Until the Hollywood studios are ready, willing, and able to deliver their newest products, very inexpensively, to people living in tiny towns 700 miles northwest of Perth, they should stop hassling the people who are actually presently doing this.
Yes, do you sing? You listen to recordings of other people singing and find them pleasurable. You make copies of these recordings so that you can get the same pleasure later. You actively listen to new radio and television shows in order to hear new songs to repeat this cycle. You go to bars and concerts to hear other people sing, even without hearing their recordings previously.
But you don't really sing yourself. It feels weird. You look weird doing it. Everyone looks at you weird should you do it. Everyone accepts that music and singing is what's on a disk that comes from an 'artist' and is something that you buy from a disk shop. Or download on a bit torrent. And get hassled and extorted by the RIAA who occasionally spy on your downloading. Something that they gave themselves the right to do without asking you.
This is your-our cultural input conduit. It is based on the economic concept that the best singers and song makers will physically go to a centralized city, meet with the best music instrument players, sing and play together, and the recording of this will be put on a disk. A corporation will make millions of copies, send these disk copies to all corners of the globe, sell them to people who enjoy the best singing and playing, keep most of the money for themselves and give the singers a few pennies maybe from every dollar that they collect from selling these magic music disks.
A hundred years go by and this strange economic model transcends mere commerce and becomes the primary cultural conduit for most people in the developed world.
But it is an aberration. It's only a 20th century phenomenon. It didn't exist in the hundred centuries before the 20th. And now the 20th is over. And the centralized cultural distribution model is getting better at putting you in jail, extorting your financial resources, and getting you thrown out of school than it is at meeting your basic human cultural needs.
So get a new model; get a new cultural conduit. Go back to the ways before the 20th century that people used to develop their cultural resources. Where are you going to find new music if not from recordings? From books. There is a system for writing and reading music. It works. Learn it. Where am I going to hear and share new songs? From listening to people sing them to you. And by you singing new songs to them. Sure it hurts the ears at first. Sure it feels weird and silly and uncomfortable. But these are only 20th century cultural conditionings. And the 20th century is over. Time to leave it behind.
This is the only way that we are going to stop the RIAA. By developing a parallel culture that meets our needs. And then keeping it secret from the 20th century music corporations.
This incident does bring up the question of what we will do when a government, NGO, or criminal group like the Mafia decides that Open Source software belongs to them and that people must pay a fee to them for using it. This situation will undoubtedly arise in places (like third world countries and minority communities in the EU, UK, and USA) where violence has always been and continues to be the way that the local leaders govern community activities.
When a corporation tried to muscle its way into open source 'ownership' several years ago by claiming that they owned Linux because some other corporation tricked them into buying UNIX, we were able to organize, fight, and destroy them using the American court system. Which is a long, expensive, tedious, but not violent process. Court room tactics don't often work in places where decision-by-violence is the normal way of handling disputes. Yet these places are usually where open source software is most attractive because violence-based economies don't generate enough wealth to afford wide-spread use of paid proprietary software.
Maybe we should just encourage people in violence-based parts of the world (like India, Russia, and the minority communities of the USA) to use pirated Microsoft and other proprietary software. That will keep Microsoft busy and keep us from having to deal with violent people who would direct their violence against us in order to keep 'their' software working.
Maybe the open-source community needs to become a little more realistic and a little less altruistic. And please don't tell me that I'm a racist or that I don't understand your open-source vision. The open-source vision only works in places where people aren't violent by nature.
How are non-french companies not operating in France (so far as I know) subject to French law?
Puisque nous sommes français. Notre vision de justice est parfaite. Elle est nous qui sont les balises de la lumière divine brillant sur l'obscurité de l'humanité. La sagesse, la vérité, l'éclaircissement et l'espoir d'Utimate est la définition fondamentale de toutes les choses françaises.
Because we are French. Our vision of justice is perfect. It is us who are the beacons of divine light shining upon the darkness of humanity. Utimate Wisdom, Truth, enlightenment and hope is the fundamental definition of all things French.
We don't need 10000 doctoral dissertations to tell us that Germans are psychopaths. Not all Germans, but a sizable percentage of them. And not individuals either, the overwhelming majority of them being wonderful people. But they have a psychopathic culture. And I'm not the one who is saying this; history says this.
Germany is changing, it's getting better all the time (to quote Paul McCartney). They have come a long way. They are accepted throughout the world as civilized and lawful people. All the people of German ancestry should be a little proud of their genetics..... BUT....
You just can't escape from the reality that the Germans created the Stasi and before that the Nazis. These things didn't just come from bad times and difficult choices forced on a reluctant people. They happened because there is a seriously ugly and evil thread running through the fabric of German culture. Since the war, (the real war, not the permanent endless good-for-business over-there semi-war of the USA that the rednecks are always confusing as patriotism) the Germans have done more than any other people to examine their culture and try to find this 'ugly thing' and remove it. They serve as an example to us all, especially us Americans.
But this was only the WEST Germans who did this. In the east, the madness and psychopathic behavior never ended. It just got worse until it nearly destroyed the whole culture and economy. So in 1989 when the wall came down, a new era began...a new hope. The Germans were ready to put the madness of the 20th century behind them and take their rightful place as full members of the peaceful and productive international community. They ask from us only guidance, acceptance, and forgiveness. And should we extend this?
Fuck no.
Not until they come fully clean about the madness that infects their culture. The Europeans and the European-Americans have lost millions of people and trillions of dollars in the past 100 years to the madness that infects German culture. We have a right (by conquest, by religion, by the golden rule) to demand that what ever caused this madness be not allowed to destroy the lives of our grandchildren in the way that it destroyed the lives of out grandparents.
