Well, there are very few cases, but... I installed a (software) key logger on my own box in order to get the raw data needed to figure out my personal letter frequency in typing -- the standard English frequency wouldn't apply, as I do a lot of C and C++ coding. (How often do you see semi-colons, let alone curly braces, in standard English writing?)
A nice side benefit is that I could review the key log -- to see if anyone else had been using my computer.
Does anybody know of a program that'll let me set up a playlist at home and then remotely control it from school? Streaming MP3s on demand, maybe?
I'm not sue your school will appreciate the bandwidth costs of 128kbps or more for several hours a day.
A better solution might be a hard-disk based mp3 player; until my Archos crapped out on me (frightfully bad Quality Assurance from Archos) I'd had 55 Gigabytes of music literally in my hand.
For now I'm making do with a Zaurus and a 512 Megabyte SD card -- which is still quite a bit larger than your school's entire hard drive --, and lets me carry around three Gilbert & Sullivan operas, a Sondheim compilation album, and half a dozen renditions of the (former) Soviet National Anthem and the Internationale -- and yes, my musical tastes would raise questions about my heterosexuality were it not for my terrible fashion sense.
Should you insist on a remote controlled solution, you can do what I do with the Zaurus when it's within range of my home Wifi: I use XMMS to either stream shoutcast stations off the 'net, or a Samba into my home PC and play the 55 GBs of music I've (all legally) collected.
Unless you're insistent on allowing multiple users -- and your home PC probably doesn't have that much uploading bandwidth anyway -- Samba's a simple and elegant solution.
I'll say this much, as an American I'm gratified to watch Blunkett's antics, if only because he proves that even Britain's Labour Party can produce a Fascist to rival our Reichsminister Ashcroft -- and even more ironically, one who's literally blind.
When I was a kid, I used to mock my leftist acquaintances (hi Anne!) for their devotion to the Soviet Union despite the Soviet Union's abysmal record on human rights and liberties as detailed, among many other places, in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. While I also derided Joe McCarthy and his ilk, little did I guess that a Republican administration would start off the twenty-first century with a scramble to enact laws as threatening to liberty as the Soviets'.
How about protecting the Bill of Rights and the Twin Towers first, and worry about denying gays their pursuit of happiness as part of a cheap political appeal to your Fundamentalist base after you've explained where those WMDs got to?
Mr. President, there are more than 500 young American service men and servicewomen who fought and died in Iraq who won't ever be able to laugh at any jokes again. They went to Iraq because they believed your word about the WMDs, Mr. President. And to you safely back in Washington, it's all a joke, Mr. President.
This administration may be laughable, but it's not funny anymore.
Assuming only a book a week, one could read 500 in a little less than ten years.
And frankly, a book a week is a bit low; I'd say double that is probably my average speed, and I'd expect higher numbers for persons still in school.
Admittedly, the two books I've read this week were both books I'd read before, and I am inclined to re-read old favorites.
Still, I'm sure that I own at least 500 books -- and while noting a lot of that is paperback fiction, I'd also guess at least a fifth is non-fiction, and that's without including technical and reference books.
A quick, unrepresentative sample from the book-shelf nearest to me: 3 fiction 1 diary (1 re-read) 1 self-help (not read) 1 textbook 6 social history, (4 partially read ), 1 re-read 2 reference 6 technical ____
20 total on that self, which is not double layered, and is unrepresentative in that it contains no non-fiction science (as I'm not counting sociology as science per se).
4-6 shelves per bookshelf (most double layered), five bookcases plus one self constructed book-rack plus several boxes. Conservatively, and without double layering, I own at least 400 books and probably double that.
The way things are going it will be more like Starship Troopers...
["]Join your local Neighbor Watch program! Want to learn more?["]
TheOnePath (757382), I am sure there's something you hold dear to your heart.
Perhaps it's Jesus Christ, maybe it's The Hobbit, perhaps it's a particular tentacle-rape hentai scene. But whatever it is, you value it, you treasure it, it hold a deep and abiding meaning for you.
I have been a fan of Robert Heinlein all my life.
Robert Heinlein wrote the novel Starship Troopers, and while interpretation of the novel remains controversial -- in particular, the continuing debate over the form of government featured in the novel, its moral-philosophic underpinnings, and what, if anything, it reveals about Robert Heinlein -- the novel, as written broaches these questions honestly and discusses them fairly and with some thoroughness for what is, after all, a novel.
