What the RIAA and SCO do is extortion, not terrorism. Extortion is using authority to force unwarrented payments by using the unauthorized extension of the authority to extract payments that are for the personal benefit of the perp.
Terrorism is random violent murder for vaguely defined and unobtainable politcal goals. RIAA extortion is getting a letter saying give us $2000 or we will use all of our Harvard Law School Grads to take everything you own, the choice is yours. Terrorism is getting your legs blown off because the Arab in the back of the bus you were on blew himself up in the name of his imaginary god and country.
The guy who runs Amazon books has been buying tons and tons of paperback books.
He ships them to India where people strip off the covers, cut the pages from the bindings, and feed the individual pages into OCR scanners. Thousands of books are going into this guy's personal database.
What is means is that the works are not lost, even though the works are copyrighted and the 'owners' refuse to allow them to be republished in inexpensive public domain collections.
However when the law changes, this guy will 'own' all these works because he is the only one in the world who actually has a copy. So in 100 years this guy's heirs or corporation will 'own' 98% of the books printed in the 20th century.
though I do believe corporations already use terrorism to get what they want (SCO, RIAA, etc.)
Terrorism is the use of mass murder of random people to invoke political changes.
The SCO and RIAA use laws in a court room to force specific people to surrender property for engaging in specific activities.
SCO and RIAA do not use terrorism to achieve their goals. This is a bad choice of metaphor because it trivalizes the actions of murderers and over-exagerates the SCO and RIAA actions.
The answer is to CHANGE THE FUCKING LAW to rebalance the scale of benefit for society and the content creators - "owners".
I don't see any need to change the fucking law. The laws against statutory rape and forced unwanted sexual contact are well written and effective for protecting young women from sexual predators.
Oh, excuse me, my mistake....
You were using the word 'fucking' as a general purpose intensifying adjective in an attempt to mimic an emotional verbal outburst rather than using the word 'fucking' as an adjective refering specifically to sexual activity.
Being a technical geek, I sometimes get too involved in using logical linguistic grammer analysis to obtain clarity of precise verbal expression.
I heard a report on NPR very early in the morning (when they play anything controversial) a few years ago about how the two main USA prison corportations (Wackenhut and Corrections Corporation of America) actually did fund Political Action Committees to lobby for ever-increasing prison sentences for minor crimes. In a real sense this is a form of modern slave-trading. The private for-profit prison corporation lobbies for vastly increased prison sentences for minor crimes like personal drug possession. Then when the large inmate population, they sell the living bodies of the prisoners to the drug companies for studies on experimental drugs. Then the drug companies sell the new drugs on television in commercials that are focused on the very personal issues that drives people to seek mild illegal drugs in the first place. For example, the drugs that a advertised on TV in the USA for 'shyness' or 'insecurity' or 'social withdrawal'.
Looks to me like the private prison corporations, the government, and the drug companies are trying to put all the black men in prison and turn all the white people into junkies for their own giant profit. Looks to me like the triangle trade all over again. In the 1700s it was black African slaves, rum, and cotton. In the 2000s it's black African-American slaves, drugs, and government prison contracts.
It's an illusion that black slavery ever ended in America. It still goes on, but in a different form. It's even more profitable for the slave traders now; they don't even have to buy the slaves, they figured out how to get the government to buy the slaves for them with our tax dollars.
I would like to see a really inexpensive portable stereo that could read MP3s on DVDs the way we can now get $20 portable CD players that read CD-R MP3 disks.
When in the mood say for 1970's pop music, I'd put in a DVD disk that had 700 songs from that period in MP3 format. Then set the play function on randon selection.
It would be like listening to a radio station with the DJs or the commercials. I tuned into a Clear Channel station recently while on a car road trip and I was just amazed at how much stupid stuff there is inbetween the musical selections. After about 30 minutes, I stuck an MP3 CDR with 100 songs on it into the car stereo just because the Clear Channel radio station was so irritating.
Since many of the oldies stations have playlists that are about 2000 songs maximum total that they ever play, having a $0.49 DVD-R disk with say 800 songs on it is like having the entire radio station's library with ever having to deal with moronic DJs and stupid commercials.
Since all this is as illegal as hell anyway, maybe we can get our local neighborhood pot sellers to give away a $0.49 DVD-R of the 800 greatest stoner tunes with every $100 quarter ounce of Humboldt Thunderbolt that they sell. Just to get their little subculture out of the habit of just turning on the radio to hear music and rebuild the cohesion between the music community and the hemp community that existed before the MP3 revolution split the corporate music structure from their audience. Musicians would be as successful distributing their music through this illegal channel than they would through the old global music corporation/record store distribution channel.
Only if your judging by the number of convictions. And Mississippi wins because they have every young idealist in the country watching them, trying to make their reputation.
I grew up in Rhode Island, by Sand Pond in Warwick. If I had been ten years younger and a few IQ points dumber, I would have been burned to death in the The Station just like everyone else. The owner had complaits about the noise, so instead of getting a professional acoustic consultation, he goes to his brother who gets him a great deal on sound foam. The brother forgot to mention that he couldn't sell it because it was highly flammable, so it goes in the club. Then one night, the dumbest band on earth comes to town and they shoot off firebombs right into the super flammable sound foam.
Typical Rhode Island.
The only reason why Mississippi is 'ahead' of Rhode Island in the corruption statistics is because no one can convict anyone of corruption in Rhode Island. It took the Feds twenty years to build a case against Buddy Cianci. It would have taken twenty minutes anywhere else.
Every year, at carnival time,
we make a new suit!
Red Yellow Green Purple and Blue,
we make a new suit!
"There's two of them. One is a quiet, dark-haired gentleman named Louis. He will leave you alone if you show the sign of the cross. Not because it affects him, but because he respects it. The other one, the blond one, talks like a gangster and is truly evil. Avoid this one."
STELLA!
Well, I went on down to the Audobon Zoo, and they all asked for you. The monkeys asks, the tigers asked, and the elephants asked me too.
Brother John is gone!
It youse da cost a quoita to go down na Quartoir onna streetcah, but'n nawh it costa dahllar.
Who put their Lucky Dog in my Hurricane glass?
