Although it may be difficult to understand given the current political climate, secession was considered a completely reasonable course of action by a large percentage of the US population.
At the time the United States was established as a political entity, it was a confederation of states. The word "state", you may notice, is in technical discussions and most parts of the world a term referring to a country, not a province. The issue of how much power the federal government was to have caused huge political strife and was by no means settled at the time of the Civil War.
Prior to Andrew Jackson and to a larger extent the Civil War, the doctrine of nullification was widely accepted. It allowed a state to refuse to comply with a federal law it felt was unconstitutional, requiring the federal government to either rescind the law or pass a Constitutional amendment (requiring a 2/3 majority) establishing it. If the federal government wished to force the issue, the state had the right to secede from a government it no longer agreed with.
Under Jackson, the federal government established tariffs on southern goods, the proceeds of which were intended to be used to prop up the failing northern economy. This enraged the south, and 1 of the states (North Carolina, perhaps?) nullified the tariff. John C. Calhoun, the Vice President, supported nullification, putting him at odds with Jackson, who learned about this time that Calhoun had supported Jackson's censure for illegally invading parts of Florida and executing 2 British citizens.
Angered by this betrayal and threatened by a state's defiance of the federal government, Jackson reacted harshly and the state was forced to back down from nullification. Jackson's other actions, such as ignoring the Supreme Court ruling on his deportation of Native Americans, further strengthened the power of the executive branch.
The Confederate States of America had a constitutional government with popular democratic support, and was in a situation basically analogous to Taiwan today. Had Lincoln not forced reunification, the 2 countries could easily have gone their separate ways. Whether these countries would have been able to survive without the joint industrial and agricultural economy enjoyed by the United States is another question.
Other actions taken during the Civil War by the federal government, such as the Alien and Sedition Acts, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the revocation of habeas corpus, cemented the perception and power of the federal government and significantly expanded the privileges enjoyed by the executive branch.
It was only until some time after the Civil War that "United States" became a singular term, nullification and secession were viewed as bizarre and unacceptable. The Civil War was a turning point for the United States of America, turning them from a republic into an empire, with Lincoln as its first emperor.
ext2 is a quite stable fs. It is not journaling, so crashing at an inconvenient time can lead to an inconsistent fs, but other than that there is no reason why an ext2 fs should magically develop inconsistencies after 3-6 weeks of runtime.
No, no! ext2 loses data like a firehose loses water! I know it's true because some guy keeps posting it to Slashdot!
The kicker is, all of the tests have some really irrelevant shit involved with them, like using the CDE Audio CD player. My job is to run a bunch of headless 450's, for web, radius, mail, news, and DNS, why the piss would I have X installed, much less use it?
Well, CDE is unadulterated steaming crap, and I agree on the lack of use for the CD player app, but you could very well use X, since it has this nifty thing called "remote display". I personally use it for other things, since all my admin tools are CLI or text files, but OSes like Red Hat and Solaris seem to have a lot of graphical admin tools, the usage of which is the recommended method of configuration.
Well. 50 megabits isn't that bad; it's only about 6 megabytes. The scary thing is that the OS X clock apparently allocates itself 50 megabytes.
Don't feel bad, though. I learned the importance of proper capitalization of units in chemistry class. I'm sure that when you get to high school you'll figure it out too.
Re:An Idea.. slightly OT, but whatever..
on
Net Vegas
·
· Score: 1
As pointed out in the article, an employee of the slot machine manufacturer altered machines for payout.. this wouldnt happen if a secure computer system were to design the slot machine[...]
I know this is massively off-topic, but I just have to mention that this brought back happy memories of hacking System RPM and Saturn assembly stand-alone on my HP49 in my HS chemistry class. Happy until the teacher took away my reference docs, that is.
Of course, aside from the extra included RAM and higher speed, the HP49 sucked in every possible way compared to the HP48. I really wish they had gotten to release a true successor to the 48... Hate Carly forever!
My apologies for the annoying <TT> post; CmdrTaco's lameness filter decided my post had "'junk' characters". Email me at vsync@quadium.net and I can supply you with a clean HTML version.
I fear that by setting forth answers to these sorts of questions, we may end up in a situation like that created by the Bill of Rights or (more recently) the Microsoft judgement; requirements previously set forth by law (de jure or de facto) are now viewed as concessions to us, and we can be granted a few, but not all, in order to appease us while the larger agenda continues.
That said, I feel it is important to set forth the rights and responsibilities I feel have already been trampled on, so that it cannot be said that we never set forth our desires in this matter. Keep in mind, however, that by and large, these are not things I think would be "nice to have"; these are things previously established by either explicit legislation, common law, or extremely sensible court precedent. I believe that many of these laws were only changed due to widespread bribery in the form of "campaign contributions", FUD called "amicus curiæ" and "Congressional testimony by industry leaders", and a continuous refusal by the modern Mob to accept that the days of the horse and buggy are, in fact, over.
1. When you speak of "MP3" technology, it seems you are committing the fallacy engaged in by a large portion of the populous. MP3 is only one of several lossy audio compression file formats. Others include Ogg Vorbis, RealAudio, and Windows Media.
