Tivo's operating system is copyright 1991-2003 Linus Torvalds, FSF and others. Anyone distributing it requires a letter of permission from the copyright holders. The GPL just happens to give the necessary permission if and only if certain conditions are met.
So who exactly has done anything here that they shouldn't?
This reminds me of an all time classic moment on the Wireless a few years ago. Nathalie Imbruglia was on GWR one evening doing an interview. The DJ, Damien Carbon - also an Aussie - asked her what she thought of the scandal about it turning out not to have been her who wrote "Torn".
Damo:So what do you think of what the papers are saying?
Nat:Well, I never said I did write it, I mean, it's all bollocks..... Oops! I can't say "bollocks" on the radio, can I? Shit. Jesus, I can't say "shit" either. Fuck..... [awkward pause]
Damo:Anyway, moving on.....
If you are just getting bandwidth, and they want to foist banner ads on you, make sure that the advertisements will come from a different IP address than your server, so your customers can block them. They want to see your editorial content, not adverts.
If you're getting hosting, make sure you get a full-blown service. A certain British cable company {clue: not Telewest} promised me 10MB, five IP addresses and my own cgi-bin when I signed up for their broadband service. Turned out they meant five e-mail addresses {not even proper virtual hosting}, one dynamically-assigned IP address that does not give me the hostname I ask for {seems to last >6 months at a time though}, and no cgi-bin - not even a shared one. They did up the offer to 50MB of space, but with neither Perl nor PHP it was slightly less useful than a chocolate fireguard {at least you can eat a chocolate fireguard}. Fortunately, their IP addresses do last awhile, so I was able to get someone to point an A record to my home server for me.
A full-featured site should include at least two scripting languages out of Perl, PHP and Python; a database {MySQL for speed or PostgreSQL for real database features}; and an AllowOverride setting liberal enough to let you specify most things in your own.htaccess file. You should have access to error.log and it's also nice if the user "nobody" {or whatever user name CGI scripts run as} has access to it -the then you can use a script for an errordoc 500, like this:
#!/bin/sh
echo -en "Content-type: text/plain\n\n"
echo -en "Your script went tits-up. Herewith its last words, as they drift along the wind to sweet oblivion:\n\n"
tail -n50/var/log/httpd/error.log
A bash prompt is nice but not essential {you can often use the #!/bin/sh trick to get around its absence}.
Basically, you want everything except root access. {There are only three ways to get root access on an ISP's machine: work for an ISP, be related to someone who works for an ISP, or save the life of someone who works for an ISP}.
Of course, if you're getting a full server to yourself, then you do want root access; ideally, you should actually install the OS yourself, so you know it is not trojanned. You should also have the ability to make a phone call to a human being and have the machine reset {it must be a human being, because fsck sometimes needs the root password if it wants to do anything hairy}.
Because there is no reason why someone who has more money should be entitled to better healthcare than someone who has less money. Just because someone is skint shouldn't mean they deserve a shorter life expectancy. It's nice to think you can level up, but sometimes you have to level down. If that means a few rich people die, so be it - how is that any worse than poor people dying?
Another thing I'd do would be create a nationalised company to manufacture about 100 popular medicines {aspirin, penicillin, salbutamol &c.} with a special exemption from patents {life before property all the time anyway, but especially before intellectual property}.
I would assume that a large majority of smokers do not smoke imported tobacco.
Wrong..... four out of five pouches of hand-rolling tobacco are imported without paying UK duty. Additionally, hypermarkets in Calais and Oostende are stocked with Benson and Hedges, Embassy and other "British" brands especially for British tourists to take back with them..... often by the vanload.
If the government was serious about not wanting people to smoke, they would not tax fags at all, just deny smokers any NHS treatment except stop-smoking aids. Instead, they choose to rake in the nicotine-stained cash, all the while the drug companies are promising a cure for cancer while doing little more than subject animals to needless cruelty. You can bet your arse that if they did discover a cure for cancer, it wouldn't be released to the public domain on a royalty-free basis.
