After all, back in the day, I read Godel, Escher, Bach - for sheer pleasure. So I doubt Cryptonomicon can really do me in.
Those two books actually overlap quite a bit. You'll see a lot of references to GEB material in Cryptonomicon. Whether Neal used GEB as research material when writing Cryptonomicon, I can't say... but it certainly seems like it to me.
I usually use Ctrl-W to close the tab, having previous opened it by middle-clicking something. But on the occasions where I actually left-clicked on something ("exec" as opposed to "fork and wait"), and the web site didn't pop up a new window (grrr!), and I want to go back... then I use the back button with the mouse.
This actually happens more often than you might think. It mostly depends on the second criterion ("the web site didn't pop up a new window"). People who write sites that pop up a new window when I left click something need reeducation. Desperately.
So why dont you also add to the sticker "Obtaining all your music legally exempts you from lawsuits"?
Because it doesn't! My god, where have you been the last year? RIAA's suing the people who share music on FastTrack (KaZaa), not the people who download it!
And Ashcroft's seizing the computers of people who run DirectConnect hubs. I don't use DC myself, but my understanding is that a DC hub is like an OpenFT search node -- it just collects lists of shares from clients/users and then acts as a search point. That's like seizing Google's servers because they might possibly link to "illegal" files.
RIAA lobbyists helped convince Congress to pass the DMCA. The DMCA created new criminal penalties for common, everyday activities which used to be non-criminal before the DMCA went into effect.
By my reasoning, that sounds like the RIAA criminalized a whole bunch of people.
the corporation has more than enough resources to determine what a fair selling price is to the consumer and, if they feel they're losing profit, they are free to raise the price.
They might make more profit by lowering the price instead.
I just want to add these to the list of "disproof by absurdity".
has in his posession something he obtained without legitimately paying for. That's stealing.
A mosquito landed on my arm. I have swatted it, and now it is dead. Its blood, and my blood, are all over my arm. Therefore I have stolen the mosquito's blood.
In my lungs there are some oxygen molecules. I didn't pay for them, so I must have stolen that oxygen.
My son kisses me on the cheek, leaving some saliva behind. Therefore, I stole my own son's saliva.
Gee, better call the cops. I'm quite the notorious robber!
So if I videotaped you masturbating and decided to give a copy of that video to everyone in the world, that is the property of all humanity
Only if I did it in a public place, or published such a video myself in the first place. If you broke into my home to film me doing it, then you've violated my privacy. And no, before you ask: I won't let you publish my credit card number either. That's also private information.
But if I write a short story and publish it -- let's say I write a really good one and manage to get it published in print, and get paid for it -- then do you have the right to distribute copies of it? Sure. Just keep my name on it and I won't complain. I know it'll just lead to more publicity and therefore more sales.
What the RIAA and the MPAA don't seem to understand yet is that people like to buy the officially published versions of things that they really enjoy. It astonishes me that long-running established, successful businesses can be so blind about human nature -- especially their own customer base! -- but this does indeed seem to be the case here.
They didn't sue their customers, they sued file swappers.
You are so wrong that I'm surprised you managed to find the "Submit" button.
Who do you think buys RIAA's music? Who do you think shares the music on the Internet? Where do you think all of those Oggs and MP3s came from in the first place?
I've got literally thousands of dollars worth of CDs, most of them RIAA-released, although many were purchased used.
As of October 2003, I have not bought a single RIAA CD unless it was used. I've been boycotting them ever since then.
On Tuesday night I saw Yes and Dream Theater in concert. They were excellent. I paid $17.50 per ticket (x2 tickets), plus ticket vendor fees. I bought two shirts at $35 apiece (one Yes, one DT). Have I bought all of Dream Theater and Yes's albums? No. I have every DT album except their latest, because it came out after the RIAA lawsuits, and therefore after my boycott started. But I bought both of the Liquid Tension Experiment CDs (on Magna Carta, a non-RIAA label), and I bought two of the official DT bootlegs from Ytse Jam. I haven't bought any of Yes's recent albums, but I have the vast majority of their CDs from the 1970s.
