There are no novels on the Internet because nobody has the attention span or time to read a novel there.
Speaking as somebody who has read several novels on the Internet, I'd say you're wrong on both counts.
Also, the Internet is free. You might find some people getting shown ads in exchange for their reading, but nobody is going to pay enough to keep a writer from starving. All of the tip-jar and subscription services have pretty much proven that you can't get people to pay directly on the Internet.
I know of several e-book publishers who would disagree with you. O'Reilly's Safari is probably the example you're most familiar with. I understand they make a tidy profit on that service. I also believe that Webscriptions.net makes a substantial profit in the SF/Fantasy market and Ellora's Cave a good one in the Romance/Erotica market. You might not pay to read stuff on the Internet. I don't either (much). But there are enough people who will that services like these _are_ viable.
I don't see it being good for people trying to break into writing as a career unless they are looking to write press releases and advertising copy. The misspelled bad grammer that is taken as a given on the Internet is no way to polish your craft.
There are plenty of places where that "misspelled bad grammer" (sic) is not taken as a given. Ironically, a topic on the XKCD forum just today made the same point. It also discussed the definition of irony and misspellings of the word "grammar". You've also presumably never hung around on any message boards that are frequented by either serious amateur or professional writers. I've used a few, and almost uniformly the commenters on those boards use good grammar and spelling, and most even return to edit their posts if they spot a mistake in either.
BTW, for someone complaining about misspellings and grammar on Internet posts, you really should look at your own. I see two cases in your post of incorrect subject/verb agreement, one case of using a word as an adverb that is not actually an adverb, and one serious and obvious misspelling.
There are no "editors" just harsh critics, most of whom are not interested in grooming an author for success but just complaining about crap.
If there are no editors, you're looking at the wrong sites. Publishing needs editors, and there are plenty of professionally edited web sites you could be reading and/or submitting your work to. You just need to go out and find them.
[link]I have earned as much as five thousand dollars per month[/link] from Google AdSense on my articles. Quite a few people in the Webmasterworld AdSense forum report earning ten thousand per month or more.
At one time it was my ambition to be a dead-tree author, but no more. I'm happier publishing on the web. Read, for example, [link]my essays on mental illness and recovery.[/link]
Wow. And you managed it without stooping to shameless self promo... wait a minute.
all I got was a smelly lump of goo that didn't do much at all
You're not using enough petrol, then. The stuff should flow slowly, about the consistency of melted chocolate. There shouldn't be lumps. And it ignites really easily.
Of course, it ain't napalm, but that's a different story entirely.
The Anarchist's Cookbook is part based on a Spanish language urban guerrilla warfare manual that the CIA cooked up when they were promoting unrest in central America.
Err, no actually, it was written by William Powell in 1971, back when the CIA were far to busy in Laos to do anything in central America.
Check. It's in my kitchen, because I use it for the preparation of ham.
250g of calcium chloride
Check. In my tool shed, labelled "concrete accelerant".
videos of beheadings
I don't have any of those, but I'm pretty sure my web browser history would be interesting enough to find _something_ that suggests I have interests in line with some extremist group or other. That's not hard, you know. Not to mention those violent video games. I'm sure there are records that could be pulled off my hard disk that show I used to play the terrorists quite regularly in Tactical Ops. And in many of my games of Civilization, I played Persia, and Persia is an old country that was located in roughly the same place Iraq is now.
and he had recently visited Pakistan.
And I've recently acquired membership to attend a planned conference of radical thinkers, many of whom posit a future in which the current world governments have been replaced by a fundamentally different political structure, and who have serious beards. Is this or is this not more fundamentally suspicious than visiting the country of one's birth (I'm just guessing this, but it seems quite likely)?
Having read the Anarchist's Cookbook, I'd say anyone actually attempting to use the "recipes" to make explosives should be considered suicidal rather than terrorist.
There are multiple publications that have used that name over the years. Some are more reliable than others...
