> Now animals wont just be raised for the slaughter, but for organ transplants as well. I sure am glad that america wont just eat healthily and not drink beer nonstop.
Now barley and hops won't be just raised for the slaughter, but for... heyyy, wait a minute, beer's a vegetable!;-)
> If only we had such sane markets. It matters not if AOL is a junk company or not, only if joe stockbuyer thinks it is. AOL has looked like a bad investment for years and years. You look at their various moronic business plans that they never really deliver on, etc. But as long as old Jod keeps buying it, it goes up - not down. Knowing they are wrong is easy, predicting the moment the bubble will burst in another thing entirely.
True. But given that the stock has been in a three-year decline from around $90 in late 2000 to today's $12 and change, I'd say that had you gone short at any time in the past three years (outside of the past two weeks:), the market would have rewarded you quite well for your prescience and patience.
Anyone who thinks "It matters not if XYZ is a junk company or not" has only to look at the stock charts for said companies over the past few years.
(And anyone who wants to talk about Enron, Tyco, Worldcon and Martha Stewart would do well to look at a one-year chart before they spoke. The market is a far harsher judge of business impropriety than Congress can ever be.)
> AOL's new plan focussed on creating content for broadband could have cable
companies over a barrel. It tries to compare programming on cable to 'programming' on the Internet >[... ] This article
omits the fact that Excite@Home tried this 'programming' approach on broadband. It failed.
>
[... ] Why should you care, and what's in it for you?
Why care? Because IMHO it betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what the net is all about, and if AOL tries this, they're fux0r3d even harder than they were after the AOL/TW merger.
What's in it for you? If you agree, and you put your money where your mouth is by selling AOL stock short, you make good money riding it down to zero. (Conversely, you can lose a bundle if you're wrong and don't realize it in time, but with great risk can come great reward:-)
> they're going to re-brand their distro as 'XENIX' and their CEO will be sued for sexual harrassment?
1) Get sued for sexual harassment.
2) Cut off internet access to all employees.
3) Pay a fortune for the name "UNIX"
4) Because Linux is "a religion" [...] that "didn't break any new ground" written by "punk young kids"
5) Shuts down all your development teams.
6) Change your mind on Linux 5 years too late and call it Caldera?
7) Umm, rename it to SCO again?
8) ????
I dunno what 9) is, but it sure as hell ain't gonna be "Profit".
> What, you mean there's a correllation between high-crime neighbourhoods and a likelihood of more crime being committed there. This is an outrage. I demand that zero-crime neighbourhoods get equal representation as places likely to have crime in the future.
"Your wish is my command - visit any airport:-)"
- Norm Mineta, Secretary of Transportation.
> Think about it - would you want to be pulled in as a suspect of a sex crime just because you porn collection came to the notice of the local thought police?
"Your honor, my client couldn't have committed the crime. The prosecution's forensic evidence says the crime happened at 0130h.
My client's ISP's billing records show that he was assigned IP address aa.bb.cc.dd from 2230 the previous night to 0330 that morning.
The HTTP logs from www.goatse.cx show that a user at aa.bb.cc.dd transferred 1,327 images of h0t g04t pr0n from 2235 to 0320h.
My client may be guilty of poor taste in pr0n that's not what he's on trial for.
And if I may add, Your Honor, one look at the spams you no doubt get every day, and you'll conclude that the rest of the country's taste in pr0n isn't that great either.
The defence moves that the Court order the prosecution to remove its head from the goat's ass. The defence rests."
> The easiest way to cure world hunger is to kill all the hungry people. The easiest way to cure crime is to kill all the criminals. Does that mean these are routes we should pursue?
No, because it's wasteful. We don't need easy solutions involving brute force and massive ignorance, we need efficient solutions. I propose the following:
> The depressing part is that this is the best we can do, folks. It's what our species has to offer. History shows a long record of governments that were either corrupt, oppressive, stupid, or any combination of the above.
USA: Corrupt. Stupid. But with so much corruption and stupidity, effectively incapable of oppression.
Communist China: Corrupt. Oppressive. But stupid? Stupid like a fox.
Nazi Germany: Oppressive. Stupid. And a population so rigidly controlled and brainwashed there was no room for serious corruption.
Thus, all election day decisions come down to "Corrupt. Oppressive. Stupid. Choose any two."
> I wonder if you compared year by year, you'd find it's a continuously increasing trend. It wouldn't suprise me.
