Plain text is by far the most robust way to store any type of information on a computer. You mess up one byte in a binary file and you don't know the file format, you're screwed.
In a text file you can just go in and edit the file by hand or use numerous other tools (grep, sed, awk, etc.) to manipulate the data in the file. Knowledge kept in plain text makes life easier.
My question then is why is DRM necessary? Under the current system you can create a copy of a work that you own for your own use. Under this law you can circumvent DRM so that you can copy things for your own use.
Under the current system it is illegal for you to distribute copies of material you own. Under this law it is illegal for you to circumvent the DRM and then distribute the material.
Any DRM will be defeated by someone within days or hours of its release. Those who are not technilogically savvy however, will be less likely to do this. So the only people this hinders are the people who are making LEGAL copies. The ones breaking the law will be up and copying in no time.
The public realized that all the campaign finance reform proposals were coming from entrenched politicians. Unlike the typical media pundit, the typical citizen realizes that putting politicians in charge of this kind of reform is like putting the mafia in charge of police internal affairs.
That and they don't obey the current laws. What makes you think they will obey new ones?
Isn't that the truth...... It should not be up to the government to protect failing business models. It should be up to corporations to adapt or die.
Major corporations seem to be unable to innovate. Because of this they have to stop others from innovating. One way to do this is to pay off government officials to legislate against such innovation.
It would also be wrong to go back and in time to 1937 and shoot Hitler, before he gassed millions of innocent people because savings uncountable lives of children just isn't justified by taking away fewer than 10 lives of a raving lunatic.
The Temporal Prime Directive forbids this. That's why it would be wrong.
I have really been impressed by the way my East Asian spam looks in Mozilla. It renders the characters nicely. At least from my point of view since I don't actually know any East Asian languagnes.
That is true, The cases are nice and will actually hold several CDs. Why buy a package of Jewel cases when you can grap a bunch of perfectly fine CD cases from the AOL display at the checkout?
Clerk: Why are you taking all of those CDs? Me: I have lots of friends. Clerk: Oh. Can I be your friend? Me: No. Get your own CDs.
Not sure about XP but I installed Win2K on my machine several months ago. It took forever. When it finally finished nothing worked. Not even my Intel NIC. At that point it becomes a real pain in the ass to install drivers when you can't download them directly to that machine.
The Red Hat install on the same box took half as long, I ended up with a fully loaded, functional system, and I only had to reboot once during the whole install. On top of that everything but my sound card worked without me having to do anything extra. (my sound card needs an OSS driver. The card was free so I can't complain.).
For me, Red Hat was way easier to install than Windows.
Again, I have no experience with XP but I found 2K to be dreadfully slow, always swapping. This is on a 900MHz PIII with 384MB of RAM. It was just frustrating to use. Perhaps all it needed was some tweaking but again, Red Hat worked and was performing well right out of the box.
That's really funny. I didn't think there could be too many universities with that phone prefix situation.
I went to MTU during the 1995-1996 school year. I lived in DHH. It was too cold up there for me and my fiance lived in Kalamazoo. So I traded in a degree at MTU for the sub-standard education I got at Western Michigan University. I have a job though so I guess I can't complain too much. =)
Agreed. It my program he was mentioned only in passing. I had to do some digging on my own to find out about this individual who is arguably the father of Computer Science. You'd think the history of the profession and major advances would be covered. Sheesh.
Of course I also took a system administration course in which the instructor lectured for nearly two weeks on how dust is bad for computers. So I guess the institution I got my degree from is probably not the best example. =)
I'll second this. Mine is great. The 5.25" devices slied out on rails, the 3.5" device cages can be removed with the flick of a little metal lever. The spare drive rails have mounts on the bottom of the case. The thing came with a power supply with two fans and three additional case fans, plus there was room to add one right in the hard drive cage. The thing actually created a draft down near the floor. And the whole thing is really quite quiet.
Oh, and both the side pannel and the from lock. This is important since my 15 month old daughter just discovered how much fun power switches are.
I'm in a similar situation. I am a developer for a collection agency that contracts with various local and federal government agencies. i.e. Pay your child support and student loans and you'll never hear from us.
We have a DAVOX predictive dialer and I just want to reinforce what was said by the parent post. We have the ability to do whatever we want with various dialer results. If you have a device that sends a SITTONE we can choose to ignore it. So while a Telezapper can be effective it does not actually remove you from the dialer's database like the ads claim. It depends entirely on how the agency involved wishes to process the results.
