You bring up an interesting point. If everybody in the world were the sort of people on Slashdot, there would be no spam. Even at very low cost, there would be zero response, and it wouldn't be worth their effort.
The problem is the real morons. The kind who are taken in by the stupidest spam tricks, like the "future spam" he describes (nonsensical but grammatical set of English text designed to slip past Bayesian filters, followed by a URL.) What kind of a moron would click on such a URL? The kind of moron with more money than brains. (Probably not much money, but clearly zero brains.)
It would be lovely to filter out those emails before they reach the morons, but that's unfortunately impractical and illegal in the general case. Maybe we all need to subsidize a cheap ISP for morons.
Presumably, they already have. If the prices are now un-fixed, the price is supposed to fall.
"Fall" is a bit complicated to measure here. If they delay a $1 price increase by a year, then the prices have fallen, by a dollar. That is, for every CD you buy, you're paying a dollar less than you would have if this settlement hadn't happened.
Or rather, if the lawsuit hadn't been filed, and won, the collusion would have gone on, and prices would have gone up at some faster rate than they are.
You'd never see the prices fall. Prices never do, not on items like this. It's easier to continue to charge the same price and wait for inflation to catch up to you. The only time prices fall is when competition allows a drastic reduction in prices, such that the overhead of slightly lowering prices is less than the extra "pull" you get from the lowered price. Knocking a buck off the price of the CD won't get you into a particular record store.
I'm not saying you should be thrilled. CDs are already pretty expensive, much more so than they need to be, through the RIAA's fault, not that of the retailers. It's impossible to distribute this money fairly (since it's impossible to keep track of the sales), and the lawyers get most of it anyway.
Since there's so little money divided among so many people, the fairest thing may well to be to give it to a nonprofit. I didn't say "fair", I said "fairest". It's still not fair. "Fair" would be refunding every cent I spent, with interest. But it can't be done. They can't refund it only to people with receipts, because that wouldn't be fair either. And taking people's word for it wouldn't be fair, because people lie when they're handing out free money.
But you can take some microscopic comfort in the fact that the prices are slightly lower than they would have been. Don't spend your $5-$20 all in one place.
I hate to flame, but there's nothing on this page worth reading. It's full of text on how to set up an Apache server, followed by:
Collecting Payments This where you find yourself between a rock and a hard place.
If you're going to post an article about micropayments, you're going to have to make the micropayments and the associated economics the lead of the article, not the tail. Important questions unasked:
* A system for refunds
* A system for letting people reload pages
* A way to get people to trust your payment system (i.e. what if I pay my $10 and you go out of business)
* The cost of doing this business
* Dealing with forgeries
I've never before complained about an article on Slashdot, but this is truly a waste of time.
I wish I could disagree with you on the point about Iraq. They keep claiming to have solid evidence, but have presented exactly none of it to the world. (Does anybody recall what happened to the secret documents they gave to various world leaders which showed why we chose Afghanistan?)
I understand very well that sources are extremely valuable, and you must protect them. That means that secret documents are usually more secret for the reasons of revealing the source than they are for the actual data they contain.
Still, this is becoming very disturbing. There have been some very anti-American articles in this thread, and it's behavior like this which encourages such. The government is proposing a war in which the proponents stand to gain very much personally.
I don't like the Bush administration, but I don't believe that they are monsters, either. I don't believe they would kill probably hundreds of Americans and thousands of Iraqis just for the privilege of making a few million (or billion) on oil. It's a plan which involves too many people, at least one of whom must have some sort of integrity.
But I do wish that they'd give me some reason for that apparently futile hope.
[As an aside, having the US own Iraqi oil fields would cement US supremacy, so it is possible that this is part of an overarching plan to secure US power, something which would have better hope of keeping adherents than plain money. But Iraq is far away, and tankers from Iraq to the US would be very vulnerable in case of war. They'd be better off taking over Venezuela or perhaps Mexico. So I tend to discount this theory.]
As for Hamas and Islamic Jihad, I suspect that they are inextricably linked to al Quaeda. When you fight one you fight the others. Israel has done little of late to cover itself in glory, but they do seem to have the moral high ground over those who blow up school buses (even if that's not saying very much.)
The adminstration probably feels that it cannot take a stronger side against the enemies of Israel while Israel is only barely better, morally. I believe that very few Muslims actively hate the US strongly enough to be in favor of al Quaeda, but Israel is a different story. It is a major sticking point with most Arabs and Muslims.
