- Street protests: Yeah, that'll make a big difference. Oh, another mass of people protesting in a major city? What good did the hundreds of thousands in multiple protests last year in Manhattan, or the millions in cities across Europe accomplish?
- Voting: Yeah, that'll make a big difference. That huge political gulf (sarcasm) between Bush and Kerry notwithstanding, there's very little to hold either to their election day promises, as many a President has shown.
To paraphrase Peter Lamborn Wilson, where did we cross the line where we forgot that protesting about the possibility of political consequences is not the same as political consequences? Voting for the RDNC will not solve our predicament. There has been a concerted effort between the parties to dig us into this hole for 50 years, and surprise, surprise, people are starting to lose faith in the system.
This is a big vote, indeed. But the likely outcome, a Bush/Kerry win, will only change the rate at which new suckage spews forth from the headlines.
What is one to do as this nation, and many of it allies, decends into war?
If you give a real alternative protest with real political consequences, these petty hackers will listen.
If you don't, you're probably part of what they're protesting.
"Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists--except that I'm not kidding--I favor full unemployment..."
Re:Still the anonymity problem
on
IPv6 is Here
·
· Score: 1
Geographical anonymity what? See:
http://www.digitalenvoy.net/solutions/netacuity. sh tml
This isn't your lat-long, but it's not anonymity either.
--
* Proven Accuracy
NetAcuity is the only technology to be independently verified as the most accurate IP intelligence technology on the market today, with accuracy rates well over 99% at a country level and 94% at a city-level worldwide
* Unsurpassed Coverage
NetAcuity provides coverage for 99.999% of the Internet and collects over one million Internet-points-of-view daily from different vantage points on the Internet, making it the most comprehensive technology available
I just happened to write an article about atomic weapons recently (though not quite as good as this one;). I'd appreciate correction and contributions, esp. facts about economic costs and radiological wastes and sicknesses.
- There was a betting pool at the Manhattan Project over whether or not the Earth's atmosphere would be consumed in a planet-wide fireball during the first atomic test explosion (Trinity).
- The second explosion of an atomic device was over the mainly civilian target of Hiroshima, Japan, later that year. President Truman, upon hearing of the successful explosion, said it was "the greatest day in history." 70,000 people died instantly, 200,000 died in total. At Nagasaki, 3 days later, 40,000 people died instantly, 140,000 died in total. Contrary to the initial reports by the U.S. Government that the attacks had shortened the war considerably, it has come to light that Japan's Emporer had agreed to contional surrender before these attacks. The only condition was that he remain Emporer and so the Japanese state remain intact. However, with the awesome destuctive will and power of the U.S. demonstrated, we emerged from the attacks as the sole nuclear power in the world, and largely determined the shape of the post WWII world, in which we later came to be the sole great power.
- As mentioned in the linked PDF, the second h-bomb test (Bravo) went awry, with a yield of twice what was thought possible, 15 megatons. The plume was 62 miles wide, 40 miles high. The exclusion zone after the test was 850 miles wide, or about 1% of the Earth's surface. The fallout cloud reached a distance that would, in comparison, cover the entire U.S. North-Eastern Seaboard.
- Testing was expanded to high atmospheric explosions, where h-bombs were exploded in the ionosphere. They variously disrupted, destroyed and created new layers in the Van Allen Belts, the natural magnetic layers that shield the Earth from solar and cosmic radiation. Those belts have been changed ever since.
- The U.S. nuclear power monopoly ended with a series of Russian tests that yielded the largest explosion yet, at 50 megatons. The shockwave rounded the Earth 3 times. The Russian program had discovered a 3rd stage fusion mechanism, which could have led directly to 100-150 megaton weapons, and virtually unlimited theoretical maximums.
- The U.S. underground testing in Nevada has exploded nearly 1000 devices, turning a large region there into a pockmarked surface, much like the face of the moon.
