I can not defend myself from the evil corporation, so whats the point in trying. I even posted this comment from Internet Explorer! John Ashcroft, you're our only hope.
In the US, (where the dept. of justice has jurisdiction, coincidentally) we have this thing called a "market". The government has better things to worry about than a market that can (and will) take care of itself.
Want proof? Download Firefox. Try it. See if there's anything you want to do that you can't do.
but most ghetto blacks won't shoot you because there ARE cops in this country
Wake up you silly little racist. Most ghetto blacks won't shoot you because THEY AREN'T MURDERERS.
I guess maybe you've listened to too much NWA and other silly stuff. Yes, violence happens. Yes, people get killed, robbed, and beaten. But its the exception. If you want to live in fear, its your choice, but it isn't the decision I make. But then, many people would rather let the media or the government make their decisions for them.
Personally, I've dealt with lots of different people, and I can tell you that there are many poor people (or ghetto blacks if you must) that I would rather be in the care of then many cops out there.
Turn off your TV. Unlock your front door, walk outside, breathe in some fresh air, and talk to your neighbors. They might scare you at first, but there's a good chance they're more like you than you realize.
Don't they know that these bullets come down with the same velocity as they went up
Bullets do not return to Earth with the same velocity that took them up.
There are two reasons for this. First, velocity is speed and direction. Obviously the direction has changed when they return to Earth. Second, air resistance slows them down. On the way up, the bullet is being pushed by energy released when the gun is fired. The whole way up its decelerating. But its only accelerating part of the way down (wind resistance quickly equalizes with gravity.)
In short, terminal velocity for a bullet is much lower than the velocity it leaves the barrel with.
I wouldn't want a falling bullet to hit me in the eye, or to hit a small child. But, I dispute pretty much every fact in your post.
I disagree. I buy an Apple. Its my property. I will do whatever I want with it.
I can accept that there are consequences for my actions. If I bash my neighbor over the head with the case, there are well defined consequences for my actions that we live with as part of a society.
If I install Linux on the Apple, then perhaps I've invalidated my warranty with Apple. Thats just quid pro quo -- Use your computer in the manner we specify, and in turn we'll fix it if theres a failure.
Where is the quid pro quo when they demand that I not install my OS on it? I already bought it, do they plan on retroactively raising the price?
Any true angbander knows that Morgoth is a Giant Humanoid, so it is represented with a grey P. That P is easily the most overpowered boss ever in any videogame, that is still beatable (that is, if you don't count the apocryphal Serpent of Chaos of Zangband).
Well, I didn't say I'm a true Angbander. I did beat him, and now that you mention it, P sounds right. I knew it was a capital letter! It was about 5 years ago, so you know how it goes. Just thinking about it makes me want to dig up Calris and do some slaying...
Is Nethack really any better than Angband or Moria? I got started on Moria, beat Angband, but never gave Nethack much of a chance.
When I finally faced Morgoth in Angband, it had taken me over 40 days to develop that character. I broke out into a cold sweat over a capitol M that was quickly smashing its way through permanant walls while it chased me. Earthquakes and Teleports barely slowed him down. Never have I felt so much tension in a turn-based text game.
Offtopic, and I agree that who needs Kylix when you've got C++ BuilderX. However, BuilderX is dropping support for VCL in favor wxWindows. Now that seems like a topic worth discussing.
People are overlooking it, but BuilderX is going to be a platform supporting Windows, Linux x86, Solaris x86, and I believe OSX. Should have C++, Java, and Delphi support. So it doesn't suprise me in the least that Kylix is done on Linux -- VCL is done on Windows, Linux, and the rest!
Also, while I used to be a rabid C++ devotee before Delphi, despite the standardazation of C++ there are still so many ways to do many things, and so many different class libraries you can use, that just about every piece of code out there seems to be using a different string class or what have you. In Delphi the class libraries are a lot more standardized (or lacking, depending on your point of view:-).
While I agree that it is not nice, the way it shakes out in C++ Builder isn't so bad. You have C strings (used by some of the C functions), ANSI strings (used by VCL functions) and c++ std::strings used by everything else.
ANSI and std::string both support.c_str() and both have constructors and operators which take a C string. Its trivial to convert from one to the other using the c_str() method.
