The translation of the press release makes for mangled reading but if I follow it correctly the law is such that you are permitted to make private copies of CDs you've bought...
Fair Use, in other words, with a levy on media
to support the music industry (we have
this in Canada, too). My French is somewhat
better than Google's, but they got that part
right.
Belgium is a small country, so what impact is this likely to have on major record labels?
Thin edge of the wedge - which can work both ways. Legal precedents, examples of what works and what doesn't work. Belgium may be a little
country, but it is an integral part of the EU,
which is big.
I own two CDs that claim to be copy-protected. One
doesn't appear to be copy-protected all, just scary notices on the artwork. The
other makes it almost impossible to play
on a Windoze box unless you use their
brain-damaged CD player application, but my Linux
box plays it without comment.
The latter also doesn't have the official CD logo
on it, either.
Is there a usable spot for a large telescope in the US or Canada that isn't affected by light pollution?
Short answer: yes.
As others have pointed out, there are lots of
wide-open spaces in North America. I've seen black
night skies in many remote parts of Canada, and the
desert southwest U.S. One fascinating
trip last year was to an
outfit out in the
middle of nowhere in New Mexico that had cool
telescopes you could use and dark skies. A blast, in
other words.
A couple of other points on location:
Too far north and you lose dark skies in the
summer. Midnight twilight north of 49 degrees,
midnight sun in the Arctic. I spent my teens at
53 north and never saw real darkness in the
summer.
South is good if you like looking at our galaxy.
The center of the Milky Way is in the direction
of Sagittarius, low in the sky from
here (Vancouver, 49 north), but overhead from
Australia or Chile. This also gets you the
Centaurus/Vela/Carina segment of the Milky Way,
which is stunning to look at and full of goodies.
As an added bonus you get two satellite galaxies, the
Magellanic Clouds.
Spend as much as you possibly can on your lens or mirror, and as little as you can on everything else. The rest of the materials dont matter much, but if you optics aren't up to scratch, the whole thing is useless.
Good advice. A decent sonotube and plywood
Dob mount is ridiculously simple to put together,
and, unless you've really screwed up,
will be stable. I can't imagine how you'd screw
it up, but I suppose it could happen.
I threw one together last year,
an 8" f/6. I used 16mm film cans for the altitude
bearings, riding on teflon pads. Real teflon,
from an offcut I bought from an industrial
plastics place in town. Used it to look at Saturn
(among other things) over Christmas, since it lives at my Mum's
place in the country. I have a 5" Synta achromat
refractor at home.
I was told that the current lack of leap seconds
was due to a change in how UTC is defined.
It seemed that one atomic clock (Mongolia, or
somewhere like that) kept really crummy time (by atomic
clock standards). The huge variances relative
to the clocks run by the nice folks
at places liike NIST and NRC made it look
like UTC was always a bit skewhiff, and they needed lots of
leap seconds to keep it in line. Then they dumped
the Mongolians and their crummy clock, the
variances all but vanished, and they haven't neede
leap seconds since.
At every security check, I simply separate my electronics and they scan it for explosive residue without turning it on. That's all.
This has been my experience at Vancouver too.
The last flight they couldn't figure out what an
star-shaped Ikea lamp was and needed to see it out of my
bag.
The flight before, however, (Vancouver to Heathrow, October)
was another matter:
I don't mind putting my cellphone, GPS, digital camera, etc. in the grey tray to go through the
machine and be swabbed for nasty stuff. But I do
mind when the Security Droids start chatting among themselves, waving
the grey tub around, with my stuff bouncing
around inside. I got hostile.
Earlier in the year when they wanted to xray my shoes
(Columbia, South Carolina), I thought they
were joking. They weren't.
I have Telus ADSL, and they are
completely upfront about what
what you get. I don't do much streaming
media and thus haven't come close
(yet) to the
6 GB/month download cap, but since I live less than
a kilometer from the CO, I routinely bounce
off the 1.5 MBPS download speed cap on well-connected
sites.
Just don't ask me what it's like to be
a Linux user on Telus, OK?:-(
If you go to a camera shop that buys and sells used cameras, you can find some excellent deals.
I second that. For what you're looking to pay
you can get a mediocre new camera, or a
very good old one.
