It seems to me its nearly as impossible to predict a traffic jam as it is to predict stock prices.
Both are fundamentally chaotic.
Predicting chaotic systems may be impossible, but often the introduction of a periodic perturbation can reduce the chaos significantly, leading to better predictability.
On the other hand, others would look at that and say that it's because life only occurs in brief flashes before it becomes intelligent enough to wipe itself out.
We know that the universe started with the Big Bang, roughly 13 billion years ago. We know that it took a while for galaxies to form, and that the first stars were mostly hydrogen and helium, with none of the heavier elements to speak of. We know that these first stars cooked up the heavier elements and then spewed them out when they went supernova, and that planets like Earth were formed from these in a later generation of star formation. Carbon, the basic structural component that makes organic life possible, didn't exist in significant quantities until this first generation of stars spewed it out.
Our solar system formed about 4.5 billion years ago. It's well within reason to speculate that Earth formed and developed life fairly close to the earliest possible time that life could have developed in the universe.
The earliest fossil evidence of life on earth dates back to 3.5 billion years, only a few hundred million years after earth cooled enough for solid rock to form, and probably about the time that the temperature of the oceans dropped to around 100 degrees fahrenheit, the temperature at which proteins seem to function best. Life on earth began as single-celled creatures, and remained that way for 3 billion years; it's only within the last 600 million years that multicellular life has existed, and less than 50 thousand years since we first developed intelligence.
The way I see it, single-cell life is probably ubiquitous throughout the universe, but multicellular life may be fairly uncommon, and intelligence even less so. Perhaps we're the first intelligent species to exist; and even if we're not alone, we could easily be the first to reach our current level of technology.
What we know at this point is that we don't see any evidence of other intelligent civilizations doing what we expect to be able to do in the near future. We ask ourselves, "Where is everybody?"
But the fact that we see no evidence of anyone more advanced that us doesn't necessarily mean that more advanced folks used to exist and then killed themselves. It's equally plausible to suggest that we could be the first, and that we've got enough smarts to avoid killing ourselves.
A open source RAD evironment sounds like it could have a huge impact on the number of apps that could be rolled out.
This month's Linux Journal had an article about a very nice RAD tool: GladeGen.py. You design your GUI with Glade, and then this script generates a python script to use your GUI. I've been using it for about a week now, and in that time I've written a couple dozen small GUI tools for my users.
Ummmm, yes. But use iPhoto to find stuff... [stuff deleted]... In short, most of the files created can and should be organized in other ways other than nested folders.
Right; organizing your photos in nested folders by date is stupid, because iPhoto has a much better scheme for storing them. It just dumps them all
into one place and then does some sort of magic to keep track of them. Let's pop into a Terminal window to see if we can understand that magic:
bifrost:~ $ find./Pictures/ -type f -name \*.jpg -print|t
The parent's point was that if Perl takes a second, then perfectly-optimized C cannot take more than a second, because the Perl interpreter is written in C.
I believe he meant that it took one second to write the perl one-liner, and one year to write the C code for a perl interpreter (or subset of same) that would execute that one-liner. In which case he was making precisely the same point you describe as "moot".
He was, after all, responding to the assertion that you could in principle write your own perl interpreter subset in C to implement the same program.
Don't forget that all this code is stolen from corporations like IBM. Billions of dollars of IP were stolen from IBM and given over to Linux. IBM stole that IP from itself and then gave it to Linux.
It's exactly like when my sister bought me a birthday gift at CompUSA, and then stole it from herself and handed it to me at my birthday party. She paid for it, so clearly it's her property, and since it's in my posession now, I'm holding stolen property. This makes me a thief and my sister an accessory to theft.
If it is not an end, but simply a transition, then perhaps aging is a way to desire that transition. If it is only a transition, then it is not negative, in fact, it could be viewed as positive and an exciting proposition.
Sure, it's a transition. It's a transition from existence to nonexistence. Personally, I like existing, and I find it hard to imagine being excited at the prospect of not existing.
remember that Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism all contain this same thought.
They all offer a common response to a common unacceptable fear.
