>Just like that little thing called the Crusades,
>that goes to prove that Christians are also morally bankrupt.
Which Christians were proven morally
bankrupt by the Crusades? The ones in Constantinople who
were raped and murdered by Crusaders?
The ones whose churches were ransacked and
destroyed in the Crusades?
I guess the poster, like a lot of people, sees Christianity as some
monolithic Western religion, when in fact
it's an Eastern and diverse one.
But who wants to be concerned about historical accuracy, anyway-- it's more fun to hit-and-run flame.
(And if you're not
well familiar with Japan's culture, it's also worth reading the articles now appearing in The Atlantic Monthly.)"
The Atlantic Monthly? Puh-leeze.
They printed a ridiculously long, biased hatched job called Russia Is Finished back in May to try to get everyone "familiar" with Russia's culture. Intelligent letter-writers have pointed out that it was mostly a crock.
So why would I care what they have to say about Japan? I think I will stick to what fellow geeks
without a political axe to grind tell me.
Your summary of the situation corresponds
pretty closely with the Insight article;
too bad you are posting as an AC, it would be interesting
to correspond with you.
You wrote:
They already knew, shortly after Barbarossa, that the Japanese were not going to attack the USSR, thanks to their spy in Japan, Sorge. Therefore they were able to move their best Siberian divisions West to attack the Germans without worrying about a Japanese attack. Note this happened well before Pearl Harbor. USSR of course would have liked to ensure that the Japanese did not change their minds...
In fact, the Insight article does mention Sorge
and his assurances that the Japanese were planning
to attack the USA, not the USSR, but:
many Soviet officials were worried Japan would change its mind. Germany constantly "tried to induce Japan to reorient her policy and to strike at Russia in the East... Sorge later said that 'the course of the Japanese-American talks was of great importance for the Soviet Union.' Had the Japanese-American talks succeeded, there would have arisen the danger that after their rapprochement, Japan and the U.S.A. [would] pursue a coordinated anti-Soviet policy."
It was at this point, according to the Insight
article (which quotes a retired KGB agent,
reprimanded for spilling the beans), that the KGB's agents of influence in Washington were tasked with derailing the talks.
Interesting stuff in any case, if only because
it reminds us how many layers there can be
behind what's written in the history books.
Check out antiwar.com if you are interested in more such.
/. readers should check out the "Tell Adolf"
manga series (there's a review at
http://www.comicon.com/ubb/Forum12/HTML/000011.htm l
which tells a lot about WWII from the Japanese side. For one thing, it shows how the Germans and Japanese really didn't like each other all that much,
something that's surprising to me.
Another interesting take, more specifically on
Pearl Harbor, is
this article with a lot of evidence that the
Soviet Union manipluated the USA into drawing a
Japanese attack, so that the Japanese would leave
the Russians alone instead of whipping their butts
as in 1905.
Wow, there's a wealth of detailed technical information available on the new format,
but not a word about what particular breakage
is built in to prohibit copying; the article (from September 2000) says it "has still to be decided."
In a better world, this would be turn out to be something relatively toothless,
like the "copying allowed" bit that's present
(though always ignored) even in the current
CD Audio spec.
But odds are it'll be something horrible
in the hardware. Then I won't mind that
this format is probably going to die
a lingering death.
Is anybody going to come out with
a format that's as free as CD-R with more
capacity?
Ironically, if anyone does it's going to be
a country as un-free as China, which makes a lot of $$$ off SVCD.
Except that the Chinese Communist Party and
the RIAA would probably get along too well.
They have hobbies in common-- like the whole
ruthless-monopoly-on-power thing...
Why is everybody so down on this?
As I understand it, this is an open format, not a
Sony- or Iomega-proprietary one. That's a win
right there.
Another one is that it doesn't seem to be
carry all the encryption and other
baggage that DVD has: you don't need
a special, expensive "for Authoring" drive
and media to get around all the copyright
baloney. No watermarking. No lossy compression.
I mean, DVD-R is so crippled that the latest
thing in the ripping community is making "mini-DVDs", CD-Rs burnt with (a few minutes of) DVD-quality video.
