> I've yet to find a public access NNTP server with a full alt.* feed.
You just haven't looked hard enough. There's an alt newsgroup about free newsservers (hint, hint) that you might want to investigate.
There's a guy who works at an ISP. As an experiment, he's running one himself. The experiment consists of two servers, one for text (anyone can read, and you can post from it if you send him a polite email), and a read-only one for binaries (from which anyone can read, but it's frequently "busy", as he limits the number of simultaneous connections with the outside world.)
His completeness and retention on binaries beats the hell out of most ISP-based servers.
The result is that you can get most of your music from your own ISP (assuming you have an ISP that has a decent USENET feed), and use his public server for any missing parts. Fewer repost requests mean a lighter load.
Incidentally, a full binaries feed is about 350GB per day. Holy fsck.
> > I've seen others who were the sports players and jocks working the counter at the local mini-mart. They are still single and still acting like they are in high school. I'm married with my first kid on it's way. >
> All that time *not* playing sports with other kids as a child means that you didn't realise that saying things like this makes you sound like a pompous prick.
The funniest part is my gut reaction to his post, which is this:
"You poor bastard."
Now it's my turn to be an even more pompous prick:
I've also seen the jocks. But most aren't single. Remember how they always "got the girls"? Most of 'em married early and have already knocked out a kid or two by now. Because of that, they couldn't take the time off to go to college. Because of they didn't go to college, they work at Wal-Mart. And every day isn't like high school to them - it's a hard struggle to make ends meet. The pay sucks. They live day-to-day knowing that their boss can come down on them harder than their most-hated high school teacher ever did. They have no savings. Their kids will probably never make it to college, let alone through it.
Me? I'm in arrogant bastard heaven. I'm out-earning my parents, I'm still single, and will never have kids. Guess what? I'm not much older than the original poster is, and I'm within striking distance of retirement. I get up, do some good work (modulo wasting my employer's time by posting to Slashdot!), come home, cook something wonderful, geek out at the computer, play some video games, listen to some music, read USENET, whack spammer nads, and call it a night.
It ain't the jocks who are single and acting like they're still in high school. It's the geeks. And some of us love it. Because we've earned enough money to get away with being pompous pricks;-)
> I can vouch for the no-violence before 1952 theory. I've watched several Fred Estaire/Ginger Rogers movies on AMC that date to the era, and apparently, no matter how extreme the difference between people, they always settled their problems through dance, not violence.
> > I think violence was invented around the same time as color. I wonder if there's a connection?
Of course there's a connection. Back then, all the good guys wore white and the bad guys wore black.
Rendered in black-and-white, shattering the Lone Ranger's cranium with a railgun would make it look like he was a bad guy. And chainsawing a bad guy, well, how could you tell the difference between the gibs soaking into his shirt and what he was already wearing?
In black and white, the gibs look like crude oil, or little globs of asphalt. Lame. There was no point to violence until we had color to see the gibs!
Back on topic, the thing I liked most about Cinematronics' arcade release of Spacewar was that you got gibs. Sure, they were just little bent vectors indicating damaged spaceships, but hey, it was all we had, and we liked it!
Come to think of it, the thing that amazed me about Williams' Defender wasn't just a control panel from hell (5 buttons and a joystick), but the beautiful explosions - when you blew up the bad guys, you got to see chunks of their ships flying all over the screen, with great "skizz-chungachungcasplorrzzzz" sound effects to go with it. Nothin' like smart-bombing four pods and huntin' down the stragglers...)
Final note on gibs and video games - Williams/Midway's 1990s-era homage to Defender and Stargate was called Strike Force. Awesome soundtrack and spectacular effects when blowing up the aliens. If you enjoyed Defender and can no longer find Strike Force in the arcades, you owe it to yourself to find it emulated.
> You don't know what you're talking about. There are plenty of evolved genetic traits that at first don't appear to be beneficial to survival but turn out to be quite ingenius.
Actually, you (and others) raise a valid point, which I glossed over in my haste to say "Yo, he's not passing a moral judgement".
Sickle cell anemia is a great example of one such trait. If there's lots of mosquitoes around, the defect's a survival benefit.
Indeed, one can make the case that homosexuality is also such a trait -- somebody's gotta be "disconnected" from child-rearing to be the tribal shaman. (cf. various studies on what some early cultures did.)
We've observed links between autism and geekiness, synesthesia and creativity, and homosexuality and creativity.
To be absolutely accurate, I probably should have limited myself to saying that evolutionary fitness implies only that the incidence of genetically-induced homosexuality in a population will be self-limited.
> Did anyone catch that wonderful preaching speech last night at the Grammy's?
