Now, let's pretend for a moment that you are the executive branch of the US government. You see a law that the previous administration enacted that you don't like. How do you get rid of it? The executive branch is the only branch of the three that can neither create nor strike down laws. All they can do is (not) enforce it.
Bush and his people could try to convince Congress to modify the law, but the last time the DMCA went through there not so long ago, it got an awful lot of support. The idea might lose some votes this time around, but not many. (MPAA and RIAA represent a big chung of US exports, economic troubles, blah blah blah)
They could decide not to enforce it, more or less ignore the white-collar copiers and only bring it up against those that should be thrown in jail. Unfortunately, that still leaves the ugly wording of the law lurking under the surface to strike back at inopportune times (say, when the next president comes into office). Besides, if you slack too much in enforcing the law, you get impeached for not doing what you're supposed to be doing.
The only other real option they have is to get the courts to strike it down (or at least modify it majorly in their interpretation of it). But, when there's a good chance that the case will appear before a judge that you didn't help put into office, how do you make sure that the court decision goes your way?
By enforcing the law in the broadest and strictest way imaginable, in a way that not only blatently demonstrates the unconstitutionality of the law as-is (so the judge would have to be a complete and utter facist to let it stand), but also pisses off enough constituants to convince Congress not to try it again any time soon.
Is what is happening really some sort of "master plan" by the Attourney General, lying in wait until they got just the right kind of nudge from dim-witted CEOs at Adobe? Probably not, Occam's Razor being what it is. However, if it's not being done on purpose, then they seem to be shooting themselves in the foot by going forward with a case that's such an attention magnet.
My experience with the various video formats on Windows boxes suggest that QT for Windows is intentionally crippled by the folks at Apple to help sell more Apple hardware.
QT files (like the Mario 128 demo I downloaded from IGN) on my HDD constantly lagged and skipped on my old 233 MMX machine with 128 MB of RAM and a Diamond Stealth III (while RealMedia and mpeg files did fine). I assumed that Apple's QT player was bloatware and required something a bit more robust to play well. However, if I'm still having the same lagging/skipping problems with a Pentium 4 1.3 GHz, 256 MB of RAM, and a GeForce board, will I ever have good enough hardware? I know the Pentium 4 isn't the best-designed chip under the sun, but this is ridiculous! Especially when other video formats work just fine on comparativley ancient hardware.
And of course this problem is only worsened by sites like IGN that offer media excluslively as QT files. (And then IGN expects me to pay money for their premium content?)
Go ahead, mod me down as flamebait, but I don't even want QT software touching my Windows installs. Why would I want it running under Linux?
"Stuff formed originally by graviational collapse. So they are initially formed by gravity in the first place. Now, asteroids get peppered by stuff, and breaks up. But eventually, won't these debris just recollapse back into a messy bunch (sans those which has sufficient escape velocity out of the center of mass)?"
If there was enough mass in the asteroid belt for this to happen, it would have happened by now, and there'd be a planet between Mars and Jupiter.
" No, not really. It's the same technology that allows a remote listener to decode printer, keyboard, fax and all sorts of other electronic gizmos."
The electrical impulses used in a keyboard is orders of magnitude less than those used in your average business fax machine or printer. And with both the fax machine and the printer, the electric motors used are extremely noisy when compared to the print head. If the printer in question is a dot matrix... maybe...
"Without taking special TEMPEST precautions there is no reason a laptop or LCD couldn't be read also."
The difference in EM radiation output between a CRT and an LCD display is like the radiation difference between uranium and gold. One involves accelerating ions to relativistic speeds, the other involves minisculse voltage differences. Combine that with the way EM drops off exponentially with distance, and, well... you get the idea.
IMO, if you're using an LCD display, and you take any precautions beyond, say, turning on a ceiling fan, you're being too paranoid.
" Almost everything is held together by gravity. Including all asteroids, comets etc...."
Nope. The less massive the object, the weaker the gravitational force it exerts on its parts. If the constituant molecules were held together solely by gravity, once you shrink to a certain size, the random thermodynamic motion of the molecules would cause the object to eventually break apart.
Gravity works great for massive objects (like our moon), but it's all but non-existant with smaller objects (like you, your computer, a Mack truck, Eros...). There, the molecules are held together by the chemical (electromagnetic) bonds between the individual molecules.
Asteroids aren't held together by gravity, they are literally one big rock. If they weren't, they wouldn't be cratered because the first impact would be its last. Just like kicking a sand castle.