So if some schmuck is unhappy about the fact that OUR historical networks, such as Wikipedia, are being used to chronicle HIS crimes, well then fuck him. We have an obligation to future generations to make sure that the story of our times is accurate and complete, and that includes all the assholes who worked for the Stasi.
" This lightweight plastic screen copies the appearance, but not the feel, of a printed newspaper. "
I'm reminded of Marshall McLuhan's observation that any new medium will have as its first content the form of the previous medium.
Why would anyone want to reproduce the format of the front page of a printed daily newspaper if you have a completely new medium available? Will the new medium be of such slow speed that the contents can only be renewed on the screen once a day (like the front page of a newspaper)? Do the various print topics have to be arranged in blocks like a newspaper? Will advertising really be necessary?
It's too bad that McLuhan died right when the digital communications era was beginning (1976 I believe). He would have had some significant insights for us.
One thing that I've noticed is that any new digital medium will ALWAYS reproduce its content in an inferior way to its corresponding analog medium. But, the new digital medium allows the content to be used in ways that so astonishingly different from the analog medium that it comes to surplant the original analog medium. The analog medium becomes a specialized subsystem of the new digital medium.
For example, consider music synthesizers. Press the cheap plastic keys on a cheap $50 plastic keyboard in BestBuy and you change the instrument being played by the keyboard. None of the instruments being sounded by the keyboard sound as good as the original instruments in orchestral form. But if you play piano, you don't need to spend ten years learning trumpet or violin to get the sound of a trumpet or violin for your music. You just press the digital button on the cheap plastic keyboard. Real trumpets and violin playing becomes a speciality and limited skill as a result of the original analog medium (instrument) being transformed by an inferior digital medium.
Anyone even remotely interested in this should be aware of the novels of David Wishart. He is a Classics scholar who writes pop fiction detective novels set in ancient Rome @30 CE.
He has too modern references and word clichés for my taste, but the three novels that I've read of his have been detailed, engrossing, and amusing.
German, a legacy language of Europe, has that 'long-word' syndrome. As if they had to pay extra for spaces. And, Holymuddafugginchrist, they have some reallylonggoddamnwords in German.
While working on the shop room floor in Silicon Valley, my Vietnamese co-workers not impressed by my 'original' riddle entry in a lunch room intercultural joke contest:
What animal walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening?
They all thought that answer was pretty lame. I just told them that it was a really old joke in the West and could probably use a little work. The answer (as any scholar of ancient Greek can tell you) is: A man. As a baby, he crawls on all fours, as an adult, he walks on two legs, and as a elder, he hobbles with a cane.
At least you aren't going to get ripped apart for not knowing the answer!
Ever go to Washington DC, to the National Archives building, and see the actual original Constitution document? It's a blank sheet of paper. The actual ink has faded away into invisibility. Everybody there notices this but the solemn atmosphere of the building (and the armed guards) keeps anyone from making smart comments.
I've been saying this every time that this topic comes up on here on Slashdot. America is broke and has been borrowing tons of money from other countries to give itself the illusion that it is rich. Meanwhile, the people have been pissing away all the money that they have been able to weasel out of the banks on dumbshit, feel-good things like BFTs (built for towing, big f**king trucks), SUVs, trips to Disneyland, and liberal-arts college degrees.
When Americans went to the moon to play golf, they owned the world. Now the world owns them.
I'm not saying that the Spam-In-A-Can manned space program is finished, I'm saying that it will be suspended for about 100 years or so until the problems of over-population, oil-depletion (energy type conversion), and the aftermath of the Bretton Woods financial system collapse have been addressed.
A good reason to either stop f**king or start taking those pills that the white girls do. Jeez looks like ya'll running out of room out there in the Maldives.
Actually, I have it. I keep it at home. It's in my basement actually.
It's right under the marijuana plants that I'm growing in the window.
The local police came by a few years ago to take me away to prison. They weren't too clear about why they felt that they had to do this, but in the heat of the discussion the topic of the marijuana plants in the window did come up, IIRC.
But when I showed them the hydrogen bomb that I keep in the basement, they just shut up and drove off. They haven't been back and no one since then has offered any opinions on my little garden.
So if you too want to grow your own stash, then I suggest that you too get your butt down to the WalMart and pick up a few of these H-babies for your own basement.
Hell, go to CostCo and get 100 for the price of 35!!!
The...er...thing... that the lead text referred to had a reference to smallpox (variola) deep inside it. A vaccine or vaccine delivery system, I believe. And don't tell me that I didn't read it. It was 'written' in a way that made it impossible to read sensibly. Look at it and tell me that I'm wrong.
Anyway, smallpox is supposed to be a dead disease. Vanquished from the earth through the work of the WHO and Dr. Lawrence Brilliant in the 1970s.
So, what's Bill and his Bozo boys talking about here? Do they know something that we don't? What we do know is that the Soviets made millions of doses of smallpox from samples that were saved for 'research' purposes during the last paranoid days of their empire. The BioPreparat program that has been documented in the book 'The Devil in the Freezer'. All these doses were supposed to be destroyed.
It would be bad news if this disease were to reappear.
Hello,
If you are interested in the hardware hacking environment of the Commodore 64, I suggest looking into the DIY projects world of PIC and AVR microcontrollers. Especially the AVR (www.AVRfreaks.net). These devices are very cheap, easy to program from the PC, and have extensive open-source programming and low-cost debugging tools (such as JTAG in-circuit-emulators and C compilers) available.
Programming these devices brings back all the joy of creating working electronic 'things' that plugging circuits into the back of the Commodore 64 used to. But these chips are all $1-$8 in cost and have the reprogrammable memory, UART, I/O ports, and analog-to-digital converters built into them.
What they don't have as yet is the video. Most microcontroller projects are at the LCD character display module stage. But bit-mapped graphics LCD modules are beginning to fall in price into the single-application range ($5-$15).
