No doubt. That's why when I got Comcast service, I called up their 800 number to get connected. I just explained that I didn't want to install any software. The technician didn't give me any problem about this, and just asked for the MAC address on the (Comcast supplied) cable modem.
(When I had Verizon DSL, I foolishly installed their software, and then wisely replaced it with a free third-party RAS PPoE.)
Of course they're going to screw us over, they're corporations.
And the irony is, all the software to throttle "unapproved" connections, all the databases to record our browsing and buying habits, will run on linux software that costs the corporations nothing -- software was developed when the web was still free.
Did anyone read the linked-to material? They are saying that putting *copyrighted* materials in a shared folder is illegal. Not just sharing any files
Technically, any creative work is copyrighted. If I write some code, is it illegal for me to put it into a shared folder? What if I write it, like most employed coders, as work for hire, such that my employer owns it? Have I broken the law by putting in a shared folder? Have I broken the law by uploading it to a publicly read-able CVS repository?
Hey, my briefcase has a copyrighted book in it. I accidently left my briefcase open, next to copy machine, where anybody could have made copies of that book. Am I guilty of illegal negligence, or am I just a straight up "thief"?
I own a bunch of copyrighted books. There's a Kinkos down the street. Is it illegal for me to leave my front door open? Can I put my books on the porch? Can I lend one to my next door neighbor, or is any of that illegal too?
This is a bizarre criminalization of mundane, innocent, and customary activities, solely intended to create a climate of fear.
More and more, our every-day right to "pursue happiness" is being taken away by those who profit by making us fear.
Fear the terrorists, submit to a an invasive search every time you go to the airport.
Fear the kiddie porn addicts, live in fear that your Google searches will be misinterpreted.
Make a mistake on your taxes, live in fear of an audit or jail.
And now, accidently put an mp3 in a shared folder, live in fear of jail time.
Look, I agree, the record companies have a right to copyright. But Americans have a right not to live in fear. We've got thousands of people living in fear in order to provide fancy cars and three houses each for a few record company execs. It goes too far.
It's time for all of us to draw a line in the sand, and say we won't live in fear anymore. America's turning into Orwell's worst nightmare, the dirty drab gray life of a rat hiding in the shadows to avoid the stomping jackboots.
If this bullshit is "safety" from "the terrorists" I don't want to be safe anymore.
If living in fear is the cost of listing to the latest boy band from Sony, it's not worth it anymore.
It's time for Americans to get up on our hind legs like men and tell the fear-mongers that we've had it with them.
Democrats get mad at that because Abramoff evidently never *directly* gave money to any Democrats. Note the use of the word "directly", since Abramoff's firm *did* give money to some Dems, but nobody's found a Dem that got money right from Abramoff unlike some Repubs.
Close but not quite.
Abramoff didn't give to democrats, and neither did his firm.
Some of Abramoff's clients gave to Democrats. and after Abramoff began representing those clients, they generally gave less than the previously had to democrats, and more to Republicans (no doubt on the advice of Jack Abramoff).
Now, I'm not claiming the democrats are pure as the driven snow, just that Abramoff was -- from his days in the College Republicans -- someone who benefited from Republicans and in turn benefited Republicans.
Abramoff is about pervasive corruption in the Republican Party.
The sad thing is this: I believe many (not all, but many) of the Republicans who made up Newt Gingrinch's "revolution" in 1994, who put together the "Contract With America -- I believe many of them started out as idealistic, honest men who genuinely wanted to reform Washington DC.
But they got captured by the system. They had to become perpetual fundraisers to keep their seats, so they ended up spending nearly every day (really, ask any politician of staffer) begging rich people and rich corporations for money. After a while, that has to get to someone, even if -- especially if -- he's an honest guy who is living in a tiny DC apartment because he still has a mortgage back in his home district.
Everyday the congressman begs for money, and everyday he votes for millions and billions of dollars in appropriations. Eventually, these guys crack, and decide they want a piece of the pie too.
We have to change the system. We have too -- as the real conservatives tell us -- shrink government. and we have to provide for public funding of campaigns, so politicians don't have to beg for money and become beholden.
As a writer, I'd like to be paid for my work. I'd rather not make it easy for people to redistribute my work without compensating me.
No redistribution => get paid might make sense for you if you were Dan brown (author of The DaVinci Code) or James Frey (author of the now discredited A Million Little Pieces).
But "shinma" I've never heard of. In all likelihood, I can't get your book at the bookstore. I don't know if you're worth reading or not.
I has the same problem with Eric Flint. Never heard of the guy, didn't know if he was a good read or not. Downloaded, for free, with no DRM, a couple of his books from the Baen Free Library which Mr. Flint created.
No DRM was as important as free here, because I read the book on my Zaurus handheld. Had they been free but DRM'd, I'd probably not been able to find a reader that worked on the Zaurus's linux OS. And even if a reader had been available, it would have been one I was unfamiliar with; I'm not going to install software just to read a book I never heard of.
But Eric Flint's stuff was in totally unencumbered HTML (and several other formats). I could just copy it to my handheld, and read it in the Open source Reader or in the handheld's version of Opera.
And I didn't have to register, or give my name or my email or remember a password, or any such crap. I just browsed the books available, and when I found one I like, I just downloaded a file, and copied it to my handheld. Simplicity.
Here's the interesting thing: the books he gave away for free were good, but not great. Interesting but contrived and hardly believable premises. Had I paid for Flint's early works, I'd have felt a little miffed, because they were a bit trite. But having gotten them for free, well, they were fun enough to read once, and better than wasting my time watching a "Law & Order" rerun.
