For anyone who listemns to music radio these days, the effect described above can easily be seen with one singer: Avril Lavigne
Avril has been heavily pushed by Clear Channel stations (I travel a bit, and I try to keep track of which stations are owned by Clear channel). Now, Avril has a song, "Complicated", which was a hit, and could have reasonably been seen to be worthy of about three weeks of fairly solid radio play, before dropping into the occasional play zone.
Instead, I still hear it almost all the god damn time, after almost a year, especially when listening to a Clear Channel station. There is NO WAY that dumb, trite, banal song should be played like it is after almost a year on the chart. It is being pushed (and I suspect it is because Avril is young, and "trendy", so that by pushing the music, the fashion image can be sold on magazines, etc. which Clear Channel probably also owns, or at least has a stake in.) and the target market of teeny bopper girls can be molded in to Avril wannanbees.
There is nothing new about all this, of course. But it has gotten so bad that is goes beyond just being noticeable. It is unescapable.
Consider also that Clear Channel owns a great number of billboards, I've noticed, and if I did some digging, I'd assume they have a large horizontal ownership presence in many media outlets.
Another recent Clear Channel story that hit the independent newspaper circuit was how they were caught getting permits for assembly at city parks, then having their radio stations promote "anti-anti-war protests" at these places (Their DJs would say things like "everyone go out there and do your patriotic duty supporting our president and our troops. Let's show these anti-war protestors how americans really feel"), and then send out their news teams to cover these events as if they had occured as a spontaneous assembly of people. In essence, they were creating the news that they were reporting (as well as astro-turfing; they denied this, of course, but people did research and traced the permit applications back to Clear Channel)
There are existing laws to deal with the trespass and obstruction, and existing civil and probably criminal penalties to deal with the damages caused to others by your actions. I don't support people shutting down freeways (I think it is generally counter-productive for any cause seeking to win people over), but those people are not necessarily terrorists. Whoever introduced this bill should be bitch-slapped, and not re-elected.
After Michael Moore made his acceptance speech, which was received with fairly loud jeers and boos, the next "speaker" on stage was Jack Valenti, which caused me to start booing as well. Sadly, the hollywood glitterati did not continue with me...
I took a couple classes from him, and found him to be a very good lecturer. VERY knowledgeable about his subject, and very well organized with his presentation.
Even reading all the course books intently, I got a great deal of helpful information from the lectures.
Huge numbers of kids are being born for no other reason than, "I got drunk and knocked up". Or, "I want a baby so that I can care for it like my parents didn't care for me." The concerns you raise are WAY down on my list of concerns regarding the *motivational* aspects of childbearing.
Python is distributed with a script (pindent.py) which can take normal python code and package it in block delimiting comments. So, one could output code without proper whitespace (and with proper comment delimiters), and have it easily 'whitespaced' before execution.
The pindent.py module also contains the class (PythonIndenter) which does the work, making it easy to incorporate in a Python program which is processing other python code.
There are also tools in the standard library to help properly generate python code directly.
If you hook up to the battery terminals, you are also hooking up directly to the alternator, which is NOT clean. It would only be safe if the car were off.
Disclaimer - I am a fuckwit regarding most things electrical.
If they had expanded the "OpenBSD" to "OpenBSD/MicroBSD", and ONLY in the files where they actually made (non-trivial) additions or changes, then that would at least be potentially tolerable. But REPLACING the "OpenBSD" outright? Outrageous!
If you can't see this, then write a book, and I'll distribute it with my name on it and not yours. Fair?
Now, if the issue was restitution, then correcting the problem quickly would probably have been acceptable to most reasonable copyright holders (although, these are OpenBSD devleopers we are discussing). But the offense itself was significant, even if done naively.
Simply put, any new ad-hoc cipher that was not designed by experts will probably be subject to flaws that could be revealed by statistical tests, assuming a sufficient amount of ciphertext.
