Yeah, well, I clicked the link and the website is sort of home-made and not at all up to the standards of mass media but also they have such highly sough after titles as Wolf's Bane and Wizards Delight, so I guess if you just finished a hot and heavy session of Dungeons and Dragons and your orb is polished to a bright crystalline glow then this might just be the bookstore for you. I am, on the other hand, looking for an ebook version of Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization or how about W.G. Sebald's acclaimed literary masterpiece Austerlitz... well, I am happy to plunk down $10 at Amazon for the convenience of a book that I can read on my phone or through my browser at any computer with Kindle Cloud Reader. And let's be honest... $10 is less than the price of a beer and a pack of cigarettes, so it's not like an ebook is really expensive. The problem with the "you are bound to find something you like" concept is that I don't want to spend an hour clicking through links because I already know what I want to read and I want to read it now, which is what makes the Kindle store so darned useful.
you need to know something that your network never heard of or doesn't know how to find. Like for example suppose you are looking for unprotected directories that contain.jpg files of both Jennifer Aniston and some obscure Flemish painter from the 18th century. The Google search box is all powerful in such situations. Or, to give another example, you are looking for papers relating to a particular topic in K Theory. Basically the Yacy approach is to go back to the good old days when me and my friends had pages online filled with links to other sites. If you were connected to a good network of links like that, then you sure could find just about anything quickly... but that was 1995.
I would rather be in a giant hole than on top of a high rise building in an Earthquake. I am sure they can design the whole think to basically float inside a shell of bedrock.... like shock absorbers on a car. If they are building the structure from nothing, then huge shock absorbers would be easy enough to install.
If Big Brother can use security theatre to deter threats then Terrorists can also use threat theatre to overwhelm the resources of Big Brother. In other words, a good Terrorist organization would spoof the system by creating a hundred Mike Fikri's all of whom are behaving suspiciously and because Big Brother's whole approach still depends on human observers verifying the data, the system's resources could be overtaxed to the point where it is useless. This is precisely what happened with anti-nuclear missile tracking systems: one missile actually carries twenty warheads that break out into individual missiles once they are over the continental US. So, instead of Mike Fikri planting a single bomb in Times Square, the Terrorist Network just has to spoof 50 bomb threats all over New York City. The bomb squad would not have the resources to filter and sort all the threats in time to find the one legitimate threat. Similarly with 50 spoofed Mike Fikri's: suspicious people all of whom belong to the same network but none of whom are really doing anything at all other than intentionally behaving in ways that light up Big Brother's threat screens. The system would become so overburdened with data that Big Brother would have to just arbitrarily start arresting everyone... which again just over taxes the system's resources. In short, it is a long term losing strategy that only works if the Terrorist Networks can be limited to a small number of real combatants which is unlikely.
I don't think it's right that they track online activity but at the same time I feel pretty confident they track quite a bit more activity than just that which they consider terrorist.... and it's not like this is new at all. The FBI under J Edgar Hoover notoriously had files on thousands of americans that they considered to be subversives who had actually never committed any crime. I wouldn't be surprised if they track a lot of online activity in order to steal industrial secrets from foreign companies. At least american citizens have a some legal protections at the constitutional level. But the CIA/NSA can do what ever it wants on the internet to non-americans and I am sure it does.
Sadly, there is on the one hand the desire to come up with ever more grandiose projects now that the space shuttle program is defunct and on the other hand looming budget cuts... so what we will get is a huge launch and a couple of years of data and then a giant chunk of metal hurling through space that no one can afford to keep track of any more. Civilization is collapsing.
I would think the NSA/FBI/CIA tracks visitors to every site they consider terrorist related anyway. Once you have gone online and proclaimed your terrorist allegiance then you would never be able to actually be a terrorist at all because the government would be able to track you and your entire social network by means of your online activity. In short, if you really are interested in becoming a terrorist, you would be a moron if you ever used a computer and the internet to learn more about it.
Anyone who has watched for any length of time knows the plays anyway and knows when a given team is running one of them. Its not like the routes the receivers run are somehow more interesting than the blocks. If you watched the game with a full field view showing all of the players, you wouldn't see any close-up drama at the line of scrimmage. Football is more complicated than any one camera angle can show. If all you know about a sport is what you have seen on television, then you really don't know that much about it at all.
