I'm not a huge fan of Limp Bizkit, but they're supporting Napster...What a concept, putting your fans before the possibility of profit.
Well, you don't have much possibility of profit without fans. It's just becoming the case that the way for those fans to support you may no longer be the sale of recordings.
Make stuff that people like, and they'll find a way to support you so you can make more of it.
a desktop with overlapping windows is not very intuitive from the start for novice users. It doesn't map to an intuitive human concept at all.
Really? A desktop covered with overlapping papers seems very intuitive to me, but maybe that's just because I'm sloppy.
I would be that 90% of the general computing public has a hard time dealing with hierarchical file systems. Check out the Download directory of your parent's PC. Everything they downloaded in the last 10 years is there...
Just like that oh-so-intuitive pile of bills and papers on my desk, you occasionally have to go through them and sort them into folders. Hierarchical file systems are no more un-intuitive than filing cabinets - but they're no easier to use, either. ("Do I put this receipt from the vet in the "Dogs" folder, the "Medical" folder, the "Visa" folder, or do I start a new folder?")
While scripting arguably makes life easier for power users, it is pretty much useless for novice users. Shells, emacs and vi are nice if you already know what you're doing.
But what is often forgotten is that novice users don't stay novices forever. (It's like arguments to "protect the children" at the expense of adult liberties, forgetting that children might want to be free adults someday.)
What's needed is a layered system, with a GUI or menuing system on top for newbie, a CLI for "power users", and open formats and protocols and system utilities for the hacker to get in under it all.
Example: I use exmh - a Tcl GUI program - to handle my email. I can also use the MH CLI programs (very useful when I'm telneted in to my box). I can also get underneath it all and just access mail messages as files - using grep to search them, moving them between folders manually, etcetera.
You tell me how many years it has taken to MS to get anywhere near Macintosh level GUI.....
The Mac's GUI should not be taken as a gold standard. I've had to use it at work for the past few months (I'm typing this on a Power Mac) and I find it rather clumsy.
Not that the Windows GUI is any better, mind you, but I'll take my Linux box any day.
Frustrations with the Mac GUI (some apply also to Windows):
Focus follows mouse. Why should I have to bring a window to the front to type or click in it? This is a relic of the single tasking world, where window managers were also task switchers. Feh! Gimme a real OS, separate windows from tasks.
Decent cut and paste. X users know the joy of the three-button mouse and the single click paste. (Selecting text precisely also seems to be more difficult on the Mac, but maybe that's just me.) Really, many of us are smart enough to have more than one button on our mouse. Much more convenient than the keyboard accelerators - which fail to work a good percentage of the time.
Resizing windows - why only at one corner? This often makes me drag and then resize instead of just resize. Yuck.
Please let me iconify a window in some better way that reducing it to it's title bar. That takes up much too much screen space - even the dreaded taskbar is better.
..but is anyone else REALLY glad that the Open Source movement has a spokesperson like ESR over RMS?
Sez who? I didn't vote for either of them to be Official "Open Source" spokesperson over the other.
They're both loud mouthed iconclasts - my kind of people! I respect them both highly, and they're both on the list of people I'd gladly buy a beer (or other refreshing beverage of choice) if I met in person. But that doesn't mean I'm in 100% - or even more than, say, 70% - agreement with either one.
Free radicals, for those of you who haven't any knowledge of nutritional/environmental terms, are components that interfere or completely disrupt cellular activity, e.g., carbon monoxide, lead, PCBs, radioactivity and other carcinogens.
No. Radicals are (chemists, please correct me here as necessary, my last chem class was 15 years ago) highly reactive molecules - or maybe more accurately "molecule parts", since they're not stable by themselves - that are strongly bouind together and act as oxidizing agents. Free radicals are radicals not bound in a molecule; they wander around breaking molecular bonds, not a good thing for the health of a cell. Carbon monoxide might qualify as a free radical, I'm not sure.
Free radicals are produced as a side-effect of normal biological processes; they can also be produced by radiation breaking molcular bonds. Anti-oxidants act to neutralize free radicals.
Lead is a heavy metal. It's a toxin, but not a free radical.
Radioactivity can create free radicals, but is not a free radical.
PCBs are toxic molecules, but are not free radicals.
I strongly agree that these are all bad things to have floating around the environment; but we need to know the enemy.
I'm sure Leonardo "EarthDayBoy" diCaprio, owner of two SUVs, appreciates your disapproval.
You don't mean that corporate and government-approved Earth Day celebrations might be...a hypcritical scam? A means of paying lip-service to environmentalism without any real action? Perish the thought.
