In that respect, your comparison of data transport and water plumbing is completely off the wall. If anything, data transport is much more closely related to roadway transport than fluid transport via plumbing.
All I have have done is try to explain the design principles, terminology definitions and the similarities between fields of endeavor. You might think that the principles that govern the design of roads used by a few hundred thousand drivers all doing their own thing doesn't relate at all to data trasnport design, but you will be mistaken. The models all break down when you try to delve into details of individual cars and include accidents and such, but the overall model of the road and how it works does not.
If a crash closes a lane, two things happen. For one, the road can now be modelled as one with one less lane. Two, the approaching drivers within visual range of the wreck can be modeled as having grossly increased reaction times.
The effects are right in line with the principles outlined earlier - increased congestion.
After passing the wreck, the drivers reaction times are reduced back to normal and the road expands by one lane and bingo - free flowing traffic in near optimal conditions.
I think that you have fallen into a semantic trap.
"Sustaining" is too vague. The ultimate definition of a "viable", or "commercially usable" reactor is one that produces enough power so that by selling that power it can pay for itself, it's fuel, staff, etc. This is what an electrical power plant does. It costs $X to build, $Y/yr to maintain, and operate. If the power that it generates can be sold for > X + (Y * useful_lifespan), then the power plant is viable and probably will be built by somebody.
There are designs for fusion plants that are purposefully not "sustaining". Instead, they pulse. During the pulses, they make more than enough power to fire off the next pulse. What they don't do, yet, is make enough to fire off the next pulse, AND pay for themselves.
> Your use of the word "throughput" reveals that > you've got the completely wrong model in your head
I think that you have it backwards. Throughput is exactly what we are talking about. There is a reason that the same terminology is used in data transport design and people transport design. The reason being, that is the same thing that we are measuring or talking about.
Throughput, traffic capacity, latency, all apply, with the same basic concepts to both fields of engineering.
Latency is how long it takes to get from one end to the other.
Throughput is how much can go through in a given time.
Just as with data transport, in people or car transport, throughput is measured in "desired-units" transported per unit of time. We are talking about bits per second, bytes per second, or cars/people per hour. The same principles apply. Make the "desired-unit" shorter and throughput goes up. The spacing of bits at 100MHz is shorter than at 10MHz. A 100MHz data transport has higher throughput than a 10MHz one, all else being equal. In data transport the actual speed is nearly fixed so the only options are to add lanes(make a wider bus) or decrease the spacing of the bits. In the people transport field there is more room to maneuver.
A road that is densely packed with narrow inter-car spacing will have high throughput and long latency. The long latency is produced because the short spacing forces the drivers to slow down due to their limited reaction time and brake performance.
The optimum condition for a roadway is when the cars are operating at the road's maximum possible speed and the minimum spacing allowable at that speed. This condition produces both minimum latency (which is very important in people transport) and the maximum throughput possible while not increasing latency. Add one more car and the spacing will be reduced, forcing the speed to be reduced, causing an increase in latency. This is the "people transport" definition of congestion.
In the data trasnport field congestion also arises when conditions force latency up. The data transport might be operating at peak throughput, but there is more data to move than in can handle. Tha data is forced to wait and therefore latency goes up. This is the data transport definition of congestion. As in the people transport case, operating conditions have forced latency to increase.
All this talk about computer driven cars comes from the need or desire to improve(reduce) reaction times and so reduce the spacing requirements for any particular speed. The alternatives, mass transport or car pooling, operate on the same principle. Notice that while I've been talking about car spacing, I've also been using the term "people transport". Moving people and their stuff is what this is all about. Putting more people, or more stuff in a vehicle also reduces the "people spacing" requirements of a road. As such it also reduces congestion and improves throughput. The same effect is produced in the data transport field by compression.
The same effects produced by compression can be seen in both fields. Compression can improve throughput but can also have a negative effect on latency. Data must wait in a buffer to be compressed and then expanded. People must navigate to and then wait at a bus stop for the bus and then do the reverse at the other end. Depending on the situation in both the data and the people transport scenarios throughput can be improved or reduced as can latency.
