This isn't a case that can be explained by economics, because there's never been anything in the past to compare to. This isn't grain supplies or something like that which can easily be replaced. We're talking about the permanent decline of the single greatest resource that sponsors all the economic theories that exist.
All of modern economic thinking is based on the assumption of continual economic growth. Without this growth recession creeps in, followed by depression. And yet this required continual growth is physically sponsored by an ever-growing amount of oil, to power the ever-growing needs of the economy.
Take away the oil, you take away the mechanism for economic growth, simply. As the costs of food and transport grow, people find themselves tighter and tigher financially, and unable to depend on future potential income, borrowing declines sharply. Take away borrowing and you take away the injection of fresh money into the economy, and the whole things just spirals down.
The big lie behind this FUD is that by using M$ software, or any propriatory packages, you are somehow covered against being sued.
However, people may remember not long ago, M$ SQL Server developers were being threatened with lawsuits, due to a patent conflict. See this Register Article...
The licence of your software really bears little relevance to how likely you are to be sued IMHO.
I think the pacing has a lot to do with the short episodes, myself. And I'm not opposed to action per se, only if it's at the expense of plot and character development, which in the first couple of episodes certainly was the case. Should also make the obligatory point that Pertwee had lots of "action" scenes and he was an old codger too!
Anyway, I enjoyed today's episode a lot more. Eccleston is getting gradually less irritating, or maybe I'm just getting used to him;-)
Maybe Tennant will be a good Doctor - he's certainly got to be better than Eccleston, who I find frankly dire - but I really don't understand this obsession TV has with youth.
Why does the Doctor have to keep getting younger and younger? To me he should be an eccentric older man, with enough years to give gravitas to some of the absurd lines he'll surely have to say!
We're told that it is so "youth" can relate to him - but that's surely nonsense. As a kid I grew up with Tom Baker, and didn't relate to him any less because he was is his forties. Bah!
It would just free up loads of electricity to be wasted in other ways. Howard's Law: wastefullness of society expands to fill the limits of technology and natural resources!;-)
Set up a catch-all account, but just have it send an auto-response - you don't actually keep the mails. They go straight into/dev/null.
The auto-responder then directs anyone who really wants to contact you to a web-page with a form on it allowing them request you contact them. Letting you choose whether or not to write back to their contact request puts you in charge, and if you suspect replying to them will put your address on a spam list, you can just delete their email!
This is how I've got my domain set-up. It's very simple to do - all you need is some PHP or Perl capabilities on your web-space. So far (six months on) my main email address still hasn't made it onto any spam lists, and I don't even have to filter it!
Don't forget this only affects the English dubs of the show. Fox could go on making the show for all the other countries which have their own native-speaking alternatives. Simpsons can be seen in almost every country in the world! For the English market, some accurate mimics would be quite good enough. They all sounded different in the early series anyway!
Ouspensky met Gurdjieff after writing this book and for a while they worked together, but parted on bad terms eventually after disagreements.
If you're worried about the book being tainted by his influence, then it's not - they hadn't even met then.
There's nothing cultish about either of them, by the way. They're just a set of philosopies about how to combine eastern mystical traditions with modern western living. There's no 'charismatic leaders', money changing hands or enforced loyalty, which are what mainly characterises cults. L Ron... now there's a weird guy!
The single best layman's guide to quantum theory is surely "In Search of Schrodingers Cat" by John Gribbin. It doesn't assume you know any physics - classical or quantum, but doesn't skimp on depth. It has some fascinating conjectures on what it all means for "reality" too. Search for it on amazon!
...by PD Ouspensky. Might be set for a reprint fairly soon - haven't checked. Fantastic sci-fi story from a Russian philosopher, about a guy who gets sent back in time to relive his life but with all the knowledge he has now. BUT... he finds himself still making all the same mistakes. Can he break free of "fate" or are we all just puppets of Circumstance?
If your Compaq comes with one of those recent Intel motherboards with on-board ethernet, the problem is the ethernet driver. Disable the ethernet, or download an alternative driver (kernel module) from the Intel site. Although the on-board ethernet detects correctly, the hardware is subtley different on the on-board version to the stand-alone version, and this difference causes a total system lockup, when using the pre-supplied kernel module.
So if all you're paying for is the download bandwidth and support, why doesn't some kind soul offer mirrors of the downloads? Perfectly acceptable under the GPL, right?
Here's a scenario... in the future memory is virtually infinite. Gigs upon gigs for next to no cost in money & space. What will the government use all this storage for? Keeping archives of all your communications for "law enforcement" possibilities. Currently the only real thing stopping the governments keeping records of every single one of your emails and phone calls is the fact that storing them is physically impossible. This sort of development scares me as it's just one step further towards a surveillance society.
Of course SuSE have a download version! You can either grab their one-disk ISO or make yourself a boot floppy and install via-FTP. Or install from the one disk version and update with the extra packages you require via FTP.
Check out ftp.suse.com and its mirrors...
The idea that terrorists can be caught by blanket scanning all public communications is so fundamentally flawed.
