Re:The above comment missed the point
on
Hacker Crackdown?
·
· Score: 2
>A soldier has a duty to disobey an illegal order.
Y'know, I've met so many people that were in the
US Army, and I've decided that it's so big, it has more than one culture.
There are soldiers who were trained and believe as you do, that they learn to question stupid orders.
Then there are soldiers who would do no such thing, that any order would be followed. It would have to be a very immoral thing to rise to the level of being questioned.
The US Army is so large that it's not one organization, I suppose.
> made my father a John Denver CD from Napstered
> mp3s in a spate of feeling guilty about breaking > his old turntable. He is really glad to have the
> music back
I take this to mean that he owns the records
of everything you've put on the CD.
What people don't seem to understand, and one
of the main points about the whole debate is
that it's LEGAL for him to have and use this CD
made from the MP3's of the songs he has a right
to use because he OWNS THE RECORDS. The royalties
were paid, and he's exercising his explicitly granted right to fair use by listening to the CD
you made.
"Perhaps sites like OLGA and lyrics.ch should have readily availabe.zips of their entire archive, and links to several mirrors."
They did have all that, and that's why there are so many mirrors today.
The tragedy is that there's no good way to CONTRIBUTE to this archive. Time was, you just submitted your updates to nevada, now you can't do that. The archive has not been maintained in several years, and many of the mirrors are from after many files were deleted ("compliance").
Do we remember Philo T. Farnsworth, the man who invented Television (Patent No. 1,773,980)
NO!
The credit goes to John Logie Baird, presumably because he was more charismatic in his presentation!
Farnsworth died in 1971, hardly recognized for his contribution to Television, or fusion research. It's tragic to me. Did you know Farnsworth even had prototypes of COLOR TV in the late 20's? How long did it take to catch up with that? That's a good decade before color film even!
Do we remember Nathan Stubblefield as the inventor of radio? NO! Even though he demonstarted a wireless telephone in 1885! He demonstrated it to large groups in 1892, and people were impressed. Bear in mind, Marconi was 17 in 1892...
In 1902, Stubblefield even demonstrated ship-to-shore voice radio. He died in 1928, broke, and obscure.
Granted, Marconi's contributions to broadcasting went far beyond the proof-of-concept type of work that Stubblefield did, but...
Stubblefield and Farnsworth were hackers. Marconi and Baird seem to have had much more "suit appeal."
Examples abound in the history of technology.
Look at Tesla and Edison. Theremin and Moog. Jobs and Gates.
"Bah! When the Harry Fox Agency shut down OLGA, nobody cared. "
I cared. Was that 1995? I *still* haven't purchased an EMI product since then, and I dramatically curtailed my CD buying after that, in general. I have stood my ground on the boycott. To me, it seemed unprecedented. An attorney representing a group of people in Great Britain made an order to an American university to shut down one of its libraries, and the university COMPLIED! That incident seems to have marked the beginning of a chain of events which has brought us exactly here.
I continue my boycott of EMI, and strive to avoid buying any label represented by the RIAA, at least "new", but this is obviously quite difficult.
Since 1995, I've also cut broadcast and cable Television out of my life completely, and I think I've seen maybe 5 films in theatrical release during that time.
Call me a luddite, but please realize, all this was a MAJOR change, and I was driven to do it by the garish commercialism of all the media (bundled with low quality), plus all the civil liberties being eroded by these legal actions of the multinational corporate meanies.
"These lawsuits just lose money for everyone in legal fees."
Not everyone.... Those legal fees go from one person's hand to another's.
When I started college in 1982, the counselors bluntly discouraged "computer science" degree programs, and recommended Biz Adm and Finance. If you insisted that you knew better than they, you would be steered toward "Business Computer Information Systems" which was a lot of (guess what?) Bus. adm and finance, with some programming and mainframe administration (Pascal on Apple II's, which was actually the most fun I ever had in a programming class I must admit), then two semesters of Cobol (in those days, we still punched our jobs on cards, and took them to be neglected by grad student high-holies!), a VAX clone running "MUSIC" (McGill University System for Interactive Computing)... But I do ramble with my nostalgia, sorry.
