Not only does it run on NT, Linux, Solaris, Free BSD and anything else you decide to
compile it for....
Who cares if the QuickTime server runs on Linux? You still can't watch any modern Quicktime movies on Linux because there is no player. It's the players that matter.
It's really irritating to hear the ``me too'' crew keep claiming that there is Linux support for QuickTime. There is none that matters.
It is unfortunately the case that RealVideo is the only cross-platform video format that is deployable today. It is unfortunate both because both QuickTime and Windows Media have dramatically better video quality, and also because Real's pricing model is extortionate.
You can get a crippled demo version of the encoder and server for cheap/free, but here's what the licensing prices for RealServer Pro look like, if you're actually using it:
This is all very well but screensavers!=demos. I know that Skal/bomb did a few graphics
hacks for xscreensaver, but a demo is much more than a unique, silent, screen.
So the difference between a ``demo'' and a ``screensaver'' is that the former makes noise and the latter doesn't?
That's nonsense. There is no difference: they are both eye candy. Show me a ``demo'' and I'll show you a program I want to use as a screen saver.
I want "Just a Browser" to view "Just Sites" I frequently visit, not those
screwed portals that don't work without JavaScript
So run Lynx, or Netscape 1.0.
Seriously, I don't understand (and never have) why people who say things like this have any interest in the Mozilla project at all (even enough interest to bitch about it.)
You already have browsers that are ``just browsers'' and don't work on those evil sites that use Java and JavaScript and Flash and all those other modern inventions. What are you asking for that you don't already have in a dozen different forms?
Most people want browsers that are capable of displaying bleeding-edge web sites. If you don't, then you don't need Mozilla at all. That's not what Mozilla is for. So why complain?
David Gerrold did a very interesting science fiction book five or six years ago. It was called
Earth, and concerned itself with reality 50 years in the future.
Earth is by David Brin,
not Gerrold, and yes, it's an excellent book. A lot of the
ideas in it were fleshed out into Brin's
article and later book called
The Transparent Society.
I used to be a card-carrying cypherpunk, but The Transparent Society convinced me that the crypto will never work, and that privacy cannot continue to exist. And that that's really not as bad as it sounds.
I agree with others who have said that all this whining about CDDB is pointless, since FreeDB exists, and has a huge amount of data in it already.
However, FreeDB very much needs help. There are a number of bugs and horrible misfeatures in it, and the main developer seems to have close to zero time to work on it. Pretty much any time I've found a problem, his response has been, ``yeah, too bad I don't have any time.''
Not that there's anything wrong with that: he's doing a big service to all of us by keeping it running at all. But, if any of you do have the time and ability, it seems to me that FreeDB desperately needs a co-developer.
I went to the last BattleBots show in San Francisco, and man, it sucked!
Each match was 2-3 minutes and there was at least 10 minutes of nothing between them. We didn't even get an idiot presenter, or music!
I really expected it to be better than
SRL, but it wasn't. SRL's problem is a complete lack of pacing, and I thought that with the directed goal of a competition, that would give BattleBots the pacing that SRL so desperately needs. But they totally blew it by having so much dead air!
And how many times can you watch one triangular wedge bump into another triangular wedge? I was particularly impressed at how badly they pilotted their vehicles: you'd think they'd spend some time learning to drive RC vehicles first, wouldn't you? I guess they spent all their time building them and none driving them... It appeared that each match was won by accident, not by the skill involved in either driving or construction.
I'd watch it on TV, but I'm sure that whatever else is on at that time will be better.
SomethingAwful.com has a review of the TV version of a recent Robot Wars. It sounds differently awful, but very similarly awful in many ways.
anime has much more imagination and thoughfulness than anything distinctly american in
terms of animation
anime is not afraid to take cultural and subject-matter related risks
anime is very high quality, with accomplished artists putting more hours and frames into just
average anime filmes than most american animators can claim.
And yet, with only a few exceptions, anime has far more uniform and uncreative character design than any western animations this side of Hannah Barbara.
Why is that?
I like some anime, but why is it all so stylistcally uniform?
Compare Ren and Stimpy with The Simpsons with, oh, I don't know, pick one -- Angry Beavers? Western cartoons are stylistically all over the map, and most anime looks like it was all drawn by the same guy.