Additionaly, any ciphertext that was encrypted by a well-designed cipher (and I'll include DES in this example, despite its relatively small keysize by modern standards) will NOT be much harder to decrypt simply because the cipher is unknown. Even if you had LOTS of ciphertext and tried against every known published cipher, along with billions of variants (ie, additional rounds for each one, etc.) the extra workload would be modest to minute, compared to the work of actually searching the keyspace (and in the case where there is no known plaintext, analyzing the de-ciphered text for probable plaintext).
Most modern protocols go well out their way to advertise the ciphers used to encode messages, precisely because that bit of information is of no real extra security as long as the key is kept secret (and is well chosen). To not do so would make deploying things a nightmare.
So I think, in the end, few experts would argue that using the most commonly known good cipher, with a well-chosen key, is any less difficult to 'break' than using an obscure and secret cipher. Especially if that cipher is not one that is also widely deployed as a secure cipher. The real hard work is in finding the key. And the fun work is in finding ad-hoc ciphers that people think are secure because the method is secret.
Including facial expressions, BTW. They have dots all over his face to catch his expression while he acts to the camera. Really helped make a difference, I believe.
Man: But presidente, America tried to kill you! Fidel Castro: Ah, they're not so bad. They even named a street after me in San Francisco! Man 2: [whispers in Castro's ear] Fidel Castro: It's full of what?!
In the SAME exact way that Spock died. In fact, much of that (piece of crap) Nemesis movie was directly ripped off from previous movies and older episodes (which I haven't even watched in about 10 years, and I STILL saw all kinds of old episode rip-offs)
Berman should just be told, "You can't shine shit."
Also, expect Data to make a comeback (if ever they make more of this garbage); he downloaded himself into someone else before he died (just like Spock; how original)
And who was it who made sure the law had a time limit? I think it might have been him as well. (I heard whoever it was say "if it is a good idea now, it'll be a good idea in seven years") Not always the best way to pass laws, but possibly helpful in this case.
By law any software produced by tax dollars is available to a citizen for the cost of distribution. Classified stuff is obviously not available.
NOT true! By law, any work created by the government is public domain, but a work for the government, even if paid for by the government, is not necessarily put in the public domain. That is one reason they are trying to get civil servants to write less software, and contractors to write more software (so that they can 'commercialize' the contractor made software.)
I work as a contractor, doing research and writing software that is paid for by government sources. Even though my company (typically) signs off the rights of my code to the government (it can be useful, but not really commercializable; just lots of research related code), it is QUITE a pain to get that code made available for public use (and it is NOT public domain, thanks to the wording of the law (title 19, or some such thing))
One can prototype in Python, then have that code running in Java (using Jython), if you choose to migrate over to Java after the prototyping stage. So code reuse is doable.
Well, in California it is already the case that I can watch TV while driving; I just need to be stuck behind a monster SUV (which are about a third of all the cars), with it's TV on (which is about an eighth of all monster SUV's). Since I can't see around the huge damn things, I have to look through them, and I therefore am occasionally watching some TV (usually through almost totally tinted windows though, which makes it even harder to see what might be coming up ahead.)
Note - this only applies in heavy, slow traffic, though. Otherwise, I'm staying well behind those mutha's, or whipping around in front of 'em.
It's one thing to deny your child reading something they asked for. I think the poster merely meant that he or she hadn't offered or recommended those specific books to the child. Otherwise, I agree with your sentiment.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for this post.
:)
For anyone who listemns to music radio these days, the effect described above can easily be seen with one singer: Avril Lavigne
Avril has been heavily pushed by Clear Channel stations (I travel a bit, and I try to keep track of which stations are owned by Clear channel). Now, Avril has a song, "Complicated", which was a hit, and could have reasonably been seen to be worthy of about three weeks of fairly solid radio play, before dropping into the occasional play zone.