Still, the books made me remember Flint's name, and figure he was a decent author, with books at least worth looking at. The next time I was in the bookstore, I did see another one of Flint's books, one not yet released for free, and I bought it.
It (1632, which is now available for free) turned out to be a pretty a damned absorbing time-travel-back-to-alternate history fantasy. So when the four or five sequels came out, I bought them at the bookstore too, rather than wait for them to be released for free. And I'll certainly be buying the next several that come out -- it's a good series.
So by giving away (initially) two or three so-so books, Flint caught my attention and managed to sell me a bunch more books. When I go to the bookstore, thousands of authors compete for my cash. Four or five times now, Flint has "won" that competition, because he got his name into my mind with his free, unencumbered by DRM, books. I enjoy his series, so I now actively look for new books in the series, and will buy that book before I even look at the other books by other authors on sale.
As a writer, Flint realized that making it easy to redistribute his work => being paid and paid again for his work.
The server will register the click and then tell your browser to redirect to www.amazon.com. The user will not even notice it, and in fact, tons of sites already do it that way.
I'll notice it, but I won't go to your server: I use a Firefox extension that a) changes the color of redirecting links and b) removes the redirect.
when I click on your link, I go straight to Amazon.
There are at least two FF extensions to remove or notify the user of redirects. According to addons.mozilla.org, the one has been downloaded 51,346 times, the other 35,665 times.
A third extension, to de-obfuscate links, has been download 10,113 times.
This spying news with iTunes sounds more like jealous FUD coming from their competitors.
Ok, then explain to me why my iTunes 6.0.1.3 (prior to 6.0.2, presumably), according to my firewall, regularly makes connections to the address of my HTTP proxy?
(Oh, incidentally, I'm an iTunes user, not a competitor. I'm not listening to Apple's "competitors", I'm looking at my own firewall logs.)
That is a problem. So store md5sums (or some more appropriate hash) of the addresses, not the addresses themselves.
If you do that, you can give the hashes to any company that wants them, and they can match against the prohibited list when they add addresses to their own lists, and scan automatically every month for addresses newly added to the prohibited list.
Of course, that cuts out the middleman company UnSpam, which is essentially being given a right to enact a private tax of about 14K per covered business.
Follow the money, and I'm sure will find UnSpam paid some lobbyists who, uh, bribed "persuaded" some legislators they could claim they were just "protecting children".
For something like an email address, how often will an md5sum hash collide?
I'm sure it's a great paper. But when it's presented as black and sky blue text on a purple background, reading it is almost like having my eyes infected with malware.
I haven't read the actual warrant, so I have no idea who I'd side with.
My friend, you don't have to read the warrant; you just need to read Alito's dissent a bit more attentively.
The important line is the last one (emphasis added): Second, even if the warrant did not contain such authorization, a reasonable police officer could certainly have read the warrant as doing so, and therefore the appellants are entitled to qualified immunity.
Now understand that: Alito's saying that it's OK if a cop misreads a warrant and does something it doesn't authorize, the cop can't be sued.
Now let's think about that. If your doctor misreads a drug formulary and gives you Topamax (an epilepsy drug) when he meant to give you Toprol-XL (a drug for heart failure), and as a result you have a heart attack, would you say that you shouldn't be allowed to sue?
Now as to the facts of the case Alito dissented from: the warrant only described, and authorized, the search of one adult male. When the cops went to the man's home to arrest him, that adult male's wife and daughter were with him. Even though the warrant only authorized a search of the man, the cops also strip searched his wife and the ten-year-old daughter.
The warrant names one adult man, and the police "misread" it to include a ten-year-old girl, and they make her take off all her clothes and bend over and be searched by a stranger.
That's a pretty substantial misreading, you'd agree? Well, maybe you wouldn't agree, but consider this: Alito's opinion was a dissent; that means two other judges disagreed with Alito and thought the police went too far.
And one of those other judges was none other than Bush's current head of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff -- no "liberal" he.
So, friend, does my explication help you decide that police strip-searching a ten-year-old girl is wrong?
Anyone know what happens when the anonymous poster is an eight year old kid?
I dunno about eight year olds. Ten year old girls get strip searched in Bush's America.
ALITO SUPPORTS UNAUTHORIZED STRIP SEARCHES: In Doe v. Groody, Alito agued that police officers had not violated constitutional rights when they strip searched a mother and her ten-year-old daughter while carrying out a search warrant that authorized only the search of a man and his home. [Doe v. Groody, 2004]
"The Bush administration didn't anticipate the mess in Iraq,"
That's because the Bush Administration made sure to fire the generals and experts who did anticipate the mess.
As Richard Clarke and others have made clear, the Bush Administration decided, immediately after 9/11, to go into Iraq. They weren't about to let facts get in the way of their "vision".
God save us from "visionary" leaders.
There are so many things the Bush administration "didn't anticipate" or got wrong, or mismanaged: warnings before 9/11, WMDs, the cost of the war, the insurgency, Katrina, spying on Americans in violation of the law.
Now, if Bush were the guy managing your 401K, and making mistakes of a similar magnitude, you'd say, "look, the guy may or may not have his heart in the right place, but his keeps screwing up, and I've got to get a new money manager before I go broke."
It's that simple: whatever Bush's motives, he's bankrupting the country, literally and metaphorically. It's time for a new manager. Surely your country's future is as important to you as your 401K?
