What do you think "global warming" is if not "climate change?"
It's semantics. The present administration refuses to call it "global warming," that's all. Not saying they have a plan or anything - but they do talk about it from time to time. They just don't want to use that "warming" word because it pisses off george's oil buddies.
I think I understand now how the old-school punk rockers felt when their culture got subverted by the unceasing quest for corporate profits.
As an old school punk, I'm not so sure about that. Believe it or not, punk was, at one time, just about making music. No business needed, just pick up an instrument and thrash. It wasn't even about "talent" - it was just about the need to make noise and be heard. It was pure expression of an ideal.
Videogames have, so long as there have been consoles. ALWAYS been about making money. Sorry, but no matter how cool you feel because you're one of a teeny minority playing videogame x.23, that game still was spawned from corporate investor boards, copyrights, patents and licenses.
Complaining about corporate culture dominating an awards show is like complaining about the wolf having teeth and fur. If you're allergic to fur and you want to avoid being bitten by the teeth, stay the fuck away from the wolf.
I download shows too. I don't get UPN because I don't have an HD tuner card yet and it's only HD where I live (UPN is a sidecar on the local CBS affiliate). Enterprise is right at the top of my weekly download list - right next to West Wing and American Dreams.
But if you want to know "who gets hurt" I have no problem explaining that: the local broadcaster is the one hurt. In my case this is an outright act on my part because I cannot stand the local stations, so I do what I can to go around them.
Networks don't offer direct downloads because this would take away ad revenue from your local affiliate. If your local affiliate can't get ad revenue then they can't stay on the air. You may not have a problem downloading stuff, but what about grandma? If the station goes dark, grandma loses her Y&R. It's the same reason you can't get ABC over a dish if the local ABC affiliate says you can get their signal.
And, in my case they did exactly that when I had a sat, in spite of the fact I cannot get ABC at all even with a rooftop antenna, the CBS affiliate often doesn't run shows and even interrupts shows right in the middle with ad placements, and the NBC affiliate is stuck on 1970s equipment and refuses to improve even to a stereo audio channel.. I say screw'em all. But I don't do this silently - I've written all my stations repeatedly informing them of what I do and why I do it. I don't see a problem with breaking laws that need to change to reflect our evolving society, but you gotta be willing to speak out and act toward that change.
So you think by releasing schematics they make it easy for competitors?
Tellyawhat: any other established company that wanted schematics could pay a single engineer a month's contract and would get the compete schematic. It's less likely this would be so easily obtainable in the oss crowd, since that would depend on someone with the skills and equipment needed to perform the operation volunteering their time.
You think you could just take those schematics and go into competition with them? Or better still just go around them and build your own?
I am 100% certain you would quickly discover you could not even begin to compete on price - that is, unless you have the resources to put together a hundred thousand or so.
Opening up the platform like this sets a great precedent. They can evolve the player more efficiently while fostering a loyal community. I wish'em the best... and I think I just found my new portable music player.
First, it's been my experience that USB hard drives suck. I've tried three different ones and on two different computers in win2k, winxp, mdk10 and ubuntu they have universally been flaky and tempermental. They also eat processor resources, which really hits laptops in hard fashion.
An external sack of firewire drives doesn't meet my definition of portable. If you can cram two 80gb hard drives in a laptop (you can, because these are about a quarter the size of an older 2.5" drive) then all you need is an external camera to feed it.
What I don't get is why no one has made an external firewire camera that has ZERO storage - price it around $300, but make up for the lack of storage by giving it better than the average $300 camera's optics and pixel rez. An external firewire drive that could do an honest 800x600 rez at 60fps progressive would offer an uncanny image and be a great travel partner in my laptop bag.
How the fuck does banning a pedophile from the internet protect children? Can he molest a child through the screen? Can a chat room allow him access to a child's naughty bits?
If you want to make sure pedophiles stay away from children you ban them from contact with children, not from contact with an electronic information service. Banning someone from the internet amounts to thought control (which is, in actuality, the goal here - to take them away from others who support the notion maybe pedophilia isn't so abnormal). But this also has the effect of stripping a person of signifiant intellectual capacity. Just think about how much the internet and google combine to allow individuals to amplify their knowledge of a subject - to access tools. Hell, just to navigate in a new city. I know the simple ability to pull up yahoo maps made my move to LA much, much more comfortable. I hate to think how many hours I would have wasted driving around that place, lost as a ghost in a mansion.
