Man, from the start of your post, I thought you got it. Then I read your post and realized you don't.
This announcement follows suspiciously closely on the heels of confirmation that Microsoft plans to expand Xbox into a more full-featured closed computing/entertainment converged device.
AOLTimeWarner doesn't want to fall behind, so they start planning their own. And what piece are they missing to fight that battle? An OS.
So Linux will only appear on "closed" boxes. Device drivers won't be a problem. Games might be. AOL won't contribute anything to device drivers, but they might bring some real user-focused applications to the deal.
They are probably very worried about MS beating them in an area AOLTW currently owns. But what Microsoft forgets is that manufacturing a consumer electronics device is probably less of a cultural gap for AOLTW than putting together entertainment is for MS.
2)rtists whose works can be copied perfectly due to digital technology (music, movies etc...) stand to lose lots of money. I know that much of the money never makes it to the artists and that most of it gets into the hands of the mega-corporation. However without some form of copyright laws the artists would get nothing at all.
Artists will no longer get any of it. They will have to go through "approved" hardware they can't afford, and they will be even more beholden to the middlemen than ever.
Artists who can't afford cheap hardware to record their own music stand to lose ALL of the money they could ever hope to make. They simply won't be legally allowed to record and distribute their own music under laws like the proposed SCSSA or whatever it's called.
As a result artists would either a) not make art,
Those artists usually quit anyway when they find out that no one is going to "discover" them and make them stars. The real artists do what they do because it's what they do. The culture of complete control cuts them out of the game altogether.
b) not share their art except at closely held screenings,
To some degree, this may be inevitable. Digital culture is closer to oral, pre-literate culture than anyone notices. If you don't believe me think of the average literacy level in a./ post. But create an entire system of DRM-enabled electronics, and smaller musicians will not be able to afford to get their music to you any way but live performances.
c) start charging a whole lot more for the copies that you can get.
This may also be inevitable. They sell fewer copies, get more for them, and more people get more stuff for nothing. Hell, western classical music was created almost entirely by the patronage of a few rich folks, and I don't recall anyone saying that weak copyright laws is the reason Mozart sucks. The only alternative to this is to create a culture of complete control. Technology tends not to stay that way forever. Railroads gave way to autos.
The point is, of course, that the Big Media Companies *are* trying to outlaw consumer electronics, and replace them all with movie theaters in your living room. They have no chance of making this work. If they outlaw the free OSes, I am going to start stockpiling grenades, land mines, bazookas, knives, guns... because it is nothing more or less than a descent into feudalism that they are seeking.
Well, bad guys being stupid is certainly more *reliable* than cops being smart...
The obvious point here being that these terrorists were dumb for using weak encryption when strong encryption is readily available (with or without export controls). It was dumb crooks, not smart US policies, that resulted in the encryption being cracked.
The article indicates that the encryption keys have not been found, which is too bad. I'd love to find out that their passphrase was "Allah akbar", because it doesn't matter how strong your encryption is when the passphrase gives you a weak link. Now that would be a real lesson to draw from this.
As Jack said, how does it hurt anyone to extend the copyright protection on Mickey Mouse for a few more years?
Lots of ways. The Wind Done Gone is a good example - someone who was playing within the system was cheated of their livelihood so that a couple of heirs - who did not create or produce anything - could get a government grant of something they do not own, deserve to own, or benefit the economy in any way by owning - more years to make money off copyrights.
Put another way, things that are X years old belong to the public - it's called the public domain. So by protecting Mickey for a few more years, Disney is actually stealing a common good and giving nothing back. They are stealing fundamental freedoms - the freedom to speak, make murals for elementary schools, draw cartoons - and offering nothing in return. They are getting a government-created monopoly that takes freedom, economic opportunity, and artistic opportunity from all of us, and they give nothing back. Unless you consider money-making incentives to dead people to be an economic stimulus of some kind.
The problem with peer review is that the logical place to go is with other scientists. And these days, they and their universities are filing patents. The business world likes to think itself tough and ruthless, but the academic world has no peer when it comes to the capacity for backbiting and subterfuge.
It would make more sense if applications were supposed to be made public in relevant industry journals - the applicant has to pay for an ad - and the public was given time to provide objections on the basis of prior art or overly broad or vague claims.
