Wish I had this manual during my freshman year.
on
Physics of Billiards
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· Score: 3
During my freshman year in college I would always skip physics class to play pool. Somehow this seemed like a legitimate use of my physics time, since it was at least SOMEWHAT related to the subject matter. Sorta. Well, it was an adaquate excuse for MY purposes.:)
In any event, had this manual been available, I might have actually thought to consult it, and I might have actually learned some physics during this time period, although I did get rather good at playing pool.:)
True.. in the grand scheme of things, aircraft navigation and auto crashes are more important than the operability of my toaster, but if there was a problem with the GPS system, my airbag would still inflate and the pilots would still manage to get the plane to its destination.
And this doesn't even get into more likely problems. I've never owned any GPS devices before, but how well do they work when you're inside a building, or underground? My CD player doesn't care where in the world I am, but if it had as much trouble operating as my cell phone does when I'm in the basement, we may see other problems even when the GPS system IS functioning perfectly.
What would happen if for some reason the GPS network developed a... problem. Say we have an unusually heavy meteor shower, which would cause no undue damage to earth itself but could reign utter havoc on satellites in orbit. Its not inconcievable that enough of the GPS satellites could be disabled that would cause GPS devices on Earth to become disabled. If this were to happen, does this mean that all consumer goods would fail to function until the sats were repaired or replaced?
In other words, Microsoft representatives warned, "anyone who adds or innovates under the GPL agrees to make the resulting code, in its entirety, available for all to use... [which] might constrain innovating stemming from taxpayer-funded software development."
I might be mistaken, but last time I heard, the greater majority of innovation does not come from taxpayer funded projects. In fact, we could really do without most of the taxpayer funded "innovation". The IRS and other taxpayer funded entities are innovating in ways I would prefer them not to.
Microsoft's position is obvious, of course. They don't want the US Federal government creating any universal policies to support only Open Source products as other countries have done. Microsoft is well aware that while Linux may not offer 100% of the "features" that Microsfot products do, it wouldn't be much of a stretch to adapt, especially if there was some work put into it.
Also, if there was interest in large scale budget cuts, the Microsoft tax would be a significant factor. Microsoft is well aware of this fact, as they would feel it from the other end.
The point is, that deep down, the RIAA is smart. They know that the great percentage of the music traded on Napster wouldn't be purchased anyways. Its not money they're losing, they're just afraid that their loyal purchasing crowd might SOMEDAY drift into that environment and they'll start losing real sales. At least with a monetary figure attached to the service, people will be less inclined to switch over to it over purchasing CD's.
However, the RIAA isn't about to start admitting that napster for the time being probably is generating more cd sales than stealing them, but they would rather lose money and keep a stranglehold on the market rather than let that market drift away from them.
First of all, some of the revenue per user can be recovered from ad banners. An alternative option can be selected by those users who wish to avoid seeing any annoying banners and have them pay a small monthly fee for the privalage.
Obviously in the spirit of the GPL, any updates to GPL code must also be GPL'ed, and therefore, even if you weren't allowed to keep IP rights to changes you made while employed there, the GPL would overrule that anyways and allow the code to continue to be public.
There is one exception though. If the company ONLY used that code for internal use and never released any source or binaries for changes, any changes you make to that code while employed for the company MIGHT be considered company property and therefore could not be used elsewhere. However, this would only hold water until ANY of the code is included in ANY program that is available to the public. Even if they extracted from the GPL'ed program only that code modifications you made while employed there, technically that code would be covered under the GPL even if the original modified program was never made publicly available.
Of course, when you're talking about inventions, this scheme doesn't make a whole lot of sense. The whole point of protecting an "invention" is not to hoarde it in house for only the company at large to use, but to release some executable form to the public to make money and own exclusive rights to that product. Obviously going in with GPL'ed code would almost ensure that any changes you make will be subject to the GPL when you leave. It might not be YOURS, but it will still be GPL'ed.
I realize that not everyone in the world is going to own a Sun product, but lets say this scheme was in corporated by a more consumer level company like Magnovox or RCA, or Sony. Then walk through any random neighborhood and chances are good that almost every house or apartment will contain at least ONE of these products.
Some anonymous individual who aquires a method for exctracting this ID from remote and is able to match the item to a specific product should walk through a neighborhood getting an inventory of everyone's homes. Then publish a list of ALL these products cross referenced by address and mail it out to everyone in the area. Make sure
you include on this list a listing of all the companies that made this possible. There would probably be such an outrage that these companies would silently retract the whole scheme lest they fall victim to extreme market pressure.
Oh come on.. you know that the ISP's are TOTALLY to blame for this. Without those EVIL ISP's, there wouldn't be any kiddy porn on the internet. As we all know, there was NO SUCH THING as kiddy porn before the internet introduced it to the world. The ISP's are TOTALLY to blame for everything, so THAT'S who we should be punishing.
