"While certainly people abused usenet, perhaps none so much as Scientology, at least it's harder to shut down."
I understand that the Scientologists' materials recently posted on/. have been available through postings on Usenet for years despite all attempts of the Scientologists to stop this on Usenet and on webpages. The anarchist.lunatic.terrorist heirarchy seems ungovernable, but browsable with good filtering, no matter what the Church of the Holy Lawsuit tried.
It makes one wonder what was so important to the AC about posting it in/. It isn't that the materials require protection of fierce anticenshorship advocates, as the attempts to censor posting on usenet failed and they can be had there. The apparent motivation is to recruit more activists against the Scientologists, relying on their inevitable
harsh response to posting the material and the ensuing resentment and lashing out by/. denizens.
To some extent, then, this posting was the mega troll of trolls: an attempt to bring a whole net community into dispute on an issue that isn't really of concern to them but wastes their time on it in the long run anyhow, all to the satisfaction and serving the ends of the trolling poster. I suppose you call it "judo" if you favor the tactic and "trolling" if you don't.
That is not to suggest that every intrusion warrants a complete forensic investigation, but in some circumstances it is entirely appropriate and needs to be done quickly (and correctly).
A stolen bag of candy is easy enough to quantify. An intruded system is another matter.
I don't think the ALA and ACLU challenging the CIPA is enough. Sure, these are great organizations, but their priorities are so clearly agains censorship, and that is the basis for their existence, so their challenges seem almost compulsatory. It would lend more credibility to the case against the CIPA to have more politically neutral technology advocates come on board. This should include coroporations (come on Bill, have some balls!), technological literacy groups, and the technology media (yes, that means Slashdot). In the ACLU and ALA, we have great weapons in the battle for continuing freedom of speech/expression, but we're running short of soldiers, and we need to widen the support base. It's not too much to ask for some of these people to at least lend a word in favor of action against the CIPA, and money would help even more. Why should the ALA and ACLU have to fight this alone?
Maybe it does sound a bit far-fetched, but I have personally seen the actual aircraft flying and downlinking data to a ground station.
At the EAA AirVenture in Oshkosh in 1999 they had the Rutan Proteus aircraft circling the airfield at high altitude and sending near-live video images to a laptop in the NASA exhibit. It wasn't quite high enough resolution to see yourself waving up at the plane, but you could see the larger display aircraft moving around on the ground.
The secret to making it work is the genius of airplane designer Burt Rutan. The Proteus is a bizarre, ungainly looking beast built optimally for long endurance at high altitude. It uses a couple of small, super efficient jet engines from Williams International to power it. Compared to something like a 747, fuel consumption is miniscule.
The mission time is expected to be anywhere from 10 to 14 hours. Two pilots take turns to fly and sleep during the mission. I guess they'll will need some smart software to execute the transmission handover when an aircraft is replaced on station by the next mission. I think they are proposing 6 aircraft per station to maintain continuous coverage.
I'm not sure about the electronics/radio side of things but I guess that the frequency band will need to be one where directional antennas are not required. Having to track a moving aircraft to maintain a connection would be impractical.
Maybe it will work, maybe it won't. But I certainly do not think it is a hoax.
Actually, I enjoyed the mini-series and admired the fact that it attempted to film something that can't be filmed - yet. Lynch's Dune was a "glorious mess" (quoting someone from years ago) and I'm happy to say the mini-series was more pleasing - even when I was 11 I felt the movie lacked. 16 or 17 years from now we may see another, better piece, but, for now, I find the mini-series the best interpretation thus far and seems to set it in the 60's mindset that the book promotes (the sets, the costumes, everything seems to call back to 60's production values without actually using them - on purpose, I think). As for Dune Messiah - Sci-Fi has signed a contract with the writer/director of the mini-series for another mini-series combining Messiah and Children of Dune. Makes good sense, I think, as those three books are truly the heart of the entire series. Of course, God Emperor of Dune would be cool to see in a few years if just for Leto...
Very interesting. I'd have to bet that these ("Angel") guys are rushing in an attempt to beat the SkyStation folks to the market. Let's hope they don't, since the Skystation stuff looks much cleaner and better planned...
