The human race will not end in a dark nuclear apocalyptic wasteland, but rather in a cheerfull, neatly-kept lawn, covering the entire land mass of the planet.
Famous noise artist G.X Jupitter-Larsen, when performing with his band, The Haters (who celebrated their 25th Anniversary last month), used to hold a live microphone against an electric grinder.
"I've recently moved to Canada and just this week had a problem with my PowerBook that called for me undertaking a reinstall. After firing up iTunes and attempting to play purchased songs, I was asked to reauthorize those songs, using the Apple ID associated with the purchase. No problem, I thought. This is the Apple Music Store, not PressPlay or MusicNet. I paid for these songs and they're mine. Silly me. Apparently, if you change your contact address and/or have your US credit card address changed, as I did, you are no longer able to play the songs you paid for while on US soil.
So, shame on me for not reading the fine print. But if you're spending money with Apple and plan a departure from the States any time soon, your money would be better spent on little round platters."
Most museums and galleries have been doing this sort of thing for years. I'd suggest contacting whatever similar groups exist in your city.
In particular there are probably any number of multimedia artists that have been doing this sort of thing with varying levels of interactivity.
One of our friends, Andra McCartney, just finished a gallery installation using a Mac, midi, and controller to handle video and audio for an interactive and unattended installation about the Lachine Canal outside Montreal.
She also installed speakers and a subwoofer inside of a hairdryer to good effect.
I will suggest that all and sundry might enjoy "Whispers in the Air", a radio documentary about Marconi that was produced literally at the foot of the cliff in St Johns where Marconi made his historic broadcast.
Chris Brookes is a wonderful award winning producer, and has also worked on documentaries about Vikings and about Reginald Fessenden, who all Canadians know beat Marconi to the punch any how.
"A Canadian, Reginald Aubrey Fessenden was the first person to prove that voices and music could be heard over the air without wires. Yet some books ignore him, others mistakenly call him an American, and one Canadian encyclopedia cites his mother as the principal founder of Empire Day but overlooks her eldest son's accomplishments. Marconi, on the other hand, is given credit for radio even though his theory on sound waves was wrong and even though he was still sending only Morse code signals when Fessenden made his first "broadcast.""
Arrgh! Yet another guide to Linux that seems mostly to say "And then go and read this long and obscure web page to try and figure out if your hardware will work".
My biggest criticism is that the article, like pretty much every similar one, does not warn the unsuspecting beginner that there is a significant likelihood that there will be at least one insoluble problem.
Even though things have improved greatly in Linux installation, new people need to understand that one of either their video card, palm sync, scanner, or networking will not work out of the box, and that tracking down a solution can take hours or days.
The last thing that Linux needs is more people throwing up their hands in despair after ten hours of an install gone horribly wrong. It's better to warn them right up front that things are still quite a bit less reliable than a Windows install.
All of this seems to reinforce the suggestion that Slashdot is not the ideal place to look for immigration advice, and that your lawyer/ accountant/ government offical may offer different suggestions than my lawyer/ accountant/ goverment offical.
Which is why I say to be very careful. What you hope to avoid is a situation where your lawyer's advice runs counter to the border guard or tax office.
I was in the US, on an H1B, not a T1, but the experience was the same. Finding reliable advice is very difficult, and I found that US government agencies were baffling to say the least.
Yes, you need a lawyer to watch over the immigration paperwork. The advice to us was to always carry a copy of all paperwork related to the visa when crossing the border, as well as the phone number of the Immigration lawyer. If you have a spouse, make sure that they have the appropriate paperwork or visa as well.
We found that some border crossings are better than others. If you drive, think in terms of small ports of entry that deal more with commercial crossings than individuals and tourists.
Never ever argue with a border guard, no matter how rude or stupid they appear.
One thing that our lawyer and accountant both told us was that the INS and the IRS don't talk to each other. If that information is useful to you, you'll know it.
In all likelihood you are still classed as a permanent resident of Canada, and will still have to report to Revenue Canada. (It takes very little to maintain that status - even one bank account will do it).
In general terms your spring time ritual will include:
1) Have your US taxes prepared and submitted to the IRS. Pay what you owe.
2) Ship your Canadian tax records and a copy of your US return to your Canadian accountant.
3) Have your Canadian taxes prepared, and pay an amount equal to your total Canadian tax bill, less whatever amounts in taxes you paid to the IRS.
In other words, as long as you are a Canadian resident, you will pay taxes at the Canadian rate.
BUY ANY PRESCRIPTION DRUGS IN CANADA! We found that Canadian prices were roughly 20-25% of what was being charged in Virginia.
