Yeah, DRM will be optional for a while. But when 90% of users are switched over to Windows2007, then banks will start to require DRM enabled computers to do your financial transactions over the web (balance transfers, checking the mortage status, etc.). Then the Powers-That-Be(TM) will decide that in order to crack down on terrorists, all on-line banking transactions will have to use a computer with DRM (and it just so happens that all transactions will also be simulatneously logged on IRS computers). Then on-line retailers will get in the act. First the Amazon's and E-Bay's will start to require it to reduce fraud. Then the banks will stiff-arm *all* merchants to only allow credit card transactions from DRM enabled machines. Of course on-line bill paying will go the same way. And now since the majority of people have these computers, other web-site operators will start to think "What kind of 'hacker' is visiting my site without a properly 'secured' browser? And what kind of data mining can I do now that I have a guarenteed identity behind the computer that I can sell to someone else!" So as more companies start to jump on the bandwagon, Grandma complains, "Some ladies in my knitting circle can't see my blog!" So the blogging software companies have to also incorporate DRM. Finally, the only people left using non DRM computer will be linux enthusiasts and criminals/terrorists. And since these two groups are about equal in size it'll be about a 50% chance that any web-surfer using a non-DRM computer is a criminal. Finally, DRM will be mandated by law and all objectors will be (secretly) rounded up and quitely disposed of (via the Patriot VI Act). So I know that I sleep sound at night knowing that DRM is *optional*.
You can't beat SkyMall for useless crap for people with too much money. I'd recommend the iPen...
As clever as it is discreet - the world's first digital camera/recorder/PDA stylus/pen
To all the world you're holding a stylish ballpoint. But there's a world of technology packed into the iPen. It's little more than 5 in. long and is the world's first combination ballpoint, viewfinder digital camera, a web cam, and as a stylus for your PDA. Discreet buttons let you select a specific function. Built-in 8MB flash memory can hold up to or up to 400 digital still images, or connect directly to a USB interface to use as a PC web camera.
Arrrgh. It sucks. There I've said it. I was an unabashed fan-boy of the first Matrix. That's why it pained me so much to see the second. If I'd had no previous expectations, I still would have walked away disappointed. And $16 poorer. But not betrayed. The sad part is, I should have seen it coming, the signs were definitely there. Sequels, it seems, are never as good as the original. Especially when the first movie does a good job of coming to a final conclusion. After the first movie, I distinctly remember thinking, "how are they going to continue this?". Everything was wrapped up so nicely for us. In retrospect, this was Hint #1.
And we all know that great works of art are solitary achievements, right? DaVinci doesn't say to himself, "Hey, that first Mona Lisa didn't turn out too bad, maybe I'll crank out a couple more". I guess the sign of a true master is knowing when to leave it alone. Hint #2.
Of course I shouldn't discount the fact that I had high expectations going into the movie. Now it might be just me, but it seems like the best films I've seen are the ones I've had no preconceived notions about. Like where a friend says, "Hey let's go see if something good is on." That was my experience for _The Matrix_. This is in contrast to _Reloaded_, where I bought the tickets on-line, so I knew I would get a ticket on opening day. I think the reason for this is because I've become accustomed to being disapointed at the theater so often. I think psychiatrists call it the "defense mechanism". If any particular film I go to is a stinker, I shrug it off and swear I'm going to abstain from movies for a while. Just like most of the previous movies I'd been to. No sense in getting all worked up over it, after all, it's only a movie. So then, when a genuinely good motion picture comes along, I'm psychologically unprepared, and I'm blown away. How could I not have picked up on #3?
And then there's that commercial crassness swirling around this flick that should have tipped me off. TV advertisements in which the cast is endorsing crap *before* the actual release of the movie should have been a giant neon sign pointing out that we were well on our way to sucksville. So I really don't know why I was surprised that the creators sold out to Cadillac.
