There's a setting in XMMS (Options tab of the Preferences dialog) to enable a pause between tracks. If you set this to 2-3 seconds, most minidisc recorders will notice the silence and insert a track mark automagically. The exact length you need to set it to will vary based on the model of MD recorder and sound card you have. Spending a few minutes experimenting with it should be enough to get it working properly.
The real drawback to minidiscs is that most recording must be done in realtime. The offset of this is that it really only needs to be done once because the media is so cheap and portable. I generally don't do much recording from my computer to minidisc since I got my minidisc/CD combo deck for my home stereo. With one of these deals I can make a digital copy of a CD at 4X, which makes the process pretty painless.
The security part has rather little use to anyone. The securedigital people claim that it uses an encryption system similar to that used in DVDs for content protection. Take that for what it's worth.
The advantage to this kind of slot is that it also reads Multi Media Cards which are pretty much like a 1/4 size version of Smart Media Cards and don't have any "content protection" schemes involved. The gain here is that you can stick a MMC in the SD slot and have a bunch of extra storage space for your MP3s and maps and stuff and still have the CF slot open for a modem or network adapter without the extra bulk of a second CF slot.
You can buy cheap 2 drawer file cabinets from any discount store for about $20. Kitchen countertop is avaliable from home improvement stores and is quite inexpensive if purchased in standard colors and lengths. I think that I got a 6' section for about $25 last year. this arrangement supports my 19" monitor, printer and stereo just fine. If you need space for another monitor you would probably want to get an 8 or 10 foot section. Overall, it's really a cheap way to get a desk and you probably needed a few file cabinets anyway.
If you need to do something immoral and noxious to make ends meet could you at least choose something a little less repulsive? Perhaps you could try selling crack to kindegardeners.
Citizen-friendly lawmakers? How far did Nader get in the last election?
Quite possilby this is because Mr. Nader is a generally unfriendly asshole. It's pretty much impossible to overcome the disadvantage of being a rude, bitter, cranky old man when attempting to run for public office. Pushing a few ideas that (though possibly good for consumers) are likely to cause a whole bunch of blue collar jobs to get shipped overseas is a really poor way to make up for a lack of likability and charisma.
Interestingly, I consider myself to be a pretty strong proponent of small government and that's why I'm encouraged by this particular situation. What has happened here is that existing laws have been applied to a new situation. The necessity of an organization like the FTC in a limited government is a topic which is open for debate, but in the case of this debate let us assume that the FTC has already been created and given the task of enforcing consumer protection laws. What I do admire about this action is that action has been taken under existing laws. We aren't seeing some brainless senator pushing legislation to ban javascript for the good of the children.
Closer to 2x actually. Hydrogen forms a diatomic molecule which has a molar mass of 2 g/mol while Helium remains as a single atom with a molar mass of 4 g/mol. In both cases, the gases are well approximated by the ideal gas law. An ideal gas has a molar volume of 22.4 l/mol at STP (freezing point of water [273K] and sea level pressure [760 mmHg]). What all this means is that at the same temperature and pressure a volume of He will weigh twice what an identical volume of H will.
On a related note, it's only three weeks till mol day!! Aren't we all excited?
I was hardly speaking for myself, merely turning around the slashbot line to illustrate why I don't have a problem with the FTC right now. I really don't have a problem with Amazon, and continue to shop there when I can't find a better price elsewhere.
As for the one click shopping thing, I think that Amazon probably was the first to add 'and we do it with a computer' to keeping customer information on file for convenience. In the larger picture I don't see a whole lot of difference between a cookie with your name and billing information on it and a library or video store card with the same information. But my beef about that isn't with Amazon, it's with the patent office.
By lazily handing this problem over to the government and allowing them to "solve" it, we are setting more precedents which erode our First Amendment rights. Honestly, do we really want the government telling us how we can and can't write JavaScript programs?
Fortunately, what's happened isn't that the government has decided to regulate javascript, the FTC is just making a reasonable application of existing laws against deceptive business practices. What we're seeing here is legal action against deceptive practices. We are not seeing action to outlaw the use of a particular technology, or any restriction on your right to write and distribute any sort of javascript tool that you like. What we are seeing is a crackdown on a business practice that was already unethical and illegal.