"If we fought in Iraq like we did in WWII when we occupied Germany we wouldn't have these problems of insurgency. Back then if someone exploded a car bomb or shot our soldiers, we just pulled out of the city, shelled it for 24 hours(all of it).... By making it a living hell for everyone, if the enemy attacks our soldiers, then the people stop hiding these insurgents or supporting them."
Oh dear.
I guess we have to blame your teachers for this, "Sir Foxx".
In WWII, we Americans didn't destroy whole villages during occupation: the Germans did that.
German civilians put up very little resistance prior to Germany's surrender, and no real resistance after surrender. No car bombs (indeed, car bombs are really a more recent invention), little or no shooting of American occupiers.
Now, the Nazi Germans did carry out reprisals against civilians in occupied countries. Don't believe me: look up Lidice or Oradour-sur-Glane and educate yourself.
When I was growing up (I'm guessing I'm a bit older than you), Americans took some pride in being the "good guys", pride in not being like the Nazis or the Soviets. We used to be proud that the rest of the world looked to America as an example of a free democracy. That was before we decided to export "democracy" by means of torture and secret prisons and Big Brother-ish spying.
That was before we became mirror images of the totalitarian regimes we had been so proud to fight against.
Like I said, I'm probably bit older than you, "Sir Foxx", and in some way, I guess, luckier, even though I didn't grow up with a computer in the house, much less a PSP or an iPod in my pocket. But I did grow up in an America that had principles. In an America that stood against torture and secret prisons and warrantless searches and unchecked government power. In an America that really was, in some true way, "the land of the free and the home of the brave".
America is no longer the "land of the free" and it's certainly not the "home of the brave". Again, I don't blame you "Sir Foxx", anymore than a Roman of the Republic would have blamed a child who grew up under Caesars for thinking Augustus really was a god.
But trust me, Americans used to be brave. Not your sort of brave, which is just the bravado of the scared bully, of the totalitarian state: "we can bomb you, we can make your life a living hell, unless you do what we say".
Americans used to be brave in that we were willing to die for the liberties our Founding Fathers risked their lives to give us. We were willing to fight and die to protect the right of any knucklehead to criticise the President, because we knew that sometimes the President is a knucklehead.
We used to be brave enough to risk getting on a train or plane without being treated like convicts or slaves or cattle, without being searched by blandly rude security guards.
We used to be brave enough to "Live Free or Die", to say "Give me Liberty or give me Death". Now we Americans piss our pants and beg to put up with any indignity, and loss of freedom, for a little security.
Nineteen hijackers didn't do this to us. Saddam didn't do this to us. Osama didn't do this to us. Yes, one terrible day Osama and his hijackers killed a bunch of Americans and shocked us all.
But it wasn't Osama who surrendered our liberty and our principles and our decency. We've done that all on our own.
Again, it's not your fault, "Sir Foxx". I blame your teachers. They never taught you what it really means to be an American.
Yeah, we can make Iraq, in your words "a living hell for everyone". And we're busy doing it right here at home too.
It's perhaps just me but I'm a bit tired of this way of presenting technology as the key that will solve the problems of the military in guerrilla environments.
There are two ways a conventional army can win guerilla wars: by attacking the civilian population, or by staying out of guerilla wars.
Britain lost the American revolution to guerillas; America lost To Vietnam's Viet Cong; Soviet Russia (and decades before, Britain) lost to Afghan guerillas.
Nazi Germany managed to prevent major uprisings by being willing to kill civilians and indeed who villages in reprisal; nevertheless partisans still harassed the Nazis in Ukraine and Russia.
America managed to put down Philippine independence at the turn of the 20th century only through widespread torture (including the newly rediscovered waterboarding) and the destruction of entire villages.
Britain put down the Mau Mau Rebellion, again by resorting to torture and atrocity, but the pyrrhic victory lead to Kenyan independence anyway, a few years later.
France used torture and atrocity and terrorism to barely keep down the Algerians, but in doing so almost led to civil war in France.
And we now find that
The real cost to America of the Iraq war is likely to be between $1 trillion and $2 trillion, up to 10 times more than previously thought, according to a report written by a Nobel prize-winning economist and a Harvard budget expert.
The study, which expands on traditional estimates by including such costs as lifetime disability and healthcare for troops injured in the conflict as well as the impact on the American economy, concludes that the U.S. Government is continuing to grossly underestimate the cost of the war.
So the lesson of history is pretty clear: to win a war against committed nationalists, the occupying power has to be willing to put aside the laws of war and human decency, to torture and terrorize the subject populace. Even so, the conventional occupying power will lose unless it devotes a considerable proportion of its total resources to the occupation.
What did Britain gain by trying to prevent Americans independence? What did America gain in Vietnam? what did Britain gain in Kenya, or France in Algeria? What did the Soviet Union gain in Afghanistan? What does American stand to gain by staying in Iraq?
Sure, just as we were told we were "halting Communism" in Vietnam, some politicians will tell you that we're winning the "War on Terror" by distracting our military in Iraq. Even if that's true, we'll leave eventually, and we'll leave behind lots of munitions and lots of Iraqis with experience killing Americans. You think some of them won't decide to bring the war home to us?
Guerilla wars aren't won by occupying powers; and even if they are won, what's "won" is no benefit to the occupying power.
Occasionally, as in Großdeutschland, local laws and practices require consideration of unique elements...
