One of the problems with this idea is to find a trustable manager
Trustable manager? Try a few managers and you'll have an easier time trusting them. Pick three reasonably dishonest people, preferentially all in different jurisdictions.
convince a newspaper to run the ad
If you're looking at using a local rag to do the publishing, a few extra bucks go a long way. I pulled a high-school prank using my local paper (10,000 subscribers). My bill would have come to $220 bucks for the quarter page. They didn't like the content. (questionable personal reference). Plunked $400 down, and told the editor to keep the reciept. It ran.
arrange for everybody to pay in an untraceable way
As for paying in an untracable way; Several Carribean nations have 'favorable' banking laws, as do the Swiss. I can open an account at any of them with a phone and a fax. Everyone who wants to contribute can just wire the sum after some prearrangement.
Humanity can deal with the worst that 'Gaia' can throw at us; With little effort we survive in the hottest deserts. With slight effort we survive underwater, at the South Pole, and in the heatless vaccuum of space.
If it can't be positively shown that we are causing the effect, who are we to screw with it? We are not gods, and we shouldn't be able to dictate the how earth deals with climatic variation. You would agree that selective extermination of 'harmful' plant or animal species is wrong, how is selective tinkering with the mechanism that produced them different?
I could define 'Whacko' as a nation on the Department of State's 'Banned travel' list; This would include Libya, Cuba, Iraq, and Chechnya. I could define it as a country who's political philosophy is currently at-odds with the US; This would give us Libya, Cuba, Iraq, Chechnya, Iran, Vietnam, and possibly China.
But as a whole, you are probably more correct than either of my definitions.
Please note; I have no particular feelings about the citizens of any of these countries. People are people, regardless of nationality. Their leaders, however...
Um, you might want to try a nation that the US government is on better terms with. You don't want laywers pointing fingers at you for being sympathetic with a Whacko nation.
What about a demand based rotation system? Alternatly hand out two mirrors, and then rotate those mirrors to the back of the stack after a certain random number of hits. Assign 'bonus points' to servers on fast connections or in untouchable countries, and have them 'rotate up' more often. Additions to the list could be made real time, and deletions just seconds before the link was to be used, i.e., ping the site to make sure it is up before rotating it in, delete from list on timeout.
Yeah.. I had a mirror here, but they've had a RAID failure and have everything after 't' down for a day or so.
It's been my experience that the reboots can be avoided during a clean install. On a 'used' machine I usually reboot, but then I'm only installing a couple of SP/HF and the extra reboot can't hurt. I'm a little faster and looser with NT than I should be, however. Then again, the Windows boxen are behind a Linux Masq firewall and then a commercial NAT and a PIX. 'The Company' buys into the security-through-paranoia model of things.
Optimally three. NT isn't the reboot whore Win95/98 are. One after resetting the NT 4.0 user/ACL/network/subsystem/registry settings, then inspect. One after installing IIS, then run through the IIS portion of the checklist. Reboot once more (this is the third) and everything should be as good as it gets on a NT box.
Of course, if you wanted a secure webserver, you would have to wipe the partition table and install OpenBSD on the box. That would require two additional reboots.
It's like the Grits references. Once a troll hits us up for a few thousand mental impressions, it sticks. There are legions of/. patrons that will still associate 'naked' and 'petrified' decades from now.
A good B/W process film gets much more striking results. Granted, all the technical photographic knowledge I have comes from the courses I took in 'crime scene photography' and 'photographic documentation of evidence', but I have done telescopic moon shots before, and I was much more satisfied by the B/W stuff than the colour process shots.
Hey now! I was just using Microsoft because I was reinstalling NT 4.0 due to a thrashed boot sector/unrecoverable registry whilst posting! It was a 'use what you got' thing, not a 'M$ is 3>17' rant. If it had appeared an hour earlier, I would have used IBM, as I was unsucessfully beating on a box that magically decided to forget it had a VM. Now that I think about it, IBM would have been a better choice, since they made extensive software provision so that you couldn't reinstall from the distributed media on some of their older minis. Stuff like wiping a bit of the LIC, rewriting a checksum so it wouldn't install, etc. They're already in the business of creativly destroying the install media.
