I don't think that membership in the RIAA has anything to do with this aspect of record company business practices. RIAA or no RIAA, the major labels would still spend millions for promo and marketing. They'd still engage in "legal" payola. They'd still be buying shelf space and end caps from the big retailers. The product would still suck, and cost the same to boot.
In trying to explain the price disparity between the Pilz recordings of Bach and the usual major label tripe, the poster relied on straw men (RIAA, copyright).
Promotion and marketing is the biggest sunk cost in major label products; more than recording, more than manufacturing, more than contractual obligations to the band. Membership in a cartel has nothing to do with this.
Which shows the true cost of producing music when the RIAA is left out and the copyright for the author has expired.
Wrong.
This shows the true cost of producing music when:
You're not spending millions of dollars on advertising and promotion.
You're not spending hundreds of thousands on a music video.
You're not spending tens of thousands on promo men who in turn grease the palms of radio music directors everywhere.
You're not spending tens of thousands on tour support.
You don't think that if Britney Spears recorded an album of public domain songs it wouldn't be priced in the $14 to $16 range?
Copyright is irrelevant here. It's not an up-front cost. The songwriter gets a share of sales (mechanical royalties) and from airplay (performance royalties). It's not an up-front expense (like promo), so it has no bearing on retail price.
Besides, Pilz holds the copyright to the recordings of those Bach pieces, regardless of whether the underlying work is public domain or not.
I work for a company that provides system and network adminsitration for small- to medium-sized businesses (5 to 50 workstations): law firms, accountants, car dealerships, home design shops, retail, food service...
Whenever possible, I try to suggest alternatives (OS X or Linux, especially on the server side). Invariably, there is some application that is integral to the operation of the business that can only run on Win32 platforms.
For the law firms, it's scheduling and time billing applications like Amicus, Abacus Law, Time and Chaos, and Timeslips. For the design shops, it's their specialized CAD programs. The car dealerships could have transitioned to Linux/BSD/OS X, since 75% of their business computing applications are run over terminal sessions to an ADP server, but the rest of their business apps are web based (ActiveX and Adobe Acrobat being the dealbreakers).
For just about all, the books are kept on Quickbooks/Quicken or Peachtree, and they have to maintain compatibility with their outside accounting firms (which means no GNUCash, even if it was a feature-for-feature match).
I'd love to get the car salesmen (who are bored and spend too much time surfing pr0n sites) off of Win32 and on to a less vulnerable platform, but it ain't gonna happen anytime soon.
As for the Microsoft hegemony, the ISVs are willing accomplices (does Intuit have a Linux product?). Quoth the monkeyboy: "Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers!".
I've lost count the number of Kevin Costner-type movies that were made about such subjects, with the good guys coming out as something less than winners.
Costner movies? Hell, boy. This is Blazing Saddles!
Darl McBride is Hedley Lamarr (Harvey Korman). Evil and inept.
Brent Stowell is Taggart (Slim Pickens), the hatchet man
Attorney David Boies is Mongo (Alex Karras). Word has it that Boies once one-punched a horse, too.
The Open Source Community are the people of the town of Rock Ridge.
The analogy sort of starts to break down here. For example, who's Bart and the Waco Kid (Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder)? Red Hat and IBM? What about Olsen Johnson, Rev. Johnson, and Gabby Johnson? Linus, Stallman, and ESR?
One thing's certain: that campfire scene with the cowboys eating beans and farting? Slashdot. For sure.
MS10-01: Vulnerability in Internet Explorer may cause user to worship other gods. MS10-02: Buffer overrun in Graven Image processing. MS10-03: Vulnerability in RPC Service may cause the name of the Lord to be taken in vain. MS10-04: Vulnerability in Task Scheduler may prevent computer from resting on the Sabbath Day. MS10-05: Vulnerability in Windows Shell may allow child process to kill parent process. MS10-06: Buffer overrun in DCE Locator Service may cause abnormal program termination. MS10-07: Vulnerability in Outlook/Outlook Express may lead to adultery. MS10-08: Vulnerability in MSKerberos may allow remote user to steal. MS10-09: Vulnerability in Excel may allow workbooks or spreadsheets to bear false witness. MS10-10: Vulnerability in Internet Explorer may cause user to covet neighbor's ass.