We humans are capable of abstract thought; whereas other animals pretty much dwell only in the eternal present, we find ourselves planning for the future pretty much all the time. We see the people around us age and then die, and with our power of abstract thought, we recognize that we are also at risk of dying in this manner.
Perhaps the most important function of abstract thought is to anticipate danger in order to avoid it. We anticipate the possibility of death by being hit by a bus, and avoid it by looking both ways before crossing the street. We anticipate death by pneumonia, so we dress in warm, dry clothing in the winter. We anticipate death by poisoning, so we throw away that tainted meat instead of eating it. We anticipate death by old age, so we seek a way to avoid it, and we're driven to the brink of insanity when we realize we can't find a way to avoid it.
One of the common ways of coping with a problem is to pretend it doesn't exist. Psychiatrists refer to this as "denial", and it's considered an unhealthy delusional state.
Developing an internally consistent set of delusions takes a lot of time and effort; it's a lot simpler to borrow a set from someone else, and sharing a common set of delusions also provides a sense of community and an external affirmation of the delusions. Gather together a large enough community sharing their delusions, and you can start to call that community an "organized religion".
As for the notion that aging and death are "natural", sure, that's true. They're as natural as smallpox and bubonic plague.
The only things you have to worry about these databases is that they don't get into the wrong hands.
You say that as if it were only a minor concern, as if the notion that the data could fall into the wrong hands is farfetched. That's kind of like saying not to worry about poisonous cleaners under the kitchen sink, because it's only a problem if the baby is curious and tries to taste them.
I guess this illustrates how far we've fallen. I seem to recall, from reading Alexis de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America" (published in 1835) long ago in college, that citizens could sue public officials freely, and that this was considered one of the fundamental checks on abuse of governmental power that characterized American democracy.
To answer another poster's assertion that the Internet is like a car, you can't just drive, you have to have some knowledge, I'd say this: sure, you have to know how to USE the car. But you shouldn't have to be expected to understand its architecture and occasionally pull the carburetor as well.
Understanding the car's architecture would be equivalent to knowing how to write a device driver. Pulling the carburetor would be equivalent to replacing a video card or a hard drive.
We're talking about more basic skills. Knowing not to click on an attachment is equivalent to knowing not to run a red light. A car is not an appliance, and a certain level of knowledge is required in order to operate one; knowledge of traffic lights, speed limits, stop signs, which side of the road to drive on, etc.
When I hear someone use the lame excuse that they're "not a computer person", I picture someone hopping in their car, careening wildly out of their driveway, driving recklessly across their neighbor's lawn and running over their dog, and then shrugging carelessly as though they'd done nothing wrong, and saying "I'm not a car person".
That is what the automotive industry is about, makeing automobiles accessable to the end users. If we do not help them, then we are self defetting...
The end user wants an appliance. They shouldn't be required to learn about boring technical things such as traffic lights, stop signs, speed limits, and what side of the road to drive on.
It is our jobs to make the vehicles easy to use.
Megacorps are neither all good nor all evil. They are just human institutions that plug along and do their thing. What they do often depends on circumstances and who is running them. Often when they do seemingly "evil" things it's out of stupidity and shortsightedness rather than malice.
Ultimately, a corporation is answerable to its stockholders, so ultimately it is the stockholders
that are running things. And those stockholders are predominantly other corporations, not human beings.
They're not actually evil, per se, but that's in the same sense that a wild animal that's developed a taste for human flesh isn't really evil. To be evil, the animal would have to understand the concept of moral behavior.
When an animal preys on humans, we don't drag it into court and hold a trial; what we do is track down the animal and destroy it. This isn't a punishment for being evil, it's simply a matter of public safety.
The same principle should apply to corporate behavior as well. The biggest mistake we've ever made in this country was when the Supreme Court granted corporations the status of "artificial persons".
Righ... Let's say you get some SPAM from an ISP in Argentina (200.x.x.x) - "oh, let's block the entire/24".
Great idea, now not only you blocked the whole country, but almost the entire South America.
I don't believe the entire South American continent shares a single IP range containing only 254 useable addresses.
What you describe here, 200.x.x.x, is a/8, not a/24. A/24 might be something like 200.47.218.x
I dare say that MOST people in the US do not make their livelyhood as shareholders.
