Re:Only 7 ammendments left in the Bill of Rights
on
That Link Is Illegal
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· Score: 2
The current regime in Washington has effectively eliminated the 1st, 4th, and 10th ammendments of our constitution.
In fairness, the 10th Amendment ceased to have any real meaning when Lee surrended to Grant at Apomattox. From that point on, the 10th Amendment has mainly existed for the farcical purposes of allowing Congress to wash its hands of issues by requiring the States to pay for federal mandates out of their own tax money.
That being said, the implied point that the current regime is a front for the interests of rich white male evangelical Christian misogynists bent on the suppression of the liberties of everyone outside of their charmed anal-retentive circle, and willing to do anything, including start wars and fill extralegal internment camps to accomplish it, is right on the money.
The most the Red^H^H^HTerorrist Menace did was claim a few thousand American lives. Ashcroft and Bush, on the other hand, have eviscerated the Constitution that hundreds of thousands have died to defend. The only reason they named it the PATRIOT act is because Right Wing Fifth Column doesn't make a good acronym.
If you're looking for evil, visit the Attorney General's office.
First of all, I'd like to thank Ms. Ian -- who is always a pleasure to read -- for taking the time to do this Slashdot interview.
Secondly, I'd like to note that there are enormous numbers of excellent unsigned artists and artists on minor labels. Oodles. Scads. Shit-tons. So many, in fact, that artistic talent is really not especially scarce and therefore not all that valuable economically, which is, IMHO, why the big media companies can get away with what they do. This is not likely to change. Supply has always exceeded demand for good -- and even bad -- art.
The other thing that makes life easy for the RIAA's clients is our laziness as music consumers. The RIAA makes it very, very easy to find their artists: there are only a few of them, they are on the radio all day long, their CDs are not only in dedicated music stores but also in ordinary department stores and even the occasional gas station and drug store.
All those thousands of other excellent musicians take work to find. You may have to actually get off your duff and go to local clubs, familiarize yourself with minor label catalogues and indepedent record dealers, troll mailing lists and the web, and so on. They're not actually all that hard to find, but you do have to work at it. And while we can hope that the current IP-rights struggle will ameliorate the situation somewhat, the economic reasons cited above suggest that the ratio of a few big name performers to tens of thousands of good-but-unknown performers will probably never change much.
So, yes, definitely, let's write our congressmen to make sure that folks like Ms. Ian get their fair cut, but let's also realize that supporting a rich and diverse musical environment requires our active participation as fans.
I wonder how long it will be before Amazon patents "a method of using a gullible technical books publisher to generate free press". Will Tim O'Reilly be "working with" Amazon to "resolve" this issue this time?
It was a technique for making types easy to identify in a language (C) that doesn't have any native way of indicating type.
Actually, C does have a way of identifying types and most compliant compilers will insist on it. The language feature in question is called a declaration.
As noted elsewhere, one of the advantages of the method is that if you change the type of a variable, you don't have to search through your source code to change variable names. In all fairness, you can shuffle the semantics into several different potential locations, all of which have advantages and drawbacks of their own.
I still find many of the current arguments about the construction of the pyramids to be unconvincing. At a minimum the timing still seems wrong. The other pyramids in the country seem to be proof. They have the step pyramids and then they have the pyramids at Dashour. The strange upsurge of amazingly well architected and built pyramids in the middle of a dynasty only to relapse into horrible pyramid building less then a few centuries later. And most of all without any evidence of civil unrest, war, or other catastrophe to explain the sudden loss of technology.
First of all, the transition from mastaba to step pyramid to true pyramid is a logical and simple one. The only trick is figuring out how to distribute massive loads, and in fact, the "bent" pyramid at Dashur and the contemporaneous pyramid that collapsed from being built at an excessively steep angle while Dashur was being built remain as records of the trial-and-error of the Egyptian architects. Pyramids are not skyscrapers; they are among the simplest structures to build if you have enough grunt labor, something that Egypt, as the most populous country in the region, always had plenty of.
Secondly, the general collapse at the end of the Old Kingdom was paralleled by collapses throughout the region, and is generally attributed to a prolonged drought. There has been some evidence in recent years that the drought may have been caused by a significant impact event on the Arabian peninsula. Moreover, there is considerable, well-documented evidence of widespread civil unrest and struggles for succession during the First Intermediate Period.
Finally, Hawass is quite correct that the "gang graffiti" inside the topmost chamber above the so-called King's Chamber is the only writing inside a chamber of the pyramid, but similar markings have been found on many of the blocks which have fallen from or have been intentionally removed from the pyramids.
