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5726

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: NoteFrog Pro (clipboard information manager) - Mini-Review

« Last post by IainB on January 09, 2012, 09:40 PM »

Find:  (paper OR clip OR paperclip) AND (pen OR pencil) NOT (nuggan or nugganite)

-rjbull (January 08, 2012, 11:50 AM)

This search term could be simplified by removing redundant terms, thus:
Was: (paper OR clip OR paperclip) AND (pen OR pencil) NOT (nuggan or nugganite)
Change to: (paper OR clip) AND (pen) NOT (nuggan)

The modified search will filter "paperclip" and "pencil" and "nugganite" in the way you want, by default.

I don't think NF or CHS can do this in "live" search, because they are not boolean and they default to (AND). Boolean terms such as (AND),  (OR), (NOT) are not usable.
However, CHS can (as we know) apply a boolean filter - i.e., including boolean terms - in its Virtual Folders.
InfoSelect will perform a "live" boolean search filter (if you want it to), thus:




The ability to perform such a live boolean search - i.e., in a similar manner to InfoSelect - could be potentially very useful, and therefore would be a useful new requirement for both NF and CHS. (I know you have brought this up several times in the DC forum, in the context of CHS.)

5727

Living Room / Re: Kopimism - a newly-formalised religion

« Last post by IainB on January 09, 2012, 08:39 PM »

Well, I learned a lot from this (below), so it might be of use to you if you feel somewhat trapped by circumstances:

Prisoned From The Cradle To The Grave
- Author: H.G.  Wells (from "The History of Mr.Polly")

from Chapter 9 - The Potwell Inn
But when a man has once broken through the paper walls of everyday circumstance, those unsubstantial walls that hold so many of us securely prisoned from the cradle to the grave, he has made a discovery.  If the world does not please you, you can change it.  Determine to alter it at any price, and you can change it altogether.  You may change it to something sinister and angry, to something appalling, but it may be you will change it to something brighter, something more agreeable, and at the worst something much more interesting.  There is only one sort of man who is absolutely to blame for his own misery, and that is the man who finds life dull and dreary.  There are no circumstances in the world that determined action cannot alter, unless, perhaps, they are the walls of a prison cell, and even those will dissolve and change, I am told, into the infirmary compartment, at any rate, for the man who can fast with resolution.

Not without some risk, some years ago I changed my life to something brighter, something more agreeable, and something much more interesting.

The creation of Kopimism is along these lines - the creation of what could become an enjoyable and more interesting reality to fight back against the oppressive reality created to enslave us by the RIAA/MAFIAA DRM brigade.

5728

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: NoteFrog Pro (clipboard information manager) - Mini-Review

« Last post by IainB on January 09, 2012, 06:47 PM »

A NoteFrog stack is stored in memory as an array. The search is very fast. On a very large database the limiting factor, speed wise, is displaying a very large list of "matching" items - the list display just takes a while (relatively). If you type fast, so we're not trying to display a new list on each character, but rather only a reasonably sized list of matching items, it will be very fast.

Since it's processor dependent, the speed will also vary somewhat based on processor speed.

-berry (January 09, 2012, 05:28 PM)

I thought it might be useful to expand on this.
A common term for this kind of search is a "live" search. That means that the search proceeds as you type each letter of the search string.
It uses the actual data in the records, not a previously-built search index/table.

Generally speaking:

• Slow typing in the search field in NF starts a fresh incremental search with every character that is typed in. This slows things down quite a bit and is a waste of processor resource. This can sometimes feel "laggy".
• Fast typing does not allow enough/much time for NF to start a fresh incremental search and to properly proceed with that search as each character is typed in. This speeds things up a bit.
• Pasting a search term into the search field is thus the fastest, since it avoids all the incremental search palaver.

You will tend to notice this effect of typing speed on the search speed when you are searching larger stacks (i.e., databases containing lots of records).

You can see the same kind of NF search behaviour in InfoSelect and CHS. Usually pretty fast.

5729

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: NoteFrog Pro (clipboard information manager) - Mini-Review

« Last post by IainB on January 09, 2012, 05:59 PM »

I think I agree, though I don't have much data in NoteFrog yet.  I'd still like to see the Search Control Area made more prominent.  Eventually I'd like to see more advanced Boolean searching, something of this kind:

Find:  (paper OR clip OR paperclip) AND (pen OR pencil) NOT (nuggan or nugganite)

That might become more valuable with bigger datasets.

-rjbull (January 08, 2012, 11:50 AM)

Do you recall when I wrote in the thread above that I had suggested that the FAQ be included in the default stack (database) for NF?
Well, by that time I had already copied all the FAQ into my main stack.
So, in order to find a documented answer to your Q, I did this:

• typed in "search" to the search field box
• pressed "Enter"
• typed in "notefrog" to the search field box
• pressed "enter"

This was the result:


Scrolling through the FAQ item, I quickly found the answer to your Q: (see "Q: How do I do compound (AND) searches?")

Spoiler

Q: How do I use the NoteFrog™ Super Search?
Search Controls
The Search Control Area at the top left is the NoteFrog™ heart and soul and provides the instant search result interface.

Simple Searches
Type your search string into the top box.
As you type, the count shown in the small box will update to show the total number of notes which match your search criteria.
If you make a typing error just backspace.
As you type, the Item List Window at the bottom left will be updating to include only those notes which contain your search string, and the body of the top note from that ever-decreasing list will be displayed in the Item Window at the right.
If you type a search string that does not exist in any of the notes of your stack, NoteFrog™ will sound an audible beep and backspace the string to the last match that was the found on any note in the stack.
Once your notes have decreased to a reasonable number, you can identify your note and select it for display in the large window, or simply cursor down the items on the left to show all that contain your search terms.
TIP To see all matches for your current search string in a particular item, press the F3 Function Key to scroll to each of the matches, one at a time.

Clearing the Search
You may clear the search and return to the entire stack of notes at any time by clicking on the "Refresh" button or by hitting the keyboard escape key [Esc].
Repeating the last search
The "Repeat Last Search" button allows fast return for activities requiring repetitive access to a matching subset of items.

Match Case: Case sensitive searches
Normally you will conduct most searches as case insensitive, largely because the speed of the NoteFrog™ search makes doing case sensitive searches unnecessary. However, case-sensitive search is an option. In case-sensitive mode, notes must contain a character string that exactly matches the upper/lower case that you type into the search string. For example, an a does not match an A, and an A does not match an a. On the other hand, in case-insensitive searches, the case of both the input and the matching string are irrelevant, only the letter itself matters.
To illustrate, in the normal case-insensitive search, typing the the string
Tom
would find all notes containing the strings
Tom, atom,Tomato and stomp.
If you specifically wanted to find notes about your friend Tom, then you could set the case sensitive box and that same search Tom would now return only
Tom and Tomato.
To get even more refined you could type a space after the Tom and that would have found only notes with Tom with a space following, and thus not the note containing Tomato.