Sure, there are child pornographers all over the place that are producing this trash and they're the ones that are actually posting it, but its the ISP's that make it possible, so the ISP's are COMPLETELY to blame.
Of course, you have to wonder why the STANDARD wasn't hashed out a LONG time ago. Instead they keep upgrading the standards and thats whats causing these problems. As I once heard, lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.
So what's wrong with Netscape 3.0? Sure, it might not load any pages with any kind of javascript on it anymore, but really, don't you think thats MY problem? If I don't access your site because you choose to make it more complex than I am able to access, then that is YOUR problem and shame on you for not providing an adaquate alternative. Certainly, you don't HAVE to, and if I REALLY need to see your page, I will. Older browsers have certain features that make them ideal. They take up less space, they're a LOT less bloated, they load faster, and in some cases, they're a lot less bug ridden.
The RIAA blames Napster for the reason that websites and the RIAA can't come to an agreement to sell music online because nobody can compete with a free service. I hate to break the news to anyone, but Napster is simply scratching a market itch that the RIAA outright refused to scratch themselves. Had the RIAA moved its ass years ago instead of holding on and assuming nothing would ever change, the rug was pulled out from under its feet. They wouldn't be having the legal battles right now had they just implemented their own online distribution methods to begin with.
Of course, piracy would have occurred anyways. It always has, and it always will. A small amount of piracy has to be tolerated to some degree if you're in this business. You may not like it, and for the most part, the law is on your side in this regard, but it probably doesn't result in the lost sales you might think it does.
However, if there was an industry endorsed online music distribution method BEFORE napster was dropped upon the world, Napster probaby would never have come to be. Or when it did, people would try it out on a few songs, see how slow it is compared to the RIAA's version, and end up just ignoring it.
But no, the RIAA wants to hold on to their old ways. Well, let them have their old ways then. They can wither into the dust for all I care. They obviously are not thinking in anyone's best interests, even their own. They deserve whatever they get.
If you build a mousetrap you can patent it. Nobody else can DUPLICATE your mousetrap and sell it while the patent is active. However, it does not prevent anyone else from creating their own mousetraps or even improving on your model. You can't patent the concept of a mousetrap, only the exact mousetrap.
You can't patent an icon, although I could imagine granting a patent for a specific icon design. Mac icons are typically different than windows icons. If its THAT damned important, then fine. Patent the damn thing. But I can still create my own icons. They can still serve the same function. You can't deny me that.
A specific algorithm? I suppose. All algorithms that produce a specific effect? Nope.
Of course, this probably isn't the way it is, and its not even the way I'd like it to be. But it does to some degree make sense.
Then again, I'm in the process of installing windows, so my mental condition at the moment is questionable, so please disregard this comment.
The biggest problem I have seen with this is that you must use a website to encode/decode the message. Hey, this is no big deal. Anyone can write a program. The best option though would be to actually encrypt the message with your typical encryption scheme, then use a filter to convert the encrypted text into spam or whatever medium you like. The first stage will protect the message. The second stage will conceal the encryption. If the actual filtering process was key based, then only the reciever would be able to determine if the spam was actually spam or concealing another message.
-Restil
Re:Good, The New Workers need to unionise.
on
The Jungle
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· Score: 2
This works much the same way at UPS. I'm in management, and although we don't always follow the rules to the letter, management personel are forbidden to touch boxes. And if an hourly employee were to monitor the amount of time a supervisor is handling packages, they get compensated for that amount of time since its time that was concievibly "stolen" from an hourly employee.
This doesn't turn out to be quite the crisis it might seem though. Ironically, many of the unionized hourly workers are only interested in working the LEAST amount of hours as possible and the more work someone else does the less they have to do, and they're not about to complain about it.
Obviously there are also exceptions. For demonstration purposes we can handle packages, or in an emergency sitution its acceptable. And this isn't something that produces a large number of complaints when half the workers are new hires who aren't completely aclimated to the workload yet and find that ANYONE helping out is a blessed relief.
I don't want someone telling my employer that I'm only allowed to work 40 hours a week. I don't want them telling my employer that they have to keep me on staff as long as the quality of my work reaches acceptable levels of mediocrity. I want to know that the quality of my work is what matters, not the fact that I show up every once in a while and perform to a minimal acceptable standard. And most important of all, I don't want to be let go because some other employee they have can't be fired because he's been there too long, even if I am more productive.
