Well, I don't know if it counts, but I've been House dancing with a circle here called Real Jam. Here's me with my team (I'm the white guy.)
http://windmill.nce.buttobi.net/04Mel(W)/denim.htm
And recently I've been dating a malaysian girl. If I could get pictures off my camera, I could show them.
Ah what the hell. This is the first time I've looked at/. in months. I was just surprised that my university was mentioned.
I'm currently finishing up a year-long exchange study at Tsukuba University, so it's nice to hear something good come out from here.
There's five Ss about Tsukuba that everyone should know: 1. Science 2. Study 3. Sports 4. Sex 5. Suicide
There's so little to do where the college is located that this school has a bad reputation for suicides. I guess it's gotten better since it gained that reputation because I haven't heard any stories about people killing themselves while I've been here.
As for myself, I've been doing 3 and 4, and occasionally number 2.
It's very reasonable to require a name, address, and telephone number if your store buys and sells used goods. As pointed out in another post, it can be used to TRY to go after people stealing those goods.
Another obvious reason is defective merchandise. Say I sell some store used CDs that turn out to be damaged. Seeing as the store has the information I gave, they can ask for money back should I try to sell CDs there again. It's a very reasonble precaution to ask for identification information (excluding SSN) if you're running a used goods store.
... disabling javascript. It's funny how impotent the anti-leech system is when something that simple nullifies it.
What the phoenix and mozilla projects should add is a javascript manager, similar to the cookie and image managers. That way you can let specific sites run javascripts and block all others or block specific sites' scripts and run ones from sites that haven't been added to "the list".
They should also add an animation/flash manager. I really hate flash ads.
Perhaps the article poster didn't want to use crippleware. Macamp limits recording streams to 3 minutes for non-paying users. Audion limits sessions to thirty minutes after the first fifteen days. Mint Audio doesn't remember playlists if you haven't registered. I could go on with other limitations on the shareware programs you mentioned, but you get the idea.
Also, seeing as iTunes is included with the Mac OS, it has been payed for. The article poster has good ground to complain about Apple's lack of Ogg support.
Because "No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State" (Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution of the United States of America), taxes on sales between two different states are probably unconstitutional.
Of course, sales that occur inside of a single state are probably taxable.
Re:WotC killed itself
on
Layoffs at WotC
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Yeah, that's why I stopped playing most card games and RPGs. I wasted so much money on Decipher's Star Wars CCGs trying to get rare cards even though the game was terrible (no where near as good as magic). I stopped buying RPG books when I realized I wasted hundreds of dollars on White Wolf's World of Darkness books just to stay up-to-date on the stories. It might be an effective business model to keep shoveling cards and books down gamers' throats, but it's not an effective consumer model.
Thankfully, there are alternatives. I recommend anything from Looney Labs. I've played Fluxx, Chrononauts, and Aquarius, and each was a fun, elegant, and affordable (no 20 different expansions to milk out more cash) game.
I don't think Tim O'Reilly remembers this story very well. In a mayoral election in Florida, voting machines running proprietary software were used, and the losing mayor of the election sued for an audit of the voting process. Of course, because the software is not open source, it can't be audited!
Sure, free software vs. proprietary software might be irrelevant for the OS or office suite a civil servant uses, but it is very important when the government needs to be auditable.
I'm not sure you're having the same problems i've had. I've tried to install win2k for at least 4 times. Sometimes it would screw up while formatting an NTFS partition. However, the last time I tried installing win2k, it installed but wouldn't boot.
I've been getting advice from the IT guy at the high school from which I just graduating / for whom I work until going to college. One thing he told me to do was to get a disk diagnosis tool from the hard drive manufacturer (mine was Western Digital) and run it from a boot floppy made on another Windows machine.
I can't remember the most recent advice he gave me. It was something along the lines of running FDISK from a windows boot floppy, copying the i386 folder from the windows cd to the hard drive, and running the installer off the hard drive. I was going to talk to the IT guy again before I actually tried it.
BTW, this is the first computer I've actually owned. The computers I've used in the past (and the one I'm using now) are owned by my parents, who are afraid to let me mess with hardware or put on another OS. In other words, I'm a newbie when it comes to getting computers to work (but not to operating them).
I wouldn't be surprised if California's free-software -in-government bill actually passes. It was probably spawned because of that $95 million dollar mess they had with Oracle.