I learned microprocessor electronics by building things like memory expanders, temperture sensors, and MIDI interfaces to plug into the back of the Commodore 64, as you have done. I'm still doing the same projects now with AVR microcontrollers using the same techniques more or less. Fortunately the 'crash-and-burn' era of ultra-violet EPROM erasing has been replaced by Flash EEPROM in-system-programming. And when I mess up, the cost is only $5 worth of zapped parts rather than an expensive C64 motherboard or semi-custom 6510 processor.
This really isn't a general Slashdot message, but more a greeting from one C64 hardware hacker to another.
The Music Industry is so happy that they could come to an 'agreement' with the ISPs.
But they don't understand that the 20th-century business model of corporations 'owning' music recordings is outdated and irrelevant as we enter the 21st-century (there's always a 10-15 year lag between the calendar year and the consciousness awareness that things are different in the new century). Everyone has the ability to copy everything that the music industry 'owns' quick, discretely, and easily. Everyone has the ability to exchange these copies freely. This isn't going to change regardless of how much what's left of the 20th-century music industry clamps down on the exchange of what they have deluded themselves into believing is their 'property'.
The best, the very best, that they can hope for is to lock up the music recordings of the 20th-century. Which turn a profit for them now, but won't when they are removed from circulation because they don't fit into 21st century business models and are forgotten. The music industry will, in 50 years, still 'own' the rights to control distribution of the Beatles and Brittany Spears. But by then that right will be as profitable and as relevant as the right to distribute 17th-century Bulgarian folk songs is today.
If you don't like the music industry and their RIAA goons, then make your own music recordings (and musical events), and keep them hidden from all the 'cool' people who make their living off the music industry.
The music industry is imprisoned by this idea that music consists of marketable individual disk units of audio recordings. Which they claim is form of property that they own. Music is an arrangement of repetitive audio patterns which are perceived by people as pleasant primarily according to their cultural training. Music is the one thing that can never be property. As the technology of the 21st century reduces the influence of audio disk recordings as the definer of music, the RIAA will become less of a burden as each year passes.
So let them have what they want; let them think that they've won their war, and move on to other forms of cultural enlightenment through music.
But, as you do, for Goodness sakes, don't tell anyone in the music industry about what you are doing.
Since,
You is a convict, and...
You is in prison for a long time because you did something that no one wants to have you do again, and...
No one believes you when you say that you won't do it again if you gets out of prison, and...
You has nothin' to do in prison except yell, kick things, and stick sharp things in other prisoners, and....
it would be too expensive to pump you full of drugs to make you shut up and behave while you're in prison, and...
we don't shove ice picks up people's noses anymore to make them behave (but you still do), and...
our God and his lawyers don't allow us to just kill you, (your God is fine with you're killing us), and...
we don't really want to hear, see, or even think about you anymore,....... we have created this wonderful alternate fantasy reality video game for you to live in.
So, amigo, you should just shut the fuck up and live happily there. While we continue to pay for your food, rent, electricity, and your alternative reality.
In other words, since you live in an alternative fantasy world, you should be filing alternative fantasy lawsuits in your alternative fantasy world, not our real world with real court systems. If you continue to plug up our justice system with your fantasies, we will simply plug the plug on you and your worthless existence; fantasy or real.
With six billion people in the world, your fate makes no difference to us.
But the real question is....Why would anybody do this?? Port Commodore64 BASIC to a PC?
I used to have a Commodore64 and learned 6502 Assembler on it. When I got a PC (a 286) I felt nostalgic for the C64 and bought a cheap one. I used it about ten minutes and realized what a mistake it was. Fortunately I was able to sell it right away.
Never look back. There is is nothing that was written for Commodore 64 that isn't 1000 times better on modern PCs. Nothing. Don't give me any BS about the wonderful SID chip and its KOOL mickey-mouse MOD files. They suck, really. Don't tell me about that fantastic game that you used to play on the C64 and have never been able to recreate the excitement on a PC. It's because you were a kid discovering video-games, not the Commode64.
Are you going to tell me that you miss spending four minutes to load a 25K file from the excretable 1541 disk drive? Or spending 40 minutes to download a 25K file on a 300 baud modem from a long-distance BBS when you're paying the phone bill? Or the stupid PEEKs and POKEs. Do you miss typing in hundreds of numbers from Compute's Gazette because the program is written in super-fast 6502 1.2MHz machine code?
The only good thing about the C64 was the keyboard. And once you start talking to your 3GigaHertz PC and having your words appear on the screen as you speak, you don't miss the keyboard. Regardless of how good it is.
Commodore 64's rule!! But, really they suck. Never look back on trash.
Passing a law against What everyone does is a risky affair. Sure, legislators have to go along with the concept that recorded media is property. As in the idea that a corporation can actually own a song or a movie, which is quite absurd, although accepted. A slight change in a note makes a different song, a minor re-edit or re-filming of the same plot makes a different movie. Which according to the bizarre theory of corporate ownership of 'intellectual property' creates an entirely new piece of property.
Add to this strange notion that everyone has the means to quite easily break this so-called law, since computers and telecommunications are ubiquitous, and you have a situation where it is easier to break a law than it is to obey it.
Which is not a stable situation. The law enforcers must either ignore the law in general, focus its enforcement on a specific minority group, or enforce the law equally against everyone. Enforcing against everyone changes the conditions that law is supposed to protect and is almost never done. Choosing between non-enforcement and selective enforcement is often a matter of culture. I would believe that the French law enforcement will not enforce this law against French citizens, only against foreigners and then only when the foreigners break other laws (or act outside of French cultural norms) and this law becomes one more weapon that can be used to make them conform.