Do me a fav.. Next time you see an obvoius, unfounded MS bash, please flame on! You are right in noticing there is too much of it going around.
I agree. It still amazes me that the new GM SUV monster gets a 'low-emissions' cert because of its weight. Just under eight thousand pounds of steel. Thats two 1961 Lincoln Continentals, three 1977 Firebirds or 6 1/2 1970 Triumphs. I'd worry more about the safety standards though. The modern SUV's go through much less stringent safety criteria than passenger cars. Hitting a traffic pole at 15 mph is catastrophic in a new Escalade. I did roughly the same in a '95 Mercedes and barely dented the bumper.
I believe that was an ad for one of Michigans sleaziest personal injury lawyers, Daniel Burton.. He shares a building with a cronie of mine, and trust me; my first bachelors pad was nicer than his office. If you saw that ad, what about the horribly annoying 'Spirit of Detroit' commercials playing about the same time?
And yet I burned less fuel than a 767 does taking off once. Why not just sit outside Dallas/Fort Worth airport and take 'em out with LAW rockets? You'll save a lot more inner-city asthmatics!
Fuel efficient? I get better highway mileage than most of the crop of Super-SUVs, and better city than at least one of them. Just because I could be driving a sub-compact hybrid doesn't mean I will.
Recent geologic studies have shown that the temperature of the Earth is normally 8-10 degrees warmer than it is now. We're still coming out of the last ice age! Try http://www.junkscience.c om/news/william-the-conqueror.html or http://www.zianet.com/wblase/endtimes/ge olog.htm Hell, hit any major search engine and you'll see that the scientists are split into two camps; The camp using models saying that we'll see a dramatic warm up, even though the models can't even figure out the current weather correctly from the 1960-70 statistics, and those that point out the fact we're ony a few thousand from the last Ice age and that man-made greenhouse gas accounts for less than 1% of that produced in a year.
What public transportation? The nearest bus stop is twenty miles further than my employer, in the opposite direction! And is riding a bicycle 90 miles/day actually feasable? Some of us still live in the great wasteland that is Suburbia because we can't afford $1,200/month apartments in the major cities.
Oh, you mean the copy of 'Abbey Road' they listened to whilst smoking pot at Harvard??
Lest we forget, Tipper is the one who brought music censorship into the spotlight, and is the reason my college freshman brother can't buy Sex Pistols albums at the local record shop.. Anyone who can laugh about smoking pot as a kid and then support the mandatory sentancing bills needs a Volkswagon enema.
At the moment gasoline is running about a $1.40/gallon. 41 cents of that is tax. It's a 30% tax already! I drive a 1979 Camaro at 12mpg 500 miles a week. That means that I gave the government $900 in gas taxes last year. What did paying the tax do for me? Less than nothing. I've replaced two shocks, a tie-rod and a tire because of their misuse of the tax.
And sin-taxes? Take smoking. In 1997, the total governmental cost of smoking related-illness was $20 billion. That very same year 24 billion packs of cigarettes were sold. I pay over a buck a pack in tax; Where else is the government mis-spending the money they said was to repay them for smoker's expenditures? And what about the untold billions they stand to make from the tobacco settlement? It certainly isn't being spent properly!
I vote we just toss all the bums out of office and start over. There's gotta be a more cost effective way of doing it!
John Locke was a liberal thinker in his day. The U.S. use of 'liberal' seems to go through a remake every decade or so. In the fifties and sixties, you were a liberal if you voted 'black' or anti-war. In the seventies, you were liberal if you weren't in the pocket of some corporation. In the eighties, it adopted the 'tax-and-spend' connitation.
At the moment it seems to be thrown at everyone who ever spoke against one of the bullshit 'Protect our children from', 'protect Medicare from', 'protect BigCorp from' proposals. Microsoft lambasts the DOJ as liberals for prosecuting them, Buchanan calls everyone a liberal because they won't go for his form of state-sponsored religion, Gore calls Bradley liberal because he once *talked* to a gay-rights group, etc.