My point is, a LOT of people went into business law in those days. These people are lawyers at the peak of what they thought was a lucrative career, until they saw (or perceive!) 18 year olds making billions because they were at the right time in the right place with the knowhow and drive to make the technology sector really happen. So now, they're getting a piece of the pie. Get it?
We are probably creating a new generation of hackers who will be able to look at object code and understand it. Perhaps source code and object code won't have such an absolute division then.
What do these electric cars do for HEAT? Heat on a gas or diesel vehicle is derived as a by-product of the cooling system, or, as in the case of air-cooled cars (vw, porsche), from heat exchangers warmed by the exhaust manifold.
If you have to use some of your electricity for heat, that's power that you won't be using to drive. I live in a warm climate, but even in Phoenix AZ I want a heater in my car in the wintertime. Last week I was in a place that reached below 30 degrees (yes, in July), and certainly would not have wanted to be in a car without a decent heater.
Somebody in Durango Colorado in February has to deal with 20 below.
"When public transit becomes as convenient as private transit more people will use it. If I actually lived and worked IN the city I'd use it. But some people don't live in the middle of the city and there is no need for those people to pay more for the privelage of being able to travel. "
I've heard the argument that people who live in one city and work in another, or live outside the city they work in, should pay a huge tax for the privelige. Most urban centers have traffic problems that would vanish if people worked in the areas where they lived. Most suburbs do not have jobs available because we take for granted that the jobs are in the city, miles away. There could be incentives for people to work, or create jobs, in the communities where they live, instead of crossing distances and zigzagging around.
"What's the difference between asking a woman out, buying her dinner, paying for a movie, and then going to bed, vs. just handing her the cash up front and jumping directly into bed?"
The difference is that the date, dinner, movie, etc. ususally ends with a "Let's Just Be Friends" instead of "going to bed."
" Anyway one day he needed $500 for something. I think his car was going to be reposessed or was rent or something. I forget. He had $200.
What did he do? He got impulsive and figured his only way out was to use all $200 and buy scratch tickets....in hopes of winning the $500 that he needed. "
" Remember when many albums had a gimmick... like that Stones Sticky Fingers album. "
Ah, the record cover that DESTROYED more other records than any other!
How about the Cheech & Chong record with the big rolling paper?
Remember Gentle Giant's "Giant for a Day" with the mask?
Led Zeppelin III with the window scenes, or the original cover of Rolling Stones' Some Girls?
There was a Grand Funk Railroad shaped like a coin.
How about the stickers that came in every copy of Dark Side of the Moon?
It is still true that the cover art is a bigger part of the production budget than the CD creation (for many releases), but it was even more so back in the day of album cover art.
" A lot of banks will accept checks written on the back of an envelope with magic marker, even, as long as all the requisite information is there. "
They *will* accept such checks, but they usually charge a fee equal to the fee for a returned check.
Re:Horse Buggies, Inc. vs. Ford Motor Co.
on
Napster Wars
·
· Score: 2
"You'll have a hard time finding a record store that carries used CDs and major label new releases, because if the store is found out, the label will stop distributing new CDs to them or refuse to allow them to advertise they have those new releases in stock. "
That would be clear prior restraint of speech and no court would uphold any such "refusal."
What you mispelleed here is the label will not contribute to coop advertising, leaving the independent record store to fend for its entire advertising budget (while the mainstream record store gets advertising money -- which is where a substantial portion of what "the label gets."
I'd be willing to bet 10% of the label revenue goes to advertising.
And they don't want any competition. Notice that phone in the seat back in front of you on the 737? The one you can swipe your card through? Even if cellular phones did work on an in-flight aircraft, they would not want you using them.
Somebody commented that "it would be nice" if you could use your phone while waiting to take off. I often make a call from the plane while it's still on the ground. They don't tell you to turn them off until they "secure the cabin for takeoff."
I'd probably become so addicted to nethack, if I could play it on a pda, that I'd never do anything else.
If you've looked at nethack and dismissed it for being too shallow or for the interface being too simple, look closer... I know there are roguelike games for the palm, etc., but nothing as intense as nethack, or even close.
