>Or are you suggesting that most Napster users are
>just trying to get MP3s of records they own,
>instead of just using a ripper program to make
>their own? Sounds pretty unlikely.
Not unlikely at all, actually. The majority of the MP3s I have *DO* fall into this category.
I personally own about 500 CDs. Let's say that I want MP3s of ten songs, each on a differentt CD. Now, what is a the, fastest, most convinent, more efficent way for me to get said MP3s?
1)
Get up from the computer, go to my CD cabinet and find those ten CDs. Most of my collection is organised alphabeticly, but my more recent purchases are not. Last I reorganised everything was about six months ago, so I have quite a time-consuming task to find those ten CDs. Perhaps some of them are out in my car, and I have to discover this, and walk out there and get them.
Now that I have those ten CDs in my hand, walk back to the computer, start a ripper/converter program, and, one at a time: remove the CD from the jewl case, open CD drive, insert CD, close drive, select track, wait for it to rip and compress, eject disk, place disk back in jewel case, repeat *10.
*OR*
2)
Start Napster. In turn: type the name of the song I want an MP3 of, select an appropiately high bitrate and connection, double click on each, repeat *10. And have those ten MP3s in a TINY fraction of the time it takes to do #1.
Now, the RIAA/metallica would have you beleive that #2 is horribly, evily, wrong, and that I should take the trouble and time of going through #1. I happen to disagree. There is no functional or moral difference if I rip the the CD track myself, or Napster it. The RIAA/metallica want #2 to be illegal, and I don't think they're happy at all about #1, but fortunately, there is a supreme court ruleing protevcting #1.
However, unlike RIAA/metallica *I* can see the difference between what is legal and what is moral. Unfortunately, it appears thay you do not; and have subscribed to the theory that (((illegal==immoral) && (legal==moral)) for all values of x).
All of the above ignores, of course, the fact that MP3 is lossy compression that sounds like crap on a real stereo system (NOT my rio headphones, NOT my computer speakers (at work or at home), NOT my car dash unit, I mean my STEREO), and is no threat to red book audio anyway.
john Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
Why is parent modded down to 0?
on
Is UNIX An OS?
·
· Score: 1
He's right.
There is a mandatory lockout period after any IPO, during which no one closely associated with the company can sell a single share.
And given that VA's stock price took a powerdive into the toilet since their IPO, I doubt that ESR will have much money to give away when he can sell anyway.
john Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
(OFFTOPIC) gates' so-called "charity"
on
Is UNIX An OS?
·
· Score: 1
BwaHaHaHa!!!
gates' so-called "charity" was exposed as nothing more than another patheticly blatant PR scam LONG ago.
(It's archived and the paragraph breaks are gone, but it's all there in black and white)
Not only were his true intentions exposed, it turns out that his so-called "charitable donations" are GROSSLY OVERVALUED!!!
If anyone actually BELEIVES this official propaganda that gates is just this warm, fuzzy, all around nice guy who would never harm a soul and wants nothing more than goodwill towards all men....
Well, I happen to own a couple of bridges in New York, some oceanfront kansas real estate, and a ton of Florida swampland.... er... vacation property that I'm sure you'd LOVE to buy!
The Glomar Explorer (the ship built for and used in project jennifer), isn't exactly inconspicous. It's a big honkin ship that the russkies just MIGHT notice.
That Golf that we grabbed in the '70s was in the middle of the Pacific ocean, FAR from the red fleet's bases... AND they did NOT know where it sunk. We DID know, by virtue of having wired practiclly the entire Pacific seabed with sonar.
(contrary to what the other poster said, we *DID* get PART of the sub, most of it did disentegrate and go back down tho)
The Kursk, OTOH, sunk a hundred miles off of the russia's largest naval base. AND the ruskies know EXACTLY where it lies. The red fleet may not be what it used to be, but somehow, I doubt that Glomar Explorer could sneak up and grab the Kursk without being caught and sunk.
From a purely technical POV tho, grabbing that Oscar would be much easier tho. To grab the Golf, Glomar Explorer had to reach down approx. 17,500ft (MORE than three MILES (!!!)). The Kursk only lies in about 350ft. But, the Explorer's not gonna get anywhere NEAR the place.
And what's scarier is thet there is precident, and we all failed to notice it and arrive at your conclusion until now.
Remember the eyntomology of the word "sabotage"?
Back in the 19th century, french factory workers took it upon themselved to force a stop to any kind of automation or technological advance. When they would come across any kind of automatic manufacturing equipment, they would force their wooden shoes, called sabot, into the machinery, destroying it; hence the word "sabotage".
The inventor of the sewing machine, if I recall my history correctly, was run out of several towns by tailors who refused to tolerate any competition; leaving a trail of smashed sewing machines in his wake.
The RIAA/metallica vs Napster, MPAA vs everybody, and now this suit againts AOL are nothing more than the modern equivelent of that same simple, pathetic thuggery. The only difference is the lack of *PHYSICAL* violence.
In all these cases, a geek invents something that threatens to make some other, old technology or business model obsolete or irrelevent; so the now useless people, instead of adapting to the new model, simply lash out at the geek who made them useless, by trying to sue the techies into destitution.
If there is any justice at all in the world, the RIAA/metallica, the MPAA, the DVD-CCA, and the whole bloody lot of them will be smacked down like the life insurance industry was in Robert Heinlein's "Lifeline".
>There are other good books too. Alan Deutschman's
> _The Second Coming of Steve Jobs
How do you know if it's a good book? I thought it wasn't out yet. Or am I thinking of another book.
I'd seriously warn anyone against taking any book with a history of Apple too seriously, however. It seems that there's not a writer out there who can put his feelings about Steve Jobs aside and simply write a history of the company.
Owen Linzmeyer (sp) did a fairly decent job of remaining detached in "Apple Confidential". But that one doesn't read like a history, so much as a collection of mostly independent essays, from which you can draw out a sence of the company's history.
Pretty much everyone else, however, uses their "history of Apple" book as their personal soap box, either to praise Jobs for his geinus, or tell the world how much they despise the man.
For a good example of the first, see Steven Levy's books; in particular "Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, The Computer That Changed Everything". The title pretty much says it all, eh? Jobs is almost the messiah in this one. Or you could read Pogue or Kaplan and get much the same.
For the other side, this "Second Comeing" book has already been widely described as a "hatchet job". Robert Cringly, in "Accidential Empires" calls Jobs "the most dangerous man in silicon valley", and compares him to the likes of Jim Jones and Saddam Hussain. And don't even bother with gil amelio's rag.