If I want to work 80 hours a week knowing that the experience and stock options MIGHT someday make me successful, then thats my choice and not the choice of a union. If someone doesn't like it, they can switch careers. There are no illusions in the technology industry. I know that not everyone who goes into it turns out to be a millionaire after 3 years. If the fact that the average passerby thinks this and finds its not all glamour as they had expected, well SORRY. Go back to whatever it was you were doing before you made that tragic mistake. SORRY if you didn't know you might have to spend 10 years of your life sitting in your bedroom hacking on your computer into the middle of the night, forgoing a social life, to achieve what some of us have. Thats the price for some of our "overnight" successes. You should accept nothing less. And no union better tell you otherwise.
It might not seem like it while you're coasting through a school zone, but 22 mph feels pretty damn fast when you're scraping across the concrete. As a test for the damage 22 mph can do, get in your car, find a handy brick wall somewhere, and drive into it at 22 mph. Oh... and you can't use the brakes.
I found myself simultaniously laughing and disgusted at the same time. I had a difficult time discerning if its a parody or if they're actually serious about it. But guess what. Its just words and pictures on a screen. I hadn't heard a thing about it until someone told me about it and I'm no more likely to stuff my cat into a jar than I was before I found the site.
As far as I'm concerned, if no cats were actually harmed during the making of the site, I don't care at all. If the cats were dead before inserting them, I don't care. If they were alive but not in pain, I don't care.
My point is this. This is the first time I ever heard anything about this. Even if this was some underground activity, I probably would have heard SOMETHING about it before. This improves the likelyhood that its only a parody and I intend to treat it as such. If there are those in the world that would be inclined to stuff their cats into a jar after reading that site, we probably have much worse things we need to worry about from those people than bonsai cats.
In other news, I find people who are extreme animal rights supporters, or at least supporters of all the animals that are fuzzy and cute, to overreact in a big way to anything that even remotely threatens something thats cute and fuzzy.
I remember the website about cat scanning that had them in an uproar because it was in some way scaring the cats or something. Everytime I take my cat to the vet, it gets all worked up. But that doesnt' mean I don't take it in every year to get its shots. At least I love my cat.
Did you know, animal rights supporters out there, that there are orginizations that you actually support that are KILLING those cute fuzzy little kitties?? YES! Its happening every day all across the USA. The SPCA will KILL those cute fuzzy kitties. Of course, the more PC term is euthinization (sp??) but the end result is the same. Yet nobody seems to complain. I can't imagine why. See that cute cow out there in the field, eating grass. It goes "MOO" you know. It shits on the ground and smells bad. Well, somebody someday is going to kill that cow and carve it up and stick it between two pieces of bread and you're going to eat it. YES. Just think MOO whenever you eat that tasty hamburger.
Cute little chicken. Adorable. Mmmm.. Nuggets.
Where are the protesters???
Froglegs Yummy. Disecting frogs in class. Where are the protestors? Didn't you know that frogs are cute, although they're not paticularly fuzzy. Come on people. PROTEST!
I had pet rats once. Of course, I didn't buy them as pets.. I had purchased them as snakefood, but the snake must not have been hungry for rat, so I ended up with two pet rats. That evil snake was going to eat those cute little rats. Pet stores all over the place will sell cute little rats and cute little mice just so they can be fed to evil snakes. But nobody seems to be protesting.
Yet if I even considered the possibility of feeding a kitty to a snake, letting that snake wrap around it, and suffucate it to death, and announcing that fact to the world, there would be mobs of angry protestors beating down my doors. I can't imagine the big deal, but there you go.
Of course, I would never feed a kitty to a snake. But I have no doubt that a snake that was big enough would try to eat it, and I certainly couldn't fault the snake for trying, as its only doing what nature has instructed it to do.
Of course, just wait. I was joking about there being no protesters against eating cows. There are. Plenty. They're just not quite as vocal yet. Soon enough though we're going to see that songs like "Carrotjuice is murder" won't be so funny anymore. They'll be candidates for National Anthem replacements.
This rant has been brought to you by Restil.
restil@alignment.net
First, it has to be powered up to work. The external power supply is almost redundant. I won't be rebooting my production linux box more than once or twice a year, and even then, the reboots will be planned. I could easily back up the drive without the external power supply. If I were to suddenly lose power, it wouldn't matter anyways since the external power supply would most likely go down as well.
Second, for 8 gig models, having a separate PCI card holding the memory makes sense. But for less than 2 gigs, you will probably be better off just using a ramdisk. Not only will this allow you to have more control over the actual memory allocation, there shouldn't be any dramatic difference in performance. As I said before, a sudden loss of power for your server is just as likely to take out the power for the drive as well, so you're not in a much safer position the other way.
The reason a lot of the mom&pop services existed in the first place was to recover some of the cost and justification of a high speed pipe. Before the widespread proliferation of cable and dsl, a T1 was about your best bet to get any decent speed, but very few people could afford it out of pocket. But most people have a hard time using 1% of their available bandwidth, so the other 99% goes to waste. Why not set up a small ISP to bring in revenue to pay for the line. You don't need many users paying a flat monthly rate to cover the cost of the line and then some and the subscriber base and network will still be rather managable by one or two people.