A little poem I performed at the 1995 Earth Day celebration at the University of Maryland College Park:
Happy Earth Day! The oil corporations Invite you to their ironic celebrations. Your corporate sponsors are indeed getting green, The color of cash, from their profits obscene A sham of environmentalism is such good P.R. While our ancient growth forests, they cover with tar.
Yell ``Save the Earth!'' while the poison land and sea A shining example of greed and hypocracy.
Harvest rare trees to build grandfather clocks But send them to you in a recycled box.
For twenty-four hours, they'll hold Mother Earth dear. But don't ask what they do the rest of the year.
The total disappearance of the ozone layer would count as "clear and compelling" evidence. The problem with this is that it would be too late to do anything by then.
The alternative to acting on clear and compelling evidence is acting on ambiguous and unconvincing evidence. I suppose you favor acting on the evidence of any crackpot that comes along?
When presented with a potential threat whose avoidance requires quick action, you may have to act without having access to all the facts. If someone points a gun at you, you can't wait until there's clear and compelling evidence that it's a functional and loaded firearm. If you have the least lick of sense, you take cover immediately, even if it's inconvenient and you might scrape your knee and tear your brand new trousers, because even a small chance of having your brains blown out trumps a 100% chance of a bloody knee and torn pants.
And no, that doesn't mean that you hit the dirt when J. Random Crackpot comes along sceaming that invisible alien Elvis clones are pointing death rays at us all.
...folks who complain that GM foods haven't been proven safe but apparently don't realize that a) it's impossible to prove food safe; b) nobody's even tried for most foods, like, say, oranges; c)genes aren't static, anyway.
a and b): a few thousand years of human experience with these foodstuffs isn't sufficient evidence? c) The total genome of a species is close enough to static for most practical purposes; while existing genes can be shuffled all around, new genes arise only through mutation - or, now, through GM.
Now, if you want to test GM foods on your body, fine. I'd prefer to wait a while, at least until there's actual engineering rather then "shoot these genes into the cell and see what happens". So please label them. More importantly, I don't want their new genes getting into the unmodified strains, so please keep your GM crops and their pollen well-contained.
My teacher brought forth the point that there is already super-efficent, super cheap, solar panels out there...the only problem is that Pacific Gas & Electric bought the patent to them and rufuses to release the technology to the public.
Any company that tries to sell solar competitively on the market today is going to fall flat on its rear.
Depends on the application. Solar is the best choice if you don't have good access to the grid - it's very expensive to get copper strung to a new location.
It's also great for portable devices. I've noticed that the alphanumeric road construction signs they use around here (the portable types that tell you "Rt 198 will be closed...April 23 2-6 am") have gone solar - I think they used to have big ol' diesel generators.
but have you copyrighted any of your Slashdot comments
You don't have to register a work, or display a copyright notice, for it to be "protected" under copyright law. Any fixed expression of a creative work is covered. However, if you value a work, displaying a copyright notice and registering with the copyright office will help in any legal dispute.
anything said in a public forum can be quoted by ANYBODY without ANY permission.
There's a difference between "quoting" and "reproducing in entirety". You can't write down a poem I read at an open reading and publish it yourself. (Though I think you should be able to do so, so long as you provide full attribtion and pay royalties to the author on any profit you make.)
But as a matter of law, comments posting in public for public dissemination can be reprinted, since they were posted for public discussion. Somebody please provide a reference for this, because it's 180 degrees away from anything I've ever read on the subject. My understanding is the posting to such a forum implies permission to reproduce and quote the work in that forum, but not outside of it. Thanks. and people are not identified by e-mail or name, so their privacy is protected. Perhaps their privacy is protected (though how much expectation of privacy is there in a public forum?), but they get no credit for their work! I don't mind at all having my work (net posts, poetry, music, whatever) copied and redistributed. I want it seen by the widest possible audience. (If you're making money at copying or distributing, I'll demand a cut, but otherwise feel free.) But I absolutely demand that I be given full authorship credit for anything I write. While short quotes without full attribution may be fair use, if any lengthy part of a post of mine was reprinted somewhere without my name on it I'd be hopping mad. Lawsuit mad, even.
Re:One of the important concepts of modern life?
on
The Code Book
·
· Score: 3
Yeah, but cryptography is *nothing like* as important as these things.
I must disagree. To start with, cryptography is the rock upon which our banking and currency systems rest. If you use an ATM, or get your paychecks directly deposited, you've directly relied on cryptography. Even you keep your money in a mattress, the whole reserve banking system (upon which, for good or ill, the economy is based) needs it to function. Every day between one and two trillion dollars worth of interbank transfers are processed by Fedwire and the Clearing House Interbank Payment System; all these transations use cryptography.
