Put up a random.wav or.mp3 clip of a public-domain song, with lyrics. User must enter a close transcription to pass the test. (Sort of an audio analog to the existing system)
Ask a series of multiple-choice questions, something stupidly simple for a human to answer, but impossible for anything short of a sophisticated AI system. (E.g. a dumbed-down version of the "reading comprehension" questions you see on the SAT...)
I once read that you could put all 6 billion people in a an area the size of Jacksonville, FL's city limits, and each person would still have 9 sq ft (3ft x 3ft) to themselves.
Physically, you could probably put that many people into that small a space---but then this is forgetting all the land needed to grow food and provide other natural resources. (Unless the writer was discussing turning Jacksonville into the world's biggest morgue...)
I came across this article some time ago, on a/. thread examining overpopulation more in depth. The numbers given there are all engineering approximations, but it goes to show that the "all 6E9 people can fit into {Texas|Jacksonville|Footown}" arguments are really not well considered enough to be meaningful.
Overpopulation has never been a problem of physical living space. It's a matter of natural resources.
My bad. Guess I missed the bit about Project Gutenberg texts...
RFBD does mostly new books, and educational ones at that. Copyright issues prevent the recordings from being freely distributed.
Anyway, these folks are interesting not so much because of their finished products, but because they recruit volunteers to record and produce them, and have all the actual equipment necessary to do that. It's a nifty way for hopeful voice actors / dramatic readers to get some footwork, and perform charity at the same time. (Yes, educational books only, but there's a whole art to not sounding like Ben Stein on Valium:-)
P.S.: Someone please mod my previous comment (-1, Overrated)....
Thanks for the link; that site is really good. 'Specially the "Paper Ballots" essay, as you said.
It's pretty interesting to see just how much thought and design has gone into the current (paper) system to guard against even highly rare/improbable forms of election fraud. Taking all that into account, it seems unlikely that any electronic voting system will ever achieve the transparency necessary to replace paper.
(Not only to protect against fraud, even, but also to make it obvious to distrusting observers that fraud isn't being committed.)
If your Mozilla install isn't being used by others, just put your plug-ins in ~/.mozilla/plugins/ (or ~/.phoenix/plugins/). Both browsers will pick 'em up fine from there.
TrollTech has Win32 and MacOSX versions of Qt (natch), but both are available only under proprietary, GPL-incompatible-if-there's-no-exception-clause licenses. The licensing of wxWindows's various incarnations seems to be a significant plus in its favor, at least for GPL'ed cross-platform GUI apps.
Their ResellerRatings page is damned impressive. I haven't bought much from them so far (only a hard drive recently), but they'll definitely get first dibs on my future purchases.
The author of the linked article has written wmzcalock, a nifty little dockapp (for Window Maker / Afterstep / Blackbox fans) that can display time in metric units. It's.01536 as I write this!
Metric time is a very nice idea. You divide the day up into 100,000 seconds (instead of 86,400); 100 "seconds" is a "minute," and 10,000 "seconds" is an "hour." (Alternately, you can have 1,000-"second" "hours"---it depends on whether you want your day to have 10 "hours" or 100.) You can imagine a digital wall clock for this time standard as simply three or five digits counting up, i.e. the decimal part of the day (hence "015" or "01536" for approximately 12:22am).
As for the silly remarks about a 100-day year, a metric time system would only be relevant in the division of a single day, as natural events pretty much dictate the larger time periods. A 10-month year is conceivable, though I think a better case could be made for a 12- or 13-month calendar (either with identical months and 1-5 extra days not belonging to any month), in light of the lunar orbit.
(Our current calendar, IMHO, needs reform more than our current system of timekeeping. Exhibit A: that weirdass formula you need to use to compute the day of the week for an arbitrary date)
Embedded devices often use the equivalent of statically-linked binaries, i.e. ROM images. The LGPL requires that you allow the user to swap out the LGPL'ed part [of a larger proprietary solution] as desired. If you distribute software which is inseparable (to the user) from LGPL'ed code, then the entirety of that software must itself be under the (L)GPL---which would allow any user with a binary to ask for source to your stuff.
The BSD/X11 licenses, since they allow outright proprietarization of their covered code, naturally don't present this difficulty. (FYI, the SDL is well-served by the LGPL as---to my knowledge---the project is not targetting the kind of embedded systems where this would come up.)
