I often have dreams where I'm flying like these guys. Oddly, in these dreams I never question that it should be impossible; it feels like the most normal thing, even though no one else in my dreams can fly.
I read a front-page Wall Street Journal article a while back that said that Putin is wildly popular with Russian citizens because he's been successful at revitalizing the Russian economy. Before Putin - including after the fall of communism - the vast majority of Russians lived in very grim conditions.
Putin has been successful in changing all that; I would imagine the giving people enough to eat and decent housing can excuse a lot of police-state abuses.
For example, that WSJ article covered a Soviet-era glass factory that was originally a very outmoded, inefficient industrial plant, but with the result of millions of dollars of foreign investment, is now earning lots of export rubles by manufacturing automobile windshields.
You know what they said about Mussolini: "At least he made the trains run on time".
Yes, libogg makes heavy use of floating point, which many embedded CPUs don't support, but the format doesn't inherently require floating point. The Tremor uses only integer instructions (fixed-point I think), specifically for embedded use. It has a "BSD-style license".
Wait, last I checked, you merely had to tell people where to get the source.
No, each organization that distributes GPL binaries has to supply their own copy of the source. It's not sufficient to point out some other website that has it.
I know this because I subscribe to the Cygwin mailing list, which has discussed this extensively. The Cygwin DLL is a POSIX emulation layer for Windows, and it's quite common for companies to port their *NIX apps to Windows with Cygwin, and then to bundle their app with the DLL but not its source. In particular the Cygwin developers - Red Hat - have made it very clear that just pointing out somebody else's copy of the source doesn't count.
Also, one must provide the exact same source code as was used to build the binary, and to maintain that version of the code for the duration of the license terms (two years after the last ship date I think). So if you upgrade your code, you can't take down the old version of the sources until your obligation under the GPL for that version expires.
The way I'm handling this in my own Free Software project is to roll a release tarball of the source as the first step of making a release, then to unpack it and use that to build the binary. That's the only way I can feel sure I've got a snapshot of the exact source for each binary.
VLC is a project developed by a French technical school, as a programming exercise for its students. The reason they can support AAC as well as numerous other patented formats is that France doesn't recognize software patents - yet.
I know this because I specifically asked on their developer mailing list; I'd like to support AAC in my own application Ogg Frog, but I can't, because I live in the US.
While there's been no enforcement action so far, it's my understanding that it's illegal for Americans to even download VLC, let alone use it.
I figured that the reason Walmart was dumping WMA was that it won't play on iPods. According to TFA that seems to be the case.
Apple has their own proprietary format called AAC; iTunes Music Store downloads are in AAC format, some of them DRMed but some not. In the battle for the hearts and minds of music fans, Microsoft will never support AAC, and Apple will never support WMA. So MP3 is left as the common denominator.
(AAC isn't as proprietary as WMA in that the file format is publicly documented, but it is patent-encumbered so that Free Software implementations such as faad and faac are illegal in countries like the US that recognize software patents. Unlike MP3, there is no free license for decoders, one has to pay for a patent license for them.)
I can imagine that Walmart.com's tech support has gotten pretty sick of fielding complaints that their downloads don't work on iPods...
... but I am as confident as I am
that the Sun will rise tomorrow that it will be safe from terrorists.
After all, we have the children to think about.
It seems that David Clark, who led the development of
the Internet way back in the '70's - did you know there
even was a '70's? -
wants to
create a whole new Internet that will fix many of the problems the
current Internet is plagued with. The New Internet's engineers will be
much more careful this time around to make sure it works better than
the first one did.
I'm afraid, though, that the engineers are not the only ones
who will be deciding how our New Internet will work.
If one is able to find any
privacy or anonymity in this New Internet,
it will be because of some undiscovered
security hole, which will be
quickly repaired, rather than any kind of conscious design decision.
Probably one reason they are accepting proposals before rolling it out
is to avoid the sort of accidental security holes that enable pr0n,
peer-to-peer filesharing and
left-wing political activism.
