GreyHawk to me was the definitive setting for D&D, not Forgotten Realms. If you had read any of Gygax wonderful novels with Gord in Greyhawk then you can get an idea of how great that Campaign could have been. Sadly Gygax's involvement in the future evolution of D&D was terminated prematurely.
I don't understand why WotC doesn't invite him back. They don't even let Richard Garfield develop on MTG anymore. Why do corporations feel the need to divorce creators from their projects?
ARRRGH!!! I cannot answer this (What CDR brand) in easy to understand layman language!!!
Like most things, I too am an expert in this field (CD media)
RiTEK or Taiyo Yuden or Mitsui are "semi acceptable"
CDRs use frail ORAGANIC dye prone to steady erasure and destruction from heat, light, water, etc.
All media sucks for long term archival except perhaps STAMPED glass platter cds using gold sputterred reflection. They are called "Century Discs" and you have never seen one, though they are special fabbed. They are inorganic. No plastic to "droop" no aluminum to oxidize slowly into powder over the decades. (Aluminum oxidizes in 2 millionths of one second when exposed to air but creates a semi-safe blanket of aluminum oxide a couple atoms thick and remains mostly reflective.) All cdrs are slowly rotting, but if kept cold could last a while and be readable in a "flat bed static CD scanner" in 2020 and later.
Start of Side topic #1 ; inorganic home recordable +100 year archival media:
I own "mostly inorganic" glass platter PDO media for archiving with a four and a half thousand dollar device I bought once. It's a Maxtor (Maxoptix) Tahiti-II and each blank cost over 100 dollars. But the data will last centuries under ANY HEAT and ANY atmosphere and ANY Radiation and ANY magnetism because it uses PLASMA STATE recording. A rare earth element is heated past liquid, past gas state, into PLASMA STATE by a ridiculously espensive high powered laser, and while in this state, a strong magnetic field orientates the crystals of the cooling rare earth metal into north-or south orientation. A simple low power read-only laser can use a polarizing filter to readily discern this data. It can do so centuries from now. The Library of Congress uses these 4 thousand dollar recorders, and the US military... and also myself for pleasure. Yup I stored porn on these Tahiti-II glass platter inorganic discs! Too bad the timing-tracking marks embedded in these crystal media 125 dollar platters was imprinted using a plastic marking substance instead of the official "acid etching using H2SO3F+" Magic acid.
Only magic acid can eat a beaker or mark the inside timing marks of these special multi-century media... and Phillips Dupont CHEATED ME and fucking used PLASTIC which will rot away slowly over the next 75 years depriving our future generations of my porn collection. You can buy magic acid in special containers, or manufacture your own by mixing antimony pentafluoride (SbF55) and fluorosulphonic acid (HSO3F). It has an unbelievable pka of 20 and is powerful enough to protonate saturated alkanes forming carbonium ions... and etch glass without spending a lot of effort trying to use hyperboloid 5Kw lasers on clear glass.
UI am definitely going off on a tangent and I was still talking about CD reflectivity, so I will continue...
End of Side topic #1 ; inorganic home recordable +100 year archival media:
I have visited pressing plants, sputtering plants, and even polycarb manufacturers for DVD and CDR, and taken a few 1,200 dollar a day seminars on laser head movement and design.
Refectivity in a CD or CD-ROM is irrelevant. The laser usually uses a "Quarter wave" plate and the frequency of the laser is specially selected and this rotated light has a 90 degree polarity difference (differential phase) that makes reading possible at high speeds. This is less relevant in CDR but very important in stamped media. I discuss this at length for you below a second discussion in my Side topic #2 on : CD Reflectivity Layers (not needing any metal or even being transparently covered)
Amusing Side NOTE : I am not just Mr Medical boy, Mr microbiology Man, Mr Lawyer, Mr Musician, Mr Trivia Buff, Etc... i am also Mr Computer expert and CD device consultant, and paid a couple times in my life to consult on CDR mechanism design.
The best CDRs use a special dye invented by Mitsui Toatsu Corporation (MTC), but no longer true after 2000 unless you have old stockpil
Toxins from the enviroment deposit in the fatty tissue of the body. Over the years as the residues accumulate, they can have a great effect on the body. Heavy drug cases are among the worse.
The Purification program which consists of a regime of heavy vitamins, niacin and long sauna sweatouts can actually purge the body of toxins. Anyone who has ever been poisoned (heavy drug users), exposed to radiation or has lived in a toxic environment (LA) could greatly benefit.