The sponsor doesn't necessarily have more control than anyone else. You could probably have more control by hiring core developers to work on projects they found interesting. But no more or less than with Linux. Code and the vote of one's feet is about all that really matters. If you are doing a lot of work with core developers, then being the sponsor and having developers on staff would be convenient as well as a good PR move, but that's about it.
Linux has a benevolent dictator with many, many contributors, FreeBSD has a larger number of dictators with fewer contributors. I suppose you could say that Linus operates like a beloved king and FreeBSD operates like Athenian democracy - it's democratic if and only if you can become a citizen, but even that moderate democracy seems to keep people happy, and may even be considered a more advanced political structure than Linux has; what happens if Linus gets run over by a beer truck? A crisis of succession. Probably Alan Cox, but every succession becomes more dicey. So it goes with dynasties. FreeBSD actually has more power centers and formalized political procedures, so it's pretty resistant to nonsense like these changes of sponsorship.
The basic idea behind all this, by the way, is that there may be extra dimensions which are large compared to the Planck scale (up to a millimeter in size - that's about as far as gravity has been probed!).
I find that amazing! Now if the theories allowed for those extra dimensions to periodically grow to sizes large enough to swallow single socks and small toy cars, I'd call it a very significant development.
Seriously, I'm amazed that gravity hasn't been experimented with on smaller scales. Would that be something that requires zero-g and objects in a vacuum, or do you get other problems, like electrostatic/electromagnetic forces or even gravity of surrounding objects on those scales that make gravity difficult to measure directly at that resolution?
I don't think your comment is a troll. You have a real point. Inserting ideology often allows people to dismiss you as a whacko.
When I get word docs in email, I say "Why did you send me that huge file when you could have sent me an e-mail? Also, I won't read your word document because you could be sending me a virus. Try cutting and pasting the text into your email and resend it." Remember to stick to your point that they did not e-mail you whatever was in the word doc. They may think you're difficult but they won't think you're wacko.
And if they make the same mistake again, just don't acknowledge that they sent it. Reply saying "I think you might have sent me a virus" hahaha.
Another trick, if you are at work and they don't know better, is to tell them that your corporate firewall strips out Word attachments. If they say "no it doesn't", then come back with "maybe it had a virus or something.
If they insist you need to have MS Word, remember to ask them if you can borrow their disk and registration number.
I don't listen to the Top 20 playlist, ever. In fact, I'm betting that my tastes are a good bit more eclectic than yours (I don't listen to music by Genre, and I like stuff that doesn't easily fit into any genre). And I'm not saying good music isn't out there; there is, tons of it. But it has less to do with the Music Industry than at any time in decades, and the top 100 is dominated by the Crap Machine like it hasn't since just before the birth of Rock.
And if you mention Tori Amos in any context, I'll throw up. She's a poor man's Kate Bush, and I don't even like Kate Bush. If you mention Jewel, I'll just laugh.
Someone needs to tell the fine author of this article to RTFA.
Once you've read that, you realize this entire article is a straw man argument. When you know all of the factors involved, and you know FROM EXPERIENCE the likely production times of various parts, you can estimate with some degree of accuracy. But the point remains that whenever you have ANY unknown area in your project, you never know what you're going to find when you overturn that last stone.
And that's the point of a healthy pessimism in estimates; when the estimates are good, it's a matter of experience, not methodology. As you read through the comments on this article, you'll notice that everyone who has a method that sounds really sensible is relying on experience and the input of programmers, not on a pure methodology.
You could have continued further: Aragorn=Solo, Boromir=Calrissian, Arwen=Leiea,etc.
Not a coincidence. You may know that Lucas is a big fan of Joseph Cambell's analysis (cf. Hero with a Thousand Faces) of recurring themes and story structures through world mythology. And Tolkien was a medivalist, so he was familiar with all sorts of old crusty stories. You see the same figures - old, wise, yet slightly disconnected mentor figures, young heroes called somewhat unwillingly to a quest, treacherous insiders, amusing sidekicks, etc. The difference is that Tolkien was semi-consciously drawing on these things, while Lucas was using the Campbell analysis as a blueprint for his screenplays. Which could be how he came about with such a shallow and annoying character as Jar-Jar, while even the single line about Bill the Pony in FoTR showed more depth.
