Laws can be unjust. In that case, I believe that we have a moral obligation not to follow them. Henry David Thoreau covers this subject rather nicely. Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King considered civil disobedience to be the central tenet in their own reform movements.
Have you looked at the date on that link? 1940. Good job with the karma-whoring, buddy. You might also want plagarizing an article that actually uses dated language.
For the record, BMI was not founded last fall. It's been around since 1939, which is an eternity in radio. ASCAP currently claims to have 275,000 members! In fact, being a member of ASCAP or BMI is virtually a requirement if you are a professional musician, as is being a member of a professional union.
But I'd like to also point out, having worked in radio, that ASCAP and BMI fees can be huge for small stations. The radio station I belonged to was owned by a university, and as a result, the university was able to negotiate a blanket contract for all peformances, radio stations, and jukeboxes operated on the campus (excluding the big performance venue, which was actually subcontracted to an outside vendor). We could have paid this fee ourselves, but it would have been a huge chunk of our operating costs.
This is greed, plain and simple. The reason why the RIAA wants a cut is because ASCAP and BMI (and SESAC, if you count Europe) fees do not go back to the labels, unless the label owns the copyright on the score (contrasted with owning the copyright on the recording). ASCAP and BMI fees are generally regarded as a good thing, because this is money that artists actually see. When a radio station plays a Nirvana cover of a Meat Puppets tune, the Meat Puppets get the dough. This is a good thing for small artists.
But there is a downside: ASCAP and BMI reporting is, at best, wildly inaccurate. "Charting" happens infrequently, and relies on stations actually taking the time to report this information correctly. Often it is not. I've heard rumors that SoundScan also has a service that scans the airwaves using a detection heuristic, but I can't find any information about that service, so maybe it was just speculation on the part of one of my coworkers.
Anyway, labels send radio stations boxes and boxes of free music. We're supposed to pay them now for playing their crap? I thought that's what all the coke and blowjobs were for;^)
On the other hand, kids are very good at "fast mapping", because nearly every conversation they have involves vocabulary that is new to them. That's not to say that a kid would understand, say, genetic inheritance, if you were to use the field's own terminology exclusively. But kids are very good at learning new vocabularly fast, so give them some pieces that they can chew on. They'll probably ask you what those words mean, on their own, and then you can give them some more.
Vygotsky and others have this idea of a "zone of proximal development". The idea is basically, put a kid in slightly over their head, but give them enough guidance that they can elevate themselves to the next level. Kids whose education routinely challenges them in this way learn faster than kids who are completely over their heads, or who have no guidance from adults or their peers. It also helps explain why kids who are never challenged to think on their own never do end up learning how to think on their own.
I was fortunate enough to grow up with a father who worked in a very cool lab. My first memories, before anything else, are of being in the lab with my father, who was working on his Ph.D. thesis in Physics, and other grad students, post docs, professors, and machinists. I was exposed to lasers, metalworking machinery, liquid nitrogen (and, unfortunately, liquid nitrogen burns), specialized scientific instruments like the lab's interferometer (yes, they let me crawl around inside), and most importantly, computers. I was given ample time to play with the lab's PDP-11. I made large ASCII-art banners that I printed out on one of the DECWriters (BTW, a kid setting a machine like a daisy wheel printer in motion is sheer joy).
I knew from an early age that I would not be happy doing anything else but using my brain for a living. Despite a momentary lapse in sanity and earning a Bachelor's in Philosophy, I am now working full time as a network engineer while I spend my nights working toward a Computer Science degree. People don't know where I get the energy to spend my evenings after a long day at work doing mathematics and programming, but I say this-- if you had had the opportunity to look through a periscope that your own father had built, or help your father set up a helium-neon laser in front of the rest of the Cub Scout troop, or any of the other countless cool things I was able to do because of science-- you'd have no end of enthusiasm for the pursuit of knowledge either.
Just take your kids to work. Build rockets. Build anything with them, really. Anything but science or engineering simply will not be an option for their fervid minds.
The irony about all the fuss over the "analog hole" is that many, if not most, pirated DVDs are probably made straight from the digital source. It has been trivial to bypass CSS for a long time, and it was what I'd consider to be "not difficult" to do even before libdvdcss was available.
But "closing the analog hole" was something that every media/hardware CEO could get on board with. It ostensibly makes copying harder, which makes the media companies happy, and it drives new hardware sales, especially among early adopters (who now have to ditch their HDTVs for no other reason than because their connectors don't match), which makes the hardware companies happy.