See, this is why I have a hard time getting in to anime. I've seen a lot of it, and there are quite a few titles that I love, but the ones that seem to get most highly recommended are, well, crap.
Of your list:
Cowboy Bebop
Interplanetary bounty hunters - an ex-cop; a former mafia hit man (??); an amoral,
beautiful, thieving, cheating, woman with a huge debt; and a somewhat feral uberhacker.
Kicks the most ass of anything that's come out recently.
Haven't seen this one yet.
Macross Plus
Two old friends, now enemies, flight-testing new transformable planes for the military.
And another friend working with the first computer capable of singing. Great stuff.
This gets consistently high ratings, but from the one episode I saw, it's just another fucking soap opera. And worse, it's a soap opera with interminable 80s-top-40-style music, not just as background noise, but central to the story!
Escaflowne
(This is actually coming out _soon_, though it's already on VHS) A high school girl
accidently gets teleported to a hidden sister planet of Earth, called Gaia. Where she gets in
the middle of a huge conflict between various countries, all of whom use mecha (they
haven't generally developed electronics; they're 99% gears and flywheels) Eerily similar
to Star Wars after a little while, and they always knock you flat on your ass every fifth
episode.
Haven't seen this one, but I must say, when the description says ``high school girl'' and ``mecha'' I think, wait, haven't I seen this about 50 times already?
Castle of Cagliostro
There's a series of French novels about Aresene Lupin, a master thief. This movie is about
his grandson, Lupin III, who's not terribly serious but knows what he's doing. This is the
best of the Lupin movies, and the director, Miyazaki is one of the best in Japan. People
always seem to like his movies.
The main character's an uninteresting asshole, and the animation is only slightly better than Speed Racer. Yawn.
Patlabor 1
In order to avoid rising sea levels and to get more land, Tokyo Bay is being dammed and
reclaimed. To speed it up, construction mecha - Labors - are developed. But soon, people
start using them for criminal activities (sharing mp3s perhaps;) so the Police also get
mecha - Patrol Labors. This is one of two movies after the long-running TV/OAV series.
It's got a lot more mystery than action, but it's really very good. The 2nd movie, not yet
released is excellent.
I saw one episode of this series, and it was yet another soap opera about the ``new guy'' and how embarrassed he was to be working at the factory, or something like that. About half way through, there was an evil industrialist, and some robots punched each other. The animation seriously failed to impress (lots of cheap tricks like ten seconds of a still frame that looked like it was moving because of the zipping lines on the background.)
Grave of the Fireflies
A really sad movie involving two siblings, set in the closing days of WWII, in Japan.
Excellent movie, but really depressing. Very much worth seeing.
Haven't seen it.
Record of Lodoss War
This was someone's Dungeons and Dragons campaign, I'm sure. Novice warrior, grizzled
dwarf, a thief, a wizard, a cleric and a cute elf girl save the world from the forces of Evil.
(one of whom looks like Evil Spock;) It's pretty good, and I understand that there's a
sequel coming out in the states now.
AAAUUGGHH! MAKE IT STOP! I think I already used the word ``interminable'' in this post, but I have to use it again here, even though that word doesn't even come close to describing how insanely boring this was! To put it in D&D terms, I think they got about five rounds into the game by episode four! If this was based on an actual game, I can't imagine how the actual game could have taken as long to go somewhere as the cartoon did! And again, shit animation with lots of cheating on the action sequences.
Serial Experiments Lain
Creepy series about a girl who gets email from dead people. But this seriously explores
computers and what happens when we create an infosphere, and what can be done with
it. Takes a couple watchings at the end to figure out what they're doing precisely. And
'Arisa's name is actually Alice, those morons.
One of the best things I've ever seen, any genre. I absolutely loved this one. The animation was great, the sound design was incredibly cool and well integrated, and though it was a little slow paced, the mysteries were played out well, and I actually cared about finding out what was going on. Lain is absolutely brilliant.
And in that respect, pretty completely unlike just about all other highly-ranked anime.
Tenchi Muyo!
I no longer even keep track of how many versions of this series are out there. I liked the
original OAVs, which aren't on DVD. You might like the TV series better. Cartoon
Network is showing something, who knows what. Go wild.