Same here. But I'd be on the lookout for bogus statistic use. The population of the US continues to grow. If 1% of the population is under surveillance, the number of wiretaps will grow.
There's also a very real factor, of course, which is that the amount of effort required to do a wiretap has decreased.
That's Moore's Law in action - in the 50s, it meant wires clipped onto wires, and a G-Man with a pair of headphones, writing stuff down in real time, and/or using a big clunky tape recorder.
Today, it's a hard drive and a few keystrokes in the phone company switching office, and one guy can probably skim through the audio stream ("just ordering a pizza", "whups, phone sex, gotta save that one for after work!", "hey, there's something interesting!") of 4-5 suspects the way you and I flip through a playlist of MP3z.
Ten years from now, it'll be an AI-holocube and a guy asking the AI-cube "So, did any of my 500 suspects make phone calls to anyone else's suspects today", or "This guy's wanted for downloading MP3z. Over the past three years, cross-reference names of all bands he describes as 'cool', 'l33t', and 'kickass' with CD purchases from credit card records. Print me out a list of all bands he likes but doesn't own CDs of. And why are you denying me access to the phone sex, Holocube? I might need those in an investigation someday! For an AI, you've been a right bastard ever since I tried to keep tabs on my wife from the office. We used to be able to do that, you know!"
Bottom line - expect the number of wiretaps to increase with the number of suspects an individual officer can keep under surveillance at any given time.
Given the alternative - hiring hundreds of thousands of officers to do it the Old-Fashioned Way, wasting billions of tax dollars in the process, and the risks that come with the addition of hundreds of thousands of (corruptible, and often corrupt) humans to the system, I'd prefer the all-seeing holocubes that only answer what they're allowed to answer.
> So a person at a protest on a college campus who throws a rock through a window is an enemy combatant? There goes the first amendment.
"Speech". You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
> Sure, it's not a right to destroy government property, but it's vandalism, not terrorism.
Destroying government property for no reason at all is vandalism.
Destroying government property (or most other uses of violence / force by non-uniformed combatants) in order to change policy is the definition of terrorism.
Granted, a rock's nowhere near as lethal as a bomb, but that's a matter of degree, not a matter of principle - by throwing that rock, you're saying to the drones in the building that if they continue to work for the institution against which you're protesting, they put their personal safety at risk. If throwing rocks through government office windows in order to change policy isn't terrorism, why not step up to Molotovs? Little chunks of lead? Where do you draw the line?
You have the right to peacably assemble and protest. You have the right to petition Congress for a redress of grievances.
Where I come from, speech comes in many forms. Sound waves. T-shirts. Handbills. Source code. Executable code. But "igneous", "metamorphic", or "sedimentary" aren't on the list.
Likewise, "stuffed into a bottle of flammable liquid and lit on fire" doesn't constitute a Constitutionally-protected way to deliver a petition.
Re:Company claims unbreakable copy protection.
on
CD Copy Stopper
·
· Score: 5, Funny
> Company claims unbreakable copy protection. >Film at 11.
> Anybody else remember Robert McElwaine [popmartian.com]?
UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this
IMPORTANT Vote is ENCOURAGED, ESPECIALLY to BALLOTS and VOTER REGISTRATION CARDS!:)
> Just wait until these bozos start getting tons of "political" e-mail from nut cases like McElwaine. I suspect that then they'll start saying "Oh, political spam is only OK if it comes from a legitimate candidate."
Actually, I hope this is true.
Before the Spam Warz started, I thought there were two kinds of companies - legitimate companies and scam artists. After the first year, I realized that spam was spam, the well was poisoned, and that any company that wanted to use the same marketing techniques as the h0t b3a5t pr0n d00dz was unworthy of my business.
So bring it on, KKK and Commies! Bring it on so that when I get my spam for Candidate Foobar, I have no idea if he's a real candidate or just some whackjob with a grudge. Bring it on, so that when anyone sees "Foobar" on the ballot, and an (R) or (D) beside his name, we conclude "Foobar? Naaw, a real political party wouldn't do that. He must be a joke candidate, or maybe the real Republicans or Democrats aren't running this race."
> There's no hope, though. The junk-fax laws and the anti-telemarketing laws already exempt political appeals. Never mind that a ban would be perfectly constitutional (under the time, manner, and place doctrine).
You're right, but you're understating the problem.
> There's no way the politicians are going to write a law that makes it harder for them to "communicate with their constituents".
You are confused because you lack perspective, grasshopper.
"There's no way the politicians are going to write a law that applies to themselves as well as the peasants."
