The only technology I can imagine which could destroy all life on earth and be wielded by one person (or even a small group without the resources of a nation) is universal-constructor-class nanotech. Indeed, I do believe that kind of tech is possible, even inevitable. But the problem with it being controlled is that it not only has the power to destroy, but to do practically anything else, including completely eliminate scarcity. If the US gov had this tech, do you think they would share it? Would they share it's fruit (unlimited material goods)? Or would they perhaps use it to aquire and maintain an even greater level of control over people, though they no longer need anything a person can provide?
Perhaps, but I suspect that the primary motivation in threatening subscribers who run p2p apps is to cut down on their bandwidth usage. Obviously an ISP doesn't have an upstream pipe as fat as all its customer's pipes combined. They maintain a ratio- it used to be between 1/6 and 1/10 when I was in the industry (in the early dial-up days). I use most of my upload and download bandwidth most of the time and therefore cost them a larger portion of their upstream bandwidth than the ratio. But I've got a business class connection and pay $100/month so they're still making plenty on me and I'll be surprised if I receive one of these notices. Like most things it boils down to $$
Right to the heart of the matter! For volume sales to work, people need to listen to mostly the same stuff. But the situation isn't so bleak, I think.
Personally, I use allmusic.com to find out about artists similar to those I already like. Then I go to the one record store I know of in Milwuakee that has lots of unsual electronica: Atomic Records. I also buy compilations with artists I like on them to get those odd tracks and discover the rest of the artists. Smaller labels often put out music of a similar style and make compilations with all their artists.
I also buy stuff I know I want online- especially out of print stuff on ebay.
I spend, perhaps, $100/month on average on cds (none of it going to riaa member labels). But, guess what- If I hadn't discovered the diversity of indie-electronica on p2p networks I'd be clueless and completely burnt out on plastic pop.
I found your comment highly insightful, though I despise you for being a republican inspite of your perceptiveness;) I just want to point out the freestateproject.org if you haven't heard of it. Some libertarians, at least, realize the power of local gov.
What you say you're doing- not buying cds- is possibly the only thing we as "consumers" can really do to hurt the riaa- so "way to go"
BUT- there is plenty of music published by indie labels, and its mostly not "pop music" which I'd like the RIAA to shove up their ass too:)
I spend about $100/month on CDs and I've only bought one RIAA label cd in the last year- and that was an accident (I didnt imagine the artist would be on a major label so didnt check)
How do I find out about all this indie music? P2P and allmusic.com:)
Better yet take over a real state and rather than ceceed (good luck trying) just reduce the role of the state government to protecting from force and fraud. Reduce depence on the national government till we can say "we dont get anything from the fed, why should we pay it taxes?" www.freestateproject.org
The only difference I can think of is that Verisign didn't even have to buy the mispelled domains, which just makes it even more infuriating. This is unquestionably an abuse of their "right" to manage the US TLDs and they should be stripped of it. Personally I don't see why we couldnt have a distributed DNS system which would work something like freenet. The trademark office could push entries into the system, signed with their private key, and various other governmental, commercial and non-profit/private entities could push whatever entries they wanted onto the stack too. It would be up to ISPs and individuals to pick which groups' entries to use and in what order. Most people (and presumably all isps) would probably place the trademark offices' lists at the top so they could find the products and companies they seek (incidentally eliminating the problems associated with others registering your trademark as a domain). A second tier of trustworthy companies would sell domain names (with market forces setting the cost based on how many isp's subscribe to their entries and how high up the search list most isp's place them) Finally, I could make my own top-level domains by placing my own list near the top of every computers resolve.conf equivalent which I use. No government-granted monopolies involved except the already existing trademark system and no need for an ultra-high-availability network at the top level. If any of this strikes you as unfeasible you probably need to read more about freenet (or conceivably I do- let me know).
The executable compression scheme used has changed too, as the article states. They also state that their software detects both without an update. Thats interesting- I always figured (and never bothered to educate myself and discover otherwise) that virus definitions were less flexible than that- like md5 sums or something. Or is Kaspersky ahead of the game?
have you done it? Is it sweet? Any pointers? What I'm actually working on doing, if you care, is wrapping an app called dcm4jboss in jython, but I'm still trying to get dcm4jboss working the way I want. I know python and c++ (along with some others) and have read and made small changes to java. From my jython book it looks pretty damn easy.