Did I download the latest DT album from a P2P network? Yes.
Does that make me a "thief"? No.
Does that make me a copyright infringer? Perhaps.
Does that make me wrong? Hell no! I've given more money to DT through all of the aforementioned purchases than they would've seen from the royalties on a single CD sale. A lot more. A hell of a lot more.
I'm a music lover. I have a full time job. I have money to spend on music. I still do spend money on music, but I make damned sure that not a penny of it gets to those putrescent sacks of filth that call themselves the RIAA. I support artists, not slimeballs.
Now, if the government and the RIAA would just get the fuck out of the way, we could carry on with our lives, and with our support of the music that we love, in our own way.
But I won't do it their way any more.
The record labels have chosen their own fate. They could have adapted with us, could have learned how to offer a produce or service that we would purchase. They could have worked with the artists and fans to find out what people want, and how to get it to them and still make some money in the process. Instead, they chose to cut off their own blood supply, and now as they lie thrashing and dying on the ground, I feel no pity for them whatsoever.
Now that I think about it... in a sense, you ("Kombat") were right. File swappers aren't all RIAA customers. Some of us are ex-customers.
What would it be if you decompressed the songs? Figure another 100x.
A CD-audio song (44.1 kHz, 16 bit, 2 channel) is 1411200 bits per second (1411 kpbs). A 128 kbps encoding gives you an 11:1 ratio, and is generally the minimum "acceptable" encoding rate for music in MP3 format (although that's a matter of opinion). (Also note that Vorbis or MP3Pro can be acceptable at much lower bitrates. I'm not sure about the AAC family.)
Audio geeks tend to aim much higher; let's suppose 256 kbps. That "only" gives you a compression ratio of about 5.5 to 1.
If you compressed a CD-audio song down to 1/100th of its size, you'd have a 14.1 kbps stream. I don't know of any audio codec capable of producing tolerable results at that bitrate except for Speex, for speech content only (no music).
Do you also want the fact that it might be a criminal offense if you loose your suit
Depends on how loose you make it. If it's just a bit baggy, no, that's not criminal. If it's falling off you and exposing parts of the body or undergarments which are not allowed to be exposed according your local indecency laws, then it could very well be a misdemeanor.
(Or in other words: I FUCKING HATE IT when people misspell "lose"!)
(And now someone's going to flame me for being a spelling Nazi. So what? Get a fucking spell checker. They're free.)
Fully supported without extra drivers on Linux 2.6.5+
How about normal Linux kernels, like 2.4.x? How about {Free,Net,Open}BSD? What's in Linux 2.6.5 that this thing needs? Isn't it a standard USB mass storage device?
Re:bash = "embrace and extend" proprietary crap
on
Bash 3.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
False analogy. A shell script can be copied to your home dir, and edited so the leading #!/bin/sh says #!/home/kirk/bin/bash instead. You already have to do that with perl scripts that have #!/usr/bin/perl -w instead of #!/usr/local/bin/perl -w or wherever your perl is. It's standard, common practice for sysadmins.
And don't give me "But you can download the web pages and modify them...." A one-line change to the shebang line of a shell script is not analogous to redesigning an entire web site.
Middle click a form submit button to submit the form and get the response page in a new tab/window, without losing the current window. That would be perfect for slashdot's front-page poll.
Press some key or click something to launch a user-configurable external editor to type text into a textarea just like the one I'm typing in right now.
Enable Javascript (or Java or Flash) on a per-domain (or even per-URL) basis.
Click to impeach politician or repeal law of choice.;-)
I actually installed that extension last night, by sheer coincidence, on my Debian Firefox box at home. But it doesn't work unless you have Javascript turned on. That makes it less than useful to me at the moment... oh well, perhaps some future version of the extension will work in a sane environment.
(Yes, Virginia, I do have Flash installed and Javascript disabled. I consider Javascript to be significantly more evil than Flash at the moment, although Flash is gaining ground quickly.)
