Maybe the BBC, historically one of the world's great information delivery organizations, has an interest in casting Google in a negative light?
I doubt it. Google is a colossal index of information. Google News can tell you what has happened recently in the world, but it only does so by linking the user to stories posted on other news sites.
This is where the BBC scores; they're a huge news provider, and a lot of those Google links will come straight to them.
Indeed, the threat Google might be said to pose is the same threat that the likes of AP or Reuters pose. Google can provide links to stories, in the same kind of way that the wire services just pump out terse reports. The BBC's role, in common with the other major news providers, is to flesh those out with analysis and commentary and consideration of the wider implications.
I'd agree with you, in general - it seems like, for a while at least, he listened too much to the sad inbred clique of a.f.p. and wrote books that tried to fit everybody's favourite characters and bits in. After the first one of those, they became formulaic - every book had to have the Watch, A-M, the Wizards, at least a passing nod to the witches, etc.
* fumes angrily at being referred to as part of a sad inbred clique, on SLASHDOT of all places *... but the rest of the point stands. From about Interesting Times onwards things got a little repetitive. Granny Weatherwax in particular got infected by the Son Gokuu Powers Inflation bug... every book she's in, some supernatural menace decides to have a go at Lancre, and she pulls even more witch mojo out of her arse and beats it. I don't think her character has really developed significantly since Lords and Ladies, and the last bit of interest is gone since she finally faced down her Black Aliss side in Carpe Jugulum. She really, really needs to die for the witch stories to go anywhere now. I ATEN'T DEAD isn't funny any more.
But it seems in the last couple of years he's woken up. "Going Postal" is a brilliant piece of work, capturing a clash between the public servant culture, modern business "ethics", and the engineer / hacker ethos. "Thief of Time" runs a close second to this - the description of the spinners going wild is the stuff power plant engineers nightmares are made of, while the whole thing is a nice piss-take / homage to a thousand martial arts movies (Rule One - heh!;-)
Surprised you didn't mention Night Watch. THAT was incredible. I'd got into the habit of buying Discworld books on release day, reading them once and then shelving them, to be re-examined only occasionally. Night Watch didn't see a shelf for weeks. That was... probably the best fantasy novel I've ever read. Sorry, JRR:)
Should be caught with said files, it would be just as bad as if you had downloaded them using a P2P client for free.
In other words, not at all.
As far as I am aware, the only people who've ever got in trouble for the mp3s they had were sharing those mp3s over public peer-to-peer networks. They were illegally distributing them. The users of allofmp3.com are not doing this; they are purchasing them from an organisation that has the legal right to distribute them, and importing them into their home countries. It's just the same as if they ordered the CDs by mail order from Russia because they're cheaper there.
If companies are violating the GPL, they don't have the right to use that software.
Yes they do. The right they do not have is to redistribute the software. Accept the GPL, reject the GPL, wipe your arse with it while shouting hosannas to Bill Gates' name if you like, you can still use Linux and the like.
The GPL is a licence setting out conditions under which you can redistribute software to others, and incorporate it into your own products - which would ordinarily be a copyright violation. As far as I can tell, however, it says not one word about actually using the software itself.
Even tough Tesco offers broadband, They are just reselling BTs service. Most of the UK is covered by BT DSL service, and there aren't many other options. Cable internet is almost non-existent. There are some alternatives but few have any noteable penetration. Point being, BT isn't going anywhere.
I'd just like to add: yes, Americans, BT is a monopoly. A fricking huge one. It used to be the state-owned one and only telecoms service, but was privatised a while back. Unfortunately all the competitors that sprang up were... well, pretty crap, really... and pretty much everyone who switched away has gone back (except in Hull, for some reason).
There's a government regulator continually leaning on BT to make sure they play nice; they stalled for quite a while about broadband, delaying its progress in the UK for bloody ages (google 'local loop unbundling' for the whole gory story), but now there's a fair amount of competition in the broadband internet market and eight-megabit connections are starting to become affordable.
