Nothing really constructive or funny to add to this - just grinning to find someone else who knows Negativland. I've seen 'em live twice - great, mind-bending multimedia shoestring extravaganzas both times.
Yellow, black and,... rectangular.
An interesting angle just occurred to me - not necesarily directly in reply to your thoughts, but more to some commonly used copyright memes.
Fripp/King Crimson have a much firmer ground for claiming specific monetary damages in this case than ANY record company/RIAA taking on a P2P sharer. The RIAA award sizes are based on speculation because someone who downloads a free copy through P2P may or may very well not have ever bought a legal download (if it were even available).
The folks who went after these EMI KC downloads OBVIOUSLY would have bought the same downloads directly from Fripp/KC - presuming at least comparable pricing. And, hell, Fripp/KC even have their own website with GB after GB of legal downloads of their own live recordings - both MP3 and lossless FLAC formats.
On that basis, this case IS more similar to theft than many copyright violations, because the monetary damages are much less a matter of speculation.
Fripp has been a forward-thinker way longer than just about any suit in the music industry; it'll make me smile if he gets a big fat settlement out of this.
21st Century Litigious Man? I Talk to the Lawyers? Is he looking for some Easy Money? Oh, gawd, this could go on for hours. The Power to Sue? As dotty as he sometimes comes across, Fripp's one of the smartest ol' guys in the industry, and has made some killer music. I hope he'll get his league of crafty attorneys together and subject EMI to some discipline.
...(the one pictured near the top of the article) at my college radio station. WMHD, at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, is in Terre Haute, IN, just a few miles from the Sony DADC plant. They gave the radio station its first CD player before I entered college (probably 1984 or '85, I came in in late '86), along with a small stack of CDs (mostly pop stuff that we rarely played). That player was a frikkin' tank, and lasted in heavy service for probably at least four years. I'd almost totally forgotten about it, but that eject button on the CD drawer itself,... definitely the one.
Yah, we use Acrobat Reader - but there's a setting buried somewhere in it that turns off the default "check website for update" behavior. If that's the only communication it does back to Adobe, then I'm not worried, but I don't know for sure that that's the case. Dunt-dunt-DUHHHHH!!!!!
Seriously, our network architecture has everything critical behind who-knows-how-many levels of firewall, and (more speculation - it's just not my area) our security monkeys stand by all the obscure ports and whack any stray packets sneaking out over the head with a crow-bar. That's the nice thing about chimp-based security.
I work in an FDA-regulated environment,...
on
Vista is Watching You
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
... and this kind of undisclosed(?) sneaky communication has to be considered a security risk from our side, and one which may very possibly invalidate the state of validation (in, again, the FDA-regulated sense) of numerous production-related systems that might eventually run on Vista platforms. We're testing Vista now, and as soon as I get my hands on a copy, I'm gonna poke arounnd and try to figure out what data is sent where, what happens if you cleverly block it, what options there are to just shut these features the f*** off, and many et ceteras,...
Oooh! Oooh! I feel an opportunity for a car analogy!
This is like requiring that a driver save and turn in the fuel-air mixture (volatile, even - geddit?) in his car's cylinders, riiiiiiiiiiight,... NOW! While he's driving.
Not really so weird. This is just longitudinal vibration with a kinda counterintuitively large amplitude. The speed of propagation of the deformation is just analogous to the speed of sound through a solid. The whole "perfectly rigid pole" assumption is just for the sake of argument, and doesn't work so well in reality. There's an old engineering joke that ends with the punch-line, "First, assume a spherical horse,..." that puts the situation in a more easily grasped perspective.
This relates to an angle I've been thinking a bit about. The great flood is supposed in retrospect to have covered the whole earth. But, did anybody (any characters in the bits of the bible that talk about the flood, or any society that existed at the time and place in question) even know about, say, the continent(s) that were such huge news-making discoveries centuries later?
What evidence is there, when those who wrote down the verses that became the bible, formed the thought of "the whole world" flooding, that they knew explicitly that they were talking about North and South America, Antarctica, Australia, etc., rather than just "as far as the eye can see, and as many other tribes as we have trade with/travel to/have received word of via people who have traveled there firsthand"?
In short, why do even completely fundamentalist literalists accept a totally uneducated assertion that "the whole world flooded" to mean the same thing as "the whole world, and we really mean the Americas, Antarctica, Greenland, New Zealand and all the other land masses we know of now due to being able to see them from satellites, flooded"?
Well, I'll be damned. My *real* Gmail address has a dot in it (for stupid reasons, the main being that they wouldn't create a username with fewer than six characters in it when I signed up, and my standard e-handle has only five, so I dotted and added my last initial, creating a Frankensteinian address that I've spent painful amounts of time spelling out to various people,...)
