A telegram is essentially a letter sent by wire, printed out, and then brought to your door. I cannot see why an eight year old could not understand that.
You do not need to know morse code or even that morse code exists to describe or use a telegram.
If people waited one minute between replies in conversations, then maybe they could speak to five people at once.
The one thing I hate about instant messages is that they are so darned slow. Since you do not see the other person, they can take all the time they want without having those awkward pauses. It might be great for them, and I kind of like it on my side, but I am a very impatient person.
That exception doesn't extend to the provisions against distributing software to get around said copy restriction software. It might be legal to use DeCSS for fair use, but it's illegal to give it to others or receive if from others.
This kind of makes the fair use exception of the DMCA useless.
Hydrogen has about 120MJ/kg of energy (lower heat value). They're saying that it either makes 300 MW of electricity or 2.5 kg/sec of hydrogen, which would imply 100% efficiency for electricty->hydrogen (2.5 kg/sec is the same as 300MW).
I wonder if they're just making up numbers, as 100% efficiency seems unreasonable good.
First, it's spelled Gigawatt (abbreviated it's GW), and it's enough power to lift a 1-megaton object about 10.2 cm vertically at Earth's surface in one second.
Large power plants are usually measured using the unit.
Gigawatt is technically pronounced with a soft g, but common usage is to use a hard g. Perhaps the movie is from before the hard g usage became standard.
Well, most users will either always say yes or say no the first time, and when their software doesn't run, they'll say yes every time in the future having learned their lesson.
Such a system requires a decent amount of knowledge on the part of the user, and can fool even an experienced user with clever naming and timing.
I'd like to see your win 2k. I give my Mandrake 9.1 system quite a workout. Bittorrent (Bittornado, curses client) runs most of the time. At the same time I can be running burning software (K3B) and playing music and surfing the web all at once, on a 750MHz CPU with 128 MB of RAM (which makes heavy use of swap when I'm doing all of the above). I haven't touched Win2k, but I'd be in coaster hell if I tried that on WinME. The only downside is that when you switch tasks (or do heavy RAM allocating/deallocating) is can get quite slow, but that's just the scheduler setting priorities and giving the burner enough resources not to coaster.
My brother has Win XP (granted, you said Win 2k, but they're off of the same base architecture) and he needs to clean out the spyware more often than I need to reboot. My mom also has Win XP, and before she upgraded from 128MB to 512MB of RAM, her computer was slower than mine despite having a CPU at over 2x the clock speed (both AMD chips). Now they're comparable, hers being better for heavy number crunching like 3D games and mine has a more responsive GUI (even though I'm running KDE - the most bloated GUI in Linuxland - and on 1/4 the RAM).
My uptime is measured in weeks, and I could easily go for months if I got myself an uninterrupted power supply.
Try getting your child ROMs and run them on an emulator (GBA, SNES, Playstation come to mind). Emulators don't come with much risk of instability or malware and they provide a much more standard interface.
All things being equal, I prefer to play the same game on an emulator than on for the PC, because things go very smoothly and the controls are consistant and configurable (at the emulator level). I got the PS version of Final Fantasy VIII and my roommate had the PC version. His had DirectX troubles and the controls were lousy. Mine played well, and even though it's better on the real Playstation hardware, even on an emulator it beats the PC version.
Installing a ROM is as easy as popping in the disc (for CD-based systems) or putting the ROM into the right directory (for cart-based games).
*** MANDATORY LINUX RANT *** Now if you switched to Linux, you wouldn't have any of these problems. Non-root users and software can't screw up your system (short of using a root exploit, and that generally requires malicious intent) so as soon as your child is done, (s)he logs out, you log in, and all your stuff is as you left it. Also, with Linux, you're fairly secure right out of the box and don't have to install Firefox + antivirus + antispyware software just to connect to the net safely.
And while we're at it, I'm going to ask Santa Clause install Ralph Nader as president of my country and replace all the coal power plants by zero-impact fusion power plants and make the world all better.
To think that you can provide 10 watts of solar power (okay, I read the article, and despite solar being in the name, solar cells not included), a power supply unit to provide backup power should you go out of the sun for a few minutes, and the actual unit itself, no less do it for quite a bit under $100 since a good chunk will go to the retailer. And to do it with untested technology no less. If only NASA could send bleeding edge tech to space for even twice this much cost.
