I've been roasting my own coffee for about a year now. Sweet Maria's sells a variety of excellent single sourced green coffee beans in the vicinity of $6/lb by the time you add in shipping. This works out to about the same as consumer grade roasted whole bean coffee (I like Peets) when you figure you lose about 15% of the mass in the roasting process.
I still haven't purchased a roasting machine. I use a Look brand skillet - heavy alumininum clad base for even high temps and a clear lid. I used to use a thermometer to measure the internal temp - now I pretty much know what setting my stove should be on to preheat the pan and just throw the beans in and shake vigorously for 5 minutes or so, then toss in a colander for a minute to cool and de-chaff. I definitely can appreciate the level of coffee I'm getting even with a crude roasting process - drinking fresh stuff is no comparison to month old pre-ground starbucks from somebody's freezer...
The other thing I insist on is brewing just enough. I have a Swiss Gold (~$10) single cup drip filter and now an Aeropress ($25 on amazon.com). Both methods make excellent coffee in small batches - I make up to 4 cups with the Aeropress and put it in my Nissan thermos. This is almost infinitely superior to most office coffee that is made in a cheap drip pot and left to cook for hours! This (to my taste buds and stomach) always leaves an acidic feel to the coffee, even if originally it was pretty good.
The kind of cool thing about coffee (for geeks) is that it's very susceptible to tinkering. Use a pour through drip filter or a chemex and you can precisely monitor the water temp. Roast yourself and learn to tell by smell and color what degree of roast you're getting (and follow instructions on Sweet Maria's site to use an old popcorn popper as your roaster). All this is fun, doesn't cost ridiculous amounts of money, and results in discernibly better coffee (I always get lots of compliments on mine at least...)
In the 1990s Linus Torvalds used to give a talk called World Domination 101 on the early steps he believed Linux would need to take to achieve "world domination -- fast" [1]. We've made a lot of progress since then...
Suffice it to say that capping on ESR w/o reading the (lengthy, well cited and well written) article is what strikes me as sophomoric...
Damned Christianists - trying to impinge on our right here in the US to free self expression and sexual freedom. Whatever happened to tolera... What? Oh, in China you say. I guess it's their culture and they have a right to do as they please...
Stephen Rissing seems to think this couldn't possibly be a random occurence because the probability is too high. Is he detecting an intelligent design in this mutation of the Federal Grant Code?
Ummm, no. Tim Lee is a big proponent of school choice. About ID he says (and I quote) "for the record, I think the theory of intelligent design is nonsense". Funnily enough, I have exactly the same reaction as you: after reading Stoller's attempt at a hatchet job of a technology commentator I have appreciated for quite some time, I thought "I knew I was on the correct side on this issue!"
OT, but if you can ping it, you can probably log in (I keep putty.exe on the desktop of the wife's windows box just for this purpose). Kill the X11 process (probably what's crashed) and spare yourself the reboot...
One nice thing about PEAR is that it's just a collection of.php files. My handrolled CMS has a few unusual PEAR requirements so I never bother trying to use a shared hosting setup's PEAR environment. I just create a directory in the documentroot and upload the/pear/PEAR directory from my box at home. Set the include path (via php.ini,.htaccess, or least preferably in.php file itself) and all the PEAR includes work...
Sure it's the same guy? This guy's "About Me" page says he's taking Dreamweaver/Flash classes at night, etc. Same name, but I don't get the corporate CEO vibe from this freehomepage.com site...
Aaargh. So they're using a weird plugin (bad) but the plugin is written in Java (good) but the plugin only works on Windows (bad again). Why would you make people download a plugin (and maybe a jre) but then forgo the alleged chief benefit of Java? (Write once, run almost anywhere)... If they wanted windows only with drm, why not just use Windows Media and active-x?
