Slashdot Mirror

If you want a glimpse of an earlier Slashdot, take a look at the WayBackMachine. The earliest copy of Slashdot's front page there is dated 13 Jan 1998. The Slashdot poll of the day? "Netscape should GPL Mozilla".

Jan 11, 1998 (Article #421) from trying links on that page to older articles.

There's always the wayback machine

I remember rare dupes back around 1998 and 1999 but it definitely got worse as time went on. It seems to be getting a little better since the firehose though.

Jan 13th, 1998, the oldest index archive.org has

circa 10 years ago: http://web.archive.org/web/19980113191222/http://slashdot.org/
oldest I could find

and here is the archive of the site mentioned....

http://web.archive.org/web/20020604012811/members.aol.com/nancyaluft/index.html?mtbrand=AOL_US

Can't believe no one else posted this yet...

http://web.archive.org/web/19970125142623/media.circus.com/~no_dhmo/

It's an error in the report. The end date was January 29, 2008. It's been already modified in Microsoft's page, but still visible on the web archive: http://web.archive.org/web/20070322100238/http://www.microsoft.com/windows/lifecycle/default.mspx

But your complaint is absurd. If one is unable to resist the feminine wiles of an online-character, then it's his own fault, not fault of the the person playing the female character.

But if I were still into gaming and the very idea of RPGs didn't bore the hell out of me (my real life is far more weird than anybody else's fiction), would it be my fault that you gave her an unfair advantage because you were a sucker for her "feminine wiles"? From my perspective, it doesn't matter if she got the Magic Gizmo by killing the Big Badlie Monster or by suckering you out of it; she still has it and can kick my ass with it.

-mcgrew

Well, we would soon run out of disk space. However, we can (and do) link to the WayBack Machine when we identify a dead citation. It is a boring job, but usually yields excellent results, as only a few sites use a robots.txt file that bans the WayBack crawler. One thing I wish is that the few sites that do block the crawler would allow it someday, and then we wouldn't have to worry about it. Heck, we could even include a link to the Internet Archive on the default citation templates ({{cite web}} and its ilk). ~~~~

There's an old ZDNET articles on fire-optic wire-tapping that made it to a previous slashdot article

Also, look at the customer agreement you agreed to ON THE DATE OF THAT AD, most notably this clause:
"6. b. In addition, Customer agrees not to:
vii. restrict, inhibit or otherwise interfere with the ability of any other person to use or enjoy Comcast equipment or services, including, without limitation, posting or transmitting any information or software which contains a virus or other harmful feature, or generating levels of traffic sufficient to impede others' ability to send or retrieve information;" [emphasis mine]
http://web.archive.org/web/20010405061019/www.comcastonline.com/subscriber-v3-clr.asp

Now, I'm no lawyer but it sounds like you gave up your "right" to saturate the link all day every day, or even during peak times. In fact, that could be read as "You agree that we can limit your usage if we feel that you are taking more than your share of our service." I suspect that is where Comcast and others get to set a limit and not provide a precise number.

I replied just a few minutes ago, but I *just* came across this perfect link. Bingo. An archived page from the Geology Department at Florida State University presenting in great detail the whole foraminifera/evolution story. A great read.

-

She had grown up since the Revolution and was too young to remember the ideological battles of the fifties and sixties. Such a thing as an independent political movement was outside her imagination: and in any case the Party was invincible. It would always exist, and it would always be the same. You could only rebel against it by secret disobedience or, at most, by isolated acts of violence such as killing somebody or blowing something up.

  1984

The WBM seems to be giving me trouble at the moment, however there is a CSE mirror site here that didn't get the memo I guess.

And that is sufficient info to find some Wayback Machine versions; indicating that any video created prior to the end of 2003 has had copyright renounced. (There may be later versions on another page, too.)

Thank you; you may now resume your gathering of torches and pitchforks....

The WBM seems to be giving me trouble at the moment, however there is a CSE mirror site here that didn't get the memo I guess.

