This is only a guess, and I think some comment from Rob or other Slashdot editors would be in order. But I suspect that Slashdot may have entered into an agreement with Amazon to do this. As such, I'm not sure what penalties they would pay for withdrwaing their links/blurbs in the books section. Additionally, they may feel reluctant to back out on what they agreed to do, just because it's good to have that kind of integrity sometimes.
Again, I don't know what's really going on, and it may be more ethical to cut ties with an organization whose ethics you don't agree with. But it's often good to keep your promises too.
Well, I suppose this shows us what is currently admired in mainstream America.
But now that he's crowned, perhaps we could compare King Jeff to King George. King Jeff has lately shown he's tempted to use his power for tyranny. By pursuing Amazon's frivolous intellectual property claim, online business outfits will be required pay licensing fees for using cookies to recall customer information (if they'll allow competitors to use it at all). This will essentially tax any online buyer... because, naturally, the businesses in question would have to pass along the cost of doing business. Taxation w/o representation, anyone?
OK, it's a big stretch.:) It's not the government levying the tax. But the point is, this frivolous and undeserved claim will likely be a losing proposition for consumers. As such, I'm not interested in being one of King Jeff's subjects.
& kudos to you, Rob, for taking your book buying elsewhere and speaking out about it.
(& if this post shows up twice, my apologies... it didn't seem to take the first time).
While there is currently no U.S. legislative requirement that manufacturers of copier technology include IDs on color copies, it is also the case that these manufacturers have the clear impression that if they do not include such IDs, legislation to require them would be immediately forthcoming.
Hmmm. OK. So cooperation is used to forestall regulation. What with the proliferation and strange application of various laws, I'm actually more comfortable with manufacturer cooperation than regulation.
From Michael:
But embedding serial numbers in all printer output? Maybe I just have a cynical mind, but I can think of about a hundred reasons this is a bad idea.
The only threat I'm able to think of at the moment is to anonymous free speech. So if someone prints a newsletter with ideas someone doesn't like, the newslettter is branded "subversive", and can be tracked back to the printer. But then what? Can they really be shut down? And how many such "subversisves" really are anonymous anyway?
As has been mentioned, log files to tend to compress well; at least that's my experience with gzip.
Another way to chop log files down to size is to remove image requests. There may be circumstances where you wouldn't want to do this, but for the average web site it cuts log size dramatically. My experience is at _least_ by 2/3. And that's just for sites that use small numbers of graphics per page... if you've got more, you'll see further shrinkage.
You can do this after the fact with some kind of script/program (I've used Perl, and also once suffered through doing it in C), or you could change your site so that it simply accesses the images from another domain/server so the logs are kept sepearately.
OK, I'll try not to get TOO nervous about Red Hat vying for world domination. I'll repeat to myself: They are good members of the Open Source Community. They are _good_ members of the Open Source Community. They _are_ good...
But can they seriously boost Mozilla? One of the tenets I've always had rehearsed at me (and reinforced by personal experience) is that it's hard to speed up a project just by throwing more developers & cash at it.... isn't everybody who's going to work on Mozilla for the right reasons already working on it? Just speculation...
Activism (or: Don't Just Sit There!)
on
New Patent Treaty
·
· Score: 2
Analysis on Slashdot will do little to change anything, unless there's a bit of activism to go along with it.
There are a number of organizations in existence who apparently work on some aspect or another of intellectual property rights. An incomplete list (with links) can be found here. A cursory look makes me think that Union for the Public Domain is promising (though moving slowly) as an organization moving the right direction.
Anyone know of any others? Or, should another one be necessary? There needs to be someway to focus resources on this matter...
It can't cost a ton, but for the amount of time I spend using a browser, I'd give $30-$50 to anyone who could deliver me a faster, less resource hungry, more stable standards-complete browser. I'm sure there are others who feel this way. In fact, some of them have posted to this discussion. Trading 2-3 hours wages for fewer hours of aggravation is an easy decision.
Of course, if there's something as good available for free, well, I'd probably take it over the offering I'd have to pay for. But I don't think Netscape or IE meet the requirements above.