> > Your district's natural resources are there for slash-and-burn style exploitation by your district's largest political contributer to your political fund. > >
I can't help but thinking that that is exactly what all the candidates are actually saying beneath the sugar-coated
fluff that are their campaign speeches.
Agreed.
That's not a political suicide speech. Hell, in California, that's how Gray Davis raises his campaign funds!
(Oracle's $25K buys a $95M contract debacle, a few weeks ago, Herbalife's $100G buys them an exemption from reporting ephedra on their product labels, the Tosco refinery's $75G buys an increase their allowance to dump dioxin into the San Francisco Bay - that last one's a real hoot, as Davis, as a Democrat, is claiming (with a straight face, no less) the environmentalist high ground.)
> actually, music sharing is more like communism than cracking down on it is... I'd call the RIAA "filthy capitalists" rather than commies.
I'll take issue with that.
A capitalist takes money, and uses that money to produce something consumers want. Consumers buy the product, giving the capitalist a return on his investment.
Contrast this with what's going on with RIAA vs. the consumer.
The consumer has said, time and time again, that he/she wants MP3s without copy protection created from sources without copy protection.
But RIAA does not want to sell what the consumer wants. They're only willing to use their capital to produce and (attempt to) sell things consumers don't want (DRM-crippled streaming services). Seeing this fail, they then use their capital to buy laws that will put anyone else in jail for the crime of providing what consumers want.
Now, I've got lots of words I can use to describe that sort of behavior. "Filthy" is on that list of words, but "Capitalist" sure as hell isn't.
> That being said, is prosectuting end users for copyright violation bad in itself?
No, it's not.
But sadly, it is a measure of how far RIAA/MPAA has fallen in the eyes of their victi^H^H^H^H^Hcustomers that I still hope every day that I live to see the time when cheap bandwidth allows everyone to instantly have free-as-in-beer access to every movie and every song ever made or recorded, at any time, from anywhere on the planet.
"...Qwest. Ride the light." (Remember those commercials?:)
And if that means the destruction of the movie and recording industries and their replacement with something that does meet the needs of the consumer, so much the better.
> One last thought, who else thinks that this will be Anna Nicole Smith's next move with the ashes of that old guy?
If he eats lots of food, and if he weighs 800+ pounds when he dies, there might be enough carbon in him to make a dildo out of pure diamond!
(Suggested epitaph: "She said she'd marry me for my money, but wouldn't put out until I could get it up and stay hard as a rock for at least an hour. Who's laughing now?")
> What's the ratio now, one good movie for every 37 cinema stinkers like "Crossroads," "Pluto Nash" or "Master of Disguise"?
So that's the MPAA's secret strategy!
Drive DeCSS off the 'net by making so many bad movies that nobody will ever want to use it.
I mean, sure, downloading and burning a 650M DiVX of "Battlefield Earth" beats subsidizing the Cult of $cientology by watching the movie on DVD. But simply smashing a blank CD-ROM with a hammer and giving your an enema with the shards beats both options, and the enema doesn't waste 650M of bandwidth.
> Selective enforcement of laws (2600, anyone?) allows them to selectively threaten people for leverage (e.g. making region-free players hard to get.)
> >
Uniform enforcement, on the other hand, or even the widely-publicized appearance of uniform enforcement, brings the issues out of the geek ghetto to where the voting public confronts it.
> >Best thing that could happen would be for the RIAA to file criminal charges against Aunt Martha for letting her friends copy her Burl Ives recordings.
Which is why selective enforcement will be used. But it won't be Aunt Martha and Burl Ives. It'll be a "hacker", because hackers are the Evil Guy Of The Day, and it won't be Burl Ives, it'll be whatever the Evil Band Of The Day is.
(Sorry, I don't know what the Evil Band of Mid-2002 is. Past winners have been Chuck Berry, for playing "nigger music" [yes, that's what fundies used to call "rock and roll" back in the 50s] to white teenage girls, Elvis Presley, for his "disgusting pelvic gyrations", Frank Zappa, for, well, being Frank Zappa, Ozzy Osbourne for satanism, Jello Biafra and the Dead Kennedys for records that were "harmful matter" to minors, NWA for glorifying gangsterism, Ice-T for glorifying murder in "Cop Killer", KMFDM after Columbine, Eminem for just about every lyric in "My Name Is", but regrettably, never Britney Spears for being a pair of tits impersonating a musician.)