Be very wary of falling into the trap of thinking that adding 'and do it with a computer' to the end of some already common thing makes it new and different. That's what Amazon did (We're going to keep our customers address and credit card number in a rolodex 'and we do it with a computer') and we all hate them for it.
Also be wary of falling into the trap of thinking that because the Internet is international no one can exert any authority over it. While it is certianly true that the US FTC has little to no authority over what foriegn companies do with offshore servers, there is still a responsiblity to put a stop to illegal actions when you are able to do so.
If you're going to implement an e-cyber-inter-i-.com project just for the sake of doing it, it's probably a bad idea. Think about the services your company provides (beyond the obvious making and shipping of product) and think about how you can use the internet to make them better. Can you automate some of your technical support? Can you provide more up to date catalog information online than you can in print? Can you provide tools to help your salesmen and customers find eachother? How can you use the internet to make it easier for your customers do business with you than with your competitors? If a project is going to increase sales or repeat customers it's probably a good idea and is worth considering. If all it's going to do is add another useless link to your website it probably ain't worth much.
It's probably too late for anyone to actually read this, but I've done a little bit of work here and I'd like to share it. Here is the text of a letter that I'll be mailing to the two Senators from my home state.:
Dear Senator,
I am writing to express my concern in regard to the comments made by your colleague Senator Gregg on Thursday the 13th of September. In his speech (beginning on page S9356 of the congressional record) he calls for the abolition of encryption software that is not easily defeated by the various law enforcement agencies. These kind of reactions to terrorist activities are misguided and strongly against the American way.
In the wake of tragedy it would be extremely foolhardy to even consider that measures such as disallowing the use of locks on doors and filing cabinets would serve to increase the security of the nation. Why then would anyone even consider that mandating the weakening of the systems that protect our computerized data would be desirable? It is clear that this is not the course that we would want to take.
As we enter a new digital age, let us not become confused by new technologies. The fundamental rights and needs of human beings have not changed. Humans still have the fundamental right to be secure in their persons and belongings and to remain free from constant searches.
Naturally my concern for freedoms extends far beyond this single issue. We as a society must continue to emphasize the importance of upholding our freedoms. This is truer than ever in this time of national crisis. Over the past few days I have heard our President quoted on the new repeatedly on the news calling America the "brightest beacon of freedom in the world." I strongly urge you to take all steps necessary to ensure that this is a true statement.
Do not be tempted to allow tyranny to appear as suitable response to terrorism. We must hold sacred the rights that are affirmed by our Bill of Rights. Remember that our rights are not given to us by our government and historical documents, but rather that they are fundamental rights which are given to all humans by the Creator and merely affirmed by our Constitution.
Freedom can no longer be defined in terms of being less oppressive than Stalin's USSR. Freedom is a challenge that must be embraced by both our government and our people, for without it we are all lost. I challenge you to take the lead in the Senate in advancing and extending the freedoms that Americans enjoy even while others may seek to restrict them under a false conception of bringing security.
Sincerely,
Adam M. Bumpus
And here is the text of Senator Judd Gregg's speech which was referenced in the Wired article.
Madam President, I thank the chairman for yielding to me. I appreciate his courtesy in my arriving in the Chamber a little late for the beginning of this work, as a group of us were in a meeting on how we are going to handle this bill and move it along, I hope.
I congratulate the chairman of the committee for this bill, which is a soothsayer bill really. Long before the events of the day before yesterday, which were so horrific and which reflected the threat of terrorism to our Nation, our committee aggressively pursued the issue of how to try to prepare for such an act.
We have held innumerable hearings over the last 4 or 5 years. One of the lines that has flowed through all those hearings has been the fact that our intelligence community--our communities focused on domestic intelligence and our communities focused on international intelligence--had concluded that it was more than likely, it was a probability, that a terrorist event would occur in the United States and that it would be of significant proportions. And it has occurred.
How have we tried to ready for this? Well, a lot of the response you saw in New York--which has been overwhelming and incredibly professional, and heroic beyond description, which has taken the lives of many firefighters and police officers and just citizens who went to help--a lot of that response was coordinated as a result of initiatives that came out of the hearing process, and the question of first responder, and how we get the people who are first there up to speed as to how to handle this type of event. So in that area at least there has been some solace.