Now mind you, I'm right there with you when it comes to questioning some of the conjectures of professional Egyptologists (as, for that matter, are many reputable dissenting Egyptologists -- which is the nature of scientific discourse, after all), but the "pyramidiots" as a class tend to be very poorly educated about modern Egyptology, apparently getting most of their information from cheap reprints of 19th century works. The most common misconception the pyramidiots promote is that Egyptian technology appeared full-fledged out of nothing, hinting at some earlier foreign (or even Atlantean) influences. Unfortunately, the truth is that the late Ice Age Nile was a much more volatile and intermittent river, frequently changing its course, and much early evidence has been scattered widely and buried deeply. However, in recent years, much interesting work has been done in uncovering older material, and that has gone a long way towards filling in the mysterious blank spaces in our understanding of ancient Egypt. Bear in mind that the one of the oldest, if not the oldest, burials of an anatomically modern human being was found in Egypt and dated to fifty thousand years before present. Egypt had a lot longer to develop than the sparse survival of fragile human artifacts would at first seem to suggest.
Zahi Hawass is indeed a bit of an egomaniac, but he is also quite intelligent and sincere, and he has been known to change his mind from time to time. In contrast, John Anthony West, one of the more prominent pyramidiots, is still hawking his theory that the vaguely pi-shaped Egyptian door design was intended to represent 3.1415... despite the fact that neither the Greeks nor the Egyptians used the Greek letter pi to represent that ratio -- Leonhard Euler was the first to use that symbol in the 19th century.
I'm no music reviewer, but it seems to me if I were to review a new album, I would want to listen to the CD on the best stereo I have access to, not a little crappy discman with $5 headphones.
That may be why they have reserved this tactic for Pearl Jam and Tori Amos. You can get GG Allin albums on 44kHz digital CDs, too, but I don't think anyone's looking for the little "DDD" designation on them.
I used to take a more moderate position on copyright, but the entertainment industry has changed my mind. I look at it this way:
Option #1: Retain copyright. Result: vital political liberties are demolished to control the flow of information for the benefit a few massive corporations. 99% of artists work day jobs.
Option #2: Abolish copyright. Result: political liberties survive and massive corporations continue to be massive corporations. 99% of artists work day jobs.
The common themes are rich corporate pigs and starving artists, and the only variable is political liberty. Seems like a no-brainer to me.
Well, of course. "A single strand of hair" represents the extreme low end of the general public's scale of measurements, with the previously mentioned Standard Texas Unit as the high end. Now, the question of how many strands of hair it takes to be the size of Texas remains unresolved...
Hmm... I learned C, C++, Perl, and PHP in that order. (Actually, before that, I learned BASIC, FORTRAN, RPG, and COBOL, but I don't like to think about that.)
My first impression on learning Perl was wondering why the heck Larry hadn't bothered to learn how to use lex, yacc, and maintain a proper symbol table. Then, of course, I realized Larry does know all that and had reasons of his own. But I still disagree with them.
When I learned PHP, I thought it was wonderful to A) only have one generic variable 'sigil', and B) to have real multidimensional arrays that didn't require Perl's horrid reference syntax. (I know they're not really multidimensional arrays behind the curtain in either language, but that's beside the point.)
For the record, I think Perl is a much more powerful language than PHP, but that PHP makes building web interfaces (usually to Perl and C backends in my case) than mod_perl or (God help me) Mason.
In the end, I still wish Larry would reconsider the type sigils on the grounds that they violated the TMTOWTDI principle and force the programmer into what may be, for any given developer or development team, a suboptimal notational system. It's as if Microsoft's Hungarian Notation were enforced by the compiler. Thanks, but if I need to include type information in my variable names, I'll put it there myself.
Those wishing to dig into Intel assembly language without shelling out seventy-some-odd bucks can download the PDF version of The Art of Assembly Language . IMHO, it's pretty good, and weighs in at about 1200 pages -- there's more there than you'll probably ever use. I no longer recall if there's a complete guide to the Intel instruction set in the book, but you can, unsurprisingly, get that from Intel's site.
Re:Cranky, but not entirely off...
on
Mr Anti-Google
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· Score: 2
Good work! Tell me his name and address, and we'll send that info over to the feds right away.
Frankly, I was less worried about the feds than I was about having "targeted" advertising shoved in my face as soon as Google has a bad quarter and decides to start selling popup ads. I don't think the feds care much about my ongoing struggle to find a usable registration key for UltraEdit, but being bombarded by Flash-animated UltraEdit popup ads would border on cruelty.
Red Hat still was contacted by Thomson to remove mp3 players from their "product" (Red Hat Linux) since it is sold. So while the terms may not have changed, kiss mp3 players in your distros goodbye.
Holy shit! You mean I'll have to learn how to download one separately? Horrors!