That is my whole point - printers are transparent by comparison to graphics cards. I'm saying that NVidia, and every other hardware manufacturer, should be compelled to document the way their graphics cards &c. work, so that anyone can write drivers for them and not be dependent on one company. After all, there are plenty other regulations they have to follow {health and safety, electrical interference &c.} so one more won't make a lot of difference.
The idea about being in on the secret was an anti-kneejerk trap - another moment's thought betrays it as totally unenforceable. Of course, if I went to a local 120-D owners' club meeting, all the other members would be entitled to know about the innermost workings of the 120-D by virtue of owning one -- nobody could ever prove that they had not discovered it independently anyway. Saying "Well, I can make mine do something that isn't mentioned in the manual, but I'd have to kill you if I told you what" isn't the most convincing word-of-mouth advertising either -- features should make the product attractive to more potential customers.
I certainly don't think it's an absolute prerequisite, but it might make MFD a little easier for paranoid manufacturers {who generally aren't used to being on the receiving end of "Tough shit, asswipe, it's the goddamn law"} to swallow at first.
Having followed the thread, I feel more strongly than ever that Mandatory Full Disclosure is something we must push for. Basically, I want the law to say that if you sell me - a consumer - a piece of hardware, then that hardware may not contain any secret from me; but that I have the right, as its owner, to access any information you hold pertaining to that hardware which would assist me in making use of it, and if any of that information is a proprietary secret then my purchase receipt is proof that I am privy to that secret, although you may bind me to keep that secret.
I am proposing that we push for change in the law because that would remove individual manufacturers' objections that "our competitors may get hold of our secrets" -- you might get hold of their secrets, it cuts both ways. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Making a profit is a privilege; using your property as you think fit is a right.
You can't. Release under the GPL or don't use GPL code at all. RMS, Linus, ESR et al did not write their code so some selfish tosser could take it and lock it away in a piece of closed-source proprietary software. It was their intention that the code should remain out in the open, where anyone can study it and make changes. And that's the way it should be: not sharing is theft.
Presumably because NVidia got lucky, and ATI didn't. Of course any manufacturer should know their product, but sometimes that isn't necessarily the case..... writing a driver requires intimacy with both the hardware and the software, and it may be that the ATI people aren't conversant enough with the way Linux and X work to write a decent driver. Of course, if the ATI drivers are truly open-source {thereby implying that the hardware specs are published in full}, then there is nothing to stop someone who knows Linux intimately from writing a better driver.
Closed-source can work, but there is no good reason why it should work perfectly. As long as it works well enough for most users, that is all the vendor cares about. <CAPITALIST>Why should they spend thousands of pounds fixing a bug that only affects a few users and which will net them very little profit?</CAPITALIST>
It doesn't work like that. Things over which you have no control shape your destiny too. A baby born with one leg is extremely unliklely to win the FA cup, for instance..... fair enough, it's an extreme example, but not everyone starts out capable of success at everything, and society does assign you a role, whether or not you realise it.
What about users like me? I'm not a coder. For me the source might as well be written in Hebrew. I get no benefits from having the code available. I can't debug it, I don't know what things do what.
Be careful when you say stuff like that - some people will think you're trolling. Just because you don't understand something doesn't mean it isn't useful to you. The point is not that you can't fix it, the point is that someone who could fix it can't. If you happened to have a good friend who was an ace low-level hardware programmer with the competence to debug kernel drivers, your friend would still be prevented from doing so by NVidia's pig-headedness.
All I care is having a drivers that work.
If the drivers were open-source, then they would work. That is certain, because open source software is - to quote Blackadder - "Not at home to Mr Cock-up". Mistakes are made, at first, but they are spotted and rectified; and the programmer who first made them learns {the hard way!} not to make them again.
If you are going to help redesign society, you should be prepared to accept any role given to you at random within the new society. Otherwise, how can anybody be sure that the society that you helped design really was fair?