But the real issue remains, How do you deal with an enemy who, as the chairman just related, is willing to give their life to make their point and who has, as their source of support, religious fervor, in most instances--and I suspect this is going to be proved true in this instance--a religious fervor which gives them a community of support and praise which causes them to be willing to proceed in the way that they did, which is to use their life to take other innocent lives?
First, how do you identify those individuals because they function as a fairly small-knit group, and it is mostly familial. It involves families. It involves sects which are very insular and very hard to penetrate.
But equally important, when you are trying to deal with that type of a personality and that type of a culture, which basically seeks martyrdom as its cause, as its purpose for life, and sees martyrdom as part of its process for getting to an afterlife in terms of their religious belief--how do you deal with that culture and group of individuals without creating more problems, without creating more people who are willing to take up the banner of hatred and willing to pursue and use their life in a way to aggravate the situation?
I think we as a committee have concluded that the first thing you have to do is have a huge new commitment to intelligence. And we have made this point. We have dramatically expanded the overseas efforts of the FBI as an outreach of this effort. But it involves more than that.
We have to set aside our natural inclination as a democracy to limit the type of people we deal with in the area of human intelligence. Unfortunately, the CIA in the 1990s was essentially limited and defanged, for all intents and purposes, in the area of human intelligence gathering because the directives and the policies did not allow us, as a nation, to direct our key intelligence community to basically go out and employ and use people who were individuals who could give us the information we needed. Because of our reticence as a democracy to use people who themselves may be violent and criminal, we found ourselves basically sightless when it came to individual intelligence.
So we have to recognize that in a period of war, which is what I think everyone characterizes this as, and which it truly is, we are, as a nation, going to have to be willing to be more aggressive in the use of human intelligence, and we are going to have to allow our agencies in the international community to be more aggressive.
Equally important, we, as a nation, because of our natural inclination and our very legitimate rules relative to search and seizure and invasion of privacy, have been very reticent to give our intelligence communities the technical capability necessary to address specifically encoding mechanisms.
The sophistication of encoding mechanisms has become overwhelming. I asked Director Freeh at one hearing when he was Director of the FBI--and I remember this rather vividly because I didn't expect this response at all--what was the most significant problem the FBI faced as they went forward. He pretty much said it was the encryption capability of the people who have an intention to hurt America, whether it happened to be the drug lords or whether it happened to be terrorist activity.
It used to be that we had the capability to break most codes because of our sophistication. This has always been something in which we, as a nation, specialized. We have a number of agencies that are dedicated to it. But the quantum leap that has occurred in the past to encrypt information--just from telephone conversation to telephone conversation, to say nothing of data--has gotten to a point where even our most sophisticated capability runs into very serious limitations.
So we need to have cooperation. This is what is key. We need to have the cooperation of the manufacturing community and the inventive community in the Western World and in Asia in the area of electronics. These are folks who have as much risk as we have as a nation, and they should understand, as a matter of citizenship, they have an obligation to allow us to have, under the scrutiny of the search and seizure clauses, which still require that you have an adequate probable cause and that you have court oversight--under that scrutiny, to have our people have the technical capability to get the keys to the basic encryption activity.
This has not happened. This simply has not happened. The manufacturing sector in this area has refused to do this. And it has been for a myriad of reasons, most of them competitive. But the fact is, this is something on which we need international cooperation and on which we need to have movement in order to get the information that allows us to anticipate an event similar to what occurred in New York and Washington.
The only way you can stop that type of a terrorist event is to have the information beforehand as to who is committing the act and their targets. And there are two key ways you do that. One is through people on the ground, on which we need to substantially increase the effort--and this bill attempts to do that in many ways through the FBI--and the other way is through having the technical capability to intercept the communications activities and to track the various funding activities of the organizations. That requires the cooperation of the commercial world and the people who are active in the commercial world. That call must go forth, in my opinion.
Another thing this bill does, which is extremely positive and which, again, regrettably anticipated the event, is to say that within our own Federal Government we are not doing a very good job of coordinating our exercise.