Unless you have absolutely no way to handle
the film, please also consider the many used medium format
cameras out there. They can take wonderful pictures -
both the old TLRs (I have a YashicaMat),
and the old folding cameras (I have a bunch,
1930s to 1950s vintage). You don't need a Hasselblad
to take good pictures, but that's OK: for $200,
you're not going to get one.
Ultimate involvement (not to
mention true photo-geekness) is building your own camera.
I built my view camera from a
kit.
A blast to build, a blast to use (in a
meditative kind of way:-), and the results
are stunning.
Uh, no. Using "he" as a generic 3rd person
pronoun is deprecated, and has been so
for a long time. Though I cringe at the
thought of women being spammers, and would
hope that women would have more sense.:-)
Note that both your references have
notations about generic usage and the
problems that arise.
The least worst I've heard recently is
singular "they".
But how much of this is really news?
Our very own
Canadian intelligence folks describe
themselves as "...an organization with
secrets to protect, not a secret organization."
They provide detailed information on what's involved
if you want to join them. The
CIA have a detailed employment FAQ
Try
the GCHQ
recruitment page.
If you click on Employment
Opprtunities at the
NSA, you
get a blank window (at least in my version of Mozilla).
The web version of invisible ink, perhaps?
I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time.
Yep, good old OS/2, written for the PS/2.
Half an operating
system for half a computer.
I worked for DEC, a long time ago. Long enough ago
that I may cancel the contract I put out on my
old boss next year as a sign of good will.
Or impending senility. Or something.
I was surprised to see tourism information
on the DPRK web site. They've never encouraged
it in the past, and what they're saying now sounds
like Khrushchev-era Intourist.
They've got a lot to learn, and could
probably learn from the Cubans. Very
much Marxists, but all
those tourist dollars are just too tempting to
ignore.
The application forms are a hoot, except for the bit about GPS not being allowed
in the country. Oh, and U.S. folks not being
allowed either.
...laura, proudly Canadian, but not planning
a trip to Pyongyang any time soon
I upgraded my laptop to 2.6.0-test4
back in September, after reading this
article.
The previous kernel (2.4.20, Slackware 9)
worked, but had a couple of rough edges. The
most serious (particularly on a laptop) was
Compaq's weird ACPI implementation that
2.4.20 couldn't figure out. After I booted
2.6.0-test4, I was able to read off all the
information I needed. Much easier
to use in the field!
In the process of upgrading I did indeed
break the 2.4 modutils. But since 2.6 works so
well, I really don't care. Some day I'll
upgrade X so it uses the ATI Radeon chipset
directly,
rather than messing around with VESA.
My wife has a digital camera, and it Just Works. Plug in the camera, start "Digital Camera Tool" from the Gnome start menu, download pics. No shell window required.
I use my digital camera on my Slackware 8.1 system
all the time. It's really very simple:
The flight information screens at
Heathrow (Terminal 3, at least)
run Windows 95 too. While waiting
for a recent flight one kept crashing,
whereupon it would POST, start Windows 95, run scandisk,
load a bunch of drivers, run the app for a few minutes
and crash again.
Supposedly the companies do this so they can say they could not fill the position and off-shore it.
I was told a long time ago that it was customary
to ask the world, see what you actually got, and
choose from there.
The real problem I've seen (from both ends) is first-level resume
screening that is done by non-technical people who only
count buzzwords. I've gotten burnt on this, and
seen others get burnt on it too.
The astronomy of the eclipse is borderline here: the eclipse is in progress
when the moon rises. The weather
is also borderline, alas, but I'll see
what happens.
YES! The clouds parted this afternoon and
the eclipse was stunning!
The moon rose at 0037 UTC, and I acquired it down
in the haze at 0050, about 20 minutes
before totality. During totality there
was a bright spot on the limb that
reminded me of the
diamond ring effect on solar eclipses.
I like xephem. It even shows details
of the eclipse tonight.
The astronomy of the eclipse is borderline here: the eclipse is in progress
when the moon rises. The weather
is also borderline, alas, but I'll see
what happens.
The last lunar eclipse here (back in
May) was 95% clouded out, with
just a few glimpses through breaks in the clouds
toward the end. But the
one I saw before that (Toronto, 21 January 2000)
was perfect, not a cloud in the sky,
with a coppery grey ash
burnt-out thing in the sky where the moon
should have been. Magic!
I feel that way every single time I read up something about the universe/astronomy.