In the case of Red Hat, I believe their public key is on the original distribution CD. How hard would it be to trojanize a shrink-wrapped product?
This doesn't cover individual authors and their tarballs on the Internet, of course. But if you're really paranoid about security, either you'll only install stuff prepared by your distribution vendor, or comb through any untrusted source code yourself.
First off, excellent comment; thanks for writing it.
At any rate, God also gave us some simple, natural ways to end pregnancy, too--in fact, until it became extinct due to over-use in the Roman era, there was a plant, described in detail in many ancient medical texts, which induced spontaneous abortions quickly and painlessly.
This is very interesting, the first I hear of such a thing. Google doesn't seem to turn up anything---do you have any links on this? Was/is there a name for this plant?
Another major problem with the GPL is that it claims to take control if I merely link to code governed by it. I have never, ever, seen a 'closed-source' licence that requires the developer to accept it simply to link to code licensed under it.
If that is true, then it is true only in an ad hoc manner. The GPL prohibits distribution of GPL'ed code linked to incompatibly licensed code; if one is found to be in such violation of the GPL, then distribution is enjoined (as it is a copyright infringement). This can be avoided, however, if the violator can change the license on the non-GPL'ed code to be compatible with the GPL---and this has happened a number of times historically (e.g. Apple's release of the GCC-derived ObjC compiler). It ends up appearing as though the GPL wrenched control of the non-GPL'ed code from the violator, but what actually happened is that the violator willingly released the code in that manner.
The GPL doesn't take control of non-GPL'ed code linked to it, but a course of action with that apparent effect is often the most convenient form of restitution for a violator. It's a shrewd bit of trickery, that favors the cause of free software, but it is walked into knowingly by the violator---he/she always has the alternative of simply ceasing distribution altogether.
If the "conversion program" worked by first creating high-resolution bitmaps of the original scalable fonts, and then automatically tracing those bitmaps into a scalable format, then the resulting scalable typeface is judged not to be a derivative work.
The U.S. Copyright Office holds that a bitmapped font is nothing more than a computerized representation of a typeface, and as such is not copyrightable...
And thus, anything created from those bitmaps is free of the copyright restrictions on the original font program. Unintuitive, but true!
This is what explains those "1500 fonts for just $4.99!" CDs that you often see in computer stores. A company can buy up a bunch of copyrighted font programs from major type foundries, create scalable lookalikes by the above process, name them something similar but not identical to the originals, and sell collections of the things. 100% legal under current copyright law.
Phpwebhosting offers "unmetered" bandwidth transfer. They have a few restrictions on what they'll tolerate (frowning on porn, warez, large file archives, etc.), but outside of that, they don't seem to mind bandwidth surges as long as they're not sustained.
(I'm not a customer of theirs, but may probably become one in the future; the above is my reading of their terms of service)
All that says is that they believe making a bug-compatible reimplementation of their server is beyond the ability of a non-commercial third party. "They couldn't possibly have copied this bug without copying our code!"
Lame doesn't even begin to describe their legal complaint.
So, I think that the offical release of BNetd should not have allowed any copies of Warcraft III to use it. Then if Blizzard had problems with Warcraft III demos being leaked, then they could not have blamed it on BNetd.
The "official" BNetD does not support Warcraft III. The software that's giving Blizzard/Vivendi a hernia is a hacked version of same, produced by the Warforge project. The original BNetD developers were an easier target, however (IIRC) and so B/V decided to go after those.
I don't think the BNetD guys should be touchable even if they did the Warforge work themselves, but it does go to show how fucked up are B/V's priorities in this whole case.
When we talk of overpopulation, what we are really saying is 'there are a class of people who should not be allowed to reproduce.' That is a dangerous and evil thought...
True. Some people think that population control means killing, if not sterilizing large amounts of people accordingly deemed unfit to reproduce. Or, failing that, strict fecundity restrictions a la China.
Most people who don't already have a genocidal streak inside them think more in terms of improved contraception and an increased standard of living [which need not be as profligate as that of your typical U.S. resident] as the ticket to a lower birth rate.
Happy, well-fed people with lives worth living tend to find it less of a priority to create new ones. That's what has been happening in almost every industrialized Western country in the past few decades, and is not happening in areas of greater human need.
Now, how to make this happen is another can of worms entirely---but most sane people concerned about overpopulation rightfully see authoritarian measures as a giant leap backward.
