I have a couple of articles that have Creative Commons licenses, and I tried at first to include RDF in them.
But when I tried to publish one article at Kuro5hin, the RDF code, which took the form of HTML comments, was displayed literally in the visible body of my article. That is, all the tags had been turned into entities so the tags appeared literally in the rendered text.
I think Kuro5hin's Scoop content management system doesn't permit HTML comments. Maybe it's not trying to suppress comments, but it didn't occur to scoop's developers to allow them.
RDF on the web would likely be much more popular if one could count on publication sites allowing it in the submitted markup.
Another problem I had is that Creative Commons' recommended way to apply a license to a web page is not permitted by any of the community sites I frequent. CC-licensed web pages usually have a small banner that links to the license text. But for obvious reasons, sites like Slashdot and Kuro5hin don't permit images in article or comment submissions.
The result is that, even for the copies of
my articles on my own website, I use neither RDF nor the CC banner, because I want to make it easy for others to copy my CC-licensed articles to site that don't permit RDF or graphics.
The way I apply the license is the much-less-cool method recommended for plain text files. I have the following text appear in the body of my articles:
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/1.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA.
I don't see why Microsoft is so constrained about the software they can bundle.
They would be perfectly within their rights to install Mozilla, Open Office, AbiWord, gcc and emacs, all of which run on Windows. I can't see how the antitrust authorities would have any problem with that.
They have quite a lot of choices actually. Freshmeat's list of Windows programs has a couple thousand entries.
For about a week now, I've been receiving about 400 MB of spam a day, nearly all of it the Zafi.B virus.
Sometimes it stops, and I thought at first the assault was over, but I think what actually happened is that whoever was sending me the virus just had their PC turned off. After a while, the onslaught starts up again.
I think it would be great if their ISP were to cut them off.
My hosting service is supposed to have ClamAV installed, as well as spamassassin, but for some reason they're not working, and I can't get ahold of tech support, possibly because they're overwhelmed right now.
What I do is copy my spool file to my home directory each day, truncate my original spool file, and filter out most of the viruses with a procmail script that looks for Zafi's Subject lines. Here's a snippet:
On my floor at 6 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, California (the Apple R&D campus), there was a spare office.
Somebody put a mattress in it.
After I found out, I would go in there and lock the door sometimes, and nap for a half hour to an hour.
Considering I had an hour to drive to get home to Santa Cruz, it enabled me to stay at work when I got tired, instead of going home I'd catch a nap and then go back to work.
I was diagnosed as schizoaffective under the DSM-III because I was hallucinating while manic. At the time it was not thought that bipolars could hallucinate.
The DSM-IV changed the criteria because it became accepted that bipolars hallucinate - but only while in extreme states of mood disturbance.
The DSM-IV distinguishes schizoaffective disorder from bipolar affective disorder according to when the hallucinations or paranoia happen: in schizoaffectives, these occur in the absence of mood symptoms.
I can get paranoid or hallucinate while my mood is otherwise normal, so I think that my diagnosis is still correct.
I'm the Michael Crawford referred to in
this comment. I have schizoaffective disorder, which is like being manic depressive and schizophrenic at the same time.
At times I experience depression, mania, visual hallucinations and paranoia. Less commonly I've heard voices and experienced dissociation, which is a sort of disconnection between reality and one's experience. Life seemed to be like a movie I was watching but not participating in. I also get anxiety at times - so bad I want to climb out of my own skin. I've had disturbed sleep for my entire life. One time I slept for twenty-nine hours, on another occasion I was awake for about a week, which made me hallucinate so heavily I could hardly see where I was going.
I've been in psychiatric hospitals five times, for periods ranging from overnight to six weeks.
I was first inspired to discuss my experiences with mental illnesses online when I read Lori Schiller's book The Quiet Room. Schiller was also diagnosed schizoaffective. She had it much worse than me, but managed to recover and had the courage to write a book about it.
Schizoaffective disorder is a spectrum of conditions. It's not completely clear whether it's a unique disorder or that one is unfortunate enough to have gotten both illnesses at once. I'm much more manic depressive than I am schizophrenic, with depression being my most prevalent symptom. Lori Schiller is much more towards the schizophrenic end, having hallucinated so badly at times she was hardly connected to the real world. I'm the bipolar type of schizoaffective, there is also a depressive type, where one does not experience mania.