The problem with conflating "MP3" with "compressed audio file", and further with "free music", as both the RIAA and the media seem to love doing, is that this creates an environment where MP3 files themselves are seen as suspicious (leading to situations where small independent artists find their own music removed by their hosting provider, something I am not entirely convinced the RIAA does not approve of) and sites like MP3.com and EMusic are tarred with the same brush as Napster. Further, MP3 is a patented technology and therefore has legal issues associated with it that are outside the scope of this discussion.
That said, some, but not all, of the noninfringing uses I support for lossy audio compression are:
Time- and space-shifting. I have a CD collection that, while not as huge as those possessed by many on Slashdot, provides me with a resource I can turn to repeatedly for musical enjoyment. Every day or two, I copy various files from this collection onto a flash card which I then listen to with a portable player while driving, working, and exercising. This has a number of advantages:
* This is more portable than taking the CDs with me, especially since I tend to mix-and-match artists and musical styles in a day's listening and therefore would need to take 5-10 CDs along with me each day. * CDs require moving parts, while flash memory does not. Therefore, converting my music into digital audio files requires me to charge up my player's batteries less often. * CDs are expensive to replace and easily damaged by scratches, sunlight, drops, cracks, and shattering. By leaving my original media at home, I have only the easy-to-replace flash card to worry about, rather than my collection of shiny plastic discs. * CDs can present an attractive target to those pondering a car break-in. A flash memory card currently does not, and it is far more easily concealed.
Online digital music purchase. I subscribe to EMusic, which for $10/month provides me with unlimited access to completely standard and unencumbered 128kb/s MP3 files. Even over a modem, the compression used allows me to have several new albums in a night's downloading. The members of the RIAA, meanwhile, are against such innovation and only occasionally will they provide access to files which can only be played by a proprietary player I cannot run on my computer's operating system, cannot be transferred to a portable player, and often cannot be backed up. Meanwhile they continue to avoid providing incentives to purchase physical compilations, such as consistently attractive cover art and CD label design, interesting liner notes, alternative packaging (perhaps tin, wicker, bamboo, etc.), membership to fan clubs, and the like.
Criticism, parody, et cetera. Compression technology provides a convenient and inexpensive way to include verbatim portions of a work necessary for the legally protected actions of criticism and parody. For example, if I am writing a report on common views of women in modern music, it is far simpler and more effective for me to simply include clips of the music being discussed than to include only the lyrics. This is a significant advantage of modern hypertext technologies, and it is important that new legislation not hamper existing rights simply because they may be exercised in a new and more effective medium.
2. Once again, diverse entities find themselves tarred with the same brush. Peer-to-peer (P2P) simply means that entities communicate with each other without requiring significant interaction with a master entity to complete the transaction. While media-sharing systems like Napster, Gnutella, and the like are generally the only ones explicitly labelled as such in the news media, they are by no means the only places where peer-to-peer technology can be found.
The Internet itself is largely peer-to-peer, for the very good reason that it is a more fault-tolerant approach than a strict client-server paradigm. Individual computers supplying resources to each other can still continue if one becomes unavailable, and "mirror sites" provide redundancy. In contrast, the continuous annexation of smaller corporations and their resources into larger ones creates situations where when one of the resulting megasites becomes unavailable, vast reaches of content drop off the net.
This is a low blow, but perhaps our legislators, so concerned about terrorism to our electronic infrastructure, should be made aware of the efforts of the RIAA and MPAA to abolish an approach determined by U.S.-sponsored research to be best at weathering network disruption.
3. I largely agree with your first assessment of the DMCA. Among the very few things I like, however, are the protections against liability for service providers (although I disagree somewhat with the approach taken to achieve this), the fact that requirements exist to get content removed, and the explicit protection of fair use.
The requirement that specific conditions be met before demanding the removal of content makes it very easy to recognize corporate censorship and, while complying with the law, publicize such action in a way that likely would not have happened before such a formulaic system was set up. The Chilling Effects Clearinghouse has taken this idea and run with it.
One of the main problems with the DMCA is that it criminalizes actions rather than technologies. Therefore one's fair use rights can be denied if copyright protection technology must be circumvented in order to get to the content and exercise one's legally protected rights. As the DVD and eBook situations show, it is not enough to allow only "significant" noninfringing uses. Rather, any noninfringing use should legitimize the tool in question, and legal action should be taken against those actually infringing copyright, in the same way our society does not prosecute locksmiths for possessing burglary tools, but prosecutes those who break into homes.
4. Put simply, these organizations can cease their slanderous and libelous attacks on a law-abiding segment of the population, and for their sakes I hope they do so prior to a huge class-action lawsuit on behalf of those whose reputations have been thus tarnished. I do not use "warez" (illegally copied software); I do not keep music around when I don't own a license to it; I have not downloaded a single motion picture. I am careful to observe the law, and I will not stand for being treated as a criminal, nor will I accept punishment for actions I have not committed.
5. I have already addressed many of these rights in my first point, but I will attempt to list a concise and non-exclusive list of important rights in relation to digital media: time-shifting, space-shifting, medium-shifting, criticism, parody, educational use, backup, the ability to store digital media in multiple and diverse locations simultaneously while only using them in one, and the ability to preview a work before purchasing it.