That doesn't help much. If it has patented yet unlicensed technology, then it can't be legally used in countries where the patent is recognized.
This is why free crypto software for a long time had an internal-RSA vs. external-RSAREF configuration switch for a long time, with the stipulation that RSAREF had to be used within the U.S.---as using internal RSA would leave you open to an infringement suit. (RSAREF was the only freely licensed implementation of RSA available, before the patent expired last year)
That would make it possible for anyone to put the hurt on a legitimate business. Don't like Bob's Hardware Emporium? Talk to these guys in Taiwan, who will put together an authentic-looking spam campaign for you.
It's the respective version numbers for those programs that are converging to pi and e (and, as DK has decreed, will reach those values upon his death).
The error-finder's fee, as I understand, is not bounded in any way-- save for The Knuth's ability to walk the walk of a perfectionist };-)
But if your information was really valuable to you and your neighbors, wouldn't the market reward companies who voluntarily protected it? Think about it - if I'm one of the dozen gas companies
(which is 11 more than I have to choose from, BTW), and I make it clear to potential customers
that I'm not like those other grotty bastards - all I want from you is a name and an address to send a bill to - shouldn't I receive a reward in the form of hordes of privacy concerned customers such as yourself descending on me to receive service? And then, seeing that, won't my competitors have to somehow respond in kind?
What if those eleven gas companies make up an oligarchy? You'd have a very difficult time breaking into that market.
Okay, so you have a billion dollars. If you also had the business sense and drive required to get a billion dollars, wouldn't you have taken advantage of the lack of privacy regulations to maximize your competitive edge?
What if it happens that the marketing point of protecting your customers' privacy doesn't turn out to be as lucrative as milking their personal information for all its worth? What if you can't convince your investors otherwise?
If you start up a business that is based on not doing $BAD_THING, but all your competitors do $BAD_THING, you're inflicting a handicap on yourself which you may or may not be able to afford.
In other words, the solution you are offering is overlooking many of the real-world intricacies of starting and sustaining a business. Why is it that you don't see (many) companies out there that offer privacy as a marketing point, given all the exposure that the issue has received?
There is at least one reason that a businessperson would prefer regulation over market dynamics: it would be unilaterally applicable. Sure, he/she would take a profit hit, but then, so would all of his/her competitors.
Slashdot Mirror
I once read that you could put all 6 billion people in a an area the size of Jacksonville, FL's city limits, and each person would still have 9 sq ft (3ft x 3ft) to themselves.
/. thread examining overpopulation more in depth. The numbers given there are all engineering approximations, but it goes to show that the "all 6E9 people can fit into {Texas|Jacksonville|Footown}" arguments are really not well considered enough to be meaningful.
Physically, you could probably put that many people into that small a space---but then this is forgetting all the land needed to grow food and provide other natural resources. (Unless the writer was discussing turning Jacksonville into the world's biggest morgue...)
I came across this article some time ago, on a
Overpopulation has never been a problem of physical living space. It's a matter of natural resources.
My bad. Guess I missed the bit about Project Gutenberg texts...
:-)
RFBD does mostly new books, and educational ones at that. Copyright issues prevent the recordings from being freely distributed.
Anyway, these folks are interesting not so much because of their finished products, but because they recruit volunteers to record and produce them, and have all the actual equipment necessary to do that. It's a nifty way for hopeful voice actors / dramatic readers to get some footwork, and perform charity at the same time. (Yes, educational books only, but there's a whole art to not sounding like Ben Stein on Valium
P.S.: Someone please mod my previous comment (-1, Overrated)....
There's a charity that specializes in doing exactly that, through the efforts of volunteers.
(I've been thinking of giving it a go someday....)
I think the previous poster meant to say "joints." Each finger (minus the thumb) has three. Four times three = twelve per hand.
:-)
It makes gesturing a number to someone else quite a bit trickier, but at least for counting it works
Thanks for the link; that site is really good. 'Specially the "Paper Ballots" essay, as you said.
It's pretty interesting to see just how much thought and design has gone into the current (paper) system to guard against even highly rare/improbable forms of election fraud. Taking all that into account, it seems unlikely that any electronic voting system will ever achieve the transparency necessary to replace paper.
(Not only to protect against fraud, even, but also to make it obvious to distrusting observers that fraud isn't being committed.)
If your Mozilla install isn't being used by others, just put your plug-ins in ~/.mozilla/plugins/ (or ~/.phoenix/plugins/). Both browsers will pick 'em up fine from there.