Power plays. I'm not drawing any conclusions about the JFK shooting itself, because it was well before my time, and it would be pure speculation on my part. But I don't think there is any dispute that what really happens in the Oval Office, corporate boardrooms, and so on, is not well known. On a smaller level, I see this all the time at my company: people walk out of a meeting and say something in many ways completely contradictory to what happened in the meeting. Not necessarily lies, but frequently distortions of events. Why? Because they're able to keep their grasp on leading us by misleading us.
JFK was assasinated. There must have been a purpose to this. We don't know the purpose. These facts alone should be enough to keep doubt in our minds about any 'official story'.
My mom rented that movie for me when I was 12, sick with the flu, knowing that I loved sci-fi. But all it did was give me really fucked up fever-induced dreams. She followed that up with Zardoz. More crazy-ass dreams. I have to give her credit-- at least she tried. But man... I've seen way more Sean Connery than I ever wanted to.
That does beat me. I'm running 10.4.9 on a machine I bought in 1999. Granted, every single part except the mothboard has been replaced, so it's not exactly recognizable anymore (1.4 GHz G4, Lian-Li case, RAID 0, etc). As you can imagine, it's been a point of pride for me, so even though it sits next to a 2.5 GHz AM2, it still gets all of the work, and I've been very happy with it.
Having hiked the Appalachian Trail, and burned roughly 10-15,000 calories a day, for 6 months, I can attest to the burning power of a lot of slow walking. OK, I was wearing a 35 lb pack, but still, walking all day will definitely do wonders.
Ethiopian Harrar is definitely my favorite bean so far. Harrar is a "dry process" coffee. I don't know why wet processed coffee has such a different flavor-- suffice it to say, Harrar has an extraordinarily full flavor and really intense, earthy aroma. My brother belongs to a local coffee roasting club, and we trade off each month's allotment, since it would just be too much coffee for the one of us alone. Harrar is by far my favorite.
I keep my beans in the freezer, in airtight packaging (although not the nitrogen-flushed foil packaging I keep my hops in; yes, I grow my own hops; and yes, I am crazy). I assume that the flavor components of coffee beans break down much like lupulin's assorted flavor components do in hops; that is, faster in the presence of warmth and oxygen. I keep thinking that maybe there's a book out there like this, that would explain the breakdown rates, ideal temperatures for brewing, brewing chemistry and so on, only for coffee. There probaby is, but I'm too lazy to look for it.
I have never felt the need to plunk down the change for a burr grinder (I've already spent way too much on grinders for barley, to fuel the other hobby that relaxes me after all the coffee), but I've been able to get a consistent grind with a spice mill and some careful shaking and pulsing of the grinder. Of course, I might simply not know what I'm missing.
In my opinion, the most intense flavor (for a regular cup of coffee) can be had with French press or something similar, assuming you don't mind coffee grinds in your cup. But I'm relatively happy with my electric percolator. I found that the Mr. Coffee automatic drip that I used before this produced somewhat uninteresting coffee. The difference is probably the temperature of the water-- a percolator tends to boil the coffee a bit more, and thus add some acidity. Fortunately, I tend to stick to lower-acid, darker roasts. But the acidity probably accounts for the "interestingness" of the flavor. My brother keeps telling me that the coffee should also taste more tannic with a perc (which you would mostly taste as bitterness), but I don't detect it. He's right, of course-- as a homebrewer I've learned (the hard way) that tannins are more soluble in boiling water than in cooler water, but perhaps there aren't enough tannins in the coffee beans I buy to make a difference. Or maybe I just can't taste them.
Anyway, I have a modest setup, but it is of course, all about the beans. Yes, fresh beans do make a difference. If you don't believe me, find a place that roasts its own coffee (or roast it yourself), and give it a try. Some people don't seem to care either way, and of course, your own brewing tastes are highly subjective. My girlfriend's parents are completely happy with Maxwell House, despite me having introduced them to some of my favorite fresh beans. YMMV.
As a slight step up from that, I played a gamed when I was in high school called "RoboWar" on the 68k Mac that I believe has been carried on by this project, if not in the actual code, at least in spirit.
There is actually a minilanguage that you need to learn. The cool thing for me, at the time, was that I was having trouble learning trigonometry. Since the minilanguage had math library functions, it really brought trig home for me. I remember my father and brother and I feverishly programming our bots to do battle with each other. The funny thing was that my brother, who mastered the minilanguage early, but who didn't have the math training, came up with very simple and clever algorithms that just killed us repeatedly. My father used to liken it to corewars in his day in grad school using the PDP-11, where he sharpened his assembly chops.