Is it the way I would design it? No. Is it a holdover from the Delphi support? Yes. Is it really so bad? No.
You mean encoding selections from the 1978 John Travolta and Olivia Newton John movie on the outter tracks of the disc? Brilliant! Even O2 won't react with John Travolta.
As far as removing Grease, the Church of Scientology can remove anything it wants. Its the perfec solution!
I think your bits per color to bits per pixel is artificially high.
I would bet there is some bleeding going on. You're going to have a very highly inked up page, and the paper may not be able to reliably hold all of that ink where you want it.
Second, many non-professional quality printers do not have enough precision in the alignment of their heads. You may be able to correct for it, but its probably a whole new can of worms.
Third, you would need some CRC type error checking in your color mapping algorithm. You already need to be using the best quality paper available, and you need to never let anything touch it, but I still think there are enough defects in the paper that you need error checking.
That said, a lot of these objections don't hold up for laser printers. When all is said and done, you could probably find a way to put 10k on a page with decent reliability. 10k may not seem like a lot, but it is plenty of space for a GPG private key, maybe a biometric signature, maybe a map to the secret treasure. Then you just need to find a safe-deposit box secure enough to hold this piece of paper.
(Then again, since when was any government operation known for saving money?)
I don't think NPR is a government operation. NPR is a non-profit that recieves grants from the government, but it is not the same. There is no Department of Media (thank God). NPR does a great job, and its more money that is not being spent on bombs, which is a good thing, in my opinion.
The drive into Pittsburgh is best from the South. You just come right into the downtown area, which is a pretty impressive view. When the weather is nice (which isn't a bad bet in the summer) its a beautiful city -- not so big that you get lost in the commotion, but still a real city.
Excellent suggestion. About 45 minutes from Pittsburgh, Fallingwater is probably the coolest house ever built.
Pittsburgh is not a typical tourist destination, but if you walk around the Carnegie Mellon campus you will probably see a robot or three rolling around the campus. Pretty common occurrence there. Lots of pickup Ultimate Frisbee and soccer games to be had.
The Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh are awesome. Check out the Natural History Museum, and the Carnegie Science Center (great place for kids) as is the Carnegie Library.
But you definitely should check out the Andy Warhol Museum while here. I have never seen anything quite like it.
When the state of IP law gets to where it is, this kind of thing is bound to happen.
Linux has a radical new licensing model (relatively speaking) that has not been through all the legal machinations yet.
There is still grey area in terms of who owns what. Still, its ridiculous that SCO can try to take hostages here without actually showing any of the infringed on code!
"Guess what? Linux infringes on some code I bought the rights for back in the day. But I can't show it to you. Save yourself some trouble and send me $200 for every computer you have linux installed on."
You'll find that the bigger organizations -- be it schools, universities, corporations, governments, non-profits -- don't always have it together the way that a small, tightly run organization can.
Everybody thinks that they want to go to the biggest school, work for the biggest company, give money to the biggest charities, etc. You have to look a little harder, but there are plenty of examples of bigger is not better.
There are certainly economies of scale that work in favor of the big ones, true. However, a ton of beauracracy does not match well placed trust in a focused, motivated small group. There is no economy of scale in trust.
It may be a little against the grain, or it may go against your intuitive perception, but there is a lot of evidence supporting this, if you have your eyes open.
Your metaphor that IT is the bolts that hold the wings on the aircraft is nice. However, it seems to me that the bolts are more liability than asset (in an accounting sense, at least). They need to be checked periodically and replaced. Thats not to say that the bolts are worthless, or that you would be better of without them.
IT in the traditional sense supports the business operations that bring money in. As soon as IT starts bringing in money (ie, when it is an asset) you might as well set up an IT department to support the original IT!
As far as I know, OpenBSD's pf is the only free packet filter that gives you the option to change the IP ID field. It is the "modulate state" command.
pf was designed into Open for 3.0, which would be about 18 months ago, I think. This makes it one of the newest and most recently designed firewalls. (Its a whole other topic of whether its the best, ipfilter has some loyal devotees).
FreeBSD's stack does do a pseudo-random ipid, but of the two firewalls available for FreeBSD (ipfw and ipf) neither rewrites the IPID, as is the case with Linux as far as I know.
