This seems to be an application of the technology described in that one paper on storing trace information in packets in a backwards-compatible way, that slashdot had a while back. I now can't find the article. Some guy described the whole process of how one could squeeze the information into unused parts of packets.
Looks like I'll be installing some flavor of BSD on my spare machine. Last time I tried Linux, it was just so unorganized and non-standard (yes, yes, I know LSB, but still...). I'm hoping the BSDs are a bit more tame as far as organization and standardization. I would even take whatever performance hits there were with NetBSD if it is actually written and designed elegantly enough that someone as rusty as me in C and C++ might actually be able to tinker with it (I am assuming most Linux users don't even dare putzing directly with their kernel). I wish there were some force for convergence instead of divergence as far as Linux distributions are concerned. Maybe that LDPS will help. It just seems that nothing really has enough teeth to tame the wildly fragmenting Linux distributions (how about a single package standard, a single update standard, even compliance with LSB?). I don't know, maybe I'm just talking out my ass.
Ok, where's the troll that's going to say "Hey, if *you're* so concerned, why are you posting on Slashdot instead of helping the poor and saving the whales?"?
Q. When was the first time you heard of the existence of a
9 utility that defeated CSS and decrypted the content of one of 10 the studio's DVDs? 11 A. Early to mid-October of 1999. 12 Q. What was that utility? 13 A. DeCSS. 14 Q. What was the source of the original information you 15 received in the existence of DeCSS? 16 A. I found it on a news posting on Slashdot.
EEEK!! They are watching. That is scary.
(ps. I hope the above quote is not copyrighted or something)
Is the *original* opened Netscape source still around? I mean before they threw it all out and started over? Even if it is crappy, it would be better to at least fix the bugs in the old Netscape and at least have a crappy *working* browser.
Code-reuse and encapsulation/componentization is in direct opposition of monolithic interdependencies. If they are actually doing this than I suggest they are not designing correctly. Encapsulation should *avoid* interdependency, not increase it. This is all partly due to the awful gui semantic agnostic X. I say stop attempting to build good stuff on mushy cruft. Rip out the cruft and start with a solid foundation. That GNOME and KDE are *another* level on top of widget toolkits, window managers, and X is just too much. Some truly common infrastructure should be built. Not just happily chugging along on divergent paths, than building weird bridges to be "compatible".
And consequently natural selection has selected for a breed of politician which is exceptionally lacking the integrity of personal honer and exceptionally good at hiding dirt.
I'd have to agree. I don't think this guy was under any illusion that downloading porn was not in conflict with his job duties (which probably required maintain some sort of moral stature). Of course that should have been made clear for those who expect to be hired to a religious institution and then break their moral laws.
Now if this was a secular institution with no pretense of moral job requirements then it might be another issue.
The problem is that anything just slightly risque to the American puritanical facade is candidate for stern and immediate censorship instead of rational analysis. For instance, many other countries like France and Spain have alcohol as part of the culture. Children grow up around it and don't go into insane drinking binges when they turn 21. Some with sex, sort of. Almost every other western nation is more free about sex. Yet in America it's some strange dangerous thing. If a guy so much as pats a man or crosses his legs the wrong way, he is immediately a homosexual. Parents can hardly hug their children without somebody crying sexual harassment. It's just really insane.
What gets me is the irony that the religious south, known for its piety is also know for its brothels and liquor. There is some disconnect there.
I recieved a very nice reply from the mayor's office citing a study by Dr. Craig A. Anderson which was used to support this decision.
http://www.apa.org/journals/psp/psp784772.html
An article at http://www.beachbrowser.com/Archives/eVoid/April-2 000/Video-games-increase-aggression.htm has a slightly different perspective.
Basically:
The first [study] showed that young men who are habitually aggressive may be particularly vulnerable to the effects of repeated exposure to violent games.
The second [study] showed that everybody can become temporarily more aggressive after even a brief exposure to violent games.
After skimming through the paper, it seems to me that the jury is still out on the long term effects, if any, of violent video games on people NOT predisposed to violent behavior, so this ordinance seems a bit premature.
This is supported by:
Dr Guy Cumberbatch, a chartered psychologist and expert in media violence, said it
was difficult to draw firm conclusions from research.
"You cannot simulate in a laboratory the complex social problems that people are concerned about, and overall the actual evidence supporting a link between media violence and real violence is very weak."
Dr Cumberbatch said research showed that some people were stimulated simply by the fast pace of action films, rather than their violent content.
In any case, regardless of your personal opinion on this, I think we should thank the Mayor's Office for being so open and responsive. Being 24 hours after the fact it is probably useless to tell all of the trolls not to flame. In fact I even got a call from them (on my answering machine) so hopefully I didn't stir up a firestorm.
Sure, having some arbitrary dimensions and fundamental particles entangled in them does seem far fetched. But remember, these are just models. There probably aren't little teensy rings of dimensions upon which some force particles are "caught". It's something so our poor 3-dimensional biased minds can understand reality. Perhaps you're right, and "dimensions" are actually a continuum, instead of cut and dried orthogonal measurements. But I think the human mind needs some model it can innately understand.