Maybe next year I'll ask jolly old St. Nicholas for a flying pig.
Sarcasm aside, I would try to provide cheap desktops before providing a cheap laptop. Anything laptop is 2-3x the cost of a comparable desktop, and repairs and theft are much bigger issues. All three of these will be concerns for units targetted for poor people.
Taxes on phones, or any of the other basics, are highly regressive, and unless there is a good social reason to discourage use of that good (like with energy), it hurts the poor disproportionatly to tax them.
I see no reason why 911 and other services cannot be supported by a tiny portion of an income or wealth tax. Alternatively, part of an airplane tax+tariff (a CO2 tax or a airplace fuel tax+tariff) could be used to pay for it.
I agree. I hate having to map alpha passwords into numeric passwords while at the same time losing security (lowercase + uppercase + specials gives you an easy 80 symbols, while decimal only gives you 10). I can't remember weird numbers if my life depended on it, but I can remember alpha passwords easily so long as it's a phonetically valid nonsense word in some language I know the phonetics of (English, French, Hawai`ian, Vietnamese, Japanese, Spanish). Hawai`ian is particularly good since the phenome is limited (13 letters, including the `) and it contains the ` character, which anything but a brute force attack won't use. Having only 13 sounds (+ 4 dipthongs) means that even a fairly long word is easy to remember.
This is likely responding to a crime wave by using artillery or carpet bombing on the city. The innocents get hurt, and the spammers just find another ISP to use.
HTTP puts all the load on the server and won't scale to demand, while Bittorrent distributes the load and actually gets better as more people use it. If you have 1,000 people downloading a file simultaneously at an average rate of 20kB/sec (common for a freshly released popular torrent), that's 20MB/sec or about 200Mbit of bandwidth. Few webmasters could afford that bill.
Upload, and only have one connection open. I generally get 40-100kB/sec on active torrents (15 or more seeds+leechers) and max out the upload line at 40kB/sec (I have about 45kB/sec, but I cap it a little underneath so that my ACK packets can be sent).
I would consider my cable (about 300kB/sec down, 45kB/sec up) to be slow cable, so with your fast cable you should be able to do better.
If you do manage to get a better speed with multiple connections, just remember that you're diverting the resources from other downloaders and putting extra load on the tracker at the same time.
There's also the archiving aspect. I'd like to keep the stuff I download forever. To that end, I burn to CD stuff that I download (once I get myself a DVD burner, it'll be DVDs) and don't rely on a frail hard drive that could break any day. Also, to have any decent material for the Tivo, I'd need a cable subscription, which would be quite expensive.
I agree that ads are the #1 reason I barely watch over the air TV any more, except for PBS (which only has a handful of ads, and even though I dislike them, putting them around shows instead of in the middle placates me enough). I consider ads to cost me far more than my time. They stick dumb brand names into my head and screw with my mind as I'm no less vulnerable to brand marketing as any other person. Even if they don't work, they can get me all steamed up from them trying, since I find propaganda to be a form of insult/attack in my moral code.
However, I won't buy the DVDs either (if the legal situation gets such that I can't get it safely, I'll just do without). I don't like paying for a large advertising and legal department. Right now I'm a student, so I don't have much money, but if I did have money to spare for entertainment, I'd much rather give it to PBS (which doesn't waste the better half of the budget on advertising) or to wikipedia or gutenberg (or other information related organizations that will make effective use of my dollar). Also, funding those groups will directly fund new content creation or distribution. On top of that, I can get a charitable contribution deduction, letting me donate a larger amount.
It might not be fair, but at least I know that my money won't be used to lobby against me if I donate to those groups. The artists could either ask for donations directly (I'll be receptive, once I get a job) or go ask the government for direct subsidies (I'm supportive of expanding subsidies for the arts, though only for artists and PBS-like organizations and not for corporations).
Even better for kids, at least if they're responsible enough to not physically destroy your machine, is to store the movie on your HDD. It takes under a minute to get it going and no rewinding or advertisements (assuming you either ripped it right, or downloaded it off the internet). All it takes is a single command (ie., mplayer ~// -zoom).