I no'ed her, she done from the I'ish Channel down ov' by the kaanaar of Tchoppatoolas 'n Caa-ly-o-pee.
"What a great meal! Could you bring us the check?"
"What! The Check? Remy, you done know your money's no good here!"
"By the way, did I introduce Miss Ann Osboure of the Federal District Attorney's Office? And, could you bring THE check?, please"
"oh, the Check! Why sure Remy, comin' right up"
"Ahh, don't go gettin' your pretty head all upset there, 'cher. It's just the way we do things down here in the Big Easy."
Dennis Quaid and Ellen Barkin in
The Big Easy 1986
Hey,where ya at? This is Louisana! Home of Edwin Edwards. Of course it's just a money grab.
If they really do enforce this, computer techs will just leave the state (I did). Everyone who is left will simply give $10 and a jar of Roue to their cousin and they'll take care of it.
If your family hasn't lived in Louisana for 300 years (and hasn't been making pay offs and arrangements for that long) then just expect to get hit with huge 'fees' and 'adjustments' if you're trying to make a living in Louisana.
It's the second most corrupt state in the USA, after Rhode Island. So if you're goin' to Nuu Orlaans, Remy, be sure to bring your 'Buddy bag' (Rhode Island in-joke).
Thank you for your reply and your interesting and valid points. Please indulge my comments on each of them as they are all excellent:
Written language is different from spoken language. Sentence structure can be more complex when you have time to edit, and the reader can review at his own pace. Homophones need not be avoided. How do you edit a word on a page by speaking? Literal transcripts of non-trivial conversations are full of spoken corrections, clarifications, and follow-ups to the extent that they are cumbersome to read.
When using a Speech-To-Text, the user will develop a different style from both casual speaking and writing. To edit a word on the screen, move the mouse to the word and say "change this to....". Highlight whole passages or sentences and say "delete this".
Written language contains symbolic hints not present in spoken language. For example, the parent post contains 64-hyphen-bit, motherf***er, 1982 written as number instead of a word, and capitalization of Star Trek.
The speech-to-text as a supplement to operating system, would have a built-in database of common grammer uses and a certain amount of cultural references. New items will be added to the user's individual usage database. The user would only have to tell the system to capitalize a title once and that title would be stored in the cultural titles section of the database, to be capitalized on the next reference. Users could exchange data bases and prune unused references.
Spoken language contains audible hints (eg, tonality, speed) not duplicated in written language. We would have to learn to not rely on them. Page formatting doesn't exist in spoken language, nor does punctuation. Problems like proper quotation marks and poetic stanzas are probably AI-complete.
All part of the Speech-to-text and not as complicated as it seems at first approach. Text editing can be handled with advanced finger interfaces like 'virtual mouse' that detects the fingertip movements within a certain defined area and uses pre-defined gestures to edit text.
Typing is silent. A room full of people talking to their machines would be a cacophony.
People would learn to whisper and talk quietly to their PC. Advanced 3-D finger interfaces like virtual keyboards and a virtual mouse would be used.
My basic point is that the advent of personal supercomputers (64 bit 5-GHz 1GigRAM 1Tbyte storage) requires a whole new user interface approach to become most useful. The keyboard was the interaction medium of the 8-bit CPU, the mouse is the interface of the 16 and 32bit CPU, and the Speech to text with 3-D fingertip readers is the interface of the coming 64-128 bit PC.
It occured to me that young people may not have ever used a real 'smash the ink ribbon against the paper' typewriter.
So I asked the beautiful young woman who was handing out GreenPeace pamthlets outside the library. She laughed and said that 'Yes, she had used one, as a kid, her mother showed her how to insert paper and make letters on it when she found it in the back of the closet.'
Anyway the point is that if you have a PC with a gigabyte of memory, a terabyte of storage, and a multi-gigahertz 64-bit processor, why in the world would you need a manual slow finger-movement input device? You should just talk to the bloody thing, mate, and have it talk back to you. Like Chris Rock said, ' you dumb low-expectations-having motherf***er! '
Ever see the Star Trek movie where Kirk and crew come back to Earth 1982 and Scotty picks up the mouse and starts talking to it? He expected an advanced user-interface system, you should too.
Thank you for the tip. I spent hours on this the first time that I installed Linux.
However, a truly advanced operating system would have all the other OS combinations for this and other common activities.
No one should have to learn a new combination of keys to do an activity like video resolution. Once you learned it, your operating system should have an adaptable user interface that remembers the way that you learned how to do something.
For example in Linux, if you do a right click on the desktop, the system should put up a window asking if you want to: change the video resolution (because this is what Windows does, which is used by 90% of the world's computer users) or something else. It should then remember your response in a configuration file.
No one should have to remember how do anything on a PC that has almost a gigabyte of memory and a terabyte of storage (next year). The computer should remember for you.
A great application of P2P would be learning Linux. Say you get stuck on something that is very easy on Windows but absurdly difficult on Linux; something like changing the video resolution from 640x460 to 1024 or vice versa. If you know how to do it, it's easy. If you don't then it's a fucking nightmare. Everything in Linux is like this, or used to be.
So you go onto the FuckThisStupidShit(tm) P2P site by pressing any of the keys on the keypad (by pounding your fist on the keypad repeatedly while chanting the name of the P2P site. I do this every day! Just ask my co-workers!).
The P2P front-end programs asks you what you want to do and you type a little message. Then the program includes the relevant configuration parameters of your machine and your text into a P2P packet and sends it off. Someone in P2P land sees it and answers your question. Your life is better. You are becoming a Linux expert. You feel better. Birds are singing. You co-workers are smiling at you again and some of the exciting ones are discretely unbuttoning their blouses.
B.S. in Astrophysics, and I'm thinking about truck driving
Well, if you're an Astrophysicist, go to another world.... Just kidding.
Try going to another country. You may not get more than ten dollars an hour, but you will get a LOT more respect than anyone who makes $10/hr in the USA. You can build a rep and a career and move back to the USA to a good job with real pay in ten years. In the USA, a good job is any job that fixes your teeth. Jobs like that for physicists are getting hard to find in the USA but easier to find elsewhere. Plus the $10/hr will go a lot further in other countries than it will in the USA. And you'll be able to afford to get your teeth fixed.