Lori Schiller spent years in a number of mental hospitals. Hers was a very difficult case, and I think she, her family and her doctors had despaired of ever finding a treatment. What saved her was a new kind of medicine, the atypical antipsychotic clozapine.
The "classic antipsychotics" like haldol and thorazine work by reducing the levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the brain. The atypical antipsychotics do that too but also act on one of the variants of the neurotransmitter serotonin.
The classic antipsychotics were troublesome in that they didn't work all that well and had a lot of bad side affects like deep sedation, hand tremors, muscle cramps and a motion disorder called
tardive dyskinesia that is a form of incurable brain damage, that causes repetetive, involuntary movements and can even put you in a wheelchair. If you see a mentally ill person who appears to be in a stupour, it's quite likely that it's caused by his medication rather than his illness.
One time I was in the hospital, profoundly manic and hallucinating, and was being given enough haldol to stun a horse. It caused a sort of seizure, where my jaws locked up so I couldn't speak, and all of my limbs curled up so I couldn't walk. I was carried to my room and injected in the butt with a large dose of
cogentin, which is usually prescribed in a lower-dose tablet form to treat the motion disorder side effects of antipsychotics.
(As I lay on my bed slowly uncurling, with the cogentin causing this odd thing with the focus of my eyes, the nurse who injected me said: "You worry too much. You should go to Hawaii and get laid.")
Classic antipsychotics didn't help Schiller much, which is why she was entered in the drug trials for clozapine. Besides haldol, I've also taken prolixin and stellazine, and never found any of them particularly helpful.
Clozapine is more effective, but it has its own problems with side affects. It can kill you by damaging your blood, so you have to have regular blood tests. It is also very expensive, with treatment
I want the OP to know there is hope for his sister. Things were pretty grim for me at one time, but I do alright now. I've been employed as a programmer full-time since 1987, and since 1998 I've operated my own consulting business.
I was really sick in my early twenties, but had several good years until I cracked up again when I was thirty. I thought the CIA was tapping my phone. I'm forty now. I had some trouble with paranoia and hallucinations last fall, but I knew well enough to get help for it and all it took was a simple adjustment to my medication. I'm doing really well now.
One can recover from mental illness, but it takes patience and a lot of hard work. There are many effective medications for schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders, however, not all the medications work well for everybody, so basically what you have to do is try them out one at a time until you find something that works. To make it more complicated, most people need more than one medication, so you have to find the right combination.
I just signed up for a userid so I can take the exam online, but after submitting my info it said I may have to wait up to two days to get an account.
Curious that they can grade essays with a computer but it looks like they have to have a human pass out the user ids.
Anyway, I'll see if I can submit one of my articles to the exam, and will post here how I did. Since I have to wait for my user ID, you'll have to look back here later to see how I did.
If you're tired of searching for new music on the Intarweb, why not just run iRATE radio and let it download MP3s for you. iRATE will even learn to download the kind of music you like!
iRATE's server has a large database of MP3s that are kept on the musicians' own websites (or MP3 hosting services, like IUMA). There are over 50,000 tracks in its database, with 3,000 Creative Commons-licensed MP3s recently added from Magnatune.
iRATE downloads a few tracks, and then you rate the tracks according to your preferences. iRATE's server then compares your ratings to those of other users, and selects new tracks based on your rating patterns. That is, if you and I like the same kind of music, iRATE will download for you the same music that I like. If we disagree, your iRATE will avoid my favorites.
This process is known as "collaborative filtering".
iRATE's client and server are both licensed under the GNU GPL, and are written in Java. For Linux, there is a native binary compiled with GCJ, so there are no non-free dependencies.
There's going to be a native Windows client, but GCJ is not presently able to build a stable Windows binary - so you could help by helping the GCJ team fix that.
There is a Mac OS X ".dmg" disk image, that runs using the Java runtime that comes with OS X. It looks like any other OS X application.