I've never known about this trick - and just verified that sending to variations of the same username WITHOUT the one dot - and with lots o'dots, etc. - comes through just fine as well.
It would have been elegantly dumb-lucky if having an intentional dot in a username meant that spam sent to that username sans dots *wouldn't* get delivered, but I guess that woulda been too much to hope for. I can still filter based on that feature, at least.
That sux. Comcast is becoming infamous for sandvining their traffic - severely hampering anyone wanting to use their bandwidth for bittorrenting, too. I don't know what I'd do if they were my *only* option. I've been really very pleased with AT&T's (formerly SBC, when I signed up) advertised 3-6mbps down/~768kbps up DSL at 36 bux/month. I reliably get the ~3mbps down (low end of their advertised range, but my share ration would suffer if I got any more asymmetric a connection, so I don't bitch), and not a peep about quota-ing my usage.
The reason I see this as at least a somewhat justified scandal is that, the federal prosecutors are part of the judicial branch of government. The white house is part of the executive branch. These branches (along with the legislative) are supposed to be checks/balances against one another.
When an incoming president cans ALL the federal prosecutors at the start of a term, he's wiping the slate clean and putting in place a set of actors who are charged with carrying out their judicial duties objectively - serving justice without being subject to any political pressure from a purportedly independent branch of government. If the president is doing his earnest best, he will choose the best people for the job, with party affiliations being not a factor.
The whole setup is kinda like the Deist concept of a creator, who makes a universe, sets it spinning under its own internal rules, and takes his hands the f*** off of it.
When the current white house, for whatever reason, canned those eight prosecutors at some suspiciously un-arbitrary point DURING a presidential term, the only inference a lot of analysts smarter than I am could draw, is that the executive white house is trying to exert influence over the judicial branch - not only the ones who were fired, but, by using them as examples of what happens when you don't carry out the judicial business to the satisfaction of the executive branch, as a means of coercing the remaining prosecutors to toe the executive party line.
The white house is trying to avoid the check, the limitation, if its power and agenda that the judicial branch is supposed to be by definition. Surprise, surprise.
My personal and professional experience tend to align more with this. I've personally had at least three Maxtors die *very* prematurely (the first time, a SATA, losing me a fair amount of data in the process) out of maybe four or five that I've ever bought. One WD death out of maybe half a dozen, and so far, 0 Seagate deaths out of what must be approaching 20. I tentatively think Maxtors may be more sensitive to overheating than other brands, 'cos the circumstances in most of these drive deaths included sub-optimal ventilation.
At work (one of my several hats is 'workstation support' in a department with around 300 specialized workstations [this dept only - company-wide, there are probably tens of thousands of desktops/workstations/laptops with hardware equivalent to store-bought builds, not to mention hundreds of monstrous servers]), it's become a running joke to the point that when a workstation in the field has a hard drive failure, we practically write the trouble ticket up as "Maxtor failure."
I bought a bunch of GE (I think) CFs a couple months back, and they give about a 1s delay in turn-on, but (and this is certainly a subjective preference) I like the color of the light I get out of them quite well. Hard to describe, but it pleases me. Some of the bulbs seem to reach full luminosity within seconds, but one particular one takes quite a while - on the order of several minutes.
The thing that prompted me to buy a few dozen of the buggers at once is that, here in Indianapolis, the utility company partnered with a few select stores in the Ace Hardware chain to offer $2 per bulb rebates on ANY CF bulbs. Combined with the fact that Ace then had the 60- and 75- (and maybe the 100-, I don't remember) watt-replacement bulbs on a fairly steep sale at the same time, brought the price for those sizes down to $1 each. The rebate was real-time - you just had to fill out a slip to hand to the cashier giving your address, thus proving that you were a customer of the utility company in question - and the only limit was a dozen per visit. I went back three or four times before they ran out of stock, and have gotten around to replacing most of the heavy-use bulbs in my house.
One of these days I'll get around to estimating how long it'll take me to break even on the investment. Probably still quite a while, since I tend to be halfway anal about not leaving lights burning when I'm not in a particular room, but I still like knowing the bulbs are cooler tan the incandescents they replaced.
I'm sure there's a joke in here somewhere about the fact that, except for the lead dog, most things that most dogs smell, smell like, and in fact *are*, ass.
Nope, you're not the only one. I really dislike trackpads - though, oddly, the first time I touched one, I liked it a lot - and vastly prefer the eraser-point nipple. My lazy pointer-finger has a much easier time not screwing things up with the enforced precision of the nipple (first time that phrase has been typed in the English language, I bet).