Unlike a VHS, there's no tape for them to screw up or wear out. Unlike a DVD, there's no disc for them to scratch and advertisements to watch.
The main downside is that it ties up a pricey machine (compared to a $50 VHS deck) and you need a decent display, but easy access to internet downloads (or just never having to buy a movie twice if you use DeCSS on a legit collection) can recoup a lot of it.
I guess it doesn't effect me because I make it a policy not to install software requiring activation (such as Win XP). I don't care if there is a readily available crack or not.
I won't even download a bootleg version, since the company benefits anyway (market share and the ability to fuck me over later).
I do make an exception when needed for work or school, but that's a last resort after I've tried to get a waiver and I've put a best faith effort into first using someone else's copy, and if I cant, getting a bootleg version. So far this year, I have not even had to go so far as bootlegging, no less actually paying for something.
Once I get a job and a little money, I'll be willing to pay money for a good game, but any company that engages either in copy restriction (I don't care how trivial) or activation (once again, no matter how trivial) won't get my money, and there's enough choice out there to find anothber title.
I don't care if it's 1 cent/month, unless you take anonymous cash payments (no idea how to do that). I don't want to have a paper trail linking me to such sites.
That and I don't have a credit card and refuse to open a Pal Pal account.
Funny thing is, at least in my city (NYC), the recycling program pretty much pays for itself. The paper recycling is profitable, being offset by plastic and glass. Although the program as a whole runs at a loss, it's still a lot cheaper than paying other cities to take our trash and paying for the transportation to move the trash to those out of state dumps.
As energy prices rise, recycling is set to become even more favored, as all three require far more energy to make out of virgin raw materials than via recycling.
Recycling also keeps money at home instead of sending it overseas to pay for energy and raw material imports. By reducing demand for said imports, it also lowers the price we pay for the imports we do buy.
1: Simple but limited: Move the window wildy around the screen while mashing out screenshots. I figured it out when I was frustrated at Real Player for not letting me take screenshots, and shook my mouse and the hammered the print screen key in frustration and suprisingly enough got my screenshot. I guess by moving the window you're able to throw the program and the OS out of sync for a few instants to get the screenshot.
I figured this out when I was still using MS Windows, and it probably won't work on Linux/XWindows.
2: Requires hacking skills but more elegant:
Modify your Xserver to have an extra screenshot hook, where it will create the screenshot by using the last value before the vsync(). If that is too hard, add an extra frame buffer and only copy from the first to the second on vsync(), preserving the data in the second buffer from the overwrite code. If that fails (perhaps if video RAM is used to store a dongle or hash key), implement a transparent video proxy, copying each pixel as it is about to be sent to the video card.
There are probably much more CPU efficient ways to do it, but the method I detailed is almost guaranteed to work, and doesn't require that much knowledge to code.
I guess Windows users (but not WINE users, assuming it is able to emulate it) would be so outta luck.
Plagarism is taking credit for others' work. Copyright actually encourages plagarism, as the odds of being caught are much lower if you plagarise.
Plagarism can occur with or without there being copyright, and with or without permission from the author. If copyright determined plagarism, students who copied papers would be all fine and kosher because they had permission to copy the paper from the copyright holder.
Also, plagarism is legal with regards to the copyright code and people who hire ghostwriters don't go to jail over the practice. Plagarism is only a moral and an academic thing. Copyright has the force of law behind it (in this day in and age, an obscene amount) and is focused with economics and transfers of wealth and control, not on morals.
I'd like to know how it works. Wouldn't you need root-level access to prevent a video capture? And if your app requires root priviledges and doesn't come with source, I don't know if that many administrators will be willing to install it, if only for the massive security risk it introduces to the system. If it does come with source, then it will be extremely easy to crack and administrators will still be reluctant to install it.
I guess disabling KDE's screen capture shouldn't be too hard, since it is a user-level application and can be killed with user priviledges, though running the XServer and the video capture program as root while running the PDF viewer as a user should stop that approach.
Slashdot Mirror
A telegram is essentially a letter sent by wire, printed out, and then brought to your door. I cannot see why an eight year old could not understand that.
You do not need to know morse code or even that morse code exists to describe or use a telegram.