However, perhaps you were refering to the probability that Opera will not likely even match (let alone eclipse) NS or IE in market share. That's probably true, but less because of the $$ issue -- more because Netscape has incredible mindshare, and Microsoft has a can't-lose distribution channel. Even if Opera cost nothing, it would still face those challenges. I think their best chance is to operate on reputation for quality and tell people "you get what you pay for."
Perhaps someone should send a counter-letter out to all of these schools, letting them know what they really are required to do under the law, and what their options are.
Perhaps someone should also look into letting the powers that be (Justice Dept? Congress?) about the first appearances of abuse, if indeed these actions aren't waranted under the law.
It seems to me that much of the damage that Microsoft has done to the market has come from the use of their power to keep other products out out of market channels -- for example, threatening ISPs and OEMs with either higher prices or loss of ability to sell MS products if they bundle Netscape with their offerings. Sure, integrating IE into Windows 98 was silly, but really, the market would probably decide that eventually, if left to itself and not distorted by the incentives and exclusives MS uses. However, restricting Microsoft's freedom to do this hasn't been touted much as a solution, even though it seems much more fitted to the crime. Any speculation on why this is?
(And now for a little bit of sortof self-promotiing but hopefully also interesting stuff)...
There's a metaphor I used in an OSNews article I wrote a while back. The article was on Microsoft's claim that IE was part of their OS. The metaphor was: a radio isn't part of a car's engine. Read the article for the full effect. OK, it's true that it's flawed in some ways, but I still think that it provides some insight and food for thought.
Also, you may be interested in reading David Kahn's "The Codebreakers". It seems to me that it was considered a significant work, at one time, but I haven't heard it mentioned for a while.
A couple of months ago, hanging out on comp.sys.beos, I read a statement that went something like "Be has been remarkably good at avoiding several landmines that would destroy them" -- and on the list of landmines was Java. I've been trying to figure out why this is so.
arrrrg. I do that consistently (mispell believe). Also, ammount, and untill. It's those darned myelin sheaths hardening in my head. Or maybe predestination...:)
As for pascal's wager, it is oversimplified. Feel free to enumerate all possible events.:)
"We might think that God wanted simply obedience to a set of rules: whereas He reall wants people of a particular sort... the point is not that God will refuse you admission to His eternal world if you have not got certain qualities of character. The point is that if people have not got at least the beginning of those qualities inside them, then no possible external conditions could make a 'Heaven' for them -- that is, could make them happy with the deep, strong, unshakeable kind of happiness God intends for us."
-- CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p 78&79/190.
"Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole with all your innumberable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature that is in harmony with God, with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures, and with itself. To be one kind of being is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness.
Two points, one of which is a direct grappling with your argument, and another which sidesteps it.
Grappling:
You could indeed tell me that God personally appeared to you and told you that you are Christ reborn. However, in accordance with what I described above, I'd expect you to outline for me some way I could have a personal experience which would verify the truth of what you were saying. That the Bible and some other religious texts do this is part of the point I was trying to express.
Of course, you could give me some crack and/or a tape of subliminal messages and stick me in a sensory deprivation tank and who knows what I might personally experience and end up beleiving. I wouldn't find such a proposition reasonable, but that's going to vary from person to person -- and does. Which is, of course, one reason why matters of faith don't lack for variation.
Sidestepping:
The ideas I posted aren't really meant to provide a watertight argument (I'm not sure that watertight arguments truly exist, except perhaps where you can narrow your assumptions, a la axiomatic mathematics. Other than that, there may only be good models). They're really meant to suggest a principle and/or outline a path one can choose to pursue in search of quality of existence. Viewed as objective arguments (intellectual objects) to be held at an arms length, they'll hold little impact on anyone. Which may be what some people want. But when they're lived in a way that seems "good" and/or "right" to the person in question, that's when they're really tested.
You can't confirm or deny for sure that God exists
Well.... you can. Sortof.
The basics of the argument I'd make are pretty much covered in the movie "Contact" (can't remember if the book is the same; it's been too long). The long and the short of it is that you can have a personal experience that is confirmation enough to convince you. The catch is such experiences are rarely observable by a third party (although some effects are usually observable). They are therefore "personal", which some folks take to mean "false".