Well, consider the average ad server is getting hit WAY more than your site, and that there is the aggregate of the latency between the client and the adserver, plus between the client and your server. If the ad were a static, cached element that came from the same point as your site, it would not be a problem. It's probably not the ad itself (what, a 20K jpg or a 80k animated gif?) but the latency of the separate request and dns lookup that you forced your client to make for the privilege. Not only that, but the ad is probably the FIRST element that the browser must resolve before it can display the rest of your site (the content!) And worse, if it's earlier in a frameset, or even worse, part of a table, then you get things like the client not able to display your page at all.
Since the ad people think the weblogs indicate something useful, they'd probably rather shove bamboo under their fingernails than use any sort of caching or asynchronous logging.
There may be a place for low quality foo's, but I've never been very impressed with VTech toys or phones.
I had one of their cordless phones; worst I've ever had. I must admit that I saw one of their toys hold the attention of a 5 year old for some time -- it was this robot thing that had functions based on punch cards. But, aside from the speech synthesizer, it was nothing innovative (I had toys based on the same principle in the late 1960's).
I'm not bitching about vtech, but I do sincerely hope that the PDA follows a different design from the toy laptops and has much higher quality than the phones.
Re:Your penis can be controlled by your frontal lo
on
The Leased Life?
·
· Score: 2
You really are a babe in the woods, aren't you?
Take a hypothetical situation:
A woman and a man are in a relationship. Woman uses birth control. Birth control method is not 100% effective. Woman gets pregnant. Wants to keep the child. Does not want to marry the man or the man does not want to marry her. (Either way).
She has the child, breaks off the relationship with the man.
Man gets sued for child support, loses big, and gets labelled as a deadbeat dad, gets to pay, and never sees his child once.
It happens. You might be shocked at how often it happens, how expensive it can be for the man, and how universally frowned upon any dissent to this situation is.
You *NEVER* hear of the man getting to keep the child and receive support payments from the woman. *EVER*.
Slashdot Mirror
>A soldier has a duty to disobey an illegal order.
Y'know, I've met so many people that were in the
US Army, and I've decided that it's so big, it has more than one culture.
There are soldiers who were trained and believe as you do, that they learn to question stupid orders.
Then there are soldiers who would do no such thing, that any order would be followed. It would have to be a very immoral thing to rise to the level of being questioned.
The US Army is so large that it's not one organization, I suppose.
> made my father a John Denver CD from Napstered
> mp3s in a spate of feeling guilty about breaking > his old turntable. He is really glad to have the
> music back
I take this to mean that he owns the records
of everything you've put on the CD.
What people don't seem to understand, and one
of the main points about the whole debate is
that it's LEGAL for him to have and use this CD
made from the MP3's of the songs he has a right
to use because he OWNS THE RECORDS. The royalties
were paid, and he's exercising his explicitly granted right to fair use by listening to the CD
you made.
I'm certainly going to want an aftermarket mouse
when I get my G4 and start running X on it.
"Perhaps sites like OLGA and lyrics.ch should have readily availabe
and links to several mirrors."
They did have all that, and that's why there are
so many mirrors today.
The tragedy is that there's no good way to CONTRIBUTE to this archive. Time was, you just submitted your updates to nevada, now you can't do that. The archive has not been maintained in several years, and many of the mirrors are from after many files were deleted ("compliance").
Do we remember Philo T. Farnsworth, the man who invented Television (Patent No. 1,773,980)
NO!
The credit goes to John Logie Baird, presumably because he was more charismatic in his presentation!
Farnsworth died in 1971, hardly recognized for his contribution to Television, or fusion research.
It's tragic to me. Did you know Farnsworth even
had prototypes of COLOR TV in the late 20's? How
long did it take to catch up with that? That's a good decade before color film even!
Do we remember Nathan Stubblefield as the inventor of radio? NO! Even though he demonstarted a wireless telephone in 1885! He demonstrated it to
large groups in 1892, and people were impressed.
Bear in mind, Marconi was 17 in 1892...
In 1902, Stubblefield even demonstrated ship-to-shore voice radio.
He died in 1928, broke, and obscure.
Granted, Marconi's contributions to broadcasting went far beyond the proof-of-concept type of work
that Stubblefield did, but...
Stubblefield and Farnsworth were hackers.
Marconi and Baird seem to have had much more
"suit appeal."
Examples abound in the history of technology.
