I keep all mission-critical and government-classified information on portable USB Flash DRAM-based storage devices. They're incredibly portable and can be brought to the gym, in the car, to work, back home, swimming, hiking, biking, etc.
I've been playing with an old CompactFlash card and a pcmcia adapter. Enciphering the data on the card with a password is a good idea too.
nearly one out of two consumers surveyed downloaded in the past month and nearly 70 percent burned the music they downloaded
Let us not forget that in a democracy the majority get to do what they want and the minority can do little to stop them. We are living in a democracy, aren't we?
I'm looking at my sigaret lighter now. It's one of those see through models. It seems as though there is some fluid in there. If I let some of that fluid escape, it's suddenly not a fluid! Huh? But it is at room temperature! Huh? And it is methane! What? I just read this is impossible.
You know that person who told you there is methane in your lighter; don't listen to that person anymore. The critical temperature for methane is 190.56K (way below room temperature), see for yourself. Also, definition of critical temperature.
If anyone is interested, I just looked up the critical point for nitrogen at webelements.com.
It's 126.2K [or -146.9 C (-232.4 F)]. Regardless of the pressure, it is not possible to liquify nitrogen (or keep it liquid) above this temperature.
Liquid nitrogen is cheap!!. If the nitrogen is kept at the right pressure, then it doesn't even have to be kept cold. Pressurized lines are already in use for gas and steam. I'm sure that liquid nitrogen isn't much different.
Nitrogen, like hydrogen, helium, oxygen, methane, and lots of other gasses cannot exist as a liquid at room temperature under any pressure. I used to work in a lab where we used alot of lN2 and the number one rule was "never seal a container with lN2 in it". If a container ever did have to be closed, it was done so with some sort of stopper or cork that would easily pop off the moment the pressure rose. If you do seal in some of one of these liquids and let the temperature rise, the liquid will turn to gas and exert extreme pressure on the container. This is the reason why hydrogen and natural gas powered cars are not popular.
Also, superconductors that conduct at lN2 temperatures do so not because they are surrounded by lN2, but because they are at or below the boiling temperature of lN2 under standard pressure. Even if you could keep the lN2 liquid at a higher temperature by pressurizing it, the superconductor would still cease to superconduct the moment it's threshold temperature is reached. The good news is the superconductors produce no heat so all that's needed to keep the lN2 around is good insulation.
But the different standards for patents in different countries isn't something we need in this day and age where products compete in a global free market. It costs companies more, adds complexity and creates legal problems.
This global market of which you speak is most definately not free as long as patents exist.
I live in a college dorm room and last Christmas while away for a few weeks I was concerned about management entering my room and possibily turning off my computer or causing other "damage". Details aside, and not having a web cam, I decided to plug a microphone into my computer and just have it record all sound in my vacant room. I whipped up some code to monitor and track the level of ambiant background noise, and to record any sound above background, convert it to mp3 format, and ssh it to a machine at school I knew I'd have access to. If someone did enter my room and turn off my computer (or even if they didn't turn off the computer), I could retrieve the mp3's of the event from where I was and find out what happened.
If anyone is interested in this code, you can get it from here. Unfortunately, I don't have time right now to package it up nicely or answer questions about it so just take it for what it's worth.
It should be clear from this paragraph that RMS is only interested in his own freedom, not your freedom. In particular, not your freedom to refuse to share. -russ
Disrespect for privacy The APSL does not allow you to make a modified version and use it for your own private purposes, without publishing your changes.
Clearly RMS has no problem with your "freedom to refuse to share". What he is against is your "freedom" to limit the freedoms of others (ie. oppress others).
Two years ago I wrote the following to the committee that oversaw my position to inquire about the rights to some software I was working on. Weeks later I got a letter back from a lawyer of the University granting me the copyright to the software in question. (Note: don't flame me if I don't appear to understand the GPL. This letter was written 2 years ago and I know alot more now.)
Hi,
This message is rather long and involved. Brace yourselves.
