There's no real secret why California's 500 year-old redwood trees are dying off at an alarming rate...
Just get behind one of the hundreds of log trucks going down Hyw 101 in Del Norte county and look at the size of the trees being hauled to the sawmill. It's not uncommon to see logs on the back of the trucks that are 12 to 18 feet (4 to 6 meters) in diameter.
The redwood forest is dying because the trees are being cut down by the thousands...
day after day... month after month... year after year.
It's a good feeling to know that the fine proud and proper Brahmins in Delhi feel no sense of responsibility at all for the helping the hundreds of thousands of the poorest, most hopeless, most destitute people in the world begging on the streets of Calcutta.
It's truely astonishing how they could delude themselves into believing that they actually hundreds of millions of dollars (billions of rupees) to piss away on a space program.
Having been to India and having had waded through hundreds of beggars willing to sell their children for pennies, I will never again feel that I am a member of the most cold, insensitive, and heartless culture on the earth.
No, I'll just think the corrupt racist demented Indian bureaucrat who thought that his people needed a space program. Compared to him, I'll never feel corrupt, racist, and demented again.
I want a computer that is QUIET!!! and turns off and on INSTANTLY!!!
I want a PC with today's tech specs and a Commodore 64's decibel level and boot time.
Cheaper and smaller doesn't hurt either.
Plus, a scanner and program that does OCR and language translations from Chinese to English so I can keep up the latest Singapore politician's diatribe in Chinese about how degenerate and morally defective the white people are (while shuckin, and grinnin' and happy backslappin' his American friends in English for the Wall Street Journal).
I also have downloaded a lot of books (several hundred from Kazaa). I've only read a few pages of each of them, but the important point is that I have them and can share them. I'll never read most of them.
We are at the point where most of the books published between 1920 and 1950 will disappear. Since they originally appeared after the Disney Mickey Mouse character the copywrite permanent extention laws will prevent any of these works from being able to be re-published (either on paper or digitally) in the public demand. And since also there is no demand to pay new list prices for these old works they won't be commercially republished. When the paper wears out the libraries will recycle them for pulp. Then they will be gone forever (save for one or two copies locked deep in the Library of Congress warehouse).
It is ironic that the conserative Christian Right wishes to return to a way of life prevalent in the first half of the 20th century, while doing nothing to prevent all accurate portrayals of that life (the novels published in that period) from disappearing. They say 'let's go back to the way live was in the 1940's' and young earnest conservatives will ask 'well, what was life like in the 1940's'? But there will be no record.
This 'piracy' is a direct result of the 100 to 1 price difference between commercial CDs and CD-R MP3s. Eight albums of 196KBPS MP3 music (which is CD quality for anyone with ears over thirty years old) will fit on a single 20 cent CD-R.
The RIAA is going to have to come to terms with this new economic reality. They can either attempt to make the cost of CD-R much more expensive, bring down the cost of commercial CD's, greatly increase the preceived value of CDs, make it legally dangerous to rip, mix, burn; or find some new approach all together.
Making CD-Rs more expensive through add-on taxes, fees, purchase restictions is unlikely to work due to the fact that this medium is also the primary means used for business data storage. Plus, most if not all, of the blank media is manufactured in countries that have no financial interest in preserving the RIAA's profit structure.
As a business political-payoff organization, the RIAA doesn't have the ability to lower CD prices and the half-dozen global media corporations are too ossified and rigid to adapt to new business models. On the highest executive levels of the six global corporations, the primary concern is debt-service and trying to convince the other six corporations to buy various sections of themselves. The music divisions are peripheral; and left to the overseeing of the troglydytes and cement-heads who have always run them in the same style for better or worse since the 1930's. Nothing can change here, so don't waste any energy trying to convince them that it is in their best interest to change. It's simply not possible.
Greatly increasing the preceived value of CDs requires the resources of the record industry coupled with the total committment and energy of the creative community. With so much discussion in recent years of the exploitive and bad contracts forced upon creative people systematically by the industry, it is unlikely that both sides will trust each other enough to combine forces that would provide a level of new content needed to bring the public's preception of the value of CDs up to their current pricing levels. Making CDs worth $18 each by adding much more and better content won't happen because the people who would be creating this content have not enough to gain from amount of work needed to create this content under the present contractual arrangements. Since the industry is petrified in its structure, the exploitive contracts can't change either. Don't expect anything more in the future than the two good songs plus filler for $18 that is being currently offered by the RIAA's clients.
The legal stategy of randomly selecting college students and other young people and using vast legal resources to extort their life-savings (and their families) is probably the best short-term strategy for the RIAA. It creates fear among the young and their parents. In the long term it will only be one more means of criminalizing an entire generation, along with drug and beer laws and other misguided attempts of using the 'justice' system to enforce lifestyle political-correctness on people who don't have the resources to deflect this extortion (traditionally minorities, but now primarilly the young). It will be interesting to see if the RIAA's lawyers will be as keen on the random extortion of college students when the former college students (whose lives were randomly selected for destruction by the RIAA to set an example) retaliate with their own network of kidnapping, extortion, and shootings of RIAA lawyers. History shows random selected extortions by all-powerful political entities will produce these results. Most corporate zips think that their corporate standing will protect them from the consequences of their own stupidity. Historically, this is not always the case.
This leaves the last possiblility: something new , unplanned, and unexpected. It is most likely to come from a source that doesn't currently have deep ties to the industry or the music community. It may even come by accident
I started using computers in 1984 with CoCos and Commodores. Using Windows is a natural step from this beginning.
In technician school we were required to take courses in Unix. This is where I and thousands of people like learned to just hate UNIX. Compared to the extraordinary microcomputer upward movement in price/performance levels, UNIX has always been an incomprehensible twisted monster designed for mainframes and embraced by people with mainframe brains. The fact that WalMart sells a $200 machine that is as powerful as a 1970's mainframe just complicates the entire issue.
I am, though, affected by the constant amount of testimonials about the ease, power, and utility of Linux and have installed it on one of my older machines as a dual boot. But when I turn it on and all those hundreds of weird and incomprehensible lines of UNIX techno-babble come scrolling on the screen - page after page of them - all ending many minutes later with an ugly comic book GUI that is just candy-coated UNIX - I start to get sick in my stomach all over again and reboot to Windows.
