To the best of our understanding, life is a self-replicating information structure. We cannot yet model this information structure, but this is, most likely, merely a question of time. The full description is lacking (this is correct), but we do have the big picture and descriptions of a number of processes.
The physical carrier of this information structure are bodies that consist of molecules (including large organic molecules), chemical and electrochemical reactions. There is no need to introduce difference on the level of individual molecules and atoms: the elementary properties of matter are the same in a piece of rock and in your body.
These are just words, you don't have to believe them (silly were you if you did!). But you can understand this yourself based on the (scientific) knowledge we have. This takes reading.
The real explanation is quite a bit longer than you want (it won't fit into a Slashdot post). It takes some study to answer these questions to oneself. Not very much if you are smart, but still a study. A good book to read is The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.
Sorry for linking to an offline text, but I haven't seen this book in electronic form anywhere.
These protesters seem to be the same kind of (confused) people that send me these emails. Posting a real one:
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2006 00:05:26 -0700 (PDT) From: barbaros bozkir <akobaros@yahoo.com> To: makarov@vad1.com Subject: about log houses
Dear Authority Me and my wife we live in Turkey. I found your address in your webside. We have some questions about wooden houses. In Turkey there also are two wooden house firm. Holger-Honkamajat and Finahsap. We contacted  both firms. But we want to get correct informations about wood you use for the building of houses. The firm Honkamajat says that they are bringing the woods from Finland. The other firm Finahsap says that they bring the wood from Syberia Russia. According to Honkomajat the woods from Syberia Russia could include radioactive elements that may be dangerous. Can the wood in this case after his burning in the owen get rid of these radioactive elements? We are looking forward for your answer. Thank you. Dr. Barbaros Bozkir
This is contrary to my experience. I fix grammatical mistakes whenever I see them, and do other small changes in articles. None of them have been reverted.
Are you logged in when editing articles? Have you been putting a note in the edit summary when you do more than fixing a misspelling? Marking the "minor edit" checkbox for edits that do not alter the contents and formatting?
What about longish filemanes? I started using RAR to pack my backup when I discovered the Joliet filesystem used for CD-Rs does not support filenames longer than 64 characters. even if you name your files carefully, you'd always get these long filenames in places like the Favorites folder.
Even if it has no practical use, there will be researchers from other places who rent it, to do proof-of-the-principle experiments and such stuff without building their own devices.
I've removed these two from my keyboard long ago. It's not that I never used them, but that they kept getting under my fingers all the time was the reason (especially the CapsLock which I often pressed instead of Tab).
If these two keys were positioned in an area of keyboard where they don't get accidentally pressed (e.g. to the right of the Pause key in the upper row), I'd have no problems with them.
After you remove the keys, cut two low dummy plugs for the holes from an elastic eraser, and you're done.
If I understand properly, these twin bodies are not near any star. At what wavelength range were they imaged? Are they hot enough to emit visible or near IR light? Anyone has a picture or a reference to some more detailed writeup/paper?
Has greylisting been used more widely than just by pair.com?
The problem with greylisting is not as much the delay, but the messages that never get delivered. I've missed two or three important emails over the last year (i.e. whose absence I later noticed: a renewal notification from a domain registrar, etc.) because of greylisting.
1 mm at lightspeed is about 3.3 picoseconds. First, what photon detector has a rise time in that range? Second, atmospheric conditions will dynamically affect the measurement, I suspect with significantly more than a few picoseconds of noise... Finally, what Time Interval Analyzer are you going to use? The SR620, one of the better units on the market, does 25 ps resolution, and accuracy is closer to 100 ps.
This is right - for a single count. However, if your equipment is stable (i.e. it has no unpredictable long-term drift) and you accumulate many counts, you get a smoothly shaped distribution curve. By finding the center of the curve, you can get much better time resolution than that of a single count. No you don't have to discriminate the timing of each count down to your time resolution. SRS620 will do, if you accumulate enough counts and fit the distribution curve over the several bins.
