Please explain which things in nature or human design are not the expression of, or at least expressable in, mathematical formulas. Not to imply I believe there are no such things, but surely a sizeable majority of the mathematical, if not the scientific, community is prone to this belief.
To exempt anything from a patent because it essentially involves an algorithm may be to exempt all things from patents. An arguable position, but not because mathematics is a special case. Or are we only to patent things in the realms of the arts and spirituality, where some would say mathematics does not express the essence as it does in the realms of engineering?
You have used my patented Picasso process in the portrayal of my patented Buddha, please decist!
I think it tries to install recommended/suggested packages automatically
Yeah, and even if you go through the dependencies and overrule it, dselect will decide that that there's a bunch of other stuff on your system that it should do you the favor of removing. Granted, I have some major programs installed from tar, because I like to run Debian stable but sometimes need a program in its most recent version. Because of Debian dependencies that means compiling from the tar (packages in unstable depend on the rest of the unstable distro) - and f*ck me but I'm not going to build a Debian package just to get Debian to recognize what I've installed. I have real work to do. Anyway, there's no problem in this except that dselect becomes very unhappy and wants to trash major parts of the system when all I'm wanting to do with it is grab some utility. Apt-get is definitely saner.
The ideal situation in business is when you can do some particular thing so much better than nobody else comes close. That's just not going to happen for hardware built from standard parts.
But VA, in doing the right thing with Source Forge, in terms of providing an environment to foster software initially to make their hardware look better, may have stumbled into an area where they can build a large business and keep the lead for some years.
The stupid thing about the dot com bubble was the notion that a group of computer jocks would be so much smarter about just everything that they could do retailing better than, say, outfits that are run by families that have decades, sometimes centuries, of retailing culture under their belts. As if ability to work with computers assured you of having 50 bonus intelligence points that could be applied anywhere in life.
Well, it's not that the nerds took over from the corporations. It's just the inverse: every traditional business of any size is becoming in significant part a software development house. And it's mostly a matter of working up from small projects that work for some particular location or department to a broader integration. The way to do this well, when you're not starting out with the computer system and trying to make the business fit it (the nerd model), is to start with the business intelligence in each of those locations and departments, and find a way to bring that all together.
But that's been very hard to coordinate. Which is why way too many large businesses bring in SAP or the big consulting firms to try to do it top down - basically, the nerd's mistake again. For generic enough businesses, where the people really don't need to do more than run a widget assembly line and sell to established markets, this can work. But for a business with more specialized intelligence innate to its operations, this can really f*ck you up.
Source Forge gives an organic way for a major corporation that's found that SAPiness saps their lifeblood, but that also has had prior trouble getting efficient, effective company-wide development worked up into higher-level integration, to pull niche-specific, wisdom-preserving integration off. Which puts VA into a position to get into the really serious money that currently mostly goes to stuffed suits who know nothing but how to walk the MBA walk - and who are hated by anyone in the firms being consulted who actually knows his or her shit, and sees how the "daddy knows best, he went to business school" attitude of the top-down fixers will destroy much of the real wisdom that older, successful corporations have accumulated in their staff.
Business likes to give lip service to the 'new,' but business is profoundly conservative. Source Forge is the conservative way to embrace and develop the newest technology without nullifying the intelligence embedded in your current business culture. It's revenge on the nerds' premise that we were smarter than everyone in every way. But it also allows the nerds, as we go to payroll or contract work for old-line firms, a degree of freedom and collaboration that we wouldn't have if the only model was SAP-like. If we've got to serf the web, at least we can whistle while we work.
(And this may be why Microsoft will essentially go out of business within a decade. Internal development based around open source models will leave no reason to license anything from Mickey G. He'll end up like Corel, with a slice of the home market from people who want to still use the software they used to know.)
it should mean something that a number of those acronyms are for the same class of goods or services: Accunet Information Manager, Adaptive Internetwork Management, Advanced Information Management, Association française pour les applications de l'Informatique à la Médecine, Automated In-line Mailer, Army Information Management, Aether Intelligent Messaging!
If you could get one of these firms onboard to assert prior ownership-by-use of the AIM trademark for that class, they could get the AOL trademark thrown out.
