Slashdot has also been a mitigating factor to some of the most severe 'quakes', especially if you're discussing the information transmitted rather than just network traffic.
Case in point? 9-11-01.
CNN was gone. USA Today was gone. Fox News was gone. Slashdot, however, was providing first-hand accounts of the disaster/attack as well as discussion about them.
Some components, such as the HTML renderer, are *never* swapped to disk because they are used to render parts of the desktop, especially under XP. Of course the memory footprint for these compenents is 'hidden' under the umbrella of Kernel memory.
Moz 1.1 sits in about 32mb of ram under normal conditions. This can swell or even double if you've got a bunch of tabs open or are loading a huge, graphically intense page. Also, ram allocated to plugins like Flash, etc.. is listed as still belonging to Mozilla, so that figure can rise dramatically, depending on the webpage.
Windows 2000, for comparison's sake, sits in about 64 mb of ram. XP has a footprint that's about 128mb wide, but a lot of that does get cached out... especially the multimedia components that are otherwise active all the time. Since Winnt4 without IE 4 or 5 will comfortably operate in 16mb or ram or less, I can only assume that most of the ram needed for Win2k and Xp are used by services or components related to Intenet Explorer, Media Player, and in some cases, Office.
If you're in any way worried about loading speed, turn on the 'Quicklaunch' feature under the advanced options area in your preferences.
This loads Moz into memory on OS bootup, the same way that Windows loads IE components. It shortens apparent application startup time significantly.
Me, I don't worry about it, since you spend the time loading the app into memory either way, but have the option of unloading it to reclaim an extra 20 mb or so when you need to do something like open a large graphics file.
PlanetQuake3: How much does it help you to be able to edit the game in real time? Did you request that feature be added?
Tim Willits: It is great for aligning textures and working with the lighting. Yes, we requested that feature be added, it is an example of the designers working with the programmers to make the best possible editing environment for the game.
This sounds surprisingly like the Build engine, which was used to create levels for Duke Nukem 3D and a few other 3DRealms games. The editor had a complete instance of the engine so that a level designer could go in and build levels around himself, aligning textures and specifying shading levels all the while. It was surprisingly intuitive once you figured out which keyboard key was responsible for which editor action.
Okay, we've heard your reasons for not wanting to post cache versions of/.'ed sites, but what's your explantion for allowing a site to be slashdotted when the maintainer is actively trying to avoid having his machine melted down by the slashdot effect let alone the inevitable DDOS that will follow, given the nature of his service?
At the very best, this is kinda irresponsible.
Re:Skin Cancer
on
Solar Surgery
·
· Score: 4, Informative
If I undestand correctly, (and physics majors please correct me) UV radition is not transmitted along with color light radiation when light is reflected (by most reflective materials). Instead, it's absorbed by the reflecting material and transferred into heat. Therefore, what reaches the patient has no damaging UV component.
Michael Dell: Drinking, a Bud, hoping like hell that the SEC doesn't decide that I'm next.
Steve Jobs: Anyway, what do you think of MacOS on Dell Hardware?
Michael Dell: It'd be a pain in the ass, Steve. Bill's got my nuts in a pair of vice-grips. I'm trying to break loose, but if I make any moves at all, I start paying Microsoft through the nose. I've made a few deals to ship OS-less PC's with Freedos media in the box, but I'm not sure how that's going to work yet.
Steve Jobs: Well, let me give you an offer like this. Supposing you do manage to start selling PC's without Windows successfully. How about you make us a promise to ship a certain volume of PC's with Mac0SX for x86 along with a copy of Virtual PC or something similiar so your users don't lose out on all thier Windows Apps. It should cost about the same as a Windows XP license, if you don't include the cost of the Windows license they have to buy to get Virtual PC to work.
Michael Dell: I'll do you one better. I understand there are some guys out there who've done a really good job with the Wine project for Linux. Crossover, or something like that. I bet with a small infusion of cash, they could get a version ready for OSX in just a few months.
Okay, Apple, you have one of the most critically acclaimed Operating Systems out there, both in terms of usability, speed, and beauty. Why are you still putting all your eggs in the hardware basket? We all know that Darwin runs on x86. How much work do you really need to port the Mac0S shell over to x86?
If you're worried about losing control of your OS, please take a nice long look at Microsoft, a company that sells very little hardware (and outsources every piece of hardware it does sell, including the X-Box) but is one of the richest and most successful companies in the history of mankind, based solely on OS sales.