Q: How do I do compound (AND) searches?
Compound Searches
Cumulative "AND" compound searching is available by hitting the [Enter] key after each string of a compound search. The search for that string will be completed and the string itself will be displayed in the box directly below the search input box. Each additional "AND" of a compound search will be searched for and displayed there also, followed by an arrow symbol.

For example, to search your notes for the specific string:
Tom, Dick and Harry
you would enter
tom, dick and harry
into the search box which would return only the notes containing that exact character-for-character string match. However to find all notes that contain all three names you would enter
tom[Enter]
dick[Enter]
harry
which would list all notes that contain those three names anywhere in the body of the note. The strings of a compound seach may be entered in any order. The intermediate results will of course vary, but the final result will be identical.

Q: What are search "tags" and do I need them?
A: A search "tag" is just any special character string that you decide to use anywhere in a note that will make that note easier to find, either as an individual note or as a member of a group of related notes all including that same tag. You can use any scheme you choose for your tags, however, we recommend that you use the same general scheme for all of your tags. For example, one good approach might be to use two right-bracket characters "]]" as the first two characters of every tag you create. That has the advantage of being a lower-case character and also easy to locate on the keyboard. But feel free to use whatever tagging scheme you choose.

The NoteFrog™ compound search is so powerful and fast that you may easily and efficiently use NoteFrog™ for thousands of notes in many different Stacks and Stack Libraries and never need to add search "tags" to any of them. Most users will probably use tags only infrequently. Even the most intense users are unlikely to ever include tags in more than a small percentage of their notes. But at the same time, they can be extremely useful for many different purposes, including the creation of N-dimensional "Tree" structures (See the "Tree Structure" FAQ).

As an example, suppose you have a friend named Tom and over time you have created many notes that have his name somewhere in the note. If you wanted to find Tom's phone number or address or email, you might choose to add a special "flag" to the note or notes that contain that information. We call that sort of flag a "tag". In this case you might just tag those "important" notes about Tom with a ]]tom string added anywhere in those important notes. Then doing a search for "]]tom" would result in only those notes containing ]]tom appearing in the match list.

You might adopt a more flexible scheme for your tags. Perhaps using something like adding a "]]PB" to any note that contains "phonebook" type information for anyone. Then you would do a compound search by first entering "]]PB" in the search box and pressing the enter key. That would eliminate from the results list all notes not containing a phonebook entry "]]PB" string. Then search within those notes for "tom" or "dick" or "harry" or any other person. Note that when doing a compound search, the order in which the various search terms are entered makes no difference to the final result. You could have entered tom then carriage return then ]]PB and the final result would be identical- a listing of only those notes containing both the strings tom and ]]PB.

Additional examples are covered in other Q/A entries on this page.

5730

Living Room / Re: "Save the internet"

« Last post by IainB on January 09, 2012, 05:44 AM »

Well, there are precedents for consumer boycotts - similar to what 40hz suggests - that have been tremendously effective. For example, it worked a treat for CAMRA (CAMpaign for Real Ale) in the UK. The big beer combines turned their marketing plans around 180° when they saw how the boycott was causing a slump in UK beer sales and a fall in their share (stock) prices.
I was an early member of CAMRA and recall doing my bit to preserve the beautiful real ales that were going to be expunged.

And when Cadbury-Schweppes started to put Palm Oil into their Cadbury chocolate (which then tasted horrible) as a substitute for the more expensive dairy/cocoa fats, the subsequent outrage and boycott by Cadbury fans made them change their minds PDQ.
(Which reminds me, I bought some Nestle Caramac today, telling my daughter how yummy it used to be. Yech! Yes, it contained "Vegetable Fat" - aka Palm Oil.)

Internet users are a huge, relatively well-informed and interconnected population.
We've already seen how Internet users can rise to the occasion over the Paul Christoforo Ocean Marketing emails and GoDaddy's support of SOPA. If there was an even bigger and worthy cause at stake (e.g., the preservation of the integrity of the Internet), then you could expect an equally massive swing of clever collaboration and protest about DRM being used to kill the 'net.

Maybe we need a "Boycott DRM Media proponents" Facebook page?

5731

Living Room / Re: Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal

« Last post by IainB on January 09, 2012, 04:58 AM »

@Carol Haynes: Blimey. That all doesn't sound too good to me.
So it sounds as though - from what you said - that it is simple cost-reduction or cost-containment that is driving things, and, yes, the provision of library services would be viewed as a non-essential service. But then other services - such as healthcare, for example - are being moved away too.

So, the provision of non-statutory healthcare and non-essential services are being progressively rationalised and centralised to points in or near relatively high-density population centres.
That is probably likely to encourage a human migration out of the small towns/villages to the nearest city. They could become ghost towns/villages over time.

I think your reasoning to put the residual library facilities back into local hands sounds good, but I suspect that it's financially not an option.
So it's sell the property and throw the books away.
Giving the books to 2nd hand bookstores could seem like a good idea. Is there any proof that all the books are chucked on a bonfire like that? What a sad reflection on a country's culture if that happens.
Have any communities succeeded in getting organised and managing to take on the local authority and retain their libraries in some shape or form?

5732

Living Room / Re: Kopimism - a newly-formalised religion

« Last post by IainB on January 08, 2012, 10:59 PM »

The word religion makes me shudder.
Because of the potential for trouble.

-cmpm (January 08, 2012, 10:35 AM)

Understandable, that, but it does not make me shudder in anticipation of potential trouble. It rather makes my ears prick up though.
I was taught at an early age (by my mother) to consider that the real enemies of humanity were those "things" that frustrated our ability to think rationally. She explained that those "things" would help us to find irrational substantiation for acts making all manner of trouble for others - and that those "things" appear to be naturally within us in the form of a subconsciously-held triumvirate consisting of:

• ignorance,
• stupidity and
• bigotry.

We are born into this state. Everything we say and do is potentially crawling with these things, disabling our ability for critical thinking, and locked into our paradigms - which latter act as a distorting lens through which we think and perceive "reality".

No-one has a monopoly on these three, but you can invariably see them at play in most/all religions and religious beliefs and religio-political ideologies in general, and in the statements that people make regarding these things.
Which was why my mother encouraged me to read and "find out for myself" about religion and the various religio-political ideologies, because that was where I would come face-to-face with the enemy of reason.
So, that's why I said:

It rather makes my ears prick up though.

We all need to be wary if an enemy is about.

5733

Living Room / Re: "Save the internet"

« Last post by IainB on January 08, 2012, 10:03 PM »

Just maybe.

• Maybe it's not only "the Internet" that needs to be in the frame for saving by our protection, but "General Computation" as well?
• Maybe GC ("General Computation") is too dangerous to be in our hands any longer - like guns?
• Maybe the technology of GC means that we have the potential ability to access and correlate too much information and leaked information? Thus, we could be at risk of being able to know too much and can agitate too much for the Corprate and/or State's liking - GC offers us the potential for too much freedom - e.g., including as in the exercise of our freedom of speech. (This latter point could presumably be part of what was behind the Iranian government's proposals, mentioned above.)
• Maybe the "contagion" of the PC technology (per Nolan's Model) is perceived as a very real threat to social cohesion and control?
• Then maybe our access to GC - like our guns (if we have them) and whatever constitutional rights we may imagine ourselves to have had - needs to be taken away?