Fighting Hamas and Islamic Jihad is hard, because it's nearly impossible to distinguish between civilians and militants. That's partly because the civilians permit themselves to be used this way, and so the line is very blurred.
The US "war on terror" does, I believe, cover these groups as well. In general it's a war on the Islamic terrorists; Basque terrorists and Irish terrorists are left out. The remaining Islamic terrorists cover a very wide body, which is all linked together. Money flows from Saddam Hussein to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. But fighting the Palestinians directly is a public relations nightmare, both because of civilian deaths and because it would tip the balance of those who only barely tolerate the US as it stands.
My opinion is that Israel should force a two-state solution on Palestine, adopting unilaterally plan that most of the non-Arab would would see as fair. When they were attacked from that state, the US would have an easier time helping them fight it, since the non-Arab would would see Israel as having already made its concessions. [Arabs and Muslims are unlikely to see any plan in which Israel still exists as fair.] But for some reason right-wingers in Israel insist on occupying some of the West Bank territory, and will not give it up.
The euphemism "war on terror" is necessary because calling it "war on Islamic terrorists" or "war on Islamic fundamentalists" would get the administration in deep, deep doodoo. Politically, it's necessary to avoid looking like they are opposed to Islam. Muslims around the world already half believe that the US really is out to war on them.
There was some talk for a while that the War on Terror would apply to anybody using terror techniques, such as the Irish Republican Army, but that's an idea that went nowhere fast. Their opponents, therefore, are primarily Muslims, but not all Muslims.
So America-bashing and Bush administration-bashing aside (and I'm not a big fan myself, having voted for the other guy), the administration is faced with the fact that a small subset of essentially very good people is committing despicable acts in the name of those good people. These people are afraid of being punished for the sins of a few. Their support is crucial, and the US in general prefers to make friends rather than enemies. This is an incredibly untenable position for the US government. I'm hard pressed to come up with a better name for the effort, even if it is an obvious euphemism.
It stuns me, actually, why people would drink Gatorade sitting on the couch. I hate the taste of the stuff. Even viciously dehydrated at mile 23 of a marathon, I find it pretty nasty.
Still, far more of it is drunk by non-athletes than athletes. (I'm sorry I don't have marketing figures to back that claim up.) In the USA, that makes sense: the couch-sitters are a far bigger market than the hockey-players.
I'm curious about the "Nikes are fast" comment. Are you a runner?
More Gatorade is consumed by people sitting on couches watching Gatorade ads than by hard-core street basketball players. The same goes for Nikes. You'd think people would want to buy sneakers which are comfortable for standing around and walking to lunch, but images of people running are far more compelling than images of people at desks.
I adore Nike ads. I think they're playful, fun, and often inspiring. They often concentrate on the ethic of sport: getting up early in the morning and doing it when you could be lying in bed. I don't wear their shoes, but I'd buy a videotape of their ads.
It's not simply a matter of being addicted to caffeine. You need only 4 hours of sleep per night. Congratulations. You're a member of a distinguished crowd, including Thomas Edison and Leonardo da Vinci.
But not everybody can get by on that much, even those who have never touched caffeine. Most pople are dangerous in automobiles after only 20 hours without sleep.
The point is to provide a way to definitively identify a site as safe for kids. Everybody's kids. Presumably we're talking real lowest-common-demoninator Barney-and-Disney stuff.
You can't achieve that with a XXX domain, because that still allows porn, etc. into places with general access. (Unless you plan to force everything with even slightly objectionable material into XXX, which is clearly unworkable.)
You can restrict your kids to.kids.us web sites and be reasonably sure you can let them explore without having to watch every single site they visit. Guidance is always valuable, but it's also true that you don't want to be overly protective and watch them every instant. Giving them a safe place to explore is a good idea.
It's not enough; there will be many places they should be allowed to go that they can't get to because somebody finds it objectionable. Then you'll have to supervise your kids on the big, scary net as a whole.
I agree that.XXX would have been a great idea. "Nice" porn providers would hang out there and not invade the rest of our space. Malicious porn providers who try to steal search engine keywords would still be a problem, but it's easier to deal with a**holes who make themselves clearly evident.
