As the cost of political campaigns goes up, it takes more money to buy a senator these days. The RIAA has to own senators in order to infringe on any rights of consumers that it *THINKS* hurts profit margins, so they must keep more money.
Besides, the RIAA thinks 9 out of 10 songs are pirated anyway, so they are just recouping losses.
Get with the program, buddy. Work. Pay Taxes. Consume. Repeat.
I have on of the Electrolux HEPA air purifiers at the house and it is awesome. Yes, it is also loud, but we actually like that because it acts as a white noise generator while you sleep (we keep it in the bedroom).
Our bedroom is pretty big (~900 sq ft) and it does a great job filtering cat hair and other crud. They run around $500.
IT'S THE LAW, STUPID
on
Linus on DRM
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
OK, I agree with what Linus is saying here - he is just a codehead and is not going to tell you what you can or can not put in your build. Cool, but we are still just talking about the technology.
The problem today is not the technology -- "IT IS THE LAW, STUPID!"
If Microsoft puts some crazy stupid DRM in the next version of Windows, it might be the final straw to get something else to the desktop (be it Mac OS X, FreeBSD, Linux, or something else). As long as people have the freedom of choice, M$ can only go so far before they loose the customer base.
The problem is the DCMA and the baby-DCMAs popping up at the state level. If the government makes DRM *MANDATORY*, you loose your choice. I can very easily see the RIAA and MPAA requiring that all OS's require DRM in the very near future. Think about it.
I run my own software company. I am still struggling, but I am going to make about $80-90k this year. Here is the deal.
I have formed a partnership with two Indian development companies. I get the contracts. I meet with the customer. I do all requirements gathering. I do the UML. I manage the project. I do everything except actually write the code.
I send the Indians the stubbed out code generated from the UML, the database as generated from the ER/WIN model and the UML. They send me back a project plan with dates and a fixed bid. The lowest bidder of the two gets the contract.
We have done 3 jobs together this way now -- one for a small software company that was outsourcing its Web Services upgrade to its existing product and two medium sized projects for Fortune 500 companies.
The biggest issue so far is getting the big guys to take you seriously and the background check they put you through to get you on the job. After that, it all comes down to dollars and this arrangement is delivering good code for about the price of 1-2 good developers but it gets done in a fraction of the time.
And... I work from home unless I am at the client site!
I quickly amassed over 5 GB of religious documents and writings that I was hosting in an effort to smuggle them into China. It took less than 2 weeks to gather that much data from the Vatican website (vatican.va) and other Catholic websites.
Funny thing about religious documents -- people give them away for free, will actually pay other people to distribute them, and some countries try to squash them for political reasons. But, hey, the minute you start trying to talk about *LEGITIMATE* uses of P2P...
Break the data you want to backup into "stripes" like a RAID array. Encrypt these stripes. Swap stripes with other users. Host these files at any URL you have control over -- your PC, the free web space your ISP gives you, a FTP site, whatever.
Give the user the option of only backing up data stripes with a select group of users (people they know and trust) or with any random user. Let the user control the ratio per user (this guy I trade with one for one, but a stranger must host 3 of my files for every one I host for him).
You send the encrypted data, you get a received confirmation with the URL, you check the URL to make sure its there. The confirmation has a leased until date just like your IP address from a DHCP server. The program either renews the lease when it is almost up or finds a new home for your data.
Whenever you need your data, you hit those URLs and reassemble the data for the encrypted stripes.
Middlemen with money pay to stay in the middle!
on
Smart Mobs
·
· Score: 1
Wireless networks are cool and all, but the minute they are a threat to the economic models in place today, the existing middlemen will try to kill them. They will go to the government and use those millions to buy the support of government officials who will make the "offensive" technology illegal. That's life.
So, yeah, it might change your life, but only as long as the fat cats get fatter at the same time.
If people started building their own public wireless backbones and created a big global ISP that was free to everyone, you can bet your bottom dollar that the members of congress who get the most donations from the fat cats would suddenly be screaming about how terrorists could use this network to detonate a dirty bomb in grandma's backyard.
Well, I'll tell you what. Walk up to any one of this bank's IT employees and ask them what ever happened to that guy who pushed the bad routing table out into production back in 1998 that caused all the stratocoms to fail. If they were there at the time, they can not forget it, because the bank had just about every single IT person working in shifts 24 hours a day until it was back up. Then ask them about the "War Room" conference call lines they had manned.
Those of us who could not fix routers manned conference call lines for 8 hour stretches and tested apps as links came back online.
A Bank in America [;)] had an outage back in 1998 where all their Stratocom went down for similar reasons. The Gateway/Network Engineering group had been saying for a couple years that we needed more redundancy but senior executives just saw the expenses and not the liability... until every single Stratacom went down.
We had to rebuild the entire network... it took a week. All non-critical traffic had to be cut-off as we pushed everything through the backup T1s and ISDN lines. It cost the bank MILLIONS of dollars.
Suddenly, that backup network was real cheap. They are now quite proud to tote their redundancy.