I'm less than totally positive about q2 being c++, but my whole basis of experience with it is writing quakec for q1 and being annoyed when it was abandoned for dll's in q2 and I could have sworn they had to be in c++
heh:) I've only just gotten into sgi's since I used to drool over the ones that are now going on ebay for $50-1000 Maybe a whole new generation of irix users are awakening! hehe, nah I know, but theres a few of us:)
I have one sgi with 6.5.13 and I installed a few of the freeware collection packages before I wondered this same thing. There is a a script linked to off the faq at freeware.sgi.com - I'm pretty sure thats where it is, but its been a little while and I'm not going to go find it for you because I had a bad experience with it. First of all there were a couple minor things wrong with it that I can't even remember, but I fixed them- they were pretty obvious. Then I installed everything I wanted. Most of it worked great, but I had a few problems and figured a reboot might help. Now after logging in the menubar loads but nothing else- really weird state like nothing I've seen in linux. I'm going to do a re-install though soon and I'll be happy if someone has a better answer than this:) And it is possible that it was a peculiarity of my system that caused it, but I cant think what- just be careful.
We need to play the knee-jerk public reaction game at least as well as the administration to have hope of fighting them. Calling their unconstitutional act the "Patriot Act" is simply brilliant. Calling efforts to protect the Bill of Rights "Anti-Patriot Act efforts" is so dumb that only a/. editor would do so;)
Indeed, the feds don't care about state marijuana laws and people and groups have been busted despite thinking they were safe. The Oakland Cannibas Club is one such victim. However, it's not entirely useless to pass these laws: most small-time breakers of such laws are busted by local cops. In fact, though I know many, many people who've paid fines and even gone to jail for pot possesion/ distribution- I don't know a single one who was busted by feds.
Check out the Free State Project if you feel that states/cities should be able to exclusively govern their own wherever the "crime" doesn't cross jurisdictions. Definately check the project out if you think your government should do little more than protecting citizens from assault.
a single 970@1.8Ghz scored 2100MFLOPS and a DUAL opteron@1.8Ghz scored 2960 !? I assume your code was multithreaded/multiprocess? Your's sounds like a much more interesting test than nasa's - could you give any more info?
The default in kazaa (and its similar in all other p2p programs I've seen) is to make one folder (empty to begin with) searchable by the other users. You would have to go out of your way to explicitly share your fair use backups. IANAL, but the act of making them available doesn't even seem like it could strictly be illegal, cuz what if someone just did it so they could get to them from another computer (say they don't know about windows file sharing much less setting up ftp servers). And then, what if someone owns a CD, but its not immediately accessable to them and they want their friend to hear a track? Would it be illegal to download someone else's fair use backup? Personally, I have a new CD that I can't listen to in any of my CD players or on my computer, but plays in older CD players that apparently ignore the data track. Shouldn't I be able to find the songs via some other means so I can listen to them on my portable, at home and at work. I mean right now I'd have to actually go to a friend's house to hear it! It's all pretty grey to me, but the RIAA only needs off-white to cost you tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees and maybe win a judgement for more.
Across Realtime = The Peace War + Marooned in RT
on
A Good Summer Read?
·
· Score: 1
I borrowed all three of these from the library not long ago- it turns out that Across Realtime is just a compilation of the other two. I highly recommend it though- and all Vinge's other books too. I especially hope he makes a novel or series out of his short story "fast times at fairmont high" (to be found in True Names and other stories)
and I'd just like to provide some info for others thinking about getting one themselves. I haven't personally used a Tivo or Replay so I can't really say whats best first hand, but I read lots of reviews before deciding on the RCA Scenium. I mostly chose it for two reasons. It is a DVD player in addition to a PVR, which is great if you don't already have one as with me. I have no complaints about its DVD playing functionality whatsoever. The other reason is, as the article points out, that it doesnt require a channel guide subscription. I didn't want to add another monthly bill to my family's life, nor pay a lifetime (of the unit) fee when the companies' lives may be even shorter than the average electronic appliance. My family pays the local cable service about ten bucks a month to have nice reception of local stations plus TNT, CSPAN and the other junk they throw in. Thus our situation as far as channels go, may be unusual, but it is an issue. The guide is flaky! When told we don't have cable it gets quite a few broadcast stations that we dont receive and associates some of the ones we do with the incorrect channels. When told we have cable it only gets the listings for TNT and the Food network consistently correct, though there was one day, since christmas that the listings seemed pretty complete across the board. I havent put a whole lot of time into figuring it out since you only get the new listing after leaving the unit off overnight, but I'm pretty sure we're hosed as far as the guide goes. That sucks, but it would be OK if the thing were reliable for doing scheduled recordings ala a vcr. No such luck! Instead of recording the scheduled show it sometimes (maybe 30%) goes to the menu and says "an error has occured". Maybe these are simple software problems that will go away with the next revision, but guess what!? the firmware is not updatable.