Suppose they were successful in their monitoring and subsequent control of file sharing. It's not like the problem that are trying to address would be solved. I have a 250 GB external usb hard drive. For argument's sake lets just suppose I fill it with movies and music and MAIL IT TO YOU. You then fill the same hard drive with 250 GB of content that you have pirated and you mail it back to me. We are still sharing pirated content but just not over the interwebs. Ultimately, someone is going to have to come up with a way to stop people from pirating their content because there is no advancement in the overall legal situation by simply making it inconvenient for morons to share files.
Mostly people are getting upsold into computer systems that they perceive to be "better" for features that they barely understand and hardly need. Every purchase commits you to future purchases. Why would you get a single core processor when you can get a DUAL core processor. Why would you get 2 GB of RAM when you can get 4 GB of RAM? Who wants a 1.73 GHz processor when you can get a 2.5 GHz processor? I would say the average person shopping at Best Buy or on the Dell website has no idea what they are really buying when they are choosing between computers. The way computers and computer parts are sold is designed to be confusing if not misleading. Personally speaking, whenever I am shopping for Graphics Cards I try to pick the package that has the highest numerical value in the name of the card AND has the picture of either a very scantily clad warrior cartoon lady on it OR the package that has the most ferocious looking monster graphic on it because I believe that they put those pictures on the graphics card boxes to give me a general idea of the various performance related features I can expect. I never buy graphics cards that have pictures of fast cars racing on their packages. For example, recently I bought a Radeon HD 5470 instead of an nVidia GTS430 because 5470 is clearly a higher number than 430.
One small consolation in all of this that Novell roared back into a competitive stance with Mono development. Banshee, for example, has the potential to put them back on the map on the mainstream desktop.
Actually, I guess sudo probably wouldn't be installed right off the bat but yes he could just su to root. running the universe as root is dangerous so he would be better off creating an adminstrator/user profile like Jesus or something and then adding Jesus to the sudoers.
God said "sudo apt-get update"
and God saw the repositories were good
and God said "sudo apt-get upgrade"... and on the seventh day God was able to connect by wifi to his local hotspot after finally getting his ndiswrapper drivers working and he rested.
You don't own Lady Gaga's music just because you bought a CD that allows you to listen to it, so you can't transfer that property to another and you don't have a right to manipulate it however you want. That seems pretty obvious to me. I don't own Star Wars just because I bought a DVD with Star Wars on it. The purchase of the DVD only means that I own the right to watch Star Wars by means of the DVD on the intended playback device. You can't just go photocopy a Harry Potter book and give it to a friend either, incidentally. The only reason the photocopier example doesn't come up very often (and almost everyone accepts the legitimacy of that restriction) is that the format isn't very appealing: who wants a photocopy of a book? "Hey I just bought a Star Wars DVD, get George Lucas on the phone because I would like to set up a deal whereby he pays me royalties for my ownership stake in the Star Wars franchise!" You don't own any of it.
Well, 85 billion dollars really isn't that much money in the grand scheme of things and it took probably tens of thousands of hours of work by some of the best educated people on earth to accumulate it, but I digress... you don't buy music or books anymore but rather you lease the content for private use, basically. Its like saying "I rented this apartment and now I am moving it to another city" and then hiring a truck to come and actually haul away the physical structure that the apartment you rented is in. You don't own the physical structure. You don't own the content. You paid a fee to enjoy it.
Knol will never be Wikipedia and it was kinda wrong to try to make a competitive online encyclopedia product... like starting your own competing nunnery right next door to Mother Theresa's place. I jumped on the bandwagon with both Wave and Google+ but ulimately stopped using both. The problem with Wave is that even though it had a lot of useful features, it was too much to ask all of the people I collaborate with to switch to it as well... we already collaborate and we already share content and make revisions etc etc. We weren't exactly looking for a whole new system for collaboration. Google+ is basically a huge CRM system for advertisers and the fact that they won't give you an account without your real name being attached to it is a little odious really. I am sure it too will be discontinued.
I have an HTC Inspire with ATT. I can take out the sim card and use google voice with wifi. You can also use a gps spoofer app with the sim card inserted and it will report your location as being where ever you want. Otherwise, the main problem is that when you buy a contract you are buying time on someone else's network. They have omniscience when they want it, basically.
not being an expert, I thought.avi was a just container format... when I use acidrip for example, I select the x264 codec for the rip but the file is named with a.avi extension. Same for k9copy.