While the society in the novel grants the franchise -- that is, voting rights-- only to those who have completed a term of civil or military service, and while it features rather harsh corporal punishment for crimes, at no point does Heinlein claim it to feature Big Brother-style surveillance or and mandatory militarism beyond high-school classes in "Moral Philosophy". Indeed, at the outset of the novel, Heinlein makes it clear that the main character's family has for several generations done quite well by itself without any of its members joining the military or voting.
The film Starship Troopers, on the other hand, rips off some superficial aspects of the novel, ignores Heinlein's honest philosophical questions about freedom and responsibility in a civil society, and recasts the characters and the society depicted -- and by extension, Mr. Heinlein -- as purely Fascistic, warmed-over cardboard-cutout sadistic Nazis.
To put it more succinctly: the film is an abominable piece of shit which is wholly unlike the novel and which besmirches the reputation of the novel's author.
The film is neither faithful to the original novel, nor in any way fair to Robert Heinlein or his beliefs.
Please keep in mind, the next time that you want to refer to Paul Verhoeven's bastardized abortion of a film version of Starship Troopers as the real article, that to real fans of Robert Heinlein that is as offensive as would be as would be an "adaptation" of Jesus's life in which Jesus crucifies small animals while shooting heroin and bullying children, or an "adaptation" of The Hobbit in which Gandalf buggers Bilbo and the dwarves join in on it to make it a gang-rape.
Well, that is what the article says, but the proof of concept page also works in IE 6.0 (6.0.2800.1106)
As it happens, provoked by receiving he Netsky virus embedded in an html email in Outlook that attempted to launch via an iframe, I happened to download Spybot Search and Destroy.
Using Spybot Search & Destroy, I found out about another Grey Magic discovered vulnerability, Executing arbitrary commands without Active Scripting or ActiveX. I also discovered that I'd apparently had an Alexa phone-home browser extension installed as a "Browser Helper Object" in IE, god knows for how long.
I've been using Mozilla FireWhatever for quite sometime, eschewing Internet Explorer except for those sites that don't work with IE or for testing my own sites in IE. But clearly, even a careful user with an up-to-date copy of IE and a firewall, isn't safe, principally because rather than concentrate on security and getting what they already have working securely, Microsoft prefers to pile on ever-accumulating layers of non-essential crap like HTML-TIME.
I've no idea why someone thought that HTML-TIME, ostensibly for adding "timing and media synchronization support" to HTMl, required the ability to arbitrarily re-write pages. But clearly it's nothing that's desirable in an email.
My course is clear at this point: after repeated attempts, Microsoft still can't get it right, still cannot write a browser that's anywhere near secure. Crap like "HTML + TIME" is NOT worth the risks it brings with it -- especially when the risks are borne by the end-user in order to make life easier for (generally commercial) web site developers. Boycott IE, and boycott sites that only work in IE -- even if -- especially if, they use Microsoft extensions like "HTML + TIME".
try http://www.emusic.com, which offers 40 songs for $10 a month.
If you're already an emusic.com customer, and you find emusic.com's "My Collection" page to be a slow, tedious, pain in the ass, and you'd prefer to download to your local harddrive an HTML page showing every album you've downloaded from emusic.com with links back to each album page at emusic.com, get this free program for Windows, Mac, or linux: Get Collection.
Am I the only one not busting a nut at the chance of paying $0.99 to download one song?
Precisely!
The problem is the same one that kept me -- a fan of classical music -- from ever making many impulse buys of classical music in record stores.
It's difficult to tell a good CD from a bad CD without first listening to it.
With Indie music, the problem is compounded: a bad recording of Bach's The Goldberg Variations is still a recording of Bach's The Goldberg Variations. A bad recording of a bad Indie composition called "Crumpetty Crumpetty Bug-a Lug-a Bomf" is an irredeemable waste of 99 cents.
Back when eMusic.com allowed unlimited downloads, this wasn't a problem: I could try out an artist I'd never heard of, and if on listening I didn't like his work, I was out nothing more than the time to download that album. Now that eMusic.com limits me to 40 tracks per month, I'm stuck with the same problem as in the record store: how do I apportion my limited resources without getting burnt?