If I am not mistaken, Tesla's last breath was spent on giving the bellboy at the hotel $500 and telling him to give it to Mark Twain, his long dead friend (30yrs dead), who borrowed money from him a lot to fund his investments.Tesla has been portrayed as a bad business man.The Westinghouse deal tends to support the oppisite when looked at in more detail.The deal he got in this first place was huge ($2.50 for each kilowatt of AC electricity sold, my current bill,if I'm reading it correctly, says $0.0092000 per KWH)! The cost to Westinghouse was very high and that was just paying off Tesla, not mention operating costs or room for much of a profit margin. This would have have made several things likely to happen.One, electrity would only be availible to the very rich (like it already was)and would mean a very small market place with smaller amounts of rotalties paid to Tesla. It also meant Tesla would spend the rest of his life selling AC (which he had already been doing for most of it) to keep the company from going under.When the royalties owed to Tesla started to exceed $1 million, Westinghouse ran into financial trouble. Tesla realized that if his contract remained in effect, Westinghouse would be out of business and he had no desire to deal with the creditors. His dream was to have cheap AC electric available to all people. Tesla once said this of George Westinghouse ``George Westinghouse was, in my opinion, the only man on this globe who could take my alternating-current system under the circumstances then existing and win the battle against prejudice and money power. He was a pioneer of imposing stature, one of the world's true nobleman of whom America may well be proud and to whom humanity owes an immense debt of gratitude.'' Tesla ripped up the contract and sold his patents, leaving Westinghouse holding all the assets, as well as all the debt.This pretty much says it all. This guy had a hand in almost everything we call technology today (radio,X-rays,vacuum tube amplifier,fluorescent bulb,neon lights,speedometer,the automobile ignition system,the basics behind radar,electron microscope,microwave ovens) and claimed he could crack the Earth in half if he wasn't careful. Where would you be without him? He raised the quality of life for most of the world in his own lifetime and beyond!He didn't need money, he needed people to listen to his ideas.What he could do was way better than anything he could buy.Thankfully, He wasn't in it for the money.Without him very few people would even have a chance to be in it for the money.They'd be in it for the food,shelter,and ocassional hot shower.
It might look like a hoax at first glance, but the latency to low earth orbit is around 30 ms, similar to ISDN. High earth orbit is
like 200 ms. That makes for pretty bad lag when you're used to 3 to 5 ms on a DSL or cablemodem link.
I can see wanting to do something like this, but exploring dirigibles first, or
even gliders, would have made sense!
As the owner of the site you mentioned, I'd like to speak up in my defense. I don't claim to be a professional web designer anywhere in my site. I don't offer help, I don't offer my services. I never even claimed to be great as you seem to have implied I did. I'm an university freshman who just plays around with it as a hobby. Big deal. Sure, it'd be a different story if I was doing something for a company or on a topic that's going to pull in thousands of visitors. But it's not. The typical age for people who visit my site range from 13 to 23 who run on fast connections and the newer browsers. It's fine for them. In fact, if you go around and look at other sites that focus on the same genre of Japanese animation, you will find that it's pretty much the same. We're just hobbyists, like our grandparents who made model boats and collected stamps before us. And there shouldn't be a problem with that. I experiment with new scripts because I can. I'm not trying to bring in a paycheck or please the masses. The web is not full of professionals, there are just as many out there who are amateurs just like to do it. So if you really want to find designers to criticize, why don't you find someone who does do it for a living and has to do it for reasons other than leisure.
The latency to low earth orbit is around 30 ms, similar to ISDN. High earth orbit is like 200 ms. I can see wanting to do something like this, but exploring dirigibles or even GLIDERS first would have made a lot of sense!
You can
rent these and as an alternative to time delaying the TV broadcasts, rip the video and burn Video CDs. Nice thing is, one episode fits neatly on one CD!
Then
donate a few bucks to the EFF to help make sure you'll still be allowed to use the digital equivalent of a VCR in a few years...
If he could use a personal ISP account to get around the FOIA, what's to stop him from sending email to lobbyists, the CIA, etc. that way? The assumption is that any email the POTUS sends is potentially official business, and must be archived and made available. So it doesn't matter whether it comes from bushjr@whitehouse.gov or dubya@hotmail.com.
this would only be a tax on interstate commerce if the sales and use tax applied only to commerce from other states, and not commerce within ohio. it is, however, merely an effort to collect taxes for items bought on which a sales and use tax has not already been collected
This is no different than a sales and use tax paid on an in-state purchase. If a retailer does not exist within your state, then you should not pay that retailer any tax. States like Wisconsin and Ohio have recently implemented voluntary reporting of sales and use taxes owed on out-of-state purchases. This is because the internet has greatly increased the number of purchases on which no sales and use tax is paid to the state in which the product will be used. However, the voluntary reporting of the sales tax does not only apply to internet sales. It also applies to mail-order and phone-order sales.
Regarding nomenclature, voluntary and trust taxes have existed for a long time. The sales and use tax charged by retailers is a trust tax, because consumers and the state are trusting retailers to report and pay the required tax in a timely manner.
Hi!