Cranky, but not entirely off...
on
Mr Anti-Google
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· Score: 4, Funny
Brandt sounds like a whiny crank who is rather missing the point. OTOH, he is correct that Google applies a persistent tracking ID via cookies, which I had not previously noticed, and about which I'm not terribly happy. And no, I don't think Google has any sinister motives, and I wouldn't be surprised if they use the tracking ID in some way to enhance the effectiveness of their engine --- but having my searches tracked in any way still makes me uncomfortable. I'd like to hear why it is being done.
In the meantime, anyone who would like to cover their tracks can use my cookie:
Of course, if it turns out that Google is planning to give a prize to the most active user, or they have some kind of search engine green stamps, you're screwed.;)
These people are NOT having their rights infringed on... If these peoples' civil rights are infringed upon... pulling them over unnecessarily... or taking them into jail without cause... If the cops checked what these individuals were doing... there's a reason why these people are in this database... Maybe they were in the wrong place... when they were picked up.
It's pretty obvious where you're coming from, but the problem with your deeply ingrained mental problem is that in a civil democracy with equal justice under the law, there is no "them", there is only us.
.and to anyone with that "Those who give up a little liberty to get safety..." line in your sig, remember NO LIBERTIES have been sacrificed here
Not by you, according to your theory, just by them. Screw them. Let's put all of them in jail. After all, "the majority were probably in the process of or about to commit crimes". No doubt you have hard statistical evidence to support this alarming contention that will overcome our horror at considering that none of them were convicted or even charged with a crime.
With geniuses like you in the voting booth, we have nothing to worry about from them. Sheesh.
Unfortunately, since the string of dot-bombs I worked for are no more, I don't have any big chunks of change lying around, but I am willing to contribute $25 to a fund for the XVID team to sue the holy living crap out of Sigma. I suspect I'm not alone.
Of course this presumes some sort of reputable arrangement so I know I'm not sending $25 to some wise-ass AC with a Paypal account, but if it comes to pass, let me know at eodell@sfront.net, and I'll pony up right away.
Incidentally (and IANAL), while it is hard to sue for damages when you're not actually selling something, I'd be surprised if the XVID team weren't entitled to a substantial chunk of any profits Sigma has been making with their work.
So let me get this right: the National Security Agency develops a port of Linux to augment, unsurprisingly, national security. Microsoft bitches that national security runs counter to their profit interests and manages to get SE Linux terminated.
Fine.
But let's be sure to mention this next time Osama bin Ballmer starts foaming at the mouth about how Linux is un-American, and remind him that Linux developers have never undermined the safety of American citizens in order to line their pockets.
And while we're at it, let's consider what gigantic software monopoly distributes a flight simulator capable of accurately emulating passenger airliners, along with detailed scenery of American airports and major urban centers, complete with individual office towers.
Of course, having already crippled Naval warships, I shouldn't be surprised that Microsoft is now trying to cripple our chief intelligence agency.
Re:Nothing on TV, and you still pay for it??
on
The Last Place
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· Score: 2
I haven't watched TV -- except, I must confess, for four seasons of The X Files -- since 1990. I don't miss it. When I do have occasion to be near a TV, I have the same feeling I had hanging out with stoners after I had quit smoking pot: man, was I really that stupid?
The only problem I have is that my coworkers and many of my casual acquaintances use TV as the same kind of common cultural touchstone as previous generations did with art and literature. I remember this was particularly annoying while Seinfeld was on the air. But even then, someone usually recited the entire plot and most of the dialogue, thereby relieving me of the need to actually watch, for example, the "Soup Nazi" episode.
Re:You misrepresent the issue & Apple reversed
on
Death to the 3.5" Floppy?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Like it or not, Ethernet IS "good enough" for sharing files. Barring incompetant wiring, it's faster and more reliable.
Unless, for a great variety of possible reasons, the source machine and the destination machine are not both connected to an ethernet network. Sheesh. That would include everyone I know personally -- none of whom have, like me, a home LAN -- and, for that matter, my not-entirely-supported-by-Linux laptop and its entirely-unsupported-by-Linux PCMCIA Ethernet card, as well as standalone machines in schools and small businesses.
My Linux desktop is alive and well. Near as I can tell, it's made of laminated particle board, and it supports my monitor and keyboard with admirable efficiency, which is most helpful when I'm working at my Linux commandline.
Oh sure, I know that's not for everyone, but I switched to Linux so I wouldn't have to do the same thing as everyone. Which is, I thought, the entire point of open source. It'll be a cold day in hell before I ever use Lycoris, but that's just me -- I might, however, install it for my wife and daughter, both of whom are quite bright, but totally disinterested in software development. And that's cool, too.
So congrats to the Lycoris folks for rolling out what looks like a polished product. More choice is always good.
The reference to the US suffrage movement may or may not be accurate. Our ability to copy and download music may not be as important as a women's right to participate in our democracy.