The world is converging in a non-Microsoft way. It's good to see the simple and common sense architecture of unix get so much gravity (BeOS, Mac OS X, *nix). The only thing I wish, and perhaps I say this out of ignorance, is the *nix catch up with the threading and media capabilities of "modern" operating systems.
I respect CNet just slightly more than ZDNet. I'm glad ZDNet, at least under that name, is disappearing. It makes sense after all. Their publications are virtually identical. GameSpot/GameCenter, etc.
When I was reading through some topology book when I was in high school it seemed to make perfect sense to me that if folds of the universe were sufficiently "close" to each other (perhaps even *overlapping) that they could have some sort of interaction. In fact, this is what wormholes are (supposed to be).
Just imagine a tablecloth on a table. Now ruffle it up. The surface of the tablecloth is actually a three dimensional world. If you trace your finger accross the surface you are travelling in space. But what if you could "jump" through a ruffle, from the upslope of the ruffle to it's downslope (or vice versa). What if a magnet on one side of the ruffle attracted a piece of metal on the other side "through" the tablecloth. That is sort of what this theory is saying. Close folds are having a dampening affect on the local gravity. The best theories are the ones that just "make sense" in retrospect.
I was terribly dismayed to hear of the recent video game law you signed. Academics agree that there is little, if any, correlation between violent video games and violent behavior in youth. Movies and video games already have ratings. The state should not act as parent or nanny. Prohibiting people from playing or purchasing video games by law is censorship, and a direct assault on the right of a parent to decide for themselves what is good for their children. I am a twenty-one year old computer programmer and video game player. I am happy to say that I have never been violent as a result of playing violent video games in my youth. Perhaps you are correct in worrying about the hostile environment youth grow up in today. But that is a societal issue. It must be addressed at the root. If children cannot distinguish right from wrong, and become violent due to playing a video game, then there is certainly a more disturbing problem in our society. This law will only allow parents to have a clear conscience while being irresponsible.
Everybody is going to bitch about this. It's all talk. If you want to make a change instead of just spouting hot air WRITE Mayor Bart Peterson and criticize him for the step backwards he has taken.
Bitching on Slashdot doesn't make anything happen.
Slashdot Mirror
This seems to be an application of the technology described in that one paper on storing trace information in packets in a backwards-compatible way, that slashdot had a while back. I now can't find the article. Some guy described the whole process of how one could squeeze the information into unused parts of packets.
Looks like I'll be installing some flavor of BSD on my spare machine. Last time I tried Linux, it was just so unorganized and non-standard (yes, yes, I know LSB, but still...). I'm hoping the BSDs are a bit more tame as far as organization and standardization. I would even take whatever performance hits there were with NetBSD if it is actually written and designed elegantly enough that someone as rusty as me in C and C++ might actually be able to tinker with it (I am assuming most Linux users don't even dare putzing directly with their kernel). I wish there were some force for convergence instead of divergence as far as Linux distributions are concerned. Maybe that LDPS will help. It just seems that nothing really has enough teeth to tame the wildly fragmenting Linux distributions (how about a single package standard, a single update standard, even compliance with LSB?). I don't know, maybe I'm just talking out my ass.
Join NASA: Be an astronaut, explore strange new worlds and civilization, and kill their inhabitants with alien bacteria.
No, but we already have a world which genetically engineered foods and drugs. Many people will be touched in some fashion by genomics.
Well, it didn't take long for that site to be cracked. As of 10:26 EST, www.geekflavor.com has a nice little ascii pengiun on it.
Ok, where's the troll that's going to say "Hey, if *you're* so concerned, why are you posting on Slashdot instead of helping the poor and saving the whales?"?
Q. When was the first time you heard of the existence of a
9 utility that defeated CSS and decrypted the content of one of
10 the studio's DVDs?
11 A. Early to mid-October of 1999.
12 Q. What was that utility?
13 A. DeCSS.
14 Q. What was the source of the original information you
15 received in the existence of DeCSS?
16 A. I found it on a news posting on Slashdot.
EEEK!! They are watching. That is scary.
(ps. I hope the above quote is not copyrighted or something)
"It's addressed to...Mrs. Channandler Bong"
I've moved around so much in the last few years even Columbia House has given up on me.
So basically, I can tell someone's secret to other people just as long as I say "But _don't_ tell anyone! Really!"
Right, soon everyone in the world has the "secret" information.
Is the *original* opened Netscape source still around? I mean before they threw it all out and started over? Even if it is crappy, it would be better to at least fix the bugs in the old Netscape and at least have a crappy *working* browser.
I guess it all depends on getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries and frequently checking credit at moral bank. ;)
"It's only because the American public willing surrender their rights little by little, that you're prepared to live with this."
And just think, if there wasn't that silly assault weapon ban, we could OVERTHROW GOVERNMENT. Damn, I'm joining the NRA!