So that's why I should have know _Reloaded_ was going to be bad. Here's why it actually is. I don't know if I can explain exactly why the first one was so good. I think it had something to do with actually having to think during the film. Everything was new and exciting. There was the meta-physical aspect (i.e. "hey, how would we know if were not in the Matrix right now?!?"). Then there was the cool camera work, and the cool music, and the cool way the agents talked. You're mind was always occupied, always immersed in the film. I wouldn't call it a formula in any sense of the word. Of course I wouldn't have written all of that if I didn't think part II was the exact opposite. The movie just felt wrong. Like they were trying to hard. Or not hard enough. Or something. Maybe it just felt forced. As Yoda might say, "Immersed, not I". Like the first fight scene where Neo takes on all of the Agent Smiths, was it just me, or did that computer generated crap look like it was rendered on a Sony PlayStation? And for that matter, who cares what the inside of the Zion ship hanger looks like. Why are we devoting 5 minutes to watching the ship land in the hanger? How does that advance the story. It felt like I was watching the guys who run the computer graphics machines masturbate. Of course, we are also treated to the engineering level of Zion. A place so boring, that no one who lives there, goes there. So why am I there? Oh yeah, so the old man can say that we are all here for a reason. Like that wasn't repeated 5,000 times elsewhere.
And I guess it's comforting to know that some things stay the same no matter what circumstances humanity has to endure. The city council meetings in Zion are precisely as dull as the city council meetings in my home town. I almost expected them to vote on a zoning
Can't we have it both ways? For instance let's say we see the following headline in the local newspaper...
Golfer bludgeons caddy with 9-iron
...are golfers now going to get their panties in a bunch because they've now be defamed as muderous thugs? Should we invent a new word to describe people who use golfing implements to commit crimes? But wasn't the killer still a golfer? Or do you have to have a certain handicap to really be considered a true golfer? Do we really think that if the local mobster strangled a person with a random USB cable lying around that the headline would describe the murderer as a hacker? Or just maybe when the word "hacker" is popularly used, it denotes at least a minimum of technical expertise, irrespective of whether the perpertrator was a mere script-kiddie (just like you don't have to be Tiger to be considered a golfer).
Sounds to me like Xen is a microkernel like thingy (what with the hardware abstraction layer and all) which you have to port your operating system personality to. What would make this different than the port of linux to the L4 microkernel (besides the Windows XP part)?
If by full-time kernel developer you mean you want to get paid to hack on the kernel, then linux is what you want. But if you are just itching a sratch you might also want to have a look at other free kernels. Besides the BSDs you might want to look into the GNU/Hurd. It has a pretty nifty architecture that hasn't really been done before, and since its not polished like Linux, there's still plenty of non-trivial, non-clean-up stuff that newbs can make a meaningful contribution to. And because we're such a small pond, that means you automatically become a big fish. Here's some sites to get you started...
Actually, for a host density ratio (HD) of 80% you still get 6.7E30 addresses for IPv6 (10^(0.8log(2^128))). That's about 50 million times less than the theoretical maximum. At a rate of 2^32 per second it'll only last us for the next 50 trillion years.
The net does not have infinite resources - even if IPv6 is deployed the
contamination of IP address space will merely be slowed, not stopped.
He must be a long term thinker. If we started allocating IPv6 addresses at
a rate of 2^32 addresses/sec (~4 billion -- that's the total address space
for IPv4) we will run out of addresses in about 584 billion years. So
we better all hope that protons don't decay.
So, how many people does that Pentium 4/polio vaccine/movie/sports car feed? Oh, that's what I thought.
So, what diminished costs do music pirates face ? Do they have no computer to decode the mp3? No hard drive to store the mp3? No opportunity costs involved in finding the mp3 in the first place? No network costs? No cost cd-r's to burn them to? Why exactly can't the record companies harness the same technology that makes digital music so inexpensive to distribute on an ad-hoc basis?
And exactly what algorithms have software patents given us that we wouldn't have otherwise? No GIFs? Oh wait, PNG, JPG, etc. No MP3 or MPGs? Hmmm... OGG. No "one-click shopping", no "buy-it-now"? Which new works of art have now been made available to us since copyright was extended from 50 to 70 years?