Instead, I still hear it almost all the god damn time, after almost a year, especially when listening to a Clear Channel station. There is NO WAY that dumb, trite, banal song should be played like it is after almost a year on the chart. It is being pushed (and I suspect it is because Avril is young, and "trendy", so that by pushing the music, the fashion image can be sold on magazines, etc. which Clear Channel probably also owns, or at least has a stake in.) and the target market of teeny bopper girls can be molded in to Avril wannanbees.
There is nothing new about all this, of course. But it has gotten so bad that is goes beyond just being noticeable. It is unescapable.
Consider also that Clear Channel owns a great number of billboards, I've noticed, and if I did some digging, I'd assume they have a large horizontal ownership presence in many media outlets.
Another recent Clear Channel story that hit the independent newspaper circuit was how they were caught getting permits for assembly at city parks, then having their radio stations promote "anti-anti-war protests" at these places (Their DJs would say things like "everyone go out there and do your patriotic duty supporting our president and our troops. Let's show these anti-war protestors how americans really feel"), and then send out their news teams to cover these events as if they had occured as a spontaneous assembly of people. In essence, they were creating the news that they were reporting (as well as astro-turfing; they denied this, of course, but people did research and traced the permit applications back to Clear Channel)
So, in conclusion, Clear Channel is evil.
There are existing laws to deal with the trespass and obstruction, and existing civil and probably criminal penalties to deal with the damages caused to others by your actions. I don't support people shutting down freeways (I think it is generally counter-productive for any cause seeking to win people over), but those people are not necessarily terrorists. Whoever introduced this bill should be bitch-slapped, and not re-elected.
I dig those 'blob' movies...
After Michael Moore made his acceptance speech, which was received with fairly loud jeers and boos, the next "speaker" on stage was Jack Valenti, which caused me to start booing as well. Sadly, the hollywood glitterati did not continue with me...
I took a couple classes from him, and found him to be a very good lecturer. VERY knowledgeable about his subject, and very well organized with his presentation.
Even reading all the course books intently, I got a great deal of helpful information from the lectures.
Huge numbers of kids are being born for no other reason than, "I got drunk and knocked up". Or, "I want a baby so that I can care for it like my parents didn't care for me." The concerns you raise are WAY down on my list of concerns regarding the *motivational* aspects of childbearing.
Python is distributed with a script (pindent.py) which can take normal python code and package it in block delimiting comments. So, one could output code without proper whitespace (and with proper comment delimiters), and have it easily 'whitespaced' before execution.
The pindent.py module also contains the class (PythonIndenter) which does the work, making it easy to incorporate in a Python program which is processing other python code.
There are also tools in the standard library to help properly generate python code directly.
In practice, it just isn't a problem.
If you hook up to the battery terminals, you are also hooking up directly to the alternator, which is NOT clean. It would only be safe if the car were off.
Disclaimer - I am a fuckwit regarding most things electrical.
Number 2 (make cache bigger) is easier said than done, and works against number 1 (cost).
Yo' momma!
If they had expanded the "OpenBSD" to "OpenBSD/MicroBSD", and ONLY in the files where they actually made (non-trivial) additions or changes, then that would at least be potentially tolerable. But REPLACING the "OpenBSD" outright? Outrageous!
If you can't see this, then write a book, and I'll distribute it with my name on it and not yours. Fair?
Now, if the issue was restitution, then correcting the problem quickly would probably have been acceptable to most reasonable copyright holders (although, these are OpenBSD devleopers we are discussing). But the offense itself was significant, even if done naively.
Simply put, any new ad-hoc cipher that was not designed by experts will probably be subject to flaws that could be revealed by statistical tests, assuming a sufficient amount of ciphertext.
Additionaly, any ciphertext that was encrypted by a well-designed cipher (and I'll include DES in this example, despite its relatively small keysize by modern standards) will NOT be much harder to decrypt simply because the cipher is unknown. Even if you had LOTS of ciphertext and tried against every known published cipher, along with billions of variants (ie, additional rounds for each one, etc.) the extra workload would be modest to minute, compared to the work of actually searching the keyspace (and in the case where there is no known plaintext, analyzing the de-ciphered text for probable plaintext).