The theory cogently put forward in a very interesting talk by Cory Doctorow is that our right to possess and freely use GC (general purpose computing) is potentially under threat of removal - The Coming War on General Computation.

I got this post from a post on TorrentFreak, copied here:

Spoiler

From: Doctorow’s Omen Shows Why We Need To Ban DRM

Cory Doctorow held a presentation just before the turn of the year, showing how the current copyright wars are just a skirmish in the battles yet to come. It is a very strong omen that gives you an idea just how much is at stake in the coming two decades.

Doctorow’s presentation is here. It is time well spent — Cory Doctorow is also quite the entertainer, even with a very serious message. If you want to speedread a transcript instead, you can do so here.

In short, Doctorow argues that the copyright industry’s fight isn’t against copying, but against general-purpose computers. As more and more devices we buy are general-purpose hardware devices with custom software designed to make that hardware do certain things out of the box, that custom software that drives the device is also custom-izable software that lets the hardware be recoded and repurposed to do completely different things.

Shortly, we’ll see basically every industry trying to crack down on the freedom to tinker, to keep the products they sold us in the same state as they were before we owned them. This is exactly where we’re headed if the current trends continue.

The problem is that many people don’t understand what a general-purpose computer is. Legislators still think in terms of hardware: A cassette player can only play a cassette. Therefore, a music player today must only play music.

That’s wrong of course. A music player today can be recoded to play, stream, receive, remix, or do other things with music. Or, for that matter, it could probably be recoded to become a networked earthquake early-warning sensor instead, if its microphone was sensitive enough to sense the low-frequency sounds that forebode earthquakes.

This idea — that an off-the-shelf entertainment device can be repurposed to become an earthquake early-warning sensor with just the copying of a file — is mind-boggling to today’s legislators. It is just so far out it doesn’t reflect sunlight any more. And it is with this mindset that they legislate that breaking any DRM — repurposing devices that you own — should be punishable with jail time.

This is the reason that I keep reminding the world why we need to ban DRM altogether. It is corporations writing their own laws restricting your property.

But it goes beyond that. Let’s return to the concept of the general-purpose computer. In the mindset of today’s oldish legislators, if you want to kill the possibility of broadcasting music from a music player, you remove some piece from that device. Just like you would remove a “stream” button from a keyboard.

But as we know, it doesn’t work like that. If you want to prevent a general-purpose computer from running a certain type of code, you have to add something to it. You have to add code that prevents it from running this type of code, which it has been designed to do, after all.

And this is where it gets interesting. Since you own the general-purpose computer, you can run any code on it — including code that removes the code preventing you from running some types of code. These instructions that kill the DRM restrictions, seen from the device’s point of view, is just any kind of code that the device will execute happily.

And so protection for the removal of the DRM code is built in next, like Sony did with its criminal rootkit in 2005 (which is why Sony is on my permanent blacklist). So then that code is removed first by the person owning the device, followed by the DRM code.

The general-purpose computer is, by its very definition, a device where DRM will never work.

The major problem is that legislators don’t understand this. They don’t understand that you need to add something to the device to make it less functional, and that this something can easily be removed by an end-user to restore full functionality again. So we get an endless nightmare where legislators mandate more code, more laws, more code, and yet more laws to try to add restricting code to our general-purpose devices, code that we can easily remove.

We need to shift the viewpoint and narrative on this story — we need to make legislators understand the concept of a general-purpose computer, and that by definition, you can’t restrict it from running code. We need a Freedom to Code at the citizen level, at the same constitutional level as Freedom of Speech, even if it goes against corporate interests. No, scratch that: especially when it goes against corporate interests.

Of course, one might argue that a general freedom to code would also be a freedom to code those pesky DRM restrictions. That is true on a philosophical level. The fight here, however, is to get an understanding of the general-purpose computer on a conceptual level into legislatures.

The TorentFreak post links to a Transcript of Cory Doctorow's talk, here:

Spoiler

Transcript copied from: github.com

The Coming War on General Computation
Cory Doctorow [email protected]
Presented at 28C3

Transcribed by Joshua Wise [email protected].

This transcription attempts to be faithful to the original, but disfluencies have generally been removed (except where they appear to contribute to the text). Some words may have been mangled by the transcription; feel free to submit pull requests to correct them!

Times are always marked in [[double square brackets]].

The original content was licensed under Creative Commons CC-BY (http://boingboing.ne...-28c3-keynote.html); this transcript is more free, as permitted. You may provide me transcript attribution if you like, or if it does not make sense given the context, you can simply give Cory Doctorow original author attribution.

If you simply wish to read the transcript, you may wish to read a version that has been formatted for screen viewing, on my web site.

Christian W\"ohrl has also submitted a translation of this text into German.

Introducer:

Anyway, I believe I've killed enough time ... so, ladies and gentlemen, a person who in this crowd needs absolutely no introduction, Cory Doctorow!

[Audience applauds.]

Doctorow:

[[27.0]] Thank you.

[[32.0]] So, when I speak in places where the first language of the nation is not English, there is a disclaimer and an apology, because I'm one of nature's fast talkers. When I was at the United Nations at the World Intellectual Property Organization, I was known as the "scourge" of the simultaneous translation corps; I would stand up and speak, and turn around, and there would be window after window of translator, and every one of them would be doing this [Doctorow facepalms]. [Audience laughs] So in advance, I give you permission when I start talking quickly to do this [Doctorow makes SOS motion] and I will slow down.

[[74.1]] So, tonight's talk -- wah, wah, waaah [Doctorow makes 'fail horn' sound, apparently in response to audience making SOS motion; audience laughs]] -- tonight's talk is not a copyright talk. I do copyright talks all the time; questions about culture and creativity are interesting enough, but to be honest, I'm quite sick of them. If you want to hear freelancer writers like me bang on about what's happening to the way we earn our living, by all means, go and find one of the many talks I've done on this subject on YouTube. But, tonight, I want to talk about something more important -- I want to talk about general purpose computers.

Because general purpose computers are, in fact, astounding -- so astounding that our society is still struggling to come to grips with them: to figure out what they're for, to figure out how to accommodate them, and how to cope with them. Which, unfortunately, brings me back to copyright.

[[133.8]] Because the general shape of the copyright wars and the lessons they can teach us about the upcoming fights over the destiny of the general purpose computer are important. In the beginning, we had packaged software, and the attendant industry, and we had sneakernet. So, we had floppy disks in ziplock bags, or in cardboard boxes, hung on pegs in shops, and sold like candy bars and magazines. And they were eminently susceptible to duplication, and so they were duplicated quickly, and widely, and this was to the great chagrin of people who made and sold software.