This last (the right of preview) is not currently a legally established right, but I see no reason for it to be denied. It is a commonly-decried situation that while the one or two songs publicized may be of acceptable quality, the rest of an album is often filler and trash. Although retailers are required by law to prominently post refund restrictions, most retailers will not accept music or movies for refund, and post this fact not at all, in small print, or on the back of the receipt once the customer has already made his or her purchase. Finally, music and movies are expensive, as the major content-producing oligarchies have already been found guilty in various courts of price-fixing. In such a world, it is important that the customer have some recourse.
I hold out little hope for legal fair use in this nation; as James Madison said in a letter to Thomas Jefferson dated October 17, 1788: "Monopolies are sacrifices of the many to the few. Where the power is in the few, it is natural for them to sacrifice the many to their own partialities and corruptions." He also suggested the reservation "in all cases a right to the public to abolish the privilege, at a price to be specified in the grant of it". Perhaps this time has come.
The file itself consists of some layers of fluff and pointers and indices and encoding not normally found in Postscript, but the rendering part that is used to paint the page in the end is pretty much Postscript. As far as I know it includes the whole Postscript programming language.
Close, but not quite. From what I've read, PDF is a subset of Postscript. Postscript is a Turing-complete Forth-like programming language which happens to have a lot of graphical stuff in it. PDF is a simpler page description language.
This is why Postscript files can always be converted to PDF, but especially tight and elegant Postscript programs (I would guess only hand-coded ones nowadays) will end up much larger as PDFs.
Postscript is a page description language developed by
Adobe systems in the hope of providing a portable format that would use the
best features of every system.
Postscript is a block structured procedural language that is similar to Forth.
Each postscript document is a computer program that when run produces the printed pages of the document.
Originally Adobe Systems intended for postscript documents to be fully
portable between different printing devices, but certain computer companies
insisted on including machine language routines in the documents produced
by their systems and so the portability between different printers was lost.
In response, Adobe created the PDF format, which allows formatting
to be tightly controlled on web and printed pages, but requires a special
PDF viewer.
I waited forever to shell out $200 for a cdrom, burned 3-4 discs, and that was about it. Now the drive isn't even plugged in, because I have four hdds in my machine.
Out of curiosity, how do you back up your 4 HDDs of data?
I like a quiet mostly dark room myself, but frequent breaks to the outside are great!
-Swivel Chair/Titlty Chair: So you can move around some and 'stretch' out.
When I was in retail prison, I used to try to sell this chair all the time ("Wow, your 6yo girl's first homework setup? Try this chair! It'll, um, last her for life..."), because it's comfortable! If only it leaned backwards a little farther. Just don't let those silly stripey-shirted inquisitive helpful salesbots fool you: it already has the good fabric (might be nice in a black and dark green, though...).
-Music up: Radio or playlist, either way try to get a variety of songs/music you know.
Back when I had bandwidth, Digitally Imported would protect me. Now that those fee guidelines are in place, can it even push me down the stairs anymore?:( (Sorry, long night...)
-Coffee/Mountain Dew/Jolt/Bawls/Etc: 'nough said
Bzzt! Tea. Hot, high-quality green or herbal tea, such as ginger.
-Food: Good snacks that don't really drain you. For me, these include things like Cashews, Chex Party Mix, and Kettle Chips (if you haven't had these potato chips, SHAME ON YOU!). Avoid anything that is really sugar-rich though, as it'll give you that little boost, then kill ya and make you want to sleep. Wanting to sleep=bad code.
Just had that happen. I had a good 6hrs sleep before coming to work, which is usually plenty for me to make it through the night. I didn't feel like making anything, so I grabbed a can of SpaghettiOs. Big mistake. After consuming half the can of starch/sugar, I immediately passed out on the floor for 3hrs. (I work nights at a hotel, and it's allowed, but still.)
Sugar is poison in large quantities. Ever wonder why jellies and jams don't really go bad?
Avoid anything sugar-rich or massively starchy, period. It'll make you fat and kill your energy in general, plus for me it causes skin problems. Protein and some fat, mostly; that'll keep you energetic for the long haul, and you should be able to stay up longer without an unpleasant crash in the middle. (Just be sure to wash hands and face if you eat anything greasy, or you'll feel gross and get grease on the keyboard besides.) Try any of Morningstar's hot dogs or Boca's sausages (brats, italian sausages, etc); they're basically pure wheat/soy protein and they taste great.
Once, at my Tedious Retail Job, I was sitting at one of the sales kiosks, which weren't supposed to be used for anything besides selling computers, but I guess it was a quiet enough day that even the managers didn't care.
I was using PuTTY to get to my laptop, and I had Emacs running with some of the code I was working on. I got interested in one particular problem, and since I seemed to have a clear mental path on how to solve it, I kept working. Some time later, I went to stretch, and I blinked in surprise as I suddenly became aware that I had been unaware of where I was, how much time had passed, which screen and what type of screen I was sitting at, which operating system I was using, and even the existence of the window decorations.
It was the most extreme form of tunnel vision I've ever experienced. I guess the more accurate term would be "focus", both in the literal visual sense and in the mental sense. It's the most productive time I can remember, and every time I've worked on a block of code for a significant period of time, I've had the benefit of a similar mindset, but never anywhere close to that degree.
