads that people want to skip.
Any appeal to intelligence of marketers and advertisers is dumb, but nevertheless, it is definitely possible to create advertising that people don't have the urge to skip.
Take me for example. I hate ads. If I've taped a show, I'll fast forward. If I'm watching live TV, I mute the TV and ignore the TV until commercials are over. I go months at a time without seeing a single commercial, and when it happens, it's by accident.
But I watch anime fansubs. No one ever cuts out the little bits at the beginning where they say, "this show was brought to you by the following sponosrs," and yet I never fast forward past the advertisement. It's only 5 seconds, and not annoying, so why bother?
You know what that is? It's an advertisement that gets watched, almost every time, by one of the most anti-advertising people around. It's the television version of Google text ads, and if advertisers adopted a strategy like this, watching TV would become a much less of a painful experience.
However, it will not happen. Advertisers will instead try to make ads even more irritating, to try and get people to pay attention out of shock value. I mean, did TV shows get any better when ratings were introduced?
I can understand spending the disk/cpu for lossless compression on, say, a 96khz classical recording, but most of what comes out of a live mix (or even a commercial rock studio recording) is just not worth the system resources. for live recordings, ogg at 256 or mp3 at 320 is more than enough, and small pipes and short CPUs are much happier.
Trust me, live shows need to be lossless more than well-done studio recordings. Or at least, live shows need to not be mp3. It doesn't show up much on high-quality soundboard recordings, but when you combine the crappy snare/cymbal/voice sound found in some audience recordings with the inherent swishiness of mp3, it doesn't matter how many mp3 bits you throw at it. The recording can be otherwise fine, but certain frequencies are gak. You just end up with a huge 320kbps file with swishy cymbals.
That said, I don't have the resources to download lossless shows, either bandwidth or disk space, both of which cost more than buying the show on CD. But there are times I hate mp3 and lossless is a good way to go.
If it's copy-protected, then We should not extend copyright-protection to it.
That's a really good idea. In other words, if someone chooses to take the law into his own hands, he should be prepared to take responsibility for managing said law, and not run to the government if he fails.
There are lots of things wrong with copyright law, but this addition would at least keep it from crippling technology as well as culture.
These days, the ability to read and write are lost arts (insert ObSlashdotEditorComment). Does that mean I get to be a hacker now?
Hooray. If I get out my copy of Neuromancer, I can hack the Gibson!
Mailblocks Inc. ... is pursuing this legal action to ensure its survival, says Mailblocks CEO Phil Goldman.
If I worked for a company whose very survival was based on patenting obvious things and suing other companies for using obvious things, instead of a software company, I would be very sad. I would be sad to find that I'm not competing with TMDA, but PanIP.
Although the letter does not threaten direct law enforcement action, it does let open relayers know that they have been noticed and warned.
I guess I should put OBVIOUS tags around this comment, I'm pretty sure no one will care. Most of my open-relay spam comes from China, Korea, Russia, and so forth. I doubt admins in those countries care about what a US organization has to say.
Their open relays have been reported, almost definitely, by someone. The relays are still open. They don't care. They make it onto open-relay blacklists. The relays are still open. They don't care.
They get a letter? They care? The FTC expects something different to happen. Ha. I know every little bit helps, but if even one admin closes his open relay, I'll be surprised.
[/OBVIOUS]
Using this same logic you could conclude that snail mail (normal postal mail) is a failure.
It is. At least, it is for me. Junk mail consistently clogs my mailbox, sometimes to the point where I almost need a prybar to get the stuff out. I'm sure all the junk mail slated for me is delivered.
On the other hand, these days important mail is not. That is, one bill a month (on average) is never delivered, or arrives 2-3 months late. If I have to constantly monitor the calendar to make sure that I've paid all the bills that were never delivered, then snail mail is a failure.
If you'll read the article, you'll see that 1984 parallels don't really work.
Those quarantined "will be called at random intervals daily and requested to turn on the camera and present themselves in front of the camera to show their presence," the ministry said.
The cameras stay off until the person turns it on. It's no more intrusive than someone knocking on your door and requesting to see that you're there (which is intrusive, but not frightingly so). Since the camera is under the control of the person under quarantine, this is more similar to being a video phone than 1984-type constant surveillance.
Just involving technology doesn't make something dystopian; how technology is used does. (The tracking wrist band for lawbreakers, something we do in the USA for people under house arrest, is a bit greyer.)
So, basically, three years ago he donated 10k to a charity. ... And now he can be held indefinitely without charging him with a crime?
The moral of the story? In America, don't give money to charities. It's not just a good idea, it's the (unwritten, secret) law. Really, though, while half of the US government has been busy trying to make every American into a criminal by default, while the other half realized that arresting only criminals is inefficient.
Since the government doesn't need a reason to arrest you, the only way to stay out of solitary is to hope they don't notice you. Don't do anything to stand out and be like everyone else, and maybe you can stay out of prison.
Funnily enough, that's the same lesson I was taught as I was growing up, but now it has some teeth. Thank you Mr. Ashmodai.
Is it possible to make a real life living in a virtual economy?