[[172.6]] Enter DRM 0.96. They started to introduce physical defects to the disks or started to insist on other physical indicia which the software could check for -- dongles, hidden sectors, challenge/response protocols that required that you had physical possession of large, unwieldy manuals that were difficult to copy, and of course these failed, for two reasons. First, they were commercially unpopular, of course, because they reduced the usefulness of the software to the legitimate purchasers, while leaving the people who took the software without paying for it untouched. The legitimate purchasers resented the non-functionality of their backups, they hated the loss of scarce ports to the authentication dongles, and they resented the inconvenience of having to transport large manuals when they wanted to run their software. And second, these didn't stop pirates, who found it trivial to patch the software and bypass authentication. Typically, the way that happened is some expert who had possession of technology and expertise of equivalent sophistication to the software vendor itself, would reverse engineer the software and release cracked versions that quickly became widely circulated. While this kind of expertise and technology sounded highly specialized, it really wasn't; figuring out what recalcitrant programs were doing, and routing around the defects in shitty floppy disk media were both core skills for computer programmers, and were even more so in the era of fragile floppy disks and the rough-and-ready early days of software development. Anti-copying strategies only became more fraught as networks spread; once we had BBSes, online services, USENET newsgroups, and mailing lists, the expertise of people who figured out how to defeat these authentication systems could be packaged up in software as little crack files, or, as the network capacity increased, the cracked disk images or executables themselves could be spread on their own.

[[296.4]] Which gave us DRM 1.0. By 1996, it became clear to everyone in the halls of power that there was something important about to happen. We were about to have an information economy, whatever the hell that was. They assumed it meant an economy where we bought and sold information. Now, information technology makes things efficient, so imagine the markets that an information economy would have. You could buy a book for a day, you could sell the right to watch the movie for one Euro, and then you could rent out the pause button at one penny per second. You could sell movies for one price in one country, and another price in another, and so on, and so on; the fantasies of those days were a little like a boring science fiction adaptation of the Old Testament book of Numbers, a kind of tedious enumeration of every permutation of things people do with information and the ways we could charge them for it.

[[355.5]] But none of this would be possible unless we could control how people use their computers and the files we transfer to them. After all, it was well and good to talk about selling someone the 24 hour right to a video, or the right to move music onto an iPod, but not the right to move music from the iPod onto another device, but how the Hell could you do that once you'd given them the file? In order to do that, to make this work, you needed to figure out how to stop computers from running certain programs and inspecting certain files and processes. For example, you could encrypt the file, and then require the user to run a program that only unlocked the file under certain circumstances.

[[395.8]] But as they say on the Internet, "now you have two problems". You also, now, have to stop the user from saving the file while it's in the clear, and you have to stop the user from figuring out where the unlocking program stores its keys, because if the user finds the keys, she'll just decrypt the file and throw away that stupid player app.

[[416.6]] And now you have three problems [audience laughs], because now you have to stop the users who figure out how to render the file in the clear from sharing it with other users, and now you've got four! problems, because now you have to stop the users who figure out how to extract secrets from unlocking programs from telling other users how to do it too, and now you've got five! problems, because now you have to stop users who figure out how to extract secrets from unlocking programs from telling other users what the secrets were!

[[442.0]] That's a lot of problems. But by 1996, we had a solution. We had the WIPO Copyright Treaty, passed by the United Nations World Intellectual Property Organization, which created laws that made it illegal to extract secrets from unlocking programs, and it created laws that made it illegal to extract media cleartexts from the unlocking programs while they were running, and it created laws that made it illegal to tell people how to extract secrets from unlocking programs, and created laws that made it illegal to host copyrighted works and secrets and all with a handy streamlined process that let you remove stuff from the Internet without having to screw around with lawyers, and judges, and all that crap. And with that, illegal copying ended forever [audience laughs very hard, applauds], the information economy blossomed into a beautiful flower that brought prosperity to the whole wide world; as they say on the aircraft carriers, "Mission Accomplished". [audience laughs]

[[511.0]] Well, of course that's not how the story ends because pretty much anyone who understood computers and networks understood that while these laws would create more problems than they could possibly solve; after all, these were laws that made it illegal to look inside your computer when it was running certain programs, they made it illegal to tell people what you found when you looked inside your computer, they made it easy to censor material on the internet without having to prove that anything wrong had happened; in short, they made unrealistic demands on reality and reality did not oblige them. After all, copying only got easier following the passage of these laws -- copying will only ever get easier! Here, 2011, this is as hard as copying will get! Your grandchildren will turn to you around the Christmas table and say "Tell me again, Grandpa, tell me again, Grandma, about when it was hard to copy things in 2011, when you couldn't get a drive the size of your fingernail that could hold every song ever recorded, every movie ever made, every word ever spoken, every picture ever taken, everything, and transfer it in such a short period of time you didn't even notice it was doing it, tell us again when it was so stupidly hard to copy things back in 2011". And so, reality asserted itself, and everyone had a good laugh over how funny our misconceptions were when we entered the 21st century, and then a lasting peace was reached with freedom and prosperity for all. [audience chuckles]

[[593.5]] Well, not really. Because, like the nursery rhyme lady who swallows a spider to catch a fly, and has to swallow a bird to catch the spider, and a cat to catch the bird, and so on, so must a regulation that has broad general appeal but is disastrous in its implementation beget a new regulation aimed at shoring up the failure of the old one. Now, it's tempting to stop the story here and conclude that the problem is that lawmakers are either clueless or evil, or possibly evilly clueless, and just leave it there, which is not a very satisfying place to go, because it's fundamentally a counsel of despair; it suggests that our problems cannot be solved for so long as stupidity and evilness are present in the halls of power, which is to say they will never be solved. But I have another theory about what's happened.

[[644.4]] It's not that regulators don't understand information technology, because it should be possible to be a non-expert and still make a good law! M.P.s and Congressmen and so on are elected to represent districts and people, not disciplines and issues. We don't have a Member of Parliament for biochemistry, and we don't have a Senator from the great state of urban planning, and we don't have an M.E.P. from child welfare. (But perhaps we should.) And yet those people who are experts in policy and politics, not technical disciplines, nevertheless, often do manage to pass good rules that make sense, and that's because government relies on heuristics -- rules of thumbs about how to balance expert input from different sides of an issue.

[[686.3]] But information technology confounds these heuristics -- it kicks the crap out of them -- in one important way, and this is it. One important test of whether or not a regulation is fit for a purpose is first, of course, whether it will work, but second of all, whether or not in the course of doing its work, it will have lots of effects on everything else. If I wanted Congress to write, or Parliament to write, or the E.U. to regulate a wheel, it's unlikely I'd succeed. If I turned up and said "well, everyone knows that wheels are good and right, but have you noticed that every single bank robber has four wheels on his car when he drives away from the bank robbery? Can't we do something about this?", the answer would of course be "no". Because we don't know how to make a wheel that is still generally useful for legitimate wheel applications but useless to bad guys. And we can all see that the general benefits of wheels are so profound that we'd be foolish to risk them in a foolish errand to stop bank robberies by changing wheels. Even if there were an /epidemic/ of bank robberies, even if society were on the verge of collapse thanks to bank robberies, no-one would think that wheels were the right place to start solving our problems.