I have been developing a piece of software that should make accessing our datatapes much easier, especially for those who don't program in Fortran. This software has been in the works for almost as long as I have worked here and it is starting to seem as though I should get it working and available for general use. The software will be custom taylored for our datatapes, but is also
generally applicable to any type of database and could, in my opinion, be useful to people other than us.
I have one problem that needs to be resolved first. Who owns the copyright to this software? [My boss] has suggested that I pose this question to the members of this committee for comments. I have referred to the copyright section of my contract (that of a sessional academic) and will quote the following paragraph
to you:
10.01 The University shall be owner of the copyright and of all copyright
works produced by a staff member who has been engaged by the University
to prepare such works for the University or part of whose normal
responsibilities to the University is the preparation of such works.
I understand that the Fortran access routines and sample programs, along with
their documentation I write is owned by the University. This is not in
question.
The software in question has been developed by me both on my own time and on
University time. I was never asked to develop this software. Until now, no
one, except [a coworker], has known that I have been writing this software.
I believe that we all have the same copyright section in our contracts so if
any of you wish to read the entire section, you should have it. If not, it is
available online at:
[url to contract]
My interpretation of the contract is:
a) The University must retain the right to use, free of charge, the software
in question.
b) If the software is to be sold, the value of the University resources
consumed must be calculated and repaid on a fixed schedule.
The copyright I wish to apply to this software is the Free Software Foundation's General Public Licence (GPL). All the terms can be read at:
This licence essentially abandons ownership of the software and ensures that no
one can take ownership and apply terms. Anyone can freely use, copy, and
modify the software, including the University. My thought is that this licence
should satisfy the 'spirit' of the copyright section of my contract. The
University will not recieve any money to pay back the resources I have used,
but would benifit from the use of the software.
I am concerned about the ramifications of simply going ahead and doing what I want to do. I suspect that I would be safer with some sort of written permission to do this. I wish to know what you think about this.
I actually don't care who holds the copyright as long as the terms are those I have stated above. I suspect it would be simpler if I hold the copyright, but recognizing the University in the copyright notice is fine by me.
When an OS runs short on RAM, maybe it should first attempt to compress LRU pages. Only once some threshold percentage of RAM is compressed, would it start swapping, and obviously the first pages to be swapped out will be the ones that are compressed, so you get more pages out to disk in a given time.
Although compressing pages when there are few CPU cycles to spare may not a good idea, often when a machine starts to swap, CPU utilization drops so there would be cycles to spare. Remember that swapping a single page can cost millions of CPU instructions. If you can compress/decompress a page in fewer instructions, it might be worth it. Hardware accellerated compression would be nice, but maybe not needed.
Honestly, I would say the same thing about a lot of commercial software as well. Just because you sell something doesn't mean that it's been designed properly, and likely just because something is free doesn't mean it's been slapped together with duct tape. Further more I'd trust a program with source more than one without and many open source developers are always willing to accept a better design.
<rant> I really wish people (especially slashdot editors) would get the terminology correct. It's commercial vs. non-profit and proprietary vs. free/open source. These are orthogonal concepts. There is nothing weird about a company that sells open source software. Lots of companies do it these days. RedHat (like all other software companies) sells nothing but commercial software (by definition). </rant>
Regarding the topic of the article, I certainly wouldn't trust proprietary software. I can't even figure out how it works, let alone what it's supposed to do. I also wouldn't trust a car that didn't let me open the hood and see how it was constructed. I see nothing inherent in the open source model that prevents adherence to design goals, certifications or regulations.
Democratic government is supposed to represent the people. Copyright laws exist because people want or, at some time in the past, used to want copyright laws. Widespread infringement of copyright laws is an indication that people no longer want copyright protections (or at least, the specific protections being infringed upon). A government that ignores or attempts to suppress this is not democratic.
There seems to be this assumption that the laws we have today are the right laws to have from now until hell freezes over. If this is what you believe, then of course you want to see all law breakers prosecuted. If not, you will realize that civil disobedience and protest are an essental part of a democratic society and much easier if one can be anonymous.