There are 42 different agencies that are responsible for intelligence activity and for counterterrorism activity. They overlap in responsibility. In many instances, they compete in responsibility.
Turf is the most significant inhibitor of effective Federal action between agencies. Although there is a sincere effort to avoid turf, and in my opinion, in working with a lot of these agencies, I have been incredibly impressed by a willingness of the various leaders of these agencies, both under the Clinton administration and under the Bush administration, to set aside this endemic problem of protection of one's prerogatives and allow parties to communicate across agency lines and to put aside the stovepipes. Even though there is that commitment, the systems do not allow it to occur in many instances.
This bill, under the leadership of the chairman, includes language which has attempted to bring more focus and structure into the cross-agency activities. One of the specific proposals in the bill, which may not be the last approach taken and probably won't be but is an attempt to move the issue down the field, is to set up a Deputy Attorney General whose purpose is to oversee counterterrorism activity and coordinate it across agencies and who is the repository of the authority to do that. There is no such person today in the Federal Government. Of these 42 agencies, everybody reports to their own agency head. Nobody reports across agency lines. There is virtually no one who can stand up and say, other than the President, ``get this done.''
The purpose of the Deputy Attorney General is to accomplish that, at least within the law enforcement area and within much of the consequence manager's area, especially the crime area, although it is understood that this individual will work in concert with the head of FEMA, the purpose of which is to actually manage the disaster relief efforts that occur as a result of an event such as New York or where you have these huge efforts committed.
That type of coordination is so critical. Would it have abated the New York and Washington situation? No, it wouldn't have. But can it, in anticipation of the next event, because this is not an isolated event. Regrettably, whether we like it or not, we are in a continuum of confrontation here.
As I mentioned earlier, there is not one or two people but rather a culture that sees this as an expression of the way they deliver their message for life, or after life for that matter. Regrettably, we have to be ready for the potential of another event.
I do believe this type of centralizing of decision, centralizing authority, centralizing the budget responsibility is absolutely critical to getting the Federal Government into an orderly set of activities or orderly set of approaches.
Just take a single example. If you happen to be a police officer in Epping, NH, and you have a sense that you notice something that isn't right, you know it isn't necessarily criminal but you think there is something wrong, something that might just, because of your intuition as an officer or your knowledge as an officer, might need to be reported, you can call your State police or you can call the FBI or you can call the U.S. attorney, but there really is no central clearinghouse for knowledge. There is no one-stop shopping. If you as a fire chief want to get ready in Epping, NH, for an event, you don't have a place to go for that one-stop shopping where you can find out how you train your people, where they go for training, what your support capabilities are going to be, who is going to support you. This should exist within the Federal Government. It does not. This is an attempt to try to get some of that into a form that will be effective and responsive to people.
Of course, when you get to the end of the line--we have talked about all the technical things we can do as a government and all the important things we can do to try to restructure ourselves and commit the resources in order to improve our capacity to address this, but in the end it comes down to a commitment of our people, understanding that we are confronting a fundamental evil, an evil of proportions equal to any that we have confronted as a nation, and that we as a nation cannot allow those who are behind this evil to undermine our way of life and our commitment to democracy.
We must make every effort, leave no stone unturned--regrettably, these people live under stones to a large degree--to find these people who are responsible and to bring them to justice. But we also must make every effort to recognize that in doing that, we cannot allow them to win by losing our basic rights and the commitment to openness as a society and a democracy. Then they would be successful, if we were to do that.
Well, I guess that's about all I have to say for today. It's all a pretty sad deal.
Have you ever heard of anything that actually succeeded in reducing the pidgeon population? My suspicion is that pidgeons are the exception to the usual Darwinian theories. No matter how dumb they are or how hard you try to kill them, they just keep breeding and shitting, shitting, shitting.
Speaking of "the shit just hit the fan", what is thins going do to urban pidgeon populations? Them damned things make enough of a mess without being chopped into pieces and spread across the city by giant fan blades. Bird bisection is a well known problem in the case of rural turbine installations, but the carcasses are generally eaten by foxes and other small carnivores. In an urban setting the mess created could become a significant problem.
When I was in college I had a job working as a custodian. Picking up discarded cigarette butts and soda cans outside of the building was bad enough work. I can't even imagine having the job of picking up bird bits from the sidewalk.