If you have a multi-disc DVD changer (and more and more geeks do), then
you can spread the movie out among a few CD-Rs,
and have an almost seamless transition. There are even firmware hacks to make initially uncooperative players support the format.
If equipment makers get on the bandwagon,
we could have a more lightweight format
for VCDs, and even double-length audio CDs.
I hope it takes off.
Only halal exchange and payment system in the world.
Instant payments (no delays)
occur in real-time
are private (encrypted transactions)
no bank as intermediary
no constraints by local authorities
It's probably got the same back-end,
but they outline a pretty cool kiosk system where you can freely exchange your e-dinars for physical gold or silver Islamic dinars. e-gold's site seems pretty mum about how you can turn your e-gold into a physical bar of the shiny yellow stuff,
and they seem to have gotten flamed for it, maybe deservedly.
--the very un-halal mdecerbo
who didn't know a dinar was anything but the battered Yugoslav currency, and wondered
who the heck would want an electronic one.
I just don't understand why there's so much
concern over Canada (or the USA, or whoever) tracking down
whoever arranges donations and coordinates
the server.
I mean, couldn't a Web page
be put up anonymously (someplace like Russia) and an anonymous
e-gold
or similar account be established to accept donations to pay its bills?
Linux-IDE guru Andre Hedrick, who's a member
of the T13 committee considering this stuff,
is doing his best to squelch this, by counter-proposing
more mandatory features for the spec that will
let the host operating system turn off the
nasty CPRM commands at the drive.
CPRM could yet be commonplace in hard
disks in the future, implemented through the back door of "Vendor Unique" commands,
Hedrick argues. And the task of finding out where CPRM is coming from would
permanently impair the performance of non-CPRM operating systems. Like a Smash the
Hippo Game, only with an infinite number of Hippos.
And he adds, there's really nothing to stop vendors doing this. Much of what your hard
drive can really do is not considered or ratified by T.13. This ain't the Supreme Court: it
only sets down lowest common denominator interoperability standards. The rest is a
free for all.
Hedrick's "suggestion" to the T.13 mailing list, promising to give away a
command parser that bounces unknown new commands, so obliging a CPRM-vigilant
OS to track and reject all such command sets. His threat poses a dilemma for drive
manufacturers which may be inclined to sneak CPRM in through the back door: they'll
effectively lose the Linux market. Hedrick's parser will include trap-doors for vendors
who try to circumvent known command sets, too.
Insightful, my ass. Of course HP workstations have sound hardware. And just because it's not important to you, doesn't mean it's not important. Try thinking out of the box.
How do I know this?
When the speech reco company
I work for was a startup (back in '96), we lost two big
contracts because sound is basically broken
on HP workstations.
Not buggy-- sound is such
an afterthought on *NIX workstations (except SGIs) that it's always buggy. Our head developer navigated
the Sun bureaucracy to the point where he eventually got the name of one the guys who wrote the Solaris audio drivers, and took him to lunch.
So now there are all kinds of hacks in our code
to determine what revision of, say, flaky Sparc 5 sound hardware it's running on. (Don't think youcan just ask the driver what chip rev is installed. You need to crank up the input gain and see whether the DC offset stays constant of drops with time.)
But sound on HPs just didn't work--
too bad both AT&T and the New York Stock Exchange
had HP boxen on every desk and were interested in speech, and we had to walk away.
What are the lessons here? That I'm still bitter, heh. And that you shouldn't be so quick to
accept buggy hardware-- somebody is getting screwed, and maybe it'll be you, unexpectedly, when something you never thought of becomes important.
It looks like the people at yourfit.com are tackling this problem for the Real World, so that you can try clothes on, on-line. From their site:
The Company's core product is the Virtual Dressing Room, serving leading apparel e-tailers. This hosted software
allows online consumers to easily create models of themselves and try on clothing in multiple sizes and colors.
Consumers receive a visual image of how garments fit and look on their body along with a written description of
the fit and a size recommendation.
The interesting thing is, you'd better create an
accurate model of yourself in order for the fit modeling to work well.
So I can't wait for this to take off, so we
can read about everybody cracking the yourfit servers to retrieve the model of that intriguing
someone special next door...