Intellectual property laws are a necessity for modern society. Take corn farmers for example. What incentive would farmers have to plant corn and sell it without IP laws? How would they recoup their initial R&D? Surely, there would be only one customer ever and that customer would buy just one solitary kernel. The buyer could merely throw the seed into the ground and with no work of his own (effortless copying), he would have access to a 100 copies of unlicensed derivative corn kernel IP in the matter of a few short months. In fact, the buyer now has complete access to the very same self-replicating nanotechnlogy that the farmer had. The buyer could then give away the corn IP to a friend or neighbor or (gasp!) even try to sell it for a profit. The ease of copying is the major problem with corn and encryption methods haven't been sucessful so far. Agriculture is one of the major industry in this country and we'd all hate to see it destroyed because of a handful of out-of-control corn pirates. So surely you can see there is no way farmers would even consider growing corn until we have strong government enforced monolopolies in corn.
Might as well begin the linux distro flame-fest... SuSe? I had the unfortunate displeasure of installing it one one of my machines, I couldn't stand it for a month. Isn't it only the newbs who like those glorified menus wrapped around the config files? Why would any IT organization want to add another layer of cruft like YaST on their systems? It's just another possible point of failure. And, of course, it makes it so you can't use most of the documentation on the web, since most of it assumes you edit the files manually. So why not use MS if you can't really fix things when they break. Why anyone thinks they need a distro other than Slackware is beyond me.
That's a completely separate issue. Sure it'd be nice to have 1 million people sue SCO (on what grounds I'm not sure). But SCO is forcing our hand by filing lawsuits against us. There isn't anything we can do to prevent this. So we need to make sure that we as defendant's don't say "well, $699 is cheaper than a lawsuit, I fold." That is (I presume) SCO's strategy -- the let's throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. They probably don't have any intention of actually suing anyone. And why would you if you can get them to pay by just sending out a threating letter. That is (or should be) our worst nightmare.
If any case screams out for class action it's this one. What can we do to make sure that all of the linux defendents get lumped into one class that acts together? This will prevent SCO from bullying 1 million defendants with 1 million lawsuits. Instead it'll get cleared up with only one trial. Should we set up a website? I'm sure there will be no shortage of great lawyers who would handle our case.
Here's a not unrelated idea. Increase the limit to +6, but make it so that it takes 4 positive moderations to go from +5 to +6 and then only 2 negative moderation to bring it back down. Or some such combination of things.
The law requires all businesses that own, license or maintain any "computerized data" that contains "personal information" to disclose any breach of the security of such database to any California resident whose personal information was, or is reasonably believed to have been, acquired by a hacker
Slashdot Mirror
Just use your prepaid calling card to get the anonymity you desire without being blocked.
Yeah, DRM will be optional for a while. But when 90% of users are switched over to Windows2007, then banks will start to require DRM enabled computers to do your financial transactions over the web (balance transfers, checking the mortage status, etc.). Then the Powers-That-Be(TM) will decide that in order to crack down on terrorists, all on-line banking transactions will have to use a computer with DRM (and it just so happens that all transactions will also be simulatneously logged on IRS computers). Then on-line retailers will get in the act. First the Amazon's and E-Bay's will start to require it to reduce fraud. Then the banks will stiff-arm *all* merchants to only allow credit card transactions from DRM enabled machines. Of course on-line bill paying will go the same way. And now since the majority of people have these computers, other web-site operators will start to think "What kind of 'hacker' is visiting my site without a properly 'secured' browser? And what kind of data mining can I do now that I have a guarenteed identity behind the computer that I can sell to someone else!" So as more companies start to jump on the bandwagon, Grandma complains, "Some ladies in my knitting circle can't see my blog!" So the blogging software companies have to also incorporate DRM. Finally, the only people left using non DRM computer will be linux enthusiasts and criminals/terrorists. And since these two groups are about equal in size it'll be about a 50% chance that any web-surfer using a non-DRM computer is a criminal. Finally, DRM will be mandated by law and all objectors will be (secretly) rounded up and quitely disposed of (via the Patriot VI Act). So I know that I sleep sound at night knowing that DRM is *optional*.