This isn't about the "right" to the latest Britney Spears MP3. The "intellectual property" juggernaut threatens consumer rights, free speech, and the open intellectual discourse upon which science and civilization rest. These people want to illegalize libraries fer chrissakes. The idea that this has a bloody thing to do with music piracy is to miss the woods for the trees.
Oh, please. Public libraries have been lending out original, purchased copies of books, not photocopies of books. Copyright law governs the production of copies, which is in large part why it's called copyright. Sheesh.
I hate to run against the brain-seized thinking on/. about what is and is not legal under copyright law, especially since I have some major objections to copyright law as it stands, but this is so blatantly illegal that it's surprising that anyone could miss the point.
Making a copy of an entire copyrighted work, except for certain very restricted special cases like personal backup copies, is illegal without the prior consent of the copyright owner. Period. It doesn't matter what scheme you come up with, or whether it actually benefits the copyright holder, or whether it's just plain common sense, or whether you're making any money off of it or not. I'm not saying this is a good thing, necessarily, but it is the law, and it is stated plain as daylight in the copyright statutes using short words that even the data-wants-to-be-free IANAL crowd could understand if they ever actually bothered to read it.
Again, I'm not in agreement with the existing laws, but if it were me and I was pursuing this ridiculous scheme, I would fully expect to be crushed beneath a ton of cease-and-desist letters and civil suits. But my guess is that the twits who are trying this will actually be surprised when their flesh is torn by weasels, and the crowd hereabouts will rally around them the way they do every time some buffoon has his wishful legal thinking shoved up his exhaust port.
Doctors are just technicians that happen to work on people. They are no more perfect than the grease monkey at the car dealership. Using a computerized database of information to research the very complex organisms we are is just common sense and is perhaps why computers became popular in the first place.
My first thought upon reading this was, "Damn, I wish they'd make something like this for the cantankerous mid-70's Volkswagen I torture myself with." But then, I've written expert systems before, and I know their capabilities (and limits).
My second thought was, "Damn, it's a pity that doctors -- possibly the only class of people on earth more computer-illiterate/phobic than public school teachers -- are responsible for our health care, because they'll never adopt this."
To be fair to doctors, this kind of paranoid fear of "thinking machines" is borne of a very widespread ignorance about how computers work. Everyone here is, of course, immune to this fear for the simple reason that we all know the difference between computation and thought. But we also know -- as I wish to hell the general public would learn -- that computation is something that thought can emulate very, very inefficiently, and it's just plain wasteful to have valuable brains performing mechanical data-retrieval and simple logic when machines do it millions of times faster and more accurately. Let the machines do the grunt work and save the brains for intelligent thought.
Linux (RedHat and Debian) is installed on all of my desktop machines. Along with some variety of Windows. I hadn't used Windows much over the last couple of years, save for three programs that have no parallel in the Linux world: MS Word, Adobe Photoshop, and Forte Agent. (If you suggest StarOffice/AbiWord, the GIMP, and that whatever-it-was-called Agent clone, you're either high or have never gotten deeply into the features of the aforementioned commercial programs.)
Recently, I resurrected my old Thinkpad 560 after buying a broken 560 from eBay to scavenge for parts. One of those parts was a larger hard drive, and unlike my RH-only original drive, this one still had Win95 on it.
(I'll spare you the rant on how horrible it is to try to get Linux installed on a CD-ROM-less laptop without actually pulling the hard drive and mounting it in a desktop machine, and how it's just flat-out impossible to get networking and X11 to work with certain hardware.)
I finally got an obscure Slackware derivative, DragonLinux, to live peaceably inside a FAT32 partition so I can continue my software development projects, but beyond that, I've been actually pleased to do everything else in unstable-as-hell outdated Win95. It is so refreshing to be able to perform so many simple non-development end user tasks without the endless pain in the ass that is Linux.
Don't get me wrong -- I've been using Linux for seven years now, and I will continue to do so both for servers and on the desktop 80% of the time, but until some real, high-quality, end-user applications are available for it, I am reluctantly obliged to pay my Microsoft tax for the remaining 20% of the time.
And if you are inclined to work on non-sexy end-user applications like word processors and such -- for god's sake, please don't be "creative", just clone what's already out there. Give me innovative system libraries and kernel modules instead. The word processor (and for that matter, the bitmap editor and newsreader) are mature technologies.
Self-awareness on the part of the machine (not much more than self-monitoring with statefulness and history.)
Self-awareness is a lot more than being able to read internal registers and maintain logs, bucko. At least it is for me; I dunno 'bout you.
I think part of the reason for this woeful ignorance of how the human mind works stems from the fact that thanks to the bad reputation psychology got from the excesses of certain psychotherapeutic schools, would-be AI researchers have thrown the baby out with the bath water and ignored modern cognitive psychology as well.