But I can't just hit a combination of keys like "CNTRL-ALT-SHIFT-BACKSPACE-F12" and instantly be in Windows. No, I have to shut down Linux and reboot the entire PC. Shutting down Linux is like shutting down the Defense Department. Again there are hundreds of weird UNIX tech-babble messages scrolling on the screen:: it takes forever. (** I have Mandrake 9.0 installed by the way **).
Does it really have to be this bad? This is not a troll, I'm an electronics/PC technician worker and I understand all the subtle arguments pro and con about open-source code and culture. It's just that... It's just that... It's just that Linux really sucks in its present form. Nothing personal guys, I'm really impressed that you have got something to work this well so far. It just needs to be smaller, faster, and more off/on like a toaster or a TV, not a 1970's mainframe on a chip.
Am I the only person over 50 who believes that Kazaa is more important than television?
You wouldn't believe the looks that I get from all the other baby-boomers when I tell that it's definely true that Kazaa is more important than television. Young adults (that's you - 15 to 25 years old) are more likely to agree; or at least realize that I'm not demented because they know what I'm talking about.
I'm trying to get a bumper sticker for my car that says:: "Kazaa will destroy Clear Channel!". It does have a really weird ring to it.
I've been noticing that the local newspaper is getting a little desperate. I get telemarketers at least once a week trying to give me free one-month subscriptions to the local fish-wrap. I patiently explain that while I might enjoy reading the paper, I most definitely do not want the 'paper'. That is the dead-tree 20 cubic inches of newsprint that is an unwanted byproduct of the information contained in the local 'newspaper'. I tell them I'll take the paper if they agree to take away yesterday's pile of newsprint each time that they deliver today's pile of newsprint. Plus the local newspaper is stone-cold cement-head conservative; they never miss an opportunity to dump on anything that important and enjoyable to young people. It's hard to understand how they could be so dumb; but they are. I suspect that most newspaper probably believe that we are still living in the 1950's.
The purpose of forcing the use of French is British Columbia is to make sure that when the rest of the world has forgotten French (along with all the other irrevelant 'legacy languages') BC will be able to forge secret alliances with far-flung former French-speaking enclaves; hence the Kamloops-Kinshasa Konnection. Smoke some more BC bud and it all begin to make sense. Smoke a little more and even Ottawa will start to make sense.
The word 'mél' seems to be a touch of sublime brilliance on the part of the language masters because it sounds exactly like the word 'mail' used by the rest of the civilized world and meets the requirement of being derived from a pure french phrase.
It's a shame that it didn't become a term of general usage. I was about to say 'it didn't catch on' but it would probably be best to avoid english idioms when posting to the slashdot community that has such a wide linguistic base.
Hello,
I grew up in New England and studied French in high school because French was 'cool' and knowing a little French would bring me that much closer to people like Brigette Bardot, Catherine Deneuve, Jeanne Moreau, Therese Liotard, or, hell, any one of the 30 million women of French descent.
It wasn't until a chance trip to Quebec that I was even aware that there was a French speaking country right across our northern border. What a shock. Everything changes right at the border. All the packaging and graphics on the products are the same but the language is different. The only place that I've seen anything like it is on the German-French border where again everything just changes according to the line across the map.
It is possible that English could be considered a distant and bizarre dialect of French because over 50% of the words in English are direct cognants and often have an exact parallel word in French. However the pronounciation is completely different between the two languages and they are mutually incomprehensible.
Since French North America has only about seven million people and the rest of the continent is divided between 300 million English speakers and about 100 million Spanish speakers, it is likely that without the draconian Quebec language laws the use of French language would fade away over time. However their current implementation is absurd. Quebec would be much better served by a massive campaign to get Quebec's media widely distributed throughout the world. The most effective means of encouraging the learning of French language in the USA has been the Canadian law requiring every product sold in Canada to have all text in both French and English (except in Quebec where the law requires French only). The extension of this law to cover DVDs has also become a major tool for French language study. Many new movies released on DVD have French audio soundtracks and subtitles available. However the audio and the subtitles are usually done by different translators so the French titles never seems to follow the spoken dialog. It's also usually impossible to get the French subtitles and English titles on the screen at the same time.
Nevertheless, this is a great new resource for learning a new language. But if you're living in the USA, why learn French? Spanish is our second language. The further away that you get from Ivy League universities and Quebec itself the less French seems like an important global communications tool and more it seems like an obscure regional European 'legacy language'. I've lived in Portland Oregon for twenty years and I've overheard a spoken French conversation only once. And I ride the public buses a lot, where in an average hour you will hear Spanish, Chinese, Southeast Asian, Russian, and ancient Central American languages like Mayan spoken. But never, never French. It's as if it just doesn't exist.
I really like French language. I will spend the he extra couple of hours to watch a DVD for a second time with the soundtrack set to French to try and become a little bit better at catching the words. But I can't help but wonder, Has it all been a mistake? It would have been much better to have studied Spanish, since one hears it everywhere.
If you have a lot of data on your hard disk, then pay about $40 and get one of the newest super fast CD-RW burners that can make a CD in about three or four minutes. Then go to Fry's and get a stack of blanks. Copy everything and verify the copy after the CD burn (Nero has a check box for this). If you have favorite music or programs, make two copies and keep one at your family home or with friends.
If you don't have a scanner, now might be a good time to beg, buy, or borrow (not steal) one for about $40 also at Fry's. Scan everything in your room that is paper: scan your photographs, scan your schoolpapers (use high-quality OCR - (Kazaa has some really good ones) if they are not already in digital format.) Scan your entire life. Bank accounts, credit cards, birth certificates, everything.
Then copy it (I suggest as encrypted files) and make several copies in the mini half-size CD format. Put one in the glove box of your car. Give one to your most trusted friend. (maybe not with the encryption password) Be sure to give your parents the key or password for the encrypted files.
If anything happens to you and you have to get out of your present location immediately, then you have a back-up of all the important papers and photos of your life. In San Francisco, it's not unheard of to have to run out into the street at 3AM in nothing but your underwear while everything that you own and all your photos and valuable papers are destroyed in a 7.5 Richter earthquake that came without warning. Having scanned back-ups of your valuable papers and photos scattered around the country is a good idea.