At this point, let's imagine you're a third party (and as such, not particularly involved in the Linux world as such -- to you it's just a platform among others) and you wish to ship your software for Linux. What are your options? Well, and that's assuming you're even going to bother trying to figure out the whole mess, you can: try to ship various packages (.rpm and.deb, really) in the hope of covering a sufficient user base, while hoping it won't completely break next time some distro upgrades to libwhatever.so.52; or you can try to get your software into the package repositories of all the major distributions (and thus become entirely dependant on the goodwill of each distro for access to your software); or you can try to package the software your own way and hope for the best (that's what Loki did for their games, for instance), which is still vastly suboptimal because it's a lot of additional work for you and you still have no guarantee it'll work well, due to countless issues [autopackage.org], the least of which not being that ELF has real, real issues where it comes to binary compatibility. Oh, and yeah, you can also just ship the sources in a tarball, hereby reducing your user base to the demographic of Linux geeks.
Compare with Windows: just put the binaries in a ZIP file or an installer. Done.
Perhaps you can explain to me why exactly you feel that doing the same is not plausible for Linux? Certainly it's how a commercial/non-free packages I've used in the past have been distributed (wordperfect, java, informix).
So you did something Windows specific. I'm utterly underwhelmed that it didn't work under Linux.
Windows it the market dominant operating system. Linux should support Windows data formats, this is clear. Linux has supported FAT since the very beginning and there are a multitude of methods for supporting NTFS (none perfect, although they are improving, slowly) also. Why not support Windows logical volumes? He said there's a solution out there but it's hard to use, so why haven't the major distributions picked it up and created a simplified install for it?
Right... and why are you complaining to _us_ about it?
Because (a) we're programmers, (b) he (apparently) isn't, (c) we want him to use Linux, and (d) he can't use Linux because it doesn't support the hardware he wants to use with it. We can do something about it substantially more easily than he can, and we also have motivation to fix it, so he wants to make sure we know what people like him really value.
This sounds to me like a great setting for a science fiction book (or a morals-related debate)- a future world where there is proprietary genetic code which only some people can afford and a gpl-style licensed genetic code which everyone can freely use.
If anyone here knows of such work that explores such issues (and not only the popular genetic profiling issue) please comment:)
I don't, but I'm willing to bet it's in Charlie Stross's file of future ideas to explore...
Ok, so what's my point? That in a lot of cases, I would not be surprised of there was some kind of food that people are sensitive to or which is eaten to excess that has compromised part of their metabolism. Taking insulin shots was a bandaid for diabetics. Taking something to inhibit PKCepsilon production is a BETTER bandaid, but it's still a bandaid. Someone's got to figure out the root cause.
Not everything is dietary. Sure, type II diabetes can often be controlled by dietary changes, but it usually still remains after that. Also many of your examples are about treating the symptoms of some problem, not treating the problem itself. What caused your unusual reaction to soy protein? It's not the protein itself, but something unusual about your metabolism. You can control it by avoiding soy protein, but that's exactly the kind of bandaid you're talking about. A cure would remove the need to avoid it.
I'd suggest, given strong evidence that type II diabetes has a genetic cause, that PKCepsilon overproduction is probably caused by a genetic defect. Perhaps there are multiple possible causes, but that one's quite likely, given current evidence.
My mother spent a large portion of her life on a 1600kcal/day diet. She worked 6 days per week on a physical job, getting more exercise each day than most of us get in a week. Then she was diagnosed with type II diabetes. Reducing her food intake any more than fractionally was implausible. Increasing her exercise equally. Fortunately, it seems the currently available medication is capable of controlling it reasonably, and her blood sugar levels aren't getting much worse at the moment. Also changing to a low carbohydrate diet seems to have helped. Hard to tell how long that will last, though.
people eat like shit and don't exercise. That's it. Pretty simple huh?
Not really, no. First of all, there's clearly a genetic component, the evidence for this is extremely strong. Also, it effects plenty of people who eat healthy diets. Various theories abound as to types of diet that may be more likely to cause it (high carbohydrate diets being a prominent leader, so everyone who put their effort into cutting fat out of their diet loses), and while overeating is a cause, it isn't necessary.
I'd be nice to eliminate the source of the problem, rather than have to litigate over the after-effects.
This will be enormously expensive for the state government. You can bet that they'll be seeing what steps they can take to prevent something like this happening again, and switching to a voting machine with an auditable paper trail will probably be one of the possibilities they consider.