The cheapest way to bring that about would be to encourage AOL to go after them all - one or another could afford the lawyers to put AOL down. If AOL won't go after them, then you have proof they aren't really enforcing the trademark, and it becomes moot. So write AOL insisting on proof that they have pursued all these "violations" of the mark in their class of goods or services.
This may not apply to collections of titles, but in books with collections of out-of-copyright images (such as the many Dover titles) you can use any image without infringement, but what Dover owns is the copyright on the collection - if you published your own book or Website with that same collection of images, you're violating Dover's copyright.
The question here is whether the record company or artist, who does not own copyright on the titles of either the recording or the individual songs, might own an enforceable copyright on the collection - so that publishing the album title followed by the songs in order, and just those songs on that album, might be in violation. I kind of doubt any court has seen this particular permutation, but there could be an argument for copyright covering it.
If you have an always-on Net connection, and you've got say Sendmail and Apache on it, it's trivial to read your mail from anywhere there's a Web browser (without trusting Hot Mail). Your address book? Just a little Perl or PHP and a database.
Okay, that's a few steps short of having your desktop appear on any terminal for you, but those are relatively short steps. Given an always-on connection at the home end, it's possible to set up a nice package accessible from anywhere. Heck, it can even, as Microsoft bought multi-page ads in the NY Times last week to marvel on, read e-mail addressed to several different accounts, from a single mailbox! Wow.
Basically it looks like Microsoft wins if (1) we don't ever get to always-on being the regular thing and (2) some crafty folks don't put together some standard beginner's collection of largely-already-available stuff into something like a Home Base Linux distro.
No one wants a time share on a mainframe.
Sublet the Veterans for Administration?
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VA Layoff Rumors
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· Score: 1
600,000 JOBS FOR THE TAKING
(Source: Publish.com) Despite corporate layoffs, employers confront a
shortfall of technology workers.
What's this about?
As a sys admin who doesn't develop in a real language (just php-mysql), I often push things to where I have questions and suggestions for improvement that I figure the developers might profit from. Maybe 40% of the time I'm right, the rest just missing some concept (which about half the time means room for improvement in the fine manuals). So I'm a nuisance more often than not, but there's a good size handful of bugs fixed in various open source products because of the hit rate I have, and developers sweating to follow up.
Problem: I'm a New Yorker. In this town it's not polite to let politeness stand in the way of getting a point across, when it's in the mutual interests of both parties to be communicating. Of course, many developers live in towns which have resisted NY cultural imperialism - who knows why? What to do? How to communicate to the thin skinned?
One surprising thing about the KDE/Gnome wars and the KDE team playing nicer together is that in academic conferences in the sciences, Americans tend to be much more collegial than Europeans - or so say the Europeans I've met at American conferences. What is it about software development that puts the Europeans ahead in collegiality? Or is this just a chance reversal of cultural averages in both camps?
Good point on the misinterpretation. Reminds you of, what?, folks who think they're 'Christians'? But notice that the Nietzcheans in the show follow premises dear to modern sociobiology (or 'evolutionary psychology' as the movement wants to change its name to to protect its feigned innocence). All the references to the genes, to the whole point of life being to serve them, are to modern pop logic what Mr. Spock was to the pop logic of rationality in the 60s, when man first dreamed the Minskian absurdity that the ultimate embodiment of humanity would be as a calculating machine.
Me, I'm betting on the one with the tail to save the universe - the closest equivalent of Kirk's emotionalism and luck. Beka as space jockey though, taken from Harrison Ford's model?
Anyone else noticing on how several of the larger open source projects the documentation is getting worse while advances in the software increase the level of knowledge required to successfully implement it? Isn't there a perverse incentive when software is GPL'd but the authors are in the business of selling support to produce software that requires support for effective use, both by having obscure gotcha's and by not providing adequate documentation?
Sure, the larger community can always put our own documentation teams together, and sometimes we do, but more usually the quality of the primary documentation remains under the control of the developers who, especially now that they aren't being smothered in VC money, are instead under pressure to create support profit centers in the Linux IPOs that hired many of them on a year or so back.