I can't help noticing that this type of focus, which proved extremely helpful in my coding (and also somewhat surreal) is explicitly denied in the corporate environment. The office, it seems, is all about being aware of the image you are presenting at all times, coworkers walking by and saying hi, and various meetings, phone calls, and other interruptions.
I keep wanting to achieve that level of attention again, but I'm easily distractable and hard to settle down. (For example, I was planning to work on my server code right now.) I just got some candles and little rocks that I set up in a nice arrangement at home; I'm hoping it provides a more conducive environment for meditating and working on code. Maybe one of those little burbling water fountains too...
The thing is Microsoft can just kill ANY software product that needs a profit to survive. Netscape this or that, could put could not put blah blah. Microsoft doesn't need to argue. They can decide they want Netscape to die and just invest X money on a bundled broswer. That's it, Netscape HAS to close.
I used to be a huge fan of Netscape. In many ways, NS3/X11 was (and still is) one of the best browsers ever made. Back when the phrase "browser wars" had any relevance, I consistently rooted for Netscape, and I have always and likely will always despise MSIE.
But the sad fact is that Netscape lost because they got overconfident and started sucking. Badly. NS4 was an unadulterated pile of tripe on every platform I've ever had the misfortune to see it running on. (I'm of the firm opinion that Netscape's sending JWZ to play on other projects was a large reason for this.)
From extremely unstable Java, JavaScript, and plugin handling, to a broken DOM, to broken font handling, to simple unmitigated flouting of Web standards, NS4 was a nightmare for developers, system administrators, and end users. And let's not forget that NS4's claim of implementing CSS, while deploying the most insane and broken implementation known to humanity, singlehandedly held back the Web by 2 or 3 years.
My experience with Netscape, the company, seems to bear this out. When I worked for a large company supposedly in a "strategic alliance" with them, they refused to even answer the phone when their phones showed it was us calling. I personally knew several people tasked with deploying Netscape products at the enterprise level, and the painful and unsupported hacks we had to put in place leave me cringing even now. We were supposed to be using the iPlanet server everywhere, but my manager had us use Apache and a third-party servlet engine after Netscape refused to implement basic Java servlet APIs and their configuration manager trashed our configs. When I later worked at a startup, we had one of the Netscape execs at our company, and he was still convinced that his old company's server products would win the day. Netcraft statistics meant nothing to him -- it was as if they didn't even exist -- and he seemed puzzled why everyone refused to mouth platitudes about it.
I use (unbranded) Mozilla now, and I'm very happy with it, but keep in mind that this is basically a complete redesign and rewrite of Netscape, years too late. Mozilla, Opera, Konqueror, and other browsers may win back market share, but it is far too late for Netscape, the company, and for good reason.
The automatic documentation generators in the style of JavaDoc did get quite popular, and started springing up on every language, almost overnight.
I suggest that Common Lisp's docstrings and the browsers and information screens available in every widespread Common Lisp environment are far more useful and convenient. Also C-z a in ILISP rocks.
The C preprocessor is quite possibly better than nothing, but it has some serious deficiencies, deficiencies which in my opinion make it little more than a handy toy for programmers.
Recursive macros are not allowed.
The entire macro falls into the caller's scope.
Macro expansion takes place on a textual basis, not a semantic one.
You have to be extremely careful about bracketing so as not to affect the meaning of the code which calls your macro.
There is AFAIK no equivalent to gensym.
Arguments to macros are multiply evaluated.
The C preprocessor does not provide a programming language, but a syntax for textual replacement.
Several things on this list may have changed since the last time I worked with C macros, but the basic premise of the preprocessor is flawed. Instead of merely replacing properly formatted strings in source code (a facility which is occasionally useful), it should offer a way to process already-tokenized source code, take it apart and modify its functionality, producing new code as the result. These two may seem similar, but in reality are widely differing expectations.
I suggest reading Paul Graham's On Lisp for an example of a much more effective macro system.
Doesn't seem all that evolved to me...
on
As Languages Evolve...
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Early languages were all very low-level, but successive generations have become higher and higher.
I don't buy this. Explain why Common Lisp lets me do this, for example:
Java, 18 years later, requires code like the following to approach the functionality of the previous snippet:
/* We have to shove EVERYTHING into a class. A singly-inherited one, no less. */ class Settings { static File settingsFile = new File("etc" + File.separator + "monkey" + File.separator + "settings.conf"); // is static initialization order even guaranteed? static File settingsFileBackup = new File(settingsFile.getName() + ".bak");
public void saveSettings() { boolean backedUpSettings = false;
if (settingsFile.exists()) {// get the old one out of the way settingsFile.renameTo(settingsFileBackup); backedUpSettings = true; }
FileOutputStream fow; BufferedOutputStream bow; try { fow = new FileOutputStream(settingsFile); bow = new BufferedOutputStream(fow); dumpSettings(bow); close(bow); } catch (Exception e) { if (bow && fow.getFD().valid()) { close(bow);// file descriptors aren't garbage collected } // now put back the old file if (backedUpSettings) { settingsFileBackup.renameTo(settingsFile); } } } }
Note that this Java code loses on systems like Mac OS, which store the file type somewhere besides the filename.