Looks like we need to start checking to be sure our next motherboard's flash can be reprogrammed with LinuxBIOS.
Arrrgh. It sucks. There I've said it. I was an unabashed fan-boy of the first Matrix. That's why it pained me so much to see the second. If I'd had no previous expectations, I still would have walked away disappointed. And $16 poorer. But not betrayed. The sad part is, I should have seen it coming, the signs were definitely there. Sequels, it seems, are never as good as the original. Especially when the first movie does a good job of coming to a final conclusion. After the first movie, I distinctly remember thinking, "how are they going to continue this?". Everything was wrapped up so nicely for us. In retrospect, this was Hint #1. And we all know that great works of art are solitary achievements, right? DaVinci doesn't say to himself, "Hey, that first Mona Lisa didn't turn out too bad, maybe I'll crank out a couple more". I guess the sign of a true master is knowing when to leave it alone. Hint #2. Of course I shouldn't discount the fact that I had high expectations going into the movie. Now it might be just me, but it seems like the best films I've seen are the ones I've had no preconceived notions about. Like where a friend says, "Hey let's go see if something good is on." That was my experience for _The Matrix_. This is in contrast to _Reloaded_, where I bought the tickets on-line, so I knew I would get a ticket on opening day. I think the reason for this is because I've become accustomed to being disapointed at the theater so often. I think psychiatrists call it the "defense mechanism". If any particular film I go to is a stinker, I shrug it off and swear I'm going to abstain from movies for a while. Just like most of the previous movies I'd been to. No sense in getting all worked up over it, after all, it's only a movie. So then, when a genuinely good motion picture comes along, I'm psychologically unprepared, and I'm blown away. How could I not have picked up on #3? And then there's that commercial crassness swirling around this flick that should have tipped me off. TV advertisements in which the cast is endorsing crap *before* the actual release of the movie should have been a giant neon sign pointing out that we were well on our way to sucksville. So I really don't know why I was surprised that the creators sold out to Cadillac. So that's why I should have know _Reloaded_ was going to be bad. Here's why it actually is. I don't know if I can explain exactly why the first one was so good. I think it had something to do with actually having to think during the film. Everything was new and exciting. There was the meta-physical aspect (i.e. "hey, how would we know if were not in the Matrix right now?!?"). Then there was the cool camera work, and the cool music, and the cool way the agents talked. You're mind was always occupied, always immersed in the film. I wouldn't call it a formula in any sense of the word. Of course I wouldn't have written all of that if I didn't think part II was the exact opposite. The movie just felt wrong. Like they were trying to hard. Or not hard enough. Or something. Maybe it just felt forced. As Yoda might say, "Immersed, not I". Like the first fight scene where Neo takes on all of the Agent Smiths, was it just me, or did that computer generated crap look like it was rendered on a Sony PlayStation? And for that matter, who cares what the inside of the Zion ship hanger looks like. Why are we devoting 5 minutes to watching the ship land in the hanger? How does that advance the story. It felt like I was watching the guys who run the computer graphics machines masturbate. Of course, we are also treated to the engineering level of Zion. A place so boring, that no one who lives there, goes there. So why am I there? Oh yeah, so the old man can say that we are all here for a reason. Like that wasn't repeated 5,000 times elsewhere. And I guess it's comforting to know that some things stay the same no matter what circumstances humanity has to endure. The city council meetings in Zion are precisely as dull as the city council meetings in my home town. I almost expected them to vote on a zoning
Sounds to me like Xen is a microkernel like thingy (what with the hardware abstraction layer and all) which you have to port your operating system personality to. What would make this different than the port of linux to the L4 microkernel (besides the Windows XP part)?