Develop and sell Mac0S for x86. You'll be glad you did.
It is impracticable to crack since it is hardware based and is based on dynamic protection. Unlike competition it is not based on passive protection (that is easily cracked) or remote activation (that is both offensive to customer's privacy and easily cracked).
Uhm. Okay guys. If I was a record producer who was living with (the very real) fear that my job was about to go away because of digital copying, the line above would make me think twice about using your technology.
62.3% of Linux users have a (warezed) Windows 2000 partition so that they can play Warcraft III
59.3% of Linux users prefer 'slender, young looking' anime babes to 'busty, voluptuous' anime babes.
only 22.3% of Linux users really think Natalie Portman is all the good looking, even in tight white spandex. Most were just thankful that JarJar only got 2 scenes.
93.2% of Linux users who read Slashdot have JonKatz permanently filtered.
32.3% - Boxers 44.1% - Tighty Whiteys 22.3% - Flappin' in the wind, baby!
62% of Linux users think that 'man' is a threatening name for a documentation application since it's vaguely homoerotic.
58.3% of Linux users think that all polls about free software are orchestrated by Microsoft and are unwilling to trust the results, even if they are positive.
When it comes to reputation, well, yes that's the only thing scientists have! They don't measure their worth through their bank balance. So what. It's the same with OSS.
While I don't mean to belittle you or your work, reputation-based compensation is problematic for the reasons stated in my post above. While it may be the way that scientists measure their own worth, scientists should be more willing to work as a team member and more willing to accept or review controversial work without dismissing it out of hand. I think that if scientists are compensated in a manner that doesn't take into account their reputation, this is more likely to happen. More scientists could do it 'for the love', and not fear not being able to work just because they don't get noticed by magazines and the national media.
For a growing number of years, science in academia and business has grown increasingly more corrupt. Part of this has to do with the profit-potential of controlling a particular scientific advancement. Look at all the companies who want to patent parts of the human genome for whatever reason. They want to be the only people who can benefit from it. This is mostly, but not entirely limited to the business science community. In the academic science community, the reason is much more simple: Ego.
Right now, we have a generation of scientists who've grown up in the wake of the most rapid scientific expansion in the history of man. That expansion has mostly petered out, but hasn't stopped entirely. Rather than expanding science, current scientists are working a lot more on applying the science we already have. (IMO, we'll probably have another period of rapid expansion once we start harnessing quantum effects for computation and communication.)
For the time being, there aren't going to be any earth-shaking breakthroughs in science like there were in the late 1800's and early-mid 1900's. Science is so complex that very little of it is going to come from single minds. The Higgs boson, for example, is almost certainly going to be disovered and observed by a team if it really exists, and not an individual. What glory there is in science is going to be spread more and more thin, even if we do have another period of expansive discovery in the near future.
While it would be nice to think that most scientists are in the field because they geniunely want to discover and help society, many of the people in the field are not. Worse, many of the people in the field are businessmen or are funded by businessmen who pressure them to produce.
In the worst case, you have a field populated by individuals who's livlihood is tied not only to their reputation, but also to their 'production level'. In this situation it starts working to the scientists' best interests to artificially inflate their own reputations and accomplishments and attack the reputations and accomplishments of other scientists.
There is a lot of work going on right now studying a possible relationship between anti-gravity and superconductivity that is completely dismissed by 'established' science as pop-science and unscientific nonsense. The reason that 'accepted' researchers are dismissing this work is not because they genuinely think it's bogus, but because it threatens them and their reputations. This sort of thing goes on all the time to greater and lesser degrees
How can this be fixed? Scientists have always had huge egos and the damage to the scientific process will take a long time to go away, but I think that a lot of corruption could be eliminated by forcing business out of academia.
Rather than see Universities taking grants from businesses in exchange for access to and control over the scientific process, I'd much rather see businesses pay a 'R&D' tax to the government which was in turn used to fund science programs at universities. Universities would, in turn, make any discoveries publicly available. It's not a perfect solution, but it would go a long way towards making the process less compromised and more trustworthy.
The BCDP is pretty much spot on for 'everyday tasks'. With current technology, and if laws are obeyed with respect to disability access, even the most severely handicapped persons can bathe, eat, work, and sleep with relative ease.
What many people fail to realize is that many disabled persons can't enjoy some of the finer aspects of life. Namely, getting it on with a member of the opposite sex.
