"...Inevitably a human will introduce microbes to the planet... and contaminate it..."
...and back here at Mission Control, Bob, they're all speechless. Noone seems to even want to try to explain why Astronaut Nolan decided to write his name on the Maritian surface with his own urine. Back to you Bob...
I want to be watching when the tech turns on the high-pitched squeal sound right when the rover gets close to an outcropping that looks strangely like a large monolith.
This is one of the reasons that Americans should be totally incensed at the millions of dollars that the government (both state and federal) spent on their antitrust trials. If left alone, the market will fix problems like monopolies. Granted, it may take a little time, and the result is often not the total destruction of the monopolistic company, but the playing field will become leveled one way or another.
Nothing that the government did has been a factor in Linux growing market share. So next time you start to talk about the big bad evil Microsoft, perhaps you should consider how much money you've given to Microsoft and compare that to how much has been taken from you by Uncle Sam to fund frivolous lawsuits and pork barrel projects.
The key to being successful is to provide a better quality service or product than the other fella. This is true of businesses, and this is true of individual people. Most people I know who I would consider successful are so because they work hard at producing quality work in everything they do. And many people I know who are less than successful are often more concerned with worrying about what other people are doing and focused on complaining as loud as they can about how they haven't gotten the same breaks as the successful people.
I don't intend for this to turn in to a tirade, but I do believe that the power of market forces are often underestimated. A truly free market is one of the most just and powerful forces on the planet. It is not meant to be taken lightly and shackled for the sake of expedience.
After all the hubbub about the Saruman scenes, I'm surprised there's noone blurping about whether they're in or out.
I was a petition signer, and hope that the scenes made it back into the theatrical release. Of course I'm still undecided if that is a big enough issue to not see the film in the theatre. (Perhaps the number of small children in the lobby will be the stronger deciding factor)
"H.R. 49 would permanently extend a moratorium on certain state and local taxation of online services and electronic commerce, and would eliminate an exception to the prohibition for certain states..."
It looks to me that this is just a little bit of staging for a future Federal tax on internet usage, perhaps interlocked with a Federal internet licensing/watchdog effort pushed through under the guise of "Homeland Security".
The rhetoric would go something like "...CyberSpace has become such an integral part of this nation's economy that it is the job of the Federal Government to protect it from terroristic disruption. In order to fund this hightened level of US Internet security, a Federal Tax will be leveyed against..." This would also effectively allow the tax payer to pay for the high speed internet of not only the Federal government, but also State governments, who would of course be exempt from the Federal tax.
Of course maybe I'm just paranoid... I sure hope so.
Personally I've found putting my modem on a box with a large amount of disk space and running squid to be extremely useful. In between the agressive caching and blocking banner ads, most of my web browsing doesn't seem very slow at all.
Of course when it's a new site chock full of graphics, or I'm doing binary downloads, I'm painfully aware of my modem's limitations. But for general surfing, sometimes it seems almost as good as the friends' broadband.
Of course isn't descrabling the greek phrase a direct violation of the DMCA?
CRAP! Now SCO can sue all the people that have printed, spoken, or otherwise communicated the obscured text!
This whole thing is really getting ridiculous. I wonder how long it will be before the laws that support this kind of nonsense are seriously reworked and/or simply gotten rid of.
On page 6 (ATA versus SCSI) Mr. Anderson (insert matrix joke here) references "ATA versus SCSI: More Than an Interface," by Dave Anderson, Erik Riedel, and Jim Dykes.
In this age of identify theft, I think Universities should be held to a high standard of privacy. I know when i attended college, I had a real problem with the University using my social security number as my "Student ID" number. I complained to the Dean of Student Affairs, and was told that it was University policy and there was nothing that could be done about it.
I remember strolling by empty offices of professors seeing the green printouts of class rosters at the beginning of each semster, and thinking that all it would take is somebody to duck into one of these rooms, lift that list, and poof, you've got hundreds of names and valid social security numbers.
I realize that many schools are moving away from using the social security number as a form of student identification, but I wonder if this coincides with a shift in the fundamental philosophies of these estabilishments, or if it is simply a method of saving face. I sincerely hope it is the former rather than the latter.