Or how about Common Lisp's condition system, which allows execution to actually continue where it left off once an error is corrected? What about MAPCAR, or DO and DO*? Heck, what about first-class function objects?
Of course, try getting a job using Common Lisp, or any other decently abstracted general-purpose programming language today...
BTW, Slashdot inserted the spurious semicolons in this post, not me.
I'm reminded of the scene at the end, with the army of Chinese orphans or whatever, all trained by the primer. Kinda fascinating how life seems to imitate art, and it would be an amazing thing for a device to have a cultural impact anything like the fiction depiction.
I can't help wondering if this might have a bigger effect than just that of simple literacy, organization, or MP3s. Many posters have mentioned a wealth disparity and massive corruption in India. If this device helps more Indians become literate and computer friendly, and Internet access (even 1 kiosk for every 50mi^2) becomes more widespread, I can't imagine some kind of political organization not taking place, whether it be labor unions, election rallies, lobbying, or all of the above.
Strangely enough, such organization would likely appear as the organic "seed" model mentioned in The Diamond Age.
Ah well, one can certainly hope for some sort of social improvement through technology. If any place needs it, India is probably it.
Slashdot Mirror
At the time the United States was established as a political entity, it was a confederation of states. The word "state", you may notice, is in technical discussions and most parts of the world a term referring to a country, not a province. The issue of how much power the federal government was to have caused huge political strife and was by no means settled at the time of the Civil War.
Prior to Andrew Jackson and to a larger extent the Civil War, the doctrine of nullification was widely accepted. It allowed a state to refuse to comply with a federal law it felt was unconstitutional, requiring the federal government to either rescind the law or pass a Constitutional amendment (requiring a 2/3 majority) establishing it. If the federal government wished to force the issue, the state had the right to secede from a government it no longer agreed with.
Under Jackson, the federal government established tariffs on southern goods, the proceeds of which were intended to be used to prop up the failing northern economy. This enraged the south, and 1 of the states (North Carolina, perhaps?) nullified the tariff. John C. Calhoun, the Vice President, supported nullification, putting him at odds with Jackson, who learned about this time that Calhoun had supported Jackson's censure for illegally invading parts of Florida and executing 2 British citizens.
Angered by this betrayal and threatened by a state's defiance of the federal government, Jackson reacted harshly and the state was forced to back down from nullification. Jackson's other actions, such as ignoring the Supreme Court ruling on his deportation of Native Americans, further strengthened the power of the executive branch.
The Confederate States of America had a constitutional government with popular democratic support, and was in a situation basically analogous to Taiwan today. Had Lincoln not forced reunification, the 2 countries could easily have gone their separate ways. Whether these countries would have been able to survive without the joint industrial and agricultural economy enjoyed by the United States is another question.
Other actions taken during the Civil War by the federal government, such as the Alien and Sedition Acts, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the revocation of habeas corpus, cemented the perception and power of the federal government and significantly expanded the privileges enjoyed by the executive branch.
It was only until some time after the Civil War that "United States" became a singular term, nullification and secession were viewed as bizarre and unacceptable. The Civil War was a turning point for the United States of America, turning them from a republic into an empire, with Lincoln as its first emperor.
Why?
No, no! ext2 loses data like a firehose loses water! I know it's true because some guy keeps posting it to Slashdot!
You are wrong. The really sad thing is how easy it was to prove this.
Well, CDE is unadulterated steaming crap, and I agree on the lack of use for the CD player app, but you could very well use X, since it has this nifty thing called "remote display". I personally use it for other things, since all my admin tools are CLI or text files, but OSes like Red Hat and Solaris seem to have a lot of graphical admin tools, the usage of which is the recommended method of configuration.
Don't feel bad, though. I learned the importance of proper capitalization of units in chemistry class. I'm sure that when you get to high school you'll figure it out too.
Your Slashdot skins are pretty impressive, though.
Even that wouldn't work; sorry.
Of course, aside from the extra included RAM and higher speed, the HP49 sucked in every possible way compared to the HP48. I really wish they had gotten to release a true successor to the 48... Hate Carly forever!
My apologies for the annoying <TT> post; CmdrTaco's lameness filter
decided my post had "'junk' characters". Email me at vsync@quadium.net
and I can supply you with a clean HTML version.
I fear that by setting forth answers to these sorts of questions, we may
end up in a situation like that created by the Bill of Rights or (more
recently) the Microsoft judgement; requirements previously set forth by
law (de jure or de facto) are now viewed as concessions to us, and we can
be granted a few, but not all, in order to appease us while the larger
agenda continues.
That said, I feel it is important to set forth the rights and
responsibilities I feel have already been trampled on, so that it cannot
be said that we never set forth our desires in this matter. Keep in mind,
however, that by and large, these are not things I think would be "nice to
have"; these are things previously established by either explicit
legislation, common law, or extremely sensible court precedent. I believe
that many of these laws were only changed due to widespread bribery in the
form of "campaign contributions", FUD called "amicus curiæ" and
"Congressional testimony by industry leaders", and a continuous refusal by
the modern Mob to accept that the days of the horse and buggy are, in
fact, over.
1. When you speak of "MP3" technology, it seems you are committing the
fallacy engaged in by a large portion of the populous. MP3 is only one
of several lossy audio compression file formats. Others include Ogg
Vorbis, RealAudio, and Windows Media.