Not having met the man, I can't say IF he's so great as Levy thinks, or the physical incarnation of evil, as Cringly would have you beleive. I suppose you could just read them all, and try to pick a middle ground to beleive. Just don't expect anything resembleing objectivity from ANY of them... with perhaps the singular exception of Linzmeyer (sp).
>Just like Compaq and Dell should be require to
>sell us laptops without an inferior Operating
>System.
Well, I can't speak for the compaq's online options 'cause I would never even consider owning such a colossal piece of shit. Hell, for that matter, the same goes for dell... if I ever own another x86 notebook it'll be an IBM or Sony... at least they put out decent hardware, even if their choice of primairy OS sucks.
But Linux on a dell? That's even MORE of a joke.
When/. first announced mikey dell's so-called "support" for Linux, I overcame my loathing of those worthless boxen, and checked out dell.com.
For starters, the Linux they offered as an option was obsolete anyway. They were offering Red Hat 5.2 when I already had RH 6.1 up and running on my IBM I was surfing on.
Oh, and here's a nifty exercise for ya: Try configuring two IDENTICAL dell boxen at their site; same hardware across the board. Look at the prices. Oops!!! where's that $100 saveings you should be seeing by omitting windoze??? Could it be? mikey is charging the same price for the hardware with the FREE OS as for the bloated overpriced trash from redmond?
Perish the thought... that CAN'T be! mikey dell's our FRIEND! He spoke at LinuxWorld and said nice stuff about us... he would *never* gouge US.... would he... WOULD HE???
But to critisize them for getting a BIT radical and tearing down some posters??? That's such a fucking hipocritical attack you make me ill.
What about when pro-lifers shoot and kill doctors they suspect of performing abortions?
What about when you people bomb clinics where abortions take place, regardless of whatever else goes on in there?
Those distance orders you people whine so fervently about are there to protect the lives of the paitents and workers. Perhaps if you weren't so egear to assault them, those restraining orders wouldn't be there.
Just how the hell do reconcile being pro-life, but being more than willing to commit assault and murder? Fucking hipocrite.
>Take two common things you probably have in your
>laundry room - bleach and chlorine. Everyone >knows what mixing those does.
Uh.... yeah. It gets your whites whiter. And mabye you use it in your swimming pool too.
I think you meant to say *ammonia* and chlorine, which, when mixed together in strong enough concentrations, form a gaseous poison remarkably similar to WWI mustard gas.
I've had people in SF try to sell me on his "geinus" before with pamphlets and book excerpts, and he comes off to me as one of those snotty, holier-than-thou (ultra)liberal arts types, as you would expect to spawn from Harvard... but MIT??? What the hell would he be doing *there*?
>usually _all_ the verbs go at the end. Which can
>be quite painful in a compliacated sentence (at
>least for this very bad German student).
Then it should be quite easy for all of us who have had to get used to useing Hewlett Packard calculators!
I used to curse HP daily for useing postfix notation (easier on the CPU, harder on the person than the normal (infix) way to represent an equation). But now that I'm used to it, I realise that Yoda must be the bastard offspring of Dave Packard. foo
Yeah... windows has pre-emptive multitasking, memory protection, threading, SMP support, and all the other buzzwords that make up a "modern OS.
Too bad for the drones that bill's implementation of all of the above blows goats.
The Amiga, as you say, had all of the above in the '80s. Didn't save the commode from getting flushed.
It's not at all uncommon for real operating systems to have uptimes measured in *YEARS*. At my previous job, we had a Solaris NFS server that has been up and running WITHOUT A REBOOT since 1993!!! Show me a windoze box with even HALF that uptime. Bueller? Bueller? Bueller? Anyone? I'm waiting...
Yeah windows is buzzword compliant. But gates' horde of trained monkeys typed out one piss-poor imitation of a pre-emptive, protected, multithreaded, "moderm" OS. My SuSE mail/web SERVER at home has been up without a single reboot since I moved into my new apartment two MONTHS ago. My windoze workststion at work (which has duty no more stressful than running Exceed to xterm into the real computers there) crashes, on the average, every two DAYS!!! (always at the WORST time)
Hell, even my Macintosh, without protected memory, minimal threading support, and cooperative multitasking OS, crashes less than the windoze box... averaging only one crash a week, and then only while running a unique combination of Netscape and AIM.
The difference being, that MacOS (X) is an EXCELLENT implemantation of a co-operative OS, wheras windows is a shoddy, piss-poor implimentation of a pre-emptive os. (With Linux ranking GOOD and Be EXCELLENT in the pre-emptive competition).
It doesn't matter if you have infinite money to throw at infinate code-monkeys. The OS will still SUCK, compared to one designed by a smaller number of COMPETENT, dedicated, inspired programmers.
>Also, I see a lot of teenagers bitching that they
>cannot vote. OK kid, tell you what. When you have
>proven that you have some degree of responsiblity,
>that you understand what it is to support yourself
>and see large amounts of your money being taken
>from you by force by well-meaning fools who will
>use it to assuage their own guilt, when you
>understand the consequences of your actions and
>the fact that some mistakes will outlive you, then
>you can vote.
Oh... and how do people "proove" that they have "some degree of responsibility" now? All you have to do is survive until your 18th birthday. Given that most people are still living with their parents and just about to go off to college for their REAL education at that time, I fail to see where that is any significant feat.
Hell, I was, if anything, MORE aware of political issues when I was sixteen, than I am now. I have too many other responsibilities now to take a week off to go down to LA and "be political". Not to mention that I don't relish the idea of being gassed and beaten by the infamously thugish LAPD, as they egearly anticipating.
To base the civil rights of a human being on the ridiculously arbitrary metric of when that person's parents decided to have sex is absurd. Many of my best friends' younger siblings are much more politically aware than their, or my, parents. And hell, they're more responsible in many other ways as well than MANY "adults" I've known.
Hell, even at my age, I am still the victim of ageism. Sure, I can drink and I can vote, but I can't rent a car when I fly home to visit my family this x-mas. And I am charged exorbitantly excessive rates for my auto insurance simply for being male, and the *horrible* crime of my parents not conceiving me a few years earlier. This, when I have had ZERO accidents, and only four tickets in eight years of being a licensed driver. Which is better than EITHER of my parents can claim.