Some adolescent boy fantasy about getting chased around by alternately dominating and submissive girls. YAWN. This one actually made my skin crawl.
Other ones that I like:
Ghost in the Shell is definitely one of my favorite movies ever;
Akira is beautiful to watch and listen to, though the plot is kind of dumb (it's a lot like 2001 in more ways than one);
Bubblegum Crisis is pretty good;
I got a kick out of Dominion: Tank Police, though it was pretty typical in a lot of ways;
Ranma 1/2 was hilariious in the early days (the original TV series) but I find the movies and the OAV series to be fairly awful. Any episode with Shampoo or Grandpa in it sucks, and that seems to be all of them lately.
I remember liking Appleseed and Battle Angel, though it's been long enough since I saw them that I can't remember which was which.
So how do I find anime that's more like Ghost in the Shell, and less like this saccharine soap opera 12-year-old-boy domination fantasy panty sniffing crap?
I want good science fiction movies, not ``Days of Our Lives'' set in Neo-Tokyo. The fact that it's animated does not magically make it watchable.
``Anime is popular because we all feel like outsiders!''
The ``humor of embarrassment'' style has been around forever, and that's all this ``oh no, I don't fit in'' stuff is. In the 30s it was called ``screwball comedy'' and usually came to a climax with everyone accidentially bumbling into the same room in the last scene and all the intertwined secrets being revealed.
I like anime (and screwball comedies, for that matter: Preston Sturges is great, especially
Sullivan's Travels and The Palm Beach Story) but claiming that there's something new here is just so much academic over-intellectualized bullshit.
This is just another attempt to pick some random piece of media and say, ``See! See! This supports the theories I already hold about my specialness!''
Anyone else notice how ABCNews.com first started out changing some of Chuck D's words to "[expletive]" but later on in the article printed those same words verbatim?
My prediction is that they will pull a stunt like the one mentioned in 'Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels' and send refund checks with an account name like 'Dildo Lovin' Ass Sluts Incorporated', which nobody in they're right mind will cash. Toooooo sad...
That was a great bit!
I'm also reminded of the bit from Fight Club where the airport guy explains the situation when luggage is found to be vibrating: ``Nine times out of ten, it's an alarm clock. But sometimes... It's a dildo. We never imply ownership, though: it's always... the dildo, never... your... dildo.''
Streaming an MP3 file out of a CGI works fine, but if you're concerned about bandwidth, you should be sure to rate-limit it: don't send the data much faster than the bitrate of the file.
it actually is wierdly legal if the wartime powers act is invoked.
The War Powers Act is already in effect: the US has been in a State of Emergency for most of a century.
I'm not totally clear on the details, because this is one of the favorite topics of the conspiracy nutjobs, along with the FEMA Secret Government, black helicopters, UN-run concentration camps, Y2K and the New World Order, and these people tend to GET VERY WORKED UP about it and USE LOTS OF SCARE-CAPITALS!! So it's hard to dig the actual facts out of the noise.
If I remember correctly, the way it works is, Lincoln created the War Powers Act (or maybe the Trading With The Enemy Act?) to declare martial law and wage war against the South. At the end of the civil war, it was terminated, but FDR invoked it again during the depression, in order to, I think, nationalize the banking system? Something like that, I think it had something to do with seizing control of privately owned banks and creating the Federal Reserve. So then it turns out that the act was never officially suspended, which means that every action of the President since 1933 is technically approved, by default, without any checks and balances from the other two branches, and the Constitution is, technically, suspended.
Of course, this situation has only rarely been taken advantage of -- as far as one can usually tell, the Constitution is still obeyed. It has been taken advantage of a few times, though, I think by Nixon and Clinton when running some private war or another, but I don't remember the details there. (Only Congress has the power to declare war, but presidents have a habit of going to war without asking We The People first.) I'm not sure where the Japanese-American internment camps fit in to the picture, but they might also have been possible because of this same act.
A Freedom Forum 1997 poll finds that: "When read the text of the First Amendment, 93% percent of respondents said they would ratify it" but "47% of those surveyed disagree with the idea that musicians should be allowed to sing songs with words that others find offensive", "29% think newspapers should not be allowed to criticize political candidates", and "75% would not allow people to utter words that might be offensive to racial groups."
