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Comment Re:No. (Score 1) 407

Videos: $10/mo.
Games: $10/mo.
ebooks: $10/mo.
Software: $10/mo.
Music scores: $10/mo.
Scientific papers: $10/mo.
Recipes: $10/mo.
Knitting instructions: $10/mo.

There's an endless variety of types of copyrighted work. Paying a blanket fee for "music" only sets up the situation for the next type of content owner to demand their tithe from all.

Disney: $10/mo.
WB: $10/mo.
Sony: $10/mo.
CNN: $10/mo.
FOX: $10/mo.

Don't think these megacorporations won't want their own guaranteed slice of your assumed piracy.

Comment Re:Organs? (Score 1) 471

Replying to myself, but the OP's question is very pertinent. The best way to get a properly developed organ is to clone the entire organism; that takes care of the genetic and environmental signals I mentioned above but leaves a question about what to do with the unwanted remainder of the organism.

Comment Re:Organs? (Score 1) 471

That's crap. You don't know what you're talking about.

The likely answer to the OP's question is it would be necessary to reproduce a complicated sequence of activated genes to reproduce the development of the organ over time, the way it does in a foetus. So stem cells would be the likely source material but they don't just turn into a heart or liver by themselves; they need extensive prodding from the environment to go down that route from undifferentiated cells and eventually become a functioning organ.

Comment Re:Quanta? (Score 2, Informative) 196

I changed to xfce recently after trying KDE 4.x for the 2nd time after 12 months (debian lenny to squeeze). The first time, I backed out of my upgrade. The second time, I took a friend's advice and switched to xfce. It's more stable than KDE (kdm locked up my screen twice in a day), much faster, and things mostly work the way I expect.

Comment "Server Error in '/' Application." (Score 3, Funny) 583

Description: An application error occurred on the server. The current custom error settings for this application prevent the details of the application error from being viewed remotely (for security reasons). It could, however, be viewed by browsers running on the local server machine.

Your God is not so powerful now, is he??

Comment Re:Actually great for these companies! (Score 1) 156

I've had "Securitel" monitored alarms, both the type where cable integrity is monitored at the exchange and the type where the alarm system dials out over PSTN with a low baud-rate modem.

My current alarm system, the LS-30 is much superior to both. Because it's ethernet-enabled, it can be monitored by a security company over the Internet. It also can alert via GSM or PSTN. Of course, one of the features of this alarm system is that the owner doesn't have to get a professional monitoring service, but the choice is there.

I haven't seen security company infrastructure but my impression is that they can achieve much better economies of scale by using the ContactID protocol and net-connected alarms. They can also provide better service to home owners.

Comment Re:is it really copyright trolling? (Score 2, Interesting) 253

Yes, it seems pretty sensible. Righthaven was not harmed at the time of publication. They clearly looked for an infringement and then brought the harm upon themselves.

On the other hand, it could be said that the Las Vegas Review-Journal had suffered harm, and Righthaven bought the rights, thus relieving LVRJ of the harm and taking it upon themselves.

Comment Go wireless networked burglar alarm (Score 3, Interesting) 825

I use the Scientech LS-30 which is a device supporting several types of wireless sensors including PIR (infra-red), reed switch, glass breakage detector, smoke detector, medical alert button and wireless outdoor alarm.

The alarm system can report a break-in, fire or medical emergency via PSTN or SMS. It's very programmable, with support for lots of different zones, X10 home automation switches, day-of-week and time-of-day mode setting, doorbell and so on.

The LS-30 has accessories including a GSM module (for sending alerts via SMS) USB interface and also ethernet interface.

I wrote the LS30 project to allow me to control and monitor the device from linux. There's a daemon which connects to the alarm's ethernet port; it proxies commands (from clients on my machine) and events (alerts / status updates) from the device.

I have daemons to watch for particular events (e.g. door open/close), logging the activity rates of PIR sensors (movement detection is reported by the unit even when disarmed) and burglaries (so the computer knows and can react accordingly e.g. by sending SMS messages or twitter).

Comment Hmm, 1987 (Score 1) 375

Looks like 1987 for me. That's not an exhaustive search, only looking through my homedir, and I'm ignoring files with obviously bogus mtimes (like Jan 1, 1980).

Files I converted from the TRS-80 would have preserved the timestamp and I think it was limited to the years 1980-1987 (due to using only 3 bits to represent the year number).

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