"Who gives a fuck about a goddamn Grammy?"
- Public Enemy, Terminator X to the Edge of Panic, 1988
"Caught, now in court 'cuz I stole a beat,
this is a samplin' sport [... ] ?"
- Public Enemy, "Caught, can I get a witness?", 1988.
("Caught" was specifically about RIAA lawsuits and the sampling controversy of the early 90s. Way to go, RIAA, your policies on sampling nearly killed rap and early electronica/techno in its tracks. How much of your revenue stream do you owe to those genres now? And how much do you get from gouging people who still try to sample?)
Side note to Chuck D - if you ever this, working the guitar riff from KMFDM's "Godlike" into "She Watch Channel Zero" was one of the weirdest, and coolest, things I've ever heard. Loved it.
> This is what I see happening if this bill gets passed: >
> -Widespread civil disobeience to the degree that somehow, sometime, they finally take notice.
"Chillin' in my crib, cold video-dubbin', FBI warnin', huh, don't mean nothin',
They call that shit a crime, yo, that shit's a joke
Hit 'record' on my dope remote."
- Ice-T, ca. 1990.
>- A wide and growing division of artists from the mainstream, where the Net finally becomes a mainstream place to purchase music or a secondary "rogue" recording industry develops that is more sympathetic to consumers rights and wants.
I'm not a huge rap fan, but I have to admit they've known about RIAA and MPAA from Day One.
Agreed on both your outcomes. Is it any wonder why Chuck D kicks the ass of RIAA every chance he gets to testify?
Circumvention cost: One soldering iron.
Another capacitor. Another resistor. And life in prison.
When electronics are outlawed, only outlaws will build electronics.
Two years ago, I would have put a smiley on that.
If you're reading this, you're probably concerned. Explain to your representative that SSSCA is a Bad Thing because a nation without technology people is a nation doomed to fail. Block out the means of getting "interested" in technology and you cut down on the number of future innovators.
Just because Jack Valenti thinks your kids should be watching movies instead of playing with electronics doesn't mean that it's a good thing for your kid's educational prospects.
Re:Two transition periods?
on
If I Had a Hammer
·
· Score: 1, Offtopic
> I'm not so sure that people will ever need even the full 64 bits, let alone 128 or more. You start getting to the point where
every atom in the known universe could have its own video diary and you'd still have used only a fraction of the space.
Step 1: Build a 128-bit CPU.
Step 2: ????^H^H^H^HConvince every atom in the known universe to keep a video diary.
Step 3: Profit!!!!
> Tread softly, you're walking down a dangerous path. If genetic diversity is considered an absolute "good"
the next logical step is to be against inter-racial reproduction. It causes the same result, though it
decreases genetic elitism.
I don't follow your logic here -- if genetic diversity is an absolute "good", banning same-race reproduction would be the more logical alternative.
(Actually, neither alternative would maximize genetic diversity -- the alternative that maximizes genetic diversity would be to ordain that all mating pairs must be selected at random. This would seem to be a contra-evolutionary strategy, however, as the point of selection - both natural selection and artificial selection - is that the more-fit genes propagate, and the less-fit genes don't.)
Given that human tastes in fashion and culture change on a 20-50 year timeframe, I'd say designer babies aren't a problem.
Just a few hundred years ago, we'd have been selecting for "fat chicks", because of that Reuben guy (where do you think the word "Reubenesque" comes from?) and the notion that being fat meant you had enough food to eat (and were therefore a "good catch"). In the 70s and 80s, we'd have sprogged a generation of anorexics with big hair.
30 years from now, fat will probably be "in" again. (rejoice, potatoes of the couches!). Maybe people will get fed up with having to wash and style their hair and a "baldness" fad will set in.
If we allow culture and fashion to dictate which genes reproduce... oh, wait a minute, that's what we're doing at the high schools, the dorms, the workplaces, the nightclubs. Designer babies will merely accelerate the process.
It could even be a Good Thing. Consider that with all the experimenting, evolution might find something interesting and worthwhile in all the mistakes that'll be made. (Some parent who thinks synesthesia is fun, and who asks for it by design because there's a correlation between synesthetes and great artists...)
> And we *are* focusing our efforts on curing AIDs and cancer.
And while we're at it, AIDS appears to have made a jump from other primate species to us.
But why to chimps get SIV (Simian Immunodeficiency Virus) and not die from it?
The same reason a small percentage of the human population can contract (and carry) HIV and yet not die of it, nor even show symptoms.