There seem to be conflicting stories about how hard/easy it is to move your domains away from NSI, so slashdot.org should try to transfer to a new registrar and tell us how it went.
This will have a few cool effects:
If everything goes smoothly for a high profile, valuable domain (without them having to release their lawyers!) then that's good news;
If things go badly, NSI will get lots of bad press;
If things go really badly, and slashdot loses their domain name as a result, NSI will be in the middle of a serious shitstorm: they'd have to answer a lot of questions about their screwed up practices to major news media, and it might actually result in them changing.
Failing that, how about someone collect a summary of peoples' experiences trying to change registrars?
If I believed it would work, I'd change all of my domains away from NSI, but I don't want to risk losing any of them, so I'm not gonna be the guinea pig...
I'd like to use a DVD-sized device for backups, but I'm having a hard time tracking down information about using DVD-RAM and/or DVD-R under Linux at all...
Which DVD-RAM and DVD-R drives work with Linux?
I've heard a rumor that discs written by DVD-RAM drives tend to be wedded to the drive that wrote them, and can't be read on other drives. Is that true?
If I don't need to re-write the discs, but just want static backups at around 4G capacity, what should I use, DVD-RAM or DVD-R? I would have guessed DVD-R, but it looks like DVD-RAM drives are around $600 while DVD-R drives are around $5000. What is there to recommend DVD-R over DVD-RAM?
Are these discs as reliable as CD-R discs? If I verify them immediately after writing them, then put them in a box, can I count on them still being readable in ten years?
Can DVD-R discs be read in normal DVD-ROM drives? My laptop's CDROM is really a DVD-ROM -- if I fed it a DVD-R, would it be able to read my backups, or is there a difference between video and data DVDs?
Last year, I tried several Linux-based OCR packages, and they basically didn't work at all.
I ended up using the Windows software that came with my scanner to OCR the documents, and at first glance it appeared to do a good job -- it didn't mess up too often. But then I went in and actually proofread and spell-checked its output to find all the typos it had made, and it turns out that this process was so time-consuming that it was faster for me to just type it all in by hand. Even though the OCR software only made a mistake every few lines, finding those mistakes took enough concentration that typing the whole thing took less time.
Your mileage may vary, according to how fast you can type.
A gedankenexperiment for you. Lets say that I release a machine equivalent to Star Trek's replicator, and replicate it to give to people. Eventually so many copies are replicated that virtually everyone has one.
Now the candy bar is like the music, it too can be copied without depriving the owner of the original.
How will modern law cope with such a paradigm shift?
The same way they do on Star Trek: every week, invent some new plot device that prevents things or people from being replicated or transported, since that technology would solve basically every problem you can imagine, and leave us with a society so far past the Vinge singularity that from here we can't even imagine what it would be like.
It's been relegated to a sad life as a desktop machine, because any time I try to do anything even remotely laptop-like with it, such as:
unsuspend and have PCMCIA still work;
switch from eth0 to ppp0 and back again;
talk to devices in the docking station;
switch hot-swap devices;
do sound;
...it basically loses its mind.
I did get sound working eventually, but not well enough to run Quake. And I was never able to get VMware to talk to the serial port or network for some unknown reason.
So does the fact that IBM is going to ship Linux on these laptops mean they're going to actually make the features of these laptops work?
Another problem with Thinkpads is that their BIOS is secret and weird, and the only way to manipulate most of it is via a Windows configurator program: so you can't delete Windows; it is your BIOS. I guess they'll have to solve this by porting their configurator to Linux...
The damn thing also eats batteries: three times now it's gone from "100% charge" to "0% charge" overnight, while plugged in to wall current, and from that point on, the battery won't take a charge at all: it becomes a $300 paperweight. This isn't some battery-memory situation, it just dies all at once, not gradually.
(PS: after that glowing review, anyone want to buy my Stinkpad?)
Nowadays he doesn't hold the same opinion from what I've heard.
Huh? Linux is somewhat easier to use these days, but it's still only free if your time has no value. Which is to say that it's not free at all. That hasn't changed, and won't. You can spend your time playing sysadmin, or you can hire someone to do it for you. If you do it yourself, you ain't getting those hours back!
And anyone who says you don't need to be (or have) a qualified sysadmin to use Linux is, in a nutshell, wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
They are not.