My second printer was a Citizen 120-D 9-pin mono dot matrix, and it was also very Epson-compatible. It had a beautiful programmer's manual replete with examples of how to access each feature, from simple double width text to high-density image graphics, and even went so far as to provide timing details for the Centronics interface. {Hey, you might be plugging the thing into some device of your own construction}. It was even known for owners of EPROM burners to patch the charsets to match certain manufacturers' non-strict interpretation of ASCII {the BBC model B, for example, had a pound sign at CHR$(96) instead of a backtick, so it could keep the comment mark at CHR$(35) - a comment in BASIC is denoted by REM, but the # was used to specify immediate mode in assembler}.
Compare and contrast that with today..... you get a Quick Start guide which says "Plug the printer into your computer. Do exactly what Windows tells you to do" and a huge manual, replete this time not with useful programming information but with dire warnings about attempting to do anything "unauthorised" with the printer, and it probably illegal to examine the printout with a magnifier to see how the fonts are made up.
IMHO the lawful owner of an instrument has the right to know everything about that instrument. My property can, by definition, contain no secrets from me {though I might reasonably be bound to keep any secret I discover}. It's time that this was enshrined into law. If you can't handle the concept of people knowing how to write drivers for your hardware then you perhaps shouldn't be selling it. Mandatory Full Disclosure would put an end to this argument once and for all.
You put two programmes on the same CD => they are not necessarily anything to do with one another. As long as you have permission from the copyright holders of both, that's fine.
You write a programme that interacts intimately with another other than via the established interfaces for user space => they definitely have something to do with one another. Your programme may well be a derviative work. If it makes use of any information obtained from another programme {e.g. a.h file in an obscure -devel package} then it is quite clearly a derived work.
Wouldn't life be so much simpler if the law just said that you have to disclose your source code, no exceptions?
It's more than ten years since I last saw a doctor; but basically, you register with a practice {usually a "family medical centre" with 2-5 doctors, serving an estate or village} and thereafter, they keep all your records {on paper then; they probably have gone electronic now}. A visit to the doctor is free. Anything stronger than aspirin is available on prescription only; there is a charge for prescriptions, but the charge is the same whatever drug or device is prescribed and whatever pharmacy it is obtained from {maybe a bit more in London, most things cost more there}.
NHS Trusts, however, are corrupt and spend more on administrative staff than on patient care. Junior doctors are overworked, nurses at all levels are overworked, janitorial staff are knackered, patients are misdiagnosed because of it..... while managers get treated privately. {First thing I'd ban..... if a hospital is good enough for the public, it's good enough for everyone else}. And, of course, it probably doesn't help that Johnny and Tasha Doley are chuffing away on cheap imported baccy from the continent {where taxes are lower because they don't have to pay for the NHS} and gorging themselves on junk food. While the slightly richer ones drive to the gym, then sit on a fake bike and pedal nowhere for an hour, or lift weights..... then they go home to let the man in to dig the garden.
Those who trust politicians and expect everything to be OK in the end
Those who think all politicians are the same and that it won't make any difference who gets in anyway
A shock would cure the Type Ones, but may be too late to do anything about it. The only way to deal with the Type Twos is to get someone standing for election who actually gives a damn - but if not you, who?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing. Most people are law-abiding but unimaginative, and would never dream that their elected representatives could have less than perfect motives..... and by the time they noticed anything was amiss, it would be too late already. If someone could have the power to subvert an election, they would effectively have absolute power forever. The election process must be protected from any such interference. If we cannot have faith in the fundamental processes of democracy, then it makes a mockery of the whole of democracy.
Who is prepared to stand up to this sort of abuse of power and excess of authority? Perhaps it's time for everyone to get active, however possible. The very foundations of democracy are under threat.
I was thinking to get a slot reader anyway with the card, as they seem to be quite reasonably priced. Do they just emulate a disc? I have USB mass storage compiled in my kernel already for my digital camera {Shameless plug: Fuji FinePix 2800 Zoom, 2MPx, 6x optical zoom, movie mode, voice caption recording}.
Warning: loading coke will taint the kernel: no license. See http://www.tux.org/lkml/#export-tainted for information about tainted modules
echo "Fucking stupid propietary drink"
Just give it a few weeks for someone to come out with a GPLed cola drink. Of course, if it was running KDE, there would probably be a Koke module, embarrassingly similar to the proprietary original but with one little niggle spoiling the overall experience. And of course there would be a GNOME equivalent, gnoke, which would be pretty, indefinitely customisable, but terminally slow.