Ironically, 'conservative' is used much the same way among liberal circles, usually with 'bible-thumping' as a prefix. Unfortunatly, the public opinion polls shopw us a 'conservative' nation at the moment, so those circles are smaller and smaller.
I don't know about that.. The gist of the patent implies simultaneous realtime record and delayed playback capability. Other than the 'Virtual VCR' software bundled with some MiroPCI TV tuners, non-destructive broadcast video editors, and of course the TiVo, I can't think of another product that fully matches the specification. Granted, the first two cases do not have the same primary use as the Gemstar patent or the TiVo, namely the consumer viewing market. You should read some of the other Gemstar/Nuvomedia patents. They're almost scary in scope.
The patent covers server-retreived information and that available to the 'device' through normal transmission medium. It's really, really broad, and I have no doubts that if someone implemented a device that read VBI data for input to a program guide, it would fall under the scope of the patent. (Or Gemstar would treat it as infringing)
Actually, the method Peanut Press is using appears to negate all the concerns I have over encrypted content: You can back up the book, back up the viewer, and you only need a key to unencrypt the book for viewing. If you lose the book, lose the key, etc, they're more than happy to give you a new one; They know who bought what. You can cut and paste from the viewer, so 'fair use' isn't trampled on, and they have viewers for all the platforms that their 'e-book' would be useful on. All in all, a class job. Their offering seems to be a little too sci-fi/business, but then only the truly nerdy/nouveau VC carry a palmtop these days, so I suppose it's called targeting.
Hell, in some places it doesn't even take the presence of a legal use. Here in Michigan, you can walk into the farm-supply store and walk out with explosives legally. There is no compelling legal use for explosives. Wanna blast a stump? Need a use permit and a noise waiver from the neighbors. Light demolition? Need a permit and a license. Mixing your own fireworks? Not in this state, buddy! We won't even let you have firecrackers!
Conversly, some stuff is outlawed that does have significant legal use. Take the 'Slim-Jim'; a tool for opening the locked doors of older cars. I own one, and have let numerous people back into their locked cars, most of them running during the winter. Ironically, most police officers carry one as standard equipment and every time I have reminded an officer of this the response ran something like 'Yeah, like I'm going to be breaking into cars.' The local police cheif refused to believe they were illegal until two deputies and the dispatcher confirmed it for him.
What is or isn't illegal seems to be a product of 'who pushed what with how much money'. The Slim-Jim was outlawed after a sizable push from the Big-Three back in the early seventies. No one has pushed the explosives issue yet; You can't purchase a large enough quantity at one time to do any real damage, and the only retailers that still carry explosives also carry Yellow-Baird plow trowels, StorBarrel grain silos and know their customers.
All are very good points! But if you wanted a hard copy of said digital photo, you'd need a very good laser or inkjet and some good photo paper. How much is photo paper these days? Probably comparable with developing a couple of exposures.
For fine timelapse of a dramatically moving subject I can just use multiple exposures with a shorter exposure time. Locking the shutter open only works for very, very fast action. But at 1 minute intervals I don't need either. Shoot off 24 on a timer, swap the body out for a new one, change the film, come back in twenty minutes and repeat. I'd have to rewind the following mechanism on my antique telescope every half hour anyway.
The only real difference is that I get the expensive hard copy by default, which I like, and you get an inexpensive digital one.
These are the same fools who gave us VCR+. There appear to be three Gemstar patents that TiVo touches on:
Video time-shifting apparatus: Allows you to 'rewind' a broadcast channel. Apparatus and method for channel scanning by theme: Lets you push the 'Sci-Fi' button and only surf through channels you designate as Science Fiction. System and method for displaying program listings in an interactive electronic program guide: Self explaining.
All are quite broad, and TiVo may have very well stepped in one of them.
Slashdot Mirror
www.opendvd.org has a nice Linux/BSD DVD howto, which I think covers compilation.