Look at Tesla and Edison. Theremin and Moog.
Jobs and Gates.
"Bah! When the Harry Fox Agency shut down OLGA, nobody cared. "
I cared. Was that 1995? I *still* haven't purchased an EMI product since then, and I dramatically curtailed my CD buying after that, in general. I have stood my ground on the boycott. To me, it seemed unprecedented. An attorney representing a group of people in Great Britain made an order to an American university to shut down one of its libraries, and the university COMPLIED! That incident seems to have marked the beginning of a chain of events which has brought us exactly here.
I continue my boycott of EMI, and strive to avoid buying any label represented by the RIAA, at least "new", but this is obviously quite difficult.
Since 1995, I've also cut broadcast and cable Television out of my life completely, and I think I've seen maybe 5 films in theatrical release during that time.
Call me a luddite, but please realize, all this was a MAJOR change, and I was driven to do it by the garish commercialism of all the media (bundled with low quality), plus all the civil liberties being eroded by these legal actions of the multinational corporate meanies.
"These lawsuits just lose money for everyone in legal fees."
Not everyone.... Those legal fees go from one person's hand to another's.
When I started college in 1982, the counselors bluntly discouraged "computer science" degree programs, and recommended Biz Adm and Finance.
If you insisted that you knew better than they,
you would be steered toward "Business Computer Information Systems" which was a lot of (guess what?) Bus. adm and finance, with some programming and mainframe administration (Pascal on Apple II's, which was actually the most fun I ever had in a programming class I must admit), then two semesters of Cobol (in those days, we still punched our jobs on cards, and took them to be neglected by grad student high-holies!), a VAX clone running "MUSIC" (McGill University System for Interactive Computing)... But I do ramble with my nostalgia, sorry.
My point is, a LOT of people went into business law in those days. These people are lawyers at the peak of what they thought was a lucrative career, until they saw (or perceive!) 18 year olds making billions because they were at the right time in the right place with the knowhow and drive to make the technology sector really happen. So now, they're getting a piece of the pie. Get it?
We are probably creating a new generation of hackers who will be able to look at object code and understand it. Perhaps source code and object code won't have such an absolute division then.
What do these electric cars do for HEAT?
Heat on a gas or diesel vehicle is derived
as a by-product of the cooling system, or,
as in the case of air-cooled cars (vw, porsche),
from heat exchangers warmed by the exhaust manifold.
If you have to use some of your electricity for heat, that's power that you won't be using to drive. I live in a warm climate, but even in Phoenix AZ I want a heater in my car in the wintertime. Last week I was in a place that reached below 30 degrees (yes, in July), and certainly would not have wanted to be in a car without a decent heater.
Somebody in Durango Colorado in February has to deal with 20 below.
"When public transit becomes as convenient as private transit more people will use it.
If I actually lived and worked IN the city I'd use it. But some people don't live in the middle of the city and there is no
need for those people to pay more for the privelage of being able to travel. "
I've heard the argument that people who live in one city and work in another, or live outside the city they work in, should pay a huge tax for the privelige. Most urban centers have traffic problems that would vanish if people worked in the areas where they lived. Most suburbs do not have jobs available because we take for granted that the jobs are in the city, miles away. There could be incentives for people to work, or create jobs, in the communities where they live, instead of crossing distances and zigzagging around.
"I wonder how much more would be left of the great library at Alexandrea hadn't been the worlds greatest book burning
party."
I'm betting that the whole contents of that library would fit on a CD-ROM.
"What's the difference between asking a woman out, buying her dinner, paying for a movie, and then going to bed, vs.
just handing her the cash up front and jumping directly into bed?"
The difference is that the date, dinner, movie, etc. ususally ends with a "Let's Just Be Friends" instead of "going to bed."
Nice guys sleep alone...
" Anyway one day he needed $500 for something. I think his car was going to be reposessed or was rent or something. I
forget. He had $200.
What did he do? He got impulsive and figured his only way out was to use all $200 and buy scratch tickets....in hopes
of winning the $500 that he needed. "
So did he win? The suspense is killing me!
You're only saying the opposite of what you mean...
Don't worry, they couldn't care less.
I would much rather have heard about Linux
replacing Solaris on the E450's, than about the
hardware changing from Sun to IBM.