Possibly things might be better if BT had actually been broken up at privatisation, but who's to say? The mobile phone market is a world of cut-throat free market competition between many providers - who generally charge a bloody fortune for calls to anyone else's network...
What the hell is wrong with people, look at the results not the personal lives of politicians.
Fine by me. But it seems the Government wants to be able to see all my porn searches. Why then should I not be able to see theirs? If Mr Bush wants his search for tranny porn or whatever he's into to be kept private, then so should my sadomasochistic sojourns.
You say that human rights are something we are born with. Something inherent, inalienable, natural, perhaps even God-given.
Something we have simply by right of being alive is something we will hold cheaply and assume will always be there, like the air we breathe.
Our rights are not God-given or inherent to ourselves. Nor are they granted to us by the benevolence of our rulers. Our rights were taken from our rulers, by force. Among all our ancestors were rebels and traitors, terrorists and pirates, mutineers and heretics and unionists and blackguards and revolutionaries and blasphemers and barbarians, and it is their struggle that we have to thank for the freedom we enjoy today. They fought against kings and barons, against tycoons and industrialists, against priests and popes, and they set themselves and their descendants free.
When you give up a freedom to the state, or to the establishment, or to the company, you aren't giving up something that is yours to give away that you've had all your life and which you got for nothing. You're giving up something bought by the blood of countless rebels over the centuries. You're betraying the sacrifices made by your ancestors.
A right we think is inalienable we will neglect and soon lose. A right we know was won by our ancestors through hardship and struggle we will defend forcefully.
What, no Hobbits discovered? Well, perhaps they were eaten by those spiders.;)
Nah. Spiders don't eat hobbits. They've tried more than once, I might add, but they found out the hard way that hobbits have a nasty tendency to sting...
If we went to a higher voltage, (you never made mention of halving the amperage so I assume no for this question) why would we use thinner wires? Wouldn't putting practically double the power down a wire that's thinner than before effectively burn it out within a very short period of time?
From high school physics, V=IR. For the same wire (constant R) then increasing the voltage will decrease the current.
Moreover, heat dissipated in the resistor = (I^2)R. So, the higher voltage / lower amperage approach will mean the wire is less likely to burn out than before, meaning that you can get away with making it thinner. Of course making the wire thinner will increase the resistance, so you'll have to play with some equations to work out just how much thinner you can get away with, but there's definitely going to be a saving.
I'm thinking it would be neat if the accelerator controls had audio "themes" like desktop operating systems. Then you could make them play a sample of Trevor Goodchild in (the original) Aeon Flux saying "Congratulations, you've just wipe out the entire human race" when they detect the creation of a self-sustaining black hole.
Hmm.
Mood: slightly guilty
Listening to: Neon Genesis Evangelion soundtrack - Komm Susser Tod.mp3
Reading: Usenet group alt.destroy.the.earth
im feelin kinda bad about what i did at work today. turned the accelerator up a few more GeV to see what would happen, and the detectors have shown a definite hawking radiation signature disappearing downwards out of the accelerator and into the earth.
i think were all fux0red to be quite honest. whole planet's going to collapse into a black hole pretty soon. not sure who to tell about it... kind of embarrassing, really.
This group was actually working hard, and doing legitimate 12 hour days, but by doing strategic 15 minute increments they were all able to charge 24 hours a day. This lasted for about a 2 week period. They appeared to be quite proud of themselves.
Of course they were. And quite rightly, too.
Corporations and governments will screw you over in a heartbeat if they can find a legal way to do so and if it will earn, or save, them money. But you don't blame them for that. It's just their nature. So I for one have no moral objection to doing the same to them if the opportunity should arise. If those are the rules by which the corporate world wants to play, then I'll applaud whenever a human being manages to score against them.
It's only about 6000 times hotter, and you DID carry out the calculation using KELVINS, right? Ratios of temperature are meaningless unless you're using Kelvins.
Not _such_ a big deal when dealing with multiples of the temperature of the solar surface. The figure in kelvin isn't so different from centigrade. When the figure's 6000-ish, it's less than one part in 20.