I did it five years ago and the results were amazing. Incredibly, my eyesight improved.
Yes, cable's more vulnerable to that - although with DSL, you're still sharing the backhaul pipe from the DSLAM to the ISP, and of course all the ISP's customers are sharing the ISP's pipe(s) to the rest of the Net. The tradeoff is that cable has much more bandwidth to share.
Yes but DSL is segemented where as cable users would suffer heavy collisions and packetloss getting through an oversaturated backhaul. Very typical of cable at large apartment complexes.
So, I have this idea, and I think it's pretty good. If I had the time, I'd do it myself, but maybe someone else will pick it up and run with it.
Here goes. What does p2p get you? Free distribution. What do you lose? Centralized control. So the materials best suited for distribution over a p2p network are 1. things you want as widely disseminated as possible and 2. things that don't have to be constantly updated and revised.
My idea, basically, is to use napster/gnutella as a publishing medium for original content that is specifically designed for p2p. If this works, you can distribute a reasonably large file over a very large network in a very short period of time, and here's the kicker- if your stuff gets popular, you don't have to pay out big bucks for akamai and better server hardware.
So what kind of content would fly? I think sketch comedy that gets updated daily would be ok, or better yet, a comedic news program. I love reading Suck.com on my palm pilot on the train every morning, I wish someone would do a Not Necessarily the News style 5-10minute news bit every morning and distribute it over napster/gnutella with a predictable filename (maybe newsTellaDDMMYY.mp3 or something like that).
Eventually you could get sponsors and integrate little ads into your content, or maybe you'd spark a phenomenon and some radio network would pick you up or something, or maybe even just sell archives of your work on cdrom or something. But it seems like the way to really capitalize on the medium is to take advantage of the fact that a public media distribution network has been made available to you.
It's not the web, it's not tv, and promoting your stuff in this media doesn't work the same way it does in these other media. If you publicise the fact that you're doing it and update consistently and often, and actually produce some funny/interesting content, I think you'd be onto something really big. Let me know how it goes if you try it.
What is P2P? It just means any connected node (called host) on the Internet can connect another one, without one system explicitly meant to be a server only, and the other one a client.
What is so special about that, why all the fuzz? Even the notion of defending P2P makes me sick and is absurd. The Internet is built on (mostly) the TCP protocol, which allows for any node to connect to any other node directly. The Internet *is* P2P and has been so from the beginning.
It is normal to telnet from machine A to machine B, and then telnet back from B to A. It is normal to act both as an ftp client and server, in fact before the web became popular, in the old days, almost any connected node to the Internet acted both as client and as server.
Why is this "evidence" needed? People trying to forbid P2P are trying to forbid Internet, or at least trying to fundamentally change its netowork protocol (which is impossible).
Only ISP's could block incoming connections, thus making "P2P" (how I hate that word, describing something that has been around for ages as if it were something new) impossible. Not many of them do (luckily), only having no fixed IP address makes acting as a server a bit more complicated, but things like dyndns get around that.
One might imagine a future where anyone with a dynamic IP address (hard to trace) is prohibited by the state to have incoming connections. That is a nightmare but I don't think such a draconic law is very probably, and it would be very hard to enforce too.
I'm not sure if this is truly P2P but it is probably close enough (and was to a certain extent inspired by Napster)
background.
The major biological databases (EMBL, GenBank, Swissprot etc.) are repositories for sequence data, the information that describes the order of the DNA or proteins (depending on the database). This is collected and curated by a relatively small number of people compared to the size of these databases.
This information is relatively useless without annotation. Annotation is the description of the biological role of the sequence and which bits are important. Unfortunately annotation is difficult and time consuming for people who are non experts to maintain. THis means that many of the entries in the databases are either poorly annotated (poor), have out of date annotation (poor) or blatently incorrect annotation (really bad).
A system of P2P sharing of annotation data has been devised where an expert working on gene Xyz can make available his own annotations without having to burden the overworked people at GenBank/EMBL/DDBJ to make updates to the central database. Interested parties can access this data in a P2P manner (ie a query on 'what does anyone know about Xyz').
One of the main protagonists of DAS (Distributed Annotation System) is Lincoln Stein at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (yes, of CGI.pm fame). It will also be presented at the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference in July this year (where I hope to find out a lot more about it too..)
