Writable or rewritable CD media have, as their primary purpose, the storage of relatively large amounts of data on easily portable media for which there is a widespread and popular read-device
This is correct. The great majority of this data is either illegally copied music or software.
That is the real world, deal with it.
I know you probably want to assuage your guilty conscience by portraying music executives/copyright laws etc as 'evil', but the simple fact is that these things are there to protect the artist.
My primary data type is the music I make, Mr ME, and I am very annoyed when I find people pirating it. This is why I welcome these laws.
You are an Artist. You have spent Two years working on your latest album. You have spent countless time trying to make it.
Now it's payback time.
Or so you thought. It turns out that everyone has the capacity to ruin your work & livelyhood at a whim. Wouldn't you want to license this technology?
Imagine you work as a programmer (as you probably do) and furthermore that you make your money from the code you write.
Now imagine that somehow someone has invented a way of getting the source from your binaries and copying at will. Wouldn't you be annoyed? The boot would be on the other foot then, wouldn't it?
I purport that these measure are perfectly reasonable. I mean, what are 99% of CD-RW's used for anyway? It is right and good that the artists should be compensated.
Y2K was a disaster. In America nothing happened because you were very well prepared. The third world did not suffer because it has very few modern computing devices anyway.
But the so called 'second world' did suffer, though it was not reported widely in the america-centric news.
I went to Russia and Poland earlier this year in a professional capacity, and came across many word-of-mouth tales of malfunctions and problems. Governments in these countries tend to cover up such problems, but they do exist, even still, I can assure you.
I am as enthusiastic about Open Source Software as the next guy on this site, but the increasingly publicity-orientated motives of the community worries me intensely.
What is to stop the community losing sight of it's goals when it becomes obsessed with user statistics & popularity contests? The community should be about word-of-mouth propogation, not mass media hype. The message that open source software from the FSF sends out is only achieved through direct use, not by glitzy advertising campaigns & talking heads.
The community approach has worked very well so far, why shouldn't work in the future?
The problem with the HURD is that it is still obsessed with the microkernel architecture. This may have seemed like a good bet ten years ago, but as Linux has shown, Microkernels are no big deal. They are inefficient, resource intensive, and the chances of a code fork with Hurd are even greater than for Linux, due to the easier understandibility of the source code.
What SysAdmin in charge of a mission critical system would take it on with such issues? I can't think of any.
Having said that, I'd like to give it a whirl on my home system anyway;)
As I understand it, the ratio of MIPS per 1000 transistors has been decreasing at a rate of about 15% per year since the birth of computing. Fortunately, the rate of increase of number of transistors greatly outstrips this, so processors do get faster. The P$ will not show it's real advantages until it is running in excess of 2GHz, because that is what it is designed for.
For example, if you compared a Z80 running at 1MHz with a P3 running at 1MHz, you would find that the Z*) does much more work.
Anyway, there were two codes used by the Japanese. There was the JN25 codes, which were based on a traditional codebook system, and were deciphered by a 325 man team at the NSA. The other system was called Purple (by the Americans). From the site:
The Japanese had obtained an Enigma machine from Germany, and decided to use the same principle to encode their messages. Rather than using rotors operated by keypresses from the keyboard, they employed electro-mechanical "stepping switches". An electromagnet, acting through a pawl and ratchet mechanism, caused rotating contacts to pass over banks of electrical contacts. The overall machine, although constructed differently, was equivalent to a four-rotor Enigma with electric typewriters on each side. A message was entered on one typewriter, and printed out, encoded, on the second. Although this eliminated some errors in copying an encode from illuminated light bulbs, the weight of the stepping switches and typewriters made it far less portable than the German field Enigma. The Japanese machine was called "97-shiki o-bun in-ji-ki," or informally "J." The Americans called their diplomatic code "Purple" and the intercepts "magic."
I know what you mean! I'm always reading the personals in the Telegraph for the same reason, ever since they had a dialogue with the Mardi Gras Bomber in their personals. They alway seem to have a 1920's conspiracy type style about them, and look like this:
Apparantly London is a hot bed of intrigue because it is the first Major English speaking City with a reasonable proximity to Europe, Middle East, America etc. I've read that lots of fanatic Middle East terrorist groups organise from London in particular, including old Bin Laden's.
