Wikipedia has pretty much always been useless for anything even slightly political.

If you're looking for something hard and factual, like perhaps information about Lenses, it's a fine resource to use as a starting point. For anything that might have a political or moral dimension to it, not so much. Everyone should know that by now.

Alternate viewpoints to the party line have been banished for as long as I can remember.

The following is from the IETF's Leap Second List file...

# 4. The decision to insert a leap second into UTC is currently
# the responsibility of the International Earth Rotation and
# Reference Systems Service. (The name was changed from the
# International Earth Rotation Service, but the acronym IERS
# is still used.)
#
# Leap seconds are announced by the IERS in its Bulletin C.
#
# See www.iers.org for more details.
#
# Every national laboratory and timing center uses the
# data from the BIPM and the IERS to construct UTC(lab),
# their local realization of UTC.
#
# Although the definition also includes the possibility
# of dropping seconds ("negative" leap seconds), this has
# never been done and is unlikely to be necessary in the
# foreseeable future.

There is other interesting info in the file, for those who might want to take a look at it.

So, if it's run by the user, it can only garbage up files owned by the user, right?

I guess there are a few idiots out there who would run it via sudo, but probably not many, and they will certainly get what they deserve.

If I were to somehow get screwed over by this, I'd just login as root, delete /home/$USER, and reload from my daily backup. This really isn't rocket science folks.

Baen Publishing seems to do pretty OK with their ebooks and print books despite the fact the every single one is published in a variety of formats without any DRM, and has been doing so for quite some time now.

In the Grantville Gazette number 88, which was published several months ago, Eric Flint had some things to say about it...

=Begin quote=

"Tempus fugit" is a Latin phrase that officially translates as "time flies." What it really is, though, is a hoity-toity way of saying "old farts forget stuff."

The old fart in this instance being me—and what I forgot was that my novel 1632 was published exactly twenty years ago.

Well

Using the term "exactly" with some poetic license. The book was indeed published in February of 2000, but I’m pretty sure it was published earlier than the 18th day of the month. So I’m fudging a little.

By any reasonable measure of the term “success,” 1632 was a successful novel. To begin with, it was successful on its own terms. It sold—this is taken directly from my royalty reports so there’s no fudging at all7,458 copies in hardcover, which was very good at the time for hardcover sales. Better still, it also had a 69% sell-through. For those of you not familiar with publishing lingo, "sell-through" means the percentage of books printed and shipped that are actually sold. The industry average is around 50%, so 69% is very good,

=snip

Furthermore, the novel is still in print after twenty years, and has sold over 140,000 copies in paperback with a 88% sell-through, which is like incredibly, spectacularly good. A publishing house which has a book that maintains an 88% sell-through over two decades has essentially been able to legally print money for all that time.

And—I love this fact because I sneer at so-called "electronic piracy"keep in mind that 1632 has been available electronically FOR FREE for about the last eighteen years and... still just keeps selling and selling. Every year I get royalty payments for the book somewhere between $4,000 and $5,000.

=End quote=

I think the fact that this book, and many others that are available for free download by anyone on the planet is still seeing kinda puts the whole 'piracy' thing to rest.

Reading through the posts here, some defend the costs imposed based on the need to fund the infrastructure to search, index, and maintain the Pacer system.

I'd argue that our taxes largely already fund this, as it is necessary for the government to have access to the information as well. I'd be interested in seeing documents about funding sources and costs.

Personally, I wouldn't necessarily need or want full access to all of the data, but any decision should be available to the public, (much as the Supreme Court already does). since we are supposed to be aware of rulings made, since these rulings are, in many cases used to clarify the scope of the laws on the books. If we, as citizens can't determine the scope and breadth of the law, it makes it much more difficult than it needs to be to actually be a law-abiding citizen.

I don't necessarily need access to the nitty gritty details of every single filing, but the decisions themselves, and oral arguments related to them at the appellate level should certainly be available to anyone interested. I'd probably also be willing to pay a nominal $5 a year or something for access, which would cover any administrative issues involved with having an account with them, especially at scale. Of course the problem with that, is it would likely eventually be inflated to $100/year or more.

I regularly read through Supreme Court decisions and arguments on cases I'm interested in. From an educational standpoint, making this available to all would be extremely useful in making it easier for folks to learn about the legal system, and the decisions they make. I wish more folks had such an interest, as it would remove a lot of misinformation about how the legal system works.

Everyone should seriously thank God that patents don't last as long as copyright, otherwise we'd be well into the 22nd century before you'd be able to freely distribute the mp3 codecs.

Modern copyright terms are serious bullshit.

I can't believe no one has mentioned Schneier's comments about electronic voting yet.

This was published quite a while back... The Problem with Electronic Voting Machines

Here's a Slashdot article on the same topic... Schneier On Electronic Voting. This topic gets recycled every major election.

Looks like an interesting device to me. The biggest problem for me though, is lack of a microsd card slot.

I like the fact that it does epubs, as I freaking hate DRM. I have a couple of thousand books on the tablet I use now. Its primary purpose in life for me is as a reader, though I do have music on it as well. E-ink displays are really just about perfect for my needs, but I really hate the way Kindles and some others lock you into their file formats and store, so I've never bought one. I just make do, and live with charging the thing daily.

I have little to no need to write on it, so that' not a real buying point for me.

If anyone has any suggestions for e-ink readers that are not vendor locked, I'd be interested in seeing them.

AGREE 100% current emergency lights on cop cars are WAY too bright at night, completely blinding...

Not to mention distracting, even when you are trying not to be distracted by it.

Baen has long flaunted this and found greater profits in their ebook sales than the other publishers. Their books are DRM free, cost less (though still too much in my opinion) and with many of their more popular series when you buy a hardbound copy of a new book you get the entire prior series to date included. They also have a nice selection of books by their various authors available for free, and found years ago that letting readers sample the first book or three of a series results in increased sales as it hooks the readers and they buy the rest of the series.

It also builds reader loyalty to the publisher. I think Baen's model is fantastic for me as a consumer, so I buy their 'monthly bundle' which pretty much includes everything they publish each month. I have no idea how much money Baen has made from my book purchases, but it is quite substantial, and I can tell you that other publishers definitely lose out by wrapping up their books in poisonous DRM because I will NOT patronize them.

The 'free library' section of BAEN where you can download the initial books from many of their author's long running series' is an excellent way to get a feel for an author before you buy their works. Like any good drug dealer, Baen knows that the first hit is always free.

It's not compatible - It's a completely different API.

Thanks. That sounds just peachy.

Let's say I have a ripper that uses freedb. I'd like to convert to musicbrainz. Is musicbrainz compatible? Can I just change my config from:
freedb.freedb.org/~cddb/cddb.cgi
to something else?

A while back, I got interested in the collatz conjecture, so I wrote a few scripts that would cycle through numbers and give information about results. One of the things I found interesting is that certain numbers came up a lot more often than you'd think. One of these was that 9232 would show up quite often as the highest number reached while doing the calculation on numbers below 10,000. For instance, checking the numbers from 1 to 5000, you'll find 9232 was the highest number reached 1225 times. That's 24.5% of the time.

Here's what it looked like by counts:
1000 354 = 35.4%
2000 677 = 33.9%
3000 925 = 30.8%
4000 1085 = 27.1%
5000 1225 = 24.5%
6000 1333 = 22.2%
7000 1425 = 20.4%
8000 1493 = 18.7%
9000 1563 = 17.4%

Doesn't really mean anything I suppose. Just seems weird to me, a non-math nerd. Other numbers seem to have similar counts when you get to larger numbers. It almost seems like it wants to cluster.