In the data transport situation, you rarely start using compression until the latency or throughput limitations become intolerable. The same thing happens in the people transport arena. Given a wide open road, good weather, and a good car, I'm driving. Given instead a traffic jam, I'll take the bus and read the paper on the way...
There are 3 basic factors that govern the throughput of a road.
1) number of lanes
2) spacing between cars
3) speed of cars
There are various others such as road condition, length of the cars, weather, etc. but these are the main ones considered when designing a roadway.
If you pick a number for the amount of traffic that is carried on a road, say 10K cars per hour; then divide by the number of lanes, say 2, you get 5K/hour/lane. Obviously, adding lanes will help, but we have not yet completed the formulation.
A car must have a finite length. This is deduced from the limiting case. If a car was infinitely long, the lane could never carry more than 1 car, ever.
The next point is spacing, since we are giving a car a finite length, and we do want the lane to carry more than one car, if there is the minimum of 2, then there must be a space between them. Again, the limits are natural. If we want to have more than one car, the space must be less than infinity and if we want to have maximum density, we could use zero. We can use this "zero option" to our advantage. To make things easier, we will dispense with the spacing and redefine the length of the car to be the distance from the front of one to the front of the next.
To see how speed influences things, we consider the limit of zero. Again it is obvious that our lane will only carry one car, or none, ever. For any speed greater than 0, the traffic capacity of the lane is simply car_length/speed.
Anything that can be done to decrease the length(spacing) or increase the speed will increase the traffic capacity of our lane. Spacing requirements can be reduced by making cars lighter, installing better braking systems and reducing the reaction time of the driver. Speed improvements can be had by making the road smoother, improving suspension design, and aerodynamics.
If you define congestion as any state where the lane is not producing its optimal throughput and reduced spacing is forcing a reduction in speed, then you can see that reducing the spacing(length) while maintaining speed is helpful and so is a speed increase while maintaining spacing.
We have made lighter cars, better brakes, smoother roads, improved aerodynamics and suspensions. Guess what's left?
I'm with you there. When I first read that story I was a kid and I almost cried. Thirty years later I found the book(a collection) and read it again. Deja-vu all over again.
Nice to hear another voice with an understanding of the situation. Many people have been up in arms about our trade agreements with China without realizing that we are attacking them with the most powerful and simultaneously the most subtle, indefensible and well directed weapon(no "collateral damage") we have.
If we dropped trade with China, it would be the equivalent of ordering our troops to stop fighting while in the middle of a battlefield.
>I don't have any spare transducers just lying around >my garage... do you??
I'll bet you do. Have any old stereo speakers? How about a microphone? Hmm, a thermometer? All of these devices convert one form of energy to another. Do you have a boat with a depth finder? If so you have a transducer that converts electricity to sound and also does the reverse. If you look in the parts list or catalog, you will even find it listed as such: "Optional high performance transom mounted transducer $39.95"
Cheers.
ROTFL, guess what I saw at the grocery store today
on
Kazaa Usability Study
·
· Score: 2
> Or do you put all your groceries on top of the > stove and hope for a gourmet meal?
I assumed that she was at the grocery store because she hoped for/planned a meal, but after she put the groceries on top of her car, got in, and then drove off; I am not so sure anymore.;-)
It wasn't all that funny when it happened, just a mess of food spread over the parking lot, coke cans spewing brown foam, oranges bouncing and rolling towards the storm drain, eggs showing white and yellow in the sun, but after reading your post, I cracked up!
Everyone wants the best performance per dollar. Always. Everytime. Everywhere.
Why has a vendor with balls(willing to post FLOPS/$ or whatever transactions/$) never been born? Somebody must have the highest performing system, who are they? Why don't they show themselves?
There's not much to comment on. It worked, slowly. There weren't many apps. Tools were very expensive.