For those who install the Java Runtime Environment, you can use the Java webstart version. You just click a link on iRATE's download page and it installs and runs.
iRATE's team always welcomes people who want to help with development and testing.
A couple of years ago I wrote an essay called Is This the America I Love? Maybe it's pertinent here, seeing how our next election is well on its way to getting even more fixed than the last one was.
I just feel the need to write right now. Something has gone
terribly wrong with the country I was raised to love. The good things
that America stands for are being trampled into the dirt by those charged
with the burden of protecting them.
I was raised to be a patriotic American. I grew up a military brat -
my father was a proud officer of the United States Navy, who served in
the Vietnam War. When I was young, I was always told that my father was
fighting to preserve the freedoms that were guaranteed us by the United
States Constitution.
In the first grade, I attended a school run by the U.S. Navy in Gaeta,
Italy, where my father was stationed aboard the U.S.S. Springfield.
Each day when we started school we sang patriotic
songs and said the Pledge of Allegiance. We were told that America stood
for freedom and democracy and justice.
I loved America for what it stood for.
I was told that things like political persecution, detainment without
trial, and beating of prisoners were things that happened in other countries, that they
would never happen in America. I was told that we fought the American
Revolution and wrote the Constitution specifically to ensure such things would
never again happen in America.
But today I see the ugly face of repression rising in America. And it
is brought to you by the United States Government.
For the first ten or so years I was programming, I always selected my jobs based on the opportunity they presented me to learn new things.
That meant that I didn't always get the best pay - my first real programming job had a salary of $20k in 1987, and I had to work a lot of extra hours without overtime pay. But I was doing image processing.
In the long run I turned out to do pretty well. I've been working as a software consultant since 1998, and managed to keep myself fed and housed as a consultant all the way through the economic downturn, so that now that the economy is getting better, my skills are still current and I'm getting as much business as I can handle.
Janet Ruhl collects salary and consulting rate surveys, and periodically sells (inexpensively) the results at her site www.realrates.com.
She also has published a number of books about how to be a computer consultant, which are quite good. I bought the PDF download version of her marketing guide, and found its advice very valuable.
Many people in this discussion have complained of what I've already experienced, that Real's free player is hard to find.
I uninstalled RealPlayer quite a while ago, because it kept hawking the paid upgrade at me, but I do find the occasional realmedia stream I would like to listen to, with no other options, so perhaps you could give me the URL of where they hide that elusive free version.
In return, I'll give you a link - right now I'm listening to Radio Paradise in streaming MP3. Best internet radio station on the planet, just now featured in Time magazine.
Because my article is written for, and widely read by music downloaders, I think this section may be the first introduction most p2p users get to the notion that there is a legitimate reason to consider the elimination of copyright: the reason being that the ability to faithfully and cheaply copy digital information yields more benefit to society than the benefit that results from allowing the authors of digital information a monopoly to their work.
While copyright law is a cornerstone to Open Source licensing - without copyrights, licenses would be unenforceable - I think it's pretty clear especially from Richard Stallman's earlier writing that his objective is the elimination of copyright.
Consider that there are far more people who listen to music than who program, or even use computers. If they were all made to understand the benefit to society of cheap, faithful digital copying, maybe we could eliminate, or at least substantially reform copyright.
You won't see much carnage coming out of Iraq, because the people in charge are very well aware that showing the truth on TV will turn public opinion against them.
I read somewhere recently that there is a news blackout at Dover Air Force base, because that's where all the coffins come back from Iraq, full of the bodies of American soldiers killed since we "won" the war.
Bigger, more successful companies than google have been known to go out of business.
I registered my first domain name after my ISP was down for a week and none of my clients could email me.
If you have your own domain, and the hosting service tanks, you can sign up with a different host and have the DNS switched over in a couple days. But if your email address is at someone else's domain, you're out of luck if they go down.
I'm glad I established my own domain when I did. I kept my old ISP even when I moved away, so I could get the odd email from people who didn't know my new one. One day, though, the national ISP that bought them out shut my old ISP down entirely, taking out the email addresses for a substantial portion of Santa Cruz, California's population.
I think each individual person on the planet should have their own domain name.
I hadn't been aware of the effects of inflation, so yes I need to address that in my article.
