I'd like to propose a new secure pen-and-paper voting system. The ballots are printed with a special ink that reacts with the invisible ink in the marker pens. After the voter marks the ballot no one can see what was selected - not even the voter!!
After the polls close, all of the ballots are sent back to our headquarters where we use our trade secret process to make the marks temporarily visible. We then tabulate the results and announce the winners.
If anyone wants a recount, we'll gladly reprocess all the ballots and re-check our work. The Board of Elections can store them for as long as they wish, but they can only be made temporarily visible by our secret process and nobody can watch while we do it so no one can ever compromise our security.
Chemical analysis of this system is strictly prohibited by the DMCA (the pen is a digital device).
This is sure to be a hit, so all you venture capitalists give me a call.
Yeah, the noise was distinctive, but so was the smell. Sort of a combination of old grease, new grease, toasted-but-not-quite-burned electrical insulation and purple ink. Lots of purple ink.
The folklore of the day held that there were over 600 moving parts in a teletype and there was a message that the repairmen typed that got all 600+ parts in motion.
Speaking of typing, there was no "roll-over" ot "type-ahead". If you tried to press the "h" key before the "t" key was finished doing its thing, the "h" key just wouldn't push. People who worked with teletypes got used to typing in a very steady, rythmical manner.
Alas, they belonged to the "bad old days" and I'm not sad to see them go. (The teletypes, not the people!)
"And this turns out to be the No. 1 thing people do with their computers: It's to send each other e-mail. The No. 2 thing is to send groups of people e-mail--to join the list of people who like to knit, or who like Microsoft products."
Knitting and MS worship are the number one and two topics of discussion!
Either this guy has his head inserted dangerously far into his colon or we here at Slashdot are really, seriously out of touch with what's going on in the real world.
This is so not the way to go. CD is a fine format. I like having the physical CD, I like having the physical artwork, I like CDs. I don't like the idea of paying money for bits and bytes that represent music.
I would like to respectfully disagree with this. Everyone has their own preferences, of course, but I buy CDs to listen to the music.
At last count I had over 600 CDs and it was a nightmare trying to keep them from entropying into a huge mess of CDs, jewel boxes and 6-CD magazines lying all around the CD player. (There was also the problem of macro-particle tunnelling which allowed the CDs, but curiously not the jewel boxes, to mysteriously travel to the kids' bedrooms.)
Finally I'd had enough and MP3'ed them all and now everyone is happy! No more mess. No more missing CDs. Everyone gets to play what they like on their own PC through their own stereo (I CAT5-ed the house) and a lot of songs that are the only good song on the CD get played on a regular basis.
All the CDs have been reunited with their jewel boxes and are resting peacefully in several large boxes in the garage.
The ultimate effect of my new music distribution model, is that piracy would come to an end, since the best copy is analog.
Ah-Ha! Not so fast, there, Angry Old Analog Man!
I will escalate your anti-piracy war by coating mylar tape (pat. pend.) with a magnetic oxide slurry and putting it into cassettes (pat. pend.). These "tapes" will record and play back the music (pat. pend.) from your vinyl "discs" and though the copies may not be good enough for Mozart, the added distortion will be perfect for Metallica. The resulting piracy (pat. pend.) will drive them off to Never-never Land where they will pull out their hair (pat. pend.) in great handfuls.
Does this mean we'll be getting good radio stations now?
Yes. If you mean stations that play the music you like, then yes, you will.
You will trot your geeky li'l butt over to here (if you're a digital geek) or to here (if you're a radio geek) and get yourself a transmitter. (You have to build and tweak the North Country Radio kit, but I think it has slightly better specs. I like my MPX96 just fine, and by buddy likes his PCS card, too.)
Then you can play the MP3s you like and everyone else be damned!
BTW, these are legal with or without the LPFM regulations because they're under 100mw. The range is about 100-200 feet, or up to a quarter mile with a longer antenna (but you might be pushing it, legal-wise, at that range.)
Are there times that you personally feel that enforcing a law to its word is unfair
but have to nevertheless enforce it to adhere to the letter ?
This is the question I really wanted to ask, but please let me put it in a slightly different context:
My best friend in college joined the IRS. In discussing his job one day long ago, he told me about a single mother of five who lived in inner-city Detroit. She owed the IRS $300 - a huge amount for her but a trifling sum in the IRS's scheme of things.