And cryptography is essential for modern military operations. Whether you're a hawk or a dove, you can't help but admit that military operation have an important impact on the lives of people around the globe, and that impact would (for good or ill) be much lessened in the absence of secure communication. Cryptography is also important in the diplomacy that holds tensions short of a state of war - the old "Red Telephone" line between Moscow and Washington was protected with, IIRC, a one time pad.
So, if you want to engage in commerce, protect or attack a nation, or are concerned about human rights, cryptography is fundamental. There are good reasons why it gives certain government agencies extreme heartburn to think of cryptography in the hands of the rest of us...
Oh? Do you find your console messages during bootup unreadable?
Some people actually prefer light text on a dark background. Usually, I don't much care; but when I have to deal with a low refresh rate, that's the only way I can avoid a headache.
On the site in question, I found the small font much harder to deal with than the color scheme. The main body of text should generally be in the font the user has selected for their browser's default; if you're going to specify a different font for the body, make it larger, not smaller!
Re:One of the important concepts of modern life?
on
The Code Book
·
· Score: 4
How can you say that when even now I'm sure that more than 90% of of the "modern world" has no inclination of what Cryptograhy is?
More than 90% of the "modern world" has no knowledge or understanding of the Otto cycle, Maxwell's equations, or the Von Neumann architecture, either. Yet they keep relying on cars, radios, and computers on an everyday basis.
Reading this reminds me of the funny sessions that one can have with Eliza or Dr. Sbaitso.
It sort of reminded me of Gnu Emacs's "M-x psychoanalyze-pinhead", which matches Eliza with a Zippy quote generator (further proof that Emacs is the One True Editor):
I am the psychotherapist. Please, describe your problems. Each time you are finished talking, type RET twice.
Yow! Are we in the perfect mood?
Why do you say are you in the perfect mood?
I was in a HOT TUB! I was NORMAL! I was ITALIAN!! I enjoyed th' EARTHQUAKE!
Is it because of your plans that you say you enjoyed th' earthquake?
Okay, BARBRA STREISAND, I recognize you now!! Also EFREM ZIMBALIST, JUNIOR!! And BEAUMONT NEWHALL!! Everybody into th' BATHROOM!
Maybe your life have something to do with this.
I'm MENTALLY here.. but PHYSICALLY I'm purchasing NAUGAHYDE furniture in the' SUBURBS of PHOENIX!!
Is it because physically you are purchasing naugahyde furniture in the' suburbs of phoenix that you came to me?
I love FRUIT PICKERS!!
I would appreciate it if you would tell me about your relationship with fruit.
I'm a GENIUS! I want to dispute sentence structure with SUSAN SONTAG!!
What makes you believe you might want to dispute?
Clear the laundromat!! This whirl-o-matic just had a nuclear meltdown!!
How inconvenient is it to deal with telemarketers? How inconvenient is it to live in a society with no free speech?
False dichotomy. It's not necessary to censor to stop telemarketers - just don't allow them to sell anything!
Simply have the law be that no person or company that engages in, or hires others to engage in, spam, junk faxing, or telemarketing, will be allowed to get a sales licence, commercial zoning permit, or any other licence or permit for commercial activity from the state. A federal version would disallow interstate commerce by any person or company that did so.
This puts no damper on citizens' speech on any topic, and doesn't extend state or federal power at all.
Does the Plain Old Telephone System have the installed equipment to combat telemarketers?
Yes. This is not your father's POTS.
I know that you can trace a call, but how fast can that be done?
Instantly. In fact, they don't really trace calls anymore, all the information come in with the call setup request.
On the Internet, you have IP's that may or may not be spoofed, but unless you pay a premium for callerID, you don't have that luxury with telephone.
You can't get the info without paying the phone company their premium, but they have that info. (At least in almost all parts of the US and Canada. YMMV.) Telephone switches are connected to each other not just with voice lines, but with data lines that form the SS7 (Signaling System 7) packet-switched network. This network carries messages that instruct the switches to set up and tear down voice connections. (Yes, the connections could be dial-up data connections with modems but that doesn't matter at this level.)
The basic idea of SS7 is reasonably simple; it's a protocol to tell telephone switches how to connect voice lines together to make a voice circuit. The implementation, however, is very complicated (because of over a century's worth of cruft) and will hurt your brain. Anyway, one of the message fields in a call setup is the telephone number that originated the call.
If you pay the telephone company for Caller ID, they'll send you that info modulated onto the ring signal (unless the caller has requested Caller ID blocking); or if you dial a certain code (*57? I forget) immediately after a harassing call they'll record the number and pass it on to the police. People with toll-free numbers also get a list of the calling numbers.