Someone would have to be in charge of The Truth in such a way that we could all objectively discern whether or not a given news story conformed to it. Professional standards ought to control the amount of bias injected into a reporter's account but oddly enough it has turned out that various news organizations will only report stories that have the correct bias injected into them, so its as if the notion of professional standards has been corroded from the inside of the profession since people with the "wrong" biases have professionalized their reporting styles. In other words, truth is mostly a social construct that depends on power and money legitimizing. If you can get enough wealthy people to start a news channel for you, and you can hire reporters to go out and report news in accord with your editorial policy, then you are a legitimate news organization on par with any other. The marketplace doesn't have to buy into your version of the story, but at least you have a right to air it (assuming you can pay for the broadcast air time). At the national and international level, the stories reported are almost exclusively political or financial abstractions, so there is no "truth" to report really. Maybe a 1% tax on capital gains will save the world from impending doom or maybe that exact same tax policy will destroy investment and lead to the destruction of the global economy. It would take a PhD in Economics to know the "truth" and even then there would be substantial disagreement. Most things today are like that unless you are reporting about proofs of mathematical theorems, and even then it often requires years of research to validate the results. I don't think anyone can say authoritatively what is going on in the world anymore.
I have never had any gaffer tape in my laptop bag, so I am interested to know how that might be more useful than an optical drive in any use-case scenario involving a portable computer. : )
Well, I use k9copy most of the time. I have a Windows 7 laptop with Ubuntu 10.04 in Virtualbox. In my virtual Ubuntu machine I have mencoder, acidrip, k3b, k9copy, and vlc. I suppose you would also have to have the Ubuntu-Restricted-Extras with libdvdcss2 installed. Since I have guest additions installed for Virtualbox, I was able to add shared folders to my fstab, so my video folder in my Windows 7 partition mounts automatically when I start my virtual machine and I can save my ripped DVDs to my Windows 7 folder with no problem. I can convert the fully ripped dvd to an.avi file with acidrip or k9copy and thereby watch it on my android phone. I also have a little acer netbook that runs Ubuntu for which I have an external optical drive that I use for ripping to save battery life on my main laptop.
So, honestly, it isn't that hard and it doesn't require handbrake at all and the optical drive is rather useful since I can use it with either one of my laptops.
Slashdot Mirror
OK: ME9H96KBF3 Anyway, it's clearly a honeypot to attract "hackers"
Yeah, well, I clicked the link and the website is sort of home-made and not at all up to the standards of mass media but also they have such highly sough after titles as Wolf's Bane and Wizards Delight, so I guess if you just finished a hot and heavy session of Dungeons and Dragons and your orb is polished to a bright crystalline glow then this might just be the bookstore for you. I am, on the other hand, looking for an ebook version of Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization or how about W.G. Sebald's acclaimed literary masterpiece Austerlitz... well, I am happy to plunk down $10 at Amazon for the convenience of a book that I can read on my phone or through my browser at any computer with Kindle Cloud Reader. And let's be honest... $10 is less than the price of a beer and a pack of cigarettes, so it's not like an ebook is really expensive. The problem with the "you are bound to find something you like" concept is that I don't want to spend an hour clicking through links because I already know what I want to read and I want to read it now, which is what makes the Kindle store so darned useful.
A thousand feet isnt that far down. I think the skyscrapers in Manhattan are sometimes anchored to bedrock that far down or at least close to that.
you need to know something that your network never heard of or doesn't know how to find. Like for example suppose you are looking for unprotected directories that contain .jpg files of both Jennifer Aniston and some obscure Flemish painter from the 18th century. The Google search box is all powerful in such situations. Or, to give another example, you are looking for papers relating to a particular topic in K Theory. Basically the Yacy approach is to go back to the good old days when me and my friends had pages online filled with links to other sites. If you were connected to a good network of links like that, then you sure could find just about anything quickly... but that was 1995.
I am pretty sure they would anchor it to bedrock.... and the surrounding soil would function like a big pillow wrapped around the whole structure.
I would rather be in a giant hole than on top of a high rise building in an Earthquake. I am sure they can design the whole think to basically float inside a shell of bedrock.... like shock absorbers on a car. If they are building the structure from nothing, then huge shock absorbers would be easy enough to install.