Interesting that you would take exception to having your choice of vocation compared with that of a politician. At least for me, being a programmer has been very much about being on a power trip. One of the things that fascinates me about machines (and computers in particular) is that if I think about it hard enough I can make the machine do whatever I want. I've been hooked on this power trip since I was a little tyke playing with GW-Basic on my family's first PC.
If your phone supports smart messaging (Most newer ones do) you may be able to make some use of that. Smart Messaging was developed by Nokia, but it's being used by other phone makers as well. Guessing from the fact that you have a Panasonic EBTX210 phone you probably have service from some flavor of AT&T so you should be able to order text messaging service which you will need to take advantage of this.
The exact formats of different messages can be found in the document stdma_sm.pdf which you can download from the nokia smart messaging page. To actually download anything you need to give them an e-mail address and click on a disclaimer, so I can't link directly to the file. There are also a lot of other very good documents on that page.
For the purpose of providing some sort of answer to your question, the thing that you are most likely to want to do is send names and numbers from your PC to your phone. The format used is basically equivalent to vCard with ASCII armor and some extra headers. Your business card messages will start with the header segment //SCKLwwww23F4xxyyzz where//SCKL signals the beginning of Smart Messaging data, wwww signals the origination port (doesn't matter what you use as long as it's a 4 digit hex number and it's the same for all parts of your message), 23F4 is the port on which the vCard receiver listens, xx is a reference number which must be common to all parts of your message, yy is the total number of parts in the message and zz is the sequence number.
As an example we'll say that you want to send to your phone a number for somone named AAA whose number is 1234567890. The vCard will look like this: BEGIN:VCARD N:AAA TEL:1234567890 END:VCARD This has to be converted to ASCIIhex to be sent to the phone, to the vCard data turns into: 424547494E3A56434152440D0A4E3A4141410D0A54454C3A31 3233343536373839300D0A454E443A56434152440D0A Now we can split this into two separate SMS messages so that it can be sent to the phone. They're going to look like this: //SCKL23F423F4990201 424547494E3A56434152440D0A4E3A4141410D0A54454C3A31 //SCKL23F423F4990202 3233343536373839300D0A454E443A56434152440D0A Given this information it should be pretty trivial to write an application which sends this data to your phone's e-mail address, but I have yet to see a decent one for either Windows or Linux. Maybe I'll write one later if I get to feeling bored.
In other nifty fun with SMS you might want to look at the shell script I wrote which sends the subject and from lines of incoming e-mail to your phone via a web to SMS gateway.
I'm not sure how well I've answered the poster's question, but I hope that I've added a little bit of information that someone finds interesting.
Several people have made a point to strongly disagree with you here. I'm going to have to throw in my two cents in agreement. Not only is the installation more difficult on a PPC than it is on a x86 (given a newbie oriented distro anyway), but many features that Mac users might expect are going to be missing.
Despite the fact that the most popular PPC distros are Red Hat based and use rpm there are very few.ppc.rpm files avaliable on freshmeat. People with more *nix experience may prefer to compile and install themselves, but newbies almost certianly don't. Add to that the fact that anything that avaliable for Linux in binary only form (Loki games, browser plugins etc.) isn't avaliable for PPC and you leave the former Mac user with the impression that Linux is a very limited operating system.
Re:Here's the line that scared me:
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Reread this. He asked a group of corporations for "immunity from prosecution". Basically, they are treated like a government now.
Actually he sued the Department of Justice as well. He was actually asking the governemnt (you know, that thing that prints the money that the <scary voice>evil corporations(tm)</scary voice> use to manipulate the same), or more correctly John Ashcroft in his official capacity as Attourney General, for protection from prosecution under the DMCA.
Re:One letter per day to your congressmen.
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Assuming that you live in the US. You shoot yourself in the foot by voting against the incumbents. Control of the good committees is decided by senority within the house or senate. The way to get power in congress is to be there a long time. The way to have your state/district represented in the best way possible is to have a powerful congressman/senator. This is why we need term limits. The people who most need to be thrown out are exactly the ones whose constituents are least likely to do so and in fact would be quite foolish if they did.