Instead of truck driving, look into sales. Not WalMart, but high tech sales of specialized equipment. Sales is where the money is in the USA. R&D and science is for losers.
Anything that you can invent that will make it easier, more expensive, and more profitable to kill people who don't shop at the Baby Gap will make you a superstar in any 'Defense Contractor'. Big bucks there too, especially as the US gets deeper and deeper every year in its permanent war with Islam.
But truck driving will bore you silly. Bad food, dumb companions, boring highways, and mediocre pay.
In the real world it's not the fault of the operating system writers or the system administrators that networked systems have failed due to viruses, it's the fault of the person who wrote the virus. We don't blame the knife makers for producing an instrument that is stiff and sharp, we blame the person who made the conscious decision to pick it up and stick it into someone.
No one would let this guy get away with mixing two stains of a real virus that created a disease that caused millions of people to be incapacited for several days (assuming that creating a real disease was as easy as creating a virus). It that case there would be serious scientific inquiry as to how an 18-year-old schmuck could be actually able to do what he did and how to create an institutional framework to prevent it from happening again.
But computer science is so new that there doesn't exist even the framework of a watchdog group to handle these situations. Computer science isn't yet considered serious enough for oversight committees that transcend corporations and governments, never mind teenage wonderkinders.
As for the individual, he should be punished. He knew the likely results of his program: it would seriously disrupt thousands of computer systems and cause millions of dollars of damage (the cost of the salaries and overtime for repairing the systems that damaged by the virus that he deliberately wrote and released). He should have the same punishment as Kevin Mitnik: a five year ban on using any computer system. Since Germans have shown their propensity for tattooing undesirables (they placed tattoo numbers on the arms of 6 million Jews before murdering them), let's tattoo "No PC use" to this guys face for the five years so if anyone allows him to use their system and gets caught, they go to jail too. In Singapore he would get many many lashes of the cane across his buttocks for his actions. In China and most of the world, he would be shot, his family charged 9 cents for the bullet, his body organs sold, and his corpse thrown in an unmarked lime pit. But nothing will probably happen to him. I suggest that he be made a computer teacher in an Eastern European girls school, where he would sexed into distraction by dozens of young women trying to get a German husband with a job and visa out. At least he'd be too distracted to write destructive code. He's eighteen and traditionally 18-year-old troublemakers are either drafted (forced to enlist) and sent off to be blown apart in some worthless place no one has ever heard of, or they are mated with several women who displace all their anti-social energies with sex, relationship drama, and children.
In the real world, Microsoft should be using it surplus billions to develop and research operating systems that are immune to this kind of attack. Post World War II governments used to fund this kind of research, but it's Microsoft's turn now. They need to adjust their predator hustler mentality to recognize that they are the leading institution in the computer world and take responsibility for its future direction and improvement.
Suppose that you live in a place where RIAA product costs $20-$25US a disk. Assume that there are also many pirates who sell the top 100 disks on the current Billboard list for $3-5 a disk. You love music and have $50 a month to spend on it. These are not unreasonable assumptions for many people outside the USA. In the USA people have more disposable income and less access to Mafia CDs.
If you get 2 'must have' CDs from RIAA sources a month you've blown your budget but you have what you want when you want it. If you buy all your CDs from outdoor stalls, you get 12 CDs a month but with questionable quality and the selection is not good. You may have to wait many weeks for the title that you specifically want if it is very popular.
Say you buy one RIAA CD and spend the rest of the music budget on Internet download time. All the money that would have gone to the Mafia pirates is now going to the ISP. Plus you have a wider selection (along with the marginal quality) than the Mafia street vendors provide.
Most of the money that would have been going to the Mafia pirates is now going to the Internet Service provider and the RIAA.
Therefore, downloading music hurts the large criminal pirate CD makers more than the RIAA. It helps the RIAA by allowing the consumer to have a wider range of available music. This increases the chances that new previously unknown titles will become part of the consumer's 'must have' list to buy from the RIAA.
I find that CD-Rs work fine for my current use. They cost $0.09 each for 700 Megabytes ($0.12US/gigabyte).
I use multiple sessions for each CDR. When it fills up I copy the directory of the CD to a text file with each directory seperated by a row of stars ***. Each CD is labeled with a code like '407a': the first number is the year digit, the second two are the month, and the letter is is the alphabetical order of that CD in the month. The CDs are kept in a stack in chronological order.
To find a file from many years ago, I load the text files for the years where the file would be found. Then a text search for the file. If found then do a text search up for four or five stars (the CD directory seperator). Now I have the CD code, for example '110f' for the sixth CD of October 2001. I open the stack of CDs from late 2001 and find the exact one located between '110e' and '110g'. Load the file into the PC and replace the CD in order onto the stack.
This works and it's cheap. I don't have to update or convert to a new medium and I can find anything quickly.
I don't trust hard disks. They're almost ready for primetime, but they're still to fragile and expensive to take seriously. But with the price/performance level doubling every 18 months for hard disks, they will soon surpass CD-R as an effective storage medium. CDR is mature technology now, it's nowhere near as bad as it was six years ago. Soon DVD-R will be just as good and just as cheap. I suspect 'CD rot' is an urban myth.
Perhaps there is confusion here between the academic environment and independent learning. I spent far too much time in school and wouldn't go back without getting seriously paid for the effort. But I still constantly need to learn new things especially in electonics/computers.
Hypertext works well if you use enough discipine to not get tangled in irrelavent threads and you have a fast internet connection. A great hypertextbook will have links to many different levels so you learn as fast as you can concentrate and not be blocked because the text book is written at too high or too low of a level.
Eventually the current system of education will crash because it simply doesn't pay off: time and tution costs vs better employment opportunities. Serious hypertextbooks will replace it.
Future textbooks will be like Slashdot posts in that a topic will be introduced, followed by a link to a technical discussion. Following will be comments and critiques with links to further in-depth discussion and off-topic threads. Students will be graded by the value of the content that they contribute to the discussion which in turn will depend on the extent that they explore the threads.
Future textbooks in hypertext ebook format will differ from Slashdot posts by having many more tutorials at various levels on the topic being presented.