According to the Global Rich List the richest 5% in the world have a yearly salary starting at $26,000 and the richest 1% starts at $40k.
The official GNU/Hurd page.
The help-hurd mailing list archive.
Actually, for a host density ratio (HD) of 80% you still get 6.7E30 addresses for IPv6 (10^(0.8log(2^128))). That's about 50 million times less than the theoretical maximum. At a rate of 2^32 per second it'll only last us for the next 50 trillion years.
2^128(IPv6 addresses)/2^32(IPv4 addresses per second) ~= 79E27 seconds
79E27 seconds / 31E6 seconds per year = 2.5E21 years
...which is a *lot* bigger than 584 billion.
Use it all you like. I hereby declare it to be in the public domain.
So, what diminished costs do music pirates face ? Do they have no computer to decode the mp3? No hard drive to store the mp3? No opportunity costs involved in finding the mp3 in the first place? No network costs? No cost cd-r's to burn them to? Why exactly can't the record companies harness the same technology that makes digital music so inexpensive to distribute on an ad-hoc basis? And exactly what algorithms have software patents given us that we wouldn't have otherwise? No GIFs? Oh wait, PNG, JPG, etc. No MP3 or MPGs? Hmmm... OGG. No "one-click shopping", no "buy-it-now"? Which new works of art have now been made available to us since copyright was extended from 50 to 70 years?
For further your further reading pleasure.
Intellectual property laws are a necessity for modern society. Take corn farmers for example. What incentive would farmers have to plant corn and sell it without IP laws? How would they recoup their initial R&D? Surely, there would be only one customer ever and that customer would buy just one solitary kernel. The buyer could merely throw the seed into the ground and with no work of his own (effortless copying), he would have access to a 100 copies of unlicensed derivative corn kernel IP in the matter of a few short months. In fact, the buyer now has complete access to the very same self-replicating nanotechnlogy that the farmer had. The buyer could then give away the corn IP to a friend or neighbor or (gasp!) even try to sell it for a profit. The ease of copying is the major problem with corn and encryption methods haven't been sucessful so far. Agriculture is one of the major industry in this country and we'd all hate to see it destroyed because of a handful of out-of-control corn pirates. So surely you can see there is no way farmers would even consider growing corn until we have strong government enforced monolopolies in corn.
Can anyone speculate why scox stock is up 21% today (to 12.66)?
Might as well begin the linux distro flame-fest... SuSe? I had the unfortunate displeasure of installing it one one of my machines, I couldn't stand it for a month. Isn't it only the newbs who like those glorified menus wrapped around the config files? Why would any IT organization want to add another layer of cruft like YaST on their systems? It's just another possible point of failure. And, of course, it makes it so you can't use most of the documentation on the web, since most of it assumes you edit the files manually. So why not use MS if you can't really fix things when they break. Why anyone thinks they need a distro other than Slackware is beyond me.
That's a completely separate issue. Sure it'd be nice to have 1 million people sue SCO (on what grounds I'm not sure). But SCO is forcing our hand by filing lawsuits against us. There isn't anything we can do to prevent this. So we need to make sure that we as defendant's don't say "well, $699 is cheaper than a lawsuit, I fold." That is (I presume) SCO's strategy -- the let's throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. They probably don't have any intention of actually suing anyone. And why would you if you can get them to pay by just sending out a threating letter. That is (or should be) our worst nightmare.
If any case screams out for class action it's this one. What can we do to make sure that all of the linux defendents get lumped into one class that acts together? This will prevent SCO from bullying 1 million defendants with 1 million lawsuits. Instead it'll get cleared up with only one trial. Should we set up a website? I'm sure there will be no shortage of great lawyers who would handle our case.
When was the last time you went to a movie that had actual professional actors instead of *stars* who can barely read cue cards?
Have you meta-moderated today?
Here's a not unrelated idea. Increase the limit to +6, but make it so that it takes 4 positive moderations to go from +5 to +6 and then only 2 negative moderation to bring it back down. Or some such combination of things.