This sounds like a perfect example of productive P2P.Have a look at http://stein.cshl.org/das/ for more information. I know that at least one of the authors on the paper referenced has been guilty of reading Slashdot in the past so maybe he would comment.
You think I'm paying to go to school so I can learn? I'm paying for 5 years of quick music, movies, and porn, damn it. Turn off my network access and I'm going to community college.
It would be a fun experiment and it would be great to teach a little about one of the greatest and most underappreciated minds in history. There are tons of pages on how to do his experiments.
Their customer satisfaction would quadruple if they would stop:
1.) Reading people's emails/chat logs
2.) Stop the domainname suing
3.) Stop censoring people (kids is debateable, but they censor adults too).
4.) Stop pissing off every gamer in the world by destroying any online gaming experience.
5.) Find a way to reverse the damage done to one's ego when someone says "Dude, you've got A-oh-hell!?"
For the love of god, please stop the piracy! Just because the RIAA is protecting its IP in a knuckleheaded fashion doesn't give America license to rip them off.
Just how would you act if your store was being looted? This is totally criminal and the harm that P2P networks cause grossly outweigh the good. We by all means should have more government involvement, injunctions and regulations of ISPs. The illegal fileswappers should be ARRESTED. Why such outrage over the idea of prosecution? After all, isn't that what we are supposed to do to lawbreakers?
Please let's put this "The RIAA is the victim of its own hubris" notion to bed and garner a modicum of respect for IP rights.
Thank you.
This is a clear and cut case where Nissanmotors is in the right. No reason why that man should be able to capitalize off of the years and $$$ Nissanmotors has spent branding its trademark.
Just because you share the name doesn't give you the right to piggyback.
It is a Scientology based alcohol and drug reform center. He said it changed his life. I never ever thought my dad would stop drinking and he has been clean and sober for over a year and quite happy. I have to agree that it is life-changing, all for the better. Insurance paid for his 3 month stay.
I guess you can say Scientology worked a miracle for me because it has brought back someone in my life who I had written off as dead (and trust me it wasn't dumb luck).
Take it for what you will. Since this is a positive statement concerning Scientology I'm sure it will be modded down to "-1 Troll".
Slashdot Mirror
I don't understand why WotC doesn't invite him back. They don't even let Richard Garfield develop on MTG anymore. Why do corporations feel the need to divorce creators from their projects?
Like most things, I too am an expert in this field (CD media)
RiTEK or Taiyo Yuden or Mitsui are "semi acceptable"
CDRs use frail ORAGANIC dye prone to steady erasure and destruction from heat, light, water, etc.
All media sucks for long term archival except perhaps STAMPED glass platter cds using gold sputterred reflection. They are called "Century Discs" and you have never seen one, though they are special fabbed. They are inorganic. No plastic to "droop" no aluminum to oxidize slowly into powder over the decades. (Aluminum oxidizes in 2 millionths of one second when exposed to air but creates a semi-safe blanket of aluminum oxide a couple atoms thick and remains mostly reflective.) All cdrs are slowly rotting, but if kept cold could last a while and be readable in a "flat bed static CD scanner" in 2020 and later.
Start of Side topic #1 ; inorganic home recordable +100 year archival media:
I own "mostly inorganic" glass platter PDO media for archiving with a four and a half thousand dollar device I bought once. It's a Maxtor (Maxoptix) Tahiti-II and each blank cost over 100 dollars. But the data will last centuries under ANY HEAT and ANY atmosphere and ANY Radiation and ANY magnetism because it uses PLASMA STATE recording. A rare earth element is heated past liquid, past gas state, into PLASMA STATE by a ridiculously espensive high powered laser, and while in this state, a strong magnetic field orientates the crystals of the cooling rare earth metal into north-or south orientation. A simple low power read-only laser can use a polarizing filter to readily discern this data. It can do so centuries from now. The Library of Congress uses these 4 thousand dollar recorders, and the US military... and also myself for pleasure. Yup I stored porn on these Tahiti-II glass platter inorganic discs! Too bad the timing-tracking marks embedded in these crystal media 125 dollar platters was imprinted using a plastic marking substance instead of the official "acid etching using H2SO3F+" Magic acid.
