The New Democrats and the Greens are the only parties in the country that don't have the "yes sir, no sir, may I please suck your balls sir?" attitude towards industry.
Write to SOCAN and demand a refund for all the CDs you've bought
Send SOCAN your receipts and tell them what you've done with your discs - burned Linux ISOs, saved photos, etc. Also, tell them that you wouldn't pirate their music, since it's all slop anyway.... OR
Run a "music exchange"
Really rub the private copying decision in SOCAN's face by having a "music exchange". Get a bunch of computers with fast CD-burners, then invite a whole bunch of people and tell them to each bring 10 of their favourite CDs. Then give everyone free blank discs. As long as the person who's keeping the copy actually MAKES the copy (i.e. puts the discs in the provided computer, clicks "copy", collects discs), it's all nice and legal.
Police were particularly concerned because, at a Counter-Stike tournament held last month, ten young men were shot... in the head... with one bullet... through five brick walls.
We just had our municipal election in Toronto. You get this big piece of paper with all of your choices, and a big arrow next to each name, like this: - -> David Miller
You fill in the gap in the arrow and then put your paper inside a cardboard cover so nobody can see your choice. The election volunteers put your cardboard cover onto this fax-like machine that sits atop a large box. The machine takes the paper, reads your vote and drops the paper into the box.
It's straightforward, it's electronically counted and there's a full paper trail. The equipment is simple and reliable, and if there's a dispute the paper records can be counted right there.
While it was no "Nitpicker's Guide to Star Trek: The Next Generation," they did manage to find a few neat errors in FotR.
But for TTT, there are hardly any mistakes recorded. And the ones that are there are pretty pathetic, the lamest of the bunch being... Blunder No. 3: "When Saruman is talking to Sauron through the palantir, his lips aren't moving." Jackson: Well, that's because he's engaged in a psychic session. That was deliberate.
Duh. Almost everyone I know has seen TTT and nobody has ever thought that to be an error. It's completely obvious.
Why did they ever bother mentioning the second film? Why not just say, "Hey Pete, great work! You stumped us!"
I believe that Konqueror DOES include application/xhtml+xml in its Accept header, but it processes the document using the HTML parser rather than a proper XML parser.
Also, I seem to remember reading application/xhtml+xml pages just fine in Opera.
I used to serve all pages on my site as pure XHTML 1.1, with the correct MIME type and everything, until I realized that I'm one of three people I know who uses a non-IE browser.:(
You can't really hate Microsoft until you've gotten serious about standards. Then their arrogance shines through.
that anyone would let a private company search their property without law enforcement being involved.
There's this one episode of The Awful Truth where they have two retired police officers (in uniform) walk around NYC and frisk random people. The frisk-ees sort of look confused for a second, then calmly allow the search.
I don't know why North Americans are so uppity about "freedom" lately. We're obviously not terribly interested if we need someone to tell us, "Don't LET people take your privacy away!"
The expected availability of a GNU/Linux client was a major incentive when I bought the game (along with being a D&D fan and the fact that Bioware is Canadian). Imagine my joy when I noticed a speed increase after switching (~7 fps)!
Then Shadows of Undrentide shipped with Linux support out of the box. I really have to applaud Bioware for working so hard on a client that probably 1% of their players will use.
Maybe we could convince them to release the source for the toolset. I'm sure that the community would do a great job of porting it to Linux, OS X and other platforms.
NWN is a platform for creating and running D&D 3E games online. That's it. The module that came with it is just an example of what could be done using the tools provided.
It's kinda like Mozilla Seamonkey: of course it's bloated and slow, it was only created to test new features and show off existing ones. They hope that you'll get some ideas and implement something yourself (i.e. Camino, Galeon, Mozilla Firebird).
High taxes on the rich don't cause job loss any more than low taxes create jobs.
Look at America today: companies just got a huge tax break from Bush, and the unemployment rate is rising. He cut the bottom out of countless social services, and the nation's in the biggest debt it's ever seen.