I think that many researchers would be surprised at how pleased the benificiaries of their research would be if they would concentrate more on doing things like developing unobstrusive and comfortable devices that would allow those who are paralized, or of abnormal shape to enjoy sex like an able-bodied person. Also of need is research on sensory stimulation for those who have lost feeling in that part of their body.
Many female paraplegics, even if they haven't lost feeling in their lower half, have lost the ability to self-lubricate. For many of thse women, KY or Astroglide is not sufficient or not even an option. Research into non surgical ways to help women lubricate would not only benifit these women, but thousands of others who cannot self-lubricate for other reasons.
This isn't what's happening, though. You're comparing taking a copy of ROTJ, adding the musical number, and then selling it as Lucas's work to producing a musical number, letting people know that you're adding it into the movie for a small fee if they'd like, and then doing it for your customers.
The people who buy content edited movies *KNOW* they're getting an adulterated product. I think they're fucking prudes for even bothering, but they're not acting like the movies they are getting are the 'real' copy.
Re:I feel so sorry for this guy
on
Meet the Spammers
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Another telling quote:
Relentless anti-spam vigilantes have hounded the 35-year-old head of Empire Towers Inc., plastering Cowles' home address and phone number all over the Web. Spam recipients call to tell Cowles how they feel.
"These people will go to the lowest depths," said Cowles, of Bowling Green, Ohio. "I have some phone clips that would make you sick."
Ahem...
You want to talk about going to the 'lowest depths'?
It's just like the idiots who want to outlaw balacavas. Sure, they're 'terrorist masks', but if you've ever been in the cold for long enough, they're simply a necessary fact of life.
For a good deal of fair-use DVD software, DeCSS was a necessary step.
Case in point: Circumventing region restrictions. No way, no how are region restrictions in any way protected under copyright law. Neither is not playing the disk on the OS of your choice.
Even if you want to complain that he wrote code for Windows rather than Linux, here's an example from my own situation, since I use windows for media tools: For a long time, (until a firmware patch came out) my mobo would not support DMA to my DVD drive under Windows 2000. This means fairly slow access speed and jerky, out-of-sync playback in any of the good software DVD players for win32. By ripping the DVD to my harddisk, however, I can watch it at normal quality settings. Without DeCSS and rippers based on it, I wouldn't be able to do that.
Besides the really horrific idea of just 'discarding' their paper libraries in favor of digital media, (They can't be planning to really do this. It seems like conversion would cost far more money than it ever saved.) The introduction of digital textbooks is just too good an opportunity for DRM to get its stinking, rapacious tentacles into the virgin halls of academia in the form of pay-per-read, unresellable, instructional media.
Now if they were planning on introducing textbooks in entirely restriction-free formats like ascii text, PNG/HTML, or postscript, then I can see this happening, but I trust them to do this like I would trust a drunken frat boy at a catholic girls' junior high school.
The article never mentions DRM, but there is a telling quote about half-way through:
"We are heading toward a world where, instead of reading a bunch of Bill Gates' quotes, you want to have a video clip of him actually speaking that quote."
Thanks, but I won't be burning my bridges just yet.
...Should be forced at gunpoint to sit down and watch crappy re-runs of 'The Six Million Dollar Man' on Sci-Fi channel for hours on end.
The real problem here is the 'Six Million dollar' bit. Even if nano-tech gives all the bonuses that some of its developers think it will, it's an expensive technology to develop.
Those who can pay for the tech in form of life-lengthening drugs (rich white Americans) will reap the benifits. Everyone else will get the shaft.
Don't think it won't happen. Just look at all the massive shipments of expensive AIDS drugs, condoms, and educational literature on sexual safety that are being shipped to places like Zimbabwe and South Africa where they are desperately needed.
Oh? What? No shipments of AIDS drugs to third-world countries? Imagine that...
Well, thanks to my wife, we will probably get to only watch Trading Spaces all day/every day.
Oh, Jeebus, do I feel your pain, my man. We've got 100+ channels of stuff to choose from, including 1 or 2 channels that I actually watch from time to time --'Southpark' on CC and... uhm... gimme a second... oh yeah, 'Harvey Birdman' on CN-- (CN doesn't show subbed anime so it doesn't interest me) and what does the little woman want to watch? Trading Spaces. Designing for the Sexes.
