Not true. The flie structure is completely 2 dimensional. On the y-axis you have parent/child relationships. On the x-axis you have sibling relationships. That's 2 d.
I disagree--I would argue that a hierarchy (which is all that a filesystem is) has no inherent visual representation. The fact that a hierarchy is so difficult to model visually in a way that is simple and yet consistant is a constant thorn in the side of interface design.
Think about the way that traditional file managers model the filesystem--it's the way you describe, siblings are stacked vertically, and children indented horizontally a bit. Logical and consistant, but very bulky to use: highlight a node deep in the structure and tell me what its parents are. You'll have to scroll up, look for each open node individually, until you get to the root. You've lost your original place by now unless perhaps you highlighted it or something. Now take a heavily expanded tree, take a node somewhere in the middle, and tell me what all its siblings are. It can be done, but it's not natural. This traditional representation becomes awkward whenever your data set becomes large enough.
Hierarchies are everywhere: filesystems, URL's menus and submenus, OOP class hierarchies; thinking further, there's species classification and mailing addresses. Hierarchies are a very natural way to represent data. However, I think a serious weakness of their use as a tool is how difficult it is to model them visually.
BTW, I like your writing style - very articulate and lucid.
Anyway, thanks for the mail, 'PJ', and thanks for the compliment:)
Yeah, I got your email.
Cute sig btw.
Is it just me, or do we have some flirting going on here?:-)
If I had to choose between one of the current Linux distros' fancy but often slow installers and FreeBSD, my choice would go to the latter. It is a simple, yet elegant and very fast installation routine that works without any hiccups.
I have to take exception to this claim. I tried FreeBSD for the first time a few weeks ago, and since then, my only real gripe is with how awful the install was.
Woe to you if you try to configure the network via DHCP and the server doesn't respond, because it will completely screw up your install: subsequent attempts to configure the network will silently fail, and all the time you're wondering what's wrong with these network settings! REBOOT!
Woe to you if one of the FTP servers won't resolve. It'll sit there almost until the brink of eternity, determined to resolve this name, and if you try to interrupt it it will NOT take you back to the server selection screen, but rather REBOOT!
Woe to you if you get halfway through the install and the file transfer hangs. Just like above, you're forced to REBOOT and start over.
I've had a great time with FreeBSD, but their installer is their weakest point as far as I'm concerned.
If NIFF is a flexible as it claims to be, then there's absolutely no reason why a perfect converter couldn't be written to take lilypond input and spit out a NIFF file (and vice versa). If a perfect converter could NOT be written, it displays exactly the reason why the use of the lilypond format is needed: the flexibility to take advantage of a particular implementation's quirks to result in the best possible output.
Now, IANAL, but unless the people who submit scores to the site created them by looking at the composer's original scores, I assume that sooner or later some lawyer will go after them for copyright infringement.
Certain versions of scores are known as "Urtext," meaning that they are exactly what the composer wrote, to the best of anyone's knowledge. Those are the scores the contributors use for input.
If so, why is that most sheet music I've bought has a very prominent 'do not photocopy' sign on its first page?
Because most of them are either recent or edited. No one said Urtext editions are neccesarily easy to come by.
(Note: you could have read about this if you had visited the page, and followed the link to "Legal Information")
I've contributed a Bach Prelude to the project, and it was definitely a worthwile experience. I hope to contribute again sometime soon.
With regard to its legality, you really ought to read their page dedicated to legal issues: here is the Google-cached version. In a nutshell, there are three sets of copyrights to take into account: The Composer's, the Editor's, and the Typesetter's. The typesetter's doesn't matter, because in this case, the computer (or more specifically, Lilypond) does that. We try to avoid the editor's copyright as well, by (surprise!) inputting from music that isn't edited! These are referred to as "Urtext" versions.
So taking both those things into account, it's perfectly legal to input music from an unedited score if the composer has been dead for at least 70 years.
Now on the technical side, music typesetting is not an exact science, and Lilypond, though mature and under very active development (current release is 1.3.124, I believe), still has its weaknesses. Though much of the output it produces is very readable and usable, sometimes it's less than ideal. You can tweak almost anything, but it often requires knowledge of its complicated implementation (C++ and Guile, I believe). Not only that, but it's SLOW! Typesetting a piece of 8 or 9 pages on my PII-300 96MB RAM takes about a minute, which sucks when you're going back to make small corrections. The run-time increases exponentially (it seems, that's not an exact observation) with more voices and more pages.