So, as a Canadian, I might've cared before Bush and his gang slapped us in the face.
I personally think that the people will elect a Democrat again, but also that the Republicans will take full advantage of the Diebold machines and rig the election.
Oh my God, I can't vote for a Liberal! He'll raise my taxes!
Well, not MY taxes per se... he'll raise the taxes on big companies and the extremely rich!!!
And give the money to me. Affordable healthcare? Decent funding for public schools? Pfft. HELLO?? Do you ever KNOW HOW CAPITALISM WORKS?
Eventually EVERYONE gets filthy rich. That's why you can't raise taxes on the rich... because, in just a few more months, YOU'LL BE ONE OF THEM! Any day now!
Oh, gotta go. I'm late for the night shift at my second job.
during the antitrust suit. Delay things until the next regime change.
When Clinton was in power, it looked like MS was going to really get in trouble for once. But they delayed, and delayed, and delayed...
then GWB was elected. All of a sudden, the federal government didn't want Microsoft split up. The judge was replaced. They just wanted a quick and easy settlement. No financial penalties needed. Just promise to be on good behaviour.
Dean wouldn't stand for this shit. He'd kick the case out of court for good.
Hey, are there going to be any protests about this whole fiasco?
I worked in the eLearning field for a while, and every LMS I had to work with was a waste of time. Including Blackboard.
The organization I was working for spend LOTS of money developing a system that would allow teachers to collaboratively create courses online (the LMS, reversed). They set it up so that it would output SCORM.
It turned out that while Blackboard SAID it supported SCORM, we couldn't actually find anything SCORM-related in the software... or the documentation.
The best example of online learning that I've seen is Lernu.net. If a couple of hacker Esperantists can beat Blackboard, so can you.
There's nothing stopping the Free software community from replicating the success that OS X is experiencing.
To succeed on the desktop, we need drivers. There are way more people writing drivers for Linux than for Darwin, but in order for those drivers to be any good we'll need cooperation from the manufacturers. So, we'd need to create a viable desktop solution that runs extremely well on commonly available hardware (i.e. NVidia cards) to show the smaller manufacturers that if they help a Free software developer write a driver, they may sell more units.
GNU/Linux with X is slower than Windows, and way slower than OS X. Linux 2.6 is going to help a lot, but it isn't going to fix things. The X people say that the widget developers don't know what they're doing. The widget developers say that they've done they best they can with what X has to offer...
So it seems to me that X is either too complicated, or not sufficiently optimized. I think that we need a complete X replacement. Forget about X compatability.
It needs to be networked, like X, but have a standard widget set and clipboard. GTK+ and QT can be implemented in this environment, just like they are in Windows.
A faster, graphical bootup, no editing of config files by hand, yadda yadda yadda... you've all heard this before.
But is it beyond our reach? I don't think so. What we need to do is admit that a lot of the stuff that we're doing on the desktop isn't working that well, and then change it.
Oh, this is great, eh. Bombadier invents the anti-snowmobile.
Well, that's not entirely true... it's got a lot in common with the snowmobile: It's useful for a whole two months out of the year, it kills half the people who ride it, and only costs a bit more than thirty years' infinite travel on the TTC.
Someone who is not motivated enough to take an hour or so to travel to their local voting booth and vote does not care or know enough about the issues involved to make an informed and sensible choice.
I'm in Toronto and and we're having our municipal elections today. There are three polling stations within 10 minutes' walk from my house (although I have been assigned to the nearest one, about 4 minutes away).
Also, all candidates enlist scores of volunteers to drive anyone who doesn't have a ride to their polling station.
Having 90% of the population vote when only 40% of the population researches, interrogates and cares only means you'll have 50% of pseudo random "noise" votes drowning out the informed, important votes. What we've started doing this year is holding high school elections, to get students in the habit of staying informed and actually voting.
The problem with voting is that we still have a first-past-the-post system. In the last provincial election the New Democratic Party saw their share of the popular vote rise by about 20%. However, they ended up losing one seat (and official party status). In a proportional system, the number of seats they hold would have doubled.