The "keep them on the line so we can trace the call" bit you see on cop shows predates the use of computer-controlled digital switches. Forget about it. The call is "traced" before the it is even connected.
Junk fax laws seem to be pretty reasonable, and some folks have tried to say that they should be applied to e-mail spam too. The case for that seems a little weak; but they might be a good place to start writing new laws for both spam and telemarketing.
OTOH, enforcement of junk fax laws is probably easier than anti-spam ones, since it's pretty darn difficult to fake your originating phone number (ff you can hack SS7, you probably have better things to do with your time than make junk phone calls), and there's a central record of calls (which is very useful for cases of telephone harassment).
There are no technical problems with anti-telemarketing ones, only political ones. Telemarketing is big business, and the one great principle upon which all American politics is founded is "Money Talks".
(<rant>BTW, does anyone else feel motivated to start dealing out pain when some telemarketer introduces their spiel by saying "This is just a courtesy call..." No, if there was any courtesy involved you wouldn't be bothing me, would you?</rant>)
Maybe it's a foreign concept to some of you guys that sometimes the most practical, most time-saving solutions is the best one, even if it's not "the right thing".
Tell us, how does something that costs a lot of money and doesn't work qualify as the most practical, most time-saving solution when compared with free, open, and stable solutions?
Slashdot Mirror
Make stuff that people like, and they'll find a way to support you so you can make more of it.
To steal something, I have to take it away from you. If I copy a song, you still have it, thus no theft.
Copyright is dead - it just ain't stopped moving yet, and it's death throes might well hurt a lot of people.
Good link! Somebody mod this up.
What's needed is a layered system, with a GUI or menuing system on top for newbie, a CLI for "power users", and open formats and protocols and system utilities for the hacker to get in under it all.
Example: I use exmh - a Tcl GUI program - to handle my email. I can also use the MH CLI programs (very useful when I'm telneted in to my box). I can also get underneath it all and just access mail messages as files - using grep to search them, moving them between folders manually, etcetera.
The Mac's GUI should not be taken as a gold standard. I've had to use it at work for the past few months (I'm typing this on a Power Mac) and I find it rather clumsy.
Not that the Windows GUI is any better, mind you, but I'll take my Linux box any day.
Frustrations with the Mac GUI (some apply also to Windows):
They're both loud mouthed iconclasts - my kind of people! I respect them both highly, and they're both on the list of people I'd gladly buy a beer (or other refreshing beverage of choice) if I met in person. But that doesn't mean I'm in 100% - or even more than, say, 70% - agreement with either one.
Free radicals are produced as a side-effect of normal biological processes; they can also be produced by radiation breaking molcular bonds. Anti-oxidants act to neutralize free radicals.
Lead is a heavy metal. It's a toxin, but not a free radical.
Radioactivity can create free radicals, but is not a free radical.
PCBs are toxic molecules, but are not free radicals.
I strongly agree that these are all bad things to have floating around the environment; but we need to know the enemy.
A little poem I performed at the 1995 Earth Day celebration at the University of Maryland College Park:
Happy Earth Day! The oil corporations
Invite you to their ironic celebrations.
Your corporate sponsors are indeed getting green,
The color of cash, from their profits obscene
A sham of environmentalism is such good P.R.
While our ancient growth forests, they cover with tar.
Yell ``Save the Earth!'' while the poison land and sea
A shining example of greed and hypocracy.
Harvest rare trees to build grandfather clocks
But send them to you in a recycled box.
For twenty-four hours, they'll hold Mother Earth dear.
But don't ask what they do the rest of the year.
When presented with a potential threat whose avoidance requires quick action, you may have to act without having access to all the facts. If someone points a gun at you, you can't wait until there's clear and compelling evidence that it's a functional and loaded firearm. If you have the least lick of sense, you take cover immediately, even if it's inconvenient and you might scrape your knee and tear your brand new trousers, because even a small chance of having your brains blown out trumps a 100% chance of a bloody knee and torn pants.
And no, that doesn't mean that you hit the dirt when J. Random Crackpot comes along sceaming that invisible alien Elvis clones are pointing death rays at us all.
Now, if you want to test GM foods on your body, fine. I'd prefer to wait a while, at least until there's actual engineering rather then "shoot these genes into the cell and see what happens". So please label them. More importantly, I don't want their new genes getting into the unmodified strains, so please keep your GM crops and their pollen well-contained.