Comets aren't held together by gravity, instead they're held together just like all snowballs: ice crystals gluedd together by the surface tension of liquid water. If it were just gravity, they wouldn't survive passing anywhere near the sun. They'd be torn apart during the first pass from steam pockets. If steam can move ships and locomotives massing millions of tons here on earth, it can sure as heck put something into escape velocity on a body where the average man weighs less than ten pounds.
OK, I'm not entirely clear where the line between "planetoid" and "asteroid" is drawn (eccentricity of their orbits, perhaps?), but I do recall a while ago hearing that the difference between a planet and an -oid is that a planet is held together by gravity rather than by chemical forces (a ball of individual grains of sand vs. one really big rock). Now, is this a formalized definition, or is it just a good idea that's been suggested to the community?
Personally, I think that if Pluto can hold down its own atmosphere (that we can discern from way over here), that's a good indication that gravity is holding it together and it should be considered a planet. The big question should be whether or not Jupiter is a brown dwarf.
"Either it's typical spook selfishness OR they think that doing so would strengthen the defense's argument."
Personally, I think by not releasing the information in and of itself helps the defense. Any lawyer worth the money he's being paid should be able to use the fact that, if the jury can't understand how the device works, they can't be convinced that it was used correctly. Or that the information was really gathered at all. "Reasonable doubt" and all that.
Keeping the keyloggers a black box pretty much gives them all the validity of a psychic. The only way a juror would buy that line is if they believed whatever the G-men said. And unless the defense attourney was a complete moron during juror selection...
" Did you ever consider a satellite conection on one end for the internet?"
We're a bunch of friends interested in sharing files and playing games, not a medium-sized business.
"Does anybody know the prices of satellite 2-way internet service?"
When last I checked (which wasn't too long ago), the prices are comaprable to a T-1.
Re:Bandwith without connectivity is worthless
on
Make Your Own DSL
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· Score: 2
You conclude that doing this to connect to the internet is the only useful application for this. When I was at college and living off-campus, my friends and I ended up running cat5 cable between townhomes in a complex (burying it when nobody else was looking, of course). Do you think we did it to share an internet connection? No, that line was used for two things: StarCraft and Quake 2. And even then, those of us that didn't live in either of those two buildings had to lug their PCs over for when we had LAN parties.
Now living arrangements have changed and, even though a lot of us still live in the same town, we're too far apart to even consider doing something like ethat. However, building a DSL cicruit like this would be just the solution. All the advantages of having a private LAN and none of the disadvantages of trying to play over the internet.
I have yet to really do anything with DVD stuff. Not only is it not entirely HDTV compatible (they must have forgotten that we're all supposed to be switching to that from NTSC, just like everybody else), the whole business with the DVD Forum has rubbed me the wrong way. If I'm going to import anime, I don't want to have to import a new DVD player as well. My laserdisc player handles foreign media just fine. (Too bad they're leaving that standard, though). As for renting movies, my VCR still works. Even if I end up getting a PS2 or an Xbox, I don't see myself spending money on DVD movies.
However, DVD+RW seems to be a format in which they've done everything right. If I were to get a DVD recorder, I'd want something that can be played on most normal players, be it a movie player or a DVD-ROM drive. DVD-R and DVD-RW can't promise that, and DVD-RAM is really just a gloriefied tape drive with its proprietary sealed cases. On top of that, this bad boy will write CD-R and CD-RW as well. I get this and a normal DVD-ROM drive and I can copy damned near anything. The only problem I see here is that, once somebody figures out how to record dual-layer discs (so you can record discs the same size as the commercial plants), that will probably entail yet another standard.
But, again, I have no use for a DVD player, and only marginal use for a DVD-ROM drive. DVD+RW would be nice in that it hold a metric fuckload of data, but do I really have that much to hold? (OK, maybe I will when I live someplace they have broadband again) Is there a reason for me to need this instead of a normal CD-RW?
It's not like they convinced NASA to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars (what's the going $/kg-to-LEO again?) to ship up a cardboard cutout of Steve Martin as part of a lame publicity stunt that doesn't do much more than demonstrate of governmental support of...
Oh, wait, the MPAA already did that with the Oscars, didn't they?
"Interesting, though, that nobody else came up with it before this particular man did."
I was harping on that particular paragraph's wording. He seems to be claiming credit for the sliderule in general (something the author points out at the bottom of the article that has been in use since the 17th century or so).