Here's a big hint: if you still think that cognitive psychology is based on subjective introspection, you're about a century behind the curve. This is, IMHO, a large part of the reason that self-proclaimed authorities like Marvin Minsky and Daniel Dennett seem so badly divorced from reality -- having chosen to ignore high-level scientific studies of the mind as a priori bullshit, and being unable to extrapolate from neurons the behavior of a complete mind, they have reverted to ancient Greek-style philosophy-in-a-factual-vacuum.
Years ago, it was a common observation that increasingly draconian and intrusive licensing agreements would lead to widespread adoption of Free and Open Source software. It hasn't been quite that dramatic, but it has been happening, mostly in Europe and elsewhere outside of the United States. But give it time -- the new MS EULA is a direct threat to corporate security. Joe Average may miss this point, but you can be sure that corporate IT security folks will flash on it as soon as they realize that they just agreed to be rooted by MS.
Slashdot Mirror
The current regime in Washington has effectively eliminated the 1st, 4th, and 10th ammendments of our constitution.
In fairness, the 10th Amendment ceased to have any real meaning when Lee surrended to Grant at Apomattox. From that point on, the 10th Amendment has mainly existed for the farcical purposes of allowing Congress to wash its hands of issues by requiring the States to pay for federal mandates out of their own tax money.
That being said, the implied point that the current regime is a front for the interests of rich white male evangelical Christian misogynists bent on the suppression of the liberties of everyone outside of their charmed anal-retentive circle, and willing to do anything, including start wars and fill extralegal internment camps to accomplish it, is right on the money.
The most the Red^H^H^HTerorrist Menace did was claim a few thousand American lives. Ashcroft and Bush, on the other hand, have eviscerated the Constitution that hundreds of thousands have died to defend. The only reason they named it the PATRIOT act is because Right Wing Fifth Column doesn't make a good acronym.
If you're looking for evil, visit the Attorney General's office.
First of all, I'd like to thank Ms. Ian -- who is always a pleasure to read -- for taking the time to do this Slashdot interview.
Secondly, I'd like to note that there are enormous numbers of excellent unsigned artists and artists on minor labels. Oodles. Scads. Shit-tons. So many, in fact, that artistic talent is really not especially scarce and therefore not all that valuable economically, which is, IMHO, why the big media companies can get away with what they do. This is not likely to change. Supply has always exceeded demand for good -- and even bad -- art.
The other thing that makes life easy for the RIAA's clients is our laziness as music consumers. The RIAA makes it very, very easy to find their artists: there are only a few of them, they are on the radio all day long, their CDs are not only in dedicated music stores but also in ordinary department stores and even the occasional gas station and drug store.
All those thousands of other excellent musicians take work to find. You may have to actually get off your duff and go to local clubs, familiarize yourself with minor label catalogues and indepedent record dealers, troll mailing lists and the web, and so on. They're not actually all that hard to find, but you do have to work at it. And while we can hope that the current IP-rights struggle will ameliorate the situation somewhat, the economic reasons cited above suggest that the ratio of a few big name performers to tens of thousands of good-but-unknown performers will probably never change much.
So, yes, definitely, let's write our congressmen to make sure that folks like Ms. Ian get their fair cut, but let's also realize that supporting a rich and diverse musical environment requires our active participation as fans.
I wonder how long it will be before Amazon patents "a method of using a gullible technical books publisher to generate free press". Will Tim O'Reilly be "working with" Amazon to "resolve" this issue this time?
Actually, C does have a way of identifying types and most compliant compilers will insist on it. The language feature in question is called a declaration.
As noted elsewhere, one of the advantages of the method is that if you change the type of a variable, you don't have to search through your source code to change variable names. In all fairness, you can shuffle the semantics into several different potential locations, all of which have advantages and drawbacks of their own.
First of all, the transition from mastaba to step pyramid to true pyramid is a logical and simple one. The only trick is figuring out how to distribute massive loads, and in fact, the "bent" pyramid at Dashur and the contemporaneous pyramid that collapsed from being built at an excessively steep angle while Dashur was being built remain as records of the trial-and-error of the Egyptian architects. Pyramids are not skyscrapers; they are among the simplest structures to build if you have enough grunt labor, something that Egypt, as the most populous country in the region, always had plenty of.
Secondly, the general collapse at the end of the Old Kingdom was paralleled by collapses throughout the region, and is generally attributed to a prolonged drought. There has been some evidence in recent years that the drought may have been caused by a significant impact event on the Arabian peninsula. Moreover, there is considerable, well-documented evidence of widespread civil unrest and struggles for succession during the First Intermediate Period.