One particular other notable relevant to Slashdot was that he ran a profitable paper without publishing sensational/tabloid articles. He got slammed quite about for censorship and denying freedom of speech when he refused to publish paid for sensational advertisements. This is something 200 years later where Newspapers say one can't run a profitable newspaper without the draw of the OJ Simpson headlines?
I like Slashdot because its not about generating a bottom line but about publishing relevant material. In my opinion I think Franklin would appreciate slashdot.org for its open source as well. Nobody is hiding behind a veneer of authoritative respectability that more, eh hem, established media outlets try to assume.
Cheers!
-Mybrid
This reminds me of a/. article from last month...?
>> A State University of New York at Stonybrook researcher has invented a machine that estimulates bone growth in subjects by just having them stand on a vibrating platform. A sheep usin the gizmo 20 minutes a day had 20% denser bones after only a year
I think that this could help out the gaming industry, and get some people off there backs by them clearly rating the games. We have a rating system in america, but that still hasn't gotten them people off our back about gaming violence, so scrach all that i said above.
This isn't a good idea, the rating system on movies dosn't work, the rating system on games dosn't work, i'm 15 and i can walk into a R rated movie like i own the place, and i can just as esily can get my grubby little hands on a M (mature) rated game. No one cares, and it still dosn't get these gaming people off our backs, so i say don't do it. These people just need something to piss and moan about. So don't do it.
Want the power and scalability of Unix Platform, and don't want to totally rewrite you current software base.
It is a very compeling business case. Also you have to go with what your developers know. Once again you could retrain, but that costs. The one time cost is far less than training.
Yes, if you wish to write from ground zero you would use Perl/PHP or another language. But, the purpose is porting.
Slashdot Mirror
Posted by wonder mule:
/. have been available through postings on Usenet for years despite all attempts of the Scientologists to stop this on Usenet and on webpages. The anarchist.lunatic.terrorist heirarchy seems ungovernable, but browsable with good filtering, no matter what the Church of the Holy Lawsuit tried.
/. It isn't that the materials require protection of fierce anticenshorship advocates, as the attempts to censor posting on usenet failed and they can be had there. The apparent motivation is to recruit more activists against the Scientologists, relying on their inevitable
/. denizens.
"While certainly people abused usenet, perhaps none so much as Scientology, at least it's harder to shut down."
I understand that the Scientologists' materials recently posted on
It makes one wonder what was so important to the AC about posting it in
harsh response to posting the material and the ensuing resentment and lashing out by
To some extent, then, this posting was the mega troll of trolls: an attempt to bring a whole net community into dispute on an issue that isn't really of concern to them but wastes their time on it in the long run anyhow, all to the satisfaction and serving the ends of the trolling poster. I suppose you call it "judo" if you favor the tactic and "trolling" if you don't.
Posted by srvivn21:
That is not to suggest that every intrusion warrants a complete forensic investigation, but in some circumstances it is entirely appropriate and needs to be done quickly (and correctly).
A stolen bag of candy is easy enough to quantify. An intruded system is another matter.
Posted by loungey:
Maybe by actively *looking* for a partner/mate you're closing your mind to the opportunities that stare you in the face?
Posted by HedgeCore:
I don't think the ALA and ACLU challenging the CIPA is enough. Sure, these are great organizations, but their priorities are so clearly agains censorship, and that is the basis for their existence, so their challenges seem almost compulsatory. It would lend more credibility to the case against the CIPA to have more politically neutral technology advocates come on board. This should include coroporations (come on Bill, have some balls!), technological literacy groups, and the technology media (yes, that means Slashdot). In the ACLU and ALA, we have great weapons in the battle for continuing freedom of speech/expression, but we're running short of soldiers, and we need to widen the support base. It's not too much to ask for some of these people to at least lend a word in favor of action against the CIPA, and money would help even more. Why should the ALA and ACLU have to fight this alone?
Maybe it does sound a bit far-fetched, but I have personally seen the actual aircraft flying and downlinking data to a ground station.
At the EAA AirVenture in Oshkosh in 1999 they had the Rutan Proteus aircraft circling the airfield at high altitude and sending near-live video images to a laptop in the NASA exhibit. It wasn't quite high enough resolution to see yourself waving up at the plane, but you could see the larger display aircraft moving around on the ground.
The secret to making it work is the genius of airplane designer Burt Rutan. The Proteus is a bizarre, ungainly looking beast built optimally for long endurance at high altitude. It uses a couple of small, super efficient jet engines from Williams International to power it. Compared to something like a 747, fuel consumption is miniscule.