Americans on the other hand are basically punitive people. Laws like this are specifically focused on targeted minorities for the specific purpose of incarcerating them for profit into private prisons, to steal their property, and to destroy their political clout. An example is the use of the drug possession laws being used to re-enslave the African-American non-middle-class youth. Each year the drug penalties get harsher and more focused on Blacks while White youth are given warnings and probation for the same 'offenses'. In America, copyright laws will be primarily used against young people who protest against any government actions.
These laws are perfect for that purpose. They can be widely broken with no ill effect to society as a whole (like the marijuana laws), and still be enforced brutally against specific individuals and groups. As long as the mainstream of people can continue to download music and movies without hassle, they will accept harsh punishments for the same downloading activity against young people who demonstrate against the government.
If McCain is elected, expect the criminalization of file downloading and harsh penalties applied against only the people who actively oppose government policies. This is the American way of doing things and there are many historical precedents for using harsh laws against harmless activities in this manner.
I'm more concerned about losing the culture from the 20th century.
Everyone born after 1975 hates the RIAA, doesn't pay any attention to whatever they say, and file-shares gigabytes without a thought to the music industry definition of 'piracy'. This is as it should be. It means that the music and movies of the (for now) young people is safe because it is widely circulated outside the control of those who have deluded themselves into believing that they own it.
It's all the stuff from the first 2/3rds of the 20th century that will disappear. Because the people who like it are in their 50's, 60's, and 70's now and don't have the technical skills to copy and distribute it. Plus they actually trust the corporations will preserve it. I mean all the books, music recordings, television shows, movies, and plays from the first half of the 20th century. The stuff that is under 'infinite copyright' and will never be in public domain because the corporations will simply pay off the politicians to endless extend the copyright period, as they do now.
As soon as all this stuff stops selling (and who nowdays is paying money for the book that was #3 on the New York Times BestSeller list of Oct 28, 1936?), and can't be legally copied because it can't enter public domain, then the corporations will just destroy it. Pulp the books; convert the film stock to ethanol to power their SUVs; dump the magazines in the oceans or in nuclear waste sites to absorb neutrons. When that happens, all this culture will be gone and historians 200 years from now will have little idea about how civilized people actually thought and acted in the critical early years of the modern technological age.
You can talk to the old people about the need to preserve their culture by making 'illegal' copies of the books, magazines, and movies that were important to them, but they are just simply and completely clueless about the extent that their culture will die as they do.
The last thing that the neo-cons want is for more government-citizen interaction and less secrecy in their more 'sensitive' actions. The less that the citizens know, the better! All this government-citizen interaction just gets in the way of what they believe a government is supposed to do: give away hundreds of billions of dollars to sleazy corrupt hedge-fund managers and mercenary corporations, and to then just disappear when it's completely broke (along with everyone's pensions and 401-K plans).
Would anyone want to be entrusted to have to try and explain anything technical to Sarah Palin? The first DAZ-MO president (dumb-as-shit mommy)! God, I've got hundreds of them trying to drive their space shuttles (huge SUVs) around town, occasionally flipping them over and crashing into poles because they haven't quite mastered the art of feeding the kids, dialing the phone, changing the DVD, and driving a huge truck-sized vehicle in dense highway traffic.
And a Palin presidency? Just tell her that "this is what America wants and needs", make a huge payoff to the people who are really deciding the policies, and walk off with the billion-dollar no-bid contracts. Two months of a Palin presidency and even the staunchest liberals will be begging the military to take over the country. Just don't shoot us, please. Shoot them, instead. You know who we mean.
PCs should turn on as fast as a Commodore 64. Sure a C64 had a 10K more or less firmware system. But it ran at 1 MHz. And it was made at a time when 8K ROM chips cost $10. All the numbers are x1000 now. 8M byte Flash ROMs selling for $1 or less running on 1Gig Hz processors.
PCs take 60+ seconds from power-on to use because they always have since 1984. Microsoft expects to be able to have 60+ to fool around (excuse me, 'boot' the OS) before the users demand response.
PCs should have the option of delivering a command line or keyboard menu for selecting the user's desired application in a second or less. The first OS maker to do this is going to be considered the leader in the next generation of personal computers.
Spent a minute trying to understand the above comment... it must be a joke. Straight diagonal lines would be a characteristic of a digital storage scope with serious Analog-to-Digital converter problems.
Although it wouldn't be used in a university physics lab, I suggest Slashdot readers download a free PC sound-card-oscilloscope program. They are basically *free* Digital Storage Scopes with a limited input frequency of 44KHz to 96KHz depending on the particular sound chip in the PC. Many of these programs include spectrum analysis and FFT features.
These are invaluable for audio and other low frequency work. It's necessary to scale the input to the sound card to about 1-2 volts peak-to-peak max, because these programs are working with the audio line-input signal. A couple of $0.40 op-amps work fine. I've used *free* sound card oscilloscopes to verify MIDI in/out streams from synthesizers, RS-232 signals, and the design/repair/calibration of hundreds of guitar stompbox circuits.
Every time space travel appears on Slashdot...I get another opportunity to remind you'all that your country is broke. Which means that there isn't going to be a grand 21st century manned space program to other planets.
You can't lose a three trillion dollar war, buy-out the bunko mortgage of every half-wit burger flipper who scammed a half-million 'loan' for a McMansion, give 700 billion dollars to Wall Street sleezos and have a grand glorious space program on other people's money. Not anymore. No matter how many times that you remind them that you have 10000 hydrogen bombs.
You're broke. Your so-called government has spent already spent every tax dollar that you and your children and your grandchildren are ever going to have taken out of their paycheck. And you got nothing out of it. You can't even get your teeth fixed. Do you have dental insurance? Every one else in the civilized world does. You don't.
There is no future manned space program. It's a fantasy.
Once again, I must remind you of this fact.
Thank you for your attention,
The rest of the world
P.S. you can go back to your comic book movies now.
