But I'm not proud of having compromised my principles to earn my keep. That's one of the reasons I'm working on a career change: I've been able to keep the rights to all my music and writing. I've copylefted all my music and much of my writing, and determined to continue doing so.
If Clinton vs. McCain, 19% of Obama supporters will vote Republican.
This is what their divisive campaigning has wrought.
The Republicans used to have a Commandment that served them very well in general elections: "Thou Shalt Not Speak Ill Of A Fellow Republican". Perhaps it's time for the Democratic Party to adopt a corresponding Commandment.
I'm an Obama supporter, and was myself considering that I might vote for McCain if Clinton were nominated. What changed my mind was reading McCain's take on the housing crisis in the paper today, in which the best he could come up with was to have some accountants and bankers to have some kind of conference. He specifically said he wouldn't bail out anyone who made unwise investments.
So if Clinton is the nominee, I'll be voting for Nader.
I did a consulting gig a while back, whose contract specifically said I was not to include open source code in my work for them.
There was no mention of licenses; open source licenses include the MIT and BSD licenses, and many similar licenses that permit keeping the source to derivative works closed. And in fact, Microsoft itself uses a lot of BSD code in Windows, without sharing any of its source.
I was very unhappy about signing such a contract, but I needed the work.
I never really asked why they wouldn't even allow source under the MIT or BSD licenses. I expect that it was a lack of education. If that's the case, I expect their attitude is not uncommon, and sorely needs to be corrected.
For what it's worth, my current employer (I'm no longer consulting) releases the source code to its Linux and BSD drivers as open source, with their source code being provided on our installation CDs.
A board that investigated the accidental flight of nuclear-armed cruise missiles across the country a few months ago found that our nation's nuclear armaments are now trusted to much lower-ranking officers and civilians than used to be the case. They found that working with nuclear arms was no longer regarded by military personnel as being a good way to advance one's career.
The US has been fighting conventionally ever since the first Gulf War - even after that war ended, there was quite a bit of combat activity to enforce Iraq's no-fly zone. With the current wars, this has resulted in military personnel regarding conventional fighting as the way to get ahead in the military.
After the Cold War, the once-vaunted Strategic Air Command, which controlled all Air Force nuclear weapons, was dismantled. The military's nuclear missiles were assigned to a division responsible for operations in space, and its nuclear bombers were moved to Air Combat Command, which also includes nonnuclear fighters and reconnaissance aircraft.
...
However, the Welch report is highly critical of the split commands. The report concludes that combining nuclear forces with nonnuclear organizations has led to "markedly reduced levels of leadership whose daily focus is the nuclear enterprise and a general devaluation of the nuclear mission and those who perform the mission."
I was very slow to move from NT4, because Win2k was kinda half baked in its first release (though not as bad as Vista). But I've always had good results starting with Service Pack 2.
The key is to install FireFox, never use Internet Explorer or any of the apps that use it (like Outlook), and don't ever expose it directly to the Internet. (The one time I did, it only took an hour or so to get clobbered by the Welchia worm.)
My wife runs XP, but mainly because that's what came on her laptop. The only real advantage I see to XP is the fast user switching. But she's never going to be a Vista user: she just bought an iMac, to run Final Cut on for her video artwork.
... People's Republic of China. They have all these excess US dollars you see, as a result of selling us consumer products. They don't have much useful to do with them, so they buy our Treasury bonds.
This means the PRC has the US over a barrel: if we try to stand up to them over, say, Tibet or Taiwan, they'll stop buying our bonds, or even dump them.
While you could coat it with a hard protective layer like aluminum oxide, I think it would be hard to protect it well enough to prevent oxidation from degrading a layer only one atom thick.
I recall that early compact discs had this problem, in which oxygen trapped in the plastic would oxidize the aluminum and reduce its reflectivity.
That was what they found when a pilot project picked up all the trash in the Downtown Eastside. The article I read about it, I think it was in The Vancouver Sun, said the trash collectors had to be escorted by the police.
11 And I beheld another beast coming up out of the earth; and he had two horns like a lamb, and he spake as a dragon. 12 And he exerciseth all the power of the first beast before him, and causeth the earth and them which dwell therein to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed. 13 And he doeth great wonders, so that he maketh fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men, 14 And deceiveth them that dwell on the earth by the means of those miracles which he had power to do in the sight of the beast; saying to them that dwell on the earth, that they should make an image to the beast, which had the wound by a sword, and did live. 15 And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed. 16 And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: 17 And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. 18 Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.
Even if you don't place any credence in The Good Book, you could recite chapter and verse to raise opposition to RealID among those who do.
Canada's poorest neighborhood is known as the Downtown Eastside. I used to work in nearby Gastown.
