Yeah, when have you ever heard of an amateur rocket being used for terrorism?
From the linked article:
"There is no consistency as to what is acceptable in one region for the ATF that won't be acceptable somewhere else," said Wickman. "The ATF people seem, as a rule, to feel this whole idea of hobby rocketry being regulated by the (government is) a mistake and a waste of time. There's a disconnect between the ATF in Washington and the regional field offices."
What's worse, even though not much has changed about the regulations, they are subject to arbitrary interpretation in the field, said Bundick, of the National Association of Rocketry. "It's a never-ending treadmill to try to pacify the local inspector."
The Justice Department's Nowacki didn't respond to questions about the ATF's perceived inconsistency.
What you model terrorists don't seem to understand is that it doesn't matter that model rockets can't be used as weapons of terror.
What's important isn't controlling model rockets, per se; what's important is getting the American public used to a never-ending "war against terror", keeping them keyed-up, ever fearful and ever compliant.
What's important is getting the public resigned to always asking permission from the government, always being afraid that they're at risk of arrest, even for hobbies the government knows full well pose no realistic risk of harm.
And ultimately, what's important is making the people of this nation realize who is boss -- the government and its bureaucrats and its corporate owners --, and who is the servant -- the common taxpayer.
Once you realize that your hobbies "need" to be regulated to "fight terror", you'll docilely let the FBI knock on your door on behalf of the RIAA's searches, and you'll agree to submit your open source code to government inspection to make sure it doesn't "INDUCE" violation of copyright.
Once the formerly free American sheeple resign themselves to arbitrary governmental intrusions into their lives in order to further some ill-defined and ever elusive "war against terror", they'll stop squawking about
Or as our beloved Reichsminister Ashcroft explained, to the Senate Judiciary Committee, "To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty... your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and... give ammunition to America's enemies."
"Bob Bemer... passed away at his home at the age of 78.
The AP reported he was 84, and Wikipedia confirms that he was born in 1920.
In any case, I'd like to commemorate Mr. Bemer with the traditional Slashdot version of a Viking funeral:
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - COBOL standardizer/Father of ASCII Bob Bemer was found dead in his Texas home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his character set, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
Now those are Weapons of Mass (Aesthetic) Destruction.
Re:Mutations, founder's effect, and inbreeding
on
Mutation Creates SuperKid
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Errm I grew up in Africa and did not die of cancer by age 12.. nor did plenty of my friends. (there is a "white" population in Africa)
I'm going to guess that you weren't living like humans lived in Africa 40,000 -- or 120,000 -- years ago: unclothed except for skins (and many days would be too hot for wearing skins), spending most of the day under the hot sun gathering uncultivated fruits and vegetables or running down undomesticated game, without sunscreen or medical supplies beyond naturally occurring plants, with no doctors or even any understanding of why skin cancer occurs.
And quite possibly before natural mutations offering resistance to skin cancers had spread through the human population (by the death of those without those mutations).
And I spend enough time outdoors, that after moving back to the USA some of my friends had a hard time recognizing me when I lost my (very) dark tan. (yes I am now "pasty white boy")
And even with all the modern conveniences of (opaque but light enough to wear in the heat) clothing, sun-screen, and medical care, your body caught enough sunlight to provoke increased melanin production even in your white, European descended body.
I not trying to be overly critical of you here; it's normal for people to think that the conditions that they have personally experienced obtained universally and throughout all of human history. Part of the challenge of learning history or understanding evolution (human or otherwise) is to begin to grasp the enormous differences and the great epochs of time -- time far, far in excess of the span of any single human's life, time measure in the millions of years -- that separate us from our origins.
Let's play a game by pretending that every year only lasts a minute. It's 2004 today, so, by this game's metric, a "minute" ago it was 2003, and thirty-five minutes ago -- a little over half an hour ago -- Neil Armstrong, in 1969, set foot on the moon. In these terms, World War Two ended just a minute less than an hour ago. Three hours and forty-eight minutes ago -- in 1776 -- Thomas Jefferson declared independence for one nation while, essentially simultaneously in our terms, Adam Smith revealed an Invisible Hand that regulated commerce among all nations.
Each hour is comprised of sixty minutes, each day of twenty-four hours, for a total of 1440 minutes per day. So by our scheme, one "day" ago, 1440 minutes ago, an English King named Riothamus -- or Arthur -- had just recently failed to keep south-western England from plunging into barbarity in 564. Since Arthur's reign, the rest of "yesterday" saw the Dark Ages in Europe offset by the flowering of Islamic science and mathematics, the rebirth of Europe in the Renaissance, the exploration and colonization of most of the world by Europeans, and, an hour ago, the beginning of the atomic age. All this in one busy "day".
Even given the brevity of our metric, compressing one year of 525600 minutes into a single minute, it's still easily possible to recite the salient historical events on a year in the sixty seconds we are given, and even include our own particular history: "1903: first heavier-than-air flight; Grandma born." or "1943: Battle of Guadalcanal, Allied invasion of Italy, Warsaw Ghetto uprising against Nazis, Dad born."
But what's most interesting isn't those years, like 1943, crammed full of events, but the far greater number of years which our histories don't distinguish from one another. Two days ago, 48 hours ago, we come to the year 875 BC (since there's no year zero, 1 AD being preceded immediately by 1 BC). While I'm sure that a historian of that era could come with an interesting event of that year, the nearest I can come up with is the ascension of Osorkon II to the pharoah's throne in Egypt the next year in 874 BC. The remainder of day two will be pretty packed: Rome will be founded and will reign for most of the day, Christ will be born and crucified in a brief half-hour - but will give rise to over a "day"
As the grandchild of several Holocaust survivors, I hereby inform you that there is not a shred of cleverness in this sort of posery. It is merely trite and repulsive.
If my grandmother were addressing you, she wouldn't be doing it nearly as politely as I am, you spoiled twit.
With all due respect to your grandmother, most of the Holocaust survivors I've met have been polite and thoughtful persons (and one was a rather pervy old guy with a who always made it obvious which women he was staring up and down, at least in the class I took from him).