I can't help but think about how MicroSoft is a monopoly-in-restraint-of-trade as bad as the American railroad ones of the 19th century.
In the 19th century, railroad monopolies charged people fees for shipping on competing lines. The goal was that you only do business with one rail line. Microsoft's response to BeOS is much like this one. Microsoft, like the monopolistic rail lines, coerced its customers, the OEMs, not do business with a competitor. However, instead of charging imaginary fees as punishment, MS uses sealed OEM licenses to forbid them from installing dual boot OSes.
However, I see why MicroSoft uses such tactics. If people got computers with Windows and BeOS dual boot or Windows and Mandrake Linux, people would actually realize that there's no reason to use only Windows.
BTW, although not monopolistic or evil, MS's frequent changes to the Word format is like the railroad lines' stubbornness against choosing a standard gauge.
On a personal not, this seems like it could have almost affected my situation. I recently bought a computer online from a NE Ohio computer company without an OS. I was planning on running GNU/Linux until I began studying at OSU, where I could get a legal copy of WinXP from a Microsoft club for $5. Of course, recent/. stories on EULA changes made me decide to use Win2k instead, and I bought a Like New copy through half.com. Unfortunately, Windows refuses to run because I have an "INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE". I feel like using an illegal copy Windows if I can't get it to work.
Why is intellectual property the most common analogy of modern life made with physical objects? I mean, content providers say that when you take some of their copyrighted material, you have stolen just as if it were physical property. Why aren't more such comparisons made (in people's favor of course)?
For example, just as a person might own land, he would own his computer. Just as he might build a house on his land, a person would also put a filesystem/OS on his computer. Just as with a house, anything that does not harm another should be allowed on a computer.
Also, meetings over the internet such as in chat rooms or over P2P networks should be considered assemblies. Therefore, as long as such an assembly is peaceful (no laws being broken, copyrights being infringed upon), it should be allowed to continue. Of course, attacking all P2P networks would be like instituting curfews; all assembly is forbidden because some people might not be peaceful and law-abiding.
In the offline world, many handgun control folks argue that people kill people and that guns are not to blame. The generalization to draw from this specific argument is that possession of the tools of crime is not criminal or immoral. If this generalization were applied to computers, it mean that writing viruses and cracker tools is not immoral as long as they are not used maliciously. It would also mean that the P2P networks are not to blame, but instead the copyright-infringing users are.
Just something I had to say...
Homeric simile of the week: MS's Palladium is like giving the RIAA and MPAA a gun, but the default option of not requiring a signing authority for programs and media is like a bullet proof vest for computers. Sen. Hollings aims to ban bullet-proof vests with the CBDTPA.
Do people really think that the CEOs would go to jail?
What's more likely is that the well paid technicians that actually do the attacks for the RIAA and MPAA would be the ones indicted. Of course, I bet those folks would be smart enough to never to go to Australia, which doesn't sound very good from recent/.stories.
Like any law, the DMCA is a complicated one. The rules against breaking copy protection is ridiculous because breaking such protections is usually for reasons better copyright infringement (such as viewing DVDs from other regions).
However, the part of the DMCA that I support is the fact the ability for a copyright holder to notify a service provider that a user is infringing on a copyright. This protects the ISP from liability, limiting to the person actually commiting the wrongdoing. As for illegitimate DMCA notices, these can be counteracted by counternotices (for which, I believe, the EFF has a wizard). Also, you can file perjury charges against a person sending illegitimate notices.
I apologize for being unfamiliar with the Malda case, though I do remember some crap about the Church of Scientology sending a DMCA notice to eBay because someone was selling an e-meter, a device, and thus, something uncopyrightable. I wish this were challenged, but I don't remember hearing such good news.
>By invoking the DMCA against their ISP any claim >against the DMCA by us becomes void, because we >have been helped by it. That is not logic. It's a red herring and an ad hominem. Being helped by something does not mean you cannot criticize it. This is analogous to saying that you cannot accept Social Security checks because you oppose such welfarist systems, even though you paid SS taxes for 30 years. Please take a logic course at a nearby college before you say something like this again.
However, I do acknowledge that not using the DMCA might be a way of personal protest against the law, but I do not acknowledge it as an effective one.
>... having an ISP remove somebody's account would >be just as wrong now. It's not necessary for the ISP to remove the account; the only thing necessary is to unlink the offending files until NeoNapster is no longer infringing on copyrights. Of course, other posts seem to say this isn't happening, but I still think the DMCA can be a useful tool in enforcing the GPL.