I have _real_ issues with my tax money being used to puchase and utilize software that is designed to block citizens from accessing content. While this alone I might be able to stomach under very strict and specific circumstances, when you add into the mix that the lists of sites that citizens are not only restricted from the view of citizens, but it is also a _federal_crime_ for a citizen to surreptitiously attempt to glean what sites this blocking software is restricting from view.
This country was founded on the ideals of freedom and individual worth. I find it extremely distasteful that the very tools of law that were designed to help us all become all we could ever want to become are now being used to to tie about our necks the stone of faschism.
My only gripe is now that things like cartoon network is available 24-7, the specialness of saturday morning cartoons is gone. Sure, kids don't sit glued to the television saturday morning, instead they sit glued to it 24-7.
I don't think cartoons are a bad thing, and I cherished my Saturday morning cartoon watching time. It taught me the value of patience, and the value of privledge. If I was bad during the week, then guess what, my cherished time of cartoon watching would be revoked.
Unlike today, I don't think parents tended to use the television as some kind of electronic babysitter. The television on the whole just wasn't entertaining to children most of the time, so instead of a crutch it was used as a reward tool. In this way, I think the Saturday morning cartoon era was much more valuable to the youth that experienced it than today's pacifier approach.
Don't want to deal with the kids? Turn on Cartoon Network. Yuck.
From an artist's point of view, does this help the artist? I'm not a musician and have never seen any of the contracts that the RIAA makes with its musical talent, but from a select few artists that have spoken out against the RIAA, I get the impression that file sharing is definately not the thing that's keeping money out of the pocket of the musician.
So, if this kind of action isn't for the good of the artist, then is it for the good of the company? I don't run a business of my own, so perhaps I'm under some false impressions, but it seems to me that the number one goal of business is to keep your existing customers excited and to constantly be trying to pull in new customers. This action as far as I can tell does exactly the opposite on both counts.
And what about file sharing in the first place. I still don't understand why the people involved in this debate keep talking like a 128k bitrate encoded mp3 is just as good as the original wav. Now this is something that I've personally investigated and analyzed, and can concretly say they are definately not of the same quality.
And what about the statistics. Which do you believe? I've looked at the RIAA's statistics showing how much revenue they lose because of file sharing. I'm not a statistician, but I really don't understand how they can claim that every traded song would have equaled an album sale. I've also looked at the statistics of the number of album sales during the years of Napster. While Napster was running full tilt, albums sales were hitting record numbers. Napster gets shut down, and the sales plunge. Once again, I'm not a statistician, but it seems to me that if I'm to be asked to believe that every song download == a missed sale, then I must also believe that Napster _created_ song sales instead of decreasing them.
So, once again, I'm back to wondering why the RIAA is taking such a hard line. I think that until we understand the motivations of the RIAA that things will certainly continue to get worse instead of better. Of course there's always the possibility that the RIAA doesn't really understand themselves what kind of road they're choosing for themselves.
In a sense I hope things get much much worse. Perhaps when a school teacher gets thrown in jail because he/she played a copyrighted song in class the public at large will finally wake up, realize what they've lost, and take it back. I'm a firm believer that Freedom can never be truly lost, just temporarily suspended.
Anyway, that's my little rant on the subject. I appologize if it came off as a confusing diatribe, but unfortunately I don't see anything but confusion when I think about the current state of copyright.
This is a horrible tragedy, and I find it heroic that the people at NASA are, inspite of their imense grief, immediately working very hard to piece together what happened in the hopes of finding out what might have happened to cause this catastrophe.
I simply wish the media would leave the speculation to the experts. I can't think of anything much more offensive than seeing some journalist spouting off speculations as to "what may have caused this". I don't know if they don't realize just how rude they are behaving, but I for one find it highly offensive. Simply tell us what facts are available, and leave the speculation to the experts who are right now racking their brains trying to determine what might have happened while at the same time trying to deal with their grief over this tragedy.
This is not the time or place for offhand "peanut gallery" scenarios.