You are correct about the official executions. Unofficially, however, Cuban policy has been to use lethal force to stop escapees. See the 13 de Marzo massacre for instance, in which Cuban coast guard sunk a fleeing tug (killing 41) or note the Clinton administrations's formal protest in '93 of the cuban practice of shooting swimmers in Guantanamo bay...
Even if not executed, being jailed in Castro's Cuba is not exactly a joyride. Amnesty International's annual reports (http://www.amnestyusa.org/countries/cuba/index.do) consistently find evidence of torture of political prisoners (most commonly beating, burning with a cigarette, etc) and bad jail conditions (5x5x5 cells, no medical treatment, no sanitary facilities, etc) resulting in the occasional death of prisoners of Conscience. Since the 2004 crackdown, it doesn't seem that you have to be very vocal to be imprisoned under the vague anti "disprespect" or "Propaganda" statutes...
Fidel may not be responsible for all the ills of Cuban society. But he is responsible for the political system's consistent oppression of the cuban people. I'm not here to defend the embargo, but I certainly don't have any affection for bully and won't waste any time trying to figure out what percentage of the oppression is his fault. Cuba Libre... But it won't happen under Castro (Fidel or Raoul).
You know, there is at least one other possible explanation for the increase in malnutrition. The pdf you link to from the UN has Cuba's proportion of undernourished going from 3% to 19% in measured period 1990-92 and 95-97. Could the increase have anything to do with Cuba's patron state (USSR) collapsing at the end of 91?
Doesn't really matter to me. I don't like the embargo, I actually think Cuba is small and close enough to be liberated through trade and contact rather than sanctions. I would like nothing better, in fact, than to see thousands of americans go to cuba and pass out books, radios, dollars, etc to the black underclass of Cuba. This would probably piss off (and weaken) Castro more than the sanctions.
It gets to the real problem I have with Cuba, however, which is that it is a totalitarian state. Ok, Cuba has free health care (though the health care offered to non-privileged (ie black and not politically connected) is not the sort of health care you or I would want. See the pics at http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/00 4070.php). In Cuba, however, you can be arrested for having a n opinion, imprisoned for being homosexual, and executed because you wish to escape.
You said "If they weren't anti-castro/anti-communist, they wouldn't have fled to the US". That seems to imply that people came here because they didn't like Castro. Sort of. People had to flee because they would be killed! That's like saying (notice how I am carefully avoiding Godwin's law) that you shouldn't take East German refugees seriously because they only left because they didn't like the government. Fleeing to avoid the execution of your family strikes me as a pretty reasonable motive for carrying a grudge. That may be selection bias, but the selecting is being done by castro.
I'm glad that you enjoy the freedom to travel. Now wouldn't it be nice if instead of being smug abut the US embargo of Cuba you were outraged at Cuba making it a sometimes Capital crime to try to escape to freedom... Yeah, the people there are doing quite well, which is why some of them risk their lives to float to the US.
I'm not so sure of this. The marginal price/kwhr might be 0 *IF* the maintenance/repair/replacement costs were also zero, but that seems unlikely.
You can't ignore the time factor either. I wish I knew enough economics to verbalize this clearly, but obviously there is an opportunity cost to committing a lump sum. Think of alternative energy as an investment. Imagine that if I spend $10,000 on an alternative energy source for my house, in 10 years it will pay for itself through lowered utility costs. Pretty good deal, right? (Especially since everything after 10 years is free money). But If I invested 10k in a 3% savings account compounding annually I'd have something to the tune of $13.5K after ten years. Time matters!
I would be very interested in finding out how estimates of cost/kilowatt hour are generated. It seems almost a TCO type of calculation (initial costs, plus maintenance costs per unit of time, etc etc)...
I like this trend of using orchestra instruments as exclamatory phrases...(I was trying to think of a funny way of calling attention to the spelling of "voila", and bassoon, I realised it wasn't a typo after all.) Timpani!
I don't want to get all pedantic about this... but explain to me how "once such a comparison is made in a thread the thread is over" has nothing to do with ending the argument...