Slashdot Mirror
Until the Hollywood studios are ready, willing, and able to deliver their newest products, very inexpensively, to people living in tiny towns 700 miles northwest of Perth, they should stop hassling the people who are actually presently doing this.
Yes, do you sing? You listen to recordings of other people singing and find them pleasurable. You make copies of these recordings so that you can get the same pleasure later. You actively listen to new radio and television shows in order to hear new songs to repeat this cycle. You go to bars and concerts to hear other people sing, even without hearing their recordings previously.
But you don't really sing yourself. It feels weird. You look weird doing it. Everyone looks at you weird should you do it. Everyone accepts that music and singing is what's on a disk that comes from an 'artist' and is something that you buy from a disk shop. Or download on a bit torrent. And get hassled and extorted by the RIAA who occasionally spy on your downloading. Something that they gave themselves the right to do without asking you.
This is your-our cultural input conduit. It is based on the economic concept that the best singers and song makers will physically go to a centralized city, meet with the best music instrument players, sing and play together, and the recording of this will be put on a disk. A corporation will make millions of copies, send these disk copies to all corners of the globe, sell them to people who enjoy the best singing and playing, keep most of the money for themselves and give the singers a few pennies maybe from every dollar that they collect from selling these magic music disks.
A hundred years go by and this strange economic model transcends mere commerce and becomes the primary cultural conduit for most people in the developed world.
But it is an aberration. It's only a 20th century phenomenon. It didn't exist in the hundred centuries before the 20th. And now the 20th is over. And the centralized cultural distribution model is getting better at putting you in jail, extorting your financial resources, and getting you thrown out of school than it is at meeting your basic human cultural needs.
So get a new model; get a new cultural conduit. Go back to the ways before the 20th century that people used to develop their cultural resources. Where are you going to find new music if not from recordings? From books. There is a system for writing and reading music. It works. Learn it. Where am I going to hear and share new songs? From listening to people sing them to you. And by you singing new songs to them. Sure it hurts the ears at first. Sure it feels weird and silly and uncomfortable. But these are only 20th century cultural conditionings. And the 20th century is over. Time to leave it behind.
This is the only way that we are going to stop the RIAA. By developing a parallel culture that meets our needs. And then keeping it secret from the 20th century music corporations.
Learn to sing.
This incident does bring up the question of what we will do when a government, NGO, or criminal group like the Mafia decides that Open Source software belongs to them and that people must pay a fee to them for using it. This situation will undoubtedly arise in places (like third world countries and minority communities in the EU, UK, and USA) where violence has always been and continues to be the way that the local leaders govern community activities.
When a corporation tried to muscle its way into open source 'ownership' several years ago by claiming that they owned Linux because some other corporation tricked them into buying UNIX, we were able to organize, fight, and destroy them using the American court system. Which is a long, expensive, tedious, but not violent process. Court room tactics don't often work in places where decision-by-violence is the normal way of handling disputes. Yet these places are usually where open source software is most attractive because violence-based economies don't generate enough wealth to afford wide-spread use of paid proprietary software.
Maybe we should just encourage people in violence-based parts of the world (like India, Russia, and the minority communities of the USA) to use pirated Microsoft and other proprietary software. That will keep Microsoft busy and keep us from having to deal with violent people who would direct their violence against us in order to keep 'their' software working.
Maybe the open-source community needs to become a little more realistic and a little less altruistic. And please don't tell me that I'm a racist or that I don't understand your open-source vision. The open-source vision only works in places where people aren't violent by nature.
How are non-french companies not operating in France (so far as I know) subject to French law?
Puisque nous sommes français. Notre vision de justice est parfaite.
Elle est nous qui sont les balises de la lumière divine brillant sur
l'obscurité de l'humanité. La sagesse, la vérité, l'éclaircissement et l'espoir d'Utimate est la définition fondamentale de toutes les choses françaises.
Because we are French. Our vision of justice is perfect. It is us who are the beacons of divine light shining upon the darkness of humanity. Utimate Wisdom, Truth, enlightenment and hope is the fundamental definition of all things French.
We don't need 10000 doctoral dissertations to tell us that Germans are psychopaths. Not all Germans, but a sizable percentage of them. And not individuals either, the overwhelming majority of them being wonderful people. But they have a psychopathic culture. And I'm not the one who is saying this; history says this. .... BUT ....
Germany is changing, it's getting better all the time (to quote Paul McCartney). They have come a long way. They are accepted throughout the world as civilized and lawful people. All the people of German ancestry should be a little proud of their genetics.
You just can't escape from the reality that the Germans created the Stasi and before that the Nazis. These things didn't just come from bad times and difficult choices forced on a reluctant people. They happened because there is a seriously ugly and evil thread running through the fabric of German culture. Since the war, (the real war, not the permanent endless good-for-business over-there semi-war of the USA that the rednecks are always confusing as patriotism) the Germans have done more than any other people to examine their culture and try to find this 'ugly thing' and remove it. They serve as an example to us all, especially us Americans.
But this was only the WEST Germans who did this. In the east, the madness and psychopathic behavior never ended. It just got worse until it nearly destroyed the whole culture and economy. So in 1989 when the wall came down, a new era began...a new hope. The Germans were ready to put the madness of the 20th century behind them and take their rightful place as full members of the peaceful and productive international community. They ask from us only guidance, acceptance, and forgiveness. And should we extend this?
Fuck no.
Not until they come fully clean about the madness that infects their culture. The Europeans and the European-Americans have lost millions of people and trillions of dollars in the past 100 years to the madness that infects German culture. We have a right (by conquest, by religion, by the golden rule) to demand that what ever caused this madness be not allowed to destroy the lives of our grandchildren in the way that it destroyed the lives of out grandparents.
So if some schmuck is unhappy about the fact that OUR historical networks, such as Wikipedia, are being used to chronicle HIS crimes, well then fuck him. We have an obligation to future generations to make sure that the story of our times is accurate and complete, and that includes all the assholes who worked for the Stasi.