It's when I hear of something described as, say 'ten thousand times the temperature of boiling water' that I get cross. Unless, that is, they mean 3.73 million degrees and not one million. They usually don't...
Do we really want our soldiers to be able to just take a pill after a battle so that they will not remember? Wouldn't it be better if they remembered, suffered, and convinced people not to go to war in the future?
"No, it wouldn't."
-- Every Government In The World
This battle is one of propaganda as much as anything else. If you use the enemy's terminology, you've already lost.
These are rootkit infected CDs. Use that phrase in conversation with your non-techie friends. 'Damn, I got an infected CD from Sony.' They'll not grasp all the geek details, but they'll get the picture.
Similarly, call what it is trying to do 'Digital Restrictions Management' whenever you have to explain what 'DRM' is. It's a far truer portrayal of what's going on.
He suggested that Apple Computer might be asked to pay a nickel or a dime to insure the complete and rapid transmission of a song via the Internet, which is being used for more and more content-intensive purposes.
Quite apart from the protection-racket sound of this that you point out, I wonder just what Bellsouth think their customers are paying them for?
They're a broadband internet service provider, right? What is attracting customers to broadband internet services? What's the killer app that's getting them all these customers and driving uptake?
Could it be music downloads? It's music downloads, isn't it? Yeah. That's what it is. That's why every damn advert I see for broadband connections emphasises that you can download music and movies and such over it.
FFS, guys. Apple are providing your killer app, your main marketing bonus, the reason why people WANT YOUR SERVICE. Talk about killing the golden goose...
Who came up with this? I'm betting Marketing, with a side-bet on Legal.
Yes, a Rouge state, namely revolutionary france - bunch of french speaking commie-pinkos:)
Actually, the Revolution didn't happen for a few years after the American war. France at the time was run by a bunch of decadent aristocrats, who probably wore a lot of, er, rouge...
They then found themselves with a bunch of veteran soldiers coming home having learned from their American comrades the importance of words like 'liberte', 'egalite' and 'fraternite'. Whoops.
And the thought that in modern times he'd be locked up under the PATRIOT act is truly sad...
Flamebait? No. It's the truth.
He first agitated for, and then actively participated in, the armed overthrow of the government, using an army of unlawful combatants backed by a rouge state.
Franklin, along with all the great founders of the United States of America, was undoubtedly guilty of high treason. Of course, as Shakespeare observed, if it prospers none dare call it treason; so Franklin's a hero. Certainly had things gone a little differently there would today be celebrations in the honour of the brave patriot Benedict Arnold.
Who's going to get their lunch money taken -- deaf kid with a PDA, or deaf kid with a giant robot hand?
Remember, though, that this is Japan. Kid with PDA probably merges with the Wired. Kid with part of giant robot merges with... well... pretty much everything, after a while.
Once that happens, your lunch money is the least of your concerns.
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt it. Google is a colossal index of information. Google News can tell you what has happened recently in the world, but it only does so by linking the user to stories posted on other news sites.
This is where the BBC scores; they're a huge news provider, and a lot of those Google links will come straight to them.
Indeed, the threat Google might be said to pose is the same threat that the likes of AP or Reuters pose. Google can provide links to stories, in the same kind of way that the wire services just pump out terse reports. The BBC's role, in common with the other major news providers, is to flesh those out with analysis and commentary and consideration of the wider implications.
Lose the bones and scythe, maybe? Give Death a new hairdo, natty clothes - hey, this'd be cool, can we have Death be a hot chick?
... naah. That'd never work. Pterry would never countenance collaborating with someone who'd do THAT to Death :)
* fumes angrily at being referred to as part of a sad inbred clique, on SLASHDOT of all places *... but the rest of the point stands. From about Interesting Times onwards things got a little repetitive. Granny Weatherwax in particular got infected by the Son Gokuu Powers Inflation bug... every book she's in, some supernatural menace decides to have a go at Lancre, and she pulls even more witch mojo out of her arse and beats it. I don't think her character has really developed significantly since Lords and Ladies, and the last bit of interest is gone since she finally faced down her Black Aliss side in Carpe Jugulum. She really, really needs to die for the witch stories to go anywhere now. I ATEN'T DEAD isn't funny any more.