No, it's not silly. I don't really care about the flaws of Sun's vi (not the least reason being that I'm more often using FreeBSD), the point is that there is vi, just vi, nothing more, no memory bloat, no pretending its something else, in the base system, and it doesn't think it's elvis or nvi or anything else. Try using FreeBSD; no matter how many times you install or uninstall or screw up Vim, you are going to have to try pretty hard to screw up vi. Get careless in RedHat, and you could leave your system without a working editor. So long live vi. It's there. It works. Need giant files or long lines? Then you are probably working in a situation where you don't need vi, just vi, to be there in your base system. I fully expect to be working on a space ship in 2323 and have to go in and repair the external security system computer and find vi there, working just like it does today.
That is an advantage to a commercial unix or a BSD over linux; you get a non-bloated working system, then you add stuff you like. It's just a cleaner way to work.
Re:Unfortunately, an end to wars
on
The Drone War
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· Score: 2
I would say that with the largest land empire in history and with battles that regularly ended in wholesale slaughter, the Mongols are getting too little credit from you. They weren't Western, and they weren't motivated by negative experiences in contact with Westerners. You have completely ignored the bronze-age remnants of horseback-riding, high-altitude living barbarians.
Also, it's a stretch to say that kill-em-all warfare is the primary reason for the ascendancy of the West. You've forgotten resistance to infectious diseases acquired from hundreds of years of living in filthy cities, and technological superiority due to scientific advancements (only some of which are attributable to the pursuit of better ways to kill), and a liberalized social environ in which education perpetuates the scientific advances, and in which human rights and a dash of economic equality produce more stable political systems (unless of course you think it's a coincidence that the Magna Carta and the British Empire came from the same island).
Go play Civ III for a while and go back and read some more. Or go rent "Pathfinder". Or ask yourself whether the cannibals of the South Pacific have something to teach the West about peace. Or just go ahead trashing "the West" because the rest of the world is hurting by comparison, and don't bother really taking a critical view of the reasons why. I mean, China is hurting because of the Opium Wars, not because of 2000 years of despotism, right? Japan's brutal militarism was learned from contact with the West, right?
Is it just me, or did anyone else look at the Tweak Films site and think "Oh my God, they killed Kenny! You bastards!". Anyway, I liked it.
On topic, I can't wait to get one of these new imacs for home and edit home movies and put them onto DVD on a comptuer that looks like a desklamp. And with OS X, I'll finally have a home machine the rest of my household can use.
I advise all relatives to buy Macs.
One parent has an iBook, the other has a Windows 98 box. Which one do you think I spend more time helping with computer problems?
Uh, not quite. You can build it as a port without having to go through Sun's licensing thing and separate download, and packages may be included on the new CDs, but:
So it's not in the source tree, which includes, unlike linux, a complete system. Vi, not a stripped-down Vim, for example.
Still, this represents a nice bump
in convenience for FreeBSD and Java together. And it's a whole lot nicer than using linux java binaries. That's also part of the recent achievement; I haven't installed it yet, but it apparently means you don't need the linux-jdk1.2.2 port to build java 1.2 for FreeBSD, which is great.
And before that it was Time Magazine's people of the century? millenium? awards for various categories. Some Turkish wingnut got on it and entered Ataturk in every category. Musician of the century, statesman of the century, artist of the century.
I don't mind if it's funny, and I don't mind under the circumstances that people know online polls are bogus, but this is different. It's like holding a show-of hands vote for the best movie of the year and having an army of studio employees burst into the room and shout out the rest of the crowd. Cynical, at best.
Well, for those of us who remember the Internet before 1998, we remember that it was plain old boring HTML that brought them online. And e-mail, and IRC. More precisely, it was the content inside those that brought them online. My son, who is under two, likes the flashy stuff, because he can see Blue and Elmo. But he's happy just to bang on the keyboard and drool on the mouse.
And it's plain old boring HTML that still brings them online. The most visited sites don't use those bullshit technologies to tart up their sites. They have reasons that people go there, and it's not just to say "ooh, pretty".
Your argument is absurd. It's like claiming that a man pays to be with a whore because he admires her makeup.