Whether we like it or not, money will be donated to campaigns, congress will vote and laws will be passed. Furthermore, monopolies will be monopolies and you will have a choice of Microsoft DRM OS running on Intel/AMD DRM hardware or you get Linux.
I think that Hollywood knows that they are never going to stop pirating. I think they are looking for a way to stop 99% of pirating. We all know that no matter what they come out with, someone will be able to pirate it.
The only way to win this battle is for the consumers to stand up and send Hollywood looking for a new business model. They do not with how they spend their money. Period. It's the only way.
I still say that ion engines like the one on the Deep Space 1 probe and M2P2 is the way to go. My proposal would be something like this.
First, you send about a dozen small ion engine powered craft. These craft would first work on stopping any rotation in reference to the Sun and second work on elongating the orbit. If you have a decade of warning, this would work... you would stop the rotation.
Second, you can now start using the paint idea while also setting up nuclear powered M2P2 generators. They would send out large magneticly charged plasma fields that would act as giant solar sails, further slowing the elongating the orbit of the asteroid.
Third, you start fine-tuning the orbit until you get the asteroid to slingshot around one of the gas giants either into the sun or out of the solar system.
Problem solved. I think it would be awesome to see an international mission that would land a couple of ion engine probes on a small, near earth asteroid just to test stopping its rotation. Then you could play with the paint idea or test some giant M2P2 engines.
I would think that Mini-Magnetospheric Plasma Propulsion (M2P2) would be the way to go. Setup some nuclear reactors on the surface of the thing, create a plasma bubble as large as you can and let the Sun push that sucker. If you can get to it outside of Mars, it would only take a slight angle adjestment to make it miss.
Of course, the other option is to send a manned mission to an near-earth asteroid and strap several ion engines on that puppy. Use the ion engines to slowly (over years) get it into a nice orbit outside lunar orbit. If we identify a killer asteroid, play a little cosmic billards - slam the ion engined asteroid into the killer one.
This is gold, baby. Where is NASA with the grant money? I knew I should have been a rocket scientist. Stupid M$ and the lure of their money for developers. Grrrr...
My daughter is 4 years old and my wife would like to get her started on Reader Rabbit. I have an old P-166 laying around and my wife just bought a whole mess of Reader Rabbit games (all about 4-5 years old) at a yard sale for $10.
Having only a little Linux experience and no WINE experience, has anyone tried getting Reader Rabbit games running under WINE? Will this hardware be enough to do it under WINE?
I would hate to drop the money for 98SE just for the kids to play games, so Linux would rule.
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As the cost of political campaigns goes up, it takes more money to buy a senator these days. The RIAA has to own senators in order to infringe on any rights of consumers that it *THINKS* hurts profit margins, so they must keep more money.
Besides, the RIAA thinks 9 out of 10 songs are pirated anyway, so they are just recouping losses.
Get with the program, buddy. Work. Pay Taxes. Consume. Repeat.
I have on of the Electrolux HEPA air purifiers at the house and it is awesome. Yes, it is also loud, but we actually like that because it acts as a white noise generator while you sleep (we keep it in the bedroom).
Our bedroom is pretty big (~900 sq ft) and it does a great job filtering cat hair and other crud. They run around $500.
OK, I agree with what Linus is saying here - he is just a codehead and is not going to tell you what you can or can not put in your build. Cool, but we are still just talking about the technology.
The problem today is not the technology -- "IT IS THE LAW, STUPID!"
If Microsoft puts some crazy stupid DRM in the next version of Windows, it might be the final straw to get something else to the desktop (be it Mac OS X, FreeBSD, Linux, or something else). As long as people have the freedom of choice, M$ can only go so far before they loose the customer base.
The problem is the DCMA and the baby-DCMAs popping up at the state level. If the government makes DRM *MANDATORY*, you loose your choice. I can very easily see the RIAA and MPAA requiring that all OS's require DRM in the very near future. Think about it.
I run my own software company. I am still struggling, but I am going to make about $80-90k this year. Here is the deal.
... I work from home unless I am at the client site!
I have formed a partnership with two Indian development companies. I get the contracts. I meet with the customer. I do all requirements gathering. I do the UML. I manage the project. I do everything except actually write the code.
I send the Indians the stubbed out code generated from the UML, the database as generated from the ER/WIN model and the UML. They send me back a project plan with dates and a fixed bid. The lowest bidder of the two gets the contract.
We have done 3 jobs together this way now -- one for a small software company that was outsourcing its Web Services upgrade to its existing product and two medium sized projects for Fortune 500 companies.
The biggest issue so far is getting the big guys to take you seriously and the background check they put you through to get you on the job. After that, it all comes down to dollars and this arrangement is delivering good code for about the price of 1-2 good developers but it gets done in a fraction of the time.
And
I quickly amassed over 5 GB of religious documents and writings that I was hosting in an effort to smuggle them into China. It took less than 2 weeks to gather that much data from the Vatican website (vatican.va) and other Catholic websites.