...therefore, we at Microsoft's German subsidiary have turned over to the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, as required by law, the names of all Jewish employees. Microsoft Germany has been assured by no less than Heinrich Himmler himself, that our Jewish employees will be peaceably resettled in the the East.
But that's the lovely nature of Firefox. The Mozilla Foundation can concentrate on building a better *browser* while leaving the API open to developers who want a little more from Firefox via Extensions.
Speaking as an extension writer myself, part of the power of FF extensions is that there is no API, per se: an extension just adds to or overrides functionality, rather than, say, "plugging in" to some callback API (but see below) or even overriding a software interrupt (as in DOS or the Palm OS -- yeah, I've done interrupt-driven stuff both of those too).
But that's also a weakness, because there's no simple way to regulate how an extension works, or how multiple extension interoperate. In one of my own extensions, I prematurely optimized ("root of all evil"); that was negligibly more efficient, but it meant the extension didn't work with mouse gestures.
And despite the power FF offers, it doesn't offer any way for my extension to change the default meaning of the mouse buttons. (Well, there's a kludgy way, but it's not worth the trouble).
Nor is browser.js written in a particularly modular way. In one of extensions, I have to override a whole function (and then call it) when I really want to override a single line -- even though the one line represents one "concept" and the whole function (unfortunately) conflates multiple functionality. Life would be easier, and FF (marginally) faster if browser.js had been written with extensions more in mind.
Another extension I use (but didn't write) is wonderful, except it takes over CTRL-F12, and I use the same key combination to invoke a system-wide spellchecker. It also uses F8 to do something I wish I could turn off.
FF does use some callbacks, for notifications, but some things which should be simple -- like notification when the page location changes, or the current tab changes, are tedious and error prone, requiring multiple callback functions and causing hard to locate problems if not done exactly right.
So, in sum: eventually, just to deal with accelerator keys, not to mention to partition functionality and allow interoperability, FF really will require a more designed framework for extensions, I think, where extensions can register as supporting or overriding certain functionality, and where the user can specify the order in which extensions override and what UI elements invoke them.
Anyway, if the Polar Bears can't find food the regular way, they may have to adapt by moving southward, which will bring them into contact with more people.
Microsoft has stepped up, and say they'll provide support for the polar bars. And something about polar bears eating penguins.
Helping the police do their duty is a responsibility of a citizen, even in, especially in, a free country.
What if their duty is to make a list of all the {Jews | Japanese-Americans | Communists | Bourgeois Capitalists | Anarchists | Muslims | Armenians | crypto-Christians | Quakers | students reading Mao} on your block?
Will you answer "Jawohl, mein Polizei, Herr Kohn in apartment 103 is one?"
It really amazes me that so many "good Christians" believe in always helping the cops. I mean, their Christ was executed, according to the law of the times, after being seized by the cops for being a troublemaking radical. You'd think they might remember that.
Sometimes, the only decent thing to do is to not help the cops.
I cant accept things have gotten to that point, yet.
Most German Jews showed themselves incapable of understanding their new situation. They believed it to be a transitory matter, a mere misunderstanding....
-- Leon Poliakov, Harvest of Hate, quoted in Kornberg, "Kristallnacht and the Politics of Anti-semitism Nazi Germany"
On November 9, 1938, I was still a German patriot. I was born into an old established family, the son of one of the most honoured German jurists and defender of rights. I myself was recognized for my twenty years of professional [legal] work,...and, as an officer in the World War, had been awarded the Iron Cross first degree. I had borne every kind of injustice since 1933 in the hope that, at least for my children who were half-Aryan, there would be a dignified life in my homeland, when, in a few years time, this reign of terror would have spent itself. Education, experience and emotion had made a truly patriotic German out of me,.... In the face of the mounting distress outside, we maintained, within our four walls, an ever more profound and confident spiritual serenity which we inculcated in our children. We believed that we possessed the spiritual and physical strength to survive the Third Reich within Germany. Unprecedented events would have to occur to cause us to abandon this foundation upon which we had built our lives. Such events did occur in the following days.
Now I'm not saying the situation in contemporary America is anywhere as bad as the situation in Nazi Germany. What I am trying to point out is that beliefs like yours, that, it "can't be that bad", have consistently been disproven.
Will things become as bad here as they got in Nazi Germany? Like you, I doubt it. But it can happen here. Just ask any Japanese American who sat out WWII in an American internment camp. Hell, ask any black person over age 40 who grew up in the American South, or anyone caught up in the anti-Communist hysteria of the 1950s.
Was Soviet Communism a real threat in the 1950s? Definitely, just as terrorism is a real threat now. But just as in the 1950s, it's also an excuse for government excess and the curtailment of personal liberties in the name of "security".
You can't belive governemtn agents are tracking people who check out books? This has all happened before, rght here in America.
It's Russ Feingold, not faux "conservative" George W. Bush or the Republican party, who is upholding the most fundamental traditional American value: our freedom from tyrannical government.
Although I'm something of a liberal, I respected Ronald Reagan because he opposed Soviet tyranny. You remember Soviet Russia, right? Where secret police recorded every conversation, where people were arrested without warrants or habeas corpus, where "enemies of the state" were sent to gulags?
Ronald Reagan, whatever his other faults, was against that. George Dubya does all that: he's spying on Americans, arresting US citizens without giving them access to the courts, and legalized torture. He's even re-opened secret prisons in Eastern Europe.