So if you have a NAT'd LAN of FreeBSD boxes, don't worry about. If you have an OpenBSD 3.0 or greater firewall, don't worry about it. Otherwise, the technique outlined in the paper will work and the boogeyman is being dispatched to your CO as we speak!
pf, the stateful firewall / packet filter for OpenBSD since 3.0 should throw the NAT detection out the window.
While most operating systems increment the IPID, OpenBSD uses a pseudo-random number generator. (And the paper mentions that FreeBSD does this, too, and it causes problems for their method.) pf can substitute the prng IPID for the incremental id from your lamo-OS (if the packet passes through a rule with the modulate state command).
Consequently, checking for variations in IP will be fruitless, because all computers behind pf (not just OBSD and FBSD) will have prng'd IPID's.
The linux team apparently approached sun to show them the specs, Sun said "sign an NDA or no deal." Linux team signs, code goes under the GPL.
OpenBSD team approaches sun, Sun said "sign an NDA or no deal", OpenBSD says no, thats against the spirit of our project and the BSD license.
The interesting thing is that here the code is being used in an open source project (linux), but OpenBSD will not make use of it, because they respect the intent of the GPL.
Unlike the other HD-based player I've used, the Nomad does not appear as a removable storage device under Windows (big mistake, Creative.) Instead you have to use this wonky piece of software from Creative that looks and acts like a poor version of Explorer (big mistake, Creative.)
This kind of thing just boggles my mind. Why do these people think I would want to use their software? Let's say I like mp3's enough to drop $300 on one of these puppies, and I have 20+ gigs of em. Do you think I have all these mp3's and no software? No, I've been using winamp for years, growing my music collection, I don't need some cheesey vb app to show me which files are "music" and which aren't.
For instance, I've got a Samsung Uproar, PCS phone + MP3 player. No complaints on this, really, except that you have to use RealJukebox (not Real One, Real Jukebox). And that sucks. For one, the start center will not go away no matter how many times I disable it or tell it not to run on startup. Second, its constantly pushing me to upgrade to Real One, which I would have no trouble doing, except Real One does not support my phone, and last I saw there was no planned support.
My only conclusion I can draw from this is that Real says to Samsung "Hey, you build the phone, we'll supply the software for it." How this helps Real is not really clear, but thats a big cost Samsung does not have to cover.
So to bring it all back to the Nomad Zen, thats probably why there is WMA support. MS says "Hey, you're coming out with this nifty gizmo, we'll bet you'd like to get the costs on your Windows software down. And you know what? We happen to write a lot of Windows software. Lets just make sure you get that WMA support, because everybody is supporting WMA."
Not that its anyone's fault, but there is nobody (that I can think of) that can muster that kind of engineering for a sweetheart deal besides MS (Real is on the ropes, and looking for the streaming market).
I like the firewire, I like the 20gb drive, the battery life, and all of that. However, I'm real particular about the software I install on my computer. If I have to install additional software just to copy files, thats like adding $150 to the price tag, in my book.
Those two are the most important for me really. I run a couple distributed computing clients at different times but I started with S@H and have a special place for it in my widdle heart. I'm in it for the search itself, not to just have a cool screen saver. I think there's plenty of others who wouldn't mind a built for speed version of your client.
One little tidbit I think I have to relate, regarding the screen saver:
My pop's computer has the SETI screen saver burned into his monitor. Its not a great monitor or anything, but that has to be the worst screen saver I've ever seen: neat functions, except for the part about actually saving the screen.
Re:Why Congress passed it: Supply and demand
on
Eldred vs. Ashcroft
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· Score: 2
First off, suppose I publish a work as a resident of Germany, and it has a certain copyright term of x. The US has a copyright term of y, where y So how does granting exclusive rights to dead people help promote science and useful arts?
The Gershwin estate's royalties on "Rhapsody in Blue" pay for the Gershwin kids' music school.
This has two facets I don't like. For one, Gershwin's kids have as much right to benefit from Gershwin's work as the general public. If he wanted it to benefit only them, he should not have published it.