Still, artists get very little of the money that one pays to purchase a CD, and I suspect those who are benefitting the most are the execs at the major record labels.
I don't have a reference handy for my claim that there are sixty million p2p users in the US, but I have seen credible statements about this, and expect I can find one and link to it once I get a chance to look for it.
Consider that the Lycos Top 50 says that the most searched-for search engine query is "kazaa", and now that my article is in the Google top 10 for "free music downloads", I'm getting 800 search engine referrals for that query each day.
A while back George Bush announced that the US was withdrawing from the anti-ballistic missile treaty, so that the US could deploy the Star Wars missile defense system.
Previously, it was forbidden for the U.S. or Russia to deploy a defense against incoming nuclear missiles, except that one city in each country could be so protected (Washington and Moscow).
Back in the early 60's, the US had Nike missiles deployed as interceptors, that were themselves nuclear-armed.
If the US can withdraw from the ABM treaty, then it can withdraw from the Berne Convention.
Slashdot Mirror
But when I tried to publish one article at Kuro5hin, the RDF code, which took the form of HTML comments, was displayed literally in the visible body of my article. That is, all the tags had been turned into entities so the tags appeared literally in the rendered text.
I think Kuro5hin's Scoop content management system doesn't permit HTML comments. Maybe it's not trying to suppress comments, but it didn't occur to scoop's developers to allow them.
RDF on the web would likely be much more popular if one could count on publication sites allowing it in the submitted markup.
Another problem I had is that Creative Commons' recommended way to apply a license to a web page is not permitted by any of the community sites I frequent. CC-licensed web pages usually have a small banner that links to the license text. But for obvious reasons, sites like Slashdot and Kuro5hin don't permit images in article or comment submissions.
The result is that, even for the copies of my articles on my own website, I use neither RDF nor the CC banner, because I want to make it easy for others to copy my CC-licensed articles to site that don't permit RDF or graphics.
The way I apply the license is the much-less-cool method recommended for plain text files. I have the following text appear in the body of my articles:
They would be perfectly within their rights to install Mozilla, Open Office, AbiWord, gcc and emacs, all of which run on Windows. I can't see how the antitrust authorities would have any problem with that.
They have quite a lot of choices actually. Freshmeat's list of Windows programs has a couple thousand entries.
Sometimes it stops, and I thought at first the assault was over, but I think what actually happened is that whoever was sending me the virus just had their PC turned off. After a while, the onslaught starts up again.
I think it would be great if their ISP were to cut them off.
My hosting service is supposed to have ClamAV installed, as well as spamassassin, but for some reason they're not working, and I can't get ahold of tech support, possibly because they're overwhelmed right now.
What I do is copy my spool file to my home directory each day, truncate my original spool file, and filter out most of the viruses with a procmail script that looks for Zafi's Subject lines. Here's a snippet:
* ^Subject:.*You`ve got 1 VoiceMessage
{
}
Somebody put a mattress in it.
After I found out, I would go in there and lock the door sometimes, and nap for a half hour to an hour.
Considering I had an hour to drive to get home to Santa Cruz, it enabled me to stay at work when I got tired, instead of going home I'd catch a nap and then go back to work.
I've never used it but it seems like a great idea. What do you think?
-
My Name is Michael, and I am an Ignorant Fool
Just posted to my kuro5hin diary.-- Mike
The DSM-IV changed the criteria because it became accepted that bipolars hallucinate - but only while in extreme states of mood disturbance.
The DSM-IV distinguishes schizoaffective disorder from bipolar affective disorder according to when the hallucinations or paranoia happen: in schizoaffectives, these occur in the absence of mood symptoms.
I can get paranoid or hallucinate while my mood is otherwise normal, so I think that my diagnosis is still correct.
At times I experience depression, mania, visual hallucinations and paranoia. Less commonly I've heard voices and experienced dissociation, which is a sort of disconnection between reality and one's experience. Life seemed to be like a movie I was watching but not participating in. I also get anxiety at times - so bad I want to climb out of my own skin. I've had disturbed sleep for my entire life. One time I slept for twenty-nine hours, on another occasion I was awake for about a week, which made me hallucinate so heavily I could hardly see where I was going.