Banning someone from the internet is simply the western version of sending them away to the gulag or the russian front; the goal obviously isn't to protect society, but to allow the state to better exact thought control on the "subject."
Seiously. Evne if I'm just going to watch a movie once I don't even bother with the DVD, because if I fall asleep (which I sometimes do) I end up hearing the damn menu loop over and over and over and over...
Last time I paid to see a movie at the theater it had like ten minutes of ads. It pissed me off and I haven't been back. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go get Hero from the newsgroups and only have about another hour and a half to do it...
There is direct correlation between more police officers in the field and lower crime.
The Reagan years were a boom time... crime was flat, didn't go down a bit. Shrub's daddy oversaw a relative boom during the gulf war (that he started) yet crime increased the entire time. In fact, it didn't even increase proportionately more after the (mild) boom ended, which further errs your attempted argument.
Crime continued to increase after clinton took office until the crime bill passed and all those police officers hit the streets.
Actually, that's my next plan. The 20gb drives weren't quite affordable enough for me, but now that 40gb drives are only a little more I've been drooling at the prospect of an 80gb raid in one of my thinkpads. Hard drives are the slowest part of laptops anyway, being able to raid0 two drives oughtta make for one very speedy laptop.
Heck, with them getting so thin as well you could actually cram FOUR drives in the drive bay of a 600 series! No disc controller to handle all those drives in the unit - but still, I find this amazing.
they should be. Make "ranking" an option but record an index of ALL printed words (besides and, or stuff like that). Many times I've been searching for something and found something else not related but mildly interesting (or not obvious in its relation) and couldn't find it the next day save for maybe a topic or phrase that was unrelated to the original search.
Many older monitors didn't check for proper synch frequency. and they synch the power supply swithing to the horizontal scan, so if you went too high you could pop the flyback switcher. But that's moot now that most all monitors have a cpu chip.
Anyway five years would put it back about 99, so I misspoke (duh, I was using linux in 99, although not on the desktop). Seems I'm getting old now and can't keep track of time...
Sorry, but I didn't want an OS that was even harder to use than DOS. Linux didn't have much appeal to me even five years ago, I can't imagine what it must have been like ten years ago.
Violent crime in the US has been declining for more than a decade. It took a mighty downward trend during the administration of that oh-so-reviled Mr. Clinton.
Gee, do you think that could have anything to do with the assload of money that administration directed toward hiring new police officers? The timing cannot be mre coincidence: at the very time the Clinton administration's new measures were going into effect in 94/95 (Billions directed toward hiring thousands more police officers, a castrated assault weapons ban), violent crime numbers began taking a severe nosedive.
Was this due to the ban on guns? I doubt it given that "assault weapons" accounted for a tiny percentage of incidents in the first place.
Since shrub has been in office he has let the assault weapons ban lapse (whoopee) but has also been cutting all that money for police. And the years since "Mr tough on crime" took office represent the first time in years that violent crime numbers have NOT shown a consistent reduction, but are actually near levelling and showing an upward trend... all despite the presence of an attorney general who has also been one of the most outspoken in calling for even further reductions in our constitutional liberties. The assault weapons ban only recently lapsed, but the upswing in crime numbers began almost immediately after the administration (and policy) changes.
So rather than simply ask "what's wrong with the UK" I would also ask "what's wrong with the US?" Because the symptoms are the same, and it appears the UK is simply working toward becoming the next new US territory...
1. How will this work on a Linux machine? With the security that is the hallmark of a Linux box, how do law enforcement officials expect to tap into someone's computer if they are running Linux? At best they could only monitor the user account they installed the software for.
I'll probably be modded troll for saying this, but linux OOTB is LESS secure from this sort of attack than any modern windows. At least the win2k/xp variants will check out critical system files at startup, so if one of them is replaced it will be corrected. Linux isn't even that secure - one could replace any of dozens of executable files on a linux machine - or even just edit root level scripts with a text editor in knoppix - and make the system record every keystroke from login.. and you'd likely never know it.