This is, for instance, how the OTDR system manufactured by Opto-Electronics Inc. (company now defunct?) works. The laser in the systtem emits some 50-ps wide light pulses. The detector and time discriminator have jitter of about the same order. Yet the OTDR system has millimeter resolution* when given enough acquisition time.
* From a single reflection, or from two closely spaced reflections (using deconvolution). More than two reflections closely spaced in time will confuse it.
The legal basis for allofmp3.com's operation is mostly buried at the end of the law, in the articles on "collective administration of economic rights".
The USSR signed the Berne convention in 1973, but specifically mentioned the convention was not to be applied retroactively. So all foreign works created before the joining date (some day in 1973, I don't remember) are in the public domain in Russia (who legally inherited the treaties the USSR made).
allofmp3.com would not have a service anyone would pay for if it wasn't for copyright and the general lack of an automatic "everything goes into the public domain at the moment of creation" situation.
No they would have a service. Exactly the same as it is now. Somebody has to run a storage and download service for recordings, and they are doing it well (no matter public domain or not; in fact some older Russian recordings allofmp3 offers are in public domain).
P2P networks is the last place I'd look for a book (in fact, I wouldn't look there at all). You put your books in a wrong place. Right now all the music and movies are on P2P, and all the books are on the Web where they can be found via a plain search engine. This may change, but today it is this way.
Perhaps if book publishers put the same kind of pressure to eradicate scanned books form the web, books will move to P2P networks. However I doubt they ever do: enough people prefer reading books from paper, and dislike electronic texts (unlike music which is just as good when downloaded).
Can't you try to playback the disc before you buy it? I often do this; many disc stores in Russia have a PC (in the software part of the store) where, if the salesguy permits, I can even see exactly how large.VOB files are.
You don't need a PC to tell single-layer from dual-layer disc. Dual layer has a slightly yellowish tint (to the contrary, single layer is pure silver color), and dual layer has two different looking (and often overlapping) inscriptions in the inner circle of the disc.
If the store doesn't have a player, the salesguy should know what languages and subtitles are available on the disc. If he doesn't know, don't buy anything there.
Well, if the Pirate Party prepares a new copyright law, they'd better take care not to leave such loopholes. For example, if the model initially allowed commercial use of her images, the right can't be taken back when the image falls into public domain.
Anyway, a standard model release form used by pro photographers contains a blanket permission for all commercial uses that the model signs away.
I don't know. However I'm all for this party getting into the parliament, and am looking forward to seeing the laws they want passed. It would be an interesting experiment to watch. The current copyright laws are not set in stone. They are just some rules of the game. The rules could possibly be different, but the game still playable.
They want the copyright term shortened to five years. Maybe it's an overkill (certainly an overkill with respect to non-movie stuff), but well, why not. FINE, even if it's a blanket five years for all copyrightable stuff. Let's see how it works.
I am telling this even though I'd suffer some financial loss should this short copyright term be introduced in Sweden. Swedish publishers could then have used my photographs for free where they occasional pay me license fees now.
The point is, in my experience, pirates in Russia usually sell higher-quality mastered discs of the movies I want than licensed discs with the same movies. I don't know why it is so.
...for instant putting an entire series of one DVD, that cannot be easily done.
At least a third of the Russian DVD market (currently formed and dominated by pirates) is just this, several movies packed onto a single DVD with no extras. Usually it's four movies on a single DVD-10 disc, priced $3.60 to $4.30 per disc. I don't buy them, but many people who don't care about viewing quality, or have small TVs that won't show much difference anyway, buy these discs.
Here we see how a market unencumbered by licensing responds to demand in a way you have anticipated.
If they sell discs where the main feature (i.e. the movie itself) is crippled, for example by lower bitrate than on premium edition, by having no English language track, or by having forced subtitles to go with, this won't beat pirates.