One grants your grandmother a certain deference because of her suffering -- just as I didn't question the apparent contradiction of the Holocaust survivor, a Polish Jew, who told me that he didn't blame the camp guards because "they were young men far from home, in the army, and ordered to be guards" -- but that he did blame the Poles, who "learned to throw stones at the Jews before they learned to walk". Absolving the Germans who were taught to hate but condemning the Poles who were taught the same hate was that survivor's way of understanding what had happened to him, and I was not about to suggest he believe otherwise.
But if my argument is wrong, it's wrong whether or not you're the grandchild of several Holocaust survivors. And if it's right, it's right regardless of your ancestry -- or mine.
Ideas are funny things: they don't become more or less valid depending on who says them. If a prisoner says the Earth moves, and the Pope says it doesn't, "Eppur si muove," -- "it still moves".
Being the grandchildren of survivors does give you a special responsibility to understand their pain, and to perhaps even to work to make sure the Shoah survivor's cry of "Never again" really does mean "never again".
But it doesn't give you any special claim to wisdom, and while it may have prompted you to study history, it doesn't necessarily give you any magical understanding of history, or any special moral vantage point from which to rule on the validity of the arguments of today. And to use your grandparents' suffering to make a rhetorical point -- to merely win an argument -- seems to me a tawdry way to use them.
Again, my reasoning is valid -- or invalid -- independent of who you are or even who I am. An argument stands -- or falls -- on its own, regardless of the personality, background, or ancestry or its proponents.
I remember reading somewhere a reason why some topics in bad movies, like really giant insects, apes, humans, or to the other direction, very tiny humans (think in Giant's Land) [are unrealistic] and [it] was related to body architecture and strength of materials.
You're thinking of the cube-square law: surface area increases according to the square of the length, but volume increases according to the cube of the length. As mass correlates with volume, thus the thin legs of insects suffice to carry their weight, but elephants need thick stumpy legs.
But this has a number of biological consequences: not only would miniature elephants be (proportionally) super-strong and giant insects unable to support their own weight, but cells in the greater volume of larger animals require food and oxygen.
In an organism with a small volume to surface area ratio, all the cells are close enough to the organism's periphery to obtain their food and oxygen more or less directly from the environment. In "large" organisms, the internal cells must be supplied by the organism itself, so lungs and circulatory systems are needed.
(Indeed, the lungs -- and the intestines -- are designed to pack a lot of surface area, surfaces at which gases can be exchanged or nutrients absorbed, into a small volume, by means of foldings and branchings.)
In "medium-sized" (but still microscopic) organisms, primitive "lungs" -- as simple as a large hollow internal area lined with cells -- and "circulatory systems" -- such as an undifferentiated internal "soup" of nutrients -- can suffice.
Researchers would not disclose the German boys identity but said he was
born to a somewhat muscular mother, a 24-year-old former professional sprinter. Her brother and three other close male relatives all were unusually strong [implying they also have one mutated copy of the gene], with one of them a construction worker able to unload heavy curbstones by hand.
In the mother, one copy of the gene is mutated and the other is normal; the boy has two mutated copies. One almost definitely came from his father, but no information about him has been disclosed. The mutation is very rare in people.
The boy has two copies. He could (absent an extremely unlikely second identical mutation on the other copy of the same gene) only get one from his mother. The other had to come from his father. The mutation is very rare. The mother has four male relatives with one copy of the mutation. The identity of the father has not been disclosed.
Anyone care to connect the dots?
I'm not pointing this out to be cruel or catty; I'm pointing it put because it's a good example of what's called the "founder's effect", a mechanism by which mutations -- by definition unique or nearly unique events -- became part of a general population.
Since this child has two copies of the mutation, not only are phenotypic effects greater -- he's even more muscular than his mother who has a single copy -- but all of his children will have at least a single copy, like his mother.
Were the conditions for founder's effect stronger -- that is, if he were a member of a smaller and more isolated population than modern Germany -- one can easily see how inbreeding could result in the mutation becoming common throughout that population.
When two persons with a single copy of the mutation breed, one-quarter of their offspring (on average) will have, like the child being studied, two copies of the mutated form (or allele) of the gene (and no copies of the gene's normal allele), one-quarter will have two copies of the normal allele, and one-half of the offspring will have, like the mother, one mutated allele and one "normal" allele.
But when a person with two copies breeds with a person with a single copy, one-half the offspring (on average) will have two copies of the mutation, and one-half will have one copy of it.
So if there's any preferential benefit to having the mutation -- if those with the mutation do better and so have more offspring -- and if there's the in-breeding of founder's effect, the mutation should become common in the founder population.
Indeed, it's likely that founder's effect, along with environmental conditions, explains why Germans and other Europeans, despite being descended from Africans 40,000 years ago, are white rather than black: being white is bad under the Africa sun, as, unprotected, it will lead to skin cancer and death by about age twelve. But being black in the weaker sunlight of Europe prevents the metabolization of vitamin D, leading to the weakened bones of rickets. In Africa, mutations that lead to less melanin production and whiteness also lead to death -- but in Europe it allowed a longer, better life.
But how did lessened melanin production and "whiteness" spread in Europe? Likely through founder's effect in small and isolated inbreeding populations -- but certainly not because of any "Aryan" superiority.
the Australian Computer Museum... need[s] storage space... [and] some way to sort the collection.
While Bubble Sort is always a sentimental favorite, I suggest Heapsort for its O( n log n) runtime, even in the worst case, and, even more importantly given the Museum's lack of storage space, Heapsort's use of only a fixed amount of extra space in which to do the sort.
Also, there is a BSD'd Heapsort implemented using forklifts and standard warehouse storage crates.
There is no connection whatsoever between spyware and OSS, so this argument makes no sense at all.
There is no connection -- but the grandparent poster still makes good sense.
How's that again?