Microsoft, a leading contributor both to this nation's
technology base
and to the
campaign coffers of its leaders, will embrace this new
technology and extend it in such a way that the development and
dissemination of Open Source
software will be, if not mathematically
and physically impossible, at least as intractible as factoring a 2048-bit
public key.
Imagine, if you will,
Trusted Computing implemented at the router level,
in such a way that any packets that go farther than one hop are certified
not only to support protocols whose
patent licenses are fully paid-up and
on file with the legal department in
Redmond, but whose content is
compliant with the
Windows standard. The faintest whisp of a
Public
License,
GNU
or
otherwise, will result in the dropping not only of the
individual packet, not only in the cancellation of the entire file
transmission, but, within microseconds, the reporting of the
physical location of the
offending server to responsible law enforcement personnel.
The identities of its
rogue administrators will be
fetched instantly from the database maintained by the
Department of Homeland Security.
(You will have to submit fingerprints and DNA samples to
obtain a
Windows
server license, as after all,
Internet servers can be
used to disseminate
explosives
r
Launch Disk Utility from/Applications/Utilities. If you want to erase your boot drive, you'll have to boot off an OS X installer CD then run Disk Utility from the installer.
Select your hard drive from the list on the left. Note that you can erase either a whole drive, or just a selected partition.
Click on the Erase tab, then on the Security Options button.
Click on the 7-Pass Erase radio button. On Tiger (10.4) it says this provides a "highly secure erasure" of the drive; on Leopard it names the MIL-STD document that the erasure conforms to.
Click the OK button, then the Erase button, then confirm that you really want to wipe your drive.
Wait a long time.
Coverup!
For the truly paranoid, there is also a 35-pass erase option.
The GNU Lesser General Public License (formerly the "Library" GPL) has the terms you describe, but the GNU General Public License (without the "Lesser") requires one to release full source if any covered libraries are used.
You may not propagate or modify a covered work except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to propagate or modify it is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License (including any patent licenses granted under the third paragraph of section 11).
However, if you cease all violation of this License, then your license from a particular copyright holder is reinstated (a) provisionally, unless and until the copyright holder explicitly and finally terminates your license, and (b) permanently, if the copyright holder fails to notify you of the violation by some reasonable means prior to 60 days after the cessation.
Moreover, your license from a particular copyright holder is reinstated permanently if the copyright holder notifies you of the violation by some reasonable means, this is the first time you have received notice of violation of this License (for any work) from that copyright holder, and you cure the violation prior to 30 days after your receipt of the notice.
Termination of your rights under this section does not terminate the licenses of parties who have received copies or rights from you under this License. If your rights have been terminated and not permanently reinstated, you do not qualify to receive new licenses for the same material under section 10.
What that means is that they have to stop shipping the game entirely.
Now, the FSF, often acting on behalf of the copyright holders, have often allowed infringers to comply by releasing the source under the GPL. But I recall reading here at Slashdot recently that they are starting to play hardball with violators, and not allowing them to comply simply by shipping source. The copyright holder would be fully within his rights to get a permanent injunction against the sale of the game.
It was unmaintained for a while, but has some fresh new developers. Many of the download links in its server are broken, mainly due to the Internet Underground Music Archive going out of business. But they are even as we speak removing the broken links, and adding new ones.
So if you find that iRATE doesn't work well for you today, give it a week or two and it should work much better.
One reason it's important to do so is that the US Supreme Court doesn't render advisory opinions; to have the Court overturn a law that makes something a crime, somebody has to actually break it, be tried and found guilty, appeal and then lose in the appellate courts, then appeal to the Supreme Court.
You don't have to pay the iTunes Music Store to download music legally. Many musicians offer free downloads of their music as a way to promote themselves. I'm one such artist. You could really help me out if you shared my music over the Internet.
I'm not talking warez and pr0n - what about all the Free and Open Source software projects that distribute their installers via BitTorrent?