This also seems to be producing major software that just will not install smoothly from source without very special knowledge, forcing people into dependence on.rpms and even.debs - in a way that just wasn't the case even a year or two back. Either I'm getting stupider (doubtless all the time) or stuff is getting more glitchy to handle without an intermediary to predigest it - which really means in a vital aspect it's no longer so open, not so much a gift as a loss leader.
- Probably only a minor diversion in the flow of what's basically a very good thing. But annoying.
How to win the blindfold test
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MP3Pro Released
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Listen to the bass line. Compression works reasonably well for mid-range instruments, but a stringed bass instrument (acoustic or electric) gets a lot of its personality from overtones that are also up into the mid-range of pitch. Most all of these overtones are thrown out by the psycho-acoustic compression algorithms, which tend to see them as noise you won't notice as missing behind the mid-range instruments.
Of course, most people don't consciously listen to the bass line, so most don't notice the difference. But if you do, it's easy to spot compressed music on any system with good enough fidelity to hear the bass as more than a thumping to begin with.
Considering that former FCC chairman Kennard says that NPR's opposition before Congress was what killed his initiative to legalize micro-broadcasting, should we be urging contributions to NPR stations? True, NPR is a bit to the left, and sometimes entertaining; true, many of the micro-broadcasters would have been evangelical churches on the far right. Still the principle seems all wrong: NPR has helped prevent the emergence of real, local, community-based radio. What with Pacifica Radio in flames, that means no voices more radical than NPR's pleasant liberals will be heard in most of the country.
If any significant portion of them aligned with - or set up their own - alternate root scheme, that would be the end of the ICANN monopoly. Those with alternatives should be actively recruiting potential defectors.
In the current Nation an article by Eric Foner describes how the just-elected conservative government of Berlusconi in Italy - the first to include lineal descendants of the Fascist party since the war - won by using slogans of "freedom" borrowed from Bushies... which is about like Microsoft borrowing ".Net" and "innovation".
We should ask, who is the real constituency of freedom, and how do we, if we are members of that group, preserve the good name of freedom from being co-opted by essentially fascist forces selling the idea that true freedom is just the freedom to be entertained by their media (Berlusconi, the richest man in Italy, owns television networks and a soccer team), while burning their oil (Bush's biggest contributor has been Enron) and eating their GM food?
First, we should recognize who the real constituency is. For example, trades which require personal freedom in order to be performed well produce more than their share of true advocates - music, visual arts, some varieties of programming, and even once-upon-a-time cattle ranching (which is why Bush baby poses as a rancher) - "don't fence me in." And we should add to this group the other staple of the frontier, the dance hall woman/sex worker.
Now, it's not hard to see that, even in our most sophisticated cities, it's easy for politicians to get a significant section of the population worked up about the danger of all these libertine sorts, trying to lure their children into museums and libraries and other places of idleness, off the assembly line of birth-school-marriage-work-death. And it's not too hard to find examples of, for instance, artists with destroyed lives attributable to their flirtation with serious freedoms - their sometimes desparate hunger for degrees of freedom and inspiration which can be fleeting and evasive.
To prevent freedom, it's technologies - particularly the psychotropic - are severely restricted. Back when radio was briefly free, in the late 60's, the broad public fears of such technologies were eased by the great and obvious beauty of the musics produced by artists whose minds were made freer by, and whose work celebrated, these means. Hoping for a revival of free and inspired musics seems polyannish at this point, after even mp3.com has gone down in cynical grovelling.
It's easy to see how Brand and Barlow, producers of the 60s psychotropic culture, fastened on the liberatory potential of computers and networking. And how programmers, being for the most part young, dependent on their creativity, and with one unfortunate exception without real power, appreciated what freedom could do for them.
But where do we go now? The fascists, having co-opted "freedom" to their ideology, can't easily disown the positive valuation of the term - if we can but wrest its meaning back it can be a powerful trojan. But how do we define freedom with such care that the concept doesn't seem to sanction a corrupt mobster like Berlusconi or Gates??
Here in NYC, when Verizon rewires a neighborhood with fiber, they typically leave a small number of pure copper lines per block, which are available first-come-first-served to those who insist on them for DSL and whatever.