In any population, some individuals will be resistant. The other primate species went through this a few million (or even hundred-thousand) years ago, and the resistant primates outbred the non-resistant ones. Voila, a population of chimps that carry SIV, but don't die from it.
Barring a cure or vaccine for AIDS, the same will happen with homo sapiens. The goal of developing a cure/vaccine is to avoid the economic impact of a disease-induced population crash.
Side note: There's anecdotal evidence that resistance to smallpox and AIDS is somehow related to what happened during the Black Death. The lack of resistance to smallpox to native North Americans is well-documented. This may be due to their isolation from all the diseases that have traipsed across Europe and Asia and Africa for the past 10000 years.
Molecular biologists are going to have some fascinating stories to tell, not the least of which is that our present modern culture may owe its existence to accidents of time, geography, and biology.
> I'm willing to bet that most people consider ugliness a disease. Look around you, there are more "cures" for ugliness than there are for anything else.
He means it's a "defect" in the evolutionary sense. That people who are sexually attracted to the same sex are likely not to reproduce.
His "duh" for gene-based homosexuality arises from the fact that an individual carrying such a trait is likely not have offspring, and that consequently, such genes render such individuals evolutionarily unfit.
His "wrong sex" was intended similarly; in most species (that is, excepting certain hermaphroditic species where androgynous individuals "become" female upon receipt of sperm excepted), the "right sex" for purposes of propagating one's genes is the opposite sex.
No judgement on moral fitness was passed. Only a judgement on evolutionary fitness. The two things are not the same.
Likewise, as a heterosexual male who Doesn't Want Children (my idea of "fun" is babysitting a newly-overclocked Athlon XP 2000+ for a few months, then upgrading it to something faster, rather than spending 18 years plugging data into a newly-fabbed homo sapiens:-).
If there's a genetic component to not having a paternal instinct, I carry it. That is, I am evolutionarily "unfit", my instincts are evolutionarily "wrong", because I have chosen to have certain bits of my anatomy snipped to ensure that (barring a serious upfuck on the part of the surgeon) I'll die without propagating my genes.
(In any case, it's a moot point now, as homosexuals and childfree heterosexuals can now pass on their genes by donating eggs or sperm and fertilizing in vitro. But evolution never anticipated primates with brains big enough to pull off stunts like that;-)
> The [Libertarian Party's] ad shows a huge blowup of the face of Drug Czar John Walters, and states: "This week, I had lunch with the President, testified before Congress, and helped funnel $40 million in illegal drug money to groups like the Taliban."
What I wouldn't give for Intel and MSFT and AMD to do the same.
Hollings: "This week, I had lunch with the President, testified before Congress, and helped shut down the $1.5 trillion computer hardware/software industries on behalf of the $10 billion entertainment industry."
> Hollywood believes that copy protection will spur the use of broadband. > > Why do they think this? With copy protection, downmloading movies would require a purchase, and fee-based online music services are already not doing well.
Without copy control, you can just download your music once, or your South Park episodes once, or your Star Wars DivX's once, and keep 'em on your local drive. Everything from USENET to FTP to the Web to Napster supports this model. You download it with some sort of client, perform a File->SaveAs function, and then render the downloaded material in a separate client that plays back the music or movie.
Ultimately the only way to make sure the user can't "File->SaveAs" is to do away with the file. You pay, a transaction occurs in a database, and a bitstream is served. The thing that's doing the downloading is the same thing that's rendering the bistream into music or video. It's a closed-source application that has no capacity to save files. (It has the capacity to put banner ads up. It has the capacity to track what you read, watch, and listen to. But it'll never have a "File->SaveAs" button. Period. Paragraph.)
The MPAA and RIAA want you to live in a world of "my copy-controlled music sounds like ass on a 28K bitstream, and my movies are the size of postage stamps, better get broadband so I can have it sound less like ass and look half-decent... and pay to re-download it every time I want to hear/watch it."
What they fear is that the consumer will say "Fuck this stuff that looks/sounds like ass. I'll download the album overnight and I'll rent a DVD for $1.99 and encode my own DivX."
The funny thing is that the ISPs themselves are pushing the user to make this choice. Due to bandwidth-capping on DSL and cablemodems, it's gotten to the point that if you live in the US, you can download as much with an "Unlimited" dialup (with unmetered local calls) account as you can with broadband. 6-8 hours of 56k downloading per day is about an hour's worth of high-bitrate MP3s.
Best of all, you can do it with a clean conscience -- if you do it in off-peak hours (say, cron jobs and USENET from midnight to 8am), you're not even taking more than your share of the ISP's modem bank, because that modem bank is largely idle at those times. And if it's USENET traffic off your ISP's own news server, you're not even imposing a transit cost on your ISP for shovelling all those bits around, because as far as your ISP is concerned, it's all local traffic.