I found the contrast between most of Vancouver, which is otherwise one of Canada's most prosperous cities, and the Downtown Eastside so stark as to be completely overwhelming. There was a time when I had been one of the urban unfortunates myself, as I have a mental illness that was at one time quite severe.
I became determined to help those that I could, often buying meals for those who asked me for spare change. But it got to be more than I could bear; the stress of it put me back in the mental hospital - I was brought to St. Paul's hospital on Burrard by an ambulance, where I stayed for three weeks in their Two-South Mental Health ward.
I discuss Vancouver, and many of those who I met there, in my weblog The Vancouver Diaries. That is, the entries before June 30th, 2007, when I moved back to the US. I kept blogging at the site, as I intend to go back someday, but for now I live in Silicon Valley.
I have to say, that the company that remotely installed this firmware, breaking their project, why they have to be worse than The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. I don't think I have in my entire life met so many people who are so unfortunate as the residents of the Downtown Eastside. I hope they have a change of heart.
They would monitor for leaks by collecting biological samples, oxidizing them down to ash, then mixing the ash in liquid scintillator then counting the rate of flashes in the fluid.
She said all the pine needles in the woods near Oak Ridge are highly radioactive.
She also monitored the lobsters caught in the Pacific next to the San Onofre plant near San Diego. Once they sent up extra lobsters: some to assay, and some to eat!
When I drove back through US customs from Vancouver on New Year's Day, there were some kind of electrical gadgets just before the inspector's booth. They were square boxes, about five inches square and an inch or so thick, several of them pointed at each car lane, with thick cables coming off of them.
I don't know what they were, but speculated that they were radiation detectors.
There are detectors buried in the road near the Los Alamos National Laboratory. A while back I read about a case where a hospital radiation source accidentally got made into rebar, which was loaded onto a truck bound for the US. The driver had a friend who worked at Los Alamos, so he drove up there to visit, setting off all the detectors which were meant to detect the transport of radioactive material away from LANL.p
This bill has only been passed by the House of Representatives. The Senate has already passed a bill that gives Bush everything he wants. What happens now is that the two bills will be "reconciled" by a conference committee, that will then yield the bill that actually gets passed - or not.
What You Need To Do Now:
If you are a US citizen, visit Congress.org and enter your zip code in the Search box to find out who your Representative and Senators are. Then write them a letter urging them to uphold the House's version of the bill in the conference committee.
Don't bother with email; if you can't write a letter, call them on the phone.
Emphasize the importance of the Constitution and the rule of law.
Urge them not to compromise, if the President does veto the final bill. It would be much better not to pass a bill at all than to allow this travesty of justice to continue.
My letter is going to point out that all the telcos knew they were breaking the law when they committed their crimes. Such criminal acts should be treated as such. IMHO, there shouldn't need to be civil lawsuits filed by those who were spied upon; all of the telco employees involved, as well as all the government officials involved, should be put in prison for a good long time.
You can't prosecute a sitting president, but what you can do is impeach him, and that's what should happen to Bush.
The bad news is that I didn't manage to compose any new material. The good news is that I spent a great deal of time working on piano during February, and made quite a bit of progress with my studies.
I compose by improvising, but found that several years of formal lessons didn't help me with improvising; if anything, I have a harder time with it than before I took lessons.
But I am working to get it back, and plan to record a new album around mid-Summer. It will be CC-licensed too.
The RIAA and MPAA, as well as their counterparts in other countries, have been pressuring legislators, ISPs and Universities to block all filesharing. But much filesharing is completely legal, and needs to be kept that way.
For example, many Open Source installers are available via BitTorrent. Their use of p2p is crucial to their success, because it reduces distribution costs.
P2P is also crucial to the success of struggling musicians who offer their music online for free, as a way to promote themselves. Direct HTTP downloads can lead to bankrupcy if their songs become sudden hits. I myself offer Bit Torrent downloads of my piano compositions.
(While I presently work as a software engineer, I'm studying piano with the aim of changing careers into music. You could really help me out if you shared my music over the Internet.)
In your letters to your legislators, please emphasize the legal uses of P2p.
Most of us Slashdot members have it pretty good - University educations, professional jobs as coders or sysadmins.
If you were born in Gaza, what kind of future lies ahead of you? Look at the pictures on TV or in the magazines. Economic conditions there are quite grim.
It's easy to understand why such a child might become a suicide bomber someday. With nothing to live for, one makes a difference the only way one can.
My album Geometric Visions is inspired by geometry; one of the pieces is called Recursion. It is minimalist instrumental piano.
There are both HTTP downloads and torrents. The sheet music to two of the songs is provided in PDF and Lilypond format, with the others to follow soon.
My music has the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. You could really help me out if you shared my music over the Internet.