... is that in many Western states the surface and subsurface rights are quite separate, for example many ranchers in Wyoming have to put up with natural gas exploitation on their land because the original lease held subsurface rights out of the deal by which the ranchers' families originally bought their ranches. If surface rights were to gain precidence or control over subsurface rights, then a whole lot of the energy industry would be in trouble.
And for the most part subsurface rights actually take precidence - they come with the right to errect oil derricks or mine entrances - or even to dig a mine under your house (which is still causing whole towns in Montana and West Virginia to 'subside' - to fall into the holes as the mine tunnels collapse). They also get to pollute your streams, after diverting them for mining and gas extraction operations.
Now, let's see, who does the current administration love more, energy or telecomm? Which rights will prevail with the judges being appointed?
Do like the astronauts, and get Rolfed. See rolf.org and rolfguild.org (there has been a branching in the training institutes). The premise is that fascia which run within and between muscles are a colloidal tissue which under the right pressure liquifies (like dirt in an earthquake of the right frequence) enabling structural stuff that's been stuck out-of-line from old injuries and habits to be freed up. Also good for returning to gravity from space tourism.
After getting rolfed, Alexander Technique and/or yoga can be invaluable for tuning and maintaining the better structure. There can also be a place for short-term chiropractic in conjunction with rolfing. Walking is also very good - there's less strain on the back when walking than sitting.
Of course, not all rolfers are equal. But of the 7 I've seen over two decades, only 2 were of questionable skill. So if you start out with someone who doesn't quite suit you, odds are switching to another will see an improvement. The standard is a course of ten sessions, after which most people are in much improved shape - of course you can always screw yourself up again, but rolfing should get you far enough forward that exercise and postural techniques become feasible and rewarding where previously they'd been a pain, and even counterproductive in terms of backlash and aggravation of existing problems.
I miss my childhood in the '50s when brand identity was secure. I'd like my favorite shows to show my television buddies drinking only my brand of beer, washing with my brand of detergent, &tc. I'd gladly sacrifice privacy to let these good companies displace despised brands from my home theater. How soon can I have this?
Alternately, can I set my Tivo to only record shows with desired brand placements?
If the courts are enforcing Scientology, think of how it'll be when Shrub's judicial appointees have their say about the just powers of Christian scams, now in line for massive federal funding.
Corporations, religious organizations, governments - only when they are well-divided do individuals have any chance of breathing free. We were alright under Clinton because the Congress - dominated by the strange religio-corporate hybrids that have become the GOP - was Clinton's throat and vice versa.
How can we divide them now? We almost need a Man From Mars to show up their shoddy scams, a true religion to shatter the unholy alliance.
I thought laws were a matter of subscription ...
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Is Law Copyrighted?
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· Score: 1
paid in installments through our taxes.
We may not own them outright, but that certainly should give us full rights to view this year's edition.
Moderation is about rating the quality of the post, not the content of the post.
This is like saying, "Voting should be about rating the quality of the candidate, not the content of the candidate." As if the content - what the candidate actually intends to do - were somehow less important that 'quality' - a nice public persona. Crap, if quality can be separated from content, then as they say in our quality-impaired media, "Content is king" - or should be. It's not how you do it, it's what you do, Ohio Players to the contrary. If the content is that the poster slanders Stallman, we shouldn't vote it up for how sweetly the poster honies his tongue, or not (in this case not).
If you want quality without content (or at least with content hidden, cover every dish with Cool Whip!
At namesys.com they have benchmarks that clearly show Reiser beating ext2 and ext3 on a number of Linux setups. From the comments here, I'd take it y'all think their bench is tilted? Maybe, but the speedup is obvious on a 2.2.x system from where I sit.
Does it bother anyone else that the kid who's pursuing this got a patent for the idea? Like: I'll run fiber through a pipe. The pipe used to be used for pneumatic mail. Therefore this is a fresh invention based on what the pipe once was. What's not entirely obvious about taking any existing pipe and running fiber through it?