The idea that education will be purchased by buying college credits through physically attending a lecture in a classroom and correctly guessing from an assortment of discreet facts with a multiple choice test after a number of lectures will fall away.
Washington State has the dubious distinction of being one of the world's centers for genocidal and omicidal (destruction of all human life) technology, storage, and control.
In the East, we have Hanford Nuclear Site where the fuel for atomic bombs has been made for fifty years. Huge radioactive pollution problems now.
Just south of there across the Oregon border is the Umatilla Ordinance Depot. This is the storage area of enough nerve gas to kill everyone on earth many times over. The 'juice' or 'Hermiston hairspray' (after the local town) is stored in liquid form in hardened canisters ready to be placed into missles and lobbed off at anyone who pisses us off. This stuff will make your town look like Jonestown, regardless of where you are or who you are. There was a plan to burn ALL of it and rid the earth of this danger. But since the great Arab massacre (which we daintilly refer to as '9-11'), plans to destroy all this nerve gas have been postponed for environmental safety reasons. Someone wants to keep their options open.
The third leg of Washington State's doorway to hell is the US Navy Undersea Warfare Center in Bangor, tucked into a little bay about 30 miles west of Seattle. This is where the nuclear submarines of the US Navy are controlled. Each of these ships can travel underwater for months without surfacing. Each carries enough Underwater ICBMs to destroy hundreds of cities with hydrogen bombs. When submerged, the only way to communicate with these ships is with very slow Ultra Low Wave radio that requires huge underground antennas miles in length.
In a sense, all this is good because it has solved a major problem that has plagued mankind since the beginning of history. That is, how do you protect yourself from being invaded and slaughtered by your neighbors? Since the mid-1960s, omnicide technology has solved the problem of providing for a national defense. It is no longer possible for anyone to invade and defeat us (or anyone who has this technology).
This is good.
But it has a serious price. Omnicide technology must always be guarded against its use and it can never be let out of control. This stuff isn't weapons of mass destruction because it can't be used as weapons, that is as an instrument that causes great bodily harm to your enemy but not yourself. It's in a new category all together.
It's surprising that in the modern age the omnicide technology from the previous century is never discussed on TV, radio, newspapers, or magazines. It's almost as if everyone has decided that if we never talk about this, then it will go away. But, no, it's here, it will never go away and it must be monitored and guarded until the end of time. This is the true legacy of the 1960's, not hippies and all the stuff that the news media says the 60's were about. No, it's the institutionalism of omnicidal technology.
Actually we have been quite lucky given the mental instablilty of the world leaders of the time. All this death technology was under the control of people like Lyndon Johnson, Mao Zhe-Dong (who was insane due to teritary siphilys), Nikita Khrushchev, and Leonid Bhrezhnev. Perhaps we only survived because these guys were obsessed with world war II power balancing mentality, and didn't really deeply comprehend how easily they could kill everyone on earth.
I sometimes wonder whether the Arabs who have declared war on the USA really understand how easily and quickly the Americans could kill every Muslim on earth. I also think that the American refusal to use this huge arsenal of genocidal technology, in the face of continued terrorist attacks, gives them true moral superiority over the Arabs in this conflict.
Historically, Americans are strange warriors in that they can be attacked over and over again and they won't respond. Then, one more little attack comes, and they respond with a built up ferocity that is vastly greater than sum of all the attacks that initially made on them. I don't think that the Arabs qu
I must admit that I was a little taken back to realize that libraries would loan the latest pop music records (this was about thirty years ago). It seemed so incongruous, this image of the little old lady (not far off the mark back then) and these sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll pop albums.
Later I realized that librarians are the guardians, defenders, and custodians of culture for the country. They take this role seriously and cultivate a lot of back channel resources. Plus the record industry sends millions of copies of the latest stuff to the libraries for free, either as a tax write-off or as general promotion (of course, it all comes out of the artist's royalities).
It's too bad that all the libraries dumped all their vinyl LPs when the CDs became the primary audio medium. This happened before the MP3 revolution. Now we could back up all the old vinyl on CD-R, but many of the LPs that didn't make it to CD are gone.
Libraries have deep, but quiet, support that the RIAA doesn't in American society. The RIAA would not be wise to mess with them, because they could well suffer a big defeat. Congress may support the RIAA because they get paid-off, but the Supreme Court would probably side with the librarians if a case of the librarians vs. the global media corporations came before them.
Given the mentality of the RIAA, it's only a matter of time before they launch a serious attack on public libraries. After all, libraries allow people to freely take CDs home, listen to them (consume RIAA product without a per-use payment), and then bring them back if they don't like them (actually bring them back whether they like them or not).
This situation seems just guaranteed to make the RIAA foam at the mouth. And these are the guys that wanted Congress to put DRM in every $1.50 Digital-to-Analog convertor chip, so you know their enthusiasm is not tempered by logic.
So an attempt by the RIAA to force the public libraries to remove all the CDs and DVDs from their shelves seems inevitable. They probably think that they can file one brief with one judge someplace and the next day all the CDs and DVDs would be removed from the all of the stacks. They probably think that putting pressure on the libraries is going to be even easier than setting 100 Harvard Law Graduates on a high school girl downloading Britany outtakes. They probably think that they're going to wake up the day after filing their little brief and find hundreds of millions of dollars in checks piled up at their doorstep sent to them from librarians in unpaid royalities from all the people who checked out CDs, took them home and listened to them,... Without Paying the RIAA anything!
Personally, myself, I wouldn't mess with the librarians. They handled many yahoos before. Bozos like the RIAA are nothing new to them.
Every generation, someone NEW to the publishing industry makes the observation that people who read books from the library aren't actually buying the books that they read... and this ain't right. The other publishers point out that they might sell 500 copies of some fool's first novel if he stands on his head long enough on TV, but the public libraries buy 50,000 copies on the basis of a thumb's up review in NY Review of Books, at full list price.
The RIAA isn't all that bright, so, maybe, messing with the Public Library institutions of America may be the force that knocks them back to their caves.
Slashdot Mirror
What the RIAA and SCO do is extortion, not terrorism. Extortion is using authority to force unwarrented payments by using the unauthorized extension of the authority to extract payments that are for the personal benefit of the perp.