I've been excited to get a powerbook for as long as the titanium ones have been around. A few months ago I got even more excited about the presence of vertex units in the radeon9000 which is in the last round of tibooks. Today, finding out about the 17" PB nearly made me cream my pants, then I find out its a 440 go (no vertex units) and I'm suddenly conflicted about screen-size vs vertex units:( I mean, which one is the ultimate DooM III notebook?;)
I realize that if you'd done more than skim the article (giving you the benefit of the doubt) your post would be too far down for me or almost anyone else to bother reading it, but if you had you'd know that there is, in fact, a remote, and that you get the information you lack without an lcd on the unit, on-screen.
I, for one, am quite interested in the unit, as I haven't yet bought a portable mp3 player or standalone dvd player. I also have a shuttle p4, the lovely face of which I've refrained from making ugly with an internal CDROM or floppy:) It can actually boot from USB devices, so I've been planning to get a USB CDRW anyway. Therefore, in my, perhaps unusual case, the Jackrabbit would kill 3, currently living, birds with one stone:)
my shuttle ss51g has it's one pci slot on the other side of the agp from most boards, but i think i might be able to cut a slot for the fan. In fact I was considering modding that side to cool my geforce 4 anyway:) Has anyone else done any modding of the shuttle case?
They boot from the CD like you'd expect any modern OS to, and they come with a hacked up ver of LILO called BELO:) I do agree about the Ross Perot thing though: it made a few people wake up to features they could provide and raised the bar for speed and responsiveness, but just like with Perot, as soon as Be became a non-issue the OS vendors relaxed and continued as before.
Slashdot Mirror
The only technology I can imagine which could destroy all life on earth and be wielded by one person (or even a small group without the resources of a nation) is universal-constructor-class nanotech. Indeed, I do believe that kind of tech is possible, even inevitable.
But the problem with it being controlled is that it not only has the power to destroy, but to do practically anything else, including completely eliminate scarcity.
If the US gov had this tech, do you think they would share it? Would they share it's fruit (unlimited material goods)? Or would they perhaps use it to aquire and maintain an even greater level of control over people, though they no longer need anything a person can provide?
Perhaps, but I suspect that the primary motivation in threatening subscribers who run p2p apps is to cut down on their bandwidth usage. Obviously an ISP doesn't have an upstream pipe as fat as all its customer's pipes combined. They maintain a ratio- it used to be between 1/6 and 1/10 when I was in the industry (in the early dial-up days). I use most of my upload and download bandwidth most of the time and therefore cost them a larger portion of their upstream bandwidth than the ratio. But I've got a business class connection and pay $100/month so they're still making plenty on me and I'll be surprised if I receive one of these notices. Like most things it boils down to $$
Right to the heart of the matter! For volume sales to work, people need to listen to mostly the same stuff. But the situation isn't so bleak, I think.
Personally, I use allmusic.com to find out about artists similar to those I already like. Then I go to the one record store I know of in Milwuakee that has lots of unsual electronica: Atomic Records. I also buy compilations with artists I like on them to get those odd tracks and discover the rest of the artists. Smaller labels often put out music of a similar style and make compilations with all their artists. I also buy stuff I know I want online- especially out of print stuff on ebay.
I spend, perhaps, $100/month on average on cds (none of it going to riaa member labels). But, guess what- If I hadn't discovered the diversity of indie-electronica on p2p networks I'd be clueless and completely burnt out on plastic pop.
I found your comment highly insightful, though I despise you for being a republican inspite of your perceptiveness ;) I just want to point out the freestateproject.org if you haven't heard of it. Some libertarians, at least, realize the power of local gov.
m
What you say you're doing- not buying cds- is possibly the only thing we as "consumers" can really do to hurt the riaa- so "way to go"
BUT- there is plenty of music published by indie labels, and its mostly not "pop music" which I'd like the RIAA to shove up their ass too:)
I spend about $100/month on CDs and I've only bought one RIAA label cd in the last year- and that was an accident (I didnt imagine the artist would be on a major label so didnt check)
How do I find out about all this indie music? P2P and allmusic.com:)
Better yet take over a real state and rather than ceceed (good luck trying) just reduce the role of the state government to protecting from force and fraud. Reduce depence on the national government till we can say "we dont get anything from the fed, why should we pay it taxes?"
www.freestateproject.org
They will start in parallel if you change the RC_PARALLEL_STARTUP="no" line in /etc/conf.d.rc
Long live Gentoo!