In today's terms, it would be like me saying "I developed a new, specialized computer for our B-2 bombers. It has a small hexadecimal LCD screen, a number pad, and four buttons, one each for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. With it, the crews can enter one number, press the multiplication button, enter a second number and receive the product of those two numbers. For more complicated calculations, I've even inclucded a small memory for storing values."
"To facilitate the calculation, I developed a special slide rule that used the general principle of multiplying two quantities by mechanically adding distances proportional to their logarithms."
He pretty much described right there the basic concept of any sliderule ever used by anybody. All that was needed was to figure out the trig formula and making the numbers different on a normal rule. And for this the Army Air Corps needed a PhD candidate? I didn't know they had PHBs that long ago.
BTW: Is it my imagination or do we no longer need P tags?
"I bet every hard working taxpayer in that city will examine his paystub with pride,"
I don't believe Houston has an income tax. Or any other local government for that matter. I'm not sure any local government even has the right to tax income. Sales tax, yes. Property tax, yes, but not income tax.
"and the philosophy and principles it stood for,"
What, you think this is taxation without representation? You don't think there was a public quorum on this?
"but for now, it's forced charity."
... and you have nobody else to blame but yourself and your neighbors.
But then we have the Bulterian Jihad where we overthrow our machine masters and learn the follies of creating machines in the image of man's mind. After that, we'll have to rely on the Navigator's Guild and their heavy reliance on the spice melange (found only on the planet Arakkis) for interstellar transportation.
Alas, poor AIX, I knew thee well...
on
IBM Wants Linux
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· Score: 2
AIX is what introduced me to *nix all those years ago in the school computer lab. The IBM PPC boxen running it beat the snot out of the Sun Sparc stations in the next room.
However, I've seen AIX, and I know that IBM obviously has some pretty decent *nix coders in their stable. You'd think they could take what they have and coble together "AIX/Linux" instead of throwing away a perfectly good OS.
If we have Gates/Borg pic as the icon for MS, why not modify a pic of Stallman for the GNU icon? Maybe put a fuzzy hat on his head and give him a Stalin-esque mustache. Or maybe something inspired by C&C: Red Alert.
OK, now I'm thinking about using that Hell March tune from the game as the start-up sound in Gnome...
Slashdot Mirror
*instert obligatory "free Sklyarov" statements here*
Now, let's pretend for a moment that you are the executive branch of the US government. You see a law that the previous administration enacted that you don't like. How do you get rid of it? The executive branch is the only branch of the three that can neither create nor strike down laws. All they can do is (not) enforce it.
Bush and his people could try to convince Congress to modify the law, but the last time the DMCA went through there not so long ago, it got an awful lot of support. The idea might lose some votes this time around, but not many. (MPAA and RIAA represent a big chung of US exports, economic troubles, blah blah blah)
They could decide not to enforce it, more or less ignore the white-collar copiers and only bring it up against those that should be thrown in jail. Unfortunately, that still leaves the ugly wording of the law lurking under the surface to strike back at inopportune times (say, when the next president comes into office). Besides, if you slack too much in enforcing the law, you get impeached for not doing what you're supposed to be doing.
The only other real option they have is to get the courts to strike it down (or at least modify it majorly in their interpretation of it). But, when there's a good chance that the case will appear before a judge that you didn't help put into office, how do you make sure that the court decision goes your way?
By enforcing the law in the broadest and strictest way imaginable, in a way that not only blatently demonstrates the unconstitutionality of the law as-is (so the judge would have to be a complete and utter facist to let it stand), but also pisses off enough constituants to convince Congress not to try it again any time soon.
Is what is happening really some sort of "master plan" by the Attourney General, lying in wait until they got just the right kind of nudge from dim-witted CEOs at Adobe? Probably not, Occam's Razor being what it is. However, if it's not being done on purpose, then they seem to be shooting themselves in the foot by going forward with a case that's such an attention magnet.
My experience with the various video formats on Windows boxes suggest that QT for Windows is intentionally crippled by the folks at Apple to help sell more Apple hardware.
QT files (like the Mario 128 demo I downloaded from IGN) on my HDD constantly lagged and skipped on my old 233 MMX machine with 128 MB of RAM and a Diamond Stealth III (while RealMedia and mpeg files did fine). I assumed that Apple's QT player was bloatware and required something a bit more robust to play well. However, if I'm still having the same lagging/skipping problems with a Pentium 4 1.3 GHz, 256 MB of RAM, and a GeForce board, will I ever have good enough hardware? I know the Pentium 4 isn't the best-designed chip under the sun, but this is ridiculous! Especially when other video formats work just fine on comparativley ancient hardware.