So what's the advantage in selective enforcement? In an age of DRM (Palladium, DMCA, copy-crippled CDs, CBDTPA laws), you don't know what constitutes infringement. You only know that someone, somewhere, might decide to put your head on a pike as an example to the rest of the world.
But if there's DRM-crippling tech in most consumer hardware and consumer operating systems, it's precisely the people capable of breaking such tech who need to have their ideas and code "chilled" with the threat of the "MP3 raid at 4am"
"Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?" said
Dr. Ferris. "We want them broken. You'd better get it straight that
it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against - then you'll know
that this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We're after power
and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick,
and you'd better get wise to it. There's no way to rule innocent men.
The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals.
Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares
so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live
without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens'
What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that
can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted - and
you create a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt.
Now that's the system, Mr. Rearden, that's the game, and once you
understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with."
- Ayn Rand, "Atlas Shrugged"
The sad thing is that when $HACKER is led off in chains for "stealing" $20 million from RIAA by sharing copies of MP3s from $EVIL_BAND, nobody's gonna pipe up and say "If $EVIL_BAND is so horrible, why are you saying they're worth $20 million to you? Why can't we think of the children, and get rid of RIAA for promoting all of these horrible evil bands that are corrupting our youth?"
Uniform enforcement hinders RIAA's cause - protection of their revenue by purchase of laws to ensure a "chilling effect" on code (DRM circumvention), music (can't record, mix, or burn without RIAA-approved hardware), and speech (being both code and music) by making everyone a suspect.
> Interesting that there are no visual cues as to _rotation_ of the record. speed, plane, elevation of stylus relative to record, but what then?
Visual cue to rotation - the fact that there's a big wavy groove running in a big spiral all around the disc. The waves have a pattern to them. (That's how the "pictures" and "data" are encoded, along with some of the physics stuff.)
Stylus - not relevant. Could be a laser bouncing off the grooves and the measurement of the deflection angle. If you've figured out that the grooves contain information, how you read it doesn't matter.
Speed - not relevant for the "pictures" and "data" - it's just like decoding the Aricebo transmission. If you measure 21cm (common wavelength, Hydrogen, yadda yadda) from the big illustration, you can figure out basic contstants like the speed of light.
So for the music - Earthers say the speed of light is 186000 miles per second. But since aliens don't know what miles or seconds are, Earthers write it as $VERYBIGNUM wavelengths of the hydrogen atom per unit-time. Speed of light and hydrogen wavelength are constant, voila, you've just taught the aliens what a second is.
The other way to do it is to get to a level of physics where you're talking about the Planck time, and tell little green men "$VERYSMALLNUM rotations per Planck Time":)
> Why is the probe running on batteries? Is it even possible to use solar power that far from the sun? What does it use energy for anyway? Is it transmitting something back to earth?
1) Radiothermoelectric Generators - RTGs. A chunk of plutonium is warm, like a puppy. Space is cold, like a puppy dipped in liquid nitrogen.
A Peltier-effect CPU cooler exploits a difference in electrical potential (power to the cooler) to create a temperature gradient (hot fins, cool CPU). The effect works in reverse -- Voyager uses the temperature gradient between cold space and warm radioactives to generate an electrical current. No moving parts, so you have 100% reliability, and it can last as long as the radioactives are sufficiently "hot" -- which is often decades.
2) No. Solar is pretty impractical at Jupiter-range distances, and you can forget about Saturn and beyond. That's why Cassini used RTGs. That's why if you want to get to the outer planets quickly, an ion engine plus an RTG is a really cool idea. (That's why I hate enviro-nuts who go apeshit at anything with the word "nukular", but that's another/. thread.)
4) Yes:)
3) To transmit the signals in #4. (And to run the computers to receive signals from Earth.) It's mainly a "where are you now?" and "what's it like out there?" kind of conversation, but there's still some useful data coming back. These long-range probes are how we'll find out if our theories of gravitation are OK or not, and once past the heliopause, give us an idea of what near-interstellar space is like.
> I can see people imagining mathematicians sitting in the offices with a big pile of knead and trying to form proper coffee cup handles out of doughnuts.
Which is easy, of course, as both are instances of a torus.
What really impresses me was turning a Klein bottle into a coffee cup... resulting in the Klein Stein
(Why yes, that's a shameless plug for Cliff Stoll's Klein Bottles. And despite the fact that it's toplogically identical to every other Klein bottle, and therefore definitely not a torus, I gotta say the Klein Stein is an amazing bit of glasswork. It holds a lot of liquid for something with no volume.)