But more importantly, you're thinking way too high level. Every machine has a BIOS and a boot sector, and most every PC uses the same code-compatible CPU. All it would take is two variants - a mac version and a lintel version. Stick it on the boot sector while the house is unoccupied and bingo. Better still, just flash it into the BIOS or infect the NVRAM.
This is but one example of the need for the linux community to get over the allergic overeaction to TCPA enabling technologies and work toward making linux the frontrunner in this regard. Any box will always be vulnerable to physical attacks, but there's a LOT we can do to protect our systems that isn't being done now on any ootb distro.
I learned the power of u??x on an SGI workstation about ten years ago. Being stuck on a 386sx system running dos at home I longed for an Irix machine of my own.
I saw this article last week and enjoyed reading it, but at the end I was still left wondering "WHY?" I love old radios and stereo gear so I'm not unappreciative of the nostalgia aspect, but my linux desktop now is, in most ways, just as fulfilling as the old irix system I grew to love.
They're cool looking computers, but in the end that entire stack of SGIs shown in the fellow's home office probaby has about as much power as the Nvidia/AMD box sitting on my desktop. In the end I'd rather have something gorgeously deco that I could keep around for years and upgrade as needed.
Of course it's due to the "undefined" legal status. Paypal wants to be seen as legit and allowing people to pay for "illegal" MP3s isn't going to fly with them any more than allowing themselves to become the gold standard for porn and child modeling sites (which they also shut down some months ago).
I've had zero issues with allofmp3. Of course I don't have a high cc limit and I don't look to change it, and I keep it close to maxed out all the time so it's not like they could rip me off.
My only beef with allofmp3 is their selection of russian artists is (ironically) pretty limited, their selection of techno even more limited, and their rip quality seems pretty bad even for the what they claim are "lossless digital" originals. My guess (based on my own experiences with "original" russian CDs) is they don't even have ready access to non-pirated "originals" - which means their own "masters" are simply bootleg CDs which were, themselves, authored from someone else's MP3 rips.
Now Magnatune...Magnatune has awesome quality and a good selection of music I like and a great support system.
Who says DeCSS is the only option? DeCSS used keys ripped out of a licensed player, and that is what they were sued for. There are other ways to decrypt CSS.
Not without getting called into court for DMCA violations.
So, would you rather be sued, or prosecuted by the feds?
No cca license, no dvd player. You can hack together as many unlicensed players as you like in your garage, but that's not likely to put food on the table.
[i]"Fuck you; I'm using DeCSS."[/i] "Fuck you; I'm suing you for patent infringement..."
In order to include decss in your product you have to be licensed. They do not HAVE to license you at ANY cost - if you have a patent it's your call whether or not to allow others to use it.
You can make a DVD player without involvement of the dvdcca, but without the ability to play encrypted discs (ie just about every hollywood movie) you're not going to find many customers for your $30k "high end" product.
Hector: I'm almost afraid to comment on what we'll see in the future because some of these ideas aren't copyrighted, and may show up on the next batch of digital players.
"Copyrighted ideas?"
Who the fuck are these people? A bunch of jr. high students? I would call this article a circle jerk, but it's too self indugent for that...
Gee that's too bad. I know how it feels: I recently lost about 60GB of music (and lots of other stuff too) when the mandrake 10 installer decided that it should reformat that windows partition without bothering to ask first.
Funny thing is, the stuff I bought online I just went and downlaoded again. All I had to do was put my email address in a form and Magnatune sent me a list of every selection I bought from them and provided a link and password for me to grab them again.
Huh. Maybe the problem isn't that the music is fragile, only that your rights are. Maybe the solution isn't worrying so much about "backups," but making sure that you give your money to someone who respects their customers.
This is a fucking game, not the state department of the US. This isn't the US saying taiwan is independant, it's not even iceland saying it.
It's fiction. It's a fucking game.
Slashdot Mirror
What do you think "global warming" is if not "climate change?"
It's semantics. The present administration refuses to call it "global warming," that's all. Not saying they have a plan or anything - but they do talk about it from time to time. They just don't want to use that "warming" word because it pisses off george's oil buddies.