Sounds interesting. I have a Tungsten E with an SD/MMC card slot {126MHz OMAP processor IIRR}. Will that run such a player? Or will I have serious trouble with battery life?
The other cause of tyre wear {beside misuse of power-assisted steering, that is} is the fact that when cornering, the outside wheel has to travel further and around a larger radius than the inside wheel. The differential takes care of the speed problem, but not the angle problem. The wheel ends up following a path which is not the same as the direction where it is pointing, so it ends up scraping slightly across. If you really want less tyre wear, you need to be able to steer the nearside and offside wheels to slightly different angles; for even less tyre wear, you would need to steer the rear wheels as well - in the same direction as the front wheels for a larger radius {crab-wise even}, or oppositely for a tighter radius. Then each wheel would be following its own path, rather than being dragged along a compromise path.
I don't think it's a trivial matter to arrange this in a purely mechanical way, though.
I'm not saying the best way is to tell the truth {in fact, if you think about it, a frightened but honest person would have the best chance of giving a false positive}, but rather to be an actor playing the part of someone who is innocent.
The purpose of the whole set-up is to preoccupy the subject's conscious mind, thereby making it harder for the subject to concentrate on giving the answers the interrogators want rather than what really happened. Psychological warfare, in other words. You have to be prepared for it. And if you were going for a job with the intelligence services, I would guess that resistance to such techniques would be a distinct advantage..... beyond a certain level, you no longer need drones who will mindlessly obey everything you tell them without question.....
Re:This is a repost that needs to be said....
on
Interviewing with the NSA
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Defeating a polygraph test is easy. If you can obtain access to a polygraph machine of your own, you can prove this nicely.
The polygraph machine records various parameters {heart rate, skin resistance, movement} on a moving paper roll as a series of questions are asked. These questions fall in three distinct groups. Now let's pretend we have two candidates: Honest Jane {goody two-shoes} and Harry the Knife {low-life}, going for the same test, and look at their answers to each type of question.
Control Questions - e.g. "Have you ever lost your temper?" Jane answers truthfully "yes", Harry answers mendaciously "no".
Test Questions - e.g. "Have you ever stolen anything?" Jane answers truthfully "no", Harry answers mendaciously "no".
Dummy Questions - e.g. "Is it Friday today?" Jane answers truthfully "yes", Harry answers truthfully "yes".
Dummy questions are not the same as control questions, because the answer to a dummy question is obvious - even Harry cannot lie. But with the control questions, the "wrong" answer is less obvious. But even Jane must have lost her temper at some stage. Harry is obviously lying. A lie in response to a dummy question will be found out straight away. So the dummy questions appear to provide the calibration data. In fact, it is the control questions which determine the truthfulness or otherwise of the subject, because Harry and Jane would answer them differently. Even the test questions, where Harry and Jane would give the same, desirable answer, are not much use.
Most of the test is in the structuring of the questions, and the machinery is a prop. If you ever have to take a Polygraph test, this is what to do {assuming you don't have access to drugs, either stimulants or sedatives, which would balls up the result}. Imagine Jane and Harry. Run each question by both of them in your mind, and see how they would answer. Then say what Jane would say. You will pass the test with flying colours.
Slashdot Mirror
Tivo's operating system is copyright 1991-2003 Linus Torvalds, FSF and others. Anyone distributing it requires a letter of permission from the copyright holders. The GPL just happens to give the necessary permission if and only if certain conditions are met.
So who exactly has done anything here that they shouldn't?
This reminds me of an all time classic moment on the Wireless a few years ago. Nathalie Imbruglia was on GWR one evening doing an interview. The DJ, Damien Carbon - also an Aussie - asked her what she thought of the scandal about it turning out not to have been her who wrote "Torn". ..... Oops! I can't say "bollocks" on the radio, can I? Shit. Jesus, I can't say "shit" either. Fuck ..... [awkward pause]
.....
Damo:So what do you think of what the papers are saying?
