Hell, they don't need to uncover anything embarassing. They can make it all up and people will condemn the poor bastard without giving him the benefit of the doubt.
See Frank Capra's Meet John Doe for a slightly hokey (it's a Frank Capra movie), yet chilling vision of what people with enough money and power can do to anyone in public view. All that's old is new again - robber barons, private police, and media manipulation of the masses...
I haven't read the text of the law, but isn't there an exemption for media outlets in terms of reporting during that 90 day gag period? I find it worrying that after the law was passed, politicians immediately started passing laws to benefit the media. You think maybe they're laying up some quid pro quo credits?
Letters aint gonna do squat if Fox/WB/NBC/ABC(disney) decide to unilaterally shape public opinion one way or another (and don't think it hasn't happened before!) Think about how little mainstream media attention there's been regarding bills like the SSSCA and the peer-to-peer attack bills.
On the other hand, Feinstein appears to have a long senate seat, so barring a recall, we'd have to wait another 4 years before getting a chance of unseating her...:(
I think it'd be cheaper to buy our own candidate and replace Feinstein. I'd rather have a candidate who stays bought, rather than one who will whore for whoever is paying more at the moment.
When we vote the whores out and replace them with people who will pay attention to American citizens, not corporations. Time to clean House again (and please, let's empty the crap out of the Senate this time, too?)
Damned if you aren't right. Maybe the NRA should start pitching to the geeks to get a concerted effort to get rid of these crack-whore politicians. It's sickening - the payola is so blatant, I can almost hear the bags of money being dropped off at each senator/representative's office...
Among those signing the letter were:
Delaware Democratic Sen. Joseph Biden *
Wisconsin Republican Rep. James Sensenbrenner
Virginia Democratic Rep. Bobby Scott
Michigan Democratic Rep. John Conyers
North Carolina Republican Rep. Howard Coble *
and California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein. *
* We know many of these names by now, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of the other payola-beholden media-whore "lawmakers" made up the other 13 signatures.
Actually, this is a serious concern. Several credit card outfits have gotten it into their heads that linking a transponder to your credit/debit card is a cool idea. Well, what happens if someone clones your transponder? What if someone just brute forces the code? Not only do they have your credit, they don't even need to have the physical card anymore.
Even worse are the replace state/national ID cards with transponder proposals...
Well, you could pay your tolls using cash, take a soldering iron to the GPS chip in your cell-phone, rip out your OnStar system (or buy a car without one), and generally avoid tying yourself to mechanisms which might record your data and could possibly be exploited against you in the future.
Or did you mean that they should have to opt-in before data-collection could be initiated?
Hmmm... Right now all of our existing code uses Direct Graphics - most of it originated with IDL 4x. I've looked into using Object Graphics, but it's a whole new kettle of fish to learn and implement consistently alongside of the current code (there are a couple of guys who are still into using common blocks), so I was planning to put it off.
However, if Object Graphics really is that slick, maybe I should look into recoding our display interfaces. Will OpenGL acceleration work for TVing bitmapped images? I had gotten the impression from the docs that it only sped stuff up if you had 3D data...
Actually, forcing you to watch trailers is an abuse of the must watch bit, which was supposed to be limited to the FBI notice. However, you put the ability in there, and the next thing ya know, some marketdroid exec decides that it should be set on ALL of the promo material before the movie...
Any IDL programmer who has tried to eke out decent performance out of the TV routine would agree with me... And the fact that only the Windows version has a supported visual toolkit builder is really annoying.
And what the hell is with drag events not being supported on Macs and PCs? Someone please explain that to me!
IDL's graphics drawing routines are subpar, performance-wise. Don't use it if you need to optimize for speed...
It's also has a weird and clunky GUI toolkit. It's great for slapping something together quickly for analyzing and manipulating stuff, but I have reservations about using it as a general purpose tool.
In his notes he mentions "Yes, I know that I should have written my own shellcode."
I'd take that to mean he's "borrowed" a portion of the W32.Beavuh exploit to show that remote shell priveliges can be granted using his window messaging exploit. Of course, since this looks like it's live, I wouldn't recommend running it on a production machine hooked up to anything...