Better yet, send CNet and NeoNapster's ISP DMCA notices. Because they are using someone else's copyrighted work but removing the notices, they are infringing on CDex's copyright, even if it free software.
Even if you don't like the DMCA, there's no reason to let the RIAA and MPAA be the only ones to use it.
I don't see the justificationg
on
MPAA vs. Television
·
· Score: 2, Informative
47 USC 336(b)(4), Hollings justification for the broadcast flag: The [FCC] shall... adopt such technical and other requirements as may be necessary or appropriate to assure the quality of the signal used to provide advanced television services, and may adopt regulations that stipulate the minimum number of hours per day that such signal must be transmitted....
I don't think any judge would believe that this provides for mandating standards to avoid copyright infringement. A change of law would be necessary if Hollings does want such a mandate.
Let's go over the history of TF2. First it was supposed to be a mod for Quake 2, much like many of the sequels to Quake mods. Then, Valve made a deal with the guys who made TF, and TF2 was supposed to be a free-as-in-beer mod for Half-Life. Plans changed again, and it was turned into a commercially sold mod. Eventually, they changed their minds again, and decided to sell it as a separate game using the HL engine. However, several months through development, they decided to make a totally new engine for it.
Several months ago, I went onto the messageboards at the official TF2 website, and it seems like all development has stopped. It's a shame too; I still hoped it would be good vaporware (like Diablo 2 as opposed to Diakatana).
The GPL only requires that the seller make the source code available to the people who actually hold copies of their software. Therefore, if the only people who hold copies of the GPLed software are military service branches, it is unlikely that a civilian would have access to the source code for sensitive software (such as the drivers or whatever for a Patriot missle or a spy plane).
As for more mundane software like OSes for PCs and servers, I think it's established that Free Software is the way to go. I remember the story that appeared on slashdot a few weeks ago about MS saying their software was so buggy that releasing the source code would threaten national security. It seems that software that has already been tested lacking of obfuscation of code would be preferable to the one whose security relies on that obfuscation.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I don't know if it counts, but I've been House dancing with a circle here called Real Jam. Here's me with my team (I'm the white guy.) http://windmill.nce.buttobi.net/04Mel(W)/denim.htm
And recently I've been dating a malaysian girl. If I could get pictures off my camera, I could show them.
Ah what the hell. This is the first time I've looked at /. in months. I was just surprised that my university was mentioned.
I'm currently finishing up a year-long exchange study at Tsukuba University, so it's nice to hear something good come out from here.
There's five Ss about Tsukuba that everyone should know:
1. Science
2. Study
3. Sports
4. Sex
5. Suicide
There's so little to do where the college is located that this school has a bad reputation for suicides. I guess it's gotten better since it gained that reputation because I haven't heard any stories about people killing themselves while I've been here.
As for myself, I've been doing 3 and 4, and occasionally number 2.
It's very reasonable to require a name, address, and telephone number if your store buys and sells used goods. As pointed out in another post, it can be used to TRY to go after people stealing those goods.
Another obvious reason is defective merchandise. Say I sell some store used CDs that turn out to be damaged. Seeing as the store has the information I gave, they can ask for money back should I try to sell CDs there again. It's a very reasonble precaution to ask for identification information (excluding SSN) if you're running a used goods store.
... disabling javascript. It's funny how impotent the anti-leech system is when something that simple nullifies it.
What the phoenix and mozilla projects should add is a javascript manager, similar to the cookie and image managers. That way you can let specific sites run javascripts and block all others or block specific sites' scripts and run ones from sites that haven't been added to "the list".
They should also add an animation/flash manager. I really hate flash ads.
Perhaps the article poster didn't want to use crippleware. Macamp limits recording streams to 3 minutes for non-paying users. Audion limits sessions to thirty minutes after the first fifteen days. Mint Audio doesn't remember playlists if you haven't registered. I could go on with other limitations on the shareware programs you mentioned, but you get the idea.
Also, seeing as iTunes is included with the Mac OS, it has been payed for. The article poster has good ground to complain about Apple's lack of Ogg support.
Because "No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State" (Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution of the United States of America), taxes on sales between two different states are probably unconstitutional.
Of course, sales that occur inside of a single state are probably taxable.
