let's get some facts out about tibet and china before anything gets out of hand:
tibet was a province of china until 1911. it was a sovereign nation for 39 years before the 1950 invasion by the pla
tibet was not, during that time or before a democracy... or even anything remotely like one
tibet was, in fact, an oligarchical theocracy before the invasion. over 90% of the population were "landless serfs" which basically means "plantation slave".
the reasons for the 1950 invasion by the pla were threefold: 1) to acquire strategic position between pro-western india and china at the height of the cold war 2) to regain the territory of 1911 3) to liberate the 90% of the population from slavery with what was seen as then as a pro-people ideology (maoism) - remember, the chinese revolution itself was very young and idealistic at that time.
after the initial invasion, the dali lama was allowed to keep his existing position and control and send a delegation to beijing. this lasted until the dali lama encouraged his followers to rise up against the pla in 1959. dali lama had to have known that this uprising was doomed to failure, massive deaths of tibetans and resulting repercussions.
the chinese government has spent an enormous amount of money on the modernization of tibet - roads, schools, industry an airport.
one of the primary changes china made to tibet was land reform. peasants in china now are owner/operators of their own farms and not slaves as they were under the theocracy before the invasion
reng rong, the general in charge of the tibet occupation was sacked in 1979 for incompetence. he had failed to bring tibet up to the standard beijing had desired.
no point. just some facts. a refreshing change of pace for slashdot.
global warming: increase in heat-retaining gasses reduce dissipation of energy from the plaent/atmosphere. since the input of energy from the sun remains constant, mean temperatures rise.
ozone depletion: stratospheric ozone (o3) blocks high-frequency solar radiation on its way to the earth's surface. less o3 means more high-frequency radiation.
since solar panels (photovoltaics) are more effective with high-frequency radiation, ozone depletion increases their output.
duh. industry is motivated by profit (step 3, remember?) which is defined by this simple little equatino:
revenue - expenditure = profit
when an industry pleas to the public and government that it contributes jobs, always remember that paycheques fall on the wrong side of the profit equation and will be reduced whenever and however possible.
creating jobs is a side effect of industry. not an end goal.
Re:How could this story be believed?
on
The Beast of Brussels
·
· Score: 4, Informative
And it was not only possible, it was real.
forget staasi. the dod and darpa in the u.s. o' a is working on a total tracking system to track, record and analyze everything about the monitored individual - phone conversations, physical movement, surfing, purchase, even vital signs. it's the "lifelog" project (reference link is here).
of course darpa/dod is saying it's only to be used on people who consent to being monitored.... but then again, j edgar hoover once said the fbi would never use phone taps. administrations and policies change y'know. so, skepticism is warranted.
the only plus side to this is that the software is written by microsoft... so you may have the option to live privately during reboots.
what i can't believe is all the record label apologists! you think apple just decided to cut 5.8 billion people off their potential market for the hell of it? no. the "can't use outside of the u.s." clause is because of the record labels.
if you want to blame somebody blame david geffen, or cbs, or sony, or capitol. not apple.
ou can buy four of these and build a Beowulf cluster for $1600 which will totally smoke this box from IBM
i'll do you one (well, four) better... build a cluster of these ibms! i'd suggest black lab project from terrasoft (makers of yellow dog linux). if you are building a cluster, really, black lab is an awesome tool: automated node building, an automatic "life sign" monitoring system for nodes, a migration tool so that you can put shared libraries on nodes over the cluser resulting in having nodes that don't even need to have a hard drive and it's altivec optimized to take advantage of the vector processing in the g4/5.
if you ran one of these clusters, you wouldn't need hookers. the babes would comt to you.
read up on it. there will come a time when your petty national law will be overridden by the unelected, unaccountable wto... and then the dmca might look good.