Thank you.
" This lightweight plastic screen copies the appearance, but not the feel, of a printed newspaper. "
I'm reminded of Marshall McLuhan's observation that any new medium will have as its first content the form of the previous medium.
Why would anyone want to reproduce the format of the front page of a printed daily newspaper if you have a completely new medium available? Will the new medium be of such slow speed that the contents can only be renewed on the screen once a day (like the front page of a newspaper)? Do the various print topics have to be arranged in blocks like a newspaper? Will advertising really be necessary?
It's too bad that McLuhan died right when the digital communications era was beginning (1976 I believe). He would have had some significant insights for us.
One thing that I've noticed is that any new digital medium will ALWAYS reproduce its content in an inferior way to its corresponding analog medium. But, the new digital medium allows the content to be used in ways that so astonishingly different from the analog medium that it comes to surplant the original analog medium. The analog medium becomes a specialized subsystem of the new digital medium.
For example, consider music synthesizers. Press the cheap plastic keys on a cheap $50 plastic keyboard in BestBuy and you change the instrument being played by the keyboard. None of the instruments being sounded by the keyboard sound as good as the original instruments in orchestral form. But if you play piano, you don't need to spend ten years learning trumpet or violin to get the sound of a trumpet or violin for your music. You just press the digital button on the cheap plastic keyboard. Real trumpets and violin playing becomes a speciality and limited skill as a result of the original analog medium (instrument) being transformed by an inferior digital medium.
Anyone even remotely interested in this should be aware of the novels of David Wishart. He is a Classics scholar who writes pop fiction detective novels set in ancient Rome @30 CE.
He has too modern references and word clichés for my taste, but the three novels that I've read of his have been detailed, engrossing, and amusing.
German, a legacy language of Europe, has that 'long-word' syndrome. As if they had to pay extra for spaces. And, Holymuddafugginchrist, they have some reallylonggoddamnwords in German.
While working on the shop room floor in Silicon Valley, my Vietnamese co-workers not impressed by my 'original' riddle entry in a lunch room intercultural joke contest:
What animal walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening?
They all thought that answer was pretty lame. I just told them that it was a really old joke in the West and could probably use a little work. The answer (as any scholar of ancient Greek can tell you) is: A man. As a baby, he crawls on all fours, as an adult, he walks on two legs, and as a elder, he hobbles with a cane.
At least you aren't going to get ripped apart for not knowing the answer!
Ever go to Washington DC, to the National Archives building, and see the actual original Constitution document? It's a blank sheet of paper. The actual ink has faded away into invisibility. Everybody there notices this but the solemn atmosphere of the building (and the armed guards) keeps anyone from making smart comments.
I've been saying this every time that this topic comes up on here on Slashdot. America is broke and has been borrowing tons of money from other countries to give itself the illusion that it is rich. Meanwhile, the people have been pissing away all the money that they have been able to weasel out of the banks on dumbshit, feel-good things like BFTs (built for towing, big f**king trucks), SUVs, trips to Disneyland, and liberal-arts college degrees.
When Americans went to the moon to play golf, they owned the world. Now the world owns them.
I'm not saying that the Spam-In-A-Can manned space program is finished, I'm saying that it will be suspended for about 100 years or so until the problems of over-population, oil-depletion (energy type conversion), and the aftermath of the Bretton Woods financial system collapse have been addressed.
A good reason to either stop f**king or start taking those pills that the white girls do. Jeez looks like ya'll running out of room out there in the Maldives.
Actually, I have it. I keep it at home. It's in my basement actually.
It's right under the marijuana plants that I'm growing in the window.
The local police came by a few years ago to take me away to prison. They weren't too clear about why they felt that they had to do this, but in the heat of the discussion the topic of the marijuana plants in the window did come up, IIRC.
But when I showed them the hydrogen bomb that I keep in the basement, they just shut up and drove off. They haven't been back and no one since then has offered any opinions on my little garden.
So if you too want to grow your own stash, then I suggest that you too get your butt down to the WalMart and pick up a few of these H-babies for your own basement.
Hell, go to CostCo and get 100 for the price of 35!!!
The ...er...thing... that the lead text referred to had a reference to smallpox (variola) deep inside it. A vaccine or vaccine delivery system, I believe. And don't tell me that I didn't read it. It was 'written' in a way that made it impossible to read sensibly. Look at it and tell me that I'm wrong.
Anyway, smallpox is supposed to be a dead disease. Vanquished from the earth through the work of the WHO and Dr. Lawrence Brilliant in the 1970s.
So, what's Bill and his Bozo boys talking about here? Do they know something that we don't?
What we do know is that the Soviets made millions of doses of smallpox from samples that were saved for 'research' purposes during the last paranoid days of their empire. The BioPreparat program that has been documented in the book 'The Devil in the Freezer'. All these doses were supposed to be destroyed.
It would be bad news if this disease were to reappear.
Hello,
If you are interested in the hardware hacking environment of the Commodore 64, I suggest looking into the DIY projects world of PIC and AVR microcontrollers. Especially the AVR (www.AVRfreaks.net). These devices are very cheap, easy to program from the PC, and have extensive open-source programming and low-cost debugging tools (such as JTAG in-circuit-emulators and C compilers) available.
Programming these devices brings back all the joy of creating working electronic 'things' that plugging circuits into the back of the Commodore 64 used to. But these chips are all $1-$8 in cost and have the reprogrammable memory, UART, I/O ports, and analog-to-digital converters built into them.
What they don't have as yet is the video. Most microcontroller projects are at the LCD character display module stage. But bit-mapped graphics LCD modules are beginning to fall in price into the single-application range ($5-$15).