Yeah, that's why I stopped playing most card games and RPGs. I wasted so much money on Decipher's Star Wars CCGs trying to get rare cards even though the game was terrible (no where near as good as magic). I stopped buying RPG books when I realized I wasted hundreds of dollars on White Wolf's World of Darkness books just to stay up-to-date on the stories. It might be an effective business model to keep shoveling cards and books down gamers' throats, but it's not an effective consumer model.
Thankfully, there are alternatives. I recommend anything from Looney Labs. I've played Fluxx, Chrononauts, and Aquarius, and each was a fun, elegant, and affordable (no 20 different expansions to milk out more cash) game.
I don't think Tim O'Reilly remembers this story very well. In a mayoral election in Florida, voting machines running proprietary software were used, and the losing mayor of the election sued for an audit of the voting process. Of course, because the software is not open source, it can't be audited!
Sure, free software vs. proprietary software might be irrelevant for the OS or office suite a civil servant uses, but it is very important when the government needs to be auditable.
I'm not sure you're having the same problems i've had. I've tried to install win2k for at least 4 times. Sometimes it would screw up while formatting an NTFS partition. However, the last time I tried installing win2k, it installed but wouldn't boot.
I've been getting advice from the IT guy at the high school from which I just graduating / for whom I work until going to college. One thing he told me to do was to get a disk diagnosis tool from the hard drive manufacturer (mine was Western Digital) and run it from a boot floppy made on another Windows machine.
I can't remember the most recent advice he gave me. It was something along the lines of running FDISK from a windows boot floppy, copying the i386 folder from the windows cd to the hard drive, and running the installer off the hard drive. I was going to talk to the IT guy again before I actually tried it.
BTW, this is the first computer I've actually owned. The computers I've used in the past (and the one I'm using now) are owned by my parents, who are afraid to let me mess with hardware or put on another OS. In other words, I'm a newbie when it comes to getting computers to work (but not to operating them).
Please send further responses via e-mail.
I wouldn't be surprised if California's free-software -in-government bill actually passes. It was probably spawned because of that $95 million dollar mess they had with Oracle.
I can't help but think about how MicroSoft is a monopoly-in-restraint-of-trade as bad as the American railroad ones of the 19th century.
In the 19th century, railroad monopolies charged people fees for shipping on competing lines. The goal was that you only do business with one rail line. Microsoft's response to BeOS is much like this one. Microsoft, like the monopolistic rail lines, coerced its customers, the OEMs, not do business with a competitor. However, instead of charging imaginary fees as punishment, MS uses sealed OEM licenses to forbid them from installing dual boot OSes.
However, I see why MicroSoft uses such tactics. If people got computers with Windows and BeOS dual boot or Windows and Mandrake Linux, people would actually realize that there's no reason to use only Windows.
BTW, although not monopolistic or evil, MS's frequent changes to the Word format is like the railroad lines' stubbornness against choosing a standard gauge.
On a personal not, this seems like it could have almost affected my situation. I recently bought a computer online from a NE Ohio computer company without an OS. I was planning on running GNU/Linux until I began studying at OSU, where I could get a legal copy of WinXP from a Microsoft club for $5. Of course, recent /. stories on EULA changes made me decide to use Win2k instead, and I bought a Like New copy through half.com. Unfortunately, Windows refuses to run because I have an "INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE". I feel like using an illegal copy Windows if I can't get it to work.
Why is intellectual property the most common analogy of modern life made with physical objects? I mean, content providers say that when you take some of their copyrighted material, you have stolen just as if it were physical property. Why aren't more such comparisons made (in people's favor of course)?
For example, just as a person might own land, he would own his computer. Just as he might build a house on his land, a person would also put a filesystem/OS on his computer. Just as with a house, anything that does not harm another should be allowed on a computer.
Also, meetings over the internet such as in chat rooms or over P2P networks should be considered assemblies. Therefore, as long as such an assembly is peaceful (no laws being broken, copyrights being infringed upon), it should be allowed to continue. Of course, attacking all P2P networks would be like instituting curfews; all assembly is forbidden because some people might not be peaceful and law-abiding.
In the offline world, many handgun control folks argue that people kill people and that guns are not to blame. The generalization to draw from this specific argument is that possession of the tools of crime is not criminal or immoral. If this generalization were applied to computers, it mean that writing viruses and cracker tools is not immoral as long as they are not used maliciously. It would also mean that the P2P networks are not to blame, but instead the copyright-infringing users are.
Just something I had to say...