And that is sufficient info to find some Wayback Machine versions; indicating that any video created prior to the end of 2003 has had copyright renounced. (There may be later versions on another page, too.)

Thank you; you may now resume your gathering of torches and pitchforks....

Since not all songs are created equally, Comcast needs to clarify their policy... I'm sure that Comcast wouldn't like it if you downloaded a 469.1 MB song 30,000 times in a month. I mean, that'd be something like 13.7 terabytes a month, or averaging approximately 27 Mbps downstream over an entire month, which wouldn't even theoretically be possible, we're not talking about FiOS here. Yes, it's a bit of hyperboly, but where I come from, when I download a song, it averages 30 MB or so (usually it's FLAC or Shorten). 30 MB x 30,000 is approximately 850 GB/month. I don't think they'd like that very much

I certainly won't argue with any of that, though I'd like to add that being such a huge demographic (or a stampede) Boomers expect to get what they want: house scraped-out and remodeled every 7 years, liposuctioned thighs, and carefully cultivated earthy christian/newage self image that's more of a consumer product itself than a belief system.

Highly relevant to this discussion and the topic of Boomers + computers + consumer state is the BBC series produced by Adam Curtis, The Century Of The Self. The second or third episode looks at how the first database-digested polls were used to develop a new (and today dominant) style of "values and lifestyles" marketing based on psychoanalysis and the ideas of Edward Bernays (Freud's nephew and a consultant for CIA black ops propaganda).

I had long thought that both the hippie/yippie thing, and the surge in the far-right evangelical movement, were both reactions to the coldness and dehumanizing effects of the White Flight: Urban whites fleeing close traditional communities into sparse, plastic-y car cultures. Viewing the Century Of The Self has added a new dimension to that understanding in terms of how formulaic and determined corporate America was in co-opting any movements that questioned material consumption.

http://www.archive.org/details/AdaCurtisCenturyoftheSelf_0
http://www.archive.org/details/AdamCurtisCenturyoftheSelfPart2of4
http://www.archive.org/details/AdamCurtisCenturyoftheSelfPart3of4
http://www.archive.org/details/AdamCurtisCenturyoftheSelfPart4of4_0

I certainly won't argue with any of that, though I'd like to add that being such a huge demographic (or a stampede) Boomers expect to get what they want: house scraped-out and remodeled every 7 years, liposuctioned thighs, and carefully cultivated earthy christian/newage self image that's more of a consumer product itself than a belief system.

Highly relevant to this discussion and the topic of Boomers + computers + consumer state is the BBC series produced by Adam Curtis, The Century Of The Self. The second or third episode looks at how the first database-digested polls were used to develop a new (and today dominant) style of "values and lifestyles" marketing based on psychoanalysis and the ideas of Edward Bernays (Freud's nephew and a consultant for CIA black ops propaganda).

I had long thought that both the hippie/yippie thing, and the surge in the far-right evangelical movement, were both reactions to the coldness and dehumanizing effects of the White Flight: Urban whites fleeing close traditional communities into sparse, plastic-y car cultures. Viewing the Century Of The Self has added a new dimension to that understanding in terms of how formulaic and determined corporate America was in co-opting any movements that questioned material consumption.

http://www.archive.org/details/AdaCurtisCenturyoftheSelf_0
http://www.archive.org/details/AdamCurtisCenturyoftheSelfPart2of4
http://www.archive.org/details/AdamCurtisCenturyoftheSelfPart3of4
http://www.archive.org/details/AdamCurtisCenturyoftheSelfPart4of4_0

I certainly won't argue with any of that, though I'd like to add that being such a huge demographic (or a stampede) Boomers expect to get what they want: house scraped-out and remodeled every 7 years, liposuctioned thighs, and carefully cultivated earthy christian/newage self image that's more of a consumer product itself than a belief system.