Input is done in plain text, in a terse-as-you-can-handle grammar, which is fairly simple to understand, though a bit more complicated once you actually try to assemble all the voices into a completed score. The example that's on the lily home page (I'm guessing it'll be slashdotted before long) is:
\relative c'' { \key c \minor; r8 c16 b c8 g as c16 b c8 d | g,4 }
Which is pretty self-explanitory. Every note is assumed to be the closest note of that name, unless you override (see the last g, the comma means down an octave), every note is assumed to have a duration of the note that came before unless you override, the pipe is a bar check, and it'll warn you if the bar doesn't end up where you told it to be. Really not too difficult, especially if you download an already completed score to base your work on.
The project is fairly small at the moment (42 scores, many of them different movements of the same work), especially compared to Gutenberg, but it can only grow. The biggest problem I've run into is finding unedited copies from which to input.
I'd encourage anyone to contribute! I look forward to the day where there are great archives where you can download expired music for quick reference, or for scholarly curiosity. It'll never replace printed, published music, of course, there's nothing like having a real, bound copy, but it could be great for certain things.
The web page is also available at http://sca.uwaterloo.ca/Mutopia/ (in case www.mutopiaproject.com goes down), though it may be the same machine, I'm not sure.
I believe too much of our community has been blinded by a Left that has been in power and infiltrating media organizations. CNN is their lapdog. Even if you are of Left ideology and don't much care, be realistic and realize that fact.
CNN, on Nov. 3: [inspirational music] "Bush, the next president of the United States!"
All the major networks, Summer 2000: "John McCain, John McCain, George Bush, John McCain! What, there are democratic primaries going on too?"
Yes. I've installed Debian over the internet at least 5 times
It's next to impossible!
Far from it, it's fairly simple. All you have to manually download are the installation floppies (5 floppy images), and the installer automatically downloads whatever else it needs. The Debian documentation unfortunately doesn't make this convenient fact very obvious, and you have my deepest sympathy if you were trying to download the packages one-by-one from the web pages at packages.debian.org. (I tried this at one time, before I knew better).
Even that's not so bad. As another poster mentioned, you can buy a Debian 3 CD set from cheapbytes for $5.99 + $5 shipping. Unfortunately this will leave you with Debian 2.2, which is very stable, but contains rather old versions of everything.
Be happy, getting Linux is easier than it's ever been! And the existence of non-corporate distributions like Debian will guarentee that it's always continues to be accessable, no matter what happens in the marketplace.
Since when does using a precompiled library make you responsible for distributing it and publishing source?
RTFL. It specifically states that 'Linking a "work that uses the Library" with the Library creates an executable that is a derivative of the Library (because it contains portions of the Library), rather than a "work that uses the library". The executable is therefore covered by this License. Section 6 states terms for distribution of such executables.'
Since the library is combined with your executable either at run-time or compile-time, it is legally a derivative work, and subject to the terms of the license of the library.
Funny, according to our lawyers the LGPL/GPL allow us to link to the libraries in a "normal" fashion without either giving credit or providing source.
LGPL libraries can be dynamically linked with proprietary software. So unless these other libraries were distributed as dll's, they violate the licenses of any LGPL'd libraries.
Everyone's been throwing out the "fact" that we'll be unable to legally crack this encryption thanks to the DMCA. However, I think this is perhaps an untrue claim.
First, "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title." I would assume that "a work protected under this title" would mean any work which is copyrighted. So accessing uncopyrighted data on your hard drive (say, a dump of/dev/random) would be fair game.
Next, "to `circumvent a technological measure' means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner" (emphasis added). Well, as long as you give yourself authority to access anything you personally have created, then that should be alright as well.
Finally (and this one's a bit less clear-cut) "a technological measure `effectively controls access to a work' if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work." Now, say your encrypted hard drive is made by IBM. Let's further stipulate that you have some Microsoft-copyrighted software on your hard drive. Though accessing your hard drive requires the application of information and a process to gain access, it doesn't require the authority of the copyright owner. Microsoft is not involved in authorizing you access of their copyrighted work. The simple proof of that is that if these hard drives were created and used without Microsoft's knowledge, you could still access the data as long as you had the authority from IBM's side. The authority comes from IBM, not Microsoft.