Icecast streaming video is still a fantasy. Last time I checked, they haven't even started.
Who cares if the QuickTime server runs on Linux? You still can't watch any modern Quicktime movies on Linux because there is no player. It's the players that matter.
It's really irritating to hear the ``me too'' crew keep claiming that there is Linux support for QuickTime. There is none that matters.
It is unfortunately the case that RealVideo is the only cross-platform video format that is deployable today. It is unfortunate both because both QuickTime and Windows Media have dramatically better video quality, and also because Real's pricing model is extortionate.
You can get a crippled demo version of the encoder and server for cheap/free, but here's what the licensing prices for RealServer Pro look like, if you're actually using it:
200 viewers: $12,000
400 viewers: $22,000
1000 viewers: $40,000
2000 viewers: $80,000
And that's for a single version of the server, with no future upgrades or support. If you want upgrades and support, add 40%.
So the difference between a ``demo'' and a ``screensaver'' is that the former makes noise and the latter doesn't?
That's nonsense. There is no difference: they are both eye candy. Show me a ``demo'' and I'll show you a program I want to use as a screen saver.
Shamelessly lifted from BAWUG 's links page, where there is lots of information about wireless hardware and software:
xscreensaver wants you!
Referring to glorified travelling salesmen as ``road warriors'' is an insult to gun-toting nomadic mercenaries everywhere.
Have you ever worn leather pants?
...send... more... paramedics...
So run Lynx, or Netscape 1.0.
Seriously, I don't understand (and never have) why people who say things like this have any interest in the Mozilla project at all (even enough interest to bitch about it.)
You already have browsers that are ``just browsers'' and don't work on those evil sites that use Java and JavaScript and Flash and all those other modern inventions. What are you asking for that you don't already have in a dozen different forms?
Most people want browsers that are capable of displaying bleeding-edge web sites. If you don't, then you don't need Mozilla at all. That's not what Mozilla is for. So why complain?
I am so fucking sick of hearing about fetchmail!
It's tiny and nobody cares! It's not an example of anything!
Any time anyone mentions fetchmail, I know to stop listening to them, because they're just taking ESR at uncritical face value again.
Earth is by David Brin , not Gerrold, and yes, it's an excellent book. A lot of the ideas in it were fleshed out into Brin's article and later book called The Transparent Society .
I used to be a card-carrying cypherpunk, but The Transparent Society convinced me that the crypto will never work, and that privacy cannot continue to exist. And that that's really not as bad as it sounds.
I agree with others who have said that all this whining about CDDB is pointless, since FreeDB exists, and has a huge amount of data in it already.
However, FreeDB very much needs help. There are a number of bugs and horrible misfeatures in it, and the main developer seems to have close to zero time to work on it. Pretty much any time I've found a problem, his response has been, ``yeah, too bad I don't have any time.''
Not that there's anything wrong with that: he's doing a big service to all of us by keeping it running at all. But, if any of you do have the time and ability, it seems to me that FreeDB desperately needs a co-developer.
I went to the last BattleBots show in San Francisco, and man, it sucked!
Each match was 2-3 minutes and there was at least 10 minutes of nothing between them. We didn't even get an idiot presenter, or music!
I really expected it to be better than SRL, but it wasn't. SRL's problem is a complete lack of pacing, and I thought that with the directed goal of a competition, that would give BattleBots the pacing that SRL so desperately needs. But they totally blew it by having so much dead air!
And how many times can you watch one triangular wedge bump into another triangular wedge? I was particularly impressed at how badly they pilotted their vehicles: you'd think they'd spend some time learning to drive RC vehicles first, wouldn't you? I guess they spent all their time building them and none driving them... It appeared that each match was won by accident, not by the skill involved in either driving or construction.
I'd watch it on TV, but I'm sure that whatever else is on at that time will be better.
SomethingAwful.com has a review of the TV version of a recent Robot Wars. It sounds differently awful, but very similarly awful in many ways.
And yet, with only a few exceptions, anime has far more uniform and uncreative character design than any western animations this side of Hannah Barbara.
Why is that?
I like some anime, but why is it all so stylistcally uniform?