I think I understand now how the old-school punk rockers felt when their culture got subverted by the unceasing quest for corporate profits.
As an old school punk, I'm not so sure about that. Believe it or not, punk was, at one time, just about making music. No business needed, just pick up an instrument and thrash. It wasn't even about "talent" - it was just about the need to make noise and be heard. It was pure expression of an ideal.
Videogames have, so long as there have been consoles. ALWAYS been about making money. Sorry, but no matter how cool you feel because you're one of a teeny minority playing videogame x.23, that game still was spawned from corporate investor boards, copyrights, patents and licenses.
Complaining about corporate culture dominating an awards show is like complaining about the wolf having teeth and fur. If you're allergic to fur and you want to avoid being bitten by the teeth, stay the fuck away from the wolf.
I download shows too. I don't get UPN because I don't have an HD tuner card yet and it's only HD where I live (UPN is a sidecar on the local CBS affiliate). Enterprise is right at the top of my weekly download list - right next to West Wing and American Dreams.
But if you want to know "who gets hurt" I have no problem explaining that: the local broadcaster is the one hurt. In my case this is an outright act on my part because I cannot stand the local stations, so I do what I can to go around them.
Networks don't offer direct downloads because this would take away ad revenue from your local affiliate. If your local affiliate can't get ad revenue then they can't stay on the air. You may not have a problem downloading stuff, but what about grandma? If the station goes dark, grandma loses her Y&R. It's the same reason you can't get ABC over a dish if the local ABC affiliate says you can get their signal.
And, in my case they did exactly that when I had a sat, in spite of the fact I cannot get ABC at all even with a rooftop antenna, the CBS affiliate often doesn't run shows and even interrupts shows right in the middle with ad placements, and the NBC affiliate is stuck on 1970s equipment and refuses to improve even to a stereo audio channel.. I say screw'em all. But I don't do this silently - I've written all my stations repeatedly informing them of what I do and why I do it. I don't see a problem with breaking laws that need to change to reflect our evolving society, but you gotta be willing to speak out and act toward that change.
So you think by releasing schematics they make it easy for competitors?
Tellyawhat: any other established company that wanted schematics could pay a single engineer a month's contract and would get the compete schematic. It's less likely this would be so easily obtainable in the oss crowd, since that would depend on someone with the skills and equipment needed to perform the operation volunteering their time.
You think you could just take those schematics and go into competition with them? Or better still just go around them and build your own?
I am 100% certain you would quickly discover you could not even begin to compete on price - that is, unless you have the resources to put together a hundred thousand or so.
Opening up the platform like this sets a great precedent. They can evolve the player more efficiently while fostering a loyal community. I wish'em the best... and I think I just found my new portable music player.
First, it's been my experience that USB hard drives suck. I've tried three different ones and on two different computers in win2k, winxp, mdk10 and ubuntu they have universally been flaky and tempermental. They also eat processor resources, which really hits laptops in hard fashion.
An external sack of firewire drives doesn't meet my definition of portable. If you can cram two 80gb hard drives in a laptop (you can, because these are about a quarter the size of an older 2.5" drive) then all you need is an external camera to feed it.
What I don't get is why no one has made an external firewire camera that has ZERO storage - price it around $300, but make up for the lack of storage by giving it better than the average $300 camera's optics and pixel rez. An external firewire drive that could do an honest 800x600 rez at 60fps progressive would offer an uncanny image and be a great travel partner in my laptop bag.
How the fuck does banning a pedophile from the internet protect children? Can he molest a child through the screen? Can a chat room allow him access to a child's naughty bits?
If you want to make sure pedophiles stay away from children you ban them from contact with children, not from contact with an electronic information service. Banning someone from the internet amounts to thought control (which is, in actuality, the goal here - to take them away from others who support the notion maybe pedophilia isn't so abnormal). But this also has the effect of stripping a person of signifiant intellectual capacity. Just think about how much the internet and google combine to allow individuals to amplify their knowledge of a subject - to access tools. Hell, just to navigate in a new city. I know the simple ability to pull up yahoo maps made my move to LA much, much more comfortable. I hate to think how many hours I would have wasted driving around that place, lost as a ghost in a mansion.