Terrorism is random violent murder for vaguely defined and unobtainable politcal goals. RIAA extortion is getting a letter saying give us $2000 or we will use all of our Harvard Law School Grads to take everything you own, the choice is yours.
Terrorism is getting your legs blown off because the Arab in the back of the bus you were on blew himself up in the name of his imaginary god and country.
Big difference, if you please.
The guy who runs Amazon books has been buying tons and tons of paperback books.
He ships them to India where people strip off the covers, cut the pages from the bindings, and feed the individual pages into OCR scanners. Thousands of books are going into this guy's personal database.
What is means is that the works are not lost, even though the works are copyrighted and the 'owners' refuse to allow them to be republished in inexpensive public domain collections.
However when the law changes, this guy will 'own' all these works because he is the only one in the world who actually has a copy. So in 100 years this guy's heirs or corporation will 'own' 98% of the books printed in the 20th century.
though I do believe corporations already use terrorism to get what they want (SCO, RIAA, etc.)
Terrorism is the use of mass murder of random people to invoke political changes.
The SCO and RIAA use laws in a court room to force specific people to surrender property for engaging in specific activities.
SCO and RIAA do not use terrorism to achieve their goals. This is a bad choice of metaphor because it trivalizes the actions of murderers and over-exagerates the SCO and RIAA actions.
The answer is to CHANGE THE FUCKING LAW to rebalance the scale of benefit for society and the content creators - "owners".
I don't see any need to change the fucking law. The laws against statutory rape and forced unwanted sexual contact are well written and effective for protecting young women from sexual predators.
Oh, excuse me, my mistake....
You were using the word 'fucking' as a general purpose intensifying adjective in an attempt to mimic an emotional verbal outburst rather than using the word 'fucking' as an adjective refering specifically to sexual activity.
Being a technical geek, I sometimes get too involved in using logical linguistic grammer analysis to obtain clarity of precise verbal expression.
Sorry...
I heard a report on NPR very early in the morning (when they play anything controversial) a few years ago about how the two main USA prison corportations (Wackenhut and Corrections Corporation of America) actually did fund Political Action Committees to lobby for ever-increasing prison sentences for minor crimes. In a real sense this is a form of modern slave-trading. The private for-profit prison corporation lobbies for vastly increased prison sentences for minor crimes like personal drug possession. Then when the large inmate population, they sell the living bodies of the prisoners to the drug companies for studies on experimental drugs. Then the drug companies sell the new drugs on television in commercials that are focused on the very personal issues that drives people to seek mild illegal drugs in the first place. For example, the drugs that a advertised on TV in the USA for 'shyness' or 'insecurity' or 'social withdrawal'.
Looks to me like the private prison corporations, the government, and the drug companies are trying to put all the black men in prison and turn all the white people into junkies for their own giant profit. Looks to me like the triangle trade all over again. In the 1700s it was black African slaves, rum, and cotton. In the 2000s it's black African-American slaves, drugs, and government prison contracts.
It's an illusion that black slavery ever ended in America. It still goes on, but in a different form. It's even more profitable for the slave traders now; they don't even have to buy the slaves, they figured out how to get the government to buy the slaves for them with our tax dollars.
I would like to see a really inexpensive portable stereo that could read MP3s on DVDs the way we can now get $20 portable CD players that read CD-R MP3 disks.
When in the mood say for 1970's pop music, I'd put in a DVD disk that had 700 songs from that period in MP3 format. Then set the play function on randon selection.
It would be like listening to a radio station with the DJs or the commercials. I tuned into a Clear Channel station recently while on a car road trip and I was just amazed at how much stupid stuff there is inbetween the musical selections. After about 30 minutes, I stuck an MP3 CDR with 100 songs on it into the car stereo just because the Clear Channel radio station was so irritating.
Since many of the oldies stations have playlists that are about 2000 songs maximum total that they ever play, having a $0.49 DVD-R disk with say 800 songs on it is like having the entire radio station's library with ever having to deal with moronic DJs and stupid commercials.
Since all this is as illegal as hell anyway, maybe we can get our local neighborhood pot sellers to give away a $0.49 DVD-R of the 800 greatest stoner tunes with every $100 quarter ounce of Humboldt Thunderbolt that they sell. Just to get their little subculture out of the habit of just turning on the radio to hear music and rebuild the cohesion between the music community and the hemp community that existed before the MP3 revolution split the corporate music structure from their audience. Musicians would be as successful distributing their music through this illegal channel than they would through the old global music corporation/record store distribution channel.
Only if your judging by the number of convictions. And Mississippi wins because they have every young idealist in the country watching them, trying to make their reputation.
I grew up in Rhode Island, by Sand Pond in Warwick. If I had been ten years younger and a few IQ points dumber, I would have been burned to death in the The Station just like everyone else.
The owner had complaits about the noise, so instead of getting a professional acoustic consultation, he goes to his brother who gets him a great deal on sound foam. The brother forgot to mention that he couldn't sell it because it was highly flammable, so it goes in the club. Then one night, the dumbest band on earth comes to town and they shoot off firebombs right into the super flammable sound foam.
Typical Rhode Island.
The only reason why Mississippi is 'ahead' of Rhode Island in the corruption statistics is because no one can convict anyone of corruption in Rhode Island. It took the Feds twenty years to build a case against Buddy Cianci. It would have taken twenty minutes anywhere else.
No,
They all AX'ed for you.
Laisse les bon tons roulez!
Ico Ico, jack kee mo fee nai nay!
Every year, at carnival time,
we make a new suit!
Red Yellow Green Purple and Blue,
we make a new suit!
"There's two of them. One is a quiet, dark-haired gentleman named Louis. He will leave you alone if you show the sign of the cross. Not because it affects him, but because he respects it. The other one, the blond one, talks like a gangster and is truly evil. Avoid this one."
STELLA!
Well, I went on down to the Audobon Zoo, and they all asked for you. The monkeys asks, the tigers asked, and the elephants asked me too.
Brother John is gone!
It youse da cost a quoita to go down na Quartoir onna streetcah, but'n nawh it costa dahllar.
Who put their Lucky Dog in my Hurricane glass?
I no'ed her, she done from the I'ish Channel down ov' by the kaanaar of Tchoppatoolas 'n Caa-ly-o-pee.