Black Panthers Weather Underground Earth Liberation Front
The first two of your examples haven't been heard of in over thirty years. The third (ELF) are not much more than vandals.
And you'd probably cringe at the thought of the World Church of the Creator, the Klan, or other denizens of the radical Right held up as examples of American conservatism.
Nope, no radical militant liberals here.
The Panthers and Weathermen were Leftists, not liberals (in fact, they scorned liberals for participating in a system that they considered bankrupt and corrupt). Some '60s leftists held decidedly illiberal views (e.g., Maoist communism).
Spywares are not viruses or trojans. They only get installed via user consent
Not quite true. Three examples:
1. User installs an application that is bundled with spyware (e.g., Cydoor bundled with Kazaa). In this case there may be a click-through EULA, but the wording is purposely vague.
2. Web site uses various methods to install spyware without user consent (e.g., ActiveX controls or the MIME types exploit that causes IE to think that an.exe is really a MIDI or.WAV file and runs it automatically).
3. Once a piece of malware like 180Solutions, LOP.COM, or new.net is on a computer, it's like an invasion beach head: other executable files and.DLLs are automatically downloaded without user consent or knowledge. I've scraped this shit off of systems that had hundreds of these. As clueless as some of these users are, none of them clicked through 466 EULAs.
Besides, there are plenty of acts that are illegal even if both parties consent, like insider trading, polygamy, or bribery. And spyware/adware is more than just annoying as there's a cost involved in cleaning PCs that have been crippled by malware (in time and/or money). Finally, many sites that install this crap target minors, who cannot legally enter into a contract (not even a EULA). There are even laws in the US about collecting information from children under 13 (IIRC it's part of the CDA).
So far, it seems as if this campaign has been about 30-year old government documents, typefaces, and who did what in 1969 or 1974. I have never experienced a presidential campaign that went so negative so early.
My questions are these: is this what we can expect from every campaign from now on? What happened to a frank and honest discussion of issues? How negative does a campaign have to get before voters give up and stay home on Election Day?
How do we break out of this cycle? Is the will to power so strong that winning an election at the expense of damaging the political process is seen as a legitimate outcome?
I hope the Discovery Channel picks this up next season...
MONDAY
VINNY Senior says that we have to have this spaceship ready for the X-Prize in November, but I just don't see it happening. We're just halfway through the mock-up and the combustion chamber has to be at the chromers by tomorrow.
TUESDAY
MIKEY (Takes out the trash)
WEDNESDAY
PAUL, JR. Whenever we do a theme spaceship, we always run into some problem. Like with this one, the attitude control thrusters were too close to the sissy bar. But Cody came through when he reversed the polarity of the positronic matrix and reconfigured the EPS conduits to emit tachyons through the deflector shields.
THURSDAY
PAUL, SR. I really had my doubts about this spaceship, but Justin came through in the end. He did a killer job on the tins and the flames and pinstripes on the body really make the design work.
In 1938, before NOAA and the National Weather Service, before satellites and the Weather Channel, a Category 3 hurricane hit Long Island and New England. A junior forecaster at the U.S. Weather Bureau had predicted its track, but he was overruled by the senior staff.
Hurricanes tend to lose energy over land, but a few days of stormy weather had created a warm, wet carpet beneath its path. Long Island was temporarily cut in half (and a new inlet -- Shinnecock -- was created and exists to this day). Wind speeds exceeded 120 MPH. Fifty foot waves hit Gloucester, MA. The Connecticut River rose 35 feet above its banks. Falmouth, MA (on Cape Cod) was under 8 feet of water. According to historian William Manchester, people in Vermont, 300 miles inland, could smell the ocean.
When it was over, 700 people were dead, 63,000 homeless. Nine thousand buildings were destroyed, along with over 3,000 boats. Wreckage from this hurricane could be seen well into the 1970s. The cost of the damage was $6.2 million in 1938 (Depression) dollars, adjusted to over $15,000,000,000 today.
Two billion trees were blown to the ground. And this was "just" a Cat 3.
So, yeah, the OP bitches about 200 miles give-or-take. Hell, we can see these forming off the coast of West Africa now. When was the last hurricane that killed 700 people here in the US? (Yes, I know about cyclones killing thousands in Bangladesh, and evacuating everyone is nigh unto impossible.)
