I am reminded of a report of the words of Robert Goddard when one of his early liquid fuel rockets exploded. Someone asked him how he felt about his latest failure. He said it was not a failure, "we have gathered valuable negative information!"
The russian space budget is only 1% of the NASA budget, but their hardware is much more reliable anyway. Instead of the NASA approach of "the fancier the better" they have a policy of not discarding something that works.
Yeah right. Don't you recall the fires on MIR? You should go read "Red Star in Orbit" by James Oberg. I particularly liked the anecdotes about the green mold growing on the capsule walls during one long-term Soyuz mission. He wrote another story about a Soyuz that went up and suddenly their water supply was gone. It was supposed to be recaptured from the humidity in the air. Except this capsule was constructed during a dry summer and the wood (wood!) pieces of the interior sucked up all the water. They had to send an emergency resupply mission.
The russkies are no great designers of space equipment. They get by on the cheap, because they have to. And the risks are higher. In fact, the ISS is using some of the same technologies as MIR, and nobody is happy about it at all.
For some historical background to this issue, I suggest people go out and read about The Zimmerman Telegram. It was intercepted by British monitoring of Western Union telegram traffic. The public release of the decrypted letter got us into WWI.
Anyway, I was talking to an FBI agent a while ago about an active cybercrime case I'm pursuing, and I just couldn't get him to jump on the case. He said that their priorities are bigger, like Bin Lauden and a multinational pedophile kidnap/slave trader ring they'd just uncovered. Echelon can read my mail all day, it is of no importance to them compared to those sorts of issues.
I went straight for the "Evidence of Echelon's existence" section and there wasn't any evidence. Just a bunch of rumors they heard from TV interviews, and a lot of sections marked "to be added later." I was not impressed by this report. It's garbage.
Could this bee a hoax? I remember it was only a few weeks ago when the FBI lured two Russian crackers to come to work at a fictitious security company called "Invicta." It was a false front created to lure the crackers into US jurisdiction.
A sign of the times when a slow moving behemouth like NTT can be so
forward thinking.
You're kidding, right? I remember in 1996 NTT announced it would have ISDN data connections available at every location in Japan within 12 months. Didn't happen, did it? They can't even deliver land lines at every location in Japan, thus the amazing statistics that more Japanese people have portable phones than home phones.
FYI,I read this in the LA Times, which posted a lengthy story with detailed information on the hefty fines paid by the studios for vandalism and destruction of federally protected cultural properties.
This reminds me of what happened on a film set a few years back. The filmmakers of "The Doors" wanted an authentic indian cave where they could film on location with indian petroglyphs in the background. They received permission on the explicit understanding that no indian petroglyphs were to be touched. Except an art director didn't get it, he thought the petroglyphs didn't come up clearly enough on camera so he painted over them with a water based paint. He completely covered every written character with dark paint. The petroglyphs were originally done in water based pigments, he thought he could wash off his overpainting but that would have washed off all the original petroglyph too. Now there is nothing left but the dumb art director's painting. Another wonderful cultural relic raped, pillaged, and destroyed by Hollywood greed-heads.
Anyway, the laws used to prosecute IBM are a two-edged sword. Street artists go up against fines like this all the time. I recall artists like Robbie Conal in Los Angeles plastering posters of political satire all over the city. An artist I knew did an amazing mural under a bridge in downtown LA. He painted it in reflective paint, you couldn't see it in the day, only at night by your car's headlights. And the city decided to paint over it. Another artist I knew did a series of oddly beautiful mini-murals, with the message "Justice Just Is." The city went out of its way to paint them over immediately. LA has laws to protect stupid murals from the days of the Olympics, but doesn't hesitate to paint over the street artists. And I'm not talking graffiti taggers, these were serious artists with no other way to reach the public except directly. I'm not sure I endorse the concept of the city government having total control of the public space and who can say what in public. I know advertising doesn't really enjoy the same first amendment protections, but when the same laws are used to suppress advertisers as well as artists, I sense a slippery slope ahead.
I'm trying to get a job in Japan, and it is the same problem, trying to find someone who will sponsor a visa. A friend of mine got a job in Japan with Sony, and he got sick of them after 2 years and quit. His company got hiim kicked him out of his housing, since Sony was the guarantor for his apartment too. It sucks.