Who else wants together to field a robot? We'll cobble it out of junkyard parts, load linux on it, strap it into CowboyNeal's car and turn it loose. Hell, at least it'll be a great excuse to go to Las Vegas...
In the stupider days of my youth, I was disassembling a phone that was still hooked up. I was holding the piezo ringer element between my thumb and forefinger when it rang - for a full second, my entire body was buzzing, and I absolutely could not let go.
When I was finally able to rip my skin from the piezo, a very clear thumbprint was burned into the thin metal.
Moral of the story: Don't play with phone network devices while they're still plugged in...
At 7 cents per kw/h, even with a $3 rebate per watt (assuming $6 per watt overall cost), I calculated it would take 30 years to recoup the costs of a 1kw solar installation, in the Los Angeles area.
Solar isn't cheap - add in the costs of inverter, permits, panels, and you're looking at a long-term investment. True, your costs go down as you add more panels (since much of your initial fixed costs can be shared by future panels) but the payback period will be about the same.
It would be cheaper to just use less power.
Also, in the LA area, the local power utility (LADWP) will not let you sell back power as a residential customer, if your solar array exceeds your power needs - you'd have to register as a power producer and pay connection fees/taxes/etc. And, as a power producer, you'd forefit the $3 per watt rebate, meaning your payback period would double...
On the other hand, if you live in the middle of nowhere, and the power company wants to charge you $15,000 just to run power lines, then solar power looks like a bargain (even including the needed battery banks to store power, and generator for backup.)
It's kind of scary - ten to fifteen years ago, I'd prowl used bookstores and snap up classic sci-fi from the 50s, 60s, and 70s, for a dollar here, seventy-five cents here. Occasionally I'd indulge and buy a hardcover for a few dollars.
Recently, I dropped by several used bookstores (it took some work to find them, as a good many have closed down locally), and found almost NO sci-fi/fantasy, and what was left was expensive - $3-4 for an old mouldering paperback, $5-6 for a used current paperback, $15-16 for a hardcover. I can buy NEW books (on sale, or remaindered) for cheaper than used books now!
I talked to some of the owners and they pretty much agreed - scfi/fantasy is more or less dead - not much new publishing these days. As someone who grew up reading Damon Knight, Robert Heinlein, Fred Saberhagen, Clifford Simak, Alan E. Nourse, I was shocked that many books have never been reprinted (try finding a hardcopy of A for Anything, or Simacralon-3.) There is one dedicated scifi/fantasy used bookstore in Los Angeles area that I know of in Sherman Oaks (Dangerous Visions?) - I guess everyone else gave up carrying their sections.
Lord knows how the local libraries are going to find replacements for their collections when their paperbacks fall apart, or when some idiot librarian decides that some classics aren't being read enough, so they just junk them. Without new younger readers to buy from the genre, the decline in purchasing interest can only get worse:(
It is immoral to do physical harm to others. Many of us consider guns (most especially handguns) to be nothing more than a device intended to cause physical harm to others. This is immoral.
Police officers carry handguns. In the commission of their duties, they injure, and sometimes kill suspects (like that rapist in California who was about to kill 2 kidnapped girls.) By your definition, would police officers not be immoral?
Some soldiers carry rifles. In the commission of their sworn duty (to defend the country from enemies, foreign and domestic) they kill and injure enemy combatants, under order from their superiors, which go all the way up to the president, who is elected by the american people. By your definition, would not every american citizen thereby share in that "immorality"?
If someone was going to beat the living shit out of me because I was (insert race, sex, religion, or chosen lifestyle here), and I decided to take exception to this by defending myself and doing physical harm to my attacker, would I not be immoral by your definition?
One problem authors have been having is that they may have clauses where material reverts back to them in the event that the publisher stops selling their book, but publishers are weaseling out of the clause by putting the book on a "print on demand" list. Techically the book is "still in print", but the publisher may not be promoting the book at all, and is essentially squatting on the right to the book.
Well, you can take a look at how trends in society have affected literature. I remember picking up a copy of The Voyages of Doctor Doolittle and finding that this newer edition had totally removed all references to the word "negro", since the original text might offend some younger readers (the Gutenberg linked above has the original, I think.)