Don't just copy everything onto a single harddrive and then carry it with you on an airplane. The morons in 'security' may demand that you open it or leave it. Either way you've lost it.
Thank you for taking the time to write this excellent message. I have been following this path (more or less) for about five years now.
My current excellent new book is "1421: The Year that China Discovered America" by Gavin Menzies.
One item that I would add to your list is to put time and money resources into converting your interests and hobbies into income-generating career possibilities. I am currently trying to develop a fascination with little microcontroller chips into an Embedded Systems Designer career. Having a genuine and focused interest in a field will help you get through those periods of depression caused by 'media-withdrawal symptom' and also when it seems that you're taking two steps backwards for every three forwards.
- I would encourage anyone interested in being exposed to new music and not wishing to give money to organizations that will use that money to destroy your life and take your property (you pay enough taxes to the federal government already) to explore the music section at their local library.
Most libraries in major cities in North America have large collections of CDs available for checkout. Be sure to check the on-line catalogs for the best stuff and place a hold or reserve on items that you are even remotely interested in.
With a resource such as this, a new approach towards musical tastes might be cultivated: make an effort to grab CDs that you have never heard of instead of those that you have been previously encouraged to consume by media exposure. In a commercial setting, your music choices are limited by your available funds so you buy and listen to recordings that you know or are similar to those you have consumed in the past, while a library has no monetary limits on your consumption. It is your attention span and the check-out-and-return procedure for the physical library materials that is the limiting factor.
Grab as many CDs as you can physically carry from the shelves and focus on titles that you have no clue as to what they sound like. Try each one in your CD player/PC for a few minutes or bring a portable CD player to the library and take a listen to the CDs there. If they are even remotely interesting, then rip, mix, and burn. Blank CD-Rs are about 20 cents (in the USA anyway) and can store about a hundred songs in MP3 or OGG format. Scan the album covers and insert books and store them in a directory along with the audio MP3s. By the way, a DVD-ROM player will rip an audio 'red-book' CD much faster and more accurately than a CD-ROM.
The CD-R is beginning to show signs of age as medium for trading new music because it is so limited in its storage capacity. Many of us have old hard drives available as we upgrade from 10-15 gig sizes to 100-200 gig drives on our primary machines. Put your favorite newly-discovered music on an older hard disk and trade these drives with fellow music lovers instead of CDs. Be sure to keep the hard disk in an anti-static bag and wrapped in bubblewrap or foam blocks to protect it against shock or bumps as they are quite delicate.
Summing up, the best way to fight the RIAA goon squads and the predatory corporations behind them is to circulate as much new and different music as freely and as cheaply as possible. This is not piracy, this is your birthright. The RIAA corporations are making a massive and bold attempt to seize and control all of the world's culture and heritage. This is like paying off the politicans for patent on air and then demanding that everybody owes them money for consuming their product!
These guys are going to kill their own business. Their copy-protection techniques will only increase the motivation to seek the content through obscure channels. When the "legitimate" version is less functional and more expensive than the "black market version", guess who's going to lose?
I agree with the above messager. This is my analysis exactly.
The media content industry (they are not artists , musicians, or 'talent' so those terms don't apply) creates a product that has a very large one -time development cost per individual unit of content and after that the marginal costs of copying and distributing these packaged units of media content are very small. Economic theory would suggest that the media content industry should maximize their profits by constantly reducing the price of the packaged production (each film or CD album title) as the sales start to slack at each price level.
The fact that they refuse to adjust to basic proven economic theory in their business model simply shows that:
1) They really don't deserve the high levels of profits that their monopoly position through copyright control grants them.
2) They will end up self-destructing as content provider corporations as advancing technology introduces more flexibility into the media consumption patterns of their customers.
Personally, I believe that the piracy argument is absurd and we as consumers deserve all the free music, books, and movies that we can consume as a compensation for tolerating the vast consolidation of the media industry into a few global corporations.
Suppose Jon Katz replies with a 100 MegaByte file(say a few pages of nonsense boilerplate text that has been scanned at 4800 dots per inch and sent as a BMP image file) as an official response.
Then the assh0le sets up a little script that constantly bombards your site with requests to download this file with a dial-up connection.
Would you still be legally required to keep this 'official reply' on-line on your website?
Europeans tend to be really good at mandating a moral balance for dispute resolution (they have too, they've fücked up to the point where if they blow it one more time like 1939 or 1914 or 1814 or 1714 or 1614 or 1514, ect then they will make themselves extinct). Nevertheless this moral balance for redress of slander should always be a guide for accepted procedures rather than an exact and precise legal code that becomes absurd when applied with malicious intent.
While I could not disagree with the statement that '' The world needs a free video codec. "", I feel that what the world (the computer user - programmer - tech geek world, that is) really needs more is a codec that is:
- Well documented down to the most basic beginners level in clear, accurate, easy-to-understand grammaratically-correct language (English preferred but any machine translatable language to English is OK)
- Easy to load and unload into the most commonly available and widely used operating system environments (notice I didn't say Linux because I didn't mean Linux).
- Debugged and robust enough that it doesn't crash the PC in mysterious ways during normal usage.
- easy to interface with the most popular and widely used programs that are used by millions of people worldwide. (The legality of these programs is inconsequencial, it's the wide usage that's important). Whether the application is commercial, shareware, or open-sourced GPL is not important as long as the codec actually works flawlessly with the application.
Since none of the video codecs that I have had the dubious pleasure to come in contact with as yet have met all or even most of the above parameters, I would like to affirm that I would actually pay real money for any new video codec that meets the above requirements.
This is the first time that I have ever offered to actually pay for a piece of software. If it actually does get written (a big IF at that) then I will be happy to buy it at resonable cost (say $10 to $20 US for a video codec, which is not unreasonable when entire DVD/MP3 players are retailing at Fry's Electronics for $50 US)
This seems to an indicator as to where the RIAA is headed: It will become a predatory extortionist group that randomly selects young music and web users (i.e. everyone except 'the greatest generation') and then uses vast legal and financial resources to threaten their random target unless they get paid off thousands of dollars. Then they do it again with some other young person randomly selected.