Queue 500 students trying to watch 30 hours of lectures for "revision" (i.e., for the first time because they couldn't be bothered to do so beforehand) in the last 48 hours before the exam.
I seem to recall that the list of "authorities" was specified separately to the act, and that it originally included all sorts of ridiculous local government agencies, benefit agencies etc.
Does anyone have a reference to the current actual list?
The government can already get you to hand over your real keys. They can get a court order to open your safe deposit box. This is just an extension into virtual space of governmental power which ALREADY exists in physical space.
Not quite. This can be done without a court order. It can be done on suspicion alone; they don't have to prove that you have access, you have to provide evidence that you don't. They can order you not to tell anyone about it.
The gov thug comes and says "Ah you're using Truecrypt, we know about that cool feature they mention in their website, so hand us all keys".
And if you're stupid you go "Uh I only have one key".
Then: a) If you're not telling the truth, you're in deep shit. b) If you're telling the truth, you're in deeper shit, since there's no key #2 to give them.
(1) both a) and b) are the same amount of shit, whatever happens. (2) The law we're discussing here requires the police to show reasonable grounds to believe that you have the second key. I don't see any reasonable grounds here. Truecrypt is just about the most commonly used encrypted disk image system for Windows. Many people use it for only one volume.
I know everyone gets their panties in a wad about the guvmint decrypting their data, but I'm somewhat okay with it if a court is involved in the issuance of a valid search warrant.
This doesn't require a search warrant. A notice under this legislation can be issued by a police officer who has been authorised by his chief constable to do so, a member of Her Majesty's Armed Forces, or an authorised officer of Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (the UK equivalent of the IRS).
The law quite explicitly states that the police must demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that the person actually has a key before any violation of this law can occur.
That's not actually true. Here're the relevant sections, with added emphasis:
49 (2) If any person with the appropriate permission under Schedule 2 believes, on reasonable grounds--
(a) that a key to the protected information is in the possession of any person
[...]
53 Failure to comply with a notice
(1) A person to whom a section 49 notice has been given is guilty of an offence if he knowingly fails, in accordance with the notice, to make the disclosure required by virtue of the giving of the notice.
(2) In proceedings against any person for an offence under this section, if it is shown that that person was in possession of a key to any protected information at any time before the time of the giving of the section 49 notice, that person shall be taken for the purposes of those proceedings to have continued to be in possession of that key at all subsequent times, unless it is shown that the key was not in his possession after the giving of the notice and before the time by which he was required to disclose it.
(3) For the purposes of this section a person shall be taken to have shown that he was not in possession of a key to protected information at a particular time if--
(a) sufficient evidence of that fact is adduced to raise an issue with respect to it; and
(b) the contrary is not proved beyond a reasonable doubt.
The only precondition for issuing a notice is reasonable belief. The only condition necessary for an offence to occur is that the recipient of the notice didn't act on it, knew what he was required to do and knew he was not doing it. The only time it is required for the prosecution to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the defendant is in posession of the key is if the defendent has produced evidence that he is not.
I believe you are in posession of a key with fingerprint 33a08b9d1e07, because somebody sent you a message that was encrypted with that key, and they wouldn't do that if they didn't think you could read it (reasonable belief). You have been issued with a section 49 notice requiring you to either decrypt the message or surrender your key. You can't do this because you don't have the key, and have no idea who sent you the encrypted message. Can you provide any evidence that you don't have the key? Because if you can't, I'm not required to prove that you do have it.
No it doesn't, at least not in the way we're talking about here. Processes are run under a modified.NET runtime, so they don't have direct access to hardware, but we're talking about virtualized hardware that looks like the real computer here, which a substantially different affair.
No it says authorities can demand that the keys be handed over. Authorities can also demand someone be arrested, show up at court and serve a sentence in jail. It doesn't say whether or not a court order is required in this particular article, but I don't think its overly naieve to assume that it would be covered by the same laws that cover searching people's physical premises.
That's because you didn't do any research into it. As a matter of fact, no court order is required. An order can be issued by an authorized member of HM Armed Forces, the Police, or HM Revenue & Customs.