"they offer the artist a chance to not have his career shot by reducing his radio air time, making sure they promote other artists better, or making him sign insane contracts ?"
bingo. remember that a "major" record label is, by definition, a label that owns its own distribution and promotion network (which is why you sometimes see albums with the indie label logo and a major's logo on the back. the major is the distro channel).
while this combo can be a good "package deal". it means that the artist is tied to one label for everything - the product, the promo, the distro. there's no shopping around.
witness the band "drive like jehu". originally they were headhunter, and indie from san diego, distributed by cargo (of montreal). their first lp did remarkably well, so they moved to capitol to get "better distro and promo". the second album was considerably different than the first and capitol decided that they didn't want to be involved with dlj anymore - so they killed the distro. three weeks after the release, the busiest hmv in my city had exactly one copy.
of course, dlj couldn't shop the product to another distro company. they'd signed a contract. in the end, the band broke up. (two of the members are in the hot snakes now... in case yr a fan).
so, the moral is this: if you sign with a major, they hold all the cards and can leverage release schedules, distro, promotional material &c. against you to force you to renogiate.
nb: dlj's contract stipulated that the vinyl release of that second lp could be done by headhunter. that was a pretty rare condition. but for a year it was the only way to get that album, in my city at least! nb also that the abovementioned album was eventually re-released last year by swami records - an indie.
Re:Here's another interesting quote
on
Open Source Law
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
""Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives. A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both."
- James Madison (Fourth President of the United States)
while making sure laws remain open is a good and necessary thing to maintain a transparent state with de jure authority, it only goes so far. if the laws are open but the interests, motivations and business dealings of lawmakers remain opaque then the openess is not complete.
mit (yep, the massachussets institute of technology) has been running a site for a while now dedicated to allowing citizens to monitor and research their legislators (and executives). the mission statement says it all:
To empower citizens by providing a single, comprehensive, easy-to-use repository of information on individuals, organizations, and corporations related to the government of the United States of America.
To allow citizens to submit intelligence about government-related issues, while maintaining their anonymity. To allow members of the government a chance to participate in the process.
i don't like spam. it is annoying and a waste of bandwidth and disk space. however, the detroit free press article is a flagrant piece of fearmongering. here's a short quote (don't worry, it's short enough to classify as a "thumbnail"):
One mother told me that when she found pornographic messages in the family's e-mail, she immediately suspected that the teenagers in her house had been up to no good. The broken trust took weeks to repair.
and that's the basic tone of the whole piece: spam is a trojan horse rolling sexual material into the living rooms of godfearing, wholesome americans.
the thing to realize is that the nsa is not the "no such agency" it was back in the 70s and 80s! twenty years ago, if a cryptologic solution or piece of software was not made in house, the nsa regarded it as either useless or dangerous.
heck, the nsa is even working on selinux (a security enhanced linux) that is open source. and the kicker is this: one of their partners is pgp secruity. (source: here
times have changed
Re:Hardly realistic
on
The Bug
·
· Score: 5, Funny
if you have debuggery problems like this, you should meditate on my maxims and arrows
debuggery - maxims and arrows
be hostile: your application was your friend - your baby. you gave it life. well, no longer. now your application is your enemy. do you admire the intricate house of cards you have built like hiram abif? don't. you have a glue gun now and you are going to do a little explaining about who is boss here! your app is taunting you - it's thinking "what does a chemical/analogue hack like that have that i don't?" well, i'll tell you: an index finger. suitable for hitting the "del" key. make this crystal goddamn clear!
kludge everything! the debug stage of the development life cycle is all about kludges. we call it klop - kludge-oriented programming:
kludge foo = new kludge(specialCase bar);
you've written that. the debugging phase comes at the end of a project. ie the part closest to the deadline when clueless suits and moneyment[1] confuse line count with product. the pressure is on. the company is on the line. are you going to walk into the glass tower and pitch to the vc's about how yr going to have to go back to the uml's and rebuild x? good luck! can i have your job when you're done? get the tape, get the staples, get the glue.