Simple: let's say that the government passes a law saying that spyware is illegal. One way to implement this would be to allow consumers to sue manufacturers of spyware, but we've already seen that the Federal CAN-SPAM Act explicitly disallows consumers to sue spammers. So let's assume that the anti-spyware legislation wouldn't work by allowing law suits.
Then the obvious way to implement the law would be a government board of "experts" who would examine software to determine if it was spyware, and ban software it found to be spyware. With me so far?
Now, we all know that big business has a lot more pull with legislatures and governments than, say, Slashdotters or Open Source programmers. That's because big business can afford to hire lobbyists and lawyers and make massive campaign contributions, while OSS coders are doing all they can to hold down a paying job while spending all their spare time on their Open Source project. Still with me?
So it pretty much goes without saying that the "experts" nominated to the reviewing committee would be drawn from Big Businesses -- like Microsoft, Oracle, etc. -- because those businesses would have the clout and influence to get government to nominate their people.
Now, since the board would be allowed to examine and potentially ban all software, do you think that the Microsoft-nominated members of the board would be inclined to ban Microsoft software? Or would they be inclined to very skeptically "test" Open Source competitors of Microsoft for being spyware?
Even of they didn't manage to ban any Open Source Software outright, they could hold it up for a long period of review, or impose testing costs and requirements that Open Source just can't afford. If all software releases required 90 days for the board's approval and a $90 check from the manufacturer to cover the testing, how many OSS products could come up with $90 to cover each version's release? What if the board "discovered" a need to raise the fee to $2000 -- an insignificant cost of doing business for a commercial software maker, it would probably break many of the projects on Sourceforge.
And at some point, the review board would be lobbied by a big software manufacturer to see a link between spyware and OSS.
The point is, when you give government a right to ban something -- or any other power -- you have to realize that it's big business that always is the best at using the government's rules to its ends, because it's big business that can afford to hire the most experts -- lawyers, lobbyists, and legislators -- to deal with government rules.
Ever notice that many big companies pay little or nothing in tax, but regular guys with regular jobs pay 25% to 50% or more (including Federal, State, FICA, etc)? That's because regular guys can't afford to spend millions on lobbyists to get billions in tax relief.
Big business will always use government rules to shut out competition, because that's what big businesses do. If you give government the right to ban software it considers spyware, big software will use it to call OSS spyware and ban Open Source Software.
So when does their 'right to free speech' end and my right to be left alone on my personal computer, in my private residence, begin?
No one is forcing you to install WhenU's software.
And one can imagine customers who might knowingly and willingly install WhenU's software because they perceive a benefit to doing so: Google's toolbar might be considered spyware -- it sends every url you browse to Google; but you receive the benefit of getting Google's page rank for the url, and Google gets the benefit of seeing who is browsing where.
Now, if the software tells you honestly that it's sending information about you to its creators, or sending ads to you, you have a remedy that requires no law, no governmental action: you can decide to uninstall the software. If the software spies or spams you without telling you honestly that it's doing so, you have a remedy in the form of existing laws against fraud or the like -- or possibly new laws that more narrowly target deceptive software.
But none of these remedies require intruding on First amendment rights. So why do we need an overly-broad law that does?\
First Amendment (and many would argue, Second Amendment) rights are the cornerstone of all other rights: the First Amendment exists to guarantee that you can stand up, get together like minded citizens, and explain why you think the government is not doing the right thing (and the Second, to have the mens to resist tyrannical government, but let's no digress). Since without that right, all other rights can be trampled without anyone having a chance to speak up about it, it's very very important to make sure that right isn't infringed even a little bit.
So in order to preserve that right from tampering, we -- as free men -- have to also put up with things -- Ku Klux Klan rallies, spam, WhenU's software -- that we may detest. Because the cure is far worse than the disease. Once we let government say there exists a class of things that can't be talked about, we risk that class be extended or used as a precedent to stop people from pointing out when the Emperor has no clothes.
I'm sorry for the inconvenience, but I'll take WhenU's spam over some Ministry of Truth's deciding what can't be said, any day.
Somebody explain this to me?
on
Amorphous Steel
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
From the linked article: Steel, an alloy of mostly iron atoms with varying amounts of carbon and other elements, is ordinarily a crystal, with an internal structure consisting of neat rows of atoms. If produced quickly from a liquid phase, however, a disordered solid can result.
Ok, somebody who understands materials science explain this to me, please: is the amorphous steel's hardness and strength greater because the non-amorphous, crystalline steel breaks easily along a row of atoms, as if along a perforation, while the amorphous steel, lacking such an orderly structure, lacks long runs of bonds along which breaks can be easily made?
Pictorially, is it like this?
Fe-Fe-Fe-Fe regular, non-amorphous steel |..|..|..| <--- break along this line Fe-Fe-Fe-Fe
Fe-..-Fe-.-Fe amorphous steel |.\-Fe-Fe/.| <--- no natural breaking line Fe-Fe-Fe..-Fe
It's been really stinking up the place for a while.
(I actually watched the last half of the "Search for Spock" movie last night. Man, that dog did not improve with age -- not to mention that Bones and Scotty looked pretty aged when it first came out.)
It's already well-documented that Yahoo moves Gmail invites into the Bulk Mail folder. I've personally confirmed the Hotmail and Yahoo blocking.
Much as I enjoy wearing my tinfoil hat, I think it can be dispensed with here.
Both Hotmail and Yahoo mail have been plagued with spam, and with users demanding they do something about that spam. Indeed, that's one reason people are interested in GMail.
Since almost all spam -- anything we think of spam, anyway -- arrives in mass quantities, and a logical way to reduce spam is simply to look for many addresses receiving the same email.
So a decent first cut at filtering bulk spam (and recall that both Yahoo and Hotmail use "bulk mail" folders) would be to take an MD5 sum of each email (not including the "To" address header lines, of course), stick the sum in hash table or other database, and increment a counter for each email with that MD5 sum. Once the counter reached some arbitrary large-ish number, you'd mark all copies of that emails spam.
Since the GMial invite varies slightly, it's clear that something fuzzier than an MD5 sum is being used, but the principle remains the same.