> Whatever happened to the Eugenics War [startrek.com] of the 1990's? The one where Khan
ruled 1/4 of the Earth, and ends up being ejected into space.
> >
And my personal favorite, The Royale [startrek.com] from Star Trek:TNG, where Picard goes off for 2 minutes on how Fermat's Last Theorem goes unsolved.
Hmph. Obviously, the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem derived by human/machine symbiotes in the late 20th century was... umm, one of humanity's treasures that was lost during the carnage of the Eugenics Wars of the 1990s!
The fact that the historical record lists the Eugenics Wars as being in the "1990s" was just an error in the historical record, arising from the Great UNIX Date Catastrophe of 2038. (Notice how the Star Trek universe never mentions the Great UNIX Date Catastrophe of 2038? It's because it happened, and all the dates got screwed up, and as a result there's no historical reference to it!)
Beam me up, Paramount, there are no scriptwriters here. ("Dammit, Jim, I'm a Slashdotter, not a scriptwriter!")
Re:Ignorance is beaming
on
Haiku vs Spam
·
· Score: 2
> Wow. I almost have no words for this. Either you slept through history and don't totally understand what your just said, or you're also one of the people who makes jokes about the holocaust under Hitler and wonders why nobody laughs.
(Yeah, in retrospect, I should have skipped the 5-7-5 and pointed out that I wanted to go Nanking on the Chinese spammers, not all Chinese. This is, after all, Slashdot - where "go all Vlad the Impaler on him in front of Level3 Headquarters to send a message" was the #1 answer to the "What shall we do with a captured spammer" poll.
So - in that vein, allow me to make amends:
Two hundred thousand
If only they'd been spammers,
Then I could forgive.
> Would the governments subsidize it, or would the costs be dumped on the consumer, increasing the cost of net access in Europe even higher then it already is?
Where, pray tell, do you think governments get the money they then distribute for "subsidies"?
Slashdot Mirror
As much as I like to bash telcos, I gotta admit, Verizon and their lawyers are earning some respect.
Now barley and hops won't be just raised for the slaughter, but for... heyyy, wait a minute, beer's a vegetable! ;-)
True. But given that the stock has been in a three-year decline from around $90 in late 2000 to today's $12 and change, I'd say that had you gone short at any time in the past three years (outside of the past two weeks :), the market would have rewarded you quite well for your prescience and patience.
Anyone who thinks "It matters not if XYZ is a junk company or not" has only to look at the stock charts for said companies over the past few years.
(And anyone who wants to talk about Enron, Tyco, Worldcon and Martha Stewart would do well to look at a one-year chart before they spoke. The market is a far harsher judge of business impropriety than Congress can ever be.)
>[
> [
Why care? Because IMHO it betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what the net is all about, and if AOL tries this, they're fux0r3d even harder than they were after the AOL/TW merger.
What's in it for you? If you agree, and you put your money where your mouth is by selling AOL stock short, you make good money riding it down to zero. (Conversely, you can lose a bundle if you're wrong and don't realize it in time, but with great risk can come great reward :-)
1) Get sued for sexual harassment.
2) Cut off internet access to all employees.
3) Pay a fortune for the name "UNIX"
4) Because Linux is "a religion" [...] that "didn't break any new ground" written by "punk young kids"
5) Shuts down all your development teams.
6) Change your mind on Linux 5 years too late and call it Caldera?
7) Umm, rename it to SCO again?
8) ????
I dunno what 9) is, but it sure as hell ain't gonna be "Profit".
"Your wish is my command - visit any airport :-)"
- Norm Mineta, Secretary of Transportation.
"Your honor, my client couldn't have committed the crime. The prosecution's forensic evidence says the crime happened at 0130h.
My client's ISP's billing records show that he was assigned IP address aa.bb.cc.dd from 2230 the previous night to 0330 that morning.
The HTTP logs from www.goatse.cx show that a user at aa.bb.cc.dd transferred 1,327 images of h0t g04t pr0n from 2235 to 0320h.
My client may be guilty of poor taste in pr0n that's not what he's on trial for.
And if I may add, Your Honor, one look at the spams you no doubt get every day, and you'll conclude that the rest of the country's taste in pr0n isn't that great either.
The defence moves that the Court order the prosecution to remove its head from the goat's ass. The defence rests."
No, because it's wasteful. We don't need easy solutions involving brute force and massive ignorance, we need efficient solutions. I propose the following:
"Kill the criminals. Feed the hungry." ;-)
USA: Corrupt. Stupid. But with so much corruption and stupidity, effectively incapable of oppression.