And of course this problem is only worsened by sites like IGN that offer media excluslively as QT files. (And then IGN expects me to pay money for their premium content?)
Go ahead, mod me down as flamebait, but I don't even want QT software touching my Windows installs. Why would I want it running under Linux?
When I saw that title, I thought I'd be reading about how the US Border Patrol would be using face-recognition on the Rio Grande or something.
http://www.solstation.com/stars/asteroid.htmi ds.txt
m e/a1010out.html
http://zimmer.csufresno.edu/~fringwal/w11b.astero
http://galaxy.ngc.peachnet.edu/~jjones/astr1010ho
You have the internet, you have Google, use them.
"Stuff formed originally by graviational collapse. So they are initially formed by gravity in the first place. Now, asteroids get peppered by stuff, and breaks up. But eventually, won't these debris just recollapse back into a messy bunch (sans those which has sufficient escape velocity out of the center of mass)?"
If there was enough mass in the asteroid belt for this to happen, it would have happened by now, and there'd be a planet between Mars and Jupiter.
"Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back" is a better movie name than "Attack of the Clones."
" No, not really. It's the same technology that allows a remote listener to decode printer, keyboard, fax and all sorts of other electronic gizmos."
The electrical impulses used in a keyboard is orders of magnitude less than those used in your average business fax machine or printer. And with both the fax machine and the printer, the electric motors used are extremely noisy when compared to the print head. If the printer in question is a dot matrix... maybe...
"Without taking special TEMPEST precautions there is no reason a laptop or LCD couldn't be read also."
The difference in EM radiation output between a CRT and an LCD display is like the radiation difference between uranium and gold. One involves accelerating ions to relativistic speeds, the other involves minisculse voltage differences. Combine that with the way EM drops off exponentially with distance, and, well... you get the idea.
IMO, if you're using an LCD display, and you take any precautions beyond, say, turning on a ceiling fan, you're being too paranoid.
" Almost everything is held together by gravity. Including all asteroids, comets etc...."
Nope. The less massive the object, the weaker the gravitational force it exerts on its parts. If the constituant molecules were held together solely by gravity, once you shrink to a certain size, the random thermodynamic motion of the molecules would cause the object to eventually break apart.
Gravity works great for massive objects (like our moon), but it's all but non-existant with smaller objects (like you, your computer, a Mack truck, Eros...). There, the molecules are held together by the chemical (electromagnetic) bonds between the individual molecules.
Asteroids aren't held together by gravity, they are literally one big rock. If they weren't, they wouldn't be cratered because the first impact would be its last. Just like kicking a sand castle.
Comets aren't held together by gravity, instead they're held together just like all snowballs: ice crystals gluedd together by the surface tension of liquid water. If it were just gravity, they wouldn't survive passing anywhere near the sun. They'd be torn apart during the first pass from steam pockets. If steam can move ships and locomotives massing millions of tons here on earth, it can sure as heck put something into escape velocity on a body where the average man weighs less than ten pounds.
OK, I'm not entirely clear where the line between "planetoid" and "asteroid" is drawn (eccentricity of their orbits, perhaps?), but I do recall a while ago hearing that the difference between a planet and an -oid is that a planet is held together by gravity rather than by chemical forces (a ball of individual grains of sand vs. one really big rock). Now, is this a formalized definition, or is it just a good idea that's been suggested to the community?
Personally, I think that if Pluto can hold down its own atmosphere (that we can discern from way over here), that's a good indication that gravity is holding it together and it should be considered a planet. The big question should be whether or not Jupiter is a brown dwarf.
You're assuming that a mobster wouldn't have the money to burn on toys like an LCD monitor, or maybe even a laptop.
"Either it's typical spook selfishness OR they think that doing so would strengthen the defense's argument."
Personally, I think by not releasing the information in and of itself helps the defense. Any lawyer worth the money he's being paid should be able to use the fact that, if the jury can't understand how the device works, they can't be convinced that it was used correctly. Or that the information was really gathered at all. "Reasonable doubt" and all that.
Keeping the keyloggers a black box pretty much gives them all the validity of a psychic. The only way a juror would buy that line is if they believed whatever the G-men said. And unless the defense attourney was a complete moron during juror selection...
" Did you ever consider a satellite conection on one end for the internet?"
We're a bunch of friends interested in sharing files and playing games, not a medium-sized business.
"Does anybody know the prices of satellite 2-way internet service?"
When last I checked (which wasn't too long ago), the prices are comaprable to a T-1.