Depending on the deductible or co-pay on your US medical insurance you may also want to take semi-annual trips to Canada for checkups and regular treatments.
If you don't tell the Ontario government that you have left the country, they likely will not discontinue your Ontario health card. That can help you to avoid the three month waiting period when you return.
If your T-1 ends, and you have to return to Canada, you quite likely will be eligible for Unemployment Insurance. There is a reciprocal agreement between Canada and the US. In my case it meant collecting Kentucky UI dollars for many months at a time when the Canadian dollar was very low. There is a special HRDC office that handles such claims, and as far as I can tell once you're on stream there is no hassle.
One of the things that we found very handy was having both US and Canadian bank accounts with the same company (TD in our case). This makes transferring funds across the border fast and easy.
If you are driving a car with Canadian plates, be very very careful about your insurance. Your company may elect to drop you without warning if you stay down there too long. In our experience this is one of those times when you really want to communicate on paper so that you have something to back you up when the insurance company tries to say that you aren't covered.
If you have a mortgage or other loan in Canada, keep in mind that your bank may refuse to acknowledge your US income. While in Kentucky we tried to negotiate a loan to replace the roof on our 120 year old Victorian in Hamilton. The bank turned us down because, although I was making 40% more than I had been in Canada, the income was not earned in Canada. Idiotic, but true.
Cross border work can be a serious pain in the ass, but if you're very careful it can be handled without disaster.
This story offers a very good example why ISPs and similar service providers should have the best lawyer possible on call. If nothing else they may have been able to halt or slow things while finding a judge who can come up with a more sensible solution.
I see no good reason why the FBI should shut down an entire business with nothing more than search warrant. Surely such a warrant defines what exactly they are seeking, and it would have been reasonable for them to extract those chunks of data on-site.
I have to conclude that the aim of the exersize was to shut down foo.net without the bother of legal proceedings, and it seems that they were successful.
The Salon site would not load the story after I had watched the ad. If their system does not function reliably I feel less compulsion to worry about this re-posting.
I watched ad, I done my time, now I want to read the article.
Or maybe I should have called Salon tech support????
Ok - I'm too tired. On closer examination. it appears to an all grils' club up there. Just some pretty exotic and to these western eyes not terribly female looking monikers.
I had a friend working with NASA when they were naming geological features on the surface of Venus. Since all features were named after women, I managed him to persuade him to name a crater after my girlfriend.
Hmmm. Out of idle curiosity, did the Russians also name things after women only? I'm assuming that since they sent so many probes there they must also have claimed some naming rights.
For that matter, do the Russians refer to the planet as "Venus" or something else?
One of the few things that distinguishes America as a free country is the absense of checkpoints and "papers please" where your very existence is presumed to be a crime until YOU demonstrate that you have a right to exist and that you are free to go.
Haven't travelled by commercial airliner recently have you?
Not to detract from the overall hard work going into the list, but would it have taken too much more effort to list the languages used on these distros instead just "Non English"?
It's also a bit misleading to describe these as having "non English" as their "Primary Function(s)".
Remarkable as it may seem, the vast majority of the world does not speak or read English.
After reading the article, I can only say it's pure PR speak, factually error prone, and more than a bit slanted. Perhaps this paragraph explains the timing:
"The announcement of the leak came on the same day Microsoft pushed in Washington for tougher anti-counterfeit legislation in the United States and worldwide, saying pervasive pirating of computer software was hurting the industry."
Given that any number of companies and computer professionals have access to Windows source for various reasons, it's not unreasonable to think that occasionally chunks of it appear in the wild.
And certainly a lack of source code hasn't slowed down the virus and worm industry.
Consequently I have to assume that this story is just a way for Microsoft to build support for even more draconian anti-piracy and DRM laws.
As a post-script - the original post and magazine link should be modded +5 funny at best. It's really quite pathetic.
AND! You can curse on the radio!
on
Canadian Privacy Act
·
· Score: 2, Informative
OTOH, you could just move to canada. Have you noticed that Canada seems to be defending civil liberties when america strips them away?
Yes, while much of the US has their shorts in a knot over Janet Jackson's nipple, and the FCC wants even more draconian penalties for college radio stations that dare to broadcast the word f*ck, Canada rolls along, worrying about neither.
Trust me, 3PM on a school day is the best time to listen to hardcore punk rock!
When we retired our old Toshiba, I wound up buying a used Dell Latitude LS. what I love about it is what's not built in - CD, floppy, some of the usual ports like the serial port.
The result is a laptop that really small, really light and really easy to toss into a briefcase and carry along.