Finally, Hawass is quite correct that the "gang graffiti" inside the topmost chamber above the so-called King's Chamber is the only writing inside a chamber of the pyramid, but similar markings have been found on many of the blocks which have fallen from or have been intentionally removed from the pyramids.
Now mind you, I'm right there with you when it comes to questioning some of the conjectures of professional Egyptologists (as, for that matter, are many reputable dissenting Egyptologists -- which is the nature of scientific discourse, after all), but the "pyramidiots" as a class tend to be very poorly educated about modern Egyptology, apparently getting most of their information from cheap reprints of 19th century works. The most common misconception the pyramidiots promote is that Egyptian technology appeared full-fledged out of nothing, hinting at some earlier foreign (or even Atlantean) influences. Unfortunately, the truth is that the late Ice Age Nile was a much more volatile and intermittent river, frequently changing its course, and much early evidence has been scattered widely and buried deeply. However, in recent years, much interesting work has been done in uncovering older material, and that has gone a long way towards filling in the mysterious blank spaces in our understanding of ancient Egypt. Bear in mind that the one of the oldest, if not the oldest, burials of an anatomically modern human being was found in Egypt and dated to fifty thousand years before present. Egypt had a lot longer to develop than the sparse survival of fragile human artifacts would at first seem to suggest.
Zahi Hawass is indeed a bit of an egomaniac, but he is also quite intelligent and sincere, and he has been known to change his mind from time to time. In contrast, John Anthony West, one of the more prominent pyramidiots, is still hawking his theory that the vaguely pi-shaped Egyptian door design was intended to represent 3.1415... despite the fact that neither the Greeks nor the Egyptians used the Greek letter pi to represent that ratio -- Leonhard Euler was the first to use that symbol in the 19th century.
That may be why they have reserved this tactic for Pearl Jam and Tori Amos. You can get GG Allin albums on 44kHz digital CDs, too, but I don't think anyone's looking for the little "DDD" designation on them.
I used to take a more moderate position on copyright, but the entertainment industry has changed my mind. I look at it this way:
Option #1: Retain copyright. Result: vital political liberties are demolished to control the flow of information for the benefit a few massive corporations. 99% of artists work day jobs.
Option #2: Abolish copyright. Result: political liberties survive and massive corporations continue to be massive corporations. 99% of artists work day jobs.
The common themes are rich corporate pigs and starving artists, and the only variable is political liberty. Seems like a no-brainer to me.
Well, of course. "A single strand of hair" represents the extreme low end of the general public's scale of measurements, with the previously mentioned Standard Texas Unit as the high end. Now, the question of how many strands of hair it takes to be the size of Texas remains unresolved...
Hmm... I learned C, C++, Perl, and PHP in that order. (Actually, before that, I learned BASIC, FORTRAN, RPG, and COBOL, but I don't like to think about that.)
My first impression on learning Perl was wondering why the heck Larry hadn't bothered to learn how to use lex, yacc, and maintain a proper symbol table. Then, of course, I realized Larry does know all that and had reasons of his own. But I still disagree with them.
When I learned PHP, I thought it was wonderful to A) only have one generic variable 'sigil', and B) to have real multidimensional arrays that didn't require Perl's horrid reference syntax. (I know they're not really multidimensional arrays behind the curtain in either language, but that's beside the point.)
For the record, I think Perl is a much more powerful language than PHP, but that PHP makes building web interfaces (usually to Perl and C backends in my case) than mod_perl or (God help me) Mason.
In the end, I still wish Larry would reconsider the type sigils on the grounds that they violated the TMTOWTDI principle and force the programmer into what may be, for any given developer or development team, a suboptimal notational system. It's as if Microsoft's Hungarian Notation were enforced by the compiler. Thanks, but if I need to include type information in my variable names, I'll put it there myself.
Those wishing to dig into Intel assembly language without shelling out seventy-some-odd bucks can download the PDF version of The Art of Assembly Language . IMHO, it's pretty good, and weighs in at about 1200 pages -- there's more there than you'll probably ever use. I no longer recall if there's a complete guide to the Intel instruction set in the book, but you can, unsurprisingly, get that from Intel's site.
Good work! Tell me his name and address, and we'll send that info over to the feds right away.
Frankly, I was less worried about the feds than I was about having "targeted" advertising shoved in my face as soon as Google has a bad quarter and decides to start selling popup ads. I don't think the feds care much about my ongoing struggle to find a usable registration key for UltraEdit, but being bombarded by Flash-animated UltraEdit popup ads would border on cruelty.
Red Hat still was contacted by Thomson to remove mp3 players from their "product" (Red Hat Linux) since it is sold. So while the terms may not have changed, kiss mp3 players in your distros goodbye.
Holy shit! You mean I'll have to learn how to download one separately? Horrors!