Yes, exactly! The whole movie production business is based crucially on the need for massive budgets for the near-obsolete tech required by using film. This is going away fast. In less than 5 years anyone coming out of 'film' school will have all the digital video gear they ever need. They're going to suck up to Hollywood producers? Why, for distribution? Not with any sort of progress in bandwidth and/or compression to the home. Not as long as we can build hi-rez net-reception home theaters. And if you want the public experience, put net-video jukeboxes in bars. The education market will take care of itself - get those science lectures for your junior high from real scientists, with you-are-there immediacy! Less boredom, more real inspiration, fewer inept teachers to hire; it will be a no-brainer. Of course, this will be greatly driven by pr0n, too. Time to resign from the Mickey Mouse Club, kiddies, the real fun's about begun.
Slashdot Mirror
Please explain which things in nature or human design are not the expression of, or at least expressable in, mathematical formulas. Not to imply I believe there are no such things, but surely a sizeable majority of the mathematical, if not the scientific, community is prone to this belief.
To exempt anything from a patent because it essentially involves an algorithm may be to exempt all things from patents. An arguable position, but not because mathematics is a special case. Or are we only to patent things in the realms of the arts and spirituality, where some would say mathematics does not express the essence as it does in the realms of engineering?
You have used my patented Picasso process in the portrayal of my patented Buddha, please decist!
Yeah, and even if you go through the dependencies and overrule it, dselect will decide that that there's a bunch of other stuff on your system that it should do you the favor of removing. Granted, I have some major programs installed from tar, because I like to run Debian stable but sometimes need a program in its most recent version. Because of Debian dependencies that means compiling from the tar (packages in unstable depend on the rest of the unstable distro) - and f*ck me but I'm not going to build a Debian package just to get Debian to recognize what I've installed. I have real work to do. Anyway, there's no problem in this except that dselect becomes very unhappy and wants to trash major parts of the system when all I'm wanting to do with it is grab some utility. Apt-get is definitely saner.
The ideal situation in business is when you can do some particular thing so much better than nobody else comes close. That's just not going to happen for hardware built from standard parts.
But VA, in doing the right thing with Source Forge, in terms of providing an environment to foster software initially to make their hardware look better, may have stumbled into an area where they can build a large business and keep the lead for some years.
The stupid thing about the dot com bubble was the notion that a group of computer jocks would be so much smarter about just everything that they could do retailing better than, say, outfits that are run by families that have decades, sometimes centuries, of retailing culture under their belts. As if ability to work with computers assured you of having 50 bonus intelligence points that could be applied anywhere in life.
Well, it's not that the nerds took over from the corporations. It's just the inverse: every traditional business of any size is becoming in significant part a software development house. And it's mostly a matter of working up from small projects that work for some particular location or department to a broader integration. The way to do this well, when you're not starting out with the computer system and trying to make the business fit it (the nerd model), is to start with the business intelligence in each of those locations and departments, and find a way to bring that all together.
But that's been very hard to coordinate. Which is why way too many large businesses bring in SAP or the big consulting firms to try to do it top down - basically, the nerd's mistake again. For generic enough businesses, where the people really don't need to do more than run a widget assembly line and sell to established markets, this can work. But for a business with more specialized intelligence innate to its operations, this can really f*ck you up.
Source Forge gives an organic way for a major corporation that's found that SAPiness saps their lifeblood, but that also has had prior trouble getting efficient, effective company-wide development worked up into higher-level integration, to pull niche-specific, wisdom-preserving integration off. Which puts VA into a position to get into the really serious money that currently mostly goes to stuffed suits who know nothing but how to walk the MBA walk - and who are hated by anyone in the firms being consulted who actually knows his or her shit, and sees how the "daddy knows best, he went to business school" attitude of the top-down fixers will destroy much of the real wisdom that older, successful corporations have accumulated in their staff.
Business likes to give lip service to the 'new,' but business is profoundly conservative. Source Forge is the conservative way to embrace and develop the newest technology without nullifying the intelligence embedded in your current business culture. It's revenge on the nerds' premise that we were smarter than everyone in every way. But it also allows the nerds, as we go to payroll or contract work for old-line firms, a degree of freedom and collaboration that we wouldn't have if the only model was SAP-like. If we've got to serf the web, at least we can whistle while we work.