It's funny what goes for "retro" nowadays. I suppose if you can't remember a time when the Internet didn't exist... Anyhow, I noticed a long time ago that my nose wasn't - shaped, so I've used a caret for as long as I can remember using smileys:^)
Are you 4? Yeah, there's a lot of stupid shit on the Internet. But there's a lot of really great stuff, too. Here you have a medium that-- finally-- can capture huge swaths of the human experience, without having to worry about whether it is marketable. Some of what people do is stupid. The stupid-shit-on-MySpace phenomenon is not the Internet's "problem", it is your neighbor-who-has-a-bug-up-his-ass's "problem". This is what humans do. Stopping people from talking about it isn't going to stop people from doing it.
Precisely. Sun has been shipping OpenSSH in Solaris since around 2002. As Theo de Raadt points out, Sun has never given OpenBSD a dime, despite the fact that they saved millions in licensing costs by choosing OpenSSH over SSH.COM.
So what's Sun's game here? Have they suddenly started giving to projects they've profited off of, or are they up to something else? My guess is that Sun's claim to be the "number one contributor to open source worldwide" is a little bit of slight-of-hand based on the fact that they've opened up Java and Solaris. Have they really given more money to OSS than, say, Red Hat or Google?
As our current president is so fond of demonstrating, international law only exists insofar as people are willing to enforce it. If China ever decides to collect on what's owed to them, I suspect that the resolution will depend a lot on who has the biggest guns and the most friends. I hope that never happens.
Having a system that provides adequate health care for all citizens and having a private medical care system are not mutually exclusive. You can have both.
I wish I could find the reference, but I recently heard on PRI's Marketplace that due to Medicare, Medicaid, government subsidies, and other costs, we currently pay more per capita than countries like Canada, which do have universal health care. Thus, our health care costs would be lower if we switched to a universal health care system.
Re:Makes a little bit of sense. . .
on
Treating the Dead
·
· Score: 1
Actually, the ratio is even more dramatic than that: it is 30 compressions for every two breaths. The previous standard was 5:1.
Slashdot Mirror
NASA sued for false color images. Dichromats sue trichromats. Red sues green. News at 11.
Laws can be unjust. In that case, I believe that we have a moral obligation not to follow them. Henry David Thoreau covers this subject rather nicely. Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King considered civil disobedience to be the central tenet in their own reform movements.
One small correction though: the RIAA does not get those license fees. The performance-rights organizations (ASCAP and BMI) get them.
Have you looked at the date on that link? 1940. Good job with the karma-whoring, buddy. You might also want plagarizing an article that actually uses dated language.
;^)
For the record, BMI was not founded last fall. It's been around since 1939, which is an eternity in radio. ASCAP currently claims to have 275,000 members! In fact, being a member of ASCAP or BMI is virtually a requirement if you are a professional musician, as is being a member of a professional union.
But I'd like to also point out, having worked in radio, that ASCAP and BMI fees can be huge for small stations. The radio station I belonged to was owned by a university, and as a result, the university was able to negotiate a blanket contract for all peformances, radio stations, and jukeboxes operated on the campus (excluding the big performance venue, which was actually subcontracted to an outside vendor). We could have paid this fee ourselves, but it would have been a huge chunk of our operating costs.
This is greed, plain and simple. The reason why the RIAA wants a cut is because ASCAP and BMI (and SESAC, if you count Europe) fees do not go back to the labels, unless the label owns the copyright on the score (contrasted with owning the copyright on the recording). ASCAP and BMI fees are generally regarded as a good thing, because this is money that artists actually see. When a radio station plays a Nirvana cover of a Meat Puppets tune, the Meat Puppets get the dough. This is a good thing for small artists.
But there is a downside: ASCAP and BMI reporting is, at best, wildly inaccurate. "Charting" happens infrequently, and relies on stations actually taking the time to report this information correctly. Often it is not. I've heard rumors that SoundScan also has a service that scans the airwaves using a detection heuristic, but I can't find any information about that service, so maybe it was just speculation on the part of one of my coworkers.
Anyway, labels send radio stations boxes and boxes of free music. We're supposed to pay them now for playing their crap? I thought that's what all the coke and blowjobs were for
On the other hand, kids are very good at "fast mapping", because nearly every conversation they have involves vocabulary that is new to them. That's not to say that a kid would understand, say, genetic inheritance, if you were to use the field's own terminology exclusively. But kids are very good at learning new vocabularly fast, so give them some pieces that they can chew on. They'll probably ask you what those words mean, on their own, and then you can give them some more.