[[762.0]] But. If I were to show up in that same body to say that I had absolute proof that hands-free phones were making cars dangerous, and I said, "I would like you to pass a law that says it's illegal to put a hands-free phone in a car", the regulator might say "Yeah, I'd take your point, we'd do that". And we might disagree about whether or not this is a good idea, or whether or not my evidence made sense, but very few of us would say "well, once you take the hands-free phones out of the car, they stop being cars". We understand that we can keep cars cars even if we remove features from them. Cars are special purpose, at least in comparison to wheels, and all that the addition of a hands-free phone does is add one more feature to an already-specialized technology. In fact, there's that heuristic that we can apply here -- special-purpose technologies are complex. And you can remove features from them without doing fundamental disfiguring violence to their underlying utility.

[[816.5]] This rule of thumb serves regulators well, by and large, but it is rendered null and void by the general-purpose computer and the general-purpose network -- the PC and the Internet. Because if you think of computer software as a feature, that is a computer with spreadsheets running on it has a spreadsheet feature, and one that's running World of Warcraft has an MMORPG feature, then this heuristic leads you to think that you could reasonably say, "make me a computer that doesn't run spreadsheets", and that it would be no more of an attack on computing than "make me a car without a hands-free phone" is an attack on cars. And if you think of protocols and sites as features of the network, then saying "fix the Internet so that it doesn't run BitTorrent", or "fix the Internet so that thepiratebay.org no longer resolves", then it sounds a lot like "change the sound of busy signals", or "take that pizzeria on the corner off the phone network", and not like an attack on the fundamental principles of internetworking.

[[870.5]] Not realizing that this rule of thumb that works for cars and for houses and for every other substantial area of technological regulation fails for the Internet does not make you evil and it does not make you an ignoramus. It just makes you part of that vast majority of the world for whom ideas like "Turing complete" and "end-to-end" are meaningless. So, our regulators go off, and they blithely pass these laws, and they become part of the reality of our technological world. There are suddenly numbers that we aren't allowed to write down on the Internet, programs we're not allowed to publish, and all it takes to make legitimate material disappear from the Internet is to say "that? That infringes copyright." It fails to attain the actual goal of the regulation; it doesn't stop people from violating copyright, but it bears a kind of superficial resemblance to copyright enforcement -- it satisfies the security syllogism: "something must be done, I am doing something, something has been done." And thus any failures that arise can be blamed on the idea that the regulation doesn't go far enough, rather than the idea that it was flawed from the outset.

[[931.2]] This kind of superficial resemblance and underlying divergence happens in other engineering contexts. I've a friend who was once a senior executive at a big consumer packaged goods company who told me about what happened when the marketing department told the engineers that they'd thought up a great idea for detergent: from now on, they were going to make detergent that made your clothes newer every time you washed them! Well after the engineers had tried unsuccessfully to convey the concept of "entropy" to the marketing department [audience laughs], they arrived at another solution -- "solution" -- they'd develop a detergent that used enzymes that attacked loose fiber ends, the kind that you get with broken fibers that make your clothes look old. So every time you washed your clothes in the detergent, they would look newer. But that was because the detergent was literally digesting your clothes! Using it would literally cause your clothes to dissolve in the washing machine! This was the opposite of making clothes newer; instead, you were artificially aging your clothes every time you washed them, and as the user, the more you deployed the "solution", the more drastic your measures had to be to keep your clothes up to date -- you actually had to go buy new clothes because the old ones fell apart.

[[1012.5]] So today we have marketing departments who say things like "we don't need computers, we need... appliances. Make me a computer that doesn't run every program, just a program that does this specialized task, like streaming audio, or routing packets, or playing Xbox games, and make sure it doesn't run programs that I haven't authorized that might undermine our profits". And on the surface, this seems like a reasonable idea -- just a program that does one specialized task -- after all, we can put an electric motor in a blender, and we can install a motor in a dishwasher, and we don't worry if it's still possible to run a dishwashing program in a blender. But that's not what we do when we turn a computer into an appliance. We're not making a computer that runs only the "appliance" app; we're making a computer that can run every program, but which uses some combination of rootkits, spyware, and code-signing to prevent the user from knowing which processes are running, from installing her own software, and from terminating processes that she doesn't want. In other words, an appliance is not a stripped-down computer -- it is a fully functional computer with spyware on it out of the box.

[audience applauds loudly] Thanks.

[[1090.5]] Because we don't know how to build the general purpose computer that is capable of running any program we can compile except for some program that we don't like, or that we prohibit by law, or that loses us money. The closest approximation that we have to this is a computer with spyware -- a computer on which remote parties set policies without the computer user's knowledge, over the objection of the computer's owner. And so it is that digital rights management always converges on malware.

[[1118.9]] There was, of course, this famous incident, a kind of gift to people who have this hypothesis, in which Sony loaded covert rootkit installers on 6 million audio CDs, which secretly executed programs that watched for attempts to read the sound files on CDs, and terminated them, and which also hid the rootkit's existence by causing the kernel to lie about which processes were running, and which files were present on the drive. But it's not the only example; just recently, Nintendo shipped the 3DS, which opportunistically updates its firmware, and does an integrity check to make sure that you haven't altered the old firmware in any way, and if it detects signs of tampering, it bricks itself.

[[1158.8]] Human rights activists have raised alarms over U-EFI, the new PC bootloader, which restricts your computer so it runs signed operating systems, noting that repressive governments will likely withhold signatures from OSes unless they have covert surveillance operations.

[[1175.5]] And on the network side, attempts to make a network that can't be used for copyright infringement always converges with the surveillance measures that we know from repressive governments. So, SOPA, the U.S. Stop Online Piracy Act, bans tools like DNSSec because they can be used to defeat DNS blocking measures. And it blocks tools like Tor, because they can be used to circumvent IP blocking measures. In fact, the proponents of SOPA, the Motion Picture Association of America, circulated a memo, citing research that SOPA would probably work, because it uses the same measures as are used in Syria, China, and Uzbekistan, and they argued that these measures are effective in those countries, and so they would work in America, too!

[audience laughs and applauds] Don't applaud me, applaud the MPAA!

[[1221.5]] Now, it may seem like SOPA is the end game in a long fight over copyright, and the Internet, and it may seem like if we defeat SOPA, we'll be well on our way to securing the freedom of PCs and networks. But as I said at the beginning of this talk, this isn't about copyright, because the copyright wars are just the 0.9 beta version of the long coming war on computation. The entertainment industry were just the first belligerents in this coming century-long conflict. We tend to think of them as particularly successful -- after all, here is SOPA, trembling on the verge of passage, and breaking the internet on this fundamental level in the name of preserving Top 40 music, reality TV shows, and Ashton Kutcher movies! [laughs, scattered applause]

[[1270.2]] But the reality is, copyright legislation gets as far as it does precisely because it's not taken seriously, which is why on one hand, Canada has had Parliament after Parliament introduce one stupid copyright bill after another, but on the other hand, Parliament after Parliament has failed to actually vote on the bill. It's why we got SOPA, a bill composed of pure stupid, pieced together molecule-by-molecule, into a kind of "Stupidite 250", which is normally only found in the heart of newborn star, and it's why these rushed-through SOPA hearings had to be adjourned midway through the Christmas break, so that lawmakers could get into a real vicious nationally-infamous debate over an important issue, unemployment insurance. It's why the World Intellectual Property Organization is gulled time and again into enacting crazed, pig-ignorant copyright proposals because when the nations of the world send their U.N. missions to Geneva, they send water experts, not copyright experts; they send health experts, not copyright experts; they send agriculture experts, not copyright experts, because copyright is just not important to pretty much everyone! [applause]