Bzzt, sorry, thanks for playing.
You can't do that anymore in Windows ME.
The operating system will only play encrypted
content to "trusted" drivers that implement "Digital Rights Management".
In operating systems prior to Microsoft(R) Windows(R) Millennium Edition (Windows Me), a security limitation related to digital content allowed users
to easily load rogue drivers that route the playback of secure content to disk. Windows Me closes this security hole by providing the ability to check
the validity of audio drivers to ensure that they are "trusted" to properly handle content and not violate usage rules.
And since Joe Sixpack will only have WinME or later in three or four years, kiss the ability to save a.wav goodbye.
It's the Microsoft monopoly protecting the
RIAA monopoly, with the Republicrat monopoly
enforcing the DMCA to back them up. Sigh.
And superdk is wrong. When you play a sound file
through a digital soundcard, as long as the sound
card doesn't do hardware resampling (like the
crappy SB Live), then the S/PDIF that comes out
is a perfect digital copy of the bits on disk.
You can copy the output, but most consumer sound
cards (as opposed to those used by recording pros)
honor the SCMS copy-protection system, which just
(to oversimplify) sets a don't-copy bit.
And even if you get a black-market SCMS stripper,
any watermark will still be there. A lot of research money has gone into development of watermarks that will survive even D-A-D conversion.
The really bad news (if anybody bothered reading the site) is that the whole SCMS system assumes
crypto in your speakers, so you won't be able to steal bits from the speaker wire,
and your speakers probably won't even play
evil un-watermarked hacker content.
The only way to stop this nightmare would be to
stop the spread of digital crypto-speakers,
but good luck with that when they start being
bundled with every new CompUSA PC.
I think the name of the system, "Publius", with
its ties to the American Revolution, suggests another reason for the 100k limit, besides treading lightly around the RIAA. By not getting bogged down in.mp3-sharing and copyright issues,
more attention can be drawn to free speech in the strictest sense-- text, probably political.
But sad to say, plain.TXT is not
much of a marketing tool these days. Tom Paine's
handprinted manifestos lit the fire of revolution;
today, only a multimedia manifesto would catch
the public attention. We are a society of Web surfers and couch potatoes. The revolution had better be televized, or it's not gonna fly.
(It's offtopic, but those televised images of the
Bosnian prisoner camps that TMiB mentions are a great example. It turns out they were faked (there's an article and even a video with the skinny on how it was done. But they sure built up a lot of sympathy for the Bosnian Muslim separatist movement, didn't they?!)
But pirate radio and TV transmitters are easy to jam and track down. That leaves computers. Freenet is not going to be a speed demon, and Publius will enforce this 100k limit. So the single most important way for people of limited means to disseminate controversial information is, I would argue, the Web. And, in fact, just about any political or controversial group you'd care to name has a Web site by now.
Once the Web becomes truly a mass medium worldwide, I predict that we will soon start seeing national governments go after the Web sites of movements they don't like. Thing is, some of those sites will be backed by other national governments. I wonder what the 'net will look like then. More firewalls like China's? Special agents attacking server rooms? ISP workers getting threatened like judges in South America?
You send TIFF files to the manufacturer, each being the image of a page. The disk will hold anywhere from 1000 to 100,000 page images; the more pages you squeeze on, the more powerful the microscope needed to read it.
Los Alamos tested a disc, and it seemed to hold up pretty well, although a long time in salt water caused slow corrosion, and baking it at high temperature messed it up.
Norsam's Web site is mum on pricing, but a discussion among some of the Long Now/Rosetta Disc folks suggests a one-off disc might be as low as $2K. If I weren't such a lazy ass, I might sign up as a reseller.
For $10k, you can get a cute add-on I didn't expect-- a computerized microscope reader that shifts the field of view as you point and click. Microfiche for the modern age, and future ones too, I guess.
I wonder just how much it would cost to produce one of these with arbitrary text.
I bet plenty of people would get excited about the chance to preserve whatever matters most to them for posterity, and be willing to pay big $$$ to do so.
A couple thousand years ago you had to be able to afford minions to engrave big obelisks for you, in order to get that kind of staying power.