Vygotsky and others have this idea of a "zone of proximal development". The idea is basically, put a kid in slightly over their head, but give them enough guidance that they can elevate themselves to the next level. Kids whose education routinely challenges them in this way learn faster than kids who are completely over their heads, or who have no guidance from adults or their peers. It also helps explain why kids who are never challenged to think on their own never do end up learning how to think on their own.
I was fortunate enough to grow up with a father who worked in a very cool lab. My first memories, before anything else, are of being in the lab with my father, who was working on his Ph.D. thesis in Physics, and other grad students, post docs, professors, and machinists. I was exposed to lasers, metalworking machinery, liquid nitrogen (and, unfortunately, liquid nitrogen burns), specialized scientific instruments like the lab's interferometer (yes, they let me crawl around inside), and most importantly, computers. I was given ample time to play with the lab's PDP-11. I made large ASCII-art banners that I printed out on one of the DECWriters (BTW, a kid setting a machine like a daisy wheel printer in motion is sheer joy).
I knew from an early age that I would not be happy doing anything else but using my brain for a living. Despite a momentary lapse in sanity and earning a Bachelor's in Philosophy, I am now working full time as a network engineer while I spend my nights working toward a Computer Science degree. People don't know where I get the energy to spend my evenings after a long day at work doing mathematics and programming, but I say this-- if you had had the opportunity to look through a periscope that your own father had built, or help your father set up a helium-neon laser in front of the rest of the Cub Scout troop, or any of the other countless cool things I was able to do because of science-- you'd have no end of enthusiasm for the pursuit of knowledge either.
Just take your kids to work. Build rockets. Build anything with them, really. Anything but science or engineering simply will not be an option for their fervid minds.
The irony about all the fuss over the "analog hole" is that many, if not most, pirated DVDs are probably made straight from the digital source. It has been trivial to bypass CSS for a long time, and it was what I'd consider to be "not difficult" to do even before libdvdcss was available.
But "closing the analog hole" was something that every media/hardware CEO could get on board with. It ostensibly makes copying harder, which makes the media companies happy, and it drives new hardware sales, especially among early adopters (who now have to ditch their HDTVs for no other reason than because their connectors don't match), which makes the hardware companies happy.
Power plays. I'm not drawing any conclusions about the JFK shooting itself, because it was well before my time, and it would be pure speculation on my part. But I don't think there is any dispute that what really happens in the Oval Office, corporate boardrooms, and so on, is not well known. On a smaller level, I see this all the time at my company: people walk out of a meeting and say something in many ways completely contradictory to what happened in the meeting. Not necessarily lies, but frequently distortions of events. Why? Because they're able to keep their grasp on leading us by misleading us.
JFK was assasinated. There must have been a purpose to this. We don't know the purpose. These facts alone should be enough to keep doubt in our minds about any 'official story'.
My mom rented that movie for me when I was 12, sick with the flu, knowing that I loved sci-fi. But all it did was give me really fucked up fever-induced dreams. She followed that up with Zardoz. More crazy-ass dreams. I have to give her credit-- at least she tried. But man... I've seen way more Sean Connery than I ever wanted to.
I'm guessing that there was more of a performance benefit to having Rosetta run on dual-core 32-bit than on 64-bit. Pure speculation here, though.
That does beat me. I'm running 10.4.9 on a machine I bought in 1999. Granted, every single part except the mothboard has been replaced, so it's not exactly recognizable anymore (1.4 GHz G4, Lian-Li case, RAID 0, etc). As you can imagine, it's been a point of pride for me, so even though it sits next to a 2.5 GHz AM2, it still gets all of the work, and I've been very happy with it.
Yeah, that's a bit of a slap in the face, isn't it?
Thanks for the post. I will look into your suggestions.
Having hiked the Appalachian Trail, and burned roughly 10-15,000 calories a day, for 6 months, I can attest to the burning power of a lot of slow walking. OK, I was wearing a 35 lb pack, but still, walking all day will definitely do wonders.
Ethiopian Harrar is definitely my favorite bean so far. Harrar is a "dry process" coffee. I don't know why wet processed coffee has such a different flavor-- suffice it to say, Harrar has an extraordinarily full flavor and really intense, earthy aroma. My brother belongs to a local coffee roasting club, and we trade off each month's allotment, since it would just be too much coffee for the one of us alone. Harrar is by far my favorite.
I keep my beans in the freezer, in airtight packaging (although not the nitrogen-flushed foil packaging I keep my hops in; yes, I grow my own hops; and yes, I am crazy). I assume that the flavor components of coffee beans break down much like lupulin's assorted flavor components do in hops; that is, faster in the presence of warmth and oxygen. I keep thinking that maybe there's a book out there like this, that would explain the breakdown rates, ideal temperatures for brewing, brewing chemistry and so on, only for coffee. There probaby is, but I'm too lazy to look for it.