- At last count, there are 12 countries (U.S., Russia, U.K., France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, South Africa, Israel, Iraq, Iran) who are known to have, or reasonably suspected of having had, active nuclear weapons programs, 7 of which have demonstrated capability (the first 7 of those). This does not include the probable fragmentation of the Soviet stockpile after the collapse of the U.S.S.R, smaller NGOs, or describe the liklihood of nuclear arms being sold. There were reports, just before the recent reversal of M.E. policy by the Bush Administration (i.e. to no invade Syria and Iran) that Russia and China had deployed nuclear missiles along the northern borders of those countries, likely pointed at Israel, the strongest nuclear power in the M.E..
- The combined (known) stockpiles of the U.S. and Russia (including former states) is estimated to be around ~3 Gigatons accross ~10k warheads each. At a total of about 6 Gigatons of explosive force, we're plenty close to the 75-100GT energy of the (K-T event) asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, thank you very much.
- The U.S. has resumed manufacturing the nuclear trigger devices. Maintenance and testing is now almost fully virtualized, being done mainly in simulation, using the U.S.'s most powerful computers provided by IBM.
- Ironically (or perhaps obviously), Japan, the only victim of nuclear warfare, is using what is now the most powerful supercomputer in the world for a completely different purpose: to simulate the natural processes of the Earth.
Besides being devestatingly ironic, humorous and even a bit ridiculous, this is a really neat idea!
Microsoft has essentially become a public utility, with none of the benefits of public ownership. But unlike with power lines, anyone can serve up the next version of IE.. just so long as they don't call it IE.. and well, this seems like the way you'd go about doing that.
We should "patch" IE's CSS implementation too. Or maybe the COM/OLE integration, to make it 100% Wine compliant.
Hey, skip IE.. it's not so bad. We need to patch Outlook to not take friggin' 100% CPU when it's not even running.
In fact, this is all possible, except possibly for the DMCA exception. I can see it now witch-hunt now... the Microsoft/RIAA/MPAA campaign against Terrorist/Communist/Free Software Hackers who threaten all that is good and wholesome, Internet security, Apple Pies and, oh, profits, by fixing all the bugs pumped into user's hands by we-promise-they're-not-monopolistic practices.
And maybe as a carrot, Ballmer doing his dance for the AOL 10.0 commerical with a witty interjection by - in order of probability - a) whoever loses the next Presidential election, b) Jack Valenti or c) the intruiging possibility of Larry Flynt.
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center weighs in at 500TB. They run Objectivity.
Internet Archive weighs in at 300-400TB and runs Linux.
Google is probably somewhere in that range, but they don't tell. A rough guess would be 3307998701 pages * 100KB/page / 1024KB/MB / 1024MB/GB / 1024GB/TB = 308TB. They run pigeons
"If copyright dies, if patents die, if the protection of intellectual property is eroded, then people will stop investing. That hurts everyone. People need to have the incentive so that if they invest and succeed, they can make a fair profit. But on another level entirely, it's just wrong to steal. Or let's put it this way: It is corrosive to one's character to steal."
Fair enough. But then, so is making oodles of profit, Mr. Billionaire.
Why not just charge cost? I'd probably buy music again (no, I don't steal it now) if it was just covering costs and not going to make rich people richer. Take it a step further, and work with music companies that only charge cost themselves.
Think Different: Convert Apple to a nonprofit corporation. Start a more substantial moral revolution.
2) Any search you get results for, you should put into your index, possibly expiring old content.
3) On a failing query, the remote server may not have a forward link for that query, in which case it would simply say "HITS 0", and you'd have to backup and go to the next neighbor in your pre-order traversal. If no node has an answer, the default could be FWD google.com, or perhaps a metasearcher like dogpile. That would be a great bootstrap, as results would quickly be moved from the big search engines to the p2p nodes instead.
I know p2p search is hopeless, but here's some ideas on how to do it anyways. I'll phrase it like an inductive proof: first make a node, then add a neighbor.
NODE - I'd use Lucene. Lucene is a traditional keyword search engine that is fast, lean, free and open. It's carried under the Apache Jakarta project, so it's not going anywhere. And, it's easy to develop with. Alternatively, any good search will do... you could probably bang something together with GNU shell utils.