If it makes you feel like that reading
about it, imagine what it must feel like to
do it yourself. I observed some wonderful sunspots
Sunday afternoon. The night before I observed
several star clusters, a couple of nebulae,
and, for good measure, spent some quality time with
Mars. It clouded over before Saturn was high
enough for good observation.
The two programs you mentioned are remakes
of British programs, both of which are actually
pretty good.
I don't know what's happened to TLC lately. I
have fond memories of The Secret Life of Machines
and Junkyard Wars, back when it was a lightly
rebranded Scrapheap Challenge. Not
the silly show it has since become.
My perennial beefs with "science" programming
are all the usual ones: too much emphasis on biology,
zero coverage of the process of science,
too many pretty pictures with zero words
to go with them, and so on.
Of course there are counterexamples. I saw
a current episode of
Scrapheap Challenge on vacation in England
recently, and it was the original, un-messed-with
format. A hoot, in other words. Another
nice counter-example was
Rocket Science, done by the (Canadian)
Discovery Channel.
How many stories have you ever seen
about mathematics? I can only think
of two (Femat's Last Theorem and the 4 Colour Theorem).
That said, if there is one thing to fix on TV, I would make the language get fixed. Prime time TV has become a sewer. "I Love Lucy" was (and still is) a funny show without having to have the characters talk like sailors. There are some situations where I understand it (ER does a good job for the most part) but overall I think there is too much cursing on TV. That famous "7 words you can't say on TV" bit (I think it's George Carlin's?), I think I heard that almost all of those words are allowed now.
Putting the shoe on the other foot, I Love Lucy
is a horrifying 1950s-stereotype-fest that shouldn't
be on prime time either. One local
cable channel (Showcase)
used to actually have a viewer discretion warning
pointing out that accepted standards for personal
and professional relationships had changed since
the program was made.
I first saw it for Wojeck.
In Canada almost anything goes later at
night when the kids should be in bed. This
is (IMHO) as it should be: we're adults, and can
make up our own minds. When (for example)
Dominic da Vinci's police pals are working
at cleaning up the Downtown East Side, the
people they encounter are Not Nice. And they
speak accordingly. As it should be.
But when even
Trinny and Susannah
come with a Coarse Language warning,
I start to wonder...
We also made the first
jet airliner in North America,
and for a while had the fastest, nastiest
jet fighter in the world.
To the day he died my Dad never forgave them
for that one...
I remember reading about one of the local
startups trying to raise some money from the
banks. The banks demanded collateral and
the company
proudly showed them 20 copies of their product,
worth $2000 each. The banks sneered
"That's a box of floppy discs. It's worth $10. Go away."
Slashdot Mirror
A colleague just asked me a technical question. He said he'd normally look it up on google, but figured it would be faster to ask me.
There's probably a moral there, somewhere.
...laura
Thin edge of the wedge - which can work both ways. Legal precedents, examples of what works and what doesn't work. Belgium may be a little country, but it is an integral part of the EU, which is big.
I own two CDs that claim to be copy-protected. One doesn't appear to be copy-protected all, just scary notices on the artwork. The other makes it almost impossible to play on a Windoze box unless you use their brain-damaged CD player application, but my Linux box plays it without comment.
The latter also doesn't have the official CD logo on it, either.
...laura
Short answer: yes.
As others have pointed out, there are lots of wide-open spaces in North America. I've seen black night skies in many remote parts of Canada, and the desert southwest U.S. One fascinating trip last year was to an outfit out in the middle of nowhere in New Mexico that had cool telescopes you could use and dark skies. A blast, in other words.
A couple of other points on location:
Too far north and you lose dark skies in the summer. Midnight twilight north of 49 degrees, midnight sun in the Arctic. I spent my teens at 53 north and never saw real darkness in the summer.
South is good if you like looking at our galaxy. The center of the Milky Way is in the direction of Sagittarius, low in the sky from here (Vancouver, 49 north), but overhead from Australia or Chile. This also gets you the Centaurus/Vela/Carina segment of the Milky Way, which is stunning to look at and full of goodies. As an added bonus you get two satellite galaxies, the Magellanic Clouds.
...laura
Let's make it a peeve party!
"Whereabouts" when the speaker meant "where".
"to be like" instead of "said" - "She's like, where's my metrosexual extreme bling-bling?"