The safe answer to this quandary is to only purchase music that you know well, or is popular, to some definition of popular. "Popular among listeners of folk music" doesn't result in my getting pablum as bad as "popular among 15 year-old girls", but using either definition of popular means that newer, less knowm and Indie artists won't even be considered for purchase.
The other answer is to spend a lot of time reading reviews, asking advice of other listeners, and otherwise doing research; the problem is that that's costly, in terms of time, too. How much, exactly, is getting good Indie music supposed to be worth to me?
So when I see stuff like Audio Lunchbox or MagnaTunes, well, I like the idea but I'm inclined not to part with my money, for fear of buying bad music. Since I already know that anything by Bob Dylan or Pete Seeger or Wilhelm Furtwangler will be good, my inclination is to spend my money on CDs by these well-known artists.
As a consequence, I'll avoid the bad Indie music but I'll also miss the good Indie music.
But I'd be far more willing, as the parent poster suggests, to take a risk on Indie music if the risk were smaller: at $2.00 per album I'd be able to get five albums for $10.00, as opposed to one for $9.99. If the odds are that one of those five would be good, then I'd have the same number of good albums for the same price: one good album for ten bucks.
And having found a good album, I'd be willing to pay somewhat more for another album by that same artist -- though I still probably wouldn't be willing to pay what I'd pay for Bob Dylan.
I don't need anything too fancy, just an added layer of protection from the multitude of various people who come in and out of my place of business everyday.
Really fucking big neodynium magnet installed in the door frame of the entrance to your office.
(Shamelessly stolen from Cryptonomicon. I guess Neal Stephenson should have used a bigger magnet.)
Right here on this Diebold machine connected directly to the Republican National Committee!
(Small print: Please note that we consider voting Democrat to be an indication of possible connections to terrorism, under the CAPPS II protocol! In the interest of Halliburton, we mean, National Security, we will filter out 10% of Democrat votes! Please enjoy your Faux Democracy!)
Curunir_wolf (588405) writes, "Before I get modded as a troll, please think about this for a minute. Is a 60 year old white female EXACTLY AS LIKELY to be a suicide bomber looking to blow up a few American White Devils as a 24 year old Saudi Arabian of Palistinean (sic) lineage?"
Well, no, not exactly as likely.
But, well, image the following:
"Dear Grandma Curunir_wolf, we, the Islamist Fundamentalist Jihad, are holding your grandchildren Bobby and Betty. We plan to torture them to death -- unless you act now!
"To save your grandchildren, you must book a flight on American Airlines Flight 99 to Rome, taking the enclosed package with you in your carry-on luggage. Once on board, you will be approached by Achmed Alluhu Akbar, to whom you will give the package.
"When we have confirmed that Flight 99 has crashed into St. Peter's Basilica and incinerated the Pope, your grandchildren will be released unharmed.
"We are confident that a grandmother of your age, in the twilight of her life, will make this sacrifice to prevent the slow and painful deaths of your grandchildren."
As temperatures approach 120F and more this summer, I'm putting more aside for this project and at this point am not concerned with any but simple methods of using up 'excess' energy.
Don't most state regulatory bodies require that electrical utilities purchase any power that a customer generates?
Just feed your excess into the power grid, and let it offset the power you buy from the utility. Pay the difference on your lower utility bill.
Question: Would anyone mind spending $2/month extra for an ISP to implement manditory (sic) WORM/Virus filters? If you want to play with them, use your LAN! This would solve all the worlds hunger problems!!!
Well, yes, I would.
I run Windows 2000 and, of all things, Outlook for an email client (as soon as Thunderbird gets a decent editor, I'll switch).
However, I've gotten a virus precisely once, when I foolishly ran some Perl source before reading it.
I have a software firewall (free as in beer), I have virus checker (free as in beer), I have Proxomitron (free as in beer) to filter HTML, and Outlook is allowed only to connect to my mailserver, not to anywhere else.
I also keep up with Microsoft's patches.
Sure, I get plenty of viruses sent to me via email -- but I don't run those various.pifs,.scrs,.exes. The viruses just end up as more fodder for SpamBayes.