I know I'm wasting my time responding about something off topic that I don't really care about. It's just that you are doing the thing that irritates me most: denying facts in the face of prima facie evidence. It's like arguing with someone on a clear day (Boy the sky sure is blue! No it isn't. Uhhh, yes it is.) You may be right that Godwin's law isn't supposed to end arguments, just tally score. But you said that a specific definition doesn't say anything about ending the argument (it does) and when the appropriate passage from the definition was quoted it doesn't faze you at all. RTFA.
Does too! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law:
There is a tradition in many Usenet newsgroups that once such a comparison is made in a thread the thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress.... Godwin's Law thus practically guarantees the existence of an upper bound on thread length in those groups. Many people understand Godwin's Law to mean this, although (as is clear from the statement of the law above) this is not the original formulation.
No no no! This is the way that some corporations want you to understand the debate about the DMCA, but it is ignoring the history of contracts and copyright have historically worked.
Do you really think that DVD publishers should be able to put arbitrary restrictions on the use of media that you purchase from them? What if your DVD label said that only one person at a time is allowed to watch the movie on the DVD? What if the federal Gov. passed a law that not only allowed "content providers" to make such restrictions as a part of contracts but would make it a felony to in any way circumvent the contract...
This is essentially what is happening right now with the DMCA: historically *fair uses* (time shifting, copying for purpose of backup, converting to a different format, etc etc) are being disallowed through technological means and the government is applying its muscle to lend the threat of criminal prosecution to prevent such uses. Rights you have always had are being taken away from you with a clever confluence of technology and law and you seem to think that's ok.
Note that the GPL is in a completely different position: it grants you rights to someone else's Intellectual Property (rights that you do not normally have) if you will respect certain restrictions. If you don't like the restrictions, you still have all the same rights any normal person has!
The concept of Fair Use has been valuable to prevent tyranny and keep people from making unreasonable demands (really, if you do not accept any limit to what someone may demand "Contractually" as part of purchasing mass commercial goods, where might it end? Imagine a world in which you commit a felony by whistling a pop tune, in which you could go to jail for speculating with a friend about what algorithm a piece of software uses, or where the full weight of governmental wrath can be brought down on your neck if you are watching a DVD and someone else walks into the room...)
I must admit that my understanding of these issues is quite limited. IANAL. But listening to Lessig's description of these issues (hear it at http://randomfoo.net/oscon/2002/lessig/free.html) has almost radicalized this conservative/libertarian... This is important stuff that will touch our livelihood and it is important that we (Geeks, technology and digital enthusiasts generally) get these issues right!
Re:Independents need to hit Netflix quickly
on
Robot Stories Movie
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· Score: 1
I just noticed the indie flick Nothing So Strange yesterday. Besides the obvious Geek appeal (cmon! it's about the investigation and coverup of the assassination of Bill Gates in 1999. Seriously.) the distributors chose to release to the theatres, DVD, and also to allow a hi-res and lo-res quicktime download over the net via bitpass.
Anybody out there use bitpass? I was going to buy the small version ($3) but saw I'd have to create a bitpass account and I didn't do it. Plus, while it doesn't say, I'm afraid the quicktime files have some sort of drm. Still, at least the effort is being made to distribute via the net. I agree with you tho: we need itunes for movies. I suppose the drm are unavoidable, but it would be nice to logon to a central place and peruse indie films I might never hear of otherwise...
Everybody is capping on the steaming pile of dung that is the "free as in free to nag you" version of RealPlayer 9. I am attempting to keep an open mind: perhaps Real has reformed its ways, perhaps it sees the light of open access, open standards, and open source.
And so I am downloading the helix client and in order to do so I must agree to two separate licenses with literally something like 6-8 pages of terms and conditions. Who would actually read all this? What does it mean? Wouldn't it just have been simpler to put AYBABTU and be done with it?