I'm on my third ThinkPad (1420i Celeron433 1999-2005; T23 PIII 1.1GHz 2005-present - on which I'm typing this; A31 P4-M 2.0GHz, bought used last month), and usually, when I'm working at my own desk at home - to get back vaguely to the sub-thread topic - have a big-ass Kensington track-ball hooked up. Am I the only person who still loves the big clunky-Centipede-machine-sized-but-oh-so-smooth optical Kensingtons beyond all other pointing devices? And am willing to cough up the hefty price?
Anybody who doesn't get that a government bending scientific inquiry to fit its doctrines is a Bad Thing should read these. Effin' scary. (As an aside, anybody who believes that Reagan or even the US as a whole as a major/necessary component in bringing down the former USSR, should also read the first reference above. That government was so internally conflicted and confounded on its own merits, it's a wonder it didn't implode sooner through sheer dysfunctionality. But I digress,...)
Zackly. My first thought on this was, hm:
410/425 = roughly 96.5% of the representatives voting have no clue how absurd and ill-defined their intention is, or just flat-out don't care that it's not even practically enforceable.
... for any computer, laptop, desktop, whatever,... is a hand-crank not to generate power but to marginally increase the voltage given to the CPU (or whatever exact component) to give the same effect as overclocking it. This would be SO satisfying (at those times I'm waiting and waiting and wishing LotusNotes would Hurry. The. F*ck. Up. and Launch! Awready!) to be able to put some muscle into a crank and actually make the machine run faster.
Not to belabor the point (I know, too late already), but did the system account for, say, someone bringing in and depositing - or withdrawing - a huge pile of cash or, heavier yet, a huge jar of coins? Or was this weight-enforcement only on employees, who could be mandated to not do that kind of stuff on the job?
My thoughts exactly. Heard on NPR on my drive in that landing was scheduled for around 9:30 Eastern, and was happily surprised when, at 9:17, I pulled up the CNN page and found the "safe landing" banner already across the top of the screen.
Still have an AP "nighttime landing" photo of the previous mission as my desktop wallpaper,...
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing really constructive or funny to add to this - just grinning to find someone else who knows Negativland. I've seen 'em live twice - great, mind-bending multimedia shoestring extravaganzas both times. Yellow, black and,... rectangular.
An interesting angle just occurred to me - not necesarily directly in reply to your thoughts, but more to some commonly used copyright memes.
Fripp/King Crimson have a much firmer ground for claiming specific monetary damages in this case than ANY record company/RIAA taking on a P2P sharer. The RIAA award sizes are based on speculation because someone who downloads a free copy through P2P may or may very well not have ever bought a legal download (if it were even available).
The folks who went after these EMI KC downloads OBVIOUSLY would have bought the same downloads directly from Fripp/KC - presuming at least comparable pricing. And, hell, Fripp/KC even have their own website with GB after GB of legal downloads of their own live recordings - both MP3 and lossless FLAC formats.
On that basis, this case IS more similar to theft than many copyright violations, because the monetary damages are much less a matter of speculation.
Fripp has been a forward-thinker way longer than just about any suit in the music industry; it'll make me smile if he gets a big fat settlement out of this.
21st Century Litigious Man? I Talk to the Lawyers? Is he looking for some Easy Money? Oh, gawd, this could go on for hours. The Power to Sue? As dotty as he sometimes comes across, Fripp's one of the smartest ol' guys in the industry, and has made some killer music. I hope he'll get his league of crafty attorneys together and subject EMI to some discipline.
...on check-list of things to take to protests:
1. Sandwich-board with appropriate slogan
2. Bullhorn
3. Goggles
4. Gas-mask
5. Long-handled butterfly net
... a "Peril-senstive" setting, meant to help people develop a relaxed attitude to,... suckiness?
...(the one pictured near the top of the article) at my college radio station. WMHD, at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, is in Terre Haute, IN, just a few miles from the Sony DADC plant. They gave the radio station its first CD player before I entered college (probably 1984 or '85, I came in in late '86), along with a small stack of CDs (mostly pop stuff that we rarely played). That player was a frikkin' tank, and lasted in heavy service for probably at least four years. I'd almost totally forgotten about it, but that eject button on the CD drawer itself,... definitely the one.
Oh, that's CHIP-based security. Like I said, not my area.