I have never felt the need to plunk down the change for a burr grinder (I've already spent way too much on grinders for barley, to fuel the other hobby that relaxes me after all the coffee), but I've been able to get a consistent grind with a spice mill and some careful shaking and pulsing of the grinder. Of course, I might simply not know what I'm missing.
In my opinion, the most intense flavor (for a regular cup of coffee) can be had with French press or something similar, assuming you don't mind coffee grinds in your cup. But I'm relatively happy with my electric percolator. I found that the Mr. Coffee automatic drip that I used before this produced somewhat uninteresting coffee. The difference is probably the temperature of the water-- a percolator tends to boil the coffee a bit more, and thus add some acidity. Fortunately, I tend to stick to lower-acid, darker roasts. But the acidity probably accounts for the "interestingness" of the flavor. My brother keeps telling me that the coffee should also taste more tannic with a perc (which you would mostly taste as bitterness), but I don't detect it. He's right, of course-- as a homebrewer I've learned (the hard way) that tannins are more soluble in boiling water than in cooler water, but perhaps there aren't enough tannins in the coffee beans I buy to make a difference. Or maybe I just can't taste them.
Anyway, I have a modest setup, but it is of course, all about the beans. Yes, fresh beans do make a difference. If you don't believe me, find a place that roasts its own coffee (or roast it yourself), and give it a try. Some people don't seem to care either way, and of course, your own brewing tastes are highly subjective. My girlfriend's parents are completely happy with Maxwell House, despite me having introduced them to some of my favorite fresh beans. YMMV.
As a slight step up from that, I played a gamed when I was in high school called "RoboWar" on the 68k Mac that I believe has been carried on by this project, if not in the actual code, at least in spirit.
There is actually a minilanguage that you need to learn. The cool thing for me, at the time, was that I was having trouble learning trigonometry. Since the minilanguage had math library functions, it really brought trig home for me. I remember my father and brother and I feverishly programming our bots to do battle with each other. The funny thing was that my brother, who mastered the minilanguage early, but who didn't have the math training, came up with very simple and clever algorithms that just killed us repeatedly. My father used to liken it to corewars in his day in grad school using the PDP-11, where he sharpened his assembly chops.
It's funny what goes for "retro" nowadays. I suppose if you can't remember a time when the Internet didn't exist... Anyhow, I noticed a long time ago that my nose wasn't - shaped, so I've used a caret for as long as I can remember using smileys :^)
Hellooooo... katra? Not everyone thinks ahead enough to dump their brains into Dr. McCoy for safekeeping. Sometimes you just gotta have a body.
Are you 4? Yeah, there's a lot of stupid shit on the Internet. But there's a lot of really great stuff, too. Here you have a medium that-- finally-- can capture huge swaths of the human experience, without having to worry about whether it is marketable. Some of what people do is stupid. The stupid-shit-on-MySpace phenomenon is not the Internet's "problem", it is your neighbor-who-has-a-bug-up-his-ass's "problem". This is what humans do. Stopping people from talking about it isn't going to stop people from doing it.
Precisely. Sun has been shipping OpenSSH in Solaris since around 2002. As Theo de Raadt points out, Sun has never given OpenBSD a dime, despite the fact that they saved millions in licensing costs by choosing OpenSSH over SSH.COM.
So what's Sun's game here? Have they suddenly started giving to projects they've profited off of, or are they up to something else? My guess is that Sun's claim to be the "number one contributor to open source worldwide" is a little bit of slight-of-hand based on the fact that they've opened up Java and Solaris. Have they really given more money to OSS than, say, Red Hat or Google?
Not that the Brits haven't taken credit for work that was mostly done by the Polish or anything.
As our current president is so fond of demonstrating, international law only exists insofar as people are willing to enforce it. If China ever decides to collect on what's owed to them, I suspect that the resolution will depend a lot on who has the biggest guns and the most friends. I hope that never happens.
A whole new meaning to that statement!
Having a system that provides adequate health care for all citizens and having a private medical care system are not mutually exclusive. You can have both.
I wish I could find the reference, but I recently heard on PRI's Marketplace that due to Medicare, Medicaid, government subsidies, and other costs, we currently pay more per capita than countries like Canada, which do have universal health care. Thus, our health care costs would be lower if we switched to a universal health care system.
Actually, the ratio is even more dramatic than that: it is 30 compressions for every two breaths. The previous standard was 5:1.