And under Dubya's watch, we've seen extraordinary government secrecy, political appointees overruling government scientist and legal experts, and pervasive corruption in Washington.
This is the limited government and personal responsibility Conservatism is supposed to be all about?
Let's elect Russ Feingold, the only senator with the presence of mind to vote against the original Patriot Act.
But what if you toss the camera and it lands upside down?
My cheap-ass $30 web cam (got it free when I got DSL) has a driver that allows the image to be flipped vertically or mirrored horizontally.
Arbitrary rotation is a bit harder, but plenty of freeware graphic apps do it; doing it in real-time just means a fast enough processor.
Forget rotating the camera: rotate the output.
Now aiming the camera, that's something the camera has to do. But rather than pay $4800 for a camera that rotates and aims itself, why not construct a ball with a camera at every 90 degrees along its circumference.
That would be six cheap-ass web cam cameras, and whatever wifi you needed for the bandwidth of 6 times camera resolution. And no moving parts, which means cheaper to manufacture and less maintenance problems.
I imagine you could make these for less than $200, and still make a profit at far less than $4800. And with six cameras, you'd more information for the viewer.
Slashdot Mirror
The Comcast software is awful.
No doubt. That's why when I got Comcast service, I called up their 800 number to get connected. I just explained that I didn't want to install any software. The technician didn't give me any problem about this, and just asked for the MAC address on the (Comcast supplied) cable modem.
(When I had Verizon DSL, I foolishly installed their software, and then wisely replaced it with a free third-party RAS PPoE.)
Of course they're going to screw us over, they're corporations.
And the irony is, all the software to throttle "unapproved" connections, all the databases to record our browsing and buying habits, will run on linux software that costs the corporations nothing -- software was developed when the web was still free.
Technically, any creative work is copyrighted. If I write some code, is it illegal for me to put it into a shared folder? What if I write it, like most employed coders, as work for hire, such that my employer owns it? Have I broken the law by putting in a shared folder? Have I broken the law by uploading it to a publicly read-able CVS repository?
Hey, my briefcase has a copyrighted book in it. I accidently left my briefcase open, next to copy machine, where anybody could have made copies of that book. Am I guilty of illegal negligence, or am I just a straight up "thief"?
I own a bunch of copyrighted books. There's a Kinkos down the street. Is it illegal for me to leave my front door open? Can I put my books on the porch? Can I lend one to my next door neighbor, or is any of that illegal too?
This is a bizarre criminalization of mundane, innocent, and customary activities, solely intended to create a climate of fear.
More and more, our every-day right to "pursue happiness" is being taken away by those who profit by making us fear.
Look, I agree, the record companies have a right to copyright. But Americans have a right not to live in fear. We've got thousands of people living in fear in order to provide fancy cars and three houses each for a few record company execs. It goes too far.
It's time for all of us to draw a line in the sand, and say we won't live in fear anymore. America's turning into Orwell's worst nightmare, the dirty drab gray life of a rat hiding in the shadows to avoid the stomping jackboots.
If this bullshit is "safety" from "the terrorists" I don't want to be safe anymore.
If living in fear is the cost of listing to the latest boy band from Sony, it's not worth it anymore.
It's time for Americans to get up on our hind legs like men and tell the fear-mongers that we've had it with them.
Close but not quite.
Abramoff didn't give to democrats, and neither did his firm.
Some of Abramoff's clients gave to Democrats. and after Abramoff began representing those clients, they generally gave less than the previously had to democrats, and more to Republicans (no doubt on the advice of Jack Abramoff).
Now, I'm not claiming the democrats are pure as the driven snow, just that Abramoff was -- from his days in the College Republicans -- someone who benefited from Republicans and in turn benefited Republicans.
Abramoff is about pervasive corruption in the Republican Party.
The sad thing is this: I believe many (not all, but many) of the Republicans who made up Newt Gingrinch's "revolution" in 1994, who put together the "Contract With America -- I believe many of them started out as idealistic, honest men who genuinely wanted to reform Washington DC.
But they got captured by the system. They had to become perpetual fundraisers to keep their seats, so they ended up spending nearly every day (really, ask any politician of staffer) begging rich people and rich corporations for money. After a while, that has to get to someone, even if -- especially if -- he's an honest guy who is living in a tiny DC apartment because he still has a mortgage back in his home district.
Everyday the congressman begs for money, and everyday he votes for millions and billions of dollars in appropriations. Eventually, these guys crack, and decide they want a piece of the pie too.
We have to change the system. We have too -- as the real conservatives tell us -- shrink government. and we have to provide for public funding of campaigns, so politicians don't have to beg for money and become beholden.
No redistribution => get paid might make sense for you if you were Dan brown (author of The DaVinci Code) or James Frey (author of the now discredited A Million Little Pieces).
But "shinma" I've never heard of. In all likelihood, I can't get your book at the bookstore. I don't know if you're worth reading or not.
I has the same problem with Eric Flint. Never heard of the guy, didn't know if he was a good read or not. Downloaded, for free, with no DRM, a couple of his books from the Baen Free Library which Mr. Flint created.
No DRM was as important as free here, because I read the book on my Zaurus handheld. Had they been free but DRM'd, I'd probably not been able to find a reader that worked on the Zaurus's linux OS. And even if a reader had been available, it would have been one I was unfamiliar with; I'm not going to install software just to read a book I never heard of.
But Eric Flint's stuff was in totally unencumbered HTML (and several other formats). I could just copy it to my handheld, and read it in the Open source Reader or in the handheld's version of Opera.