When I look at some of the current laptops they seem so big and heavy that I doubt I would want to lug them around.
So think in terms of some of the models that lets you leave the less used stuff like CD drives at home and just carry the essentials.
Every few months for several years I have downloaded a couple of Linux distros with the express purpose of trying install it on my PC. Sometimes I tried clean installs, sometimes dual boot.
As much as I would love to use Linux and OSS, I have an even greater need of a working system that handles my basic needs. Right off the top my system has to handle a USB and parallel port printer, HP scanner, Palm sync, Internet connection, access to the Windows boxes on our small network, and allow the Windows boxes to use the printers and see my files.
If all of those work, I can spare the time to wade though the great morass of information that Linux calls "documentation" and learn the obscure tricks that are needed to manage a Linux system.
What I can't afford is to have a system that does only some of the things above. Thus far installing Linux has always left me with at least two of my needed functions absent. I already know that trying to find out how to fix them will consume days if not weeks.
With Windows 2K (and driver discs) everything above "just works" out of the box.
Just for the record: Mandrake (a few times) RedHat (3 times), Suse, Caldera (long time ago), Knoppix, and at least two others.
Ok, I'll admit that I sort of went directly from BBSs to Netscape (the one with the giant pulsing "N", and hasn't it all been downhill from there...) about - what was it? - '96?
Consequently I never used gopher. Can someone save me the time of actually looking it up and tell us what the heck it did?
Slashdot Mirror
Pshaw - so much for Apple's superb engineering innovation!
Sony has for many years been the leader in crappy minijack technology. Just ask anyone who has used a microphone with one of their minidisc recorders!
The human race will not end in a dark nuclear apocalyptic wasteland, but rather in a cheerfull, neatly-kept lawn, covering the entire land mass of the planet.
Cool! Sounds like Teletubbies land!!
Go here to find out which Teletubbies charcter you are, but oh my, this doesn't seem right....
Famous noise artist G.X Jupitter-Larsen, when performing with his band, The Haters (who celebrated their 25th Anniversary last month), used to hold a live microphone against an electric grinder.
At maximum amplification.
Until it stopped working.
As GX is fond of saying...
A xylowave occurs everytime an effect has no cause, or a cause has no effect.
Your existing songs won't become useless, you just won't be able to buy any new ones.
s .html
Not true. It's illegal under Apple's licence and if you need to reinstall your software you're toast.
From Politech.
"I've recently moved to Canada and just this week had a problem with my PowerBook that called for me undertaking a reinstall. After firing up iTunes and attempting to play purchased songs, I was asked to reauthorize those songs, using the Apple ID associated with the purchase. No problem, I
thought. This is the Apple Music Store, not PressPlay or MusicNet. I paid for these songs and they're mine. Silly me. Apparently, if you change your contact address and/or have your US credit card address changed, as I did, you are no longer able to play the songs you paid for while on US soil.
After going back and forth with AMS customer support, they pointed me to the terms of sale policy, and there it is in the very first paragraph:
http://www.info.apple.com/usen/musicstore/policie
So, shame on me for not reading the fine print. But if you're spending money with Apple and plan a departure from the States any time soon, your money would be better spent on little round platters."
Listening to Air America helped me understand one thing. All these years I though that it was the right wing assholes on talk radio that annoyed me.
Now I know that talk radio is intensly irritating, even if I agree with the politics!
Most museums and galleries have been doing this sort of thing for years. I'd suggest contacting whatever similar groups exist in your city.
In particular there are probably any number of multimedia artists that have been doing this sort of thing with varying levels of interactivity.
One of our friends, Andra McCartney, just finished a gallery installation using a Mac, midi, and controller to handle video and audio for an interactive and unattended installation about the Lachine Canal outside Montreal.
She also installed speakers and a subwoofer inside of a hairdryer to good effect.
I will suggest that all and sundry might enjoy "Whispers in the Air", a radio documentary about Marconi that was produced literally at the foot of the cliff in St Johns where Marconi made his historic broadcast.
RealAudio links are to be found on this page.
Chris Brookes is a wonderful award winning producer, and has also worked on documentaries about Vikings and about Reginald Fessenden, who all Canadians know beat Marconi to the punch any how.
"A Canadian, Reginald Aubrey Fessenden was the first person to prove that voices and music could be heard over the air without wires. Yet some books ignore him, others mistakenly call him an American, and one Canadian encyclopedia cites his mother as the principal founder of Empire Day but overlooks her eldest son's accomplishments. Marconi, on the other hand, is given credit for radio even though his theory on sound waves was wrong and even though he was still sending only Morse code signals when Fessenden made his first "broadcast.""