Well, the new Fellowship of the Rings DVD takes 2 DVDs for the movie alone, and that's low-rez NTSC format. Already you've got a reason for a DVD+ sized disk. Jack the resolution up to HDTV format and suddenly you've got something that the average person wants that would require 80Gb.
You're talking primarily about recording stuff. You may not do it on your computer, but if your TiVo could burn onto 80Gb disks, you'd be able to store a lot more hours of TV. Again, especially after HDTV provides you with 4x as many bits to store.
a generator that gets 3 litres per minute (0.8GPM) of 75C (167F) hot water, gives about 50 Watts when also supplied with the same flow of cold water used for cooling.
They also claim to produce about a 20C drop in temperature. Theoretically that's 4,200 Watts (it takes a lot of energy to raise a liter of water 1 degree). So their efficiency is only 1%.
I hope I've done the math right; high school chemistry was half a lifetime ago.
I don't think that anybody expected that it would be impossible to get a terrorist through the system. It's incorrect that the profiling system is "less effective" than random searching. The system requires much effort on the part of potential terrorists, and that effort exposes them. They have to spend money, which means that more money must be obtained, and if that money is coming from a tracked source, they risk exposure. It takes time, which means extra opportunities for law enforcement to find them.
The point is only to raise the bar high enough that it becomes less and less likely for an attack to be made before the perpetrators are caught by other means. The system does make it harder for terrorists to get on a plane. It costs time and money and provides opportunities for them to make mistakes which result in capture.
I suspect that people would prefer to get a perfect system in exchange for giving up some of their liberties and privacy. Every system involves trading some liberty for security; you're already not allowed to bring a gun on a plane despite your second amendment rights.
I cannot say whether this particular tradeoff is a good one or a bad one, and that will only be resolved by much debate like this and an eventual unhappy compromise. But it seems to me that demanding a perfect system is not a valid way to reach that consensus.
I can't imagine that it tastes very good. In general, carnivorous mammals taste nasty. (Carnivorous fish are OK, and birds that eat bug's aren't too bad.)
I have no idea who would eat puma. Best guess: rich hunter manages to kill and eat a puma, only to get hit with a massive case of chronic retribution. Trichinosis is really, really unpleasant.
The jaggies are most noticeable in the subtitles, where you're looking at absolutely straight diagonal lines of a single color.
By contrast, the "natural" stuff was always devoid of them, even for the digitally generated Yoda. I kept looking at the weave of Yoda's robe and seeing details that looked smaller than the jaggy pixels on the screen. It's just an illusion; the eye notices only on unnaturally straight lines and corrects automatically for natural ones.
I loved the rock-solid picture, and I thought it looked good almost all the time, but it's going to need another generation or two before I stop noticing the aliasing artifiacts.
I think that your success may have as much to do with the sorts of programs you've been asked to wrote as your programming style.
A comms program does the same thing, over and over. If it runs for one day, it'll probably run for five years. The number of novel scenarios it encounters is relatively small.
While delivery, billing, and inventory systems are driven by many complex algorithms and sets of rules, they, too, tend to do the same thing over and over. Once they work, they tend to go on working; six years is the same thing as a single day to a piece of software.
You're talking about a specialized system here. If you'd written a general inventory system, which has to deal with every single customization that the end user will try to come up with, is a vastly more complicated piece of machinery and is much harder to test.
It sounds like you're used to working on small systems, with a single programmer working from scratch. The larger the system, the harder it is to examine every single line yourself, and track every single one of the dependencies. OOP systems are one way of encapsulating the work so that the dependencies are reduced and the task becomes manageable even when done by a large team.
It is without a doubt true that "the more familiar you are with the code that is executing, the better your chances of producing error free programs." However, demanding 100% understanding of the code puts an important limit on the sorts of programs that can get written.
I have a right to freely exchange and manipulate content that I've purchased or otherwise aquired - the infamous fair use.
Fair use allows you to use it; it does not allow you to "exchange" it.
But they aren't owed my money, either.
They have a right to charge for their content, if you wish to watch it. Perhaps using the airwaves to distribute it is a bad idea. It was always kind of dubious as a model, since the "price" of content is exchanged through the weird medium of advertising money. Still, at one point it functioned according to an economic model that suited everybody reasonably well: they broadcast it, you saw it live, and it was over. You didn't get to rebroadcast it or watch it without the commercials.