Banning someone from the internet is simply the western version of sending them away to the gulag or the russian front; the goal obviously isn't to protect society, but to allow the state to better exact thought control on the "subject."
Ah, I forgot some folks are so brainwashed by herr steve they subconciously apply that branding to everything in their lives.
Aren't those just "rips?"
Only go see period films. Kinda hard to work the Nike swoosh into Hero or The Age of Innocence.
mplayer dvd://1 --dumpstream --dumpfile...
Seiously. Evne if I'm just going to watch a movie once I don't even bother with the DVD, because if I fall asleep (which I sometimes do) I end up hearing the damn menu loop over and over and over and over...
Last time I paid to see a movie at the theater it had like ten minutes of ads. It pissed me off and I haven't been back. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go get Hero from the newsgroups and only have about another hour and a half to do it...
There is direct correlation between more police officers in the field and lower crime.
The Reagan years were a boom time... crime was flat, didn't go down a bit. Shrub's daddy oversaw a relative boom during the gulf war (that he started) yet crime increased the entire time. In fact, it didn't even increase proportionately more after the (mild) boom ended, which further errs your attempted argument.
Crime continued to increase after clinton took office until the crime bill passed and all those police officers hit the streets.
Care to try again?
Actually, that's my next plan. The 20gb drives weren't quite affordable enough for me, but now that 40gb drives are only a little more I've been drooling at the prospect of an 80gb raid in one of my thinkpads. Hard drives are the slowest part of laptops anyway, being able to raid0 two drives oughtta make for one very speedy laptop.
Heck, with them getting so thin as well you could actually cram FOUR drives in the drive bay of a 600 series! No disc controller to handle all those drives in the unit - but still, I find this amazing.
Surely you're not serious. Did you really spend ten thousand dollars buying mundane-fi, easily destroyed itunes tracks?
Then you burned them to cd.. right?
they should be. Make "ranking" an option but record an index of ALL printed words (besides and, or stuff like that). Many times I've been searching for something and found something else not related but mildly interesting (or not obvious in its relation) and couldn't find it the next day save for maybe a topic or phrase that was unrelated to the original search.
Many older monitors didn't check for proper synch frequency. and they synch the power supply swithing to the horizontal scan, so if you went too high you could pop the flyback switcher. But that's moot now that most all monitors have a cpu chip.
Anyway five years would put it back about 99, so I misspoke (duh, I was using linux in 99, although not on the desktop). Seems I'm getting old now and can't keep track of time...
No.
Sorry, but I didn't want an OS that was even harder to use than DOS. Linux didn't have much appeal to me even five years ago, I can't imagine what it must have been like ten years ago.
Violent crime in the US has been declining for more than a decade. It took a mighty downward trend during the administration of that oh-so-reviled Mr. Clinton.
Gee, do you think that could have anything to do with the assload of money that administration directed toward hiring new police officers? The timing cannot be mre coincidence: at the very time the Clinton administration's new measures were going into effect in 94/95 (Billions directed toward hiring thousands more police officers, a castrated assault weapons ban), violent crime numbers began taking a severe nosedive.
Was this due to the ban on guns? I doubt it given that "assault weapons" accounted for a tiny percentage of incidents in the first place.
Since shrub has been in office he has let the assault weapons ban lapse (whoopee) but has also been cutting all that money for police. And the years since "Mr tough on crime" took office represent the first time in years that violent crime numbers have NOT shown a consistent reduction, but are actually near levelling and showing an upward trend... all despite the presence of an attorney general who has also been one of the most outspoken in calling for even further reductions in our constitutional liberties. The assault weapons ban only recently lapsed, but the upswing in crime numbers began almost immediately after the administration (and policy) changes.
So rather than simply ask "what's wrong with the UK" I would also ask "what's wrong with the US?" Because the symptoms are the same, and it appears the UK is simply working toward becoming the next new US territory...
1. How will this work on a Linux machine?
With the security that is the hallmark of a Linux box, how do law enforcement officials expect to tap into someone's computer if they are running Linux? At best they could only monitor the user account they installed the software for.