> Of course, if the message is along the lines of "MY GIRLFRIENDS WANT YOU NOW!!!", the yelling, screaming and 'physical activity' may be of a more pleasant nature.
You Know You've Been Fighting Spam Too Long When...
...you're at the local bar and a woman comes nuzzles up to you and says "My sister thinks you're cute, but she's too shy, so she asked me to say hello for her, wanna chat for a bit?"
And your response is to roll your eyes and holler "Hey, barkeep, got another live-action-pr0n spammer, get the bouncers to throw 'er out, willya? How the hell am I s'posed to enjoy my beer with all the goddamn spammers in this bar?"
> The lawyers are not saying, "Blame these other parties too." > >
What they are saying is, "Blaming our clients for this is just as ridiculous as blamiong all these other parties
would be."
True, but having the Internet deemed illegal and shut down is exactly what MPAA and RIAA would like.
All it would take would be the stroke of a pen of a judge clueless or corrupt enough to say "You're right. ISPs are responsible for all infringement that occurs on their network", and it's Game Over.
I think it's a brilliant strategy on the part of EFF to try this, but it's also incredibly risky.
> Hmmm...but those from Arkansas can only count to 20 (fingers and toes)
Huh? This is Arkansas! The correct number is either 22 or 24, for lucky induhviduals who have six digits per appendage, or waaaaay less than 20 for those who've said "watch this!" while chopping firewood or doing body work on the '73 Ford in the driveway.
In any case, it sure as hell ain't 20, that's fer shure!
> I think we all just want to live in a world where people are responsible for themselves. That's not the same world Americans want to live in. They don't like that kinda of freedom. [They want the freedom to do what the gummint tells them]
Actually, it seems they just want to live in a world where they can pirate their MP3z and pr0n. Free political speech is also OK too, but nobody really wants to read that crap when there's pr0n and Britney Spears MP3z to be downloaded!;)
> Actually, it's not the information that is dangerous. It is the uncritical mind that contains it that can be dangerous. So rather than trying to evoke a critical mind in a person through discussion or whatever, a censor chooses to try to keep the information away from the person. Simply, if you teach a person to think critically and reasonably, you don't need to worry about what information they have
To paraphrase Calvin and Hobbes - verbing isn't the only thing that weirds language.
But if your power rests upon a voting base (or other political unit) composed of uncritical minds, the most dangerous thing in the world to you is a text that threatens to foster critical thinking.
If you don't want a man politically unhappy, don't give him two sides to
a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him
forget there is such a thing as war. If the government is inefficient,
top-heavy and tax mad, better it be all those things than people worry
over it. Peace, Montag.
Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular
songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year.
Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so full of "facts" they
feel stuffed, but absolutely "brilliant" with information. Then they'll
feel they're thinking, and they'll get a *sense* of motion without moving.
And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change. Don't give
them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with.
That way lies melancholy. Any man who can take a TV wall apart and put it
back together again, and most men can, nowadays, is happier than any man
who tries to slide-rule, measure, and equate the universe, which just won't
be measured or equated without making man feel bestial and lonely.
- from Fahrenheit 451
To would-be censors, 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 are two of the most dangerous books ever written.
Orwell's idea of Newspeak addressed the problem effectively -- eliminate the means to talk about such things, and you eliminate the ideas themselves.
When the sentence "All men are created equal" gets parsed as "All humans are identical in every respect and interchangeable", it becomes a logical absurdity, and is immediately rejected.
If "free" can mean only "free as in beer", then "free speech" exists everywhere, because nobody's being charged money to open their mouth, and the notion that "people ought to be free" is akin to institutionalized slavery.
> AFAIK, the Torah has been hand-copied exactly word for word for over 2,000 years by Jewish scribes/Rabbis.
My God, think of the DMCA liabilities!
Babylonian Lawyer: "And if you don't think having to write the whole thing out by hand constitutes a protection mechanism, you're nuts! Off with all your heads!"
Rabbi: "Hey, ya schmucks, just 'cuz it's hard to copy doesn't mean you can stop us!"
> I find it funny and interesting that because the NSA and other TLA agengies are *so* tight lipped we assume their skills and abilities are far ahead of current "joe-sixpack" tech.
For the past 50 years, that's been the case.
> I suppose this very well could be the case, but it sure lends itself to great conspiracy theories.
For the past 50 years, that's also been the case;-)
Most of us older/.ers grew up believing that the mods to the S-boxes in DES were probably backdoors. Turns out they were to secure the algorithm against differential cryptanalysis, which didn't get discovered outside of NSA until recently.
