And of course, I'm surprised nobody has suggested the obvious application:
Get Gold & Appel (or some similar organization) to launch a mess of "sats" into "orbit" at the Earth/Sun Lagrange points. Run something like "Freedom" on them. Give each sat a bunch of space-hardened (i.e. you need an atmosphere and some radiation and heat shielding) umpteen gigabyte RAID drives.
15 minute ping times, sure. But how the fsck will RIAA stop us from downloading MP3s when the servers are located in deep space?:):):)
All it takes is one.com billionaire with a really twisted sense of humor.
IMHO, yes, XML can replace proprietary binary formats, but only insofar as the authors of editing software are willing to release not only XML but the DTDs as well.
As long as the DTDs remain locked up in the software, you're fscked.
I'm presently quite happy with Framemaker (proprietariness be damned, at least I can count on a Frame doc written under Solaris to render the same way on NT or Mac, whereas with M$-Turd, I can't even depend on the same goddamn file to page-break the same way on two NT boxen!) to generate PDF and WebWorks Publisher for batch HTML conversion, but am becoming increasingly open to alternatives.
Fsck Microslut's half-baked excuse for XML. They're not interested in anything more than lining their own pockets and reinforcing the Orifice monopoly. Interoperability is not in their vocabulary. Scalability never was. The only good use for M$Turd is for writing one-page memos. (If you're a technical writer, I point out that at least this is long enough to write a letter of acceptance for a new job, and a letter of resignation to any manager dumb enough to use "but Office is the corporate standard, and we've already paid for it" as an excuse to take away professional authoring tools.
Rant off. Where the hell was I going with this? OH yeah...
I may soon have the budget for a pure XML solution, does anyone know anything about ArborText? Looks bloody promising, and appears to offer easy integration with the DocBook DTD as a sweet bonus.
Greetings. I remember your signing of my recipe for a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster in an SF bookstore many moons ago, and yes, I still have the recipe:-)
Q1: At the time, there was considerable wonder regarding what would happen with regards to the future of the Infocom HHGTTG game, which left the player standing on the surface of Magrathea.
Now that it's been many years - to the extent you feel free to discuss it, whatever happened between yourself and Infocom way-back-when? Aspiring historians wanna know.
Q2: After what seemed an eternity, it was really neat to see you back on the scene with Starship Titanic. Although I enjoyed ST, I also had the feeling it was also a technology demonstration; here's a basic engine which will allow a few puzzles and the integration of video sequences with some sort of character interaction. The ability to parse text was still there; not quite as much as it was in the Infocom engine, but definitely a lot of potential. Soooooo...
Q2: (I'm sure you knew this was coming) What can you tell us about the HHGTTG adventure game currently under development by H2G2/Pan? Will we finally get a blending of Infocom-style parsing of text-based puzzles with graphics and interactivity?
The reason I ask is because, for me, this was the only thing I found lacking (or more accurately, "expected to find more of") in Starship Titanic -- so much of the humor your work series is literary and textual in nature, hence my burning desire for more textual puzzles. The writing behind the ST characters was great; I just wanted to experience more of it from the user's end. For me, that meant being able to type commands to the game, rather than mousing around the screen. And some things seem to be better represented by text than visuals; the Babel Fish puzzle in the original HHGTTG game, for instance, wouldn't have been nearly as funny if rendered only visually - the humor of the puzzle was powerfully enhanced by the writing associated with each failed attempt to get the fish. (Umm, but thanks for at least saving me the trouble of putting the fish in my ear myself!)
And finally...
Q3: With the universe obliterated by the vogons, there won't be a sixth HHGTTG book, will there? Or will there? I suspect not, but hey, the end of the universe hasn't stopped you before:-)
I, too, have never installed WinZIP on my Windoze boxen. I have no use for GUI-based fluff when the command line will let me extract the files of my choosing to the directory of my choosing.
A mouse is a device for figuring out which window you want to type in.
I don't give a rat's fried patoot whether Mr. Billington thinks that reading on a screen isn't as much fun as reading dead trees. Frankly, he may well be right - but I'd rather read a screen than nothing at all, which is what I can presently read from the Library of Congress.
Overshadowed in this, however, is the very real fact that it costs a Lot Of Money to digitize all the books. OCR isn't 100%, so anything digitized will also have to be proofread.
The special-format material - the maps, the pamphlets, and what-not, lend themselves much more readily to digitization. No OCR issues, and even stronger issues with regards to how long they can be expected to survive repeated handling.
Dead trees in book form can be expected to survive many hundreds of years. Dead trees in the form of 10-foot-by-10-foot roll-out maps don't hold up nearly as well.
Dead trees in book form are readily translated to ASCII as long as the characters are legible. Dead trees in pamphlet form, with lots of images and other stuff, can be served up as.PNGs or.PDFs, with ASCII text as a side order - from a historian's perspective, the physical layout of the page is important in both the case of books and pamphlets, but almost always much more important in the case of pamphlets.
But I agree that Mr. Billington should drop the Luddism. It doesn't serve him well at all.
Re: the Devcorner 100 programme. The interesting thing for me is that I haven't signed up yet. Two reasons:
Lack of trust. This is a company that (although it appears to be backing off from such agressive tactics) still did the following:
Billed me for my first month's service, even though the units never phoned home, and I ordered before this policy went into effect. When I ordered on the phone, I had verbal assurances that there would be no charges until the units phoned home.
Attempted to persuade me to send the units back when I called to cancel the ISP and ask about the charges. I was told that "the new thing" (the $500 policy) didn't apply to me, but that "we can't do anything" about the other $20-odd unauthorized charge. At this point, seeing as how NPLI was threatening to charge $500 and apply their new TOS retroactively, I figured I'd eat the fraudulent loss and be done with it. I'm still not convinced that three months down the road, I won't see a $500 bill on my card. They've given me verbal assurances before and gone back on them.
Used fear tactics - "may be illegal" (likely in reference to FCC regs) to mod the units? Puh-leeze.
Used bait-and-switch tactics - deliberately withholding orders, and then attempting to force the March 31st TOS on customers who had ordered before March 31st, but who inquired as to where the fsck their IOs were.
Used bait-and-switch tactics II - claimed it was a "new model", when the only changes had been to either clip some pins on a mobo connector, or apply goop to the BIOS ROM. Whether this constitutes a "new model" or not is sufficiently ambiguous that it would probably have had to go to court sooner or later.
Will I attempt to develop stuff for my IOs? You betcha. But given their actions towards the community, will I contact them until after I've done something cool? No way.
The Devcorner Catch-22:
If joining the Devcorner 100 means I get a free IO before I develop something cool, NPLI has the problem of people joining only to get the toy.
I might join after I develop something cool, but then, I already own an IO for far below its cost, why try to get another?:-) I'd be happy to give away whatever I developed for it whether or not NPLI gave me a free unit in exchange.
There's a catch-22 here, in that you either already own one, and can prove your worth on it, and thereby join the programme. Or you don't own one, in which case, how can you get started, however good your idea is, after the first 100 units are given out?
On to other things - things I'd ask NPLI.
Why didn't you write up the TOS of March 31st and apply them on the 17th? If your goal was to stop the bleeding of red ink, it could have been done just as well then as the 31st.
Why did it take you so long to get on the clue train and back off from your policy of attempting to pressure customers who ordered before the 31st into your new TOS? You'd already seen the effects of people talking amongst themselves; we know the hardware under the hood of that thing better than you did. Did you not think we'd talk amongst ourselves and that word of those pressure tactics would spread equally as fast?
To what extent is the recent change in policy (particularly with regard to orders received before the 31st) the result of threatened legal action, or the result of a fears of a PR backlash among geeks that had started to spill onto CNet and Wired?
(No, you don't have to - and probably can't - answer that one publicly. It's just something to think about. You'll note that nowhere on that list is "it was the right thing to do". We're not that naive.)