You conclude that doing this to connect to the internet is the only useful application for this. When I was at college and living off-campus, my friends and I ended up running cat5 cable between townhomes in a complex (burying it when nobody else was looking, of course). Do you think we did it to share an internet connection? No, that line was used for two things: StarCraft and Quake 2. And even then, those of us that didn't live in either of those two buildings had to lug their PCs over for when we had LAN parties.
Now living arrangements have changed and, even though a lot of us still live in the same town, we're too far apart to even consider doing something like ethat. However, building a DSL cicruit like this would be just the solution. All the advantages of having a private LAN and none of the disadvantages of trying to play over the internet.
Try "four years of German in high school, and being in said German class for the collapse of communism."
Maybe I just dated myself, but when I saw that headline, I asked myself "What the heck is LinuxHardware.org doing shooting up stuff in East Germany?"
I have yet to really do anything with DVD stuff. Not only is it not entirely HDTV compatible (they must have forgotten that we're all supposed to be switching to that from NTSC, just like everybody else), the whole business with the DVD Forum has rubbed me the wrong way. If I'm going to import anime, I don't want to have to import a new DVD player as well. My laserdisc player handles foreign media just fine. (Too bad they're leaving that standard, though). As for renting movies, my VCR still works. Even if I end up getting a PS2 or an Xbox, I don't see myself spending money on DVD movies.
However, DVD+RW seems to be a format in which they've done everything right. If I were to get a DVD recorder, I'd want something that can be played on most normal players, be it a movie player or a DVD-ROM drive. DVD-R and DVD-RW can't promise that, and DVD-RAM is really just a gloriefied tape drive with its proprietary sealed cases. On top of that, this bad boy will write CD-R and CD-RW as well. I get this and a normal DVD-ROM drive and I can copy damned near anything. The only problem I see here is that, once somebody figures out how to record dual-layer discs (so you can record discs the same size as the commercial plants), that will probably entail yet another standard.
But, again, I have no use for a DVD player, and only marginal use for a DVD-ROM drive. DVD+RW would be nice in that it hold a metric fuckload of data, but do I really have that much to hold? (OK, maybe I will when I live someplace they have broadband again) Is there a reason for me to need this instead of a normal CD-RW?
My guess is that since it didn't say "support weapon" or even "assault rifle," it was a panzy-ass MAC-11.
It's not like they convinced NASA to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars (what's the going $/kg-to-LEO again?) to ship up a cardboard cutout of Steve Martin as part of a lame publicity stunt that doesn't do much more than demonstrate of governmental support of...
Oh, wait, the MPAA already did that with the Oscars, didn't they?
"Interesting, though, that nobody else came up with it before this particular man did."
I was harping on that particular paragraph's wording. He seems to be claiming credit for the sliderule in general (something the author points out at the bottom of the article that has been in use since the 17th century or so).
In today's terms, it would be like me saying "I developed a new, specialized computer for our B-2 bombers. It has a small hexadecimal LCD screen, a number pad, and four buttons, one each for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. With it, the crews can enter one number, press the multiplication button, enter a second number and receive the product of those two numbers. For more complicated calculations, I've even inclucded a small memory for storing values."
"To facilitate the calculation, I developed a special slide rule that used the general principle of multiplying two quantities by mechanically adding distances proportional to their logarithms."
He pretty much described right there the basic concept of any sliderule ever used by anybody. All that was needed was to figure out the trig formula and making the numbers different on a normal rule. And for this the Army Air Corps needed a PhD candidate? I didn't know they had PHBs that long ago.
BTW: Is it my imagination or do we no longer need P tags?
I don't believe Houston has an income tax. Or any other local government for that matter. I'm not sure any local government even has the right to tax income. Sales tax, yes. Property tax, yes, but not income tax.
"and the philosophy and principles it stood for,"
What, you think this is taxation without representation? You don't think there was a public quorum on this?
"but for now, it's forced charity."
... and you have nobody else to blame but yourself and your neighbors.
I didn't know you aged a year when you died...
But then we have the Bulterian Jihad where we overthrow our machine masters and learn the follies of creating machines in the image of man's mind. After that, we'll have to rely on the Navigator's Guild and their heavy reliance on the spice melange (found only on the planet Arakkis) for interstellar transportation.
However, I've seen AIX, and I know that IBM obviously has some pretty decent *nix coders in their stable. You'd think they could take what they have and coble together "AIX/Linux" instead of throwing away a perfectly good OS.
OK, now I'm thinking about using that Hell March tune from the game as the start-up sound in Gnome...