<Sarcasm>Please can we have some more shows about seriously fruity people telling us what color of fuschia we should paint the insides of our bathrooms?</Sarcasm>
Mozilla only blocks unrequested popups. I still see popups all the time if they're a result of a click. There is no problem viewing sites that functionally open new windows. You must have been doing it wrong.
Sure, for this version of Mozilla. The first version that was in was... 0.9.2... I think. The first version of the setting (which you had to activate by editing Moz's ini file) blocked *all* extra windows. Period. There was no checking to see if they were requested or not or if they came from an 'onLoad' event.
Where are those popups everybody seems so angry about? Haven't advertisers stopped using them around the time Mozilla was released?
Recently, I decided to redo my personal site with a PHP backend for easier updates. In the process I decided to eliminate all javascript from my site. I had an image gallery that opened images in a popup, and most of the text files were targeted at new browser windows. Turning on Moz's first version (not the newer, slightly more intelligent version) of 'Don't open new windows', it elminated about half the content on my site.
Javascript is a wonderful thing, but it's just like anything else. If abused, it's ruined for everyone.
Now, I'm happier. My users are happier. Those of us using Moz are infinitely happier than those using IE.
I'm so rich that I think I'm going to blow my money on breaking records for my personal glory rather than trying to help people in need or advancing technology to help everyone.
Seriously, I can't help but think that Mister Fosset could get significantly more head-rush for his money by doing something like sky-diving than building vast, record-breaking projects that have very little effect on advancing technology. Imagine for a second that, rather than attempting to circle the globe in a baloon eight or nine times, he had held back a few years, used the money to improve his balloon technology, and tried again with better technology than the same technology over and over again.
I'm a very firm beleiver that throwing money at problems doesn't make them go away, but if he had spent *half* the funds from his balloon venture on something like inner-city literacy campaigns or AIDS research, I can't help but feel like the world would be a better place.
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot has also been a mitigating factor to some of the most severe 'quakes', especially if you're discussing the information transmitted rather than just network traffic.
Case in point? 9-11-01.
CNN was gone. USA Today was gone. Fox News was gone. Slashdot, however, was providing first-hand accounts of the disaster/attack as well as discussion about them.
Some components, such as the HTML renderer, are *never* swapped to disk because they are used to render parts of the desktop, especially under XP. Of course the memory footprint for these compenents is 'hidden' under the umbrella of Kernel memory.
Moz 1.1 sits in about 32mb of ram under normal conditions. This can swell or even double if you've got a bunch of tabs open or are loading a huge, graphically intense page. Also, ram allocated to plugins like Flash, etc.. is listed as still belonging to Mozilla, so that figure can rise dramatically, depending on the webpage.
Windows 2000, for comparison's sake, sits in about 64 mb of ram. XP has a footprint that's about 128mb wide, but a lot of that does get cached out... especially the multimedia components that are otherwise active all the time. Since Winnt4 without IE 4 or 5 will comfortably operate in 16mb or ram or less, I can only assume that most of the ram needed for Win2k and Xp are used by services or components related to Intenet Explorer, Media Player, and in some cases, Office.
If you're in any way worried about loading speed, turn on the 'Quicklaunch' feature under the advanced options area in your preferences.
This loads Moz into memory on OS bootup, the same way that Windows loads IE components. It shortens apparent application startup time significantly.
Me, I don't worry about it, since you spend the time loading the app into memory either way, but have the option of unloading it to reclaim an extra 20 mb or so when you need to do something like open a large graphics file.
PlanetQuake3: How much does it help you to be able to edit the game in real time? Did you request that feature be added?
Tim Willits: It is great for aligning textures and working with the lighting. Yes, we requested that feature be added, it is an example of the designers working with the programmers to make the best possible editing environment for the game.
This sounds surprisingly like the Build engine, which was used to create levels for Duke Nukem 3D and a few other 3DRealms games. The editor had a complete instance of the engine so that a level designer could go in and build levels around himself, aligning textures and specifying shading levels all the while. It was surprisingly intuitive once you figured out which keyboard key was responsible for which editor action.
Okay, we've heard your reasons for not wanting to post cache versions of /.'ed sites, but what's your explantion for allowing a site to be slashdotted when the maintainer is actively trying to avoid having his machine melted down by the slashdot effect let alone the inevitable DDOS that will follow, given the nature of his service?
At the very best, this is kinda irresponsible.
If I undestand correctly, (and physics majors please correct me) UV radition is not transmitted along with color light radiation when light is reflected (by most reflective materials). Instead, it's absorbed by the reflecting material and transferred into heat. Therefore, what reaches the patient has no damaging UV component.