NSA is still reputed to be the largest employer of mathematicians on the planet. They're reputed to have more supercomputing power than any organization on the planet. Both allegations are reasonably well-substantiated.
> I suppose the TLA agencies don't really need strong crypto to invade on my privacy. They just need a court order.
Correct. NSA's got two missions - secure American computing and communications, and 0wn every one else's;-)
Not only is it easier to get a court order to make you give up your keys (or to eavesdrop/keylog you while you enter them), it's a hell of a lot safer.
The funniest part of Cryptonomicon is where the Brits are busy sending bombers to "see" German shipping but not bomb it. (If they just bombed the Germans, the Germans would realize that their crypto had been broken.) One of the protagonist's jobs, as an information theorist, was to figure out just how often they could get away with "just bombing them" and how often they had to make it look like they "got lucky" with a chance overflight or other observation.
The hardest part of crypto isn't breaking your opponent's codes, nor is it securing your own secrets. It's securing the big secret, namely not acting in a way that proves you've broken your opponent's codes.
Knowing your enemy's "A" team plans to attack tomorrow at dawn is good, but if you take out the "A" team 5 minutes before dawn, you run the risk of losing your ability to monitor the "B" team.
Slashdot Mirror
*lol*
But he can google for that newsgroup, and using what he learns there, can find the servers.
You just haven't looked hard enough. There's an alt newsgroup about free newsservers (hint, hint) that you might want to investigate.
There's a guy who works at an ISP. As an experiment, he's running one himself. The experiment consists of two servers, one for text (anyone can read, and you can post from it if you send him a polite email), and a read-only one for binaries (from which anyone can read, but it's frequently "busy", as he limits the number of simultaneous connections with the outside world.)
His completeness and retention on binaries beats the hell out of most ISP-based servers.
The result is that you can get most of your music from your own ISP (assuming you have an ISP that has a decent USENET feed), and use his public server for any missing parts. Fewer repost requests mean a lighter load.
Incidentally, a full binaries feed is about 350GB per day. Holy fsck.
"so far"?
After seeing "monkey boy" and "developers", I suppose one might also go so far as to describe the Grand Canyon as a ditch.
>
> All that time *not* playing sports with other kids as a child means that you didn't realise that saying things like this makes you sound like a pompous prick.
The funniest part is my gut reaction to his post, which is this:
"You poor bastard."
Now it's my turn to be an even more pompous prick:
I've also seen the jocks. But most aren't single. Remember how they always "got the girls"? Most of 'em married early and have already knocked out a kid or two by now. Because of that, they couldn't take the time off to go to college. Because of they didn't go to college, they work at Wal-Mart. And every day isn't like high school to them - it's a hard struggle to make ends meet. The pay sucks. They live day-to-day knowing that their boss can come down on them harder than their most-hated high school teacher ever did. They have no savings. Their kids will probably never make it to college, let alone through it.
Me? I'm in arrogant bastard heaven. I'm out-earning my parents, I'm still single, and will never have kids. Guess what? I'm not much older than the original poster is, and I'm within striking distance of retirement. I get up, do some good work (modulo wasting my employer's time by posting to Slashdot!), come home, cook something wonderful, geek out at the computer, play some video games, listen to some music, read USENET, whack spammer nads, and call it a night.
It ain't the jocks who are single and acting like they're still in high school. It's the geeks. And some of us love it. Because we've earned enough money to get away with being pompous pricks ;-)
>
> I think violence was invented around the same time as color. I wonder if there's a connection?
Of course there's a connection. Back then, all the good guys wore white and the bad guys wore black.
Rendered in black-and-white, shattering the Lone Ranger's cranium with a railgun would make it look like he was a bad guy. And chainsawing a bad guy, well, how could you tell the difference between the gibs soaking into his shirt and what he was already wearing?
In black and white, the gibs look like crude oil, or little globs of asphalt. Lame. There was no point to violence until we had color to see the gibs!
Back on topic, the thing I liked most about Cinematronics' arcade release of Spacewar was that you got gibs. Sure, they were just little bent vectors indicating damaged spaceships, but hey, it was all we had, and we liked it!
Come to think of it, the thing that amazed me about Williams' Defender wasn't just a control panel from hell (5 buttons and a joystick), but the beautiful explosions - when you blew up the bad guys, you got to see chunks of their ships flying all over the screen, with great "skizz-chungachungcasplorrzzzz" sound effects to go with it. Nothin' like smart-bombing four pods and huntin' down the stragglers...)