I'm also offering to send free CDs - autographed - to anyone anywhere in the world; just email your snail mail address to support@oggfrog.com
While I presently work as a programmer, I have been studying piano intensively for several years with the aim of one day enrolling in music school to study musical composition. I want to write symphonies!
I expect that my privacy policy can be just a few sentences long. AdSense's T&Cs say we should advise the user on how to disable cookies - I might well provide a detailed HOWTO, with screen shots, for all the top browsers.
If you or anyone else want a free CD of my album - autographed! - send your snail mail address to support@oggfrog.com
I'll get a PHP order form up on that page Real Soon Now.
There's a way it could be done, but impractical
on
IFPI Turning To Lawsuits
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· Score: 2, Informative
You'd have to compare the general sound of audio files to known audio tracks whose copyright owners don't license them for sharing.
But you can't do a bit-for-bit comparing, or a hash, because there are a lot of ways to change the precise data in a file without changing what it sounds like in a way that is noticable to the human ear.
For example, you could re-compress it to a different bit rate, or transcode it say from MP3 to Ogg Vorbis, or what have you.
I'm sure there are known algorithms that can tell if two audio tracks sound alike, despite lossy compression.
The problem is that there are a lot of tracks to compare against, and a lot of sharing files. So it would be so computationally expensive that no ISP could afford to actually implement it.
File sharing is crucial to the success of musicians such as myself who offer free downloads of their music. We do this to promote our work, and to gain fans.
But direct HTTP downloads can bankrupt a struggling musician if their music suddenly becomes a hit. To allow mass distribution at modest expense, I offer Bit Torrent downloads of my music.
I can't really see how an ISP could filter out copyright infringement without also filtering out files that are non-infringing.
Bit Torrent distribution is also crucial to Free and Open Source software projects, whose installers are sometimes hundreds of megabytes or even gigabytes in size.
In the debate about file sharing, please speak up for the legal uses of it.
And yes, I know I can host my work on free sites like MySpace, but then it would be MySpace's website and not my own that would benefit from links placed by fans. For business reasons, it's much better for a musician to have their own website if they possibly can.
Slashdot Mirror
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If McCain vs. Obama, 28% of Clinton Backers Go for McCain
If Clinton vs. McCain, 19% of Obama supporters will vote Republican.This is what their divisive campaigning has wrought.
The Republicans used to have a Commandment that served them very well in general elections: "Thou Shalt Not Speak Ill Of A Fellow Republican". Perhaps it's time for the Democratic Party to adopt a corresponding Commandment.
I'm an Obama supporter, and was myself considering that I might vote for McCain if Clinton were nominated. What changed my mind was reading McCain's take on the housing crisis in the paper today, in which the best he could come up with was to have some accountants and bankers to have some kind of conference. He specifically said he wouldn't bail out anyone who made unwise investments.
So if Clinton is the nominee, I'll be voting for Nader.
There was no mention of licenses; open source licenses include the MIT and BSD licenses, and many similar licenses that permit keeping the source to derivative works closed. And in fact, Microsoft itself uses a lot of BSD code in Windows, without sharing any of its source.
I was very unhappy about signing such a contract, but I needed the work.
I never really asked why they wouldn't even allow source under the MIT or BSD licenses. I expect that it was a lack of education. If that's the case, I expect their attitude is not uncommon, and sorely needs to be corrected.
For what it's worth, my current employer (I'm no longer consulting) releases the source code to its Linux and BSD drivers as open source, with their source code being provided on our installation CDs.
The US has been fighting conventionally ever since the first Gulf War - even after that war ended, there was quite a bit of combat activity to enforce Iraq's no-fly zone. With the current wars, this has resulted in military personnel regarding conventional fighting as the way to get ahead in the military.
Let me find you a link...
The key is to install FireFox, never use Internet Explorer or any of the apps that use it (like Outlook), and don't ever expose it directly to the Internet. (The one time I did, it only took an hour or so to get clobbered by the Welchia worm.)
My wife runs XP, but mainly because that's what came on her laptop. The only real advantage I see to XP is the fast user switching. But she's never going to be a Vista user: she just bought an iMac, to run Final Cut on for her video artwork.
This means the PRC has the US over a barrel: if we try to stand up to them over, say, Tibet or Taiwan, they'll stop buying our bonds, or even dump them.
I recall that early compact discs had this problem, in which oxygen trapped in the plastic would oxidize the aluminum and reduce its reflectivity.
I found the contrast between most of Vancouver, which is otherwise one of Canada's most prosperous cities, and the Downtown Eastside so stark as to be completely overwhelming. There was a time when I had been one of the urban unfortunates myself, as I have a mental illness that was at one time quite severe.
