No luck. Couldn't find the message when searching for various combinations of "xenu.net", "scientology", and a couple of other scientology-related terms.
It's not as visible or easily accessible a message as the article would lead one to believe.
You can get a 3-month membership for $45. In the first week of my membership, I snagged about 3GB worth of music-- orders of magnitude above and beyond the 3 CDs that would buy. Use freeamp, queue up your downloads, and take 'em for all they're worth.:)
The recommendations engine isn't half-bad, either. I like a large chunk of the stuff it picks out for me.
So, yeah, you gave Vivendi $45. But you used a buttload of their bandwidth, and got a bazillion albums on top of it.
I'll back that up. For $100, you don't get the most accurate position in the world. You'll always win with a differential gps (which you could add to this one externally) or with gps+glonass, or by standing still and waiting for the error to average out.
Antenna makes a big difference too. This device is cheap, tiny, rugged, and waterproof, with no external antenna. It does okay. Something with a large quadrifilar antenna will knock the socks off of it.
Car: yes Upside down in car: yes Center of office building: no Edge of office building: yes
I also frequently take it in a backpack on long runs through the in the national forest here, and it works fine there, too.
The Garmin eTrex units do not have an external antenna. You make a good point about the antenna, though-- whatever internal patch antenna they are using is probably larger than the wristwatch model. But don't forget that that device can use the PCS network for positioning also.
To deactivate without removing, simply wrap watch in a small piece of lead foil while wearing. This should effectively shield both GPS reception and PCS transmission of your location. Heck, aluminum foil may be good enough by itself.
My $100 Garmin eTrex works beautifully in my car. It also works in my backpack when I go running, or from the inside of my apartment or single-story office building.
Oh, sorry for the omission-- the "mysterious third" is the European Galileo system that just got approved and will be up (i think) by 2007. It will be more accurate than GPS and Glonass by itself, but all three together would be spot-on and incredibly redundant.
I thought this for some time, too, until I noticed that some pan&scan movies actually contain picture that's not present in the widescreen. This isn't always true, but some common films do it. I believe it is referred to as "soft matting" and the picture is filmed at 1.33:1 and cropped for the theatre, while the video version uses the whole image. Some examples: Spaceballs, Silence of the Lambs, Total Recall, Edward Scissorhands.
Another combination that produces this is filming on Super-35. This film has a ratio of 1.6:1, rather than the 2.35:1 we're used to. So it is cropped vertically for theatre and horizontally for 1.33:1 video. Examples include: Abyss, Terminator 2, True Lies, Apollo 13, Titanic.
Sometimes this results in you seeing things you weren't supposed to. In Terminator 2 at 1.33:1 (full-screen on a normal TV) you can see the pay phone is already broken, or John Cleese's shorts in the Fish Called Wanda 2 "nude" scene.
http://www.britannia.org/film/support/screenform at s.shtml
Now, you're probably saying to yourself "but we could still use one master stream and crop it differently for the two formats." And you're right, assuming the format supported that. But you still wouldn't want to-- since we're stuck at 720x480, we want the film->DVD transfer to use as much of the available space as possible. So we have an anamorphic widescreen that fills the data area, and we have a separate pan&scan that fills the data area. If we didn't do this, both formats would contain less image data-- something that is already in short supply at NTSC and PAL resolutions.
A cue track and the ability to switch aspect ratios on the fly would be brilliant additions to the next standard, though!!
The more satellites your receiver can see, the more accurate your position is. Some receivers available now make use of the Russian Glonass system AND the GPS system at the same time. So you get better accuracy than GPS.
I don't know if anybody makes an affordable consumer one though-- I have only heard about them through an engineer friend who sometimes does survey work for the state.
Imagine the accuracy and the reliability you could get with all three!
You don't need to go to quite the extremes you outline, but you can get close without spending much. (or even saving money)
I bought a 2001 Honda Civic HX CVT. ULEV emissions and 40mpg, in a very inexpensive and reliable car.
Our power company lets you pay a little extra for a 'clean power' program, where they use the money to purchase power from clean providers. The additional cost is partly offset by using CF lightbulbs around the house to cut my power usage. (CF bulbs pay for themselves several times over in additional life alone)
So, while i'm not driving an $80K fuel-cell prototype or paying the government vountary taxes, I am doing nearly the same thing via more realistic channels.
If everybody made a few small adjustments like this, the overall reduction in energy use and pollution would be huge.
Depends on the manufacturer. Some of them are quite crappy, yes. But after some testing, I have replaced all of my lights with modern compact fluorescents, which produce a nice warm light and don't have a warm-up period. You can get dimmable ones, round decorator bulbs for your bathroom, recessed reflector bulbs for your ceilings, and even torch lamps.