Fortunately, unlike you, I am not so far removed from being a teenager that I judge them to be worthless trash, I actually have sympathy for their issues. I see draconian teen curfue laws, and still imagine how much it would have sucked if I had still been under the magic 18 when they were enacted. I see them being blamed for every soceital evil, and see them being stripped of many of the rights I enjoyed when I was that age. And frankly, it disgusts me.
Ageism is America's last dirty little secret discrimination, and it should be ended. Guess what people... you do NOT magiclly become a superior, responsible, superhuman being, just by having lived X number of years. Judge people on their merit, not on stupid, arbitrary, divisions, such as being born too late for your tastes.
>Personally I detest the idea of genetically
>modified crops, I think it is the ultimate in
>human arrogance to belive that we even have the
>remotest idea what effect our tamperings will
>have on our environment,
Now this is something that baffles me about the anti-genetic-engineering crowd.
I, personally, have nothing, in principle, against geneticlly enginnered "supercrops"... so long as they do, in fact, live up to their advretisements. What baffles me, is that while the antigenetics crowd are protesting the use of these crops AT ALL, they are equally outraged at Monsanto's invention of the "terminator" gene, which would make it possible to CONTROL these same GM crops if they get out of hand.
Personally, I think *ALL* geneticlly modified food crops *should* include Monsanto's "terminator" gene. That way GM foods that are all good and true to their purpose can continue to be super-productive and feed more people more efficently. But if any of these "supercrops" turns out to have horribly bad side effects (or if they simply escape the confined of a controlled environment and start to overrun the baseline strain), they can be "terminated" in one generation, without escaping into the general population and overrunning the "normal" strains of foodstuffs.
And I have little doubt that there will always be a demand for organic foods, grown from the original strain with no artificial ferterlisers or pesticides. So there *IS* a baseline to fall back upon.
What I DO, however, take issue with, is the use of tetracycaline to activate the "terminator" gene. That seems just plain stupid to me. We have too many resistant bacteria strains as it is, WITHOUT spraying more antibiotics all over seed fields.
But as to why people who oppose GM foods also oppose the mechanism that would keep them from getting out of control??? That just baffles me.
Any greenies want to share their thoughts/reasoning on that one? I'd love to know.
>Would the AMA push for approval of such a
>technology,
snip
>disturbing fact that there is a hideous amount
>of financial incentive not to cure many diseases.
If I'm CEO of the company that makes the drugs that treat said disease, sure, it makes sence. But only until the 17 year patent on said drug runs out, at that point I damn well better make the cure available and profit off it before *its* 17 year patent runs out. I'd be lynched by my shareholders otherwise. And if *I* have the cure, and my COMPETITOR makes the treatment? Damn skippy, I'd release it.
>What would happen if, say, a generalized cure
>for all our physical ailments were developed
>(e.g. nano-facilitated medical immortality)?
You seem to forget the fact that many, if not most geeks don't give a DAMN about the status quo; and, in fact, would be happy to shatter it into a zillion pieces if given the chance.
If I'm at the helm of the Sunnyvale nanotech startup that figures out how to make microscopic robots give humanity clinical immortality, damn straight I'm going to push it out. Those robots would make me rich beyond the dreams of Midas, make me a hero worldwide (hell, I might even get my own holiday), and... oh yeah... provide an immeasurable benefit to humanity. *SCREW* the AMA.
(Working out the resulting overpopulation problems resulting from immortality is left as an exercise for the reader. Tho, if I perfect nanotech to the point where I can make humans immortal, I suppose nanotech will be prefected to make resources (except for real estate) essentially unlimited too. (Time to get my 'bots working on those carbon nanotubes for that space elevator!!!))
As for the doctors? Well, they HAD their salad days. We'll still have a need for plastic surgeons, dentists and ER docs I suppose.
But just because you've been making money in the PAST, you do NOT have the guaranteed right to that money in the FUTURE. Robert Heinlein said as much in one of his novels (much more elequently than my humble self). Someone's been posting the quote in most every iteration of the Napster debate, referring to the RIAA rathar than the medical industry)
**
(in the Heinlein story in question, someone invents a machine which will tell you the EXACT day you're going to die, and is promptly sued by the entire insurance industry. The insurancemongers are duely and properly smacked down in the supreme court.
I read it a LONG time ago, but can't dredge up the title or exact quote at the moment)
**
> Sysadmins can choose to censor inbound mail to
> their customers. It's their bandwidth, there
> servers, etc
Unless contractually bound otherwise, yeppers. You might try reading your service agreement with your ISP. Spam is expressly FORBIDDEN in most every one I've come across.
>Just like the phone company can block incoming
>calls to your home phone whenever they want to,
If you don't pay your bill, they can and will. Otherwise, nope... the telcos operate a public utility, not a PRIVATE network. Even though the phoneCo may, itself, be a company, not a utility comission, special restrictions and obligations are placed upon it in exchange for it's having a monopoly and for the right to run its lines on the public right of way.
>landlord can lock you or whoever else out of your
>house because you're just renting it, it's *the
>landlords* house.
Under the correct circumstances, he can. Your lease is a *CONTRACT* between you and your landlord. Quit paying your rent, and yep, you'll be evicted in no time flat. OTOH, if he locks you out just because he's feeling contrary that day, you can have his ass in court.
>Worldcom is going to be able to control
>what you say.
Nope. Worldcom has common carrier status. Read up on it. They share similar legal protections and obligations as a phoneCo.
>RBL is censorship. If you support RBL, you have to
>admit that some censorship is ok.
Nope. RBL is simply a list of IPs that spam out junk mail to people who don't want it. Essentially, it is a list of reviews, nothing more, nothing less. Refusing to carry trafic from those assholes is no morally different than buying a copy of Zagats Restraunt Guide at Borders, and refusing to eat at any place where the reviewer got salmonella.
>They are in fact only there as trained monkeys
>because AI bots havn't been perfected yet.
Proof positive right there that you've never BEEN a sysadmin. Or for that matter, quite likely have never done time on the helldesk either. It's more work than you think.
But back to the spam arguement...
You seem to be confused as to the difference between a PUBLIC service, and a PRIVATE network.
For starters, your analogy does not hold water:
>That's like saying that as a landlord of a
>building you have the right to read through my
>mail and throw out anyhting that looks like junk
>(or if you prefer bulk) mail right?
The proper analogy is to say that as the owner (leasor actually) of a telephone line, I have EVERY right to prevent people from coming into *MY* home, placing long distance calls on *MY* line, or receiving long distance collect calls on *MY* line.