As more people realize the oppresive nature of intellectual property laws, they are going to want to change them. This scares the hell out of corporations and hence they want to see all such individuals silenced and jailed. This is much easier to do if anominity is non-existant.
It's their music to sell as they want for however much they want. That is a free market. If it costs too much buy someone elses music that is cheaper.
In a free market anyone is allowed to try to sell the product in question. Markets for cars, houses, bread, etc. are free markets. The market for music is far from "free", by any definition of the word. When the market is not free, prices are almost certainly wrong.
Freedom is measured by listing what you can't do, not by listing what you can do.
This is something that has been bugging me for a while. Why does our justice system put so much emphasis on punishment and not enough emphasis on problem solving? I don't know much about the Mitnick case, but I assume he broke into some computers or something. Why was he thrown in jail? If the goal of the justice system was to simply solve the problem, they would have banned him from using computers for some period of time (perhaps the rest of his life) and left it at that. He would have remained out in society to fend for himself instead of sitting around in jail at the tax payers expence. Jail should be reserved for people who must be physically removed from society. Should Mitnick violate the court's order (use a computer), then he would have to be incarcerated. I also see setting out to ruin a person's life because of a crime as punishment. Why not give a person every chance to become a productive member of society, short of repeating their crimes. Would this not be for the benifit of all society?
The Free software movement, League for Programming Freedom, Open Source Software, on the other hand, talk idealistic young individuals out of their writing. "Contribute it towards a greater good." Be rewarded by occasional e-mails of thanks from your peers.
Programmers are not being talked 'out of their writing'. They are being talked out of oppressing others. There is nothing weird about selling free software and open source programmers are just a capable of selling their writings as a closed source programmer. The programmer whose only motivation is money should simple not program unless someone is willing to pay them. If someone comes along and says, "Hey, I'll pay you to write some software for me." Should the programmer care what licence the software ends up under? No. Actually, the programmer should prefer an open source licence in order to maintain the use of the software should the programmer give up the copyright. If the programmer does not give up the copyright, the person paying for the software should demand open source. Lots of programmers today make lots of money writing open source software. They have not given up anything (except the right to oppress others).
While I was working in a pathology lab several years back I had access to liquid nitrogen. I had figured out the exact amount of LN2 necessary to cool a can of coke from room temperature to an appropriate temperature for drinking. It was about a cup or so. I'd just put the LN2 in the dewer, followed by the can of coke. A minute later (after the LN2 had boiled away), the coke was ready to drink.
The concept is awesome - the only problem I can see is that discman-style players are notoriously power-hungry - and the extra processing required to decode the mp3 audio might make the battery time low enough to be a nuisance. (I get about 6-8 hours out of a set of batteries on my current player - I'd expect this to drop to 5-7 if the player has to do extra processing - a hardware decoder could help out here, but would probably make the player a bit more expensive)
With an mp3 player there is the potential to save power as you only need to spin the disk at 0.1x or something like that.
Does the GPL really insist that Corel must sell (give) their software to anyone and everyone who wants it? It seems to me that Corel has the right to refuse to sell (give) its product to anyone they choose. What Corel does not have the right to do is attempt to restrict who its customers are allowed to redistribute the software to. A minor must be able to get Corel Linux from anyone willing to give (sell) it to them (even if Corel itself won't). Is Corel trying to prevent this?
Construct a moving sidewalk that is radial instead of linear. Imagine a room that is circular and contains a moving sidewalk that when in motion always moves occupants towards the center of the room. When the occupant is not moving, they will be in the center of the room and the sidewalk will be stopped. If the person starts walking in any direction, the sidewalk starts moving (gently enough so as not to be noticed) to prevent the person from approaching a wall. When the person stops walking, the sidewalk slows to a crawl and gently returns the person to center. If the room is large enough, the person could even start running and never hit a wall. I suppose the speed of the sidewalk could simply be proportional to the distance the person is from the center of the room. The tricky part is creating such a sidewalk.