NEIGHBOR - Turn search into a common TCP/IP protocol, a la SMTP, FTP, etc.. Telnet to port 534268 (the digits that most look like "SEARCH"), and have something like this:
So, you'd start by querying your own host's search-engine. Perhaps it would spider N-deep from what you browse, so it would perhaps have ready responses for many of your queries.
But your own node may not have the answer for you, so you forward on to the next. How does the forwarding table get setup? One way to do it would be by hand, but also, I imagine posting "known expert" lists to gnutella could help automate the process. A list would be a map of keywords to IPs. These lists wouldn't need to be too robust, as they'd serve to occasionally seed the network, not constantly sustain it.
Once you had a good forwarding table on your node, you'd have access to quite a large search DB. With 100 nodes in the search network, each using 1GB for its index, and 3:10 index to indexed ratio, that's 100*1GB*3.3=330GB of indexed text. Let's say the average webpage is 100KB (?), that's a total search DB size of 3.4M pages. Increase the number of nodes to 10,000 and increase each node's index size to 10GB, and you have 3,460,300,800 pages, which is just about equal to Google, which is currently at 3,307,998,701. 10k nodes happens to be about what distributed.net is running right now, and 10GB is getting cheaper by the minute.;)
Hats of to Hatch, for bringing the debate down another rung. Why not throw in an anti-terrorism clause to make it a sure win? Nah, probably not necessary.
Webpages aren't replacements for books. Or rather, you shouldn't use them that way.
If they're lasting on average 100 days, that puts them somewhere between transient culture, like spoken conversation, and printed culture, like newspapers. Big deal.
We want to preserve culture for future generations, no doubt. But we don't want to preserve all culture for future generations. Anything that is lasting for 100 days and isn't being persisted... well, relatively that's not worth much to future culture.
I don't remember the exact saying, but there is a Native American saying to the effect of "We don't write things down. If we don't remember it, it's not worth remembering." Now, they're not the last word (no pun intended) in wisdom traditions, but there is a certain amount of enforced vitality necessitated by forgetting the details.
We'd better get used to the idea. We're only going to be forgetting more and more of the details as we generate more and more useless information.
Based off of scoop about 6 months ago.. it's compatible with the scoop db, but not nearly as fully featured as k5 currently. Just in case anyone passing through is working on such a thing.
I'll be posting it to scoop.k5.rg once 1.0 is ready.
Nerds are a special interest group. We are the aristocrats of computerdom and geekery. We see no more wisdom in a Congressman from Minnesota making laws than we do in a PHB issuing clueless work orders on how and when to code. They simply don't know what they're talking about.
So, it's pretty clear that whatever solution for spam a lawmaker from Minnesota, or anyone else in Congress, makes, it won't get the nod of the geek would-be aristocrats.. including myself.
But he's right.. you can't have it free and unrestricted on the one hand and have KOL (!) on the other. The only thing we differ over is which side to favor. Too bad he gets to decide.
In a rush to avoid the tragedy of the commons we'll throw the baby out with the bath water. There, I've said it. That's positively the lamest little meme I could think up to describe what's going on.
Either we keep the internet, socially, as a p2p network that requires lots of care, thinking and personal responsibility, or it becomes hub-and-spoke network that, through a variety of enclosure laws - like e-mail taxation - turns into the next medium for mass-stupidity and mass-vegitation. TV will, by comparison, seem like yesterday's radio. The Matrix will be seen by most as a wrong-headed, pessimistic critique of the real benefits of zombification.
Ah, who am I kidding. Who's going to go spend the holidays with their family and explain the virtues of open and free, a promising cultural renaissance, and DIY to families full of folks happy to just get up-to-the-second sports scores, infinite celebrity gossip, free music and endless naked women (or men) so long as nobody asks too many questions? Thought so.
They're the voters, mind you. Mmmm... democracy.