So I'm beginning to wonder if it's worth the hassle. I'm currently thinking that the best approach is to go to work for a US company with Japanese divisions, and transfer within the company.
Lessig wrote an essay describing this very problem. I'm trying to dig it up, it's probably linked to lessig.org but I haven't found it yet.
Anyway, Lessig said that the problem with the RIAA, MPAA, and even Microsoft isn't a monopoly problem, it is a copyright problem. These groups have accumulated excessive influence and excessive power due to the huge amounts of money they gain from overly favorable copyrights. They use their power and money to try to get even more favorable terms to extend their powers even further (i.e. MPAA/CSS, MS/CPRM). He even suggested that the solution to these monopolies is to revoke their copyrights and give them back to the public. I endorse this concept.
I have a whole collection of vintage punk records on vinyl. They're scratched to hell, and I'd love to have them on CD quality, except that the record companies rarely release them on CD format. And when they do, I don't feel like paying royalties a second time for records I already bought once. So I'll just download them as MP3s.
But think about the copy protection issues a little closer. If I record an original mp3, like for example, I want to sing Happy Birthday to my niece and email it to my sister so she can play it on her computer to my niece, with content protection, I'd have to buy a license from Microsoft to allow the mp3 to run on a different machine. And Paul McCartney would certainly want a royalty too, he owns the music performance rights to the Happy Birthday song!
You are seriously confused, there is a huge difference between bundling and tying.
Quicktime doesn't prevent other media players from working
MacOS doesn't tie OS level features to the browser, stuff like ActiveX.
Disc Burner doesn't prevent Toast from working.
And most of all, Apple doesn't have the monopoly power to force people to use their products.
Get a grip on the situation and understand the issues. A monopoly is not illegal. Bundling is not illegal. But using your monopoly power to push bundles onto people IS illegal, it is called Product Tying and is specifically prohibited. Go read the DoJ filings. The classic example is Kodak. They lost an antitrust lawsuit over product tying. They sold photo processing machines and forced people to use Kodak chemicals when Fuji sold the same chemicals for less. Their customers revolted and insisted on their right to use the product of their choice. We deserve the same rights in the computer world.
Now THAT was truly sad and disrespectful. You're just another poor excuse for an anonymous coward. Only a true scumbag like you would troll over Adam's death.
I first encountered Douglas Adams when I was nearly a kid, listening to HHGTG on the BBC via shortwave radio. It fueled my hobby, trying to catch the episodes at inconvenient times in Grenwich Mean Time. I never did catch them all.
Not too many years later, probably around 1982 or so, I met Douglas Adams when I was working at a dinky computer store in Studio City CA. The staff and I were all computer games players, and the store was known for its devotion to games, as well as support for Hollywood scriptwriters. We sold DEC Rainbow and Kaypro computers, and Adams had a Rainbow back in England, so he came to us when he was in LA working on the some scripts. He wanted to buy a new Kaypro portable, and we helped him convert some Wordstar floppy disks of scripts to the new machine. I knew Adams' work, so I suggested he might be interested in this game that was sucking up all our free time, Zork. I sat him down at a demo machine, fired it up, and I could see he was immediately hooked. So we converted an 8in floppy of Zork over to his 5in Kaypro disk format, and he bought it. IIRC, it cost something like $20. The store went bankrupt shortly after that, and I never saw him again.
Many years later, he wrote about how his first exposure to Zork was what got him hooked on the text adventure format, and convinced him to produce HHGTG as a text adventure. So I'm claiming direct responsibility for the HHGTG computer game, I accidentally inspired it by exposing Adams to my favorite game.
So I'm seriously bummed about his passing. Douglas Adams was a nice guy, and gave the world many hours of laughter, and that's something we all need more of. I can only think of one thing to say, "We apologize for the inconvenience."
What Linux (and the unix world in general) needs is *not* another file manager or window manager.
What Linux (and the other unix flavors) needs is a BETTER windowing environment.
Yeah, I'm running that right now. It's called Aqua. MacOS X is BSD plus Nextstep plus Nautilus. The Finder app in MacOS X does about 98% of what Nautilus tried and failed to achieve.