# create lock file and fix cookies if ln -s $prog $prog.lock 2>/dev/null; then $GREP -f cookies.valid cookies.new mv -f cookies cookies.old mv -f cookies.new cookies rm -f $prog.lock fi ==== end ====
==== ~/.netscape/cookies.valid ==== ^# ^$ ^slashdot.org\> ==== end ====
And add the following to.profile:
# delete bad cookies ~/.netscape/fixcookies
This ensures that bad cookies I receive only last one day or so.
Slashdot Mirror
Another product that's been around for a while and works pretty good is Differential X Protocol Compressor. How does this new product differ?
If anyone is interested, I just looked up the critical point for nitrogen at webelements.com. It's 126.2K [or -146.9 C (-232.4 F)]. Regardless of the pressure, it is not possible to liquify nitrogen (or keep it liquid) above this temperature.
Also, superconductors that conduct at lN2 temperatures do so not because they are surrounded by lN2, but because they are at or below the boiling temperature of lN2 under standard pressure. Even if you could keep the lN2 liquid at a higher temperature by pressurizing it, the superconductor would still cease to superconduct the moment it's threshold temperature is reached. The good news is the superconductors produce no heat so all that's needed to keep the lN2 around is good insulation.
Finally, both gas and steam are gasses.
I live in a college dorm room and last Christmas while away for a few weeks I was concerned about management entering my room and possibily turning off my computer or causing other "damage". Details aside, and not having a web cam, I decided to plug a microphone into my computer and just have it record all sound in my vacant room. I whipped up some code to monitor and track the level of ambiant background noise, and to record any sound above background, convert it to mp3 format, and ssh it to a machine at school I knew I'd have access to. If someone did enter my room and turn off my computer (or even if they didn't turn off the computer), I could retrieve the mp3's of the event from where I was and find out what happened.
If anyone is interested in this code, you can get it from here. Unfortunately, I don't have time right now to package it up nicely or answer questions about it so just take it for what it's worth.
-russ
From http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/apsl.html:
Clearly RMS has no problem with your "freedom to refuse to share". What he is against is your "freedom" to limit the freedoms of others (ie. oppress others).
Chris.
When an OS runs short on RAM, maybe it should first attempt to compress LRU pages. Only once some threshold percentage of RAM is compressed, would it start swapping, and obviously the first pages to be swapped out will be the ones that are compressed, so you get more pages out to disk in a given time.
Although compressing pages when there are few CPU cycles to spare may not a good idea, often when a machine starts to swap, CPU utilization drops so there would be cycles to spare. Remember that swapping a single page can cost millions of CPU instructions. If you can compress/decompress a page in fewer instructions, it might be worth it. Hardware accellerated compression would be nice, but maybe not needed.
For fast compression, see: http://wildsau.idv.uni-linz.ac.at/mf x/lzo.html.
Honestly, I would say the same thing about a lot of commercial software as well. Just because you sell something doesn't mean that it's been designed properly, and likely just because something is free doesn't mean it's been slapped together with duct tape. Further more I'd trust a program with source more than one without and many open source developers are always willing to accept a better design.
<rant>
I really wish people (especially slashdot editors) would get the terminology correct. It's commercial vs. non-profit and proprietary vs. free/open source. These are orthogonal concepts. There is nothing weird about a company that sells open source software. Lots of companies do it these days. RedHat (like all other software companies) sells nothing but commercial software (by definition).
</rant>
Regarding the topic of the article, I certainly wouldn't trust proprietary software. I can't even figure out how it works, let alone what it's supposed to do. I also wouldn't trust a car that didn't let me open the hood and see how it was constructed. I see nothing inherent in the open source model that prevents adherence to design goals, certifications or regulations.
More thoughts related to my previous post:
Democratic government is supposed to represent the people. Copyright laws exist because people want or, at some time in the past, used to want copyright laws. Widespread infringement of copyright laws is an indication that people no longer want copyright protections (or at least, the specific protections being infringed upon). A government that ignores or attempts to suppress this is not democratic.