blame others: teamwork is just a code word for being the shepherd to a flock of scapegoats. if you were smart, you'd have been working on cultivating a culture of accepting blame early on in the cycle. this is espescially effective if yr building a client/server thingy. establish early on that most of the failures are on the client(server) side. whichever one you're not writing.
make yourself documentation czar if possible - then abuse the position to retroactively assign blame to other team members ("the docs explicitly state that we use roman numerals" - "gee, i don't remember that" - "well tough. get coding").if you set it up right you can build an army of debugging minions to do your kluding for you while you, uh, write in your blog...
redefine feature sets. the client is a clueless little doughboy who can't tell his ass from his operating system anyway. he's been flaking you on the spec-n-req all year. turn those tables! if a feature is buggy, yank it. if there's a complaint, reference the client to some vaguely-related advisory somewhere (trust me, he won't read all the way down). if he complains say "in light of advisory x we strongly adivse against implementing _______ (feature). a work around may be possible at a future point and we are more than willing to calculate the billing for that additional work now."
all that and echo will solve all yr debuggery problems.
You either download the few songs you like, or you order it from an online store where it doesn't cost so much.
bingo. although it should be noted that p2p only gets a small amount of attention in the article. the bottom line is that the retailers are getting creamed on price. simply, there are other channels that offer the same material for less and consumers are going there instead. sure, p2p is considered a factor, but the three big culprits are:
discount stores: walmart, target and friends can flog the most popular cd's at a discount - sometimes even as loss leaders to generate traffic. with prices sometimes several dollars less than, say, hmv people will pick up the new madonna cd along with their toilet paper. this price discount is all about volume
online sales of new cds: amazon for instance. they can underprice tower records because of volume just like walmart, but also because of reduced operating costs of not having a physical store front.
online sales of used cds: ebay here. even for something as durable as a cd, the used price always comes in lower than new. with the internet facilitating used cd sales, it's taking a big chunk out of the retailers.
note also that this is only about retailers, not labels or artists. the riaa is concerned about geffen moving units. it doesn't necessarily car if those units are moved through tower or target or amazon.
'let's start a war or 2 to fix up the economy' hasn't worked
of course not.
the traditional theory is that war is a stimulus for the economy because it is an instant export generator. materiel (bombs, ammo etc) is manufactured domestically and then exported to (ie, dropped on) a foreign country. george orwell outlines this economic theory quite nicely in 1984, and that's how it was back in '48.
however, the war against iraq and most modern interstate wars involving a developed nation are different for several reasons:
they are shorter. unlike world war 2 which lasted between 8 years (if you were japanese or chinese) and 4 years (if you were american), modern wars are measured in weeks. there is no time to ramp up domestic production. peacetime surpluses of materiel are expended so there is no productivity boost during the war itself.
modern weapons don't lend themselves to effective wartime production. during ww2, planes, tanks, guns were all simple to mass produce and were consumed en masse for the war effort. modern weaponry (planes for instance) require a long time to design and manufacture. they are best developed during non-war periods and then held on hand to be consumed during a conflict. replacement production during wartime is not really an option.
production is no longer exclusively or predominantly domestic. for better or worse (i suspect worse) oecd economies are globalized. foreign instability caused by war or threat of war has a greater impact on the domestic economy than during the isolationist 40's. look how badly wall street behaved during the lead up the iraq invasion.
the bottom line is, that war's traditional role of providing a fine way to just throw away production on a foreign "market" is obsolete. if the united states wants to develop a government-funded make work project, they should investigate something more productive... highways again maybe. or a second panama canal?
no, it's bad for netflix because walmart has a virtually limitless warchest and can win by attrition. how big is walmart?
last year their revenues were $200 billion us. that's more than the gdp of israel
of the 10 richest people in the world, five are waltons (of walmart fame). you think gates is a fat cat? the waltons are downright obese!