Now all you need are a few dollars or DM for, presumably, something like fab time. (How are the disks manufactured, anyway?)
I bet there are rich Internet entrepeneurs with big egos who'd spring for their own disk, plus a small commission for me.
(Lame idea? Well, at least I read the article and am not just kvetching about Genesis, when the article mentioned a variety of creation stories; and wondering about format obsolescence, when the article mentioned it's an analog, graphical disk. Geez,/..)
when someone else needs an application protocol that requires connection-oriented, asynchronous request-response interactions, they can start with BXXP.
Hasn't changed much since '96 (!) but neither has the taste of a nice thick juicy steak, mmm.
Today's "e-books": ANTIbooks!
on
RMS On eBooks
·
· Score: 2
These are antibooks. As the prescient Eric Eldred writes: an antibook is a book that has been murdered--it has been bought up like private property, enclosed inside a secure hardware lock by strong encryption and digital signatures, wrapped up inside a shrinkwrap software license you have no choice but to accept, copyrighted whether it deserves a new copyright or not and protected by the criminal sanctions of the new laws, delivered directly to consumers over the Internet instead of being sold by used bookstores or browsable on a bookstore shelf, incapable of being lent by public libraries because of all the licensing restrictions, locked up securely so the reader cannot print it out, copy it to a disk to backup or use on another computer or share with anyone else, in fact so locked up it requires proprietary software or hardware to even view the antibook, incapable of being resold because of the shrinkwrap license and the hardware locks, and unable to be accessed for any fair use by scholars or by anyone, including blind readers, if it ever technically reverted to the public domain.
What's more, free e-books are threatened not only by the antibooks and horrors like DMCA, but by copyright extension: media companies want permanent copyright, but they'll settle for extending it by twenty-five years, every twenty-five years, retroactively of course.
Slashdot Mirror
...that this is an urban legend; the line (which Aladdin mutters to Jasmine's pet tiger), is "Scat, good tiger, take off and go."
But the story got picked up by the same credulous
wackos who insist the Procter and Gamble logo is Satanic, and now it won't die...
>that goes to prove that Christians are also morally bankrupt.
Which Christians were proven morally bankrupt by the Crusades?
The ones in Constantinople who were raped and murdered by Crusaders?
The ones whose churches were ransacked and destroyed in the Crusades?
I guess the poster, like a lot of people, sees Christianity as some monolithic Western religion,
when in fact it's an Eastern and diverse one.
But who wants to be concerned about historical accuracy, anyway--
it's more fun to hit-and-run flame.
They printed a ridiculously long, biased hatched job called Russia Is Finished back in May to try to get everyone "familiar" with Russia's culture. Intelligent letter-writers have pointed out that it was mostly a crock.
So why would I care what they have to say about Japan?
I think I will stick to what fellow geeks without a political axe to grind tell me.
In this St. Pete Times story, this Bay News 9 story, or even yeterday's slashdot article.
You wrote:
In fact, the Insight article does mention Sorge and his assurances that the Japanese were planning to attack the USA, not the USSR, but: It was at this point, according to the Insight article (which quotes a retired KGB agent, reprimanded for spilling the beans), that the KGB's agents of influence in Washington were tasked with derailing the talks.Interesting stuff in any case, if only because it reminds us how many layers there can be behind what's written in the history books. Check out antiwar.com if you are interested in more such.
Another interesting take, more specifically on Pearl Harbor, is this article with a lot of evidence that the Soviet Union manipluated the USA into drawing a Japanese attack, so that the Japanese would leave the Russians alone instead of whipping their butts as in 1905.
In a better world, this would be turn out to be something relatively toothless, like the "copying allowed" bit that's present (though always ignored) even in the current CD Audio spec.
But odds are it'll be something horrible in the hardware. Then I won't mind that this format is probably going to die a lingering death.
Is anybody going to come out with a format that's as free as CD-R with more capacity?
Ironically, if anyone does it's going to be a country as un-free as China, which makes a lot of $$$ off SVCD.
Except that the Chinese Communist Party and the RIAA would probably get along too well. They have hobbies in common-- like the whole ruthless-monopoly-on-power thing...