The first N GMail invites weren't marked as "bulk email"; after the counter threshold was reached, all the rest have been.
So all we've learned from this is that, even during this invite-only beta test, GMail must be sending out a hell of a lot of invites, and that, yes indeed, Hotmail and Yahoo customers demanded and got "bulk email" filtering.
So take off the tinfoil hats -- you'll have a real reason to wear them soon enough.
Here's a good link for people who want to find out more about any unknown terms.
What kind of unknown terms?
Or as Secretary of Defense "Robert S." Rumsfeld put it at a Department of Defense news briefing:
As we know,
There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know There are known unknowns. That is to say We know there are some things We do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, The ones we don't know We don't know.
I found that at Wikipedia, which is also a pretty good place to find out about known unknown terms, or to explain knowns known to you to others to whom those terms are known unknowns.
Excuse my ignorace (sic), but surely nanotechnology would produce safer, lighter and cheaper (depending on the meaning..[.] I'm assuming consumer-side cost) everything?
Yeah, sure, safer, lighter, cheaper.
But the real questions all are about style. To wit, can I get one of these cars in a "gray goo" color?
Re:Great for paranoid nuts, useless for real peopl
on
RF-Blocking Wallpaper
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Ok, its nice. This wallpaper blocks a lot of RF radation (sic). This means that you can not use WLAN, cellphones and terrestrial TV/Radio. Is this really what you want?
It's what defense contractors, the government, and businesses worried about industrial espionage by employees, want.
And given that Witchfinder General Ashcroft and Big Blunkett are in power, I'm sure it will not only sell well, but be heavily subsidized by government, and probably required on certain government contractors.
the music swapping types are bound to find a way around this one, im (sic) sure
Yes, holding down the Shift key to prevent the DRM from being auto-played and auto-installed does the trick.
And if you scroll down, you'll see literally dozens of comments from Slashdotters crowing about how easily they ripped this CD to MP3 or Ogg or ACC or whatever format suits them.
And what that means is the RIAA has won this round.
What do I mean by that? This CD is a trap, and everybody who is crowing about how easy it is to circumvent its copy-protection has fallen into the trap.
The trap consists of two parts: one, as Mr. Roadkill (731328) explains here, because circumvention is so easy there will not be any en masse returns of this CD. BMG will declare that the public doesn't mind copy-protection because there will be few complaints or returns, and its massive sales given the publicity BMG is giving to this release. And with that they've slipped in the thin edge of the wedge, begun accustomizing us to copy-protection.
slip in DRM keys "personalized" to your computer and, to add insult to injury,
get you to agree to a license, for Christ's sake, in order to listen to music,
and agree to listen to the music only on a personal computer (and presumably not a work computer, and surely not an MP3 player) (EULA paragraph 1.1)
and agree that your right to use the "digital content" lapses if you lose the physical CD (EULA paragraph 1.2)
and agree as well to give up your right (EULA, paragraph 1.4) to make a back-up copy of purchased software.
They're not just sipping in the DRM keys; they're slipping in a whole different legal interpretation in which to understand CDS, an interpretation that emphasizes licensing instead of purchasing.
And that's just the first part of the trap.
The second part of the trap is even more insidious: BMG has purposely used a trivially simple and already well known to be easily circumvented copy-protection in order to encourage you to circumvent it.
Why would BMG do that? So they can point out all the happy, crowing, boasting circumventors to the Congress, call all the people holding down a Shift key "hackers" (indeed SunnCom's already said they don't expect this to be "unhackable"), and thus justify legislation to made DRM mandatory. "See what those hackers did, Senator? They hack our state-of-the-art copy-protection, those evil wizarsds! That's why we must make a hardware copyright bit mandatory on all new CD and CD-ROM players!"
Every time you think you've scored a point by managing to rip this CD, all you've done is to further play yourself -- and you liberties -- into the hands of BMG and the RIAA. You're given them a precedents to point to and a spurious "threat" to whine to Congress about. Who's really winning here?
But I doubt it. Meaning no disrespect to anyone by my use of dialect, I think it's more a case of "Oh massa, dem new chains is so shiny, I's be heppy to fassin dem ons me an' git right in yo boat, suh".
The difference, of course, is that Africans, proud of their freedoms, didn't line up willingly to be slaves in hopes of wearing shiny bonds -- but we modern Americans have become so neglectful of our liberties that we'll give them up for the next boy band's CD or the facile assurance that the next intrusive government surveillance program really will finally guarantee our safety.
Like Esau in the Bible, we willingly give up our birthright of liberty for a mess of pottage -- for Consumerism's shiny trinkets and the bland assurances of the Fascists who whip up our fears and then promise to protect us from our freedoms.
If this CD stays at the top of the charts, expect all new CDs to be copy-protected -- but worse than the copy-protection will be that we will take for granted that copy-protection legitimately should be there. The Corporation's triumph isn't in getting you to buy a copy-protected CD or a particular kind of DRM; it's in getting you to accept as natural and legitimate and right that by buying a CD or a shrink-wrapped software title you now must forever afterward ask the permission of the seller to use what you have honestly purchased, that you must acquiesce to the seller forever setting the rules and conditions under which you can use what you have bought.
In short, you've been changed from a purchaser of a good to a renter of a license and have consented to be taxed and regulated in perpetuity for the privilege of renting.
Thomas Jefferson dreamt for his country a Republic of proudly independent freeholders, each man the owner of his Real Estate; George Washington, drawing on the Bible's prophet Micah, foresaw an America where "everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid". Instead we're turning into a rabble of peasants and share-croppers slaving for, and kowtowing to, the modern day Lords of Corporatism. And we put on our chains so willingly!
The confusing part is that I also subscribe to Yahoo's business email (don't ask why I do both... It's either complicated, or I'm stupid or both) Anyway, their business mail, which goes for $10 per month, is still only getting 25MB. Note, this is 1/4 the space of what the free email people get and, well, a whole, whole lot less than the mail plus people, but at a much higher price.