And not just software - p2p is critical to the ability of independent musicians to distribute downloads of their music. For example, Jamendo offers Creative Commons music from thousands of artists via BitTorrent and eMule.
I'm such a musician - I offer BitTorrent downloads of my music. If (Heaven forbid!) I got slashdotted, the torrents would keep me from being bankrupted by bandwidth bills, as would be the case if I only offered HTTP downloads.
Right underneath the Creative Commons license logo, the jewel case insert says "Please Burn Copies For Your Friends". A sticker on the back of the case asks you to share my music over the Internet, burn copies, and link to my website.
Many musicians offer free downloads of their music as a way to promote themselves. I'm one - see my sig. I wrote the following article back in 2003 which catalogues many, many music download sites. Some are paid, but most are free, and there are some music hosting sites listed that offer downloads from thousands of musicians:
Besides offerring music links, the article explores the filesharing controversy and the history of copyright in the US, and suggests a number of concrete steps you can take to make filesharing legal.
If you're a musician or music hosting site operator, and offer at least one COMPLETE track from your site, I'll be happy to give you a link. It's even OK if you charge for your music, as long as there are some complete tracks and not just samples. Email me at
legaldownloads@gmail.com
I leave my laptop on for days at a time, just putting it to sleep when I'm not using it. This mostly works, but every couple days I have to quit FireFox and relaunch it, because it becomes so slow as to be unusable. For example, holding the mouse down on a scroll bar arrow causes it to scroll one increment every ten seconds or so, rather than scrolling rapidly as it should.
Several times I've seen flocks of birds flying in circles. One time I watched this for several minutes. The birds were flying really fast but going nowhere.
Conventional quantum mechanics works well for electrons bound to nuclei, because they don't have a very high binding energy; the energy is not equivalent to much mass, so relativity need not be considered. Conceptually speaking, atomic electrons don't move fast enough for relativistic effects to be worth worrying about.
Quantum mechanics combined with special relativity works well for freely moving (unbound) particles. Richard Feynman and (sp?) Tominaga shared the Nobel Prize for formulating Quantum Electrodynamics, which calculates with great precision what happens when light (photons) and charged particles interact.
But nuclear particles are bound by the "color" force, which is far, far stronger than electromagnetism. Quantum Chromodynamics has to take into account relativistic effects because the binding energy of nuclear particles has significant mass. Conceptually, the quarks that make up neutrons and protons are moving close to the speed of light.
Unfortunately, this makes the equations so much more complex that no one knows how to solve them. My understanding is that the Standard Model, when applied to the bound states of nuclear particles, is just an approximation to the sought-for precise theory. It's full of what they call "injectable constants" that are tweaked to make the numbers come out right, but nobody has ever pretended that the Standard Model was any kind of physical law. It's just a device for making calculations, much as Ptolemy's epicycles weren't based in any kind of physical reality, but still could serve as a device for calculating the motions of the planets.
To my knowledge, there is not yet a fundamental theory that allows us to calculate, for example, the gamma-ray spectrum of radioactive nuclei, or their half-lives and the like. Instead, we have the Standard Model that sorta kinda gets the right answers.
If this fellow's theory can explain relativistic bound states of particles, then he'd really be onto something.
My landlady said I could use her wireless (she lived upstairs from me) but both she and a neighbor, who I never identified, had unsecured wireless, with both networks being named "linksys". They also used two different ISPs.
My MacBook Pro's Airport card connected to each network more or less at random. When I connected to her's, it worked OK, but when I connected to her neighbor's, it didn't work at all. Sometimes the Airport would switch networks in the middle of my use of the Internet, which really got to be a drag.
So I finally convinced her to let me rename and secure her access point. This went very well, and I was able to set up both my Mac and her WinXP laptop to use the newly secured net.
Except that I made a crucial mistake: I performed the re-configuration wirelessly. I didn't do it by plugging an ethernet cable into her access point.