This kind of ranting, raving, finger-pointing, and concept that rules should be made with the intention to be used as clubs is the _exact_ reason I quit frequenting #debian. This has also played a role in my migration of almost all my boxes to Gentoo. Software runs faster, the atmosphere in #gentoo and on the mailing lists is much more amicable, and I think they have a better distribution concept.
Of course, mplayer works quite well with gentoo... after all, it gets compiled when you emerge mplayer.
I think Frank Zappa effectively summed up my major concerns whenever the government and/or "public interest groups" start talking about how private business "must" do this or that to their product because it's perceived that it's "upsetting" a percentage of the population.
The comment I'm referring to is when he asked the PMRC "All I want to know is who's going to pay for it?".
All too often this is a very overlooked factor. My personal opinion is because the people pushing for the changes realize that if they say "oh, and everybody who is allowed to buy this product gets to pay extra for the labeling that does a shoddy job of making sure little johnny doesn't see 'bad stuff' on the shiny screen in his room" that all of a sudden the folk who at first react emotionally with "you know, maybe little johnny shouldn't be seeing this stuff" would all of a sudden react rationally with "why don't I just keep my money and let little johnny's parents worry about his emotional adjustments".
Like most things, I think it's unwise to fault the tool. The problem as I see it is that the educators themselves don't understand the basic fundabmentals of computing. This creates a situation where computers are brought into the education environment, the teachers really don't know what to do with them, and so they get thrown at the kids wholesale "here, go learn on these computers" without any guidance or instruction.
I am often amazed at the number of people who have been using computers for years, but still don't understand the bare basics of what that big box is. To many people, I think, when they open a text document, they don't have a conceptual grasp that they have just opened a file for processing, that that file has a physical presence inside that box on the hard drive, etc. To most, that open text file is nothing more than a picture on the tv screen.
I don't know how it is with other technologies but I think one of the amazing things about comptuters is the ability for people to use them without ever having to learn anything about what they're using. If the educators themselves don't grasp the fundamental nature of the tools they've been handed, then how can it come as any surpise that they've become nothing more than an overgrown "Speak N Say" in the classroom.
Not to belabour the point, but this discussion has reminded me of a situation I was in not too long ago. Part of my job involves managing server backups. Well, I get a call one afternoon that a person (Mr. X) has messed up a file, and needs it restored. No problem, I think. I open up the software, find the file in question, and then restore it. Well, I get a call from Mr. X saying that the file I restored didn't have the changes they'd made to it. I explained that backups happen at night, so I could only produce the file that existed the previous night. Any changes that had been made that day were gone. After a bit of silence, Mr. X, exclaimed joyfully, "oooooh! so the changes I made today you won't be able to get to me until tomorrow....". Shocked not the best word, but the closest I can think of to describe my mental state at that particular moment. I had no idea how to approach the subject to Mr. X without being offensive. I ended up simply explaining that any changes made today to the file before it was deleted were gone forever. This seemed to confuse Mr. X mightily, but I didn't have any idea how else to approach it. It later turns out that the problem with the file in the first place, was Mr. X's boss had instructed Mr. X that two files had their names backwards, file1 needed to be file2, and vice versa. Well, to go about this, Mr. X had opened up file1, saved it into the same directory as file2. Opened up file2, and much to his surprise it looked exactly the same as file 2.
I know this is getting long, but the basic point is, Mr. X and millions like him have been using computers for many many years, yet still do not grasp the basic concepts which define a computer. Without these basic concepts, how can we ever hope for our children to become "computer literate".
While I don't know from any first hand experience, I think the very first thing you would want to do is fine a good lawyer and sit down and have a very long talk about all the legalities, rules, and fees that you're looking to incur.
I suspect it is something odd with the IDE chipset. This board is a Tyan Tiger MP.
I do have the license key set as an evironment variable, so I know that's not it. I haven't tried the hdparm -u 0 trick suggested by another fellow yet though.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a mirror of the article:l
http://www.gutenpress.org/links/LG/102/piszcz.htm
...and back here at Mission Control, Bob, they're all speechless. Noone seems to even want to try to explain why Astronaut Nolan decided to write his name on the Maritian surface with his own urine. Back to you Bob ...
What's the ugliest part of your body?