There's always going to be property damage. But property can be rebuilt. Even a +- 400 mile forecast saves hundreds, even thousands of lives.
Oh, and about that data thing? Just ftp your stuff somewhere and let everyone else mirror it. Worked for Linus, right?
The complexity issues are irrelevant to a one time pad, but a one time pad has to be as big as the message. So if you have a channel secure enough to send the one time pad, you may as well sent the message instead.
There's nothing stopping one from sending more than one "one time pad" through that initial secure channel. Consider the example of a DVD-R filled with random data in a diplomatic pouch (or a USB keychain drive working its way through a courier's intestines). I'm sure you can send enough data for a year's worth of one time pads that way. Or for that matter, an agreement to use the King James Bible as a pad, starting at Exodus 9:3.
It's my impression that cryptography is all about sending secure messages over an insecure channel (e.g., the Venona intercepts of Soviet telegraph messages, Enigma, JP-25). Transmission of timely intelligence or operational data can't always wait for a secure channel.
Frequently, in times square, the huge animated billboards will be bluescreened. It's pretty funny. You'd think that software for made for doing this stuff wouldn't crap out. You'd hope that no one installs quake on these machines or any other non-related software, but I guess people do.
I'd love to see Quake broadcast on one of those screens above Times Square. Better yet, CounterStrike, with a CNN-style text crawl at the bottom of the screen:
...Cease fire in Iraq breaks down...Shia militia resorts to bunny-hop tactics...AWP Wh0r3 wounds three...OMFG u ghey camper...
If anyone can pull this off during the GOP convention I will pay them $1000.
I have a client who has been having intermittent problems with Word2002, namely "abnormal termination" errors. Crash, boom, bang.
I've done everything: deleted "NORMAL.DOT" (which had bloated to 710KB), scanned for macro viruses, did a repair install, did an uninstall and a clean re-install, applied all three service packs (service packs for a word processor?), started it up in safe mode ("winword.exe/a" -- a word processor with a "safe mode"?), installed the support and troubleshooting document templates, turned off NAV Office virus checking (as per the MS KB article 320475).
And still it mocks me.
I'm starting to look at the OS and the network at this point, but none of the other applications have crashed, and both the computers and network are new (under a year old, mostly Dells running XP Pro). The users don't do anything fancy with Word, no pictures, no embedded objects, just plain vanilla legal documents (it's a law office, so I'm thinking that maybe there's a karma thing happening).
I've met every challenge that administration has thrown at me, but the solution for this one has eluded me for a month now. The users are getting impatient and they aren't taking "Well, it is a Microsoft product" for an excuse. Nor do I for that matter. I can't blame Redmond, even though their products are starting to remind me of the US automotive industry back in the 1970s: big, inefficient, prone to crashing, waiting for a nimble competitor (Japan) to eat their lunch.
The automobile:software analogy breaks down, of course. When you bought a Toyota to replace your Ford you didn't have to migrate anything but the contents of your glove compartment and your trunk, not a year's worth of.DOC files. I would switch these users to something better, if only there was a clearly superior product on the market. As much as Word sucks, it's become a de facto standard. There's no competition anymore, and I wonder if this situation means that there's no incentive to make this a stable product. I wonder who is in charge of product development in Redmond: engineers or marketdroids? Do I really need the ability to make Word my default HTML editor? Do I really need to know my Fleisch score? Clippy? Hello? Is anyone home?
Just give me a goddamned word processor that doesn't throw a runtime error and my users and I will be happy. Or I swear to God I'll kill this puppy.
6. Do not commit murder as defined by law. 7. Do not 8. Do not commit theft or kidnapping.
Yeah, I could see how applying the Seventh Commandment ("Thou shall not commit adultery.") would be hard to translate into machine code. For one thing, robot marriages aren't legal (yet, but give Massachusetts time to come around). And though only one party has to be married for an affair to be adulterous, we all know that once the technology is sufficently advanced, "pleasure bots" are going to be one hell of a hot item (bigger than the Segway, even).
Maybe it should be "Thou shalt not sleep with that really cute vending machine in the lobby by the elevators, even if she does flirt shamelessly every time you glide by on your noiseless rubber wheels.".