I recently read a book by Ben Bova (The Watchmen), a re-release of a pair of novels originally written in the 60's, where he specifically says in the 1994 foreword that he did NOT alter the original text, and hence you would find women referred to generically as "girls".
Who's responsible for preserving information if the copyright holder doesn't do it? There's a lot of material generated over the past century that's turning to dust, or has been shoveled into landfills (many MGM props/old negatives were THROWN AWAY by the studio in the 70's to save space...)
With this mania about preventing copies, I can see a day when NOBODY can benefit from when copyright expires on an item, because it's long mouldered away, neglected by it's owner, and locked away from those who would have preserved it. Really, copyright should be shortened to a reasonable period, or else compulsory licensing to libraries and archives should be part of the deal, in order to ensure that the stuff the copyright owner makes money off of today can be enjoyed by the public tommorrow.
After all, the intent of copyright was to ensure the public had access to creative works, but making sure the creator had an incentive (ie, they got paid) to release their work and profit by it. But the key intent is to make sure that the work is acessible to all, so that the public as a whole can benefit. After all, that's why we have libraries, so that the society as a whole can be enriched.
Unfortunately, there are some who believe the exact opposite, that money should come before the public good... and they can afford to hire politicians to write laws that enforce that belief, and the lawyers to make it stick. The irony here is that corporations too were created for the public good.
And it doesn't look like any concrete reform is going to come out of Enron and Worldcom. We really need to address the issue of corporations divorcing themselves from the rest of society, and acting as if they're above the law. Perhaps we need to go back to chartering corporations with specific aims that can benefit the public, by power of the state legislatures again?
According to the article, library officials estimated that $250,000 (in Canadian dollars, I'm assuming) would be needed to clean and restore the material. I think this would be a worthy project to contribute to, especially with the favorable exchange rate.
I've been looking over the UCalagary library site but I couldn't find any explicit donation mechanism. Anyone know who to contact to donate funds to preserve this material?
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Why would coils be exposed to the elements? I know NOTHING about maglev, so treat this as a newbie question...
Hell, they don't need to uncover anything embarassing. They can make it all up and people will condemn the poor bastard without giving him the benefit of the doubt.
See Frank Capra's Meet John Doe for a slightly hokey (it's a Frank Capra movie), yet chilling vision of what people with enough money and power can do to anyone in public view. All that's old is new again - robber barons, private police, and media manipulation of the masses...
I haven't read the text of the law, but isn't there an exemption for media outlets in terms of reporting during that 90 day gag period? I find it worrying that after the law was passed, politicians immediately started passing laws to benefit the media. You think maybe they're laying up some quid pro quo credits?
Letters aint gonna do squat if Fox/WB/NBC/ABC(disney) decide to unilaterally shape public opinion one way or another (and don't think it hasn't happened before!) Think about how little mainstream media attention there's been regarding bills like the SSSCA and the peer-to-peer attack bills.
On the other hand, Feinstein appears to have a long senate seat, so barring a recall, we'd have to wait another 4 years before getting a chance of unseating her... :(
I think it'd be cheaper to buy our own candidate and replace Feinstein. I'd rather have a candidate who stays bought, rather than one who will whore for whoever is paying more at the moment.
When we vote the whores out and replace them with people who will pay attention to American citizens, not corporations. Time to clean House again (and please, let's empty the crap out of the Senate this time, too?)
Actually, there were 19 of the filthy bastards, so that makes 13 that the article didn't list.
Damned if you aren't right. Maybe the NRA should start pitching to the geeks to get a concerted effort to get rid of these crack-whore politicians. It's sickening - the payola is so blatant, I can almost hear the bags of money being dropped off at each senator/representative's office...
Among those signing the letter were:
Delaware Democratic Sen. Joseph Biden *
Wisconsin Republican Rep. James Sensenbrenner
Virginia Democratic Rep. Bobby Scott
Michigan Democratic Rep. John Conyers
North Carolina Republican Rep. Howard Coble *
and California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein. *
* We know many of these names by now, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of the other payola-beholden media-whore "lawmakers" made up the other 13 signatures.