Since then, technology has changed that. Maybe they need to stop broadcasting over the air. Certainly there are other people who would like to be using that spectrum. RF is hardly the only area where this occurs; the government sells land rights for mining and agriculture dirt cheap as long as you have enough money. So the technology has changed, and it seems like time to renegotiate the contract, not time to assert rights to a resource that has changed dramatically since the contract was create.
When I read your comment, I envisioned a studio executive holding the freshly-completed final copy of, say, the next episode of Alias, and waiting for your demand that you hand it over immediately.
Before the thing is broadcast, at least, a TV show or album is a thing with a lot of value and you have zero rights to it whatsoever. The guy wants to find some way to sell it to you, to recoup his investment in making the thing. So he's suddenly trampling on your rights by trying to sell it to everybody rather than having you give it away for free, just because you have a way to do the cheap part (duplicating bits)?
There used to be a good way to do that distrubution: he'd put it on the air, and sell people rights to interrupt it with commercials. Obviously that's a deeply flawed system, but it's one way to do it, and it has the advantage to you that you get to watch it without laying out any cash.
Technology has exacerbated the flaws in that system to the point where it's totally dysfunctional, and a new technology must created to solve the problems. But the flaws are in the fact that the broadcaster can't control distribution any more, not that you suddenly don't have your "free" content anymore.
Maybe it is time to end over-the-air broadcasts entirely, since it only works by giving monopolies on a public resource to rich people, who are no longer able to get the value out of it that they need to produce their content. That would make a lot of people unhappy, since they don't get their TV, but we get our airwaves back.
I just implore you to think twice where rights come from before you call the broadcasters "rights-trampling monopolists". Yes, they are using public resources to enrich their pockets, but they are also creating content and employing a lot of people, from actors to writers, directors, and gaffers. They also profit from the system.
There is a serious debate here over the best way to control content, and how much copyright affords. But suggesting that all of the power is on your side, and that they owe you this content, is unhelpful and greedy.
Without a doubt, breaking the connection between the large music distributors and the radio stations will be a boon. We'll hear a lot more music. It won't necessarily be better music, but at least it won't be the same thing.
Unfortunately, that's still not great marketing for the smaller companies. Hearing a song once on the radio isn't going to get you a big following. It might get you a small one, and it might actually get people to the web site to hear those sample tracks in the first place.
The sample tracks alone aren't enough. There are thousands of sample tracks, and most people simply won't listen to any of them. You get your first glimpse of a band in a club, or over the air, or in a poster in a music store. Getting that first play or that poster in the music store is the tricky part.
A CD really does cost money to produce. The reason you (well, not you necessarily, but somebody) want the Mariah Carey CD is that somebody brought it to your attention. "Attention", as everybody on the Internet knows, costs money.
Physical stores cost money: clerks, rent, utilities, inventory overhead. Some of what Fightcloud is doing just matches the Amazon model of using the Internet to reduce many of those costs. Good for them; I applaud it.
Now comes the real question: will they have any CDs worth buying? And if they do, how will you know? Most CDs are crap. Even in a general area that you like, most CDs aren't worth the plastic they're printed on, at least to you. It's the job of marketing to match you with that CD, and that's expensive to do. We'll see if $4.95 gradually becomes $9.95. Still a better price than the RIAA wants you to pay, of course.
I used to write software for the DoD and I found that the primary reason to use open source software is that I didn't have to go through the tortuous procurement processes to get it. They talk about the necessary approval processes, but in fact most of the time nobody cares as long as you get your work done.
This actually doesn't much affect the sorts of software Microsoft is pushing, since the OS and office apps tend to come pre-loaded on the systems as they're given to us. But in general when it came down to a choice of open-source vs. commercial software, the project would usually be completed with the open-source stuff before we could even lay our hands on the commercial stuff.
According to the article, the worm sets up a web site for doing advertising, presumably porn. I'd think that that the sites being advertised would be a good place to start figuring out who's responsible.
It's an amusing idea to use a worm to carry a proft-generating payload, but it sounds like it'll leave a really big paper trail. The more advertisers you get, the bigger the trail.
Slashdot Mirror
You bring up an interesting point. If everybody in the world were the sort of people on Slashdot, there would be no spam. Even at very low cost, there would be zero response, and it wouldn't be worth their effort.