TrollTech has Win32 and MacOSX versions of Qt (natch), but both are available only under proprietary, GPL-incompatible-if-there's-no-exception-clause licenses. The licensing of wxWindows's various incarnations seems to be a significant plus in its favor, at least for GPL'ed cross-platform GUI apps.
Their ResellerRatings page is damned impressive. I haven't bought much from them so far (only a hard drive recently), but they'll definitely get first dibs on my future purchases.
The author of the linked article has written wmzcalock, a nifty little dockapp (for Window Maker / Afterstep / Blackbox fans) that can display time in metric units. It's .01536 as I write this!
Metric time is a very nice idea. You divide the day up into 100,000 seconds (instead of 86,400); 100 "seconds" is a "minute," and 10,000 "seconds" is an "hour." (Alternately, you can have 1,000-"second" "hours"---it depends on whether you want your day to have 10 "hours" or 100.) You can imagine a digital wall clock for this time standard as simply three or five digits counting up, i.e. the decimal part of the day (hence "015" or "01536" for approximately 12:22am).
As for the silly remarks about a 100-day year, a metric time system would only be relevant in the division of a single day, as natural events pretty much dictate the larger time periods. A 10-month year is conceivable, though I think a better case could be made for a 12- or 13-month calendar (either with identical months and 1-5 extra days not belonging to any month), in light of the lunar orbit.
(Our current calendar, IMHO, needs reform more than our current system of timekeeping. Exhibit A: that weirdass formula you need to use to compute the day of the week for an arbitrary date)
Embedded devices often use the equivalent of statically-linked binaries, i.e. ROM images. The LGPL requires that you allow the user to swap out the LGPL'ed part [of a larger proprietary solution] as desired. If you distribute software which is inseparable (to the user) from LGPL'ed code, then the entirety of that software must itself be under the (L)GPL---which would allow any user with a binary to ask for source to your stuff.
The BSD/X11 licenses, since they allow outright proprietarization of their covered code, naturally don't present this difficulty. (FYI, the SDL is well-served by the LGPL as---to my knowledge---the project is not targetting the kind of embedded systems where this would come up.)
Very much so!
Though ~$600 for their lightest card seems a bit much. I'd be happy with plain-Jane two-channel recording with an ADC that doesn't suck.
In the case of Red Hat, I believe their public key is on the original distribution CD. How hard would it be to trojanize a shrink-wrapped product?
This doesn't cover individual authors and their tarballs on the Internet, of course. But if you're really paranoid about security, either you'll only install stuff prepared by your distribution vendor, or comb through any untrusted source code yourself.
Talk about nature putting one over on modern pharmacology---would that RU486 worked as well!
First off, excellent comment; thanks for writing it.
At any rate, God also gave us some simple, natural ways to end pregnancy, too--in fact, until it became extinct due to over-use in the Roman era, there was a plant, described in detail in many ancient medical texts, which induced spontaneous abortions quickly and painlessly.
This is very interesting, the first I hear of such a thing. Google doesn't seem to turn up anything---do you have any links on this? Was/is there a name for this plant?
Another major problem with the GPL is that it claims to take control if I merely link to code governed by it. I have never, ever, seen a 'closed-source' licence that requires the developer to accept it simply to link to code licensed under it.
If that is true, then it is true only in an ad hoc manner. The GPL prohibits distribution of GPL'ed code linked to incompatibly licensed code; if one is found to be in such violation of the GPL, then distribution is enjoined (as it is a copyright infringement). This can be avoided, however, if the violator can change the license on the non-GPL'ed code to be compatible with the GPL---and this has happened a number of times historically (e.g. Apple's release of the GCC-derived ObjC compiler). It ends up appearing as though the GPL wrenched control of the non-GPL'ed code from the violator, but what actually happened is that the violator willingly released the code in that manner.
The GPL doesn't take control of non-GPL'ed code linked to it, but a course of action with that apparent effect is often the most convenient form of restitution for a violator. It's a shrewd bit of trickery, that favors the cause of free software, but it is walked into knowingly by the violator---he/she always has the alternative of simply ceasing distribution altogether.
As is said in the comp.fonts FAQ:And thus, anything created from those bitmaps is free of the copyright restrictions on the original font program. Unintuitive, but true!