Communist China: Corrupt. Oppressive. But stupid? Stupid like a fox.
Nazi Germany: Oppressive. Stupid. And a population so rigidly controlled and brainwashed there was no room for serious corruption.
Thus, all election day decisions come down to "Corrupt. Oppressive. Stupid. Choose any two."
Same here. But I'd be on the lookout for bogus statistic use. The population of the US continues to grow. If 1% of the population is under surveillance, the number of wiretaps will grow.
There's also a very real factor, of course, which is that the amount of effort required to do a wiretap has decreased.
That's Moore's Law in action - in the 50s, it meant wires clipped onto wires, and a G-Man with a pair of headphones, writing stuff down in real time, and/or using a big clunky tape recorder.
Today, it's a hard drive and a few keystrokes in the phone company switching office, and one guy can probably skim through the audio stream ("just ordering a pizza", "whups, phone sex, gotta save that one for after work!", "hey, there's something interesting!") of 4-5 suspects the way you and I flip through a playlist of MP3z.
Ten years from now, it'll be an AI-holocube and a guy asking the AI-cube "So, did any of my 500 suspects make phone calls to anyone else's suspects today", or "This guy's wanted for downloading MP3z. Over the past three years, cross-reference names of all bands he describes as 'cool', 'l33t', and 'kickass' with CD purchases from credit card records. Print me out a list of all bands he likes but doesn't own CDs of. And why are you denying me access to the phone sex, Holocube? I might need those in an investigation someday! For an AI, you've been a right bastard ever since I tried to keep tabs on my wife from the office. We used to be able to do that, you know!"
Bottom line - expect the number of wiretaps to increase with the number of suspects an individual officer can keep under surveillance at any given time.
Given the alternative - hiring hundreds of thousands of officers to do it the Old-Fashioned Way, wasting billions of tax dollars in the process, and the risks that come with the addition of hundreds of thousands of (corruptible, and often corrupt) humans to the system, I'd prefer the all-seeing holocubes that only answer what they're allowed to answer.
"Speech". You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
> Sure, it's not a right to destroy government property, but it's vandalism, not terrorism.
Destroying government property for no reason at all is vandalism.
Destroying government property (or most other uses of violence / force by non-uniformed combatants) in order to change policy is the definition of terrorism.
Granted, a rock's nowhere near as lethal as a bomb, but that's a matter of degree, not a matter of principle - by throwing that rock, you're saying to the drones in the building that if they continue to work for the institution against which you're protesting, they put their personal safety at risk. If throwing rocks through government office windows in order to change policy isn't terrorism, why not step up to Molotovs? Little chunks of lead? Where do you draw the line?
You have the right to peacably assemble and protest. You have the right to petition Congress for a redress of grievances.
Where I come from, speech comes in many forms. Sound waves. T-shirts. Handbills. Source code. Executable code. But "igneous", "metamorphic", or "sedimentary" aren't on the list.
Likewise, "stuffed into a bottle of flammable liquid and lit on fire" doesn't constitute a Constitutionally-protected way to deliver a petition.
>Film at 11.
Crack at 10:30.
UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT Vote is ENCOURAGED, ESPECIALLY to BALLOTS and VOTER REGISTRATION CARDS! :)
> Just wait until these bozos start getting tons of "political" e-mail from nut cases like McElwaine. I suspect that then they'll start saying "Oh, political spam is only OK if it comes from a legitimate candidate."
Actually, I hope this is true.
Before the Spam Warz started, I thought there were two kinds of companies - legitimate companies and scam artists. After the first year, I realized that spam was spam, the well was poisoned, and that any company that wanted to use the same marketing techniques as the h0t b3a5t pr0n d00dz was unworthy of my business.
So bring it on, KKK and Commies! Bring it on so that when I get my spam for Candidate Foobar, I have no idea if he's a real candidate or just some whackjob with a grudge. Bring it on, so that when anyone sees "Foobar" on the ballot, and an (R) or (D) beside his name, we conclude "Foobar? Naaw, a real political party wouldn't do that. He must be a joke candidate, or maybe the real Republicans or Democrats aren't running this race."
> There's no hope, though. The junk-fax laws and the anti-telemarketing laws already exempt political appeals. Never mind that a ban would be perfectly constitutional (under the time, manner, and place doctrine).
You're right, but you're understating the problem.
> There's no way the politicians are going to write a law that makes it harder for them to "communicate with their constituents".