I can imagine the disappointment of anyone who enlists with the expectation that service in the armed forces is anything like a video game. Sorry, kid: no aimbots, no wall-hacks, not everyone gets a sniper rifle, and if you bunny-hop on a 30 mile march once more the drill sargeant will take you behind the barracks for some wall-to-wall discipline.
What we really need are some mods for America's Army, like AA: KP and Latrine Duty or AA: Abu Ghraib.
Of course, you aren't the only one who has to get going in the morning. Your spouse and kids will be taken care of, too -- with smart toilets analyzing their urine and sensor-rich toothbrushes checking their saliva to make sure everything is ticketyboo; most health problems will be caught early and be trivial to correct.
I'm not sure I like this. I mean, where is the data going? To my doctor? I think that would overload him, getting three piss tests per day from all of his patients. Or is the toilet so smart that it can do its own diagnosis?
How does the toilet know it's me? Do I have to swipe a smart card before I pee? (There's a joke here about "logging in" but I'm not going to make it.)
What happens when the dog drinks from the toilet?
What about someone who's been convicted of a drunk driving offense; would these become mandatory? What if they pissed in the sink instead?
Would I get a lecture from my toilet after a night of hard drinking? Would it complain if I ate too many jalapenos?
Seriously, I don't think we'll have self-cleaning toilets by 2014, much less Tommy the Talking Toilet.
Last year, I found myself without a home or a job (by choice, actually). I moved to another part of the US and, while I looked for a job and a place to live, I relied on open access points for e-mail (to my old ISP over the web via SSL).
When not job-hunting, I made a modest living helping the local businesses secure their open access points (which expiated some of the guilt over leeching on open WAPs). This led to more business as a tech support consultant, which kept me afloat and paid my motel bills until I found a permanent position.
Using NetStumbler and a DeLorme Earthmate GPS on a laptop, I identified open access points. Then I would approach the business and offer to secure their connection for a modest fee (usually $100). Only two businesses turned me away, but the rest were glad to have my services.
I've read some comments from people who intentionally leave their access points open. While I don't advise this, that's entirely up to you, and I'm sure that you understand the consequences. These small business owners that I worked with were not so aware of the ramifications. They bought a WAP, hooked it up, and were pleased with themselves when it worked. And with two exceptions, they were all horrified that someone 500 feet away from their office or store had access to their network and data.
Some tips if you want to do this:
Look professional. I wore a suit when I made my cold calls. Think of this as a job interview. It is.
Be polite. If they decline your help, thank them for their time. If they do ask for your help, let them bring up the issue of compensation. I never had to ask for money; I was always asked what my fee would be.
Visual aids help. NetStumbler's signal strength graph was really useful for showing how far an 802.11 signal propagates.
Don't overplay the threat. It's enough to say that someone across the street could plug into the network. Invoking the possibility of Al Qaeda using the WAP to send coded messages is overkill.
Don't underplay the threat, either. Business owners do worry about identity theft, both theirs and their customers. Medical offices have HIPAA (Health Insurance Privacy and Accountability Act) compliance to worry about.
This is a legal grey area. So tread lightly. I avoided approaching financial institutions because of 18 USC 1030 (IIRC), which levies higher penalties on misuse or abuse of their networks and computers. While a banker wouldn't think twice about calling the cops on me, the car dealers and restaurant owners were willing to hear my pitch.
Don't charge an arm and a leg. Because these small business owners are always looking for tech help, a break in the price now will lead to more business later (mostly cleaning spyware and viruses, but that's another story).
Don't charge too little, either. Though it depends on the part of the country (or world) you live in, I've found between $60 and $100/hr. to be a reasonable price point. Feel your customer out: the cafe owner won't pay as much as the Mercedes dealer.
Know the gear. Some WAPs have a web interface. Others rely on SNMP or a direct connection via USB cable. Hit the manufacturers' sites and download the manuals. Be prepared.
Leave a business card. Because you will get a callback when the administrative assistant's computer gets hosed by spyware.
I wouldn't want to do this full time, but for a few months I made a pretty decent living at this, enough to stay in a nice motel, eat lobster, and drink good scotch. When I was hired by a company that provided contract network administration services I had a nice stack of references (and new business for the firm, something that clinched the deal).
Actually, in the early 1940s there was a general strike among ASCAP-affiliated musicians over the fact that radio stations weren't paying their contractual performance royalties. This led to the formation of BMI, a competing performance rights organization. The strike, supported by the musicians' union (AFM) wasn't settled until 1944.