My preceding negative comments aside - it's clear that you're learning. Why you're changing Doing The Right Thing is less important to me than the fact that you ARE Doing The Right Thing.
Your shareholders' interests are protected in the future by the new TOS, and the interests of the community have been protected by a decision to Do The Right Thing for customers who ordered before the new TOS.
So, my next question: What's next?
We have lots of questions about this product. You have lots of answers. We know what it can do running our operating system of choice; heck, we even know what it can do running Windows:)
Can you create a space for us where we can talk and share information with each other and with your techs? It looks like you're interested. We're very interested.
Finally - four minor bug reports, and some product requests for the future:
Bugs:
Reports of phasing issues with the speakers. If true, the fault might be on the motherboard. Can one of your techs confirm or deny?
Reports of BIOS-socket unreliability caused by curing of the epoxy goop. Can one of yours (or Quanta's) failure analysis experts look into it?
Hardcoded root passwords appear to be identical from unit to unit. There's a telnetd running on the machine. Please ensure (at a minimum) that root cannot telnet in from the network. It's been long enough that a brute-force attack could be close to breaking the root password. Yes, we know it uses a nonstandard crypt algorithm. Yes, source for it has already been posted.
That [user]@netpliance.com password for the initial dialup. It might be wise to find ways of embedding that information somewhere less likely for us to find it. Security through obscurity isn't security.
Requests:
Line-out. Lots of people want MP3 players. Even your intended audience may want headphones, particularly those who are hard of hearing.
Broadband. This has already taken care of via the USB jack. I can see you're thinking ahead. Sweet.
Dig into the MP3 market. Rather than spending a fortune to populate that CF card slot and limiting yourself to memory-card technologies, consider selling (via the partnership arrangement you already have with the mouse/printer vendors) a USB-based CD-ROM, and including some software to play back MP3s on a CDROM. This could be done in three ways:
CDROM hanging out the back of the USB port. COTS hardware, small software cost.
Sell a new base for the unit with the CDROM embedded in the base. Sell it as an upgrade kit to turn it into a stereo.
Sell an optional IR upgrade kit, as above.
For ultimate sex, swap out the "mail" LED for an IR sensor and associated circuitry. Sell a remote control, or include "learning" software to make it work with existing remotes. You now have a device that competes on price with the Brujo or other "stereo component" MP3 players, but yours weighs less, looks better, and has a flat-screen display for funky visualization. There is abso-freakin-lutely NOTHING on the market today that matches this. Do a market study on it - I'll bet you there's a market segment who'd pay $500-800 for one of these without blinking an eye.
1) Port it to the i-opener and make a distro of Linux that fits in less than 8M of flash ROM, leaving 8M free:-)
2) Chop out Email, News. I want a web browser. I already have an MUA and a newsreader.
3) Single-menubar-button toggling of Java/Javascript, and image-autoloading. I usually want 'em all off all the time. Sometimes I have to turn 'em on, and I don't want it buried under three levels of menus like in Nutscrape 4.xx.
Amazing stuff. Lord British, thank you for a decade and change of incredible work. Tonight I'm gonna see if my original (!) copy of Ultima I, written in Integer BASIC on an Apple ][+, still boots. I have a feeling I won't be getting any sleep tonight. I'm a veteran of Ultima I through V, and loved every one of them. Please accept my thanks for the past, and my best wishes for the future.
Moderators, please drop my original post #133 back to "2". If you're gonna upmod me, please do it for something a little more worthy of the points. My apologies for having had you waste the modpoints.
> I think Netpliance has been perfectly justified in moving into an automatic billing scheme.
Absolutely. They should've done this from Day Zero, even before it was discovered the units were moddable.
> It's one thing to take advantage of a loss-leading price like this, and I myself feel a little guilty for participating,
Also absolutely. I sympathize with 'em for the loss.
> but people like this, those that are really TRYING to give Netpliance the shaft here really annoy me.
But since when is objecting to unauthorized charges giving NPLI the shaft? Hell, I'd still buy one at $300ish if they offered it for outright purchase without the ISP encumbrance. But I didn't have that option.
So as one who signed up before they changed their policy to automatically bill the credit card, and as one who was assured that there would be no billing until the unit was hooked up to a phone line, I'm quite steamed.
Tell me - would I be unjustified to contest the charges if NPLI charged $22 per month for a year, even after a request to cancel service? How about if they retroactively implemented a $250 "early disconnect" policy? After all, your point of view seems to be that they're allowed to retroactively charge us something to make up for their losses on the loss-leader units sold to geeks, so how much do you think they've got the right to charge?
This isn't about the money, it's about the principle. As soon as you allow a firm to retroactively change their billing policy to bill you once for $22 "because they made a mistake selling it for $99 and lost some money on the deal", you've implicitly allowed them to bill you for $220 to cover their losses. Or $2200. Or any other amount they feel like.
Am I gonna go out and sue NPLI for being bastards about this, or call for a class-action suit? No. The only beneficiary would be the lawyers. Am I gonna stop recommending i-openers to friends and relations for their intended purchase? Yeah, for a while, at least until I cool off. Am I gonna call them and insist that they remove these charges and live up to the terms of the original agreement they made at the time I purchased my unit? You betcha.
It's tit-for-tat. Give me a cool unit for $99, get recommendations to your real customers. Charge my credit card without authorization, lose those recommendations and have your charges contested.
Will my contesting of the charges "win" or "lose"? I dunno, but I'm willing to trust my bank's judgement either way, particularly since there'll be hundreds of fellow geeks contesting the same charges. (I wonder if Mastercard's abuse department is ready for the/. effect?)
But tit-for-tat isn't about bearing grudges. Offer me a unit for roughly your breakeven cost, unencumbered by your ISP (umm, and gimme back the money you charged without authorization my credit card that was gonna buy pizza for an all-night hack session to get Linux on the SanDisk:), get recommendations to geek friends for the Developer's Model as well as non-geek friends for the regular model. I'll probably even buy another one - at the developer's price - and send my modded one to some geek friends outside the States.
'Course, I'll buy it for cash at Circuit City now, instead of via credit card directly from them. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me:-)
Andrew: Thanx for clarifying it. For the first few days after the story broke on/. - there was no requirement for service, and speaking for myself, I was personally assured, (after explicitly asking) that charges to the would not begin until the unit phoned home and set itself up with subscriber info. My order was placed before any change in billing policy. I was therefore charged without authorization.
While I agree that the thing's still a screaming bargain at $99 + $40 shipping + $22firstmonthservice, I do not agree that they had the right to make that charge.
If I'd ordered a few days later, they'd be entitled to charge me for the first month. If I'd ordered after March 20th, they're entitled to send me something I "can't hack", and it's good that they're being upfront about the modifications they're making to the unit. But at the time I ordered it, I was assured there would be no service charges.
Maybe NPLI lied to me. Maybe NPLI simply screwed up. I dunno. But if you ordered before the change in policy, you should probably check your statements or call your bank ASAP to find out what's going on.
Whether or not NPLI is losing money (and they almost certainly are) on people who bought these things to hack is irrelevant. If they're charging people for stuff not ordered, something's wrong and needs to be fixed.
> What really gets to me personally, is there changing policy on people who have allready made a purchase.
Agreed.
I ordered a unit on or about the same day as the Slashdot complainant did, and checked my records based on this article.
I, too, ordered by voice and was assured that there would be no billing until the unit called home.
I too, now have charges on my credit card which I did not authorize.
NPLI, I've gone to bat for you on the bulletin boards on the grounds that the only "switch" you've pulled on your customers without notifying them has been to upgrade the CPU from 180 MHz to 200 MHz.
You've just crossed that line. I will no longer recommend your service to my computerphobic relatives. I will contest these charges.