Dude! Ever heard of "Letters from a Birmingham Jail?" One of the great pieces of american writing! I'll be mightily disappointed if my english lit. teacher lied and it was actually composed from a Motel 6...
Even more misreading going on... In fact I can only surmise that mhrivnak deliberately spun the press release. He says (and I quote) that "They explain why Linux is a 'monopoly,' how this policy is 'socialist' and why 'The old Soviet Union could not have done this any better.'"
I call bullshit. I have no idea about CAGW's politics or whether they are a bought and paid for pawn of M$, but their press release says that it is mandating open source that is the monopoly, not that linux itself is a monopoly. And they are right... (There may be arguments that this is a Good Thing! but it is still a policy of non-competition.) In addition they are clearly calling the policy socialistic, not Linux (as the posting notes, to be fair) but with all the FUD fiaSCO has been spewing about Linux being communistic, I would wager that many readers (along with myself) saw the ref. and assumed it was Linux again being defamed...RTFA people!
The problem is that spammers have a significant financial motivation to act in the ways that they do.
Spam fighters, on the other hand, are fighting back and providing services mostly out of the goodness of their hearts. (Check me if I'm wrong, but i've never seen an article on the lavish lifestyles built by opposing spam.) This means that unless we can come up with an *unbreakable* technological solution the spammers will always win the war: they have a financial motivation to fight harder than we do.
The solutions I've heard proposed sound more like problems than solutions: central governing bodies, a regulated internet, pay-per-email, etc all make my crypto-libertarian instincts nervous. If we don't want our commons taken away, we have to defend it ourselves!
So how can we win against an enemy with superior motivation? We need to take away their motivation! We can't ever win by fighting the spammers, so lets start fighting the people funding them!
We need to (legally) DOS the resources of those who are benefitting from spam. This is going to require maturity and restraint in the heat of battle, but if we attack the wrong people, we will be no better than the spammers. Let me propose the following:
Someone of stature in the community (maybe not a first tier personality like ESR, but someone who commands unquestioned respect) must be the figurehead for this. In addition there will have to be actual real human intervention by members of the service to verify targets and avoid friendly fire.
Through conventional resources we identify single beneficiaries of mass quantities of spam who have an exposed point of contact: for example I currently have spam in my folder that wants me to buy the drug vicodin and provides a url. If it can be verified that this spam is widespread (ie really is spam) and that the resource in question really belongs to the person behind the spam (ie really does link to cheesy mail-order drug store) then
Our anti-spam service distributes the url of the target and everyone subscribing to the service attempts to view the page (command line recursive wget would be appropriate I suspect).
The target of the attack is now rendered unusable.
Benefits and prerequisites...
Speed is of the essence. Attack must respond to take down target before any profit is made. Scale is important as well. Volume of traffic must decimate servers even on fat pipes (or at least cause high bandwidth $$$ usage). It might even be possible to DOS 1-800 numbers if every subscriber was willing to place a call and complain.
Would all this be illegal? Certainly as a whole the intent is to DOS the target and therefore is illegal. I could even imagine RICO coming into play (this is after all an organized conspiracy to commit a crime). However the actions of those subscribing to the service are not illegal (IANAL, someone else comment). After all, I (as subscriber) am just saving a highly recommended commercial resource for later perusal!:) This is where it is key to have high profile trusted and respected figurehead. If Joe Blow organises this on his dsl line, his access gets cut off and the feds disapprove. If an innocent party is wronged than he probably goes to jail. If, on the other hand, ESR organises it, public opinion on the net will massively oppose federal pressure against him and commercial pressure (ie his access being cut off) is much less likely.
I realise that there is lots of hand waving going on here. But I firmly feel that this may be an instance to fight fire with fire, fight outlaws with vigilante justice, etc. We need to claim our space for our productive use and not for other's pollution and decimation. Fighting spammers directly is like "fighting terrorism". Attacking those who provide the incentive is like taking the battle to host countries of terrorism; a much more likely strategy.