I've been in psychiatric hospitals five times, for periods ranging from overnight to six weeks.
I was first inspired to discuss my experiences with mental illnesses online when I read Lori Schiller's book The Quiet Room. Schiller was also diagnosed schizoaffective. She had it much worse than me, but managed to recover and had the courage to write a book about it.
Schizoaffective disorder is a spectrum of conditions. It's not completely clear whether it's a unique disorder or that one is unfortunate enough to have gotten both illnesses at once. I'm much more manic depressive than I am schizophrenic, with depression being my most prevalent symptom. Lori Schiller is much more towards the schizophrenic end, having hallucinated so badly at times she was hardly connected to the real world. I'm the bipolar type of schizoaffective, there is also a depressive type, where one does not experience mania.
Lori Schiller spent years in a number of mental hospitals. Hers was a very difficult case, and I think she, her family and her doctors had despaired of ever finding a treatment. What saved her was a new kind of medicine, the atypical antipsychotic clozapine.
The "classic antipsychotics" like haldol and thorazine work by reducing the levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the brain. The atypical antipsychotics do that too but also act on one of the variants of the neurotransmitter serotonin.
The classic antipsychotics were troublesome in that they didn't work all that well and had a lot of bad side affects like deep sedation, hand tremors, muscle cramps and a motion disorder called tardive dyskinesia that is a form of incurable brain damage, that causes repetetive, involuntary movements and can even put you in a wheelchair. If you see a mentally ill person who appears to be in a stupour, it's quite likely that it's caused by his medication rather than his illness.
One time I was in the hospital, profoundly manic and hallucinating, and was being given enough haldol to stun a horse. It caused a sort of seizure, where my jaws locked up so I couldn't speak, and all of my limbs curled up so I couldn't walk. I was carried to my room and injected in the butt with a large dose of cogentin, which is usually prescribed in a lower-dose tablet form to treat the motion disorder side effects of antipsychotics.
(As I lay on my bed slowly uncurling, with the cogentin causing this odd thing with the focus of my eyes, the nurse who injected me said: "You worry too much. You should go to Hawaii and get laid.")
Classic antipsychotics didn't help Schiller much, which is why she was entered in the drug trials for clozapine. Besides haldol, I've also taken prolixin and stellazine, and never found any of them particularly helpful.
Clozapine is more effective, but it has its own problems with side affects. It can kill you by damaging your blood, so you have to have regular blood tests. It is also very expensive, with treatment
I also recommend it, it's a wonderful book.
I also have it on my personal site, with somewhat more pleasant HTML design and a few photos:
-
Living with Schizoaffective Disorder
I want the OP to know there is hope for his sister. Things were pretty grim for me at one time, but I do alright now. I've been employed as a programmer full-time since 1987, and since 1998 I've operated my own consulting business.I was really sick in my early twenties, but had several good years until I cracked up again when I was thirty. I thought the CIA was tapping my phone. I'm forty now. I had some trouble with paranoia and hallucinations last fall, but I knew well enough to get help for it and all it took was a simple adjustment to my medication. I'm doing really well now.
One can recover from mental illness, but it takes patience and a lot of hard work. There are many effective medications for schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders, however, not all the medications work well for everybody, so basically what you have to do is try them out one at a time until you find something that works. To make it more complicated, most people need more than one medication, so you have to find the right combination.
I just signed up for a userid so I can take the exam online, but after submitting my info it said I may have to wait up to two days to get an account.
Curious that they can grade essays with a computer but it looks like they have to have a human pass out the user ids.
Anyway, I'll see if I can submit one of my articles to the exam, and will post here how I did. Since I have to wait for my user ID, you'll have to look back here later to see how I did.
If you're tired of searching for new music on the Intarweb, why not just run iRATE radio and let it download MP3s for you. iRATE will even learn to download the kind of music you like!
iRATE's server has a large database of MP3s that are kept on the musicians' own websites (or MP3 hosting services, like IUMA). There are over 50,000 tracks in its database, with 3,000 Creative Commons-licensed MP3s recently added from Magnatune.
iRATE downloads a few tracks, and then you rate the tracks according to your preferences. iRATE's server then compares your ratings to those of other users, and selects new tracks based on your rating patterns. That is, if you and I like the same kind of music, iRATE will download for you the same music that I like. If we disagree, your iRATE will avoid my favorites.