Yahoo's not pricing what's "fair", they're pricing what the market can bear.
They've figured (probably correctly) that business users can and will pay more -- and probably also would find it more disruptive and expensive, in terms of lost business --, to change addresses.
Since businesses can, and will, and have more to lose if they won't, pay more, Yahoo is more than willing to charge business users more.
Slashdot Mirror
Then again, this logic is so logically flawed, it's kind of like saying, "Citizens should not have water, as it could lead to drowning deaths".
Citizens should not have water, as they can use it to waterboard Iraqi and Afghani prisoners.
Oh, sorry, that was done by the U.S. government on CIA orders, so it's ok.
Nevermind.
From the linked article:
What you model terrorists don't seem to understand is that it doesn't matter that model rockets can't be used as weapons of terror.
What's important isn't controlling model rockets, per se; what's important is getting the American public used to a never-ending "war against terror", keeping them keyed-up, ever fearful and ever compliant.
What's important is getting the public resigned to always asking permission from the government, always being afraid that they're at risk of arrest, even for hobbies the government knows full well pose no realistic risk of harm.
And ultimately, what's important is making the people of this nation realize who is boss -- the government and its bureaucrats and its corporate owners --, and who is the servant -- the common taxpayer.
Once you realize that your hobbies "need" to be regulated to "fight terror", you'll docilely let the FBI knock on your door on behalf of the RIAA's searches, and you'll agree to submit your open source code to government inspection to make sure it doesn't "INDUCE" violation of copyright.
Once the formerly free American sheeple resign themselves to arbitrary governmental intrusions into their lives in order to further some ill-defined and ever elusive "war against terror", they'll stop squawking about
Or as our beloved Reichsminister Ashcroft explained, to the Senate Judiciary Committee, "To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty
"Bob Bemer... passed away at his home at the age of 78.
The AP reported he was 84, and Wikipedia confirms that he was born in 1920.
In any case, I'd like to commemorate Mr. Bemer with the traditional Slashdot version of a Viking funeral:
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - COBOL standardizer/Father of ASCII Bob Bemer was found dead in his Texas home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his character set, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
Yes, but it's exactly what the RIAA had in mind, so couldn't the Attourney [sic] General charge the RIAA with the intentional corruption of youth?
Hey, it's not like they distributed those albums of William Shatner singing "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds", or Leonard Nimoy signing about that hobbit "Bilbo Baggins" (link is the video).
Now those are Weapons of Mass (Aesthetic) Destruction.
Errm I grew up in Africa and did not die of cancer by age 12.. nor did plenty of my friends. (there is a "white" population in Africa)
I'm going to guess that you weren't living like humans lived in Africa 40,000 -- or 120,000 -- years ago: unclothed except for skins (and many days would be too hot for wearing skins), spending most of the day under the hot sun gathering uncultivated fruits and vegetables or running down undomesticated game, without sunscreen or medical supplies beyond naturally occurring plants, with no doctors or even any understanding of why skin cancer occurs.
And quite possibly before natural mutations offering resistance to skin cancers had spread through the human population (by the death of those without those mutations).
And I spend enough time outdoors, that after moving back to the USA some of my friends had a hard time recognizing me when I lost my (very) dark tan. (yes I am now "pasty white boy")
And even with all the modern conveniences of (opaque but light enough to wear in the heat) clothing, sun-screen, and medical care, your body caught enough sunlight to provoke increased melanin production even in your white, European descended body.
I not trying to be overly critical of you here; it's normal for people to think that the conditions that they have personally experienced obtained universally and throughout all of human history. Part of the challenge of learning history or understanding evolution (human or otherwise) is to begin to grasp the enormous differences and the great epochs of time -- time far, far in excess of the span of any single human's life, time measure in the millions of years -- that separate us from our origins.
Let's play a game by pretending that every year only lasts a minute. It's 2004 today, so, by this game's metric, a "minute" ago it was 2003, and thirty-five minutes ago -- a little over half an hour ago -- Neil Armstrong, in 1969, set foot on the moon. In these terms, World War Two ended just a minute less than an hour ago. Three hours and forty-eight minutes ago -- in 1776 -- Thomas Jefferson declared independence for one nation while, essentially simultaneously in our terms, Adam Smith revealed an Invisible Hand that regulated commerce among all nations.
Each hour is comprised of sixty minutes, each day of twenty-four hours, for a total of 1440 minutes per day. So by our scheme, one "day" ago, 1440 minutes ago, an English King named Riothamus -- or Arthur -- had just recently failed to keep south-western England from plunging into barbarity in 564. Since Arthur's reign, the rest of "yesterday" saw the Dark Ages in Europe offset by the flowering of Islamic science and mathematics, the rebirth of Europe in the Renaissance, the exploration and colonization of most of the world by Europeans, and, an hour ago, the beginning of the atomic age. All this in one busy "day".
Even given the brevity of our metric, compressing one year of 525600 minutes into a single minute, it's still easily possible to recite the salient historical events on a year in the sixty seconds we are given, and even include our own particular history: "1903: first heavier-than-air flight; Grandma born." or "1943: Battle of Guadalcanal, Allied invasion of Italy, Warsaw Ghetto uprising against Nazis, Dad born."
But what's most interesting isn't those years, like 1943, crammed full of events, but the far greater number of years which our histories don't distinguish from one another. Two days ago, 48 hours ago, we come to the year 875 BC (since there's no year zero, 1 AD being preceded immediately by 1 BC). While I'm sure that a historian of that era could come with an interesting event of that year, the nearest I can come up with is the ascension of Osorkon II to the pharoah's throne in Egypt the next year in 874 BC. The remainder of day two will be pretty packed: Rome will be founded and will reign for most of the day, Christ will be born and crucified in a brief half-hour - but will give rise to over a "day"
As the grandchild of several Holocaust survivors, I hereby inform you that there is not a shred of cleverness in this sort of posery. It is merely trite and repulsive.
If my grandmother were addressing you, she wouldn't be doing it nearly as politely as I am, you spoiled twit.