It could be your nose,
It could be your toes,
I think it's your mind.
I want to be watching when the tech turns on the high-pitched squeal sound right when the rover gets close to an outcropping that looks strangely like a large monolith.
Nothing that the government did has been a factor in Linux growing market share. So next time you start to talk about the big bad evil Microsoft, perhaps you should consider how much money you've given to Microsoft and compare that to how much has been taken from you by Uncle Sam to fund frivolous lawsuits and pork barrel projects.
The key to being successful is to provide a better quality service or product than the other fella. This is true of businesses, and this is true of individual people. Most people I know who I would consider successful are so because they work hard at producing quality work in everything they do. And many people I know who are less than successful are often more concerned with worrying about what other people are doing and focused on complaining as loud as they can about how they haven't gotten the same breaks as the successful people.
I don't intend for this to turn in to a tirade, but I do believe that the power of market forces are often underestimated. A truly free market is one of the most just and powerful forces on the planet. It is not meant to be taken lightly and shackled for the sake of expedience.
After all the hubbub about the Saruman scenes, I'm surprised there's noone blurping about whether they're in or out.
I was a petition signer, and hope that the scenes made it back into the theatrical release. Of course I'm still undecided if that is a big enough issue to not see the film in the theatre. (Perhaps the number of small children in the lobby will be the stronger deciding factor)
It looks to me that this is just a little bit of staging for a future Federal tax on internet usage, perhaps interlocked with a Federal internet licensing/watchdog effort pushed through under the guise of "Homeland Security".
The rhetoric would go something like "...CyberSpace has become such an integral part of this nation's economy that it is the job of the Federal Government to protect it from terroristic disruption. In order to fund this hightened level of US Internet security, a Federal Tax will be leveyed against ..." This would also effectively allow the tax payer to pay for the high speed internet of not only the Federal government, but also State governments, who would of course be exempt from the Federal tax.
Of course maybe I'm just paranoid ... I sure hope so.
Personally I've found putting my modem on a box with a large amount of disk space and running squid to be extremely useful. In between the agressive caching and blocking banner ads, most of my web browsing doesn't seem very slow at all.
Of course when it's a new site chock full of graphics, or I'm doing binary downloads, I'm painfully aware of my modem's limitations. But for general surfing, sometimes it seems almost as good as the friends' broadband.
Of course isn't descrabling the greek phrase a direct violation of the DMCA?
CRAP! Now SCO can sue all the people that have printed, spoken, or otherwise communicated the obscured text!
This whole thing is really getting ridiculous. I wonder how long it will be before the laws that support this kind of nonsense are seriously reworked and/or simply gotten rid of.
On page 6 (ATA versus SCSI) Mr. Anderson (insert matrix joke here) references "ATA versus SCSI: More Than an Interface," by Dave Anderson, Erik Riedel, and Jim Dykes.
The pdf can he had here: ATA_vs_SCSI
I thought it was quite an interesting read, and an excellent companion piece to the "You Don't Know Jack about Disks" article.
In this age of identify theft, I think Universities should be held to a high standard of privacy. I know when i attended college, I had a real problem with the University using my social security number as my "Student ID" number. I complained to the Dean of Student Affairs, and was told that it was University policy and there was nothing that could be done about it.
I remember strolling by empty offices of professors seeing the green printouts of class rosters at the beginning of each semster, and thinking that all it would take is somebody to duck into one of these rooms, lift that list, and poof, you've got hundreds of names and valid social security numbers.
I realize that many schools are moving away from using the social security number as a form of student identification, but I wonder if this coincides with a shift in the fundamental philosophies of these estabilishments, or if it is simply a method of saving face. I sincerely hope it is the former rather than the latter.
I have _real_ issues with my tax money being used to puchase and utilize software that is designed to block citizens from accessing content. While this alone I might be able to stomach under very strict and specific circumstances, when you add into the mix that the lists of sites that citizens are not only restricted from the view of citizens, but it is also a _federal_crime_ for a citizen to surreptitiously attempt to glean what sites this blocking software is restricting from view.
This country was founded on the ideals of freedom and individual worth. I find it extremely distasteful that the very tools of law that were designed to help us all become all we could ever want to become are now being used to to tie about our necks the stone of faschism.