There is such a right, but it is interpreted in a narrow sense that wouldn't apply in this situation. See here:
Although not specifically mentioned in Article 6 of the Convention the right to silence and the right not to incriminate oneself are generally recognised international standards which lie at the heart of the notion of a fair procedure under Article 6. The right not to incriminate oneself is primarily concerned, however, with respecting the will of an accused person to remain silent. As commonly understood in the legal systems of the contracting parties to the Convention and elsewhere, it does not extend to the use in criminal proceedings of material which may be obtained from the accused through the use of compulsory powers but which has an existence independent of the will of the suspect such as, inter alia, documents acquired pursuant to a warrant, breath, blood and urine samples and bodily tissue for the purpose of DNA testing.
Slashdot Mirror
There are no novels on the Internet because nobody has the attention span or time to read a novel there.
Speaking as somebody who has read several novels on the Internet, I'd say you're wrong on both counts.
Also, the Internet is free. You might find some people getting shown ads in exchange for their reading, but nobody is going to pay enough to keep a writer from starving. All of the tip-jar and subscription services have pretty much proven that you can't get people to pay directly on the Internet.
I know of several e-book publishers who would disagree with you. O'Reilly's Safari is probably the example you're most familiar with. I understand they make a tidy profit on that service. I also believe that Webscriptions.net makes a substantial profit in the SF/Fantasy market and Ellora's Cave a good one in the Romance/Erotica market. You might not pay to read stuff on the Internet. I don't either (much). But there are enough people who will that services like these _are_ viable.
I don't see it being good for people trying to break into writing as a career unless they are looking to write press releases and advertising copy. The misspelled bad grammer that is taken as a given on the Internet is no way to polish your craft.
There are plenty of places where that "misspelled bad grammer" (sic) is not taken as a given. Ironically, a topic on the XKCD forum just today made the same point. It also discussed the definition of irony and misspellings of the word "grammar". You've also presumably never hung around on any message boards that are frequented by either serious amateur or professional writers. I've used a few, and almost uniformly the commenters on those boards use good grammar and spelling, and most even return to edit their posts if they spot a mistake in either.
BTW, for someone complaining about misspellings and grammar on Internet posts, you really should look at your own. I see two cases in your post of incorrect subject/verb agreement, one case of using a word as an adverb that is not actually an adverb, and one serious and obvious misspelling.
There are no "editors" just harsh critics, most of whom are not interested in grooming an author for success but just complaining about crap.
If there are no editors, you're looking at the wrong sites. Publishing needs editors, and there are plenty of professionally edited web sites you could be reading and/or submitting your work to. You just need to go out and find them.
[link]I have earned as much as five thousand dollars per month[/link] from Google AdSense on my articles. Quite a few people in the Webmasterworld AdSense forum report earning ten thousand per month or more.
At one time it was my ambition to be a dead-tree author, but no more. I'm happier publishing on the web. Read, for example, [link]my essays on mental illness and recovery.[/link]
Wow. And you managed it without stooping to shameless self promo... wait a minute.
all I got was a smelly lump of goo that didn't do much at all
You're not using enough petrol, then. The stuff should flow slowly, about the consistency of melted chocolate. There shouldn't be lumps. And it ignites really easily.
Of course, it ain't napalm, but that's a different story entirely.
The Anarchist's Cookbook is part based on a Spanish language urban guerrilla warfare manual that the CIA cooked up when they were promoting unrest in central America.
Err, no actually, it was written by William Powell in 1971, back when the CIA were far to busy in Laos to do anything in central America.
this guy had half a kilo of potassium nitrate
Check. It's in my kitchen, because I use it for the preparation of ham.
250g of calcium chloride
Check. In my tool shed, labelled "concrete accelerant".
videos of beheadings
I don't have any of those, but I'm pretty sure my web browser history would be interesting enough to find _something_ that suggests I have interests in line with some extremist group or other. That's not hard, you know. Not to mention those violent video games. I'm sure there are records that could be pulled off my hard disk that show I used to play the terrorists quite regularly in Tactical Ops. And in many of my games of Civilization, I played Persia, and Persia is an old country that was located in roughly the same place Iraq is now.
and he had recently visited Pakistan.