Highly relevant to this discussion and the topic of Boomers + computers + consumer state is the BBC series produced by Adam Curtis, The Century Of The Self. The second or third episode looks at how the first database-digested polls were used to develop a new (and today dominant) style of "values and lifestyles" marketing based on psychoanalysis and the ideas of Edward Bernays (Freud's nephew and a consultant for CIA black ops propaganda).

I had long thought that both the hippie/yippie thing, and the surge in the far-right evangelical movement, were both reactions to the coldness and dehumanizing effects of the White Flight: Urban whites fleeing close traditional communities into sparse, plastic-y car cultures. Viewing the Century Of The Self has added a new dimension to that understanding in terms of how formulaic and determined corporate America was in co-opting any movements that questioned material consumption.

http://www.archive.org/details/AdaCurtisCenturyoftheSelf_0
http://www.archive.org/details/AdamCurtisCenturyoftheSelfPart2of4
http://www.archive.org/details/AdamCurtisCenturyoftheSelfPart3of4
http://www.archive.org/details/AdamCurtisCenturyoftheSelfPart4of4_0

I certainly won't argue with any of that, though I'd like to add that being such a huge demographic (or a stampede) Boomers expect to get what they want: house scraped-out and remodeled every 7 years, liposuctioned thighs, and carefully cultivated earthy christian/newage self image that's more of a consumer product itself than a belief system.

Highly relevant to this discussion and the topic of Boomers + computers + consumer state is the BBC series produced by Adam Curtis, The Century Of The Self. The second or third episode looks at how the first database-digested polls were used to develop a new (and today dominant) style of "values and lifestyles" marketing based on psychoanalysis and the ideas of Edward Bernays (Freud's nephew and a consultant for CIA black ops propaganda).

I had long thought that both the hippie/yippie thing, and the surge in the far-right evangelical movement, were both reactions to the coldness and dehumanizing effects of the White Flight: Urban whites fleeing close traditional communities into sparse, plastic-y car cultures. Viewing the Century Of The Self has added a new dimension to that understanding in terms of how formulaic and determined corporate America was in co-opting any movements that questioned material consumption.

http://www.archive.org/details/AdaCurtisCenturyoftheSelf_0
http://www.archive.org/details/AdamCurtisCenturyoftheSelfPart2of4
http://www.archive.org/details/AdamCurtisCenturyoftheSelfPart3of4
http://www.archive.org/details/AdamCurtisCenturyoftheSelfPart4of4_0

I don't think Comcast advertises "unlimited use" anymore. The ads I've seen talk about the following features of Comcast High-Speed Internet:

Actually, when I signed up they did. So are they in violation of their contract with me and everyone else who signed up?

Oh and here is the advertisement at the time I signed up.

either way, the company is irresponsible in the manner it treats its customers. You get one phone call, no idea how much you are allowed to consume in a month, then get terminated for 12 months if you don't meet their "mysterious" bandwidth cap.

And yes, it's happened quite frequently. People more and more are hearing about my blog and posting their experiences there.

Most don't believe the numbers being quoted. People who have been monitoring their usage can prove what they have used. But when they tell Comcast they are wrong, they are gone anyway.

It doesn't take many people getting screwed by the company before this starts to become a real problem.

Up until a few days ago CSE's website had this disclaimer: "None of the materials produced by Creation Science Evangelism are copyrighted, so feel free to copy those and distribute them freely."

This would not surprise me. However... the Wayback Machine seems to have a decent collection of content from the CSE website at DrDino.com; my quick sampling indicates they started asserting at least some copyright in 2005, and didn't turn up any quote on those lines. Care to point to a particular page from the WBM?

The only time this question has ever come before a Judge in Canada, he ruled that it WAS NOT illegal to download music in Canada.

http://web.archive.org/web/20040407114727/http://www.mytelus.com/news/article.do?pageID=canada_home&articleID=1563030

Quote: "Justice Konrad von Finckenstein ruled Wednesday that the Canadian Recording Industry Association did not prove there was copyright infringement by 29 so-called music uploaders. He said that downloading a song or making files available in shared directories, like those on Kazaa, does not constitute copyright infringement under the current Canadian law."