I'll probably be modded troll for saying this, but linux OOTB is LESS secure from this sort of attack than any modern windows. At least the win2k/xp variants will check out critical system files at startup, so if one of them is replaced it will be corrected. Linux isn't even that secure - one could replace any of dozens of executable files on a linux machine - or even just edit root level scripts with a text editor in knoppix - and make the system record every keystroke from login.. and you'd likely never know it.
But more importantly, you're thinking way too high level. Every machine has a BIOS and a boot sector, and most every PC uses the same code-compatible CPU. All it would take is two variants - a mac version and a lintel version. Stick it on the boot sector while the house is unoccupied and bingo. Better still, just flash it into the BIOS or infect the NVRAM.
This is but one example of the need for the linux community to get over the allergic overeaction to TCPA enabling technologies and work toward making linux the frontrunner in this regard. Any box will always be vulnerable to physical attacks, but there's a LOT we can do to protect our systems that isn't being done now on any ootb distro.
I learned the power of u??x on an SGI workstation about ten years ago. Being stuck on a 386sx system running dos at home I longed for an Irix machine of my own.
I saw this article last week and enjoyed reading it, but at the end I was still left wondering "WHY?" I love old radios and stereo gear so I'm not unappreciative of the nostalgia aspect, but my linux desktop now is, in most ways, just as fulfilling as the old irix system I grew to love.
They're cool looking computers, but in the end that entire stack of SGIs shown in the fellow's home office probaby has about as much power as the Nvidia/AMD box sitting on my desktop. In the end I'd rather have something gorgeously deco that I could keep around for years and upgrade as needed.
Of course it's due to the "undefined" legal status. Paypal wants to be seen as legit and allowing people to pay for "illegal" MP3s isn't going to fly with them any more than allowing themselves to become the gold standard for porn and child modeling sites (which they also shut down some months ago).
I've had zero issues with allofmp3. Of course I don't have a high cc limit and I don't look to change it, and I keep it close to maxed out all the time so it's not like they could rip me off.
My only beef with allofmp3 is their selection of russian artists is (ironically) pretty limited, their selection of techno even more limited, and their rip quality seems pretty bad even for the what they claim are "lossless digital" originals. My guess (based on my own experiences with "original" russian CDs) is they don't even have ready access to non-pirated "originals" - which means their own "masters" are simply bootleg CDs which were, themselves, authored from someone else's MP3 rips.
Now Magnatune...Magnatune has awesome quality and a good selection of music I like and a great support system.
And... they also take paypal.
Who says DeCSS is the only option? DeCSS used keys ripped out of a licensed player, and that is what they were sued for. There are other ways to decrypt CSS.
Not without getting called into court for DMCA violations.
So, would you rather be sued, or prosecuted by the feds?
No cca license, no dvd player. You can hack together as many unlicensed players as you like in your garage, but that's not likely to put food on the table.
[i]"Fuck you; I'm using DeCSS."[/i]
"Fuck you; I'm suing you for patent infringement..."
In order to include decss in your product you have to be licensed. They do not HAVE to license you at ANY cost - if you have a patent it's your call whether or not to allow others to use it.
You can make a DVD player without involvement of the dvdcca, but without the ability to play encrypted discs (ie just about every hollywood movie) you're not going to find many customers for your $30k "high end" product.
Hector: I'm almost afraid to comment on what we'll see in the future because some of these ideas aren't copyrighted, and may show up on the next batch of digital players.
"Copyrighted ideas?"
Who the fuck are these people? A bunch of jr. high students? I would call this article a circle jerk, but it's too self indugent for that...
Gee that's too bad. I know how it feels: I recently lost about 60GB of music (and lots of other stuff too) when the mandrake 10 installer decided that it should reformat that windows partition without bothering to ask first.
Funny thing is, the stuff I bought online I just went and downlaoded again. All I had to do was put my email address in a form and Magnatune sent me a list of every selection I bought from them and provided a link and password for me to grab them again.
Huh. Maybe the problem isn't that the music is fragile, only that your rights are. Maybe the solution isn't worrying so much about "backups," but making sure that you give your money to someone who respects their customers.
Don't get the license, you don't have access to css disks.. which is pretty much every mainstream movie.
No license, no product.
This is a fucking game, not the state department of the US. This isn't the US saying taiwan is independant, it's not even iceland saying it. It's fiction. It's a fucking game.