If people waited one minute between replies in conversations, then maybe they could speak to five people at once.
The one thing I hate about instant messages is that they are so darned slow. Since you do not see the other person, they can take all the time they want without having those awkward pauses. It might be great for them, and I kind of like it on my side, but I am a very impatient person.
That exception doesn't extend to the provisions against distributing software to get around said copy restriction software. It might be legal to use DeCSS for fair use, but it's illegal to give it to others or receive if from others.
This kind of makes the fair use exception of the DMCA useless.
Hydrogen has about 120MJ/kg of energy (lower heat value). They're saying that it either makes 300 MW of electricity or 2.5 kg/sec of hydrogen, which would imply 100% efficiency for electricty->hydrogen (2.5 kg/sec is the same as 300MW).
I wonder if they're just making up numbers, as 100% efficiency seems unreasonable good.
First, it's spelled Gigawatt (abbreviated it's GW), and it's enough power to lift a 1-megaton object about 10.2 cm vertically at Earth's surface in one second.
Large power plants are usually measured using the unit.
Gigawatt is technically pronounced with a soft g, but common usage is to use a hard g. Perhaps the movie is from before the hard g usage became standard.
Reader Rabbit should work on DOSEmu. It doesn't even work on modern versions of Windows (same goes with a lot of other DOS games).
I don't know anything about the Shrek game, since it wasn't during my time.
Well, most users will either always say yes or say no the first time, and when their software doesn't run, they'll say yes every time in the future having learned their lesson.
Such a system requires a decent amount of knowledge on the part of the user, and can fool even an experienced user with clever naming and timing.
I'd like to see your win 2k. I give my Mandrake 9.1 system quite a workout. Bittorrent (Bittornado, curses client) runs most of the time. At the same time I can be running burning software (K3B) and playing music and surfing the web all at once, on a 750MHz CPU with 128 MB of RAM (which makes heavy use of swap when I'm doing all of the above). I haven't touched Win2k, but I'd be in coaster hell if I tried that on WinME. The only downside is that when you switch tasks (or do heavy RAM allocating/deallocating) is can get quite slow, but that's just the scheduler setting priorities and giving the burner enough resources not to coaster.
My brother has Win XP (granted, you said Win 2k, but they're off of the same base architecture) and he needs to clean out the spyware more often than I need to reboot. My mom also has Win XP, and before she upgraded from 128MB to 512MB of RAM, her computer was slower than mine despite having a CPU at over 2x the clock speed (both AMD chips). Now they're comparable, hers being better for heavy number crunching like 3D games and mine has a more responsive GUI (even though I'm running KDE - the most bloated GUI in Linuxland - and on 1/4 the RAM).
My uptime is measured in weeks, and I could easily go for months if I got myself an uninterrupted power supply.
Try getting your child ROMs and run them on an emulator (GBA, SNES, Playstation come to mind). Emulators don't come with much risk of instability or malware and they provide a much more standard interface.
All things being equal, I prefer to play the same game on an emulator than on for the PC, because things go very smoothly and the controls are consistant and configurable (at the emulator level). I got the PS version of Final Fantasy VIII and my roommate had the PC version. His had DirectX troubles and the controls were lousy. Mine played well, and even though it's better on the real Playstation hardware, even on an emulator it beats the PC version.
Installing a ROM is as easy as popping in the disc (for CD-based systems) or putting the ROM into the right directory (for cart-based games).
*** MANDATORY LINUX RANT ***
Now if you switched to Linux, you wouldn't have any of these problems. Non-root users and software can't screw up your system (short of using a root exploit, and that generally requires malicious intent) so as soon as your child is done, (s)he logs out, you log in, and all your stuff is as you left it. Also, with Linux, you're fairly secure right out of the box and don't have to install Firefox + antivirus + antispyware software just to connect to the net safely.
And while we're at it, I'm going to ask Santa Clause install Ralph Nader as president of my country and replace all the coal power plants by zero-impact fusion power plants and make the world all better.
To think that you can provide 10 watts of solar power (okay, I read the article, and despite solar being in the name, solar cells not included), a power supply unit to provide backup power should you go out of the sun for a few minutes, and the actual unit itself, no less do it for quite a bit under $100 since a good chunk will go to the retailer. And to do it with untested technology no less. If only NASA could send bleeding edge tech to space for even twice this much cost.