Damn straight.
I'd pop >$200 for a StarBlast (which you can retrofit to a nice CCD imager later) or get a middling nice 80mm refractor (which can be used as a spotter/guider later) and a cheap equatorial mount and get out and observe. Once you have a handle on the basics you can retrofit for CCD imaging and get a better scope to fit your needs.

In the Meantime you can indulge your desire for astrophotography by looking into off chip integration and drift integration no equatorial mount needed! Check out the "QuickCam and Unconventional Imaging Astronomy Group" QCUIAG.

Damn straight.
I'd pop >$200 for a StarBlast (which you can retrofit to a nice CCD imager later) or get a middling nice 80mm refractor (which can be used as a spotter/guider later) and a cheap equatorial mount and get out and observe. Once you have a handle on the basics you can retrofit for CCD imaging and get a better scope to fit your needs.

In the Meantime you can indulge your desire for astrophotography by looking into off chip integration and drift integration no equatorial mount needed! Check out the "QuickCam and Unconventional Imaging Astronomy Group" QCUIAG.

Libraries are also trying to maintain local copies of online journals. Think disaster recovery with offsite storage of backups. See http://www.lockss.org/. Please don't diss libraries. They have been trying to maintain access to human scholarship for centuries. Not that my college term papers were any great addition to the store of knowledge, but I saved them on 5 1/2 inch floppies and couldn't easily open them ten years after they were written. Not every website from the early days is backed up. I'm sure everything can't been saved in the Internet Archive http://www.archive.org/. That's part of what libraries do, they select what to save for their local users, because nobody has the resources to permanently save everything. And just when someone has the hubris to think they can, a natural disaster like the fire of Alexandria or Hurricane Katrina comes along to show us our folly.

Lots of people bash Michael Robertson for one thing or another, but I completely agree with you -- he and his Linspire team have done a good job of preparing a GNU/Linux distro for the mainstream.

One of the biggest contributions that Michael Robertson made to the Free Software community (yes, that means all of us, including Eric S. Raymond) is that he envisioned a commercial distro which would be palatable to North Americans. I have traveled to 3 continents and five nations to shoot filmed interviews for a documentary that I am making about how FOSS is changing culture, and I can tell you that there are HUGE differences in the way that people perceive FOSS.

In Brazil and other places in South America, people are more likely to resonate with the libertad of "Free Software." In North America and Europe, people are more likely to talk about how wonderful it is that "open source" is creating so many new opportunities to create wealth.

The differences are differences of culture.

Michael Robertson's message resonates with consumers who are sick and tired of the high cost of Apple, and Microsoft's dirty tricks, high cost, and malware. But many of his best customers don't care about Freedom in cycberspace. At least not yet. And maybe then never will. But they sure do love the convenience of CNR, Linspire's implementation of the Debian pool. But maybe one day they will finally "get" it that low cost and convenience are best obtained where there is freedom in cyberspace and true competition on the desktop. And Michael Robertson will have contributed to these consumers' support for a FOSS market.

I tend to be more of a "Free Software" guy than an "open source" guy. And yet I am very grateful for Michael Robertson's work, because he is helping us build a larger, more populous, and more diverse FOSS community.

Christian Einfeldt,
Producer, The Digital Tipping Point

The site now says "based on open source products". If you look at the old versions of the site they all say "an open source remote PC access implementation". Seems they were deliberately misleading people to me, and now they've just changed it. Check it out

Why science fiction, why not science fact? How about a book like "One, Two, Three... Infinity" by George Gamow? Or anything written by Martin Gardner? How about Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos? Or Max Born wrote a book, "Einstein's Theory of Relativity", which explains relativity in great detail with nothing more than pre-algebra. Or for the computer nerds, the obligatory recommendation is "Godel Escher Bach, an Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas Hofstadter.

I have never understood the point of fiction, except as pure entertainment. Non-fiction is where the good stuff is. If it really has to be fiction, try Flatland by Edwin Abbott.

