While the US Constitution allows Congress to enact copyright laws, it doesn't actually require it to do so. Not just the DMCA, but copyright itself could be repealed tomorrow if we could get the votes in Congress to do so.
If you don't think that could happen, consider that there are sixty million peer-to-peer network users in the US, more people than voted for George Bush in 2000. The problem is then how to get all the p2p users to become politically active.
Find out how in
Change the Law, which explores the history of copyright law in the US and suggests several specific steps you can take to bring about much needed copyright reform. The steps range from speaking out to practicing civil disobedience.
If you feel as I do that more people need to read what I wrote in my article, you can help by linking to it from your own web site, web log, or from message boards.
A rare but very unpleasant side effect of all the medications that block dopamine (used to treat schizophrenia) is tardive dyskenesia.
Someone who has it appears to have parkinson's disease. TD is a "motion disorder" where one has involuntary, repetitive movements of some part of the body.
It's a form of brain damage that is presently incurable, and can put you in a wheelchair.
As I mentioned in a comment below, I take Risperdal, and since increasing my dose my psychiatrist has recommended I take another antipsychotic that has less likelihood to cause TD than risperdal. Most likely I will try seroquel, but am considering just staying on my present dose of risperdal because I'm doing so well these days.
I don't know what would be worse - having TD or having the symptoms that the risperdal treats. Being crippled would be no fun at all but neither is seeing the police everywhere, even when no police are present.
Risperdal is a dopamine blocker, I think, and helps my concentration.
Last fall when I was hallucinating and paranoid because of my
schizoaffective disorder, I was completely unable to focus on my work for several months, and got absolutely nothing done.
The psychiatrist I saw about it said that I had psychotic breakthrough symptoms, and this would make it difficult to concentrate. Such symptoms are the result of too much dopamine activity in the brain.
My dose was raised from 3 mg a day to 5, and after a few weeks of time off to recover, I was able to start working productively again.
And I worked for several years as a programmer without a degree before I went back to school and graduated (mainly because I got tired of job interviews where they'd ask why I never graduated).
I had a few programing language courses at a community college, and one real computer science course at Caltech, an intro to data structures and algorithms.
Early on I could see how I was at quite a disadvantage compared to those with CS degrees, so I put a lot of effort into studying programming - reading books like Knuth's Art of Computer Programming on the bus to work, learning to program macs by writing a graphics editor on my Mac Plus, reading other people's source code and fixing it.
It's been quite some time since the lack of a CS degree has been a problem. I have seventeen years paid experience as a programmer, and have run my own consulting business for six years. Here's my resume.
I have a catch all email address at my domain. It's catching so much email that I've had to tell all my clients to email me at this Yahoo address that (ironically) I registered so I could sign up for websites that I suspected would be spammers.
My hosting service had the ClamAV antivirus software installed for a little bit, but had to disable it because it was using too much CPU time, I think because the host was getting so much mail.
I've been told that the surgery only has a 50% success rate. The advantage is that once you have it, if it is successful, you're cured and you don't have to deal with the damn CPAP machine anymore.
The disadvantage is that it's expensive, painful, and there is some risk. If you've ever had general anaesthesia, you will be hesitant to ever volunteer for it again.
If the apnea is caused by being overweight though, then there is a simple cure (well sort of) - lose the weight!
Now, I've always had sleep problems, but they were never so bad as during the period I weighed 250. It's not like that anymore now that I've lost the weight.
Strangely, even though my sleep specialist had his nurse weigh me each time I went in for an exam, he never once suggested I try losing weight.
There are other causes for apnea. Someone else said there are other kinds than obstructive, and even obstructive might not be caused by being overweight. So weight loss might not cure it, but it sure beats surgery.
My bike got messed up in the moving truck when I moved last fall, but I'm finally getting around to getting it repaired, and should have it back today.
The best I've ever felt in my life was when I had a summer job at UC Santa Cruz, which is at the top of a big hill, and I lived at the bottom of the hill. I rode my bike to work because I couldn't afford the parking permit.
By the end of the summer I'd ride back up to campus a second time, after work, just to get the ride in. I lost twenty pounds and felt great.
I sleep more than anyone else I know, and have done so all my life, even when I was very young. (My mother told me that when I was a newborn, still in the hospital, I didn't like to be awakened for my feedings.)
However, I often stay up all night, and have gone as long as five days without sleeping. The longest I've slept in one shot is 29 hours.
I have a hell of a time getting out of bed each day. It is endlessly frustrating to my wife, who would like me to share her much more regular hours. I always feel like I've been hit by a truck, when I wake up. My wife never used to understand why I would protest that I was tired, after waking up from fourteen hours of sleep.