You are confused because you lack perspective, grasshopper.
"There's no way the politicians are going to write a law that applies to themselves as well as the peasants."
The world makes much more sense now, no?
>
> I can't help but thinking that that is exactly what all the candidates are actually saying beneath the sugar-coated fluff that are their campaign speeches.
Agreed.
That's not a political suicide speech. Hell, in California, that's how Gray Davis raises his campaign funds!
(Oracle's $25K buys a $95M contract debacle, a few weeks ago, Herbalife's $100G buys them an exemption from reporting ephedra on their product labels, the Tosco refinery's $75G buys an increase their allowance to dump dioxin into the San Francisco Bay - that last one's a real hoot, as Davis, as a Democrat, is claiming (with a straight face, no less) the environmentalist high ground.)
I'll take issue with that.
A capitalist takes money, and uses that money to produce something consumers want. Consumers buy the product, giving the capitalist a return on his investment.
Contrast this with what's going on with RIAA vs. the consumer.
The consumer has said, time and time again, that he/she wants MP3s without copy protection created from sources without copy protection.
But RIAA does not want to sell what the consumer wants. They're only willing to use their capital to produce and (attempt to) sell things consumers don't want (DRM-crippled streaming services). Seeing this fail, they then use their capital to buy laws that will put anyone else in jail for the crime of providing what consumers want.
Now, I've got lots of words I can use to describe that sort of behavior. "Filthy" is on that list of words, but "Capitalist" sure as hell isn't.
No, it's not.
But sadly, it is a measure of how far RIAA/MPAA has fallen in the eyes of their victi^H^H^H^H^Hcustomers that I still hope every day that I live to see the time when cheap bandwidth allows everyone to instantly have free-as-in-beer access to every movie and every song ever made or recorded, at any time, from anywhere on the planet.
"...Qwest. Ride the light." (Remember those commercials? :)
And if that means the destruction of the movie and recording industries and their replacement with something that does meet the needs of the consumer, so much the better.
If he eats lots of food, and if he weighs 800+ pounds when he dies, there might be enough carbon in him to make a dildo out of pure diamond!
(Suggested epitaph: "She said she'd marry me for my money, but wouldn't put out until I could get it up and stay hard as a rock for at least an hour. Who's laughing now?")
So that's the MPAA's secret strategy!
Drive DeCSS off the 'net by making so many bad movies that nobody will ever want to use it.
I mean, sure, downloading and burning a 650M DiVX of "Battlefield Earth" beats subsidizing the Cult of $cientology by watching the movie on DVD. But simply smashing a blank CD-ROM with a hammer and giving your an enema with the shards beats both options, and the enema doesn't waste 650M of bandwidth.
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> Uniform enforcement, on the other hand, or even the widely-publicized appearance of uniform enforcement, brings the issues out of the geek ghetto to where the voting public confronts it.
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>Best thing that could happen would be for the RIAA to file criminal charges against Aunt Martha for letting her friends copy her Burl Ives recordings.
Which is why selective enforcement will be used. But it won't be Aunt Martha and Burl Ives. It'll be a "hacker", because hackers are the Evil Guy Of The Day, and it won't be Burl Ives, it'll be whatever the Evil Band Of The Day is.
(Sorry, I don't know what the Evil Band of Mid-2002 is. Past winners have been Chuck Berry, for playing "nigger music" [yes, that's what fundies used to call "rock and roll" back in the 50s] to white teenage girls, Elvis Presley, for his "disgusting pelvic gyrations", Frank Zappa, for, well, being Frank Zappa, Ozzy Osbourne for satanism, Jello Biafra and the Dead Kennedys for records that were "harmful matter" to minors, NWA for glorifying gangsterism, Ice-T for glorifying murder in "Cop Killer", KMFDM after Columbine, Eminem for just about every lyric in "My Name Is", but regrettably, never Britney Spears for being a pair of tits impersonating a musician.)
So what's the advantage in selective enforcement? In an age of DRM (Palladium, DMCA, copy-crippled CDs, CBDTPA laws), you don't know what constitutes infringement. You only know that someone, somewhere, might decide to put your head on a pike as an example to the rest of the world.
But if there's DRM-crippling tech in most consumer hardware and consumer operating systems, it's precisely the people capable of breaking such tech who need to have their ideas and code "chilled" with the threat of the "MP3 raid at 4am"
The sad thing is that when $HACKER is led off in chains for "stealing" $20 million from RIAA by sharing copies of MP3s from $EVIL_BAND, nobody's gonna pipe up and say "If $EVIL_BAND is so horrible, why are you saying they're worth $20 million to you? Why can't we think of the children, and get rid of RIAA for promoting all of these horrible evil bands that are corrupting our youth?"