Homeric simile of the week: MS's Palladium is like giving the RIAA and MPAA a gun, but the default option of not requiring a signing authority for programs and media is like a bullet proof vest for computers. Sen. Hollings aims to ban bullet-proof vests with the CBDTPA.
Do people really think that the CEOs would go to jail?
What's more likely is that the well paid technicians that actually do the attacks for the RIAA and MPAA would be the ones indicted. Of course, I bet those folks would be smart enough to never to go to Australia, which doesn't sound very good from recent /. stories.
Like any law, the DMCA is a complicated one. The rules against breaking copy protection is ridiculous because breaking such protections is usually for reasons better copyright infringement (such as viewing DVDs from other regions).
However, the part of the DMCA that I support is the fact the ability for a copyright holder to notify a service provider that a user is infringing on a copyright. This protects the ISP from liability, limiting to the person actually commiting the wrongdoing. As for illegitimate DMCA notices, these can be counteracted by counternotices (for which, I believe, the EFF has a wizard). Also, you can file perjury charges against a person sending illegitimate notices.
I apologize for being unfamiliar with the Malda case, though I do remember some crap about the Church of Scientology sending a DMCA notice to eBay because someone was selling an e-meter, a device, and thus, something uncopyrightable. I wish this were challenged, but I don't remember hearing such good news.
>By invoking the DMCA against their ISP any claim
>against the DMCA by us becomes void, because we
>have been helped by it.
That is not logic. It's a red herring and an ad hominem. Being helped by something does not mean you cannot criticize it. This is analogous to saying that you cannot accept Social Security checks because you oppose such welfarist systems, even though you paid SS taxes for 30 years. Please take a logic course at a nearby college before you say something like this again.
However, I do acknowledge that not using the DMCA might be a way of personal protest against the law, but I do not acknowledge it as an effective one.
>... having an ISP remove somebody's account would
>be just as wrong now.
It's not necessary for the ISP to remove the account; the only thing necessary is to unlink the offending files until NeoNapster is no longer infringing on copyrights. Of course, other posts seem to say this isn't happening, but I still think the DMCA can be a useful tool in enforcing the GPL.
Better yet, send CNet and NeoNapster's ISP DMCA notices. Because they are using someone else's copyrighted work but removing the notices, they are infringing on CDex's copyright, even if it free software.
Even if you don't like the DMCA, there's no reason to let the RIAA and MPAA be the only ones to use it.
47 USC 336(b)(4), Hollings justification for the broadcast flag: ... adopt such technical and other requirements as may be necessary or appropriate to assure the quality of the signal used to provide advanced television services, and may adopt regulations that stipulate the minimum number of hours per day that such signal must be transmitted....
The [FCC] shall
I don't think any judge would believe that this provides for mandating standards to avoid copyright infringement. A change of law would be necessary if Hollings does want such a mandate.
Let's go over the history of TF2. First it was supposed to be a mod for Quake 2, much like many of the sequels to Quake mods. Then, Valve made a deal with the guys who made TF, and TF2 was supposed to be a free-as-in-beer mod for Half-Life. Plans changed again, and it was turned into a commercially sold mod. Eventually, they changed their minds again, and decided to sell it as a separate game using the HL engine. However, several months through development, they decided to make a totally new engine for it.
Several months ago, I went onto the messageboards at the official TF2 website, and it seems like all development has stopped. It's a shame too; I still hoped it would be good vaporware (like Diablo 2 as opposed to Diakatana).
From: the traditions, techniques, ingredients and recipes
JAPANESE cooking :
"Green tea should not be brewed with boiling water. The better the quality of tea, the less hot the water should be.
"The tea [gyokuro] should be brewed in warm water, at about 50 degrees Celsuis/122 degrees Farenheit...."
Although I don't drink much hot drink, I hate how restaurants serve coffee and tea at scalding temperatures.
The GPL only requires that the seller make the source code available to the people who actually hold copies of their software. Therefore, if the only people who hold copies of the GPLed software are military service branches, it is unlikely that a civilian would have access to the source code for sensitive software (such as the drivers or whatever for a Patriot missle or a spy plane).
As for more mundane software like OSes for PCs and servers, I think it's established that Free Software is the way to go. I remember the story that appeared on slashdot a few weeks ago about MS saying their software was so buggy that releasing the source code would threaten national security. It seems that software that has already been tested lacking of obfuscation of code would be preferable to the one whose security relies on that obfuscation.