However, now that a large number of people can pick up a dsl line for less than $100 a month, the need to recover the cost is gone, as well as the need for expensive T1 lines. Thus the mom&pop services don't exist because the specific itch they used to scratch just doesn't exist anymore.
But are wireless services THAT big of a deal? Of course I understand their usefulness for mobile users, that goes without saying. But what is the deal with people getting wireless service in the middle of a big city where they easily have several options for high bandwidth service. Why are people using wireless networks inside their house to just save a couple hours running wires.
Why are wireless services being billed as the wave of the future, when hopefully within 10 years there will be a fibre connection dropped into every house. Maybe my foresight is a bit foggy, but some things just don't seem to make a whole lot of sense to me.
If they're going bankrupt, then it means the market isn't there. Go look at this coverage map. Notice all the green area? Thats the area of the US that is most in need of wireless services, and with the unique nature of wireless services being able to cover a wide area with no more than a single antenna, it actually makes sense in those areas. But instead they've blown their capital on infrastructure in all the places where wireless services are needed the LEAST. Go figure.
Sure, wireless services have SOME demand in metropolitan areas. However, its not adaquate to keep the business solvant at this point, or perhaps they operate like all the other dotcoms and are doomed to bankruptcy because they don't understand the basic fundamentals of economics. My guess its something in between.
I couldn't quite tell if the cops involved were campus cops or municipal cops. Since in some areas campus cops at state universities are effectively state troopers, I suppose it doesn't really make any difference. The point here is an issue of jurisdiction. You live in a school dorm and use a school network. You expect to have some degree of privacy, but it appears if that is not the case. You can be monitored, and while a warrant was obtained, it was probably rather easy to obtain due to the extra fine print that is inserted all over university documents with regards to use of the school's network and what is considered acceptable behavior in dorms.
There are extenuating circumstances here that create extra problems. If these students lived in their own house and paid for their own isolated internet connection that had no connection to the university, the "evidence" collecting methods that caused the problems in the first place wouldn't exist and nobody would ever have obtained a warrant against them, let alone ever found out about the website in the first place.
I'm quite certain these types of issues have been going on for quite some time, but before Columbine people generally turned a blind eye to the activity since it wasn't on their radar screen. I had my account canceled on a university computer back in 1992 because I telnet'ed into the system from another university when I was visiting there and was accused of unauthorized access as a result. They apparrenly watch things like that pretty closely and I don't doubt they have stepped up their surveillance in past years as computers have gotten more powerful and networks have been used more.
I don't suppose there's an easy solution to this problem. Part of the advantage of living in a dorm room is unfettered access to the university's often ample internet bandwidth, and in many cases you don't curtail any activities based soley on what someone else might think of them. But the network is not public. There are restrictions in place and like it or not, the university has probably gone to great lengths to assure they they will have the means to "protect" themselves and others from any "dangerous" students, no matter how they go about discovering this information.
The solution isn't really simple. The solution to this problem is to isolate yourself from the university. Don't use a university network and don't live in dorms. Rent a local house with your roommates and pick up a dsl or cable connection for your bandwidth. It might cost more (in some cases it might not), but that is sometimes the price of freedom. On a separate network, this wouldn't have happened. On a separate network, the student who had his equipment confiscated for "hacking" a website by running some dns tests on it after it was cracked would not have heard a peep about it.
I work at UPS, and ALL of the items listed would have made it through as shipped with no problems, except for the fact that they might be a bit roughhoused. It might seem strange to drop a hammer into a mailbox, but at UPS, this is par for the course. There are a LOT of individual items shipped as is, no wrapping, with just a label slapped on the side. Especially around Xmas, people will literally ship Xmas trees with a label taped around the trunk. It usually ends up in several pieces by the time it gets to its destination, but it WILL get there.
Other strange things that have come through the system include an unwrapped matress, a freshly severed bear's head, LOTS of tires with no wrapping, a car bumper that looked like it had been ripped off the car, complete with the license plate, boxes of live crickets which usually break open so you have crickets loose all over the place, individual car parts with no wrapping. Rank food is quite common on return items.
Fortunately, at UPS about 3% of the volume involves packages like this, so there are regular methods to transport them internally (they don't travel on the conveyor belts) I would imagine that the post office simply doesn't have the facilities to deal with a large number of unusual objects.
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During my freshman year in college I would always skip physics class to play pool. Somehow this seemed like a legitimate use of my physics time, since it was at least SOMEWHAT related to the subject matter. Sorta. Well, it was an adaquate excuse for MY purposes. :)
:)
In any event, had this manual been available, I might have actually thought to consult it, and I might have actually learned some physics during this time period, although I did get rather good at playing pool.