One of the problems with this idea is to find a trustable manager
Trustable manager? Try a few managers and you'll have an easier time trusting them. Pick three reasonably dishonest people, preferentially all in different jurisdictions.
convince a newspaper to run the ad
If you're looking at using a local rag to do the publishing, a few extra bucks go a long way. I pulled a high-school prank using my local paper (10,000 subscribers). My bill would have come to $220 bucks for the quarter page. They didn't like the content. (questionable personal reference). Plunked $400 down, and told the editor to keep the reciept. It ran.
arrange for everybody to pay in an untraceable way
As for paying in an untracable way; Several Carribean nations have 'favorable' banking laws, as do the Swiss. I can open an account at any of them with a phone and a fax. Everyone who wants to contribute can just wire the sum after some prearrangement.
Problems solved
Humanity can deal with the worst that 'Gaia' can throw at us; With little effort we survive in the hottest deserts. With slight effort we survive underwater, at the South Pole, and in the heatless vaccuum of space.
If it can't be positively shown that we are causing the effect, who are we to screw with it? We are not gods, and we shouldn't be able to dictate the how earth deals with climatic variation. You would agree that selective extermination of 'harmful' plant or animal species is wrong, how is selective tinkering with the mechanism that produced them different?
I could define 'Whacko' as a nation on the Department of State's 'Banned travel' list; This would include Libya, Cuba, Iraq, and Chechnya. I could define it as a country who's political philosophy is currently at-odds with the US; This would give us Libya, Cuba, Iraq, Chechnya, Iran, Vietnam, and possibly China.
But as a whole, you are probably more correct than either of my definitions.
Please note; I have no particular feelings about the citizens of any of these countries. People are people, regardless of nationality. Their leaders, however...
Um, you might want to try a nation that the US government is on better terms with. You don't want laywers pointing fingers at you for being sympathetic with a Whacko nation.
What about a demand based rotation system? Alternatly hand out two mirrors, and then rotate those mirrors to the back of the stack after a certain random number of hits. Assign 'bonus points' to servers on fast connections or in untouchable countries, and have them 'rotate up' more often. Additions to the list could be made real time, and deletions just seconds before the link was to be used, i.e., ping the site to make sure it is up before rotating it in, delete from list on timeout.
Yeah.. I had a mirror here, but they've had a RAID failure and have everything after 't' down for a day or so.
prompt for a reboot after application
It's been my experience that the reboots can be avoided during a clean install. On a 'used' machine I usually reboot, but then I'm only installing a couple of SP/HF and the extra reboot can't hurt. I'm a little faster and looser with NT than I should be, however. Then again, the Windows boxen are behind a Linux Masq firewall and then a commercial NAT and a PIX. 'The Company' buys into the security-through-paranoia model of things.
Optimally three. NT isn't the reboot whore Win95/98 are. One after resetting the NT 4.0 user/ACL/network/subsystem/registry settings, then inspect. One after installing IIS, then run through the IIS portion of the checklist. Reboot once more (this is the third) and everything should be as good as it gets on a NT box.
Of course, if you wanted a secure webserver, you would have to wipe the partition table and install OpenBSD on the box. That would require two additional reboots.
It's like the Grits references. Once a troll hits us up for a few thousand mental impressions, it sticks. There are legions of /. patrons that will still associate 'naked' and 'petrified' decades from now.
A good B/W process film gets much more striking results. Granted, all the technical photographic knowledge I have comes from the courses I took in 'crime scene photography' and 'photographic documentation of evidence', but I have done telescopic moon shots before, and I was much more satisfied by the B/W stuff than the colour process shots.
Hey now! I was just using Microsoft because I was reinstalling NT 4.0 due to a thrashed boot sector/unrecoverable registry whilst posting! It was a 'use what you got' thing, not a 'M$ is 3>17' rant. If it had appeared an hour earlier, I would have used IBM, as I was unsucessfully beating on a box that magically decided to forget it had a VM. Now that I think about it, IBM would have been a better choice, since they made extensive software provision so that you couldn't reinstall from the distributed media on some of their older minis. Stuff like wiping a bit of the LIC, rewriting a checksum so it wouldn't install, etc. They're already in the business of creativly destroying the install media.