I learned microprocessor electronics by building things like memory expanders, temperture sensors, and MIDI interfaces to plug into the back of the Commodore 64, as you have done. I'm still doing the same projects now with AVR microcontrollers using the same techniques more or less. Fortunately the 'crash-and-burn' era of ultra-violet EPROM erasing has been replaced by Flash EEPROM in-system-programming. And when I mess up, the cost is only $5 worth of zapped parts rather than an expensive C64 motherboard or semi-custom 6510 processor.
This really isn't a general Slashdot message, but more a greeting from one C64 hardware hacker to another.
The Music Industry is so happy that they could come to an 'agreement' with the ISPs.
But they don't understand that the 20th-century business model of corporations 'owning' music recordings is outdated and irrelevant as we enter the 21st-century (there's always a 10-15 year lag between the calendar year and the consciousness awareness that things are different in the new century). Everyone has the ability to copy everything that the music industry 'owns' quick, discretely, and easily. Everyone has the ability to exchange these copies freely. This isn't going to change regardless of how much what's left of the 20th-century music industry clamps down on the exchange of what they have deluded themselves into believing is their 'property'.
The best, the very best, that they can hope for is to lock up the music recordings of the 20th-century. Which turn a profit for them now, but won't when they are removed from circulation because they don't fit into 21st century business models and are forgotten. The music industry will, in 50 years, still 'own' the rights to control distribution of the Beatles and Brittany Spears. But by then that right will be as profitable and as relevant as the right to distribute 17th-century Bulgarian folk songs is today.
If you don't like the music industry and their RIAA goons, then make your own music recordings (and musical events), and keep them hidden from all the 'cool' people who make their living off the music industry.
The music industry is imprisoned by this idea that music consists of marketable individual disk units of audio recordings. Which they claim is form of property that they own. Music is an arrangement of repetitive audio patterns which are perceived by people as pleasant primarily according to their cultural training. Music is the one thing that can never be property. As the technology of the 21st century reduces the influence of audio disk recordings as the definer of music, the RIAA will become less of a burden as each year passes.
So let them have what they want; let them think that they've won their war, and move on to other forms of cultural enlightenment through music.
But, as you do, for Goodness sakes, don't tell anyone in the music industry about what you are doing.
Have a nice day!
Since, .... ... we have created this wonderful alternate fantasy reality video game for you to live in.
You is a convict, and...
You is in prison for a long time because you did something that no one wants to have you do again, and...
No one believes you when you say that you won't do it again if you gets out of prison, and...
You has nothin' to do in prison except yell, kick things, and stick sharp things in other prisoners, and....
it would be too expensive to pump you full of drugs to make you shut up and behave while you're in prison, and...
we don't shove ice picks up people's noses anymore to make them behave (but you still do), and...
our God and his lawyers don't allow us to just kill you, (your God is fine with you're killing us), and...
we don't really want to hear, see, or even think about you anymore,
So, amigo, you should just shut the fuck up and live happily there. While we continue to pay for your food, rent, electricity, and your alternative reality.
In other words, since you live in an alternative fantasy world, you should be filing alternative fantasy lawsuits in your alternative fantasy world, not our real world with real court systems. If you continue to plug up our justice system with your fantasies, we will simply plug the plug on you and your worthless existence; fantasy or real.
With six billion people in the world, your fate makes no difference to us.
Turd convict.
But the real question is....Why would anybody do this?? Port Commodore64 BASIC to a PC?
I used to have a Commodore64 and learned 6502 Assembler on it. When I got a PC (a 286) I felt nostalgic for the C64 and bought a cheap one. I used it about ten minutes and realized what a mistake it was. Fortunately I was able to sell it right away.
Never look back. There is is nothing that was written for Commodore 64 that isn't 1000 times better on modern PCs. Nothing. Don't give me any BS about the wonderful SID chip and its KOOL mickey-mouse MOD files. They suck, really. Don't tell me about that fantastic game that you used to play on the C64 and have never been able to recreate the excitement on a PC. It's because you were a kid discovering video-games, not the Commode64.
Are you going to tell me that you miss spending four minutes to load a 25K file from the excretable 1541 disk drive? Or spending 40 minutes to download a 25K file on a 300 baud modem from a long-distance BBS when you're paying the phone bill? Or the stupid PEEKs and POKEs. Do you miss typing in hundreds of numbers from Compute's Gazette because the program is written in super-fast 6502 1.2MHz machine code?
The only good thing about the C64 was the keyboard. And once you start talking to your 3GigaHertz PC and having your words appear on the screen as you speak, you don't miss the keyboard. Regardless of how good it is.
Commodore 64's rule!! But, really they suck. Never look back on trash.
Passing a law against What everyone does is a risky affair. Sure, legislators have to go along with the concept that recorded media is property. As in the idea that a corporation can actually own a song or a movie, which is quite absurd, although accepted. A slight change in a note makes a different song, a minor re-edit or re-filming of the same plot makes a different movie. Which according to the bizarre theory of corporate ownership of 'intellectual property' creates an entirely new piece of property.
Add to this strange notion that everyone has the means to quite easily break this so-called law, since computers and telecommunications are ubiquitous, and you have a situation where it is easier to break a law than it is to obey it.
Which is not a stable situation. The law enforcers must either ignore the law in general, focus its enforcement on a specific minority group, or enforce the law equally against everyone. Enforcing against everyone changes the conditions that law is supposed to protect and is almost never done. Choosing between non-enforcement and selective enforcement is often a matter of culture. I would believe that the French law enforcement will not enforce this law against French citizens, only against foreigners and then only when the foreigners break other laws (or act outside of French cultural norms) and this law becomes one more weapon that can be used to make them conform.