>In fact if you so much as read another's private
>email correspondence from start to finish you have
>commited a violation of privacy of the user.
Wrong. On *MY* PRIVATE network the traffic is MINE until it leaves my system. I have every right to look at, or/dev/null any packet that passes through. Your boss at work has every right to read your email or monitor or curtail the useage of your boxen.
If you don't like that, get a contract that specifies otherwise, or encrypt all your mail (preferably both). And get a new job where they don't monitor employee computer useage while you're at it.
>The point is that civil rights supercede in every
>instince your right to do whatever the hell you
>want.
Wrong again.
Your arguement applies only if it's the govergnment doing the spam blocking.
On a PRIVATE network, which *I* own and adminster (wether I personally own all the hardware, own 51% of the stock in the company, or simply write the service policy that users agree to when they sign up) civil rights do not apply.
If I own a message board, I can block any message that contains the word "fuck" (or "fred" or "lederhosen") if I care to (I don't). If it's an email service, I am entirely within my rights to block spammers. If it's a usenet gateway, it is my right to block the alt heiarchy if I want (I don't, but I impose an upper size limit on it).
The point is that I have no obligation beyond what is in the *CONTRACT*. Is you don't like my terms, you don't have to do business with me.
I beleive it is in some places. Didn't Colorado recently pass an anti-spam law? In any case it IS a civil, if not criminal offence. AOL's single redemming quality is that they have in the past, and continue to, sucessfully sue many spammers.
>Bandwidth is not a public commons.
(almost) Exactly the point. It's private property.
>band of Sysadmins who have no business blocking
>people's recipt of email.
Here is where you are flat-assed wrong. I have EVERY business doing whatever the hell I please.
It is *MY* hardware.
It is *MY* software.
It is *MY* bandwidth.
It is *MY* root login.
I have every right to refuse to carry traffic from yesmail, harris, or from any other fool. I can pass said traffic to the designated receiver, send it to Zimbabwe, or drop it into/dev/null. I can CHOOSE not to block ANY spam, I can CHOOSE to use the MAPS RBL, I can CHOOSE to use someone else's blacklist, or I can CHOOSE to compile my own list of spammers. It's *MY* hardware, and *MY* bandwidth.
You don't like that? Tough cookies. Unless you and I have a contract that says otherwise, if you don't like my policies, you're more than welcome to take a long walk off pier39 into the bay.
Okay, so MAPS needs an overseas (hmmmm... HavenCo perhaps?) mirror. Or hell, if HavenCo works out as promised, relocate the RBL there entirely.
It could be ironic. IIRC, HavenCo has committed to being a good netizen and disallowing spam. But what if they had decided on a total free-for-all and gave spammers the green light?
It would've been funny as hell if the RBL that/dev/null's spammers was located in the same CoLo as the spamming servers themselves.
Oh well, just a little bit of irony that I'm sure we'll never get to savor.
I just moved to San Francisco from Orlando a few months ago.
First off, check "Jonathan Byron"'s reply. He summed up many of the points quite nicely.
But I just have to chime in, 'cause I recognise the address.
Knights Krossing is a notoriously shadey apartment complex directly across the street from the UCF campus, at the corner of Alafaya and University. I actually used to live about three miles west of there on University.
The complex caters to the least responsible of all the college students there. You rent a BEDROOM in an otherwise (poorly)furnished apartment. Each unit has four of these bed/bathroom combos, and you get paired up with roommates at random if you don't have a group of four. Utilities are included in the rent, but between the four of you, you still wind up paying about twice what it would cost if you were responsible enough to be able to pass a credit check and rent a house. But then, there's totally insufficent parking there, perhaps being right across the street from campus, mabye you make up for the price by not maintaining a car.
Basiclly Knights Krossing is (for the most part) where you get the 'rents/government to pay for you to live if college is simply 13-16th grade (or 17th or 18th as the case may be). I'm talking party central here. Any given night you can drive in there, park in a guest slot (or you WILL get towed) and find a kegger or five open to anyone who staggers up to the door (drinking age? what's that?). It is also where you go if you want to score weed or ecstacy or acid (or possibly something worse) and you don't want to head over to the bad part of town.
*LOTS* of dubious "business" deals go on there. From chem majors selling their cooked up batches of LSD, MDMA, and GHB, to CompSci majors running spam or porn sites (in at least one instance I know of, the FILMING of said porn was done in a Knights Krossing unit too). It's across the street from UCF, so there's bandwidth aplenty, both cable and dsl), and UCF does have a fairly good CompSci program (graduate, at least... undergrad classes are rathar lackluster).
Also, if you note the "technical" contact, you'll see "adelphia.com" adelphia is a notoriously WRETCHED cable company that, in Florida, just HAPPENS to employ a fair number of UCF grads.
>Why do you talk about the cost of a blank cd as
>being part of the issue? For instance, a Redhat
>Linux CD costs $50 from Redhat. That's a helluva
>a lot more markup than ever occurs with a single
>mass produced music CD...
Your comparison does not hold.
When you buy that $50 Redhat CD (or the $70 version, or the $120 version, etc), you're NOT paying for the Linux operating system. You are paying for the SUPPORT contract that comes with that level of the Redhat distro.
If you don't want the support, got to:
http://www.redhat.com/download/mirror.html
... and go at it.
Ditto for SuSE, Mandrake, xBSD, etc.
As for the windoze and office packages being outrageously overpriced for the festering piles of crap that they are, I agree entirely. That's why I use either Appleworks (came free with the computer) on my Mac, or StarOffice (came free with the distro) on my SuSE box.
Okay, so what happens when this thing starts generating false positives out the yin yang?
And generate false positives it will... At least with respect to illegal drugs.
There was a study done a while back that showed that something like 90+ percent of US paper currency was tainted with detectible amounts of cocaine and/or pot.
Seems that one person would use a bill to roll a joint or divide up a line. Then he'd eventually spend that currency on something. That bill would get in a cash register and contaminate the others around it. These would eventually find their way to a bank, where they are fed into high-speed money-counting machinery. The machinery is now contaminated with coke/pot residue and duely taints every subsequent bill fed through it.
So just think. Pretty much EVERYONE is carrying, on their person, detectible amounts of illegal drugs.
Paper currency (not actually paper, but a linnen/cotton blend IIRC), is remarkably fiberous and holds particulates quite well. Hell, it soaks up liquids pretty good too, AND is plenty durable.