If they sell discs with high-bitrate main feature (DVD-9 filled to the brink please), original-language soundtrack available and no UOP gimmicks, they win. Hell, if they do it consistently, they could sell such discs for a whopping $4.30 in Russia and I would gladly buy them over pirated ones. Besides I throw the box away, anyway, and pack the discs into a wallet to save space right away. Just give me the properly mastered stuff, no frills.
To bad I suspect the cheap licensed edition would be crippled. Then pirates, who care about customers more, get my business.
Slashdot Mirror
To the best of our understanding, life is a self-replicating information structure. We cannot yet model this information structure, but this is, most likely, merely a question of time. The full description is lacking (this is correct), but we do have the big picture and descriptions of a number of processes.
The physical carrier of this information structure are bodies that consist of molecules (including large organic molecules), chemical and electrochemical reactions. There is no need to introduce difference on the level of individual molecules and atoms: the elementary properties of matter are the same in a piece of rock and in your body.
These are just words, you don't have to believe them (silly were you if you did!). But you can understand this yourself based on the (scientific) knowledge we have. This takes reading.
The real explanation is quite a bit longer than you want (it won't fit into a Slashdot post). It takes some study to answer these questions to oneself. Not very much if you are smart, but still a study. A good book to read is The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.
Sorry for linking to an offline text, but I haven't seen this book in electronic form anywhere.
This is contrary to my experience. I fix grammatical mistakes whenever I see them, and do other small changes in articles. None of them have been reverted.
Are you logged in when editing articles? Have you been putting a note in the edit summary when you do more than fixing a misspelling? Marking the "minor edit" checkbox for edits that do not alter the contents and formatting?
What about longish filemanes? I started using RAR to pack my backup when I discovered the Joliet filesystem used for CD-Rs does not support filenames longer than 64 characters. even if you name your files carefully, you'd always get these long filenames in places like the Favorites folder.
What filesystem is used for DVD-Rs?
Even if it has no practical use, there will be researchers from other places who rent it, to do proof-of-the-principle experiments and such stuff without building their own devices.
Do you know how to disable the Insert key under Windows (but keep the Ctrl+Insert and Shift+Insert combinations working)?
I've removed these two from my keyboard long ago. It's not that I never used them, but that they kept getting under my fingers all the time was the reason (especially the CapsLock which I often pressed instead of Tab).
If these two keys were positioned in an area of keyboard where they don't get accidentally pressed (e.g. to the right of the Pause key in the upper row), I'd have no problems with them.
After you remove the keys, cut two low dummy plugs for the holes from an elastic eraser, and you're done.
Don't fight for removal, fight for repositioning.
If I understand properly, these twin bodies are not near any star. At what wavelength range were they imaged? Are they hot enough to emit visible or near IR light? Anyone has a picture or a reference to some more detailed writeup/paper?
And, how do they know it is a twin? We can't resolve two separate points at such a distance, can't we?
Has greylisting been used more widely than just by pair.com?
The problem with greylisting is not as much the delay, but the messages that never get delivered. I've missed two or three important emails over the last year (i.e. whose absence I later noticed: a renewal notification from a domain registrar, etc.) because of greylisting.
1 mm at lightspeed is about 3.3 picoseconds. First, what photon detector has a rise time in that range? Second, atmospheric conditions will dynamically affect the measurement, I suspect with significantly more than a few picoseconds of noise... Finally, what Time Interval Analyzer are you going to use? The SR620, one of the better units on the market, does 25 ps resolution, and accuracy is closer to 100 ps.
This is right - for a single count. However, if your equipment is stable (i.e. it has no unpredictable long-term drift) and you accumulate many counts, you get a smoothly shaped distribution curve. By finding the center of the curve, you can get much better time resolution than that of a single count. No you don't have to discriminate the timing of each count down to your time resolution. SRS620 will do, if you accumulate enough counts and fit the distribution curve over the several bins.
