Well, I agree with others that he voted for the FISA authorization rather than abstain or pair (with an opposing voter, nullifying both), and the sum of his FISA vote and this request for stay looks bad. So, I'd like to see a positive move on his behalf on the warrant-less wiretapping issue.
This sucks. However let's keep in mind that the order to close the detention/torture center at Gitmo has gone out, and to close the CIA detention centers, and the order to err on the side of disclosure in FOIA cases.
Let's keep in mind that it's a request for stay, not the last word. But it looks like Obama isn't on our side regarding this issue, and we might have to work for a long time to win it. Consider what we are winning so far, and keep on working. We were never going to get a candidate elected who agreed with us on everything.
Uh-huh. It is especially true for folks like me who really just stuck their name on the front of the book for series recognition and didn't do the work. Authors don't need that any longer, if they even did then.
Do you think you might try to do it on your own? Selling online, demand printing, etc? I'd do it that way today if I felt the need to write.
Sourcelabs tried it with swik.net, I think, but didn't make it. I was gone from there by then. Anyway, much of their content was scraped from elsewhere.
How are your books doing? I am pretty much out of that business for now. The Prentice Hall division I was with did professional reference. That is probably the niche that has suffered most, not from the economy but from online sources.
Folks, dead-tree publishing is hardly the wave of the future. People don't even buy our reference works any longer, they just google. We can sell them more tutorial works, and we can make money from advertising coupled with online references only if ours are consistently better than everyone else's, because there is no shortage of online references for computer software and languages. Half of you do things we don't have much use for any longer. We've got to radically redirect our entire business, and that doesn't mean just getting rid of some jobs, it means that some of you older folks who don't have the flexibility will be replaced with young, shiny, eager folks who know the new paradigm.
If there's one thing we've learned about the modern world, it's that the guild system doesn't work to deliver value to employers over the long term. Our only choice is to let you go, or go out of business ourselves. And you know what? We might still fail anyway.
The problem was that we were being told absurd prices before, not that the prices are absurd now. My home supposedly tripled in value over the first 10 years since I bought it. Now, that would be a problem if you borrowed on that falsely-inflated value, or assumed that it represented a durable component of your net worth. I didn't. A lot of other people did, and they are paying for their mistake now.
Sure, this is really bad for people who bought within the last decade. But a Million-dollar mortgage has always been the equivalent of selling yourself into lifetime indenture. Maybe the slaves should have revolted before.
Do you really use reference books any longer? I just use the web. I used to have my own line of 24 reference books, these days I'd feel bad about wasting all of that paper. Now, tutorial books can still sell.
Most of the Air Force One aircraft of the past are at the On-base annex of the Air Force Museum in Dayton. One thing that's evident is that every one is larger than the last. You can stand in the plane where they swore in LBJ after Kennedy was killed.
To visit the aircraft, you have to arrive early at the museum and ask your way to the folks who dispense base tickets, as you'll need to take a bus from the museum to the base. Bring good ID, it's a military base and security is serious.
The museum is a great side-trip before or after the Dayton Hamvention. Definitely worth a day, you will find it difficult to see everything in that long.
Come on, Bruce.
Its slashdot for God's sake. If you can't laugh at someone's death here where can you?
Oh, anywhere that it's fashionable to have absolutely no taste or sense of the appropriate, and where flaunting your a sense of bankruptcy is in style.
It's not that quiet there. The coordinator of the zone has been very cooperative with ham radio operators and other users. It's only necessary for the coordinator to protect their radio-astronomy project, not to shut off RF entirely.
Well, sorry to disappoint you, but I am out of the platform business for the moment. This is probably my last visit to DC for a while. People who play that game have to make sure they have the financial leisure to support themselves while doing it, and I have to work on that for a while. The good news is that some interesting Open Source software will come out of that.
Yes, I am concerned by the FISA re-authorization bill as well. The candidate who would have voted against that bill, and his party, were not capable of leading a majority of the American people even far enough to vote for him. Obama, in contrast, was able to rally a country behind him while still representing substantial and needed change.
If Obama continues to support bills that are in clear violation of the constitution, and that subvert the rule of law subsequent to the crime, there's a problem. This particular activity seems to have been related to moving the country on from the odious acts of the previous administration.
The fact that George W. Bush is not being tried for treason is itself a sign of the present weakness of our constitution, but such a trial might well have torn the country apart when moving on is the best solution for us collectively. I am still wondering what efforts will take place in international courts.
ha, you got to be kidding, one scratch or a bad player and it is trash. I hope you are not an sys admin for any company.