It's hard to get motivated to vote unless you're voting for someone who you're certain is going to win. Otherwise, it feels like a terrible waste. I can certainly understand the apathy most voters feel.
I met a woman at church who is absolutely terrified of her Windows PC. If an error message pops up, she shuts the machine off and tries again the next day.
Imagine my surprise when I learned that she used to be a software developer. She used to write programs for mainframes in assembler!
I'm afraid of touching assembler in case I fuck something up, and she has to have a lie down when Word barfs at her?
I think that people have been conditioned by the industry to fear their computers. Don't touch these settings! You may damage your computer! Call Microsoft Tech Support at 1-900-MO-MONEY!
Teaching someone a programming language, even if they don't get much further than for loops, really empowers a person. I'm sure that if she fiddled with a Python interpreter from time to time she wouldn't be so terrified.
Instead of beige boxing, young phreakers will now cut their teeth using a laptop running AirSnort. And the inductive probe will find new uses, for sure.
There's been some talk of adding a feature like this to FastMail (i.e. accessing one's FastMail address book via LDAP).
The problem is that most mail clients have a pretty crummy LDAP implementation: they don't support user logins (so you could only offer one global directory - bad idea), LDAP+SSL or writing changes to the directory.
Slashdot Mirror
What if university and college students in Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal etc. shut their cities down when things like this happened?
The New Democrats and the Greens are the only parties in the country that don't have the "yes sir, no sir, may I please suck your balls sir?" attitude towards industry.
Send SOCAN your receipts and tell them what you've done with your discs - burned Linux ISOs, saved photos, etc. Also, tell them that you wouldn't pirate their music, since it's all slop anyway.... OR
Really rub the private copying decision in SOCAN's face by having a "music exchange". Get a bunch of computers with fast CD-burners, then invite a whole bunch of people and tell them to each bring 10 of their favourite CDs. Then give everyone free blank discs. As long as the person who's keeping the copy actually MAKES the copy (i.e. puts the discs in the provided computer, clicks "copy", collects discs), it's all nice and legal.
Why doesn't NASA just give up and announce that they've discovered large oil reserves on Europa?
We'll have humans there in two years!
Police were particularly concerned because, at a Counter-Stike tournament held last month, ten young men were shot... in the head... with one bullet... through five brick walls.
US: Change Galileo so we can jam it.
... and?
EU:
US: And what?
EU: And what concession will you make?
US: If you comply with our request, the United States government is prepared to not nuke your ass.
EU: I say, that's very generous. We accept.
Write to SOCAN and tell them (nicely) what you think about this.
Then write to the Supreme Court and do the same.
Remember, these have to be sent through the post - they think that each snail mail letter represents ten people!
Finally, here's a good guide on how to write a professional-looking letter.
Even if SOCAN just got 20 negative letters, they'd flip out!
Re:In wonder (Score:4, GodWeNeedGirlfriends)
We just had our municipal election in Toronto.
You get this big piece of paper with all of your choices, and a big arrow next to each name, like this:
- -> David Miller
You fill in the gap in the arrow and then put your paper inside a cardboard cover so nobody can see your choice.
The election volunteers put your cardboard cover onto this fax-like machine that sits atop a large box. The machine takes the paper, reads your vote and drops the paper into the box.
It's straightforward, it's electronically counted and there's a full paper trail. The equipment is simple and reliable, and if there's a dispute the paper records can be counted right there.
While it was no "Nitpicker's Guide to Star Trek: The Next Generation," they did manage to find a few neat errors in FotR.
But for TTT, there are hardly any mistakes recorded. And the ones that are there are pretty pathetic, the lamest of the bunch being...
Blunder No. 3: "When Saruman is talking to Sauron through the palantir, his lips aren't moving."
Jackson: Well, that's because he's engaged in a psychic session. That was deliberate.
Duh. Almost everyone I know has seen TTT and nobody has ever thought that to be an error. It's completely obvious.