Do me a fav.. Next time you see an obvoius, unfounded MS bash, please flame on! You are right in noticing there is too much of it going around.
I agree. It still amazes me that the new GM SUV monster gets a 'low-emissions' cert because of its weight. Just under eight thousand pounds of steel. Thats two 1961 Lincoln Continentals, three 1977 Firebirds or 6 1/2 1970 Triumphs. I'd worry more about the safety standards though. The modern SUV's go through much less stringent safety criteria than passenger cars. Hitting a traffic pole at 15 mph is catastrophic in a new Escalade. I did roughly the same in a '95 Mercedes and barely dented the bumper.
I believe that was an ad for one of Michigans sleaziest personal injury lawyers, Daniel Burton.. He shares a building with a cronie of mine, and trust me; my first bachelors pad was nicer than his office. If you saw that ad, what about the horribly annoying 'Spirit of Detroit' commercials playing about the same time?
Sorry. I was being a prick, and you just happened to be in my sights.
I apologize.
And yet I burned less fuel than a 767 does taking off once. Why not just sit outside Dallas/Fort Worth airport and take 'em out with LAW rockets? You'll save a lot more inner-city asthmatics!
Fuel efficient? I get better highway mileage than most of the crop of Super-SUVs, and better city than at least one of them. Just because I could be driving a sub-compact hybrid doesn't mean I will.
Recent geologic studies have shown that the temperature of the Earth is normally 8-10 degrees warmer than it is now. We're still coming out of the last ice age! Try http://www.junkscience.c om/news/william-the-conqueror.html or http://www.zianet.com/wblase/endtimes/ge olog.htm Hell, hit any major search engine and you'll see that the scientists are split into two camps; The camp using models saying that we'll see a dramatic warm up, even though the models can't even figure out the current weather correctly from the 1960-70 statistics, and those that point out the fact we're ony a few thousand from the last Ice age and that man-made greenhouse gas accounts for less than 1% of that produced in a year.
What public transportation? The nearest bus stop is twenty miles further than my employer, in the opposite direction! And is riding a bicycle 90 miles/day actually feasable? Some of us still live in the great wasteland that is Suburbia because we can't afford $1,200/month apartments in the major cities.
Oh, you mean the copy of 'Abbey Road' they listened to whilst smoking pot at Harvard??
Lest we forget, Tipper is the one who brought music censorship into the spotlight, and is the reason my college freshman brother can't buy Sex Pistols albums at the local record shop.. Anyone who can laugh about smoking pot as a kid and then support the mandatory sentancing bills needs a Volkswagon enema.
At the moment gasoline is running about a $1.40/gallon. 41 cents of that is tax. It's a 30% tax already! I drive a 1979 Camaro at 12mpg 500 miles a week. That means that I gave the government $900 in gas taxes last year. What did paying the tax do for me? Less than nothing. I've replaced two shocks, a tie-rod and a tire because of their misuse of the tax.
And sin-taxes? Take smoking. In 1997, the total governmental cost of smoking related-illness was $20 billion. That very same year 24 billion packs of cigarettes were sold. I pay over a buck a pack in tax; Where else is the government mis-spending the money they said was to repay them for smoker's expenditures? And what about the untold billions they stand to make from the tobacco settlement? It certainly isn't being spent properly!
I vote we just toss all the bums out of office and start over. There's gotta be a more cost effective way of doing it!
John Locke was a liberal thinker in his day. The U.S. use of 'liberal' seems to go through a remake every decade or so. In the fifties and sixties, you were a liberal if you voted 'black' or anti-war. In the seventies, you were liberal if you weren't in the pocket of some corporation. In the eighties, it adopted the 'tax-and-spend' connitation.
At the moment it seems to be thrown at everyone who ever spoke against one of the bullshit 'Protect our children from', 'protect Medicare from', 'protect BigCorp from' proposals. Microsoft lambasts the DOJ as liberals for prosecuting them, Buchanan calls everyone a liberal because they won't go for his form of state-sponsored religion, Gore calls Bradley liberal because he once *talked* to a gay-rights group, etc.