Compare Ren and Stimpy with The Simpsons with, oh, I don't know, pick one -- Angry Beavers? Western cartoons are stylistically all over the map, and most anime looks like it was all drawn by the same guy.
Its not a bad style, but where's the variety?
See, this is why I have a hard time getting in to anime. I've seen a lot of it, and there are quite a few titles that I love, but the ones that seem to get most highly recommended are, well, crap.
Of your list:
Haven't seen this one yet.This gets consistently high ratings, but from the one episode I saw, it's just another fucking soap opera. And worse, it's a soap opera with interminable 80s-top-40-style music, not just as background noise, but central to the story!
Haven't seen this one, but I must say, when the description says ``high school girl'' and ``mecha'' I think, wait, haven't I seen this about 50 times already?
The main character's an uninteresting asshole, and the animation is only slightly better than Speed Racer. Yawn.
I saw one episode of this series, and it was yet another soap opera about the ``new guy'' and how embarrassed he was to be working at the factory, or something like that. About half way through, there was an evil industrialist, and some robots punched each other. The animation seriously failed to impress (lots of cheap tricks like ten seconds of a still frame that looked like it was moving because of the zipping lines on the background.)
Haven't seen it.
AAAUUGGHH! MAKE IT STOP! I think I already used the word ``interminable'' in this post, but I have to use it again here, even though that word doesn't even come close to describing how insanely boring this was! To put it in D&D terms, I think they got about five rounds into the game by episode four! If this was based on an actual game, I can't imagine how the actual game could have taken as long to go somewhere as the cartoon did! And again, shit animation with lots of cheating on the action sequences.
One of the best things I've ever seen, any genre. I absolutely loved this one. The animation was great, the sound design was incredibly cool and well integrated, and though it was a little slow paced, the mysteries were played out well, and I actually cared about finding out what was going on. Lain is absolutely brilliant.
And in that respect, pretty completely unlike just about all other highly-ranked anime.
Some adolescent boy fantasy about getting chased around by alternately dominating and submissive girls. YAWN. This one actually made my skin crawl.
Other ones that I like:
So how do I find anime that's more like Ghost in the Shell, and less like this saccharine soap opera 12-year-old-boy domination fantasy panty sniffing crap?
I want good science fiction movies, not ``Days of Our Lives'' set in Neo-Tokyo. The fact that it's animated does not magically make it watchable.
``Anime is popular because we all feel like outsiders!''
The ``humor of embarrassment'' style has been around forever, and that's all this ``oh no, I don't fit in'' stuff is. In the 30s it was called ``screwball comedy'' and usually came to a climax with everyone accidentially bumbling into the same room in the last scene and all the intertwined secrets being revealed.
I like anime (and screwball comedies, for that matter: Preston Sturges is great, especially Sullivan's Travels and The Palm Beach Story) but claiming that there's something new here is just so much academic over-intellectualized bullshit.
This is just another attempt to pick some random piece of media and say, ``See! See! This supports the theories I already hold about my specialness!''
I hate that shit.
I guess that's when they said ``oh, fuck it.''
That was a great bit!
I'm also reminded of the bit from Fight Club where the airport guy explains the situation when luggage is found to be vibrating: ``Nine times out of ten, it's an alarm clock. But sometimes... It's a dildo. We never imply ownership, though: it's always... the dildo, never... your... dildo.''
`` But I...''
``That's allright sir.''
Streaming an MP3 file out of a CGI works fine, but if you're concerned about bandwidth, you should be sure to rate-limit it: don't send the data much faster than the bitrate of the file.
The War Powers Act is already in effect: the US has been in a State of Emergency for most of a century.
I'm not totally clear on the details, because this is one of the favorite topics of the conspiracy nutjobs, along with the FEMA Secret Government, black helicopters, UN-run concentration camps, Y2K and the New World Order, and these people tend to GET VERY WORKED UP about it and USE LOTS OF SCARE-CAPITALS!! So it's hard to dig the actual facts out of the noise.
If I remember correctly, the way it works is, Lincoln created the War Powers Act (or maybe the Trading With The Enemy Act?) to declare martial law and wage war against the South. At the end of the civil war, it was terminated, but FDR invoked it again during the depression, in order to, I think, nationalize the banking system? Something like that, I think it had something to do with seizing control of privately owned banks and creating the Federal Reserve. So then it turns out that the act was never officially suspended, which means that every action of the President since 1933 is technically approved, by default, without any checks and balances from the other two branches, and the Constitution is, technically, suspended.