Uniform enforcement hinders RIAA's cause - protection of their revenue by purchase of laws to ensure a "chilling effect" on code (DRM circumvention), music (can't record, mix, or burn without RIAA-approved hardware), and speech (being both code and music) by making everyone a suspect.
Visual cue to rotation - the fact that there's a big wavy groove running in a big spiral all around the disc. The waves have a pattern to them. (That's how the "pictures" and "data" are encoded, along with some of the physics stuff.)
Stylus - not relevant. Could be a laser bouncing off the grooves and the measurement of the deflection angle. If you've figured out that the grooves contain information, how you read it doesn't matter.
Speed - not relevant for the "pictures" and "data" - it's just like decoding the Aricebo transmission. If you measure 21cm (common wavelength, Hydrogen, yadda yadda) from the big illustration, you can figure out basic contstants like the speed of light.
So for the music - Earthers say the speed of light is 186000 miles per second. But since aliens don't know what miles or seconds are, Earthers write it as $VERYBIGNUM wavelengths of the hydrogen atom per unit-time. Speed of light and hydrogen wavelength are constant, voila, you've just taught the aliens what a second is.
The other way to do it is to get to a level of physics where you're talking about the Planck time, and tell little green men "$VERYSMALLNUM rotations per Planck Time" :)
1) Radiothermoelectric Generators - RTGs. A chunk of plutonium is warm, like a puppy. Space is cold, like a puppy dipped in liquid nitrogen.
A Peltier-effect CPU cooler exploits a difference in electrical potential (power to the cooler) to create a temperature gradient (hot fins, cool CPU). The effect works in reverse -- Voyager uses the temperature gradient between cold space and warm radioactives to generate an electrical current. No moving parts, so you have 100% reliability, and it can last as long as the radioactives are sufficiently "hot" -- which is often decades.
2) No. Solar is pretty impractical at Jupiter-range distances, and you can forget about Saturn and beyond. That's why Cassini used RTGs. That's why if you want to get to the outer planets quickly, an ion engine plus an RTG is a really cool idea. (That's why I hate enviro-nuts who go apeshit at anything with the word "nukular", but that's another /. thread.)
4) Yes :)
3) To transmit the signals in #4. (And to run the computers to receive signals from Earth.) It's mainly a "where are you now?" and "what's it like out there?" kind of conversation, but there's still some useful data coming back. These long-range probes are how we'll find out if our theories of gravitation are OK or not, and once past the heliopause, give us an idea of what near-interstellar space is like.
Which is easy, of course, as both are instances of a torus.
What really impresses me was turning a Klein bottle into a coffee cup... resulting in the Klein Stein
(Why yes, that's a shameless plug for Cliff Stoll's Klein Bottles. And despite the fact that it's toplogically identical to every other Klein bottle, and therefore definitely not a torus, I gotta say the Klein Stein is an amazing bit of glasswork. It holds a lot of liquid for something with no volume.)
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> And my personal favorite, The Royale [startrek.com] from Star Trek:TNG, where Picard goes off for 2 minutes on how Fermat's Last Theorem goes unsolved.
Hmph. Obviously, the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem derived by human/machine symbiotes in the late 20th century was... umm, one of humanity's treasures that was lost during the carnage of the Eugenics Wars of the 1990s!
The fact that the historical record lists the Eugenics Wars as being in the "1990s" was just an error in the historical record, arising from the Great UNIX Date Catastrophe of 2038. (Notice how the Star Trek universe never mentions the Great UNIX Date Catastrophe of 2038? It's because it happened, and all the dates got screwed up, and as a result there's no historical reference to it!)
Beam me up, Paramount, there are no scriptwriters here. ("Dammit, Jim, I'm a Slashdotter, not a scriptwriter!")
(Yeah, in retrospect, I should have skipped the 5-7-5 and pointed out that I wanted to go Nanking on the Chinese spammers, not all Chinese. This is, after all, Slashdot - where "go all Vlad the Impaler on him in front of Level3 Headquarters to send a message" was the #1 answer to the "What shall we do with a captured spammer" poll.
So - in that vein, allow me to make amends:
Two hundred thousand
If only they'd been spammers,
Then I could forgive.
Where, pray tell, do you think governments get the money they then distribute for "subsidies"?