Americans on the other hand are basically punitive people. Laws like this are specifically focused on targeted minorities for the specific purpose of incarcerating them for profit into private prisons, to steal their property, and to destroy their political clout. An example is the use of the drug possession laws being used to re-enslave the African-American non-middle-class youth. Each year the drug penalties get harsher and more focused on Blacks while White youth are given warnings and probation for the same 'offenses'. In America, copyright laws will be primarily used against young people who protest against any government actions.
These laws are perfect for that purpose. They can be widely broken with no ill effect to society as a whole (like the marijuana laws), and still be enforced brutally against specific individuals and groups. As long as the mainstream of people can continue to download music and movies without hassle, they will accept harsh punishments for the same downloading activity against young people who demonstrate against the government.
If McCain is elected, expect the criminalization of file downloading and harsh penalties applied against only the people who actively oppose government policies. This is the American way of doing things and there are many historical precedents for using harsh laws against harmless activities in this manner.
I'm more concerned about losing the culture from the 20th century.
Everyone born after 1975 hates the RIAA, doesn't pay any attention to whatever they say, and file-shares gigabytes without a thought to the music industry definition of 'piracy'. This is as it should be. It means that the music and movies of the (for now) young people is safe because it is widely circulated outside the control of those who have deluded themselves into believing that they own it.
It's all the stuff from the first 2/3rds of the 20th century that will disappear. Because the people who like it are in their 50's, 60's, and 70's now and don't have the technical skills to copy and distribute it. Plus they actually trust the corporations will preserve it. I mean all the books, music recordings, television shows, movies, and plays from the first half of the 20th century. The stuff that is under 'infinite copyright' and will never be in public domain because the corporations will simply pay off the politicians to endless extend the copyright period, as they do now.
As soon as all this stuff stops selling (and who nowdays is paying money for the book that was #3 on the New York Times BestSeller list of Oct 28, 1936?), and can't be legally copied because it can't enter public domain, then the corporations will just destroy it. Pulp the books; convert the film stock to ethanol to power their SUVs; dump the magazines in the oceans or in nuclear waste sites to absorb neutrons. When that happens, all this culture will be gone and historians 200 years from now will have little idea about how civilized people actually thought and acted in the critical early years of the modern technological age.
You can talk to the old people about the need to preserve their culture by making 'illegal' copies of the books, magazines, and movies that were important to them, but they are just simply and completely clueless about the extent that their culture will die as they do.
The last thing that the neo-cons want is for more government-citizen interaction and less secrecy in their more 'sensitive' actions. The less that the citizens know, the better! All this government-citizen interaction just gets in the way of what they believe a government is supposed to do: give away hundreds of billions of dollars to sleazy corrupt hedge-fund managers and mercenary corporations, and to then just disappear when it's completely broke (along with everyone's pensions and 401-K plans).
Would anyone want to be entrusted to have to try and explain anything technical to Sarah Palin? The first DAZ-MO president (dumb-as-shit mommy)! God, I've got hundreds of them trying to drive their space shuttles (huge SUVs) around town, occasionally flipping them over and crashing into poles because they haven't quite mastered the art of feeding the kids, dialing the phone, changing the DVD, and driving a huge truck-sized vehicle in dense highway traffic.
And a Palin presidency? Just tell her that "this is what America wants and needs", make a huge payoff to the people who are really deciding the policies, and walk off with the billion-dollar no-bid contracts. Two months of a Palin presidency and even the staunchest liberals will be begging the military to take over the country. Just don't shoot us, please. Shoot them, instead. You know who we mean.
Jeez.
PCs should turn on as fast as a Commodore 64. Sure a C64 had a 10K more or less firmware system. But it ran at 1 MHz. And it was made at a time when 8K ROM chips cost $10. All the numbers are x1000 now. 8M byte Flash ROMs selling for $1 or less running on 1Gig Hz processors.
PCs take 60+ seconds from power-on to use because they always have since 1984. Microsoft expects to be able to have 60+ to fool around (excuse me, 'boot' the OS) before the users demand response.
PCs should have the option of delivering a command line or keyboard menu for selecting the user's desired application in a second or less. The first OS maker to do this is going to be considered the leader in the next generation of personal computers.
Spent a minute trying to understand the above comment... it must be a joke. Straight diagonal lines would be a characteristic of a digital storage scope with serious Analog-to-Digital converter problems.
Although it wouldn't be used in a university physics lab, I suggest Slashdot readers download a free PC sound-card-oscilloscope program. They are basically *free* Digital Storage Scopes with a limited input frequency of 44KHz to 96KHz depending on the particular sound chip in the PC. Many of these programs include spectrum analysis and FFT features.
These are invaluable for audio and other low frequency work. It's necessary to scale the input to the sound card to about 1-2 volts peak-to-peak max, because these programs are working with the audio line-input signal. A couple of $0.40 op-amps work fine. I've used *free* sound card oscilloscopes to verify MIDI in/out streams from synthesizers, RS-232 signals, and the design/repair/calibration of hundreds of guitar stompbox circuits.
Every time space travel appears on Slashdot...I get another opportunity to remind you'all that your country is broke. Which means that there isn't going to be a grand 21st century manned space program to other planets.
You can't lose a three trillion dollar war, buy-out the bunko mortgage of every half-wit burger flipper who scammed a half-million 'loan' for a McMansion, give 700 billion dollars to Wall Street sleezos and have a grand glorious space program on other people's money. Not anymore. No matter how many times that you remind them that you have 10000 hydrogen bombs.
You're broke. Your so-called government has spent already spent every tax dollar that you and your children and your grandchildren are ever going to have taken out of their paycheck.
And you got nothing out of it. You can't even get your teeth fixed. Do you have dental insurance? Every one else in the civilized world does. You don't.
There is no future manned space program. It's a fantasy.
Once again, I must remind you of this fact.
Thank you for your attention,
The rest of the world
P.S. you can go back to your comic book movies now.