Arrgh! Yet another guide to Linux that seems mostly to say "And then go and read this long and obscure web page to try and figure out if your hardware will work".
My biggest criticism is that the article, like pretty much every similar one, does not warn the unsuspecting beginner that there is a significant likelihood that there will be at least one insoluble problem.
Even though things have improved greatly in Linux installation, new people need to understand that one of either their video card, palm sync, scanner, or networking will not work out of the box, and that tracking down a solution can take hours or days.
The last thing that Linux needs is more people throwing up their hands in despair after ten hours of an install gone horribly wrong. It's better to warn them right up front that things are still quite a bit less reliable than a Windows install.
Being called for jury duty often involves a large amount of time sitting around waiting before being involved the selection process or trial.
Once you've seen the "So, Now You're on a Jury" video and have found out where the restroom is located, there's not much to do.
All of this seems to reinforce the suggestion that Slashdot is not the ideal place to look for immigration advice, and that your lawyer/ accountant/ government offical may offer different suggestions than my lawyer/ accountant/ goverment offical.
Which is why I say to be very careful. What you hope to avoid is a situation where your lawyer's advice runs counter to the border guard or tax office.
I was in the US, on an H1B, not a T1, but the experience was the same. Finding reliable advice is very difficult, and I found that US government agencies were baffling to say the least.
Yes, you need a lawyer to watch over the immigration paperwork. The advice to us was to always carry a copy of all paperwork related to the visa when crossing the border, as well as the phone number of the Immigration lawyer. If you have a spouse, make sure that they have the appropriate paperwork or visa as well.
We found that some border crossings are better than others. If you drive, think in terms of small ports of entry that deal more with commercial crossings than individuals and tourists.
Never ever argue with a border guard, no matter how rude or stupid they appear.
One thing that our lawyer and accountant both told us was that the INS and the IRS don't talk to each other. If that information is useful to you, you'll know it.
In all likelihood you are still classed as a permanent resident of Canada, and will still have to report to Revenue Canada. (It takes very little to maintain that status - even one bank account will do it).
In general terms your spring time ritual will include:
1) Have your US taxes prepared and submitted to the IRS. Pay what you owe.
2) Ship your Canadian tax records and a copy of your US return to your Canadian accountant.
3) Have your Canadian taxes prepared, and pay an amount equal to your total Canadian tax bill, less whatever amounts in taxes you paid to the IRS.
In other words, as long as you are a Canadian resident, you will pay taxes at the Canadian rate.
BUY ANY PRESCRIPTION DRUGS IN CANADA! We found that Canadian prices were roughly 20-25% of what was being charged in Virginia.
Depending on the deductible or co-pay on your US medical insurance you may also want to take semi-annual trips to Canada for checkups and regular treatments.
If you don't tell the Ontario government that you have left the country, they likely will not discontinue your Ontario health card. That can help you to avoid the three month waiting period when you return.
If your T-1 ends, and you have to return to Canada, you quite likely will be eligible for Unemployment Insurance. There is a reciprocal agreement between Canada and the US. In my case it meant collecting Kentucky UI dollars for many months at a time when the Canadian dollar was very low. There is a special HRDC office that handles such claims, and as far as I can tell once you're on stream there is no hassle.
One of the things that we found very handy was having both US and Canadian bank accounts with the same company (TD in our case). This makes transferring funds across the border fast and easy.
If you are driving a car with Canadian plates, be very very careful about your insurance. Your company may elect to drop you without warning if you stay down there too long. In our experience this is one of those times when you really want to communicate on paper so that you have something to back you up when the insurance company tries to say that you aren't covered.
If you have a mortgage or other loan in Canada, keep in mind that your bank may refuse to acknowledge your US income. While in Kentucky we tried to negotiate a loan to replace the roof on our 120 year old Victorian in Hamilton. The bank turned us down because, although I was making 40% more than I had been in Canada, the income was not earned in Canada. Idiotic, but true.
Cross border work can be a serious pain in the ass, but if you're very careful it can be handled without disaster.
Barry
This story offers a very good example why ISPs and similar service providers should have the best lawyer possible on call. If nothing else they may have been able to halt or slow things while finding a judge who can come up with a more sensible solution.
I see no good reason why the FBI should shut down an entire business with nothing more than search warrant. Surely such a warrant defines what exactly they are seeking, and it would have been reasonable for them to extract those chunks of data on-site.
I have to conclude that the aim of the exersize was to shut down foo.net without the bother of legal proceedings, and it seems that they were successful.