I dunno about the IP address the original USENET poster put in there. I replaced it with 127.0.0.1 and run a "web server" on my own box that responds only to requests from localhost and returns a 1x1 transparent.GIF instead.
One addendum: I was surprised to see an ad one day, and also had to add ad-adex[0-9].flycast.com instead of just ad-adex3.flycast.com to the list.
Seriously, when was the last time you ever wanted to see "content" from any of these sites? Blackhole 'em all.
It's dumb. It violates causality. It's hokey pseudoscience. It can't possibly work. It makes no sense whatsoever. The person applying for the patent is a gibbering idiot with fantasies of world domination.
But what the hell, they allow software patents that have exactly the same characteristics, why not approve this one too?
> Your servers may be private property. Maybe they shouldn't be. > OR think of them as real life mailboxes. They're on your property, but everyone is welcome to send stuff to you.
You Just Don't Get It.
My servers are private property. I bought them. I own. They are mine because of that. You're quite free to tell me that what I've paid for "shouldn't be" mine, but I'm also quite free to call someone who wants to take from me what is mine, a "thief".
Your analogy with post office mailboxes is deeply flawed. My snail-mailbox is NOT mine. It resides on my property, but only the US Post Office is allowed to place things into it. If I tamper with someone else's snail-mail, I'm not only wronging them, but am breaking a federal law because the US Postal Service has a monopoly on the delivery of snail-mail to snail-mailboxes.
Unlike my snail-mailbox - owned by the USPS and the USPS having the obligation to put things that they've been paid to deliver whether I want those things or not - my/var/mail spool IS mine, and you may not have it.
I don't even have to give you a reason why you can't have it. The fact that it's my property is enough.
Finally, "submitting your name to the DMA" is laughably ineffective. DMA membership costs money. The vast majority of spammers have no reason to join the DMA, nor to abide by its practices. Particularly when the overwhelming majority (>95% by my personal 12-megabyte archive of spam) is for offers that are fraudulent.
You also wrote: > they [spammers] need to be forced into compliance with some standards.
And what do you think a law telling them "you may not steal other people's time and diskspace, and doing so with fraudulent headers is especially bad, and doing so for the purposes of committing fraud is even worse" is? That law is a standard - a standard approved of by the vast majority of people in WA state - and it says "Theft is wrong. You may not do it."
Your "standard" of opt-out means more people get free reign to steal my resources. Until you're paying for those resources (making them your resources, not mine), may I cordially invite you to go fsck yourself? (Actually, just go fsck yourself. I don't have be cordial to thieves.)
My "standard" means thieves go to jail or end up on the wrong end of collection agencies. Stay the fsck off of my servers or expect punishment.
Anyone who's researchied this issue knows we've tried telling spammers to "be nice". For four years. The fact is, spam is theft, and telling thieves to "be nice when you steal" does nothing to fix the underlying problem. They're still punk spamming thieves.
And they'll continue to get their accounts whacked every time they spam me.
And when there's a federal law allowing for a right of private action in an amount ($500 or higher) sufficient to justify placing claims against spammers, I'll send demand letters to every fscking one of them.
TurkishGeek writes: > [ lots of very valid stuff about how this will likely not put Netpliance out of business, > but how their business model is, at least presently, flawed, and how it's too late for them to do > much about it now anyways ]
He also writes one thing with which I disagree: > I would like to hereby congratulate the Netpliance engineer who invented [ the flipped-pins >on the IDE port for "security" ] . It would be too bad if he went back to > flipping burgers just weeks before the IPO.
Hell, I'd like to thank said engineer. For making it possible for all of us to enjoy a really cool toy for $99.
I'd also like to point out to his bosses that Netpliance's sales may well skyrocket before the IPO. Even if Netpliance doesn't see the kind of revenue it originally projected, by using a relatively open architecture with no real effort made at preventing re-use of the hardware, it's made a name for itself among geeks.
The poster to whom I'm replying also made a suggestion: that Netpliance consider selling general-purpose versions of these machines in the $200-250 range.
I'd like to echo that suggestion. It's a damn sexy box. Hell, it exudes sex. I, along with many other Slashdot readers, am probably gonna buy one of these things at $99+$30 shipping in order to hack it to run Linux and skip the built-in ISP part of the equation. That's because I'm not afraid of voiding a warranty with a soldering iron.
But given that the hack will likely take a few hours, and given that an even larger contingent on Slashdot may question their ability to re-pin a ribbon cable, I'd think there'd be strong and widespread interest in buying the unit unencumbered for $200-250. Truth be known, even though I enjoy mucking about with a soldering iron, I'd probably have preferred to pay a little extra and buy the unit that way myself.
If you're a Netpliance exec and you're reading this, and if there's a reasonable price point at which you can sell the unit and still make money - please consider it as an option. What looks like today's disaster may simply be tomorrow's opportunity in disguise. There's a reason your call volume and web site traffic just soared tonight.
So don't fire him. Give the guy who thought up the pin-swapped IDE connector a helluva bonus. If you'd built the box on a wholly-proprietary architecture, it would have cost far more to build, and would have had no geek appeal whatsoever.
But as it stands - it runs UNIX (whether QNX or Linux) and it's a flatscreen and it's expandable - it's bloody sexy, and I'm gonna buy one. I'll buy it for $99+30 and hack it -- but only because I didn't have the option for buying it at $200-250 without the ISP tie-in.
Re:Iridium Flash - lots of questions
on
R.I.P. Iridium
·
· Score: 3
> Iridium Flashes can saturate several pixel and ruin an entire exposure, which might have taken hours to take. > Astronomers have wised up, and try to schedule around Iridium Flashes and take shorter exposures and add them when possible. However, this means we waste our time > that we should be doing scientific research correction for the obnoxousness of Iridium.
The alternative - deorbiting them by shooting them down en masse - is just as bad; space debris all over the place.
Which reminds me - it's been said that the dinosaurs died because they didn't have a space program. Truth is, they did have access to space, but the dinosaurs were damned if they did, damned if they didn't. Y'see, if it weren't for spending so much time avoiding iridium flashes, the dino-astronomers would have seen the damn asteroid coming with plenty of time to spare.
But by the time the dino-astronomers wised up to why their near-earth asteroid observations were so screwed up and shot down the iridium satellites in a fit of rage (when the Dean of Astronomy's a T. Rex, these things happen), incidentally creating the big layer of iridium-enriched dirt we observe at the 65-million-year mark in the fossil record, it was far too late to prevent the asteroid collision.
What's more, the rest of the dino-citizenry was so annoyed at them ("First they send tons of iridium into our backyard swimming pools, then they try to tell us there's gonna be a big hunk of rock falling down next year, but that that mess won't be their fault! Stupid astronomers! How dumb do they think we are?") that nobody heeded their warnings.
So the rock came, and the only survivors were the dino-astronomers themselves and a few mammals. After the catastrophe, the dino-astronomers gave up on astronomy and settled for evolving wings instead. It had started as an effort to lower the liftoff weight of their planned escape vehicles, but it turned out that flying was so much fun that they just gave up on the whole getting-to-orbit thing and settled into their new ecological niche, leaving dominion of the earth to the mammals.
I s'pose it worked out for the best, at least for us primates... but I can't help but wonder if the cockroaches are behind this whole iridium thing, just waiting for their turn to evolve...
> q: can motorola help me out at all in finding an alternative satellite service provider? > > a: motorola cares deeply about its customers. However, motorola feels it cannot provide you any more help than listing a couple of phone numbers at this time.
And if you're in a remote area like the Antarctic, and your only voice line out is an Iridium phone, Motorola recommends that you make that phone call quickly:-)
> would you please slap a decoder onto a CDROM drive so we can have > portable MP3 players using CDs as the delivery mechanism
Agreed. I have no interest in flash-memory-based devices. Nor do I have interest in devices which require me to run proprietary software to transfer my MP3s to the device. The former - hey, battery-operated portables that play an hour's worth of music have been around for years. As for the latter, I really don't trust most major companies' closed-source software not to embed RIAA-friendly codes in my MP3s. A CD-ROM-based solution wins on both counts.