The G-men are coming, and the Internet will be owned by their favorite caretakers. Back to work, peons.
On copyright: "The name and trademarks of Microsoft may NOT be used in any manner, including advertising or publicity pertaining to the Specification or its contents without specific, written prior permission. Title to copyright in the Specification will at all times remain with Microsoft."
On patent.. you're right.. I only read the first license, not the linked patent license. It is indeed royalty free, but hardly open...
You can't change the schema: "No right to create modifications or derivatives of this Specification is granted herein."
You can't write an a partial or super implementation. "A "Licensed Implementation" means only those specific portions of a software product that read and writes files that are fully compliant with the specifications for the Office Schemas. The term "Necessary Claims" means claims of a patent or patent application that are owned or controlled by Microsoft and that are necessarily infringed by reading or writing files pursuant to the requirements of the Office Schemas. A claim is necessarily infringed only when it is not possible to avoid infringing when conforming to the specification because there is no technically reasonable non-infringing alternative for reading or writing such files."
You can't sub-license: "You are not licensed to sublicense or transfer your rights."
Visit the Open Music Registry today. It's not in the best of shape, but don't complain.. help it get better.
If you know musicians, get them to release their music under the EFF's Open Audio License, register their songs at the OMR and release the songs on the p2p nets.
If you're a listener, sort through the songs at the OMR and give good feedback.
Just like OSS.
That's the recipe for a Jail-free and Big-Media-free future!
"Any person who commits an offense under section 506(a)(1) of title 17 -
(1) shall be imprisoned not more than 5 years, or fined in the amount set forth in this title, or both, if the offense consists of the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of at least 10 copies or phonorecords, of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $2,500;"
The same language is going into The FTAA Treaty, meaning all of North and South America would face prison for the same crime:
"[4.1. Each Party shall provide criminal procedures and penalties to be applied at least in cases of willful trademark counterfeiting or infringement of copyrights or neighboring rights on a commercial scale. Each Party shall provide that significant willful infringements of copyrights or neighboring rights that have no direct or indirect motivation of financial gain shall be considered willful infringement on a commercial scale.
In criminal procedures, remedies available shall include imprisonment and/or monetary fines sufficiently high to deter future acts of infringement and with a policy to remove the monetary incentive to the infringer. Each Party shall further ensure that such fines are imposed by judicial authorities at levels that actually deter future infringements.]"
"Smithers & Co., a research firm in London, calculated the cost of these footnoted options and concluded that the American companies granting them overstated their profits by as much as half in the financial year ending in 1998. In some cases, particularly that of high-tech firms (which tend to be generous with options), the disparity is even greater. For instance, Microsoft, the world's most valuable company, declared a profit of $4.5 billion in 1998; when the cost of options awarded that year, plus the change in the value of outstanding options, is deducted, the firm made a loss of $18 billion."
And strange this, Buffet weighed in against:
"Some maintain that these numbers exaggerate the problem: there is genuine dispute over how best to calculate and account for the cost of executive options. But this is quibbling. Warren Buffett, a well-known American investor, put the case succinctly for tightening the rules on share-option schemes in the recent annual report of his investment company, Berkshire Hathaway. "Accounting principles offer management a choice: pay employees in one form and count the cost, or pay them in another form and ignore the cost. Small wonder then that the use of options has mushroomed," he observes. "If options aren't a form of compensation, what are they? If compensation isn't an expense, what is it? And, if expenses shouldn't go into the calculation of earnings, where in the world should they go?""
Slashdot Mirror
Please, someone propose a better protest then.
So far, here's what we have:
- Street protests: Yeah, that'll make a big difference. Oh, another mass of people protesting in a major city? What good did the hundreds of thousands in multiple protests last year in Manhattan, or the millions in cities across Europe accomplish?
- Voting: Yeah, that'll make a big difference. That huge political gulf (sarcasm) between Bush and Kerry notwithstanding, there's very little to hold either to their election day promises, as many a President has shown.