"Why do you go after her for $300?" I wanted to know. "There are other people who owe much more and can better afford to pay it."
"She owes the government money; she's gotta pay it," was his reply.
"But how can you live with yourself?" I asked.
"She owes the government money; she's gotta pay it," he repeated in a tone that implied that I just didn't "get" it.
So the question is this: do you personally find that you have to divorce yourself from the humanity of a situation in order to carry out your duty to the DofJ? If the answer is "Yes" then do you feel that your job makes you somehow less human? Is it worth it to you?
When you consider that the average mainframes of the early '70s had around 512K (yes, "K") of memory (the big ones had a meg or two), you can understand the need to conserve memory. Most programs ran in 60K regions. You just didn't have room for a lot of large data buffers.
CKD format allowed you to write whatever size records made sense for your application.
The real beauty of CKD was the "K" or "key" field. If you wrote data blocks with keys, you could then ask the disk controller to search for a given key while your program was executing other code. The controller would find the matching record, read it into storage and interrupt when it was done!
Nowadays most mainframe DASD is really RAID-1 or RAID-5 SCSI arrays that emulate CKD under the covers. With gobs of RAM and the introduction of "dataspaces", the usefulness of CKD is debatable, but like other legacy interfaces, CKD will be a long time dying.
If I buy a box of doggie treats, am I forbidden to eat them myself? After all, the manufacturer created them for the stated purpose of feeding dogs. They could argue that I agreed to this use when I purchased them (the box clearly stated that they were for dogs).
Following your logic, if I didn't want to give them to a dog, I didn't have to buy them. Assuming they were cheaper than a box of crackers (not necessarily valid!), am I depriving the Treats Industry of their due profits?
If it wasn't for US foreign policy, Europe would be one big Germany.
If it wasn't for US foreign policy, there would be no "South" Korea.
Shall I go on?
Yes, please do go on. Tell us about:
"North" Vietnam
"Communist" China
and "Castro's" Cuba.
If this ever comes out in the states, I'll send so many replies to M$ that it won't even be funny. Then their legal team can find the loophole and I can use that same loophole on my own sites.
Their loophole will be that your deluge of replies are "sham transactions" designed to abuse the law and they are therefore not required to acknowledge them.
There's nothing like Eurocrats speanding hideous quantities of time and money on something which proves useless by sheer virtue of its unenforcability.
Who you callin' slackers, Euroboy? [big grin]
Us 'Merikans are still in the competition, thankyewverymuch.
Slashdot Mirror
After the polls close, all of the ballots are sent back to our headquarters where we use our trade secret process to make the marks temporarily visible. We then tabulate the results and announce the winners.
If anyone wants a recount, we'll gladly reprocess all the ballots and re-check our work. The Board of Elections can store them for as long as they wish, but they can only be made temporarily visible by our secret process and nobody can watch while we do it so no one can ever compromise our security.Chemical analysis of this system is strictly prohibited by the DMCA (the pen is a digital device).
This is sure to be a hit, so all you venture capitalists give me a call.
The folklore of the day held that there were over 600 moving parts in a teletype and there was a message that the repairmen typed that got all 600+ parts in motion.
Speaking of typing, there was no "roll-over" ot "type-ahead". If you tried to press the "h" key before the "t" key was finished doing its thing, the "h" key just wouldn't push. People who worked with teletypes got used to typing in a very steady, rythmical manner.Alas, they belonged to the "bad old days" and I'm not sad to see them go. (The teletypes, not the people!)
Knitting and MS worship are the number one and two topics of discussion!
Either this guy has his head inserted dangerously far into his colon or we here at Slashdot are really, seriously out of touch with what's going on in the real world.Move it to the "OFF" position.
There. You've solved the problem.Have a beer. Admire your solution.
And, as always, "Thank you for using Ask Slashdot."Rabbit-Guy: Uhmm, yeah, dude. Mostly in my left foot.
Distributed backups are easy. It's the distributed restores that tend to get a little squirrely.
My mother-in-law lives with us.
Sorry, but you are totally-wrong, squared, dude-guy.Drown him!
Model airplanes don't kill people - hamsters kill people!
Not any more! The US Congress passed a law back in the '70s, I think, that made the words "inflammable" and "imflammable" illegal.