And mechanical royalties (a fee paid to songwriters on a per song basis that persists to this day on every CD that's sold) has its origin in player piano rolls, back in the 19th Century (hence the name mechanical).
"...and in other news, a local cameraman was found dead today, killed by a single shot to the head from a high-powered rifle. A police spokesman stated that a possible suspect was seen jumping off of a wooden crate and hopping away at high speed. No arrests have been made."
Whoever wound up with the rights to his music has, I suspect, a rather different view of things.
Nora Guthrie, Woody's daughter, is the trustee of his estate (which includes his copyrights). She also runs the Woody Guthrie Foundation and administers the archives of Woody's manuscripts and notebooks (located on 57th St. in NYC). And she's an active member and contributor to the Huntington's Disease Society of America (Huntington's Chorea is the degenerative nerve disease that killed her father).
Nora's actually a really sweet person, and the archives are open to anyone who wants to do research. She's also pretty open about licensing Woody's work (she's worked with Billy Bragg and Wilco, among others). If she has a fault, it's that she's quite zealous about guarding Woody's legacy.
My take on this is that Nora didn't like seeing one of Woody's songs dragged into a partison political battle (nevermind that the JibJab animation was pretty evenhanded). I'd like to think that if JibJab had asked permission (like Weird Al does with his parodies), she would probably have granted it. Of course, my opinion is that JibJab is within the parody safe harbor of copyright fair use, but it still bothers me to see a normally generous person like Nora tarred with the Disney "infinite copyright control freak" brush.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think that membership in the RIAA has anything to do with this aspect of record company business practices. RIAA or no RIAA, the major labels would still spend millions for promo and marketing. They'd still engage in "legal" payola. They'd still be buying shelf space and end caps from the big retailers. The product would still suck, and cost the same to boot.
In trying to explain the price disparity between the Pilz recordings of Bach and the usual major label tripe, the poster relied on straw men (RIAA, copyright).
Promotion and marketing is the biggest sunk cost in major label products; more than recording, more than manufacturing, more than contractual obligations to the band. Membership in a cartel has nothing to do with this.
k.
Wrong.
This shows the true cost of producing music when:
You don't think that if Britney Spears recorded an album of public domain songs it wouldn't be priced in the $14 to $16 range?
Copyright is irrelevant here. It's not an up-front cost. The songwriter gets a share of sales (mechanical royalties) and from airplay (performance royalties). It's not an up-front expense (like promo), so it has no bearing on retail price.
Besides, Pilz holds the copyright to the recordings of those Bach pieces, regardless of whether the underlying work is public domain or not.
k.
Darl McBride is running against Richard Stallman, with Theo DeRaadt as a third party candidate.
k.
I work for a company that provides system and network adminsitration for small- to medium-sized businesses (5 to 50 workstations): law firms, accountants, car dealerships, home design shops, retail, food service...
Whenever possible, I try to suggest alternatives (OS X or Linux, especially on the server side). Invariably, there is some application that is integral to the operation of the business that can only run on Win32 platforms.
For the law firms, it's scheduling and time billing applications like Amicus, Abacus Law, Time and Chaos, and Timeslips. For the design shops, it's their specialized CAD programs. The car dealerships could have transitioned to Linux/BSD/OS X, since 75% of their business computing applications are run over terminal sessions to an ADP server, but the rest of their business apps are web based (ActiveX and Adobe Acrobat being the dealbreakers).
For just about all, the books are kept on Quickbooks/Quicken or Peachtree, and they have to maintain compatibility with their outside accounting firms (which means no GNUCash, even if it was a feature-for-feature match).
I'd love to get the car salesmen (who are bored and spend too much time surfing pr0n sites) off of Win32 and on to a less vulnerable platform, but it ain't gonna happen anytime soon.
As for the Microsoft hegemony, the ISVs are willing accomplices (does Intuit have a Linux product?). Quoth the monkeyboy: "Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers!".
k.
Costner movies? Hell, boy. This is Blazing Saddles!
The analogy sort of starts to break down here. For example, who's Bart and the Waco Kid (Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder)? Red Hat and IBM? What about Olsen Johnson, Rev. Johnson, and Gabby Johnson? Linus, Stallman, and ESR?