Maybe next year I'll ask jolly old St. Nicholas for a flying pig.
Sarcasm aside, I would try to provide cheap desktops before providing a cheap laptop. Anything laptop is 2-3x the cost of a comparable desktop, and repairs and theft are much bigger issues. All three of these will be concerns for units targetted for poor people.
Taxes on phones, or any of the other basics, are highly regressive, and unless there is a good social reason to discourage use of that good (like with energy), it hurts the poor disproportionatly to tax them.
I see no reason why 911 and other services cannot be supported by a tiny portion of an income or wealth tax. Alternatively, part of an airplane tax+tariff (a CO2 tax or a airplace fuel tax+tariff) could be used to pay for it.
I agree. I hate having to map alpha passwords into numeric passwords while at the same time losing security (lowercase + uppercase + specials gives you an easy 80 symbols, while decimal only gives you 10). I can't remember weird numbers if my life depended on it, but I can remember alpha passwords easily so long as it's a phonetically valid nonsense word in some language I know the phonetics of (English, French, Hawai`ian, Vietnamese, Japanese, Spanish). Hawai`ian is particularly good since the phenome is limited (13 letters, including the `) and it contains the ` character, which anything but a brute force attack won't use. Having only 13 sounds (+ 4 dipthongs) means that even a fairly long word is easy to remember.
This is likely responding to a crime wave by using artillery or carpet bombing on the city. The innocents get hurt, and the spammers just find another ISP to use.
HTTP puts all the load on the server and won't scale to demand, while Bittorrent distributes the load and actually gets better as more people use it. If you have 1,000 people downloading a file simultaneously at an average rate of 20kB/sec (common for a freshly released popular torrent), that's 20MB/sec or about 200Mbit of bandwidth. Few webmasters could afford that bill.
Perhaps 90% of stuff is crap because different people have different tastes.
I personally like cartoons and anime and find most other stuff to be crap. Other people might disagree and decide the stuff I like is crap.
As long as there's something I like, that's good enough.
Upload, and only have one connection open. I generally get 40-100kB/sec on active torrents (15 or more seeds+leechers) and max out the upload line at 40kB/sec (I have about 45kB/sec, but I cap it a little underneath so that my ACK packets can be sent).
I would consider my cable (about 300kB/sec down, 45kB/sec up) to be slow cable, so with your fast cable you should be able to do better.
If you do manage to get a better speed with multiple connections, just remember that you're diverting the resources from other downloaders and putting extra load on the tracker at the same time.
There's also the archiving aspect. I'd like to keep the stuff I download forever. To that end, I burn to CD stuff that I download (once I get myself a DVD burner, it'll be DVDs) and don't rely on a frail hard drive that could break any day. Also, to have any decent material for the Tivo, I'd need a cable subscription, which would be quite expensive.
I agree that ads are the #1 reason I barely watch over the air TV any more, except for PBS (which only has a handful of ads, and even though I dislike them, putting them around shows instead of in the middle placates me enough). I consider ads to cost me far more than my time. They stick dumb brand names into my head and screw with my mind as I'm no less vulnerable to brand marketing as any other person. Even if they don't work, they can get me all steamed up from them trying, since I find propaganda to be a form of insult/attack in my moral code.
However, I won't buy the DVDs either (if the legal situation gets such that I can't get it safely, I'll just do without). I don't like paying for a large advertising and legal department. Right now I'm a student, so I don't have much money, but if I did have money to spare for entertainment, I'd much rather give it to PBS (which doesn't waste the better half of the budget on advertising) or to wikipedia or gutenberg (or other information related organizations that will make effective use of my dollar). Also, funding those groups will directly fund new content creation or distribution. On top of that, I can get a charitable contribution deduction, letting me donate a larger amount.
It might not be fair, but at least I know that my money won't be used to lobby against me if I donate to those groups. The artists could either ask for donations directly (I'll be receptive, once I get a job) or go ask the government for direct subsidies (I'm supportive of expanding subsidies for the arts, though only for artists and PBS-like organizations and not for corporations).