The conspiracy side of me thinks that this might be a preemptive move to try to keep Transmeta off the radar of SCO lawyers.
... but hey, you never know.
This is _pure_ paranoid speculation on my part
My only gripe is now that things like cartoon network is available 24-7, the specialness of saturday morning cartoons is gone. Sure, kids don't sit glued to the television saturday morning, instead they sit glued to it 24-7.
I don't think cartoons are a bad thing, and I cherished my Saturday morning cartoon watching time. It taught me the value of patience, and the value of privledge. If I was bad during the week, then guess what, my cherished time of cartoon watching would be revoked.
Unlike today, I don't think parents tended to use the television as some kind of electronic babysitter. The television on the whole just wasn't entertaining to children most of the time, so instead of a crutch it was used as a reward tool. In this way, I think the Saturday morning cartoon era was much more valuable to the youth that experienced it than today's pacifier approach.
Don't want to deal with the kids? Turn on Cartoon Network. Yuck.
I don't even know what to think about this.
From an artist's point of view, does this help the artist? I'm not a musician and have never seen any of the contracts that the RIAA makes with its musical talent, but from a select few artists that have spoken out against the RIAA, I get the impression that file sharing is definately not the thing that's keeping money out of the pocket of the musician.
So, if this kind of action isn't for the good of the artist, then is it for the good of the company? I don't run a business of my own, so perhaps I'm under some false impressions, but it seems to me that the number one goal of business is to keep your existing customers excited and to constantly be trying to pull in new customers. This action as far as I can tell does exactly the opposite on both counts.
And what about file sharing in the first place. I still don't understand why the people involved in this debate keep talking like a 128k bitrate encoded mp3 is just as good as the original wav. Now this is something that I've personally investigated and analyzed, and can concretly say they are definately not of the same quality.
And what about the statistics. Which do you believe? I've looked at the RIAA's statistics showing how much revenue they lose because of file sharing. I'm not a statistician, but I really don't understand how they can claim that every traded song would have equaled an album sale. I've also looked at the statistics of the number of album sales during the years of Napster. While Napster was running full tilt, albums sales were hitting record numbers. Napster gets shut down, and the sales plunge. Once again, I'm not a statistician, but it seems to me that if I'm to be asked to believe that every song download == a missed sale, then I must also believe that Napster _created_ song sales instead of decreasing them.
So, once again, I'm back to wondering why the RIAA is taking such a hard line. I think that until we understand the motivations of the RIAA that things will certainly continue to get worse instead of better. Of course there's always the possibility that the RIAA doesn't really understand themselves what kind of road they're choosing for themselves.
In a sense I hope things get much much worse. Perhaps when a school teacher gets thrown in jail because he/she played a copyrighted song in class the public at large will finally wake up, realize what they've lost, and take it back. I'm a firm believer that Freedom can never be truly lost, just temporarily suspended.
Anyway, that's my little rant on the subject. I appologize if it came off as a confusing diatribe, but unfortunately I don't see anything but confusion when I think about the current state of copyright.
...*blink* *blink* ... ummm ... *heh* ... *blink* *blink* .... I'm still not sure what to think of this idea.
This is a horrible tragedy, and I find it heroic that the people at NASA are, inspite of their imense grief, immediately working very hard to piece together what happened in the hopes of finding out what might have happened to cause this catastrophe.
I simply wish the media would leave the speculation to the experts. I can't think of anything much more offensive than seeing some journalist spouting off speculations as to "what may have caused this". I don't know if they don't realize just how rude they are behaving, but I for one find it highly offensive. Simply tell us what facts are available, and leave the speculation to the experts who are right now racking their brains trying to determine what might have happened while at the same time trying to deal with their grief over this tragedy.
This is not the time or place for offhand "peanut gallery" scenarios.
This kind of ranting, raving, finger-pointing, and concept that rules should be made with the intention to be used as clubs is the _exact_ reason I quit frequenting #debian. This has also played a role in my migration of almost all my boxes to Gentoo. Software runs faster, the atmosphere in #gentoo and on the mailing lists is much more amicable, and I think they have a better distribution concept.