One thing's certain: that campfire scene with the cowboys eating beans and farting? Slashdot. For sure.
k.
MS10-01: Vulnerability in Internet Explorer may cause user to worship other gods.
MS10-02: Buffer overrun in Graven Image processing.
MS10-03: Vulnerability in RPC Service may cause the name of the Lord to be taken in vain.
MS10-04: Vulnerability in Task Scheduler may prevent computer from resting on the Sabbath Day.
MS10-05: Vulnerability in Windows Shell may allow child process to kill parent process.
MS10-06: Buffer overrun in DCE Locator Service may cause abnormal program termination.
MS10-07: Vulnerability in Outlook/Outlook Express may lead to adultery.
MS10-08: Vulnerability in MSKerberos may allow remote user to steal.
MS10-09: Vulnerability in Excel may allow workbooks or spreadsheets to bear false witness.
MS10-10: Vulnerability in Internet Explorer may cause user to covet neighbor's ass.
k.
The first two of your examples haven't been heard of in over thirty years. The third (ELF) are not much more than vandals.
And you'd probably cringe at the thought of the World Church of the Creator, the Klan, or other denizens of the radical Right held up as examples of American conservatism.
The Panthers and Weathermen were Leftists, not liberals (in fact, they scorned liberals for participating in a system that they considered bankrupt and corrupt). Some '60s leftists held decidedly illiberal views (e.g., Maoist communism).
k.
Not quite true. Three examples:
1. User installs an application that is bundled with spyware (e.g., Cydoor bundled with Kazaa). In this case there may be a click-through EULA, but the wording is purposely vague.
2. Web site uses various methods to install spyware without user consent (e.g., ActiveX controls or the MIME types exploit that causes IE to think that an
3. Once a piece of malware like 180Solutions, LOP.COM, or new.net is on a computer, it's like an invasion beach head: other executable files and
Besides, there are plenty of acts that are illegal even if both parties consent, like insider trading, polygamy, or bribery. And spyware/adware is more than just annoying as there's a cost involved in cleaning PCs that have been crippled by malware (in time and/or money). Finally, many sites that install this crap target minors, who cannot legally enter into a contract (not even a EULA). There are even laws in the US about collecting information from children under 13 (IIRC it's part of the CDA).
k.
So far, it seems as if this campaign has been about 30-year old government documents, typefaces, and who did what in 1969 or 1974. I have never experienced a presidential campaign that went so negative so early.
My questions are these: is this what we can expect from every campaign from now on? What happened to a frank and honest discussion of issues? How negative does a campaign have to get before voters give up and stay home on Election Day?
How do we break out of this cycle? Is the will to power so strong that winning an election at the expense of damaging the political process is seen as a legitimate outcome?
k.
I wholeheartedly agree.
Regards,
Arthur Goatse.cx, Sr.
I hope the Discovery Channel picks this up next season...
MONDAY
VINNY
Senior says that we have to have this spaceship ready for the X-Prize in November, but I just don't see it happening. We're just halfway through the mock-up and the combustion chamber has to be at the chromers by tomorrow.
TUESDAY
MIKEY
(Takes out the trash)
WEDNESDAY
PAUL, JR.
Whenever we do a theme spaceship, we always run into some problem. Like with this one, the attitude control thrusters were too close to the sissy bar. But Cody came through when he reversed the polarity of the positronic matrix and reconfigured the EPS conduits to emit tachyons through the deflector shields.
THURSDAY
PAUL, SR.
I really had my doubts about this spaceship, but Justin came through in the end. He did a killer job on the tins and the flames and pinstripes on the body really make the design work.
k.
In 1938, before NOAA and the National Weather Service, before satellites and the Weather Channel, a Category 3 hurricane hit Long Island and New England. A junior forecaster at the U.S. Weather Bureau had predicted its track, but he was overruled by the senior staff.
Hurricanes tend to lose energy over land, but a few days of stormy weather had created a warm, wet carpet beneath its path. Long Island was temporarily cut in half (and a new inlet -- Shinnecock -- was created and exists to this day). Wind speeds exceeded 120 MPH. Fifty foot waves hit Gloucester, MA. The Connecticut River rose 35 feet above its banks. Falmouth, MA (on Cape Cod) was under 8 feet of water. According to historian William Manchester, people in Vermont, 300 miles inland, could smell the ocean.