Imagine you're a terrorist. You know that your cell phone and emails will be scanned. Why not set up a non-internet connected dial-up BBS in some remote country and leave encrypted messages there instead from a public phone? There are millions of ways of bypassing the usual channels of interception and its naive to think that terrorists wouldn't be capable of this too.
All blanket surveillance and interception privilidges will catch are those terrorists too dumb to be a real threat anyway.
Please email me all your credit card details, pets names, photos of old girlfriends...
You are protected by my privacy policy below....
I guarantee I will not use your data in any way other than how I see fit and will protect your privacy by not selling your details to anyone bad and only using them myself for felonies as I deem fit.
So here's the situation... back before Hotmail was taken over by M$, I had a hotmail address. When they were bought out... oh wonder of wonders... I was given a Passport, without even being asked if I wanted one. (Isn't this even worse than signing up now for hotmail?! At the time I signed up I wasn't even dealing with MS!!!)
So here's the big Q: I don't need the damn thing anymore and I want it cancelled. Is there any provision for this? And if not... WHY NOT!?!
That's not all the Who audio you can find online.. We at floorten.com have been doing audio Dr Who stories for a couple of years now! The production values are fairly good (especially if you get hold of our 256 kbps mp3s - please ask!) and the writing isn't your normal fanboy w*nk, though some might like to disagree!
Well as far as Zork is concerned you could extract the story file from the game and play it on a PC Z-machine interpreter perfectly legally, but otherwise in the eyes of the law it's illegal:-(
Gosh! At last something I have been involved in appears on Slashdot!;-)
The legalities of fan fiction are highly dubious, but fortunately most of the copyright owners are clever enough to realise it's actually promoting their product rather than doing it any harm.
We do fan audio stories of Doctor Who at floorten.com, but have had more trouble from other fans than we have from the BBC! Actually the BBC producer bought one of our CDs!
Quite curiously we did post another group's audio stories on the web once without their permission, which they weren't too happy about - but nettiquette aside, it does pose the greater question - can fanfic productions claim any kind of copyright protection? I'm of the opinion that it hypocrasy to complain when your copyright is violated when your story already violates many copyrights and trademarks itself... but then I'm just an old GPL socialist at heart!
Anyway - stop by and have a listen to our stories. Love to hear what you all think of them!
Hmm... what's to stop a site running a little perl app which generates valid playlists every minute (valid for an hour) and serves them up on a webpage for all to use? Sounds like mp3.com have revolutionised the art of piracy to me. No more lame mp3 ftp sites - just go straight to them!
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't a case that can be explained by economics, because there's never been anything in the past to compare to. This isn't grain supplies or something like that which can easily be replaced. We're talking about the permanent decline of the single greatest resource that sponsors all the economic theories that exist.
All of modern economic thinking is based on the assumption of continual economic growth. Without this growth recession creeps in, followed by depression. And yet this required continual growth is physically sponsored by an ever-growing amount of oil, to power the ever-growing needs of the economy.
Take away the oil, you take away the mechanism for economic growth, simply. As the costs of food and transport grow, people find themselves tighter and tigher financially, and unable to depend on future potential income, borrowing declines sharply. Take away borrowing and you take away the injection of fresh money into the economy, and the whole things just spirals down.
It's not a pretty picture.
Douglas Adams died exercising in the gym. I think that says something important to us all ... ;-)
The big lie behind this FUD is that by using M$ software, or any propriatory packages, you are somehow covered against being sued.
However, people may remember not long ago, M$ SQL Server developers were being threatened with lawsuits, due to a patent conflict. See this Register Article...
The licence of your software really bears little relevance to how likely you are to be sued IMHO.
Where have you read about DNA's life? This interests me. Does he have a biography out?
I think the pacing has a lot to do with the short episodes, myself. And I'm not opposed to action per se, only if it's at the expense of plot and character development, which in the first couple of episodes certainly was the case. Should also make the obligatory point that Pertwee had lots of "action" scenes and he was an old codger too!
;-)
Anyway, I enjoyed today's episode a lot more. Eccleston is getting gradually less irritating, or maybe I'm just getting used to him
Maybe Tennant will be a good Doctor - he's certainly got to be better than Eccleston, who I find frankly dire - but I really don't understand this obsession TV has with youth.
Why does the Doctor have to keep getting younger and younger? To me he should be an eccentric older man, with enough years to give gravitas to some of the absurd lines he'll surely have to say!
We're told that it is so "youth" can relate to him - but that's surely nonsense. As a kid I grew up with Tom Baker, and didn't relate to him any less because he was is his forties. Bah!
It would just free up loads of electricity to be wasted in other ways. Howard's Law: wastefullness of society expands to fill the limits of technology and natural resources! ;-)
Set up a catch-all account, but just have it send an auto-response - you don't actually keep the mails. They go straight into /dev/null.
:-)
The auto-responder then directs anyone who really wants to contact you to a web-page with a form on it allowing them request you contact them. Letting you choose whether or not to write back to their contact request puts you in charge, and if you suspect replying to them will put your address on a spam list, you can just delete their email!