Try one or two out-- if they suck, put them someplace where they won't bug you much like a closet or your attic. Wouldn't it be nice if the attic lights always worked when you went up there? I haven't had to replace one so far in over 3 years.
Sounds good to me. I was all ready to send 'em some cash, but surprisingly, I couldn't find a donations page. I suppose I'll just have to mail a check the old-fashioned way.
I certainly hope they succeed. This is precisely the sort of effort I have been wishing the EFF would take, but they seem to concentrate solely on 'defensive' measures. (defending people who are accused under silly tech laws rather than pressing for good tech laws)
If anyone is a current or past club member, could you give us some comments on the benefits of joining the mandrake user club? They claim "Club-only download of commercial applications normally only available in retail products" Is there anything useful there?
I'm sorry to see them in a pinch like this-- I have purchased a couple of versions of their distro in the past, and had planned on buying 8.2 when it arrived. I don't want to just hand a commercial company money, though-- if they need the revenue, they need to make it worthwhile for people to subscribe.
If you want a copyright, you have to hand a highest-quality unencrypted (preferably digital) copy over to the library of congress. That way, at least, it's there for the public domain when the copyright is up instead of being eaten by the corporation to prevent public domain from competing with their other works.
You have to turn in details for a patent-- why not for a copyright?
I know a relatively high-ranking civil engineer in the Indiana DOT who frequently has dealings with traffic light systems. We have cameras at intersections springing up all over indy, and I was a bit curious. When I asked him about them, he said that they are there solely to replace the huge, expensive, and difficult-to-maintain buried detector coils they put in the road for traffic lights. They work on image comparison to determine if a car is there, and with the exception of a *very* short term buffer in memory, the systems store NO DATA.
The most important bit of his answer was that they will NEVER store the data coming back from the cameras, simply because of the huge manpower and budget requirement this would put on the state. Not archiving and storing them, which although a large cost is nothing compared with the cost of answering every lawyer's request for tapes.
Can you imagine the number of requests for multi-angle videotapes of intersections that would come from lawyers on both sides of traffic accident cases? It is simply impossible for the state to keep this data due to their legal liability.
So, while I can't say for sure what is happening in Seattle, I imagine that despite the larger size of the city, they still cannot justify the gigantic expense of keeping that video.
I made my point badly, I guess. What I meant with the whole bulletproof vest mess was this:
Nobody is held liable for not preventing a crime if they did not know about the crime in advance.
No policeman will ever be fired for not arresting someone in advance of there being a crime.
I imagine we could go around about this forever-- I believe that as long as a software company doesn't advertise that they're virus-proof, then they should not be liable for virus damage.
Those 20 million people really were one virus writer's victims. Sheer volume does not somehow move the writer's responsibility to microsoft.
However, in the presence of regulations (like automobile safety standards) there may be additional responsibilities placed on the software developer. But I don't believe those exist now.
It's nice to actually find intelligent discussion on/. for a change.
You're absolutely right. They should pay more for insurance against hacking/viruses if they are using a less secure OS.
That certainly doesn't make you *guilty* any more than it makes a homeowner who doesn't bar his windows in a rough neighborhood guilty. The guy who does the breaking and entering is still at fault, not the builder, the homeowner, or the manufacturer who made the windows.
So, by your logic, since wearing a bulletproof vest would prevent you from getting shot-- your failure to wear one makes you partially guilty for your own murder. Or, the police are guilty for all murders since they didn't lock up the madmen in advance. Our legal system typically finds the people guilty who actually comitted the crime, while making a reasonable effort to defend our rights to talk about crime all we want.
I would agree that we all have the right to author malicious software by the same token that we have the right to write books about arson. But the ACT of arson is what is illegal. Releasing your malicious program into the "wild" is what ought to be illegal. That's where you cross the line from "here's how to write a virus" to actually being a trespasser and a vandal.
Microsoft would be guilty, however, if they made a claim like "windows is secure from viruses" and it then fell victim to nimda. If they are indeed making such bold claims (I can't possibly know everything they've said), then screw 'em. That's just false advertising. If they don't claim their product does that, then there is no recourse. Much like you can't sue a car manufacturer when you discover the car doesn't float. (assuming they never told you it did.) You can't sue over functionality you *wish* a product had.
We get into a bit of a grey are with reasonable expectations, though. I think it's fair to assume that a product will not kill you even if the manufacturer doesn't explicitly say so. Is it fair to assume an OS is secure against everything? Is it fair to assume your car is unstealable because it has locks and an alarm?