I'm sure it's no more difficult than making a real life living in a real economy. Now pardon me, I have to get back to collecting aluminium cans to turn in so I can afford a packet of instant ramen.
At our company we now have multiple college graduates working for under $10/hour.
... something....
That seems about right the way things in IT are turning out. I'd like to see, well, even $9/hour would be nicer.
But all through our youth, we were told how cool computers were. I fell prey to it. I could have stuck with my first love, astronomy, and have a fine career doing
And because everyone went into computers, a company gets hundreds of applications for every position, so they no longer have to pay as much as in the fast food or manufacturing industries. What corporation could resist the HR equivalent of buying a stereo from a crack addict?
I blame Commodore, Atari, and Tandy for ruining my life. There's a lawsuit in this, I bet. Are any of those companies still around to sue?
Maybe make the Slashdot mirror only for subscribers?
That would miss the point. The point of Slashdot mirroring content is not a service to the Slashdot readers, but to the poor sites that get linked. Limiting the Slashdot mirror to a small number of people wouldn't help at all.
There is a more or less loosely Nethack-based webcomic somewhere out there.
I don't know of the comic you speak of, but I'll take this time to plug "Final Fantasy @," an eight panel doujinshi (fan comic) for Final Fantasy X, done in the roguelike style. I'm not particularly fond of the game, but there are so many Final Fantasy doujins out there, I couldn't resist.
It's not that good, but the juxtaposition of the expensive FMV of FF being replaced by ASCII amuses me.
Halfway down the page:
http://worldrim.tripod.com/comics.html.
College is not about the lessons you take in class, but the lessons you learn in life. These students have learned the financial benefits of being a whore to shady business interests.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the future of the United States Congress. [applause]
All spammers would have to (by law) query the "national do-no-email" database before sending out their crap.
That's a great idea. It would really cut down on the spam. I think the entire database should be stored on a drivespaced 286 behind a 300 baud modem. One query per connection, please.
That should cut the delivered spams per day down to under a thousand per day nationwide, I think.
All these cellphone things remind me of the extra episode of the anime "Platonic Chain." This series is made up about little weird snippets of the modern consumer tech world just a little bit into the future.
... I don't know if it's a promo or what), people with video cellphones (kind of like this one, sent to a website) go around the city video blogging their daily lives. And guys who consider themselves players video themselves picking up chicks.
In "Platonic Chain Web," the extra episode (not exactly part of the series
It's the wave of the future.
Kill Yourself Now.
.signature...)
That's good advice at any age.
(Which seques nicely into my
Of course, I'd say "buy microsoft, and sell it before 2000; same with AOL; buy RedHat and sell early." Having money is better than poverty.
After telling myself that engineering would be a waste of time, especially since I'm going to get rich on the stock market, I'd tell myself that in 20 years there would be lots of really cool Japanese stuff available in America, and if I don't take a Japanese major, I'd have to depend on ROM hackers, scanslators, and fansub groups, which would suck.
But most importantly, I'd tell myself that in college and beyond, I would have a few opportunities to trust people. DON'T! I'd tell myself to remember that everyone is an enemy and give myself a list of names of people to not even talk to.
Oh, and where did the moose/blender term come from? I'm starting to get a little worried about the mental health of the Opera team.
What's so scarry about a blender with a stupid moose in it? I mean, that's a big moose, but really.
Are those walnuts?
Sure, all the thinking jobs are moving overseas, but right now it's impossible to move face-to-face service jobs out of the country. So we're fine. I think Repo Man said it best:
"There's f**'n room to move as a fry cook."
That'll be America. A nation of fast food workers servicing the needs of corporate managers. God bless it.
I know it's so late no one will read this, but...
All you have to do is know your limits. This ends the cycle of materialism. If you start out with well-defined goals of what you want, you don't get the "I need a cool car" syndrome. I want a decent computer. I can't afford one, but if I were to get one, it would be no more than $1000. That's not so hard. I know my limits.
All you have to do is know that people are more trouble than they're worth. This ends the cycle of loneliness. "I need a wife?" Who has time for a wife when you're working 50 hours a week and commuting 15?
All you have to know is that you shouldn't reproduce. This ends the cycle of supporting kids through their life. It also fights the overpopulation problem.
It doesn't take a god, only self-awareness and a realistic outlook.
"Almost 300 anti-Ralsky posts were made on the Slashdot.org Web site..."
Sure that sounds impressive, but how many of those were dupes?
The slashdot editors owe me a buck for everybody that reads this comment.
So by moderating it down, you save slashdot money. Ok, moderators, do your civic duty and moderate the parent down. Keep slashdot alive!
Phoenix 0.3? Don't you mean Pheonix 404?
/pub/phoenix/releases/0.3/phoenix-0.3-win32.zip was not found on this server.
The requested URL
(Yes, I AM a windows user.)
But seriously, I really like Phoenix 0.2. It's not as fast and as useful as the version of Opera I use, not by a long shot, but it's small and doesn't force me to use some lame Windows installer/registry timebomb. I doubt I'll use it for a main browser until it's as fast as Opera, but these two features make it perfect as a backup browser, for those commercial sites with broken javascript interfaces.