In many cases, corporate run prisons exploit the almost free labor to make goods/provide services at a pittance of a cost. A few cents/hour is the general rule.
Do you care to expand on this a little bit? What you have stated here is very much different than the programs I know to exist in Iowa. Here the rules of the program are that the corporation (I know, it's the John Katz bad C word. McCarthy had a bad C word too) must show that there is a shortage of workers and that prison labor is the only way to get the necessary employees. In addition they must pay the prevailing wage for similar work to the workers (about $9/hour starting, average wage for all workers in this state is $13.50 or so. $9/hour starting is pretty much in line with that) what the inmates get to keep is a different matter. I think that they take home about $2/hour, just like everyone else they have to pay taxes and room and board. Overall, this seems to be a pretty fair system. Why these people are imprisoned is a matter for a completely separate debate.
And this is different from Add/Remove Programs how? You go through the list (in alphabetical order), find the one you don't want anymore, and click uninstall. It's not difficult, and even if you think it is difficult, it's no easier or harder than Add/Remove Programs. What's the difference?
The difference is that the add/remove programs box has different tabs for programs and windows components. Most of the graphic rpm managers I've seen to this to some extent, but I really think that there should be a bit more separation between system utilities and user applications to make things a little more friendly. Any package that puts a file in/sbin or/usr/sbin shouldn't be very easy to uninstall. Anything that installs to/usr/local/bin or/opt should be pretty easy to get rid of if you find yourself not using it.
Its been my experience (as a web development instructor with a private post-secondary school) that teens these days, despite the stereotypes, actually posess less computer literacy than geeks of my generation.
I'll have to agree with you that today there are more people who don't know what they're doing using computers. However, I think that you've made the wrong diagnosis. I don't think that the WIMP environment has actually made anyone dumber.
The symptom is that a larger percentage of people who use computers don't understand that they're doing. Guess what, that's exactly the point. The people who are fascinated by computers still learn what's going on and understand. The difference is that the people who don't understand can use a computer today. Unlike 10-12 years ago you don't have to be a propeller head to really use a computer.
The propeller heads are still there it's just that they're not the only ones sitting in front of a computer anymore.
The difference is that you purchase ISP service on a subscription plan. If they change their TOS or AUP in a way that you don't like, you're free to complain until they cancel your account and quit sending you a bill every month. Lucky thing is that there is still a small amount of competition in the ISP market and you really do have some choice in the matter.
Slashdot Mirror
The real drawback to minidiscs is that most recording must be done in realtime. The offset of this is that it really only needs to be done once because the media is so cheap and portable. I generally don't do much recording from my computer to minidisc since I got my minidisc/CD combo deck for my home stereo. With one of these deals I can make a digital copy of a CD at 4X, which makes the process pretty painless.
The advantage to this kind of slot is that it also reads Multi Media Cards which are pretty much like a 1/4 size version of Smart Media Cards and don't have any "content protection" schemes involved. The gain here is that you can stick a MMC in the SD slot and have a bunch of extra storage space for your MP3s and maps and stuff and still have the CF slot open for a modem or network adapter without the extra bulk of a second CF slot.
You can buy cheap 2 drawer file cabinets from any discount store for about $20. Kitchen countertop is avaliable from home improvement stores and is quite inexpensive if purchased in standard colors and lengths. I think that I got a 6' section for about $25 last year. this arrangement supports my 19" monitor, printer and stereo just fine. If you need space for another monitor you would probably want to get an 8 or 10 foot section. Overall, it's really a cheap way to get a desk and you probably needed a few file cabinets anyway.
For MP3, sure. I prefer Vorbis.
The two are not mutually exlusive. Newer versions (I'm seeing it in version 3.86) of LAME support ogg encoding with the --ogg option.
Has anyone here played with ogg encoding in LAME yet? I haven't tried it out and I'm wondering how it compares to oggenc.
If you need to do something immoral and noxious to make ends meet could you at least choose something a little less repulsive? Perhaps you could try selling crack to kindegardeners.
Quite possilby this is because Mr. Nader is a generally unfriendly asshole. It's pretty much impossible to overcome the disadvantage of being a rude, bitter, cranky old man when attempting to run for public office. Pushing a few ideas that (though possibly good for consumers) are likely to cause a whole bunch of blue collar jobs to get shipped overseas is a really poor way to make up for a lack of likability and charisma.