Why should I pay an extra $2 for someone else's stupidity? Especially when an ISP filter is bound to turn into either a potential threat to privacy -- by examining my downloads and doing traffic analysis on my activities -- or disruptive port blocking that prevents me from adding to my security by using stuff like VPN or ssh.
Clean out your own stable, lock your own barn door, and don't ask me to pay extra for you to do it.
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Better start practicing singing a song in your head to block out the thought police
Maybe I'm getting old, but I think it's more likely that under the current administration, I just can't enjoy the innocent thrill of thinking, "Wow, what coll technology!"
Instead my first thought is, "How soon until that theocrat Ashcroft starts using this to interrogate dissidents?"
This is perfect for rooting out hidden Muslims -- we're at war, you know --, closeted homosexuals -- Bush's newest appointee has just ruled that homosexual Federal employees can be fired --, and I wonder how soon it will be used to expose athiests and crypto-Catholics at Saint John the Intolerant's regular Department of Justice prayer breakfasts.
I'm sorry, but I just can't find much glee in this announcement, given the current officially encouraged climate of fear and hostility toward civil liberties.
Mod parent up -- and start practicing his song: it may soon be the only Fifth Amedment protection you'll have left.
t seems like these Diebold systems have all sorts of features like smart cards and locks that make them look secure, but when you actually kick the tires you realize things are not as secure as they should be.
This crap is supposed to save us from another Florida chad-count? Or have we just decided that democracy isn't really important enought to make secure?
Hell of a weird-ass place to base a server (on an ADSL line on Maui), when the Project Gutenberg 2 guy is registered as being in either North Carolina (billing whois) or Alaska (admin whois). I'll bet they're regretting it in retrospect, given the slashdotting the thing is getting now.
According to the article linked to the blurb.linked to by Slashdot:
the person running PG 2 is John Guagliardo, a past president of the Hawaii Library Association, who, at one point, has been described as having invented "the idea of eBooks and eLibraries on his own, and then invited Project Gutenberg founder, Michael Hart, to speak at several of the HLA Annual Conferences, where they met in person."
Maui, of course, is an island and a county in Hawaii.
This won't be any problem at all since the Project Gutenberg folks remembered to register their trademark.
The "Project Gutenburg folks" didn't register the trademark.
You and three mods didn't read the linked article, which is actually a blurb that quotes the real article, to wit (emphasis mine):
"Over the weekend a Project Gutenberg volunteer list was buzzing with all kinds of questions for
PG founder Michael Hart, who personally owns the Project Gutenberg trademark."
Or, for those who don't read C++: I prefer an official artwork that identifies an official build, because that makes it easier for me to avoid non-standard and possibly suborned copies.
And yes, someone will argue, "trojan writers would just steal the artwork too, only the md5sum is proof!", and while that's true, let's also keep in mind there are Trojan writers who try scrupulously to stay within the law and would be deterred from violating copyright, while at the same time showing a complete lack of ethics, such as Gator/Claria and Bonzi Buddy.
the Foundation announced that the new Firefox artwork is not open-source and can only be used in official builds or those sanctioned by the Foundation - this has led to debates about whether Firefox is free enough to be included in the Debian Linux distribution."
Will the Debian Linux distribution refuse all Open Source Software that also says, "you can re-compile this software, and even add your own modifications, but you can't represent your own compilations or modifications as official builds"?
Because that's all that reserving the artwork does: the artwork is an imprimatur, a symbol essentially equivalent to a signature, that identifies a build as official.
I've made some of my code open source, but I've never said that people could remove my name from the copyright, or conversely, put my name on their own work. If my signature were a Chinese ideogram, or a picture of fox wrapped around a globe, I wouldn't let anyone else use that.
If the Debian Foundation decides that Firefox isn't "free enough", can I produce my own Linux distribution and call it "Debian Linux"?
Slashdot Mirror
This is the only posting in this discussion worthy of +1 informative.
:->)
Mod parent +N meta-informative!!!
(Or -N, yet another redundant self-referential Cretan paradox.
I can't think of anything that's terribly legal
Well, there are very few cases, but... I installed a (software) key logger on my own box in order to get the raw data needed to figure out my personal letter frequency in typing -- the standard English frequency wouldn't apply, as I do a lot of C and C++ coding. (How often do you see semi-colons, let alone curly braces, in standard English writing?)
A nice side benefit is that I could review the key log -- to see if anyone else had been using my computer.