Imagine my dismay when I realized I had reconfigured her neighbor's access point, and not her's!
I sat in my room quaking with fear, awaiting the heavy bootheels of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police kicking down my door so they could haul me in for being a cyberterrorist.
I never heard any complaints though, and eventually my neighbor's network was renamed to "linksys" and was again unsecured. My guess is that LinkSys tech support explained how to do a hard reset.
My question for my Slashdot friends is this: who is the Rocket Scientist at LinkSys who decided to support wireless reconfiguration of their routers?
... by discovering the previously-unpredicted particles that his paper predicts, especially of the properties of the new particles match the predictions, then there is no doubt whatsoever that he'll win the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Back in the day, I thought I might win the Nobel when I grew up. But life intervened; as of this month I have twenty years as a software engineer. I'm sick to death of it. But I'm not going back to Physics - download the tracks in my sig, and you can help me go back to school to study musical composition.
I offer BitTorrent downloads of my Creative Commons-licensed music. P2P distribution is crucial to me, in that it keeps down my hosting costs.
My torrents are completely legal because they're posted with the permission of the copyright holder - me.
When I was using an Eastlink cable modem in Nova Scotia, Canada, the ISP blocked me from downloading my own torrents, so I wasn't able to verify that they were working!
I think everyone who offers legal torrents, especially non-profit Open Source and Free Software organizations who provide installation isos via BitTorrent, should band together to defeat the blocking of BitTorrent downloads.
Is there a way we could file a class-action lawsuit?
But there was no way the Nazis could get enough electricity to refine Uranium with Calutrons as the US did (they are large mass spectrometers), so they were trying to build a reactor to synthesize plutonium.
One can fuel a reactor with unrefined uranium if one uses heavy water as a moderator, but they were unable to get enough heavy water because some commandos blew up the Norsk Hydro heavy water plant in Norway, then when they were trying to ship their existing inventory to Germany, the commandos sunk the ship it was on. Their heroics were portrayed in the movie The Heroes of Telemark.
After the war, the Allies found a sub-critical heavy water reactor in Germany.
Saddam Hussein really was trying to build a bomb before the first Gulf War - arms inspectors found calutrons, as well as buried power cables going from power plants to the calutrons (they require prodigous amounts of electricity to power their electromagnets).
The arms inspectors also found copies of World War II-era US patents on improvements to Calutron technology. They had been declassified, you see.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe I'll try one out someday...
Putin has been successful in changing all that; I would imagine the giving people enough to eat and decent housing can excuse a lot of police-state abuses.
For example, that WSJ article covered a Soviet-era glass factory that was originally a very outmoded, inefficient industrial plant, but with the result of millions of dollars of foreign investment, is now earning lots of export rubles by manufacturing automobile windshields.
You know what they said about Mussolini: "At least he made the trains run on time".
I know this because I subscribe to the Cygwin mailing list, which has discussed this extensively. The Cygwin DLL is a POSIX emulation layer for Windows, and it's quite common for companies to port their *NIX apps to Windows with Cygwin, and then to bundle their app with the DLL but not its source. In particular the Cygwin developers - Red Hat - have made it very clear that just pointing out somebody else's copy of the source doesn't count.
Also, one must provide the exact same source code as was used to build the binary, and to maintain that version of the code for the duration of the license terms (two years after the last ship date I think). So if you upgrade your code, you can't take down the old version of the sources until your obligation under the GPL for that version expires.
The way I'm handling this in my own Free Software project is to roll a release tarball of the source as the first step of making a release, then to unpack it and use that to build the binary. That's the only way I can feel sure I've got a snapshot of the exact source for each binary.
I know this because I specifically asked on their developer mailing list; I'd like to support AAC in my own application Ogg Frog, but I can't, because I live in the US.
While there's been no enforcement action so far, it's my understanding that it's illegal for Americans to even download VLC, let alone use it.