To paraphrase Peter Lamborn Wilson, where did we cross the line where we forgot that protesting about the possibility of political consequences is not the same as political consequences? Voting for the RDNC will not solve our predicament. There has been a concerted effort between the parties to dig us into this hole for 50 years, and surprise, surprise, people are starting to lose faith in the system.
This is a big vote, indeed. But the likely outcome, a Bush/Kerry win, will only change the rate at which new suckage spews forth from the headlines.
What is one to do as this nation, and many of it allies, decends into war?
If you give a real alternative protest with real political consequences, these petty hackers will listen.
If you don't, you're probably part of what they're protesting.
http://deoxy.org/endwork.htm
"Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists--except that I'm not kidding--I favor full unemployment..."
No.
Is at:
http://freality.org/library
Under "sound".
Please mirror if you d/l.
Geographical anonymity what? See:
. sh tml
http://www.digitalenvoy.net/solutions/netacuity
This isn't your lat-long, but it's not anonymity either.
--
* Proven Accuracy
NetAcuity is the only technology to be independently verified as the most accurate IP intelligence technology on the market today, with accuracy rates well over 99% at a country level and 94% at a city-level worldwide
* Unsurpassed Coverage
NetAcuity provides coverage for 99.999% of the Internet and collects over one million Internet-points-of-view daily from different vantage points on the Internet, making it the most comprehensive technology available
That's the first thing I thought. Looks like another item to add to my Skynet HOWTO.
The author's benchmark doesn't account for this switchover:
http://java.sun.com/docs/hotspot/VMOptions.html
java -XX:CompileThreshold=10000 Test
other interesting flags:
-XX:+PrintCompilation
-XX:+PrintInlining
I just happened to write an article about atomic weapons recently (though not quite as good as this one ;). I'd appreciate correction and contributions, esp. facts about economic costs and radiological wastes and sicknesses.
- There was a betting pool at the Manhattan Project over whether or not the Earth's atmosphere would be consumed in a planet-wide fireball during the first atomic test explosion (Trinity).
- The second explosion of an atomic device was over the mainly civilian target of Hiroshima, Japan, later that year. President Truman, upon hearing of the successful explosion, said it was "the greatest day in history." 70,000 people died instantly, 200,000 died in total. At Nagasaki, 3 days later, 40,000 people died instantly, 140,000 died in total. Contrary to the initial reports by the U.S. Government that the attacks had shortened the war considerably, it has come to light that Japan's Emporer had agreed to contional surrender before these attacks. The only condition was that he remain Emporer and so the Japanese state remain intact. However, with the awesome destuctive will and power of the U.S. demonstrated, we emerged from the attacks as the sole nuclear power in the world, and largely determined the shape of the post WWII world, in which we later came to be the sole great power.
- As mentioned in the linked PDF, the second h-bomb test (Bravo) went awry, with a yield of twice what was thought possible, 15 megatons. The plume was 62 miles wide, 40 miles high. The exclusion zone after the test was 850 miles wide, or about 1% of the Earth's surface. The fallout cloud reached a distance that would, in comparison, cover the entire U.S. North-Eastern Seaboard.
- Testing was expanded to high atmospheric explosions, where h-bombs were exploded in the ionosphere. They variously disrupted, destroyed and created new layers in the Van Allen Belts, the natural magnetic layers that shield the Earth from solar and cosmic radiation. Those belts have been changed ever since.
- The U.S. nuclear power monopoly ended with a series of Russian tests that yielded the largest explosion yet, at 50 megatons. The shockwave rounded the Earth 3 times. The Russian program had discovered a 3rd stage fusion mechanism, which could have led directly to 100-150 megaton weapons, and virtually unlimited theoretical maximums.
- The U.S. underground testing in Nevada has exploded nearly 1000 devices, turning a large region there into a pockmarked surface, much like the face of the moon.