Corporations are accountable to their shareholder. Problem is, those shareholders are predominantly other corporations. Actual flesh-and-blood people are pretty much out of the loop because of this.
They should have been using sun-bloc SPF-10,000,000
Um, the dinosaurs went out 65 mya (million years ago) in the Cretaceous extinction. Dinosaurs first evolved some time after the Permian extinction, which was about 225 mya. The article talks about the Ordovician extinction, 440 mya, which was long before dinosaurs evolved; in fact it wasn not very long after multicellular life first evolved (560 mya).
Then why do I have an appendix? (Or slim body hairs?)
If having an appendix is more harmful than not having one, then there'd be selective pressure that would tend to eliminate it. If having an appendix is beneficial, then selective pressure will tend to retain it.
However, if having an appendix is neither more harmful nor more beneficial than not having one, then there'd be no selective pressure either way. Thus the status quo will tend to be conserved in that respect.
don't point fingers at corporations about how they have no loyalty to the US workforce, and then drive home in your fsckin' Honda or Toyota.
Corporate behavior is a problem, but we're nevertheless dependent on them. The problem is, we created corporations to serve our needs, but they went feral around the time of the Civil War here in the U.S. Since then, corporations have been gaining in power, at the expense of our human population.
We can't simply abolish corporations; we depend on them too much for that to work. What we need to do is re-domesticate them, to take back the political power they've usurped.
One part of that would be to reverse the 1886 Supreme Court decision that granted corporations the status of "artificial persons" with the same constitutional protections as human citizens. It's only one of many steps needed to tame corporations, but it's a critical one. One of the most powerful tools corporations have used throughout the past hundred years to overturn legislation limiting their power is the 15th Amendment, and their use of it depends on their status as legal persons:
Amendment XV (1870)
Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
There have been an astronomical number of court cases over the years where, for example, a small town wanted to block the opening of a McDonald's or a Walmart, to preserve their community's culture, and time after time the local community lost the fight based on charges that such a ban discriminated against the corporation's constitutional rights as a legal person, which amounted to a violation of the 15th Amendment.
Look at an organization as a sort of life form built out of people, just like people are life forms built out of organs and cells, etc.
I'd argue that it's even worse than that; the organization isn't made of people, it's made of a network of jobs. People merely provide the physical and intellectual labor that fuels those jobs.
The collective term for such a network of jobs is "bureaucracy". Just as a living organism is made of flesh and blood, an organization is made of bureaucracy and cash-flow.
Consider that when a person takes a vacation, or retires, or is fired/laid off/hit by a bus, their job functions still exist when they're away. A co-worker or temp fills in for the vacationing employee or a new hire replaces the fired/retired/deceased employee. Such a shift in personnel is a routine business event, not a major traumatic event like a heart transplant.
Consider also what would happen if you managed to convince a CEO of a corporation to make his corporation "act morally" at the expense of profits. More than likely the CEO will be sued by the corporation's shareholders (many of whom are other corporations) or arrested by the SEC for fiscal irresponsibility, and replaced by a new CEO, and you're back to square one. Net result: no change in the corporation's behavior.
And the old CEO in jail gives the new CEO a powerful incentive to focus on the bottom line.
Actually, the ruling against Fox encourages people NOT to release copyrighted material into the public domain.
Nope, that's not right. The way you phrase that suggests that a work becomes public domain through an explicit act, and remains locked up by default in the absence of that act. In reality, the reverse was true: under the rules that applied to the Fox material in question, before the Sonny Bobo extension, an explicit act of re-registration was required to keep it out of the public domain, and Fox neglected to pursue that act.
Since you've obviously missed the "concern" over this whole issue let me help you out in also stating the obvious.
Speaking of stating the obvious, have you ever looked in the dictionary under the word "sarcasm"? Personally, I thought michael's one-line summary accurately conveyed the substance of the article, and that its patent absurdity was obvious enough not to need additional belaboring.
Why would you want to do this unless you were stealing source?
There's a branch of archaeology where researchers reverse-engineer ancient technologies and actually build the tools and techniques in a historically authentic manner. There are many such studies building and testing things like medieval siege engines, ancient Greek warships, Polynesian transoceanic sailboats, stone-age tools and weapons, and Egyptian pyramids. It's one of the most fascinating areas of archaeological research today.