(And this may be why Microsoft will essentially go out of business within a decade. Internal development based around open source models will leave no reason to license anything from Mickey G. He'll end up like Corel, with a slice of the home market from people who want to still use the software they used to know.)
it should mean something that a number of those acronyms are for the same class of goods or services: Accunet Information Manager, Adaptive Internetwork Management, Advanced Information Management, Association française pour les applications de l'Informatique à la Médecine, Automated In-line Mailer, Army Information Management, Aether Intelligent Messaging!
If you could get one of these firms onboard to assert prior ownership-by-use of the AIM trademark for that class, they could get the AOL trademark thrown out.
The cheapest way to bring that about would be to encourage AOL to go after them all - one or another could afford the lawyers to put AOL down. If AOL won't go after them, then you have proof they aren't really enforcing the trademark, and it becomes moot. So write AOL insisting on proof that they have pursued all these "violations" of the mark in their class of goods or services.
This may not apply to collections of titles, but in books with collections of out-of-copyright images (such as the many Dover titles) you can use any image without infringement, but what Dover owns is the copyright on the collection - if you published your own book or Website with that same collection of images, you're violating Dover's copyright.
The question here is whether the record company or artist, who does not own copyright on the titles of either the recording or the individual songs, might own an enforceable copyright on the collection - so that publishing the album title followed by the songs in order, and just those songs on that album, might be in violation. I kind of doubt any court has seen this particular permutation, but there could be an argument for copyright covering it.
If you have an always-on Net connection, and you've got say Sendmail and Apache on it, it's trivial to read your mail from anywhere there's a Web browser (without trusting Hot Mail). Your address book? Just a little Perl or PHP and a database.
Okay, that's a few steps short of having your desktop appear on any terminal for you, but those are relatively short steps. Given an always-on connection at the home end, it's possible to set up a nice package accessible from anywhere. Heck, it can even, as Microsoft bought multi-page ads in the NY Times last week to marvel on, read e-mail addressed to several different accounts, from a single mailbox! Wow.
Basically it looks like Microsoft wins if (1) we don't ever get to always-on being the regular thing and (2) some crafty folks don't put together some standard beginner's collection of largely-already-available stuff into something like a Home Base Linux distro.
No one wants a time share on a mainframe.
600,000 JOBS FOR THE TAKING (Source: Publish.com) Despite corporate layoffs, employers confront a shortfall of technology workers. What's this about?
As a sys admin who doesn't develop in a real language (just php-mysql), I often push things to where I have questions and suggestions for improvement that I figure the developers might profit from. Maybe 40% of the time I'm right, the rest just missing some concept (which about half the time means room for improvement in the fine manuals). So I'm a nuisance more often than not, but there's a good size handful of bugs fixed in various open source products because of the hit rate I have, and developers sweating to follow up.
Problem: I'm a New Yorker. In this town it's not polite to let politeness stand in the way of getting a point across, when it's in the mutual interests of both parties to be communicating. Of course, many developers live in towns which have resisted NY cultural imperialism - who knows why? What to do? How to communicate to the thin skinned?
One surprising thing about the KDE/Gnome wars and the KDE team playing nicer together is that in academic conferences in the sciences, Americans tend to be much more collegial than Europeans - or so say the Europeans I've met at American conferences. What is it about software development that puts the Europeans ahead in collegiality? Or is this just a chance reversal of cultural averages in both camps?
Good point on the misinterpretation. Reminds you of, what?, folks who think they're 'Christians'? But notice that the Nietzcheans in the show follow premises dear to modern sociobiology (or 'evolutionary psychology' as the movement wants to change its name to to protect its feigned innocence). All the references to the genes, to the whole point of life being to serve them, are to modern pop logic what Mr. Spock was to the pop logic of rationality in the 60s, when man first dreamed the Minskian absurdity that the ultimate embodiment of humanity would be as a calculating machine.
Me, I'm betting on the one with the tail to save the universe - the closest equivalent of Kirk's emotionalism and luck. Beka as space jockey though, taken from Harrison Ford's model?