Actually, this is a serious concern. Several credit card outfits have gotten it into their heads that linking a transponder to your credit/debit card is a cool idea. Well, what happens if someone clones your transponder? What if someone just brute forces the code? Not only do they have your credit, they don't even need to have the physical card anymore.
Even worse are the replace state/national ID cards with transponder proposals...
Well, you could pay your tolls using cash, take a soldering iron to the GPS chip in your cell-phone, rip out your OnStar system (or buy a car without one), and generally avoid tying yourself to mechanisms which might record your data and could possibly be exploited against you in the future.
Or did you mean that they should have to opt-in before data-collection could be initiated?
Hmmm... Right now all of our existing code uses Direct Graphics - most of it originated with IDL 4x. I've looked into using Object Graphics, but it's a whole new kettle of fish to learn and implement consistently alongside of the current code (there are a couple of guys who are still into using common blocks), so I was planning to put it off.
However, if Object Graphics really is that slick, maybe I should look into recoding our display interfaces. Will OpenGL acceleration work for TVing bitmapped images? I had gotten the impression from the docs that it only sped stuff up if you had 3D data...
Actually, forcing you to watch trailers is an abuse of the must watch bit, which was supposed to be limited to the FBI notice. However, you put the ability in there, and the next thing ya know, some marketdroid exec decides that it should be set on ALL of the promo material before the movie...
Any IDL programmer who has tried to eke out decent performance out of the TV routine would agree with me... And the fact that only the Windows version has a supported visual toolkit builder is really annoying.
And what the hell is with drag events not being supported on Macs and PCs? Someone please explain that to me!
IDL's graphics drawing routines are subpar, performance-wise. Don't use it if you need to optimize for speed...
It's also has a weird and clunky GUI toolkit. It's great for slapping something together quickly for analyzing and manipulating stuff, but I have reservations about using it as a general purpose tool.
In his notes he mentions "Yes, I know that I should have written my own shellcode."
I'd take that to mean he's "borrowed" a portion of the W32.Beavuh exploit to show that remote shell priveliges can be granted using his window messaging exploit. Of course, since this looks like it's live, I wouldn't recommend running it on a production machine hooked up to anything...
Who else wants together to field a robot? We'll cobble it out of junkyard parts, load linux on it, strap it into CowboyNeal's car and turn it loose. Hell, at least it'll be a great excuse to go to Las Vegas...
In the stupider days of my youth, I was disassembling a phone that was still hooked up. I was holding the piezo ringer element between my thumb and forefinger when it rang - for a full second, my entire body was buzzing, and I absolutely could not let go.
When I was finally able to rip my skin from the piezo, a very clear thumbprint was burned into the thin metal.
Moral of the story: Don't play with phone network devices while they're still plugged in...
At 7 cents per kw/h, even with a $3 rebate per watt (assuming $6 per watt overall cost), I calculated it would take 30 years to recoup the costs of a 1kw solar installation, in the Los Angeles area.
Solar isn't cheap - add in the costs of inverter, permits, panels, and you're looking at a long-term investment. True, your costs go down as you add more panels (since much of your initial fixed costs can be shared by future panels) but the payback period will be about the same.
It would be cheaper to just use less power.
Also, in the LA area, the local power utility (LADWP) will not let you sell back power as a residential customer, if your solar array exceeds your power needs - you'd have to register as a power producer and pay connection fees/taxes/etc. And, as a power producer, you'd forefit the $3 per watt rebate, meaning your payback period would double...
On the other hand, if you live in the middle of nowhere, and the power company wants to charge you $15,000 just to run power lines, then solar power looks like a bargain (even including the needed battery banks to store power, and generator for backup.)
It's kind of scary - ten to fifteen years ago, I'd prowl used bookstores and snap up classic sci-fi from the 50s, 60s, and 70s, for a dollar here, seventy-five cents here. Occasionally I'd indulge and buy a hardcover for a few dollars.
:(
Recently, I dropped by several used bookstores (it took some work to find them, as a good many have closed down locally), and found almost NO sci-fi/fantasy, and what was left was expensive - $3-4 for an old mouldering paperback, $5-6 for a used current paperback, $15-16 for a hardcover. I can buy NEW books (on sale, or remaindered) for cheaper than used books now!