I became determined to help those that I could, often buying meals for those who asked me for spare change. But it got to be more than I could bear; the stress of it put me back in the mental hospital - I was brought to St. Paul's hospital on Burrard by an ambulance, where I stayed for three weeks in their Two-South Mental Health ward.
I discuss Vancouver, and many of those who I met there, in my weblog The Vancouver Diaries. That is, the entries before June 30th, 2007, when I moved back to the US. I kept blogging at the site, as I intend to go back someday, but for now I live in Silicon Valley.
I have to say, that the company that remotely installed this firmware, breaking their project, why they have to be worse than The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. I don't think I have in my entire life met so many people who are so unfortunate as the residents of the Downtown Eastside. I hope they have a change of heart.
She said all the pine needles in the woods near Oak Ridge are highly radioactive.
She also monitored the lobsters caught in the Pacific next to the San Onofre plant near San Diego. Once they sent up extra lobsters: some to assay, and some to eat!
I don't know what they were, but speculated that they were radiation detectors.
There are detectors buried in the road near the Los Alamos National Laboratory. A while back I read about a case where a hospital radiation source accidentally got made into rebar, which was loaded onto a truck bound for the US. The driver had a friend who worked at Los Alamos, so he drove up there to visit, setting off all the detectors which were meant to detect the transport of radioactive material away from LANL.p
What You Need To Do Now:
If you are a US citizen, visit Congress.org and enter your zip code in the Search box to find out who your Representative and Senators are. Then write them a letter urging them to uphold the House's version of the bill in the conference committee.
Don't bother with email; if you can't write a letter, call them on the phone.
Emphasize the importance of the Constitution and the rule of law.
Urge them not to compromise, if the President does veto the final bill. It would be much better not to pass a bill at all than to allow this travesty of justice to continue.
My letter is going to point out that all the telcos knew they were breaking the law when they committed their crimes. Such criminal acts should be treated as such. IMHO, there shouldn't need to be civil lawsuits filed by those who were spied upon; all of the telco employees involved, as well as all the government officials involved, should be put in prison for a good long time.
You can't prosecute a sitting president, but what you can do is impeach him, and that's what should happen to Bush.
I compose by improvising, but found that several years of formal lessons didn't help me with improvising; if anything, I have a harder time with it than before I took lessons.
But I am working to get it back, and plan to record a new album around mid-Summer. It will be CC-licensed too.
For example, many Open Source installers are available via BitTorrent. Their use of p2p is crucial to their success, because it reduces distribution costs.
P2P is also crucial to the success of struggling musicians who offer their music online for free, as a way to promote themselves. Direct HTTP downloads can lead to bankrupcy if their songs become sudden hits. I myself offer Bit Torrent downloads of my piano compositions.
(While I presently work as a software engineer, I'm studying piano with the aim of changing careers into music. You could really help me out if you shared my music over the Internet.)
In your letters to your legislators, please emphasize the legal uses of P2p.
If you were born in Gaza, what kind of future lies ahead of you? Look at the pictures on TV or in the magazines. Economic conditions there are quite grim.
It's easy to understand why such a child might become a suicide bomber someday. With nothing to live for, one makes a difference the only way one can.
There are both HTTP downloads and torrents. The sheet music to two of the songs is provided in PDF and Lilypond format, with the others to follow soon.
My music has the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. You could really help me out if you shared my music over the Internet.
I'm also offering to send free CDs - autographed - to anyone anywhere in the world; just email your snail mail address to support@oggfrog.com
While I presently work as a programmer, I have been studying piano intensively for several years with the aim of one day enrolling in music school to study musical composition. I want to write symphonies!
'
I'll get a PHP order form up on that page Real Soon Now.
But you can't do a bit-for-bit comparing, or a hash, because there are a lot of ways to change the precise data in a file without changing what it sounds like in a way that is noticable to the human ear.
For example, you could re-compress it to a different bit rate, or transcode it say from MP3 to Ogg Vorbis, or what have you.
I'm sure there are known algorithms that can tell if two audio tracks sound alike, despite lossy compression.
The problem is that there are a lot of tracks to compare against, and a lot of sharing files. So it would be so computationally expensive that no ISP could afford to actually implement it.
But direct HTTP downloads can bankrupt a struggling musician if their music suddenly becomes a hit. To allow mass distribution at modest expense, I offer Bit Torrent downloads of my music.
I can't really see how an ISP could filter out copyright infringement without also filtering out files that are non-infringing.
Bit Torrent distribution is also crucial to Free and Open Source software projects, whose installers are sometimes hundreds of megabytes or even gigabytes in size.
In the debate about file sharing, please speak up for the legal uses of it.
And yes, I know I can host my work on free sites like MySpace, but then it would be MySpace's website and not my own that would benefit from links placed by fans. For business reasons, it's much better for a musician to have their own website if they possibly can.