When it was over, 700 people were dead, 63,000 homeless. Nine thousand buildings were destroyed, along with over 3,000 boats. Wreckage from this hurricane could be seen well into the 1970s. The cost of the damage was $6.2 million in 1938 (Depression) dollars, adjusted to over $15,000,000,000 today.
Two billion trees were blown to the ground. And this was "just" a Cat 3.
So, yeah, the OP bitches about 200 miles give-or-take. Hell, we can see these forming off the coast of West Africa now. When was the last hurricane that killed 700 people here in the US? (Yes, I know about cyclones killing thousands in Bangladesh, and evacuating everyone is nigh unto impossible.)
There's always going to be property damage. But property can be rebuilt. Even a +- 400 mile forecast saves hundreds, even thousands of lives.
Oh, and about that data thing? Just ftp your stuff somewhere and let everyone else mirror it. Worked for Linus, right?
k.
There's nothing stopping one from sending more than one "one time pad" through that initial secure channel. Consider the example of a DVD-R filled with random data in a diplomatic pouch (or a USB keychain drive working its way through a courier's intestines). I'm sure you can send enough data for a year's worth of one time pads that way. Or for that matter, an agreement to use the King James Bible as a pad, starting at Exodus 9:3.
It's my impression that cryptography is all about sending secure messages over an insecure channel (e.g., the Venona intercepts of Soviet telegraph messages, Enigma, JP-25). Transmission of timely intelligence or operational data can't always wait for a secure channel.
k.
I'd love to see Quake broadcast on one of those screens above Times Square. Better yet, CounterStrike, with a CNN-style text crawl at the bottom of the screen:
If anyone can pull this off during the GOP convention I will pay them $1000.
k.
Fahrenheit 411? Wasn't that the movie where they burned all the phone books?
k.
I have a client who has been having intermittent problems with Word2002, namely "abnormal termination" errors. Crash, boom, bang.
/a" -- a word processor with a "safe mode"?), installed the support and troubleshooting document templates, turned off NAV Office virus checking (as per the MS KB article 320475).
.DOC files. I would switch these users to something better, if only there was a clearly superior product on the market. As much as Word sucks, it's become a de facto standard. There's no competition anymore, and I wonder if this situation means that there's no incentive to make this a stable product. I wonder who is in charge of product development in Redmond: engineers or marketdroids? Do I really need the ability to make Word my default HTML editor? Do I really need to know my Fleisch score? Clippy? Hello? Is anyone home?
I've done everything: deleted "NORMAL.DOT" (which had bloated to 710KB), scanned for macro viruses, did a repair install, did an uninstall and a clean re-install, applied all three service packs (service packs for a word processor?), started it up in safe mode ("winword.exe
And still it mocks me.
I'm starting to look at the OS and the network at this point, but none of the other applications have crashed, and both the computers and network are new (under a year old, mostly Dells running XP Pro). The users don't do anything fancy with Word, no pictures, no embedded objects, just plain vanilla legal documents (it's a law office, so I'm thinking that maybe there's a karma thing happening).
I've met every challenge that administration has thrown at me, but the solution for this one has eluded me for a month now. The users are getting impatient and they aren't taking "Well, it is a Microsoft product" for an excuse. Nor do I for that matter. I can't blame Redmond, even though their products are starting to remind me of the US automotive industry back in the 1970s: big, inefficient, prone to crashing, waiting for a nimble competitor (Japan) to eat their lunch.
The automobile:software analogy breaks down, of course. When you bought a Toyota to replace your Ford you didn't have to migrate anything but the contents of your glove compartment and your trunk, not a year's worth of
Just give me a goddamned word processor that doesn't throw a runtime error and my users and I will be happy. Or I swear to God I'll kill this puppy.
k.
Yeah, I could see how applying the Seventh Commandment ("Thou shall not commit adultery.") would be hard to translate into machine code. For one thing, robot marriages aren't legal (yet, but give Massachusetts time to come around). And though only one party has to be married for an affair to be adulterous, we all know that once the technology is sufficently advanced, "pleasure bots" are going to be one hell of a hot item (bigger than the Segway, even).
Maybe it should be "Thou shalt not sleep with that really cute vending machine in the lobby by the elevators, even if she does flirt shamelessly every time you glide by on your noiseless rubber wheels.".
k.