Another one is that it doesn't seem to be carry all the encryption and other baggage that DVD has: you don't need a special, expensive "for Authoring" drive and media to get around all the copyright baloney. No watermarking. No lossy compression.
I mean, DVD-R is so crippled that the latest thing in the ripping community is making "mini-DVDs", CD-Rs burnt with (a few minutes of) DVD-quality video.
If you have a multi-disc DVD changer (and more and more geeks do), then you can spread the movie out among a few CD-Rs, and have an almost seamless transition. There are even firmware hacks to make initially uncooperative players support the format.
If equipment makers get on the bandwagon, we could have a more lightweight format for VCDs, and even double-length audio CDs. I hope it takes off.
Quoting from http://www.e-dinar.com/en/main_parts/6/6_advantage s.html:
It's probably got the same back-end, but they outline a pretty cool kiosk system where you can freely exchange your e-dinars for physical gold or silver Islamic dinars. e-gold's site seems pretty mum about how you can turn your e-gold into a physical bar of the shiny yellow stuff, and they seem to have gotten flamed for it, maybe deservedly.--the very un-halal mdecerbo
who didn't know a dinar was anything but the battered Yugoslav currency,
and wondered who the heck would want an electronic one.
Check out http://205.159.169.11/.
Farther afield, it's too bad that only this Swedish group seems to be doing much with the point-to-point 10Mbps link.
I mean, couldn't a Web page be put up anonymously (someplace like Russia) and an anonymous e-gold or similar account be established to accept donations to pay its bills?
is doing his best to squelch this, by counter-proposing more mandatory features for the spec
that will let the host operating system turn off the nasty CPRM commands at the drive.
As a Register article puts it:
For those interested in this CPRM nonsense, there's a good page at http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/2/17009.htmlHow do I know this?
When the speech reco company I work for was a startup (back in '96), we lost two big contracts because sound is basically broken on HP workstations.
Not buggy-- sound is such an afterthought on *NIX workstations (except SGIs) that it's always buggy. Our head developer navigated the Sun bureaucracy to the point where he eventually got the name of one the guys who wrote the Solaris audio drivers, and took him to lunch. So now there are all kinds of hacks in our code to determine what revision of, say, flaky Sparc 5 sound hardware it's running on. (Don't think youcan just ask the driver what chip rev is installed. You need to crank up the input gain and see whether the DC offset stays constant of drops with time.)
But sound on HPs just didn't work-- too bad both AT&T and the New York Stock Exchange had HP boxen on every desk and were interested in speech, and we had to walk away.
What are the lessons here? That I'm still bitter, heh. And that you shouldn't be so quick to accept buggy hardware-- somebody is getting screwed, and maybe it'll be you, unexpectedly, when something you never thought of becomes important.
For the curious, this is the Massachusetts Republican Party.
So I can't wait for this to take off, so we can read about everybody cracking the yourfit servers to retrieve the model of that intriguing someone special next door...
The Microsoft "Introducing DRM for Audio Drivers" white paper has the details:
And since Joe Sixpack will only have WinME or later in three or four years, kiss the ability to save aIt's the Microsoft monopoly protecting the RIAA monopoly, with the Republicrat monopoly enforcing the DMCA to back them up. Sigh.
And superdk is wrong. When you play a sound file through a digital soundcard, as long as the sound card doesn't do hardware resampling (like the crappy SB Live), then the S/PDIF that comes out is a perfect digital copy of the bits on disk.
You can copy the output, but most consumer sound cards (as opposed to those used by recording pros) honor the SCMS copy-protection system, which just (to oversimplify) sets a don't-copy bit.
And even if you get a black-market SCMS stripper, any watermark will still be there. A lot of research money has gone into development of watermarks that will survive even D-A-D conversion.
The really bad news (if anybody bothered reading the site) is that the whole SCMS system assumes crypto in your speakers, so you won't be able to steal bits from the speaker wire, and your speakers probably won't even play evil un-watermarked hacker content.
The only way to stop this nightmare would be to stop the spread of digital crypto-speakers, but good luck with that when they start being bundled with every new CompUSA PC.