The problem is the real morons. The kind who are taken in by the stupidest spam tricks, like the "future spam" he describes (nonsensical but grammatical set of English text designed to slip past Bayesian filters, followed by a URL.) What kind of a moron would click on such a URL? The kind of moron with more money than brains. (Probably not much money, but clearly zero brains.)
It would be lovely to filter out those emails before they reach the morons, but that's unfortunately impractical and illegal in the general case. Maybe we all need to subsidize a cheap ISP for morons.
Presumably, they already have. If the prices are now un-fixed, the price is supposed to fall.
"Fall" is a bit complicated to measure here. If they delay a $1 price increase by a year, then the prices have fallen, by a dollar. That is, for every CD you buy, you're paying a dollar less than you would have if this settlement hadn't happened.
Or rather, if the lawsuit hadn't been filed, and won, the collusion would have gone on, and prices would have gone up at some faster rate than they are.
You'd never see the prices fall. Prices never do, not on items like this. It's easier to continue to charge the same price and wait for inflation to catch up to you. The only time prices fall is when competition allows a drastic reduction in prices, such that the overhead of slightly lowering prices is less than the extra "pull" you get from the lowered price. Knocking a buck off the price of the CD won't get you into a particular record store.
I'm not saying you should be thrilled. CDs are already pretty expensive, much more so than they need to be, through the RIAA's fault, not that of the retailers. It's impossible to distribute this money fairly (since it's impossible to keep track of the sales), and the lawyers get most of it anyway.
Since there's so little money divided among so many people, the fairest thing may well to be to give it to a nonprofit. I didn't say "fair", I said "fairest". It's still not fair. "Fair" would be refunding every cent I spent, with interest. But it can't be done. They can't refund it only to people with receipts, because that wouldn't be fair either. And taking people's word for it wouldn't be fair, because people lie when they're handing out free money.
But you can take some microscopic comfort in the fact that the prices are slightly lower than they would have been. Don't spend your $5-$20 all in one place.
I hate to flame, but there's nothing on this page worth reading. It's full of text on how to set up an Apache server, followed by:
Collecting Payments
This where you find yourself between a rock and a hard place.
If you're going to post an article about micropayments, you're going to have to make the micropayments and the associated economics the lead of the article, not the tail. Important questions unasked:
* A system for refunds
* A system for letting people reload pages
* A way to get people to trust your payment system (i.e. what if I pay my $10 and you go out of business)
* The cost of doing this business
* Dealing with forgeries
I've never before complained about an article on Slashdot, but this is truly a waste of time.
I wish I could disagree with you on the point about Iraq. They keep claiming to have solid evidence, but have presented exactly none of it to the world. (Does anybody recall what happened to the secret documents they gave to various world leaders which showed why we chose Afghanistan?)
I understand very well that sources are extremely valuable, and you must protect them. That means that secret documents are usually more secret for the reasons of revealing the source than they are for the actual data they contain.
Still, this is becoming very disturbing. There have been some very anti-American articles in this thread, and it's behavior like this which encourages such. The government is proposing a war in which the proponents stand to gain very much personally.
I don't like the Bush administration, but I don't believe that they are monsters, either. I don't believe they would kill probably hundreds of Americans and thousands of Iraqis just for the privilege of making a few million (or billion) on oil. It's a plan which involves too many people, at least one of whom must have some sort of integrity.
But I do wish that they'd give me some reason for that apparently futile hope.
[As an aside, having the US own Iraqi oil fields would cement US supremacy, so it is possible that this is part of an overarching plan to secure US power, something which would have better hope of keeping adherents than plain money. But Iraq is far away, and tankers from Iraq to the US would be very vulnerable in case of war. They'd be better off taking over Venezuela or perhaps Mexico. So I tend to discount this theory.]
As for Hamas and Islamic Jihad, I suspect that they are inextricably linked to al Quaeda. When you fight one you fight the others. Israel has done little of late to cover itself in glory, but they do seem to have the moral high ground over those who blow up school buses (even if that's not saying very much.)
The adminstration probably feels that it cannot take a stronger side against the enemies of Israel while Israel is only barely better, morally. I believe that very few Muslims actively hate the US strongly enough to be in favor of al Quaeda, but Israel is a different story. It is a major sticking point with most Arabs and Muslims.