[[1350.3]] Canada's Parliament didn't vote on its copyright bills because, of all the things that Canada needs to do, fixing copyright ranks well below resolving health emergencies on First Nations reservations, exploiting the oil patch in Alberta, interceding in sectarian resentments among French- and English-speakers, solving resources crises in the nation's fisheries, and a thousand other issues! The triviality of copyright tells you that when other sectors of the economy start to evince concerns about the Internet and the PC, that copyright will be revealed for a minor skirmish, and not a war. Why would other sectors nurse grudges against computers? Well, because the world we live in today is /made/ of computers. We don't have cars anymore, we have computers we ride in; we don't have airplanes anymore, we have flying Solaris boxes with a big bucketful of SCADA controllers [laughter]; a 3D printer is not a device, it's a peripheral, and it only works connected to a computer; a radio is no longer a crystal, it's a general-purpose computer with a fast ADC and a fast DAC and some software.

[[1418.9]] The grievances that arose from unauthorized copying are trivial, when compared to the calls for action that our new computer-embroidered reality will create. Think of radio for a minute. The entire basis for radio regulation up until today was based on the idea that the properties of a radio are fixed at the time of manufacture, and can't be easily altered. You can't just flip a switch on your baby monitor, and turn it into something that interferes with air traffic control signals. But powerful software-defined radios can change from baby monitor to emergency services dispatcher to air traffic controller just by loading and executing different software, which is why the first time the American telecoms regulator (the FCC) considered what would happen when we put SDRs in the field, they asked for comment on whether it should mandate that all software-defined radios should be embedded in trusted computing machines. Ultimately, whether every PC should be locked, so that the programs they run are strictly regulated by central authorities.

[[1477.9]] And even this is a shadow of what is to come. After all, this was the year in which we saw the debut of open sourced shape files for converting AR-15s to full automatic. This was the year of crowd-funded open-sourced hardware for gene sequencing. And while 3D printing will give rise to plenty of trivial complaints, there will be judges in the American South and Mullahs in Iran who will lose their minds over people in their jurisdiction printing out sex toys. [guffaw from audience] The trajectory of 3D printing will most certainly raise real grievances, from solid state meth labs, to ceramic knives.

[[1516.0]] And it doesn't take a science fiction writer to understand why regulators might be nervous about the user-modifiable firmware on self-driving cars, or limiting interoperability for aviation controllers, or the kind of thing you could do with bio-scale assemblers and sequencers. Imagine what will happen the day that Monsanto determines that it's really... really... important to make sure that computers can't execute programs that cause specialized peripherals to output organisms that eat their lunch... literally. Regardless of whether you think these are real problems or merely hysterical fears, they are nevertheless the province of lobbies and interest groups that are far more influential than Hollywood and big content are on their best days, and every one of them will arrive at the same place -- "can't you just make us a general purpose computer that runs all the programs, except the ones that scare and anger us? Can't you just make us an Internet that transmits any message over any protocol between any two points, unless it upsets us?"

[[1576.3]] And personally, I can see that there will be programs that run on general purpose computers and peripherals that will even freak me out. So I can believe that people who advocate for limiting general purpose computers will find receptive audience for their positions. But just as we saw with the copyright wars, banning certain instructions, or protocols, or messages, will be wholly ineffective as a means of prevention and remedy; and as we saw in the copyright wars, all attempts at controlling PCs will converge on rootkits; all attempts at controlling the Internet will converge on surveillance and censorship, which is why all this stuff matters. Because we've spent the last 10+ years as a body sending our best players out to fight what we thought was the final boss at the end of the game, but it turns out it's just been the mini-boss at the end of the level, and the stakes are only going to get higher.

[[1627.8]] As a member of the Walkman generation, I have made peace with the fact that I will require a hearing aid long before I die, and of course, it won't be a hearing aid, it will be a computer I put in my body. So when I get into a car -- a computer I put my body into -- with my hearing aid -- a computer I put inside my body -- I want to know that these technologies are not designed to keep secrets from me, and to prevent me from terminating processes on them that work against my interests. [vigorous applause from audience] Thank you.

[[1669.4]] Thank you. So, last year, the Lower Merion School District, in a middle-class, affluent suburb of Philadelphia found itself in a great deal of trouble, because it was caught distributing PCs to its students, equipped with rootkits that allowed for remote covert surveillance through the computer's camera and network connection. It transpired that they had been photographing students thousands of times, at home and at school, awake and asleep, dressed and naked. Meanwhile, the latest generation of lawful intercept technology can covertly operate cameras, mics, and GPSes on PCs, tablets, and mobile devices.

[[1705.0]] Freedom in the future will require us to have the capacity to monitor our devices and set meaningful policy on them, to examine and terminate the processes that run on them, to maintain them as honest servants to our will, and not as traitors and spies working for criminals, thugs, and control freaks. And we haven't lost yet, but we have to win the copyright wars to keep the Internet and the PC free and open. Because these are the materiel in the wars that are to come, we won't be able to fight on without them. And I know this sounds like a counsel of despair, but as I said, these are early days. We have been fighting the mini-boss, and that means that great challenges are yet to come, but like all good level designers, fate has sent us a soft target to train ourselves on -- we have a organizations that fight for them -- EFF, Bits of Freedom, EDRi, CCC, Netzpolitik, La Quadrature du Net, and all the others, who are thankfully, too numerous to name here -- we may yet win the battle, and secure the ammunition we'll need for the war.

[[1778.9]] Thank you.

[sustained applause]

This could arguably be one possible and maybe even incontrovertible explanation for the seemingly remorseless supplier-push of a plethora of devices like the X-box, iPad, Kindle, Nook and other locked-down embedded computing devices and diversions.

5734

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« Last post by IainB on January 08, 2012, 10:00 PM »

Speaking of good poetry, good graffiti is arguably just a form of poetry.
For example:

Spotted years ago, scrawled on a wall in the Euston Underground:
    Hanratty was
    innassent (crossed out)
    inorssent (crossed out)
    anascent (crossed out)
    guilty.

5735

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« Last post by IainB on January 08, 2012, 09:58 PM »

@TaoPhoenix: So that's the reason!
All aspects of good poetry, I guess.

5736

Living Room / Re: Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal

« Last post by IainB on January 08, 2012, 08:48 PM »

@Carol Haynes: As a "pretext" for what, exactly? I don't quite understand. Do you mean to say the pretext is for the Libraries Transformation Project? (Or perhaps a more accurately renamed Libraries Rationalisation Project.)

Is that project defined somewhere as being the implementation of a stated government national policy for the rationalisation/consolidation of libraries or for cultural "transformation" by that means?
If several/all councils are doing it, then it sure looks like it could be a co-ordinated strategy - i.e., not just/only a cost-saving tactic by each locality.
Are you able to suppose as to why there might be a concealment of this by euphemistically calling it "a cost-saving tactic"?