This is how I've got my domain set-up. It's very simple to do - all you need is some PHP or Perl capabilities on your web-space. So far (six months on) my main email address still hasn't made it onto any spam lists, and I don't even have to filter it!
Hope this proves useful to someone
This is no real "invention". My father (75) told me about how they used to do this when he was a soldier.
Maybe if I go over to Nigeria I too might claim a prize for inventing a round spinning thing for enabling the movement of carts...
Don't forget this only affects the English dubs of the show. Fox could go on making the show for all the other countries which have their own native-speaking alternatives. Simpsons can be seen in almost every country in the world!
For the English market, some accurate mimics would be quite good enough. They all sounded different in the early series anyway!
If you're worried about the book being tainted by his influence, then it's not - they hadn't even met then.
There's nothing cultish about either of them, by the way. They're just a set of philosopies about how to combine eastern mystical traditions with modern western living. There's no 'charismatic leaders', money changing hands or enforced loyalty, which are what mainly characterises cults. L Ron ... now there's a weird guy!
The single best layman's guide to quantum theory is surely "In Search of Schrodingers Cat" by John Gribbin. It doesn't assume you know any physics - classical or quantum, but doesn't skimp on depth. It has some fascinating conjectures on what it all means for "reality" too. Search for it on amazon!
Read it NOW!
If your Compaq comes with one of those recent Intel motherboards with on-board ethernet, the problem is the ethernet driver. Disable the ethernet, or download an alternative driver (kernel module) from the Intel site. Although the on-board ethernet detects correctly, the hardware is subtley different on the on-board version to the stand-alone version, and this difference causes a total system lockup, when using the pre-supplied kernel module.
So if all you're paying for is the download bandwidth and support, why doesn't some kind soul offer mirrors of the downloads?
Perfectly acceptable under the GPL, right?
Here's a scenario... in the future memory is virtually infinite. Gigs upon gigs for next to no cost in money & space. What will the government use all this storage for? Keeping archives of all your communications for "law enforcement" possibilities.
Currently the only real thing stopping the governments keeping records of every single one of your emails and phone calls is the fact that storing them is physically impossible. This sort of development scares me as it's just one step further towards a surveillance society.
Of course SuSE have a download version! You can either grab their one-disk ISO or make yourself a boot floppy and install via-FTP. Or install from the one disk version and update with the extra packages you require via FTP.
Check out ftp.suse.com and its mirrors...
The idea that terrorists can be caught by blanket scanning all public communications is so fundamentally flawed.
Imagine you're a terrorist. You know that your cell phone and emails will be scanned. Why not set up a non-internet connected dial-up BBS in some remote country and leave encrypted messages there instead from a public phone? There are millions of ways of bypassing the usual channels of interception and its naive to think that terrorists wouldn't be capable of this too.
All blanket surveillance and interception privilidges will catch are those terrorists too dumb to be a real threat anyway.
Please email me all your credit card details, pets names, photos of old girlfriends...
You are protected by my privacy policy below....
I guarantee I will not use your data in any way other than how I see fit and will protect your privacy by not selling your details to anyone bad and only using them myself for felonies as I deem fit.
So here's the situation... back before Hotmail was taken over by M$, I had a hotmail address. When they were bought out... oh wonder of wonders... I was given a Passport, without even being asked if I wanted one. (Isn't this even worse than signing up now for hotmail?! At the time I signed up I wasn't even dealing with MS!!!)
So here's the big Q: I don't need the damn thing anymore and I want it cancelled. Is there any provision for this? And if not... WHY NOT!?!
This was at the MOMI museum, which has now shut down indefinatelf for rufurbishment. So sorry, no dalek, folks!
Just thought I'd mention us!
Howard, floorten.com
Well as far as Zork is concerned you could extract the story file from the game and play it on a PC Z-machine interpreter perfectly legally, but otherwise in the eyes of the law it's illegal :-(
The legalities of fan fiction are highly dubious, but fortunately most of the copyright owners are clever enough to realise it's actually promoting their product rather than doing it any harm.
We do fan audio stories of Doctor Who at floorten.com, but have had more trouble from other fans than we have from the BBC! Actually the BBC producer bought one of our CDs!
Quite curiously we did post another group's audio stories on the web once without their permission, which they weren't too happy about - but nettiquette aside, it does pose the greater question - can fanfic productions claim any kind of copyright protection? I'm of the opinion that it hypocrasy to complain when your copyright is violated when your story already violates many copyrights and trademarks itself... but then I'm just an old GPL socialist at heart!
Anyway - stop by and have a listen to our stories. Love to hear what you all think of them!
Howard,
floorten.com.
Hmm... what's to stop a site running a little perl app which generates valid playlists every minute (valid for an hour) and serves them up on a webpage for all to use?
Sounds like mp3.com have revolutionised the art of piracy to me. No more lame mp3 ftp sites - just go straight to them!
Howard,
floorten.com