Wasn't RICO passed to protect the citizens from this kind of activity?
Maybe people should stand outside of record stores asking people not to buy RIAA product because more money will go to trying to put customers in prison and stealing their life savings than will ever get to the artists and musicians that created the recording.
My first sense of disaffection with Apple occured in the mid-1980's when the first Mac was about one year old. As an electronics technology student, I was very impressed with the Mac and excited to find out that the amount of memory could be quadrupled at moderate cost by carefully removing the sixteen 64K Dynamic RAM chips and replacing them all with 256K Dynamic RAM chips. Then adding a jumper or two to the main board and the system was supercharged and ready for serious work.
So many people were doing this that Apple started to offer it as a factory upgrade. But they charged something like two to four times as much as the technicians who were charging basically for the chips, the desoldering equipment, and the time involved. Naturally people went with the independent technician option.
Apple responded by invalidating the warranty of anyone who received an outside upgrade, AND refused to allow anyone with a third-party RAM upgrade to get updated firmware EPROMs to correct the assorted bugs in the initial release.
This gave me the impression that Apple was a really sleasy company that was in reality 180 degrees opposite to their 'empower your world, create the new future' ever-present advertisements and media hype.
To this day I can't shake the underlying feeling that Apple is primarily a sleasy, weird, and creepy company; regardless of how many hundreds of millions of dollars that they have managed to spend manipulating their image in the media.
Apple is what people buy when they have large amounts of other-people's-money to spend and have an unbalanced obsession with looking cool.
I have been thinking a lot about this very subject recently. It appears that there could be a major gap in the 20th century literature collections approaching due to the fact that few people and/or libraries are retaining books that have been published in the years 1920 to 1950. Plus the new copyright restictions may possibly prevent books from this period from ever reaching the public domain. If thousands of titles from this period don't get digitally copied, then they will have disappeared with the disintegration of the physical paper and binding.
For example, I was reading Florence (National Review's former misanthrope) King's book on why white people are so weird and how they got that way ('WASP, Where is Thy Sting?' (out-of-print) ) recently. She makes reference to many books that were bestsellers in the 30's and 40's that strongly influenced 'the greatest generation's' thought patterns. Most of these books that she referred to are simply gone in that they can't be found anywhere; not in libraries or bookstores; only a few copies scattered in private home collections of the elderly and the Library of Congress.
It would have been nice to have been able to download several of these titles in digital form, but they have never been scanned and quite likely never will be scanned.
I've scanned a few of my favorite books and posted them onto Kazaa, but nobody there is interested in reading anything except Fantasy and Science Fiction. In the year or so that I've had titles by Gore Vidal and John Updike available in my P2P directory, they have been accessed only twice.
Besides, scanning and proofreading books is a serious hassle and major undertaking. Even with good quality OCR software and a reasonable fast scanner it will take about 20 to 30 hours to scan and proof an entire book. Walking through the stacks of the local library recently made me realize that it would take a hundred years to scan all of this material. Before then most of the books on the shelves would have been chucked and pulped.
I asked at the local Best Buy store about using a high resolution digital camera on a custom made stand to photograph book pages and feed the data from the camera to an OCR program using USB 2.0. Needless to say, the response that I got was; 'Duh...'. Nevertheless, it still seems like a good idea to speed the process of preserving our culture by transferring books to a more fluid media.
Any thoughts?
I agree. I live in Beaverton Oregon outside of Portland and I never cease to be amazed at the wide range of cultural diversity (did I just make up a new cliche?) here.
I took a short business trip to North Atlanta Georgia and found the same level of diversity. Given the vast differences that existed in metro Atlanta before the great immigrations to the USA in the late 20th-century, and the relative sameness of the Oregonians previous to that migration, I'm sure that there must be more cultural diversity in metro Atlanta than Oregon.
As for Vermont, everyone that I've met or seen there seems to be pretty normal by New England standards.
This reflects a new cultural pattern in our country: the suburbs are more cosmopolitian and diverse than the cities whereas in every other country, the opposite is the case.
You may want to monitor the air quality for particle matter for a few days.
Shinyei makes a small nephelometer (a device for detecting the amount of microscopic dust and pollutants in the air) for about $10. I don't know if you would be able to get a sample or a test unit. See it at: http://www.shinyei.com/dust_e.htm
A company in Portland Oregon called AirAdvice will monitor your environment for air particle levels and send you daily reports. See:
www.airadvice.com
The smart investments of Mrs. Clinton in the mid 1980's were actually an indirect bribe from the Tyson family to Governor Bill Clinton. The Arkansas Dept of Health was directed by the governor to overlook certain irregularities in the Tyson's family chicken processing factories.
It seems that an investment firm in Little Rock was selecting investment opportunities at random. The proceeds from the winners went to Mrs. Clinton (now Senator) while the losing investments were picked up by the Tyson family interests.
None of this would have ever come light or be cared about if Bill Clinton had not become president or Mrs. Clinton not been so open, arrogant, or greedy.
One would assume that the senator from New York has learned how to keep these special investments much more discreet nowdays.
English is one of the few (if not the only) major language that allows any word to be any part of speech (noun, verb, adverb, ect..) depending on its position in the sentence. Other languages have strict positioning requirements for the placement of words in a sentence, or the word must be modified (either at its end as in the Romance languages, or its beginning like German, or its middle as in Japanese) within strict parameters to indicate what part of speech that it is.
The C programming language is a subconscious reflection of the English language in that any (almost) combination of operators will actually compile. The flexiblity and ease-of-use of C in the computing world is symbiotic to the flexibility of English as a spoken language.
It is no coincidence that C programming language was developed in an exclusively English language environment. Nor is it a coincidence that both languages have come the dominate both international communication and computer programming.
Slashdot Mirror
There's no real secret why California's 500 year-old redwood trees are dying off at an alarming rate...
Just get behind one of the hundreds of log trucks going down Hyw 101 in Del Norte county and look at the size of the trees being hauled to the sawmill. It's not uncommon to see logs on the back of the trucks that are 12 to 18 feet (4 to 6 meters) in diameter.