So although this is of course a despicable proposal, it seems that cracking it is perfectly legal, until they discover this loophole and plug it with further legislation.
Disclaimer: Of course I am not a lawyer--no one on/. is!:-)
I figure that if other people aren't using free e-mail accounts to filter out their spam, and then complain about it, they rank on the same level as sys admins who don't apply the latest security patches and whine when a skript kiddie roots their box.
I think you could better compare them to people who voice opinions with their real name and then are upset when they get harassing mail and phone calls for it. I shouldn't have to live in anonymity for fear of what spammers will do if they know where my address is.
Of course I have a spam-collecting account. Now call me crazy, but I'd like to be able to post my real e-mail address to newsgroups, in case a real person wants to contact me! I don't want to wade through pages of spam on a regular basis, just to see if someone has privately responded to a post of mine.
Not to mention that an e-mail address is part of your online identity. The domain indicates something about you; whether it be your educational institution, place of work, or what you associate yourself with. The e-mail address is a sort of distinctive mark, and personally I'd much rather post with a name that really identifies me than coughdropaddict@hotmail.com, just like I'd rather give a street address than a PO box.
I don't think the intention was for the government to read messages sent to my girlfriend.
Neither was the intention of the German census for Hitler to be able to find all the Jews. Your comments are incredibly naive. If you've never heard all the arguments and reasons why, then I suggest you do some reading. EPIC and the book 1984 would be a good start. If, on the other hand, you've heard all the arguments and still have a bubbly-eyed adoration and faith in your government, then go be the first on the block to voluntarily install a telescreen in your bedroom, but leave us who really care about privacy alone.
IE is subsidized, Netscape is subsidized, Mozilla is donated. So why the hell does Opera support its development by means of direct monetary compensation?
Opera's move doesn't cater well to people who misunderstand the word "free." You can't get money from people who think they're already getting something for nothing. That's like trying to convince someone that the peanuts they give you on an airplane are actually more expensive than the peanuts you buy in the store, even though they don't charge for the peanuts on a plane.
After seeing this story, I hope that Opera suffers for being upfront about where its resources to support its product come from.
Could someone who is in the know offer any insight as to what the chances are that Bush even knew about this interview, let alone wrote any of the responses? I'd be interested to know.
Rare is it when everything suddenly changes just because some technology was introduced.
Thanks for reminding me that introduction of better navigational technologies didn't result in a radical increase in exploration and colonization of new lands.
Thanks for reminding me that introduction of the printing press didn't result in a radical increase of the availability of books.
I'm glad I remember now that introduction of the cotton gin didn't make production of cotton radically less expensive, and more popular.
Radio, telephone, assembly line, fiber optics, and, yes, the Internet...
(Note: ripping on Katz is not sophisticated, insightful, nor interesting. Your post could have been generated by a perl script grabbing random sentences from previous anti-Katz posts and stringing them together in random order. don't you have anything better to do?)
It is true that we are not at war, but as history will prove, you *always* have to be prepared for the slightest chance of conflict and maintain a realistic image of strong national defense.
Thanks for doing your part to maintain the self-fulfilling prophecy. I hope you keep a bat or a gun under your bed at night, you never know who could be out to get you.
Meanwhile, next time you and your counterparts from other countries decide to go duke it out because your leaders think it's a good idea, I'll have changed my address to perhaps British Columbia, though Alberta seems nice enough.
I'm sure everyone had heard of him, and knew who he was and what he had done. But my point was that he lived in an age without TV or radio, probably no one had heard him speak or seen him or even knew what he looked like. The only knowledge people had was probably based on reputation and word of mouth (and we know how accurate that is...). Radio was a major step in the right direction, as was TV, and the Internet is the next step that makes the process even better.
And let's not forget, he did win the war....
...with the help of the French, who were fairly powerful and hated the British anyway. I agree that his best skill was holding things together, none of the historians I've heard talk have anything gushing to say about his military ability though. In the French and Indian War, he was an officer sent on a few missions that he failied miserably. I wish I remembered more of the specifics to be able to say just which ones.
To a layman, America is a democracy (dictionary.com offers the layman's definition: Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives.)
But to a political scientist, there is of course a difference between a republic and a democracy.