Totally off topic. Did you go to Michigan Tech? I am pretty sure 487 was the campus exchange and 482 was Houghton. It's been a few years though...... =)
I really wish it had subselects. I use these all the time with other database packages. They are easy enough to work without when you are querying from a programming languange but when you just want to look at a couple of rows to double check something they make life a lot easier.
>>I wonder how accurate that poll was and how people interpreted it. Was it Freedom==Rights or Freedom==convenience?
Agreed. These are the questions to ask regarding any poll since polls are often designed to manipulate people. The statement on the radio presented it as freedom rather than convenience. I wish I had been more awake during Morning Edition and had caught who did the poll so I could find it.
>>How about real questions like "To protect yourself from terrorism would you be willing to give up your right to legal counsel?", "Would you give up your right to criticise the government?", "Would you endorse a law to curtail the information the press can give you?", "Would you be willing to revoke the 2nd...........
If you phrased a poll in this way I would hope that most everyone would say no, I am not willing to give these things up. The problem is that freedoms are revoked one little step at a time. People are willing to or not even aware that they are making small conessions. Next thing you know we do have people who practice Islam registered and in internment camps. It happened with East Asians in WWII. That was during the lifetime of some of our parents and most all of our grand parents. It wasn't that long ago! It could happen again. We have to be vigilant.
But you are correct. Freedom Convenience. It is not a right to be able to get through an airport in 15 mins or less.
Slashdot Mirror
Plain text is by far the most robust way to store any type of information on a computer. You mess up one byte in a binary file and you don't know the file format, you're screwed.
In a text file you can just go in and edit the file by hand or use numerous other tools (grep, sed, awk, etc.) to manipulate the data in the file. Knowledge kept in plain text makes life easier.
My question then is why is DRM necessary? Under the current system you can create a copy of a work that you own for your own use. Under this law you can circumvent DRM so that you can copy things for your own use.
Under the current system it is illegal for you to distribute copies of material you own. Under this law it is illegal for you to circumvent the DRM and then distribute the material.
Any DRM will be defeated by someone within days or hours of its release. Those who are not technilogically savvy however, will be less likely to do this. So the only people this hinders are the people who are making LEGAL copies. The ones breaking the law will be up and copying in no time.
All this does is hurt legit use.
The public realized that all the campaign finance reform proposals were coming from entrenched politicians. Unlike the typical media pundit, the typical citizen realizes that putting politicians in charge of this kind of reform is like putting the mafia in charge of police internal affairs.
That and they don't obey the current laws. What makes you think they will obey new ones?
Would an object 2km in size effect things like tides? Maybe it is too small for that but it is something to consider........
Yeah, this could definitely be considered anti-USA behavior. Maybe the FBI should investigate the individual who drew it. He's probably a terrorist.
SO that's what happened to my dog!
Isn't that the truth...... It should not be up to the government to protect failing business models. It should be up to corporations to adapt or die.
Major corporations seem to be unable to innovate. Because of this they have to stop others from innovating. One way to do this is to pay off government officials to legislate against such innovation.
It is as simple as that.
It would also be wrong to go back and in time to 1937 and shoot Hitler, before he gassed millions of innocent people because savings uncountable lives of children just isn't justified by taking away fewer than 10 lives of a raving lunatic.
The Temporal Prime Directive forbids this. That's why it would be wrong.
I have really been impressed by the way my East Asian spam looks in Mozilla. It renders the characters nicely. At least from my point of view since I don't actually know any East Asian languagnes.
That is true, The cases are nice and will actually hold several CDs. Why buy a package of Jewel cases when you can grap a bunch of perfectly fine CD cases from the AOL display at the checkout?
Clerk: Why are you taking all of those CDs?
Me: I have lots of friends.
Clerk: Oh. Can I be your friend?
Me: No. Get your own CDs.
Even more fun than trying to roll a quarter completely down the college hallway during late hours!
I used to roll 5.25" hard disk platters down the hallway during late hours. They made a very satisfying BONG when they hit the wall at the end.
I was sort of sad when AOL switched to CDs. I liked the floppies. I was collecting them. I hoped to some day tile a bathroom with them.
I think that Kickstart and an NFS server makes things simple enough. I've installed a 32 node beowulf cluster in less than four hours.