Messing around with libraries would arguably be unlikely to usefully "transform" libraries per se, but it probably would be likely to transform the culture of those localities where the libraries have been removed.
That would be because it would directly change (reduce?) the people's right and ease of access to so many things previously taken for granted and as funded (your point) by the people in those communities - e.g., including media such as CDs, DVDs, microfiche, books/literature, magazines, informational pamphlets - all containing information and knowledge and even related to the co-ordination of local cultural events.

These would be things that otherwise normally might all have been accessed/distributed through the local library facility. And what of the travelling libraries that I recall being so useful in outlying small villages in the UK?
It will leave a vacuum.

Are you aware of there being any stated or mooted intention to fill the vacuum caused by the closing-down of local libraries? e.g., (say) the institution of local "cultural reading rooms" funded by local religious groups and/or by local employers/corporations or by the EU Commission on Libraries (if such a thing exists)?
That could be interesting, and certainly potentially transformational for the local culture(s). Maybe that is the long-term intent? Cultural re-engineering?

In any event, if you implement the project at a local level in each and every council's domain, then wouldn't that directly imply a potential nation-wide cultural transformation?
So, if the project was being progressively applied across all localities, then it brings us back to the question I asked above:

Is that project defined somewhere as being the implementation of a stated government national policy for the rationalisation/consolidation of libraries or for cultural "transformation"?

5737

Living Room / Re: How to destroy yourself on the internet in 24 hours

« Last post by IainB on January 08, 2012, 07:40 PM »

@J-MAc: Thankyou. I had not known that the PC brigade had ameliorated the definition of the terminology for "psychopathy".

...psychopathy (and sociopathy for that matter) doesn’t exist anymore officially!

Both of those terms are now labelled as "Antisocial Behavior Personality" in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition (DSM-IV). New and improved insight into such personality disorders? Or simply more political correctness garbage in the English language?

-J-Mac (January 03, 2012, 12:38 PM)

One of the more accurate comments I can think of to say about that is:

"Political correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a piece of sh*t by the clean end."
(Texas A&M website)

5738

Living Room / Re: silly humor - post 'em here! [warning some NSFW and adult content]

« Last post by IainB on January 08, 2012, 07:44 AM »

Just came across this.
A beautifully simplified explanation of the underlying concepts: DEBT LIMIT - A GUIDE TO AMERICAN FEDERAL DEBT MADE EASY.

5739

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: NoteFrog Pro (clipboard information manager) - Mini-Review

« Last post by IainB on January 08, 2012, 07:39 AM »

Feedback from ß testing:
I installed and worked with NFß "01" as I shall refer to it.
I reported back to @berry with:
4 positive points
8 negative issues (a couple of may have been due to my lack of knowledge of NF).

The issues have been addressed where repeatable, and a new NFß "02" has been issued, which I have downloaded and installed and am using now with NF running all the time.

So those issues that could be replicated have been fixed in NFß "02", so have now gone away.
There was one obscure issue that could not be replicated, and that also seems to have gone away (or has not yet recurred, at any rate).

I also have CHS running all the time, so this involves duplication, but I'd rather be safe than sorry - I know that CHS has shown itself to be pretty much rock solid. Neither proggy seems to get in the way of the other, so far, and I am learning more about NF as I continue to use it.

5740

General Software Discussion / Re: MuseScore - music notation and composition tool (freeware)

« Last post by IainB on January 07, 2012, 11:42 PM »

@40hz: Thanks for mentioning your experience.
Roger wilco.

5741

Living Room / Re: Kopimism - a newly-formalised religion

« Last post by IainB on January 07, 2012, 11:37 PM »

+10 for what Renegade said.   
Woot!

5742

Living Room / Re: "Save the internet"

« Last post by IainB on January 07, 2012, 11:26 PM »

Well, whether they were "forced down a path or chose to take it" could seem to be a subject of opinion and in any event could arguably be largely irrelevant in the context of the Iranian CUG/Intranet.

What I find interesting is that:
(a) The Iranian proposal would seem to be entirely consistent with Islamic teachings/belief (as above). (Come to think of it - though I could be wrong, of course - I don't recall ever having seen the Iranians to be inconsistent in any of their actions or proclamations/declarations.)

(b) If the infection is considered to be Western religio-political ideology in general, and if one of the main vectors for carrying that infection is the Internet, then the sensible thing could be to quarantine the vector - the Internet. That is presumably precisely what a national Iranian CUG (Closed User Group) Intranet could achieve.

Whether it is a practical approach, I wouldn't know. For example, it would presumably have been the sort of approach that the Chinese, Pakistani and Indian governments could have considered - and maybe they did and later abandoned for a variety of reasons (the biggest maybe being the risk of subjecting themselves to cultural-isolation).
But if all Islamic theocracies/nations were to do the same as the Iranian proposal, then they could form a common Islamic Caliphate CUG INTERNET, and that just might have enough mass/momentum so as to be a workable proposition. I think the concept would need to be tested out in prototype before you could be certain though. Maybe Iran's CUG proposal is a prototype for all members of the OIC/Muslim Brotherhood?

The orthodox Islamic approach is that it is forbidden - it is an offence - for kafirs (e.g., Christians - who are part of the world of heresy or "Dar al-Harb") to proselytise or seek to convert Muslims to their faith. The offence could be punishable by death. That is probably the reason behind the various reports of Christian churches being torched and Christians being killed and Christian refugees fleeing in Egypt's "Arab Spring" revolution.

Thus, by the same token, if offensive/blasphemous Western ideological paradigms/beliefs are infecting Iranian Internet users, then severing publicly-accessible connections to the WWW/Internet could be the logical thing to do. One advantage would be that nobody gets killed in that action - which is arguably a more peaceful approach than making death threats for publication of Internet media/content that is deemed to be offensive (if not blasphemous) to Muslim beliefs.

So Iran could get what they need/want. And this would not destroy the Internet - so it is still "saved" - but it would change it in a way that the original designers possibly could not have foreseen and certainly away from the early CERN-inspired concept of universal, common, "open" and "free" sharing and access of all scientific information/knowledge.

Maybe this case indicates that 2012 is going to be a very interesting year, but I suspect that, at this rate (by locking up human knowledge), it will not see us getting any closer to the mythical ideal of the three Atlantean Halls of Record that Cayce spoke of. (Sigh.)

5743

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Giveaway of the Day - ArcSoft Perfect365

« Last post by IainB on January 07, 2012, 10:11 PM »

Just some feedback.
Having had the opportunity to play around with this proggy, it seems to be essentially a tool for prettifying/beautifying (i.e., falsifying) images of women's faces, turning them into images of faces that do not exist in real life.
I'm no expert, but I would say that it seems to do what it's designed to do, and rather well at that. You can even manipulate parts of the object's face - e.g., making the jaws wider or thinner; changing the smile, the nose.

It seems to focus on just one aspect (the face) of what you can do with Photoshop.