The redwood forest is dying because the trees are being cut down by the thousands...
day after day... month after month... year after year.
To quote P.J. O'Rourke:
"Anyone who doesn't know what with the public schools has never screwed an education major."
It's a good feeling to know that the fine proud and proper Brahmins in Delhi feel no sense of responsibility at all for the helping the hundreds of thousands of the poorest, most hopeless, most destitute people in the world begging on the streets of Calcutta.
It's truely astonishing how they could delude themselves into believing that they actually hundreds of millions of dollars (billions of rupees) to piss away on a space program.
Having been to India and having had waded through hundreds of beggars willing to sell their children for pennies, I will never again feel that I am a member of the most cold, insensitive, and heartless culture on the earth.
No, I'll just think the corrupt racist demented Indian bureaucrat who thought that his people needed a space program. Compared to him, I'll never feel corrupt, racist, and demented again.
I want a computer that is QUIET!!! and turns off and on INSTANTLY!!!
I want a PC with today's tech specs and a Commodore 64's decibel level and boot time.
Cheaper and smaller doesn't hurt either.
Plus, a scanner and program that does OCR and language translations from Chinese to English so I can keep up the latest Singapore politician's diatribe in Chinese about how degenerate and morally defective the white people are (while shuckin, and grinnin' and happy backslappin' his American friends in English for the Wall Street Journal).
I also have downloaded a lot of books (several hundred from Kazaa). I've only read a few pages of each of them, but the important point is that I have them and can share them. I'll never read most of them.
We are at the point where most of the books published between 1920 and 1950 will disappear. Since they originally appeared after the Disney Mickey Mouse character the copywrite permanent extention laws will prevent any of these works from being able to be re-published (either on paper or digitally) in the public demand. And since also there is no demand to pay new list prices for these old works they won't be commercially republished. When the paper wears out the libraries will recycle them for pulp. Then they will be gone forever (save for one or two copies locked deep in the Library of Congress warehouse).
It is ironic that the conserative Christian Right wishes to return to a way of life prevalent in the first half of the 20th century, while doing nothing to prevent all accurate portrayals of that life (the novels published in that period) from disappearing. They say 'let's go back to the way live was in the 1940's' and young earnest conservatives will ask 'well, what was life like in the 1940's'? But there will be no record.
This 'piracy' is a direct result of the 100 to 1 price difference between commercial CDs and CD-R MP3s. Eight albums of 196KBPS MP3 music (which is CD quality for anyone with ears over thirty years old) will fit on a single 20 cent CD-R.
The RIAA is going to have to come to terms with this new economic reality. They can either attempt to make the cost of CD-R much more expensive, bring down the cost of commercial CD's, greatly increase the preceived value of CDs, make it legally dangerous to rip, mix, burn; or find some new approach all together.
Making CD-Rs more expensive through add-on taxes, fees, purchase restictions is unlikely to work due to the fact that this medium is also the primary means used for business data storage. Plus, most if not all, of the blank media is manufactured in countries that have no financial interest in preserving the RIAA's profit structure.
As a business political-payoff organization, the RIAA doesn't have the ability to lower CD prices and the half-dozen global media corporations are too ossified and rigid to adapt to new business models. On the highest executive levels of the six global corporations, the primary concern is debt-service and trying to convince the other six corporations to buy various sections of themselves. The music divisions are peripheral; and left to the overseeing of the troglydytes and cement-heads who have always run them in the same style for better or worse since the 1930's. Nothing can change here, so don't waste any energy trying to convince them that it is in their best interest to change. It's simply not possible.
Greatly increasing the preceived value of CDs requires the resources of the record industry coupled with the total committment and energy of the creative community. With so much discussion in recent years of the exploitive and bad contracts forced upon creative people systematically by the industry, it is unlikely that both sides will trust each other enough to combine forces that would provide a level of new content needed to bring the public's preception of the value of CDs up to their current pricing levels. Making CDs worth $18 each by adding much more and better content won't happen because the people who would be creating this content have not enough to gain from amount of work needed to create this content under the present contractual arrangements. Since the industry is petrified in its structure, the exploitive contracts can't change either. Don't expect anything more in the future than the two good songs plus filler for $18 that is being currently offered by the RIAA's clients.
The legal stategy of randomly selecting college students and other young people and using vast legal resources to extort their life-savings (and their families) is probably the best short-term strategy for the RIAA. It creates fear among the young and their parents. In the long term it will only be one more means of criminalizing an entire generation, along with drug and beer laws and other misguided attempts of using the 'justice' system to enforce lifestyle political-correctness on people who don't have the resources to deflect this extortion (traditionally minorities, but now primarilly the young). It will be interesting to see if the RIAA's lawyers will be as keen on the random extortion of college students when the former college students (whose lives were randomly selected for destruction by the RIAA to set an example) retaliate with their own network of kidnapping, extortion, and shootings of RIAA lawyers. History shows random selected extortions by all-powerful political entities will produce these results. Most corporate zips think that their corporate standing will protect them from the consequences of their own stupidity. Historically, this is not always the case.
This leaves the last possiblility: something new , unplanned, and unexpected. It is most likely to come from a source that doesn't currently have deep ties to the industry or the music community. It may even come by accident
Hello,
I started using computers in 1984 with CoCos and Commodores. Using Windows is a natural step from this beginning.
In technician school we were required to take courses in Unix. This is where I and thousands of people like learned to just hate UNIX. Compared to the extraordinary microcomputer upward movement in price/performance levels, UNIX has always been an incomprehensible twisted monster designed for mainframes and embraced by people with mainframe brains. The fact that WalMart sells a $200 machine that is as powerful as a 1970's mainframe just complicates the entire issue.
I am, though, affected by the constant amount of testimonials about the ease, power, and utility of Linux and have installed it on one of my older machines as a dual boot. But when I turn it on and all those hundreds of weird and incomprehensible lines of UNIX techno-babble come scrolling on the screen - page after page of them - all ending many minutes later with an ugly comic book GUI that is just candy-coated UNIX - I start to get sick in my stomach all over again and reboot to Windows.