...laura who wonders if she's just getting old
Good advice. A decent sonotube and plywood Dob mount is ridiculously simple to put together, and, unless you've really screwed up, will be stable. I can't imagine how you'd screw it up, but I suppose it could happen.
I threw one together last year, an 8" f/6. I used 16mm film cans for the altitude bearings, riding on teflon pads. Real teflon, from an offcut I bought from an industrial plastics place in town. Used it to look at Saturn (among other things) over Christmas, since it lives at my Mum's place in the country. I have a 5" Synta achromat refractor at home.
...laura
I was told that the current lack of leap seconds was due to a change in how UTC is defined. It seemed that one atomic clock (Mongolia, or somewhere like that) kept really crummy time (by atomic clock standards). The huge variances relative to the clocks run by the nice folks at places liike NIST and NRC made it look like UTC was always a bit skewhiff, and they needed lots of leap seconds to keep it in line. Then they dumped the Mongolians and their crummy clock, the variances all but vanished, and they haven't neede leap seconds since.
No confirmation, probably apocryphal anyway...
...laura
This has been my experience at Vancouver too. The last flight they couldn't figure out what an star-shaped Ikea lamp was and needed to see it out of my bag.
The flight before, however, (Vancouver to Heathrow, October) was another matter: I don't mind putting my cellphone, GPS, digital camera, etc. in the grey tray to go through the machine and be swabbed for nasty stuff. But I do mind when the Security Droids start chatting among themselves, waving the grey tub around, with my stuff bouncing around inside. I got hostile.
Earlier in the year when they wanted to xray my shoes (Columbia, South Carolina), I thought they were joking. They weren't.
...laura
I have Telus ADSL, and they are completely upfront about what what you get. I don't do much streaming media and thus haven't come close (yet) to the 6 GB/month download cap, but since I live less than a kilometer from the CO, I routinely bounce off the 1.5 MBPS download speed cap on well-connected sites.
Just don't ask me what it's like to be a Linux user on Telus, OK? :-(
...laura
While you're at it, look up irony.
I second that. For what you're looking to pay you can get a mediocre new camera, or a very good old one.
Unless you have absolutely no way to handle the film, please also consider the many used medium format cameras out there. They can take wonderful pictures - both the old TLRs (I have a YashicaMat), and the old folding cameras (I have a bunch, 1930s to 1950s vintage). You don't need a Hasselblad to take good pictures, but that's OK: for $200, you're not going to get one.
Ultimate involvement (not to mention true photo-geekness) is building your own camera. I built my view camera from a kit. A blast to build, a blast to use (in a meditative kind of way :-), and the results
are stunning.
...laura
Uh, no. Using "he" as a generic 3rd person pronoun is deprecated, and has been so for a long time. Though I cringe at the thought of women being spammers, and would hope that women would have more sense. :-)
Note that both your references have notations about generic usage and the problems that arise.
The least worst I've heard recently is singular "they".
...laura
But how much of this is really news? Our very own Canadian intelligence folks describe themselves as "...an organization with secrets to protect, not a secret organization." They provide detailed information on what's involved if you want to join them. The CIA have a detailed employment FAQ Try the GCHQ recruitment page.
If you click on Employment Opprtunities at the NSA, you get a blank window (at least in my version of Mozilla). The web version of invisible ink, perhaps?
...laura
Yep, good old OS/2, written for the PS/2. Half an operating system for half a computer.
I worked for DEC, a long time ago. Long enough ago that I may cancel the contract I put out on my old boss next year as a sign of good will. Or impending senility. Or something.
...laura
I was surprised to see tourism information on the DPRK web site. They've never encouraged it in the past, and what they're saying now sounds like Khrushchev-era Intourist. They've got a lot to learn, and could probably learn from the Cubans. Very much Marxists, but all those tourist dollars are just too tempting to ignore.
The application forms are a hoot, except for the bit about GPS not being allowed in the country. Oh, and U.S. folks not being allowed either.
...laura, proudly Canadian, but not planning a trip to Pyongyang any time soon
I upgraded my laptop to 2.6.0-test4 back in September, after reading this article.
The previous kernel (2.4.20, Slackware 9) worked, but had a couple of rough edges. The most serious (particularly on a laptop) was Compaq's weird ACPI implementation that 2.4.20 couldn't figure out. After I booted 2.6.0-test4, I was able to read off all the information I needed. Much easier to use in the field!