(for those sarcasm-impaired, that was sarcasm)
Code-reuse and encapsulation/componentization is in direct opposition of monolithic interdependencies. If they are actually doing this than I suggest they are not designing correctly. Encapsulation should *avoid* interdependency, not increase it. This is all partly due to the awful gui semantic agnostic X. I say stop attempting to build good stuff on mushy cruft. Rip out the cruft and start with a solid foundation. That GNOME and KDE are *another* level on top of widget toolkits, window managers, and X is just too much. Some truly common infrastructure should be built. Not just happily chugging along on divergent paths, than building weird bridges to be "compatible".
And consequently natural selection has selected for a breed of politician which is exceptionally lacking the integrity of personal honer and exceptionally good at hiding dirt.
Don't you love evolution.
I'd have to agree. I don't think this guy was under any illusion that downloading porn was not in conflict with his job duties (which probably required maintain some sort of moral stature). Of course that should have been made clear for those who expect to be hired to a religious institution and then break their moral laws.
Now if this was a secular institution with no pretense of moral job requirements then it might be another issue.
The problem is that anything just slightly risque to the American puritanical facade is candidate for stern and immediate censorship instead of rational analysis. For instance, many other countries like France and Spain have alcohol as part of the culture. Children grow up around it and don't go into insane drinking binges when they turn 21. Some with sex, sort of. Almost every other western nation is more free about sex. Yet in America it's some strange dangerous thing. If a guy so much as pats a man or crosses his legs the wrong way, he is immediately a homosexual. Parents can hardly hug their children without somebody crying sexual harassment. It's just really insane.
What gets me is the irony that the religious south, known for its piety is also know for its brothels and liquor. There is some disconnect there.
Please. This whole article is flamebait.
I recieved a very nice reply from the mayor's office citing a study by Dr. Craig A. Anderson which was used to support this decision.
http://www.apa.org/journals/psp/psp784772.html
An article at http://www.beachbrowser.com/Archives/eVoid/April-
Basically:
After skimming through the paper, it seems to me that the jury is still out on the long term effects, if any, of violent video games on people NOT predisposed to violent behavior, so this ordinance seems a bit premature.
This is supported by:
In any case, regardless of your personal opinion on this, I think we should thank the Mayor's Office for being so open and responsive. Being 24 hours after the fact it is probably useless to tell all of the trolls not to flame. In fact I even got a call from them (on my answering machine) so hopefully I didn't stir up a firestorm.
Hmm...very true. I did not think of this. Can "hyperlinking" a word be considered a "derived work"? I would say so. Up to the courts.
Sure, having some arbitrary dimensions and fundamental particles entangled in them does seem far fetched. But remember, these are just models. There probably aren't little teensy rings of dimensions upon which some force particles are "caught". It's something so our poor 3-dimensional biased minds can understand reality. Perhaps you're right, and "dimensions" are actually a continuum, instead of cut and dried orthogonal measurements. But I think the human mind needs some model it can innately understand.
The world is converging in a non-Microsoft way. It's good to see the simple and common sense architecture of unix get so much gravity (BeOS, Mac OS X, *nix). The only thing I wish, and perhaps I say this out of ignorance, is the *nix catch up with the threading and media capabilities of "modern" operating systems.
I respect CNet just slightly more than ZDNet. I'm glad ZDNet, at least under that name, is disappearing. It makes sense after all. Their publications are virtually identical. GameSpot/GameCenter, etc.
When I was reading through some topology book when I was in high school it seemed to make perfect sense to me that if folds of the universe were sufficiently "close" to each other (perhaps even *overlapping) that they could have some sort of interaction. In fact, this is what wormholes are (supposed to be).
Just imagine a tablecloth on a table. Now ruffle it up. The surface of the tablecloth is actually a three dimensional world. If you trace your finger accross the surface you are travelling in space. But what if you could "jump" through a ruffle, from the upslope of the ruffle to it's downslope (or vice versa). What if a magnet on one side of the ruffle attracted a piece of metal on the other side "through" the tablecloth. That is sort of what this theory is saying. Close folds are having a dampening affect on the local gravity. The best theories are the ones that just "make sense" in retrospect.
Dear Sir,
I was terribly dismayed to hear of the recent video game law you signed. Academics agree
that there is little, if any, correlation between violent video games and violent behavior in
youth. Movies and video games already have ratings. The state should not act as parent or
nanny. Prohibiting people from playing or purchasing video games by law is censorship, and a
direct assault on the right of a parent to decide for themselves what is good for their
children.
I am a twenty-one year old computer programmer and video game player. I am happy to say
that I have never been violent as a result of playing violent video games in my youth.
Perhaps you are correct in worrying about the hostile environment youth grow up in today. But
that is a societal issue. It must be addressed at the root. If children cannot distinguish
right from wrong, and become violent due to playing a video game, then there is certainly a
more disturbing problem in our society. This law will only allow parents to have a clear
conscience while being irresponsible.
Everybody is going to bitch about this. It's all talk. If you want to make a change instead of just spouting hot air WRITE Mayor Bart Peterson and criticize him for the step backwards he has taken.
k .htm
Bitching on Slashdot doesn't make anything happen.
http://www1.ci.indianapolis.in.us/mayor/feedbac
Mayor Bart Peterson
2501 City-County Building
200 East Washington Street
Indianapolis, Indiana 46204