5744

Living Room / Kopimism - a newly-formalised religion

« Last post by IainB on January 07, 2012, 09:40 PM »

This religion looks like it could be something that some people might find useful and worth joining.
So far, they (the Kopimists) are neither asking for nor demanding any money either - unlike most other religions that come to mind.
The potential legal implications seem interesting: MPAA Lawyer Inspired File-Sharing Religion, Catholic Bishop Unhappy

“In an interview in 2007 or 2008 (I believe, not sure about the date) the Swedish lawyer for the MPAA, Monique Wadsted, got a question about her views on the people advocating file sharing,” Sunde explains.

“It’s just a few people, very loud. They’re a cult. They call themselves Kopimists,” Wadsted responded.

At least it should avoid the Cruise-type wingnuts belonging to L. Ron Hubbard's (the science fiction author) invented cult of Scientology - which apparently claims:

"...the galactic warlord Xenu dumped 13.5 trillion beings in volcanoes on Earth, blowing them up and scattering their souls."

5745

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: Giveaway of the Day - InPaint 3.1 (for Windows and Mac)

« Last post by IainB on January 07, 2012, 07:11 PM »

...this is a terrific program...
Photoshop CS5 made a big splash with its Content Aware feature to remove unwanted items from photos, but I've found that InPaint is just as easy, just as effective in most instances, and infinitely less expensive (even when it's not on GAOTD). 

-cyberdiva (January 07, 2012, 08:45 AM)

Yes.
Having now had some opportunity to play with InPaint myself, I have to say that it seems like a classic example of a specialised/niche software tool - it really seems to do only one thing, and it seems to do it really well.   
That "one thing" is a very common requirement - remove or repair/mend objects/blemishes in digital images.
For example, I have been looking for something like this for ages, to repair blemishes in old photos. There's a similar tool in Picasa, but it doesn't seem to work all that well as it is difficult to avoid having it leave residual "ghosty" image particles around the repaired areas.

5746

Living Room / Re: "Save the internet"

« Last post by IainB on January 07, 2012, 06:55 PM »

I just thought of something. You know who we haven't heard from? President Obama! Isn't that the *Point* of the Presidency - to sign *or* veto a bill? So far we hear the lawmakers having a grand field day - what if it runs into President Obama's Veto Hammer?

-TaoPhoenix (January 07, 2012, 01:26 PM)

Has Obama's performance to date indicated that he is more than likely to block anything that restricts individual freedoms/rights under the Constitution?
I would suggest that all you need to do to ensure that the proposed law change gets signed off is do nothing.
Easy.

5747

General Software Discussion / MuseScore - music notation and composition tool (freeware)

« Last post by IainB on January 07, 2012, 06:24 PM »

I have been looking for a decent music notation and composition tool to try out for a while.
I may have just found it.

Reading this link at The Windows Club: Download MuseScore for Windows – A Freeware to Notate and Compose Music
- took me to this link: http://musescore.org/
- and then this link to music-related software training: http://www.midnightmusic.com.au/

The music notation and composition tool is MuseScore:

From:http://musescore.org/

MuseScore is a free cross-platform WYSIWYG music notation program that offers a cost-effective alternative to commercial programs such as Sibelius and Finale.
You can print beautifully engraved sheet music or save it as PDF or MIDI file.

Some highlights:
    WYSIWYG, notes are entered on a "virtual note sheet"
    Unlimited number of staves
    Up to four voices per staff
    Easy and fast note entry with your keyboard, mouse, or MIDI keyboard
    Integrated sequencer and FluidSynth software synthesizer
    Import and export of MusicXML and Standard MIDI Files
    Available for Windows, Mac and Linux
    Translated in 43 languages
    GNU GPL licensed

Might be of interest to DCF members.

5748

Living Room / Re: Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal

« Last post by IainB on January 07, 2012, 07:00 AM »

A simple and fair library lending model would be the publishers provide the books for the standard eBook price and in the traditional way the library only gets the copies they buy - that means that is the maximum they can lend at any one time. To account for the fact that books never need to be replaced they could charge a subscription of a few cents per loan. That cost could be passed on to the borrower.

To maintain the traditional interlibrary loan system books could be lent temporarily to other libraries on a similar basis but put in a delay as there is now to add 'friction' to the system.

-Carol Haynes (December 25, 2011, 06:28 PM)

I wonder whether this is likely to happen?
Looks like the "libraries", in London areas at least, are being "transformed": The Demise of the Public Library

I wonder if this is true?

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Found Deals and Discounts / Giveaway of the Day - InPaint 3.1 (for Windows and Mac)

« Last post by IainB on January 07, 2012, 06:42 AM »

Giveaway of the Day - InPaint 3.1 (for Windows and Mac)
Looks like a simple picture "mender" touch-up proggy.
19hrs 20mins to go as at time of posting this.

5750

Living Room / Re: "Save the internet"

« Last post by IainB on January 07, 2012, 03:27 AM »

This disease in the US is infectious... The US is just patient zero.

-Renegade (January 06, 2012, 03:03 PM)

Well, it might be Patient Zero in the Western democracies, and it might be infectious, but the non-Western non-democracies have already got a head start with their own form of totalitarian censorship - e.g., including China, Pakistan - and there have been some recent daft censorship proposals in the Indian democracy.

However, talking of "infectious", I think Iran has been able to demonstrate some innovative thought-leadership here: Iran Further Restricts Facebook and Twitter, Prepares Its Own Internet

Iran is testing a domestic Internet, a “Halal” network that will restrict citizens from penetrating foreign sites. Internet users this week reported delays in their network connections, which is believed to be connected to the new network’s trial run.

The Wall Street Journal says the domestic Internet replacement aims to restrict the influence of non-Islamic culture and western ideology. The network — technically an Intranet — should be ready to go live within a few weeks, Iranian media reported.
(There's more.)

This arguably makes a lot of sense for any Islamic theocracy in the Caliphate. Is is entirely consistent with the Koran.
Any student who has understood and learned the Koran knows that Islam draws a clear distinction between the world of Islam (Dar al-Islam) and the world of heresy (Dar al-Harb) - they are antithetical. Muslims (believers) are in the former, and all others (kafirs -  unbelievers, infidels, skeptics) are in the latter.
By plugging Iran into a national CUG (Closed User Group) Intranet, the Iranians will be simply and effectively protecting themselves from infection by Dar al-Harb via the Internet, by quarantining the Internet. That infection includes Dar al-Harb concepts - e.g., including such as "freedom", or "democracy", both of which are obscene in the Islamic context of having submitted to Islam (the word of Allah).

Iran, in common with other Muslim nation members of the global Caliphate, is a theocracy, and if this quarantining of the Internet is what they want, then why shouldn't it be done? Western Dar al-Harb concepts and ideas have the potential to corrupt, or arguably actually already have corrupted some of the basic building blocks of these Islamic societies.

At least currently, and for a while, in America there still remains the democratic freedom to protest, argue and debate proposed US proscriptive, prohibitionist, or censoring measures - e.g., such as SOPA. If you think this is a valuable thing, then be grateful for it.