Good thing you're posting that from the UK.I thought drunks did limericks:
Phil Katz helped our hobby to growAs readers of
if our man were here
he'd be asking for beer
Not pest'ring the USPTO
I would like to respectfully disagree with this. Everyone has their own preferences, of course, but I buy CDs to listen to the music.
At last count I had over 600 CDs and it was a nightmare trying to keep them from entropying into a huge mess of CDs, jewel boxes and 6-CD magazines lying all around the CD player. (There was also the problem of macro-particle tunnelling which allowed the CDs, but curiously not the jewel boxes, to mysteriously travel to the kids' bedrooms.)Finally I'd had enough and MP3'ed them all and now everyone is happy! No more mess. No more missing CDs. Everyone gets to play what they like on their own PC through their own stereo (I CAT5-ed the house) and a lot of songs that are the only good song on the CD get played on a regular basis.
All the CDs have been reunited with their jewel boxes and are resting peacefully in several large boxes in the garage.Ah-Ha! Not so fast, there, Angry Old Analog Man!
I will escalate your anti-piracy war by coating mylar tape (pat. pend.) with a magnetic oxide slurry and putting it into cassettes (pat. pend.). These "tapes" will record and play back the music (pat. pend.) from your vinyl "discs" and though the copies may not be good enough for Mozart, the added distortion will be perfect for Metallica. The resulting piracy (pat. pend.) will drive them off to Never-never Land where they will pull out their hair (pat. pend.) in great handfuls.Yes. If you mean stations that play the music you like, then yes, you will.
You will trot your geeky li'l butt over to here (if you're a digital geek) or to here (if you're a radio geek) and get yourself a transmitter. (You have to build and tweak the North Country Radio kit, but I think it has slightly better specs. I like my MPX96 just fine, and by buddy likes his PCS card, too.)Then you can play the MP3s you like and everyone else be damned!
BTW, these are legal with or without the LPFM regulations because they're under 100mw. The range is about 100-200 feet, or up to a quarter mile with a longer antenna (but you might be pushing it, legal-wise, at that range.)This is the question I really wanted to ask, but please let me put it in a slightly different context:
My best friend in college joined the IRS. In discussing his job one day long ago, he told me about a single mother of five who lived in inner-city Detroit. She owed the IRS $300 - a huge amount for her but a trifling sum in the IRS's scheme of things."Why do you go after her for $300?" I wanted to know. "There are other people who owe much more and can better afford to pay it."
"She owes the government money; she's gotta pay it," was his reply."But how can you live with yourself?" I asked.
"She owes the government money; she's gotta pay it," he repeated in a tone that implied that I just didn't "get" it.So the question is this: do you personally find that you have to divorce yourself from the humanity of a situation in order to carry out your duty to the DofJ? If the answer is "Yes" then do you feel that your job makes you somehow less human? Is it worth it to you?
The real beauty of CKD was the "K" or "key" field. If you wrote data blocks with keys, you could then ask the disk controller to search for a given key while your program was executing other code. The controller would find the matching record, read it into storage and interrupt when it was done!
Nowadays most mainframe DASD is really RAID-1 or RAID-5 SCSI arrays that emulate CKD under the covers. With gobs of RAM and the introduction of "dataspaces", the usefulness of CKD is debatable, but like other legacy interfaces, CKD will be a long time dying.After reading /. for a year or two, I sort of deduced that the whole philosophy behind linux was to be cool.
Following your logic, if I didn't want to give them to a dog, I didn't have to buy them. Assuming they were cheaper than a box of crackers (not necessarily valid!), am I depriving the Treats Industry of their due profits?
If it wasn't for US foreign policy, there would be no "South" Korea.
Shall I go on?
Yes, please do go on. Tell us about:
"North" Vietnam"Communist" China
and "Castro's" Cuba.
Of course they are! Cables carry information and "information wants to be free."
From what I remember from old B movies, it's a good idea to wear some dark sunglasses so the Chief can't tell when you're oogling his daughter.
Good luck and don't forget to write!Is it just a coincidence that this guitar is left-handed?
Their loophole will be that your deluge of replies are "sham transactions" designed to abuse the law and they are therefore not required to acknowledge them.
Oops!Who you callin' slackers, Euroboy? [big grin]
Us 'Merikans are still in the competition, thankyewverymuch.Think Geek!