By your logic, these researchers are merely IP thieves.
Alpha particles and other such impacting on a chip, changing zeros to ones or vice versa could alter a nanobot's programming, effectively creating a mutation analogous to biological mutations. This could be a big problem with self-replicating types of nanobots. You don't have room to put in radiation shielding.
Kind of like the way a collision on the highway can randomly mutate your car into a planet-destroying monster?
A damaged nanomachine will simply be broken. It would take a lot of extra effort to add in a capability to mutate and evolve.
A RIAA Official, wearing his dress uniform and goose-stepping, will arrive at the door of any family days after it becomes apparent that a child possesses any musical talent. The child will then be promptly escorted to an officially-sanctioned RIAA retraining facility for indoctrination. This methodology will prevent the production of music by any non-sanctioned source, which could be blamed for hurting profit
Of course, they will provide several choices. The child can sign with the RIAA, or undergo a drug therapy for the rest of their lives that suppresses psi.. er, musical potential. Or they can just go directly to jail.
It's all to protect the public, of course. "The RIAA is Mother, the RIAA is Father".
So do you have a recommendation for OSS and Linux posters, preferably suitable for the general public?
I don't have any specific recommendations for existing posters, but with a little artistic skill, you can always make your own, using a service like cafepress.com. I do that with the logo I created for my LUG; I opened a storefront on cafepress.com, uploaded a large JPEG graphic of my logo, and applied it to stuff like T-shirts, baseball caps, posters, and bumper stickers. Then my members can order the items they want, and cafepress.com handles all the production and shipping details.
If you could give me a link to better info than what I have I'd be interested in exploring the possibility of getting a series 1 dtivo and using that.
It's been a couple of years since I got it all working; here's what I remember. As I recall, the instructions that finally worked for me came from a link off of 9thtee.com, which was where I bought the ethernet card. BTW, I've got a standalone unit, not a DirecTiVo, and I'm not sure if that makes a difference.
Basically I put the TiVo's hard drive in a PC, enabled telnet and installed an ftp server, and then put the drive back in the TiVo. I installed tivoweb, which provides a web interface to the TiVo, and modified its NowShowing module to include the fsid index numbers corresponding to each stream. I installed sendstream and nc binaries on the TiVo, and on my Linux desktop I set up a simple script under xinetd that would accept a connection and then write everything it received as-is to a time-stamped file. To convert these files to mpeg2 on the Linux desktop, I use "tyc", and on the rare occasions where that fails, I use "vsplit" which saves the audio and video as separate files, then I multiplex the two back together.
Once I got the whole thing working by hand, I wrapped it up in a script that I run just before I go to bed, that extracts all the tyStreams overnight. The next day I convert them to mpeg2, rename them to something that identifies them, and save them to a removable IDE drive. I just got a new Mac recently, and now I periodically move a bunch of the mpeg2 files to the Mac to burn onto DVD. Data DVD, not video; transcoding the files and creating video DVDs out of them would take a significant amount of time and effort, too much for me to bother with. YMMV, of course.
I went through an extensive search on google to find the various bits and pieces before I got it all working. You can start with 9thtee.com. Also, it's been a couple years since I did this, so the process is probably more mature and a lot simpler now. I believe there was a story here on slashdot recently about TyStudio - http://dvd-create.sourceforge.net/tystudio - that's supposed to be a lot simpler than what I went through.
Slashdot Mirror
Predicting chaotic systems may be impossible, but often the introduction of a periodic perturbation can reduce the chaos significantly, leading to better predictability.
We know that the universe started with the Big Bang, roughly 13 billion years ago. We know that it took a while for galaxies to form, and that the first stars were mostly hydrogen and helium, with none of the heavier elements to speak of. We know that these first stars cooked up the heavier elements and then spewed them out when they went supernova, and that planets like Earth were formed from these in a later generation of star formation. Carbon, the basic structural component that makes organic life possible, didn't exist in significant quantities until this first generation of stars spewed it out.
Our solar system formed about 4.5 billion years ago. It's well within reason to speculate that Earth formed and developed life fairly close to the earliest possible time that life could have developed in the universe.