-Restil
True.. in the grand scheme of things, aircraft navigation and auto crashes are more important than the operability of my toaster, but if there was a problem with the GPS system, my airbag would still inflate and the pilots would still manage to get the plane to its destination.
And this doesn't even get into more likely problems. I've never owned any GPS devices before, but how well do they work when you're inside a building, or underground? My CD player doesn't care where in the world I am, but if it had as much trouble operating as my cell phone does when I'm in the basement, we may see other problems even when the GPS system IS functioning perfectly.
What would happen if for some reason the GPS network developed a... problem. Say we have an unusually heavy meteor shower, which would cause no undue damage to earth itself but could reign utter havoc on satellites in orbit. Its not inconcievable that enough of the GPS satellites could be disabled that would cause GPS devices on Earth to become disabled. If this were to happen, does this mean that all consumer goods would fail to function until the sats were repaired or replaced?
-Restil
I might be mistaken, but last time I heard, the greater majority of innovation does not come from taxpayer funded projects. In fact, we could really do without most of the taxpayer funded "innovation". The IRS and other taxpayer funded entities are innovating in ways I would prefer them not to.
Microsoft's position is obvious, of course. They don't want the US Federal government creating any universal policies to support only Open Source products as other countries have done. Microsoft is well aware that while Linux may not offer 100% of the "features" that Microsfot products do, it wouldn't be much of a stretch to adapt, especially if there was some work put into it.
Also, if there was interest in large scale budget cuts, the Microsoft tax would be a significant factor. Microsoft is well aware of this fact, as they would feel it from the other end.
-Restil
The point is, that deep down, the RIAA is smart. They know that the great percentage of the music traded on Napster wouldn't be purchased anyways. Its not money they're losing, they're just afraid that their loyal purchasing crowd might SOMEDAY drift into that environment and they'll start losing real sales. At least with a monetary figure attached to the service, people will be less inclined to switch over to it over purchasing CD's.
However, the RIAA isn't about to start admitting that napster for the time being probably is generating more cd sales than stealing them, but they would rather lose money and keep a stranglehold on the market rather than let that market drift away from them.
-Restil
First of all, some of the revenue per user can be recovered from ad banners. An alternative option can be selected by those users who wish to avoid seeing any annoying banners and have them pay a small monthly fee for the privalage.
-Restil
Obviously in the spirit of the GPL, any updates to GPL code must also be GPL'ed, and therefore, even if you weren't allowed to keep IP rights to changes you made while employed there, the GPL would overrule that anyways and allow the code to continue to be public.
There is one exception though. If the company ONLY used that code for internal use and never released any source or binaries for changes, any changes you make to that code while employed for the company MIGHT be considered company property and therefore could not be used elsewhere. However, this would only hold water until ANY of the code is included in ANY program that is available to the public. Even if they extracted from the GPL'ed program only that code modifications you made while employed there, technically that code would be covered under the GPL even if the original modified program was never made publicly available.
Of course, when you're talking about inventions, this scheme doesn't make a whole lot of sense. The whole point of protecting an "invention" is not to hoarde it in house for only the company at large to use, but to release some executable form to the public to make money and own exclusive rights to that product. Obviously going in with GPL'ed code would almost ensure that any changes you make will be subject to the GPL when you leave. It might not be YOURS, but it will still be GPL'ed.
-Restil
restil@alignment.net
I realize that not everyone in the world is going to own a Sun product, but lets say this scheme was in corporated by a more consumer level company like Magnovox or RCA, or Sony. Then walk through any random neighborhood and chances are good that almost every house or apartment will contain at least ONE of these products.
Some anonymous individual who aquires a method for exctracting this ID from remote and is able to match the item to a specific product should walk through a neighborhood getting an inventory of everyone's homes. Then publish a list of ALL these products cross referenced by address and mail it out to everyone in the area. Make sure
you include on this list a listing of all the companies that made this possible. There would probably be such an outrage that these companies would silently retract the whole scheme lest they fall victim to extreme market pressure.
-Restil
restil@alignment.net
Oh come on.. you know that the ISP's are TOTALLY to blame for this. Without those EVIL ISP's, there wouldn't be any kiddy porn on the internet. As we all know, there was NO SUCH THING as kiddy porn before the internet introduced it to the world. The ISP's are TOTALLY to blame for everything, so THAT'S who we should be punishing.
Sure, there are child pornographers all over the place that are producing this trash and they're the ones that are actually posting it, but its the ISP's that make it possible, so the ISP's are COMPLETELY to blame.
-Restil
restil@alignment.net
PS. This message is an example of sarcasm.