But I can't just hit a combination of keys like "CNTRL-ALT-SHIFT-BACKSPACE-F12" and instantly be in Windows. No, I have to shut down Linux and reboot the entire PC. Shutting down Linux is like shutting down the Defense Department. Again there are hundreds of weird UNIX tech-babble messages scrolling on the screen:: it takes forever. (** I have Mandrake 9.0 installed by the way **).
Does it really have to be this bad? This is not a troll, I'm an electronics/PC technician worker and I understand all the subtle arguments pro and con about open-source code and culture. It's just that... It's just that... It's just that Linux really sucks in its present form. Nothing personal guys, I'm really impressed that you have got something to work this well so far. It just needs to be smaller, faster, and more off/on like a toaster or a TV, not a 1970's mainframe on a chip.
Thank you,
Simonetta
Am I the only person over 50 who believes that Kazaa is more important than television?
You wouldn't believe the looks that I get from all the other baby-boomers when I tell that it's definely true that Kazaa is more important than television. Young adults (that's you - 15 to 25 years old) are more likely to agree; or at least realize that I'm not demented because they know what I'm talking about.
I'm trying to get a bumper sticker for my car that says:: "Kazaa will destroy Clear Channel!".
It does have a really weird ring to it.
I've been noticing that the local newspaper is getting a little desperate. I get telemarketers at least once a week trying to give me free one-month subscriptions to the local fish-wrap. I patiently explain that while I might enjoy reading the paper, I most definitely do not want the 'paper'. That is the dead-tree 20 cubic inches of newsprint that is an unwanted byproduct of the information contained in the local 'newspaper'. I tell them I'll take the paper if they agree to take away yesterday's pile of newsprint each time that they deliver today's pile of newsprint. Plus the local newspaper is stone-cold cement-head conservative; they never miss an opportunity to dump on anything that important and enjoyable to young people. It's hard to understand how they could be so dumb; but they are. I suspect that most newspaper probably believe that we are still living in the 1950's.
The purpose of forcing the use of French is British Columbia is to make sure that when the rest of the world has forgotten French (along with all the other irrevelant 'legacy languages') BC will be able to forge secret alliances with far-flung former French-speaking enclaves; hence the Kamloops-Kinshasa Konnection. Smoke some more BC bud and it all begin to make sense. Smoke a little more and even Ottawa will start to make sense.
The word 'mél' seems to be a touch of sublime brilliance on the part of the language masters because it sounds exactly like the word 'mail' used by the rest of the civilized world and meets the requirement of being derived from a pure french phrase.
It's a shame that it didn't become a term of general usage. I was about to say 'it didn't catch on' but it would probably be best to avoid english idioms when posting to the slashdot community that has such a wide linguistic base.
Hello,
I grew up in New England and studied French in high school because French was 'cool' and knowing a little French would bring me that much closer to people like Brigette Bardot, Catherine Deneuve, Jeanne Moreau, Therese Liotard, or, hell, any one of the 30 million women of French descent.
It wasn't until a chance trip to Quebec that I was even aware that there was a French speaking country right across our northern border. What a shock. Everything changes right at the border. All the packaging and graphics on the products are the same but the language is different. The only place that I've seen anything like it is on the German-French border where again everything just changes according to the line across the map.
It is possible that English could be considered a distant and bizarre dialect of French because over 50% of the words in English are direct cognants and often have an exact parallel word in French. However the pronounciation is completely different between the two languages and they are mutually incomprehensible.
Since French North America has only about seven million people and the rest of the continent is divided between 300 million English speakers and about 100 million Spanish speakers, it is likely that without the draconian Quebec language laws the use of French language would fade away over time. However their current implementation is absurd. Quebec would be much better served by a massive campaign to get Quebec's media widely distributed throughout the world. The most effective means of encouraging the learning of French language in the USA has been the Canadian law requiring every product sold in Canada to have all text in both French and English (except in Quebec where the law requires French only). The extension of this law to cover DVDs has also become a major tool for French language study. Many new movies released on DVD have French audio soundtracks and subtitles available. However the audio and the subtitles are usually done by different translators so the French titles never seems to follow the spoken dialog. It's also usually impossible to get the French subtitles and English titles on the screen at the same time.
Nevertheless, this is a great new resource for learning a new language. But if you're living in the USA, why learn French? Spanish is our second language. The further away that you get from Ivy League universities and Quebec itself the less French seems like an important global communications tool and more it seems like an obscure regional European 'legacy language'. I've lived in Portland Oregon for twenty years and I've overheard a spoken French conversation only once. And I ride the public buses a lot, where in an average hour you will hear Spanish, Chinese, Southeast Asian, Russian, and ancient Central American languages like Mayan spoken. But never, never French. It's as if it just doesn't exist.
I really like French language. I will spend the he extra couple of hours to watch a DVD for a second time with the soundtrack set to French to try and become a little bit better at catching the words. But I can't help but wonder, Has it all been a mistake? It would have been much better to have studied Spanish, since one hears it everywhere.
If you have a lot of data on your hard disk, then pay about $40 and get one of the newest super fast CD-RW burners that can make a CD in about three or four minutes. Then go to Fry's and get a stack of blanks. Copy everything and verify the copy after the CD burn (Nero has a check box for this). If you have favorite music or programs, make two copies and keep one at your family home or with friends.
If you don't have a scanner, now might be a good time to beg, buy, or borrow (not steal) one for about $40 also at Fry's. Scan everything in your room that is paper: scan your photographs, scan your schoolpapers (use high-quality OCR - (Kazaa has some really good ones) if they are not already in digital format.) Scan your entire life. Bank accounts, credit cards, birth certificates, everything.
Then copy it (I suggest as encrypted files) and make several copies in the mini half-size CD format. Put one in the glove box of your car. Give one to your most trusted friend. (maybe not with the encryption password) Be sure to give your parents the key or password for the encrypted files.
If anything happens to you and you have to get out of your present location immediately, then you have a back-up of all the important papers and photos of your life. In San Francisco, it's not unheard of to have to run out into the street at 3AM in nothing but your underwear while everything that you own and all your photos and valuable papers are destroyed in a 7.5 Richter earthquake that came without warning. Having scanned back-ups of your valuable papers and photos scattered around the country is a good idea.