Sure, the larger community can always put our own documentation teams together, and sometimes we do, but more usually the quality of the primary documentation remains under the control of the developers who, especially now that they aren't being smothered in VC money, are instead under pressure to create support profit centers in the Linux IPOs that hired many of them on a year or so back.
This also seems to be producing major software that just will not install smoothly from source without very special knowledge, forcing people into dependence on .rpms and even .debs - in a way that just wasn't the case even a year or two back. Either I'm getting stupider (doubtless all the time) or stuff is getting more glitchy to handle without an intermediary to predigest it - which really means in a vital aspect it's no longer so open, not so much a gift as a loss leader.
- Probably only a minor diversion in the flow of what's basically a very good thing. But annoying.
Listen to the bass line. Compression works reasonably well for mid-range instruments, but a stringed bass instrument (acoustic or electric) gets a lot of its personality from overtones that are also up into the mid-range of pitch. Most all of these overtones are thrown out by the psycho-acoustic compression algorithms, which tend to see them as noise you won't notice as missing behind the mid-range instruments.
Of course, most people don't consciously listen to the bass line, so most don't notice the difference. But if you do, it's easy to spot compressed music on any system with good enough fidelity to hear the bass as more than a thumping to begin with.
Who buys systems when we can just assemble them from all these parts lying around?
Considering that former FCC chairman Kennard says that NPR's opposition before Congress was what killed his initiative to legalize micro-broadcasting, should we be urging contributions to NPR stations? True, NPR is a bit to the left, and sometimes entertaining; true, many of the micro-broadcasters would have been evangelical churches on the far right. Still the principle seems all wrong: NPR has helped prevent the emergence of real, local, community-based radio. What with Pacifica Radio in flames, that means no voices more radical than NPR's pleasant liberals will be heard in most of the country.
If any significant portion of them aligned with - or set up their own - alternate root scheme, that would be the end of the ICANN monopoly. Those with alternatives should be actively recruiting potential defectors.
We should ask, who is the real constituency of freedom, and how do we, if we are members of that group, preserve the good name of freedom from being co-opted by essentially fascist forces selling the idea that true freedom is just the freedom to be entertained by their media (Berlusconi, the richest man in Italy, owns television networks and a soccer team), while burning their oil (Bush's biggest contributor has been Enron) and eating their GM food?
First, we should recognize who the real constituency is. For example, trades which require personal freedom in order to be performed well produce more than their share of true advocates - music, visual arts, some varieties of programming, and even once-upon-a-time cattle ranching (which is why Bush baby poses as a rancher) - "don't fence me in." And we should add to this group the other staple of the frontier, the dance hall woman/sex worker.
Now, it's not hard to see that, even in our most sophisticated cities, it's easy for politicians to get a significant section of the population worked up about the danger of all these libertine sorts, trying to lure their children into museums and libraries and other places of idleness, off the assembly line of birth-school-marriage-work-death. And it's not too hard to find examples of, for instance, artists with destroyed lives attributable to their flirtation with serious freedoms - their sometimes desparate hunger for degrees of freedom and inspiration which can be fleeting and evasive.
To prevent freedom, it's technologies - particularly the psychotropic - are severely restricted. Back when radio was briefly free, in the late 60's, the broad public fears of such technologies were eased by the great and obvious beauty of the musics produced by artists whose minds were made freer by, and whose work celebrated, these means. Hoping for a revival of free and inspired musics seems polyannish at this point, after even mp3.com has gone down in cynical grovelling.
It's easy to see how Brand and Barlow, producers of the 60s psychotropic culture, fastened on the liberatory potential of computers and networking. And how programmers, being for the most part young, dependent on their creativity, and with one unfortunate exception without real power, appreciated what freedom could do for them.
But where do we go now? The fascists, having co-opted "freedom" to their ideology, can't easily disown the positive valuation of the term - if we can but wrest its meaning back it can be a powerful trojan. But how do we define freedom with such care that the concept doesn't seem to sanction a corrupt mobster like Berlusconi or Gates??
Here in NYC, when Verizon rewires a neighborhood with fiber, they typically leave a small number of pure copper lines per block, which are available first-come-first-served to those who insist on them for DSL and whatever.