heck, s. robson walton may even be richer than bill! the "rich list 2001" claimed that s.r. had a personal bankroll of 65 billion, and placed him in the top slot for wealth worldwide.
walmart has 1 million employees. three times general motors.
however, despite all this, the average walmart employee makes only 15k/year.
what the hell are they thinking? v glorifies terrorism! witness:
the humans don't wear uniforms - they are "unclassified combatants"
they wear the visitors' uniforms in combat situations
they win in the first series by using biological weapons of mass destruction
given the current political atmosphere in the united states i find it amazing that anyone could dare glorify the efforts of extremist human terrorists.
if you wonder how the majors screw over and claw back on bands, the definitive source is stevel alibini's "majore labels: some of your firends are already this fucked"
If I'm a musician and I throw out the master recordings from an album I've been working on, I would still own the IP to that material...wouldn't I?
bzzt. incorrect analogy. the guy isn't photocopying the "master" pattern. he's selling the envelopes. a better analogy would be if you threw away your cd collection and somebody picked it up and sold it.
Last year, Greek authorities were confronted with 2,411 counterfeiting cases and seized 4,776 counterfeit banknotes
that's about 2 banknotes per "counterfeiting case". sounds like this "problem" is really just some kids with a colour scanner...
Slashdot Mirror
no point. just some facts. a refreshing change of pace for slashdot.
do not call. just tap. :)
global warming: increase in heat-retaining gasses reduce dissipation of energy from the plaent/atmosphere. since the input of energy from the sun remains constant, mean temperatures rise.
ozone depletion: stratospheric ozone (o3) blocks high-frequency solar radiation on its way to the earth's surface. less o3 means more high-frequency radiation.
since solar panels (photovoltaics) are more effective with high-frequency radiation, ozone depletion increases their output.
global warming just sucks
revenue - expenditure = profit
when an industry pleas to the public and government that it contributes jobs, always remember that paycheques fall on the wrong side of the profit equation and will be reduced whenever and however possible.
creating jobs is a side effect of industry. not an end goal.
forget staasi. the dod and darpa in the u.s. o' a is working on a total tracking system to track, record and analyze everything about the monitored individual - phone conversations, physical movement, surfing, purchase, even vital signs. it's the "lifelog" project (reference link is here).
of course darpa/dod is saying it's only to be used on people who consent to being monitored.... but then again, j edgar hoover once said the fbi would never use phone taps. administrations and policies change y'know. so, skepticism is warranted.
the only plus side to this is that the software is written by microsoft... so you may have the option to live privately during reboots.
if you want to blame somebody blame david geffen, or cbs, or sony, or capitol. not apple.
if(bush)
bush++;
else
bush++;
i'll do you one (well, four) better... build a cluster of these ibms! i'd suggest black lab project from terrasoft (makers of yellow dog linux). if you are building a cluster, really, black lab is an awesome tool: automated node building, an automatic "life sign" monitoring system for nodes, a migration tool so that you can put shared libraries on nodes over the cluser resulting in having nodes that don't even need to have a hard drive and it's altivec optimized to take advantage of the vector processing in the g4/5.
if you ran one of these clusters, you wouldn't need hookers. the babes would comt to you.
read up on it. there will come a time when your petty national law will be overridden by the unelected, unaccountable wto... and then the dmca might look good.
bingo. remember that a "major" record label is, by definition, a label that owns its own distribution and promotion network (which is why you sometimes see albums with the indie label logo and a major's logo on the back. the major is the distro channel).
while this combo can be a good "package deal". it means that the artist is tied to one label for everything - the product, the promo, the distro. there's no shopping around.
witness the band "drive like jehu". originally they were headhunter, and indie from san diego, distributed by cargo (of montreal). their first lp did remarkably well, so they moved to capitol to get "better distro and promo". the second album was considerably different than the first and capitol decided that they didn't want to be involved with dlj anymore - so they killed the distro. three weeks after the release, the busiest hmv in my city had exactly one copy.
of course, dlj couldn't shop the product to another distro company. they'd signed a contract. in the end, the band broke up. (two of the members are in the hot snakes now... in case yr a fan).
so, the moral is this: if you sign with a major, they hold all the cards and can leverage release schedules, distro, promotional material &c. against you to force you to renogiate.
nb: dlj's contract stipulated that the vinyl release of that second lp could be done by headhunter. that was a pretty rare condition. but for a year it was the only way to get that album, in my city at least! nb also that the abovementioned album was eventually re-released last year by swami records - an indie.