In the meantime, anyone who would like to cover their tracks can use my cookie:
.google.com TRUE / FALSE 2147368045 PREF ID=111439b95052c72a:TM=1030056425:LM=1030056425:S= v7T9QSFKEkI
;)
Of course, if it turns out that Google is planning to give a prize to the most active user, or they have some kind of search engine green stamps, you're screwed.
It's pretty obvious where you're coming from, but the problem with your deeply ingrained mental problem is that in a civil democracy with equal justice under the law, there is no "them", there is only us.
Not by you, according to your theory, just by them. Screw them. Let's put all of them in jail. After all, "the majority were probably in the process of or about to commit crimes". No doubt you have hard statistical evidence to support this alarming contention that will overcome our horror at considering that none of them were convicted or even charged with a crime.
With geniuses like you in the voting booth, we have nothing to worry about from them. Sheesh.
Unfortunately, since the string of dot-bombs I worked for are no more, I don't have any big chunks of change lying around, but I am willing to contribute $25 to a fund for the XVID team to sue the holy living crap out of Sigma. I suspect I'm not alone.
Of course this presumes some sort of reputable arrangement so I know I'm not sending $25 to some wise-ass AC with a Paypal account, but if it comes to pass, let me know at eodell@sfront.net, and I'll pony up right away.
Incidentally (and IANAL), while it is hard to sue for damages when you're not actually selling something, I'd be surprised if the XVID team weren't entitled to a substantial chunk of any profits Sigma has been making with their work.
So let me get this right: the National Security Agency develops a port of Linux to augment, unsurprisingly, national security. Microsoft bitches that national security runs counter to their profit interests and manages to get SE Linux terminated.
Fine.
But let's be sure to mention this next time Osama bin Ballmer starts foaming at the mouth about how Linux is un-American, and remind him that Linux developers have never undermined the safety of American citizens in order to line their pockets.
And while we're at it, let's consider what gigantic software monopoly distributes a flight simulator capable of accurately emulating passenger airliners, along with detailed scenery of American airports and major urban centers, complete with individual office towers.
Of course, having already crippled Naval warships, I shouldn't be surprised that Microsoft is now trying to cripple our chief intelligence agency.
I haven't watched TV -- except, I must confess, for four seasons of The X Files -- since 1990. I don't miss it. When I do have occasion to be near a TV, I have the same feeling I had hanging out with stoners after I had quit smoking pot: man, was I really that stupid?
The only problem I have is that my coworkers and many of my casual acquaintances use TV as the same kind of common cultural touchstone as previous generations did with art and literature. I remember this was particularly annoying while Seinfeld was on the air. But even then, someone usually recited the entire plot and most of the dialogue, thereby relieving me of the need to actually watch, for example, the "Soup Nazi" episode.
Like it or not, Ethernet IS "good enough" for sharing files. Barring incompetant wiring, it's faster and more reliable.
Unless, for a great variety of possible reasons, the source machine and the destination machine are not both connected to an ethernet network. Sheesh. That would include everyone I know personally -- none of whom have, like me, a home LAN -- and, for that matter, my not-entirely-supported-by-Linux laptop and its entirely-unsupported-by-Linux PCMCIA Ethernet card, as well as standalone machines in schools and small businesses.
Snob.
My Linux desktop is alive and well. Near as I can tell, it's made of laminated particle board, and it supports my monitor and keyboard with admirable efficiency, which is most helpful when I'm working at my Linux commandline.
Oh sure, I know that's not for everyone, but I switched to Linux so I wouldn't have to do the same thing as everyone. Which is, I thought, the entire point of open source. It'll be a cold day in hell before I ever use Lycoris, but that's just me -- I might, however, install it for my wife and daughter, both of whom are quite bright, but totally disinterested in software development. And that's cool, too.
So congrats to the Lycoris folks for rolling out what looks like a polished product. More choice is always good.
The reference to the US suffrage movement may or may not be accurate. Our ability to copy and download music may not be as important as a women's right to participate in our democracy.
This isn't about the "right" to the latest Britney Spears MP3. The "intellectual property" juggernaut threatens consumer rights, free speech, and the open intellectual discourse upon which science and civilization rest. These people want to illegalize libraries fer chrissakes. The idea that this has a bloody thing to do with music piracy is to miss the woods for the trees.
Oh, please. Public libraries have been lending out original, purchased copies of books, not photocopies of books. Copyright law governs the production of copies, which is in large part why it's called copyright. Sheesh.
/. about what is and is not legal under copyright law, especially since I have some major objections to copyright law as it stands, but this is so blatantly illegal that it's surprising that anyone could miss the point.