... is that in many Western states the surface and subsurface rights are quite separate, for example many ranchers in Wyoming have to put up with natural gas exploitation on their land because the original lease held subsurface rights out of the deal by which the ranchers' families originally bought their ranches. If surface rights were to gain precidence or control over subsurface rights, then a whole lot of the energy industry would be in trouble.
And for the most part subsurface rights actually take precidence - they come with the right to errect oil derricks or mine entrances - or even to dig a mine under your house (which is still causing whole towns in Montana and West Virginia to 'subside' - to fall into the holes as the mine tunnels collapse). They also get to pollute your streams, after diverting them for mining and gas extraction operations.
Now, let's see, who does the current administration love more, energy or telecomm? Which rights will prevail with the judges being appointed?
After getting rolfed, Alexander Technique and/or yoga can be invaluable for tuning and maintaining the better structure. There can also be a place for short-term chiropractic in conjunction with rolfing. Walking is also very good - there's less strain on the back when walking than sitting.
Of course, not all rolfers are equal. But of the 7 I've seen over two decades, only 2 were of questionable skill. So if you start out with someone who doesn't quite suit you, odds are switching to another will see an improvement. The standard is a course of ten sessions, after which most people are in much improved shape - of course you can always screw yourself up again, but rolfing should get you far enough forward that exercise and postural techniques become feasible and rewarding where previously they'd been a pain, and even counterproductive in terms of backlash and aggravation of existing problems.
I miss my childhood in the '50s when brand identity was secure. I'd like my favorite shows to show my television buddies drinking only my brand of beer, washing with my brand of detergent, &tc. I'd gladly sacrifice privacy to let these good companies displace despised brands from my home theater. How soon can I have this?
Alternately, can I set my Tivo to only record shows with desired brand placements?
If the courts are enforcing Scientology, think of how it'll be when Shrub's judicial appointees have their say about the just powers of Christian scams, now in line for massive federal funding.
Corporations, religious organizations, governments - only when they are well-divided do individuals have any chance of breathing free. We were alright under Clinton because the Congress - dominated by the strange religio-corporate hybrids that have become the GOP - was Clinton's throat and vice versa.
How can we divide them now? We almost need a Man From Mars to show up their shoddy scams, a true religion to shatter the unholy alliance.
paid in installments through our taxes.
We may not own them outright, but that certainly should give us full rights to view this year's edition.
This is like saying, "Voting should be about rating the quality of the candidate, not the content of the candidate." As if the content - what the candidate actually intends to do - were somehow less important that 'quality' - a nice public persona. Crap, if quality can be separated from content, then as they say in our quality-impaired media, "Content is king" - or should be. It's not how you do it, it's what you do, Ohio Players to the contrary. If the content is that the poster slanders Stallman, we shouldn't vote it up for how sweetly the poster honies his tongue, or not (in this case not).
If you want quality without content (or at least with content hidden, cover every dish with Cool Whip!
At namesys.com they have benchmarks that clearly show Reiser beating ext2 and ext3 on a number of Linux setups. From the comments here, I'd take it y'all think their bench is tilted? Maybe, but the speedup is obvious on a 2.2.x system from where I sit.
Does it bother anyone else that the kid who's pursuing this got a patent for the idea? Like: I'll run fiber through a pipe. The pipe used to be used for pneumatic mail. Therefore this is a fresh invention based on what the pipe once was. What's not entirely obvious about taking any existing pipe and running fiber through it?
Yes, exactly! The whole movie production business is based crucially on the need for massive budgets for the near-obsolete tech required by using film. This is going away fast. In less than 5 years anyone coming out of 'film' school will have all the digital video gear they ever need. They're going to suck up to Hollywood producers? Why, for distribution? Not with any sort of progress in bandwidth and/or compression to the home. Not as long as we can build hi-rez net-reception home theaters. And if you want the public experience, put net-video jukeboxes in bars. The education market will take care of itself - get those science lectures for your junior high from real scientists, with you-are-there immediacy! Less boredom, more real inspiration, fewer inept teachers to hire; it will be a no-brainer. Of course, this will be greatly driven by pr0n, too. Time to resign from the Mickey Mouse Club, kiddies, the real fun's about begun.