Most modern protocols go well out their way to advertise the ciphers used to encode messages, precisely because that bit of information is of no real extra security as long as the key is kept secret (and is well chosen). To not do so would make deploying things a nightmare.
So I think, in the end, few experts would argue that using the most commonly known good cipher, with a well-chosen key, is any less difficult to 'break' than using an obscure and secret cipher. Especially if that cipher is not one that is also widely deployed as a secure cipher. The real hard work is in finding the key. And the fun work is in finding ad-hoc ciphers that people think are secure because the method is secret.
Including facial expressions, BTW. They have dots all over his face to catch his expression while he acts to the camera. Really helped make a difference, I believe.
Jesus H., don't make me shoot myself!
That has THE best quote, IMO. (from snpp):
Man: But presidente, America tried to kill you!
Fidel Castro: Ah, they're not so bad. They even named a street after me in San Francisco!
Man 2: [whispers in Castro's ear]
Fidel Castro: It's full of what?!
In the SAME exact way that Spock died. In fact, much of that (piece of crap) Nemesis movie was directly ripped off from previous movies and older episodes (which I haven't even watched in about 10 years, and I STILL saw all kinds of old episode rip-offs)
Berman should just be told, "You can't shine shit."
Also, expect Data to make a comeback (if ever they make more of this garbage); he downloaded himself into someone else before he died (just like Spock; how original)
And who was it who made sure the law had a time limit? I think it might have been him as well. (I heard whoever it was say "if it is a good idea now, it'll be a good idea in seven years") Not always the best way to pass laws, but possibly helpful in this case.
By law any software produced by tax dollars is available to a citizen for the cost of distribution. Classified stuff is obviously not available.
NOT true! By law, any work created by the government is public domain, but a work for the government, even if paid for by the government, is not necessarily put in the public domain. That is one reason they are trying to get civil servants to write less software, and contractors to write more software (so that they can 'commercialize' the contractor made software.)
I work as a contractor, doing research and writing software that is paid for by government sources. Even though my company (typically) signs off the rights of my code to the government (it can be useful, but not really commercializable; just lots of research related code), it is QUITE a pain to get that code made available for public use (and it is NOT public domain, thanks to the wording of the law (title 19, or some such thing))
I'm saying you can rewrite parts, or slowly rewrite all of the code, in Java, while still using the non-rewritten Python parts.
You can even continue to extend the design in Python, while rewriting parts in Java (perhaps for speed, perhaps to make use of Java libraries, etc.)
One can prototype in Python, then have that code running in Java (using Jython), if you choose to migrate over to Java after the prototyping stage. So code reuse is doable.
There are 2 free alternatives to bitkeeper: CVS and Subversion. Learn them, use them.
Actually, I just started using Arch, which has a learning curve, but which is Really Cool (tm).
Distributed repositories, so I can code on the road or at home, and not worry about getting too out of sync.
wait, wait, wait... Are you saying that the iPod plays Ogg Vorbis files? (I don't mean iMusic. I mean iPod.) A google search seems to indicate "no".
Well, in California it is already the case that I can watch TV while driving; I just need to be stuck behind a monster SUV (which are about a third of all the cars), with it's TV on (which is about an eighth of all monster SUV's). Since I can't see around the huge damn things, I have to look through them, and I therefore am occasionally watching some TV (usually through almost totally tinted windows though, which makes it even harder to see what might be coming up ahead.)
Note - this only applies in heavy, slow traffic, though. Otherwise, I'm staying well behind those mutha's, or whipping around in front of 'em.
So you are speculating that maybe all the "dark matter" in the universe is, in fact, all the light in the universe?
Or that all the missing mass in our models of the universe is the mass of all the gravity that attracts together all the mass in the universe?
My head might soon explode and create a small bang.
It's one thing to deny your child reading something they asked for. I think the poster merely meant that he or she hadn't offered or recommended those specific books to the child. Otherwise, I agree with your sentiment.