I hate to run against the brain-seized thinking on
Making a copy of an entire copyrighted work, except for certain very restricted special cases like personal backup copies, is illegal without the prior consent of the copyright owner. Period. It doesn't matter what scheme you come up with, or whether it actually benefits the copyright holder, or whether it's just plain common sense, or whether you're making any money off of it or not. I'm not saying this is a good thing, necessarily, but it is the law, and it is stated plain as daylight in the copyright statutes using short words that even the data-wants-to-be-free IANAL crowd could understand if they ever actually bothered to read it.
Again, I'm not in agreement with the existing laws, but if it were me and I was pursuing this ridiculous scheme, I would fully expect to be crushed beneath a ton of cease-and-desist letters and civil suits. But my guess is that the twits who are trying this will actually be surprised when their flesh is torn by weasels, and the crowd hereabouts will rally around them the way they do every time some buffoon has his wishful legal thinking shoved up his exhaust port.
Okay, that was harsh, but tell me I'm wrong.
My first thought upon reading this was, "Damn, I wish they'd make something like this for the cantankerous mid-70's Volkswagen I torture myself with." But then, I've written expert systems before, and I know their capabilities (and limits).
My second thought was, "Damn, it's a pity that doctors -- possibly the only class of people on earth more computer-illiterate/phobic than public school teachers -- are responsible for our health care, because they'll never adopt this."
To be fair to doctors, this kind of paranoid fear of "thinking machines" is borne of a very widespread ignorance about how computers work. Everyone here is, of course, immune to this fear for the simple reason that we all know the difference between computation and thought. But we also know -- as I wish to hell the general public would learn -- that computation is something that thought can emulate very, very inefficiently, and it's just plain wasteful to have valuable brains performing mechanical data-retrieval and simple logic when machines do it millions of times faster and more accurately. Let the machines do the grunt work and save the brains for intelligent thought.
Linux (RedHat and Debian) is installed on all of my desktop machines. Along with some variety of Windows. I hadn't used Windows much over the last couple of years, save for three programs that have no parallel in the Linux world: MS Word, Adobe Photoshop, and Forte Agent. (If you suggest StarOffice/AbiWord, the GIMP, and that whatever-it-was-called Agent clone, you're either high or have never gotten deeply into the features of the aforementioned commercial programs.)
Recently, I resurrected my old Thinkpad 560 after buying a broken 560 from eBay to scavenge for parts. One of those parts was a larger hard drive, and unlike my RH-only original drive, this one still had Win95 on it.
(I'll spare you the rant on how horrible it is to try to get Linux installed on a CD-ROM-less laptop without actually pulling the hard drive and mounting it in a desktop machine, and how it's just flat-out impossible to get networking and X11 to work with certain hardware.)
I finally got an obscure Slackware derivative, DragonLinux, to live peaceably inside a FAT32 partition so I can continue my software development projects, but beyond that, I've been actually pleased to do everything else in unstable-as-hell outdated Win95. It is so refreshing to be able to perform so many simple non-development end user tasks without the endless pain in the ass that is Linux.
Don't get me wrong -- I've been using Linux for seven years now, and I will continue to do so both for servers and on the desktop 80% of the time, but until some real, high-quality, end-user applications are available for it, I am reluctantly obliged to pay my Microsoft tax for the remaining 20% of the time.
And if you are inclined to work on non-sexy end-user applications like word processors and such -- for god's sake, please don't be "creative", just clone what's already out there. Give me innovative system libraries and kernel modules instead. The word processor (and for that matter, the bitmap editor and newsreader) are mature technologies.
Self-awareness is a lot more than being able to read internal registers and maintain logs, bucko. At least it is for me; I dunno 'bout you.
I think part of the reason for this woeful ignorance of how the human mind works stems from the fact that thanks to the bad reputation psychology got from the excesses of certain psychotherapeutic schools, would-be AI researchers have thrown the baby out with the bath water and ignored modern cognitive psychology as well.
Here's a big hint: if you still think that cognitive psychology is based on subjective introspection, you're about a century behind the curve. This is, IMHO, a large part of the reason that self-proclaimed authorities like Marvin Minsky and Daniel Dennett seem so badly divorced from reality -- having chosen to ignore high-level scientific studies of the mind as a priori bullshit, and being unable to extrapolate from neurons the behavior of a complete mind, they have reverted to ancient Greek-style philosophy-in-a-factual-vacuum.
Years ago, it was a common observation that increasingly draconian and intrusive licensing agreements would lead to widespread adoption of Free and Open Source software. It hasn't been quite that dramatic, but it has been happening, mostly in Europe and elsewhere outside of the United States. But give it time -- the new MS EULA is a direct threat to corporate security. Joe Average may miss this point, but you can be sure that corporate IT security folks will flash on it as soon as they realize that they just agreed to be rooted by MS.