Interestingly, I consider myself to be a pretty strong proponent of small government and that's why I'm encouraged by this particular situation. What has happened here is that existing laws have been applied to a new situation. The necessity of an organization like the FTC in a limited government is a topic which is open for debate, but in the case of this debate let us assume that the FTC has already been created and given the task of enforcing consumer protection laws. What I do admire about this action is that action has been taken under existing laws. We aren't seeing some brainless senator pushing legislation to ban javascript for the good of the children.
On a related note, it's only three weeks till mol day!! Aren't we all excited?
As for the one click shopping thing, I think that Amazon probably was the first to add 'and we do it with a computer' to keeping customer information on file for convenience. In the larger picture I don't see a whole lot of difference between a cookie with your name and billing information on it and a library or video store card with the same information. But my beef about that isn't with Amazon, it's with the patent office.
Fortunately, what's happened isn't that the government has decided to regulate javascript, the FTC is just making a reasonable application of existing laws against deceptive business practices. What we're seeing here is legal action against deceptive practices. We are not seeing action to outlaw the use of a particular technology, or any restriction on your right to write and distribute any sort of javascript tool that you like. What we are seeing is a crackdown on a business practice that was already unethical and illegal.
Be very wary of falling into the trap of thinking that adding 'and do it with a computer' to the end of some already common thing makes it new and different. That's what Amazon did (We're going to keep our customers address and credit card number in a rolodex 'and we do it with a computer') and we all hate them for it.
Also be wary of falling into the trap of thinking that because the Internet is international no one can exert any authority over it. While it is certianly true that the US FTC has little to no authority over what foriegn companies do with offshore servers, there is still a responsiblity to put a stop to illegal actions when you are able to do so.
You use a keyboard for your programming? You spoiled little brat! Whatever is wrong with a nice row of toggle switches?
If you're going to implement an e-cyber-inter-i-.com project just for the sake of doing it, it's probably a bad idea. Think about the services your company provides (beyond the obvious making and shipping of product) and think about how you can use the internet to make them better. Can you automate some of your technical support? Can you provide more up to date catalog information online than you can in print? Can you provide tools to help your salesmen and customers find eachother? How can you use the internet to make it easier for your customers do business with you than with your competitors? If a project is going to increase sales or repeat customers it's probably a good idea and is worth considering. If all it's going to do is add another useless link to your website it probably ain't worth much.
And here is the text of Senator Judd Gregg's speech which was referenced in the Wired article.
Well, I guess that's about all I have to say for today. It's all a pretty sad deal.Have you ever heard of anything that actually succeeded in reducing the pidgeon population? My suspicion is that pidgeons are the exception to the usual Darwinian theories. No matter how dumb they are or how hard you try to kill them, they just keep breeding and shitting, shitting, shitting.
When I was in college I had a job working as a custodian. Picking up discarded cigarette butts and soda cans outside of the building was bad enough work. I can't even imagine having the job of picking up bird bits from the sidewalk.
Interesting that you would take exception to having your choice of vocation compared with that of a politician. At least for me, being a programmer has been very much about being on a power trip. One of the things that fascinates me about machines (and computers in particular) is that if I think about it hard enough I can make the machine do whatever I want. I've been hooked on this power trip since I was a little tyke playing with GW-Basic on my family's first PC.
The exact formats of different messages can be found in the document stdma_sm.pdf which you can download from the nokia smart messaging page. To actually download anything you need to give them an e-mail address and click on a disclaimer, so I can't link directly to the file. There are also a lot of other very good documents on that page.