(For bonus points - scan the disc as an ISO-9660 disc or just use the ISO-9660-friendly part of the Joliet filesystem for *.mp3 - through all subdirectories - and ignore files not ending in *.mp3. Then you ensure that nobody will have to re-burn their CDs to use them with your device. Primitive solutions like "assume only.mp3 files exist" or "assume all files are in the root directory" are a cop-out, given the infancy of the market.)
People have already mentioned the MamboX as a possible contender - personally, it's been delayed so long that I'm not sure it'll ever get released. (That said, the day I see one is probably the day I buy one!:-)
On the open source front, check out these guys: Soundbastard. Looks like a group of geeks doing a decoder-in-firmware device that'll have an onboard IDE controller. It'll be your choice whether to use it with a conventional CD-ROM or an IDE (laptop or even conventional) hard drive. And the whole thing - hardware and firmware - is GPL'd!
What's nice is that the Soundbastard folks seem to be doing it with a minimum of surface-mount parts, meaning that the end product should be assemblable in kit form by an end user with a soldering iron. Sweeeeeeeet!
An AC writes: > (Gary's AFA-associated phone number snipped)
Naah, truth be known - while I have very strong feelings about his (mis)use of rape as a rhetorical device to link an unfiltered Internet with real-world violence - that's not what this fight is about.
(Frankly, I'm surprised my rant got moderated up as high as it did - in all honesty, it's only tangentially related to the topic at hand. Or maybe we're just ready to move from hot gr1tz to volumes of the OED:-)
What this fight is about, is the right of library patrons to have unfettered access to information. Nothing more, nothing less.
One culturally-insensitive AFA representative can choose to stop trivializing rape in his propaganda whenever he wants.
But he can't hide the fact that the AFA's solution is fundamentally flawed, technically unworkable, and offers poor value-for-tax-dollar.
The AFA can't hide the fact that the only beneficiaries of their solution will be the balance sheets of the companies that hawk censorware.
Indeed - with so many strikes against it - the fact that the AFA solution is also morally unjustifiable (i.e., being in direct opposition to what a library is supposed to be for), is almost of secondary importance.
The people of Holland have spoken, and Jamie has helped show us that even the combination of big money and an existing predilection towards extreme social conservatism can't win against the facts. He's helped show even the most cynical among us (myself included) that the people aren't as easily-duped as we may have thought they were.
If there's a real message here, it's not my rant against Gary's cheap shot at rape victims - it's to see what Jamie did, and to "Go ye and do likewaise".
> [We're worried about kids seeing nekkid chix before they're ready but] Who here hasn't seen, say, > that grainy black-and-white film clip showing a bulldozer pushing a huge pile of dead, emaciated bodies > of Jewish victims into a shallow grave?
True - our (North American) culture is one that puts a "PG" rating on a breast being blown to smithereens, but an "R" rating on one being kissed. (I suppose when that AFA guy is done trivializing rape, he can say that it's the nakedness of the bodies being bulldozed that's the problem with that footage...)
As for the effects of seeing real violence upon impressionable young minds, I learned about the Holocaust at about age 8 or 9, watching war documentaries. Seeing a clip of Hitler hollering his lungs out in this majestic-looking square, facing thousands of adoring fans, and having seen the occasional swastika spraypainted on the walls of my public school, I wondered aloud who was this guy with the funny moustache and squiggly symbols behind him, and why did all the people seem to like him so much?
Dad made a very quick judgment call (a clue to AFA: this how you protect kids, it's called "parenting"), and said "He's a very, very evil man", which I tentatively took for granted, although I didn't quite understand why. Dad picked up on my confusion, warned me that I might see some things that would disturb me, but invited me to have a seat. Being a kid, of course, I couldn't resist a golden opportunity to watch "adult stuff". (More style points for Dad:-)
So Dad and I watched the rest of the documentary and followed the history of WWII together. Six weekends later, 50,000,000 were dead on all sides, but the war was mostly over, our side had won, the Russians were blowing the hell out of the rubble that was once Berlin, and our troops finally started liberating the camps. And I had a much better appreciation of what Evil was.
"So the Russians were the good guys, right? So how come they're the bad guys now?" (Kids can come up with the most embarassing questions...)
So Dad (hey, nobody said parenting was easy:-) had to tell me about Stalin. We went to the library (oh, irony, a library, of all places!) and checked out some books. I found out how he came to power. What he did afterwards. Why we overlooked it during WWII. The purges. The KGB. Another 10,000,000 on top of Hitler's 6,000,000. Yet more Evil.
Over the next few years, I realized that you don't get to pull off anything really Evil without the support - or at least wilful ignorance - of the people. All that stuff about "the banality of evil"; excuses like "just following orders", and "hey, I'm bummed by it, but I just drive the bulldozer, it's not like I can stop them".
Evil is what happens when you let government - any government - get out of control. And all that is necessary for Evil to triumph is that Good do nothing.
It took a parent to teach me that, not an Internet filter.
Gary Glenn, president of the AFA's state chapter, says: "Our only concern is providing maximum protection for children," he says, citing a recent case in Muskegon, Mich., where a girl was raped at a library with full Internet access.
Woo-hoo! We've finally found the rhetorical level lower than "the dumb bitch asked for it by dressing like a slut", we have "the Internet made him do it".
<MODE=ABSOLUTELY_LIVID_WITH_RAGE>
I have a friend who was raped within a block of a library. It happened in 1985. Obviously it had nothing to do with the library having Internet access, but the library did have a wide selection of books.
It must've been the books.
Mr. Glenn should consider himself extremely fortunate that he's at least 1500 miles away from said friend at the moment, or he'd be the proud recipient of the Oxford English Dictionary (the unabridged version!), each volume delivered through what remains of his distended, torn and bleeding anal sphincter. Given such an opportunity, I'd gladly fly up to Holland and hand my friend each volume for insertion.
I'd vidcap the results and webcast it, live, in streaming screaming video, to the world. I'd make a (non-encrypted:) DVD of the video. I'd sample Gary's screams, lay 'em over a pumpin' backbeat and distribute the MP3s far and wide. And I'd print out choice.JPGs along with a narrative, and put the whole thing into a professionally-bound hardcover book. That MP3 would be a chart-topper. That book would go into every library in the world. That website would be the default home page on every copy of IE5 that Bill Gates shipped.
You want obscene, Gary? Obscene isn't what's on the bookshelves of your local library. Obscene isn't what's on the Internet. Obscene isn't even what happened to my friend 14 years ago.
Obscene is what you, Gary, just did to every rape victim and everyone who's had to help pick up the pieces.
Quickly, Gary, since you're the expert on what's obscene and what's not obscene - did I just jot down an obscene piece of violent pornography, or was I making valid commentary on what it means to the victims when you trivialize rape?
Besides, if any cereal qualifies as geeky, it's gotta be Cap'n Crunch. I'm showing my age here, but there's a reason why John Draper (the father of fone phreaking, for you young'uns who missed the late '70s...) called himself "Captain Crunch", and it ain't because he stayed crunchy in milk!
Finally, who says cereals don't go well with colas? Pour a handful of Cap'n Crunch into a wide-mouthed tumbler of Jolt Cola. Drink the Jolt straining it through the crunchy things as they release extra sugar into the acidic pool of cola. Yum!
(Damned if I know why it works, my guess would be that it prevents you from chugging the Jolt all at once, encouraging you to sip slowly... turning a slam-blast of caffeine into a slow IV-drip-style dosage all night long. At least for me, 2-3 cans' worth of Jolt makes the second consecutive all-nighter go pretty well...)