Nat:Well, I never said I did write it, I mean, it's all bollocks
Damo:Anyway, moving on
If you're getting hosting, make sure you get a full-blown service. A certain British cable company {clue: not Telewest} promised me 10MB, five IP addresses and my own cgi-bin when I signed up for their broadband service. Turned out they meant five e-mail addresses {not even proper virtual hosting}, one dynamically-assigned IP address that does not give me the hostname I ask for {seems to last >6 months at a time though}, and no cgi-bin - not even a shared one. They did up the offer to 50MB of space, but with neither Perl nor PHP it was slightly less useful than a chocolate fireguard {at least you can eat a chocolate fireguard}. Fortunately, their IP addresses do last awhile, so I was able to get someone to point an A record to my home server for me.
A full-featured site should include at least two scripting languages out of Perl, PHP and Python; a database {MySQL for speed or PostgreSQL for real database features}; and an AllowOverride setting liberal enough to let you specify most things in your own
Basically, you want everything except root access. {There are only three ways to get root access on an ISP's machine: work for an ISP, be related to someone who works for an ISP, or save the life of someone who works for an ISP}.
Of course, if you're getting a full server to yourself, then you do want root access; ideally, you should actually install the OS yourself, so you know it is not trojanned. You should also have the ability to make a phone call to a human being and have the machine reset {it must be a human being, because fsck sometimes needs the root password if it wants to do anything hairy}.
Another thing I'd do would be create a nationalised company to manufacture about 100 popular medicines {aspirin, penicillin, salbutamol &c.} with a special exemption from patents {life before property all the time anyway, but especially before intellectual property}. Wrong
If the government was serious about not wanting people to smoke, they would not tax fags at all, just deny smokers any NHS treatment except stop-smoking aids. Instead, they choose to rake in the nicotine-stained cash, all the while the drug companies are promising a cure for cancer while doing little more than subject animals to needless cruelty. You can bet your arse that if they did discover a cure for cancer, it wouldn't be released to the public domain on a royalty-free basis.
That is my whole point - printers are transparent by comparison to graphics cards. I'm saying that NVidia, and every other hardware manufacturer, should be compelled to document the way their graphics cards &c. work, so that anyone can write drivers for them and not be dependent on one company. After all, there are plenty other regulations they have to follow {health and safety, electrical interference &c.} so one more won't make a lot of difference.
The idea about being in on the secret was an anti-kneejerk trap - another moment's thought betrays it as totally unenforceable. Of course, if I went to a local 120-D owners' club meeting, all the other members would be entitled to know about the innermost workings of the 120-D by virtue of owning one -- nobody could ever prove that they had not discovered it independently anyway. Saying "Well, I can make mine do something that isn't mentioned in the manual, but I'd have to kill you if I told you what" isn't the most convincing word-of-mouth advertising either -- features should make the product attractive to more potential customers.
I certainly don't think it's an absolute prerequisite, but it might make MFD a little easier for paranoid manufacturers {who generally aren't used to being on the receiving end of "Tough shit, asswipe, it's the goddamn law"} to swallow at first.
Having followed the thread, I feel more strongly than ever that Mandatory Full Disclosure is something we must push for. Basically, I want the law to say that if you sell me - a consumer - a piece of hardware, then that hardware may not contain any secret from me; but that I have the right, as its owner, to access any information you hold pertaining to that hardware which would assist me in making use of it, and if any of that information is a proprietary secret then my purchase receipt is proof that I am privy to that secret, although you may bind me to keep that secret.
I am proposing that we push for change in the law because that would remove individual manufacturers' objections that "our competitors may get hold of our secrets" -- you might get hold of their secrets, it cuts both ways. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Making a profit is a privilege; using your property as you think fit is a right.
So who's with me?
You can't. Release under the GPL or don't use GPL code at all. RMS, Linus, ESR et al did not write their code so some selfish tosser could take it and lock it away in a piece of closed-source proprietary software. It was their intention that the code should remain out in the open, where anyone can study it and make changes. And that's the way it should be: not sharing is theft.