The only difference I can think of is that Verisign didn't even have to buy the mispelled domains, which just makes it even more infuriating.
This is unquestionably an abuse of their "right" to manage the US TLDs and they should be stripped of it.
Personally I don't see why we couldnt have a distributed DNS system which would work something like freenet. The trademark office could push entries into the system, signed with their private key, and various other governmental, commercial and non-profit/private entities could push whatever entries they wanted onto the stack too.
It would be up to ISPs and individuals to pick which groups' entries to use and in what order.
Most people (and presumably all isps) would probably place the trademark offices' lists at the top so they could find the products and companies they seek (incidentally eliminating the problems associated with others registering your trademark as a domain).
A second tier of trustworthy companies would sell domain names (with market forces setting the cost based on how many isp's subscribe to their entries and how high up the search list most isp's place them)
Finally, I could make my own top-level domains by placing my own list near the top of every computers resolve.conf equivalent which I use.
No government-granted monopolies involved except the already existing trademark system and no need for an ultra-high-availability network at the top level.
If any of this strikes you as unfeasible you probably need to read more about freenet (or conceivably I do- let me know).
this wasnt a breach per se, just the potential for one.
and while this is not a happy precedent, the guy didnt handle it in the coolest way possible.
The executable compression scheme used has changed too, as the article states.
They also state that their software detects both without an update. Thats interesting- I always figured (and never bothered to educate myself and discover otherwise) that virus definitions were less flexible than that- like md5 sums or something. Or is Kaspersky ahead of the game?
have you done it? Is it sweet? Any pointers?
What I'm actually working on doing, if you care, is wrapping an app called dcm4jboss in jython, but I'm still trying to get dcm4jboss working the way I want. I know python and c++ (along with some others) and have read and made small changes to java. From my jython book it looks pretty damn easy.
I'm less than totally positive about q2 being c++, but my whole basis of experience with it is writing quakec for q1 and being annoyed when it was abandoned for dll's in q2 and I could have sworn they had to be in c++
You are mistaken. Quake I was written in C with extensions in "QuakeC". Quake II is C++
heh:)
I've only just gotten into sgi's since I used to drool over the ones that are now going on ebay for $50-1000
Maybe a whole new generation of irix users are awakening! hehe, nah I know, but theres a few of us:)
I have one sgi with 6.5.13 and I installed a few of the freeware collection packages before I wondered this same thing. There is a a script linked to off the faq at freeware.sgi.com - I'm pretty sure thats where it is, but its been a little while and I'm not going to go find it for you because I had a bad experience with it.
First of all there were a couple minor things wrong with it that I can't even remember, but I fixed them- they were pretty obvious. Then I installed everything I wanted. Most of it worked great, but I had a few problems and figured a reboot might help. Now after logging in the menubar loads but nothing else- really weird state like nothing I've seen in linux. I'm going to do a re-install though soon and I'll be happy if someone has a better answer than this:)
And it is possible that it was a peculiarity of my system that caused it, but I cant think what- just be careful.
We need to play the knee-jerk public reaction game at least as well as the administration to have hope of fighting them. Calling their unconstitutional act the "Patriot Act" is simply brilliant. Calling efforts to protect the Bill of Rights "Anti-Patriot Act efforts" is so dumb that only a /. editor would do so ;)
Indeed, the feds don't care about state marijuana laws and people and groups have been busted despite thinking they were safe. The Oakland Cannibas Club is one such victim. However, it's not entirely useless to pass these laws: most small-time breakers of such laws are busted by local cops. In fact, though I know many, many people who've paid fines and even gone to jail for pot possesion/ distribution- I don't know a single one who was busted by feds.
Check out the Free State Project if you feel that states/cities should be able to exclusively govern their own wherever the "crime" doesn't cross jurisdictions. Definately check the project out if you think your government should do little more than protecting citizens from assault.
a single 970@1.8Ghz scored 2100MFLOPS and a DUAL opteron@1.8Ghz scored 2960 !? I assume your code was multithreaded/multiprocess? Your's sounds like a much more interesting test than nasa's - could you give any more info?