It looks like the only CDR media that is affected is cheapshit taiwanese generic media. I've always avoided those garbage brands, they have serious problems with quality and storage life. I only use Sony or Taiyo Yuden brands, I last paid $25 for a spindle of 50 Sonys, the article says Sony and Taiyo Yuden are unaffected by the price rise since they are not in the royalties renegotiation that is the main reason for the price rise.
Wow, good article, I was a CBBS user from the earliest days, I'd forgotten all about them. But these guys weren't the first BBS, they existed on mainframes long before they were implemented on micros.
I got ahold of the Apple BBS software, I was one of the first people to get the public release. This must have been around mid-1978 or 79.
What are you refering to, my comment on late 1970s BBSes? I don't recall the software, it was the first BBS software that was available for the Apple. I ran a BBS in the 319 area code for the local university hospital, it was called Apple-Med. We used it to distribute educational software for cardiologists and anaesthesiologists, we wrote the progs in Applesoft Basic.
I also noticed my best BBS wasn't listed. I had a Wildcat system in the 818 area code, called Solaris. They list a system in 818 called by the same name, but it's from the mid 90s. This BBS was way cool because it had 2 modems attached to a PCjr with one floppy disk. It could actually relay Wildcat traffic.. as long as the traffic wasn't very big. I challenge anyone to come up with a BBS that did more with less!
Shortly after developing transparent-layered photography (positive-negative on translucent/transparent bases) William Henry Fox Talbot made pictures like this
and displayed them to the Royal Society. The RGB combination worked, but only by accident, as the current light-sensitive emulsions were not sensitive to blue.
Turned out one of the blue models used reflected heavily in the UV, which was recorded. All of this around 1845.
You are quite mistaken. Talbot did not experiment with color-separation. The Calotype (Talbotype) process cannot be used to represent colors. The colors turn out at almost random. I've seen Calotypes with my own eyes, the colors range from green to rusty reds, and this was a monochrome image. Talbot did not work in color photography. You're thinking of the experiments of James Clerk Maxwell, which were about 30 years after Talbot.
This method of RGB filtering and in-camera color separation was invented by James Clerk Maxwell, 2 years before this russian guy was born. Check it out for yourself at:
http://www.f32.com/articles/article.asp?artID=128
Maxwell also invented a few other minor things related to mathematics, like Information Theory.
Wrong. The monitor companies have been talking about implementing this for a while now.
No, it is you who are wrong. What would be the point of encrypting communications between your computer and your monitor? So the russkies couldn't monitor your video signal using a TEMPEST box?
This is strictly a content-control and access-control system for broadband TV systems. Go read the paper.
Go read the paper. This has nothing to do with computer monitors. This is a system for encrypting cable tv, satellite, and other broadband TV systems. This is CSS for your television set. Didn't pay your subscription fee this month? No HDTV for you, your key is revoked. Hacked your HDTV-Tivo? Your key is dead. Want to tape that TV show for time-shifted viewing? Sorry, it can't be intercepted for recording, watch it at the time AOL/TimeWarner/Microsoft broadcast it or forget it.
Slashdot Mirror
big bada boom.
I am reminded of a report of the words of Robert Goddard when one of his early liquid fuel rockets exploded. Someone asked him how he felt about his latest failure. He said it was not a failure, "we have gathered valuable negative information!"
The russkies are no great designers of space equipment. They get by on the cheap, because they have to. And the risks are higher. In fact, the ISS is using some of the same technologies as MIR, and nobody is happy about it at all.
For some historical background to this issue, I suggest people go out and read about The Zimmerman Telegram. It was intercepted by British monitoring of Western Union telegram traffic. The public release of the decrypted letter got us into WWI.
Anyway, I was talking to an FBI agent a while ago about an active cybercrime case I'm pursuing, and I just couldn't get him to jump on the case. He said that their priorities are bigger, like Bin Lauden and a multinational pedophile kidnap/slave trader ring they'd just uncovered. Echelon can read my mail all day, it is of no importance to them compared to those sorts of issues.
I went straight for the "Evidence of Echelon's existence" section and there wasn't any evidence. Just a bunch of rumors they heard from TV interviews, and a lot of sections marked "to be added later." I was not impressed by this report. It's garbage.