(Score:4, Informative)
Not sure about XP but I installed Win2K on my machine several months ago. It took forever. When it finally finished nothing worked. Not even my Intel NIC. At that point it becomes a real pain in the ass to install drivers when you can't download them directly to that machine.
The Red Hat install on the same box took half as long, I ended up with a fully loaded, functional system, and I only had to reboot once during the whole install. On top of that everything but my sound card worked without me having to do anything extra. (my sound card needs an OSS driver. The card was free so I can't complain.).
For me, Red Hat was way easier to install than Windows.
Again, I have no experience with XP but I found 2K to be dreadfully slow, always swapping. This is on a 900MHz PIII with 384MB of RAM. It was just frustrating to use. Perhaps all it needed was some tweaking but again, Red Hat worked and was performing well right out of the box.
And keeping all of those fluff items on actually cause quite a performance hit.
That's really funny. I didn't think there could be too many universities with that phone prefix situation.
I went to MTU during the 1995-1996 school year. I lived in DHH. It was too cold up there for me and my fiance lived in Kalamazoo. So I traded in a degree at MTU for the sub-standard education I got at Western Michigan University. I have a job though so I guess I can't complain too much. =)
Agreed. It my program he was mentioned only in passing. I had to do some digging on my own to find out about this individual who is arguably the father of Computer Science. You'd think the history of the profession and major advances would be covered. Sheesh.
Of course I also took a system administration course in which the instructor lectured for nearly two weeks on how dust is bad for computers. So I guess the institution I got my degree from is probably not the best example. =)
I'll second this. Mine is great. The 5.25" devices slied out on rails, the 3.5" device cages can be removed with the flick of a little metal lever. The spare drive rails have mounts on the bottom of the case. The thing came with a power supply with two fans and three additional case fans, plus there was room to add one right in the hard drive cage. The thing actually created a draft down near the floor. And the whole thing is really quite quiet.
Oh, and both the side pannel and the from lock. This is important since my 15 month old daughter just discovered how much fun power switches are.
I'm in a similar situation. I am a developer for a collection agency that contracts with various local and federal government agencies. i.e. Pay your child support and student loans and you'll never hear from us.
We have a DAVOX predictive dialer and I just want to reinforce what was said by the parent post. We have the ability to do whatever we want with various dialer results. If you have a device that sends a SITTONE we can choose to ignore it. So while a Telezapper can be effective it does not actually remove you from the dialer's database like the ads claim. It depends entirely on how the agency involved wishes to process the results.
The commercials are definitely misleading.
Totally off topic. Did you go to Michigan Tech? I am pretty sure 487 was the campus exchange and 482 was Houghton. It's been a few years though...... =)
India and Portugal are not what I would call third world countries.
Oh....and I am pretty sure that colored people are just like you and me.
I think you may need to educate yourself about the world a bit.
I really wish it had subselects. I use these all the time with other database packages. They are easy enough to work without when you are querying from a programming languange but when you just want to look at a couple of rows to double check something they make life a lot easier.
An apololgy was the right response given the situation. We should do our best to make sure that fewer apologies are necessary in the future.
Birthday. =)
....
I didn't feel like playing the name game.
zaphod......no
zaphod1.....no
zaphod2.....no
I figured if I picked an off the wall number I could spend less time trying to find an unused one and more time reading news.
>>I wonder how accurate that poll was and how people interpreted it. Was it Freedom==Rights or Freedom==convenience?
Agreed. These are the questions to ask regarding any poll since polls are often designed to manipulate people. The statement on the radio presented it as freedom rather than convenience. I wish I had been more awake during Morning Edition and had caught who did the poll so I could find it.
>>How about real questions like "To protect yourself from terrorism would you be willing to give up your right to legal counsel?", "Would you give up your right to criticise the government?", "Would you endorse a law to curtail the information the press can give you?", "Would you be willing to revoke the 2nd...........
If you phrased a poll in this way I would hope that most everyone would say no, I am not willing to give these things up. The problem is that freedoms are revoked one little step at a time. People are willing to or not even aware that they are making small conessions. Next thing you know we do have people who practice Islam registered and in internment camps. It happened with East Asians in WWII. That was during the lifetime of some of our parents and most all of our grand parents. It wasn't that long ago! It could happen again. We have to be vigilant.
But you are correct. Freedom Convenience. It is not a right to be able to get through an airport in 15 mins or less.