They make installing plugins easy but installing the program itself on linux requires compliation.
Uh... not on i386, it surely doesn't. Not even in those lesser distributions. (And of course, in Debian, you just type apt-get install mozilla-firefox and voila -- even on non-i386 architectures.)
so where's the linux rpm?
Oh. Did I say lesser distributions? Err, I meant, uh, more traditional distributions. Yeah, that's it....
Re:Who wants to look at eyes?
on
eyeBlog
·
· Score: 2, Funny
My first thought when reading this story was similar, but reversed. Rather than being notified whenever someone looks at my eyes, I think it might be useful to be informed when someone looks at my ass.
If you want a specific book, "pirating" it is difficult. If you just want something to read, it's easier, faster, and cheaper to hit up USENET than to go to the bookstore.
No, it's faster for me to drive to the public library. Hell, I could even walk there from my house in about 20 minutes.
And for any books they don't have, there's always an Inter-Library Loan.
Many music copyright holders will not release their works digitally without some kind of technological protection.
Sure they do. They release their music on standard audio CDs. Well, most of them anyway... there are a few that release only plastic discs that happen to look like CDs except for all the errors... not that this stops anyone from copying the CDs using cdparanoia or its Windows equivalents.
How sad that we are willing to go to the wall for images of women being degraded by rape, Russian pre-teens [...]
READ THE ARTICLE! Here, I'll quote it for you:
FBI agents are spending millions of dollars to bring anti-obscenity cases to courthouses across the country for the first time in 10 years. Nothing is off limits, they warn, even soft-core cable programs such as HBO's long-running Real Sex or the adult movies widely offered in guestrooms of major hotel chains.
And:
In 2001, though, one interesting case emerged from St. Charles County, Mo., the heart of Ashcroft's conservative Missouri base. First Amendment lawyer Cambria defended a video store there against state charges that it was renting two obscene videotapes that depicted group sex, anal sex and sex with objects.
Cambria won, convincing a jury of 12 women, all between the ages of 40 and 60, that the tapes had educational value and helped reduce inhibitions. They reached the verdict in less than three hours.
Slashdot Mirror
After all, back in the day, I read Godel, Escher, Bach - for sheer pleasure. So I doubt Cryptonomicon can really do me in.
Those two books actually overlap quite a bit. You'll see a lot of references to GEB material in Cryptonomicon. Whether Neal used GEB as research material when writing Cryptonomicon, I can't say... but it certainly seems like it to me.
I usually use Ctrl-W to close the tab, having previous opened it by middle-clicking something. But on the occasions where I actually left-clicked on something ("exec" as opposed to "fork and wait"), and the web site didn't pop up a new window (grrr!), and I want to go back... then I use the back button with the mouse.
This actually happens more often than you might think. It mostly depends on the second criterion ("the web site didn't pop up a new window"). People who write sites that pop up a new window when I left click something need reeducation. Desperately.
So why dont you also add to the sticker "Obtaining all your music legally exempts you from lawsuits"?
Because it doesn't! My god, where have you been the last year? RIAA's suing the people who share music on FastTrack (KaZaa), not the people who download it!
And Ashcroft's seizing the computers of people who run DirectConnect hubs. I don't use DC myself, but my understanding is that a DC hub is like an OpenFT search node -- it just collects lists of shares from clients/users and then acts as a search point. That's like seizing Google's servers because they might possibly link to "illegal" files.
The RIAA IS NOT criminalizing anyone.
RIAA lobbyists helped convince Congress to pass the DMCA. The DMCA created new criminal penalties for common, everyday activities which used to be non-criminal before the DMCA went into effect.
By my reasoning, that sounds like the RIAA criminalized a whole bunch of people.
the corporation has more than enough resources to determine what a fair selling price is to the consumer and, if they feel they're losing profit, they are free to raise the price.
They might make more profit by lowering the price instead.
I just want to add these to the list of "disproof by absurdity".
has in his posession something he obtained without legitimately paying for. That's stealing.