Second, the point of promoting science and the useful arts is to increase the scope and value of the public domain. This is tied fundamentally to the idea of the "commons", which I would be speaking out of school on if I continued. Since this is Slashdot though, the idea is that there are things that should benefit everyone and be free. This domain (be it physical, such as the commons in a town where people could let their animals graze, or the public domain) has been persistantly encroached upon since it was created.
At this point in time, the public domain has ceased growing, and so its usefulness is shrinking as the public grows.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, please, government! Save me!
I can not defend myself from the evil corporation, so whats the point in trying. I even posted this comment from Internet Explorer! John Ashcroft, you're our only hope.
In the US, (where the dept. of justice has jurisdiction, coincidentally) we have this thing called a "market". The government has better things to worry about than a market that can (and will) take care of itself.
Want proof? Download Firefox. Try it. See if there's anything you want to do that you can't do.
Wake up you silly little racist. Most ghetto blacks won't shoot you because THEY AREN'T MURDERERS.
I guess maybe you've listened to too much NWA and other silly stuff. Yes, violence happens. Yes, people get killed, robbed, and beaten. But its the exception. If you want to live in fear, its your choice, but it isn't the decision I make. But then, many people would rather let the media or the government make their decisions for them.
Personally, I've dealt with lots of different people, and I can tell you that there are many poor people (or ghetto blacks if you must) that I would rather be in the care of then many cops out there.
Turn off your TV. Unlock your front door, walk outside, breathe in some fresh air, and talk to your neighbors. They might scare you at first, but there's a good chance they're more like you than you realize.
Bullets do not return to Earth with the same velocity that took them up.
There are two reasons for this.
First, velocity is speed and direction. Obviously the direction has changed when they return to Earth.
Second, air resistance slows them down. On the way up, the bullet is being pushed by energy released when the gun is fired. The whole way up its decelerating. But its only accelerating part of the way down (wind resistance quickly equalizes with gravity.)
In short, terminal velocity for a bullet is much lower than the velocity it leaves the barrel with.
I wouldn't want a falling bullet to hit me in the eye, or to hit a small child. But, I dispute pretty much every fact in your post.
I disagree. I buy an Apple. Its my property. I will do whatever I want with it.
I can accept that there are consequences for my actions. If I bash my neighbor over the head with the case, there are well defined consequences for my actions that we live with as part of a society.
If I install Linux on the Apple, then perhaps I've invalidated my warranty with Apple. Thats just quid pro quo -- Use your computer in the manner we specify, and in turn we'll fix it if theres a failure.
Where is the quid pro quo when they demand that I not install my OS on it? I already bought it, do they plan on retroactively raising the price?
Well, I didn't say I'm a true Angbander. I did beat him, and now that you mention it, P sounds right. I knew it was a capital letter! It was about 5 years ago, so you know how it goes. Just thinking about it makes me want to dig up Calris and do some slaying...
Is Nethack really any better than Angband or Moria? I got started on Moria, beat Angband, but never gave Nethack much of a chance.
When I finally faced Morgoth in Angband, it had taken me over 40 days to develop that character. I broke out into a cold sweat over a capitol M that was quickly smashing its way through permanant walls while it chased me. Earthquakes and Teleports barely slowed him down. Never have I felt so much tension in a turn-based text game.
Offtopic, and I agree that who needs Kylix when you've got C++ BuilderX. However, BuilderX is dropping support for VCL in favor wxWindows. Now that seems like a topic worth discussing.
People are overlooking it, but BuilderX is going to be a platform supporting Windows, Linux x86, Solaris x86, and I believe OSX. Should have C++, Java, and Delphi support. So it doesn't suprise me in the least that Kylix is done on Linux -- VCL is done on Windows, Linux, and the rest!
Also, while I used to be a rabid C++ devotee before Delphi, despite the standardazation of C++ there are still so many ways to do many things, and so many different class libraries you can use, that just about every piece of code out there seems to be using a different string class or what have you. In Delphi the class libraries are a lot more standardized (or lacking, depending on your point of view :-).
.c_str() and both have constructors and operators which take a C string. Its trivial to convert from one to the other using the c_str() method.
While I agree that it is not nice, the way it shakes out in C++ Builder isn't so bad. You have C strings (used by some of the C functions), ANSI strings (used by VCL functions) and c++ std::strings used by everything else.