Could this bee a hoax? I remember it was only a few weeks ago when the FBI lured two Russian crackers to come to work at a fictitious security company called "Invicta." It was a false front created to lure the crackers into US jurisdiction.
I remember in 1996 NTT announced it would have ISDN data connections available at every location in Japan within 12 months. Didn't happen, did it? They can't even deliver land lines at every location in Japan, thus the amazing statistics that more Japanese people have portable phones than home phones.
FYI,I read this in the LA Times, which posted a lengthy story with detailed information on the hefty fines paid by the studios for vandalism and destruction of federally protected cultural properties.
This reminds me of what happened on a film set a few years back. The filmmakers of "The Doors" wanted an authentic indian cave where they could film on location with indian petroglyphs in the background. They received permission on the explicit understanding that no indian petroglyphs were to be touched. Except an art director didn't get it, he thought the petroglyphs didn't come up clearly enough on camera so he painted over them with a water based paint. He completely covered every written character with dark paint. The petroglyphs were originally done in water based pigments, he thought he could wash off his overpainting but that would have washed off all the original petroglyph too. Now there is nothing left but the dumb art director's painting. Another wonderful cultural relic raped, pillaged, and destroyed by Hollywood greed-heads.
Anyway, the laws used to prosecute IBM are a two-edged sword. Street artists go up against fines like this all the time. I recall artists like Robbie Conal in Los Angeles plastering posters of political satire all over the city. An artist I knew did an amazing mural under a bridge in downtown LA. He painted it in reflective paint, you couldn't see it in the day, only at night by your car's headlights. And the city decided to paint over it. Another artist I knew did a series of oddly beautiful mini-murals, with the message "Justice Just Is." The city went out of its way to paint them over immediately. LA has laws to protect stupid murals from the days of the Olympics, but doesn't hesitate to paint over the street artists. And I'm not talking graffiti taggers, these were serious artists with no other way to reach the public except directly. I'm not sure I endorse the concept of the city government having total control of the public space and who can say what in public. I know advertising doesn't really enjoy the same first amendment protections, but when the same laws are used to suppress advertisers as well as artists, I sense a slippery slope ahead.
I'm trying to get a job in Japan, and it is the same problem, trying to find someone who will sponsor a visa. A friend of mine got a job in Japan with Sony, and he got sick of them after 2 years and quit. His company got hiim kicked him out of his housing, since Sony was the guarantor for his apartment too. It sucks.
So I'm beginning to wonder if it's worth the hassle. I'm currently thinking that the best approach is to go to work for a US company with Japanese divisions, and transfer within the company.
Lessig wrote an essay describing this very problem. I'm trying to dig it up, it's probably linked to lessig.org but I haven't found it yet.
Anyway, Lessig said that the problem with the RIAA, MPAA, and even Microsoft isn't a monopoly problem, it is a copyright problem. These groups have accumulated excessive influence and excessive power due to the huge amounts of money they gain from overly favorable copyrights. They use their power and money to try to get even more favorable terms to extend their powers even further (i.e. MPAA/CSS, MS/CPRM). He even suggested that the solution to these monopolies is to revoke their copyrights and give them back to the public. I endorse this concept.
I have a whole collection of vintage punk records on vinyl. They're scratched to hell, and I'd love to have them on CD quality, except that the record companies rarely release them on CD format. And when they do, I don't feel like paying royalties a second time for records I already bought once. So I'll just download them as MP3s.
But think about the copy protection issues a little closer. If I record an original mp3, like for example, I want to sing Happy Birthday to my niece and email it to my sister so she can play it on her computer to my niece, with content protection, I'd have to buy a license from Microsoft to allow the mp3 to run on a different machine. And Paul McCartney would certainly want a royalty too, he owns the music performance rights to the Happy Birthday song!
You are seriously confused, there is a huge difference between bundling and tying.
Quicktime doesn't prevent other media players from working
MacOS doesn't tie OS level features to the browser, stuff like ActiveX.
Disc Burner doesn't prevent Toast from working.
And most of all, Apple doesn't have the monopoly power to force people to use their products.