The problem with conflating "MP3" with "compressed audio file", and
further with "free music", as both the RIAA and the media seem to love
doing, is that this creates an environment where MP3 files themselves
are seen as suspicious (leading to situations where small independent
artists find their own music removed by their hosting provider,
something I am not entirely convinced the RIAA does not approve of)
and sites like MP3.com and EMusic are tarred with the same brush as
Napster. Further, MP3 is a patented technology and therefore has legal
issues associated with it that are outside the scope of this
discussion.
That said, some, but not all, of the noninfringing uses I support for
lossy audio compression are:
Time- and space-shifting.
I have a CD collection that, while not as huge as those
possessed by many on Slashdot, provides me with a
resource I can turn to repeatedly for musical enjoyment.
Every day or two, I copy various files from this
collection onto a flash card which I then listen to with
a portable player while driving, working, and exercising.
This has a number of advantages:
* This is more portable than taking the CDs with me,
especially since I tend to mix-and-match artists and
musical styles in a day's listening and therefore
would need to take 5-10 CDs along with me each day.
* CDs require moving parts, while flash memory does
not. Therefore, converting my music into digital
audio files requires me to charge up my player's
batteries less often.
* CDs are expensive to replace and easily damaged by
scratches, sunlight, drops, cracks, and shattering.
By leaving my original media at home, I have only
the easy-to-replace flash card to worry about,
rather than my collection of shiny plastic discs.
* CDs can present an attractive target to those
pondering a car break-in. A flash memory card
currently does not, and it is far more easily
concealed.
Online digital music purchase.
I subscribe to EMusic, which for $10/month provides me
with unlimited access to completely standard and
unencumbered 128kb/s MP3 files. Even over a modem, the
compression used allows me to have several new albums in
a night's downloading. The members of the RIAA,
meanwhile, are against such innovation and only
occasionally will they provide access to files which can
only be played by a proprietary player I cannot run on my
computer's operating system, cannot be transferred to a
portable player, and often cannot be backed up. Meanwhile
they continue to avoid providing incentives to purchase
physical compilations, such as consistently attractive
cover art and CD label design, interesting liner notes,
alternative packaging (perhaps tin, wicker, bamboo,
etc.), membership to fan clubs, and the like.
Criticism, parody, et cetera.
Compression technology provides a convenient and
inexpensive way to include verbatim portions of a work
necessary for the legally protected actions of criticism
and parody. For example, if I am writing a report on
common views of women in modern music, it is far simpler
and more effective for me to simply include clips of the
music being discussed than to include only the lyrics.
This is a significant advantage of modern hypertext
technologies, and it is important that new legislation
not hamper existing rights simply because they may be
exercised in a new and more effective medium.
2. Once again, diverse entities find themselves tarred with the same
brush. Peer-to-peer (P2P) simply means that entities communicate with
each other without requiring significant interaction with a master
entity to complete the transaction. While media-sharing systems like
Napster, Gnutella, and the like are generally the only ones explicitly
labelled as such in the news media, they are by no means the only
places where peer-to-peer technology can be found.
The Internet itself is largely peer-to-peer, for the very good reason
that it is a more fault-tolerant approach than a strict client-server
paradigm. Individual computers supplying resources to each other can
still continue if one becomes unavailable, and "mirror sites" provide
redundancy. In contrast, the continuous annexation of smaller
corporations and their resources into larger ones creates situations
where when one of the resulting megasites becomes unavailable, vast
reaches of content drop off the net.
This is a low blow, but perhaps our legislators, so concerned about
terrorism to our electronic infrastructure, should be made aware of
the efforts of the RIAA and MPAA to abolish an approach determined by
U.S.-sponsored research to be best at weathering network disruption.
3. I largely agree with your first assessment of the DMCA. Among the very
few things I like, however, are the protections against liability for
service providers (although I disagree somewhat with the approach
taken to achieve this), the fact that requirements exist to get
content removed, and the explicit protection of fair use.
The requirement that specific conditions be met before demanding the
removal of content makes it very easy to recognize corporate
censorship and, while complying with the law, publicize such action in
a way that likely would not have happened before such a formulaic
system was set up. The Chilling Effects Clearinghouse has taken this
idea and run with it.
One of the main problems with the DMCA is that it criminalizes actions
rather than technologies. Therefore one's fair use rights can be
denied if copyright protection technology must be circumvented in
order to get to the content and exercise one's legally protected
rights. As the DVD and eBook situations show, it is not enough to
allow only "significant" noninfringing uses. Rather, any noninfringing
use should legitimize the tool in question, and legal action should be
taken against those actually infringing copyright, in the same way our
society does not prosecute locksmiths for possessing burglary tools,
but prosecutes those who break into homes.
4. Put simply, these organizations can cease their slanderous and
libelous attacks on a law-abiding segment of the population, and for
their sakes I hope they do so prior to a huge class-action lawsuit on
behalf of those whose reputations have been thus tarnished. I do not
use "warez" (illegally copied software); I do not keep music around
when I don't own a license to it; I have not downloaded a single
motion picture. I am careful to observe the law, and I will not stand
for being treated as a criminal, nor will I accept punishment for
actions I have not committed.