Why did they ever bother mentioning the second film? Why not just say, "Hey Pete, great work! You stumped us!"
I believe that Konqueror DOES include application/xhtml+xml in its Accept header, but it processes the document using the HTML parser rather than a proper XML parser.
:(
Also, I seem to remember reading application/xhtml+xml pages just fine in Opera.
I used to serve all pages on my site as pure XHTML 1.1, with the correct MIME type and everything, until I realized that I'm one of three people I know who uses a non-IE browser.
You can't really hate Microsoft until you've gotten serious about standards. Then their arrogance shines through.
that anyone would let a private company search their property without law enforcement being involved.
There's this one episode of The Awful Truth where they have two retired police officers (in uniform) walk around NYC and frisk random people.
The frisk-ees sort of look confused for a second, then calmly allow the search.
I don't know why North Americans are so uppity about "freedom" lately. We're obviously not terribly interested if we need someone to tell us, "Don't LET people take your privacy away!"
The expected availability of a GNU/Linux client was a major incentive when I bought the game (along with being a D&D fan and the fact that Bioware is Canadian). Imagine my joy when I noticed a speed increase after switching (~7 fps)!
Then Shadows of Undrentide shipped with Linux support out of the box. I really have to applaud Bioware for working so hard on a client that probably 1% of their players will use.
Maybe we could convince them to release the source for the toolset. I'm sure that the community would do a great job of porting it to Linux, OS X and other platforms.
NWN is a platform for creating and running D&D 3E games online. That's it.
The module that came with it is just an example of what could be done using the tools provided.
It's kinda like Mozilla Seamonkey: of course it's bloated and slow, it was only created to test new features and show off existing ones. They hope that you'll get some ideas and implement something yourself (i.e. Camino, Galeon, Mozilla Firebird).
High taxes on the rich don't cause job loss any more than low taxes create jobs.
Look at America today: companies just got a huge tax break from Bush, and the unemployment rate is rising. He cut the bottom out of countless social services, and the nation's in the biggest debt it's ever seen.
So, as a Canadian, I might've cared before Bush and his gang slapped us in the face.
I personally think that the people will elect a Democrat again, but also that the Republicans will take full advantage of the Diebold machines and rig the election.
Oh my God, I can't vote for a Liberal! He'll raise my taxes!
Well, not MY taxes per se... he'll raise the taxes on big companies and the extremely rich!!!
And give the money to me. Affordable healthcare? Decent funding for public schools? Pfft.
HELLO?? Do you ever KNOW HOW CAPITALISM WORKS?
Eventually EVERYONE gets filthy rich. That's why you can't raise taxes on the rich... because, in just a few more months, YOU'LL BE ONE OF THEM! Any day now!
Oh, gotta go. I'm late for the night shift at my second job.
during the antitrust suit. Delay things until the next regime change.
When Clinton was in power, it looked like MS was going to really get in trouble for once. But they delayed, and delayed, and delayed...
then GWB was elected. All of a sudden, the federal government didn't want Microsoft split up. The judge was replaced. They just wanted a quick and easy settlement. No financial penalties needed. Just promise to be on good behaviour.
Dean wouldn't stand for this shit. He'd kick the case out of court for good.
Hey, are there going to be any protests about this whole fiasco?
802.11i will use AES encryption. It looks like they're finally figuring it out.
I worked in the eLearning field for a while, and every LMS I had to work with was a waste of time. Including Blackboard.
The organization I was working for spend LOTS of money developing a system that would allow teachers to collaboratively create courses online (the LMS, reversed). They set it up so that it would output SCORM.
It turned out that while Blackboard SAID it supported SCORM, we couldn't actually find anything SCORM-related in the software... or the documentation.
The best example of online learning that I've seen is Lernu.net. If a couple of hacker Esperantists can beat Blackboard, so can you.
X is faster than windows, it's the bloated desktop environments and toolkits that bog it down.
As I said, people either say that X is slow because GTK+ and QT suck, or that X is slow because it's bloated.