"What a great meal! Could you bring us the check?"
"What! The Check? Remy, you done know your money's no good here!"
"By the way, did I introduce Miss Ann Osboure of the Federal District Attorney's Office? And, could you bring THE check?, please"
"oh, the Check! Why sure Remy, comin' right up"
"Ahh, don't go gettin' your pretty head all upset there, 'cher. It's just the way we do things down here in the Big Easy."
Dennis Quaid and Ellen Barkin in
The Big Easy 1986
Hey,where ya at? This is Louisana! Home of Edwin Edwards. Of course it's just a money grab.
If they really do enforce this, computer techs will just leave the state (I did). Everyone who is left will simply give $10 and a jar of Roue to their cousin and they'll take care of it.
If your family hasn't lived in Louisana for 300 years (and hasn't been making pay offs and arrangements for that long) then just expect to get hit with huge 'fees' and 'adjustments' if you're trying to make a living in Louisana.
It's the second most corrupt state in the USA, after Rhode Island. So if you're goin' to Nuu Orlaans, Remy, be sure to bring your 'Buddy bag' (Rhode Island in-joke).
Thank you for your reply and your interesting and valid points. Please indulge my comments on each of them as they are all excellent:
....". Highlight whole passages or sentences and say "delete this".
Written language is different from spoken language. Sentence structure can be more complex when you have time to edit, and the reader can review at his own pace. Homophones need not be avoided. How do you edit a word on a page by speaking? Literal transcripts of non-trivial conversations are full of spoken corrections, clarifications, and follow-ups to the extent that they are cumbersome to read.
When using a Speech-To-Text, the user will develop a different style from both casual speaking and writing. To edit a word on the screen, move the mouse to the word and say "change this to
Written language contains symbolic hints not present in spoken language. For example, the parent post contains 64-hyphen-bit, motherf***er, 1982 written as number instead of a word, and capitalization of Star Trek.
The speech-to-text as a supplement to operating system, would have a built-in database of common grammer uses and a certain amount of cultural references. New items will be added to the user's individual usage database. The user would only have to tell the system to capitalize a title once and that title would be stored in the cultural titles section of the database, to be capitalized on the next reference. Users could exchange data bases and prune unused references.
Spoken language contains audible hints (eg, tonality, speed) not duplicated in written language. We would have to learn to not rely on them.
Page formatting doesn't exist in spoken language, nor does punctuation. Problems like proper quotation marks and poetic stanzas are probably AI-complete.
All part of the Speech-to-text and not as complicated as it seems at first approach. Text editing can be handled with advanced finger interfaces like 'virtual mouse' that detects the fingertip movements within a certain defined area and uses pre-defined gestures to edit text.
Typing is silent. A room full of people talking to their machines would be a cacophony.
People would learn to whisper and talk quietly to their PC. Advanced 3-D finger interfaces like virtual keyboards and a virtual mouse would be used.
My basic point is that the advent of personal supercomputers (64 bit 5-GHz 1GigRAM 1Tbyte storage) requires a whole new user interface approach to become most useful. The keyboard was the interaction medium of the 8-bit CPU, the mouse is the interface of the 16 and 32bit CPU, and the Speech to text with 3-D fingertip readers is the interface of the coming 64-128 bit PC.
Thank you,
It occured to me that young people may not have ever used a real 'smash the ink ribbon against the paper' typewriter.
So I asked the beautiful young woman who was handing out GreenPeace pamthlets outside the library. She laughed and said that 'Yes, she had used one, as a kid, her mother showed her how to insert paper and make letters on it when she found it in the back of the closet.'
Anyway the point is that if you have a PC with a gigabyte of memory, a terabyte of storage, and a multi-gigahertz 64-bit processor, why in the world would you need a manual slow finger-movement input device? You should just talk to the bloody thing, mate, and have it talk back to you. Like Chris Rock said, ' you dumb low-expectations-having motherf***er! '
Ever see the Star Trek movie where Kirk and crew come back to Earth 1982 and Scotty picks up the mouse and starts talking to it? He expected an advanced user-interface system, you should too.
Thank you for the tip. I spent hours on this the first time that I installed Linux.
However, a truly advanced operating system would have all the other OS combinations for this and other common activities.
No one should have to learn a new combination of keys to do an activity like video resolution. Once you learned it, your operating system should have an adaptable user interface that remembers the way that you learned how to do something.
For example in Linux, if you do a right click on the desktop, the system should put up a window asking if you want to: change the video resolution (because this is what Windows does, which is used by 90% of the world's computer users) or something else. It should then remember your response in a configuration file.
No one should have to remember how do anything on a PC that has almost a gigabyte of memory and a terabyte of storage (next year). The computer should remember for you.
"Plus the $10/hr will go a lot further in other countries than it will in the USA."
Oh really? Switzerland? The Netherlands?
No, silly!
Poland, India, Mexico, Argentina, Morocco...
Inexpensive countries with growing engineering infrastructures.
A great application of P2P would be learning Linux. Say you get stuck on something that is very easy on Windows but absurdly difficult on Linux; something like changing the video resolution from 640x460 to 1024 or vice versa. If you know how to do it, it's easy. If you don't then it's a fucking nightmare. Everything in Linux is like this, or used to be.
So you go onto the FuckThisStupidShit(tm) P2P site by pressing any of the keys on the keypad (by pounding your fist on the keypad repeatedly while chanting the name of the P2P site. I do this every day! Just ask my co-workers!).
The P2P front-end programs asks you what you want to do and you type a little message. Then the program includes the relevant configuration parameters of your machine and your text into a P2P packet and sends it off. Someone in P2P land sees it and answers your question. Your life is better. You are becoming a Linux expert. You feel better. Birds are singing. You co-workers are smiling at you again and some of the exciting ones are discretely unbuttoning their blouses.
B.S. in Astrophysics, and I'm thinking about truck driving
... Just kidding.
Well, if you're an Astrophysicist, go to another world.