With all due respect to your grandmother, most of the Holocaust survivors I've met have been polite and thoughtful persons (and one was a rather pervy old guy with a who always made it obvious which women he was staring up and down, at least in the class I took from him).
One grants your grandmother a certain deference because of her suffering -- just as I didn't question the apparent contradiction of the Holocaust survivor, a Polish Jew, who told me that he didn't blame the camp guards because "they were young men far from home, in the army, and ordered to be guards" -- but that he did blame the Poles, who "learned to throw stones at the Jews before they learned to walk". Absolving the Germans who were taught to hate but condemning the Poles who were taught the same hate was that survivor's way of understanding what had happened to him, and I was not about to suggest he believe otherwise.
But if my argument is wrong, it's wrong whether or not you're the grandchild of several Holocaust survivors. And if it's right, it's right regardless of your ancestry -- or mine.
Ideas are funny things: they don't become more or less valid depending on who says them. If a prisoner says the Earth moves, and the Pope says it doesn't, "Eppur si muove," -- "it still moves".
Being the grandchildren of survivors does give you a special responsibility to understand their pain, and to perhaps even to work to make sure the Shoah survivor's cry of "Never again" really does mean "never again".
But it doesn't give you any special claim to wisdom, and while it may have prompted you to study history, it doesn't necessarily give you any magical understanding of history, or any special moral vantage point from which to rule on the validity of the arguments of today. And to use your grandparents' suffering to make a rhetorical point -- to merely win an argument -- seems to me a tawdry way to use them.
Again, my reasoning is valid -- or invalid -- independent of who you are or even who I am. An argument stands -- or falls -- on its own, regardless of the personality, background, or ancestry or its proponents.
I remember reading somewhere a reason why some topics in bad movies, like really giant insects, apes, humans, or to the other direction, very tiny humans (think in Giant's Land) [are unrealistic] and [it] was related to body architecture and strength of materials.
You're thinking of the cube-square law: surface area increases according to the square of the length, but volume increases according to the cube of the length. As mass correlates with volume, thus the thin legs of insects suffice to carry their weight, but elephants need thick stumpy legs.
But this has a number of biological consequences: not only would miniature elephants be (proportionally) super-strong and giant insects unable to support their own weight, but cells in the greater volume of larger animals require food and oxygen.
In an organism with a small volume to surface area ratio, all the cells are close enough to the organism's periphery to obtain their food and oxygen more or less directly from the environment. In "large" organisms, the internal cells must be supplied by the organism itself, so lungs and circulatory systems are needed.
(Indeed, the lungs -- and the intestines -- are designed to pack a lot of surface area, surfaces at which gases can be exchanged or nutrients absorbed, into a small volume, by means of foldings and branchings.)
In "medium-sized" (but still microscopic) organisms, primitive "lungs" -- as simple as a large hollow internal area lined with cells -- and "circulatory systems" -- such as an undifferentiated internal "soup" of nutrients -- can suffice.
From this MSNBC article:
The boy has two copies. He could (absent an extremely unlikely second identical mutation on the other copy of the same gene) only get one from his mother. The other had to come from his father. The mutation is very rare. The mother has four male relatives with one copy of the mutation. The identity of the father has not been disclosed.
Anyone care to connect the dots?
I'm not pointing this out to be cruel or catty; I'm pointing it put because it's a good example of what's called the "founder's effect", a mechanism by which mutations -- by definition unique or nearly unique events -- became part of a general population.
Since this child has two copies of the mutation, not only are phenotypic effects greater -- he's even more muscular than his mother who has a single copy -- but all of his children will have at least a single copy, like his mother.
Were the conditions for founder's effect stronger -- that is, if he were a member of a smaller and more isolated population than modern Germany -- one can easily see how inbreeding could result in the mutation becoming common throughout that population.
When two persons with a single copy of the mutation breed, one-quarter of their offspring (on average) will have, like the child being studied, two copies of the mutated form (or allele) of the gene (and no copies of the gene's normal allele), one-quarter will have two copies of the normal allele, and one-half of the offspring will have, like the mother, one mutated allele and one "normal" allele.
But when a person with two copies breeds with a person with a single copy, one-half the offspring (on average) will have two copies of the mutation, and one-half will have one copy of it.
So if there's any preferential benefit to having the mutation -- if those with the mutation do better and so have more offspring -- and if there's the in-breeding of founder's effect, the mutation should become common in the founder population.
Indeed, it's likely that founder's effect, along with environmental conditions, explains why Germans and other Europeans, despite being descended from Africans 40,000 years ago, are white rather than black: being white is bad under the Africa sun, as, unprotected, it will lead to skin cancer and death by about age twelve. But being black in the weaker sunlight of Europe prevents the metabolization of vitamin D, leading to the weakened bones of rickets. In Africa, mutations that lead to less melanin production and whiteness also lead to death -- but in Europe it allowed a longer, better life.
But how did lessened melanin production and "whiteness" spread in Europe? Likely through founder's effect in small and isolated inbreeding populations -- but certainly not because of any "Aryan" superiority.
Now let's see the US government follow in Germany's footsteps and directly sponsor the development of some critical piece of open-source software.
What, Total, er, now, Terrorism Information Awareness, CAPPS II, and Echelon aren't enough for you?
Following in Germany's footsteps indeed.
Although I think Reichminister Ashcroft isn't so much following the footsteps of the current Bundesrepublik Deutschland as those of Das Dritte Reich -- that is Himmmler's and Heydrich's footsteps.
On The Making Of Cannon Fodder
And I thought Slashdot was finally editorializing about Bush's quagmire in Iraq.
the Australian Computer Museum... need[s] storage space... [and] some way to sort the collection.
While Bubble Sort is always a sentimental favorite, I suggest Heapsort for its O( n log n) runtime, even in the worst case, and, even more importantly given the Museum's lack of storage space, Heapsort's use of only a fixed amount of extra space in which to do the sort.