Final note on gibs and video games - Williams/Midway's 1990s-era homage to Defender and Stargate was called Strike Force. Awesome soundtrack and spectacular effects when blowing up the aliens. If you enjoyed Defender and can no longer find Strike Force in the arcades, you owe it to yourself to find it emulated.
Actually, you (and others) raise a valid point, which I glossed over in my haste to say "Yo, he's not passing a moral judgement".
Sickle cell anemia is a great example of one such trait. If there's lots of mosquitoes around, the defect's a survival benefit.
Indeed, one can make the case that homosexuality is also such a trait -- somebody's gotta be "disconnected" from child-rearing to be the tribal shaman. (cf. various studies on what some early cultures did.) We've observed links between autism and geekiness, synesthesia and creativity, and homosexuality and creativity.
To be absolutely accurate, I probably should have limited myself to saying that evolutionary fitness implies only that the incidence of genetically-induced homosexuality in a population will be self-limited.
"Who gives a fuck about a goddamn Grammy?"
- Public Enemy, Terminator X to the Edge of Panic, 1988
"Caught, now in court 'cuz I stole a beat, this is a samplin' sport [ ... ] ?"
- Public Enemy, "Caught, can I get a witness?", 1988.
("Caught" was specifically about RIAA lawsuits and the sampling controversy of the early 90s. Way to go, RIAA, your policies on sampling nearly killed rap and early electronica/techno in its tracks. How much of your revenue stream do you owe to those genres now? And how much do you get from gouging people who still try to sample?)
Side note to Chuck D - if you ever this, working the guitar riff from KMFDM's "Godlike" into "She Watch Channel Zero" was one of the weirdest, and coolest, things I've ever heard. Loved it.
> This is what I see happening if this bill gets passed:
>
> -Widespread civil disobeience to the degree that somehow, sometime, they finally take notice.
"Chillin' in my crib, cold video-dubbin',
FBI warnin', huh, don't mean nothin',
They call that shit a crime, yo, that shit's a joke
Hit 'record' on my dope remote."
- Ice-T, ca. 1990.
>- A wide and growing division of artists from the mainstream, where the Net finally becomes a mainstream place to purchase music or a secondary "rogue" recording industry develops that is more sympathetic to consumers rights and wants. I'm not a huge rap fan, but I have to admit they've known about RIAA and MPAA from Day One.
Agreed on both your outcomes. Is it any wonder why Chuck D kicks the ass of RIAA every chance he gets to testify?
>
>Hardware Cost: One 556 timer IC, two resistors, two capacitors, one switch and one buzzer.
Circumvention cost: One soldering iron. Another capacitor. Another resistor. And life in prison.
When electronics are outlawed, only outlaws will build electronics.
Two years ago, I would have put a smiley on that.
If you're reading this, you're probably concerned. Explain to your representative that SSSCA is a Bad Thing because a nation without technology people is a nation doomed to fail. Block out the means of getting "interested" in technology and you cut down on the number of future innovators.
Just because Jack Valenti thinks your kids should be watching movies instead of playing with electronics doesn't mean that it's a good thing for your kid's educational prospects.
Step 1: Build a 128-bit CPU.
Step 2: ????^H^H^H^HConvince every atom in the known universe to keep a video diary.
Step 3: Profit!!!!
When do we get funding?
I don't follow your logic here -- if genetic diversity is an absolute "good", banning same-race reproduction would be the more logical alternative.
(Actually, neither alternative would maximize genetic diversity -- the alternative that maximizes genetic diversity would be to ordain that all mating pairs must be selected at random. This would seem to be a contra-evolutionary strategy, however, as the point of selection - both natural selection and artificial selection - is that the more-fit genes propagate, and the less-fit genes don't.)
Given that human tastes in fashion and culture change on a 20-50 year timeframe, I'd say designer babies aren't a problem.
Just a few hundred years ago, we'd have been selecting for "fat chicks", because of that Reuben guy (where do you think the word "Reubenesque" comes from?) and the notion that being fat meant you had enough food to eat (and were therefore a "good catch"). In the 70s and 80s, we'd have sprogged a generation of anorexics with big hair. 30 years from now, fat will probably be "in" again. (rejoice, potatoes of the couches!). Maybe people will get fed up with having to wash and style their hair and a "baldness" fad will set in.
If we allow culture and fashion to dictate which genes reproduce... oh, wait a minute, that's what we're doing at the high schools, the dorms, the workplaces, the nightclubs. Designer babies will merely accelerate the process.
It could even be a Good Thing. Consider that with all the experimenting, evolution might find something interesting and worthwhile in all the mistakes that'll be made. (Some parent who thinks synesthesia is fun, and who asks for it by design because there's a correlation between synesthetes and great artists...)