In the process of upgrading I did indeed break the 2.4 modutils. But since 2.6 works so well, I really don't care. Some day I'll upgrade X so it uses the ATI Radeon chipset directly, rather than messing around with VESA.
Impressed hell out of my co-workers, too.
...laura, looking forward to 2.6.0
I use my digital camera on my Slackware 8.1 system all the time. It's really very simple:
modprobe usb-storage /camera
modprobe sd_mod
modprobe uhci
mount
If this isn't user-friendly, I don't know what is. :-)
...laura
The flight information screens at Heathrow (Terminal 3, at least) run Windows 95 too. While waiting for a recent flight one kept crashing, whereupon it would POST, start Windows 95, run scandisk, load a bunch of drivers, run the app for a few minutes and crash again.
Yep. Got pictures. :-)
...laura
I was told a long time ago that it was customary to ask the world, see what you actually got, and choose from there. The real problem I've seen (from both ends) is first-level resume screening that is done by non-technical people who only count buzzwords. I've gotten burnt on this, and seen others get burnt on it too.
...laura
YES! The clouds parted this afternoon and the eclipse was stunning!
The moon rose at 0037 UTC, and I acquired it down in the haze at 0050, about 20 minutes before totality. During totality there was a bright spot on the limb that reminded me of the diamond ring effect on solar eclipses.
Way cool.
...laura
I like xephem. It even shows details of the eclipse tonight.
The astronomy of the eclipse is borderline here: the eclipse is in progress when the moon rises. The weather is also borderline, alas, but I'll see what happens.
The last lunar eclipse here (back in May) was 95% clouded out, with just a few glimpses through breaks in the clouds toward the end. But the one I saw before that (Toronto, 21 January 2000) was perfect, not a cloud in the sky, with a coppery grey ash burnt-out thing in the sky where the moon should have been. Magic!
...laura
Light pollution? The sun?
I brought my telescope to work today, set it up in the parking lot, and showed my co-workers. The view was stunning, with lots of oohs and aahs.
I used a filter like these which reduce the sun to a comfortable intensity.
...laura
If it makes you feel like that reading about it, imagine what it must feel like to do it yourself. I observed some wonderful sunspots Sunday afternoon. The night before I observed several star clusters, a couple of nebulae, and, for good measure, spent some quality time with Mars. It clouded over before Saturn was high enough for good observation.
...laura
The two programs you mentioned are remakes of British programs, both of which are actually pretty good.
I don't know what's happened to TLC lately. I have fond memories of The Secret Life of Machines and Junkyard Wars, back when it was a lightly rebranded Scrapheap Challenge. Not the silly show it has since become.
My perennial beefs with "science" programming are all the usual ones: too much emphasis on biology, zero coverage of the process of science, too many pretty pictures with zero words to go with them, and so on.
Of course there are counterexamples. I saw a current episode of Scrapheap Challenge on vacation in England recently, and it was the original, un-messed-with format. A hoot, in other words. Another nice counter-example was Rocket Science, done by the (Canadian) Discovery Channel.
How many stories have you ever seen about mathematics? I can only think of two (Femat's Last Theorem and the 4 Colour Theorem).
I wish there were more.
...laura
Putting the shoe on the other foot, I Love Lucy is a horrifying 1950s-stereotype-fest that shouldn't be on prime time either. One local cable channel (Showcase) used to actually have a viewer discretion warning pointing out that accepted standards for personal and professional relationships had changed since the program was made. I first saw it for Wojeck .
In Canada almost anything goes later at night when the kids should be in bed. This is (IMHO) as it should be: we're adults, and can make up our own minds. When (for example) Dominic da Vinci's police pals are working at cleaning up the Downtown East Side, the people they encounter are Not Nice. And they speak accordingly. As it should be.
But when even Trinny and Susannah come with a Coarse Language warning, I start to wonder...
...laura
We also made the first jet airliner in North America, and for a while had the fastest, nastiest jet fighter in the world. To the day he died my Dad never forgave them for that one...
I remember reading about one of the local startups trying to raise some money from the banks. The banks demanded collateral and the company proudly showed them 20 copies of their product, worth $2000 each. The banks sneered "That's a box of floppy discs. It's worth $10. Go away."
...laura