I don't think that Nimda is a good example of the sort of thing that microsoft could be held liable for. Errors that cause data loss, yes. Errors that cause the machine to lock up and cost you time, yes. This is akin to holding car manufacturers liable for things that go wrong with the car (exploding fuel lines and such), and is perfectly justifiable since the manufacturer is directly at fault.
The fault for Nimda, however lies squarely on the shoulders of the virus author. Claiming that an operating system, no matter how insecure, is at fault, is like claiming that non-bulletproof t-shirts are responsible for murder by gunshot. Murderers are responsible for murder. Virus authors are responsible for viruses. Software writers are responsible for software problems-- but not for criminal acts by other people.
I don't think a palm would last much after my first good wipeout. I use a Garmin etrex GPS (rugged, waterproof, small, and only $100). It records all the same stuff a bike computer does except cadence (although the palm units don't seem to do cadence either), plus it can tell you your route and so forth. It doesn't need to have any wheel sensors and extra wires strapped to the bike since it does all its measurement via satellite signal. It's a lot smaller than a palm, too (although somewhat bigger than a $30 bike 'puter) They sell a handlebar mount for it, and the computer sync cable lets you save your ride data and load route data in advance.
One of my biggest gripes about our system is the fact that works can completely disappear before they enter the public domain. I would suggest that anyone who wishes to apply for a copyright be required place a high-quality, unencrypted, unrestricted, and preferably digital (or easily digitized) copy of their work (1st-gen film print, HTML for books, 24+ bit audio masters, digital TV masters, etc...) in escrow with the Library of Congress, to be released into the public domain at the end of the copyright. This way, no matter how far they push the copyright, nothing will be truly "lost" in the long run. Under the current system, companies have a nasty habit of locking things away after their marketable life to prevent older stuff from competing with newer stuff-- which results in things disappearing completely.
This is not a solution to the problem of ever-expanding copyright terms, but it does prevent us from losing things irretrievably.
Slashdot Mirror
No luck. Couldn't find the message when searching for various combinations of "xenu.net", "scientology", and a couple of other scientology-related terms.
It's not as visible or easily accessible a message as the article would lead one to believe.
Or I'm just slow.
You can get a 3-month membership for $45. In the first week of my membership, I snagged about 3GB worth of music-- orders of magnitude above and beyond the 3 CDs that would buy. Use freeamp, queue up your downloads, and take 'em for all they're worth. :)
The recommendations engine isn't half-bad, either. I like a large chunk of the stuff it picks out for me.
So, yeah, you gave Vivendi $45. But you used a buttload of their bandwidth, and got a bazillion albums on top of it.
I'll back that up. For $100, you don't get the most accurate position in the world. You'll always win with a differential gps (which you could add to this one externally) or with gps+glonass, or by standing still and waiting for the error to average out.
Antenna makes a big difference too. This device is cheap, tiny, rugged, and waterproof, with no external antenna. It does okay. Something with a large quadrifilar antenna will knock the socks off of it.
Car: yes
Upside down in car: yes
Center of office building: no
Edge of office building: yes
I also frequently take it in a backpack on long runs through the in the national forest here, and it works fine there, too.
The Garmin eTrex units do not have an external antenna. You make a good point about the antenna, though-- whatever internal patch antenna they are using is probably larger than the wristwatch model. But don't forget that that device can use the PCS network for positioning also.
To deactivate without removing, simply wrap watch in a small piece of lead foil while wearing. This should effectively shield both GPS reception and PCS transmission of your location. Heck, aluminum foil may be good enough by itself.
My $100 Garmin eTrex works beautifully in my car. It also works in my backpack when I go running, or from the inside of my apartment or single-story office building.
Oh, sorry for the omission-- the "mysterious third" is the European Galileo system that just got approved and will be up (i think) by 2007. It will be more accurate than GPS and Glonass by itself, but all three together would be spot-on and incredibly redundant.
I thought this for some time, too, until I noticed that some pan&scan movies actually contain picture that's not present in the widescreen. This isn't always true, but some common films do it. I believe it is referred to as "soft matting" and the picture is filmed at 1.33:1 and cropped for the theatre, while the video version uses the whole image. Some examples: Spaceballs, Silence of the Lambs, Total Recall, Edward Scissorhands.
m at s.shtml
Another combination that produces this is filming on Super-35. This film has a ratio of 1.6:1, rather than the 2.35:1 we're used to. So it is cropped vertically for theatre and horizontally for 1.33:1 video. Examples include: Abyss, Terminator 2, True Lies, Apollo 13, Titanic.