Yah, we use Acrobat Reader - but there's a setting buried somewhere in it that turns off the default "check website for update" behavior. If that's the only communication it does back to Adobe, then I'm not worried, but I don't know for sure that that's the case. Dunt-dunt-DUHHHHH!!!!! Seriously, our network architecture has everything critical behind who-knows-how-many levels of firewall, and (more speculation - it's just not my area) our security monkeys stand by all the obscure ports and whack any stray packets sneaking out over the head with a crow-bar. That's the nice thing about chimp-based security.
... and this kind of undisclosed(?) sneaky communication has to be considered a security risk from our side, and one which may very possibly invalidate the state of validation (in, again, the FDA-regulated sense) of numerous production-related systems that might eventually run on Vista platforms. We're testing Vista now, and as soon as I get my hands on a copy, I'm gonna poke arounnd and try to figure out what data is sent where, what happens if you cleverly block it, what options there are to just shut these features the f*** off, and many et ceteras,...
Oooh! Oooh! I feel an opportunity for a car analogy!
This is like requiring that a driver save and turn in the fuel-air mixture (volatile, even - geddit?) in his car's cylinders, riiiiiiiiiiight,... NOW! While he's driving.
Not really so weird. This is just longitudinal vibration with a kinda counterintuitively large amplitude. The speed of propagation of the deformation is just analogous to the speed of sound through a solid. The whole "perfectly rigid pole" assumption is just for the sake of argument, and doesn't work so well in reality. There's an old engineering joke that ends with the punch-line, "First, assume a spherical horse,..." that puts the situation in a more easily grasped perspective.
This relates to an angle I've been thinking a bit about. The great flood is supposed in retrospect to have covered the whole earth. But, did anybody (any characters in the bits of the bible that talk about the flood, or any society that existed at the time and place in question) even know about, say, the continent(s) that were such huge news-making discoveries centuries later?
What evidence is there, when those who wrote down the verses that became the bible, formed the thought of "the whole world" flooding, that they knew explicitly that they were talking about North and South America, Antarctica, Australia, etc., rather than just "as far as the eye can see, and as many other tribes as we have trade with/travel to/have received word of via people who have traveled there firsthand"?
In short, why do even completely fundamentalist literalists accept a totally uneducated assertion that "the whole world flooded" to mean the same thing as "the whole world, and we really mean the Americas, Antarctica, Greenland, New Zealand and all the other land masses we know of now due to being able to see them from satellites, flooded"?
Well, I'll be damned. My *real* Gmail address has a dot in it (for stupid reasons, the main being that they wouldn't create a username with fewer than six characters in it when I signed up, and my standard e-handle has only five, so I dotted and added my last initial, creating a Frankensteinian address that I've spent painful amounts of time spelling out to various people,...)
I've never known about this trick - and just verified that sending to variations of the same username WITHOUT the one dot - and with lots o'dots, etc. - comes through just fine as well.
It would have been elegantly dumb-lucky if having an intentional dot in a username meant that spam sent to that username sans dots *wouldn't* get delivered, but I guess that woulda been too much to hope for. I can still filter based on that feature, at least.
That sux. Comcast is becoming infamous for sandvining their traffic - severely hampering anyone wanting to use their bandwidth for bittorrenting, too. I don't know what I'd do if they were my *only* option. I've been really very pleased with AT&T's (formerly SBC, when I signed up) advertised 3-6mbps down/~768kbps up DSL at 36 bux/month. I reliably get the ~3mbps down (low end of their advertised range, but my share ration would suffer if I got any more asymmetric a connection, so I don't bitch), and not a peep about quota-ing my usage.
When an incoming president cans ALL the federal prosecutors at the start of a term, he's wiping the slate clean and putting in place a set of actors who are charged with carrying out their judicial duties objectively - serving justice without being subject to any political pressure from a purportedly independent branch of government. If the president is doing his earnest best, he will choose the best people for the job, with party affiliations being not a factor.
The whole setup is kinda like the Deist concept of a creator, who makes a universe, sets it spinning under its own internal rules, and takes his hands the f*** off of it.
When the current white house, for whatever reason, canned those eight prosecutors at some suspiciously un-arbitrary point DURING a presidential term, the only inference a lot of analysts smarter than I am could draw, is that the executive white house is trying to exert influence over the judicial branch - not only the ones who were fired, but, by using them as examples of what happens when you don't carry out the judicial business to the satisfaction of the executive branch, as a means of coercing the remaining prosecutors to toe the executive party line.
The white house is trying to avoid the check, the limitation, if its power and agenda that the judicial branch is supposed to be by definition. Surprise, surprise.