- At last count, there are 12 countries (U.S., Russia, U.K., France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, South Africa, Israel, Iraq, Iran) who are known to have, or reasonably suspected of having had, active nuclear weapons programs, 7 of which have demonstrated capability (the first 7 of those). This does not include the probable fragmentation of the Soviet stockpile after the collapse of the U.S.S.R, smaller NGOs, or describe the liklihood of nuclear arms being sold. There were reports, just before the recent reversal of M.E. policy by the Bush Administration (i.e. to no invade Syria and Iran) that Russia and China had deployed nuclear missiles along the northern borders of those countries, likely pointed at Israel, the strongest nuclear power in the M.E..
- The combined (known) stockpiles of the U.S. and Russia (including former states) is estimated to be around ~3 Gigatons accross ~10k warheads each. At a total of about 6 Gigatons of explosive force, we're plenty close to the 75-100GT energy of the (K-T event) asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, thank you very much.
- The U.S. has resumed manufacturing the nuclear trigger devices. Maintenance and testing is now almost fully virtualized, being done mainly in simulation, using the U.S.'s most powerful computers provided by IBM.
- Ironically (or perhaps obviously), Japan, the only victim of nuclear warfare, is using what is now the most powerful supercomputer in the world for a completely different purpose: to simulate the natural processes of the Earth.
See, OSS makes sense :)
Besides being devestatingly ironic, humorous and even a bit ridiculous, this is a really neat idea!
Microsoft has essentially become a public utility, with none of the benefits of public ownership. But unlike with power lines, anyone can serve up the next version of IE.. just so long as they don't call it IE.. and well, this seems like the way you'd go about doing that.
We should "patch" IE's CSS implementation too. Or maybe the COM/OLE integration, to make it 100% Wine compliant.
Hey, skip IE.. it's not so bad. We need to patch Outlook to not take friggin' 100% CPU when it's not even running.
In fact, this is all possible, except possibly for the DMCA exception. I can see it now witch-hunt now... the Microsoft/RIAA/MPAA campaign against Terrorist/Communist/Free Software Hackers who threaten all that is good and wholesome, Internet security, Apple Pies and, oh, profits, by fixing all the bugs pumped into user's hands by we-promise-they're-not-monopolistic practices.
And maybe as a carrot, Ballmer doing his dance for the AOL 10.0 commerical with a witty interjection by - in order of probability - a) whoever loses the next Presidential election, b) Jack Valenti or c) the intruiging possibility of Larry Flynt.
But I digress...
required msg
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center weighs in at 500TB. They run Objectivity.
Internet Archive weighs in at 300-400TB and runs Linux.
Google is probably somewhere in that range, but they don't tell. A rough guess would be 3307998701 pages * 100KB/page / 1024KB/MB / 1024MB/GB / 1024GB/TB = 308TB. They run pigeons
Your sarcasm assumes that's not the case.
"If copyright dies, if patents die, if the protection of intellectual property is eroded, then people will stop investing. That hurts everyone. People need to have the incentive so that if they invest and succeed, they can make a fair profit. But on another level entirely, it's just wrong to steal. Or let's put it this way: It is corrosive to one's character to steal."
Fair enough. But then, so is making oodles of profit, Mr. Billionaire.
Why not just charge cost? I'd probably buy music again (no, I don't steal it now) if it was just covering costs and not going to make rich people richer. Take it a step further, and work with music companies that only charge cost themselves.
Think Different: Convert Apple to a nonprofit corporation. Start a more substantial moral revolution.
1) 534268 -> 53268 (to make it legal)
2) Any search you get results for, you should put into your index, possibly expiring old content.
3) On a failing query, the remote server may not have a forward link for that query, in which case it would simply say "HITS 0", and you'd have to backup and go to the next neighbor in your pre-order traversal. If no node has an answer, the default could be FWD google.com, or perhaps a metasearcher like dogpile. That would be a great bootstrap, as results would quickly be moved from the big search engines to the p2p nodes instead.
I know p2p search is hopeless, but here's some ideas on how to do it anyways. I'll phrase it like an inductive proof: first make a node, then add a neighbor.