Presumably because NVidia got lucky, and ATI didn't. Of course any manufacturer should know their product, but sometimes that isn't necessarily the case ..... writing a driver requires intimacy with both the hardware and the software, and it may be that the ATI people aren't conversant enough with the way Linux and X work to write a decent driver. Of course, if the ATI drivers are truly open-source {thereby implying that the hardware specs are published in full}, then there is nothing to stop someone who knows Linux intimately from writing a better driver.
Closed-source can work, but there is no good reason why it should work perfectly. As long as it works well enough for most users, that is all the vendor cares about. <CAPITALIST>Why should they spend thousands of pounds fixing a bug that only affects a few users and which will net them very little profit?</CAPITALIST>
It doesn't work like that. Things over which you have no control shape your destiny too. A baby born with one leg is extremely unliklely to win the FA cup, for instance ..... fair enough, it's an extreme example, but not everyone starts out capable of success at everything, and society does assign you a role, whether or not you realise it.
If you are going to help redesign society, you should be prepared to accept any role given to you at random within the new society. Otherwise, how can anybody be sure that the society that you helped design really was fair?
My second printer was a Citizen 120-D 9-pin mono dot matrix, and it was also very Epson-compatible. It had a beautiful programmer's manual replete with examples of how to access each feature, from simple double width text to high-density image graphics, and even went so far as to provide timing details for the Centronics interface. {Hey, you might be plugging the thing into some device of your own construction}. It was even known for owners of EPROM burners to patch the charsets to match certain manufacturers' non-strict interpretation of ASCII {the BBC model B, for example, had a pound sign at CHR$(96) instead of a backtick, so it could keep the comment mark at CHR$(35) - a comment in BASIC is denoted by REM, but the # was used to specify immediate mode in assembler}.
..... you get a Quick Start guide which says "Plug the printer into your computer. Do exactly what Windows tells you to do" and a huge manual, replete this time not with useful programming information but with dire warnings about attempting to do anything "unauthorised" with the printer, and it probably illegal to examine the printout with a magnifier to see how the fonts are made up.
Compare and contrast that with today
IMHO the lawful owner of an instrument has the right to know everything about that instrument. My property can, by definition, contain no secrets from me {though I might reasonably be bound to keep any secret I discover}. It's time that this was enshrined into law. If you can't handle the concept of people knowing how to write drivers for your hardware then you perhaps shouldn't be selling it. Mandatory Full Disclosure would put an end to this argument once and for all.
You put two programmes on the same CD => they are not necessarily anything to do with one another. As long as you have permission from the copyright holders of both, that's fine.
.h file in an obscure -devel package} then it is quite clearly a derived work.
You write a programme that interacts intimately with another other than via the established interfaces for user space => they definitely have something to do with one another. Your programme may well be a derviative work. If it makes use of any information obtained from another programme {e.g. a
Wouldn't life be so much simpler if the law just said that you have to disclose your source code, no exceptions?
Says this. Copyright law demands permission to base things on other things.
It's more than ten years since I last saw a doctor; but basically, you register with a practice {usually a "family medical centre" with 2-5 doctors, serving an estate or village} and thereafter, they keep all your records {on paper then; they probably have gone electronic now}. A visit to the doctor is free. Anything stronger than aspirin is available on prescription only; there is a charge for prescriptions, but the charge is the same whatever drug or device is prescribed and whatever pharmacy it is obtained from {maybe a bit more in London, most things cost more there}.
..... while managers get treated privately. {First thing I'd ban ..... if a hospital is good enough for the public, it's good enough for everyone else}. And, of course, it probably doesn't help that Johnny and Tasha Doley are chuffing away on cheap imported baccy from the continent {where taxes are lower because they don't have to pay for the NHS} and gorging themselves on junk food. While the slightly richer ones drive to the gym, then sit on a fake bike and pedal nowhere for an hour, or lift weights ..... then they go home to let the man in to dig the garden.