Even better for kids, at least if they're responsible enough to not physically destroy your machine, is to store the movie on your HDD. It takes under a minute to get it going and no rewinding or advertisements (assuming you either ripped it right, or downloaded it off the internet). All it takes is a single command (ie., mplayer ~// -zoom).
Unlike a VHS, there's no tape for them to screw up or wear out. Unlike a DVD, there's no disc for them to scratch and advertisements to watch.
The main downside is that it ties up a pricey machine (compared to a $50 VHS deck) and you need a decent display, but easy access to internet downloads (or just never having to buy a movie twice if you use DeCSS on a legit collection) can recoup a lot of it.
I guess it doesn't effect me because I make it a policy not to install software requiring activation (such as Win XP). I don't care if there is a readily available crack or not.
I won't even download a bootleg version, since the company benefits anyway (market share and the ability to fuck me over later).
I do make an exception when needed for work or school, but that's a last resort after I've tried to get a waiver and I've put a best faith effort into first using someone else's copy, and if I cant, getting a bootleg version. So far this year, I have not even had to go so far as bootlegging, no less actually paying for something.
Once I get a job and a little money, I'll be willing to pay money for a good game, but any company that engages either in copy restriction (I don't care how trivial) or activation (once again, no matter how trivial) won't get my money, and there's enough choice out there to find anothber title.
I don't care if it's 1 cent/month, unless you take anonymous cash payments (no idea how to do that). I don't want to have a paper trail linking me to such sites.
That and I don't have a credit card and refuse to open a Pal Pal account.
Funny thing is, at least in my city (NYC), the recycling program pretty much pays for itself. The paper recycling is profitable, being offset by plastic and glass. Although the program as a whole runs at a loss, it's still a lot cheaper than paying other cities to take our trash and paying for the transportation to move the trash to those out of state dumps.
As energy prices rise, recycling is set to become even more favored, as all three require far more energy to make out of virgin raw materials than via recycling.
Recycling also keeps money at home instead of sending it overseas to pay for energy and raw material imports. By reducing demand for said imports, it also lowers the price we pay for the imports we do buy.
In that case, here are two workarounds:
1: Simple but limited: Move the window wildy around the screen while mashing out screenshots. I figured it out when I was frustrated at Real Player for not letting me take screenshots, and shook my mouse and the hammered the print screen key in frustration and suprisingly enough got my screenshot. I guess by moving the window you're able to throw the program and the OS out of sync for a few instants to get the screenshot.
I figured this out when I was still using MS Windows, and it probably won't work on Linux/XWindows.
2: Requires hacking skills but more elegant:
Modify your Xserver to have an extra screenshot hook, where it will create the screenshot by using the last value before the vsync(). If that is too hard, add an extra frame buffer and only copy from the first to the second on vsync(), preserving the data in the second buffer from the overwrite code. If that fails (perhaps if video RAM is used to store a dongle or hash key), implement a transparent video proxy, copying each pixel as it is about to be sent to the video card.
There are probably much more CPU efficient ways to do it, but the method I detailed is almost guaranteed to work, and doesn't require that much knowledge to code.
I guess Windows users (but not WINE users, assuming it is able to emulate it) would be so outta luck.
Plagarism is taking credit for others' work. Copyright actually encourages plagarism, as the odds of being caught are much lower if you plagarise.
Plagarism can occur with or without there being copyright, and with or without permission from the author. If copyright determined plagarism, students who copied papers would be all fine and kosher because they had permission to copy the paper from the copyright holder.
Also, plagarism is legal with regards to the copyright code and people who hire ghostwriters don't go to jail over the practice. Plagarism is only a moral and an academic thing. Copyright has the force of law behind it (in this day in and age, an obscene amount) and is focused with economics and transfers of wealth and control, not on morals.
I'd like to know how it works. Wouldn't you need root-level access to prevent a video capture? And if your app requires root priviledges and doesn't come with source, I don't know if that many administrators will be willing to install it, if only for the massive security risk it introduces to the system. If it does come with source, then it will be extremely easy to crack and administrators will still be reluctant to install it.
I guess disabling KDE's screen capture shouldn't be too hard, since it is a user-level application and can be killed with user priviledges, though running the XServer and the video capture program as root while running the PDF viewer as a user should stop that approach.