Seems like you could screw up the system something fierce by saturating your cash with whatever you plan to smuggle in the future, and just wait a few months for everyone to get sick of all the false positives generated.
Or hell, don't smuggle anything, just fsck the anti-privacy brigade on general principle.
Slashdot Mirror
>just trying to get MP3s of records they own,
>instead of just using a ripper program to make
>their own? Sounds pretty unlikely.
Not unlikely at all, actually. The majority of the MP3s I have *DO* fall into this category.
I personally own about 500 CDs. Let's say that I want MP3s of ten songs, each on a differentt CD. Now, what is a the, fastest, most convinent, more efficent way for me to get said MP3s?
1)
Get up from the computer, go to my CD cabinet and find those ten CDs. Most of my collection is organised alphabeticly, but my more recent purchases are not. Last I reorganised everything was about six months ago, so I have quite a time-consuming task to find those ten CDs. Perhaps some of them are out in my car, and I have to discover this, and walk out there and get them.
Now that I have those ten CDs in my hand, walk back to the computer, start a ripper/converter program, and, one at a time: remove the CD from the jewl case, open CD drive, insert CD, close drive, select track, wait for it to rip and compress, eject disk, place disk back in jewel case, repeat *10.
*OR*
2)
Start Napster. In turn: type the name of the song I want an MP3 of, select an appropiately high bitrate and connection, double click on each, repeat *10. And have those ten MP3s in a TINY fraction of the time it takes to do #1.
Now, the RIAA/metallica would have you beleive that #2 is horribly, evily, wrong, and that I should take the trouble and time of going through #1. I happen to disagree. There is no functional or moral difference if I rip the the CD track myself, or Napster it. The RIAA/metallica want #2 to be illegal, and I don't think they're happy at all about #1, but fortunately, there is a supreme court ruleing protevcting #1.
However, unlike RIAA/metallica *I* can see the difference between what is legal and what is moral. Unfortunately, it appears thay you do not; and have subscribed to the theory that (((illegal==immoral) && (legal==moral)) for all values of x).
All of the above ignores, of course, the fact that MP3 is lossy compression that sounds like crap on a real stereo system (NOT my rio headphones, NOT my computer speakers (at work or at home), NOT my car dash unit, I mean my STEREO), and is no threat to red book audio anyway.
john
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There is a mandatory lockout period after any IPO, during which no one closely associated with the company can sell a single share.
And given that VA's stock price took a powerdive into the toilet since their IPO, I doubt that ESR will have much money to give away when he can sell anyway.
john
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gates' so-called "charity" was exposed as nothing more than another patheticly blatant PR scam LONG ago.
Leaked email exposes MS charity as PR exercise
(It's archived and the paragraph breaks are gone, but it's all there in black and white)
Not only were his true intentions exposed, it turns out that his so-called "charitable donations" are GROSSLY OVERVALUED!!!
If anyone actually BELEIVES this official propaganda that gates is just this warm, fuzzy, all around nice guy who would never harm a soul and wants nothing more than goodwill towards all men....
Well, I happen to own a couple of bridges in New York, some oceanfront kansas real estate, and a ton of Florida swampland.... er... vacation property that I'm sure you'd LOVE to buy!
john
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>Explorer caught the Russian sub and started to
>lift it, but the sub crumbled to small pieces,
I do beleive that I DID specify that we only recovered part of it, AND that the rest disentegrated and fell back to the seabed.
Try reading the whole post before you start flameing.
john
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the proper spelling is:
Frohman
http://www.idiotsavant.com/bueller/script.htm
john
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That Golf that we grabbed in the '70s was in the middle of the Pacific ocean, FAR from the red fleet's bases... AND they did NOT know where it sunk. We DID know, by virtue of having wired practiclly the entire Pacific seabed with sonar.
(contrary to what the other poster said, we *DID* get PART of the sub, most of it did disentegrate and go back down tho)
The Kursk, OTOH, sunk a hundred miles off of the russia's largest naval base. AND the ruskies know EXACTLY where it lies. The red fleet may not be what it used to be, but somehow, I doubt that Glomar Explorer could sneak up and grab the Kursk without being caught and sunk.
From a purely technical POV tho, grabbing that Oscar would be much easier tho. To grab the Golf, Glomar Explorer had to reach down approx. 17,500ft (MORE than three MILES (!!!)). The Kursk only lies in about 350ft. But, the Explorer's not gonna get anywhere NEAR the place.
john
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And what's scarier is thet there is precident, and we all failed to notice it and arrive at your conclusion until now.
Remember the eyntomology of the word "sabotage"?
Back in the 19th century, french factory workers took it upon themselved to force a stop to any kind of automation or technological advance. When they would come across any kind of automatic manufacturing equipment, they would force their wooden shoes, called sabot, into the machinery, destroying it; hence the word "sabotage".
The inventor of the sewing machine, if I recall my history correctly, was run out of several towns by tailors who refused to tolerate any competition; leaving a trail of smashed sewing machines in his wake.
The RIAA/metallica vs Napster, MPAA vs everybody, and now this suit againts AOL are nothing more than the modern equivelent of that same simple, pathetic thuggery. The only difference is the lack of *PHYSICAL* violence.
In all these cases, a geek invents something that threatens to make some other, old technology or business model obsolete or irrelevent; so the now useless people, instead of adapting to the new model, simply lash out at the geek who made them useless, by trying to sue the techies into destitution.
If there is any justice at all in the world, the RIAA/metallica, the MPAA, the DVD-CCA, and the whole bloody lot of them will be smacked down like the life insurance industry was in Robert Heinlein's "Lifeline".
john
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Haiku:
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Remove the collective if
> _The Second Coming of Steve Jobs
How do you know if it's a good book? I thought it wasn't out yet. Or am I thinking of another book.
I'd seriously warn anyone against taking any book with a history of Apple too seriously, however. It seems that there's not a writer out there who can put his feelings about Steve Jobs aside and simply write a history of the company.
Owen Linzmeyer (sp) did a fairly decent job of remaining detached in "Apple Confidential". But that one doesn't read like a history, so much as a collection of mostly independent essays, from which you can draw out a sence of the company's history.
Pretty much everyone else, however, uses their "history of Apple" book as their personal soap box, either to praise Jobs for his geinus, or tell the world how much they despise the man.
For a good example of the first, see Steven Levy's books; in particular "Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, The Computer That Changed Everything". The title pretty much says it all, eh? Jobs is almost the messiah in this one. Or you could read Pogue or Kaplan and get much the same.
