Are you saying I should pay for channels that I don't watch? Or that I should pay for the whole HBO "production" just to watch one show? I understand that I might be bullied into those things, but I don't see any moral obligation:-)
On the other hand, I would be happy to pay $1/hour to watch the stuff I like. It seams they would still have to provide ad-supported versions, otherwise few people will try new shows. Perhaps, broadcast companies can provide official ReplayTV data to accurately strip commercials for a small price.
I assume Deersoft is the company that released regular SpamAsassin under GPL. In this case, I don't think they can remove GPL from any part of the code, including it's name. If they just used GPL code from other people, they would have to either release source code for the PRO version or license the original one separately. Even then, GPL license would still protect everyone's right to use the name. Not a lawyer, just seems common sense.
Wow. A cortical implant that lets you read e-books while you are asleep! Cleverland, here I come...
Re:Chemistry in Soviet Russia (no kidding!)
on
Uncle Tungsten
·
· Score: 1
Hmmm... Those are not exactly household chemicals. Budding young chemists might want to check this page for suggested home experiments instead. See what I mean about finding benign hobbies though? If one doesn't get high hacking...
Chemistry in Soviet Russia (no kidding!)
on
Uncle Tungsten
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Well, I grew up in the said place, next to a science research center (anyone from Academgorodok?). My school lab was actually kind of well stocked, complete with a nice jar of uranium oxide "for making green glass". Most of my classmates on the other hand would be expelled from a school in Harlem in a day. One of the few redeeming effects of that is that the chemistry teacher was so moved that she let me have a free run of the place. Also, my father was able to leech some stuff from his friends.
When one has access to such resources, the first thing to do is to answer some questions to bother young minds:
Q: What happens if you drop a piece of potassium into concentrated nitric acid? A: For a few seconds, nothing. Then you get a potassium bullet that shoots out of test tube and embeds itself in the ceiling.
Q: How to make tear gas from household stuff. A: You need acetone (the original nail polish remover). Pump a chlorine gas though. You can make chlorine by passing DC current though a salt solutio. Hmmm... wonder if bleech would work? Or mixture of bleech with vinigar.
Q: How to make a contact explosive?
A: Pour amonium solution on iodine crystals until they turn into black powder. While it's wet, drop SMALL crumbs on the school floor. Once dry, it will go off when someone steps on it, giving a satisfying firecracker sound and a wonderful whiff of purple iodine wapor. The fun could go on for hours.
With the essential needs taken care of, I actually started doing research. Not that I was likely to discover anything, but I did stuff based on hunch, kept a journal and had a lot of fun. By heating P with some organic stuff, I got a test tube that not just glowed, but blinked in regular intervals. I also went to student competitions and got a second place in the country once.
Is it dangerous to give the good stuff to children/teenagers? Well, we did have one case where someone mishandled acetone peroxide (a much stronger contact explosive than NI3). Basically, they had to scrub the walls of his dorm room to get his cranial matter into the casket. But the truth be told, you WILL do something dangerous when you are growing up. For this one story, I know countless others who died from drugs or got killed in a gang clash. Might as well redirect that risk that one would take anyway to some ultimately good purpose.
So what happened eventually. Well, I came to US to dodge draft. If you are reading this and have a poor country with too many potential scientists/engineers that you just can't get rid of, because they are not that crazy about money... well, I think you know now how to solve this problem nicely. So anyway, chemistry classes here really, insanely suck. I mean, titration!!! Chemistry should have exposions, flashes of light, weird smells, holes in the cloth and multi-colored stains on hands. Not the lame drops of one transparent liquid into another one with nothing happening when they make contact.
So anyway, I saw that this field is pretty much closed to fun in US. And then that another one was, at that time, still wide open. I read a couple of stories. One was "The hacker's crackdown" and of course it's pretty lame, but it introduced a concept that I was never exposed to in Russia. That you can actually visit places around the world without leaving your home and learn something about what people there are doing. Another one was a story about the first internet worm. This made me feel like you can throw a pebble into the ocean and watch it grow into Tsunami. Like finger of the god. So anyway, I played with PC programming a little bit before, but this really made me learn UNIX, to see how people do such wonderous things.
Of course, the first target were school systems. The very first thing I learned is the effect of for(;;) fork(); on old UNIX systems. I actually planned to just run it for a few seconds and then ^C it, but apparently telnetd just didn't get enough CPU cycles to process my keystrokes. I got an angry e-mail and apologized.
The next thing I figured out is about setuid shell scripts and race conditions. I didn't think about link to -i, So I just made a link to the script to my home directory, ran it and then very quickly replaced it with my own script. Sometimes, the shell wouldn't open the file yet and ran my code instead.
After these lucky breaks, I gradually learned less lame stuff. Like booting Sun 3's with -i flag to run my own code instead of/sbin/init, even though -s boot would ask for password. Or replacing the crypt function in libc.so to execl/bin/sh when passed a certain string. The first time I tried this, I messed up the system because I tried to use cp instead of mv and it was itself dynamically linked. I was sorry for the admin who had to restore libc from the backup, but got a good understanding of shared libraries.
Since I behaved myself when I got root access, the university was surprisingly tolerant. Eventually professors started asking me to install programs for their classes, since the regular sysop was too lazy. Then I got a student job doing the same thing officially. As with chemistry, I got my fix of watching things blow up and moved to regular programming, which I am doing to this day.
I wonder though what options are available to students now. With DMCA, and terrorist bullshit that must restrict all the fun activities both in chemistry and programming... I would imagine the current generation would learn programming by writting VB for their palladium-enabled PC and constantly checking if their code infringes on anyone's IP rights or could be possibly misused to let others do the same thing. Thanks god I was born earlier and had a benign way to occupy my mind while growing up.
Hmm... We have to take care of this situation right away:
1. Sims Expansion Pack: The Ripper 2. Harry Potter 2: Street Quidditch 3. Roller Coaster Terrorist 2 4. Zoo Tycoon: The Jurassic Park 5. Sims Vacation: Pakistan
It has zsh, ssh, perl, emacs, etc right out of the box. Even a development IDE with nice UI, based on gcc and JDK, ship with every copy of the OS, which can not be said about UNIX from one Mountain View company.
It multitasks better than any version of Windows and Linux I have ever seen. You can run Virtual PC in one window, capture from a TV tuner in the background and still run iTunes without skipping a beat. Probably dual processor helps, but still...
And one look at the UI will make you move your KDE and XP into its Trash can and then wonder why the container looks better than it's components.
and have to pay $100 to upgrade one of the bundled applications right away? Given that Mac software is rather expensive, people will wait for a version bundled with what they want rather than buy a new Mac right away. Both Apple and the user lose.
The purpose of having copyright laws is to encourage creation of new ideas to the maximum degree, not to maximize profit of the creator. A copyright which is too long actually discourages one from creating new ideas. Certainly, copyright that doesn't expires during your lifetime will encourage you to milk your old ideas rather than coming up with new ones. Like Disney holding on to old characters instead of making new ones more compelling. For most IP fields - like programs, songs and movies - 10 years will be more than enough. About now, we'll be able to use DOS 5.0 for free - so what?
There might be some fields like medicine and architecture where one needs longer copyrights because it takes a long time to develop the idea and/or implement it. I don't know how to provide those exceptions without wild abuse by lawyers, but nothing can be worse than the current situation.
This is unbelievably cool, not only for itself, but also as a proof of concept. With some experience and technology, perhaps regular groups of fans will one day shoot good movies in a couple of years. This should give MPAA a lot of food for thought - not only about copy protection but also about producing inferior movies like the Nemesis.
Oh yeah? Then how come those over-the-air TV stations are still in business? It's just ineffective advertisement that is going under. Passing a supermarker isle stocked with stuff that you just heard about is as effective as it gets.
Don't you think your neighbor is entitled to watch ESPN in relative peace whenever they want?
Well, a point can be made that I am "entitled" to play DDR whenever I want. Or that I should go complain to the manager whenever I don't like the smell of his ethnic cousin coming from downstairs before he retires to his ESPN. Or that parents of small children should be able to watch two towers.
I think a big part of freedom in US is that we can all annoy each other - with noises, smells, dress styles, and public displays of affection - in order to live as we like. If you take it away, you are left with polite but very regimented society. Those who give up freedom for quite...
I saw Two Towers yesterday and heard a couple of ring tones. No big deal. I just kept watching, didn't even look and check who it was. If it did bother me, I would just ask them politely to turn it off or go outside.
Small annoyances like cell phones or crying children do not bother me. It's much worse to have a bozo making a big deal of those things. Like a neighbor who threatens to talk to my manager because I use a dance pad at 8pm.
It's no fun to live if you have to be polite and considerate all the time, in every aspect. I do set my phone to vibrate, but sometimes have to explain some scene in the movie to my english-challenged girlfriend. Sometimes needs of a few or one outweigh the needs of the many.
Put one in Safeway that lets you make a free 10 minute local call after you listen to a 30 second ad on whatever they want you to buy. For a little viral effect, also make the other end listen to the ad.
Perhaps base phone service is so cheap this days it has to be subsidized by or sold together with something else. Good quality video payphones that can call each other or a DSL-connected PC: priceless.
Do you really want the plane to land because you mistake gas for a heart attack (apparently a common case for ER visits)? When you are talking about 500 people, a few of them will have really important reasons for being there - like visiting a dying relative. You don't want to divert the plane unless you are really in danger before the regular landing.
Since you have nothing to hide, post your SSN and your credit card numbers/expiration dates here. What? You never file taxes online? Log in to your banks? Shop on Internet? Then YOU might have nothing to hide, but your company still does. Unless your work machine and it's local network also do not have any confidential information.
Token ideas appeared long time ago, including I believe on slashdot. This is way too complicated. Better to just use signed e-mail for most communications. Each user will have a key signed by one of certificate authorities. Anyone - like your ISP - will be able to be a CA, with the only requirement that each key has to be tracable to the real person and the CA itself must have a valid, real-world contact information. Each CA will choose a policy on what kind of messages are valid.
The first time you get e-mail signed by a new CA, you will see it's policy and decide weather to accept messages signed by it. A typical ISP might state that any messages are allowed as long as it doesn't break local laws and is not an uninvited commerical contact. Another CA might support spam-free anonymous e-mail by signing each message directly instead of signing a user's key and charging a fee for each e-mail to make sure it's important communications and not just mass marketing. You can even have a "Disney CA" which only allows family-friendly messages for those so inclined.
Either way, if you accept a CA and then get a message that violates it's policy, you will forward it back to CA. If they agree, they automatically charge a fine to the violator - let's say $100 - and send you (most of) the money. Or for more serious violations than spam, actually send you real-world contact info for that person and/or notify the autorities.
If the CA fails to respond, you can block it. Pretty soon there will be web sites to rate various CAs and filter out spam-friendly ones.
This scheme doesn't have to be implemented all at once. Some ISP - say AOL - can release an e-mail program that puts signed messages in a separate group in INBOX. The idea is that you will encourage your friends to sign up for AOL because this way their messages will not get lost in spam. Then as the system becomes more popular, people will require all their messages to be signed and stop checking the second group.
You mean, TotalRecorder doesn't work with those the same as with LiquidAudio? Well, if not regular analog output shouldn't be too bad either. I wonder how much of the quality loss can be canceled by capturing the same song multiple times, at different volumes.
mp3pro has high frequency compression that has a decent sound at a low additional bitrate. Although it's not free, we are talking about technically cool here and compressing high frequencies on the fly would be way better than just stripping them.
As it is I am not very entusiastic about listening to more poor-sounding low-bandwidth streams. I *am* very interested in better sounding low-bandwidth streams over my dialup at home.
It seams premature to try to survive in space for long time, when we had no success with settlements deep underwater and underground. They are much easier to sustain, provide a good chance to survive most of the disasters that might wipe out life on Earth and have pragmatic benefits. For example, an extensive underground level - with artificial sky, ventilation and so on - might relief overcrowded cities.
More to the point of the article, we can probably establish settlements like this now, with current level of technology. Then in future a space settlement will only need to get in space and deal with problems unique to being there. Other problems that a domed settlement on Mars might face - creating a self-sustained biosphere, making repairs using only material inside and so on - will already be solved on Earth.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, I would be happy to pay $1/hour to watch the stuff I like. It seams they would still have to provide ad-supported versions, otherwise few people will try new shows. Perhaps, broadcast companies can provide official ReplayTV data to accurately strip commercials for a small price.
I assume Deersoft is the company that released regular SpamAsassin under GPL. In this case, I don't think they can remove GPL from any part of the code, including it's name. If they just used GPL code from other people, they would have to either release source code for the PRO version or license the original one separately. Even then, GPL license would still protect everyone's right to use the name. Not a lawyer, just seems common sense.
Wow. A cortical implant that lets you read e-books while you are asleep! Cleverland, here I come...
Hmmm... Those are not exactly household chemicals. Budding young chemists might want to check this page for suggested home experiments instead. See what I mean about finding benign hobbies though? If one doesn't get high hacking...
When one has access to such resources, the first thing to do is to answer some questions to bother young minds:
- Q: What happens if you drop a piece of potassium into concentrated nitric acid? A: For a few seconds, nothing. Then you get a potassium bullet that shoots out of test tube and embeds itself in the ceiling.
- Q: How to make tear gas from household stuff. A: You need acetone (the original nail polish remover). Pump a chlorine gas though. You can make chlorine by passing DC current though a salt solutio. Hmmm... wonder if bleech would work? Or mixture of bleech with vinigar.
- Q: How to make a contact explosive?
A: Pour amonium solution on iodine crystals until they turn into black powder. While it's wet, drop SMALL crumbs on the school floor. Once dry, it will go off when someone steps on it, giving a satisfying firecracker sound and a wonderful whiff of purple iodine wapor. The fun could go on for hours.
With the essential needs taken care of, I actually started doing research. Not that I was likely to discover anything, but I did stuff based on hunch, kept a journal and had a lot of fun. By heating P with some organic stuff, I got a test tube that not just glowed, but blinked in regular intervals. I also went to student competitions and got a second place in the country once.Is it dangerous to give the good stuff to children/teenagers? Well, we did have one case where someone mishandled acetone peroxide (a much stronger contact explosive than NI3). Basically, they had to scrub the walls of his dorm room to get his cranial matter into the casket. But the truth be told, you WILL do something dangerous when you are growing up. For this one story, I know countless others who died from drugs or got killed in a gang clash. Might as well redirect that risk that one would take anyway to some ultimately good purpose.
So what happened eventually. Well, I came to US to dodge draft. If you are reading this and have a poor country with too many potential scientists/engineers that you just can't get rid of, because they are not that crazy about money... well, I think you know now how to solve this problem nicely. So anyway, chemistry classes here really, insanely suck. I mean, titration!!! Chemistry should have exposions, flashes of light, weird smells, holes in the cloth and multi-colored stains on hands. Not the lame drops of one transparent liquid into another one with nothing happening when they make contact.
So anyway, I saw that this field is pretty much closed to fun in US. And then that another one was, at that time, still wide open. I read a couple of stories. One was "The hacker's crackdown" and of course it's pretty lame, but it introduced a concept that I was never exposed to in Russia. That you can actually visit places around the world without leaving your home and learn something about what people there are doing. Another one was a story about the first internet worm. This made me feel like you can throw a pebble into the ocean and watch it grow into Tsunami. Like finger of the god. So anyway, I played with PC programming a little bit before, but this really made me learn UNIX, to see how people do such wonderous things.
Of course, the first target were school systems. The very first thing I learned is the effect of for(;;) fork(); on old UNIX systems. I actually planned to just run it for a few seconds and then ^C it, but apparently telnetd just didn't get enough CPU cycles to process my keystrokes. I got an angry e-mail and apologized.
The next thing I figured out is about setuid shell scripts and race conditions. I didn't think about link to -i, So I just made a link to the script to my home directory, ran it and then very quickly replaced it with my own script. Sometimes, the shell wouldn't open the file yet and ran my code instead.
After these lucky breaks, I gradually learned less lame stuff. Like booting Sun 3's with -i flag to run my own code instead of /sbin/init, even though -s boot would ask for password. Or replacing the crypt function in libc.so to execl /bin/sh when passed a certain string. The first time I tried this, I messed up the system because I tried to use cp instead of mv and it was itself dynamically linked. I was sorry for the admin who had to restore libc from the backup, but got a good understanding of shared libraries.
Since I behaved myself when I got root access, the university was surprisingly tolerant. Eventually professors started asking me to install programs for their classes, since the regular sysop was too lazy. Then I got a student job doing the same thing officially. As with chemistry, I got my fix of watching things blow up and moved to regular programming, which I am doing to this day.
I wonder though what options are available to students now. With DMCA, and terrorist bullshit that must restrict all the fun activities both in chemistry and programming... I would imagine the current generation would learn programming by writting VB for their palladium-enabled PC and constantly checking if their code infringes on anyone's IP rights or could be possibly misused to let others do the same thing. Thanks god I was born earlier and had a benign way to occupy my mind while growing up.
Hmm... We have to take care of this situation right away:
1. Sims Expansion Pack: The Ripper
2. Harry Potter 2: Street Quidditch
3. Roller Coaster Terrorist 2
4. Zoo Tycoon: The Jurassic Park
5. Sims Vacation: Pakistan
It multitasks better than any version of Windows and Linux I have ever seen. You can run Virtual PC in one window, capture from a TV tuner in the background and still run iTunes without skipping a beat. Probably dual processor helps, but still...
And one look at the UI will make you move your KDE and XP into its Trash can and then wonder why the container looks better than it's components.
How about $20 for two original star trek episodes that used to show free on TV? They are not always as reasonable as you think.
and have to pay $100 to upgrade one of the bundled applications right away? Given that Mac software is rather expensive, people will wait for a version bundled with what they want rather than buy a new Mac right away. Both Apple and the user lose.
You mean "Scary Movie" actually got permission from Scream, 6th sense and Blair Witch project?
There might be some fields like medicine and architecture where one needs longer copyrights because it takes a long time to develop the idea and/or implement it. I don't know how to provide those exceptions without wild abuse by lawyers, but nothing can be worse than the current situation.
Are there other projects like this on the web?
Oh yeah? Then how come those over-the-air TV stations are still in business? It's just ineffective advertisement that is going under. Passing a supermarker isle stocked with stuff that you just heard about is as effective as it gets.
I think a big part of freedom in US is that we can all annoy each other - with noises, smells, dress styles, and public displays of affection - in order to live as we like. If you take it away, you are left with polite but very regimented society. Those who give up freedom for quite...
Small annoyances like cell phones or crying children do not bother me. It's much worse to have a bozo making a big deal of those things. Like a neighbor who threatens to talk to my manager because I use a dance pad at 8pm.
It's no fun to live if you have to be polite and considerate all the time, in every aspect. I do set my phone to vibrate, but sometimes have to explain some scene in the movie to my english-challenged girlfriend. Sometimes needs of a few or one outweigh the needs of the many.
Perhaps base phone service is so cheap this days it has to be subsidized by or sold together with something else. Good quality video payphones that can call each other or a DSL-connected PC: priceless.
Do you really want the plane to land because you mistake gas for a heart attack (apparently a common case for ER visits)? When you are talking about 500 people, a few of them will have really important reasons for being there - like visiting a dying relative. You don't want to divert the plane unless you are really in danger before the regular landing.
Since you have nothing to hide, post your SSN and your credit card numbers/expiration dates here. What? You never file taxes online? Log in to your banks? Shop on Internet? Then YOU might have nothing to hide, but your company still does. Unless your work machine and it's local network also do not have any confidential information.
Sure, here are the instructions. Good luck with IP rights on cocao trees.
The first time you get e-mail signed by a new CA, you will see it's policy and decide weather to accept messages signed by it. A typical ISP might state that any messages are allowed as long as it doesn't break local laws and is not an uninvited commerical contact. Another CA might support spam-free anonymous e-mail by signing each message directly instead of signing a user's key and charging a fee for each e-mail to make sure it's important communications and not just mass marketing. You can even have a "Disney CA" which only allows family-friendly messages for those so inclined.
Either way, if you accept a CA and then get a message that violates it's policy, you will forward it back to CA. If they agree, they automatically charge a fine to the violator - let's say $100 - and send you (most of) the money. Or for more serious violations than spam, actually send you real-world contact info for that person and/or notify the autorities.
If the CA fails to respond, you can block it. Pretty soon there will be web sites to rate various CAs and filter out spam-friendly ones.
This scheme doesn't have to be implemented all at once. Some ISP - say AOL - can release an e-mail program that puts signed messages in a separate group in INBOX. The idea is that you will encourage your friends to sign up for AOL because this way their messages will not get lost in spam. Then as the system becomes more popular, people will require all their messages to be signed and stop checking the second group.
Sounds like you got a bit of a problem...
You mean, TotalRecorder doesn't work with those the same as with LiquidAudio? Well, if not regular analog output shouldn't be too bad either. I wonder how much of the quality loss can be canceled by capturing the same song multiple times, at different volumes.
As it is I am not very entusiastic about listening to more poor-sounding low-bandwidth streams. I *am* very interested in better sounding low-bandwidth streams over my dialup at home.
Then how come it shakes the earth when it passes through? I think you would definitely get mangled!
More to the point of the article, we can probably establish settlements like this now, with current level of technology. Then in future a space settlement will only need to get in space and deal with problems unique to being there. Other problems that a domed settlement on Mars might face - creating a self-sustained biosphere, making repairs using only material inside and so on - will already be solved on Earth.