Also, there is a BSD'd Heapsort implemented using forklifts and standard warehouse storage crates.
There is no connection whatsoever between spyware and OSS, so this argument makes no sense at all.
There is no connection -- but the grandparent poster still makes good sense.
How's that again?
Simple: let's say that the government passes a law saying that spyware is illegal. One way to implement this would be to allow consumers to sue manufacturers of spyware, but we've already seen that the Federal CAN-SPAM Act explicitly disallows consumers to sue spammers. So let's assume that the anti-spyware legislation wouldn't work by allowing law suits.
Then the obvious way to implement the law would be a government board of "experts" who would examine software to determine if it was spyware, and ban software it found to be spyware. With me so far?
Now, we all know that big business has a lot more pull with legislatures and governments than, say, Slashdotters or Open Source programmers. That's because big business can afford to hire lobbyists and lawyers and make massive campaign contributions, while OSS coders are doing all they can to hold down a paying job while spending all their spare time on their Open Source project. Still with me?
So it pretty much goes without saying that the "experts" nominated to the reviewing committee would be drawn from Big Businesses -- like Microsoft, Oracle, etc. -- because those businesses would have the clout and influence to get government to nominate their people.
Now, since the board would be allowed to examine and potentially ban all software, do you think that the Microsoft-nominated members of the board would be inclined to ban Microsoft software? Or would they be inclined to very skeptically "test" Open Source competitors of Microsoft for being spyware?
Even of they didn't manage to ban any Open Source Software outright, they could hold it up for a long period of review, or impose testing costs and requirements that Open Source just can't afford. If all software releases required 90 days for the board's approval and a $90 check from the manufacturer to cover the testing, how many OSS products could come up with $90 to cover each version's release? What if the board "discovered" a need to raise the fee to $2000 -- an insignificant cost of doing business for a commercial software maker, it would probably break many of the projects on Sourceforge.
And at some point, the review board would be lobbied by a big software manufacturer to see a link between spyware and OSS.
The point is, when you give government a right to ban something -- or any other power -- you have to realize that it's big business that always is the best at using the government's rules to its ends, because it's big business that can afford to hire the most experts -- lawyers, lobbyists, and legislators -- to deal with government rules.
Ever notice that many big companies pay little or nothing in tax, but regular guys with regular jobs pay 25% to 50% or more (including Federal, State, FICA, etc)? That's because regular guys can't afford to spend millions on lobbyists to get billions in tax relief.
Big business will always use government rules to shut out competition, because that's what big businesses do. If you give government the right to ban software it considers spyware, big software will use it to call OSS spyware and ban Open Source Software.
So when does their 'right to free speech' end and my right to be left alone on my personal computer, in my private residence, begin?
No one is forcing you to install WhenU's software.
And one can imagine customers who might knowingly and willingly install WhenU's software because they perceive a benefit to doing so: Google's toolbar might be considered spyware -- it sends every url you browse to Google; but you receive the benefit of getting Google's page rank for the url, and Google gets the benefit of seeing who is browsing where.
Now, if the software tells you honestly that it's sending information about you to its creators, or sending ads to you, you have a remedy that requires no law, no governmental action: you can decide to uninstall the software. If the software spies or spams you without telling you honestly that it's doing so, you have a remedy in the form of existing laws against fraud or the like -- or possibly new laws that more narrowly target deceptive software.
But none of these remedies require intruding on First amendment rights. So why do we need an overly-broad law that does?\
First Amendment (and many would argue, Second Amendment) rights are the cornerstone of all other rights: the First Amendment exists to guarantee that you can stand up, get together like minded citizens, and explain why you think the government is not doing the right thing (and the Second, to have the mens to resist tyrannical government, but let's no digress). Since without that right, all other rights can be trampled without anyone having a chance to speak up about it, it's very very important to make sure that right isn't infringed even a little bit.
So in order to preserve that right from tampering, we -- as free men -- have to also put up with things -- Ku Klux Klan rallies, spam, WhenU's software -- that we may detest. Because the cure is far worse than the disease. Once we let government say there exists a class of things that can't be talked about, we risk that class be extended or used as a precedent to stop people from pointing out when the Emperor has no clothes.
I'm sorry for the inconvenience, but I'll take WhenU's spam over some Ministry of Truth's deciding what can't be said, any day.
Ok, somebody who understands materials science explain this to me, please: is the amorphous steel's hardness and strength greater because the non-amorphous, crystalline steel breaks easily along a row of atoms, as if along a perforation, while the amorphous steel, lacking such an orderly structure, lacks long runs of bonds along which breaks can be easily made?
Pictorially, is it like this?
Skype Technologies has just released a free beta version of their software for Linux.
Ok, but the important question is, does it use Ogg? I mean, Vorbis?
Babylon 5 Creator Pitches Trek
Somebody needed to pitch it.
It's been really stinking up the place for a while.
(I actually watched the last half of the "Search for Spock" movie last night. Man, that dog did not improve with age -- not to mention that Bones and Scotty looked pretty aged when it first came out.)
It's already well-documented that Yahoo moves Gmail invites into the Bulk Mail folder. I've personally confirmed the Hotmail and Yahoo blocking.
Much as I enjoy wearing my tinfoil hat, I think it can be dispensed with here.
Both Hotmail and Yahoo mail have been plagued with spam, and with users demanding they do something about that spam. Indeed, that's one reason people are interested in GMail.
Since almost all spam -- anything we think of spam, anyway -- arrives in mass quantities, and a logical way to reduce spam is simply to look for many addresses receiving the same email.
So a decent first cut at filtering bulk spam (and recall that both Yahoo and Hotmail use "bulk mail" folders) would be to take an MD5 sum of each email (not including the "To" address header lines, of course), stick the sum in hash table or other database, and increment a counter for each email with that MD5 sum. Once the counter reached some arbitrary large-ish number, you'd mark all copies of that emails spam.
Since the GMial invite varies slightly, it's clear that something fuzzier than an MD5 sum is being used, but the principle remains the same.