Oh. I suppose then you want me to use recording tape? It's much more reliable then? Even if it was, backup tape drives are horribly expensive and depreciate faster than fresh fruit. I finally demagnitized my Ontrak tapes, and gave them away at the electronics flea market, and that's the last tape drive I'm going to buy.
Obviously my backups would be in better shape if I carved them into granite with a chisel and shot them into orbit. But the only practical thing I can do is to have multiple copies, at multiple locations.
The thing to understand is that Obama has to lead where the whole country will follow. This means that there is lots of change he might like to make, but can't.
Regardless of what the RIAA wants, the market has rejected DRM for audio recordings. What's happening with iTunes is proof enough of that. Obviously this doesn't extend to video yet.
But the real issue we need to fight, of which the conduct of RIAA and MPAA are just one one symptom, is corporate totalitarianism. The rights of corporations stop somewhere short of the micromanagement of individual conduct represented by DRM and the legal structure supporting it. Leaders in other countries have come to understand what that is, and it can happen here too.
They make fire safes that are specially designed to not reach the temperature where digital media will be harmed.
Yes. I see two hours at 1850 degrees F, for a few hundred bucks. I guess this is a combination of insulation and thermal mass. One has a USB pass through on the safe door, but no power wire, and a resistive loss on the USB power line according to one reviewer, so the drive pocket in the safe is sized for 2-1/2 inch drives. It'd have nowhere to send internal heat, so that's just as well.
Fire safes are generally designed to keep their contents below the combustion point of paper. Hard drives will melt at much, much cooler temperatures.
Good point. You don't want to be in the sort of situation where it's necessary to call Kroll Ontrak to recover the drive. The fire safe will probably reach an unacceptable temperature in a structure-destroying fire. That's why I have off-site backups.
Instructions to my wife and child in case of a fire are get out first, do not concern yourself about any disks. This even though some of the forest fires we are subject to give warning before the structure must be evacuated. My critical business data gets backed up out of the state every night, via the net.Bruce
You do this by using a hard disk copy as the "master", and copying to and from SD, considering that the SD is always "ephemeral", and may get bent, may pop out of the device and be stepped on and lost, etc. So, it is never the host for any critical data for very long.
And you make darned sure to back up the disk. These days my short-term backup medium is a couple of 1G or larger SATA disks, which I place in a front-loading holder and put in the fire safe after they're written. Long-term backup media is currently DVD, but will probably go to Blu-Ray when the media gets cheap enough. Some of these are stored in a relative's closet, because having all of your backups in one building is stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I agree with others that he voted for the FISA authorization rather than abstain or pair (with an opposing voter, nullifying both), and the sum of his FISA vote and this request for stay looks bad. So, I'd like to see a positive move on his behalf on the warrant-less wiretapping issue.
Bruce
Perens in 2016! :-)
Folks,
This sucks. However let's keep in mind that the order to close the detention/torture center at Gitmo has gone out, and to close the CIA detention centers, and the order to err on the side of disclosure in FOIA cases.
Let's keep in mind that it's a request for stay, not the last word. But it looks like Obama isn't on our side regarding this issue, and we might have to work for a long time to win it. Consider what we are winning so far, and keep on working. We were never going to get a candidate elected who agreed with us on everything.
Bruce
The point of S-video is that chrominance-luminance crosstalk could be reduced but not eliminated if both were on the same channel.
Uh-huh. It is especially true for folks like me who really just stuck their name on the front of the book for series recognition and didn't do the work. Authors don't need that any longer, if they even did then.
Do you think you might try to do it on your own? Selling online, demand printing, etc? I'd do it that way today if I felt the need to write.
Thanks
Bruce
How are your books doing? I am pretty much out of that business for now. The Prentice Hall division I was with did professional reference. That is probably the niche that has suffered most, not from the economy but from online sources.
Tim O'Reilly on truth drugs:
Folks, dead-tree publishing is hardly the wave of the future. People don't even buy our reference works any longer, they just google. We can sell them more tutorial works, and we can make money from advertising coupled with online references only if ours are consistently better than everyone else's, because there is no shortage of online references for computer software and languages. Half of you do things we don't have much use for any longer. We've got to radically redirect our entire business, and that doesn't mean just getting rid of some jobs, it means that some of you older folks who don't have the flexibility will be replaced with young, shiny, eager folks who know the new paradigm.
If there's one thing we've learned about the modern world, it's that the guild system doesn't work to deliver value to employers over the long term. Our only choice is to let you go, or go out of business ourselves. And you know what? We might still fail anyway.
Sure, this is really bad for people who bought within the last decade. But a Million-dollar mortgage has always been the equivalent of selling yourself into lifetime indenture. Maybe the slaves should have revolted before.