ObGeekFood: - Pound of ground beef. - 1 yellow onion 26-oz jar of tomato sauce. - 15-oz can of stewed tomatoes. - 6 cloves garlic, finely-chopped - Butter/olive oil/other-frying-liquid. - Assorted spices - oregano, basil, chili powder for me...
- Start with garlic, finely-chopped, until sizzling in about 1 tablespoon olive oil or butter. - Add beef. Fry until half-cooked. - Slice onion while beef cooks, throw into mix. Add your spices at this time. Dump in tomato sauce. - Let simmer while you throw in the stewed tomatoes. - Add any other spices to taste, and let simmer for at least an hour, bubbling off the water and turning the runny liquid sauce you get from a can (made even more liquid with the goop from the stewed tomatoes) into a rich, thick, brownish-red sauce.
The recipe is versatile and amenable to tweaking. The default mode makes killer spaghetti sauce. Use about half as much tomato sauce, and add more chili powder or swap the stewed tomatoes for chopped chilies, and you've got taco filling.
For the single geek, take half the sauce and put it in the fridge for use during the next few days. Take the other half and put it in the freezer, for that "it tastes like it took 2 hours to cook" feeling when you only have 10 minutes. There's at least a week's worth of pasta meals, probably two weeks if you stretch it, in the recipe outlined above.
Insight #1: For me, food, like hacking, is about experimenting.
When I need a caffeine fix, a can of Jolt is at the ready. When I need pure sugar, I call for the Cap'n. When I wanna make a week's worth of supper for $10.00 ($2.00 for sauce, $3.00 for beef, $2.00 for veggies and spices, $1.00 for the tomatoes, $2.00 for a pound and a half of pasta), I put in two hours and do the sauce thing.
Insight #2: It's cheaper to eat well than to eat poorly.
Cap'n Crunch: $4.00+ per box. Pure sugar. Jolt Cola: $1.00 per can, at least where I live. Pure sugar. Supper for a week-and-a-half: $10.00, or $1.00 per night. Contains fats from beef, protein from beef, carbs from pasta, and whatever nutrients in the veggies survive the cooking process. But dollar-for-dollar, a hell of a lot better eatin' than the first alternatives.
Insight #3: Cooking good food doesn't take that long after all.
2 hours for the pasta sauce sounds like a lot - but amortized over 10 days, it's 12 minutes a day.
Slashdot Mirror
Get Gold & Appel (or some similar organization) to launch a mess of "sats" into "orbit" at the Earth/Sun Lagrange points. Run something like "Freedom" on them. Give each sat a bunch of space-hardened (i.e. you need an atmosphere and some radiation and heat shielding) umpteen gigabyte RAID drives.
15 minute ping times, sure. But how the fsck will RIAA stop us from downloading MP3s when the servers are located in deep space? :) :) :)
All it takes is one .com billionaire with a really twisted sense of humor.
As long as the DTDs remain locked up in the software, you're fscked.
I'm presently quite happy with Framemaker (proprietariness be damned, at least I can count on a Frame doc written under Solaris to render the same way on NT or Mac, whereas with M$-Turd, I can't even depend on the same goddamn file to page-break the same way on two NT boxen!) to generate PDF and WebWorks Publisher for batch HTML conversion, but am becoming increasingly open to alternatives.
Fsck Microslut's half-baked excuse for XML. They're not interested in anything more than lining their own pockets and reinforcing the Orifice monopoly. Interoperability is not in their vocabulary. Scalability never was. The only good use for M$Turd is for writing one-page memos. (If you're a technical writer, I point out that at least this is long enough to write a letter of acceptance for a new job, and a letter of resignation to any manager dumb enough to use "but Office is the corporate standard, and we've already paid for it" as an excuse to take away professional authoring tools.
Rant off. Where the hell was I going with this? OH yeah...
I may soon have the budget for a pure XML solution, does anyone know anything about ArborText? Looks bloody promising, and appears to offer easy integration with the DocBook DTD as a sweet bonus.
Now that it's been many years - to the extent you feel free to discuss it, whatever happened between yourself and Infocom way-back-when? Aspiring historians wanna know.
Q2: After what seemed an eternity, it was really neat to see you back on the scene with Starship Titanic. Although I enjoyed ST, I also had the feeling it was also a technology demonstration; here's a basic engine which will allow a few puzzles and the integration of video sequences with some sort of character interaction. The ability to parse text was still there; not quite as much as it was in the Infocom engine, but definitely a lot of potential. Soooooo...
The reason I ask is because, for me, this was the only thing I found lacking (or more accurately, "expected to find more of") in Starship Titanic -- so much of the humor your work series is literary and textual in nature, hence my burning desire for more textual puzzles. The writing behind the ST characters was great; I just wanted to experience more of it from the user's end. For me, that meant being able to type commands to the game, rather than mousing around the screen. And some things seem to be better represented by text than visuals; the Babel Fish puzzle in the original HHGTTG game, for instance, wouldn't have been nearly as funny if rendered only visually - the humor of the puzzle was powerfully enhanced by the writing associated with each failed attempt to get the fish. (Umm, but thanks for at least saving me the trouble of putting the fish in my ear myself!)
And finally...
Soundbastard
I, too, have never installed WinZIP on my Windoze boxen. I have no use for GUI-based fluff when the command line will let me extract the files of my choosing to the directory of my choosing.
A mouse is a device for figuring out which window you want to type in.
I don't give a rat's fried patoot whether Mr. Billington thinks that reading on a screen isn't as much fun as reading dead trees. Frankly, he may well be right - but I'd rather read a screen than nothing at all, which is what I can presently read from the Library of Congress.
Overshadowed in this, however, is the very real fact that it costs a Lot Of Money to digitize all the books. OCR isn't 100%, so anything digitized will also have to be proofread.
The special-format material - the maps, the pamphlets, and what-not, lend themselves much more readily to digitization. No OCR issues, and even stronger issues with regards to how long they can be expected to survive repeated handling.
Dead trees in book form can be expected to survive many hundreds of years. Dead trees in the form of 10-foot-by-10-foot roll-out maps don't hold up nearly as well.
Dead trees in book form are readily translated to ASCII as long as the characters are legible. Dead trees in pamphlet form, with lots of images and other stuff, can be served up as .PNGs or .PDFs, with ASCII text as a side order - from a historian's perspective, the physical layout of the page is important in both the case of books and pamphlets, but almost always much more important in the case of pamphlets.
But I agree that Mr. Billington should drop the Luddism. It doesn't serve him well at all.
Hell hath no fury like a cellphone customer spammed. Nuff said.
Re: the Devcorner 100 programme. The interesting thing for me is that I haven't signed up yet. Two reasons:
Will I attempt to develop stuff for my IOs? You betcha. But given their actions towards the community, will I contact them until after I've done something cool? No way.
- If joining the Devcorner 100 means I get a free IO before I develop something cool, NPLI has the problem of people joining only to get the toy.
- I might join after I develop something cool, but then, I already own an IO for far below its cost, why try to get another?
:-) I'd be happy to give away whatever I developed for it whether or not NPLI gave me a free unit in exchange.
There's a catch-22 here, in that you either already own one, and can prove your worth on it, and thereby join the programme. Or you don't own one, in which case, how can you get started, however good your idea is, after the first 100 units are given out?On to other things - things I'd ask NPLI.
- Why didn't you write up the TOS of March 31st and apply them on the 17th? If your goal was to stop the bleeding of red ink, it could have been done just as well then as the 31st.
- Why did it take you so long to get on the clue train and back off from your policy of attempting to pressure customers who ordered before the 31st into your new TOS? You'd already seen the effects of people talking amongst themselves; we know the hardware under the hood of that thing better than you did. Did you not think we'd talk amongst ourselves and that word of those pressure tactics would spread equally as fast?