A mosquito landed on my arm. I have swatted it, and now it is dead. Its blood, and my blood, are all over my arm. Therefore I have stolen the mosquito's blood.
In my lungs there are some oxygen molecules. I didn't pay for them, so I must have stolen that oxygen.
My son kisses me on the cheek, leaving some saliva behind. Therefore, I stole my own son's saliva.
Gee, better call the cops. I'm quite the notorious robber!
So if I videotaped you masturbating and decided to give a copy of that video to everyone in the world, that is the property of all humanity
Only if I did it in a public place, or published such a video myself in the first place. If you broke into my home to film me doing it, then you've violated my privacy. And no, before you ask: I won't let you publish my credit card number either. That's also private information.
But if I write a short story and publish it -- let's say I write a really good one and manage to get it published in print, and get paid for it -- then do you have the right to distribute copies of it? Sure. Just keep my name on it and I won't complain. I know it'll just lead to more publicity and therefore more sales.
What the RIAA and the MPAA don't seem to understand yet is that people like to buy the officially published versions of things that they really enjoy. It astonishes me that long-running established, successful businesses can be so blind about human nature -- especially their own customer base! -- but this does indeed seem to be the case here.
They didn't sue their customers, they sued file swappers.
You are so wrong that I'm surprised you managed to find the "Submit" button.
Who do you think buys RIAA's music? Who do you think shares the music on the Internet? Where do you think all of those Oggs and MP3s came from in the first place?
I've got literally thousands of dollars worth of CDs, most of them RIAA-released, although many were purchased used.
As of October 2003, I have not bought a single RIAA CD unless it was used. I've been boycotting them ever since then.
On Tuesday night I saw Yes and Dream Theater in concert. They were excellent. I paid $17.50 per ticket (x2 tickets), plus ticket vendor fees. I bought two shirts at $35 apiece (one Yes, one DT). Have I bought all of Dream Theater and Yes's albums? No. I have every DT album except their latest, because it came out after the RIAA lawsuits, and therefore after my boycott started. But I bought both of the Liquid Tension Experiment CDs (on Magna Carta, a non-RIAA label), and I bought two of the official DT bootlegs from Ytse Jam. I haven't bought any of Yes's recent albums, but I have the vast majority of their CDs from the 1970s.
Did I download the latest DT album from a P2P network? Yes.
Does that make me a "thief"? No.
Does that make me a copyright infringer? Perhaps.
Does that make me wrong? Hell no! I've given more money to DT through all of the aforementioned purchases than they would've seen from the royalties on a single CD sale. A lot more. A hell of a lot more.
I'm a music lover. I have a full time job. I have money to spend on music. I still do spend money on music, but I make damned sure that not a penny of it gets to those putrescent sacks of filth that call themselves the RIAA. I support artists, not slimeballs.
Now, if the government and the RIAA would just get the fuck out of the way, we could carry on with our lives, and with our support of the music that we love, in our own way.
But I won't do it their way any more.
The record labels have chosen their own fate. They could have adapted with us, could have learned how to offer a produce or service that we would purchase. They could have worked with the artists and fans to find out what people want, and how to get it to them and still make some money in the process. Instead, they chose to cut off their own blood supply, and now as they lie thrashing and dying on the ground, I feel no pity for them whatsoever.
Now that I think about it... in a sense, you ("Kombat") were right. File swappers aren't all RIAA customers. Some of us are ex-customers.
What would it be if you decompressed the songs? Figure another 100x.
A CD-audio song (44.1 kHz, 16 bit, 2 channel) is 1411200 bits per second (1411 kpbs). A 128 kbps encoding gives you an 11:1 ratio, and is generally the minimum "acceptable" encoding rate for music in MP3 format (although that's a matter of opinion). (Also note that Vorbis or MP3Pro can be acceptable at much lower bitrates. I'm not sure about the AAC family.)