As for your link, that's interesting in theory, but hardly bears any resemblence to reality. When was the last Supreme Court ruling that openly endorsed superceding the Constitution because the country is in a state of emergency?
When George Washington was elected president, I bet that more than half the population had never so much as seen a picture of him. Who can guess how many knew anything significant about his ideas, aspirations, or plans for the presidency? He happened to be the General of the Continental forces during the revolutionary war, but from what I've read, he wasn't even very good at that.
Fast forward to now. Anyone who has a computer (and between home, school, the library, and work, who doesn't) can post a question that the presidential candidates will read and respond to, and if it's good enough (judged not by the media, not by campaign spokespeople, not by some faceless beaurocrat, but by your peers). You could be a 12 year old student or a senior citizen, of any race--a handle doesn't discriminate.
It's amazing how the Internet is bringing democracy to a level the world has never seen. Kudos to/. for managing to arrange this interview, and kudos to the candidates for participating.
Best way to protect your kid is to make sure you know why they're on the 'net. If they say that they wish to look for something you're willing to allow them to look for, chances are they really are. And by staying nearby, you can make sure they really do.
Dare I say... best way to protect your kid is to give them a moral foundation and then TRUST them? My internet usage, and therefore my massive self-education campaign, would have been severely stifled if my parents had demanded that they know every time I was online, or worse, decided to monitor every session.
Slashdot Mirror
Not true. The flie structure is completely 2 dimensional. On the y-axis you have parent/child relationships. On the x-axis you have sibling relationships. That's 2 d.
:)
:-)
I disagree--I would argue that a hierarchy (which is all that a filesystem is) has no inherent visual representation. The fact that a hierarchy is so difficult to model visually in a way that is simple and yet consistant is a constant thorn in the side of interface design.
Think about the way that traditional file managers model the filesystem--it's the way you describe, siblings are stacked vertically, and children indented horizontally a bit. Logical and consistant, but very bulky to use: highlight a node deep in the structure and tell me what its parents are. You'll have to scroll up, look for each open node individually, until you get to the root. You've lost your original place by now unless perhaps you highlighted it or something. Now take a heavily expanded tree, take a node somewhere in the middle, and tell me what all its siblings are. It can be done, but it's not natural. This traditional representation becomes awkward whenever your data set becomes large enough.
Hierarchies are everywhere: filesystems, URL's menus and submenus, OOP class hierarchies; thinking further, there's species classification and mailing addresses. Hierarchies are a very natural way to represent data. However, I think a serious weakness of their use as a tool is how difficult it is to model them visually.
BTW, I like your writing style - very articulate and lucid.
Anyway, thanks for the mail, 'PJ', and thanks for the compliment
Yeah, I got your email.
Cute sig btw.
Is it just me, or do we have some flirting going on here?
--
cat somefile > /somepath/window/new
/somepath/window/1
Should open a window with the text of somefile in it...
rm
Could close the window with ID of 1.
This reminds me a lot of the program "hey" for BeOS. It's extremely useful for both scripting and interactive use. Sample commands:
$ hey Tracker get Title of Window [0]
(Tracker is the equivalent of the Finder on MacOS). Or maybe something like:
$ hey StyledEdit set Frame of Window 0 to "BRect(107,76,607,476)"
I admit I don't know that much about it, but check out http://www.beosbible.com/bos/ch_scripting6.html
--
If I had to choose between one of the current Linux distros' fancy but often slow installers and FreeBSD, my choice would go to the latter. It is a simple, yet elegant and very fast installation routine that works without any hiccups.
I have to take exception to this claim. I tried FreeBSD for the first time a few weeks ago, and since then, my only real gripe is with how awful the install was.
Woe to you if you try to configure the network via DHCP and the server doesn't respond, because it will completely screw up your install: subsequent attempts to configure the network will silently fail, and all the time you're wondering what's wrong with these network settings! REBOOT!
Woe to you if one of the FTP servers won't resolve. It'll sit there almost until the brink of eternity, determined to resolve this name, and if you try to interrupt it it will NOT take you back to the server selection screen, but rather REBOOT!
Woe to you if you get halfway through the install and the file transfer hangs. Just like above, you're forced to REBOOT and start over.
I've had a great time with FreeBSD, but their installer is their weakest point as far as I'm concerned.