Well, seeing how I can't get any java applets to work on ns 3.0 anymore ANYWAYS, lack of java support is not a major crisis.
-Restil
Of course, you have to wonder why the STANDARD wasn't hashed out a LONG time ago. Instead they keep upgrading the standards and thats whats causing these problems. As I once heard, lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.
-Restil
So what's wrong with Netscape 3.0? Sure, it might not load any pages with any kind of javascript on it anymore, but really, don't you think thats MY problem? If I don't access your site because you choose to make it more complex than I am able to access, then that is YOUR problem and shame on you for not providing an adaquate alternative. Certainly, you don't HAVE to, and if I REALLY need to see your page, I will. Older browsers have certain features that make them ideal. They take up less space, they're a LOT less bloated, they load faster, and in some cases, they're a lot less bug ridden.
So I'll use whatever browser I damn well please.
-Restil
restil@alignment.net
The RIAA blames Napster for the reason that websites and the RIAA can't come to an agreement to sell music online because nobody can compete with a free service. I hate to break the news to anyone, but Napster is simply scratching a market itch that the RIAA outright refused to scratch themselves. Had the RIAA moved its ass years ago instead of holding on and assuming nothing would ever change, the rug was pulled out from under its feet. They wouldn't be having the legal battles right now had they just implemented their own online distribution methods to begin with.
Of course, piracy would have occurred anyways. It always has, and it always will. A small amount of piracy has to be tolerated to some degree if you're in this business. You may not like it, and for the most part, the law is on your side in this regard, but it probably doesn't result in the lost sales you might think it does.
However, if there was an industry endorsed online music distribution method BEFORE napster was dropped upon the world, Napster probaby would never have come to be. Or when it did, people would try it out on a few songs, see how slow it is compared to the RIAA's version, and end up just ignoring it.
But no, the RIAA wants to hold on to their old ways. Well, let them have their old ways then. They can wither into the dust for all I care. They obviously are not thinking in anyone's best interests, even their own. They deserve whatever they get.
-Restil
restil@alignment.net
As patents go.
If you build a mousetrap you can patent it. Nobody else can DUPLICATE your mousetrap and sell it while the patent is active. However, it does not prevent anyone else from creating their own mousetraps or even improving on your model. You can't patent the concept of a mousetrap, only the exact mousetrap.
You can't patent an icon, although I could imagine granting a patent for a specific icon design. Mac icons are typically different than windows icons. If its THAT damned important, then fine. Patent the damn thing. But I can still create my own icons. They can still serve the same function. You can't deny me that.
A specific algorithm? I suppose. All algorithms that produce a specific effect? Nope.
Of course, this probably isn't the way it is, and its not even the way I'd like it to be. But it does to some degree make sense.
Then again, I'm in the process of installing windows, so my mental condition at the moment is questionable, so please disregard this comment.
-Restil
The biggest problem I have seen with this is that you must use a website to encode/decode the message. Hey, this is no big deal. Anyone can write a program. The best option though would be to actually encrypt the message with your typical encryption scheme, then use a filter to convert the encrypted text into spam or whatever medium you like. The first stage will protect the message. The second stage will conceal the encryption. If the actual filtering process was key based, then only the reciever would be able to determine if the spam was actually spam or concealing another message.
-Restil
This works much the same way at UPS. I'm in management, and although we don't always follow the rules to the letter, management personel are forbidden to touch boxes. And if an hourly employee were to monitor the amount of time a supervisor is handling packages, they get compensated for that amount of time since its time that was concievibly "stolen" from an hourly employee.
This doesn't turn out to be quite the crisis it might seem though. Ironically, many of the unionized hourly workers are only interested in working the LEAST amount of hours as possible and the more work someone else does the less they have to do, and they're not about to complain about it.
Obviously there are also exceptions. For demonstration purposes we can handle packages, or in an emergency sitution its acceptable. And this isn't something that produces a large number of complaints when half the workers are new hires who aren't completely aclimated to the workload yet and find that ANYONE helping out is a blessed relief.
-Restil
I don't want someone telling my employer that I'm only allowed to work 40 hours a week. I don't want them telling my employer that they have to keep me on staff as long as the quality of my work reaches acceptable levels of mediocrity. I want to know that the quality of my work is what matters, not the fact that I show up every once in a while and perform to a minimal acceptable standard. And most important of all, I don't want to be let go because some other employee they have can't be fired because he's been there too long, even if I am more productive.