If Big Brother can use security theatre to deter threats then Terrorists can also use threat theatre to overwhelm the resources of Big Brother. In other words, a good Terrorist organization would spoof the system by creating a hundred Mike Fikri's all of whom are behaving suspiciously and because Big Brother's whole approach still depends on human observers verifying the data, the system's resources could be overtaxed to the point where it is useless. This is precisely what happened with anti-nuclear missile tracking systems: one missile actually carries twenty warheads that break out into individual missiles once they are over the continental US. So, instead of Mike Fikri planting a single bomb in Times Square, the Terrorist Network just has to spoof 50 bomb threats all over New York City. The bomb squad would not have the resources to filter and sort all the threats in time to find the one legitimate threat. Similarly with 50 spoofed Mike Fikri's: suspicious people all of whom belong to the same network but none of whom are really doing anything at all other than intentionally behaving in ways that light up Big Brother's threat screens. The system would become so overburdened with data that Big Brother would have to just arbitrarily start arresting everyone... which again just over taxes the system's resources. In short, it is a long term losing strategy that only works if the Terrorist Networks can be limited to a small number of real combatants which is unlikely.
I don't think it's right that they track online activity but at the same time I feel pretty confident they track quite a bit more activity than just that which they consider terrorist.... and it's not like this is new at all. The FBI under J Edgar Hoover notoriously had files on thousands of americans that they considered to be subversives who had actually never committed any crime. I wouldn't be surprised if they track a lot of online activity in order to steal industrial secrets from foreign companies. At least american citizens have a some legal protections at the constitutional level. But the CIA/NSA can do what ever it wants on the internet to non-americans and I am sure it does.
Sadly, there is on the one hand the desire to come up with ever more grandiose projects now that the space shuttle program is defunct and on the other hand looming budget cuts... so what we will get is a huge launch and a couple of years of data and then a giant chunk of metal hurling through space that no one can afford to keep track of any more. Civilization is collapsing.
I would think the NSA/FBI/CIA tracks visitors to every site they consider terrorist related anyway. Once you have gone online and proclaimed your terrorist allegiance then you would never be able to actually be a terrorist at all because the government would be able to track you and your entire social network by means of your online activity. In short, if you really are interested in becoming a terrorist, you would be a moron if you ever used a computer and the internet to learn more about it.
Anyone who has watched for any length of time knows the plays anyway and knows when a given team is running one of them. Its not like the routes the receivers run are somehow more interesting than the blocks. If you watched the game with a full field view showing all of the players, you wouldn't see any close-up drama at the line of scrimmage. Football is more complicated than any one camera angle can show. If all you know about a sport is what you have seen on television, then you really don't know that much about it at all.
Suppose they were successful in their monitoring and subsequent control of file sharing. It's not like the problem that are trying to address would be solved. I have a 250 GB external usb hard drive. For argument's sake lets just suppose I fill it with movies and music and MAIL IT TO YOU. You then fill the same hard drive with 250 GB of content that you have pirated and you mail it back to me. We are still sharing pirated content but just not over the interwebs. Ultimately, someone is going to have to come up with a way to stop people from pirating their content because there is no advancement in the overall legal situation by simply making it inconvenient for morons to share files.
Mostly people are getting upsold into computer systems that they perceive to be "better" for features that they barely understand and hardly need. Every purchase commits you to future purchases. Why would you get a single core processor when you can get a DUAL core processor. Why would you get 2 GB of RAM when you can get 4 GB of RAM? Who wants a 1.73 GHz processor when you can get a 2.5 GHz processor? I would say the average person shopping at Best Buy or on the Dell website has no idea what they are really buying when they are choosing between computers. The way computers and computer parts are sold is designed to be confusing if not misleading. Personally speaking, whenever I am shopping for Graphics Cards I try to pick the package that has the highest numerical value in the name of the card AND has the picture of either a very scantily clad warrior cartoon lady on it OR the package that has the most ferocious looking monster graphic on it because I believe that they put those pictures on the graphics card boxes to give me a general idea of the various performance related features I can expect. I never buy graphics cards that have pictures of fast cars racing on their packages. For example, recently I bought a Radeon HD 5470 instead of an nVidia GTS430 because 5470 is clearly a higher number than 430.
One small consolation in all of this that Novell roared back into a competitive stance with Mono development. Banshee, for example, has the potential to put them back on the map on the mainstream desktop.
Actually, I guess sudo probably wouldn't be installed right off the bat but yes he could just su to root. running the universe as root is dangerous so he would be better off creating an adminstrator/user profile like Jesus or something and then adding Jesus to the sudoers.
God said "sudo apt-get update" and God saw the repositories were good and God said "sudo apt-get upgrade" ... and on the seventh day God was able to connect by wifi to his local hotspot after finally getting his ndiswrapper drivers working and he rested.