Don't just copy everything onto a single harddrive and then carry it with you on an airplane. The morons in 'security' may demand that you open it or leave it. Either way you've lost it.
Actually, Irony is where the Iranians come from.
Thank you for taking the time to write this excellent message. I have been following this path (more or less) for about five years now.
My current excellent new book is "1421: The Year that China Discovered America" by Gavin Menzies.
One item that I would add to your list is to put time and money resources into converting your interests and hobbies into income-generating career possibilities. I am currently trying to develop a fascination with little microcontroller chips into an Embedded Systems Designer career. Having a genuine and focused interest in a field will help you get through those periods of depression caused by 'media-withdrawal symptom' and also when it seems that you're taking two steps backwards for every three forwards.
- I would encourage anyone interested in being exposed to new music and not wishing to give money to organizations that will use that money to destroy your life and take your property (you pay enough taxes to the federal government already) to explore the music section at their local library.
t uebeauty/fantasy. htm
Most libraries in major cities in North America have large collections of CDs available for checkout. Be sure to check the on-line catalogs for the best stuff and place a hold or reserve on items that you are even remotely interested in.
With a resource such as this, a new approach towards musical tastes might be cultivated: make an effort to grab CDs that you have never heard of instead of those that you have been previously encouraged to consume by media exposure. In a commercial setting, your music choices are limited by your available funds so you buy and listen to recordings that you know or are similar to those you have consumed in the past, while a library has no monetary limits on your consumption. It is your attention span and the check-out-and-return procedure for the physical library materials that is the limiting factor.
Grab as many CDs as you can physically carry from the shelves and focus on titles that you have no clue as to what they sound like. Try each one in your CD player/PC for a few minutes or bring a portable CD player to the library and take a listen to the CDs there. If they are even remotely interesting, then rip, mix, and burn. Blank CD-Rs are about 20 cents (in the USA anyway) and can store about a hundred songs in MP3 or OGG format. Scan the album covers and insert books and store them in a directory along with the audio MP3s. By the way, a DVD-ROM player will rip an audio 'red-book' CD much faster and more accurately than a CD-ROM.
The CD-R is beginning to show signs of age as medium for trading new music because it is so limited in its storage capacity. Many of us have old hard drives available as we upgrade from 10-15 gig sizes to 100-200 gig drives on our primary machines. Put your favorite newly-discovered music on an older hard disk and trade these drives with fellow music lovers instead of CDs. Be sure to keep the hard disk in an anti-static bag and wrapped in bubblewrap or foam blocks to protect it against shock or bumps as they are quite delicate.
Summing up, the best way to fight the RIAA goon squads and the predatory corporations behind them is to circulate as much new and different music as freely and as cheaply as possible. This is not piracy, this is your birthright. The RIAA corporations are making a massive and bold attempt to seize and control all of the world's culture and heritage. This is like paying off the politicans for patent on air and then demanding that everybody owes them money for consuming their product!
Thank you,
Simonetta
www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2001/vir
These guys are going to kill their own business. Their copy-protection techniques will only increase the motivation to seek the content through obscure channels. When the "legitimate" version is less functional and more expensive than the "black market version", guess who's going to lose?
y /f antasy.htm
I agree with the above messager. This is my analysis exactly.
The media content industry (they are not artists , musicians, or 'talent' so those terms don't apply) creates a product that has a very large one -time development cost per individual unit of content and after that the marginal costs of copying and distributing these packaged units of media content are very small. Economic theory would suggest that the media content industry should maximize their profits by constantly reducing the price of the packaged production (each film or CD album title) as the sales start to slack at each price level.
The fact that they refuse to adjust to basic proven economic theory in their business model simply shows that:
1) They really don't deserve the high levels of profits that their monopoly position through copyright control grants them.
2) They will end up self-destructing as content provider corporations as advancing technology introduces more flexibility into the media consumption patterns of their customers.
Personally, I believe that the piracy argument is absurd and we as consumers deserve all the free music, books, and movies that we can consume as a compensation for tolerating the vast consolidation of the media industry into a few global corporations.
Thank you,
Simonetta
http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2001/virtuebeaut
Suppose Jon Katz replies with a 100 MegaByte file(say a few pages of nonsense boilerplate text that has been scanned at 4800 dots per inch and sent as a BMP image file) as an official response.
Then the assh0le sets up a little script that constantly bombards your site with requests to download this file with a dial-up connection.
Would you still be legally required to keep this 'official reply' on-line on your website?
Europeans tend to be really good at mandating a moral balance for dispute resolution (they have too, they've fücked up to the point where if they blow it one more time like 1939 or 1914 or 1814 or 1714 or 1614 or 1514, ect then they will make themselves extinct). Nevertheless this moral balance for redress of slander should always be a guide for accepted procedures rather than an exact and precise legal code that becomes absurd when applied with malicious intent.
While I could not disagree with the statement that
0 01/
'' The world needs a free video codec. "", I feel that what the world (the computer user - programmer - tech geek world, that is) really needs more is a codec that is:
- Well documented down to the most basic beginners level in clear, accurate, easy-to-understand grammaratically-correct language (English preferred but any machine translatable language to English is OK)
- Easy to load and unload into the most commonly available and widely used operating system environments (notice I didn't say Linux because I didn't mean Linux).
- Debugged and robust enough that it doesn't crash the PC in mysterious ways during normal usage.
- easy to interface with the most popular and widely used programs that are used by millions of people worldwide. (The legality of these programs is inconsequencial, it's the wide usage that's important). Whether the application is commercial, shareware, or open-sourced GPL is not important as long as the codec actually works flawlessly with the application.
Since none of the video codecs that I have had the dubious pleasure to come in contact with as yet have met all or even most of the above parameters, I would like to affirm that I would actually pay real money for any new video codec that meets the above requirements.
This is the first time that I have ever offered to actually pay for a piece of software. If it actually does get written (a big IF at that) then I will be happy to buy it at resonable cost (say $10 to $20 US for a video codec, which is not unreasonable when entire DVD/MP3 players are retailing at Fry's Electronics for $50 US)
Thank you,
Simonetta
http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2
virtuebeauty/fantasy.htm
This seems to an indicator as to where the RIAA is headed: It will become a predatory extortionist group that randomly selects young music and web users (i.e. everyone except 'the greatest generation') and then uses vast legal and financial resources to threaten their random target unless they get paid off thousands of dollars. Then they do it again with some other young person randomly selected.