Does anybody know of a program that'll let me set up a playlist at home and then remotely control it from school? Streaming MP3s on demand, maybe?
I'm not sue your school will appreciate the bandwidth costs of 128kbps or more for several hours a day.
A better solution might be a hard-disk based mp3 player; until my Archos crapped out on me (frightfully bad Quality Assurance from Archos) I'd had 55 Gigabytes of music literally in my hand.
For now I'm making do with a Zaurus and a 512 Megabyte SD card -- which is still quite a bit larger than your school's entire hard drive --, and lets me carry around three Gilbert & Sullivan operas, a Sondheim compilation album, and half a dozen renditions of the (former) Soviet National Anthem and the Internationale -- and yes, my musical tastes would raise questions about my heterosexuality were it not for my terrible fashion sense.
Should you insist on a remote controlled solution, you can do what I do with the Zaurus when it's within range of my home Wifi: I use XMMS to either stream shoutcast stations off the 'net, or a Samba into my home PC and play the 55 GBs of music I've (all legally) collected.
Unless you're insistent on allowing multiple users -- and your home PC probably doesn't have that much uploading bandwidth anyway -- Samba's a simple and elegant solution.
Interestingly, in the UK we can now be extradited on a whim by the US, thanks to laws signed in this year by the lovely David Blunkett.
That's because Blunkett wants to ensure that, in the cases of wrongful conviction, it's the U.S. and not the U.K. that will have to sue the innocent men to pay for their food and lodgings while wrongfully held in prison.
I'll say this much, as an American I'm gratified to watch Blunkett's antics, if only because he proves that even Britain's Labour Party can produce a Fascist to rival our Reichsminister Ashcroft -- and even more ironically, one who's literally blind.
That's because we don't need to. The U.S. is perfectly capable of
When I was a kid, I used to mock my leftist acquaintances (hi Anne!) for their devotion to the Soviet Union despite the Soviet Union's abysmal record on human rights and liberties as detailed, among many other places, in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago . While I also derided Joe McCarthy and his ilk, little did I guess that a Republican administration would start off the twenty-first century with a scramble to enact laws as threatening to liberty as the Soviets'.
Under current American law, you can actually get ten years in Federal prison -- for editing a book written in country under U.S. embargo. That's right: editing a book written by a Iranian or a Cuba or a Syrian or a North Korean -- or even adding illustrations to such a book -- is now a criminal offense in this the "land of the free and home of the brave".
And to and insult to injury, the same administration that is trampling our traditional liberties
How about protecting the Bill of Rights and the Twin Towers first, and worry about denying gays their pursuit of happiness as part of a cheap political appeal to your Fundamentalist base after you've explained where those WMDs got to?
Oh, I nearly forgot: on Wednesday, President Bush used the occasion of a media dinner to joke about not finding the "Weapons of Mass Destruction" that were his excuse for going to war.
Mr. President, there are more than 500 young American service men and servicewomen who fought and died in Iraq who won't ever be able to laugh at any jokes again. They went to Iraq because they believed your word about the WMDs, Mr. President. And to you safely back in Washington, it's all a joke, Mr. President.
This administration may be laughable, but it's not funny anymore.
Have most people even read 500 books?
Assuming only a book a week, one could read 500 in a little less than ten years.
And frankly, a book a week is a bit low; I'd say double that is probably my average speed, and I'd expect higher numbers for persons still in school.
Admittedly, the two books I've read this week were both books I'd read before, and I am inclined to re-read old favorites.
Still, I'm sure that I own at least 500 books -- and while noting a lot of that is paperback fiction, I'd also guess at least a fifth is non-fiction, and that's without including technical and reference books.
A quick, unrepresentative sample from the book-shelf nearest to me:
3 fiction
1 diary (1 re-read)
1 self-help (not read)
1 textbook
6 social history, (4 partially read ), 1 re-read
2 reference
6 technical
____
20 total on that self, which is not double layered, and is unrepresentative in that it contains no non-fiction science (as I'm not counting sociology as science per se).
4-6 shelves per bookshelf (most double layered), five bookcases plus one self constructed book-rack plus several boxes. Conservatively, and without double layering, I own at least 400 books and probably double that.
I had 10,000 assholes on my screen and so many being launched I couldn't stop them.