Excellent discussion of this idea on den beste's blog. More indepth than your average slashdot commentary (pretty graphs and everything)...
Summing it up, there seem to be all sort of issues (that i mostly don't understand) about letting large quantities of people spin the dials backwards...
Remember, binaryhead asked for book ideas. You may or may not agree with Rand, but Atlas Shrugged is still pretty good reading (aside from the 60 page John Galt monologue at the end). On the other hand I've never been able to read Kant. Study, yes, read no.
Slashdot Mirror
My 2 cents -
I've been roasting my own coffee for about a year now. Sweet Maria's sells a variety of excellent single sourced green coffee beans in the vicinity of $6/lb by the time you add in shipping. This works out to about the same as consumer grade roasted whole bean coffee (I like Peets) when you figure you lose about 15% of the mass in the roasting process.
I still haven't purchased a roasting machine. I use a Look brand skillet - heavy alumininum clad base for even high temps and a clear lid. I used to use a thermometer to measure the internal temp - now I pretty much know what setting my stove should be on to preheat the pan and just throw the beans in and shake vigorously for 5 minutes or so, then toss in a colander for a minute to cool and de-chaff. I definitely can appreciate the level of coffee I'm getting even with a crude roasting process - drinking fresh stuff is no comparison to month old pre-ground starbucks from somebody's freezer...
The other thing I insist on is brewing just enough. I have a Swiss Gold (~$10) single cup drip filter and now an Aeropress ($25 on amazon.com). Both methods make excellent coffee in small batches - I make up to 4 cups with the Aeropress and put it in my Nissan thermos. This is almost infinitely superior to most office coffee that is made in a cheap drip pot and left to cook for hours! This (to my taste buds and stomach) always leaves an acidic feel to the coffee, even if originally it was pretty good.
The kind of cool thing about coffee (for geeks) is that it's very susceptible to tinkering. Use a pour through drip filter or a chemex and you can precisely monitor the water temp. Roast yourself and learn to tell by smell and color what degree of roast you're getting (and follow instructions on Sweet Maria's site to use an old popcorn popper as your roaster). All this is fun, doesn't cost ridiculous amounts of money, and results in discernibly better coffee (I always get lots of compliments on mine at least...)
RTFA! From the first paragraph:
Suffice it to say that capping on ESR w/o reading the (lengthy, well cited and well written) article is what strikes me as sophomoric...
Damned Christianists - trying to impinge on our right here in the US to free self expression and sexual freedom. Whatever happened to tolera... What? Oh, in China you say. I guess it's their culture and they have a right to do as they please...
Stephen Rissing seems to think this couldn't possibly be a random occurence because the probability is too high. Is he detecting an intelligent design in this mutation of the Federal Grant Code?
Ummm, no. Tim Lee is a big proponent of school choice. About ID he says (and I quote) "for the record, I think the theory of intelligent design is nonsense". Funnily enough, I have exactly the same reaction as you: after reading Stoller's attempt at a hatchet job of a technology commentator I have appreciated for quite some time, I thought "I knew I was on the correct side on this issue!"
OT, but if you can ping it, you can probably log in (I keep putty.exe on the desktop of the wife's windows box just for this purpose). Kill the X11 process (probably what's crashed) and spare yourself the reboot...
One nice thing about PEAR is that it's just a collection of .php files. My handrolled CMS has a few unusual PEAR requirements so I never bother trying to use a shared hosting setup's PEAR environment. I just create a directory in the documentroot and upload the /pear/PEAR directory from my box at home. Set the include path (via php.ini, .htaccess, or least preferably in .php file itself) and all the PEAR includes work...
Sure it's the same guy? This guy's "About Me" page says he's taking Dreamweaver/Flash classes at night, etc. Same name, but I don't get the corporate CEO vibe from this freehomepage.com site...