NODE - I'd use Lucene. Lucene is a traditional keyword search engine that is fast, lean, free and open. It's carried under the Apache Jakarta project, so it's not going anywhere. And, it's easy to develop with. Alternatively, any good search will do... you could probably bang something together with GNU shell utils.
NEIGHBOR - Turn search into a common TCP/IP protocol, a la SMTP, FTP, etc.. Telnet to port 534268 (the digits that most look like "SEARCH"), and have something like this:
If there are no results at that node, the server forwards you on:
So, you'd start by querying your own host's search-engine. Perhaps it would spider N-deep from what you browse, so it would perhaps have ready responses for many of your queries.
But your own node may not have the answer for you, so you forward on to the next. How does the forwarding table get setup? One way to do it would be by hand, but also, I imagine posting "known expert" lists to gnutella could help automate the process. A list would be a map of keywords to IPs. These lists wouldn't need to be too robust, as they'd serve to occasionally seed the network, not constantly sustain it.
Once you had a good forwarding table on your node, you'd have access to quite a large search DB. With 100 nodes in the search network, each using 1GB for its index, and 3:10 index to indexed ratio, that's 100*1GB*3.3=330GB of indexed text. Let's say the average webpage is 100KB (?), that's a total search DB size of 3.4M pages. Increase the number of nodes to 10,000 and increase each node's index size to 10GB, and you have 3,460,300,800 pages, which is just about equal to Google, which is currently at 3,307,998,701. 10k nodes happens to be about what distributed.net is running right now, and 10GB is getting cheaper by the minute. ;)
Hats of to Hatch, for bringing the debate down another rung. Why not throw in an anti-terrorism clause to make it a sure win? Nah, probably not necessary.
Webpages aren't replacements for books. Or rather, you shouldn't use them that way.
If they're lasting on average 100 days, that puts them somewhere between transient culture, like spoken conversation, and printed culture, like newspapers. Big deal.
We want to preserve culture for future generations, no doubt. But we don't want to preserve all culture for future generations. Anything that is lasting for 100 days and isn't being persisted... well, relatively that's not worth much to future culture.
I don't remember the exact saying, but there is a Native American saying to the effect of "We don't write things down. If we don't remember it, it's not worth remembering." Now, they're not the last word (no pun intended) in wisdom traditions, but there is a certain amount of enforced vitality necessitated by forgetting the details.
We'd better get used to the idea. We're only going to be forgetting more and more of the details as we generate more and more useless information.
Based off of scoop about 6 months ago.. it's compatible with the scoop db, but not nearly as fully featured as k5 currently. Just in case anyone passing through is working on such a thing.
I'll be posting it to scoop.k5.rg once 1.0 is ready.
Nerds are a special interest group. We are the aristocrats of computerdom and geekery. We see no more wisdom in a Congressman from Minnesota making laws than we do in a PHB issuing clueless work orders on how and when to code. They simply don't know what they're talking about.
So, it's pretty clear that whatever solution for spam a lawmaker from Minnesota, or anyone else in Congress, makes, it won't get the nod of the geek would-be aristocrats.. including myself.
But he's right.. you can't have it free and unrestricted on the one hand and have KOL (!) on the other. The only thing we differ over is which side to favor. Too bad he gets to decide.
In a rush to avoid the tragedy of the commons we'll throw the baby out with the bath water. There, I've said it. That's positively the lamest little meme I could think up to describe what's going on.
Either we keep the internet, socially, as a p2p network that requires lots of care, thinking and personal responsibility, or it becomes hub-and-spoke network that, through a variety of enclosure laws - like e-mail taxation - turns into the next medium for mass-stupidity and mass-vegitation. TV will, by comparison, seem like yesterday's radio. The Matrix will be seen by most as a wrong-headed, pessimistic critique of the real benefits of zombification.
Ah, who am I kidding. Who's going to go spend the holidays with their family and explain the virtues of open and free, a promising cultural renaissance, and DIY to families full of folks happy to just get up-to-the-second sports scores, infinite celebrity gossip, free music and endless naked women (or men) so long as nobody asks too many questions? Thought so.