Thing is, most of the messages are probably just adulterers;)
You are restricted by capitalism though: capitalism is all about owning things, about increasing ones wealth. Everthing that you own and control is one less thing for me to own. It's a zero sum restrictive game in it's most fundamental sense.
Have some imagination! There are a whole host of things that society prohibits me from doing. I can't go out and live off the land - the land is owned. I can't go and take up a hunter-gatherer existence, for the animals are owned by society. This is why I would argue that a decent Dole Payment should be given to anyone who wants it in perpetuity so that people don't have to live in society. Society is obligated to do this, IMO, because it has taken everything away.
Democratic software development won't work. The problem is that is the developers are put in charge, they will add endless k001 features that the great majority of normal users will neither want nor care about. Software developers greatly overestimate the intelligence of the average computer user, so you need a strong 'Gatesian' hand, if you will, to force them to develop for the user, and not for each other.
...why they don't have an infinite number of Top Level domains? Or at least, as many as people desire. Is there some technical reason for this? Or do ICAAN have some unknown interest in keeping the TLD's to a minimum?
I used to build intelligent cyborgs made entirely from Lego, but they got ambitious and developed a strange philosophy that involved Materialism and the Atomic nature of Matter, and when they had sex it was messy. Plus, they got jealous of my mechano set. So, after a struggle, I disassembled them.
I think people should have the right to use a mobile phone, nomatter how dangerous the phone is. But only if they are aware of the risks, and are capable of taking the decision. Children should not be allowed mobiles, IMO. Indeed, here in Britain the government is taking steps to reduce mobile usage in children under 16. Whether it will be compulsory I don't know, but I don't see how we can be inconsistant in this matter, so hopefully it will be compulsory.
This demonstrates one of the few benefits of a welfare state, I suppose - the government can make sure that the people are properly looked after.
I was speaking to a doctor chappie in Harley St, London the other day and he had a damning & startling assesment of the Iridium network. He said that the wavelength that the Iridium phones use resonates with the average head almost perfectly, and that because the phones have to be *extremely* powerful to communicate with orbiting satellites, the degree of heating in the Brain is much more pronounced compared to normal mobiles. He estimated that the chance of cancer was up to fifteen times more likely.
My question is, why has there been such a devastating silence on this issue? Considering the risks, it's remarkable that so few people have heard of this.
If you ask me, it shows why Nasa need to get a new PR agency. Jesus, the stupid american public will say, why bother spending a fortune to send it into space to find this out? I could find this out in my own backyard.
It's missions like this that screw NASA over, and get congress on their back. NASA should focus on more commercial missions, so as to keep these people satisfied.
I mean, I still don't understand this concept. Generally, to make money you have to sell something or some service, but AOL don't do this with Mozilla. So how can they possibly make cash?
One of my girlfriends says that anybody who gives software away for free is a wannabee monopolist, because they will just introduce charges later when the competition is squashed. Is this true in the case of AOL? Or other software vendors? I'm not sure if I believe her, should I?
She used to work for SuSE's London headquarters, so I suppose she should know about these things.
How much proof is there that RSI and Carpal tunnel are actually real? You see, chaps, here in Britain these laments have a reputation as being those of malingerers and the like. I have a personal interest in this, because one of my girlfriends has RSI, but her boss doesn't take it seriously.
Watch Microsoft write the code and then watch the party most sympathetic to microsoft get elected.
A simple voting system, such as a paper and pencil means everybody knows whats going on. Electronic voting allows for fraud through obscurity, because only a few people understand how the system works.
Slashdot Mirror
Wages are the bottom line for any employer-employee relationship. Anyone who says otherwise is deluding himself.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
What irks me is that there does not seem to be any debate about the potential dangers of nanotech.
Make no mistake, nanotech could destroy the world. It would take just one rogue miachine to run amok to reduce the world to sludge.
And yet the techy community is, as usual, utterly blase about such issues.
These questions need to be considered now.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
This is correct. The great majority of this data is either illegally copied music or software.
That is the real world, deal with it.
I know you probably want to assuage your guilty conscience by portraying music executives/copyright laws etc as 'evil', but the simple fact is that these things are there to protect the artist.