This is what explains those "1500 fonts for just $4.99!" CDs that you often see in computer stores. A company can buy up a bunch of copyrighted font programs from major type foundries, create scalable lookalikes by the above process, name them something similar but not identical to the originals, and sell collections of the things. 100% legal under current copyright law.
Phpwebhosting offers "unmetered" bandwidth transfer. They have a few restrictions on what they'll tolerate (frowning on porn, warez, large file archives, etc.), but outside of that, they don't seem to mind bandwidth surges as long as they're not sustained.
(I'm not a customer of theirs, but may probably become one in the future; the above is my reading of their terms of service)
All that says is that they believe making a bug-compatible reimplementation of their server is beyond the ability of a non-commercial third party. "They couldn't possibly have copied this bug without copying our code!"
Lame doesn't even begin to describe their legal complaint.
So, I think that the offical release of BNetd should not have allowed any copies of Warcraft III to use it. Then if Blizzard had problems with Warcraft III demos being leaked, then they could not have blamed it on BNetd.
The "official" BNetD does not support Warcraft III. The software that's giving Blizzard/Vivendi a hernia is a hacked version of same, produced by the Warforge project. The original BNetD developers were an easier target, however (IIRC) and so B/V decided to go after those.
I don't think the BNetD guys should be touchable even if they did the Warforge work themselves, but it does go to show how fucked up are B/V's priorities in this whole case.
When we talk of overpopulation, what we are really saying is 'there are a class of people who should not be allowed to reproduce.' That is a dangerous and evil thought...
True. Some people think that population control means killing, if not sterilizing large amounts of people accordingly deemed unfit to reproduce. Or, failing that, strict fecundity restrictions a la China.
Most people who don't already have a genocidal streak inside them think more in terms of improved contraception and an increased standard of living [which need not be as profligate as that of your typical U.S. resident] as the ticket to a lower birth rate.
Happy, well-fed people with lives worth living tend to find it less of a priority to create new ones. That's what has been happening in almost every industrialized Western country in the past few decades, and is not happening in areas of greater human need.
Now, how to make this happen is another can of worms entirely---but most sane people concerned about overpopulation rightfully see authoritarian measures as a giant leap backward.
That doesn't help much. If it has patented yet unlicensed technology, then it can't be legally used in countries where the patent is recognized.
This is why free crypto software for a long time had an internal-RSA vs. external-RSAREF configuration switch for a long time, with the stipulation that RSAREF had to be used within the U.S.---as using internal RSA would leave you open to an infringement suit. (RSAREF was the only freely licensed implementation of RSA available, before the patent expired last year)
That would make it possible for anyone to put the hurt on a legitimate business. Don't like Bob's Hardware Emporium? Talk to these guys in Taiwan, who will put together an authentic-looking spam campaign for you.
It's the respective version numbers for those programs that are converging to pi and e (and, as DK has decreed, will reach those values upon his death).
The error-finder's fee, as I understand, is not bounded in any way-- save for The Knuth's ability to walk the walk of a perfectionist };-)
But if your information was really valuable to you and your neighbors, wouldn't the market reward companies who voluntarily protected it? Think about it - if I'm one of the dozen gas companies
(which is 11 more than I have to choose from, BTW), and I make it clear to potential customers
that I'm not like those other grotty bastards - all I want from you is a name and an address to send a bill to - shouldn't I receive a reward in the form of hordes of privacy concerned customers such as yourself descending on me to receive service? And then, seeing that, won't my competitors have to somehow respond in kind?
What if those eleven gas companies make up an oligarchy? You'd have a very difficult time breaking into that market.
Okay, so you have a billion dollars. If you also had the business sense and drive required to get a billion dollars, wouldn't you have taken advantage of the lack of privacy regulations to maximize your competitive edge?
What if it happens that the marketing point of protecting your customers' privacy doesn't turn out to be as lucrative as milking their personal information for all its worth? What if you can't convince your investors otherwise?
If you start up a business that is based on not doing $BAD_THING, but all your competitors do $BAD_THING, you're inflicting a handicap on yourself which you may or may not be able to afford.
In other words, the solution you are offering is overlooking many of the real-world intricacies of starting and sustaining a business. Why is it that you don't see (many) companies out there that offer privacy as a marketing point, given all the exposure that the issue has received?
There is at least one reason that a businessperson would prefer regulation over market dynamics: it would be unilaterally applicable. Sure, he/she would take a profit hit, but then, so would all of his/her competitors.