ANSI and std::string both support
Is it the way I would design it? No. Is it a holdover from the Delphi support? Yes. Is it really so bad? No.
Using Grease to seal a CD-R?
You mean encoding selections from the 1978 John Travolta and Olivia Newton John movie on the outter tracks of the disc? Brilliant! Even O2 won't react with John Travolta.
As far as removing Grease, the Church of Scientology can remove anything it wants. Its the perfec solution!
I think your bits per color to bits per pixel is artificially high.
I would bet there is some bleeding going on. You're going to have a very highly inked up page, and the paper may not be able to reliably hold all of that ink where you want it.
Second, many non-professional quality printers do not have enough precision in the alignment of their heads. You may be able to correct for it, but its probably a whole new can of worms.
Third, you would need some CRC type error checking in your color mapping algorithm. You already need to be using the best quality paper available, and you need to never let anything touch it, but I still think there are enough defects in the paper that you need error checking.
That said, a lot of these objections don't hold up for laser printers. When all is said and done, you could probably find a way to put 10k on a page with decent reliability. 10k may not seem like a lot, but it is plenty of space for a GPG private key, maybe a biometric signature, maybe a map to the secret treasure. Then you just need to find a safe-deposit box secure enough to hold this piece of paper.
I don't think NPR is a government operation. NPR is a non-profit that recieves grants from the government, but it is not the same. There is no Department of Media (thank God). NPR does a great job, and its more money that is not being spent on bombs, which is a good thing, in my opinion.
I think the point was not to build a beefy robot, but to build a system that had the optics and intelligence to guide itself.
Anybody can put beefy shocks and knobby tires on a robot, but if all the robot can do is go forward until it runs out of juice, well, big whup.
The drive into Pittsburgh is best from the South. You just come right into the downtown area, which is a pretty impressive view. When the weather is nice (which isn't a bad bet in the summer) its a beautiful city -- not so big that you get lost in the commotion, but still a real city.
Excellent suggestion. About 45 minutes from Pittsburgh, Fallingwater is probably the coolest house ever built.
Pittsburgh is not a typical tourist destination, but if you walk around the Carnegie Mellon campus you will probably see a robot or three rolling around the campus. Pretty common occurrence there. Lots of pickup Ultimate Frisbee and soccer games to be had.
The Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh are awesome. Check out the Natural History Museum, and the Carnegie Science Center (great place for kids) as is the Carnegie Library.
But you definitely should check out the Andy Warhol Museum while here. I have never seen anything quite like it.
The University of Pittsburgh's Cathedral of Learning was the home of Gozar the Gozarian (remember Ghostbusters?)
When the state of IP law gets to where it is, this kind of thing is bound to happen.
Linux has a radical new licensing model (relatively speaking) that has not been through all the legal machinations yet.
There is still grey area in terms of who owns what. Still, its ridiculous that SCO can try to take hostages here without actually showing any of the infringed on code!
"Guess what? Linux infringes on some code I bought the rights for back in the day. But I can't show it to you. Save yourself some trouble and send me $200 for every computer you have linux installed on."
You'll find that the bigger organizations -- be it schools, universities, corporations, governments, non-profits -- don't always have it together the way that a small, tightly run organization can.
Everybody thinks that they want to go to the biggest school, work for the biggest company, give money to the biggest charities, etc. You have to look a little harder, but there are plenty of examples of bigger is not better.
There are certainly economies of scale that work in favor of the big ones, true. However, a ton of beauracracy does not match well placed trust in a focused, motivated small group. There is no economy of scale in trust.
It may be a little against the grain, or it may go against your intuitive perception, but there is a lot of evidence supporting this, if you have your eyes open.
Your metaphor that IT is the bolts that hold the wings on the aircraft is nice. However, it seems to me that the bolts are more liability than asset (in an accounting sense, at least). They need to be checked periodically and replaced. Thats not to say that the bolts are worthless, or that you would be better of without them.
IT in the traditional sense supports the business operations that bring money in. As soon as IT starts bringing in money (ie, when it is an asset) you might as well set up an IT department to support the original IT!
Yeah, he's a hell of a football player, too. Remember the IM fields and the tattered shirts!