My primary data type is the music I make, Mr ME, and I am very annoyed when I find people pirating it. This is why I welcome these laws.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
If you do, you have a very optomistic view of human nature.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
Now it's payback time.
Or so you thought. It turns out that everyone has the capacity to ruin your work & livelyhood at a whim. Wouldn't you want to license this technology?
Imagine you work as a programmer (as you probably do) and furthermore that you make your money from the code you write.
Now imagine that somehow someone has invented a way of getting the source from your binaries and copying at will. Wouldn't you be annoyed? The boot would be on the other foot then, wouldn't it?
I purport that these measure are perfectly reasonable. I mean, what are 99% of CD-RW's used for anyway? It is right and good that the artists should be compensated.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
But the so called 'second world' did suffer, though it was not reported widely in the america-centric news.
I went to Russia and Poland earlier this year in a professional capacity, and came across many word-of-mouth tales of malfunctions and problems. Governments in these countries tend to cover up such problems, but they do exist, even still, I can assure you.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
What is to stop the community losing sight of it's goals when it becomes obsessed with user statistics & popularity contests? The community should be about word-of-mouth propogation, not mass media hype. The message that open source software from the FSF sends out is only achieved through direct use, not by glitzy advertising campaigns & talking heads.
The community approach has worked very well so far, why shouldn't work in the future?
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
What SysAdmin in charge of a mission critical system would take it on with such issues? I can't think of any.
Having said that, I'd like to give it a whirl on my home system anyway ;)
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
For example, if you compared a Z80 running at 1MHz with a P3 running at 1MHz, you would find that the Z*) does much more work.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
Anyway, there were two codes used by the Japanese. There was the JN25 codes, which were based on a traditional codebook system, and were deciphered by a 325 man team at the NSA. The other system was called Purple (by the Americans). From the site:
The Japanese had obtained an Enigma machine from Germany, and decided to use the same principle to encode their messages. Rather than using rotors operated by keypresses from the keyboard, they employed electro-mechanical "stepping switches". An electromagnet, acting through a pawl and ratchet mechanism, caused rotating contacts to pass over banks of electrical contacts. The overall machine, although constructed differently, was equivalent to a four-rotor Enigma with electric typewriters on each side. A message was entered on one typewriter, and printed out, encoded, on the second. Although this eliminated some errors in copying an encode from illuminated light bulbs, the weight of the stepping switches and typewriters made it far less portable than the German field Enigma. The Japanese machine was called "97-shiki o-bun in-ji-ki," or informally "J." The Americans called their diplomatic code "Purple" and the intercepts "magic."
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
Cerberus:
Please connect Thor, 700. Thanks, Stephan.
Apparantly London is a hot bed of intrigue because it is the first Major English speaking City with a reasonable proximity to Europe, Middle East, America etc. I've read that lots of fanatic Middle East terrorist groups organise from London in particular, including old Bin Laden's.
Thing is, most of the messages are probably just adulterers ;)
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
Have some imagination! There are a whole host of things that society prohibits me from doing. I can't go out and live off the land - the land is owned. I can't go and take up a hunter-gatherer existence, for the animals are owned by society. This is why I would argue that a decent Dole Payment should be given to anyone who wants it in perpetuity so that people don't have to live in society. Society is obligated to do this, IMO, because it has taken everything away.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
DOH!
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
This demonstrates one of the few benefits of a welfare state, I suppose - the government can make sure that the people are properly looked after.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
My question is, why has there been such a devastating silence on this issue? Considering the risks, it's remarkable that so few people have heard of this.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
It's missions like this that screw NASA over, and get congress on their back. NASA should focus on more commercial missions, so as to keep these people satisfied.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
One of my girlfriends says that anybody who gives software away for free is a wannabee monopolist, because they will just introduce charges later when the competition is squashed. Is this true in the case of AOL? Or other software vendors? I'm not sure if I believe her, should I?
She used to work for SuSE's London headquarters, so I suppose she should know about these things.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
A simple voting system, such as a paper and pencil means everybody knows whats going on. Electronic voting allows for fraud through obscurity, because only a few people understand how the system works.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.