Tell that to Avery Lee who got his code stolen. The FSF was very helpful in forcing the individuals who stole it to comply with GNU terms.
Being that Xvid is a larger project than Virtual Dub, I would be highly surprised to not see the FSF step in at some point.
Steve Jobs: Hey, Mike, whassup?
Michael Dell: Drinking, a Bud, hoping like hell that the SEC doesn't decide that I'm next.
Steve Jobs: Anyway, what do you think of MacOS on Dell Hardware?
Michael Dell: It'd be a pain in the ass, Steve. Bill's got my nuts in a pair of vice-grips. I'm trying to break loose, but if I make any moves at all, I start paying Microsoft through the nose. I've made a few deals to ship OS-less PC's with Freedos media in the box, but I'm not sure how that's going to work yet.
Steve Jobs: Well, let me give you an offer like this. Supposing you do manage to start selling PC's without Windows successfully. How about you make us a promise to ship a certain volume of PC's with Mac0SX for x86 along with a copy of Virtual PC or something similiar so your users don't lose out on all thier Windows Apps. It should cost about the same as a Windows XP license, if you don't include the cost of the Windows license they have to buy to get Virtual PC to work.
Michael Dell: I'll do you one better. I understand there are some guys out there who've done a really good job with the Wine project for Linux. Crossover, or something like that. I bet with a small infusion of cash, they could get a version ready for OSX in just a few months.
Steve Jobs: Is it any good?
Michael Dell: It plays Warcraft 3.
Steve Jobs: Hmmm...
Michael Dell: Hmmm...
Okay, Apple, you have one of the most critically acclaimed Operating Systems out there, both in terms of usability, speed, and beauty. Why are you still putting all your eggs in the hardware basket? We all know that Darwin runs on x86. How much work do you really need to port the Mac0S shell over to x86?
If you're worried about losing control of your OS, please take a nice long look at Microsoft, a company that sells very little hardware (and outsources every piece of hardware it does sell, including the X-Box) but is one of the richest and most successful companies in the history of mankind, based solely on OS sales.
Develop and sell Mac0S for x86. You'll be glad you did.
From Doc Witness's homepage:
It is impracticable to
crack since it is hardware based and is
based on dynamic protection. Unlike
competition it is not based on passive
protection (that is easily cracked)
or remote activation (that is both offensive
to customer's privacy and easily cracked).
Uhm. Okay guys. If I was a record producer who was living with (the very real) fear that my job was about to go away because of digital copying, the line above would make me think twice about using your technology.
62.3% of Linux users have a (warezed) Windows 2000 partition so that they can play Warcraft III
59.3% of Linux users prefer 'slender, young looking' anime babes to 'busty, voluptuous' anime babes.
only 22.3% of Linux users really think Natalie Portman is all the good looking, even in tight white spandex. Most were just thankful that JarJar only got 2 scenes.
93.2% of Linux users who read Slashdot have JonKatz permanently filtered.
32.3% - Boxers
44.1% - Tighty Whiteys
22.3% - Flappin' in the wind, baby!
62% of Linux users think that 'man' is a threatening name for a documentation application since it's vaguely homoerotic.
58.3% of Linux users think that all polls about free software are orchestrated by Microsoft and are unwilling to trust the results, even if they are positive.
When it comes to reputation, well, yes that's the only thing scientists have! They don't measure their worth through their bank balance. So what. It's the same with OSS.
While I don't mean to belittle you or your work, reputation-based compensation is problematic for the reasons stated in my post above. While it may be the way that scientists measure their own worth, scientists should be more willing to work as a team member and more willing to accept or review controversial work without dismissing it out of hand. I think that if scientists are compensated in a manner that doesn't take into account their reputation, this is more likely to happen. More scientists could do it 'for the love', and not fear not being able to work just because they don't get noticed by magazines and the national media.
Of course this is just my opinion.
For a growing number of years, science in academia and business has grown increasingly more corrupt. Part of this has to do with the profit-potential of controlling a particular scientific advancement. Look at all the companies who want to patent parts of the human genome for whatever reason. They want to be the only people who can benefit from it. This is mostly, but not entirely limited to the business science community. In the academic science community, the reason is much more simple: Ego.