But it seems in the last couple of years he's woken up. "Going Postal" is a brilliant piece of work, capturing a clash between the public servant culture, modern business "ethics", and the engineer / hacker ethos. "Thief of Time" runs a close second to this - the description of the spinners going wild is the stuff power plant engineers nightmares are made of, while the whole thing is a nice piss-take / homage to a thousand martial arts movies (Rule One - heh! ;-)
Surprised you didn't mention Night Watch. THAT was incredible. I'd got into the habit of buying Discworld books on release day, reading them once and then shelving them, to be re-examined only occasionally. Night Watch didn't see a shelf for weeks. That was... probably the best fantasy novel I've ever read. Sorry, JRR :)
In other words, not at all.
As far as I am aware, the only people who've ever got in trouble for the mp3s they had were sharing those mp3s over public peer-to-peer networks. They were illegally distributing them. The users of allofmp3.com are not doing this; they are purchasing them from an organisation that has the legal right to distribute them, and importing them into their home countries. It's just the same as if they ordered the CDs by mail order from Russia because they're cheaper there.
Yes they do. The right they do not have is to redistribute the software. Accept the GPL, reject the GPL, wipe your arse with it while shouting hosannas to Bill Gates' name if you like, you can still use Linux and the like.
The GPL is a licence setting out conditions under which you can redistribute software to others, and incorporate it into your own products - which would ordinarily be a copyright violation. As far as I can tell, however, it says not one word about actually using the software itself.
I'd just like to add: yes, Americans, BT is a monopoly. A fricking huge one. It used to be the state-owned one and only telecoms service, but was privatised a while back. Unfortunately all the competitors that sprang up were... well, pretty crap, really... and pretty much everyone who switched away has gone back (except in Hull, for some reason).
There's a government regulator continually leaning on BT to make sure they play nice; they stalled for quite a while about broadband, delaying its progress in the UK for bloody ages (google 'local loop unbundling' for the whole gory story), but now there's a fair amount of competition in the broadband internet market and eight-megabit connections are starting to become affordable.
Possibly things might be better if BT had actually been broken up at privatisation, but who's to say? The mobile phone market is a world of cut-throat free market competition between many providers - who generally charge a bloody fortune for calls to anyone else's network...
A perl script to automatically surf pages on a spare machine and fill this thing up with valid-looking but nonetheless phony data, in 5... 4... 3...
Fine by me. But it seems the Government wants to be able to see all my porn searches. Why then should I not be able to see theirs? If Mr Bush wants his search for tranny porn or whatever he's into to be kept private, then so should my sadomasochistic sojourns.
Something we have simply by right of being alive is something we will hold cheaply and assume will always be there, like the air we breathe.
Our rights are not God-given or inherent to ourselves. Nor are they granted to us by the benevolence of our rulers. Our rights were taken from our rulers, by force. Among all our ancestors were rebels and traitors, terrorists and pirates, mutineers and heretics and unionists and blackguards and revolutionaries and blasphemers and barbarians, and it is their struggle that we have to thank for the freedom we enjoy today. They fought against kings and barons, against tycoons and industrialists, against priests and popes, and they set themselves and their descendants free.
When you give up a freedom to the state, or to the establishment, or to the company, you aren't giving up something that is yours to give away that you've had all your life and which you got for nothing. You're giving up something bought by the blood of countless rebels over the centuries. You're betraying the sacrifices made by your ancestors.
A right we think is inalienable we will neglect and soon lose. A right we know was won by our ancestors through hardship and struggle we will defend forcefully.
You misspelled 'is'.
Nah. Spiders don't eat hobbits. They've tried more than once, I might add, but they found out the hard way that hobbits have a nasty tendency to sting...
I mean, seriously, as if anyone thinks unguided physical processes can produce such intricate patterns?
Libertarians support government-enforced monopolies restricting certain forms of speech for corporate profit? Interesting.