... after all, it gets compiled when you emerge mplayer.
Of course, mplayer works quite well with gentoo
I think Frank Zappa effectively summed up my major concerns whenever the government and/or "public interest groups" start talking about how private business "must" do this or that to their product because it's perceived that it's "upsetting" a percentage of the population.
The comment I'm referring to is when he asked the PMRC "All I want to know is who's going to pay for it?".
All too often this is a very overlooked factor. My personal opinion is because the people pushing for the changes realize that if they say "oh, and everybody who is allowed to buy this product gets to pay extra for the labeling that does a shoddy job of making sure little johnny doesn't see 'bad stuff' on the shiny screen in his room" that all of a sudden the folk who at first react emotionally with "you know, maybe little johnny shouldn't be seeing this stuff" would all of a sudden react rationally with "why don't I just keep my money and let little johnny's parents worry about his emotional adjustments".
Like most things, I think it's unwise to fault the tool. The problem as I see it is that the educators themselves don't understand the basic fundabmentals of computing. This creates a situation where computers are brought into the education environment, the teachers really don't know what to do with them, and so they get thrown at the kids wholesale "here, go learn on these computers" without any guidance or instruction.
I am often amazed at the number of people who have been using computers for years, but still don't understand the bare basics of what that big box is. To many people, I think, when they open a text document, they don't have a conceptual grasp that they have just opened a file for processing, that that file has a physical presence inside that box on the hard drive, etc. To most, that open text file is nothing more than a picture on the tv screen.
I don't know how it is with other technologies but I think one of the amazing things about comptuters is the ability for people to use them without ever having to learn anything about what they're using. If the educators themselves don't grasp the fundamental nature of the tools they've been handed, then how can it come as any surpise that they've become nothing more than an overgrown "Speak N Say" in the classroom.
Not to belabour the point, but this discussion has reminded me of a situation I was in not too long ago. Part of my job involves managing server backups. Well, I get a call one afternoon that a person (Mr. X) has messed up a file, and needs it restored. No problem, I think. I open up the software, find the file in question, and then restore it. Well, I get a call from Mr. X saying that the file I restored didn't have the changes they'd made to it. I explained that backups happen at night, so I could only produce the file that existed the previous night. Any changes that had been made that day were gone. After a bit of silence, Mr. X, exclaimed joyfully, "oooooh! so the changes I made today you won't be able to get to me until tomorrow....". Shocked not the best word, but the closest I can think of to describe my mental state at that particular moment. I had no idea how to approach the subject to Mr. X without being offensive. I ended up simply explaining that any changes made today to the file before it was deleted were gone forever. This seemed to confuse Mr. X mightily, but I didn't have any idea how else to approach it. It later turns out that the problem with the file in the first place, was Mr. X's boss had instructed Mr. X that two files had their names backwards, file1 needed to be file2, and vice versa. Well, to go about this, Mr. X had opened up file1, saved it into the same directory as file2. Opened up file2, and much to his surprise it looked exactly the same as file 2.
I know this is getting long, but the basic point is, Mr. X and millions like him have been using computers for many many years, yet still do not grasp the basic concepts which define a computer. Without these basic concepts, how can we ever hope for our children to become "computer literate".
Just in case the main site gets slashdotted .... the story can be gotten here as well:
D F
http://www.gutenpress.org/SantaClausVsMarketers.P
For a while I kept getting blue screens on my win2k box at work (turns out it was a hardware issue). Most mornings I would come in to:
IRQ LESS THAN OR EQUAL TO ZERO
I'd love to comment on ol' RMS (who doesn't), but unfortunately all I get when I go to the page is:
"Sorry, this Module isn't active!"
Anybody have a mirror?
While I don't know from any first hand experience, I think the very first thing you would want to do is fine a good lawyer and sit down and have a very long talk about all the legalities, rules, and fees that you're looking to incur.
I suspect it is something odd with the IDE chipset. This board is a Tyan Tiger MP.
I do have the license key set as an evironment variable, so I know that's not it. I haven't tried the hdparm -u 0 trick suggested by another fellow yet though.