For the other side, this "Second Comeing" book has already been widely described as a "hatchet job". Robert Cringly, in "Accidential Empires" calls Jobs "the most dangerous man in silicon valley", and compares him to the likes of Jim Jones and Saddam Hussain. And don't even bother with gil amelio's rag.
Not having met the man, I can't say IF he's so great as Levy thinks, or the physical incarnation of evil, as Cringly would have you beleive. I suppose you could just read them all, and try to pick a middle ground to beleive. Just don't expect anything resembleing objectivity from ANY of them... with perhaps the singular exception of Linzmeyer (sp).
john
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Haiku:
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>sell us laptops without an inferior Operating
>System.
Well, I can't speak for the compaq's online options 'cause I would never even consider owning such a colossal piece of shit. Hell, for that matter, the same goes for dell... if I ever own another x86 notebook it'll be an IBM or Sony... at least they put out decent hardware, even if their choice of primairy OS sucks.
But Linux on a dell? That's even MORE of a joke.
When
For starters, the Linux they offered as an option was obsolete anyway. They were offering Red Hat 5.2 when I already had RH 6.1 up and running on my IBM I was surfing on.
Oh, and here's a nifty exercise for ya: Try configuring two IDENTICAL dell boxen at their site; same hardware across the board. Look at the prices. Oops!!! where's that $100 saveings you should be seeing by omitting windoze??? Could it be? mikey is charging the same price for the hardware with the FREE OS as for the bloated overpriced trash from redmond?
Perish the thought... that CAN'T be! mikey dell's our FRIEND! He spoke at LinuxWorld and said nice stuff about us... he would *never* gouge US.... would he... WOULD HE???
john
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But to critisize them for getting a BIT radical and tearing down some posters??? That's such a fucking hipocritical attack you make me ill.
What about when pro-lifers shoot and kill doctors they suspect of performing abortions?
What about when you people bomb clinics where abortions take place, regardless of whatever else goes on in there?
Those distance orders you people whine so fervently about are there to protect the lives of the paitents and workers. Perhaps if you weren't so egear to assault them, those restraining orders wouldn't be there.
Just how the hell do reconcile being pro-life, but being more than willing to commit assault and murder? Fucking hipocrite.
Why don't you do us all a favor and just die.
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>laundry room - bleach and chlorine. Everyone >knows what mixing those does.
Uh.... yeah. It gets your whites whiter. And mabye you use it in your swimming pool too.
I think you meant to say *ammonia* and chlorine, which, when mixed together in strong enough concentrations, form a gaseous poison remarkably similar to WWI mustard gas.
john
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MIT???
I thought chomsky was a harvardite...
I've had people in SF try to sell me on his "geinus" before with pamphlets and book excerpts, and he comes off to me as one of those snotty, holier-than-thou (ultra)liberal arts types, as you would expect to spawn from Harvard... but MIT??? What the hell would he be doing *there*?
Certianly, he's no techie.
john
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>usually _all_ the verbs go at the end. Which can
>be quite painful in a compliacated sentence (at
>least for this very bad German student).
Then it should be quite easy for all of us who have had to get used to useing Hewlett Packard calculators!
I used to curse HP daily for useing postfix notation (easier on the CPU, harder on the person than the normal (infix) way to represent an equation). But now that I'm used to it, I realise that Yoda must be the bastard offspring of Dave Packard. foo
john
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foo
"The difference being, that MacOS (X)"
should read:
"The difference being, that MacOS (pre OS X)"
bar
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Haiku:
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Remove the collective if
Too bad for the drones that bill's implementation of all of the above blows goats.
The Amiga, as you say, had all of the above in the '80s. Didn't save the commode from getting flushed.
It's not at all uncommon for real operating systems to have uptimes measured in *YEARS*. At my previous job, we had a Solaris NFS server that has been up and running WITHOUT A REBOOT since 1993!!! Show me a windoze box with even HALF that uptime. Bueller? Bueller? Bueller? Anyone? I'm waiting...
Yeah windows is buzzword compliant. But gates' horde of trained monkeys typed out one piss-poor imitation of a pre-emptive, protected, multithreaded, "moderm" OS. My SuSE mail/web SERVER at home has been up without a single reboot since I moved into my new apartment two MONTHS ago. My windoze workststion at work (which has duty no more stressful than running Exceed to xterm into the real computers there) crashes, on the average, every two DAYS!!! (always at the WORST time)
Hell, even my Macintosh, without protected memory, minimal threading support, and cooperative multitasking OS, crashes less than the windoze box... averaging only one crash a week, and then only while running a unique combination of Netscape and AIM.
The difference being, that MacOS (X) is an EXCELLENT implemantation of a co-operative OS, wheras windows is a shoddy, piss-poor implimentation of a pre-emptive os. (With Linux ranking GOOD and Be EXCELLENT in the pre-emptive competition).
It doesn't matter if you have infinite money to throw at infinate code-monkeys. The OS will still SUCK, compared to one designed by a smaller number of COMPETENT, dedicated, inspired programmers.
john
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Haiku:
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>cannot vote. OK kid, tell you what. When you have
>proven that you have some degree of responsiblity,
>that you understand what it is to support yourself
>and see large amounts of your money being taken
>from you by force by well-meaning fools who will
>use it to assuage their own guilt, when you
>understand the consequences of your actions and
>the fact that some mistakes will outlive you, then
>you can vote.
Oh... and how do people "proove" that they have "some degree of responsibility" now? All you have to do is survive until your 18th birthday. Given that most people are still living with their parents and just about to go off to college for their REAL education at that time, I fail to see where that is any significant feat.
Hell, I was, if anything, MORE aware of political issues when I was sixteen, than I am now. I have too many other responsibilities now to take a week off to go down to LA and "be political". Not to mention that I don't relish the idea of being gassed and beaten by the infamously thugish LAPD, as they egearly anticipating.
To base the civil rights of a human being on the ridiculously arbitrary metric of when that person's parents decided to have sex is absurd. Many of my best friends' younger siblings are much more politically aware than their, or my, parents. And hell, they're more responsible in many other ways as well than MANY "adults" I've known.
Hell, even at my age, I am still the victim of ageism. Sure, I can drink and I can vote, but I can't rent a car when I fly home to visit my family this x-mas. And I am charged exorbitantly excessive rates for my auto insurance simply for being male, and the *horrible* crime of my parents not conceiving me a few years earlier. This, when I have had ZERO accidents, and only four tickets in eight years of being a licensed driver. Which is better than EITHER of my parents can claim.