And I didn't have to register, or give my name or my email or remember a password, or any such crap. I just browsed the books available, and when I found one I like, I just downloaded a file, and copied it to my handheld. Simplicity.
Here's the interesting thing: the books he gave away for free were good, but not great. Interesting but contrived and hardly believable premises. Had I paid for Flint's early works, I'd have felt a little miffed, because they were a bit trite. But having gotten them for free, well, they were fun enough to read once, and better than wasting my time watching a "Law & Order" rerun.
Still, the books made me remember Flint's name, and figure he was a decent author, with books at least worth looking at. The next time I was in the bookstore, I did see another one of Flint's books, one not yet released for free, and I bought it.
It (1632, which is now available for free) turned out to be a pretty a damned absorbing time-travel-back-to-alternate history fantasy. So when the four or five sequels came out, I bought them at the bookstore too, rather than wait for them to be released for free. And I'll certainly be buying the next several that come out -- it's a good series.
So by giving away (initially) two or three so-so books, Flint caught my attention and managed to sell me a bunch more books. When I go to the bookstore, thousands of authors compete for my cash. Four or five times now, Flint has "won" that competition, because he got his name into my mind with his free, unencumbered by DRM, books. I enjoy his series, so I now actively look for new books in the series, and will buy that book before I even look at the other books by other authors on sale.
As a writer, Flint realized that making it easy to redistribute his work => being paid and paid again for his work.
Give it a try, tell me if it works for you.
The server will register the click and then tell your browser to redirect to www.amazon.com. The user will not even notice it, and in fact, tons of sites already do it that way.
I'll notice it, but I won't go to your server: I use a Firefox extension that
a) changes the color of redirecting links and
b) removes the redirect.
when I click on your link, I go straight to Amazon.
Some data.
There are at least two FF extensions to remove or notify the user of redirects. According to addons.mozilla.org, the one has been downloaded 51,346 times, the other 35,665 times.
A third extension, to de-obfuscate links, has been download 10,113 times.
And the Newton 2.1 OS is hands down the best PDA interface
;)
Ok, professor, I own a Zaurus, I've written some code for it, I've read ebooks on it, I've even commented to slashdot on it.
What makes the Newton interface so much better? Can you point me to a site or sites that explains this?
I'm convincable; convince me.
Thanks.
This spying news with iTunes sounds more like jealous FUD coming from their competitors.
Ok, then explain to me why my iTunes 6.0.1.3 (prior to 6.0.2, presumably), according to my firewall, regularly makes connections to the address of my HTTP proxy?
(Oh, incidentally, I'm an iTunes user, not a competitor. I'm not listening to Apple's "competitors", I'm looking at my own firewall logs.)
Another email list for spammers to harvest?
That is a problem. So store md5sums (or some more appropriate hash) of the addresses, not the addresses themselves.
If you do that, you can give the hashes to any company that wants them, and they can match against the prohibited list when they add addresses to their own lists, and scan automatically every month for addresses newly added to the prohibited list.
Of course, that cuts out the middleman company UnSpam, which is essentially being given a right to enact a private tax of about 14K per covered business.
Follow the money, and I'm sure will find UnSpam paid some lobbyists who, uh, bribed "persuaded" some legislators they could claim they were just "protecting children".
For something like an email address, how often will an md5sum hash collide?
Jeeez, I've published Firefox extensions, and I never even knew about diabling styles via the view menu.
Great tip, thanks!
I'm sure it's a great paper. But when it's presented as black and sky blue text on a purple background, reading it is almost like having my eyes infected with malware.
I haven't read the actual warrant, so I have no idea who I'd side with.
My friend, you don't have to read the warrant; you just need to read Alito's dissent a bit more attentively.
The important line is the last one (emphasis added): Second, even if the warrant did not contain such authorization, a reasonable police officer could certainly have read the warrant as doing so, and therefore the appellants are entitled to qualified immunity.
Now understand that: Alito's saying that it's OK if a cop misreads a warrant and does something it doesn't authorize, the cop can't be sued.
Now let's think about that. If your doctor misreads a drug formulary and gives you Topamax (an epilepsy drug) when he meant to give you Toprol-XL (a drug for heart failure), and as a result you have a heart attack, would you say that you shouldn't be allowed to sue?
Now as to the facts of the case Alito dissented from: the warrant only described, and authorized, the search of one adult male. When the cops went to the man's home to arrest him, that adult male's wife and daughter were with him. Even though the warrant only authorized a search of the man, the cops also strip searched his wife and the ten-year-old daughter.
The warrant names one adult man, and the police "misread" it to include a ten-year-old girl, and they make her take off all her clothes and bend over and be searched by a stranger.
That's a pretty substantial misreading, you'd agree? Well, maybe you wouldn't agree, but consider this: Alito's opinion was a dissent; that means two other judges disagreed with Alito and thought the police went too far.
And one of those other judges was none other than Bush's current head of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff -- no "liberal" he.
So, friend, does my explication help you decide that police strip-searching a ten-year-old girl is wrong?
I dunno about eight year olds. Ten year old girls get strip searched in Bush's America.
"The Bush administration didn't anticipate the mess in Iraq,"
That's because the Bush Administration made sure to fire the generals and experts who did anticipate the mess.
As Richard Clarke and others have made clear, the Bush Administration decided, immediately after 9/11, to go into Iraq. They weren't about to let facts get in the way of their "vision".
God save us from "visionary" leaders.