The first N GMail invites weren't marked as "bulk email"; after the counter threshold was reached, all the rest have been.
So all we've learned from this is that, even during this invite-only beta test, GMail must be sending out a hell of a lot of invites, and that, yes indeed, Hotmail and Yahoo customers demanded and got "bulk email" filtering.
So take off the tinfoil hats -- you'll have a real reason to wear them soon enough.
What kind of unknown terms?
Or as Secretary of Defense "Robert S." Rumsfeld put it at a Department of Defense news briefing:
I found that at Wikipedia, which is also a pretty good place to find out about known unknown terms, or to explain knowns known to you to others to whom those terms are known unknowns.
Judging from some of the moderations I see here, I suspect the Slashdot editors are sharing karma with some plants -- or mental vegetables, anyway.
Dear users who currently have mod points: of course by this I certainly do not mean you!
I kid, I keed.
Excuse my ignorace (sic), but surely nanotechnology would produce safer, lighter and cheaper (depending on the meaning..[.] I'm assuming consumer-side cost) everything?
Yeah, sure, safer, lighter, cheaper.
But the real questions all are about style. To wit, can I get one of these cars in a "gray goo" color?
Ok, its nice. This wallpaper blocks a lot of RF radation (sic). This means that you can not use WLAN, cellphones and terrestrial TV/Radio. Is this really what you want?
It's what defense contractors, the government, and businesses worried about industrial espionage by employees, want.
And given that Witchfinder General Ashcroft and Big Blunkett are in power, I'm sure it will not only sell well, but be heavily subsidized by government, and probably required on certain government contractors.
a new application for RF-absorbing materials: Wallpaper that blocks Wi-Fi.
Ok, I know it's not tin foil....
But the important question is, can I use it to make a hat?
Yes, holding down the Shift key to prevent the DRM from being auto-played and auto-installed does the trick.
And if you scroll down, you'll see literally dozens of comments from Slashdotters crowing about how easily they ripped this CD to MP3 or Ogg or ACC or whatever format suits them.
And what that means is the RIAA has won this round.
What do I mean by that? This CD is a trap, and everybody who is crowing about how easy it is to circumvent its copy-protection has fallen into the trap.
The trap consists of two parts: one, as Mr. Roadkill (731328) explains here, because circumvention is so easy there will not be any en masse returns of this CD. BMG will declare that the public doesn't mind copy-protection because there will be few complaints or returns, and its massive sales given the publicity BMG is giving to this release. And with that they've slipped in the thin edge of the wedge, begun accustomizing us to copy-protection.
But more than just copy-protection: as The-Bus (138060) demonstrates by copying the entire CD EULA, BMG will also
They're not just sipping in the DRM keys; they're slipping in a whole different legal interpretation in which to understand CDS, an interpretation that emphasizes licensing instead of purchasing.
And that's just the first part of the trap.
The second part of the trap is even more insidious: BMG has purposely used a trivially simple and already well known to be easily circumvented copy-protection in order to encourage you to circumvent it.
Why would BMG do that? So they can point out all the happy, crowing, boasting circumventors to the Congress, call all the people holding down a Shift key "hackers" (indeed SunnCom's already said they don't expect this to be "unhackable"), and thus justify legislation to made DRM mandatory. "See what those hackers did, Senator? They hack our state-of-the-art copy-protection, those evil wizarsds! That's why we must make a hardware copyright bit mandatory on all new CD and CD-ROM players!"
Every time you think you've scored a point by managing to rip this CD, all you've done is to further play yourself -- and you liberties -- into the hands of BMG and the RIAA. You're given them a precedents to point to and a spurious "threat" to whine to Congress about. Who's really winning here?
The anger will come soon...
I hope you're right.
But I doubt it. Meaning no disrespect to anyone by my use of dialect, I think it's more a case of "Oh massa, dem new chains is so shiny, I's be heppy to fassin dem ons me an' git right in yo boat, suh".
The difference, of course, is that Africans, proud of their freedoms, didn't line up willingly to be slaves in hopes of wearing shiny bonds -- but we modern Americans have become so neglectful of our liberties that we'll give them up for the next boy band's CD or the facile assurance that the next intrusive government surveillance program really will finally guarantee our safety.
Like Esau in the Bible, we willingly give up our birthright of liberty for a mess of pottage -- for Consumerism's shiny trinkets and the bland assurances of the Fascists who whip up our fears and then promise to protect us from our freedoms.
If this CD stays at the top of the charts, expect all new CDs to be copy-protected -- but worse than the copy-protection will be that we will take for granted that copy-protection legitimately should be there. The Corporation's triumph isn't in getting you to buy a copy-protected CD or a particular kind of DRM; it's in getting you to accept as natural and legitimate and right that by buying a CD or a shrink-wrapped software title you now must forever afterward ask the permission of the seller to use what you have honestly purchased, that you must acquiesce to the seller forever setting the rules and conditions under which you can use what you have bought.
In short, you've been changed from a purchaser of a good to a renter of a license and have consented to be taxed and regulated in perpetuity for the privilege of renting.
Thomas Jefferson dreamt for his country a Republic of proudly independent freeholders, each man the owner of his Real Estate; George Washington, drawing on the Bible's prophet Micah, foresaw an America where "everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid". Instead we're turning into a rabble of peasants and share-croppers slaving for, and kowtowing to, the modern day Lords of Corporatism. And we put on our chains so willingly!
The confusing part is that I also subscribe to Yahoo's business email (don't ask why I do both... It's either complicated, or I'm stupid or both) Anyway, their business mail, which goes for $10 per month, is still only getting 25MB. Note, this is 1/4 the space of what the free email people get and, well, a whole, whole lot less than the mail plus people, but at a much higher price.
Yahoo's not pricing what's "fair", they're pricing what the market can bear.
They've figured (probably correctly) that business users can and will pay more -- and probably also would find it more disruptive and expensive, in terms of lost business --, to change addresses.
Since businesses can, and will, and have more to lose if they won't, pay more, Yahoo is more than willing to charge business users more.