Get a grip on the situation and understand the issues. A monopoly is not illegal. Bundling is not illegal. But using your monopoly power to push bundles onto people IS illegal, it is called Product Tying and is specifically prohibited. Go read the DoJ filings. The classic example is Kodak. They lost an antitrust lawsuit over product tying. They sold photo processing machines and forced people to use Kodak chemicals when Fuji sold the same chemicals for less. Their customers revolted and insisted on their right to use the product of their choice. We deserve the same rights in the computer world.
Now THAT was truly sad and disrespectful. You're just another poor excuse for an anonymous coward. Only a true scumbag like you would troll over Adam's death.
I first encountered Douglas Adams when I was nearly a kid, listening to HHGTG on the BBC via shortwave radio. It fueled my hobby, trying to catch the episodes at inconvenient times in Grenwich Mean Time. I never did catch them all.
Not too many years later, probably around 1982 or so, I met Douglas Adams when I was working at a dinky computer store in Studio City CA. The staff and I were all computer games players, and the store was known for its devotion to games, as well as support for Hollywood scriptwriters. We sold DEC Rainbow and Kaypro computers, and Adams had a Rainbow back in England, so he came to us when he was in LA working on the some scripts. He wanted to buy a new Kaypro portable, and we helped him convert some Wordstar floppy disks of scripts to the new machine. I knew Adams' work, so I suggested he might be interested in this game that was sucking up all our free time, Zork. I sat him down at a demo machine, fired it up, and I could see he was immediately hooked. So we converted an 8in floppy of Zork over to his 5in Kaypro disk format, and he bought it. IIRC, it cost something like $20. The store went bankrupt shortly after that, and I never saw him again.
Many years later, he wrote about how his first exposure to Zork was what got him hooked on the text adventure format, and convinced him to produce HHGTG as a text adventure. So I'm claiming direct responsibility for the HHGTG computer game, I accidentally inspired it by exposing Adams to my favorite game.
So I'm seriously bummed about his passing. Douglas Adams was a nice guy, and gave the world many hours of laughter, and that's something we all need more of. I can only think of one thing to say, "We apologize for the inconvenience."
It looks like the only CDR media that is affected is cheapshit taiwanese generic media. I've always avoided those garbage brands, they have serious problems with quality and storage life. I only use Sony or Taiyo Yuden brands, I last paid $25 for a spindle of 50 Sonys, the article says Sony and Taiyo Yuden are unaffected by the price rise since they are not in the royalties renegotiation that is the main reason for the price rise.
Wow, good article, I was a CBBS user from the earliest days, I'd forgotten all about them. But these guys weren't the first BBS, they existed on mainframes long before they were implemented on micros.
I got ahold of the Apple BBS software, I was one of the first people to get the public release. This must have been around mid-1978 or 79.
What are you refering to, my comment on late 1970s BBSes? I don't recall the software, it was the first BBS software that was available for the Apple. I ran a BBS in the 319 area code for the local university hospital, it was called Apple-Med. We used it to distribute educational software for cardiologists and anaesthesiologists, we wrote the progs in Applesoft Basic. I also noticed my best BBS wasn't listed. I had a Wildcat system in the 818 area code, called Solaris. They list a system in 818 called by the same name, but it's from the mid 90s. This BBS was way cool because it had 2 modems attached to a PCjr with one floppy disk. It could actually relay Wildcat traffic.. as long as the traffic wasn't very big. I challenge anyone to come up with a BBS that did more with less!
I used to run Apple-based BBSes in the late 1970s. The list only goes back to the 1980s.
Of course, there's a footnote that might explain the attribution somewhat:
This method of RGB filtering and in-camera color separation was invented by James Clerk Maxwell, 2 years before this russian guy was born. Check it out for yourself at:
http://www.f32.com/articles/article.asp?artID=128
Maxwell also invented a few other minor things related to mathematics, like Information Theory.
This is strictly a content-control and access-control system for broadband TV systems. Go read the paper.
Go read the paper. This has nothing to do with computer monitors. This is a system for encrypting cable tv, satellite, and other broadband TV systems. This is CSS for your television set. Didn't pay your subscription fee this month? No HDTV for you, your key is revoked. Hacked your HDTV-Tivo? Your key is dead. Want to tape that TV show for time-shifted viewing? Sorry, it can't be intercepted for recording, watch it at the time AOL/TimeWarner/Microsoft broadcast it or forget it.