Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, the DMCA is winning, and 2600 just rolled over and played dead.

I can understand their point – of course they don’t have a prayer, none of us have a prayer against the powers that be in a land where justice is for sale to the highest bidder – but I’m still saddened.

Next up, pallidium. The consumers apparently accepted XP, so I suspect they’ll accept Pallidium too. And motherboards that won’t run linux..

It would appear that we’re too scared of everything from terrorism to economic collapse to care that we’re losing our freedom.

Well, said freedom was mostly illusion anyway. But we’re losing even the illusion, and we don’t, for the most part, care.

Sad, very sad.

Why can’t we turn off the TV?

Been watching lots of movies lately.. in fact, in the past four days, I have watched:

*) Men In Black
*) Scooby Doo
*) What’s the worst that could happen?
*) Smiling fish and goat on fire

Actually, the first two were rather comic – two movies in a row with talking dogs, even. I was actually the most impressed by Scooby Doo. I don’t know what it is with the movie remakes of 70s television shows, but this has to be one of the better examples of the genre..

I did, however, find myself more than mildly incensed by the 4 minutes (approximately) of full motion video advertisements taht preceded the movie.

In other thoughts..

You know, the christian church is what you get when you make god in man’s image.

Saw the great patriotic happenings at Gasworks park with P. – truly brilliant fireworks. And, being someone with a criminal record for fireworks posession [and someone who helped put togeather a fireworks show twice]

On a side note – what I want to do with the mpeg library..

is make it a library.

I know, mp3.com tried that. The music companies went nuts. But we could do something that mp3.com couldn’t do.

We could hold the physical assets.

If you have the physical CD, do you have the right to play it to ‘one’ person, for the cost of providing that service? (i.e. operating as a non profit corperation)

This opens up another interesting hole for you to slip through – because you don’t have to be *one* nonprofit. If only 1/1000th of the napster crowd are dedicated enough to set up a independant library service, you suddenly have a LOT of nonprofit orginizations to squash.

But the software has to be bulletproof.

——————————————-

In the meantime, I seem to be repeating myself. I suppose this is what happens with senility – I’ll stop having new ideas shortly, and then I’ll just repeat the two dozen or so old ones I’ve had over and over in subtily different ways for the rest of eternity..

A survey of the computers in my house, for your amusement:

1) P4, 512M RAM, 120G disk, win2k/RH 7.3, ‘main dev machine’
2) Celeron 433, 64M RAM, 8G disk, NT 4.0, ‘NT test machine’
3) Celeron 433, 64M RAM, 8G disk, Win98, not mine.. P.’s machine
4) P-III, 192M RAM, 132G RAID-5, RH 6.1, file server
5) Celeron 433, 128M RAM, 2x20G disk, RH 6.2, firewall/web server
6) P-III laptop, 128M RAM, RH6.2/Win98, my typical travelling machine
7) G3 laptop, 128M RAM, OS 9, mac testing machine
8) K6-733, 40G disk, 128M RAM, Win98, 36″ SVGA display – TV replacement
9) 2xP-III, 128G RAID, 256M RAM, win2k, ‘music machine’
10) P-I, 64M RAM, win98, touchscreen/AVR programming station
11) p-I, 32M RAM, laptop, rh 6.2, car software dev and whatnot
12) Amiga 2k, 12M RAM, nostalgia purposes
13) Amiga 4k, 32M RAM, nostalgia purposes
14) P-III, 128M RAM, win98, game machine
15) Sparc 5, not currently in service
16) DEC Alpha LX164, not currently in service
17) DEC Multias, 2, not currently in service

This is getting a touch excessive. Even I have to admit that. 17 (!) computers, 15 of which have ethernet jacks.

Okay, so I find myself, though jcurious [I really should learn what the link format for people’s journals is] running into the journals of a whole lot people that I know.

This has good sides and bad sides. The good side is that I get to catch up, at least somewhat, on their lives. The bad side is that I get to find out what they made and make of my reactions to them and vice versa.

And, as usual, they think I suck. 😉

I should probably come to terms with sucking sooner or later.. the problem is that inwardly, deep down, I don’t want to suck. I still have some teenage compulsion to be ‘cool’ – long after there’s any hope of coolness, and long after I should have come to terms with the fact that there’s really not much point to being cool anyway..

I should just go about my business, try to survive and keep myself entertained. Maybe kill off a few more brain cells in some creative ways..

I don’t know.

Oh, and to friends of mine, please sign up for a account at qm.sheer.us, I’ll be locking it down soon and then you won’t be able to. 😉

On other related annoyance note, my second set of 30Gbyte maxtors seems to have gone the way of my first set – i.e. two of the drives have gone tits-up. Now this is getting sad and pathetic. When a set of warantee replacement drives does the same thing the original drives did – i.e. 2 out of the four drives fail – that’s just.. hrm.. pathetic? Sad? I wasn’t even pushing them that hard.

I’ll call maxtor warantee support and see what (if anything) they have to say. My option at this point is to either stop using maxtor altogeather, or get a replacement set of drives that is *not* from the 30Gbyte line.

S.

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/rja14/

here you will find, among other things:

*) Description of a possible hardware implimentation designed to make the DMCA enforcable

*) Description of a possible attack to reverse engineer memory maps of microcontrollers, among other things.