Fighting Hamas and Islamic Jihad is hard, because it's nearly impossible to distinguish between civilians and militants. That's partly because the civilians permit themselves to be used this way, and so the line is very blurred.
The US "war on terror" does, I believe, cover these groups as well. In general it's a war on the Islamic terrorists; Basque terrorists and Irish terrorists are left out. The remaining Islamic terrorists cover a very wide body, which is all linked together. Money flows from Saddam Hussein to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. But fighting the Palestinians directly is a public relations nightmare, both because of civilian deaths and because it would tip the balance of those who only barely tolerate the US as it stands.
My opinion is that Israel should force a two-state solution on Palestine, adopting unilaterally plan that most of the non-Arab would would see as fair. When they were attacked from that state, the US would have an easier time helping them fight it, since the non-Arab would would see Israel as having already made its concessions. [Arabs and Muslims are unlikely to see any plan in which Israel still exists as fair.] But for some reason right-wingers in Israel insist on occupying some of the West Bank territory, and will not give it up.
They added a bunch of cooling fans to the shredder to allow it to run longer and harder before it overheated.
It's just supposed to be funny. If it doesn't make you laugh, skip on to the next article.
The euphemism "war on terror" is necessary because calling it "war on Islamic terrorists" or "war on Islamic fundamentalists" would get the administration in deep, deep doodoo. Politically, it's necessary to avoid looking like they are opposed to Islam. Muslims around the world already half believe that the US really is out to war on them.
There was some talk for a while that the War on Terror would apply to anybody using terror techniques, such as the Irish Republican Army, but that's an idea that went nowhere fast. Their opponents, therefore, are primarily Muslims, but not all Muslims.
So America-bashing and Bush administration-bashing aside (and I'm not a big fan myself, having voted for the other guy), the administration is faced with the fact that a small subset of essentially very good people is committing despicable acts in the name of those good people. These people are afraid of being punished for the sins of a few. Their support is crucial, and the US in general prefers to make friends rather than enemies. This is an incredibly untenable position for the US government. I'm hard pressed to come up with a better name for the effort, even if it is an obvious euphemism.
Hey, you should live where I do. We can't get _any_ haggis in the supermarket.
Sheesh. What kind of a country is this?
It stuns me, actually, why people would drink Gatorade sitting on the couch. I hate the taste of the stuff. Even viciously dehydrated at mile 23 of a marathon, I find it pretty nasty.
Still, far more of it is drunk by non-athletes than athletes. (I'm sorry I don't have marketing figures to back that claim up.) In the USA, that makes sense: the couch-sitters are a far bigger market than the hockey-players.
I'm curious about the "Nikes are fast" comment. Are you a runner?
More Gatorade is consumed by people sitting on couches watching Gatorade ads than by hard-core street basketball players. The same goes for Nikes. You'd think people would want to buy sneakers which are comfortable for standing around and walking to lunch, but images of people running are far more compelling than images of people at desks.
I adore Nike ads. I think they're playful, fun, and often inspiring. They often concentrate on the ethic of sport: getting up early in the morning and doing it when you could be lying in bed. I don't wear their shoes, but I'd buy a videotape of their ads.
It's not simply a matter of being addicted to caffeine. You need only 4 hours of sleep per night. Congratulations. You're a member of a distinguished crowd, including Thomas Edison and Leonardo da Vinci.
But not everybody can get by on that much, even those who have never touched caffeine. Most pople are dangerous in automobiles after only 20 hours without sleep.
Be careful in generalizing your experiences.
The point is to provide a way to definitively identify a site as safe for kids. Everybody's kids. Presumably we're talking real lowest-common-demoninator Barney-and-Disney stuff.
.kids.us web sites and be reasonably sure you can let them explore without having to watch every single site they visit. Guidance is always valuable, but it's also true that you don't want to be overly protective and watch them every instant. Giving them a safe place to explore is a good idea.
.XXX would have been a great idea. "Nice" porn providers would hang out there and not invade the rest of our space. Malicious porn providers who try to steal search engine keywords would still be a problem, but it's easier to deal with a**holes who make themselves clearly evident.
You can't achieve that with a XXX domain, because that still allows porn, etc. into places with general access. (Unless you plan to force everything with even slightly objectionable material into XXX, which is clearly unworkable.)