NHS Trusts, however, are corrupt and spend more on administrative staff than on patient care. Junior doctors are overworked, nurses at all levels are overworked, janitorial staff are knackered, patients are misdiagnosed because of it
- Those who trust politicians and expect everything to be OK in the end
- Those who think all politicians are the same and that it won't make any difference who gets in anyway
A shock would cure the Type Ones, but may be too late to do anything about it. The only way to deal with the Type Twos is to get someone standing for election who actually gives a damn - but if not you, who?The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing. Most people are law-abiding but unimaginative, and would never dream that their elected representatives could have less than perfect motives ..... and by the time they noticed anything was amiss, it would be too late already. If someone could have the power to subvert an election, they would effectively have absolute power forever. The election process must be protected from any such interference. If we cannot have faith in the fundamental processes of democracy, then it makes a mockery of the whole of democracy.
Who is prepared to stand up to this sort of abuse of power and excess of authority? Perhaps it's time for everyone to get active, however possible. The very foundations of democracy are under threat.
I was thinking to get a slot reader anyway with the card, as they seem to be quite reasonably priced. Do they just emulate a disc? I have USB mass storage compiled in my kernel already for my digital camera {Shameless plug: Fuji FinePix 2800 Zoom, 2MPx, 6x optical zoom, movie mode, voice caption recording}.
That explains Perl then.
Sounds interesting. I have a Tungsten E with an SD/MMC card slot {126MHz OMAP processor IIRR}. Will that run such a player? Or will I have serious trouble with battery life?
The other cause of tyre wear {beside misuse of power-assisted steering, that is} is the fact that when cornering, the outside wheel has to travel further and around a larger radius than the inside wheel. The differential takes care of the speed problem, but not the angle problem. The wheel ends up following a path which is not the same as the direction where it is pointing, so it ends up scraping slightly across. If you really want less tyre wear, you need to be able to steer the nearside and offside wheels to slightly different angles; for even less tyre wear, you would need to steer the rear wheels as well - in the same direction as the front wheels for a larger radius {crab-wise even}, or oppositely for a tighter radius. Then each wheel would be following its own path, rather than being dragged along a compromise path.
I don't think it's a trivial matter to arrange this in a purely mechanical way, though.
I'm not saying the best way is to tell the truth {in fact, if you think about it, a frightened but honest person would have the best chance of giving a false positive}, but rather to be an actor playing the part of someone who is innocent.
..... beyond a certain level, you no longer need drones who will mindlessly obey everything you tell them without question .....
The purpose of the whole set-up is to preoccupy the subject's conscious mind, thereby making it harder for the subject to concentrate on giving the answers the interrogators want rather than what really happened. Psychological warfare, in other words. You have to be prepared for it. And if you were going for a job with the intelligence services, I would guess that resistance to such techniques would be a distinct advantage
The polygraph machine records various parameters {heart rate, skin resistance, movement} on a moving paper roll as a series of questions are asked. These questions fall in three distinct groups. Now let's pretend we have two candidates: Honest Jane {goody two-shoes} and Harry the Knife {low-life}, going for the same test, and look at their answers to each type of question.
- Control Questions - e.g. "Have you ever lost your temper?" Jane answers truthfully "yes", Harry answers mendaciously "no".
- Test Questions - e.g. "Have you ever stolen anything?" Jane answers truthfully "no", Harry answers mendaciously "no".
- Dummy Questions - e.g. "Is it Friday today?" Jane answers truthfully "yes", Harry answers truthfully "yes".
Dummy questions are not the same as control questions, because the answer to a dummy question is obvious - even Harry cannot lie. But with the control questions, the "wrong" answer is less obvious. But even Jane must have lost her temper at some stage. Harry is obviously lying. A lie in response to a dummy question will be found out straight away. So the dummy questions appear to provide the calibration data. In fact, it is the control questions which determine the truthfulness or otherwise of the subject, because Harry and Jane would answer them differently. Even the test questions, where Harry and Jane would give the same, desirable answer, are not much use.Most of the test is in the structuring of the questions, and the machinery is a prop. If you ever have to take a Polygraph test, this is what to do {assuming you don't have access to drugs, either stimulants or sedatives, which would balls up the result}. Imagine Jane and Harry. Run each question by both of them in your mind, and see how they would answer. Then say what Jane would say. You will pass the test with flying colours.