Fortunately, unlike you, I am not so far removed from being a teenager that I judge them to be worthless trash, I actually have sympathy for their issues. I see draconian teen curfue laws, and still imagine how much it would have sucked if I had still been under the magic 18 when they were enacted. I see them being blamed for every soceital evil, and see them being stripped of many of the rights I enjoyed when I was that age. And frankly, it disgusts me.
Ageism is America's last dirty little secret discrimination, and it should be ended. Guess what people... you do NOT magiclly become a superior, responsible, superhuman being, just by having lived X number of years. Judge people on their merit, not on stupid, arbitrary, divisions, such as being born too late for your tastes.
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
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Remove the collective if
>modified crops, I think it is the ultimate in
>human arrogance to belive that we even have the
>remotest idea what effect our tamperings will
>have on our environment,
Now this is something that baffles me about the anti-genetic-engineering crowd.
I, personally, have nothing, in principle, against geneticlly enginnered "supercrops"... so long as they do, in fact, live up to their advretisements. What baffles me, is that while the antigenetics crowd are protesting the use of these crops AT ALL, they are equally outraged at Monsanto's invention of the "terminator" gene, which would make it possible to CONTROL these same GM crops if they get out of hand.
Personally, I think *ALL* geneticlly modified food crops *should* include Monsanto's "terminator" gene. That way GM foods that are all good and true to their purpose can continue to be super-productive and feed more people more efficently. But if any of these "supercrops" turns out to have horribly bad side effects (or if they simply escape the confined of a controlled environment and start to overrun the baseline strain), they can be "terminated" in one generation, without escaping into the general population and overrunning the "normal" strains of foodstuffs.
And I have little doubt that there will always be a demand for organic foods, grown from the original strain with no artificial ferterlisers or pesticides. So there *IS* a baseline to fall back upon.
What I DO, however, take issue with, is the use of tetracycaline to activate the "terminator" gene. That seems just plain stupid to me. We have too many resistant bacteria strains as it is, WITHOUT spraying more antibiotics all over seed fields.
But as to why people who oppose GM foods also oppose the mechanism that would keep them from getting out of control??? That just baffles me.
Any greenies want to share their thoughts/reasoning on that one? I'd love to know.
john
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>Would the AMA push for approval of such a
>technology,
snip
>disturbing fact that there is a hideous amount
>of financial incentive not to cure many diseases.
If I'm CEO of the company that makes the drugs that treat said disease, sure, it makes sence. But only until the 17 year patent on said drug runs out, at that point I damn well better make the cure available and profit off it before *its* 17 year patent runs out. I'd be lynched by my shareholders otherwise. And if *I* have the cure, and my COMPETITOR makes the treatment? Damn skippy, I'd release it.
>What would happen if, say, a generalized cure
>for all our physical ailments were developed
>(e.g. nano-facilitated medical immortality)?
You seem to forget the fact that many, if not most geeks don't give a DAMN about the status quo; and, in fact, would be happy to shatter it into a zillion pieces if given the chance.
If I'm at the helm of the Sunnyvale nanotech startup that figures out how to make microscopic robots give humanity clinical immortality, damn straight I'm going to push it out. Those robots would make me rich beyond the dreams of Midas, make me a hero worldwide (hell, I might even get my own holiday), and... oh yeah... provide an immeasurable benefit to humanity. *SCREW* the AMA.
(Working out the resulting overpopulation problems resulting from immortality is left as an exercise for the reader. Tho, if I perfect nanotech to the point where I can make humans immortal, I suppose nanotech will be prefected to make resources (except for real estate) essentially unlimited too. (Time to get my 'bots working on those carbon nanotubes for that space elevator!!!))
As for the doctors? Well, they HAD their salad days. We'll still have a need for plastic surgeons, dentists and ER docs I suppose.
But just because you've been making money in the PAST, you do NOT have the guaranteed right to that money in the FUTURE. Robert Heinlein said as much in one of his novels (much more elequently than my humble self). Someone's been posting the quote in most every iteration of the Napster debate, referring to the RIAA rathar than the medical industry)
**
(in the Heinlein story in question, someone invents a machine which will tell you the EXACT day you're going to die, and is promptly sued by the entire insurance industry. The insurancemongers are duely and properly smacked down in the supreme court.
I read it a LONG time ago, but can't dredge up the title or exact quote at the moment)
**
john
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Haiku:
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Remove the collective if
> their customers. It's their bandwidth, there
> servers, etc
Unless contractually bound otherwise, yeppers. You might try reading your service agreement with your ISP. Spam is expressly FORBIDDEN in most every one I've come across.
>Just like the phone company can block incoming
>calls to your home phone whenever they want to,
If you don't pay your bill, they can and will. Otherwise, nope... the telcos operate a public utility, not a PRIVATE network. Even though the phoneCo may, itself, be a company, not a utility comission, special restrictions and obligations are placed upon it in exchange for it's having a monopoly and for the right to run its lines on the public right of way.
>landlord can lock you or whoever else out of your
>house because you're just renting it, it's *the
>landlords* house.
Under the correct circumstances, he can. Your lease is a *CONTRACT* between you and your landlord. Quit paying your rent, and yep, you'll be evicted in no time flat. OTOH, if he locks you out just because he's feeling contrary that day, you can have his ass in court.
>Worldcom is going to be able to control
>what you say.
Nope. Worldcom has common carrier status. Read up on it. They share similar legal protections and obligations as a phoneCo.
>RBL is censorship. If you support RBL, you have to
>admit that some censorship is ok.
Nope. RBL is simply a list of IPs that spam out junk mail to people who don't want it. Essentially, it is a list of reviews, nothing more, nothing less. Refusing to carry trafic from those assholes is no morally different than buying a copy of Zagats Restraunt Guide at Borders, and refusing to eat at any place where the reviewer got salmonella.
john
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>because AI bots havn't been perfected yet.
Proof positive right there that you've never BEEN a sysadmin. Or for that matter, quite likely have never done time on the helldesk either. It's more work than you think.
But back to the spam arguement...
You seem to be confused as to the difference between a PUBLIC service, and a PRIVATE network.
For starters, your analogy does not hold water:
>That's like saying that as a landlord of a
>building you have the right to read through my
>mail and throw out anyhting that looks like junk
>(or if you prefer bulk) mail right?