If I want to work 80 hours a week knowing that the experience and stock options MIGHT someday make me successful, then thats my choice and not the choice of a union. If someone doesn't like it, they can switch careers. There are no illusions in the technology industry. I know that not everyone who goes into it turns out to be a millionaire after 3 years. If the fact that the average passerby thinks this and finds its not all glamour as they had expected, well SORRY. Go back to whatever it was you were doing before you made that tragic mistake. SORRY if you didn't know you might have to spend 10 years of your life sitting in your bedroom hacking on your computer into the middle of the night, forgoing a social life, to achieve what some of us have. Thats the price for some of our "overnight" successes. You should accept nothing less. And no union better tell you otherwise.
-Restil
It might not seem like it while you're coasting through a school zone, but 22 mph feels pretty damn fast when you're scraping across the concrete. As a test for the damage 22 mph can do, get in your car, find a handy brick wall somewhere, and drive into it at 22 mph. Oh... and you can't use the brakes.
-Restil
Thats SO amazing. I wonder how that could have possibly happened???? :)
I found myself simultaniously laughing and disgusted at the same time. I had a difficult time discerning if its a parody or if they're actually serious about it. But guess what. Its just words and pictures on a screen. I hadn't heard a thing about it until someone told me about it and I'm no more likely to stuff my cat into a jar than I was before I found the site.
As far as I'm concerned, if no cats were actually harmed during the making of the site, I don't care at all. If the cats were dead before inserting them, I don't care. If they were alive but not in pain, I don't care.
My point is this. This is the first time I ever heard anything about this. Even if this was some underground activity, I probably would have heard SOMETHING about it before. This improves the likelyhood that its only a parody and I intend to treat it as such. If there are those in the world that would be inclined to stuff their cats into a jar after reading that site, we probably have much worse things we need to worry about from those people than bonsai cats.
In other news, I find people who are extreme animal rights supporters, or at least supporters of all the animals that are fuzzy and cute, to overreact in a big way to anything that even remotely threatens something thats cute and fuzzy.
I remember the website about cat scanning that had them in an uproar because it was in some way scaring the cats or something. Everytime I take my cat to the vet, it gets all worked up. But that doesnt' mean I don't take it in every year to get its shots. At least I love my cat.
Did you know, animal rights supporters out there, that there are orginizations that you actually support that are KILLING those cute fuzzy little kitties?? YES! Its happening every day all across the USA. The SPCA will KILL those cute fuzzy kitties. Of course, the more PC term is euthinization (sp??) but the end result is the same. Yet nobody seems to complain. I can't imagine why. See that cute cow out there in the field, eating grass. It goes "MOO" you know. It shits on the ground and smells bad. Well, somebody someday is going to kill that cow and carve it up and stick it between two pieces of bread and you're going to eat it. YES. Just think MOO whenever you eat that tasty hamburger.
Cute little chicken. Adorable. Mmmm.. Nuggets.
Where are the protesters???
Froglegs Yummy. Disecting frogs in class. Where are the protestors? Didn't you know that frogs are cute, although they're not paticularly fuzzy. Come on people. PROTEST!
I had pet rats once. Of course, I didn't buy them as pets.. I had purchased them as snakefood, but the snake must not have been hungry for rat, so I ended up with two pet rats. That evil snake was going to eat those cute little rats. Pet stores all over the place will sell cute little rats and cute little mice just so they can be fed to evil snakes. But nobody seems to be protesting.
Yet if I even considered the possibility of feeding a kitty to a snake, letting that snake wrap around it, and suffucate it to death, and announcing that fact to the world, there would be mobs of angry protestors beating down my doors. I can't imagine the big deal, but there you go.
Of course, I would never feed a kitty to a snake. But I have no doubt that a snake that was big enough would try to eat it, and I certainly couldn't fault the snake for trying, as its only doing what nature has instructed it to do.
Of course, just wait. I was joking about there being no protesters against eating cows. There are. Plenty. They're just not quite as vocal yet. Soon enough though we're going to see that songs like "Carrotjuice is murder" won't be so funny anymore. They'll be candidates for National Anthem replacements.
This rant has been brought to you by Restil.
restil@alignment.net
First, it has to be powered up to work. The external power supply is almost redundant. I won't be rebooting my production linux box more than once or twice a year, and even then, the reboots will be planned. I could easily back up the drive without the external power supply. If I were to suddenly lose power, it wouldn't matter anyways since the external power supply would most likely go down as well.
Second, for 8 gig models, having a separate PCI card holding the memory makes sense. But for less than 2 gigs, you will probably be better off just using a ramdisk. Not only will this allow you to have more control over the actual memory allocation, there shouldn't be any dramatic difference in performance. As I said before, a sudden loss of power for your server is just as likely to take out the power for the drive as well, so you're not in a much safer position the other way.
Just a few thoughts.