You don't own Lady Gaga's music just because you bought a CD that allows you to listen to it, so you can't transfer that property to another and you don't have a right to manipulate it however you want. That seems pretty obvious to me. I don't own Star Wars just because I bought a DVD with Star Wars on it. The purchase of the DVD only means that I own the right to watch Star Wars by means of the DVD on the intended playback device. You can't just go photocopy a Harry Potter book and give it to a friend either, incidentally. The only reason the photocopier example doesn't come up very often (and almost everyone accepts the legitimacy of that restriction) is that the format isn't very appealing: who wants a photocopy of a book? "Hey I just bought a Star Wars DVD, get George Lucas on the phone because I would like to set up a deal whereby he pays me royalties for my ownership stake in the Star Wars franchise!" You don't own any of it.
Well, 85 billion dollars really isn't that much money in the grand scheme of things and it took probably tens of thousands of hours of work by some of the best educated people on earth to accumulate it, but I digress... you don't buy music or books anymore but rather you lease the content for private use, basically. Its like saying "I rented this apartment and now I am moving it to another city" and then hiring a truck to come and actually haul away the physical structure that the apartment you rented is in. You don't own the physical structure. You don't own the content. You paid a fee to enjoy it.
Knol will never be Wikipedia and it was kinda wrong to try to make a competitive online encyclopedia product... like starting your own competing nunnery right next door to Mother Theresa's place. I jumped on the bandwagon with both Wave and Google+ but ulimately stopped using both. The problem with Wave is that even though it had a lot of useful features, it was too much to ask all of the people I collaborate with to switch to it as well... we already collaborate and we already share content and make revisions etc etc. We weren't exactly looking for a whole new system for collaboration. Google+ is basically a huge CRM system for advertisers and the fact that they won't give you an account without your real name being attached to it is a little odious really. I am sure it too will be discontinued.
I have an HTC Inspire with ATT. I can take out the sim card and use google voice with wifi. You can also use a gps spoofer app with the sim card inserted and it will report your location as being where ever you want. Otherwise, the main problem is that when you buy a contract you are buying time on someone else's network. They have omniscience when they want it, basically.
not being an expert, I thought .avi was a just container format... when I use acidrip for example, I select the x264 codec for the rip but the file is named with a .avi extension. Same for k9copy.
Someone would have to be in charge of The Truth in such a way that we could all objectively discern whether or not a given news story conformed to it. Professional standards ought to control the amount of bias injected into a reporter's account but oddly enough it has turned out that various news organizations will only report stories that have the correct bias injected into them, so its as if the notion of professional standards has been corroded from the inside of the profession since people with the "wrong" biases have professionalized their reporting styles. In other words, truth is mostly a social construct that depends on power and money legitimizing. If you can get enough wealthy people to start a news channel for you, and you can hire reporters to go out and report news in accord with your editorial policy, then you are a legitimate news organization on par with any other. The marketplace doesn't have to buy into your version of the story, but at least you have a right to air it (assuming you can pay for the broadcast air time). At the national and international level, the stories reported are almost exclusively political or financial abstractions, so there is no "truth" to report really. Maybe a 1% tax on capital gains will save the world from impending doom or maybe that exact same tax policy will destroy investment and lead to the destruction of the global economy. It would take a PhD in Economics to know the "truth" and even then there would be substantial disagreement. Most things today are like that unless you are reporting about proofs of mathematical theorems, and even then it often requires years of research to validate the results. I don't think anyone can say authoritatively what is going on in the world anymore.
I have never had any gaffer tape in my laptop bag, so I am interested to know how that might be more useful than an optical drive in any use-case scenario involving a portable computer. : )
Well, I use k9copy most of the time. I have a Windows 7 laptop with Ubuntu 10.04 in Virtualbox. In my virtual Ubuntu machine I have mencoder, acidrip, k3b, k9copy, and vlc. I suppose you would also have to have the Ubuntu-Restricted-Extras with libdvdcss2 installed. Since I have guest additions installed for Virtualbox, I was able to add shared folders to my fstab, so my video folder in my Windows 7 partition mounts automatically when I start my virtual machine and I can save my ripped DVDs to my Windows 7 folder with no problem. I can convert the fully ripped dvd to an .avi file with acidrip or k9copy and thereby watch it on my android phone. I also have a little acer netbook that runs Ubuntu for which I have an external optical drive that I use for ripping to save battery life on my main laptop.
So, honestly, it isn't that hard and it doesn't require handbrake at all and the optical drive is rather useful since I can use it with either one of my laptops.
there are known knowns, unknown knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns.