Firstly, you need public liability insurance for the event in case someone electrocutes themselves or trips on a case of bawls or something. Secondly, you need a guy on the door at all times to act as a security guard/receptionist. It doesn't have to be a professional, you can ask for volunteers to do a couple of shifts on the door, but they do need to know what to do in case of emergency and have a working phone. I suggest having two people on the door so it's less lonely and so there can be someone on the door at all times. Thirdly, use a very simple asset tagging system - everyone coming in gets a festival-style wristband marked with a number. Their computer and monitor get marked with a sticker bearing the same number. Anyone carrying hardware out of the venue gets their numbers checked - if any of their credentials are missing, the police get called. Make sure not to publicise the location of the event and only provide details to registered participants.
You've read the first few chapters of an economics textbook - I'd recommend finishing it. Data is not inherently scarce as you can make unlimited copies at negligible cost and therefore it cannot be treated like natural property. If I steal your tin of peas, you don't have a tin of peas, but if I pirate your song we both have a copy. That's why copyright infringement and theft are completely different offences and why open-source software works and communism doesn't. Data is a limitless resource unlike pretty much anything else in our economy. DRM is a tool to make data artificially scarce in an attempt to inflate it's value. The record companies don't recognise that much of the value of a CD to the modern consumer is the ability to copy it to computers and MP3 players, so by using DRM they inadvertently make a CD or a paid-for download less valuable to their consumers.
Before the advent of home taping, recorded music was an inherently scarce resource - recording studios and pressing plants were expensive and making a good recording was very difficult, so the only people capable of making good copies were the record labels. As recording technology developed, people became able to make copies more easily, but because analog copies degrade with each generation they were still unavoidably of worse quality than copies made from the master, which was locked away in a recording companies vault. With digital copying, all the scarcity went out of recorded music - it was as if someone discovered a way to turn water into gasoline. If someone were to make gas out of water, all of us understand that the value (and so the price paid) would plummet to practically nothing.
The record companies had a pretty good idea that this was going to happen eventually, so they've spent the last 40 years trying to bullshit us into believing that their data is property and that music depends upon their business model - anyone remember "home taping is killing music"? It's only because of that propaganda that we struggle to see the economic reality of recorded music. The truth is that a song has no intrinsic value - for the thousands of years before recording we used to copy them using our minds and our voices. The record industry is fucked because they don't have anything to sell anymore. We don't need them - bands can make records in their bedroom that sound just as good as those recorded in expensive studios and distribute at negligible cost. They'll find a way to make a living, be it selling concert tickets, merchandise, autographs or some other naturally scarce product. Maybe we'll return to patronage, the quaint system used to support artists for the best part of the history of mankind.
The record industry should be behaving like any other industry in decline by making its product better and cheaper and responding to consumer need, but they're not, largely because they've been granted a government monopoly in the name of copyright. We can see it in their sales figures, we can see it in their scared little eyes - they're fucked, and no amount of threats, bullying and lawsuits will turn their product into something we want to buy.
People are forgetting that the vast majority of people described as 'profoundly autistic' also have very low IQ. Temple Grandin is the obvious example of someone who very strongly exhibits autistic symptoms but manages to live a largely independent life, primarily due to her intelligence enabling her to understand and work around her impediments. The stereotypical absent-minded professor would be regarded as learning disabled if they had a below-average IQ. It's emotionally easier for parents to imagine that their profoundly autistic child could be cured of the autism and become 'normal', but the truth is that most such people are autistic retards - no cure for autism will overcome their lack of cognitive ability. Take two people with the same level of moderate-to-severe autistic symptoms, one with an IQ of 150, the other with an IQ of 70 - one will probably live largely independently and may well become very successful, the other will probably never cook their own dinner unsupervised. Autism is one element of what makes up a person - a big one, admittedly, but it's not everything.
Shure offer headphones with a button that shuts off the music and feeds in sound from outside. I use Grado headphones which are open-backed; they don't attenuate outside sounds at all, I can hear the outside world through them perfectly clearly and hold a conversation normally, just with music superimposed onto my hearing. Why should sensible, responsible users of headphones be penalised because some idiots listening to earbuds at deafening levels walk into oncoming traffic? Hell, why are the authoritarian fuckwits running New York seemingly outlawing everything they even vaguely disapprove of?
Other way round. Temple Grandin is one of the foremost experts in slaughterhouse design, the first to design a slaughterhouse from a cow's perspective. The hug box is a spin-off from the meat industry where similar devices have been used for years as an aid to cattle handling. Temple noticed the calming effect of enveloping pressure on cattle and tried it for herself. She believes that autistic people can tell us a lot about animal behaviour and vice versa - her success in the field would suggest that she's right.
Art is about expression of the self, about sharing an emotional experience with someone else. Movies, music, paintings and poems express a broad range of emotions and often in a profound manner. People cry in movies. People define their relationships with 'our song'. These forms can be about anything and can express any emotion. Many examples of these forms (hollywood blockbusters, bubblegum pop) may have little or no artistic merit but that does not invalidate the large body of important work. Good art is generally ageless. A very few games are perhaps sufficiently fluent and emotionally sophisticated to qualify as art (maybe Max Payne, maybe Final Fantasy, some others) but those are so few as for games not to be recognisable as an artform. Like very early cinema, games are an amusing novelty that may well flourish into a fully fledged art form but are currently in their infancy. The vast majority of games offer little more than exhilaration and distraction, no more artistic than a Lumiere short.
No current games are disturbing in the "keep you up at night thinking, appear in pathologically terrifying nightmares, make you think twice about telling people about it" sense. They're scary and shock in the same way a slasher movie will, but ultimately they're shallow in the same way, lacking in depth and development. Nothing 'horrific' in that sense happens in films like Donnie Darko, Jacob's Ladder, Requiem for a Dream or Silkwood, but they're far more emotionally disturbing than, say, Doom or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. They express a deep, complex and gut-wrenching fear of the real and utterly tragic rather than simplistic caricatures of brutal violence. No game has ever made me rethink my attitudes to nuclear energy, phone up an old friend just to see if they're still alive or toss and turn for days.
Hit and hope. You write it, copyright it, play it to a few music-geek friends, if it turns out to be absolutely identical to something written by someone with money then you change it about a bit, otherwise you publish and be damned. Pay too much attention to prior art and you're at legal risk - it's only copyright infringement proper if they can show you knew of the original, which is why producers never read unsolicited scripts.
Realise that most pop songs are based around age old patterns - verse/chorus/verse/chorus/middle 8/chorus, twelve bar blues, I/IV/V progressions. There are only twelve notes in the chromatic scale, there's only so many ways you can arrange them into familiar-but-interesting sounding patterns. Deconstruct metal songs and you find pop ballads, deconstruct punk and you find country and folk songs. Try and do something really, truly new and you get free jazz, which certainly has a fanbase, but not one that's going to pay the bills. The real miracle of pop music is that it has repackaged and represented the same songs for well over a century without many people really noticing.
If people really did hate ticketmaster as much as they claim to, they'd ditch Kelly Clarkson or whoever and only see artists who they can buy a ticket from directly or through a booking agent that doesn't take the piss (as I do). Same goes for DRM - if an artist cares so little for their fans as to allow their music to be pissed upon by virus-riddled crap, they're not getting any of my money. I virulently believe in the right of businesses to do as they please within the law, but with that comes the responsibility of consumers to act in accordance with their own morals. Fuck "oh, it's too hard, the system conspires against us, we can't make use of the alternatives that already exist unless there's, like, a revolution, dude". You're lazy, you're a coward, you're a hypocrite who prefers words to action. I don't drive, I'm off the grid but I have actually ended up arguing with car-owning 'environmentalists' who see me as the enemy because I don't seek to force everyone to live as my theory on climate says they should. It seems most 'liberals' simply want the hard work to be done on their behalf, they want the government to come in, wave their magic wand and make everything OK without them having to get off their arses and oh, I dunno, vote with their feet, form cogent arguments to convince others and build alternatives themselves which, if better than the current option will be highly profitable.
have obviously never met the kind of person who steals laptops. Almost without exception they are heroin or crack addicts stealing for drugs. They will get perhaps fifty dollars from the pawnshop owner or dodgy friend and be very happy with it. For very obvious reasons the laptop will be sold on as quickly as possible, usually at far below market value. Given that 95%+ of laptops are unprotected, anything that doesn't boot straight into an OS will be refused by the middleman - for the same reason that there are very few mac and linux viruses, these guys never bother to learn much more than how to reinstall windows. The level of skill people are talking about when they say "the mac firmware password is easy to bypass" is more than enough skill to get a higher paying, lower risk job in IT rather than spending your day looking over your shoulder and dealing with jumped-up crackheads.
This is really a bit convoluted as an anti-theft measure, although it does look interesting. By far the best way to avoid having your laptop stolen is not to leave it unattended, not to use it anywhere you wouldn't wave $1000 in cash above your head and not to keep it in anything that resembles a laptop bag - use a ratty old satchel or a diaper bag. Muggers are just about the bottom of the criminal food chain, it doesn't take a lot to outsmart them. Just like net security, you just need to be a slightly more difficult target than the next guy and that next guy is talking on his cellphone while walking through a car park at 11pm with a swanky leather 'dell' bag on his shoulder.
Frankly, I rejoice at news of some ubervirus causing massive damage. Dang, I wish viruses went back to being plain malicious rather than profitable tools as they are now. Every noob that has their computer trashed is one less noob on the net, one step closer to a pre-september 1993 internet. People blame villains and crooks for spam, viruses, popups and other such malware but really it's all the fault of the idiots who make it good business. Here's hoping that noobs get hunted to extinction and we can claim back the net from the clueless masses.
Stitch some dividers into the most nasty-ass bag you can find, perhaps put a bit of upholstery foam at the bottom if you're clumsy. If you buy an $850 prada bag, you won't keep it for long. Your odds of being mugged for your laptop are inversely proportional to the amount you spent on the bag it's carried in. Anything that looks designed for the job is going to vanish the first time you doze off in an airport lounge. As a bonus, military-issue rucksacks are usually immensely comfortable for monster loads and the only thing I'd want to regularly carry much more than a single laptop in. Just avoid the ALICE packs, they're shit.
"Any device with non-replaceable or non-standard-format Li-Ion batteries should at the very least have to be labeled: "This device _WILL_ break and need servicing within 18 months."
Whoa there pal. Bit of a wild assertion. A battery (primary or secondary) is a consumable and recognised as such by the industry. It's like ordering laser printer manufacturers to give the warning "this device will break and need servicing within 10,000 prints" - while technically true in the broadest interpretation, it's obviously an unreasonable misunderstanding of the nature of the device. An iPod, cellphone or laptop battery is no more difficult or expensive to replace than a toner cartridge or a drum unit. Of course companies don't like advertising this fact as, well, it's a bit of a bummer, but it's something we all just have to get used to. The alternatives are all worse - methanol fuel cells that require constant refuelling as well as seal and catalyst replacement, vastly less energy-dense NimH cells or (the horror!) primary cells.
As far as I can gather, this legislation is targeted at industrial users who can get through truly vast quantities of wardrobe-sized UPS lead-acid or NiCd batteries, both of which are chemically nasty. Second on the list are the obscene numbers of primary cells used by consumers who really should know better. Small liion cells are relatively insignificant in the scheme of things, but should be recycled for fairly obvious water-course-poisoning reasons.
Looks like someone's gonna get totally screwed over. These contests are almost invariably the same - a cheap way of aquiring content, with the T&Cs robbing the young, naive winner of their rights as an artist. Photography contests are notorious for this, with the prize often going to a friend of the sponsor and the runner-up images appearing all over the place after being sold through stock libraries. The majority of wildlife and nature calendars get their images this way.
Minor drinks booze - people might die. Unlicensed driver on the loose - people might die. Someone sells a used copy of Windows XP - microsoft's profit margins are nibbled into. There is a really, really big difference. If you can't see that you're either deluded or a bullshitter and I pray to god for the sake of 'society' that you're the latter.
We're supposed to just accept that governments rob us of our freedom in their interests? We're being wanton individualists with no regard for the 'greater good' if we get pissed off that the laws of our land are being perverted by the cryptobribery of lobbyists like Abramoff? We're supposed to just bend over and take it when some senator with a back pocket full of "donations" decides that our rights are inferior to that of some corporation or other? If that's the case then fuck society, fuck the greater good and fuck you.
Use pro-level gear that has balanced connections on XLR or TRS jacks. Balanced cables have three conductors carrying ground, the signal, and a copy of the signal 180 degrees out of phase. Any interference affects both signal lines identically, so when they are put back in phase at the other end, any interference will be phase cancelled as it will now be 180 degrees out of phase.
If you're even *considering* taking even something as puny as a PDA, you're in for a hell of a shock a few miles down the way. On the Appalachian Trail there's a sweet little racket going for the trailside equipment stores - the guys at the trailhead sell you all sorts of lightly used equipment that you absolutely can't be without at a great price. On discovering that the relatively trivial function of these gizmos isn't worth the immense pain your packweight is causing you, it gets sold for far less than it's worth to the guy in the store a couple of days down the trail (who doesn't have to go far to get a good price for it). I'm guessing this is your first long-distance trip, as the question from people who've done it before is always 'how can I carry less stuff?'. Once the blisters start to appear and your shoulders start chafing, you'll be throwing out anything isn't keeping you alive. Go read about Ray Jardine's methods, it'll save you a lot of time, money and pain.
So you'd rather no-one had access to genomic data? You'd rather we ignore the most promising development in medicine in our history because of some comical, pissant 'privacy concerns' or some primitivist anti-science agenda? What the hell are you thinking? Really, what is going on in your head?
Making data publicly available at no charge is evil and advancing the privatisation of genetic data. That makes sense. Torvalds, Cox and Stallman must be evil for all that Free software. The Gutenberg Project must be pure evil for making all that literature publicly available - who knows what Evil Corporations(TM) might do with that information? Seems to me that this 'bio-piracy' malarkey is a thinly veiled primitivist agenda.
Buy technics 1210s, spend life in record stores.
on
Learning to DJ?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
That's about the long and short of it. DJing is not a technical skill - that's turntablism. There's a minimum level of proficiency required to DJ some kinds of material, but basic beatmatching can be learned in a couple of weeks. The best way to learn is to find someone who can show you the ropes and then head for your bedroom and practice. What really matters is that you play music people want to hear and that you are reliable in doing it. Computers are generally out of the question on grounds of reliability, but you need to be comfortable working on technics because they're the common ground of DJing - 95%+ of clubs use technics decks, very few of them will have CD decks, BPM counters or anything else. Having a box full of vinyl and traditional skills means you can turn up at a friend's party and do a set. Learn the basics and hone them until they're perfect. Be the kind of guy promoters like to hire - consistent, punctual and reliable.
The real meat of DJing is records. If you're serious, you'll be spending tens of hours and hundreds of dollars a month shopping for records - much more time if you play obscure stuff, much more money if you do contemporary pop or commercial dance. The DJ is the lord of the meta; acting as a metafilter and selecting the best of the kind of music the audience wants to hear and arranging it across the length of a set, forming a metanarrative for maximum emotional impact. Learn about music, about classical composition, about artistic lineage and the history of movements and styles. See the connections that no-one else sees, hear the subtext that no-one else hears and make them obvious to an audience. In short, be the guy who always finds cool new music and play it to people.
I bought my current laptop several years ago and can't see myself ever needing anything more powerful. I've recorded an album on it, I've edited high-definition video on it and photoshopped 22 megapixel stills. 99% of the time however, I use it simply because it's convenient and fits in with the rest of my life, it's little more than a marginally intelligent terminal. Anything of any importance comes from somewhere else - most of the time the laptop is just a box with a KVM, a web browser and a terminal emulator and wildly overspecced for that role. The personal file server stashed under my bed holds my record and movie collection, my colocated virtual server holds my work files, runs my mailserver and provides mutt, vim and everything else I really need via SSH. Fingers crossed, 'normal people' will start switching on to the idea that they're better off leaving someone else to run their software and store their files, a glorious return to the mainframe era and a huge leap towards computing that 'just works. Services like Gmail are spreading the meme, I reckon the next IT boom will be in web-based apps.
I have no problem finding public terminals in libraries, friends houses and coffeeshops that I can boot from a USB key or a businesscard CD, so perversely don't take my laptop on the road. I could be rendered homeless tomorrow and my clients wouldn't notice. It's a barely perceptible but immensely powerful change in the world - net access isn't ubiquitous, but it can be found for free or at nominal cost just about anywhere in the developed (or even semi-developed) world, as easily found as a public restroom or a dumpster full of yesterday's bagels. People like the homeless guy are as much a part of the information age as the rest of us. That's world-changing stuff that no-one really notices.
with a cupboard full of spare parts and useful bits, a headful of clue and an open office door. Talk to all the people you're adminning for, ask them what they want doing and make sure you don't overstep your agreed-upon boundaries. Make it clear to everyone that you're just there to help everyone get their job done faster and whether they want root or just a reliable box to SSH from, that's what you'll provide. Deal with pissy bureocrats on their behalf, harangue the network guys when things go wrong, just try and create as pleasant and hassle-free environment as possible.
Funny you guys assume I'm a liberal and then accuse me of partisan thinking. I'm a Libertarian, I think both your main parties are hopeless, but the Republicans are just insane. Were I a US citizen I'd readily vote for the Democrats just to get rid of that chimp, but I'll readily admit that the Democrats will be little better and likely worse in a few areas (namely gun control and tax for the more productive). For the moment my main concerns are WWIII kicking off over Iran's nuclear programme and the blatant and vicious persecution of dark folks and weirdos on US soil. IMHO in areas where it really matters and in the immediate future the Democrats are an incalculably better bet than the Republicans, but either side would be some sort of hell for me. If I were an American I'd be getting the hell out while I still can, using my absentee ballot to vote for the lesser evil and campaigning for libertarian issues (although not the libertarian party at a national level).
Quelle suprise. A republican reels out an illogical, unjust and morally oppressive proposition to tax people who don't fit into their puritanical world view. I just hope anyone calling the republicans a party in favour of low tax and fairness feels a jolt of ridiculousness from now on - they're simply religious fundamentalists trying to impose their fairy-tale morals on the rest of us, lying closer to the new islamist parties of the middle east than anyone else. From the grassroots to the very top they're a bunch of mindless, populist, reactionary and authoritarian asshats.
Slashdot Mirror
Firstly, you need public liability insurance for the event in case someone electrocutes themselves or trips on a case of bawls or something. Secondly, you need a guy on the door at all times to act as a security guard/receptionist. It doesn't have to be a professional, you can ask for volunteers to do a couple of shifts on the door, but they do need to know what to do in case of emergency and have a working phone. I suggest having two people on the door so it's less lonely and so there can be someone on the door at all times. Thirdly, use a very simple asset tagging system - everyone coming in gets a festival-style wristband marked with a number. Their computer and monitor get marked with a sticker bearing the same number. Anyone carrying hardware out of the venue gets their numbers checked - if any of their credentials are missing, the police get called. Make sure not to publicise the location of the event and only provide details to registered participants.
Before the advent of home taping, recorded music was an inherently scarce resource - recording studios and pressing plants were expensive and making a good recording was very difficult, so the only people capable of making good copies were the record labels. As recording technology developed, people became able to make copies more easily, but because analog copies degrade with each generation they were still unavoidably of worse quality than copies made from the master, which was locked away in a recording companies vault. With digital copying, all the scarcity went out of recorded music - it was as if someone discovered a way to turn water into gasoline. If someone were to make gas out of water, all of us understand that the value (and so the price paid) would plummet to practically nothing.
The record companies had a pretty good idea that this was going to happen eventually, so they've spent the last 40 years trying to bullshit us into believing that their data is property and that music depends upon their business model - anyone remember "home taping is killing music"? It's only because of that propaganda that we struggle to see the economic reality of recorded music. The truth is that a song has no intrinsic value - for the thousands of years before recording we used to copy them using our minds and our voices. The record industry is fucked because they don't have anything to sell anymore. We don't need them - bands can make records in their bedroom that sound just as good as those recorded in expensive studios and distribute at negligible cost. They'll find a way to make a living, be it selling concert tickets, merchandise, autographs or some other naturally scarce product. Maybe we'll return to patronage, the quaint system used to support artists for the best part of the history of mankind.
The record industry should be behaving like any other industry in decline by making its product better and cheaper and responding to consumer need, but they're not, largely because they've been granted a government monopoly in the name of copyright. We can see it in their sales figures, we can see it in their scared little eyes - they're fucked, and no amount of threats, bullying and lawsuits will turn their product into something we want to buy.
People are forgetting that the vast majority of people described as 'profoundly autistic' also have very low IQ. Temple Grandin is the obvious example of someone who very strongly exhibits autistic symptoms but manages to live a largely independent life, primarily due to her intelligence enabling her to understand and work around her impediments. The stereotypical absent-minded professor would be regarded as learning disabled if they had a below-average IQ. It's emotionally easier for parents to imagine that their profoundly autistic child could be cured of the autism and become 'normal', but the truth is that most such people are autistic retards - no cure for autism will overcome their lack of cognitive ability. Take two people with the same level of moderate-to-severe autistic symptoms, one with an IQ of 150, the other with an IQ of 70 - one will probably live largely independently and may well become very successful, the other will probably never cook their own dinner unsupervised. Autism is one element of what makes up a person - a big one, admittedly, but it's not everything.
Shure offer headphones with a button that shuts off the music and feeds in sound from outside. I use Grado headphones which are open-backed; they don't attenuate outside sounds at all, I can hear the outside world through them perfectly clearly and hold a conversation normally, just with music superimposed onto my hearing. Why should sensible, responsible users of headphones be penalised because some idiots listening to earbuds at deafening levels walk into oncoming traffic? Hell, why are the authoritarian fuckwits running New York seemingly outlawing everything they even vaguely disapprove of?
Other way round. Temple Grandin is one of the foremost experts in slaughterhouse design, the first to design a slaughterhouse from a cow's perspective. The hug box is a spin-off from the meat industry where similar devices have been used for years as an aid to cattle handling. Temple noticed the calming effect of enveloping pressure on cattle and tried it for herself. She believes that autistic people can tell us a lot about animal behaviour and vice versa - her success in the field would suggest that she's right.
Art is about expression of the self, about sharing an emotional experience with someone else. Movies, music, paintings and poems express a broad range of emotions and often in a profound manner. People cry in movies. People define their relationships with 'our song'. These forms can be about anything and can express any emotion. Many examples of these forms (hollywood blockbusters, bubblegum pop) may have little or no artistic merit but that does not invalidate the large body of important work. Good art is generally ageless. A very few games are perhaps sufficiently fluent and emotionally sophisticated to qualify as art (maybe Max Payne, maybe Final Fantasy, some others) but those are so few as for games not to be recognisable as an artform. Like very early cinema, games are an amusing novelty that may well flourish into a fully fledged art form but are currently in their infancy. The vast majority of games offer little more than exhilaration and distraction, no more artistic than a Lumiere short.
No current games are disturbing in the "keep you up at night thinking, appear in pathologically terrifying nightmares, make you think twice about telling people about it" sense. They're scary and shock in the same way a slasher movie will, but ultimately they're shallow in the same way, lacking in depth and development. Nothing 'horrific' in that sense happens in films like Donnie Darko, Jacob's Ladder, Requiem for a Dream or Silkwood, but they're far more emotionally disturbing than, say, Doom or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. They express a deep, complex and gut-wrenching fear of the real and utterly tragic rather than simplistic caricatures of brutal violence. No game has ever made me rethink my attitudes to nuclear energy, phone up an old friend just to see if they're still alive or toss and turn for days.
Realise that most pop songs are based around age old patterns - verse/chorus/verse/chorus/middle 8/chorus, twelve bar blues, I/IV/V progressions. There are only twelve notes in the chromatic scale, there's only so many ways you can arrange them into familiar-but-interesting sounding patterns. Deconstruct metal songs and you find pop ballads, deconstruct punk and you find country and folk songs. Try and do something really, truly new and you get free jazz, which certainly has a fanbase, but not one that's going to pay the bills. The real miracle of pop music is that it has repackaged and represented the same songs for well over a century without many people really noticing.
If people really did hate ticketmaster as much as they claim to, they'd ditch Kelly Clarkson or whoever and only see artists who they can buy a ticket from directly or through a booking agent that doesn't take the piss (as I do). Same goes for DRM - if an artist cares so little for their fans as to allow their music to be pissed upon by virus-riddled crap, they're not getting any of my money. I virulently believe in the right of businesses to do as they please within the law, but with that comes the responsibility of consumers to act in accordance with their own morals. Fuck "oh, it's too hard, the system conspires against us, we can't make use of the alternatives that already exist unless there's, like, a revolution, dude". You're lazy, you're a coward, you're a hypocrite who prefers words to action. I don't drive, I'm off the grid but I have actually ended up arguing with car-owning 'environmentalists' who see me as the enemy because I don't seek to force everyone to live as my theory on climate says they should. It seems most 'liberals' simply want the hard work to be done on their behalf, they want the government to come in, wave their magic wand and make everything OK without them having to get off their arses and oh, I dunno, vote with their feet, form cogent arguments to convince others and build alternatives themselves which, if better than the current option will be highly profitable.
This is really a bit convoluted as an anti-theft measure, although it does look interesting. By far the best way to avoid having your laptop stolen is not to leave it unattended, not to use it anywhere you wouldn't wave $1000 in cash above your head and not to keep it in anything that resembles a laptop bag - use a ratty old satchel or a diaper bag. Muggers are just about the bottom of the criminal food chain, it doesn't take a lot to outsmart them. Just like net security, you just need to be a slightly more difficult target than the next guy and that next guy is talking on his cellphone while walking through a car park at 11pm with a swanky leather 'dell' bag on his shoulder.
Frankly, I rejoice at news of some ubervirus causing massive damage. Dang, I wish viruses went back to being plain malicious rather than profitable tools as they are now. Every noob that has their computer trashed is one less noob on the net, one step closer to a pre-september 1993 internet. People blame villains and crooks for spam, viruses, popups and other such malware but really it's all the fault of the idiots who make it good business. Here's hoping that noobs get hunted to extinction and we can claim back the net from the clueless masses.
Stitch some dividers into the most nasty-ass bag you can find, perhaps put a bit of upholstery foam at the bottom if you're clumsy. If you buy an $850 prada bag, you won't keep it for long. Your odds of being mugged for your laptop are inversely proportional to the amount you spent on the bag it's carried in. Anything that looks designed for the job is going to vanish the first time you doze off in an airport lounge. As a bonus, military-issue rucksacks are usually immensely comfortable for monster loads and the only thing I'd want to regularly carry much more than a single laptop in. Just avoid the ALICE packs, they're shit.
"Any device with non-replaceable or non-standard-format Li-Ion batteries should at the very least have to be labeled: "This device _WILL_ break and need servicing within 18 months." Whoa there pal. Bit of a wild assertion. A battery (primary or secondary) is a consumable and recognised as such by the industry. It's like ordering laser printer manufacturers to give the warning "this device will break and need servicing within 10,000 prints" - while technically true in the broadest interpretation, it's obviously an unreasonable misunderstanding of the nature of the device. An iPod, cellphone or laptop battery is no more difficult or expensive to replace than a toner cartridge or a drum unit. Of course companies don't like advertising this fact as, well, it's a bit of a bummer, but it's something we all just have to get used to. The alternatives are all worse - methanol fuel cells that require constant refuelling as well as seal and catalyst replacement, vastly less energy-dense NimH cells or (the horror!) primary cells. As far as I can gather, this legislation is targeted at industrial users who can get through truly vast quantities of wardrobe-sized UPS lead-acid or NiCd batteries, both of which are chemically nasty. Second on the list are the obscene numbers of primary cells used by consumers who really should know better. Small liion cells are relatively insignificant in the scheme of things, but should be recycled for fairly obvious water-course-poisoning reasons.
News for nerds, stuff that matters? It's a bloody press release. I despair.
Looks like someone's gonna get totally screwed over. These contests are almost invariably the same - a cheap way of aquiring content, with the T&Cs robbing the young, naive winner of their rights as an artist. Photography contests are notorious for this, with the prize often going to a friend of the sponsor and the runner-up images appearing all over the place after being sold through stock libraries. The majority of wildlife and nature calendars get their images this way.
We're supposed to just accept that governments rob us of our freedom in their interests? We're being wanton individualists with no regard for the 'greater good' if we get pissed off that the laws of our land are being perverted by the cryptobribery of lobbyists like Abramoff? We're supposed to just bend over and take it when some senator with a back pocket full of "donations" decides that our rights are inferior to that of some corporation or other? If that's the case then fuck society, fuck the greater good and fuck you.
Use pro-level gear that has balanced connections on XLR or TRS jacks. Balanced cables have three conductors carrying ground, the signal, and a copy of the signal 180 degrees out of phase. Any interference affects both signal lines identically, so when they are put back in phase at the other end, any interference will be phase cancelled as it will now be 180 degrees out of phase.
If you're even *considering* taking even something as puny as a PDA, you're in for a hell of a shock a few miles down the way. On the Appalachian Trail there's a sweet little racket going for the trailside equipment stores - the guys at the trailhead sell you all sorts of lightly used equipment that you absolutely can't be without at a great price. On discovering that the relatively trivial function of these gizmos isn't worth the immense pain your packweight is causing you, it gets sold for far less than it's worth to the guy in the store a couple of days down the trail (who doesn't have to go far to get a good price for it). I'm guessing this is your first long-distance trip, as the question from people who've done it before is always 'how can I carry less stuff?'. Once the blisters start to appear and your shoulders start chafing, you'll be throwing out anything isn't keeping you alive. Go read about Ray Jardine's methods, it'll save you a lot of time, money and pain.
So you'd rather no-one had access to genomic data? You'd rather we ignore the most promising development in medicine in our history because of some comical, pissant 'privacy concerns' or some primitivist anti-science agenda? What the hell are you thinking? Really, what is going on in your head?
Making data publicly available at no charge is evil and advancing the privatisation of genetic data. That makes sense. Torvalds, Cox and Stallman must be evil for all that Free software. The Gutenberg Project must be pure evil for making all that literature publicly available - who knows what Evil Corporations(TM) might do with that information? Seems to me that this 'bio-piracy' malarkey is a thinly veiled primitivist agenda.
The real meat of DJing is records. If you're serious, you'll be spending tens of hours and hundreds of dollars a month shopping for records - much more time if you play obscure stuff, much more money if you do contemporary pop or commercial dance. The DJ is the lord of the meta; acting as a metafilter and selecting the best of the kind of music the audience wants to hear and arranging it across the length of a set, forming a metanarrative for maximum emotional impact. Learn about music, about classical composition, about artistic lineage and the history of movements and styles. See the connections that no-one else sees, hear the subtext that no-one else hears and make them obvious to an audience. In short, be the guy who always finds cool new music and play it to people.
I have no problem finding public terminals in libraries, friends houses and coffeeshops that I can boot from a USB key or a businesscard CD, so perversely don't take my laptop on the road. I could be rendered homeless tomorrow and my clients wouldn't notice. It's a barely perceptible but immensely powerful change in the world - net access isn't ubiquitous, but it can be found for free or at nominal cost just about anywhere in the developed (or even semi-developed) world, as easily found as a public restroom or a dumpster full of yesterday's bagels. People like the homeless guy are as much a part of the information age as the rest of us. That's world-changing stuff that no-one really notices.
with a cupboard full of spare parts and useful bits, a headful of clue and an open office door. Talk to all the people you're adminning for, ask them what they want doing and make sure you don't overstep your agreed-upon boundaries. Make it clear to everyone that you're just there to help everyone get their job done faster and whether they want root or just a reliable box to SSH from, that's what you'll provide. Deal with pissy bureocrats on their behalf, harangue the network guys when things go wrong, just try and create as pleasant and hassle-free environment as possible.
Funny you guys assume I'm a liberal and then accuse me of partisan thinking. I'm a Libertarian, I think both your main parties are hopeless, but the Republicans are just insane. Were I a US citizen I'd readily vote for the Democrats just to get rid of that chimp, but I'll readily admit that the Democrats will be little better and likely worse in a few areas (namely gun control and tax for the more productive). For the moment my main concerns are WWIII kicking off over Iran's nuclear programme and the blatant and vicious persecution of dark folks and weirdos on US soil. IMHO in areas where it really matters and in the immediate future the Democrats are an incalculably better bet than the Republicans, but either side would be some sort of hell for me. If I were an American I'd be getting the hell out while I still can, using my absentee ballot to vote for the lesser evil and campaigning for libertarian issues (although not the libertarian party at a national level).
Quelle suprise. A republican reels out an illogical, unjust and morally oppressive proposition to tax people who don't fit into their puritanical world view. I just hope anyone calling the republicans a party in favour of low tax and fairness feels a jolt of ridiculousness from now on - they're simply religious fundamentalists trying to impose their fairy-tale morals on the rest of us, lying closer to the new islamist parties of the middle east than anyone else. From the grassroots to the very top they're a bunch of mindless, populist, reactionary and authoritarian asshats.