Aaargh. So they're using a weird plugin (bad) but the plugin is written in Java (good) but the plugin only works on Windows (bad again). Why would you make people download a plugin (and maybe a jre) but then forgo the alleged chief benefit of Java? (Write once, run almost anywhere)... If they wanted windows only with drm, why not just use Windows Media and active-x?
I am anxiously waiting the release of the 770 and would like to buy a dev preview my self!
t ml
Anyways, the open source ui effort is called Maemo and you can download the dev platform and check out contribution options at http://www.maemo.org/community/getting-involved.h
You are correct about the official executions. Unofficially, however, Cuban policy has been to use lethal force to stop escapees. See the 13 de Marzo massacre for instance, in which Cuban coast guard sunk a fleeing tug (killing 41) or note the Clinton administrations's formal protest in '93 of the cuban practice of shooting swimmers in Guantanamo bay...
o ) consistently find evidence of torture of political prisoners (most commonly beating, burning with a cigarette, etc) and bad jail conditions (5x5x5 cells, no medical treatment, no sanitary facilities, etc) resulting in the occasional death of prisoners of Conscience. Since the 2004 crackdown, it doesn't seem that you have to be very vocal to be imprisoned under the vague anti "disprespect" or "Propaganda" statutes...
Even if not executed, being jailed in Castro's Cuba is not exactly a joyride. Amnesty International's annual reports (http://www.amnestyusa.org/countries/cuba/index.d
Fidel may not be responsible for all the ills of Cuban society. But he is responsible for the political system's consistent oppression of the cuban people. I'm not here to defend the embargo, but I certainly don't have any affection for bully and won't waste any time trying to figure out what percentage of the oppression is his fault. Cuba Libre... But it won't happen under Castro (Fidel or Raoul).
You know, there is at least one other possible explanation for the increase in malnutrition. The pdf you link to from the UN has Cuba's proportion of undernourished going from 3% to 19% in measured period 1990-92 and 95-97. Could the increase have anything to do with Cuba's patron state (USSR) collapsing at the end of 91?
0 4070.php).
Doesn't really matter to me. I don't like the embargo, I actually think Cuba is small and close enough to be liberated through trade and contact rather than sanctions. I would like nothing better, in fact, than to see thousands of americans go to cuba and pass out books, radios, dollars, etc to the black underclass of Cuba. This would probably piss off (and weaken) Castro more than the sanctions.
It gets to the real problem I have with Cuba, however, which is that it is a totalitarian state. Ok, Cuba has free health care (though the health care offered to non-privileged (ie black and not politically connected) is not the sort of health care you or I would want. See the pics at http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/0
In Cuba, however, you can be arrested for having a n opinion, imprisoned for being homosexual, and executed because you wish to escape.
You said "If they weren't anti-castro/anti-communist, they wouldn't have fled to the US". That seems to imply that people came here because they didn't like Castro. Sort of. People had to flee because they would be killed! That's like saying (notice how I am carefully avoiding Godwin's law) that you shouldn't take East German refugees seriously because they only left because they didn't like the government. Fleeing to avoid the execution of your family strikes me as a pretty reasonable motive for carrying a grudge. That may be selection bias, but the selecting is being done by castro.
I'm glad that you enjoy the freedom to travel. Now wouldn't it be nice if instead of being smug abut the US embargo of Cuba you were outraged at Cuba making it a sometimes Capital crime to try to escape to freedom... Yeah, the people there are doing quite well, which is why some of them risk their lives to float to the US.
I'm not so sure of this. The marginal price/kwhr might be 0 *IF* the maintenance/repair/replacement costs were also zero, but that seems unlikely.
You can't ignore the time factor either. I wish I knew enough economics to verbalize this clearly, but obviously there is an opportunity cost to committing a lump sum. Think of alternative energy as an investment. Imagine that if I spend $10,000 on an alternative energy source for my house, in 10 years it will pay for itself through lowered utility costs. Pretty good deal, right? (Especially since everything after 10 years is free money). But If I invested 10k in a 3% savings account compounding annually I'd have something to the tune of $13.5K after ten years. Time matters!