In either case, X is slow! If widget developers can't figure out how to write for X, maybe it's too complicated.
There's nothing stopping the Free software community from replicating the success that OS X is experiencing.
To succeed on the desktop, we need drivers. There are way more people writing drivers for Linux than for Darwin, but in order for those drivers to be any good we'll need cooperation from the manufacturers. So, we'd need to create a viable desktop solution that runs extremely well on commonly available hardware (i.e. NVidia cards) to show the smaller manufacturers that if they help a Free software developer write a driver, they may sell more units.
GNU/Linux with X is slower than Windows, and way slower than OS X. Linux 2.6 is going to help a lot, but it isn't going to fix things. The X people say that the widget developers don't know what they're doing. The widget developers say that they've done they best they can with what X has to offer...
So it seems to me that X is either too complicated, or not sufficiently optimized. I think that we need a complete X replacement. Forget about X compatability.
It needs to be networked, like X, but have a standard widget set and clipboard. GTK+ and QT can be implemented in this environment, just like they are in Windows.
A faster, graphical bootup, no editing of config files by hand, yadda yadda yadda...
you've all heard this before.
But is it beyond our reach? I don't think so. What we need to do is admit that a lot of the stuff that we're doing on the desktop isn't working that well, and then change it.
Oh, this is great, eh. Bombadier invents the anti-snowmobile.
Well, that's not entirely true... it's got a lot in common with the snowmobile:
It's useful for a whole two months out of the year, it kills half the people who ride it, and only costs a bit more than thirty years' infinite travel on the TTC.
Someone who is not motivated enough to take an hour or so to travel to their local voting booth and vote does not care or know enough about the issues involved to make an informed and sensible choice.
I'm in Toronto and and we're having our municipal elections today. There are three polling stations within 10 minutes' walk from my house (although I have been assigned to the nearest one, about 4 minutes away).
Also, all candidates enlist scores of volunteers to drive anyone who doesn't have a ride to their polling station.
Having 90% of the population vote when only 40% of the population researches, interrogates and cares only means you'll have 50% of pseudo random "noise" votes drowning out the informed, important votes.
What we've started doing this year is holding high school elections, to get students in the habit of staying informed and actually voting.
The problem with voting is that we still have a first-past-the-post system. In the last provincial election the New Democratic Party saw their share of the popular vote rise by about 20%. However, they ended up losing one seat (and official party status). In a proportional system, the number of seats they hold would have doubled.
It's hard to get motivated to vote unless you're voting for someone who you're certain is going to win. Otherwise, it feels like a terrible waste. I can certainly understand the apathy most voters feel.
I met a woman at church who is absolutely terrified of her Windows PC. If an error message pops up, she shuts the machine off and tries again the next day.
Imagine my surprise when I learned that she used to be a software developer. She used to write programs for mainframes in assembler!
I'm afraid of touching assembler in case I fuck something up, and she has to have a lie down when Word barfs at her?
I think that people have been conditioned by the industry to fear their computers.
Don't touch these settings! You may damage your computer! Call Microsoft Tech Support at 1-900-MO-MONEY!
Teaching someone a programming language, even if they don't get much further than for loops, really empowers a person. I'm sure that if she fiddled with a Python interpreter from time to time she wouldn't be so terrified.
VoIP may usher in a new golden age of phreaking!
Instead of beige boxing, young phreakers will now cut their teeth using a laptop running AirSnort.
And the inductive probe will find new uses, for sure.
Hey, you just brightened my day! Thanks!
BitTorrent regularly asks me for donations when I start it up.
Unfortunately, if I answer, "No, I haven't donated," it segfaults. I can't tell whether or not that's by design.
There's been some talk of adding a feature like this to FastMail (i.e. accessing one's FastMail address book via LDAP).
The problem is that most mail clients have a pretty crummy LDAP implementation: they don't support user logins (so you could only offer one global directory - bad idea), LDAP+SSL or writing changes to the directory.
*sigh* Still so far from my dream PIM setup.