0 01/virtuebeauty/f antasy.htm
Wasn't RICO passed to protect the citizens from this kind of activity?
Maybe people should stand outside of record stores asking people not to buy RIAA product because more money will go to trying to put customers in prison and stealing their life savings than will ever get to the artists and musicians that created the recording.
Thank you,
Simonetta
http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2
My first sense of disaffection with Apple occured in the mid-1980's when the first Mac was about one year old. As an electronics technology student, I was very impressed with the Mac and excited to find out that the amount of memory could be quadrupled at moderate cost by carefully removing the sixteen 64K Dynamic RAM chips and replacing them all with 256K Dynamic RAM chips. Then adding a jumper or two to the main board and the system was supercharged and ready for serious work.
y /f antasy.htm
So many people were doing this that Apple started to offer it as a factory upgrade. But they charged something like two to four times as much
as the technicians who were charging basically for the chips, the desoldering equipment, and the time involved. Naturally people went with the independent technician option.
Apple responded by invalidating the warranty of anyone who received an outside upgrade, AND refused to allow anyone with a third-party RAM upgrade to get updated firmware EPROMs to correct the assorted bugs in the initial release.
This gave me the impression that Apple was a really sleasy company that was in reality 180 degrees opposite to their 'empower your world, create the new future' ever-present advertisements and media hype.
To this day I can't shake the underlying feeling that Apple is primarily a sleasy, weird, and creepy company; regardless of how many hundreds of millions of dollars that they have managed to spend manipulating their image in the media.
Apple is what people buy when they have large amounts of other-people's-money to spend and have an unbalanced obsession with looking cool.
Thank you,
Simonetta
http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2001/virtuebeaut
I have been thinking a lot about this very subject recently. It appears that there could be a major gap in the 20th century literature collections approaching due to the fact that few people and/or libraries are retaining books that have been published in the years 1920 to 1950. Plus the new copyright restictions may possibly prevent books from this period from ever reaching the public domain. If thousands of titles from this period don't get digitally copied, then they will have disappeared with the disintegration of the physical paper and binding.
For example, I was reading Florence (National Review's former misanthrope) King's book on why white people are so weird and how they got that way ('WASP, Where is Thy Sting?' (out-of-print) ) recently. She makes reference to many books that were bestsellers in the 30's and 40's that strongly influenced 'the greatest generation's' thought patterns. Most of these books that she referred to are simply gone in that they can't be found anywhere; not in libraries or bookstores; only a few copies scattered in private home collections of the elderly and the Library of Congress.
It would have been nice to have been able to download several of these titles in digital form, but they have never been scanned and quite likely never will be scanned.
I've scanned a few of my favorite books and posted them onto Kazaa, but nobody there is interested in reading anything except Fantasy and Science Fiction. In the year or so that I've had titles by Gore Vidal and John Updike available in my P2P directory, they have been accessed only twice.
Besides, scanning and proofreading books is a serious hassle and major undertaking. Even with good quality OCR software and a reasonable fast scanner it will take about 20 to 30 hours to scan and proof an entire book. Walking through the stacks of the local library recently made me realize that it would take a hundred years to scan all of this material. Before then most of the books on the shelves would have been chucked and pulped.
I asked at the local Best Buy store about using a high resolution digital camera on a custom made stand to photograph book pages and feed the data from the camera to an OCR program using USB 2.0. Needless to say, the response that I got was; 'Duh...'. Nevertheless, it still seems like a good idea to speed the process of preserving our culture by transferring books to a more fluid media.
Any thoughts?
Thank you,
Simonetta
I agree. I live in Beaverton Oregon outside of Portland and I never cease to be amazed at the wide range of cultural diversity (did I just make up a new cliche?) here.
I took a short business trip to North Atlanta Georgia and found the same level of diversity. Given the vast differences that existed in metro Atlanta before the great immigrations to the USA in the late 20th-century, and the relative sameness of the Oregonians previous to that migration, I'm sure that there must be more cultural diversity in metro Atlanta than Oregon.
As for Vermont, everyone that I've met or seen there seems to be pretty normal by New England standards.
This reflects a new cultural pattern in our country: the suburbs are more cosmopolitian and diverse than the cities whereas in every other country, the opposite is the case.
You may want to monitor the air quality for particle matter for a few days.
Shinyei makes a small nephelometer (a device for detecting the amount of microscopic dust and pollutants in the air) for about $10. I don't know if you would be able to get a sample or a test unit. See it at: http://www.shinyei.com/dust_e.htm
A company in Portland Oregon called AirAdvice will monitor your environment for air particle levels and send you daily reports. See:
www.airadvice.com
The smart investments of Mrs. Clinton in the mid 1980's were actually an indirect bribe from the Tyson family to Governor Bill Clinton. The Arkansas Dept of Health was directed by the governor to overlook certain irregularities in the Tyson's family chicken processing factories.
It seems that an investment firm in Little Rock was selecting investment opportunities at random. The proceeds from the winners went to Mrs. Clinton (now Senator) while the losing investments were picked up by the Tyson family interests.
None of this would have ever come light or be cared about if Bill Clinton had not become president or Mrs. Clinton not been so open, arrogant, or greedy.
One would assume that the senator from New York has learned how to keep these special investments much more discreet nowdays.
English is one of the few (if not the only) major language that allows any word to be any part of speech (noun, verb, adverb, ect..) depending on its position in the sentence. Other languages have strict positioning requirements for the placement of words in a sentence, or the word must be modified (either at its end as in the Romance languages, or its beginning like German, or its middle as in Japanese) within strict parameters to indicate what part of speech that it is.
The C programming language is a subconscious reflection of the English language in that any (almost) combination of operators will actually compile. The flexiblity and ease-of-use of C in the computing world is symbiotic to the flexibility of English as a spoken language.
It is no coincidence that C programming language was developed in an exclusively English language environment. Nor is it a coincidence that both languages have come the dominate both international communication and computer programming.
Thank you,