I switched it to linux way, way back in the 2.0.xx era. Since then it has acquired my personal uptime record of 350+ days while working 24/7 as home-office smtp/http/squid/ftp/firewall/etc. box. It's as solid as a rock and completely invulnerable to intel-style buffer overflow exploits and other arbitrary(x86) code execution attacks. I get a hit every other day from some skiddie that doesn't know what an alpha is or is not.
Have the humans do something that machines can't do very well, say image recognition and/or categorization.
A simple "Tell me about this picture" and an associated image and a text box would do. If the text submitted does not match a previously stored description well enough, no deal.
Every one in five or so, put out a new, previously un-cataloged, image and log the description...That would also be an easy way to beef up their image search engine.
You folks are talking about blowing a whole day's pay on a fucking movie? Either you're getting a mere $1.00 per hour or you are so stupid that you should be.
Really, sign up folks, hold up your hands. Let's see just how many fools there are out there. Sheesh, no wonder we've got problems.
"Where There's A Willy, There's a Way. "
on
Hacking the Highways
·
· Score: 4, Funny
From: http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~opa/ur/pranks.html
In 1988, a group of students pulled off the biggest prank at Rice. They rotated the 2,000 pound statue of William Marsh Rice 180 degrees, making Willy face Fondren Library for the first time in 58 years.
"We were sitting in the pub drinking beer, and we decided something had to be done," says John Q. Smith '86, who helped mastermind the operation. After two futile attempts, the pranksters decided the third time had to be the charm.
Three electrical engineers, two mechanical engineers, a civil engineer, a mathematical scientist, a biochemist, a chemist, a physicist and an English major put their brains and brawn together to carry out the elaborate scheme.
Using plans of the statue taken from Fondren Li-brary, they simulated the transfer load through a computer model. They built two 24- foot A-frames, which they painted black to blend with the night, and put a beam on top that supported a three ton hoist in the middle and two one ton hoists on the sides. The A-frames were tested at an off-campus garage by lifting a 2,250-pound Toyota that was swung back and forth to simulate rotation. A pair of Houston police officers looked on after being told the car hoisting was "a senior research project. "
These same police officers stopped the students as they were hauling the A-frames back to campus. Convinced it was only a school project, the officers gave the students a police escort to Entrance 8. Lookouts and decoys positioned themselves around the Quad and communicated to each other through walkie-talkies using code names from the X-Men comic book series. The light on Anderson Hall had been turned off every night for the two previous weeks. Each morning the pranksters reconnected the light so that physical plant people would not replace it.
In the early morning hours of Tuesday, Apri112, 1988, before the sun came up, Willy sat facing the library. Only one student was caught, Patrick Dyson '88, and was made to pay the cost of turning the statue to its rightful position.
Students rallied behind Dyson and sold T -shirts that read, "Where There's A Willy, There's a Way. " More than enough money was collected to pay the cost of restoring Willy to his familiar perspective. What took the pranksters one hour and cost $400 to do took professional movers three hours and a rumored $1,500-$2,000 to remedy. The students were blamed for breaking a guide pin underneath the statue, but they claim the professional movers did that.
Reports of the prank quickly spread across the country with the help of the media. "People are going to have a hard time beating this one," comments a contented Smith.
Well, maybe. But Rice students don't have excellent minds for nothing and they know quite well that a masterminded prank is a terrible thing to waste.
If we use the web as if it was expected to fail, then we could just as well have stuck with usenet.
Even if he thinks that countermeasures are justified then he should properly credit it as copied verbatim from the site.
Or, do like most and post a link to a mirror. Or, do like most and wait for complaints. Or, do like most and realize that a commercial site that has few images like magellan.com is not likely to be slashdotted especially since the article never made it to the front page.
I mean really, should the/. editors just copy the contents of the links that are(would have been) posted and post them with the whole story?
You know, a plastic disk with spiral dot patterns on them. In addition to that I usually get a bunch of paper, dried ink, and cardboard. That's all trash. What I want is the CD. I like to look at them. I like to shine lights on them and look at and sometimes record the fancy reflections. I've even got a gizmo that takes the reflections and converts them to electricity which is used to move magnets. Sometimes it makes some really nice sounds. Other times I use those reflection patterns to make all kinds images on my screen.