- James Madison (Fourth President of the United States)
while making sure laws remain open is a good and necessary thing to maintain a transparent state with de jure authority, it only goes so far. if the laws are open but the interests, motivations and business dealings of lawmakers remain opaque then the openess is not complete.
mit (yep, the massachussets institute of technology) has been running a site for a while now dedicated to allowing citizens to monitor and research their legislators (and executives). the mission statement says it all:
To empower citizens by providing a single, comprehensive, easy-to-use repository of information on individuals, organizations, and corporations related to the government of the United States of America.
To allow citizens to submit intelligence about government-related issues, while maintaining their anonymity. To allow members of the government a chance to participate in the process.
the full site is at: http://opengov.media.mit.edu/
it's a good read.
well, it's all laid out for anyone with an internet connection to read! i am referring to esr's jargon file (for the lazy, the lexicon is here)
One mother told me that when she found pornographic messages in the family's e-mail, she immediately suspected that the teenagers in her house had been up to no good. The broken trust took weeks to repair.
and that's the basic tone of the whole piece: spam is a trojan horse rolling sexual material into the living rooms of godfearing, wholesome americans.
of course, it's not worse than the detroit free press who provides for the solicitation of prositution....
heck, the nsa is even working on selinux (a security enhanced linux) that is open source. and the kicker is this: one of their partners is pgp secruity. (source: here
times have changed
debuggery - maxims and arrows
- be hostile: your application was your friend - your baby. you gave it life. well, no longer. now your application is your enemy. do you admire the intricate house of cards you have built like hiram abif? don't. you have a glue gun now and you are going to do a little explaining about who is boss here! your app is taunting you - it's thinking "what does a chemical/analogue hack like that have that i don't?" well, i'll tell you: an index finger. suitable for hitting the "del" key. make this crystal goddamn clear!
- kludge everything! the debug stage of the development life cycle is all about kludges. we call it klop - kludge-oriented programming:
- blame others: teamwork is just a code word for being the shepherd to a flock of scapegoats. if you were smart, you'd have been working on cultivating a culture of accepting blame early on in the cycle. this is espescially effective if yr building a client/server thingy. establish early on that most of the failures are on the client(server) side. whichever one you're not writing.
- redefine feature sets. the client is a clueless little doughboy who can't tell his ass from his operating system anyway. he's been flaking you on the spec-n-req all year. turn those tables! if a feature is buggy, yank it. if there's a complaint, reference the client to some vaguely-related advisory somewhere (trust me, he won't read all the way down). if he complains say "in light of advisory x we strongly adivse against implementing _______ (feature). a work around may be possible at a future point and we are more than willing to calculate the billing for that additional work now."
all that and echo will solve all yr debuggery problems.kludge foo = new kludge(specialCase bar);
you've written that. the debugging phase comes at the end of a project. ie the part closest to the deadline when clueless suits and moneyment[1] confuse line count with product. the pressure is on. the company is on the line. are you going to walk into the glass tower and pitch to the vc's about how yr going to have to go back to the uml's and rebuild x? good luck! can i have your job when you're done? get the tape, get the staples, get the glue.
make yourself documentation czar if possible - then abuse the position to retroactively assign blame to other team members ("the docs explicitly state that we use roman numerals" - "gee, i don't remember that" - "well tough. get coding").if you set it up right you can build an army of debugging minions to do your kluding for you while you, uh, write in your blog...