That's funny, but if you realize (as the majority of idiots here do not) that they are talking about transmission compression, and not storage compression, you're probably closer to what they are pretending to do than you think. So their method would actually result in larger files if you compress them, but you could have reduced bandwidth if you have the right set of lookup tables at each endpoint.
I'd still be surprised if this were anything other than the sheerest vapor, because the objections about compressibility of random data still apply. Call it the Pigeonhole theory or whatever, but the point is that as you accumulate different varieties of non-repeating segments, the set of codes you use to refer to them grows to the same size as the data it represents.
It's a damn good theory. Fortunately, while people are easily duped by propaganda - they'll forever pay lip service to "stopping pirates" even when it means their digital serfdom - they are a lot smarter when it comes to their wallets. As soon as they buy a CD, they get smarter. Just look at consumer rejection of crippled CDs...
I, for one, will buy one of those CDs when you put a fucking gun to my head. The danger is if they manage to create CDs that behave this way in suitable players, but work normally in current CD players. That would mean CDs that look like Redbook CDs, but have hidden data that plays under the other schema - or evne just fakes it. I hope that's not possible.
It's worse than that. I think they haven't produced music this shitty in 40 years. Note that during the 60s, 70s, and 80s, there were major challenges from outside the industry. Naturally, since they have the distribution racket figured out, and since they know how to dupe naive trend-followers, latecomer bands, into shitty contracts and then promote the hell out of those bands like they are the real thing, most people don't know the damn difference, meanwhile they buy up the newer, smaller labels who are often close to burning out anyway trying to ride their wave as hard as they can. Pretty soon they are back to producing bland, manageable pap as usual. But during the 90s, you had only the corpse of the late 80s (why do you think Kurt killed himself?) and nothing really new has crossed the pipes except the mainstreaming of hip-hop into a trillion lookalike boring videos.
Meanwhile, since the major labels are ALL part of the major entertainment companies, they've figured out how to cross-promote like hell, which may be part of how they are succeeding better than usual at keeping their lame crap on top - people like what they already know and they make damn sure you know about it. And if you don't believe me, ask yourself how many events you've seen on ABC where Brittany, that boy band, and Aerosmith are all present, sometimes on the stage at the same time, and said "Fuck me mickey".
Going back up above the "POLICE STATE" line, you'll notice that every single one of those things he talks about is ALREADY HERE IN THE U.S. AND MUCH OF EUROPE. Sure, it's not a police state just because the folks in charge know - or can find out - anything that's going on; if it were, every single small town on the planet would be a police state.
But - and you have obviously been lucky and privileged enough to have the luxury of ignorance on this point - in much of the world, people have had a bad history of actually being persecuted by actual police states. They often used a technique that is actually the main point of the article; licensed, traceable presses. In former East Bloc states (I know you weren't born before the fall of the Soviet Empire, so go ask your history teacher), typewriters were licensed. They had serial numbers, they were registered with the police, and they had sample pages stored on file to compare against any counter-revolutionary screeds. This way, if anyone criticised the state, it was possible to find and punish the misdoers.
The serial numbers discussed in the article are, in effect, Big Biz and the Gummint doing an end run around constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech. They are accomplishing what the East Bloc folks did with laws meant, allegedly, to PROTECT the interests of authors. They have put in place a massively intrusive mechanism for destroying privacy and created extremely effective tools for violating the rights of citizens. You don't know of any cases of these tools being used, but that's a poor guarantee of freedom. Don't throw away that mimeograph machine just yet.
And since you go for the ad hominem thing, I won't hold this last one back. Sure, he's paranoid, but you are a toady. Gimme a choice between a paranoid and a vicious whiner with his nose up the Man's ass, and guess which one I'll toss out of the lifeboat?
Re:has the targeted demographic really changed?
on
Attack of the Clones
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· Score: 2
You forgot to mention interpretive dance, the first three minutes consisting only of Wookies grunting, and Art Carney actually saying the words "Wookie Ookies", which means "Wookie cookies", only it's twice as stupid and less comprehensible.