And I've recently acquired membership to attend a planned conference of radical thinkers, many of whom posit a future in which the current world governments have been replaced by a fundamentally different political structure, and who have serious beards. Is this or is this not more fundamentally suspicious than visiting the country of one's birth (I'm just guessing this, but it seems quite likely)?
Having read the Anarchist's Cookbook, I'd say anyone actually attempting to use the "recipes" to make explosives should be considered suicidal rather than terrorist.
There are multiple publications that have used that name over the years. Some are more reliable than others...
At this point, let's imagine you're a third party (and as such, not particularly involved in the Linux world as such -- to you it's just a platform among others) and you wish to ship your software for Linux. What are your options? Well, and that's assuming you're even going to bother trying to figure out the whole mess, you can: try to ship various packages (.rpm and .deb, really) in the hope of covering a sufficient user base, while hoping it won't completely break next time some distro upgrades to libwhatever.so.52; or you can try to get your software into the package repositories of all the major distributions (and thus become entirely dependant on the goodwill of each distro for access to your software); or you can try to package the software your own way and hope for the best (that's what Loki did for their games, for instance), which is still vastly suboptimal because it's a lot of additional work for you and you still have no guarantee it'll work well, due to countless issues [autopackage.org], the least of which not being that ELF has real, real issues where it comes to binary compatibility. Oh, and yeah, you can also just ship the sources in a tarball, hereby reducing your user base to the demographic of Linux geeks.
Compare with Windows: just put the binaries in a ZIP file or an installer. Done.
Perhaps you can explain to me why exactly you feel that doing the same is not plausible for Linux? Certainly it's how a commercial/non-free packages I've used in the past have been distributed (wordperfect, java, informix).
So you did something Windows specific. I'm utterly underwhelmed that it didn't work under Linux.
Windows it the market dominant operating system. Linux should support Windows data formats, this is clear. Linux has supported FAT since the very beginning and there are a multitude of methods for supporting NTFS (none perfect, although they are improving, slowly) also. Why not support Windows logical volumes? He said there's a solution out there but it's hard to use, so why haven't the major distributions picked it up and created a simplified install for it?
Right... and why are you complaining to _us_ about it?
Because (a) we're programmers, (b) he (apparently) isn't, (c) we want him to use Linux, and (d) he can't use Linux because it doesn't support the hardware he wants to use with it. We can do something about it substantially more easily than he can, and we also have motivation to fix it, so he wants to make sure we know what people like him really value.
Seems pretty logical to me.
This sounds to me like a great setting for a science fiction book (or a morals-related debate)- a future world where there is proprietary genetic code which only some people can afford and a gpl-style licensed genetic code which everyone can freely use.
:)
If anyone here knows of such work that explores such issues (and not only the popular genetic profiling issue) please comment
I don't, but I'm willing to bet it's in Charlie Stross's file of future ideas to explore...
Ok, so what's my point? That in a lot of cases, I would not be surprised of there was some kind of food that people are sensitive to or which is eaten to excess that has compromised part of their metabolism. Taking insulin shots was a bandaid for diabetics. Taking something to inhibit PKCepsilon production is a BETTER bandaid, but it's still a bandaid. Someone's got to figure out the root cause.
Not everything is dietary. Sure, type II diabetes can often be controlled by dietary changes, but it usually still remains after that. Also many of your examples are about treating the symptoms of some problem, not treating the problem itself. What caused your unusual reaction to soy protein? It's not the protein itself, but something unusual about your metabolism. You can control it by avoiding soy protein, but that's exactly the kind of bandaid you're talking about. A cure would remove the need to avoid it.
I'd suggest, given strong evidence that type II diabetes has a genetic cause, that PKCepsilon overproduction is probably caused by a genetic defect. Perhaps there are multiple possible causes, but that one's quite likely, given current evidence.
My mother spent a large portion of her life on a 1600kcal/day diet. She worked 6 days per week on a physical job, getting more exercise each day than most of us get in a week. Then she was diagnosed with type II diabetes. Reducing her food intake any more than fractionally was implausible. Increasing her exercise equally. Fortunately, it seems the currently available medication is capable of controlling it reasonably, and her blood sugar levels aren't getting much worse at the moment. Also changing to a low carbohydrate diet seems to have helped. Hard to tell how long that will last, though.
people eat like shit and don't exercise. That's it. Pretty simple huh?