bingo. although it should be noted that p2p only gets a small amount of attention in the article. the bottom line is that the retailers are getting creamed on price. simply, there are other channels that offer the same material for less and consumers are going there instead. sure, p2p is considered a factor, but the three big culprits are:
- discount stores: walmart, target and friends can flog the most popular cd's at a discount - sometimes even as loss leaders to generate traffic. with prices sometimes several dollars less than, say, hmv people will pick up the new madonna cd along with their toilet paper. this price discount is all about volume
- online sales of new cds: amazon for instance. they can underprice tower records because of volume just like walmart, but also because of reduced operating costs of not having a physical store front.
- online sales of used cds: ebay here. even for something as durable as a cd, the used price always comes in lower than new. with the internet facilitating used cd sales, it's taking a big chunk out of the retailers.
note also that this is only about retailers, not labels or artists. the riaa is concerned about geffen moving units. it doesn't necessarily car if those units are moved through tower or target or amazon.of course not.
the traditional theory is that war is a stimulus for the economy because it is an instant export generator. materiel (bombs, ammo etc) is manufactured domestically and then exported to (ie, dropped on) a foreign country. george orwell outlines this economic theory quite nicely in 1984, and that's how it was back in '48.
however, the war against iraq and most modern interstate wars involving a developed nation are different for several reasons:
- they are shorter. unlike world war 2 which lasted between 8 years (if you were japanese or chinese) and 4 years (if you were american), modern wars are measured in weeks. there is no time to ramp up domestic production. peacetime surpluses of materiel are expended so there is no productivity boost during the war itself.
- modern weapons don't lend themselves to effective wartime production. during ww2, planes, tanks, guns were all simple to mass produce and were consumed en masse for the war effort. modern weaponry (planes for instance) require a long time to design and manufacture. they are best developed during non-war periods and then held on hand to be consumed during a conflict. replacement production during wartime is not really an option.
- production is no longer exclusively or predominantly domestic. for better or worse (i suspect worse) oecd economies are globalized. foreign instability caused by war or threat of war has a greater impact on the domestic economy than during the isolationist 40's. look how badly wall street behaved during the lead up the iraq invasion.
the bottom line is, that war's traditional role of providing a fine way to just throw away production on a foreign "market" is obsolete. if the united states wants to develop a government-funded make work project, they should investigate something more productive... highways again maybe. or a second panama canal?- last year their revenues were $200 billion us. that's more than the gdp of israel
- of the 10 richest people in the world, five are waltons (of walmart fame). you think gates is a fat cat? the waltons are downright obese!
- heck, s. robson walton may even be richer than bill! the "rich list 2001" claimed that s.r. had a personal bankroll of 65 billion, and placed him in the top slot for wealth worldwide.
- walmart has 1 million employees. three times general motors.
- however, despite all this, the average walmart employee makes only 15k/year.
how do you beat that kind of war chest?fine ideas culled from there include:
- the humans don't wear uniforms - they are "unclassified combatants"
- they wear the visitors' uniforms in combat situations
- they win in the first series by using biological weapons of mass destruction
given the current political atmosphere in the united states i find it amazing that anyone could dare glorify the efforts of extremist human terrorists.now, everyone together: "no blood for water!"
http://www.arancidamoeba.com/mrr/problemwithmusic. html
dumpster millenium contorl act
good god, i slay me.
bzzt. incorrect analogy. the guy isn't photocopying the "master" pattern. he's selling the envelopes. a better analogy would be if you threw away your cd collection and somebody picked it up and sold it.
http://www.arancidamoeba.com/mrr/problemwithmusic. html
if you're short on time, just skip to the math at the bottom.
Last year, Greek authorities were confronted with 2,411 counterfeiting cases and seized 4,776 counterfeit banknotes that's about 2 banknotes per "counterfeiting case". sounds like this "problem" is really just some kids with a colour scanner...