After seeing that special, I understood why Harrison Ford can't watch himself in Star Wars.
here's the news - you're an ass
on
Monsanto and PCBs
·
· Score: 1, Flamebait
You reek of elitism. Right, the poor farmer should shut up and keep slaving in the fields, and leave it to the intelligent scientists to keep him in business. What scum-sucking yuppie twits like you don't know is that farmers, like fishermen of all stripes, and folks in a lot of other professions that keep you from starving, have an intense interest in science relating to their fields. Sure, they are focused on applications and not on basic research, but their financial well-being depends on not being passive grunts. Breeding is not a loony thought experiment to them, but something that affects their bottom line year by year. And they could give a rats ass whether you think they must be blue collar and ignorant. They know things the eggheads often don't - for instance, fishery stocks have in some places been grossly underestimated simply because no one could find the fish for a few years, and when they came back, they were mature, not young as if the stock was simply rebounding. Fishermen knew this from daily observation, and eventually scientists realized they were on to something. Go back in your cave.
Slashdot Mirror
This announcement follows suspiciously closely on the heels of confirmation that Microsoft plans to expand Xbox into a more full-featured closed computing/entertainment converged device.
AOLTimeWarner doesn't want to fall behind, so they start planning their own. And what piece are they missing to fight that battle? An OS.
So Linux will only appear on "closed" boxes. Device drivers won't be a problem. Games might be. AOL won't contribute anything to device drivers, but they might bring some real user-focused applications to the deal.
They are probably very worried about MS beating them in an area AOLTW currently owns. But what Microsoft forgets is that manufacturing a consumer electronics device is probably less of a cultural gap for AOLTW than putting together entertainment is for MS.
Artists will no longer get any of it. They will have to go through "approved" hardware they can't afford, and they will be even more beholden to the middlemen than ever. Artists who can't afford cheap hardware to record their own music stand to lose ALL of the money they could ever hope to make. They simply won't be legally allowed to record and distribute their own music under laws like the proposed SCSSA or whatever it's called.
As a result artists would either a) not make art,
Those artists usually quit anyway when they find out that no one is going to "discover" them and make them stars. The real artists do what they do because it's what they do. The culture of complete control cuts them out of the game altogether.
b) not share their art except at closely held screenings,
To some degree, this may be inevitable. Digital culture is closer to oral, pre-literate culture than anyone notices. If you don't believe me think of the average literacy level in a ./ post. But create an entire system of DRM-enabled electronics, and smaller musicians will not be able to afford to get their music to you any way but live performances.
c) start charging a whole lot more for the copies that you can get.
This may also be inevitable. They sell fewer copies, get more for them, and more people get more stuff for nothing. Hell, western classical music was created almost entirely by the patronage of a few rich folks, and I don't recall anyone saying that weak copyright laws is the reason Mozart sucks. The only alternative to this is to create a culture of complete control. Technology tends not to stay that way forever. Railroads gave way to autos.
The point is, of course, that the Big Media Companies *are* trying to outlaw consumer electronics, and replace them all with movie theaters in your living room. They have no chance of making this work. If they outlaw the free OSes, I am going to start stockpiling grenades, land mines, bazookas, knives, guns... because it is nothing more or less than a descent into feudalism that they are seeking.
I'm going to make this one an abbreviation because it won't die: W!IABCOT
The obvious point here being that these terrorists were dumb for using weak encryption when strong encryption is readily available (with or without export controls). It was dumb crooks, not smart US policies, that resulted in the encryption being cracked.
The article indicates that the encryption keys have not been found, which is too bad. I'd love to find out that their passphrase was "Allah akbar", because it doesn't matter how strong your encryption is when the passphrase gives you a weak link. Now that would be a real lesson to draw from this.
Lots of ways. The Wind Done Gone is a good example - someone who was playing within the system was cheated of their livelihood so that a couple of heirs - who did not create or produce anything - could get a government grant of something they do not own, deserve to own, or benefit the economy in any way by owning - more years to make money off copyrights.
Put another way, things that are X years old belong to the public - it's called the public domain. So by protecting Mickey for a few more years, Disney is actually stealing a common good and giving nothing back. They are stealing fundamental freedoms - the freedom to speak, make murals for elementary schools, draw cartoons - and offering nothing in return. They are getting a government-created monopoly that takes freedom, economic opportunity, and artistic opportunity from all of us, and they give nothing back. Unless you consider money-making incentives to dead people to be an economic stimulus of some kind.