- To what extent is the recent change in policy (particularly with regard to orders received before the 31st) the result of threatened legal action, or the result of a fears of a PR backlash among geeks that had started to spill onto CNet and Wired?
- My preceding negative comments aside - it's clear that you're learning. Why you're changing Doing The Right Thing is less important to me than the fact that you ARE Doing The Right Thing.
- So, my next question: What's next?
Finally - four minor bug reports, and some product requests for the future:(No, you don't have to - and probably can't - answer that one publicly. It's just something to think about. You'll note that nowhere on that list is "it was the right thing to do". We're not that naive.)
Your shareholders' interests are protected in the future by the new TOS, and the interests of the community have been protected by a decision to Do The Right Thing for customers who ordered before the new TOS.
We have lots of questions about this product. You have lots of answers. We know what it can do running our operating system of choice; heck, we even know what it can do running Windows :)
Can you create a space for us where we can talk and share information with each other and with your techs? It looks like you're interested. We're very interested.
Bugs:
- Reports of phasing issues with the speakers. If true, the fault might be on the motherboard. Can one of your techs confirm or deny?
- Reports of BIOS-socket unreliability caused by curing of the epoxy goop. Can one of yours (or Quanta's) failure analysis experts look into it?
- Hardcoded root passwords appear to be identical from unit to unit. There's a telnetd running on the machine. Please ensure (at a minimum) that root cannot telnet in from the network. It's been long enough that a brute-force attack could be close to breaking the root password. Yes, we know it uses a nonstandard crypt algorithm. Yes, source for it has already been posted.
- That [user]@netpliance.com password for the initial dialup. It might be wise to find ways of embedding that information somewhere less likely for us to find it. Security through obscurity isn't security.
Requests:2) Chop out Email, News. I want a web browser. I already have an MUA and a newsreader.
3) Single-menubar-button toggling of Java/Javascript, and image-autoloading. I usually want 'em all off all the time. Sometimes I have to turn 'em on, and I don't want it buried under three levels of menus like in Nutscrape 4.xx.
Amazing stuff. Lord British, thank you for a decade and change of incredible work. Tonight I'm gonna see if my original (!) copy of Ultima I, written in Integer BASIC on an Apple ][+, still boots. I have a feeling I won't be getting any sleep tonight. I'm a veteran of Ultima I through V, and loved every one of them. Please accept my thanks for the past, and my best wishes for the future.
Moderators, please drop my original post #133 back to "2". If you're gonna upmod me, please do it for something a little more worthy of the points. My apologies for having had you waste the modpoints.
Absolutely. They should've done this from Day Zero, even before it was discovered the units were moddable.
> It's one thing to take advantage of a loss-leading price like this, and I myself feel a little guilty for participating,
Also absolutely. I sympathize with 'em for the loss.
> but people like this, those that are really TRYING to give Netpliance the shaft here really annoy me.
But since when is objecting to unauthorized charges giving NPLI the shaft? Hell, I'd still buy one at $300ish if they offered it for outright purchase without the ISP encumbrance. But I didn't have that option.
So as one who signed up before they changed their policy to automatically bill the credit card, and as one who was assured that there would be no billing until the unit was hooked up to a phone line, I'm quite steamed.
Tell me - would I be unjustified to contest the charges if NPLI charged $22 per month for a year, even after a request to cancel service? How about if they retroactively implemented a $250 "early disconnect" policy? After all, your point of view seems to be that they're allowed to retroactively charge us something to make up for their losses on the loss-leader units sold to geeks, so how much do you think they've got the right to charge?
This isn't about the money, it's about the principle. As soon as you allow a firm to retroactively change their billing policy to bill you once for $22 "because they made a mistake selling it for $99 and lost some money on the deal", you've implicitly allowed them to bill you for $220 to cover their losses. Or $2200. Or any other amount they feel like.
Am I gonna go out and sue NPLI for being bastards about this, or call for a class-action suit? No. The only beneficiary would be the lawyers. Am I gonna stop recommending i-openers to friends and relations for their intended purchase? Yeah, for a while, at least until I cool off. Am I gonna call them and insist that they remove these charges and live up to the terms of the original agreement they made at the time I purchased my unit? You betcha.
It's tit-for-tat. Give me a cool unit for $99, get recommendations to your real customers. Charge my credit card without authorization, lose those recommendations and have your charges contested.
Will my contesting of the charges "win" or "lose"? I dunno, but I'm willing to trust my bank's judgement either way, particularly since there'll be hundreds of fellow geeks contesting the same charges. (I wonder if Mastercard's abuse department is ready for the /. effect?)
But tit-for-tat isn't about bearing grudges. Offer me a unit for roughly your breakeven cost, unencumbered by your ISP (umm, and gimme back the money you charged without authorization my credit card that was gonna buy pizza for an all-night hack session to get Linux on the SanDisk :), get recommendations to geek friends for the Developer's Model as well as non-geek friends for the regular model. I'll probably even buy another one - at the developer's price - and send my modded one to some geek friends outside the States.
'Course, I'll buy it for cash at Circuit City now, instead of via credit card directly from them. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me :-)
While I agree that the thing's still a screaming bargain at $99 + $40 shipping + $22firstmonthservice, I do not agree that they had the right to make that charge.
If I'd ordered a few days later, they'd be entitled to charge me for the first month. If I'd ordered after March 20th, they're entitled to send me something I "can't hack", and it's good that they're being upfront about the modifications they're making to the unit. But at the time I ordered it, I was assured there would be no service charges.
Maybe NPLI lied to me. Maybe NPLI simply screwed up. I dunno. But if you ordered before the change in policy, you should probably check your statements or call your bank ASAP to find out what's going on.
Whether or not NPLI is losing money (and they almost certainly are) on people who bought these things to hack is irrelevant. If they're charging people for stuff not ordered, something's wrong and needs to be fixed.
Agreed.
I ordered a unit on or about the same day as the Slashdot complainant did, and checked my records based on this article.
I, too, ordered by voice and was assured that there would be no billing until the unit called home.
I too, now have charges on my credit card which I did not authorize.
NPLI, I've gone to bat for you on the bulletin boards on the grounds that the only "switch" you've pulled on your customers without notifying them has been to upgrade the CPU from 180 MHz to 200 MHz.
You've just crossed that line. I will no longer recommend your service to my computerphobic relatives. I will contest these charges.
> 127.0.0.1 [adserver] # fsck 'em all
Better yet, try:
The Ultimate HOSTS file
I dunno about the IP address the original USENET poster put in there. I replaced it with 127.0.0.1 and run a "web server" on my own box that responds only to requests from localhost and returns a 1x1 transparent .GIF instead.
One addendum: I was surprised to see an ad one day, and also had to add ad-adex[0-9].flycast.com instead of just ad-adex3.flycast.com to the list.
Seriously, when was the last time you ever wanted to see "content" from any of these sites? Blackhole 'em all.
But what the hell, they allow software patents that have exactly the same characteristics, why not approve this one too?
> OR think of them as real life mailboxes. They're on your property, but everyone is welcome to send stuff to you.
You Just Don't Get It.
My servers are private property. I bought them. I own. They are mine because of that. You're quite free to tell me that what I've paid for "shouldn't be" mine, but I'm also quite free to call someone who wants to take from me what is mine, a "thief".
Your analogy with post office mailboxes is deeply flawed. My snail-mailbox is NOT mine. It resides on my property, but only the US Post Office is allowed to place things into it. If I tamper with someone else's snail-mail, I'm not only wronging them, but am breaking a federal law because the US Postal Service has a monopoly on the delivery of snail-mail to snail-mailboxes.
Unlike my snail-mailbox - owned by the USPS and the USPS having the obligation to put things that they've been paid to deliver whether I want those things or not - my /var/mail spool IS mine, and you may not have it.
I don't even have to give you a reason why you can't have it. The fact that it's my property is enough.