I went to a sleep specialist, and had two sleep studies done, and was diagnosed with obstructive sleep apnea. The continuous positive air pressure machine that the doctor prescribed helped, but did not solve the problem.
Apnea is often caused by being overweight, and at the time I weighed 250 lbs, but I managed to lose 50 lbs and I don't think I have the apnea anymore. I still sleep very irregularly though.
It's a primary reason I am self-employed as a consultant. I don't think I could hold a job anymore, where I had to show up at any particular time.
It's 7 am where I am, and I've been working since midnight, and feeling great, but after getting out of bed yesterday afternoon I felt like hell and just wanted to take a nap until I came alive late into the night.
I don't think I have a circadian rhythm, at least not like other people.
I observed the same problem at Apple when I worked there in the mid-90's.
Maybe it's doing better now because Steve Jobs came back.
When I was at a very small company called Working Software, an Apple employee came to visit, and was very envious of us, precisely because we were a small company. She said we could adapt to changing market conditions in a way Apple was incapable of.
Has he been to Canada? There are starbucks in three Chapters bookstores that I know of, in Dartmouth and Halifax, Nova Scotia, and St. John's Newfoundland.
It's tough for most cafes in Canada, because Canadians seem to prefer Tim Hortons. For comparison, I live in Truro, which is a medium sized town, and there are seven Tim Hortons here.
Like many of those here, I provide free tech support to friends and relatives.
Mom's ordering a new computer today. And I expect she won't have much trouble with it.
She's actually been very happy with her old computer, but the video went out a couple days ago, and she decided it was time to get a new computer rather than having the old one repaired, something I urged her to do because most of today's software won't run on the machine I gave her and dad for Christmas in 1995.
She was still running netscape 4.5. I avoided using CSS for the longest time for the sole reason that it wouldn't render well on Mom & Dad's machine.
(Dad passed away, I'm very sorry to say, about a year ago.)
Mom's old machine? A Mac 6130. I forget if it was a powermac or performa. It had a 66 Mhz PowerPC 601. Remember - Mom was perfectly happy with her old Mac until it lost video. It might even be easy to repair, but we're a continent apart so I can't look at it myself.
Her new machine? A 17 inch iMac, with 256 MB of RAM, 80 GB hard drive, 1.2 GHz PowerPC CPU. I think the iMacs all use G4s now.
No worms or viruses for her.
I recommended purchasing AppleCare. It will take her some time to get used to Mac OS X. I think her iMac could boot into Mac OS 9, but I'm not going to tell her how. I'm going to suggest she take a class to learn about Mac OS X.
All her old software will still run, just under the Classic mode within OS X.
Do you do tech support for your Mom? Get her an iMac, and get ready to stop cursing at Windows.
Aunt Peggy, Mom's twin sister, got an iBook about a year ago, again on my recommendation.
That my wife got very homesick. We were living in Maine after our wedding, where neither of us got to know many people. She has lots of friends here in Nova Scotia.
But one reason I was enthusiastic about the move was that I really do feel safer here.
I don't have the sense that I'm surrounded by a bunch of jingoistic gun nuts, the way I felt in the US.
Canadians have guns too, but for the most part they're for hunting, and not for satisfying some sick obsession. The murder rates in Canada are much lower than in the US.
I'm self-employed doing software consulting, and so far all my clients are in the U.S. (which is great for me, getting paid in US dollars, but with living expenses in Canadian dollars).
However, the exchange rate is not as good for me as what it was when I was in Newfoundland for our wedding in 2000. Back then, it was 1.6 Canadian dollars to a U.S. dollar, now it is 1.3.
The Canadian economy in general has been doing better than the US economy for a while, which is why the Canadian dollar is stronger now.
But I don't know about the tech sector. I suspect it's not as good at the Canadian economy in general, because the market for Canadian tech is likely the same as the market for US tech.
Corel is a Canadian company, as is QNX, which makes a nice embedded OS.
My wife, who is from Newfoundland, is sponsoring my immigration to Canada.
I feel very fortunate not to be living in the US anymore. I didn't feel safe. For example, I've received some threatening email from people who didn't like what I wrote on this page.
You can immigrate to Canada too. The most permanent way is to marry a Canadian citizen or permanent resident.
You can live and work here for a year if you get a TN-1 visa, which you can qualify for if you have a bachelor's degree and a written job offer, for a job that's on a certain list specified by the NAFTA agreement. Any qualifying citizen of the U.S., Mexico or Canada can work in either of the other NAFTA countries with a TN-1. The procedure for getting a TN-1 is very simple and inexpensive, and can be renewed each year if you continue to qualify.
During the dot-com boom, Canada established a special visa just for computer programmers. There was a shortage here, because all the Canadian programmers were going to the US to work. You'll need to find a Canadian company to hire you as a programmer and sponsor you for the visa.