Not really, no. First of all, there's clearly a genetic component, the evidence for this is extremely strong. Also, it effects plenty of people who eat healthy diets. Various theories abound as to types of diet that may be more likely to cause it (high carbohydrate diets being a prominent leader, so everyone who put their effort into cutting fat out of their diet loses), and while overeating is a cause, it isn't necessary.
So the plan goes:
1. Patent comic book style device
2. Subtract expenses from revenue
3. Profit
Hmmm.
I'd be nice to eliminate the source of the problem, rather than have to litigate over the after-effects.
This will be enormously expensive for the state government. You can bet that they'll be seeing what steps they can take to prevent something like this happening again, and switching to a voting machine with an auditable paper trail will probably be one of the possibilities they consider.
Queue 500 students trying to watch 30 hours of lectures for "revision" (i.e., for the first time because they couldn't be bothered to do so beforehand) in the last 48 hours before the exam.
I know it's what I'd have done.
Goatse.ch? Wow. You're really scraping the bottom of the barrel for domain names now.
I seem to recall that the list of "authorities" was specified separately to the act, and that it originally included all sorts of ridiculous local government agencies, benefit agencies etc.
Does anyone have a reference to the current actual list?
Yes, it's here. See section 9, particularly pages 41 - 43.
The government can already get you to hand over your real keys. They can get a court order to open your safe deposit box. This is just an extension into virtual space of governmental power which ALREADY exists in physical space.
Not quite. This can be done without a court order. It can be done on suspicion alone; they don't have to prove that you have access, you have to provide evidence that you don't. They can order you not to tell anyone about it.
The gov thug comes and says "Ah you're using Truecrypt, we know about that cool feature they mention in their website, so hand us all keys".
And if you're stupid you go "Uh I only have one key".
Then:
a) If you're not telling the truth, you're in deep shit.
b) If you're telling the truth, you're in deeper shit, since there's no key #2 to give them.
(1) both a) and b) are the same amount of shit, whatever happens.
(2) The law we're discussing here requires the police to show reasonable grounds to believe that you have the second key. I don't see any reasonable grounds here. Truecrypt is just about the most commonly used encrypted disk image system for Windows. Many people use it for only one volume.
I know everyone gets their panties in a wad about the guvmint decrypting their data, but I'm somewhat okay with it if a court is involved in the issuance of a valid search warrant.
This doesn't require a search warrant. A notice under this legislation can be issued by a police officer who has been authorised by his chief constable to do so, a member of Her Majesty's Armed Forces, or an authorised officer of Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (the UK equivalent of the IRS).
That's not actually true. Here're the relevant sections, with added emphasis:
The only precondition for issuing a notice is reasonable belief. The only condition necessary for an offence to occur is that the recipient of the notice didn't act on it, knew what he was required to do and knew he was not doing it. The only time it is required for the prosecution to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the defendant is in posession of the key is if the defendent has produced evidence that he is not.
I believe you are in posession of a key with fingerprint 33a08b9d1e07, because somebody sent you a message that was encrypted with that key, and they wouldn't do that if they didn't think you could read it (reasonable belief). You have been issued with a section 49 notice requiring you to either decrypt the message or surrender your key. You can't do this because you don't have the key, and have no idea who sent you the encrypted message. Can you provide any evidence that you don't have the key? Because if you can't, I'm not required to prove that you do have it.
Microsoft's new research operating system "singularity" http://research.microsoft.com/os/singularity/ runs every process in its own virtual machine.
.NET runtime, so they don't have direct access to hardware, but we're talking about virtualized hardware that looks like the real computer here, which a substantially different affair.
No it doesn't, at least not in the way we're talking about here. Processes are run under a modified
No it says authorities can demand that the keys be handed over. Authorities can also demand someone be arrested, show up at court and serve a sentence in jail. It doesn't say whether or not a court order is required in this particular article, but I don't think its overly naieve to assume that it would be covered by the same laws that cover searching people's physical premises.
That's because you didn't do any research into it. As a matter of fact, no court order is required. An order can be issued by an authorized member of HM Armed Forces, the Police, or HM Revenue & Customs.