As far as I know, OpenBSD's pf is the only free packet filter that gives you the option to change the IP ID field. It is the "modulate state" command.
pf was designed into Open for 3.0, which would be about 18 months ago, I think. This makes it one of the newest and most recently designed firewalls. (Its a whole other topic of whether its the best, ipfilter has some loyal devotees).
FreeBSD's stack does do a pseudo-random ipid, but of the two firewalls available for FreeBSD (ipfw and ipf) neither rewrites the IPID, as is the case with Linux as far as I know.
So if you have a NAT'd LAN of FreeBSD boxes, don't worry about. If you have an OpenBSD 3.0 or greater firewall, don't worry about it. Otherwise, the technique outlined in the paper will work and the boogeyman is being dispatched to your CO as we speak!
pf, the stateful firewall / packet filter for OpenBSD since 3.0 should throw the NAT detection out the window.
While most operating systems increment the IPID, OpenBSD uses a pseudo-random number generator. (And the paper mentions that FreeBSD does this, too, and it causes problems for their method.) pf can substitute the prng IPID for the incremental id from your lamo-OS (if the packet passes through a rule with the modulate state command).
Consequently, checking for variations in IP will be fruitless, because all computers behind pf (not just OBSD and FBSD) will have prng'd IPID's.
I stand corrected, I guess. I thought part of the problem involved doing a "clean room" implementation.
The linux team apparently approached sun to show them the specs, Sun said "sign an NDA or no deal." Linux team signs, code goes under the GPL.
OpenBSD team approaches sun, Sun said "sign an NDA or no deal", OpenBSD says no, thats against the spirit of our project and the BSD license.
The interesting thing is that here the code is being used in an open source project (linux), but OpenBSD will not make use of it, because they respect the intent of the GPL.
This kind of thing just boggles my mind. Why do these people think I would want to use their software? Let's say I like mp3's enough to drop $300 on one of these puppies, and I have 20+ gigs of em. Do you think I have all these mp3's and no software? No, I've been using winamp for years, growing my music collection, I don't need some cheesey vb app to show me which files are "music" and which aren't.
For instance, I've got a Samsung Uproar, PCS phone + MP3 player. No complaints on this, really, except that you have to use RealJukebox (not Real One, Real Jukebox). And that sucks. For one, the start center will not go away no matter how many times I disable it or tell it not to run on startup. Second, its constantly pushing me to upgrade to Real One, which I would have no trouble doing, except Real One does not support my phone, and last I saw there was no planned support.
My only conclusion I can draw from this is that Real says to Samsung "Hey, you build the phone, we'll supply the software for it." How this helps Real is not really clear, but thats a big cost Samsung does not have to cover.
So to bring it all back to the Nomad Zen, thats probably why there is WMA support. MS says "Hey, you're coming out with this nifty gizmo, we'll bet you'd like to get the costs on your Windows software down. And you know what? We happen to write a lot of Windows software. Lets just make sure you get that WMA support, because everybody is supporting WMA."
Not that its anyone's fault, but there is nobody (that I can think of) that can muster that kind of engineering for a sweetheart deal besides MS (Real is on the ropes, and looking for the streaming market).
I like the firewire, I like the 20gb drive, the battery life, and all of that. However, I'm real particular about the software I install on my computer. If I have to install additional software just to copy files, thats like adding $150 to the price tag, in my book.
One little tidbit I think I have to relate, regarding the screen saver:
My pop's computer has the SETI screen saver burned into his monitor. Its not a great monitor or anything, but that has to be the worst screen saver I've ever seen: neat functions, except for the part about actually saving the screen.
This has two facets I don't like. For one, Gershwin's kids have as much right to benefit from Gershwin's work as the general public. If he wanted it to benefit only them, he should not have published it.
Second, the point of promoting science and the useful arts is to increase the scope and value of the public domain. This is tied fundamentally to the idea of the "commons", which I would be speaking out of school on if I continued. Since this is Slashdot though, the idea is that there are things that should benefit everyone and be free. This domain (be it physical, such as the commons in a town where people could let their animals graze, or the public domain) has been persistantly encroached upon since it was created.
At this point in time, the public domain has ceased growing, and so its usefulness is shrinking as the public grows.