I would be very interested in finding out how estimates of cost/kilowatt hour are generated. It seems almost a TCO type of calculation (initial costs, plus maintenance costs per unit of time, etc etc)...
I like this trend of using orchestra instruments as exclamatory phrases...(I was trying to think of a funny way of calling attention to the spelling of "voila", and bassoon, I realised it wasn't a typo after all.) Timpani!
I don't want to get all pedantic about this... but explain to me how "once such a comparison is made in a thread the thread is over" has nothing to do with ending the argument...
I know I'm wasting my time responding about something off topic that I don't really care about. It's just that you are doing the thing that irritates me most: denying facts in the face of prima facie evidence. It's like arguing with someone on a clear day (Boy the sky sure is blue! No it isn't. Uhhh, yes it is.) You may be right that Godwin's law isn't supposed to end arguments, just tally score. But you said that a specific definition doesn't say anything about ending the argument (it does) and when the appropriate passage from the definition was quoted it doesn't faze you at all. RTFA.
No no no! This is the way that some corporations want you to understand the debate about the DMCA, but it is ignoring the history of contracts and copyright have historically worked.
Do you really think that DVD publishers should be able to put arbitrary restrictions on the use of media that you purchase from them? What if your DVD label said that only one person at a time is allowed to watch the movie on the DVD? What if the federal Gov. passed a law that not only allowed "content providers" to make such restrictions as a part of contracts but would make it a felony to in any way circumvent the contract...
This is essentially what is happening right now with the DMCA: historically *fair uses* (time shifting, copying for purpose of backup, converting to a different format, etc etc) are being disallowed through technological means and the government is applying its muscle to lend the threat of criminal prosecution to prevent such uses. Rights you have always had are being taken away from you with a clever confluence of technology and law and you seem to think that's ok.
Note that the GPL is in a completely different position: it grants you rights to someone else's Intellectual Property (rights that you do not normally have) if you will respect certain restrictions. If you don't like the restrictions, you still have all the same rights any normal person has!
The concept of Fair Use has been valuable to prevent tyranny and keep people from making unreasonable demands (really, if you do not accept any limit to what someone may demand "Contractually" as part of purchasing mass commercial goods, where might it end? Imagine a world in which you commit a felony by whistling a pop tune, in which you could go to jail for speculating with a friend about what algorithm a piece of software uses, or where the full weight of governmental wrath can be brought down on your neck if you are watching a DVD and someone else walks into the room...)
I must admit that my understanding of these issues is quite limited. IANAL. But listening to Lessig's description of these issues (hear it at http://randomfoo.net/oscon/2002/lessig/free.html) has almost radicalized this conservative/libertarian... This is important stuff that will touch our livelihood and it is important that we (Geeks, technology and digital enthusiasts generally) get these issues right!
I just noticed the indie flick Nothing So Strange yesterday. Besides the obvious Geek appeal (cmon! it's about the investigation and coverup of the assassination of Bill Gates in 1999. Seriously.) the distributors chose to release to the theatres, DVD, and also to allow a hi-res and lo-res quicktime download over the net via bitpass.
Anybody out there use bitpass? I was going to buy the small version ($3) but saw I'd have to create a bitpass account and I didn't do it. Plus, while it doesn't say, I'm afraid the quicktime files have some sort of drm. Still, at least the effort is being made to distribute via the net. I agree with you tho: we need itunes for movies. I suppose the drm are unavoidable, but it would be nice to logon to a central place and peruse indie films I might never hear of otherwise...
Everybody is capping on the steaming pile of dung that is the "free as in free to nag you" version of RealPlayer 9. I am attempting to keep an open mind: perhaps Real has reformed its ways, perhaps it sees the light of open access, open standards, and open source.