Only magic acid can eat a beaker or mark the inside timing marks of these special multi-century media... and Phillips Dupont CHEATED ME and fucking used PLASTIC which will rot away slowly over the next 75 years depriving our future generations of my porn collection. You can buy magic acid in special containers, or manufacture your own by mixing antimony pentafluoride (SbF55) and fluorosulphonic acid (HSO3F). It has an unbelievable pka of 20 and is powerful enough to protonate saturated alkanes forming carbonium ions... and etch glass without spending a lot of effort trying to use hyperboloid 5Kw lasers on clear glass.
UI am definitely going off on a tangent and I was still talking about CD reflectivity, so I will continue...
End of Side topic #1 ; inorganic home recordable +100 year archival media:
I have visited pressing plants, sputtering plants, and even polycarb manufacturers for DVD and CDR, and taken a few 1,200 dollar a day seminars on laser head movement and design.
Refectivity in a CD or CD-ROM is irrelevant. The laser usually uses a "Quarter wave" plate and the frequency of the laser is specially selected and this rotated light has a 90 degree polarity difference (differential phase) that makes reading possible at high speeds. This is less relevant in CDR but very important in stamped media. I discuss this at length for you below a second discussion in my Side topic #2 on : CD Reflectivity Layers (not needing any metal or even being transparently covered)
Amusing Side NOTE : I am not just Mr Medical boy, Mr microbiology Man, Mr Lawyer, Mr Musician, Mr Trivia Buff, Etc... i am also Mr Computer expert and CD device consultant, and paid a couple times in my life to consult on CDR mechanism design.
The best CDRs use a special dye invented by Mitsui Toatsu Corporation (MTC), but no longer true after 2000 unless you have old stockpil
ok, that comment makes no sense whatsoever. plz "ssssh"!
The Purification program which consists of a regime of heavy vitamins, niacin and long sauna sweatouts can actually purge the body of toxins. Anyone who has ever been poisoned (heavy drug users), exposed to radiation or has lived in a toxic environment (LA) could greatly benefit.
I did it five years ago and the results were amazing. Incredibly, my eyesight improved.
read more here .
And this is the book, Clear Body, Clear Mind.
Yes, cable's more vulnerable to that - although with DSL, you're still sharing the backhaul pipe from the DSLAM to the ISP, and of course all the ISP's customers are sharing the ISP's pipe(s) to the rest of the Net. The tradeoff is that cable has much more bandwidth to share.
Yes but DSL is segemented where as cable users would suffer heavy collisions and packetloss getting through an oversaturated backhaul. Very typical of cable at large apartment complexes.
He's out looking for all the packets he dropped!
I like toons!!
Why on earth is my post considered flamebait? :confused:
So, I have this idea, and I think it's pretty good. If I had the time, I'd do it myself, but maybe someone else will pick it up and run with it.
Here goes. What does p2p get you? Free distribution. What do you lose? Centralized control. So the materials best suited for distribution over a p2p network are 1. things you want as widely disseminated as possible and 2. things that don't have to be constantly updated and revised.
My idea, basically, is to use napster/gnutella as a publishing medium for original content that is specifically designed for p2p. If this works, you can distribute a reasonably large file over a very large network in a very short period of time, and here's the kicker- if your stuff gets popular, you don't have to pay out big bucks for akamai and better server hardware.
So what kind of content would fly? I think sketch comedy that gets updated daily would be ok, or better yet, a comedic news program. I love reading Suck.com on my palm pilot on the train every morning, I wish someone would do a Not Necessarily the News style 5-10minute news bit every morning and distribute it over napster/gnutella with a predictable filename (maybe newsTellaDDMMYY.mp3 or something like that).
Eventually you could get sponsors and integrate little ads into your content, or maybe you'd spark a phenomenon and some radio network would pick you up or something, or maybe even just sell archives of your work on cdrom or something. But it seems like the way to really capitalize on the medium is to take advantage of the fact that a public media distribution network has been made available to you.
It's not the web, it's not tv, and promoting your stuff in this media doesn't work the same way it does in these other media. If you publicise the fact that you're doing it and update consistently and often, and actually produce some funny/interesting content, I think you'd be onto something really big. Let me know how it goes if you try it.
What is P2P? It just means any connected node (called host) on the Internet can connect another one, without one system explicitly meant to be a server only, and the other one a client.
What is so special about that, why all the fuzz? Even the notion of defending P2P makes me sick and is absurd. The Internet is built on (mostly) the TCP protocol, which allows for any node to connect to any other node directly. The Internet *is* P2P and has been so from the beginning.