From high school physics, V=IR. For the same wire (constant R) then increasing the voltage will decrease the current.
Moreover, heat dissipated in the resistor = (I^2)R. So, the higher voltage / lower amperage approach will mean the wire is less likely to burn out than before, meaning that you can get away with making it thinner. Of course making the wire thinner will increase the resistance, so you'll have to play with some equations to work out just how much thinner you can get away with, but there's definitely going to be a saving.
Hmm.
Mood: slightly guilty
Listening to: Neon Genesis Evangelion soundtrack - Komm Susser Tod.mp3
Reading: Usenet group alt.destroy.the.earth
im feelin kinda bad about what i did at work today. turned the accelerator up a few more GeV to see what would happen, and the detectors have shown a definite hawking radiation signature disappearing downwards out of the accelerator and into the earth.
i think were all fux0red to be quite honest. whole planet's going to collapse into a black hole pretty soon. not sure who to tell about it... kind of embarrassing, really.
Of course they were. And quite rightly, too.
Corporations and governments will screw you over in a heartbeat if they can find a legal way to do so and if it will earn, or save, them money. But you don't blame them for that. It's just their nature. So I for one have no moral objection to doing the same to them if the opportunity should arise. If those are the rules by which the corporate world wants to play, then I'll applaud whenever a human being manages to score against them.
Not _such_ a big deal when dealing with multiples of the temperature of the solar surface. The figure in kelvin isn't so different from centigrade. When the figure's 6000-ish, it's less than one part in 20.
It's when I hear of something described as, say 'ten thousand times the temperature of boiling water' that I get cross. Unless, that is, they mean 3.73 million degrees and not one million. They usually don't...
Sounds familiar. So, in Soviet Russia, they could also get the warrants retrospectively.
The only difference, then, being that in Soviet Russia they actually bothered to do so?
"No, it wouldn't."
-- Every Government In The World
This battle is one of propaganda as much as anything else. If you use the enemy's terminology, you've already lost.
These are rootkit infected CDs. Use that phrase in conversation with your non-techie friends. 'Damn, I got an infected CD from Sony.' They'll not grasp all the geek details, but they'll get the picture.
Similarly, call what it is trying to do 'Digital Restrictions Management' whenever you have to explain what 'DRM' is. It's a far truer portrayal of what's going on.
Yep. Like it. Can't see any possible downside there.
You know, I think what I'll do is, I'll pretend I'm one of those deaf-mutes... * clickety - click *
Quite apart from the protection-racket sound of this that you point out, I wonder just what Bellsouth think their customers are paying them for?
They're a broadband internet service provider, right? What is attracting customers to broadband internet services? What's the killer app that's getting them all these customers and driving uptake?
Could it be music downloads? It's music downloads, isn't it? Yeah. That's what it is. That's why every damn advert I see for broadband connections emphasises that you can download music and movies and such over it.
FFS, guys. Apple are providing your killer app, your main marketing bonus, the reason why people WANT YOUR SERVICE. Talk about killing the golden goose...
Who came up with this? I'm betting Marketing, with a side-bet on Legal.
Actually, the Revolution didn't happen for a few years after the American war. France at the time was run by a bunch of decadent aristocrats, who probably wore a lot of, er, rouge...
They then found themselves with a bunch of veteran soldiers coming home having learned from their American comrades the importance of words like 'liberte', 'egalite' and 'fraternite'. Whoops.
Flamebait? No. It's the truth.
He first agitated for, and then actively participated in, the armed overthrow of the government, using an army of unlawful combatants backed by a rouge state.
Franklin, along with all the great founders of the United States of America, was undoubtedly guilty of high treason. Of course, as Shakespeare observed, if it prospers none dare call it treason; so Franklin's a hero. Certainly had things gone a little differently there would today be celebrations in the honour of the brave patriot Benedict Arnold.
Remember, though, that this is Japan. Kid with PDA probably merges with the Wired. Kid with part of giant robot merges with... well... pretty much everything, after a while.
Once that happens, your lunch money is the least of your concerns.