And so I am downloading the helix client and in order to do so I must agree to two separate licenses with literally something like 6-8 pages of terms and conditions. Who would actually read all this? What does it mean? Wouldn't it just have been simpler to put AYBABTU and be done with it?
Sure doesn't reassure me...
Dude! Ever heard of "Letters from a Birmingham Jail?" One of the great pieces of american writing! I'll be mightily disappointed if my english lit. teacher lied and it was actually composed from a Motel 6...
Even more misreading going on... In fact I can only surmise that mhrivnak deliberately spun the press release. He says (and I quote) that "They explain why Linux is a 'monopoly,' how this policy is 'socialist' and why 'The old Soviet Union could not have done this any better.'"
I call bullshit. I have no idea about CAGW's politics or whether they are a bought and paid for pawn of M$, but their press release says that it is mandating open source that is the monopoly, not that linux itself is a monopoly. And they are right... (There may be arguments that this is a Good Thing! but it is still a policy of non-competition.) In addition they are clearly calling the policy socialistic, not Linux (as the posting notes, to be fair) but with all the FUD fiaSCO has been spewing about Linux being communistic, I would wager that many readers (along with myself) saw the ref. and assumed it was Linux again being defamed...RTFA people!
The only solution is all out war!
The problem is that spammers have a significant financial motivation to act in the ways that they do.
Spam fighters, on the other hand, are fighting back and providing services mostly out of the goodness of their hearts. (Check me if I'm wrong, but i've never seen an article on the lavish lifestyles built by opposing spam.) This means that unless we can come up with an *unbreakable* technological solution the spammers will always win the war: they have a financial motivation to fight harder than we do.
The solutions I've heard proposed sound more like problems than solutions: central governing bodies, a regulated internet, pay-per-email, etc all make my crypto-libertarian instincts nervous. If we don't want our commons taken away, we have to defend it ourselves!
So how can we win against an enemy with superior motivation? We need to take away their motivation! We can't ever win by fighting the spammers, so lets start fighting the people funding them!
We need to (legally) DOS the resources of those who are benefitting from spam. This is going to require maturity and restraint in the heat of battle, but if we attack the wrong people, we will be no better than the spammers. Let me propose the following:
Benefits and prerequisites... :) This is where it is key to have high profile trusted and respected figurehead. If Joe Blow organises this on his dsl line, his access gets cut off and the feds disapprove. If an innocent party is wronged than he probably goes to jail. If, on the other hand, ESR organises it, public opinion on the net will massively oppose federal pressure against him and commercial pressure (ie his access being cut off) is much less likely.
Speed is of the essence. Attack must respond to take down target before any profit is made. Scale is important as well. Volume of traffic must decimate servers even on fat pipes (or at least cause high bandwidth $$$ usage). It might even be possible to DOS 1-800 numbers if every subscriber was willing to place a call and complain.
Would all this be illegal? Certainly as a whole the intent is to DOS the target and therefore is illegal. I could even imagine RICO coming into play (this is after all an organized conspiracy to commit a crime). However the actions of those subscribing to the service are not illegal (IANAL, someone else comment). After all, I (as subscriber) am just saving a highly recommended commercial resource for later perusal!
I realise that there is lots of hand waving going on here. But I firmly feel that this may be an instance to fight fire with fire, fight outlaws with vigilante justice, etc. We need to claim our space for our productive use and not for other's pollution and decimation. Fighting spammers directly is like "fighting terrorism". Attacking those who provide the incentive is like taking the battle to host countries of terrorism; a much more likely strategy.
Excellent discussion of this idea on den beste's blog. More indepth than your average slashdot commentary (pretty graphs and everything)...
Summing it up, there seem to be all sort of issues (that i mostly don't understand) about letting large quantities of people spin the dials backwards...
Remember, binaryhead asked for book ideas. You may or may not agree with Rand, but Atlas Shrugged is still pretty good reading (aside from the 60 page John Galt monologue at the end). On the other hand I've never been able to read Kant. Study, yes, read no.