-Restil
restil@alignment.net
The reason a lot of the mom&pop services existed in the first place was to recover some of the cost and justification of a high speed pipe. Before the widespread proliferation of cable and dsl, a T1 was about your best bet to get any decent speed, but very few people could afford it out of pocket. But most people have a hard time using 1% of their available bandwidth, so the other 99% goes to waste. Why not set up a small ISP to bring in revenue to pay for the line. You don't need many users paying a flat monthly rate to cover the cost of the line and then some and the subscriber base and network will still be rather managable by one or two people.
However, now that a large number of people can pick up a dsl line for less than $100 a month, the need to recover the cost is gone, as well as the need for expensive T1 lines. Thus the mom&pop services don't exist because the specific itch they used to scratch just doesn't exist anymore.
-Restil
restil@alignment.net
But are wireless services THAT big of a deal? Of course I understand their usefulness for mobile users, that goes without saying. But what is the deal with people getting wireless service in the middle of a big city where they easily have several options for high bandwidth service. Why are people using wireless networks inside their house to just save a couple hours running wires.
Why are wireless services being billed as the wave of the future, when hopefully within 10 years there will be a fibre connection dropped into every house. Maybe my foresight is a bit foggy, but some things just don't seem to make a whole lot of sense to me.
If they're going bankrupt, then it means the market isn't there. Go look at this coverage map. Notice all the green area? Thats the area of the US that is most in need of wireless services, and with the unique nature of wireless services being able to cover a wide area with no more than a single antenna, it actually makes sense in those areas. But instead they've blown their capital on infrastructure in all the places where wireless services are needed the LEAST. Go figure.
Sure, wireless services have SOME demand in metropolitan areas. However, its not adaquate to keep the business solvant at this point, or perhaps they operate like all the other dotcoms and are doomed to bankruptcy because they don't understand the basic fundamentals of economics. My guess its something in between.
-Restil
restil@alignment.net
I couldn't quite tell if the cops involved were campus cops or municipal cops. Since in some areas campus cops at state universities are effectively state troopers, I suppose it doesn't really make any difference. The point here is an issue of jurisdiction. You live in a school dorm and use a school network. You expect to have some degree of privacy, but it appears if that is not the case. You can be monitored, and while a warrant was obtained, it was probably rather easy to obtain due to the extra fine print that is inserted all over university documents with regards to use of the school's network and what is considered acceptable behavior in dorms.
There are extenuating circumstances here that create extra problems. If these students lived in their own house and paid for their own isolated internet connection that had no connection to the university, the "evidence" collecting methods that caused the problems in the first place wouldn't exist and nobody would ever have obtained a warrant against them, let alone ever found out about the website in the first place.
I'm quite certain these types of issues have been going on for quite some time, but before Columbine people generally turned a blind eye to the activity since it wasn't on their radar screen. I had my account canceled on a university computer back in 1992 because I telnet'ed into the system from another university when I was visiting there and was accused of unauthorized access as a result. They apparrenly watch things like that pretty closely and I don't doubt they have stepped up their surveillance in past years as computers have gotten more powerful and networks have been used more.
I don't suppose there's an easy solution to this problem. Part of the advantage of living in a dorm room is unfettered access to the university's often ample internet bandwidth, and in many cases you don't curtail any activities based soley on what someone else might think of them. But the network is not public. There are restrictions in place and like it or not, the university has probably gone to great lengths to assure they they will have the means to "protect" themselves and others from any "dangerous" students, no matter how they go about discovering this information.
The solution isn't really simple. The solution to this problem is to isolate yourself from the university. Don't use a university network and don't live in dorms. Rent a local house with your roommates and pick up a dsl or cable connection for your bandwidth. It might cost more (in some cases it might not), but that is sometimes the price of freedom. On a separate network, this wouldn't have happened. On a separate network, the student who had his equipment confiscated for "hacking" a website by running some dns tests on it after it was cracked would not have heard a peep about it.
-Restil
restil@alignment.net
I work at UPS, and ALL of the items listed would have made it through as shipped with no problems, except for the fact that they might be a bit roughhoused. It might seem strange to drop a hammer into a mailbox, but at UPS, this is par for the course. There are a LOT of individual items shipped as is, no wrapping, with just a label slapped on the side. Especially around Xmas, people will literally ship Xmas trees with a label taped around the trunk. It usually ends up in several pieces by the time it gets to its destination, but it WILL get there.
Other strange things that have come through the system include an unwrapped matress, a freshly severed bear's head, LOTS of tires with no wrapping, a car bumper that looked like it had been ripped off the car, complete with the license plate, boxes of live crickets which usually break open so you have crickets loose all over the place, individual car parts with no wrapping. Rank food is quite common on return items.
Fortunately, at UPS about 3% of the volume involves packages like this, so there are regular methods to transport them internally (they don't travel on the conveyor belts) I would imagine that the post office simply doesn't have the facilities to deal with a large number of unusual objects.
-Restil