Do you really use reference books any longer? I just use the web. I used to have my own line of 24 reference books, these days I'd feel bad about wasting all of that paper. Now, tutorial books can still sell.
To visit the aircraft, you have to arrive early at the museum and ask your way to the folks who dispense base tickets, as you'll need to take a bus from the museum to the base. Bring good ID, it's a military base and security is serious.
The museum is a great side-trip before or after the Dayton Hamvention. Definitely worth a day, you will find it difficult to see everything in that long.
That should be "where flaunting your moral bankruptcy is in style"
Oh, anywhere that it's fashionable to have absolutely no taste or sense of the appropriate, and where flaunting your a sense of bankruptcy is in style.
I don't have them, and I'm not looking at this story again, because I'm grossed out by some of the folks here.
It's not that quiet there. The coordinator of the zone has been very cooperative with ham radio operators and other users. It's only necessary for the coordinator to protect their radio-astronomy project, not to shut off RF entirely.
Where have you been for the last 8 years? There is nothing righteous about our power.
Well, sorry to disappoint you, but I am out of the platform business for the moment. This is probably my last visit to DC for a while. People who play that game have to make sure they have the financial leisure to support themselves while doing it, and I have to work on that for a while. The good news is that some interesting Open Source software will come out of that.
Bruce
How can you defend and uphold the constitution if you can't get yourself elected to office?
Yes, I am concerned by the FISA re-authorization bill as well. The candidate who would have voted against that bill, and his party, were not capable of leading a majority of the American people even far enough to vote for him. Obama, in contrast, was able to rally a country behind him while still representing substantial and needed change.
If Obama continues to support bills that are in clear violation of the constitution, and that subvert the rule of law subsequent to the crime, there's a problem. This particular activity seems to have been related to moving the country on from the odious acts of the previous administration.
The fact that George W. Bush is not being tried for treason is itself a sign of the present weakness of our constitution, but such a trial might well have torn the country apart when moving on is the best solution for us collectively. I am still wondering what efforts will take place in international courts.
Bruce
Where is there a scientific evaluation of write-once DVD endurance? This was such a big issue with CDRs, but a quick net search didn't find much.
Oh. I suppose then you want me to use recording tape? It's much more reliable then? Even if it was, backup tape drives are horribly expensive and depreciate faster than fresh fruit. I finally demagnitized my Ontrak tapes, and gave them away at the electronics flea market, and that's the last tape drive I'm going to buy.
Obviously my backups would be in better shape if I carved them into granite with a chisel and shot them into orbit. But the only practical thing I can do is to have multiple copies, at multiple locations.
Bruce
The thing to understand is that Obama has to lead where the whole country will follow. This means that there is lots of change he might like to make, but can't.
Regardless of what the RIAA wants, the market has rejected DRM for audio recordings. What's happening with iTunes is proof enough of that. Obviously this doesn't extend to video yet.
But the real issue we need to fight, of which the conduct of RIAA and MPAA are just one one symptom, is corporate totalitarianism. The rights of corporations stop somewhere short of the micromanagement of individual conduct represented by DRM and the legal structure supporting it. Leaders in other countries have come to understand what that is, and it can happen here too.
Bruce
Yes. I see two hours at 1850 degrees F, for a few hundred bucks. I guess this is a combination of insulation and thermal mass. One has a USB pass through on the safe door, but no power wire, and a resistive loss on the USB power line according to one reviewer, so the drive pocket in the safe is sized for 2-1/2 inch drives. It'd have nowhere to send internal heat, so that's just as well.
This is making me really like net backups.
Good point. You don't want to be in the sort of situation where it's necessary to call Kroll Ontrak to recover the drive. The fire safe will probably reach an unacceptable temperature in a structure-destroying fire. That's why I have off-site backups.
Instructions to my wife and child in case of a fire are get out first, do not concern yourself about any disks. This even though some of the forest fires we are subject to give warning before the structure must be evacuated. My critical business data gets backed up out of the state every night, via the net.Bruce
I tried to moderate your posting, but there was no "yuk-yuk" button. Sorry!
Treat your SD cards as garbage! No kidding!
You do this by using a hard disk copy as the "master", and copying to and from SD, considering that the SD is always "ephemeral", and may get bent, may pop out of the device and be stepped on and lost, etc. So, it is never the host for any critical data for very long.
And you make darned sure to back up the disk. These days my short-term backup medium is a couple of 1G or larger SATA disks, which I place in a front-loading holder and put in the fire safe after they're written. Long-term backup media is currently DVD, but will probably go to Blu-Ray when the media gets cheap enough. Some of these are stored in a relative's closet, because having all of your backups in one building is stupid.
Bruce