Welcome to Slashdot.
The way things are going it will be more like Starship Troopers...
["]Join your local Neighbor Watch program!
Want to learn more?["]
TheOnePath (757382), I am sure there's something you hold dear to your heart.
Perhaps it's Jesus Christ, maybe it's The Hobbit, perhaps it's a particular tentacle-rape hentai scene. But whatever it is, you value it, you treasure it, it hold a deep and abiding meaning for you.
I have been a fan of Robert Heinlein all my life.
Robert Heinlein wrote the novel Starship Troopers, and while interpretation of the novel remains controversial -- in particular, the continuing debate over the form of government featured in the novel, its moral-philosophic underpinnings, and what, if anything, it reveals about Robert Heinlein -- the novel, as written broaches these questions honestly and discusses them fairly and with some thoroughness for what is, after all, a novel.
While the society in the novel grants the franchise -- that is, voting rights-- only to those who have completed a term of civil or military service, and while it features rather harsh corporal punishment for crimes, at no point does Heinlein claim it to feature Big Brother-style surveillance or and mandatory militarism beyond high-school classes in "Moral Philosophy". Indeed, at the outset of the novel, Heinlein makes it clear that the main character's family has for several generations done quite well by itself without any of its members joining the military or voting.
The film Starship Troopers, on the other hand, rips off some superficial aspects of the novel, ignores Heinlein's honest philosophical questions about freedom and responsibility in a civil society, and recasts the characters and the society depicted -- and by extension, Mr. Heinlein -- as purely Fascistic, warmed-over cardboard-cutout sadistic Nazis.
To put it more succinctly: the film is an abominable piece of shit which is wholly unlike the novel and which besmirches the reputation of the novel's author.
The film is neither faithful to the original novel, nor in any way fair to Robert Heinlein or his beliefs.
Please keep in mind, the next time that you want to refer to Paul Verhoeven's bastardized abortion of a film version of Starship Troopers as the real article, that to real fans of Robert Heinlein that is as offensive as would be as would be an "adaptation" of Jesus's life in which Jesus crucifies small animals while shooting heroin and bullying children, or an "adaptation" of The Hobbit in which Gandalf buggers Bilbo and the dwarves join in on it to make it a gang-rape.
only works in IE5 though...
.
Well, that is what the article says, but the proof of concept page also works in IE 6.0 (6.0.2800.1106)
As it happens, provoked by receiving he Netsky virus embedded in an html email in Outlook that attempted to launch via an iframe, I happened to download Spybot Search and Destroy.
Using Spybot Search & Destroy, I found out about another Grey Magic discovered vulnerability, Executing arbitrary commands without Active Scripting or ActiveX. I also discovered that I'd apparently had an Alexa phone-home browser extension installed as a "Browser Helper Object" in IE, god knows for how long.
I've been using Mozilla FireWhatever for quite sometime, eschewing Internet Explorer except for those sites that don't work with IE or for testing my own sites in IE. But clearly, even a careful user with an up-to-date copy of IE and a firewall, isn't safe, principally because rather than concentrate on security and getting what they already have working securely, Microsoft prefers to pile on ever-accumulating layers of non-essential crap like HTML-TIME
I've no idea why someone thought that HTML-TIME, ostensibly for adding "timing and media synchronization support" to HTMl, required the ability to arbitrarily re-write pages. But clearly it's nothing that's desirable in an email.
My course is clear at this point: after repeated attempts, Microsoft still can't get it right, still cannot write a browser that's anywhere near secure. Crap like "HTML + TIME" is NOT worth the risks it brings with it -- especially when the risks are borne by the end-user in order to make life easier for (generally commercial) web site developers. Boycott IE, and boycott sites that only work in IE -- even if -- especially if, they use Microsoft extensions like "HTML + TIME".
try http://www.emusic.com, which offers 40 songs for $10 a month.
If you're already an emusic.com customer, and you find emusic.com's "My Collection" page to be a slow, tedious, pain in the ass, and you'd prefer to download to your local harddrive an HTML page showing every album you've downloaded from emusic.com with links back to each album page at emusic.com, get this free program for Windows, Mac, or linux:
Get Collection.
Am I the only one not busting a nut at the chance of paying $0.99 to download one song?
Precisely!