--
If NIFF is a flexible as it claims to be, then there's absolutely no reason why a perfect converter couldn't be written to take lilypond input and spit out a NIFF file (and vice versa). If a perfect converter could NOT be written, it displays exactly the reason why the use of the lilypond format is needed: the flexibility to take advantage of a particular implementation's quirks to result in the best possible output.
--
Now, IANAL, but unless the people who submit scores to the site created them by looking at the composer's original scores, I assume that sooner or later some lawyer will go after them for copyright infringement.
Certain versions of scores are known as "Urtext," meaning that they are exactly what the composer wrote, to the best of anyone's knowledge. Those are the scores the contributors use for input.
If so, why is that most sheet music I've bought has a very prominent 'do not photocopy' sign on its first page?
Because most of them are either recent or edited. No one said Urtext editions are neccesarily easy to come by.
(Note: you could have read about this if you had visited the page, and followed the link to "Legal Information")
--
I've contributed a Bach Prelude to the project, and it was definitely a worthwile experience. I hope to contribute again sometime soon.
With regard to its legality, you really ought to read their page dedicated to legal issues: here is the Google-cached version. In a nutshell, there are three sets of copyrights to take into account: The Composer's, the Editor's, and the Typesetter's. The typesetter's doesn't matter, because in this case, the computer (or more specifically, Lilypond) does that. We try to avoid the editor's copyright as well, by (surprise!) inputting from music that isn't edited! These are referred to as "Urtext" versions.
So taking both those things into account, it's perfectly legal to input music from an unedited score if the composer has been dead for at least 70 years.
Now on the technical side, music typesetting is not an exact science, and Lilypond, though mature and under very active development (current release is 1.3.124, I believe), still has its weaknesses. Though much of the output it produces is very readable and usable, sometimes it's less than ideal. You can tweak almost anything, but it often requires knowledge of its complicated implementation (C++ and Guile, I believe). Not only that, but it's SLOW! Typesetting a piece of 8 or 9 pages on my PII-300 96MB RAM takes about a minute, which sucks when you're going back to make small corrections. The run-time increases exponentially (it seems, that's not an exact observation) with more voices and more pages.
Input is done in plain text, in a terse-as-you-can-handle grammar, which is fairly simple to understand, though a bit more complicated once you actually try to assemble all the voices into a completed score. The example that's on the lily home page (I'm guessing it'll be slashdotted before long) is:
\relative c'' { \key c \minor; r8 c16 b c8 g as c16 b c8 d | g,4 }
Which is pretty self-explanitory. Every note is assumed to be the closest note of that name, unless you override (see the last g, the comma means down an octave), every note is assumed to have a duration of the note that came before unless you override, the pipe is a bar check, and it'll warn you if the bar doesn't end up where you told it to be. Really not too difficult, especially if you download an already completed score to base your work on.
The project is fairly small at the moment (42 scores, many of them different movements of the same work), especially compared to Gutenberg, but it can only grow. The biggest problem I've run into is finding unedited copies from which to input.
I'd encourage anyone to contribute! I look forward to the day where there are great archives where you can download expired music for quick reference, or for scholarly curiosity. It'll never replace printed, published music, of course, there's nothing like having a real, bound copy, but it could be great for certain things.
The web page is also available at http://sca.uwaterloo.ca/Mutopia/ (in case www.mutopiaproject.com goes down), though it may be the same machine, I'm not sure.
--
I believe too much of our community has been blinded by a Left that has been in power and infiltrating media organizations. CNN is their lapdog. Even if you are of Left ideology and don't much care, be realistic and realize that fact.
CNN, on Nov. 3: [inspirational music] "Bush, the next president of the United States!"
All the major networks, Summer 2000: "John McCain, John McCain, George Bush, John McCain! What, there are democratic primaries going on too?"
--
You ever try to download Debian?
Yes. I've installed Debian over the internet at least 5 times
It's next to impossible!
Far from it, it's fairly simple. All you have to manually download are the installation floppies (5 floppy images), and the installer automatically downloads whatever else it needs. The Debian documentation unfortunately doesn't make this convenient fact very obvious, and you have my deepest sympathy if you were trying to download the packages one-by-one from the web pages at packages.debian.org. (I tried this at one time, before I knew better).
Or, if you want to download a CD image, head to http://cdimage.debian.org/.