And while we're at it, AIDS appears to have made a jump from other primate species to us.
But why to chimps get SIV (Simian Immunodeficiency Virus) and not die from it?
The same reason a small percentage of the human population can contract (and carry) HIV and yet not die of it, nor even show symptoms.
In any population, some individuals will be resistant. The other primate species went through this a few million (or even hundred-thousand) years ago, and the resistant primates outbred the non-resistant ones. Voila, a population of chimps that carry SIV, but don't die from it.
Barring a cure or vaccine for AIDS, the same will happen with homo sapiens. The goal of developing a cure/vaccine is to avoid the economic impact of a disease-induced population crash.
Side note: There's anecdotal evidence that resistance to smallpox and AIDS is somehow related to what happened during the Black Death. The lack of resistance to smallpox to native North Americans is well-documented. This may be due to their isolation from all the diseases that have traipsed across Europe and Asia and Africa for the past 10000 years.
Molecular biologists are going to have some fascinating stories to tell, not the least of which is that our present modern culture may owe its existence to accidents of time, geography, and biology.
"Money. I make lots and lots of money!" ;-)
He means it's a "defect" in the evolutionary sense. That people who are sexually attracted to the same sex are likely not to reproduce.
His "duh" for gene-based homosexuality arises from the fact that an individual carrying such a trait is likely not have offspring, and that consequently, such genes render such individuals evolutionarily unfit.
His "wrong sex" was intended similarly; in most species (that is, excepting certain hermaphroditic species where androgynous individuals "become" female upon receipt of sperm excepted), the "right sex" for purposes of propagating one's genes is the opposite sex.
No judgement on moral fitness was passed. Only a judgement on evolutionary fitness. The two things are not the same.
Likewise, as a heterosexual male who Doesn't Want Children (my idea of "fun" is babysitting a newly-overclocked Athlon XP 2000+ for a few months, then upgrading it to something faster, rather than spending 18 years plugging data into a newly-fabbed homo sapiens :-).
If there's a genetic component to not having a paternal instinct, I carry it. That is, I am evolutionarily "unfit", my instincts are evolutionarily "wrong", because I have chosen to have certain bits of my anatomy snipped to ensure that (barring a serious upfuck on the part of the surgeon) I'll die without propagating my genes.
(In any case, it's a moot point now, as homosexuals and childfree heterosexuals can now pass on their genes by donating eggs or sperm and fertilizing in vitro. But evolution never anticipated primates with brains big enough to pull off stunts like that ;-)
What I wouldn't give for Intel and MSFT and AMD to do the same.
Hollings: "This week, I had lunch with the President, testified before Congress, and helped shut down the $1.5 trillion computer hardware/software industries on behalf of the $10 billion entertainment industry."
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> Why do they think this? With copy protection, downmloading movies would require a purchase, and fee-based online music services are already not doing well.
Without copy control, you can just download your music once, or your South Park episodes once, or your Star Wars DivX's once, and keep 'em on your local drive. Everything from USENET to FTP to the Web to Napster supports this model. You download it with some sort of client, perform a File->SaveAs function, and then render the downloaded material in a separate client that plays back the music or movie.
Ultimately the only way to make sure the user can't "File->SaveAs" is to do away with the file. You pay, a transaction occurs in a database, and a bitstream is served. The thing that's doing the downloading is the same thing that's rendering the bistream into music or video. It's a closed-source application that has no capacity to save files. (It has the capacity to put banner ads up. It has the capacity to track what you read, watch, and listen to. But it'll never have a "File->SaveAs" button. Period. Paragraph.)
The MPAA and RIAA want you to live in a world of "my copy-controlled music sounds like ass on a 28K bitstream, and my movies are the size of postage stamps, better get broadband so I can have it sound less like ass and look half-decent... and pay to re-download it every time I want to hear/watch it."
What they fear is that the consumer will say "Fuck this stuff that looks/sounds like ass. I'll download the album overnight and I'll rent a DVD for $1.99 and encode my own DivX."
The funny thing is that the ISPs themselves are pushing the user to make this choice. Due to bandwidth-capping on DSL and cablemodems, it's gotten to the point that if you live in the US, you can download as much with an "Unlimited" dialup (with unmetered local calls) account as you can with broadband. 6-8 hours of 56k downloading per day is about an hour's worth of high-bitrate MP3s.
Best of all, you can do it with a clean conscience -- if you do it in off-peak hours (say, cron jobs and USENET from midnight to 8am), you're not even taking more than your share of the ISP's modem bank, because that modem bank is largely idle at those times. And if it's USENET traffic off your ISP's own news server, you're not even imposing a transit cost on your ISP for shovelling all those bits around, because as far as your ISP is concerned, it's all local traffic.