The default in kazaa (and its similar in all other p2p programs I've seen) is to make one folder (empty to begin with) searchable by the other users. You would have to go out of your way to explicitly share your fair use backups. IANAL, but the act of making them available doesn't even seem like it could strictly be illegal, cuz what if someone just did it so they could get to them from another computer (say they don't know about windows file sharing much less setting up ftp servers). And then, what if someone owns a CD, but its not immediately accessable to them and they want their friend to hear a track? Would it be illegal to download someone else's fair use backup?
Personally, I have a new CD that I can't listen to in any of my CD players or on my computer, but plays in older CD players that apparently ignore the data track. Shouldn't I be able to find the songs via some other means so I can listen to them on my portable, at home and at work. I mean right now I'd have to actually go to a friend's house to hear it!
It's all pretty grey to me, but the RIAA only needs off-white to cost you tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees and maybe win a judgement for more.
I borrowed all three of these from the library not long ago- it turns out that Across Realtime is just a compilation of the other two. I highly recommend it though- and all Vinge's other books too.
I especially hope he makes a novel or series out of his short story "fast times at fairmont high" (to be found in True Names and other stories)
Michael
and I'd just like to provide some info for others thinking about getting one themselves. I haven't personally used a Tivo or Replay so I can't really say whats best first hand, but I read lots of reviews before deciding on the RCA Scenium.
I mostly chose it for two reasons. It is a DVD player in addition to a PVR, which is great if you don't already have one as with me. I have no complaints about its DVD playing functionality whatsoever.
The other reason is, as the article points out, that it doesnt require a channel guide subscription. I didn't want to add another monthly bill to my family's life, nor pay a lifetime (of the unit) fee when the companies' lives may be even shorter than the average electronic appliance. My family pays the local cable service about ten bucks a month to have nice reception of local stations plus TNT, CSPAN and the other junk they throw in. Thus our situation as far as channels go, may be unusual, but it is an issue. The guide is flaky! When told we don't have cable it gets quite a few broadcast stations that we dont receive and associates some of the ones we do with the incorrect channels. When told we have cable it only gets the listings for TNT and the Food network consistently correct, though there was one day, since christmas that the listings seemed pretty complete across the board. I havent put a whole lot of time into figuring it out since you only get the new listing after leaving the unit off overnight, but I'm pretty sure we're hosed as far as the guide goes. That sucks, but it would be OK if the thing were reliable for doing scheduled recordings ala a vcr. No such luck! Instead of recording the scheduled show it sometimes (maybe 30%) goes to the menu and says "an error has occured". Maybe these are simple software problems that will go away with the next revision, but guess what!? the firmware is not updatable.
I've been excited to get a powerbook for as long as the titanium ones have been around. A few months ago I got even more excited about the presence of vertex units in the radeon9000 which is in the last round of tibooks. Today, finding out about the 17" PB nearly made me cream my pants, then I find out its a 440 go (no vertex units) and I'm suddenly conflicted about screen-size vs vertex units:( I mean, which one is the ultimate DooM III notebook? ;)
I realize that if you'd done more than skim the article (giving you the benefit of the doubt) your post would be too far down for me or almost anyone else to bother reading it, but if you had you'd know that there is, in fact, a remote, and that you get the information you lack without an lcd on the unit, on-screen.
I, for one, am quite interested in the unit, as I haven't yet bought a portable mp3 player or standalone dvd player. I also have a shuttle p4, the lovely face of which I've refrained from making ugly with an internal CDROM or floppy:) It can actually boot from USB devices, so I've been planning to get a USB CDRW anyway.
Therefore, in my, perhaps unusual case, the Jackrabbit would kill 3, currently living, birds with one stone:)
hmmm,
my shuttle ss51g has it's one pci slot on the other side of the agp from most boards, but i think i might be able to cut a slot for the fan. In fact I was considering modding that side to cool my geforce 4 anyway:)
Has anyone else done any modding of the shuttle case?
~m
They boot from the CD like you'd expect any modern OS to, and they come with a hacked up ver of LILO called BELO:)
I do agree about the Ross Perot thing though: it made a few people wake up to features they could provide and raised the bar for speed and responsiveness, but just like with Perot, as soon as Be became a non-issue the OS vendors relaxed and continued as before.