The problem is the same one that kept me -- a fan of classical music -- from ever making many impulse buys of classical music in record stores.
It's difficult to tell a good CD from a bad CD without first listening to it.
With Indie music, the problem is compounded: a bad recording of Bach's The Goldberg Variations is still a recording of Bach's The Goldberg Variations. A bad recording of a bad Indie composition called "Crumpetty Crumpetty Bug-a Lug-a Bomf" is an irredeemable waste of 99 cents.
Back when eMusic.com allowed unlimited downloads, this wasn't a problem: I could try out an artist I'd never heard of, and if on listening I didn't like his work, I was out nothing more than the time to download that album. Now that eMusic.com limits me to 40 tracks per month, I'm stuck with the same problem as in the record store: how do I apportion my limited resources without getting burnt?
The safe answer to this quandary is to only purchase music that you know well, or is popular, to some definition of popular. "Popular among listeners of folk music" doesn't result in my getting pablum as bad as "popular among 15 year-old girls", but using either definition of popular means that newer, less knowm and Indie artists won't even be considered for purchase.
The other answer is to spend a lot of time reading reviews, asking advice of other listeners, and otherwise doing research; the problem is that that's costly, in terms of time, too. How much, exactly, is getting good Indie music supposed to be worth to me?
So when I see stuff like Audio Lunchbox or MagnaTunes, well, I like the idea but I'm inclined not to part with my money, for fear of buying bad music. Since I already know that anything by Bob Dylan or Pete Seeger or Wilhelm Furtwangler will be good, my inclination is to spend my money on CDs by these well-known artists.
As a consequence, I'll avoid the bad Indie music but I'll also miss the good Indie music.
But I'd be far more willing, as the parent poster suggests, to take a risk on Indie music if the risk were smaller: at $2.00 per album I'd be able to get five albums for $10.00, as opposed to one for $9.99. If the odds are that one of those five would be good, then I'd have the same number of good albums for the same price: one good album for ten bucks.
And having found a good album, I'd be willing to pay somewhat more for another album by that same artist -- though I still probably wouldn't be willing to pay what I'd pay for Bob Dylan.
I don't need anything too fancy, just an added layer of protection from the multitude of various people who come in and out of my place of business everyday.
Really fucking big neodynium magnet installed in the door frame of the entrance to your office.
(Shamelessly stolen from Cryptonomicon. I guess Neal Stephenson should have used a bigger magnet.)
You lost the freedom for which you stand....
Not true.
You can vote.
Right here on this Diebold machine connected directly to the Republican National Committee!
(Small print: Please note that we consider voting Democrat to be an indication of possible connections to terrorism, under the CAPPS II protocol! In the interest of Halliburton, we mean, National Security, we will filter out 10% of Democrat votes! Please enjoy your Faux Democracy!)
Curunir_wolf (588405) writes, "Before I get modded as a troll, please think about this for a minute. Is a 60 year old white female EXACTLY AS LIKELY to be a suicide bomber looking to blow up a few American White Devils as a 24 year old Saudi Arabian of Palistinean (sic) lineage?"
Well, no, not exactly as likely.
But, well, image the following:
"Dear Grandma Curunir_wolf, we, the Islamist Fundamentalist Jihad, are holding your grandchildren Bobby and Betty. We plan to torture them to death -- unless you act now!
"To save your grandchildren, you must book a flight on American Airlines Flight 99 to Rome, taking the enclosed package with you in your carry-on luggage. Once on board, you will be approached by Achmed Alluhu Akbar, to whom you will give the package.
"When we have confirmed that Flight 99 has crashed into St. Peter's Basilica and incinerated the Pope, your grandchildren will be released unharmed.
"We are confident that a grandmother of your age, in the twilight of her life, will make this sacrifice to prevent the slow and painful deaths of your grandchildren."
What the world really needs is a cheap, non-bulky rechargable battery.... Conspiracy theories, anyone?
I suggest we use people as batteries and energy sources.
We can keep them placid by simulating a whole universe for them to "experience".
We just have to make sure they don't take the red pill.
As temperatures approach 120F and more this summer, I'm putting more aside for this project and at this point am not concerned with any but simple methods of using up 'excess' energy.
Don't most state regulatory bodies require that electrical utilities purchase any power that a customer generates?