Finally, "submitting your name to the DMA" is laughably ineffective. DMA membership costs money. The vast majority of spammers have no reason to join the DMA, nor to abide by its practices. Particularly when the overwhelming majority (>95% by my personal 12-megabyte archive of spam) is for offers that are fraudulent.
You also wrote:
> they [spammers] need to be forced into compliance with some standards.
And what do you think a law telling them "you may not steal other people's time and diskspace, and doing so with fraudulent headers is especially bad, and doing so for the purposes of committing fraud is even worse" is? That law is a standard - a standard approved of by the vast majority of people in WA state - and it says "Theft is wrong. You may not do it."
Your "standard" of opt-out means more people get free reign to steal my resources. Until you're paying for those resources (making them your resources, not mine), may I cordially invite you to go fsck yourself? (Actually, just go fsck yourself. I don't have be cordial to thieves.)
My "standard" means thieves go to jail or end up on the wrong end of collection agencies. Stay the fsck off of my servers or expect punishment.
Anyone who's researchied this issue knows we've tried telling spammers to "be nice". For four years. The fact is, spam is theft, and telling thieves to "be nice when you steal" does nothing to fix the underlying problem. They're still punk spamming thieves.
And they'll continue to get their accounts whacked every time they spam me.
And when there's a federal law allowing for a right of private action in an amount ($500 or higher) sufficient to justify placing claims against spammers, I'll send demand letters to every fscking one of them.
> [ lots of very valid stuff about how this will likely not put Netpliance out of business,
> but how their business model is, at least presently, flawed, and how it's too late for them to do
> much about it now anyways ]
He also writes one thing with which I disagree:
> I would like to hereby congratulate the Netpliance engineer who invented [ the flipped-pins
>on the IDE port for "security" ] . It would be too bad if he went back to
> flipping burgers just weeks before the IPO.
Hell, I'd like to thank said engineer. For making it possible for all of us to enjoy a really cool toy for $99.
I'd also like to point out to his bosses that Netpliance's sales may well skyrocket before the IPO. Even if Netpliance doesn't see the kind of revenue it originally projected, by using a relatively open architecture with no real effort made at preventing re-use of the hardware, it's made a name for itself among geeks.
The poster to whom I'm replying also made a suggestion: that Netpliance consider selling general-purpose versions of these machines in the $200-250 range.
I'd like to echo that suggestion. It's a damn sexy box. Hell, it exudes sex. I, along with many other Slashdot readers, am probably gonna buy one of these things at $99+$30 shipping in order to hack it to run Linux and skip the built-in ISP part of the equation. That's because I'm not afraid of voiding a warranty with a soldering iron.
But given that the hack will likely take a few hours, and given that an even larger contingent on Slashdot may question their ability to re-pin a ribbon cable, I'd think there'd be strong and widespread interest in buying the unit unencumbered for $200-250. Truth be known, even though I enjoy mucking about with a soldering iron, I'd probably have preferred to pay a little extra and buy the unit that way myself.
If you're a Netpliance exec and you're reading this, and if there's a reasonable price point at which you can sell the unit and still make money - please consider it as an option. What looks like today's disaster may simply be tomorrow's opportunity in disguise. There's a reason your call volume and web site traffic just soared tonight.
So don't fire him. Give the guy who thought up the pin-swapped IDE connector a helluva bonus. If you'd built the box on a wholly-proprietary architecture, it would have cost far more to build, and would have had no geek appeal whatsoever.
But as it stands - it runs UNIX (whether QNX or Linux) and it's a flatscreen and it's expandable - it's bloody sexy, and I'm gonna buy one. I'll buy it for $99+30 and hack it -- but only because I didn't have the option for buying it at $200-250 without the ISP tie-in.
> Astronomers have wised up, and try to schedule around Iridium Flashes and take shorter exposures and add them when possible. However, this means we waste our time
> that we should be doing scientific research correction for the obnoxousness of Iridium.
The alternative - deorbiting them by shooting them down en masse - is just as bad; space debris all over the place.
Which reminds me - it's been said that the dinosaurs died because they didn't have a space program. Truth is, they did have access to space, but the dinosaurs were damned if they did, damned if they didn't. Y'see, if it weren't for spending so much time avoiding iridium flashes, the dino-astronomers would have seen the damn asteroid coming with plenty of time to spare.
But by the time the dino-astronomers wised up to why their near-earth asteroid observations were so screwed up and shot down the iridium satellites in a fit of rage (when the Dean of Astronomy's a T. Rex, these things happen), incidentally creating the big layer of iridium-enriched dirt we observe at the 65-million-year mark in the fossil record, it was far too late to prevent the asteroid collision.
What's more, the rest of the dino-citizenry was so annoyed at them ("First they send tons of iridium into our backyard swimming pools, then they try to tell us there's gonna be a big hunk of rock falling down next year, but that that mess won't be their fault! Stupid astronomers! How dumb do they think we are?") that nobody heeded their warnings.
So the rock came, and the only survivors were the dino-astronomers themselves and a few mammals. After the catastrophe, the dino-astronomers gave up on astronomy and settled for evolving wings instead. It had started as an effort to lower the liftoff weight of their planned escape vehicles, but it turned out that flying was so much fun that they just gave up on the whole getting-to-orbit thing and settled into their new ecological niche, leaving dominion of the earth to the mammals.
I s'pose it worked out for the best, at least for us primates... but I can't help but wonder if the cockroaches are behind this whole iridium thing, just waiting for their turn to evolve...
>
> a: motorola cares deeply about its customers. However, motorola feels it cannot provide you any more help than listing a couple of phone numbers at this time.
And if you're in a remote area like the Antarctic, and your only voice line out is an Iridium phone, Motorola recommends that you make that phone call quickly :-)
> portable MP3 players using CDs as the delivery mechanism
Agreed. I have no interest in flash-memory-based devices. Nor do I have interest in devices which require me to run proprietary software to transfer my MP3s to the device. The former - hey, battery-operated portables that play an hour's worth of music have been around for years. As for the latter, I really don't trust most major companies' closed-source software not to embed RIAA-friendly codes in my MP3s. A CD-ROM-based solution wins on both counts.
(For bonus points - scan the disc as an ISO-9660 disc or just use the ISO-9660-friendly part of the Joliet filesystem for *.mp3 - through all subdirectories - and ignore files not ending in *.mp3. Then you ensure that nobody will have to re-burn their CDs to use them with your device. Primitive solutions like "assume only .mp3 files exist" or "assume all files are in the root directory" are a cop-out, given the infancy of the market.)
People have already mentioned the MamboX as a possible contender - personally, it's been delayed so long that I'm not sure it'll ever get released. (That said, the day I see one is probably the day I buy one! :-)
On the open source front, check out these guys: Soundbastard. Looks like a group of geeks doing a decoder-in-firmware device that'll have an onboard IDE controller. It'll be your choice whether to use it with a conventional CD-ROM or an IDE (laptop or even conventional) hard drive. And the whole thing - hardware and firmware - is GPL'd!
What's nice is that the Soundbastard folks seem to be doing it with a minimum of surface-mount parts, meaning that the end product should be assemblable in kit form by an end user with a soldering iron. Sweeeeeeeet!
Naah, truth be known - while I have very strong feelings about his (mis)use of rape as a rhetorical device to link an unfiltered Internet with real-world violence - that's not what this fight is about.
(Frankly, I'm surprised my rant got moderated up as high as it did - in all honesty, it's only tangentially related to the topic at hand. Or maybe we're just ready to move from hot gr1tz to volumes of the OED :-)
What this fight is about, is the right of library patrons to have unfettered access to information. Nothing more, nothing less.
One culturally-insensitive AFA representative can choose to stop trivializing rape in his propaganda whenever he wants.