Audio geeks tend to aim much higher; let's suppose 256 kbps. That "only" gives you a compression ratio of about 5.5 to 1.
If you compressed a CD-audio song down to 1/100th of its size, you'd have a 14.1 kbps stream. I don't know of any audio codec capable of producing tolerable results at that bitrate except for Speex, for speech content only (no music).
Do you also want the fact that it might be a criminal offense if you loose your suit
Depends on how loose you make it. If it's just a bit baggy, no, that's not criminal. If it's falling off you and exposing parts of the body or undergarments which are not allowed to be exposed according your local indecency laws, then it could very well be a misdemeanor.
(Or in other words: I FUCKING HATE IT when people misspell "lose"!)
(And now someone's going to flame me for being a spelling Nazi. So what? Get a fucking spell checker. They're free.)
Fully supported without extra drivers on Linux 2.6.5+
How about normal Linux kernels, like 2.4.x? How about {Free,Net,Open}BSD? What's in Linux 2.6.5 that this thing needs? Isn't it a standard USB mass storage device?
False analogy. A shell script can be copied to your home dir, and edited so the leading #!/bin/sh says #!/home/kirk/bin/bash instead. You already have to do that with perl scripts that have #!/usr/bin/perl -w instead of #!/usr/local/bin/perl -w or wherever your perl is. It's standard, common practice for sysadmins.
And don't give me "But you can download the web pages and modify them...." A one-line change to the shebang line of a shell script is not analogous to redesigning an entire web site.
where '^?' is actually the single CTRL+? character. If anybody knows a cleaner way to write that, please let me know and I'll amend the page.
In bash, at least, you can use $'\177' -- I don't know whether that works in zsh.
our timecard program requires IE
Fix it. Duh!
I work for morons (the US government).
Oh. Well, you can still quit, right?
I actually installed that extension last night, by sheer coincidence, on my Debian Firefox box at home. But it doesn't work unless you have Javascript turned on. That makes it less than useful to me at the moment... oh well, perhaps some future version of the extension will work in a sane environment.
(Yes, Virginia, I do have Flash installed and Javascript disabled. I consider Javascript to be significantly more evil than Flash at the moment, although Flash is gaining ground quickly.)
They make installing plugins easy but installing the program itself on linux requires compliation.
Uh... not on i386, it surely doesn't. Not even in those lesser distributions. (And of course, in Debian, you just type apt-get install mozilla-firefox and voila -- even on non-i386 architectures.)
so where's the linux rpm?
Oh. Did I say lesser distributions? Err, I meant, uh, more traditional distributions. Yeah, that's it....
My first thought when reading this story was similar, but reversed. Rather than being notified whenever someone looks at my eyes, I think it might be useful to be informed when someone looks at my ass.
Hmmm... sorry, I can't read Russian. And the "english" link doesn't work (White Page of Death -- it's 100% pure javascript, no HTML, sorry charlie).
With likely thousands of people downloading music from them,
You didn't actually go to the new MP3.com site yet, did you?
There's no music there.
If you want a specific book, "pirating" it is difficult. If you just want something to read, it's easier, faster, and cheaper to hit up USENET than to go to the bookstore.
No, it's faster for me to drive to the public library. Hell, I could even walk there from my house in about 20 minutes.
And for any books they don't have, there's always an Inter-Library Loan.
Many music copyright holders will not release their works digitally without some kind of technological protection.
Sure they do. They release their music on standard audio CDs. Well, most of them anyway... there are a few that release only plastic discs that happen to look like CDs except for all the errors... not that this stops anyone from copying the CDs using cdparanoia or its Windows equivalents.
On a decnet computer IE will load in just a second or two. In contrast Mozilla takes at least 10 seconds before you get anything on the screen.
Does it work better on a TCP/IP computer?
(And yes, damn you, I really did think you meant DECnet for the first few seconds of reading your post!)
2) Netcat.Forgive my bash-centrism, but this should work for at least 95% of Linux users....
READ THE ARTICLE! Here, I'll quote it for you:
And:
Any more questions?