I've also used them as coasters.
When I was in college, we used them as pee targets for freshmen. If you made it through the hole, you came out clean. If you missed, it spattered back.
After I'm tired of all that, I take them to the gun range and use them as targets.
What I have not done is copy either the dot patterns or the fancy ink patterns on the trash that comes with it and distribute the copies.
He's already paid for that piece of plastic and the fancy spiral dot patterns on it. He has legal access to everything on it. The access control was legally satisfied when he walked out the front door of the store. He doesn't have to perform any sort of dance afterward. He doesn't even have to peel off the cover! He can sit on it, throw it in the air, put it in the microwave, put it in his PC, take it out, put it in the CDROM drive, spin it around, shine lights on it, observe the fancy reflections, even record the fancy reflections and then modify the recording of the reflections. He can even take it to the range and use it for a target if he wants.
What he cannot do is sell or distribute copies of it.
What he is doing with readily available tools is no different than scribbling notes with pen or pencil in the margins of a book that you have purchased. Yes, he is modifying it, but that is not against the law, even the DMCA.
Indeed, what he is doing is more akin to turning on a light so that it is easier to read the book you just bought.
That the Russian economy is definitely on the upside. Just read a bit about their new tax laws and the results. Should be required reading for all taxpayers.
Slashdot Mirror
No where have I tried to treat it as such.
In that respect, your comparison of data transport and water plumbing is completely off the wall. If anything, data transport is much more closely related to roadway transport than fluid transport via plumbing.
All I have have done is try to explain the design principles, terminology definitions and the similarities between fields of endeavor. You might think that the principles that govern the design of roads used by a few hundred thousand drivers all doing their own thing doesn't relate at all to data trasnport design, but you will be mistaken. The models all break down when you try to delve into details of individual cars and include accidents and such, but the overall model of the road and how it works does not.
If a crash closes a lane, two things happen. For one, the road can now be modelled as one with one less lane. Two, the approaching drivers within visual range of the wreck can be modeled as having grossly increased reaction times.
The effects are right in line with the principles outlined earlier - increased congestion.
After passing the wreck, the drivers reaction times are reduced back to normal and the road expands by one lane and bingo - free flowing traffic in near optimal conditions.
I think that you have fallen into a semantic trap.
"Sustaining" is too vague. The ultimate definition of a "viable", or "commercially usable" reactor is one that produces enough power so that by selling that power it can pay for itself, it's fuel, staff, etc. This is what an electrical power plant does. It costs $X to build, $Y/yr to maintain, and operate. If the power that it generates can be sold for > X + (Y * useful_lifespan), then the power plant is viable and probably will be built by somebody.
There are designs for fusion plants that are purposefully not "sustaining". Instead, they pulse. During the pulses, they make more than enough power to fire off the next pulse. What they don't do, yet, is make enough to fire off the next pulse, AND pay for themselves.
> Your use of the word "throughput" reveals that
> you've got the completely wrong model in your head
I think that you have it backwards. Throughput is exactly what we are talking about. There is a reason that the same terminology is used in data transport design and people transport design. The reason being, that is the same thing that we are measuring or talking about.
Throughput, traffic capacity, latency, all apply, with the same basic concepts to both fields of engineering.
Latency is how long it takes to get from one end to the other.
Throughput is how much can go through in a given time.
Just as with data transport, in people or car transport, throughput is measured in "desired-units" transported per unit of time. We are talking about bits per second, bytes per second, or cars/people per hour. The same principles apply. Make the "desired-unit" shorter and throughput goes up. The spacing of bits at 100MHz is shorter than at 10MHz. A 100MHz data transport has higher throughput than a 10MHz one, all else being equal. In data transport the actual speed is nearly fixed so the only options are to add lanes(make a wider bus) or decrease the spacing of the bits. In the people transport field there is more room to maneuver.