" Remember when many albums had a gimmick... like that Stones Sticky Fingers album. "
Ah, the record cover that DESTROYED more other records than any other!
How about the Cheech & Chong record with the big
rolling paper?
Remember Gentle Giant's "Giant for a Day" with the
mask?
Led Zeppelin III with the window scenes,
or the original cover of Rolling Stones' Some Girls?
There was a Grand Funk Railroad shaped like a coin.
How about the stickers that came in every copy
of Dark Side of the Moon?
It is still true that the cover art is a bigger
part of the production budget than the CD creation (for many releases), but it was even more so back
in the day of album cover art.
" A lot of banks will accept checks written on the back of an envelope with magic marker, even, as long as all the
requisite information is there. "
They *will* accept such checks, but they usually
charge a fee equal to the fee for a returned check.
"You'll have a hard time finding a record store that carries used CDs
and major label new releases, because if the store is found out, the label will stop distributing new CDs to them or refuse to allow them to
advertise they have those new releases in stock. "
That would be clear prior restraint of speech and no court would uphold any such "refusal."
What you mispelleed here is the label will not contribute to coop advertising, leaving the independent record store to fend for its entire advertising budget (while the mainstream record store gets advertising money -- which is where a
substantial portion of what "the label gets."
I'd be willing to bet 10% of the label revenue goes to advertising.
And they don't want any competition.
Notice that phone in the seat back in front of you
on the 737? The one you can swipe your card through? Even if cellular phones did work on
an in-flight aircraft, they would not want you
using them.
Somebody commented that "it would be nice" if you could use your phone while waiting to take off.
I often make a call from the plane while it's still on the ground. They don't tell you to turn them off until they "secure the cabin for takeoff."
"I for one would love to have Nethack, ADOM, Omega or such in my cell phone. I don't carry a laptop with me but
a phone goes where ever I do."
I *do* carry a laptop around, just to play nethack. (Seriously).
I'd probably become so addicted to nethack,
if I could play it on a pda, that I'd never
do anything else.
If you've looked at nethack and dismissed it for
being too shallow or for the interface being too
simple, look closer... I know there are roguelike
games for the palm, etc., but nothing as intense
as nethack, or even close.
Well, consider the average ad server is getting
hit WAY more than your site, and that there is
the aggregate of the latency between the client and the adserver, plus between the client and your server. If the ad were a static, cached element that came from the same point as your site, it would not be a problem. It's probably not the
ad itself (what, a 20K jpg or a 80k animated gif?)
but the latency of the separate request and dns lookup that you forced your client to make for the privilege. Not only that, but the ad is probably
the FIRST element that the browser must resolve before it can display the rest of your site (the content!) And worse, if it's earlier in a frameset, or even worse, part of a table, then you
get things like the client not able to display your page at all.
Since the ad people think the weblogs indicate something useful, they'd probably rather shove bamboo under their fingernails than use any sort of caching or asynchronous logging.
There may be a place for low quality foo's,
but I've never been very impressed with VTech
toys or phones.
I had one of their cordless phones; worst I've ever had. I must admit that I saw one of their toys hold the attention of a 5 year old for some
time -- it was this robot thing that had functions
based on punch cards. But, aside from the speech synthesizer, it was nothing innovative (I had toys
based on the same principle in the late 1960's).
I'm not bitching about vtech, but I do sincerely hope that the PDA follows a different design from the toy laptops and has much higher quality than the phones.
I Am Not Poor
o thing.html
http://www.theonion.com/onion3604/name_brand_cl
You really are a babe in the woods, aren't you?
Take a hypothetical situation:
A woman and a man are in a relationship.
Woman uses birth control. Birth control method
is not 100% effective. Woman gets pregnant. Wants to keep the child. Does not want to marry
the man or the man does not want to marry her.
(Either way).
She has the child, breaks off the relationship with the man.
Man gets sued for child support, loses big, and gets labelled as a deadbeat dad, gets to pay, and
never sees his child once.
It happens. You might be shocked at how often it happens, how expensive it can be for the man, and how universally frowned upon any dissent to this situation is.
You *NEVER* hear of the man getting to keep the child and receive support payments from the woman.
*EVER*.