It's also great for portable devices. I've noticed that the alphanumeric road construction signs they use around here (the portable types that tell you "Rt 198 will be closed...April 23 2-6 am") have gone solar - I think they used to have big ol' diesel generators.
You don't have to register a work, or display a copyright notice, for it to be "protected" under copyright law. Any fixed expression of a creative work is covered. However, if you value a work, displaying a copyright notice and registering with the copyright office will help in any legal dispute.
But as a matter of law, comments posting in public for public dissemination can be reprinted, since they were posted for public discussion. Somebody please provide a reference for this, because it's 180 degrees away from anything I've ever read on the subject. My understanding is the posting to such a forum implies permission to reproduce and quote the work in that forum, but not outside of it. Thanks. and people are not identified by e-mail or name, so their privacy is protected. Perhaps their privacy is protected (though how much expectation of privacy is there in a public forum?), but they get no credit for their work! I don't mind at all having my work (net posts, poetry, music, whatever) copied and redistributed. I want it seen by the widest possible audience. (If you're making money at copying or distributing, I'll demand a cut, but otherwise feel free.) But I absolutely demand that I be given full authorship credit for anything I write. While short quotes without full attribution may be fair use, if any lengthy part of a post of mine was reprinted somewhere without my name on it I'd be hopping mad. Lawsuit mad, even.
I must disagree. To start with, cryptography is the rock upon which our banking and currency systems rest. If you use an ATM, or get your paychecks directly deposited, you've directly relied on cryptography. Even you keep your money in a mattress, the whole reserve banking system (upon which, for good or ill, the economy is based) needs it to function. Every day between one and two trillion dollars worth of interbank transfers are processed by Fedwire and the Clearing House Interbank Payment System; all these transations use cryptography.
And cryptography is essential for modern military operations. Whether you're a hawk or a dove, you can't help but admit that military operation have an important impact on the lives of people around the globe, and that impact would (for good or ill) be much lessened in the absence of secure communication. Cryptography is also important in the diplomacy that holds tensions short of a state of war - the old "Red Telephone" line between Moscow and Washington was protected with, IIRC, a one time pad.
Cryptography is used by people around the globe working for human rights; groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International use cryptography to secure their communication.
So, if you want to engage in commerce, protect or attack a nation, or are concerned about human rights, cryptography is fundamental. There are good reasons why it gives certain government agencies extreme heartburn to think of cryptography in the hands of the rest of us...
Some people actually prefer light text on a dark background. Usually, I don't much care; but when I have to deal with a low refresh rate, that's the only way I can avoid a headache.
On the site in question, I found the small font much harder to deal with than the color scheme. The main body of text should generally be in the font the user has selected for their browser's default; if you're going to specify a different font for the body, make it larger, not smaller!
Simply have the law be that no person or company that engages in, or hires others to engage in, spam, junk faxing, or telemarketing, will be allowed to get a sales licence, commercial zoning permit, or any other licence or permit for commercial activity from the state. A federal version would disallow interstate commerce by any person or company that did so.
This puts no damper on citizens' speech on any topic, and doesn't extend state or federal power at all.
The basic idea of SS7 is reasonably simple; it's a protocol to tell telephone switches how to connect voice lines together to make a voice circuit. The implementation, however, is very complicated (because of over a century's worth of cruft) and will hurt your brain. Anyway, one of the message fields in a call setup is the telephone number that originated the call.
If you pay the telephone company for Caller ID, they'll send you that info modulated onto the ring signal (unless the caller has requested Caller ID blocking); or if you dial a certain code (*57? I forget) immediately after a harassing call they'll record the number and pass it on to the police. People with toll-free numbers also get a list of the calling numbers.
The "keep them on the line so we can trace the call" bit you see on cop shows predates the use of computer-controlled digital switches. Forget about it. The call is "traced" before the it is even connected.
Junk fax laws seem to be pretty reasonable, and some folks have tried to say that they should be applied to e-mail spam too. The case for that seems a little weak; but they might be a good place to start writing new laws for both spam and telemarketing.
OTOH, enforcement of junk fax laws is probably easier than anti-spam ones, since it's pretty darn difficult to fake your originating phone number (ff you can hack SS7, you probably have better things to do with your time than make junk phone calls), and there's a central record of calls (which is very useful for cases of telephone harassment).
There are no technical problems with anti-telemarketing ones, only political ones. Telemarketing is big business, and the one great principle upon which all American politics is founded is "Money Talks".
(<rant>BTW, does anyone else feel motivated to start dealing out pain when some telemarketer introduces their spiel by saying "This is just a courtesy call..." No, if there was any courtesy involved you wouldn't be bothing me, would you?</rant>)