A road that is densely packed with narrow inter-car spacing will have high throughput and long latency. The long latency is produced because the short spacing forces the drivers to slow down due to their limited reaction time and brake performance.
The optimum condition for a roadway is when the cars are operating at the road's maximum possible speed and the minimum spacing allowable at that speed. This condition produces both minimum latency (which is very important in people transport) and the maximum throughput possible while not increasing latency. Add one more car and the spacing will be reduced, forcing the speed to be reduced, causing an increase in latency. This is the "people transport" definition of congestion.
In the data trasnport field congestion also arises when conditions force latency up. The data transport might be operating at peak throughput, but there is more data to move than in can handle. Tha data is forced to wait and therefore latency goes up. This is the data transport definition of congestion. As in the people transport case, operating conditions have forced latency to increase.
All this talk about computer driven cars comes from the need or desire to improve(reduce) reaction times and so reduce the spacing requirements for any particular speed. The alternatives, mass transport or car pooling, operate on the same principle. Notice that while I've been talking about car spacing, I've also been using the term "people transport". Moving people and their stuff is what this is all about. Putting more people, or more stuff in a vehicle also reduces the "people spacing" requirements of a road. As such it also reduces congestion and improves throughput. The same effect is produced in the data transport field by compression.
The same effects produced by compression can be seen in both fields. Compression can improve throughput but can also have a negative effect on latency. Data must wait in a buffer to be compressed and then expanded. People must navigate to and then wait at a bus stop for the bus and then do the reverse at the other end. Depending on the situation in both the data and the people transport scenarios throughput can be improved or reduced as can latency.
In the data transport situation, you rarely start using compression until the latency or throughput limitations become intolerable. The same thing happens in the people transport arena. Given a wide open road, good weather, and a good car, I'm driving. Given instead a traffic jam, I'll take the bus and read the paper on the way...
All else being equal.
There are 3 basic factors that govern the throughput of a road.
1) number of lanes
2) spacing between cars
3) speed of cars
There are various others such as road condition, length of the cars, weather, etc. but these are the main ones considered when designing a roadway.
If you pick a number for the amount of traffic that is carried on a road, say 10K cars per hour; then divide by the number of lanes, say 2, you get 5K/hour/lane. Obviously, adding lanes will help, but we have not yet completed the formulation.
A car must have a finite length. This is deduced from the limiting case. If a car was infinitely long, the lane could never carry more than 1 car, ever.
The next point is spacing, since we are giving a car a finite length, and we do want the lane to carry more than one car, if there is the minimum of 2, then there must be a space between them. Again, the limits are natural. If we want to have more than one car, the space must be less than infinity and if we want to have maximum density, we could use zero. We can use this "zero option" to our advantage. To make things easier, we will dispense with the spacing and redefine the length of the car to be the distance from the front of one to the front of the next.
To see how speed influences things, we consider the limit of zero. Again it is obvious that our lane will only carry one car, or none, ever. For any speed greater than 0, the traffic capacity of the lane is simply car_length/speed.
Anything that can be done to decrease the length(spacing) or increase the speed will increase the traffic capacity of our lane. Spacing requirements can be reduced by making cars lighter, installing better braking systems and reducing the reaction time of the driver. Speed improvements can be had by making the road smoother, improving suspension design, and aerodynamics.
If you define congestion as any state where the lane is not producing its optimal throughput and reduced spacing is forcing a reduction in speed, then you can see that reducing the spacing(length) while maintaining speed is helpful and so is a speed increase while maintaining spacing.
We have made lighter cars, better brakes, smoother roads, improved aerodynamics and suspensions. Guess what's left?
YAJE, give it a try. I have standardized on it for all platforms. It looks the same, works the same everywhere.
http://www.jext.org/
Enjoy.
Or any other "analog" input for that matter.
Just turn the gain up to the max and read the values. It's plenty noisy.
Should have previewed...should read:
What good it would do to have SMARTER PEOPLE!
At the very least we would not have to put up with so many stupid ones.