There seems to be this assumption that the laws we have today are the right laws to have from now until hell freezes over. If this is what you believe, then of course you want to see all law breakers prosecuted. If not, you will realize that civil disobedience and protest are an essental part of a democratic society and much easier if one can be anonymous.
As more people realize the oppresive nature of intellectual property laws, they are going to want to change them. This scares the hell out of corporations and hence they want to see all such individuals silenced and jailed. This is much easier to do if anominity is non-existant.
In a free market anyone is allowed to try to sell the product in question. Markets for cars, houses, bread, etc. are free markets. The market for music is far from "free", by any definition of the word. When the market is not free, prices are almost certainly wrong.
Freedom is measured by listing what you can't do, not by listing what you can do.
This is something that has been bugging me for a while. Why does our justice system put so much emphasis on punishment and not enough emphasis on problem solving? I don't know much about the Mitnick case, but I assume he broke into some computers or something. Why was he thrown in jail? If the goal of the justice system was to simply solve the problem, they would have banned him from using computers for some period of time (perhaps the rest of his life) and left it at that. He would have remained out in society to fend for himself instead of sitting around in jail at the tax payers expence. Jail should be reserved for people who must be physically removed from society. Should Mitnick violate the court's order (use a computer), then he would have to be incarcerated. I also see setting out to ruin a person's life because of a crime as punishment. Why not give a person every chance to become a productive member of society, short of repeating their crimes. Would this not be for the benifit of all society?
Programmers are not being talked 'out of their writing'. They are being talked out of oppressing others. There is nothing weird about selling free software and open source programmers are just a capable of selling their writings as a closed source programmer. The programmer whose only motivation is money should simple not program unless someone is willing to pay them. If someone comes along and says, "Hey, I'll pay you to write some software for me." Should the programmer care what licence the software ends up under? No. Actually, the programmer should prefer an open source licence in order to maintain the use of the software should the programmer give up the copyright. If the programmer does not give up the copyright, the person paying for the software should demand open source. Lots of programmers today make lots of money writing open source software. They have not given up anything (except the right to oppress others).
This sounds like a demand to me, not freedom.
Not that I recall. Why would it? The can was still sealed.
While I was working in a pathology lab several years back I had access to liquid nitrogen. I had figured out the exact amount of LN2 necessary to cool a can of coke from room temperature to an appropriate temperature for drinking. It was about a cup or so. I'd just put the LN2 in the dewer, followed by the can of coke. A minute later (after the LN2 had boiled away), the coke was ready to drink.
With an mp3 player there is the potential to save power as you only need to spin the disk at 0.1x or something like that.
Chris.
Construct a moving sidewalk that is radial instead of linear. Imagine a room that is circular and contains a moving sidewalk that when in motion always moves occupants towards the center of the room. When the occupant is not moving, they will be in the center of the room and the sidewalk will be stopped. If the person starts walking in any direction, the sidewalk starts moving (gently enough so as not to be noticed) to prevent the person from approaching a wall. When the person stops walking, the sidewalk slows to a crawl and gently returns the person to center. If the room is large enough, the person could even start running and never hit a wall. I suppose the speed of the sidewalk could simply be proportional to the distance the person is from the center of the room. The tricky part is creating such a sidewalk.
To clean my cookie file everytime I login, I use the following script:
.profile:
==== ~/.netscape/fixcookies ====
#!/bin/bash
cd `dirname $0`
umask 077
prog=`basename $0`
GREP=/usr/bin/grep
# create lock file and fix cookies
if ln -s $prog $prog.lock 2>/dev/null; then
$GREP -f cookies.valid cookies.new
mv -f cookies cookies.old
mv -f cookies.new cookies
rm -f $prog.lock
fi
==== end ====
==== ~/.netscape/cookies.valid ====
^#
^$
^slashdot.org\>
==== end ====
And add the following to
# delete bad cookies
~/.netscape/fixcookies
This ensures that bad cookies I receive only last one day or so.
I don't know if anyone has posted this link yet, but you can find a good web based Dvorak typing tutor at:
http://www.mit.edu:8001/pe ople/jcb/Dvorak/dvorak-course/