It is normal to telnet from machine A to machine B, and then telnet back from B to A. It is normal to act both as an ftp client and server, in fact before the web became popular, in the old days, almost any connected node to the Internet acted both as client and as server.
Why is this "evidence" needed? People trying to forbid P2P are trying to forbid Internet, or at least trying to fundamentally change its netowork protocol (which is impossible).
Only ISP's could block incoming connections, thus making "P2P" (how I hate that word, describing something that has been around for ages as if it were something new) impossible. Not many of them do (luckily), only having no fixed IP address makes acting as a server a bit more complicated, but things like dyndns get around that.
One might imagine a future where anyone with a dynamic IP address (hard to trace) is prohibited by the state to have incoming connections. That is a nightmare but I don't think such a draconic law is very probably, and it would be very hard to enforce too.
I'm not sure if this is truly P2P but it is probably close enough (and was to a certain extent inspired by Napster) background.
The major biological databases (EMBL, GenBank, Swissprot etc.) are repositories for sequence data, the information that describes the order of the DNA or proteins (depending on the database). This is collected and curated by a relatively small number of people compared to the size of these databases.
This information is relatively useless without annotation. Annotation is the description of the biological role of the sequence and which bits are important. Unfortunately annotation is difficult and time consuming for people who are non experts to maintain. THis means that many of the entries in the databases are either poorly annotated (poor), have out of date annotation (poor) or blatently incorrect annotation (really bad).
A system of P2P sharing of annotation data has been devised where an expert working on gene Xyz can make available his own annotations without having to burden the overworked people at GenBank/EMBL/DDBJ to make updates to the central database. Interested parties can access this data in a P2P manner (ie a query on 'what does anyone know about Xyz').
One of the main protagonists of DAS (Distributed Annotation System) is Lincoln Stein at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (yes, of CGI.pm fame). It will also be presented at the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference in July this year (where I hope to find out a lot more about it too..)
This sounds like a perfect example of productive P2P.Have a look at http://stein.cshl.org/das/ for more information. I know that at least one of the authors on the paper referenced has been guilty of reading Slashdot in the past so maybe he would comment.
You think I'm paying to go to school so I can learn? I'm paying for 5 years of quick music, movies, and porn, damn it. Turn off my network access and I'm going to community college.
If you're going to do it, use a dial-up account with your own ISP, because they can't afford all of the bandwidth nor the legal pressure.
How 'bout Tesla Coils!
It would be a fun experiment and it would be great to teach a little about one of the greatest and most underappreciated minds in history. There are tons of pages on how to do his experiments.
http://www.amasci.com/tesla/tesla.html#tplan
Their customer satisfaction would quadruple if they would stop:
1.) Reading people's emails/chat logs
2.) Stop the domainname suing
3.) Stop censoring people (kids is debateable, but they censor adults too).
4.) Stop pissing off every gamer in the world by destroying any online gaming experience.
5.) Find a way to reverse the damage done to one's ego when someone says "Dude, you've got A-oh-hell!?"
For the love of god, please stop the piracy! Just because the RIAA is protecting its IP in a knuckleheaded fashion doesn't give America license to rip them off. Just how would you act if your store was being looted? This is totally criminal and the harm that P2P networks cause grossly outweigh the good. We by all means should have more government involvement, injunctions and regulations of ISPs. The illegal fileswappers should be ARRESTED. Why such outrage over the idea of prosecution? After all, isn't that what we are supposed to do to lawbreakers? Please let's put this "The RIAA is the victim of its own hubris" notion to bed and garner a modicum of respect for IP rights. Thank you.
This is a clear and cut case where Nissanmotors is in the right. No reason why that man should be able to capitalize off of the years and $$$ Nissanmotors has spent branding its trademark. Just because you share the name doesn't give you the right to piggyback.
It is a Scientology based alcohol and drug reform center. He said it changed his life. I never ever thought my dad would stop drinking and he has been clean and sober for over a year and quite happy. I have to agree that it is life-changing, all for the better. Insurance paid for his 3 month stay.
I guess you can say Scientology worked a miracle for me because it has brought back someone in my life who I had written off as dead (and trust me it wasn't dumb luck).
Take it for what you will. Since this is a positive statement concerning Scientology I'm sure it will be modded down to "-1 Troll".
*sneers*