Right now, we have a generation of scientists who've grown up in the wake of the most rapid scientific expansion in the history of man. That expansion has mostly petered out, but hasn't stopped entirely. Rather than expanding science, current scientists are working a lot more on applying the science we already have. (IMO, we'll probably have another period of rapid expansion once we start harnessing quantum effects for computation and communication.)
For the time being, there aren't going to be any earth-shaking breakthroughs in science like there were in the late 1800's and early-mid 1900's. Science is so complex that very little of it is going to come from single minds. The Higgs boson, for example, is almost certainly going to be disovered and observed by a team if it really exists, and not an individual. What glory there is in science is going to be spread more and more thin, even if we do have another period of expansive discovery in the near future.
While it would be nice to think that most scientists are in the field because they geniunely want to discover and help society, many of the people in the field are not. Worse, many of the people in the field are businessmen or are funded by businessmen who pressure them to produce.
In the worst case, you have a field populated by individuals who's livlihood is tied not only to their reputation, but also to their 'production level'. In this situation it starts working to the scientists' best interests to artificially inflate their own reputations and accomplishments and attack the reputations and accomplishments of other scientists.
There is a lot of work going on right now studying a possible relationship between anti-gravity and superconductivity that is completely dismissed by 'established' science as pop-science and unscientific nonsense. The reason that 'accepted' researchers are dismissing this work is not because they genuinely think it's bogus, but because it threatens them and their reputations. This sort of thing goes on all the time to greater and lesser degrees
How can this be fixed? Scientists have always had huge egos and the damage to the scientific process will take a long time to go away, but I think that a lot of corruption could be eliminated by forcing business out of academia.
Rather than see Universities taking grants from businesses in exchange for access to and control over the scientific process, I'd much rather see businesses pay a 'R&D' tax to the government which was in turn used to fund science programs at universities. Universities would, in turn, make any discoveries publicly available. It's not a perfect solution, but it would go a long way towards making the process less compromised and more trustworthy.
The BCDP is pretty much spot on for 'everyday tasks'. With current technology, and if laws are obeyed with respect to disability access, even the most severely handicapped persons can bathe, eat, work, and sleep with relative ease.
What many people fail to realize is that many disabled persons can't enjoy some of the finer aspects of life. Namely, getting it on with a member of the opposite sex.
I think that many researchers would be surprised at how pleased the benificiaries of their research would be if they would concentrate more on doing things like developing unobstrusive and comfortable devices that would allow those who are paralized, or of abnormal shape to enjoy sex like an able-bodied person. Also of need is research on sensory stimulation for those who have lost feeling in that part of their body.
Many female paraplegics, even if they haven't lost feeling in their lower half, have lost the ability to self-lubricate. For many of thse women, KY or Astroglide is not sufficient or not even an option. Research into non surgical ways to help women lubricate would not only benifit these women, but thousands of others who cannot self-lubricate for other reasons.
Damn, and there I thought I had a good idea for a Sci-fi story until I read this and found that someone had already beat me to it.
Still, it's an interesting idea to contemplate:
Aliens/Deities come down and notice some pre-hominid primates.
"Boy, these guys got potential, but not a lot. Why don't we KICK 'EM UP A NOTCH! BAM!"
Okay, sorry. I should be shot for the gratuitous catch phrase.
RAM, Harddrives, or even many processors.
While I would hesitate to speculate on this kind of technology, if introduced, would mean an end to the way we think about storage and processing.
This isn't what's happening, though. You're comparing taking a copy of ROTJ, adding the musical number, and then selling it as Lucas's work to producing a musical number, letting people know that you're adding it into the movie for a small fee if they'd like, and then doing it for your customers.
The people who buy content edited movies *KNOW* they're getting an adulterated product. I think they're fucking prudes for even bothering, but they're not acting like the movies they are getting are the 'real' copy.
Another telling quote:
Relentless anti-spam vigilantes have hounded the 35-year-old head of Empire Towers Inc., plastering Cowles' home address and phone number all over the Web. Spam recipients call to tell Cowles how they feel.
"These people will go to the lowest depths," said Cowles, of Bowling Green, Ohio. "I have some phone clips that would make you sick."
Ahem...
You want to talk about going to the 'lowest depths'?
It's just like the idiots who want to outlaw balacavas. Sure, they're 'terrorist masks', but if you've ever been in the cold for long enough, they're simply a necessary fact of life.
For a good deal of fair-use DVD software, DeCSS was a necessary step.