My personal and professional experience tend to align more with this. I've personally had at least three Maxtors die *very* prematurely (the first time, a SATA, losing me a fair amount of data in the process) out of maybe four or five that I've ever bought. One WD death out of maybe half a dozen, and so far, 0 Seagate deaths out of what must be approaching 20. I tentatively think Maxtors may be more sensitive to overheating than other brands, 'cos the circumstances in most of these drive deaths included sub-optimal ventilation.
At work (one of my several hats is 'workstation support' in a department with around 300 specialized workstations [this dept only - company-wide, there are probably tens of thousands of desktops/workstations/laptops with hardware equivalent to store-bought builds, not to mention hundreds of monstrous servers]), it's become a running joke to the point that when a workstation in the field has a hard drive failure, we practically write the trouble ticket up as "Maxtor failure."
I bought a bunch of GE (I think) CFs a couple months back, and they give about a 1s delay in turn-on, but (and this is certainly a subjective preference) I like the color of the light I get out of them quite well. Hard to describe, but it pleases me. Some of the bulbs seem to reach full luminosity within seconds, but one particular one takes quite a while - on the order of several minutes. The thing that prompted me to buy a few dozen of the buggers at once is that, here in Indianapolis, the utility company partnered with a few select stores in the Ace Hardware chain to offer $2 per bulb rebates on ANY CF bulbs. Combined with the fact that Ace then had the 60- and 75- (and maybe the 100-, I don't remember) watt-replacement bulbs on a fairly steep sale at the same time, brought the price for those sizes down to $1 each. The rebate was real-time - you just had to fill out a slip to hand to the cashier giving your address, thus proving that you were a customer of the utility company in question - and the only limit was a dozen per visit. I went back three or four times before they ran out of stock, and have gotten around to replacing most of the heavy-use bulbs in my house. One of these days I'll get around to estimating how long it'll take me to break even on the investment. Probably still quite a while, since I tend to be halfway anal about not leaving lights burning when I'm not in a particular room, but I still like knowing the bulbs are cooler tan the incandescents they replaced.
I'm sure there's a joke in here somewhere about the fact that, except for the lead dog, most things that most dogs smell, smell like, and in fact *are*, ass.
I'm on my third ThinkPad (1420i Celeron433 1999-2005; T23 PIII 1.1GHz 2005-present - on which I'm typing this; A31 P4-M 2.0GHz, bought used last month), and usually, when I'm working at my own desk at home - to get back vaguely to the sub-thread topic - have a big-ass Kensington track-ball hooked up. Am I the only person who still loves the big clunky-Centipede-machine-sized-but-oh-so-smooth optical Kensingtons beyond all other pointing devices? And am willing to cough up the hefty price?
The Perversion of Knowledge:
http://www.perseusbooksgroup.com/basic/book_detail .jsp?isbn=0813342805
and
Science in the Third Reich:
http://www.alibris.com/search/detail.cfm?chunk=25& mtype=&qisbn=1859734219&S=R&bid=8761280764&pbest=& pqtynew=&page=1&matches=10&qsort=p
or
http://tinyurl.com/e8en8
Anybody who doesn't get that a government bending scientific inquiry to fit its doctrines is a Bad Thing should read these. Effin' scary. (As an aside, anybody who believes that Reagan or even the US as a whole as a major/necessary component in bringing down the former USSR, should also read the first reference above. That government was so internally conflicted and confounded on its own merits, it's a wonder it didn't implode sooner through sheer dysfunctionality. But I digress,...)
Zackly. My first thought on this was, hm: 410/425 = roughly 96.5% of the representatives voting have no clue how absurd and ill-defined their intention is, or just flat-out don't care that it's not even practically enforceable.
... for any computer, laptop, desktop, whatever,... is a hand-crank not to generate power but to marginally increase the voltage given to the CPU (or whatever exact component) to give the same effect as overclocking it. This would be SO satisfying (at those times I'm waiting and waiting and wishing LotusNotes would Hurry. The. F*ck. Up. and Launch! Awready!) to be able to put some muscle into a crank and actually make the machine run faster.
Oh, duh - disregard that last comment - I'd missed the "bank IT center" bit in my haste. Makes a lot more sense that way.
Not to belabor the point (I know, too late already), but did the system account for, say, someone bringing in and depositing - or withdrawing - a huge pile of cash or, heavier yet, a huge jar of coins? Or was this weight-enforcement only on employees, who could be mandated to not do that kind of stuff on the job?
My thoughts exactly. Heard on NPR on my drive in that landing was scheduled for around 9:30 Eastern, and was happily surprised when, at 9:17, I pulled up the CNN page and found the "safe landing" banner already across the top of the screen.
Still have an AP "nighttime landing" photo of the previous mission as my desktop wallpaper,...