The experiences are, however, sort of repeatable. The conditions under which such things are experienced are published, too. Though not necessarily well understood -- that's another catch.
Sigh. A slashdot post is probably not the best vehicle for the nuances of these ideas. But give 'em some thought, and realize this: if you're looking for proof in the words of the Bible (or any religious text), you're not using it the way it was meant to be used. In my experience, it has a lot more to do with how you live.
Ummm. I realize this is widely repeated and beleived, but the Mac GUI was not a direct rip-off of the Xerox GUI. Go kick about in www.mackido.com for details. This fact doesn't necessarily change whether or not look and feel lawsuits are bad, but slinging around inaccuracies surely can't help the matter.
So far, most posts have focused on ways around the hardware walls. They're probably right; eventually, someone would find a way around limitations. However... maybe a temporary stall out in processor speed increase would force an increase in effeciency on the software side. Fewer people could get by w/o reading Knuth. More people would take an interest in effecient algorithms & code re-use. Software would be less bloated and slow.
It looks as if this thread describes how to rip a cassette tape, not a DAT.
Basically, if you're in this situation -- ripping any analog recording -- then obviously the only way to do this is to play into a sound card of some sort that'll do the AD conversion.
But with anything recorded digitally, you obviously shouldn't do this, since you've already got the bits... you just need to get them to the HD and get something that understands the format they're written in.
The suggestions in the post below seem good to me.
It looks as if this thread describes how to rip a cassette tape, not a DAT.
Basically, if you're in this situation -- ripping any analog recording -- then obviously the only way to do this is to play into a sound card of some sort that'll do the AD conversion.
But with anything recorded digitally, you obviously shouldn't do this, since you've already got the bits... you just need to get them to the HD and get something that understands the format they're written in.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone interested in doing something like this
please contact me at iowa_so8ng@hot8mail.com
(remove eights).
This is only a guess, and I think some comment from Rob or other Slashdot editors would be in order. But I suspect that Slashdot may have entered into an agreement with Amazon to do this. As such, I'm not sure what penalties they would pay for withdrwaing their links/blurbs in the books section. Additionally, they may feel reluctant to back out on what they agreed to do, just because it's good to have that kind of integrity sometimes.
Again, I don't know what's really going on, and it may be more ethical to cut ties with an organization whose ethics you don't agree with. But it's often good to keep your promises too.
Rob? Anyone? Comments....
Well, I suppose this shows us what is currently admired in mainstream America.
:) It's not the government levying the tax. But the point is, this frivolous and undeserved claim will likely be a losing proposition for consumers. As such, I'm not interested in being one of King Jeff's subjects.
But now that he's crowned, perhaps we could compare King Jeff to King George. King Jeff has lately shown he's tempted to use his power for tyranny. By pursuing Amazon's frivolous intellectual property claim, online business outfits will be required pay licensing fees for using cookies to recall customer information (if they'll allow competitors to use it at all). This will essentially tax any online buyer... because, naturally, the businesses in question would have to pass along the cost of doing business. Taxation w/o representation, anyone?
OK, it's a big stretch.
& kudos to you, Rob, for taking your book buying elsewhere and speaking out about it.
(& if this post shows up twice, my apologies...
it didn't seem to take the first time).
From the article:
While there is currently no U.S. legislative requirement that manufacturers of copier technology include IDs on color copies, it is also the case that these manufacturers have the clear impression that if they do not include such IDs, legislation to require them would be immediately forthcoming.
Hmmm. OK. So cooperation is used to forestall regulation. What with the proliferation and strange application of various laws, I'm actually more comfortable with manufacturer cooperation than regulation.
From Michael:
But embedding serial numbers in all printer output? Maybe I just have a cynical mind, but I can think of about a hundred reasons this is a bad idea.
The only threat I'm able to think of at the moment is to anonymous free speech. So if someone prints a newsletter with ideas someone doesn't like, the newslettter is branded "subversive", and can be tracked back to the printer. But then what? Can they really be shut down? And how many such "subversisves" really are anonymous anyway?
I have a list of links to organizations who are interested in defending similar freedoms.
Union for the Public Domain, EFF, Digital Future Coalition, and more.
Please take a look and feel free to suggest any more to me.