You can restrict your kids to
It's not enough; there will be many places they should be allowed to go that they can't get to because somebody finds it objectionable. Then you'll have to supervise your kids on the big, scary net as a whole.
I agree that
Well, the new Fellowship of the Rings DVD takes 2 DVDs for the movie alone, and that's low-rez NTSC format. Already you've got a reason for a DVD+ sized disk. Jack the resolution up to HDTV format and suddenly you've got something that the average person wants that would require 80Gb.
You're talking primarily about recording stuff. You may not do it on your computer, but if your TiVo could burn onto 80Gb disks, you'd be able to store a lot more hours of TV. Again, especially after HDTV provides you with 4x as many bits to store.
Uh, that would been _green_ cheese, I believe.
They claim:
a generator that gets 3 litres per minute (0.8GPM) of 75C (167F) hot water, gives about 50 Watts when also supplied with the same flow of cold water used for cooling.
They also claim to produce about a 20C drop in temperature. Theoretically that's 4,200 Watts (it takes a lot of energy to raise a liter of water 1 degree). So their efficiency is only 1%.
I hope I've done the math right; high school chemistry was half a lifetime ago.
I don't think that anybody expected that it would be impossible to get a terrorist through the system. It's incorrect that the profiling system is "less effective" than random searching. The system requires much effort on the part of potential terrorists, and that effort exposes them. They have to spend money, which means that more money must be obtained, and if that money is coming from a tracked source, they risk exposure. It takes time, which means extra opportunities for law enforcement to find them.
The point is only to raise the bar high enough that it becomes less and less likely for an attack to be made before the perpetrators are caught by other means. The system does make it harder for terrorists to get on a plane. It costs time and money and provides opportunities for them to make mistakes which result in capture.
I suspect that people would prefer to get a perfect system in exchange for giving up some of their liberties and privacy. Every system involves trading some liberty for security; you're already not allowed to bring a gun on a plane despite your second amendment rights.
I cannot say whether this particular tradeoff is a good one or a bad one, and that will only be resolved by much debate like this and an eventual unhappy compromise. But it seems to me that demanding a perfect system is not a valid way to reach that consensus.
I can't imagine that it tastes very good. In general, carnivorous mammals taste nasty. (Carnivorous fish are OK, and birds that eat bug's aren't too bad.)
I have no idea who would eat puma. Best guess: rich hunter manages to kill and eat a puma, only to get hit with a massive case of chronic retribution. Trichinosis is really, really unpleasant.
The jaggies are most noticeable in the subtitles, where you're looking at absolutely straight diagonal lines of a single color.
By contrast, the "natural" stuff was always devoid of them, even for the digitally generated Yoda. I kept looking at the weave of Yoda's robe and seeing details that looked smaller than the jaggy pixels on the screen. It's just an illusion; the eye notices only on unnaturally straight lines and corrects automatically for natural ones.
I loved the rock-solid picture, and I thought it looked good almost all the time, but it's going to need another generation or two before I stop noticing the aliasing artifiacts.
We've had intelligent, self-replicating human beings around for quite a while and we haven't accomplished squat, cosmically speaking.
I think that your success may have as much to do with the sorts of programs you've been asked to wrote as your programming style.
A comms program does the same thing, over and over. If it runs for one day, it'll probably run for five years. The number of novel scenarios it encounters is relatively small.
While delivery, billing, and inventory systems are driven by many complex algorithms and sets of rules, they, too, tend to do the same thing over and over. Once they work, they tend to go on working; six years is the same thing as a single day to a piece of software.
You're talking about a specialized system here. If you'd written a general inventory system, which has to deal with every single customization that the end user will try to come up with, is a vastly more complicated piece of machinery and is much harder to test.
It sounds like you're used to working on small systems, with a single programmer working from scratch. The larger the system, the harder it is to examine every single line yourself, and track every single one of the dependencies. OOP systems are one way of encapsulating the work so that the dependencies are reduced and the task becomes manageable even when done by a large team.
It is without a doubt true that "the more familiar you are with the code that is executing, the better your chances of producing error free programs." However, demanding 100% understanding of the code puts an important limit on the sorts of programs that can get written.
Fair use allows you to use it; it does not allow you to "exchange" it.
But they aren't owed my money, either.