Try going to another country. You may not get more than ten dollars an hour, but you will get a LOT more respect than anyone who makes $10/hr in the USA. You can build a rep and a career and move back to the USA to a good job with real pay in ten years. In the USA, a good job is any job that fixes your teeth. Jobs like that for physicists are getting hard to find in the USA but easier to find elsewhere. Plus the $10/hr will go a lot further in other countries than it will in the USA. And you'll be able to afford to get your teeth fixed.
Instead of truck driving, look into sales. Not WalMart, but high tech sales of specialized equipment. Sales is where the money is in the USA. R&D and science is for losers.
Anything that you can invent that will make it easier, more expensive, and more profitable to kill people who don't shop at the Baby Gap will make you a superstar in any 'Defense Contractor'. Big bucks there too, especially as the US gets deeper and deeper every year in its permanent war with Islam.
But truck driving will bore you silly. Bad food, dumb companions, boring highways, and mediocre pay.
In the real world it's not the fault of the operating system writers or the system administrators that networked systems have failed due to viruses, it's the fault of the person who wrote the virus. We don't blame the knife makers for producing an instrument that is stiff and sharp, we blame the person who made the conscious decision to pick it up and stick it into someone.
No one would let this guy get away with mixing two stains of a real virus that created a disease that caused millions of people to be incapacited for several days (assuming that creating a real disease was as easy as creating a virus). It that case there would be serious scientific inquiry as to how an 18-year-old schmuck could be actually able to do what he did and how to create an institutional framework to prevent it from happening again.
But computer science is so new that there doesn't exist even the framework of a watchdog group to handle these situations. Computer science isn't yet considered serious enough for oversight committees that transcend corporations and governments, never mind teenage wonderkinders.
As for the individual, he should be punished. He knew the likely results of his program: it would seriously disrupt thousands of computer systems and cause millions of dollars of damage (the cost of the salaries and overtime for repairing the systems that damaged by the virus that he deliberately wrote and released). He should have the same punishment as Kevin Mitnik: a five year ban on using any computer system. Since Germans have shown their propensity for tattooing undesirables (they placed tattoo numbers on the arms of 6 million Jews before murdering them), let's tattoo "No PC use" to this guys face for the five years so if anyone allows him to use their system and gets caught, they go to jail too.
In Singapore he would get many many lashes of the cane across his buttocks for his actions. In China and most of the world, he would be shot, his family charged 9 cents for the bullet, his body organs sold, and his corpse thrown in an unmarked lime pit. But nothing will probably happen to him. I suggest that he be made a computer teacher in an Eastern European girls school, where he would sexed into distraction by dozens of young women trying to get a German husband with a job and visa out. At least he'd be too distracted to write destructive code. He's eighteen and traditionally 18-year-old troublemakers are either drafted (forced to enlist) and sent off to be blown apart in some worthless place no one has ever heard of, or they are mated with several women who displace all their anti-social energies with sex, relationship drama, and children.
In the real world, Microsoft should be using it surplus billions to develop and research operating systems that are immune to this kind of attack. Post World War II governments used to fund this kind of research, but it's Microsoft's turn now. They need to adjust their predator hustler mentality to recognize that they are the leading institution in the computer world and take responsibility for its future direction and improvement.
Suppose that you live in a place where RIAA product costs $20-$25US a disk. Assume that there are also many pirates who sell the top 100 disks on the current Billboard list for $3-5 a disk. You love music and have $50 a month to spend on it. These are not unreasonable assumptions for many people outside the USA. In the USA people have more disposable income and less access to Mafia CDs.
If you get 2 'must have' CDs from RIAA sources a month you've blown your budget but you have what you want when you want it. If you buy all your CDs from outdoor stalls, you get 12 CDs a month but with questionable quality and the selection is not good. You may have to wait many weeks for the title that you specifically want if it is very popular.
Say you buy one RIAA CD and spend the rest of the music budget on Internet download time. All the money that would have gone to the Mafia pirates is now going to the ISP. Plus you have a wider selection (along with the marginal quality) than the Mafia street vendors provide.
Most of the money that would have been going to the Mafia pirates is now going to the Internet Service provider and the RIAA.
Therefore, downloading music hurts the large criminal pirate CD makers more than the RIAA. It helps the RIAA by allowing the consumer to have a wider range of available music. This increases the chances that new previously unknown titles will become part of the consumer's 'must have' list to buy from the RIAA.
I find that CD-Rs work fine for my current use.
They cost $0.09 each for 700 Megabytes ($0.12US/gigabyte).
I use multiple sessions for each CDR. When it fills up I copy the directory of the CD to a text file with each directory seperated by a row of stars ***. Each CD is labeled with a code like '407a': the first number is the year digit, the second two are the month, and the letter is is the alphabetical order of that CD in the month. The CDs are kept in a stack in chronological order.
To find a file from many years ago, I load the text files for the years where the file would be found. Then a text search for the file. If found then do a text search up for four or five stars (the CD directory seperator). Now I have the CD code, for example '110f' for the sixth CD of October 2001. I open the stack of CDs from late 2001 and find the exact one located between '110e' and '110g'. Load the file into the PC and replace the CD in order onto the stack.
This works and it's cheap. I don't have to update or convert to a new medium and I can find anything quickly.
I don't trust hard disks. They're almost ready for primetime, but they're still to fragile and expensive to take seriously. But with the price/performance level doubling every 18 months for hard disks, they will soon surpass CD-R as an effective storage medium. CDR is mature technology now, it's nowhere near as bad as it was six years ago. Soon DVD-R will be just as good and just as cheap. I suspect 'CD rot' is an urban myth.
Perhaps there is confusion here between the academic environment and independent learning. I spent far too much time in school and wouldn't go back without getting seriously paid for the effort. But I still constantly need to learn new things especially in electonics/computers.
Hypertext works well if you use enough discipine to not get tangled in irrelavent threads and you have a fast internet connection. A great hypertextbook will have links to many different levels so you learn as fast as you can concentrate and not be blocked because the text book is written at too high or too low of a level.
Eventually the current system of education will crash because it simply doesn't pay off: time and tution costs vs better employment opportunities. Serious hypertextbooks will replace it.
Future textbooks will be like Slashdot posts in that a topic will be introduced, followed by a link to a technical discussion. Following will be comments and critiques with links to further in-depth discussion and off-topic threads. Students will be graded by the value of the content that they contribute to the discussion which in turn will depend on the extent that they explore the threads.