They're the voters, mind you. Mmmm... democracy.
The G-men are coming, and the Internet will be owned by their favorite caretakers. Back to work, peons.
Ah right, that's me too.
On copyright: "The name and trademarks of Microsoft may NOT be used in any manner, including advertising or publicity pertaining to the Specification or its contents without specific, written prior permission. Title to copyright in the Specification will at all times remain with Microsoft."
On patent.. you're right.. I only read the first license, not the linked patent license. It is indeed royalty free, but hardly open...
You can't change the schema: "No right to create modifications or derivatives of this Specification is granted herein."
You can't write an a partial or super implementation. "A "Licensed Implementation" means only those specific portions of a software product that read and writes files that are fully compliant with the specifications for the Office Schemas. The term "Necessary Claims" means claims of a patent or patent application that are owned or controlled by Microsoft and that are necessarily infringed by reading or writing files pursuant to the requirements of the Office Schemas. A claim is necessarily infringed only when it is not possible to avoid infringing when conforming to the specification because there is no technically reasonable non-infringing alternative for reading or writing such files."
You can't sub-license: "You are not licensed to sublicense or transfer your rights."
So, here's the spec, but if you talk about it you'll be sued by our trademark©right lawyers, or if you read or write to the format you'll be sued by our patent lawyers. Where do you want to go today? Jail?
Visit the Open Music Registry today. It's not in the best of shape, but don't complain.. help it get better.
If you know musicians, get them to release their music under the EFF's Open Audio License, register their songs at the OMR and release the songs on the p2p nets.
If you're a listener, sort through the songs at the OMR and give good feedback.
Just like OSS.
That's the recipe for a Jail-free and Big-Media-free future!
Don't let the Aussies get all of the credit!
Title 18, Section 2319 of the US Code:
"Any person who commits an offense under section 506(a)(1) of title 17 -
(1) shall be imprisoned not more than 5 years, or fined in the amount set forth in this title, or both, if the offense consists of the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of at least 10 copies or phonorecords, of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $2,500;"
You can search the US code here.
The same language is going into The FTAA Treaty, meaning all of North and South America would face prison for the same crime:
"[4.1. Each Party shall provide criminal procedures and penalties to be
applied at least in cases of willful trademark counterfeiting or infringement
of copyrights or neighboring rights on a commercial scale. Each Party shall
provide that significant willful infringements of copyrights or neighboring
rights that have no direct or indirect motivation of financial gain shall be
considered willful infringement on a commercial scale.
In criminal procedures, remedies available shall include imprisonment and/or
monetary fines sufficiently high to deter future acts of infringement and
with a policy to remove the monetary incentive to the infringer. Each Party
shall further ensure that such fines are imposed by judicial authorities at
levels that actually deter future infringements.]"
"Smithers & Co., a research firm in London, calculated the cost of these footnoted options and concluded that the American companies granting them overstated their profits by as much as half in the financial year ending in 1998. In some cases, particularly that of high-tech firms (which tend to be generous with options), the disparity is even greater. For instance, Microsoft, the world's most valuable company, declared a profit of $4.5 billion in 1998; when the cost of options awarded that year, plus the change in the value of outstanding options, is deducted, the firm made a loss of $18 billion."
;)
And strange this, Buffet weighed in against:
"Some maintain that these numbers exaggerate the problem: there is genuine dispute over how best to calculate and account for the cost of executive options. But this is quibbling. Warren Buffett, a well-known American investor, put the case succinctly for tightening the rules on share-option schemes in the recent annual report of his investment company, Berkshire Hathaway. "Accounting principles offer management a choice: pay employees in one form and count the cost, or pay them in another form and ignore the cost. Small wonder then that the use of options has mushroomed," he observes. "If options aren't a form of compensation, what are they? If compensation isn't an expense, what is it? And, if expenses shouldn't go into the calculation of earnings, where in the world should they go?""
Well, he is good at analyzing long-term value