I talked to some of the owners and they pretty much agreed - scfi/fantasy is more or less dead - not much new publishing these days. As someone who grew up reading Damon Knight, Robert Heinlein, Fred Saberhagen, Clifford Simak, Alan E. Nourse, I was shocked that many books have never been reprinted (try finding a hardcopy of A for Anything, or Simacralon-3.) There is one dedicated scifi/fantasy used bookstore in Los Angeles area that I know of in Sherman Oaks (Dangerous Visions?) - I guess everyone else gave up carrying their sections.
Lord knows how the local libraries are going to find replacements for their collections when their paperbacks fall apart, or when some idiot librarian decides that some classics aren't being read enough, so they just junk them. Without new younger readers to buy from the genre, the decline in purchasing interest can only get worse
Ok, I'll bite.
It is immoral to do physical harm to others. Many of us consider guns (most especially handguns) to be nothing more than a device intended to cause physical harm to others. This is immoral.
Police officers carry handguns. In the commission of their duties, they injure, and sometimes kill suspects (like that rapist in California who was about to kill 2 kidnapped girls.) By your definition, would police officers not be immoral?
Some soldiers carry rifles. In the commission of their sworn duty (to defend the country from enemies, foreign and domestic) they kill and injure enemy combatants, under order from their superiors, which go all the way up to the president, who is elected by the american people. By your definition, would not every american citizen thereby share in that "immorality"?
If someone was going to beat the living shit out of me because I was (insert race, sex, religion, or chosen lifestyle here), and I decided to take exception to this by defending myself and doing physical harm to my attacker, would I not be immoral by your definition?
One problem authors have been having is that they may have clauses where material reverts back to them in the event that the publisher stops selling their book, but publishers are weaseling out of the clause by putting the book on a "print on demand" list. Techically the book is "still in print", but the publisher may not be promoting the book at all, and is essentially squatting on the right to the book.
Well, you can take a look at how trends in society have affected literature. I remember picking up a copy of The Voyages of Doctor Doolittle and finding that this newer edition had totally removed all references to the word "negro", since the original text might offend some younger readers (the Gutenberg linked above has the original, I think.)
I recently read a book by Ben Bova (The Watchmen), a re-release of a pair of novels originally written in the 60's, where he specifically says in the 1994 foreword that he did NOT alter the original text, and hence you would find women referred to generically as "girls".
Who's responsible for preserving information if the copyright holder doesn't do it? There's a lot of material generated over the past century that's turning to dust, or has been shoveled into landfills (many MGM props/old negatives were THROWN AWAY by the studio in the 70's to save space...)
With this mania about preventing copies, I can see a day when NOBODY can benefit from when copyright expires on an item, because it's long mouldered away, neglected by it's owner, and locked away from those who would have preserved it. Really, copyright should be shortened to a reasonable period, or else compulsory licensing to libraries and archives should be part of the deal, in order to ensure that the stuff the copyright owner makes money off of today can be enjoyed by the public tommorrow.
After all, the intent of copyright was to ensure the public had access to creative works, but making sure the creator had an incentive (ie, they got paid) to release their work and profit by it. But the key intent is to make sure that the work is acessible to all, so that the public as a whole can benefit. After all, that's why we have libraries, so that the society as a whole can be enriched.
Unfortunately, there are some who believe the exact opposite, that money should come before the public good... and they can afford to hire politicians to write laws that enforce that belief, and the lawyers to make it stick. The irony here is that corporations too were created for the public good.
And it doesn't look like any concrete reform is going to come out of Enron and Worldcom. We really need to address the issue of corporations divorcing themselves from the rest of society, and acting as if they're above the law. Perhaps we need to go back to chartering corporations with specific aims that can benefit the public, by power of the state legislatures again?
According to the article, library officials estimated that $250,000 (in Canadian dollars, I'm assuming) would be needed to clean and restore the material. I think this would be a worthy project to contribute to, especially with the favorable exchange rate.
I've been looking over the UCalagary library site but I couldn't find any explicit donation mechanism. Anyone know who to contact to donate funds to preserve this material?