What good would it would do to SMARTER PEOPLE!
At the very least we would not have to put up with so many stupid ones.
I'm with you there. When I first read that story I was a kid and I almost cried. Thirty years later I found the book(a collection) and read it again. Deja-vu all over again.
Nice to hear another voice with an understanding of the situation. Many people have been up in arms about our trade agreements with China without realizing that we are attacking them with the most powerful and simultaneously the most subtle, indefensible and well directed weapon(no "collateral damage") we have.
If we dropped trade with China, it would be the equivalent of ordering our troops to stop fighting while in the middle of a battlefield.
...Since I submitted this a couple of days ago:
100+GB samples in 2003 Apparently they have prototype hardware working today.
>I don't have any spare transducers just lying around
>my garage... do you??
I'll bet you do. Have any old stereo speakers? How about a microphone? Hmm, a thermometer? All of these devices convert one form of energy to another. Do you have a boat with a depth finder? If so you have a transducer that converts electricity to sound and also does the reverse. If you look in the parts list or catalog, you will even find it listed as such: "Optional high performance transom mounted transducer $39.95"
Cheers.
> Or do you put all your groceries on top of the
;-)
> stove and hope for a gourmet meal?
I assumed that she was at the grocery store because she hoped for/planned a meal, but after she put the groceries on top of her car, got in, and then drove off; I am not so sure anymore.
It wasn't all that funny when it happened, just a mess of food spread over the parking lot, coke cans spewing brown foam, oranges bouncing and rolling towards the storm drain, eggs showing white and yellow in the sun, but after reading your post, I cracked up!
Thanks.
Everyone wants the best performance per dollar.
Always.
Everytime.
Everywhere.
Why has a vendor with balls(willing to post FLOPS/$ or whatever transactions/$) never been born? Somebody must have the highest performing system, who are they? Why don't they show themselves?
I do have experience running NT on an alpha.
There's not much to comment on. It worked, slowly. There weren't many apps. Tools were very expensive.
I switched it to linux way, way back in the 2.0.xx era. Since then it has acquired my personal uptime record of 350+ days while working 24/7 as home-office smtp/http/squid/ftp/firewall/etc. box. It's as solid as a rock and completely invulnerable to intel-style buffer overflow exploits and other arbitrary(x86) code execution attacks. I get a hit every other day from some skiddie that doesn't know what an alpha is or is not.
Have the humans do something that machines can't do very well, say image recognition and/or categorization.
A simple "Tell me about this picture" and an associated image and a text box would do. If the text submitted does not match a previously stored description well enough, no deal.
Every one in five or so, put out a new, previously un-cataloged, image and log the description...That would also be an easy way to beef up their image search engine.
...obviously. ;-)
You folks are talking about blowing a whole day's pay on a fucking movie? Either you're getting a mere $1.00 per hour or you are so stupid that you should be.
Really, sign up folks, hold up your hands. Let's see just how many fools there are out there. Sheesh, no wonder we've got problems.
From: http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~opa/ur/pranks.html
In 1988, a group of students pulled off the biggest prank at Rice. They rotated the 2,000 pound statue of William Marsh Rice 180 degrees, making Willy face Fondren Library for the first time in 58 years.
"We were sitting in the pub drinking beer, and we decided something had to be done," says John Q. Smith '86, who helped mastermind the operation. After two futile attempts, the pranksters decided the third time had to be the charm.
Three electrical engineers, two mechanical engineers, a civil engineer, a mathematical scientist, a biochemist, a chemist, a physicist and an English major put their brains and brawn together to carry out the elaborate scheme.
Using plans of the statue taken from Fondren Li-brary, they simulated the transfer load through a computer model. They built two 24- foot A-frames, which they painted black to blend with the night, and put a beam on top that supported a three ton hoist in the middle and two one ton hoists on the sides.