The earliest fossil evidence of life on earth dates back to 3.5 billion years, only a few hundred million years after earth cooled enough for solid rock to form, and probably about the time that the temperature of the oceans dropped to around 100 degrees fahrenheit, the temperature at which proteins seem to function best. Life on earth began as single-celled creatures, and remained that way for 3 billion years; it's only within the last 600 million years that multicellular life has existed, and less than 50 thousand years since we first developed intelligence.
The way I see it, single-cell life is probably ubiquitous throughout the universe, but multicellular life may be fairly uncommon, and intelligence even less so. Perhaps we're the first intelligent species to exist; and even if we're not alone, we could easily be the first to reach our current level of technology.
What we know at this point is that we don't see any evidence of other intelligent civilizations doing what we expect to be able to do in the near future. We ask ourselves, "Where is everybody?" But the fact that we see no evidence of anyone more advanced that us doesn't necessarily mean that more advanced folks used to exist and then killed themselves. It's equally plausible to suggest that we could be the first, and that we've got enough smarts to avoid killing ourselves.
This month's Linux Journal had an article about a very nice RAD tool: GladeGen.py. You design your GUI with Glade, and then this script generates a python script to use your GUI. I've been using it for about a week now, and in that time I've written a couple dozen small GUI tools for my users.
There's a page of links from the article at linuxjournal.com.
Right; organizing your photos in nested folders by date is stupid, because iPhoto has a much better scheme for storing them. It just dumps them all into one place and then does some sort of magic to keep track of them. Let's pop into a Terminal window to see if we can understand that magic:
Oh wait; it looks like iPhoto's magic trick is to store the photos in nested folders by date.
I believe he meant that it took one second to write the perl one-liner, and one year to write the C code for a perl interpreter (or subset of same) that would execute that one-liner. In which case he was making precisely the same point you describe as "moot".
He was, after all, responding to the assertion that you could in principle write your own perl interpreter subset in C to implement the same program.
Don't forget that all this code is stolen from corporations like IBM. Billions of dollars of IP were stolen from IBM and given over to Linux. IBM stole that IP from itself and then gave it to Linux.
It's exactly like when my sister bought me a birthday gift at CompUSA, and then stole it from herself and handed it to me at my birthday party. She paid for it, so clearly it's her property, and since it's in my posession now, I'm holding stolen property. This makes me a thief and my sister an accessory to theft.
Sure, it's a transition. It's a transition from existence to nonexistence. Personally, I like existing, and I find it hard to imagine being excited at the prospect of not existing.
They all offer a common response to a common unacceptable fear.
We humans are capable of abstract thought; whereas other animals pretty much dwell only in the eternal present, we find ourselves planning for the future pretty much all the time. We see the people around us age and then die, and with our power of abstract thought, we recognize that we are also at risk of dying in this manner.
Perhaps the most important function of abstract thought is to anticipate danger in order to avoid it. We anticipate the possibility of death by being hit by a bus, and avoid it by looking both ways before crossing the street. We anticipate death by pneumonia, so we dress in warm, dry clothing in the winter. We anticipate death by poisoning, so we throw away that tainted meat instead of eating it. We anticipate death by old age, so we seek a way to avoid it, and we're driven to the brink of insanity when we realize we can't find a way to avoid it.
One of the common ways of coping with a problem is to pretend it doesn't exist. Psychiatrists refer to this as "denial", and it's considered an unhealthy delusional state.
Developing an internally consistent set of delusions takes a lot of time and effort; it's a lot simpler to borrow a set from someone else, and sharing a common set of delusions also provides a sense of community and an external affirmation of the delusions. Gather together a large enough community sharing their delusions, and you can start to call that community an "organized religion".
As for the notion that aging and death are "natural", sure, that's true. They're as natural as smallpox and bubonic plague.
You say that as if it were only a minor concern, as if the notion that the data could fall into the wrong hands is farfetched. That's kind of like saying not to worry about poisonous cleaners under the kitchen sink, because it's only a problem if the baby is curious and tries to taste them.