Sometimes this results in you seeing things you weren't supposed to. In Terminator 2 at 1.33:1 (full-screen on a normal TV) you can see the pay phone is already broken, or John Cleese's shorts in the Fish Called Wanda 2 "nude" scene.
http://www.britannia.org/film/support/screenfor
See this page for details:
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~leopold/Ld/FilmToVideo/
Now, you're probably saying to yourself "but we could still use one master stream and crop it differently for the two formats." And you're right, assuming the format supported that. But you still wouldn't want to-- since we're stuck at 720x480, we want the film->DVD transfer to use as much of the available space as possible. So we have an anamorphic widescreen that fills the data area, and we have a separate pan&scan that fills the data area. If we didn't do this, both formats would contain less image data-- something that is already in short supply at NTSC and PAL resolutions.
A cue track and the ability to switch aspect ratios on the fly would be brilliant additions to the next standard, though!!
The more satellites your receiver can see, the more accurate your position is. Some receivers available now make use of the Russian Glonass system AND the GPS system at the same time. So you get better accuracy than GPS.
I don't know if anybody makes an affordable consumer one though-- I have only heard about them through an engineer friend who sometimes does survey work for the state.
Imagine the accuracy and the reliability you could get with all three!
It would be great if I knew who was paying off my senators here in Indianapolis-- where did you find that information?
Thanks!!!
You don't need to go to quite the extremes you outline, but you can get close without spending much. (or even saving money)
I bought a 2001 Honda Civic HX CVT. ULEV emissions and 40mpg, in a very inexpensive and reliable car.
Our power company lets you pay a little extra for a 'clean power' program, where they use the money to purchase power from clean providers. The additional cost is partly offset by using CF lightbulbs around the house to cut my power usage. (CF bulbs pay for themselves several times over in additional life alone)
So, while i'm not driving an $80K fuel-cell prototype or paying the government vountary taxes, I am doing nearly the same thing via more realistic channels.
If everybody made a few small adjustments like this, the overall reduction in energy use and pollution would be huge.
Depends on the manufacturer. Some of them are quite crappy, yes. But after some testing, I have replaced all of my lights with modern compact fluorescents, which produce a nice warm light and don't have a warm-up period. You can get dimmable ones, round decorator bulbs for your bathroom, recessed reflector bulbs for your ceilings, and even torch lamps.
Try one or two out-- if they suck, put them someplace where they won't bug you much like a closet or your attic. Wouldn't it be nice if the attic lights always worked when you went up there? I haven't had to replace one so far in over 3 years.
Sounds good to me. I was all ready to send 'em some cash, but surprisingly, I couldn't find a donations page. I suppose I'll just have to mail a check the old-fashioned way.
I certainly hope they succeed. This is precisely the sort of effort I have been wishing the EFF would take, but they seem to concentrate solely on 'defensive' measures. (defending people who are accused under silly tech laws rather than pressing for good tech laws)
If anyone is a current or past club member, could you give us some comments on the benefits of joining the mandrake user club? They claim "Club-only download of commercial applications normally only available in retail products" Is there anything useful there?
I'm sorry to see them in a pinch like this-- I have purchased a couple of versions of their distro in the past, and had planned on buying 8.2 when it arrived. I don't want to just hand a commercial company money, though-- if they need the revenue, they need to make it worthwhile for people to subscribe.
If you want a copyright, you have to hand a highest-quality unencrypted (preferably digital) copy over to the library of congress. That way, at least, it's there for the public domain when the copyright is up instead of being eaten by the corporation to prevent public domain from competing with their other works.
You have to turn in details for a patent-- why not for a copyright?
I know a relatively high-ranking civil engineer in the Indiana DOT who frequently has dealings with traffic light systems. We have cameras at intersections springing up all over indy, and I was a bit curious. When I asked him about them, he said that they are there solely to replace the huge, expensive, and difficult-to-maintain buried detector coils they put in the road for traffic lights. They work on image comparison to determine if a car is there, and with the exception of a *very* short term buffer in memory, the systems store NO DATA.
The most important bit of his answer was that they will NEVER store the data coming back from the cameras, simply because of the huge manpower and budget requirement this would put on the state. Not archiving and storing them, which although a large cost is nothing compared with the cost of answering every lawyer's request for tapes.
Can you imagine the number of requests for multi-angle videotapes of intersections that would come from lawyers on both sides of traffic accident cases? It is simply impossible for the state to keep this data due to their legal liability.