There are so many things the Bush administration "didn't anticipate" or got wrong, or mismanaged: warnings before 9/11, WMDs, the cost of the war, the insurgency, Katrina, spying on Americans in violation of the law.
Now, if Bush were the guy managing your 401K, and making mistakes of a similar magnitude, you'd say, "look, the guy may or may not have his heart in the right place, but his keeps screwing up, and I've got to get a new money manager before I go broke."
It's that simple: whatever Bush's motives, he's bankrupting the country, literally and metaphorically. It's time for a new manager. Surely your country's future is as important to you as your 401K?
"If we fought in Iraq like we did in WWII when we occupied Germany we wouldn't have these problems of insurgency. Back then if someone exploded a car bomb or shot our soldiers, we just pulled out of the city, shelled it for 24 hours(all of it).... By making it a living hell for everyone, if the enemy attacks our soldiers, then the people stop hiding these insurgents or supporting them."
Oh dear.
I guess we have to blame your teachers for this, "Sir Foxx".
In WWII, we Americans didn't destroy whole villages during occupation: the Germans did that.
German civilians put up very little resistance prior to Germany's surrender, and no real resistance after surrender. No car bombs (indeed, car bombs are really a more recent invention), little or no shooting of American occupiers.
Now, the Nazi Germans did carry out reprisals against civilians in occupied countries. Don't believe me: look up Lidice or Oradour-sur-Glane and educate yourself.
When I was growing up (I'm guessing I'm a bit older than you), Americans took some pride in being the "good guys", pride in not being like the Nazis or the Soviets. We used to be proud that the rest of the world looked to America as an example of a free democracy. That was before we decided to export "democracy" by means of torture and secret prisons and Big Brother-ish spying.
That was before we became mirror images of the totalitarian regimes we had been so proud to fight against.
Like I said, I'm probably bit older than you, "Sir Foxx", and in some way, I guess, luckier, even though I didn't grow up with a computer in the house, much less a PSP or an iPod in my pocket. But I did grow up in an America that had principles. In an America that stood against torture and secret prisons and warrantless searches and unchecked government power. In an America that really was, in some true way, "the land of the free and the home of the brave".
America is no longer the "land of the free" and it's certainly not the "home of the brave". Again, I don't blame you "Sir Foxx", anymore than a Roman of the Republic would have blamed a child who grew up under Caesars for thinking Augustus really was a god.
But trust me, Americans used to be brave. Not your sort of brave, which is just the bravado of the scared bully, of the totalitarian state: "we can bomb you, we can make your life a living hell, unless you do what we say".
Americans used to be brave in that we were willing to die for the liberties our Founding Fathers risked their lives to give us. We were willing to fight and die to protect the right of any knucklehead to criticise the President, because we knew that sometimes the President is a knucklehead.
We used to be brave enough to risk getting on a train or plane without being treated like convicts or slaves or cattle, without being searched by blandly rude security guards.
We used to be brave enough to "Live Free or Die", to say "Give me Liberty or give me Death". Now we Americans piss our pants and beg to put up with any indignity, and loss of freedom, for a little security.
Nineteen hijackers didn't do this to us. Saddam didn't do this to us. Osama didn't do this to us. Yes, one terrible day Osama and his hijackers killed a bunch of Americans and shocked us all.
But it wasn't Osama who surrendered our liberty and our principles and our decency. We've done that all on our own.
Again, it's not your fault, "Sir Foxx". I blame your teachers. They never taught you what it really means to be an American.
Yeah, we can make Iraq, in your words "a living hell for everyone". And we're busy doing it right here at home too.
There are two ways a conventional army can win guerilla wars: by attacking the civilian population, or by staying out of guerilla wars.
Britain lost the American revolution to guerillas; America lost To Vietnam's Viet Cong; Soviet Russia (and decades before, Britain) lost to Afghan guerillas.
Nazi Germany managed to prevent major uprisings by being willing to kill civilians and indeed who villages in reprisal; nevertheless partisans still harassed the Nazis in Ukraine and Russia.
America managed to put down Philippine independence at the turn of the 20th century only through widespread torture (including the newly rediscovered waterboarding) and the destruction of entire villages.
Britain put down the Mau Mau Rebellion, again by resorting to torture and atrocity, but the pyrrhic victory lead to Kenyan independence anyway, a few years later.
France used torture and atrocity and terrorism to barely keep down the Algerians, but in doing so almost led to civil war in France.
And we now find that
So the lesson of history is pretty clear: to win a war against committed nationalists, the occupying power has to be willing to put aside the laws of war and human decency, to torture and terrorize the subject populace. Even so, the conventional occupying power will lose unless it devotes a considerable proportion of its total resources to the occupation.
What did Britain gain by trying to prevent Americans independence? What did America gain in Vietnam? what did Britain gain in Kenya, or France in Algeria? What did the Soviet Union gain in Afghanistan? What does American stand to gain by staying in Iraq?
Sure, just as we were told we were "halting Communism" in Vietnam, some politicians will tell you that we're winning the "War on Terror" by distracting our military in Iraq. Even if that's true, we'll leave eventually, and we'll leave behind lots of munitions and lots of Iraqis with experience killing Americans. You think some of them won't decide to bring the war home to us?
Guerilla wars aren't won by occupying powers; and even if they are won, what's "won" is no benefit to the occupying power.
But that's the lovely nature of Firefox. The Mozilla Foundation can concentrate on building a better *browser* while leaving the API open to developers who want a little more from Firefox via Extensions.