As has been mentioned, log files to tend to compress well; at least that's my experience with gzip.
Another way to chop log files down to size is to remove image requests. There may be circumstances where you wouldn't want to do this, but for the average web site it cuts log size dramatically. My experience is at _least_ by 2/3. And that's just for sites that use small numbers of graphics per page... if you've got more, you'll see further shrinkage.
You can do this after the fact with some kind of script/program (I've used Perl, and also once suffered through doing it in C), or you could change your site so that it simply accesses the images from another domain/server so the logs are kept sepearately.
OK, I'll try not to get TOO nervous about Red Hat vying for world domination. I'll repeat to myself: They are good members of the Open Source Community. They are _good_ members of the Open Source Community. They _are_ good...
But can they seriously boost Mozilla? One of the tenets I've always had rehearsed at me (and reinforced by personal experience) is that it's hard to speed up a project just by throwing more developers & cash at it.... isn't everybody who's going to work on Mozilla for the right reasons already working on it? Just speculation...
Analysis on Slashdot will do little to change anything, unless there's a bit of activism to go along with it.
There are a number of organizations in existence who apparently work on some aspect or another of intellectual property rights. An incomplete list (with links) can be found here. A cursory look makes me think that Union for the Public Domain is promising (though moving slowly) as an organization moving the right direction.
Anyone know of any others? Or, should another one be necessary? There needs to be someway to focus resources on this matter...
It can't cost a ton, but for the amount of time I spend using a browser, I'd give $30-$50 to anyone who could deliver me a faster, less resource hungry, more stable standards-complete browser. I'm sure there are others who feel this way. In fact, some of them have posted to this discussion. Trading 2-3 hours wages for fewer hours of aggravation is an easy decision.
Of course, if there's something as good available for free, well, I'd probably take it over the offering I'd have to pay for. But I don't think Netscape or IE meet the requirements above.
However, perhaps you were refering to the probability that Opera will not likely even match (let alone eclipse) NS or IE in market share. That's probably true, but less because of the $$ issue -- more because Netscape has incredible mindshare, and Microsoft has a can't-lose distribution channel. Even if Opera cost nothing, it would still face those challenges. I think their best chance is to operate on reputation for quality and tell people "you get what you pay for."
When I see issues like this, I wonder why organizations like the ACLU aren't all over this. Any guess?
Perhaps someone should send a counter-letter out to all of these schools, letting them know what they really are required to do under the law, and what their options are.
Perhaps someone should also look into letting the powers that be (Justice Dept? Congress?) about the first appearances of abuse, if indeed these actions aren't waranted under the law.
(And now for a little bit of sortof self-promotiing but hopefully also interesting stuff)...
There's a metaphor I used in an OSNews article I wrote a while back. The article was on Microsoft's claim that IE was part of their OS. The metaphor was: a radio isn't part of a car's engine. Read the article for the full effect. OK, it's true that it's flawed in some ways, but I still think that it provides some insight and food for thought.
Also, you may be interested in reading
David Kahn's "The Codebreakers". It seems to
me that it was considered a significant work,
at one time, but I haven't heard it mentioned
for a while.
A couple of months ago, hanging out on comp.sys.beos, I read a statement that went something like "Be has been remarkably good at avoiding several landmines that would destroy them" -- and on the list of landmines was Java. I've been trying to figure out why this is so.
Ideas?
Like Nanotech? Like Bear?
Take a look at "The Forge of God".
Depressing ending, but some interesting nanotech
shows up in the book. Some in "The Anvil of Stars" too.
arrrrg. I do that consistently (mispell believe). :)
:)
Also, ammount, and untill. It's those darned myelin sheaths hardening in my head. Or maybe predestination...
As for pascal's wager, it is oversimplified. Feel free to enumerate all possible events.
Hmmm. A well-said insight into how an athiest would see it.
Pascal's wager, though, takes the reverse tack on the same premise. Map out the event space:
------------- God Exists --- God Doesn't--
|*I beleive**|**Big Payoff*|****loss******|
|**I don't***|VeryBig Loss|****gain******|
------------------------------------------
If you're thinking 50/50 on the God Exists/Doesn't, beleiving gives you a better expected value.