I guess this illustrates how far we've fallen. I seem to recall, from reading Alexis de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America" (published in 1835) long ago in college, that citizens could sue public officials freely, and that this was considered one of the fundamental checks on abuse of governmental power that characterized American democracy.
Understanding the car's architecture would be equivalent to knowing how to write a device driver. Pulling the carburetor would be equivalent to replacing a video card or a hard drive.
We're talking about more basic skills. Knowing not to click on an attachment is equivalent to knowing not to run a red light. A car is not an appliance, and a certain level of knowledge is required in order to operate one; knowledge of traffic lights, speed limits, stop signs, which side of the road to drive on, etc.
When I hear someone use the lame excuse that they're "not a computer person", I picture someone hopping in their car, careening wildly out of their driveway, driving recklessly across their neighbor's lawn and running over their dog, and then shrugging carelessly as though they'd done nothing wrong, and saying "I'm not a car person".
That is what the automotive industry is about, makeing automobiles accessable to the end users. If we do not help them, then we are self defetting...
The end user wants an appliance. They shouldn't be required to learn about boring technical things such as traffic lights, stop signs, speed limits, and what side of the road to drive on. It is our jobs to make the vehicles easy to use.
Ultimately, a corporation is answerable to its stockholders, so ultimately it is the stockholders that are running things. And those stockholders are predominantly other corporations, not human beings.
They're not actually evil, per se, but that's in the same sense that a wild animal that's developed a taste for human flesh isn't really evil. To be evil, the animal would have to understand the concept of moral behavior.
When an animal preys on humans, we don't drag it into court and hold a trial; what we do is track down the animal and destroy it. This isn't a punishment for being evil, it's simply a matter of public safety.
The same principle should apply to corporate behavior as well. The biggest mistake we've ever made in this country was when the Supreme Court granted corporations the status of "artificial persons".
I don't believe the entire South American continent shares a single IP range containing only 254 useable addresses.
What you describe here, 200.x.x.x, is a /8, not a /24. A /24 might be something like 200.47.218.x
Corporations are accountable to their shareholder. Problem is, those shareholders are predominantly other corporations. Actual flesh-and-blood people are pretty much out of the loop because of this.
Um, the dinosaurs went out 65 mya (million years ago) in the Cretaceous extinction. Dinosaurs first evolved some time after the Permian extinction, which was about 225 mya. The article talks about the Ordovician extinction, 440 mya, which was long before dinosaurs evolved; in fact it wasn not very long after multicellular life first evolved (560 mya).
If having an appendix is more harmful than not having one, then there'd be selective pressure that would tend to eliminate it. If having an appendix is beneficial, then selective pressure will tend to retain it.
However, if having an appendix is neither more harmful nor more beneficial than not having one, then there'd be no selective pressure either way. Thus the status quo will tend to be conserved in that respect.
Corporate behavior is a problem, but we're nevertheless dependent on them. The problem is, we created corporations to serve our needs, but they went feral around the time of the Civil War here in the U.S. Since then, corporations have been gaining in power, at the expense of our human population.
We can't simply abolish corporations; we depend on them too much for that to work. What we need to do is re-domesticate them, to take back the political power they've usurped.
One part of that would be to reverse the 1886 Supreme Court decision that granted corporations the status of "artificial persons" with the same constitutional protections as human citizens. It's only one of many steps needed to tame corporations, but it's a critical one. One of the most powerful tools corporations have used throughout the past hundred years to overturn legislation limiting their power is the 15th Amendment, and their use of it depends on their status as legal persons:
There have been an astronomical number of court cases over the years where, for example, a small town wanted to block the opening of a McDonald's or a Walmart, to preserve their community's culture, and time after time the local community lost the fight based on charges that such a ban discriminated against the corporation's constitutional rights as a legal person, which amounted to a violation of the 15th Amendment.
I'd argue that it's even worse than that; the organization isn't made of people, it's made of a network of jobs. People merely provide the physical and intellectual labor that fuels those jobs.
The collective term for such a network of jobs is "bureaucracy". Just as a living organism is made of flesh and blood, an organization is made of bureaucracy and cash-flow.