For the purpose of providing some sort of answer to your question, the thing that you are most likely to want to do is send names and numbers from your PC to your phone. The format used is basically equivalent to vCard with ASCII armor and some extra headers. Your business card messages will start with the header segment
//SCKLwwww23F4xxyyzz //SCKL signals the beginning of Smart Messaging data, wwww signals the origination port (doesn't matter what you use as long as it's a 4 digit hex number and it's the same for all parts of your message), 23F4 is the port on which the vCard receiver listens, xx is a reference number which must be common to all parts of your message, yy is the total number of parts in the message and zz is the sequence number.
where
As an example we'll say that you want to send to your phone a number for somone named AAA whose number is 1234567890. The vCard will look like this:1 3233343536373839300D0A454E443A56434152440D0A
//SCKL23F423F4990201 424547494E3A56434152440D0A4E3A4141410D0A54454C3A31
BEGIN:VCARD
N:AAA
TEL:1234567890
END:VCARD
This has to be converted to ASCIIhex to be sent to the phone, to the vCard data turns into:
424547494E3A56434152440D0A4E3A4141410D0A54454C3A3
Now we can split this into two separate SMS messages so that it can be sent to the phone. They're going to look like this:
//SCKL23F423F4990202 3233343536373839300D0A454E443A56434152440D0A
Given this information it should be pretty trivial to write an application which sends this data to your phone's e-mail address, but I have yet to see a decent one for either Windows or Linux. Maybe I'll write one later if I get to feeling bored.
In other nifty fun with SMS you might want to look at the shell script I wrote which sends the subject and from lines of incoming e-mail to your phone via a web to SMS gateway.
I'm not sure how well I've answered the poster's question, but I hope that I've added a little bit of information that someone finds interesting.
Despite the fact that the most popular PPC distros are Red Hat based and use rpm there are very few .ppc.rpm files avaliable on freshmeat. People with more *nix experience may prefer to compile and install themselves, but newbies almost certianly don't. Add to that the fact that anything that avaliable for Linux in binary only form (Loki games, browser plugins etc.) isn't avaliable for PPC and you leave the former Mac user with the impression that Linux is a very limited operating system.
Actually he sued the Department of Justice as well. He was actually asking the governemnt (you know, that thing that prints the money that the <scary voice>evil corporations(tm)</scary voice> use to manipulate the same), or more correctly John Ashcroft in his official capacity as Attourney General, for protection from prosecution under the DMCA.
Assuming that you live in the US. You shoot yourself in the foot by voting against the incumbents. Control of the good committees is decided by senority within the house or senate. The way to get power in congress is to be there a long time. The way to have your state/district represented in the best way possible is to have a powerful congressman/senator. This is why we need term limits. The people who most need to be thrown out are exactly the ones whose constituents are least likely to do so and in fact would be quite foolish if they did.
Do you care to expand on this a little bit? What you have stated here is very much different than the programs I know to exist in Iowa. Here the rules of the program are that the corporation (I know, it's the John Katz bad C word. McCarthy had a bad C word too) must show that there is a shortage of workers and that prison labor is the only way to get the necessary employees. In addition they must pay the prevailing wage for similar work to the workers (about $9/hour starting, average wage for all workers in this state is $13.50 or so. $9/hour starting is pretty much in line with that) what the inmates get to keep is a different matter. I think that they take home about $2/hour, just like everyone else they have to pay taxes and room and board. Overall, this seems to be a pretty fair system. Why these people are imprisoned is a matter for a completely separate debate.
The difference is that the add/remove programs box has different tabs for programs and windows components. Most of the graphic rpm managers I've seen to this to some extent, but I really think that there should be a bit more separation between system utilities and user applications to make things a little more friendly. Any package that puts a file in /sbin or /usr/sbin shouldn't be very easy to uninstall. Anything that installs to /usr/local/bin or /opt should be pretty easy to get rid of if you find yourself not using it.
I'll have to agree with you that today there are more people who don't know what they're doing using computers. However, I think that you've made the wrong diagnosis. I don't think that the WIMP environment has actually made anyone dumber.
The symptom is that a larger percentage of people who use computers don't understand that they're doing. Guess what, that's exactly the point. The people who are fascinated by computers still learn what's going on and understand. The difference is that the people who don't understand can use a computer today. Unlike 10-12 years ago you don't have to be a propeller head to really use a computer.
The propeller heads are still there it's just that they're not the only ones sitting in front of a computer anymore.
The difference is that you purchase ISP service on a subscription plan. If they change their TOS or AUP in a way that you don't like, you're free to complain until they cancel your account and quit sending you a bill every month. Lucky thing is that there is still a small amount of competition in the ISP market and you really do have some choice in the matter.
Is the cat dead or alive?
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