But he can't hide the fact that the AFA's solution is fundamentally flawed, technically unworkable, and offers poor value-for-tax-dollar.
The AFA can't hide the fact that the only beneficiaries of their solution will be the balance sheets of the companies that hawk censorware.
Indeed - with so many strikes against it - the fact that the AFA solution is also morally unjustifiable (i.e., being in direct opposition to what a library is supposed to be for), is almost of secondary importance.
The people of Holland have spoken, and Jamie has helped show us that even the combination of big money and an existing predilection towards extreme social conservatism can't win against the facts. He's helped show even the most cynical among us (myself included) that the people aren't as easily-duped as we may have thought they were.
If there's a real message here, it's not my rant against Gary's cheap shot at rape victims - it's to see what Jamie did, and to "Go ye and do likewaise".
> that grainy black-and-white film clip showing a bulldozer pushing a huge pile of dead, emaciated bodies
> of Jewish victims into a shallow grave?
True - our (North American) culture is one that puts a "PG" rating on a breast being blown to smithereens, but an "R" rating on one being kissed. (I suppose when that AFA guy is done trivializing rape, he can say that it's the nakedness of the bodies being bulldozed that's the problem with that footage...)
As for the effects of seeing real violence upon impressionable young minds, I learned about the Holocaust at about age 8 or 9, watching war documentaries. Seeing a clip of Hitler hollering his lungs out in this majestic-looking square, facing thousands of adoring fans, and having seen the occasional swastika spraypainted on the walls of my public school, I wondered aloud who was this guy with the funny moustache and squiggly symbols behind him, and why did all the people seem to like him so much?
Dad made a very quick judgment call (a clue to AFA: this how you protect kids, it's called "parenting"), and said "He's a very, very evil man", which I tentatively took for granted, although I didn't quite understand why. Dad picked up on my confusion, warned me that I might see some things that would disturb me, but invited me to have a seat. Being a kid, of course, I couldn't resist a golden opportunity to watch "adult stuff". (More style points for Dad :-)
So Dad and I watched the rest of the documentary and followed the history of WWII together. Six weekends later, 50,000,000 were dead on all sides, but the war was mostly over, our side had won, the Russians were blowing the hell out of the rubble that was once Berlin, and our troops finally started liberating the camps. And I had a much better appreciation of what Evil was.
"So the Russians were the good guys, right? So how come they're the bad guys now?" (Kids can come up with the most embarassing questions...)
So Dad (hey, nobody said parenting was easy :-) had to tell me about Stalin. We went to the library (oh, irony, a library, of all places!) and checked out some books. I found out how he came to power. What he did afterwards. Why we overlooked it during WWII. The purges. The KGB. Another 10,000,000 on top of Hitler's 6,000,000. Yet more Evil.
Over the next few years, I realized that you don't get to pull off anything really Evil without the support - or at least wilful ignorance - of the people. All that stuff about "the banality of evil"; excuses like "just following orders", and "hey, I'm bummed by it, but I just drive the bulldozer, it's not like I can stop them".
Evil is what happens when you let government - any government - get out of control. And all that is necessary for Evil to triumph is that Good do nothing.
It took a parent to teach me that, not an Internet filter.
"Our only concern is providing maximum protection for children," he says, citing a recent case in Muskegon, Mich., where a girl was raped at a library with full Internet access.
Woo-hoo! We've finally found the rhetorical level lower than "the dumb bitch asked for it by dressing like a slut", we have "the Internet made him do it".
<MODE=ABSOLUTELY_LIVID_WITH_RAGE>
I have a friend who was raped within a block of a library. It happened in 1985. Obviously it had nothing to do with the library having Internet access, but the library did have a wide selection of books.
It must've been the books.
Mr. Glenn should consider himself extremely fortunate that he's at least 1500 miles away from said friend at the moment, or he'd be the proud recipient of the Oxford English Dictionary (the unabridged version!), each volume delivered through what remains of his distended, torn and bleeding anal sphincter. Given such an opportunity, I'd gladly fly up to Holland and hand my friend each volume for insertion.
I'd vidcap the results and webcast it, live, in streaming screaming video, to the world. I'd make a (non-encrypted :) DVD of the video. I'd sample Gary's screams, lay 'em over a pumpin' backbeat and distribute the MP3s far and wide. And I'd print out choice .JPGs along with a narrative, and put the whole thing into a professionally-bound hardcover book. That MP3 would be a chart-topper. That book would go into every library in the world. That website would be the default home page on every copy of IE5 that Bill Gates shipped.
You want obscene, Gary? Obscene isn't what's on the bookshelves of your local library. Obscene isn't what's on the Internet. Obscene isn't even what happened to my friend 14 years ago.
Obscene is what you, Gary, just did to every rape victim and everyone who's had to help pick up the pieces.
Quickly, Gary, since you're the expert on what's obscene and what's not obscene - did I just jot down an obscene piece of violent pornography, or was I making valid commentary on what it means to the victims when you trivialize rape?
Now get the fuck out of our libraries.
Finally, who says cereals don't go well with colas? Pour a handful of Cap'n Crunch into a wide-mouthed tumbler of Jolt Cola. Drink the Jolt straining it through the crunchy things as they release extra sugar into the acidic pool of cola. Yum!
(Damned if I know why it works, my guess would be that it prevents you from chugging the Jolt all at once, encouraging you to sip slowly... turning a slam-blast of caffeine into a slow IV-drip-style dosage all night long. At least for me, 2-3 cans' worth of Jolt makes the second consecutive all-nighter go pretty well...)
ObGeekFood:
- Pound of ground beef.
- 1 yellow onion
26-oz jar of tomato sauce.
- 15-oz can of stewed tomatoes.
- 6 cloves garlic, finely-chopped
- Butter/olive oil/other-frying-liquid.
- Assorted spices - oregano, basil, chili powder for me...
- Start with garlic, finely-chopped, until sizzling in about 1 tablespoon olive oil or butter.
- Add beef. Fry until half-cooked.
- Slice onion while beef cooks, throw into mix. Add your spices at this time.
Dump in tomato sauce.
- Let simmer while you throw in the stewed tomatoes.
- Add any other spices to taste, and let simmer for at least an hour, bubbling off the water and turning the runny liquid sauce you get from a can (made even more liquid with the goop from the stewed tomatoes) into a rich, thick, brownish-red sauce.
The recipe is versatile and amenable to tweaking. The default mode makes killer spaghetti sauce. Use about half as much tomato sauce, and add more chili powder or swap the stewed tomatoes for chopped chilies, and you've got taco filling.
For the single geek, take half the sauce and put it in the fridge for use during the next few days. Take the other half and put it in the freezer, for that "it tastes like it took 2 hours to cook" feeling when you only have 10 minutes. There's at least a week's worth of pasta meals, probably two weeks if you stretch it, in the recipe outlined above.
Insight #1: For me, food, like hacking, is about experimenting.
When I need a caffeine fix, a can of Jolt is at the ready. When I need pure sugar, I call for the Cap'n. When I wanna make a week's worth of supper for $10.00 ($2.00 for sauce, $3.00 for beef, $2.00 for veggies and spices, $1.00 for the tomatoes, $2.00 for a pound and a half of pasta), I put in two hours and do the sauce thing.
Insight #2: It's cheaper to eat well than to eat poorly.
Cap'n Crunch: $4.00+ per box. Pure sugar.
Jolt Cola: $1.00 per can, at least where I live. Pure sugar.
Supper for a week-and-a-half: $10.00, or $1.00 per night. Contains fats from beef, protein from beef, carbs from pasta, and whatever nutrients in the veggies survive the cooking process. But dollar-for-dollar, a hell of a lot better eatin' than the first alternatives.
Insight #3: Cooking good food doesn't take that long after all.
2 hours for the pasta sauce sounds like a lot - but amortized over 10 days, it's 12 minutes a day.