Funny thing about religious documents -- people give them away for free, will actually pay other people to distribute them, and some countries try to squash them for political reasons. But, hey, the minute you start trying to talk about *LEGITIMATE* uses of P2P...
Break the data you want to backup into "stripes" like a RAID array. Encrypt these stripes. Swap stripes with other users. Host these files at any URL you have control over -- your PC, the free web space your ISP gives you, a FTP site, whatever.
Give the user the option of only backing up data stripes with a select group of users (people they know and trust) or with any random user. Let the user control the ratio per user (this guy I trade with one for one, but a stranger must host 3 of my files for every one I host for him).
You send the encrypted data, you get a received confirmation with the URL, you check the URL to make sure its there. The confirmation has a leased until date just like your IP address from a DHCP server. The program either renews the lease when it is almost up or finds a new home for your data.
Whenever you need your data, you hit those URLs and reassemble the data for the encrypted stripes.
Wireless networks are cool and all, but the minute they are a threat to the economic models in place today, the existing middlemen will try to kill them. They will go to the government and use those millions to buy the support of government officials who will make the "offensive" technology illegal. That's life.
So, yeah, it might change your life, but only as long as the fat cats get fatter at the same time.
If people started building their own public wireless backbones and created a big global ISP that was free to everyone, you can bet your bottom dollar that the members of congress who get the most donations from the fat cats would suddenly be screaming about how terrorists could use this network to detonate a dirty bomb in grandma's backyard.
Well, I'll tell you what. Walk up to any one of this bank's IT employees and ask them what ever happened to that guy who pushed the bad routing table out into production back in 1998 that caused all the stratocoms to fail. If they were there at the time, they can not forget it, because the bank had just about every single IT person working in shifts 24 hours a day until it was back up. Then ask them about the "War Room" conference call lines they had manned.
Those of us who could not fix routers manned conference call lines for 8 hour stretches and tested apps as links came back online.
A Bank in America [;)] had an outage back in 1998 where all their Stratocom went down for similar reasons. The Gateway/Network Engineering group had been saying for a couple years that we needed more redundancy but senior executives just saw the expenses and not the liability ... until every single Stratacom went down.
... it took a week. All non-critical traffic had to be cut-off as we pushed everything through the backup T1s and ISDN lines. It cost the bank MILLIONS of dollars.
We had to rebuild the entire network
Suddenly, that backup network was real cheap. They are now quite proud to tote their redundancy.
Whether we like it or not, money will be donated to campaigns, congress will vote and laws will be passed. Furthermore, monopolies will be monopolies and you will have a choice of Microsoft DRM OS running on Intel/AMD DRM hardware or you get Linux.
I think that Hollywood knows that they are never going to stop pirating. I think they are looking for a way to stop 99% of pirating. We all know that no matter what they come out with, someone will be able to pirate it.
The only way to win this battle is for the consumers to stand up and send Hollywood looking for a new business model. They do not with how they spend their money. Period. It's the only way.
I still say that ion engines like the one on the Deep Space 1 probe and M2P2 is the way to go. My proposal would be something like this.
... you would stop the rotation.
First, you send about a dozen small ion engine powered craft. These craft would first work on stopping any rotation in reference to the Sun and second work on elongating the orbit. If you have a decade of warning, this would work
Second, you can now start using the paint idea while also setting up nuclear powered M2P2 generators. They would send out large magneticly charged plasma fields that would act as giant solar sails, further slowing the elongating the orbit of the asteroid.
Third, you start fine-tuning the orbit until you get the asteroid to slingshot around one of the gas giants either into the sun or out of the solar system.
Problem solved. I think it would be awesome to see an international mission that would land a couple of ion engine probes on a small, near earth asteroid just to test stopping its rotation. Then you could play with the paint idea or test some giant M2P2 engines.
So how many Billion would that cost?
I would think that Mini-Magnetospheric Plasma Propulsion (M2P2) would be the way to go. Setup some nuclear reactors on the surface of the thing, create a plasma bubble as large as you can and let the Sun push that sucker. If you can get to it outside of Mars, it would only take a slight angle adjestment to make it miss.
Of course, the other option is to send a manned mission to an near-earth asteroid and strap several ion engines on that puppy. Use the ion engines to slowly (over years) get it into a nice orbit outside lunar orbit. If we identify a killer asteroid, play a little cosmic billards - slam the ion engined asteroid into the killer one.
This is gold, baby. Where is NASA with the grant money? I knew I should have been a rocket scientist. Stupid M$ and the lure of their money for developers. Grrrr...
My daughter is 4 years old and my wife would like to get her started on Reader Rabbit. I have an old P-166 laying around and my wife just bought a whole mess of Reader Rabbit games (all about 4-5 years old) at a yard sale for $10.
Having only a little Linux experience and no WINE experience, has anyone tried getting Reader Rabbit games running under WINE? Will this hardware be enough to do it under WINE?
I would hate to drop the money for 98SE just for the kids to play games, so Linux would rule.