So, while I can't say for sure what is happening in Seattle, I imagine that despite the larger size of the city, they still cannot justify the gigantic expense of keeping that video.
I made my point badly, I guess. What I meant with the whole bulletproof vest mess was this:
/. for a change.
Nobody is held liable for not preventing a crime if they did not know about the crime in advance.
No policeman will ever be fired for not arresting someone in advance of there being a crime.
I imagine we could go around about this forever-- I believe that as long as a software company doesn't advertise that they're virus-proof, then they should not be liable for virus damage.
Those 20 million people really were one virus writer's victims. Sheer volume does not somehow move the writer's responsibility to microsoft.
However, in the presence of regulations (like automobile safety standards) there may be additional responsibilities placed on the software developer. But I don't believe those exist now.
It's nice to actually find intelligent discussion on
I dare you to try to find a copy of the old vector arcade game "Asteroids" in the LOC.
The lack of enforcement makes this nearly pointless.
You're absolutely right. They should pay more for insurance against hacking/viruses if they are using a less secure OS.
That certainly doesn't make you *guilty* any more than it makes a homeowner who doesn't bar his windows in a rough neighborhood guilty. The guy who does the breaking and entering is still at fault, not the builder, the homeowner, or the manufacturer who made the windows.
So, by your logic, since wearing a bulletproof vest would prevent you from getting shot-- your failure to wear one makes you partially guilty for your own murder. Or, the police are guilty for all murders since they didn't lock up the madmen in advance. Our legal system typically finds the people guilty who actually comitted the crime, while making a reasonable effort to defend our rights to talk about crime all we want.
I would agree that we all have the right to author malicious software by the same token that we have the right to write books about arson. But the ACT of arson is what is illegal. Releasing your malicious program into the "wild" is what ought to be illegal. That's where you cross the line from "here's how to write a virus" to actually being a trespasser and a vandal.
Microsoft would be guilty, however, if they made a claim like "windows is secure from viruses" and it then fell victim to nimda. If they are indeed making such bold claims (I can't possibly know everything they've said), then screw 'em. That's just false advertising. If they don't claim their product does that, then there is no recourse. Much like you can't sue a car manufacturer when you discover the car doesn't float. (assuming they never told you it did.) You can't sue over functionality you *wish* a product had.
We get into a bit of a grey are with reasonable expectations, though. I think it's fair to assume that a product will not kill you even if the manufacturer doesn't explicitly say so. Is it fair to assume an OS is secure against everything? Is it fair to assume your car is unstealable because it has locks and an alarm?
I don't think that Nimda is a good example of the sort of thing that microsoft could be held liable for. Errors that cause data loss, yes. Errors that cause the machine to lock up and cost you time, yes. This is akin to holding car manufacturers liable for things that go wrong with the car (exploding fuel lines and such), and is perfectly justifiable since the manufacturer is directly at fault.
The fault for Nimda, however lies squarely on the shoulders of the virus author. Claiming that an operating system, no matter how insecure, is at fault, is like claiming that non-bulletproof t-shirts are responsible for murder by gunshot. Murderers are responsible for murder. Virus authors are responsible for viruses. Software writers are responsible for software problems-- but not for criminal acts by other people.
I don't think a palm would last much after my first good wipeout. I use a Garmin etrex GPS (rugged, waterproof, small, and only $100). It records all the same stuff a bike computer does except cadence (although the palm units don't seem to do cadence either), plus it can tell you your route and so forth. It doesn't need to have any wheel sensors and extra wires strapped to the bike since it does all its measurement via satellite signal. It's a lot smaller than a palm, too (although somewhat bigger than a $30 bike 'puter) They sell a handlebar mount for it, and the computer sync cable lets you save your ride data and load route data in advance.
One of my biggest gripes about our system is the fact that works can completely disappear before they enter the public domain. I would suggest that anyone who wishes to apply for a copyright be required place a high-quality, unencrypted, unrestricted, and preferably digital (or easily digitized) copy of their work (1st-gen film print, HTML for books, 24+ bit audio masters, digital TV masters, etc...) in escrow with the Library of Congress, to be released into the public domain at the end of the copyright. This way, no matter how far they push the copyright, nothing will be truly "lost" in the long run. Under the current system, companies have a nasty habit of locking things away after their marketable life to prevent older stuff from competing with newer stuff-- which results in things disappearing completely.
This is not a solution to the problem of ever-expanding copyright terms, but it does prevent us from losing things irretrievably.
Yes, you would be gruntled. Go look at www.m-w.com to verify. :)
Scanning, in the sense that the gun in your television scans as it draws the picture. As in "scanlines".