Programmers don't make as much in Canada as they do in the US, but then the cost of living is much lower here (in Nova Scotia anyway) than anywhere I've lived in the US.
I know this because ad-aware tells me so when I have it scan all my disks.
The vast majority are very small files. How much more space would be required to give each one some RDF? And remember disk space is allocate in terms of sectors, or sometimes in blocks of several sectors, so small files waste proportionately more space.
And that's just on the Windows installation for my PC. I also have Slackware Linux and BeOS on other partitions. Quite likely there are very nearly a million files on my PC alone.
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't think that could happen, consider that there are sixty million peer-to-peer network users in the US, more people than voted for George Bush in 2000. The problem is then how to get all the p2p users to become politically active.
Find out how in Change the Law, which explores the history of copyright law in the US and suggests several specific steps you can take to bring about much needed copyright reform. The steps range from speaking out to practicing civil disobedience.
If you feel as I do that more people need to read what I wrote in my article, you can help by linking to it from your own web site, web log, or from message boards.
Thank you for your attention.
Someone who has it appears to have parkinson's disease. TD is a "motion disorder" where one has involuntary, repetitive movements of some part of the body.
It's a form of brain damage that is presently incurable, and can put you in a wheelchair.
As I mentioned in a comment below, I take Risperdal, and since increasing my dose my psychiatrist has recommended I take another antipsychotic that has less likelihood to cause TD than risperdal. Most likely I will try seroquel, but am considering just staying on my present dose of risperdal because I'm doing so well these days.
I don't know what would be worse - having TD or having the symptoms that the risperdal treats. Being crippled would be no fun at all but neither is seeing the police everywhere, even when no police are present.
Last fall when I was hallucinating and paranoid because of my schizoaffective disorder, I was completely unable to focus on my work for several months, and got absolutely nothing done.
The psychiatrist I saw about it said that I had psychotic breakthrough symptoms, and this would make it difficult to concentrate. Such symptoms are the result of too much dopamine activity in the brain.
My dose was raised from 3 mg a day to 5, and after a few weeks of time off to recover, I was able to start working productively again.
I had a few programing language courses at a community college, and one real computer science course at Caltech, an intro to data structures and algorithms.
Early on I could see how I was at quite a disadvantage compared to those with CS degrees, so I put a lot of effort into studying programming - reading books like Knuth's Art of Computer Programming on the bus to work, learning to program macs by writing a graphics editor on my Mac Plus, reading other people's source code and fixing it.
It's been quite some time since the lack of a CS degree has been a problem. I have seventeen years paid experience as a programmer, and have run my own consulting business for six years. Here's my resume.
I use my middle name to distinguish myself from that OTHER Michael Crawford. I shouldn't have to - he changed his name for the stage.
-
Use Validators and Load Generators to Test Your Web Applications
It is released under the GNU Free Documentation License.I have more details in my Kuro5hin diary:
-
Two Thousand Spams a Day - mostly racist messages intended to affect the recent German elections
-
Four Hundred Megabytes of Spam a Day - mostly the zafi.b virus
You`ve got 1 VoiceMessage!My hosting service had the ClamAV antivirus software installed for a little bit, but had to disable it because it was using too much CPU time, I think because the host was getting so much mail.
The disadvantage is that it's expensive, painful, and there is some risk. If you've ever had general anaesthesia, you will be hesitant to ever volunteer for it again.
If the apnea is caused by being overweight though, then there is a simple cure (well sort of) - lose the weight!
Now, I've always had sleep problems, but they were never so bad as during the period I weighed 250. It's not like that anymore now that I've lost the weight.
Strangely, even though my sleep specialist had his nurse weigh me each time I went in for an exam, he never once suggested I try losing weight.
There are other causes for apnea. Someone else said there are other kinds than obstructive, and even obstructive might not be caused by being overweight. So weight loss might not cure it, but it sure beats surgery.
The best I've ever felt in my life was when I had a summer job at UC Santa Cruz, which is at the top of a big hill, and I lived at the bottom of the hill. I rode my bike to work because I couldn't afford the parking permit.
By the end of the summer I'd ride back up to campus a second time, after work, just to get the ride in. I lost twenty pounds and felt great.
I hope to reproduce that in the next few months.
I'm serious.
However, I often stay up all night, and have gone as long as five days without sleeping. The longest I've slept in one shot is 29 hours.
I have a hell of a time getting out of bed each day. It is endlessly frustrating to my wife, who would like me to share her much more regular hours. I always feel like I've been hit by a truck, when I wake up. My wife never used to understand why I would protest that I was tired, after waking up from fourteen hours of sleep.