(+5, Funny). I now have to clean coffee off my monitor ;-)
You Know You've Been Fighting Spam Too Long When...
And your response is to roll your eyes and holler "Hey, barkeep, got another live-action-pr0n spammer, get the bouncers to throw 'er out, willya? How the hell am I s'posed to enjoy my beer with all the goddamn spammers in this bar?"
(I always wondered why I don't date much ;-)
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> What they are saying is, "Blaming our clients for this is just as ridiculous as blamiong all these other parties would be."
True, but having the Internet deemed illegal and shut down is exactly what MPAA and RIAA would like.
All it would take would be the stroke of a pen of a judge clueless or corrupt enough to say "You're right. ISPs are responsible for all infringement that occurs on their network", and it's Game Over.
I think it's a brilliant strategy on the part of EFF to try this, but it's also incredibly risky.
Huh? This is Arkansas! The correct number is either 22 or 24, for lucky induhviduals who have six digits per appendage, or waaaaay less than 20 for those who've said "watch this!" while chopping firewood or doing body work on the '73 Ford in the driveway.
In any case, it sure as hell ain't 20, that's fer shure!
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>Somebody get Mr. Valenti a copy of Godel, Escher, Bach -- STAT!!!
You can give a PC to a Homo Habilis and he'll use it.
He'll use it to crack walnuts, mind you, but he'll use it.
Actually, it seems they just want to live in a world where they can pirate their MP3z and pr0n. Free political speech is also OK too, but nobody really wants to read that crap when there's pr0n and Britney Spears MP3z to be downloaded! ;)
To paraphrase Calvin and Hobbes - verbing isn't the only thing that weirds language. But if your power rests upon a voting base (or other political unit) composed of uncritical minds, the most dangerous thing in the world to you is a text that threatens to foster critical thinking.
To would-be censors, 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 are two of the most dangerous books ever written.
Orwell's idea of Newspeak addressed the problem effectively -- eliminate the means to talk about such things, and you eliminate the ideas themselves.
When the sentence "All men are created equal" gets parsed as "All humans are identical in every respect and interchangeable", it becomes a logical absurdity, and is immediately rejected.
If "free" can mean only "free as in beer", then "free speech" exists everywhere, because nobody's being charged money to open their mouth, and the notion that "people ought to be free" is akin to institutionalized slavery.
My God, think of the DMCA liabilities!
Babylonian Lawyer: "And if you don't think having to write the whole thing out by hand constitutes a protection mechanism, you're nuts! Off with all your heads!"
Rabbi: "Hey, ya schmucks, just 'cuz it's hard to copy doesn't mean you can stop us!"
For the past 50 years, that's been the case.
> I suppose this very well could be the case, but it sure lends itself to great conspiracy theories.
For the past 50 years, that's also been the case ;-)
Most of us older /.ers grew up believing that the mods to the S-boxes in DES were probably backdoors. Turns out they were to secure the algorithm against differential cryptanalysis, which didn't get discovered outside of NSA until recently.
NSA is still reputed to be the largest employer of mathematicians on the planet. They're reputed to have more supercomputing power than any organization on the planet. Both allegations are reasonably well-substantiated.
> I suppose the TLA agencies don't really need strong crypto to invade on my privacy. They just need a court order.
Correct. NSA's got two missions - secure American computing and communications, and 0wn every one else's ;-)
Not only is it easier to get a court order to make you give up your keys (or to eavesdrop/keylog you while you enter them), it's a hell of a lot safer.
The funniest part of Cryptonomicon is where the Brits are busy sending bombers to "see" German shipping but not bomb it. (If they just bombed the Germans, the Germans would realize that their crypto had been broken.) One of the protagonist's jobs, as an information theorist, was to figure out just how often they could get away with "just bombing them" and how often they had to make it look like they "got lucky" with a chance overflight or other observation.
The hardest part of crypto isn't breaking your opponent's codes, nor is it securing your own secrets. It's securing the big secret, namely not acting in a way that proves you've broken your opponent's codes.
Knowing your enemy's "A" team plans to attack tomorrow at dawn is good, but if you take out the "A" team 5 minutes before dawn, you run the risk of losing your ability to monitor the "B" team.
Ah, but what of the Great Unwashed, who figured "PGP? Too complicated! I can't be bothered! They'll just decrypt it anyways."
If this math turns out to be real, the Great Unwashed was right for anyone with less than a 4096-bit key ;-)