Of course, this situation has only rarely been taken advantage of -- as far as one can usually tell, the Constitution is still obeyed. It has been taken advantage of a few times, though, I think by Nixon and Clinton when running some private war or another, but I don't remember the details there. (Only Congress has the power to declare war, but presidents have a habit of going to war without asking We The People first.) I'm not sure where the Japanese-American internment camps fit in to the picture, but they might also have been possible because of this same act.
This one is somewhat less shrill that most, but it's very long and hard to follow: http://www.afcomm.com/afc/report.html
The Constitution of the United States isn't perfect, but it's a lot better than what we have today.
----------------------------
Oh by the way: http://www.freedomforum.org/newsstand/reports/sofa /foreword.asp
I hate it here.
This will have a few cool effects:
Failing that, how about someone collect a summary of peoples' experiences trying to change registrars?
If I believed it would work, I'd change all of my domains away from NSI, but I don't want to risk losing any of them, so I'm not gonna be the guinea pig...
I'd like to use a DVD-sized device for backups, but I'm having a hard time tracking down information about using DVD-RAM and/or DVD-R under Linux at all...
Which DVD-RAM and DVD-R drives work with Linux?
I've heard a rumor that discs written by DVD-RAM drives tend to be wedded to the drive that wrote them, and can't be read on other drives. Is that true?
If I don't need to re-write the discs, but just want static backups at around 4G capacity, what should I use, DVD-RAM or DVD-R? I would have guessed DVD-R, but it looks like DVD-RAM drives are around $600 while DVD-R drives are around $5000. What is there to recommend DVD-R over DVD-RAM?
Are these discs as reliable as CD-R discs? If I verify them immediately after writing them, then put them in a box, can I count on them still being readable in ten years?
Can DVD-R discs be read in normal DVD-ROM drives? My laptop's CDROM is really a DVD-ROM -- if I fed it a DVD-R, would it be able to read my backups, or is there a difference between video and data DVDs?
Last year, I tried several Linux-based OCR packages, and they basically didn't work at all.
I ended up using the Windows software that came with my scanner to OCR the documents, and at first glance it appeared to do a good job -- it didn't mess up too often. But then I went in and actually proofread and spell-checked its output to find all the typos it had made, and it turns out that this process was so time-consuming that it was faster for me to just type it all in by hand. Even though the OCR software only made a mistake every few lines, finding those mistakes took enough concentration that typing the whole thing took less time.
Your mileage may vary, according to how fast you can type.
The same way they do on Star Trek: every week, invent some new plot device that prevents things or people from being replicated or transported, since that technology would solve basically every problem you can imagine, and leave us with a society so far past the Vinge singularity that from here we can't even imagine what it would be like.
I have a Thinkpad 770ED, and man, it sucks.
It's been relegated to a sad life as a desktop machine, because any time I try to do anything even remotely laptop-like with it, such as:
I did get sound working eventually, but not well enough to run Quake. And I was never able to get VMware to talk to the serial port or network for some unknown reason.
So does the fact that IBM is going to ship Linux on these laptops mean they're going to actually make the features of these laptops work?
Another problem with Thinkpads is that their BIOS is secret and weird, and the only way to manipulate most of it is via a Windows configurator program: so you can't delete Windows; it is your BIOS. I guess they'll have to solve this by porting their configurator to Linux...
The damn thing also eats batteries: three times now it's gone from "100% charge" to "0% charge" overnight, while plugged in to wall current, and from that point on, the battery won't take a charge at all: it becomes a $300 paperweight. This isn't some battery-memory situation, it just dies all at once, not gradually.
(PS: after that glowing review, anyone want to buy my Stinkpad?)
Huh? Linux is somewhat easier to use these days, but it's still only free if your time has no value. Which is to say that it's not free at all. That hasn't changed, and won't. You can spend your time playing sysadmin, or you can hire someone to do it for you. If you do it yourself, you ain't getting those hours back!
And anyone who says you don't need to be (or have) a qualified sysadmin to use Linux is, in a nutshell, wrong.