Future textbooks in hypertext ebook format will differ from Slashdot posts by having many more tutorials at various levels on the topic being presented.
The idea that education will be purchased by buying college credits through physically attending a lecture in a classroom and correctly guessing from an assortment of discreet facts with a multiple choice test after a number of lectures will fall away.
Washington State has the dubious distinction of being one of the world's centers for genocidal and omicidal (destruction of all human life) technology, storage, and control.
In the East, we have Hanford Nuclear Site where the fuel for atomic bombs has been made for fifty years. Huge radioactive pollution problems now.
Just south of there across the Oregon border is the Umatilla Ordinance Depot. This is the storage area of enough nerve gas to kill everyone on earth many times over. The 'juice' or 'Hermiston hairspray' (after the local town) is stored in liquid form in hardened canisters ready to be placed into missles and lobbed off at anyone who pisses us off. This stuff will make your town look like Jonestown, regardless of where you are or who you are. There was a plan to burn ALL of it and rid the earth of this danger. But since the great Arab massacre (which we daintilly refer to as '9-11'), plans to destroy all this nerve gas have been postponed for environmental safety reasons. Someone wants to keep their options open.
The third leg of Washington State's doorway to hell is the US Navy Undersea Warfare Center in Bangor, tucked into a little bay about 30 miles west of Seattle. This is where the nuclear submarines of the US Navy are controlled. Each of these ships can travel underwater for months without surfacing. Each carries enough Underwater ICBMs to destroy hundreds of cities with hydrogen bombs. When submerged, the only way to communicate with these ships is with very slow Ultra Low Wave radio that requires huge underground antennas miles in length.
In a sense, all this is good because it has solved a major problem that has plagued mankind since the beginning of history. That is, how do you protect yourself from being invaded and slaughtered by your neighbors? Since the mid-1960s, omnicide technology has solved the problem of providing for a national defense. It is no longer possible for anyone to invade and defeat us (or anyone who has this technology).
This is good.
But it has a serious price. Omnicide technology must always be guarded against its use and it can never be let out of control. This stuff isn't weapons of mass destruction because it can't be used as weapons, that is as an instrument that causes great bodily harm to your enemy but not yourself. It's in a new category all together.
It's surprising that in the modern age the omnicide technology from the previous century is never discussed on TV, radio, newspapers, or magazines. It's almost as if everyone has decided that if we never talk about this, then it will go away. But, no, it's here, it will never go away and it must be monitored and guarded until the end of time. This is the true legacy of the 1960's, not hippies and all the stuff that the news media says the 60's were about. No, it's the institutionalism of omnicidal technology.
Actually we have been quite lucky given the mental instablilty of the world leaders of the time. All this death technology was under the control of people like Lyndon Johnson, Mao Zhe-Dong (who was insane due to teritary siphilys), Nikita Khrushchev, and Leonid Bhrezhnev. Perhaps we only survived because these guys were obsessed with world war II power balancing mentality, and didn't really deeply comprehend how easily they could kill everyone on earth.
I sometimes wonder whether the Arabs who have declared war on the USA really understand how easily and quickly the Americans could kill every Muslim on earth. I also think that the American refusal to use this huge arsenal of genocidal technology, in the face of continued terrorist attacks, gives them true moral superiority over the Arabs in this conflict.
Historically, Americans are strange warriors in that they can be attacked over and over again and they won't respond. Then, one more little attack comes, and they respond with a built up ferocity that is vastly greater than sum of all the attacks that initially made on them. I don't think that the Arabs qu
I must admit that I was a little taken back to realize that libraries would loan the latest pop music records (this was about thirty years ago). It seemed so incongruous, this image of the little old lady (not far off the mark back then) and these sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll pop albums.
Later I realized that librarians are the guardians, defenders, and custodians of culture for the country. They take this role seriously and cultivate a lot of back channel resources. Plus the record industry sends millions of copies of the latest stuff to the libraries for free, either as a tax write-off or as general promotion (of course, it all comes out of the artist's royalities).
It's too bad that all the libraries dumped all their vinyl LPs when the CDs became the primary audio medium. This happened before the MP3 revolution. Now we could back up all the old vinyl on CD-R, but many of the LPs that didn't make it to CD are gone.
Libraries have deep, but quiet, support that the RIAA doesn't in American society. The RIAA would not be wise to mess with them, because they could well suffer a big defeat. Congress may support the RIAA because they get paid-off, but the Supreme Court would probably side with the librarians if a case of the librarians vs. the global media corporations came before them.
Given the mentality of the RIAA, it's only a matter of time before they launch a serious attack on public libraries. After all, libraries allow people to freely take CDs home, listen to them (consume RIAA product without a per-use payment), and then bring them back if they don't like them (actually bring them back whether they like them or not).
This situation seems just guaranteed to make the RIAA foam at the mouth. And these are the guys that wanted Congress to put DRM in every $1.50 Digital-to-Analog convertor chip, so you know their enthusiasm is not tempered by logic.
So an attempt by the RIAA to force the public libraries to remove all the CDs and DVDs from their shelves seems inevitable. They probably think that they can file one brief with one judge someplace and the next day all the CDs and DVDs would be removed from the all of the stacks. They probably think that putting pressure on the libraries is going to be even easier than setting 100 Harvard Law Graduates on a high school girl downloading Britany outtakes. They probably think that they're going to wake up the day after filing their little brief and find hundreds of millions of dollars in checks piled up at their doorstep sent to them from librarians in unpaid royalities from all the people who checked out CDs, took them home and listened to them,... Without Paying the RIAA anything!
Personally, myself, I wouldn't mess with the librarians. They handled many yahoos before. Bozos like the RIAA are nothing new to them.
Every generation, someone NEW to the publishing industry makes the observation that people who read books from the library aren't actually buying the books that they read... and this ain't right. The other publishers point out that they might sell 500 copies of some fool's first novel if he stands on his head long enough on TV, but the public libraries buy 50,000 copies on the basis of a thumb's up review in NY Review of Books, at full list price.
The RIAA isn't all that bright, so, maybe, messing with the Public Library institutions of America may be the force that knocks them back to their caves.