If you don't see the same odds, the expected value might change. Also, you may adjust the payoffs/losses scheme according to your perspective.
Also, some folks see immediate (within lifetime, if not 6-8 weeks) benefits in beleiving and living a certain way _now_.
But the point about trying to scare an athiest with hell is great!
"We might think that God wanted simply obedience to a set of rules: whereas He reall wants people of a particular sort... the point is not that God will refuse you admission to His eternal world if you have not got certain qualities of character. The point is that if people have not got at least the beginning of those qualities inside them, then no possible external conditions could make a 'Heaven' for them -- that is, could make them happy with the deep, strong, unshakeable kind of happiness God intends for us."
-- CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p 78&79/190.
"Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole with all your innumberable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature that is in harmony with God, with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures, and with itself. To be one kind of being is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness.
-- same work, p 86/190.
Two points, one of which is a direct grappling with your argument, and another which sidesteps it.
Grappling:
You could indeed tell me that God personally appeared to you and told you that you are Christ reborn. However, in accordance with what I described above, I'd expect you to outline for me some way I could have a personal experience which would verify the truth of what you were saying. That the Bible and some other religious texts do this is part of the point I was trying to express.
Of course, you could give me some crack and/or a tape of subliminal messages and stick me in a sensory deprivation tank and who knows what I might personally experience and end up beleiving. I wouldn't find such a proposition reasonable, but that's going to vary from person to person -- and does. Which is, of course, one reason why matters of faith don't lack for variation.
Sidestepping:
The ideas I posted aren't really meant to provide a watertight argument (I'm not sure that watertight arguments truly exist, except perhaps where you can narrow your assumptions, a la axiomatic mathematics. Other than that, there may only be good models). They're really meant to suggest a principle and/or outline a path one can choose to pursue in search of quality of existence. Viewed as objective arguments (intellectual objects) to be held at an arms length, they'll hold little impact on anyone. Which may be what some people want. But when they're lived in a way that seems "good" and/or "right" to the person in question, that's when they're really tested.
Well.... you can. Sortof.
The basics of the argument I'd make are pretty much covered in the movie "Contact" (can't remember if the book is the same; it's been too long). The long and the short of it is that you can have a personal experience that is confirmation enough to convince you. The catch is such experiences are rarely observable by a third party (although some effects are usually observable). They are therefore "personal", which some folks take to mean "false".
The experiences are, however, sort of repeatable. The conditions under which such things are experienced are published, too. Though not necessarily well understood -- that's another catch.
Sigh. A slashdot post is probably not the best vehicle for the nuances of these ideas. But give 'em some thought, and realize this: if you're looking for proof in the words of the Bible (or any religious text), you're not using it the way it was meant to be used. In my experience, it has a lot more to do with how you live.
Ummm. I realize this is widely repeated and beleived, but the Mac GUI was not a direct rip-off of the Xerox GUI. Go kick about in www.mackido.com for details. This fact doesn't necessarily change whether or not look and feel lawsuits are bad, but slinging around inaccuracies surely can't help the matter.
So far, most posts have focused on ways around the hardware walls. They're probably right; eventually, someone would find a way around limitations. However... maybe a temporary stall out in processor speed increase would force an increase in effeciency on the software side. Fewer people could get by w/o reading Knuth. More people would take an interest in effecient algorithms & code re-use. Software would be less bloated and slow.
Maybe, anyway.
It looks as if this thread describes how to rip a cassette tape, not a DAT.
Basically, if you're in this situation -- ripping any analog recording -- then obviously the only way to do this is to play into a sound card of some sort that'll do the AD conversion.
But with anything recorded digitally, you obviously shouldn't do this, since you've already got the bits... you just need to get them to the HD and get something that understands the format they're written in.
The suggestions in the post below seem good to me.
It looks as if this thread describes how
to rip a cassette tape, not a DAT.
Basically, if you're in this situation
-- ripping any analog recording -- then
obviously the only way to do this is to play
into a sound card of some sort that'll do the
AD conversion.
But with anything recorded digitally, you obviously shouldn't do this, since you've already got the bits... you just need to get them to
the HD and get something that understands the
format they're written in.
The suggestions below seem good to me.