You have to buy it!
Even that's not so bad. As another poster mentioned, you can buy a Debian 3 CD set from cheapbytes for $5.99 + $5 shipping. Unfortunately this will leave you with Debian 2.2, which is very stable, but contains rather old versions of everything.
Be happy, getting Linux is easier than it's ever been! And the existence of non-corporate distributions like Debian will guarentee that it's always continues to be accessable, no matter what happens in the marketplace.
--
Since when does using a precompiled library make you responsible for distributing it and publishing source?
RTFL. It specifically states that 'Linking a "work that uses the Library" with the Library creates an executable that is a derivative of the Library (because it contains portions of the Library), rather than a "work that uses the library". The executable is therefore covered by this License. Section 6 states terms for distribution of such executables.'
Since the library is combined with your executable either at run-time or compile-time, it is legally a derivative work, and subject to the terms of the license of the library.
Funny, according to our lawyers the LGPL/GPL allow us to link to the libraries in a "normal" fashion without either giving credit or providing source.
RTFL, I'm not going to do your work for you.
--
LGPL can be used in proprietary software.
Wrong!
LGPL libraries can be dynamically linked with proprietary software. So unless these other libraries were distributed as dll's, they violate the licenses of any LGPL'd libraries.
Not to mention many libraries are GPL'd anyway.
--
Everyone's been throwing out the "fact" that we'll be unable to legally crack this encryption thanks to the DMCA. However, I think this is perhaps an untrue claim.
/dev/random) would be fair game.
/. is! :-)
First, "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title." I would assume that "a work protected under this title" would mean any work which is copyrighted. So accessing uncopyrighted data on your hard drive (say, a dump of
Next, "to `circumvent a technological measure' means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner" (emphasis added). Well, as long as you give yourself authority to access anything you personally have created, then that should be alright as well.
Finally (and this one's a bit less clear-cut) "a technological measure `effectively controls access to a work' if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work." Now, say your encrypted hard drive is made by IBM. Let's further stipulate that you have some Microsoft-copyrighted software on your hard drive. Though accessing your hard drive requires the application of information and a process to gain access, it doesn't require the authority of the copyright owner. Microsoft is not involved in authorizing you access of their copyrighted work. The simple proof of that is that if these hard drives were created and used without Microsoft's knowledge, you could still access the data as long as you had the authority from IBM's side. The authority comes from IBM, not Microsoft.
So although this is of course a despicable proposal, it seems that cracking it is perfectly legal, until they discover this loophole and plug it with further legislation.
Disclaimer: Of course I am not a lawyer--no one on
--
I figure that if other people aren't using free e-mail accounts to filter out their spam, and then complain about it, they rank on the same level as sys admins who don't apply the latest security patches and whine when a skript kiddie roots their box.
I think you could better compare them to people who voice opinions with their real name and then are upset when they get harassing mail and phone calls for it. I shouldn't have to live in anonymity for fear of what spammers will do if they know where my address is.
Of course I have a spam-collecting account. Now call me crazy, but I'd like to be able to post my real e-mail address to newsgroups, in case a real person wants to contact me! I don't want to wade through pages of spam on a regular basis, just to see if someone has privately responded to a post of mine.
Not to mention that an e-mail address is part of your online identity. The domain indicates something about you; whether it be your educational institution, place of work, or what you associate yourself with. The e-mail address is a sort of distinctive mark, and personally I'd much rather post with a name that really identifies me than coughdropaddict@hotmail.com, just like I'd rather give a street address than a PO box.
--
Why does everyone get so damn pissed off at spam?
I can't post to USENET with an e-mail address that I actually use (I did once, and I'm paying for it now).
I can't read much of USENET with the S/N ratio being as low as it is.
Those are my two main gripes.
--
I don't think the intention was for the government to read messages sent to my girlfriend.
Neither was the intention of the German census for Hitler to be able to find all the Jews. Your comments are incredibly naive. If you've never heard all the arguments and reasons why, then I suggest you do some reading. EPIC and the book 1984 would be a good start. If, on the other hand, you've heard all the arguments and still have a bubbly-eyed adoration and faith in your government, then go be the first on the block to voluntarily install a telescreen in your bedroom, but leave us who really care about privacy alone.
--
IE is subsidized, Netscape is subsidized, Mozilla is donated. So why the hell does Opera support its development by means of direct monetary compensation?