It would make more sense if applications were supposed to be made public in relevant industry journals - the applicant has to pay for an ad - and the public was given time to provide objections on the basis of prior art or overly broad or vague claims.
Linux has a benevolent dictator with many, many contributors, FreeBSD has a larger number of dictators with fewer contributors. I suppose you could say that Linus operates like a beloved king and FreeBSD operates like Athenian democracy - it's democratic if and only if you can become a citizen, but even that moderate democracy seems to keep people happy, and may even be considered a more advanced political structure than Linux has; what happens if Linus gets run over by a beer truck? A crisis of succession. Probably Alan Cox, but every succession becomes more dicey. So it goes with dynasties. FreeBSD actually has more power centers and formalized political procedures, so it's pretty resistant to nonsense like these changes of sponsorship.
I find that amazing! Now if the theories allowed for those extra dimensions to periodically grow to sizes large enough to swallow single socks and small toy cars, I'd call it a very significant development.
Seriously, I'm amazed that gravity hasn't been experimented with on smaller scales. Would that be something that requires zero-g and objects in a vacuum, or do you get other problems, like electrostatic/electromagnetic forces or even gravity of surrounding objects on those scales that make gravity difficult to measure directly at that resolution?
When I get word docs in email, I say "Why did you send me that huge file when you could have sent me an e-mail? Also, I won't read your word document because you could be sending me a virus. Try cutting and pasting the text into your email and resend it." Remember to stick to your point that they did not e-mail you whatever was in the word doc. They may think you're difficult but they won't think you're wacko.
And if they make the same mistake again, just don't acknowledge that they sent it. Reply saying "I think you might have sent me a virus" hahaha.
Another trick, if you are at work and they don't know better, is to tell them that your corporate firewall strips out Word attachments. If they say "no it doesn't", then come back with "maybe it had a virus or something.
If they insist you need to have MS Word, remember to ask them if you can borrow their disk and registration number.
Congratulations, you just described the FreeBSD ports system.
And if you mention Tori Amos in any context, I'll throw up. She's a poor man's Kate Bush, and I don't even like Kate Bush. If you mention Jewel, I'll just laugh.
And that's the point of a healthy pessimism in estimates; when the estimates are good, it's a matter of experience, not methodology. As you read through the comments on this article, you'll notice that everyone who has a method that sounds really sensible is relying on experience and the input of programmers, not on a pure methodology.
Not a coincidence. You may know that Lucas is a big fan of Joseph Cambell's analysis (cf. Hero with a Thousand Faces) of recurring themes and story structures through world mythology. And Tolkien was a medivalist, so he was familiar with all sorts of old crusty stories. You see the same figures - old, wise, yet slightly disconnected mentor figures, young heroes called somewhat unwillingly to a quest, treacherous insiders, amusing sidekicks, etc. The difference is that Tolkien was semi-consciously drawing on these things, while Lucas was using the Campbell analysis as a blueprint for his screenplays. Which could be how he came about with such a shallow and annoying character as Jar-Jar, while even the single line about Bill the Pony in FoTR showed more depth.
That is an advantage to a commercial unix or a BSD over linux; you get a non-bloated working system, then you add stuff you like. It's just a cleaner way to work.
Also, it's a stretch to say that kill-em-all warfare is the primary reason for the ascendancy of the West. You've forgotten resistance to infectious diseases acquired from hundreds of years of living in filthy cities, and technological superiority due to scientific advancements (only some of which are attributable to the pursuit of better ways to kill), and a liberalized social environ in which education perpetuates the scientific advances, and in which human rights and a dash of economic equality produce more stable political systems (unless of course you think it's a coincidence that the Magna Carta and the British Empire came from the same island).
Go play Civ III for a while and go back and read some more. Or go rent "Pathfinder". Or ask yourself whether the cannibals of the South Pacific have something to teach the West about peace. Or just go ahead trashing "the West" because the rest of the world is hurting by comparison, and don't bother really taking a critical view of the reasons why. I mean, China is hurting because of the Opium Wars, not because of 2000 years of despotism, right? Japan's brutal militarism was learned from contact with the West, right?
On topic, I can't wait to get one of these new imacs for home and edit home movies and put them onto DVD on a comptuer that looks like a desklamp. And with OS X, I'll finally have a home machine the rest of my household can use.