Ever consider that the dinosaurs might still rule the Earth if they had MADMEN?
No! Surely they would had MAD-DINO system.
The Salon site would not load the story after I had watched the ad. If their system does not function reliably I feel less compulsion to worry about this re-posting.
I watched ad, I done my time, now I want to read the article.
Or maybe I should have called Salon tech support????
Ok - I'm too tired. On closer examination. it appears to an all grils' club up there. Just some pretty exotic and to these western eyes not terribly female looking monikers.
Well, the Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature answered my question, and also seems to suggest that in fact not everything on Venus has a woman's name.
Craters though are! Sadly Melissa is not on the list.
Actually, check out the whole USGS Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature. It's very cool.
I had a friend working with NASA when they were naming geological features on the surface of Venus. Since all features were named after women, I managed him to persuade him to name a crater after my girlfriend.
Hmmm. Out of idle curiosity, did the Russians also name things after women only? I'm assuming that since they sent so many probes there they must also have claimed some naming rights.
For that matter, do the Russians refer to the planet as "Venus" or something else?
One of the few things that distinguishes America as a free country is the absense of checkpoints and "papers please" where your very existence is presumed to be a crime until YOU demonstrate that you have a right to exist and that you are free to go.
Haven't travelled by commercial airliner recently have you?
Was I the only person who was unable to access the Slashdot site at the exact moment that this was posted?
Coincidence? I think not!
Not to detract from the overall hard work going into the list, but would it have taken too much more effort to list the languages used on these distros instead just "Non English"?
It's also a bit misleading to describe these as having "non English" as their "Primary Function(s)".
Remarkable as it may seem, the vast majority of the world does not speak or read English.
After reading the article, I can only say it's pure PR speak, factually error prone, and more than a bit slanted. Perhaps this paragraph explains the timing:
"The announcement of the leak came on the same day Microsoft pushed in Washington for tougher anti-counterfeit legislation in the United States and worldwide, saying pervasive pirating of computer software was hurting the industry."
Given that any number of companies and computer professionals have access to Windows source for various reasons, it's not unreasonable to think that occasionally chunks of it appear in the wild.
And certainly a lack of source code hasn't slowed down the virus and worm industry.
Consequently I have to assume that this story is just a way for Microsoft to build support for even more draconian anti-piracy and DRM laws.
As a post-script - the original post and magazine link should be modded +5 funny at best. It's really quite pathetic.
OTOH, you could just move to canada. Have you noticed that Canada seems to be defending civil liberties when america strips them away?
Yes, while much of the US has their shorts in a knot over Janet Jackson's nipple, and the FCC wants even more draconian penalties for college radio stations that dare to broadcast the word f*ck, Canada rolls along, worrying about neither.
Trust me, 3PM on a school day is the best time to listen to hardcore punk rock!
When we retired our old Toshiba, I wound up buying a used Dell Latitude LS. what I love about it is what's not built in - CD, floppy, some of the usual ports like the serial port.
The result is a laptop that really small, really light and really easy to toss into a briefcase and carry along.
When I look at some of the current laptops they seem so big and heavy that I doubt I would want to lug them around.
So think in terms of some of the models that lets you leave the less used stuff like CD drives at home and just carry the essentials.
Although Powerbooks... mmmmmm.
Every few months for several years I have downloaded a couple of Linux distros with the express purpose of trying install it on my PC. Sometimes I tried clean installs, sometimes dual boot.
As much as I would love to use Linux and OSS, I have an even greater need of a working system that handles my basic needs. Right off the top my system has to handle a USB and parallel port printer, HP scanner, Palm sync, Internet connection, access to the Windows boxes on our small network, and allow the Windows boxes to use the printers and see my files.
If all of those work, I can spare the time to wade though the great morass of information that Linux calls "documentation" and learn the obscure tricks that are needed to manage a Linux system.
What I can't afford is to have a system that does only some of the things above. Thus far installing Linux has always left me with at least two of my needed functions absent. I already know that trying to find out how to fix them will consume days if not weeks.
With Windows 2K (and driver discs) everything above "just works" out of the box.
Just for the record: Mandrake (a few times) RedHat (3 times), Suse, Caldera (long time ago), Knoppix, and at least two others.
Ok, I'll admit that I sort of went directly from BBSs to Netscape (the one with the giant pulsing "N", and hasn't it all been downhill from there...) about - what was it? - '96?
Consequently I never used gopher. Can someone save me the time of actually looking it up and tell us what the heck it did?
Or Archie and Veronica for that matter?