Just feed your excess into the power grid, and let it offset the power you buy from the utility. Pay the difference on your lower utility bill.
Question:
.pifs, .scrs, .exes. The viruses just end up as more fodder for SpamBayes.
Would anyone mind spending $2/month extra for an ISP to implement manditory (sic) WORM/Virus filters? If you want to play with them, use your LAN! This would solve all the worlds hunger problems!!!
Well, yes, I would.
I run Windows 2000 and, of all things, Outlook for an email client (as soon as Thunderbird gets a decent editor, I'll switch).
However, I've gotten a virus precisely once, when I foolishly ran some Perl source before reading it.
I have a software firewall (free as in beer), I have virus checker (free as in beer), I have Proxomitron (free as in beer) to filter HTML, and Outlook is allowed only to connect to my mailserver, not to anywhere else.
I also keep up with Microsoft's patches.
Sure, I get plenty of viruses sent to me via email -- but I don't run those various
Why should I pay an extra $2 for someone else's stupidity? Especially when an ISP filter is bound to turn into either a potential threat to privacy -- by examining my downloads and doing traffic analysis on my activities -- or disruptive port blocking that prevents me from adding to my security by using stuff like VPN or ssh.
Clean out your own stable, lock your own barn door, and don't ask me to pay extra for you to do it.
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Better start practicing singing a song in your head to block out the thought police
Maybe I'm getting old, but I think it's more likely that under the current administration, I just can't enjoy the innocent thrill of thinking, "Wow, what coll technology!"
Instead my first thought is, "How soon until that theocrat Ashcroft starts using this to interrogate dissidents?"
This is perfect for rooting out hidden Muslims -- we're at war, you know --, closeted homosexuals -- Bush's newest appointee has just ruled that homosexual Federal employees can be fired --, and I wonder how soon it will be used to expose athiests and crypto-Catholics at Saint John the Intolerant's regular Department of Justice prayer breakfasts.
I'm sorry, but I just can't find much glee in this announcement, given the current officially encouraged climate of fear and hostility toward civil liberties.
Mod parent up -- and start practicing his song: it may soon be the only Fifth Amedment protection you'll have left.
t seems like these Diebold systems have all sorts of features like smart cards and locks that make them look secure, but when you actually kick the tires you realize things are not as secure as they should be.
Seems like Diebold's Automatic Teller Machines (ATMs) are no more secure. Until I'd clicked that link, I'd never seen the Windows Media Player playing on an ATM.
This crap is supposed to save us from another Florida chad-count? Or have we just decided that democracy isn't really important enought to make secure?
According to the article linked to the blurb
Maui, of course, is an island and a county in Hawaii.
The "Project Gutenburg folks" didn't register the trademark.
You and three mods didn't read the linked article, which is actually a blurb that quotes the real article, to wit (emphasis mine):
Of course you have to worry about official builds, so that you don't get this build:Or, for those who don't read C++: I prefer an official artwork that identifies an official build, because that makes it easier for me to avoid non-standard and possibly suborned copies.
And yes, someone will argue, "trojan writers would just steal the artwork too, only the md5sum is proof!", and while that's true, let's also keep in mind there are Trojan writers who try scrupulously to stay within the law and would be deterred from violating copyright, while at the same time showing a complete lack of ethics, such as Gator/Claria and Bonzi Buddy.
the Foundation announced that the new Firefox artwork is not open-source and can only be used in official builds or those sanctioned by the Foundation - this has led to debates about whether Firefox is free enough to be included in the Debian Linux distribution."
Will the Debian Linux distribution refuse all Open Source Software that also says, "you can re-compile this software, and even add your own modifications, but you can't represent your own compilations or modifications as official builds"?
Because that's all that reserving the artwork does: the artwork is an imprimatur, a symbol essentially equivalent to a signature, that identifies a build as official.
I've made some of my code open source, but I've never said that people could remove my name from the copyright, or conversely, put my name on their own work. If my signature were a Chinese ideogram, or a picture of fox wrapped around a globe, I wouldn't let anyone else use that.
If the Debian Foundation decides that Firefox isn't "free enough", can I produce my own Linux distribution and call it "Debian Linux"?
Pity Leni Riefenstahl isn't around to consult on such positive outlooks of the future.
Triumph of the Bill (Gates)?