5. I have already addressed many of these rights in my first point, but I
will attempt to list a concise and non-exclusive list of important
rights in relation to digital media: time-shifting, space-shifting,
medium-shifting, criticism, parody, educational use, backup, the
ability to store digital media in multiple and diverse locations
simultaneously while only using them in one, and the ability to
preview a work before purchasing it.
This last (the right of preview) is not currently a legally
established right, but I see no reason for it to be denied. It is a
commonly-decried situation that while the one or two songs publicized
may be of acceptable quality, the rest of an album is often filler and
trash. Although retailers are required by law to prominently post
refund restrictions, most retailers will not accept music or movies
for refund, and post this fact not at all, in small print, or on the
back of the receipt once the customer has already made his or her
purchase. Finally, music and movies are expensive, as the major
content-producing oligarchies have already been found guilty in
various courts of price-fixing. In such a world, it is important that
the customer have some recourse.
I hold out little hope for legal fair use in this nation; as James Madison
said in a letter to Thomas Jefferson dated October 17, 1788: "Monopolies
are sacrifices of the many to the few. Where the power is in the few, it
is natural for them to sacrifice the many to their own partialities and
corruptions." He also suggested the reservation "in all cases a right to
the public to abolish the privilege, at a price to be specified in the
grant of it". Perhaps this time has come.
Close, but not quite. From what I've read, PDF is a subset of Postscript. Postscript is a Turing-complete Forth-like programming language which happens to have a lot of graphical stuff in it. PDF is a simpler page description language.
This is why Postscript files can always be converted to PDF, but especially tight and elegant Postscript programs (I would guess only hand-coded ones nowadays) will end up much larger as PDFs.
The DMOZ language descriptions page has more information about Postscript:
Congratulations, you're completely incorrect.
Out of curiosity, how do you back up your 4 HDDs of data?
I think JWZ actually deserves that honor.
Check it out! They sampled Linus for the techno remix of RMS's free software song!
I like a quiet mostly dark room myself, but frequent breaks to the outside are great!
When I was in retail prison, I used to try to sell this chair all the time ("Wow, your 6yo girl's first homework setup? Try this chair! It'll, um, last her for life..."), because it's comfortable! If only it leaned backwards a little farther. Just don't let those silly stripey-shirted inquisitive helpful salesbots fool you: it already has the good fabric (might be nice in a black and dark green, though...).
Back when I had bandwidth, Digitally Imported would protect me. Now that those fee guidelines are in place, can it even push me down the stairs anymore? :( (Sorry, long night...)
Bzzt! Tea. Hot, high-quality green or herbal tea, such as ginger.
Just had that happen. I had a good 6hrs sleep before coming to work, which is usually plenty for me to make it through the night. I didn't feel like making anything, so I grabbed a can of SpaghettiOs. Big mistake. After consuming half the can of starch/sugar, I immediately passed out on the floor for 3hrs. (I work nights at a hotel, and it's allowed, but still.)
Sugar is poison in large quantities. Ever wonder why jellies and jams don't really go bad?
Avoid anything sugar-rich or massively starchy, period. It'll make you fat and kill your energy in general, plus for me it causes skin problems. Protein and some fat, mostly; that'll keep you energetic for the long haul, and you should be able to stay up longer without an unpleasant crash in the middle. (Just be sure to wash hands and face if you eat anything greasy, or you'll feel gross and get grease on the keyboard besides.) Try any of Morningstar's hot dogs or Boca's sausages (brats, italian sausages, etc); they're basically pure wheat/soy protein and they taste great.
Yes, Mr. Turing, we're very impressed with your work, and we're really sorry about that apple business and all, but we already figured this out...
Once, at my Tedious Retail Job, I was sitting at one of the sales kiosks, which weren't supposed to be used for anything besides selling computers, but I guess it was a quiet enough day that even the managers didn't care.
I was using PuTTY to get to my laptop, and I had Emacs running with some of the code I was working on. I got interested in one particular problem, and since I seemed to have a clear mental path on how to solve it, I kept working. Some time later, I went to stretch, and I blinked in surprise as I suddenly became aware that I had been unaware of where I was, how much time had passed, which screen and what type of screen I was sitting at, which operating system I was using, and even the existence of the window decorations.
It was the most extreme form of tunnel vision I've ever experienced. I guess the more accurate term would be "focus", both in the literal visual sense and in the mental sense. It's the most productive time I can remember, and every time I've worked on a block of code for a significant period of time, I've had the benefit of a similar mindset, but never anywhere close to that degree.
I can't help noticing that this type of focus, which proved extremely helpful in my coding (and also somewhat surreal) is explicitly denied in the corporate environment. The office, it seems, is all about being aware of the image you are presenting at all times, coworkers walking by and saying hi, and various meetings, phone calls, and other interruptions.
I keep wanting to achieve that level of attention again, but I'm easily distractable and hard to settle down. (For example, I was planning to work on my server code right now.) I just got some candles and little rocks that I set up in a nice arrangement at home; I'm hoping it provides a more conducive environment for meditating and working on code. Maybe one of those little burbling water fountains too...
Then how does Opera Software stay afloat?