Ironically, 'conservative' is used much the same way among liberal circles, usually with 'bible-thumping' as a prefix. Unfortunatly, the public opinion polls shopw us a 'conservative' nation at the moment, so those circles are smaller and smaller.
I don't know about that.. The gist of the patent implies simultaneous realtime record and delayed playback capability. Other than the 'Virtual VCR' software bundled with some MiroPCI TV tuners, non-destructive broadcast video editors, and of course the TiVo, I can't think of another product that fully matches the specification. Granted, the first two cases do not have the same primary use as the Gemstar patent or the TiVo, namely the consumer viewing market. You should read some of the other Gemstar/Nuvomedia patents. They're almost scary in scope.
The patent covers server-retreived information and that available to the 'device' through normal transmission medium. It's really, really broad, and I have no doubts that if someone implemented a device that read VBI data for input to a program guide, it would fall under the scope of the patent. (Or Gemstar would treat it as infringing)
Actually, the method Peanut Press is using appears to negate all the concerns I have over encrypted content: You can back up the book, back up the viewer, and you only need a key to unencrypt the book for viewing. If you lose the book, lose the key, etc, they're more than happy to give you a new one; They know who bought what. You can cut and paste from the viewer, so 'fair use' isn't trampled on, and they have viewers for all the platforms that their 'e-book' would be useful on. All in all, a class job. Their offering seems to be a little too sci-fi/business, but then only the truly nerdy/nouveau VC carry a palmtop these days, so I suppose it's called targeting.
Hell, in some places it doesn't even take the presence of a legal use. Here in Michigan, you can walk into the farm-supply store and walk out with explosives legally. There is no compelling legal use for explosives. Wanna blast a stump? Need a use permit and a noise waiver from the neighbors. Light demolition? Need a permit and a license. Mixing your own fireworks? Not in this state, buddy! We won't even let you have firecrackers!
Conversly, some stuff is outlawed that does have significant legal use. Take the 'Slim-Jim'; a tool for opening the locked doors of older cars. I own one, and have let numerous people back into their locked cars, most of them running during the winter. Ironically, most police officers carry one as standard equipment and every time I have reminded an officer of this the response ran something like 'Yeah, like I'm going to be breaking into cars.' The local police cheif refused to believe they were illegal until two deputies and the dispatcher confirmed it for him.
What is or isn't illegal seems to be a product of 'who pushed what with how much money'. The Slim-Jim was outlawed after a sizable push from the Big-Three back in the early seventies. No one has pushed the explosives issue yet; You can't purchase a large enough quantity at one time to do any real damage, and the only retailers that still carry explosives also carry Yellow-Baird plow trowels, StorBarrel grain silos and know their customers.
All are very good points! But if you wanted a hard copy of said digital photo, you'd need a very good laser or inkjet and some good photo paper. How much is photo paper these days? Probably comparable with developing a couple of exposures.
For fine timelapse of a dramatically moving subject I can just use multiple exposures with a shorter exposure time. Locking the shutter open only works for very, very fast action. But at 1 minute intervals I don't need either. Shoot off 24 on a timer, swap the body out for a new one, change the film, come back in twenty minutes and repeat. I'd have to rewind the following mechanism on my antique telescope every half hour anyway.
The only real difference is that I get the expensive hard copy by default, which I like, and you get an inexpensive digital one.
The Gemstar
If Gemstar does go after Peanut Press, I hope the judge sees the notable differences.
These are the same fools who gave us VCR+. There appear to be three Gemstar patents that TiVo touches on:
Video time-shifting apparatus: Allows you to 'rewind' a broadcast channel.
Apparatus and method for channel scanning by theme: Lets you push the 'Sci-Fi' button and only surf through channels you designate as Science Fiction.
System and method for displaying program listings in an interactive electronic program guide: Self explaining.
All are quite broad, and TiVo may have very well stepped in one of them.