But sad to say, plain .TXT is not
much of a marketing tool these days. Tom Paine's
handprinted manifestos lit the fire of revolution;
today, only a multimedia manifesto would catch
the public attention. We are a society of Web surfers and couch potatoes. The revolution had better be televized, or it's not gonna fly.
(It's offtopic, but those televised images of the Bosnian prisoner camps that TMiB mentions are a great example. It turns out they were faked (there's an article and even a video with the skinny on how it was done. But they sure built up a lot of sympathy for the Bosnian Muslim separatist movement, didn't they?!)
But pirate radio and TV transmitters are easy to jam and track down. That leaves computers. Freenet is not going to be a speed demon, and Publius will enforce this 100k limit. So the single most important way for people of limited means to disseminate controversial information is, I would argue, the Web. And, in fact, just about any political or controversial group you'd care to name has a Web site by now.
Once the Web becomes truly a mass medium worldwide, I predict that we will soon start seeing national governments go after the Web sites of movements they don't like. Thing is, some of those sites will be backed by other national governments. I wonder what the 'net will look like then. More firewalls like China's? Special agents attacking server rooms? ISP workers getting threatened like judges in South America?
The disks are manufactured by Norsam in Oregon.
You send TIFF files to the manufacturer, each being the image of a page. The disk will hold anywhere from 1000 to 100,000 page images; the more pages you squeeze on, the more powerful the microscope needed to read it.
Los Alamos tested a disc, and it seemed to hold up pretty well, although a long time in salt water caused slow corrosion, and baking it at high temperature messed it up.
Norsam's Web site is mum on pricing, but a discussion among some of the Long Now/Rosetta Disc folks suggests a one-off disc might be as low as $2K. If I weren't such a lazy ass, I might sign up as a reseller.
For $10k, you can get a cute add-on I didn't expect-- a computerized microscope reader that shifts the field of view as you point and click. Microfiche for the modern age, and future ones too, I guess.
I bet plenty of people would get excited about the chance to preserve whatever matters most to them for posterity, and be willing to pay big $$$ to do so.
A couple thousand years ago you had to be able to afford minions to engrave big obelisks for you, in order to get that kind of staying power.
Now all you need are a few dollars or DM for, presumably, something like fab time. (How are the disks manufactured, anyway?)
I bet there are rich Internet entrepeneurs with big egos who'd spring for their own disk, plus a small commission for me.
(Lame idea? Well, at least I read the article and am not just kvetching about Genesis, when the article mentioned a variety of creation stories; and wondering about format obsolescence, when the article mentioned it's an analog, graphical disk. Geez, /. .)
He calls it a framework, not a protocol:
>so I could send my vegetarian friends to it.
People Eating Tasty Animals can still be found, at http://www.mtd.com/tasty/.
Hasn't changed much since '96 (!) but neither has the taste of a nice thick juicy steak, mmm.
an antibook is a book that has been murdered--it has been bought up like private property, enclosed inside a secure hardware lock by strong encryption and digital signatures, wrapped up inside a shrinkwrap software license you have no choice but to accept, copyrighted whether it deserves a new copyright or not and protected by the criminal sanctions of the new laws, delivered directly to consumers over the Internet instead of being sold by used bookstores or browsable on a bookstore shelf, incapable of being lent by public libraries because of all the licensing restrictions, locked up securely so the reader cannot print it out, copy it to a disk to backup or use on another computer or share with anyone else, in fact so locked up it requires proprietary software or hardware to even view the antibook, incapable of being resold because of the shrinkwrap license and the hardware locks, and unable to be accessed for any fair use by scholars or by anyone, including blind readers, if it ever technically reverted to the public domain.
What's more, free e-books are threatened not only by the antibooks and horrors like DMCA, but by copyright extension: media companies want permanent copyright, but they'll settle for extending it by twenty-five years, every twenty-five years, retroactively of course.
See http://eldred.ne.mediaone.net for more on this-- plus free e-books in HTML format.
>free to the public and make it the standard?
At least the folks at xiph.org are working on doing this for audio,
so we can have a free replacement for MP3/Real Audio.
Video, I'd guess, would be an even huger task.