This process is known as "collaborative filtering".
iRATE's client and server are both licensed under the GNU GPL, and are written in Java. For Linux, there is a native binary compiled with GCJ, so there are no non-free dependencies.
There's going to be a native Windows client, but GCJ is not presently able to build a stable Windows binary - so you could help by helping the GCJ team fix that.
There is a Mac OS X ".dmg" disk image, that runs using the Java runtime that comes with OS X. It looks like any other OS X application. For those who install the Java Runtime Environment, you can use the Java webstart version. You just click a link on iRATE's download page and it installs and runs.
iRATE's team always welcomes people who want to help with development and testing.
He spent most of the ceremony trying to crawl under the seats to get out of the sun - it was an outdoor wedding on a warm day.
Afterwards, he posed with my wife and I for some of our wedding photos.
That meant that I didn't always get the best pay - my first real programming job had a salary of $20k in 1987, and I had to work a lot of extra hours without overtime pay. But I was doing image processing.
In the long run I turned out to do pretty well. I've been working as a software consultant since 1998, and managed to keep myself fed and housed as a consultant all the way through the economic downturn, so that now that the economy is getting better, my skills are still current and I'm getting as much business as I can handle.
She also has published a number of books about how to be a computer consultant, which are quite good. I bought the PDF download version of her marketing guide, and found its advice very valuable.
I uninstalled RealPlayer quite a while ago, because it kept hawking the paid upgrade at me, but I do find the occasional realmedia stream I would like to listen to, with no other options, so perhaps you could give me the URL of where they hide that elusive free version.
In return, I'll give you a link - right now I'm listening to Radio Paradise in streaming MP3. Best internet radio station on the planet, just now featured in Time magazine.
Because my article is written for, and widely read by music downloaders, I think this section may be the first introduction most p2p users get to the notion that there is a legitimate reason to consider the elimination of copyright: the reason being that the ability to faithfully and cheaply copy digital information yields more benefit to society than the benefit that results from allowing the authors of digital information a monopoly to their work.
While copyright law is a cornerstone to Open Source licensing - without copyrights, licenses would be unenforceable - I think it's pretty clear especially from Richard Stallman's earlier writing that his objective is the elimination of copyright.
Consider that there are far more people who listen to music than who program, or even use computers. If they were all made to understand the benefit to society of cheap, faithful digital copying, maybe we could eliminate, or at least substantially reform copyright.
I read somewhere recently that there is a news blackout at Dover Air Force base, because that's where all the coffins come back from Iraq, full of the bodies of American soldiers killed since we "won" the war.
I registered my first domain name after my ISP was down for a week and none of my clients could email me.
If you have your own domain, and the hosting service tanks, you can sign up with a different host and have the DNS switched over in a couple days. But if your email address is at someone else's domain, you're out of luck if they go down.
I'm glad I established my own domain when I did. I kept my old ISP even when I moved away, so I could get the odd email from people who didn't know my new one. One day, though, the national ISP that bought them out shut my old ISP down entirely, taking out the email addresses for a substantial portion of Santa Cruz, California's population.
I think each individual person on the planet should have their own domain name.
Still, artists get very little of the money that one pays to purchase a CD, and I suspect those who are benefitting the most are the execs at the major record labels.
I don't have a reference handy for my claim that there are sixty million p2p users in the US, but I have seen credible statements about this, and expect I can find one and link to it once I get a chance to look for it.
Consider that the Lycos Top 50 says that the most searched-for search engine query is "kazaa", and now that my article is in the Google top 10 for "free music downloads", I'm getting 800 search engine referrals for that query each day.
Previously, it was forbidden for the U.S. or Russia to deploy a defense against incoming nuclear missiles, except that one city in each country could be so protected (Washington and Moscow).
Back in the early 60's, the US had Nike missiles deployed as interceptors, that were themselves nuclear-armed.
If the US can withdraw from the ABM treaty, then it can withdraw from the Berne Convention.