I can imagine the disappointment of anyone who enlists with the expectation that service in the armed forces is anything like a video game. Sorry, kid: no aimbots, no wall-hacks, not everyone gets a sniper rifle, and if you bunny-hop on a 30 mile march once more the drill sargeant will take you behind the barracks for some wall-to-wall discipline.
What we really need are some mods for America's Army, like AA: KP and Latrine Duty or AA: Abu Ghraib.
k.
I'm not sure I like this. I mean, where is the data going? To my doctor? I think that would overload him, getting three piss tests per day from all of his patients. Or is the toilet so smart that it can do its own diagnosis?
How does the toilet know it's me? Do I have to swipe a smart card before I pee? (There's a joke here about "logging in" but I'm not going to make it.)
What happens when the dog drinks from the toilet?
What about someone who's been convicted of a drunk driving offense; would these become mandatory? What if they pissed in the sink instead?
Would I get a lecture from my toilet after a night of hard drinking? Would it complain if I ate too many jalapenos?
Seriously, I don't think we'll have self-cleaning toilets by 2014, much less Tommy the Talking Toilet.
k.
When not job-hunting, I made a modest living helping the local businesses secure their open access points (which expiated some of the guilt over leeching on open WAPs). This led to more business as a tech support consultant, which kept me afloat and paid my motel bills until I found a permanent position.
Using NetStumbler and a DeLorme Earthmate GPS on a laptop, I identified open access points. Then I would approach the business and offer to secure their connection for a modest fee (usually $100). Only two businesses turned me away, but the rest were glad to have my services.
I've read some comments from people who intentionally leave their access points open. While I don't advise this, that's entirely up to you, and I'm sure that you understand the consequences. These small business owners that I worked with were not so aware of the ramifications. They bought a WAP, hooked it up, and were pleased with themselves when it worked. And with two exceptions, they were all horrified that someone 500 feet away from their office or store had access to their network and data.
Some tips if you want to do this:
I wouldn't want to do this full time, but for a few months I made a pretty decent living at this, enough to stay in a nice motel, eat lobster, and drink good scotch. When I was hired by a company that provided contract network administration services I had a nice stack of references (and new business for the firm, something that clinched the deal).
k.
You know that guy in the movie The Graduate who says "I want to say one word to you. Just one word...plastics." to Dustin Hoffman's character?
You're his son, aren't you?
k.
Almost two years old, in fact:
http://www.securityfocus.com/news/613
I'm sure one could find even earlier discussions of this vulnerability.
k.
Actually, in the early 1940s there was a general strike among ASCAP-affiliated musicians over the fact that radio stations weren't paying their contractual performance royalties. This led to the formation of BMI, a competing performance rights organization. The strike, supported by the musicians' union (AFM) wasn't settled until 1944.
And mechanical royalties (a fee paid to songwriters on a per song basis that persists to this day on every CD that's sold) has its origin in player piano rolls, back in the 19th Century (hence the name mechanical).
k.
"...and in other news, a local cameraman was found dead today, killed by a single shot to the head from a high-powered rifle. A police spokesman stated that a possible suspect was seen jumping off of a wooden crate and hopping away at high speed. No arrests have been made."
k.
Nora Guthrie, Woody's daughter, is the trustee of his estate (which includes his copyrights). She also runs the Woody Guthrie Foundation and administers the archives of Woody's manuscripts and notebooks (located on 57th St. in NYC). And she's an active member and contributor to the Huntington's Disease Society of America (Huntington's Chorea is the degenerative nerve disease that killed her father).
Nora's actually a really sweet person, and the archives are open to anyone who wants to do research. She's also pretty open about licensing Woody's work (she's worked with Billy Bragg and Wilco, among others). If she has a fault, it's that she's quite zealous about guarding Woody's legacy.
My take on this is that Nora didn't like seeing one of Woody's songs dragged into a partison political battle (nevermind that the JibJab animation was pretty evenhanded). I'd like to think that if JibJab had asked permission (like Weird Al does with his parodies), she would probably have granted it. Of course, my opinion is that JibJab is within the parody safe harbor of copyright fair use, but it still bothers me to see a normally generous person like Nora tarred with the Disney "infinite copyright control freak" brush.
But hey, more free publicity for JibJab, right?
k.