Speaking as an extension writer myself, part of the power of FF extensions is that there is no API, per se: an extension just adds to or overrides functionality, rather than, say, "plugging in" to some callback API (but see below) or even overriding a software interrupt (as in DOS or the Palm OS -- yeah, I've done interrupt-driven stuff both of those too).
But that's also a weakness, because there's no simple way to regulate how an extension works, or how multiple extension interoperate. In one of my own extensions, I prematurely optimized ("root of all evil"); that was negligibly more efficient, but it meant the extension didn't work with mouse gestures.
And despite the power FF offers, it doesn't offer any way for my extension to change the default meaning of the mouse buttons. (Well, there's a kludgy way, but it's not worth the trouble).
Nor is browser.js written in a particularly modular way. In one of extensions, I have to override a whole function (and then call it) when I really want to override a single line -- even though the one line represents one "concept" and the whole function (unfortunately) conflates multiple functionality. Life would be easier, and FF (marginally) faster if browser.js had been written with extensions more in mind.
Another extension I use (but didn't write) is wonderful, except it takes over CTRL-F12, and I use the same key combination to invoke a system-wide spellchecker. It also uses F8 to do something I wish I could turn off.
FF does use some callbacks, for notifications, but some things which should be simple -- like notification when the page location changes, or the current tab changes, are tedious and error prone, requiring multiple callback functions and causing hard to locate problems if not done exactly right.
So, in sum: eventually, just to deal with accelerator keys, not to mention to partition functionality and allow interoperability, FF really will require a more designed framework for extensions, I think, where extensions can register as supporting or overriding certain functionality, and where the user can specify the order in which extensions override and what UI elements invoke them.
Anyway, if the Polar Bears can't find food the regular way, they may have to adapt by moving southward, which will bring them into contact with more people.
Microsoft has stepped up, and say they'll provide support for the polar bars. And something about polar bears eating penguins.
Helping the police do their duty is a responsibility of a citizen, even in, especially in, a free country.
What if their duty is to make a list of all the {Jews | Japanese-Americans | Communists | Bourgeois Capitalists | Anarchists | Muslims | Armenians | crypto-Christians | Quakers | students reading Mao} on your block?
Will you answer "Jawohl, mein Polizei, Herr Kohn in apartment 103 is one?"
It really amazes me that so many "good Christians" believe in always helping the cops. I mean, their Christ was executed, according to the law of the times, after being seized by the cops for being a troublemaking radical. You'd think they might remember that.
Sometimes, the only decent thing to do is to not help the cops.
Ihre Papiere, bitte!
-- Leon Poliakov, Harvest of Hate, quoted in Kornberg, "Kristallnacht and the Politics of Anti-semitism Nazi Germany"
-- Albert Fuchs, My Experiences From November 9th to 16th, 1938 (Written on November 19, 1938 on the way from Strasbourg to Paris)
Now I'm not saying the situation in contemporary America is anywhere as bad as the situation in Nazi Germany. What I am trying to point out is that beliefs like yours, that, it "can't be that bad", have consistently been disproven.
Will things become as bad here as they got in Nazi Germany? Like you, I doubt it. But it can happen here. Just ask any Japanese American who sat out WWII in an American internment camp. Hell, ask any black person over age 40 who grew up in the American South, or anyone caught up in the anti-Communist hysteria of the 1950s.
Was Soviet Communism a real threat in the 1950s? Definitely, just as terrorism is a real threat now. But just as in the 1950s, it's also an excuse for government excess and the curtailment of personal liberties in the name of "security".
You can't belive governemtn agents are tracking people who check out books? This has all happened before, rght here in America.
Russ for President in 2008
Amen to that!
It's Russ Feingold, not faux "conservative" George W. Bush or the Republican party, who is upholding the most fundamental traditional American value: our freedom from tyrannical government.
Although I'm something of a liberal, I respected Ronald Reagan because he opposed Soviet tyranny. You remember Soviet Russia, right? Where secret police recorded every conversation, where people were arrested without warrants or habeas corpus, where "enemies of the state" were sent to gulags?
Ronald Reagan, whatever his other faults, was against that. George Dubya does all that: he's spying on Americans, arresting US citizens without giving them access to the courts, and legalized torture. He's even re-opened secret prisons in Eastern Europe.
And under Dubya's watch, we've seen extraordinary government secrecy, political appointees overruling government scientist and legal experts, and pervasive corruption in Washington.
This is the limited government and personal responsibility Conservatism is supposed to be all about?
Let's elect Russ Feingold, the only senator with the presence of mind to vote against the original Patriot Act.
But what if you toss the camera and it lands upside down?
My cheap-ass $30 web cam (got it free when I got DSL) has a driver that allows the image to be flipped vertically or mirrored horizontally.
Arbitrary rotation is a bit harder, but plenty of freeware graphic apps do it; doing it in real-time just means a fast enough processor.
Forget rotating the camera: rotate the output.
Now aiming the camera, that's something the camera has to do. But rather than pay $4800 for a camera that rotates and aims itself, why not construct a ball with a camera at every 90 degrees along its circumference.
That would be six cheap-ass web cam cameras, and whatever wifi you needed for the bandwidth of 6 times camera resolution. And no moving parts, which means cheaper to manufacture and less maintenance problems.
I imagine you could make these for less than $200, and still make a profit at far less than $4800. And with six cameras, you'd more information for the viewer.
WAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!