They have a right to charge for their content, if you wish to watch it. Perhaps using the airwaves to distribute it is a bad idea. It was always kind of dubious as a model, since the "price" of content is exchanged through the weird medium of advertising money. Still, at one point it functioned according to an economic model that suited everybody reasonably well: they broadcast it, you saw it live, and it was over. You didn't get to rebroadcast it or watch it without the commercials.
Since then, technology has changed that. Maybe they need to stop broadcasting over the air. Certainly there are other people who would like to be using that spectrum. RF is hardly the only area where this occurs; the government sells land rights for mining and agriculture dirt cheap as long as you have enough money. So the technology has changed, and it seems like time to renegotiate the contract, not time to assert rights to a resource that has changed dramatically since the contract was create.
When I read your comment, I envisioned a studio executive holding the freshly-completed final copy of, say, the next episode of Alias, and waiting for your demand that you hand it over immediately.
Before the thing is broadcast, at least, a TV show or album is a thing with a lot of value and you have zero rights to it whatsoever. The guy wants to find some way to sell it to you, to recoup his investment in making the thing. So he's suddenly trampling on your rights by trying to sell it to everybody rather than having you give it away for free, just because you have a way to do the cheap part (duplicating bits)?
There used to be a good way to do that distrubution: he'd put it on the air, and sell people rights to interrupt it with commercials. Obviously that's a deeply flawed system, but it's one way to do it, and it has the advantage to you that you get to watch it without laying out any cash.
Technology has exacerbated the flaws in that system to the point where it's totally dysfunctional, and a new technology must created to solve the problems. But the flaws are in the fact that the broadcaster can't control distribution any more, not that you suddenly don't have your "free" content anymore.
Maybe it is time to end over-the-air broadcasts entirely, since it only works by giving monopolies on a public resource to rich people, who are no longer able to get the value out of it that they need to produce their content. That would make a lot of people unhappy, since they don't get their TV, but we get our airwaves back.
I just implore you to think twice where rights come from before you call the broadcasters "rights-trampling monopolists". Yes, they are using public resources to enrich their pockets, but they are also creating content and employing a lot of people, from actors to writers, directors, and gaffers. They also profit from the system.
There is a serious debate here over the best way to control content, and how much copyright affords. But suggesting that all of the power is on your side, and that they owe you this content, is unhelpful and greedy.
Without a doubt, breaking the connection between the large music distributors and the radio stations will be a boon. We'll hear a lot more music. It won't necessarily be better music, but at least it won't be the same thing.
Unfortunately, that's still not great marketing for the smaller companies. Hearing a song once on the radio isn't going to get you a big following. It might get you a small one, and it might actually get people to the web site to hear those sample tracks in the first place.
The sample tracks alone aren't enough. There are thousands of sample tracks, and most people simply won't listen to any of them. You get your first glimpse of a band in a club, or over the air, or in a poster in a music store. Getting that first play or that poster in the music store is the tricky part.
A CD really does cost money to produce. The reason you (well, not you necessarily, but somebody) want the Mariah Carey CD is that somebody brought it to your attention. "Attention", as everybody on the Internet knows, costs money.
Physical stores cost money: clerks, rent, utilities, inventory overhead. Some of what Fightcloud is doing just matches the Amazon model of using the Internet to reduce many of those costs. Good for them; I applaud it.
Now comes the real question: will they have any CDs worth buying? And if they do, how will you know? Most CDs are crap. Even in a general area that you like, most CDs aren't worth the plastic they're printed on, at least to you. It's the job of marketing to match you with that CD, and that's expensive to do. We'll see if $4.95 gradually becomes $9.95. Still a better price than the RIAA wants you to pay, of course.
I used to write software for the DoD and I found that the primary reason to use open source software is that I didn't have to go through the tortuous procurement processes to get it. They talk about the necessary approval processes, but in fact most of the time nobody cares as long as you get your work done.
This actually doesn't much affect the sorts of software Microsoft is pushing, since the OS and office apps tend to come pre-loaded on the systems as they're given to us. But in general when it came down to a choice of open-source vs. commercial software, the project would usually be completed with the open-source stuff before we could even lay our hands on the commercial stuff.
According to the article, the worm sets up a web site for doing advertising, presumably porn. I'd think that that the sites being advertised would be a good place to start figuring out who's responsible.
It's an amusing idea to use a worm to carry a proft-generating payload, but it sounds like it'll leave a really big paper trail. The more advertisers you get, the bigger the trail.