The mission time is expected to be anywhere from 10 to 14 hours. Two pilots take turns to fly and sleep during the mission. I guess they'll will need some smart software to execute the transmission handover when an aircraft is replaced on station by the next mission. I think they are proposing 6 aircraft per station to maintain continuous coverage.
I'm not sure about the electronics/radio side of things but I guess that the frequency band will need to be one where directional antennas are not required. Having to track a moving aircraft to maintain a connection would be impractical. Maybe it will work, maybe it won't.
But I certainly do not think it is a hoax.
Check It Out!
Posted by gamgee5273:
Actually, I enjoyed the mini-series and admired the fact that it attempted to film something that can't be filmed - yet. Lynch's Dune was a "glorious mess" (quoting someone from years ago) and I'm happy to say the mini-series was more pleasing - even when I was 11 I felt the movie lacked. 16 or 17 years from now we may see another, better piece, but, for now, I find the mini-series the best interpretation thus far and seems to set it in the 60's mindset that the book promotes (the sets, the costumes, everything seems to call back to 60's production values without actually using them - on purpose, I think). As for Dune Messiah - Sci-Fi has signed a contract with the writer/director of the mini-series for another mini-series combining Messiah and Children of Dune. Makes good sense, I think, as those three books are truly the heart of the entire series. Of course, God Emperor of Dune would be cool to see in a few years if just for Leto...
Posted by blerki:
Very interesting. I'd have to bet that these ("Angel") guys are rushing in an attempt to beat the SkyStation folks to the market. Let's hope they don't, since the Skystation stuff looks much cleaner and better planned...
Posted by Russell-White:
,if I'm reading it correctly, says $0.0092000 per KWH)! The cost to Westinghouse was very high and that was just paying off Tesla, not mention operating costs or room for much of a profit margin. This would have have made several things likely to happen.One, electrity would only be availible to the very rich (like it already was)and would mean a very small market place with smaller amounts of rotalties paid to Tesla. It also meant Tesla would spend the rest of his life selling AC (which he had already been doing for most of it) to keep the company from going under.When the royalties owed to Tesla started to exceed $1 million, Westinghouse ran into financial trouble. Tesla realized that if his contract remained in effect, Westinghouse would be out of business and he had no desire to deal with the creditors. His dream was to have cheap AC electric available to all people. Tesla once said this of George Westinghouse ``George Westinghouse was, in my opinion, the only man on this globe who could take my alternating-current system under the circumstances then existing and win the battle against prejudice and money power. He was a pioneer of imposing stature, one of the world's true nobleman of whom America may well be proud and to whom humanity owes an immense debt of gratitude.'' Tesla ripped up the contract and sold his patents, leaving Westinghouse holding all the assets, as well as all the debt.This pretty much says it all. This guy had a hand in almost everything we call technology today (radio,X-rays,vacuum tube amplifier,fluorescent bulb,neon lights,speedometer,the automobile ignition system,the basics behind radar,electron microscope,microwave ovens) and claimed he could crack the Earth in half if he wasn't careful. Where would you be without him? He raised the quality of life for most of the world in his own lifetime and beyond!He didn't need money, he needed people to listen to his ideas.What he could do was way better than anything he could buy.Thankfully, He wasn't in it for the money.Without him very few people would even have a chance to be in it for the money.They'd be in it for the food,shelter,and ocassional hot shower.
If I am not mistaken, Tesla's last breath was spent on giving the bellboy at the hotel $500 and telling him to give it to Mark Twain, his long dead friend (30yrs dead), who borrowed money from him a lot to fund his investments.Tesla has been portrayed as a bad business man.The Westinghouse deal tends to support the oppisite when looked at in more detail.The deal he got in this first place was huge ($2.50 for each kilowatt of AC electricity sold, my current bill
It might look like a hoax at first glance, but the latency to low earth orbit is around 30 ms, similar to ISDN. High earth orbit is like 200 ms. That makes for pretty bad lag when you're used to 3 to 5 ms on a DSL or cablemodem link.
I can see wanting to do something like this, but exploring dirigibles first, or even gliders, would have made sense!
Posted by Dianalyn101:
As the owner of the site you mentioned, I'd like to speak up in my defense. I don't claim to be a professional web designer anywhere in my site. I don't offer help, I don't offer my services. I never even claimed to be great as you seem to have implied I did. I'm an university freshman who just plays around with it as a hobby. Big deal. Sure, it'd be a different story if I was doing something for a company or on a topic that's going to pull in thousands of visitors. But it's not. The typical age for people who visit my site range from 13 to 23 who run on fast connections and the newer browsers. It's fine for them. In fact, if you go around and look at other sites that focus on the same genre of Japanese animation, you will find that it's pretty much the same. We're just hobbyists, like our grandparents who made model boats and collected stamps before us. And there shouldn't be a problem with that. I experiment with new scripts because I can. I'm not trying to bring in a paycheck or please the masses. The web is not full of professionals, there are just as many out there who are amateurs just like to do it. So if you really want to find designers to criticize, why don't you find someone who does do it for a living and has to do it for reasons other than leisure.