I went to a sleep specialist, and had two sleep studies done, and was diagnosed with obstructive sleep apnea. The continuous positive air pressure machine that the doctor prescribed helped, but did not solve the problem.
Apnea is often caused by being overweight, and at the time I weighed 250 lbs, but I managed to lose 50 lbs and I don't think I have the apnea anymore. I still sleep very irregularly though.
It's a primary reason I am self-employed as a consultant. I don't think I could hold a job anymore, where I had to show up at any particular time.
It's 7 am where I am, and I've been working since midnight, and feeling great, but after getting out of bed yesterday afternoon I felt like hell and just wanted to take a nap until I came alive late into the night.
I don't think I have a circadian rhythm, at least not like other people.
- Legal Torrents
Bit Torrent was in general developed to ease p2p sharing of legit material.Is there some way I can disable them all?
Maybe it's doing better now because Steve Jobs came back.
When I was at a very small company called Working Software, an Apple employee came to visit, and was very envious of us, precisely because we were a small company. She said we could adapt to changing market conditions in a way Apple was incapable of.
It's tough for most cafes in Canada, because Canadians seem to prefer Tim Hortons. For comparison, I live in Truro, which is a medium sized town, and there are seven Tim Hortons here.
Mom's ordering a new computer today. And I expect she won't have much trouble with it.
She's actually been very happy with her old computer, but the video went out a couple days ago, and she decided it was time to get a new computer rather than having the old one repaired, something I urged her to do because most of today's software won't run on the machine I gave her and dad for Christmas in 1995.
She was still running netscape 4.5. I avoided using CSS for the longest time for the sole reason that it wouldn't render well on Mom & Dad's machine.
(Dad passed away, I'm very sorry to say, about a year ago.)
Mom's old machine? A Mac 6130. I forget if it was a powermac or performa. It had a 66 Mhz PowerPC 601. Remember - Mom was perfectly happy with her old Mac until it lost video. It might even be easy to repair, but we're a continent apart so I can't look at it myself.
Her new machine? A 17 inch iMac, with 256 MB of RAM, 80 GB hard drive, 1.2 GHz PowerPC CPU. I think the iMacs all use G4s now.
No worms or viruses for her.
I recommended purchasing AppleCare. It will take her some time to get used to Mac OS X. I think her iMac could boot into Mac OS 9, but I'm not going to tell her how. I'm going to suggest she take a class to learn about Mac OS X.
All her old software will still run, just under the Classic mode within OS X.
Do you do tech support for your Mom? Get her an iMac, and get ready to stop cursing at Windows.
Aunt Peggy, Mom's twin sister, got an iBook about a year ago, again on my recommendation.
But one reason I was enthusiastic about the move was that I really do feel safer here.
Canadians have guns too, but for the most part they're for hunting, and not for satisfying some sick obsession. The murder rates in Canada are much lower than in the US.
However, the exchange rate is not as good for me as what it was when I was in Newfoundland for our wedding in 2000. Back then, it was 1.6 Canadian dollars to a U.S. dollar, now it is 1.3.
The Canadian economy in general has been doing better than the US economy for a while, which is why the Canadian dollar is stronger now.
But I don't know about the tech sector. I suspect it's not as good at the Canadian economy in general, because the market for Canadian tech is likely the same as the market for US tech.
Corel is a Canadian company, as is QNX, which makes a nice embedded OS.
I feel very fortunate not to be living in the US anymore. I didn't feel safe. For example, I've received some threatening email from people who didn't like what I wrote on this page.
You can immigrate to Canada too. The most permanent way is to marry a Canadian citizen or permanent resident.
You can live and work here for a year if you get a TN-1 visa, which you can qualify for if you have a bachelor's degree and a written job offer, for a job that's on a certain list specified by the NAFTA agreement. Any qualifying citizen of the U.S., Mexico or Canada can work in either of the other NAFTA countries with a TN-1. The procedure for getting a TN-1 is very simple and inexpensive, and can be renewed each year if you continue to qualify.
During the dot-com boom, Canada established a special visa just for computer programmers. There was a shortage here, because all the Canadian programmers were going to the US to work. You'll need to find a Canadian company to hire you as a programmer and sponsor you for the visa.
Programmers don't make as much in Canada as they do in the US, but then the cost of living is much lower here (in Nova Scotia anyway) than anywhere I've lived in the US.
The vast majority are very small files. How much more space would be required to give each one some RDF? And remember disk space is allocate in terms of sectors, or sometimes in blocks of several sectors, so small files waste proportionately more space.
And that's just on the Windows installation for my PC. I also have Slackware Linux and BeOS on other partitions. Quite likely there are very nearly a million files on my PC alone.