Opera's move doesn't cater well to people who misunderstand the word "free." You can't get money from people who think they're already getting something for nothing. That's like trying to convince someone that the peanuts they give you on an airplane are actually more expensive than the peanuts you buy in the store, even though they don't charge for the peanuts on a plane.
After seeing this story, I hope that Opera suffers for being upfront about where its resources to support its product come from.
--
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
print "CNN declares " . ("Bush", "Gore")[rand 2];
print " the winner of Florida\n";
--
Could someone who is in the know offer any insight as to what the chances are that Bush even knew about this interview, let alone wrote any of the responses? I'd be interested to know.
--
Rare is it when everything suddenly changes just because some technology was introduced.
Thanks for reminding me that introduction of better navigational technologies didn't result in a radical increase in exploration and colonization of new lands.
Thanks for reminding me that introduction of the printing press didn't result in a radical increase of the availability of books.
I'm glad I remember now that introduction of the cotton gin didn't make production of cotton radically less expensive, and more popular.
Radio, telephone, assembly line, fiber optics, and, yes, the Internet...
(Note: ripping on Katz is not sophisticated, insightful, nor interesting. Your post could have been generated by a perl script grabbing random sentences from previous anti-Katz posts and stringing them together in random order. don't you have anything better to do?)
--
It is true that we are not at war, but as history will prove, you *always* have to be prepared for the slightest chance of conflict and maintain a realistic image of strong national defense.
Thanks for doing your part to maintain the self-fulfilling prophecy. I hope you keep a bat or a gun under your bed at night, you never know who could be out to get you.
Meanwhile, next time you and your counterparts from other countries decide to go duke it out because your leaders think it's a good idea, I'll have changed my address to perhaps British Columbia, though Alberta seems nice enough.
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I'm sure everyone had heard of him, and knew who he was and what he had done. But my point was that he lived in an age without TV or radio, probably no one had heard him speak or seen him or even knew what he looked like. The only knowledge people had was probably based on reputation and word of mouth (and we know how accurate that is...). Radio was a major step in the right direction, as was TV, and the Internet is the next step that makes the process even better.
And let's not forget, he did win the war....
...with the help of the French, who were fairly powerful and hated the British anyway. I agree that his best skill was holding things together, none of the historians I've heard talk have anything gushing to say about his military ability though. In the French and Indian War, he was an officer sent on a few missions that he failied miserably. I wish I remembered more of the specifics to be able to say just which ones.
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Compared to Facism, America is a democracy.
To a layman, America is a democracy (dictionary.com offers the layman's definition: Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives.)
But to a political scientist, there is of course a difference between a republic and a democracy.
As for your link, that's interesting in theory, but hardly bears any resemblence to reality. When was the last Supreme Court ruling that openly endorsed superceding the Constitution because the country is in a state of emergency?
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Isn't this amazing?
/. for managing to arrange this interview, and kudos to the candidates for participating.
When George Washington was elected president, I bet that more than half the population had never so much as seen a picture of him. Who can guess how many knew anything significant about his ideas, aspirations, or plans for the presidency? He happened to be the General of the Continental forces during the revolutionary war, but from what I've read, he wasn't even very good at that.
Fast forward to now. Anyone who has a computer (and between home, school, the library, and work, who doesn't) can post a question that the presidential candidates will read and respond to, and if it's good enough (judged not by the media, not by campaign spokespeople, not by some faceless beaurocrat, but by your peers). You could be a 12 year old student or a senior citizen, of any race--a handle doesn't discriminate.
It's amazing how the Internet is bringing democracy to a level the world has never seen. Kudos to
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Are you aware that your comment has absolutely nothing to do with the comment you're replying to?
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Collections/containers/algorithms that aren't the abomination that is STL.
Why is STL an abomination? I've never heard anything negative about it before, and never had any problems using it.
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Best way to protect your kid is to make sure you know why they're on the 'net. If they say that they wish to look for something you're willing to allow them to look for, chances are they really are. And by staying nearby, you can make sure they really do.
Dare I say... best way to protect your kid is to give them a moral foundation and then TRUST them? My internet usage, and therefore my massive self-education campaign, would have been severely stifled if my parents had demanded that they know every time I was online, or worse, decided to monitor every session.
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