I advise all relatives to buy Macs. One parent has an iBook, the other has a Windows 98 box. Which one do you think I spend more time helping with computer problems?
find /usr/src -name "*java*"
/usr/src/contrib/file/Magdir/java
/usr/src/contrib/perl5/eg/cgi/javascript.cgi
So it's not in the source tree, which includes, unlike linux, a complete system. Vi, not a stripped-down Vim, for example.
Still, this represents a nice bump in convenience for FreeBSD and Java together. And it's a whole lot nicer than using linux java binaries. That's also part of the recent achievement; I haven't installed it yet, but it apparently means you don't need the linux-jdk1.2.2 port to build java 1.2 for FreeBSD, which is great.
I don't mind if it's funny, and I don't mind under the circumstances that people know online polls are bogus, but this is different. It's like holding a show-of hands vote for the best movie of the year and having an army of studio employees burst into the room and shout out the rest of the crowd. Cynical, at best.
And it's plain old boring HTML that still brings them online. The most visited sites don't use those bullshit technologies to tart up their sites. They have reasons that people go there, and it's not just to say "ooh, pretty".
Your argument is absurd. It's like claiming that a man pays to be with a whore because he admires her makeup.
I'd still be surprised if this were anything other than the sheerest vapor, because the objections about compressibility of random data still apply. Call it the Pigeonhole theory or whatever, but the point is that as you accumulate different varieties of non-repeating segments, the set of codes you use to refer to them grows to the same size as the data it represents.
I, for one, will buy one of those CDs when you put a fucking gun to my head. The danger is if they manage to create CDs that behave this way in suitable players, but work normally in current CD players. That would mean CDs that look like Redbook CDs, but have hidden data that plays under the other schema - or evne just fakes it. I hope that's not possible.
Meanwhile, since the major labels are ALL part of the major entertainment companies, they've figured out how to cross-promote like hell, which may be part of how they are succeeding better than usual at keeping their lame crap on top - people like what they already know and they make damn sure you know about it. And if you don't believe me, ask yourself how many events you've seen on ABC where Brittany, that boy band, and Aerosmith are all present, sometimes on the stage at the same time, and said "Fuck me mickey".
But - and you have obviously been lucky and privileged enough to have the luxury of ignorance on this point - in much of the world, people have had a bad history of actually being persecuted by actual police states. They often used a technique that is actually the main point of the article; licensed, traceable presses. In former East Bloc states (I know you weren't born before the fall of the Soviet Empire, so go ask your history teacher), typewriters were licensed. They had serial numbers, they were registered with the police, and they had sample pages stored on file to compare against any counter-revolutionary screeds. This way, if anyone criticised the state, it was possible to find and punish the misdoers.
The serial numbers discussed in the article are, in effect, Big Biz and the Gummint doing an end run around constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech. They are accomplishing what the East Bloc folks did with laws meant, allegedly, to PROTECT the interests of authors. They have put in place a massively intrusive mechanism for destroying privacy and created extremely effective tools for violating the rights of citizens. You don't know of any cases of these tools being used, but that's a poor guarantee of freedom. Don't throw away that mimeograph machine just yet.
And since you go for the ad hominem thing, I won't hold this last one back. Sure, he's paranoid, but you are a toady. Gimme a choice between a paranoid and a vicious whiner with his nose up the Man's ass, and guess which one I'll toss out of the lifeboat?
After seeing that special, I understood why Harrison Ford can't watch himself in Star Wars.
You reek of elitism. Right, the poor farmer should shut up and keep slaving in the fields, and leave it to the intelligent scientists to keep him in business. What scum-sucking yuppie twits like you don't know is that farmers, like fishermen of all stripes, and folks in a lot of other professions that keep you from starving, have an intense interest in science relating to their fields. Sure, they are focused on applications and not on basic research, but their financial well-being depends on not being passive grunts. Breeding is not a loony thought experiment to them, but something that affects their bottom line year by year. And they could give a rats ass whether you think they must be blue collar and ignorant. They know things the eggheads often don't - for instance, fishery stocks have in some places been grossly underestimated simply because no one could find the fish for a few years, and when they came back, they were mature, not young as if the stock was simply rebounding. Fishermen knew this from daily observation, and eventually scientists realized they were on to something. Go back in your cave.