Consider that when a person takes a vacation, or retires, or is fired/laid off/hit by a bus, their job functions still exist when they're away. A co-worker or temp fills in for the vacationing employee or a new hire replaces the fired/retired/deceased employee. Such a shift in personnel is a routine business event, not a major traumatic event like a heart transplant.
Consider also what would happen if you managed to convince a CEO of a corporation to make his corporation "act morally" at the expense of profits. More than likely the CEO will be sued by the corporation's shareholders (many of whom are other corporations) or arrested by the SEC for fiscal irresponsibility, and replaced by a new CEO, and you're back to square one. Net result: no change in the corporation's behavior.
And the old CEO in jail gives the new CEO a powerful incentive to focus on the bottom line.Actually, the ruling against Fox encourages people NOT to release copyrighted material into the public domain.
Nope, that's not right. The way you phrase that suggests that a work becomes public domain through an explicit act, and remains locked up by default in the absence of that act. In reality, the reverse was true: under the rules that applied to the Fox material in question, before the Sonny Bobo extension, an explicit act of re-registration was required to keep it out of the public domain, and Fox neglected to pursue that act.
Speaking of stating the obvious, have you ever looked in the dictionary under the word "sarcasm"? Personally, I thought michael's one-line summary accurately conveyed the substance of the article, and that its patent absurdity was obvious enough not to need additional belaboring.
There's a branch of archaeology where researchers reverse-engineer ancient technologies and actually build the tools and techniques in a historically authentic manner. There are many such studies building and testing things like medieval siege engines, ancient Greek warships, Polynesian transoceanic sailboats, stone-age tools and weapons, and Egyptian pyramids. It's one of the most fascinating areas of archaeological research today.
By your logic, these researchers are merely IP thieves.
Kind of like the way a collision on the highway can randomly mutate your car into a planet-destroying monster?
A damaged nanomachine will simply be broken. It would take a lot of extra effort to add in a capability to mutate and evolve.
Of course, they will provide several choices. The child can sign with the RIAA, or undergo a drug therapy for the rest of their lives that suppresses psi.. er, musical potential. Or they can just go directly to jail.
It's all to protect the public, of course. "The RIAA is Mother, the RIAA is Father".
I don't have any specific recommendations for existing posters, but with a little artistic skill, you can always make your own, using a service like cafepress.com. I do that with the logo I created for my LUG; I opened a storefront on cafepress.com, uploaded a large JPEG graphic of my logo, and applied it to stuff like T-shirts, baseball caps, posters, and bumper stickers. Then my members can order the items they want, and cafepress.com handles all the production and shipping details.
It's been a couple of years since I got it all working; here's what I remember. As I recall, the instructions that finally worked for me came from a link off of 9thtee.com, which was where I bought the ethernet card. BTW, I've got a standalone unit, not a DirecTiVo, and I'm not sure if that makes a difference.
Basically I put the TiVo's hard drive in a PC, enabled telnet and installed an ftp server, and then put the drive back in the TiVo. I installed tivoweb, which provides a web interface to the TiVo, and modified its NowShowing module to include the fsid index numbers corresponding to each stream. I installed sendstream and nc binaries on the TiVo, and on my Linux desktop I set up a simple script under xinetd that would accept a connection and then write everything it received as-is to a time-stamped file. To convert these files to mpeg2 on the Linux desktop, I use "tyc", and on the rare occasions where that fails, I use "vsplit" which saves the audio and video as separate files, then I multiplex the two back together.
Once I got the whole thing working by hand, I wrapped it up in a script that I run just before I go to bed, that extracts all the tyStreams overnight. The next day I convert them to mpeg2, rename them to something that identifies them, and save them to a removable IDE drive. I just got a new Mac recently, and now I periodically move a bunch of the mpeg2 files to the Mac to burn onto DVD. Data DVD, not video; transcoding the files and creating video DVDs out of them would take a significant amount of time and effort, too much for me to bother with. YMMV, of course.
I went through an extensive search on google to find the various bits and pieces before I got it all working. You can start with 9thtee.com. Also, it's been a couple years since I did this, so the process is probably more mature and a lot simpler now. I believe there was a story here on slashdot recently about TyStudio - http://dvd-create.sourceforge.net/tystudio - that's supposed to be a lot simpler than what I went through.