I used to be a huge fan of Netscape. In many ways, NS3/X11 was (and still is) one of the best browsers ever made. Back when the phrase "browser wars" had any relevance, I consistently rooted for Netscape, and I have always and likely will always despise MSIE.
But the sad fact is that Netscape lost because they got overconfident and started sucking. Badly. NS4 was an unadulterated pile of tripe on every platform I've ever had the misfortune to see it running on. (I'm of the firm opinion that Netscape's sending JWZ to play on other projects was a large reason for this.)
From extremely unstable Java, JavaScript, and plugin handling, to a broken DOM, to broken font handling, to simple unmitigated flouting of Web standards, NS4 was a nightmare for developers, system administrators, and end users. And let's not forget that NS4's claim of implementing CSS, while deploying the most insane and broken implementation known to humanity, singlehandedly held back the Web by 2 or 3 years.
My experience with Netscape, the company, seems to bear this out. When I worked for a large company supposedly in a "strategic alliance" with them, they refused to even answer the phone when their phones showed it was us calling. I personally knew several people tasked with deploying Netscape products at the enterprise level, and the painful and unsupported hacks we had to put in place leave me cringing even now. We were supposed to be using the iPlanet server everywhere, but my manager had us use Apache and a third-party servlet engine after Netscape refused to implement basic Java servlet APIs and their configuration manager trashed our configs. When I later worked at a startup, we had one of the Netscape execs at our company, and he was still convinced that his old company's server products would win the day. Netcraft statistics meant nothing to him -- it was as if they didn't even exist -- and he seemed puzzled why everyone refused to mouth platitudes about it.
I use (unbranded) Mozilla now, and I'm very happy with it, but keep in mind that this is basically a complete redesign and rewrite of Netscape, years too late. Mozilla, Opera, Konqueror, and other browsers may win back market share, but it is far too late for Netscape, the company, and for good reason.
No.
I suggest that Common Lisp's docstrings and the browsers and information screens available in every widespread Common Lisp environment are far more useful and convenient. Also C-z a in ILISP rocks.
Several things on this list may have changed since the last time I worked with C macros, but the basic premise of the preprocessor is flawed. Instead of merely replacing properly formatted strings in source code (a facility which is occasionally useful), it should offer a way to process already-tokenized source code, take it apart and modify its functionality, producing new code as the result. These two may seem similar, but in reality are widely differing expectations.
I suggest reading Paul Graham's On Lisp for an example of a much more effective macro system.
Early languages were all very low-level, but
:directory '(:absolute "etc" "monkey")
:name "settings"
:type "conf"))
:if-does-not-exist :create
:if-exists :rename
:direction :output)
// is static initialization order even guaranteed?
// get the old one out of the way
// file descriptors aren't garbage collected
// now put back the old file
successive generations have become higher and
higher.
I don't buy this. Explain why Common Lisp lets
me do this, for example:
(defparameter *settings-file-location*
(make-pathname
(defun save-settings ()
(with-open-file (settings-file *settings-file-location*
(prin1 *settings*))
Java, 18 years later, requires code like the
following to approach the functionality of the
previous snippet:
/* We have to shove EVERYTHING into a class.
A singly-inherited one, no less. */
class Settings {
static File settingsFile = new File("etc" + File.separator +
"monkey" + File.separator +
"settings.conf");
static File settingsFileBackup = new File(settingsFile.getName() +
".bak");
public void saveSettings() {
boolean backedUpSettings = false;
if (settingsFile.exists()) {
settingsFile.renameTo(settingsFileBackup);
backedUpSettings = true;
}
FileOutputStream fow;
BufferedOutputStream bow;
try {
fow = new FileOutputStream(settingsFile);
bow = new BufferedOutputStream(fow);
dumpSettings(bow);
close(bow);
} catch (Exception e) {
if (bow && fow.getFD().valid()) {
close(bow);
}
if (backedUpSettings) {
settingsFileBackup.renameTo(settingsFile);
}
}
}
}
Note that this Java code loses on systems like
Mac OS, which store the file type somewhere
besides the filename.
Or how about Common Lisp's condition system,
which allows execution to actually continue
where it left off once an error is corrected?
What about MAPCAR, or DO and DO*? Heck, what
about first-class function objects?
Of course, try getting a job using Common Lisp,
or any other decently abstracted general-purpose
programming language today...
BTW, Slashdot inserted the spurious semicolons
in this post, not me.
Don't underestimate people, even poor brown people.
SPOILER ALERT SPOILER KEEP SCROLLING ALARM!
I'm reminded of the scene at the end, with the army of Chinese orphans or whatever, all trained by the primer. Kinda fascinating how life seems to imitate art, and it would be an amazing thing for a device to have a cultural impact anything like the fiction depiction.
I can't help wondering if this might have a bigger effect than just that of simple literacy, organization, or MP3s. Many posters have mentioned a wealth disparity and massive corruption in India. If this device helps more Indians become literate and computer friendly, and Internet access (even 1 kiosk for every 50mi^2) becomes more widespread, I can't imagine some kind of political organization not taking place, whether it be labor unions, election rallies, lobbying, or all of the above.
Strangely enough, such organization would likely appear as the organic "seed" model mentioned in The Diamond Age.
Ah well, one can certainly hope for some sort of social improvement through technology. If any place needs it, India is probably it.