This is, for instance, how the OTDR system manufactured by Opto-Electronics Inc. (company now defunct?) works. The laser in the systtem emits some 50-ps wide light pulses. The detector and time discriminator have jitter of about the same order. Yet the OTDR system has millimeter resolution* when given enough acquisition time.
* From a single reflection, or from two closely spaced reflections (using deconvolution). More than two reflections closely spaced in time will confuse it.
does anybody know anything about Russian copyright laws? Do they have any?
Russian original | English translation.
The legal basis for allofmp3.com's operation is mostly buried at the end of the law, in the articles on "collective administration of economic rights".
The USSR signed the Berne convention in 1973, but specifically mentioned the convention was not to be applied retroactively. So all foreign works created before the joining date (some day in 1973, I don't remember) are in the public domain in Russia (who legally inherited the treaties the USSR made).
do you believe that it's as cheap to build and maintain data servers in the US as it is in Russia?
Internet connectivity and bandwidth (for servers in a datacenter) in Russia is several times more expensive than in the U.S.
allofmp3.com would not have a service anyone would pay for if it wasn't for copyright and the general lack of an automatic "everything goes into the public domain at the moment of creation" situation.
No they would have a service. Exactly the same as it is now. Somebody has to run a storage and download service for recordings, and they are doing it well (no matter public domain or not; in fact some older Russian recordings allofmp3 offers are in public domain).
Electricity does not smell.
Perhaps if book publishers put the same kind of pressure to eradicate scanned books form the web, books will move to P2P networks. However I doubt they ever do: enough people prefer reading books from paper, and dislike electronic texts (unlike music which is just as good when downloaded).
You don't need a PC to tell single-layer from dual-layer disc. Dual layer has a slightly yellowish tint (to the contrary, single layer is pure silver color), and dual layer has two different looking (and often overlapping) inscriptions in the inner circle of the disc.
If the store doesn't have a player, the salesguy should know what languages and subtitles are available on the disc. If he doesn't know, don't buy anything there.
Anyway, a standard model release form used by pro photographers contains a blanket permission for all commercial uses that the model signs away.
E.g. this and this pictures were licensed to Swedish firms for use as illustrations/ads.
They want the copyright term shortened to five years. Maybe it's an overkill (certainly an overkill with respect to non-movie stuff), but well, why not. FINE, even if it's a blanket five years for all copyrightable stuff. Let's see how it works.
I am telling this even though I'd suffer some financial loss should this short copyright term be introduced in Sweden. Swedish publishers could then have used my photographs for free where they occasional pay me license fees now.
The point is, in my experience, pirates in Russia usually sell higher-quality mastered discs of the movies I want than licensed discs with the same movies. I don't know why it is so.
At least a third of the Russian DVD market (currently formed and dominated by pirates) is just this, several movies packed onto a single DVD with no extras. Usually it's four movies on a single DVD-10 disc, priced $3.60 to $4.30 per disc. I don't buy them, but many people who don't care about viewing quality, or have small TVs that won't show much difference anyway, buy these discs.
Here we see how a market unencumbered by licensing responds to demand in a way you have anticipated.
Well said. Vote for the Pirate Party on the upcoming elections (if you are in Sweden)!
If they sell discs where the main feature (i.e. the movie itself) is crippled, for example by lower bitrate than on premium edition, by having no English language track, or by having forced subtitles to go with, this won't beat pirates.
If they sell discs with high-bitrate main feature (DVD-9 filled to the brink please), original-language soundtrack available and no UOP gimmicks, they win. Hell, if they do it consistently, they could sell such discs for a whopping $4.30 in Russia and I would gladly buy them over pirated ones. Besides I throw the box away, anyway, and pack the discs into a wallet to save space right away. Just give me the properly mastered stuff, no frills.
To bad I suspect the cheap licensed edition would be crippled. Then pirates, who care about customers more, get my business.