The A-frames were tested at an off-campus garage by lifting a 2,250-pound Toyota that was swung back and forth to simulate rotation. A pair of Houston police officers looked on after being told the car hoisting was "a senior research project. "
These same police officers stopped the students as they were hauling the A-frames back to campus. Convinced it was only a school project, the officers gave the students a police escort to Entrance 8.
Lookouts and decoys positioned themselves around the Quad and communicated to each other through walkie-talkies using code names from the X-Men comic book series. The light on Anderson Hall had been turned off every night for the two previous weeks. Each morning the pranksters reconnected the light so that physical plant people would not replace it.
In the early morning hours of Tuesday, Apri112, 1988, before the sun came up, Willy sat facing the library. Only one student was caught, Patrick Dyson '88, and was made to pay the cost of turning the statue to its rightful position.
Students rallied behind Dyson and sold T -shirts that read, "Where There's A Willy, There's a Way. " More than enough money was collected to pay the cost of restoring Willy to his familiar perspective.
What took the pranksters one hour and cost $400 to do took professional movers three hours and a rumored $1,500-$2,000 to remedy. The students were blamed for breaking a guide pin underneath the statue, but they claim the professional movers did that.
Reports of the prank quickly spread across the country with the help of the media.
"People are going to have a hard time beating this one," comments a contented Smith.
Well, maybe. But Rice students don't have excellent minds for nothing and they know quite well that a masterminded prank is a terrible thing to waste.
The archive:h tml
http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/er/seh/feather.
and some old video:
http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/er/seh/feather.avi
What are links for?
/. editors just copy the contents of the links that are(would have been) posted and post them with the whole story?
If we use the web as if it was expected to fail, then we could just as well have stuck with usenet.
Even if he thinks that countermeasures are justified then he should properly credit it as copied verbatim from the site.
Or, do like most and post a link to a mirror.
Or, do like most and wait for complaints.
Or, do like most and realize that a commercial site that has few images like magellan.com is not likely to be slashdotted especially since the article never made it to the front page.
I mean really, should the
I repeat, why do we have links?
You know, a plastic disk with spiral dot patterns on them. In addition to that I usually get a bunch of paper, dried ink, and cardboard. That's all trash. What I want is the CD. I like to look at them. I like to shine lights on them and look at and sometimes record the fancy reflections. I've even got a gizmo that takes the reflections and converts them to electricity which is used to move magnets. Sometimes it makes some really nice sounds. Other times I use those reflection patterns to make all kinds images on my screen.
I've also used them as coasters.
When I was in college, we used them as pee targets for freshmen. If you made it through the hole, you came out clean. If you missed, it spattered back.
After I'm tired of all that, I take them to the gun range and use them as targets.
What I have not done is copy either the dot patterns or the fancy ink patterns on the trash that comes with it and distribute the copies.
He's already paid for that piece of plastic and the fancy spiral dot patterns on it. He has legal access to everything on it. The access control was legally satisfied when he walked out the front door of the store. He doesn't have to perform any sort of dance afterward. He doesn't even have to peel off the cover! He can sit on it, throw it in the air, put it in the microwave, put it in his PC, take it out, put it in the CDROM drive, spin it around, shine lights on it, observe the fancy reflections, even record the fancy reflections and then modify the recording of the reflections. He can even take it to the range and use it for a target if he wants.
What he cannot do is sell or distribute copies of it.
What he is doing with readily available tools is no different than scribbling notes with pen or pencil in the margins of a book that you have purchased. Yes, he is modifying it, but that is not against the law, even the DMCA.
Indeed, what he is doing is more akin to turning on a light so that it is easier to read the book you just bought.
He just copied the web page without any attribution.
It's a crime.
That the Russian economy is definitely on the upside. Just read a bit about their new tax laws and the results. Should be required reading for all taxpayers.
3 1- 00.shtml2 2102.html3 2102.htmlm ent/comment -mitchell032202.shtml
http://www.theglobalist.com/nor/gdiary/2000/05-
http://www.russiaeconomy.org/comments/0
http://www.heritage.org/views/2002/ed0
http://www.nationalreview.com/nrof_com
For more, just hit google.