Apple has their own proprietary format called AAC; iTunes Music Store downloads are in AAC format, some of them DRMed but some not. In the battle for the hearts and minds of music fans, Microsoft will never support AAC, and Apple will never support WMA. So MP3 is left as the common denominator.
(AAC isn't as proprietary as WMA in that the file format is publicly documented, but it is patent-encumbered so that Free Software implementations such as faad and faac are illegal in countries like the US that recognize software patents. Unlike MP3, there is no free license for decoders, one has to pay for a patent license for them.)
I can imagine that Walmart.com's tech support has gotten pretty sick of fielding complaints that their downloads don't work on iPods...
... but I am as confident as I am that the Sun will rise tomorrow that it will be safe from terrorists. After all, we have the children to think about.
July 12, 2005
Copyright © 2005 Michael David Crawford.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
If one is able to find any privacy or anonymity in this New Internet, it will be because of some undiscovered security hole, which will be quickly repaired, rather than any kind of conscious design decision. Probably one reason they are accepting proposals before rolling it out is to avoid the sort of accidental security holes that enable pr0n, peer-to-peer filesharing and left-wing political activism.
Microsoft, a leading contributor both to this nation's technology base and to the campaign coffers of its leaders, will embrace this new technology and extend it in such a way that the development and dissemination of Open Source software will be, if not mathematically and physically impossible, at least as intractible as factoring a 2048-bit public key.
Imagine, if you will, Trusted Computing implemented at the router level, in such a way that any packets that go farther than one hop are certified not only to support protocols whose patent licenses are fully paid-up and on file with the legal department in Redmond, but whose content is compliant with the Windows standard. The faintest whisp of a Public License, GNU or otherwise, will result in the dropping not only of the individual packet, not only in the cancellation of the entire file transmission, but, within microseconds, the reporting of the physical location of the offending server to responsible law enforcement personnel. The identities of its rogue administrators will be fetched instantly from the database maintained by the Department of Homeland Security. (You will have to submit fingerprints and DNA samples to obtain a Windows server license, as after all, Internet servers can be used to disseminate explosives r
Select your hard drive from the list on the left. Note that you can erase either a whole drive, or just a selected partition.
Click on the Erase tab, then on the Security Options button.
Click on the 7-Pass Erase radio button. On Tiger (10.4) it says this provides a "highly secure erasure" of the drive; on Leopard it names the MIL-STD document that the erasure conforms to.
Click the OK button, then the Erase button, then confirm that you really want to wipe your drive.
Wait a long time.
Coverup!
For the truly paranoid, there is also a 35-pass erase option.
Now, the FSF, often acting on behalf of the copyright holders, have often allowed infringers to comply by releasing the source under the GPL. But I recall reading here at Slashdot recently that they are starting to play hardball with violators, and not allowing them to comply simply by shipping source. The copyright holder would be fully within his rights to get a permanent injunction against the sale of the game.
So if you find that iRATE doesn't work well for you today, give it a week or two and it should work much better.
One reason it's important to do so is that the US Supreme Court doesn't render advisory opinions; to have the Court overturn a law that makes something a crime, somebody has to actually break it, be tried and found guilty, appeal and then lose in the appellate courts, then appeal to the Supreme Court.
You can find many other such artists, and free, legal music hosting sites in my article Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads.
And not just software - p2p is critical to the ability of independent musicians to distribute downloads of their music. For example, Jamendo offers Creative Commons music from thousands of artists via BitTorrent and eMule.
I'm such a musician - I offer BitTorrent downloads of my music. If (Heaven forbid!) I got slashdotted, the torrents would keep me from being bankrupted by bandwidth bills, as would be the case if I only offered HTTP downloads.
Geometric Visions: The Rough Draft has the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.
- Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads
Besides offerring music links, the article explores the filesharing controversy and the history of copyright in the US, and suggests a number of concrete steps you can take to make filesharing legal.If you're a musician or music hosting site operator, and offer at least one COMPLETE track from your site, I'll be happy to give you a link. It's even OK if you charge for your music, as long as there are some complete tracks and not just samples. Email me at legaldownloads@gmail.com
Quantum mechanics combined with special relativity works well for freely moving (unbound) particles. Richard Feynman and (sp?) Tominaga shared the Nobel Prize for formulating Quantum Electrodynamics, which calculates with great precision what happens when light (photons) and charged particles interact.
But nuclear particles are bound by the "color" force, which is far, far stronger than electromagnetism. Quantum Chromodynamics has to take into account relativistic effects because the binding energy of nuclear particles has significant mass. Conceptually, the quarks that make up neutrons and protons are moving close to the speed of light.
Unfortunately, this makes the equations so much more complex that no one knows how to solve them. My understanding is that the Standard Model, when applied to the bound states of nuclear particles, is just an approximation to the sought-for precise theory. It's full of what they call "injectable constants" that are tweaked to make the numbers come out right, but nobody has ever pretended that the Standard Model was any kind of physical law. It's just a device for making calculations, much as Ptolemy's epicycles weren't based in any kind of physical reality, but still could serve as a device for calculating the motions of the planets.
To my knowledge, there is not yet a fundamental theory that allows us to calculate, for example, the gamma-ray spectrum of radioactive nuclei, or their half-lives and the like. Instead, we have the Standard Model that sorta kinda gets the right answers.
If this fellow's theory can explain relativistic bound states of particles, then he'd really be onto something.
My MacBook Pro's Airport card connected to each network more or less at random. When I connected to her's, it worked OK, but when I connected to her neighbor's, it didn't work at all. Sometimes the Airport would switch networks in the middle of my use of the Internet, which really got to be a drag.
So I finally convinced her to let me rename and secure her access point. This went very well, and I was able to set up both my Mac and her WinXP laptop to use the newly secured net.
Except that I made a crucial mistake: I performed the re-configuration wirelessly. I didn't do it by plugging an ethernet cable into her access point.
Imagine my dismay when I realized I had reconfigured her neighbor's access point, and not her's!
I sat in my room quaking with fear, awaiting the heavy bootheels of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police kicking down my door so they could haul me in for being a cyberterrorist.
I never heard any complaints though, and eventually my neighbor's network was renamed to "linksys" and was again unsecured. My guess is that LinkSys tech support explained how to do a hard reset.
My question for my Slashdot friends is this: who is the Rocket Scientist at LinkSys who decided to support wireless reconfiguration of their routers?
Back in the day, I thought I might win the Nobel when I grew up. But life intervened; as of this month I have twenty years as a software engineer. I'm sick to death of it. But I'm not going back to Physics - download the tracks in my sig, and you can help me go back to school to study musical composition.
My torrents are completely legal because they're posted with the permission of the copyright holder - me.
When I was using an Eastlink cable modem in Nova Scotia, Canada, the ISP blocked me from downloading my own torrents, so I wasn't able to verify that they were working!
I think everyone who offers legal torrents, especially non-profit Open Source and Free Software organizations who provide installation isos via BitTorrent, should band together to defeat the blocking of BitTorrent downloads.
Is there a way we could file a class-action lawsuit?
One can fuel a reactor with unrefined uranium if one uses heavy water as a moderator, but they were unable to get enough heavy water because some commandos blew up the Norsk Hydro heavy water plant in Norway, then when they were trying to ship their existing inventory to Germany, the commandos sunk the ship it was on. Their heroics were portrayed in the movie The Heroes of Telemark.
After the war, the Allies found a sub-critical heavy water reactor in Germany.
Saddam Hussein really was trying to build a bomb before the first Gulf War - arms inspectors found calutrons, as well as buried power cables going from power plants to the calutrons (they require prodigous amounts of electricity to power their electromagnets).
The arms inspectors also found copies of World War II-era US patents on improvements to Calutron technology. They had been declassified, you see.
I discuss these and other fun facts in my essay Kiss Your Sorry Ass Goodbye, The Atom Bomb Is Gonna Fly.