The proper analogy is to say that as the owner (leasor actually) of a telephone line, I have EVERY right to prevent people from coming into *MY* home, placing long distance calls on *MY* line, or receiving long distance collect calls on *MY* line.
>In fact if you so much as read another's private
>email correspondence from start to finish you have
>commited a violation of privacy of the user.
Wrong. On *MY* PRIVATE network the traffic is MINE until it leaves my system. I have every right to look at, or
If you don't like that, get a contract that specifies otherwise, or encrypt all your mail (preferably both). And get a new job where they don't monitor employee computer useage while you're at it.
>The point is that civil rights supercede in every
>instince your right to do whatever the hell you
>want.
Wrong again.
Your arguement applies only if it's the govergnment doing the spam blocking.
On a PRIVATE network, which *I* own and adminster (wether I personally own all the hardware, own 51% of the stock in the company, or simply write the service policy that users agree to when they sign up) civil rights do not apply.
If I own a message board, I can block any message that contains the word "fuck" (or "fred" or "lederhosen") if I care to (I don't). If it's an email service, I am entirely within my rights to block spammers. If it's a usenet gateway, it is my right to block the alt heiarchy if I want (I don't, but I impose an upper size limit on it).
The point is that I have no obligation beyond what is in the *CONTRACT*. Is you don't like my terms, you don't have to do business with me.
john
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I beleive it is in some places. Didn't Colorado recently pass an anti-spam law? In any case it IS a civil, if not criminal offence. AOL's single redemming quality is that they have in the past, and continue to, sucessfully sue many spammers.
>Bandwidth is not a public commons.
(almost) Exactly the point. It's private property.
>band of Sysadmins who have no business blocking
>people's recipt of email.
Here is where you are flat-assed wrong. I have EVERY business doing whatever the hell I please.
It is *MY* hardware.
It is *MY* software.
It is *MY* bandwidth.
It is *MY* root login.
I have every right to refuse to carry traffic from yesmail, harris, or from any other fool. I can pass said traffic to the designated receiver, send it to Zimbabwe, or drop it into
You don't like that? Tough cookies. Unless you and I have a contract that says otherwise, if you don't like my policies, you're more than welcome to take a long walk off pier39 into the bay.
john
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Okay, so MAPS needs an overseas (hmmmm... HavenCo perhaps?) mirror. Or hell, if HavenCo works out as promised, relocate the RBL there entirely.
It could be ironic. IIRC, HavenCo has committed to being a good netizen and disallowing spam. But what if they had decided on a total free-for-all and gave spammers the green light?
It would've been funny as hell if the RBL that
Oh well, just a little bit of irony that I'm sure we'll never get to savor.
john
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First off, check "Jonathan Byron"'s reply. He summed up many of the points quite nicely.
But I just have to chime in, 'cause I recognise the address.
Knights Krossing is a notoriously shadey apartment complex directly across the street from the UCF campus, at the corner of Alafaya and University. I actually used to live about three miles west of there on University.
The complex caters to the least responsible of all the college students there. You rent a BEDROOM in an otherwise (poorly)furnished apartment. Each unit has four of these bed/bathroom combos, and you get paired up with roommates at random if you don't have a group of four. Utilities are included in the rent, but between the four of you, you still wind up paying about twice what it would cost if you were responsible enough to be able to pass a credit check and rent a house. But then, there's totally insufficent parking there, perhaps being right across the street from campus, mabye you make up for the price by not maintaining a car.
Basiclly Knights Krossing is (for the most part) where you get the 'rents/government to pay for you to live if college is simply 13-16th grade (or 17th or 18th as the case may be). I'm talking party central here. Any given night you can drive in there, park in a guest slot (or you WILL get towed) and find a kegger or five open to anyone who staggers up to the door (drinking age? what's that?). It is also where you go if you want to score weed or ecstacy or acid (or possibly something worse) and you don't want to head over to the bad part of town.
*LOTS* of dubious "business" deals go on there. From chem majors selling their cooked up batches of LSD, MDMA, and GHB, to CompSci majors running spam or porn sites (in at least one instance I know of, the FILMING of said porn was done in a Knights Krossing unit too). It's across the street from UCF, so there's bandwidth aplenty, both cable and dsl), and UCF does have a fairly good CompSci program (graduate, at least... undergrad classes are rathar lackluster).
Also, if you note the "technical" contact, you'll see "adelphia.com" adelphia is a notoriously WRETCHED cable company that, in Florida, just HAPPENS to employ a fair number of UCF grads.
Funny how it's such a small world after all...
john
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Haiku:
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>being part of the issue? For instance, a Redhat
>Linux CD costs $50 from Redhat. That's a helluva
>a lot more markup than ever occurs with a single
>mass produced music CD...
Your comparison does not hold.
When you buy that $50 Redhat CD (or the $70 version, or the $120 version, etc), you're NOT paying for the Linux operating system. You are paying for the SUPPORT contract that comes with that level of the Redhat distro.
If you don't want the support, got to:
http://www.redhat.com/download/mirror.html
... and go at it.
Ditto for SuSE, Mandrake, xBSD, etc.
As for the windoze and office packages being outrageously overpriced for the festering piles of crap that they are, I agree entirely. That's why I use either Appleworks (came free with the computer) on my Mac, or StarOffice (came free with the distro) on my SuSE box.
john
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Haiku:
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Remove the collective if
And generate false positives it will... At least with respect to illegal drugs.
There was a study done a while back that showed that something like 90+ percent of US paper currency was tainted with detectible amounts of cocaine and/or pot.
Seems that one person would use a bill to roll a joint or divide up a line. Then he'd eventually spend that currency on something. That bill would get in a cash register and contaminate the others around it. These would eventually find their way to a bank, where they are fed into high-speed money-counting machinery. The machinery is now contaminated with coke/pot residue and duely taints every subsequent bill fed through it.
So just think. Pretty much EVERYONE is carrying, on their person, detectible amounts of illegal drugs.
Paper currency (not actually paper, but a linnen/cotton blend IIRC), is remarkably fiberous and holds particulates quite well. Hell, it soaks up liquids pretty good too, AND is plenty durable.
Seems like you could screw up the system something fierce by saturating your cash with whatever you plan to smuggle in the future, and just wait a few months for everyone to get sick of all the false positives generated.
Or hell, don't smuggle anything, just fsck the anti-privacy brigade on general principle.
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if