Case in point: Circumventing region restrictions. No way, no how are region restrictions in any way protected under copyright law. Neither is not playing the disk on the OS of your choice.
Even if you want to complain that he wrote code for Windows rather than Linux, here's an example from my own situation, since I use windows for media tools: For a long time, (until a firmware patch came out) my mobo would not support DMA to my DVD drive under Windows 2000. This means fairly slow access speed and jerky, out-of-sync playback in any of the good software DVD players for win32. By ripping the DVD to my harddisk, however, I can watch it at normal quality settings. Without DeCSS and rippers based on it, I wouldn't be able to do that.
Besides the really horrific idea of just 'discarding' their paper libraries in favor of digital media, (They can't be planning to really do this. It seems like conversion would cost far more money than it ever saved.) The introduction of digital textbooks is just too good an opportunity for DRM to get its stinking, rapacious tentacles into the virgin halls of academia in the form of pay-per-read, unresellable, instructional media.
Now if they were planning on introducing textbooks in entirely restriction-free formats like ascii text, PNG/HTML, or postscript, then I can see this happening, but I trust them to do this like I would trust a drunken frat boy at a catholic girls' junior high school.
The article never mentions DRM, but there is a telling quote about half-way through:
"We are heading toward a world where, instead of reading a bunch of Bill Gates' quotes, you want to have a video clip of him actually speaking that quote."
Thanks, but I won't be burning my bridges just yet.
...Should be forced at gunpoint to sit down and watch crappy re-runs of 'The Six Million Dollar Man' on Sci-Fi channel for hours on end.
The real problem here is the 'Six Million dollar' bit. Even if nano-tech gives all the bonuses that some of its developers think it will, it's an expensive technology to develop.
Those who can pay for the tech in form of life-lengthening drugs (rich white Americans) will reap the benifits. Everyone else will get the shaft.
Don't think it won't happen. Just look at all the massive shipments of expensive AIDS drugs, condoms, and educational literature on sexual safety that are being shipped to places like Zimbabwe and South Africa where they are desperately needed.
Oh? What? No shipments of AIDS drugs to third-world countries? Imagine that...
Well, thanks to my wife, we will probably get to only watch Trading Spaces all day/every day.
Oh, Jeebus, do I feel your pain, my man. We've got 100+ channels of stuff to choose from, including 1 or 2 channels that I actually watch from time to time --'Southpark' on CC and... uhm... gimme a second... oh yeah, 'Harvey Birdman' on CN-- (CN doesn't show subbed anime so it doesn't interest me) and what does the little woman want to watch? Trading Spaces. Designing for the Sexes.
<Sarcasm>Please can we have some more shows about seriously fruity people telling us what color of fuschia we should paint the insides of our bathrooms?</Sarcasm>
Mozilla only blocks unrequested popups. I still see popups all the time if they're a result of a click. There is no problem viewing sites that functionally open new windows. You must have been doing it wrong.
Sure, for this version of Mozilla. The first version that was in was... 0.9.2... I think. The first version of the setting (which you had to activate by editing Moz's ini file) blocked *all* extra windows. Period. There was no checking to see if they were requested or not or if they came from an 'onLoad' event.
Where are those popups everybody seems so angry about? Haven't advertisers stopped using them around the time Mozilla was released?
Recently, I decided to redo my personal site with a PHP backend for easier updates. In the process I decided to eliminate all javascript from my site. I had an image gallery that opened images in a popup, and most of the text files were targeted at new browser windows. Turning on Moz's first version (not the newer, slightly more intelligent version) of 'Don't open new windows', it elminated about half the content on my site.
Javascript is a wonderful thing, but it's just like anything else. If abused, it's ruined for everyone.
Now, I'm happier. My users are happier. Those of us using Moz are infinitely happier than those using IE.
I'm so rich that I think I'm going to blow my money on breaking records for my personal glory rather than trying to help people in need or advancing technology to help everyone.
Seriously, I can't help but think that Mister Fosset could get significantly more head-rush for his money by doing something like sky-diving than building vast, record-breaking projects that have very little effect on advancing technology. Imagine for a second that, rather than attempting to circle the globe in a baloon eight or nine times, he had held back a few years, used the money to improve his balloon technology, and tried again with better technology than the same technology over and over again.
I'm a very firm beleiver that throwing money at problems doesn't make them go away, but if he had spent *half* the funds from his balloon venture on something like inner-city literacy campaigns or AIDS research, I can't help but feel like the world would be a better place.