Hell of a way to beat latency!
The latency to low earth orbit is around 30 ms, similar to ISDN. High earth orbit is like 200 ms. I can see wanting to do something like this, but exploring dirigibles or even GLIDERS first would have made a lot of sense!
You can rent these and as an alternative to time delaying the TV broadcasts, rip the video and burn Video CDs. Nice thing is, one episode fits neatly on one CD!
Then donate a few bucks to the EFF to help make sure you'll still be allowed to use the digital equivalent of a VCR in a few years...
Posted by barmar:
If he could use a personal ISP account to get around the FOIA, what's to stop him from sending email to lobbyists, the CIA, etc. that way? The assumption is that any email the POTUS sends is potentially official business, and must be archived and made available. So it doesn't matter whether it comes from bushjr@whitehouse.gov or dubya@hotmail.com.
Posted by blerki:
So it makes sense to slam Matrox for issuing closed source drivers, but praise nVidia for doing the same?
Posted by srvivn21:
Sadly, you can't legislate morality.
Posted by jak1320:
this would only be a tax on interstate commerce if the sales and use tax applied only to commerce from other states, and not commerce within ohio. it is, however, merely an effort to collect taxes for items bought on which a sales and use tax has not already been collected
Posted by jak1320:
This is no different than a sales and use tax paid on an in-state purchase. If a retailer does not exist within your state, then you should not pay that retailer any tax. States like Wisconsin and Ohio have recently implemented voluntary reporting of sales and use taxes owed on out-of-state purchases. This is because the internet has greatly increased the number of purchases on which no sales and use tax is paid to the state in which the product will be used. However, the voluntary reporting of the sales tax does not only apply to internet sales. It also applies to mail-order and phone-order sales.
Regarding nomenclature, voluntary and trust taxes have existed for a long time. The sales and use tax charged by retailers is a trust tax, because consumers and the state are trusting retailers to report and pay the required tax in a timely manner.
Posted by Mybrid:
Hi! One particular other notable relevant to Slashdot was that he ran a profitable paper without publishing sensational/tabloid articles. He got slammed quite about for censorship and denying freedom of speech when he refused to publish paid for sensational advertisements. This is something 200 years later where Newspapers say one can't run a profitable newspaper without the draw of the OJ Simpson headlines? I like Slashdot because its not about generating a bottom line but about publishing relevant material. In my opinion I think Franklin would appreciate slashdot.org for its open source as well. Nobody is hiding behind a veneer of authoritative respectability that more, eh hem, established media outlets try to assume. Cheers! -Mybrid
Posted by Bel Iblis:
Amen to that JFTaylor..Amen to that.
Posted by Le tech:
Figures the login didn't go through right. Stupid browser! Anyways, that's my post.
This reminds me of a
>> A State University of New York at Stonybrook researcher has invented a machine that estimulates bone growth in subjects by just having them stand on a vibrating platform. A sheep usin the gizmo 20 minutes a day had 20% denser bones after only a year
http://slashdot.org/science/01/02/10/0327241.shtml
Posted by xxmacdaddyxx:
Screw that! Allow developers to secretly nominate each other for public flogging - it wont help productivity, but it's way more satisfying...
I think that this could help out the gaming industry, and get some people off there backs by them clearly rating the games. We have a rating system in america, but that still hasn't gotten them people off our back about gaming violence, so scrach all that i said above.
This isn't a good idea, the rating system on movies dosn't work, the rating system on games dosn't work, i'm 15 and i can walk into a R rated movie like i own the place, and i can just as esily can get my grubby little hands on a M (mature) rated game. No one cares, and it still dosn't get these gaming people off our backs, so i say don't do it. These people just need something to piss and moan about. So don't do it.
"I hate you milkman dan"....Suzie
Posted by njspencer:
Very simple.
Want the power and scalability of Unix Platform, and don't want to totally rewrite you current software base.
It is a very compeling business case. Also you have to go with what your developers know. Once again you could retrain, but that costs. The one time cost is far less than training.
Yes, if you wish to write from ground zero you would use Perl/PHP or another language. But, the purpose is porting.
Posted by SchumacherWinsAgain:
PHP = Schumacher
ASP = Hakkinen
Winner, Hero, Schumacher!