They've been around for awhile at least: http://web.archive.org/web/*///http://www.mindbrid ge.com/

Thanks for the great response, the points you make are very good.

But it was indeed "Slashdot: News for Nerds on the Stuff That Matters" at one point. If you look at this link from archive.org:

http://web.archive.org/web/19980113191222/http://s lashdot.org/ ... which is the oldest slashdot.org link there (from Jan 13, 1998), you can see this. On my browser the logo at the top of the page is just a grey blob which I am sure was at one point a picture reading "Slashdot: News for Nerds on the Stuff that Matters". If you look at the HTML source, you can see that the alt text for this image is the old slogan.

The next oldest link that works from archive.org is from Nov. 11, 1998, and the logo and the alt text at that point had already been changed to "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters."

My memory was wrong, I thought that the change happened in late 1999 or 2000 sometime, around the time that Slashdot's parent company (Andover.net) went public. I guess it was sometime in 1998 that the slogan was changed.

That's a really nice rant, and I agree with you somewhat in your general assertion that Slashdot has drifted pretty far away from being a nerd site (WTF is up with the Politics section, for example). However, I have some issues:

1.) I haven't been around quite as long as you have, but I don't recall the slogan ever being "News for Nerds on the Stuff that Matters". That may have been the original intent, but I don't think that was ever the actual slogan. The oldest page from Slashdot I could find on web.archive.org is from November, 1998, which was prior to the Andover.net buyout (thereby presumably before the major corporate influence began). On that page, the slogan is "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters."

Now, I grant you, prior to maybe 5 or 6 years ago, the "stuff that matters FOR NERDS" was sort of implied, but that hasn't really been the case for a long, long time.

2.) Jack Thompson has been going after the gaming industry for a long time. Seeing his long, slow descent into madness is of great interest to gaming nerds, even if not to you particularly. Even if you decide that the site should be limited only to things that the typical nerd would care about (not your decision or mine to make), this still would fit that category.

So, even though I agree with you that Slashdot in general has strayed pretty far from its roots (but what site this old hasn't), I disagree with you about this particular story.

http://web.archive.org/web/20011117091256/www.powe rgenitalia.com/inglese/HomeengFrame.html
www.whorepresents.com

We're never going to see an Elvis or The Beatles or even the "lesser gods of rock" like Zep again, the massive popularity and market saturation of acts like that was only possible because people had never seen anything like that before - and the big labels were the sole gateway to national distribution.

What Led Zeppelin did was take the blues and set it to electric guitar- the "ketchup" of musical instruments (it makes almost anything sound better). They borrowed from a well established genre, which had already proven its worth to a wide audience, and played it with a new style to a new, mostly-disjoint audience that had never been exposed to it. "When the Levee Breaks" is an obvious example; it was originally a blues song by Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie in 1929 about a flood 2 years prior. "Gallows Pole" is an English folk song that is centuries old; a blues version ("Gallis Pole") was recorded in 1939 by Leadbelly. There was a resurgence of interest in the sixties and a few other people were carrying blues concepts over into rock. Janis Joplin was doing it. Before I had been exposed to a lot of Led Zeppelin, I had really never appreciated the blues. Then I realized all this Led Zeppelin music I was listening to was actually based on it. Now I hear the blues and it sounds like Led Zeppelin- even the stuff that Zeppelin didn't go near. I can almost hear "Led Zeppelin songs" I've never heard before when I listen to the blues.

Whenever music can be carried over from one genre to another, I always find that really impressive. It speaks to the genius of both the original and the cover artists. A few weeks ago everyone was forwarding around Paul Anka's jazz cover of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in bemused horror. I think that cover was underappreciated. I was amazed that a Nirvana song could hold up in jazz at all. And it made me deeply impressed by Paul Anka (whose fans were as horrified as Nirvana's, apparently). As if he had constructed the song out of Legos. But I think only a well-established artist could have gotten away with that. (Otherwise either nobody would see you, or that would be your "schtick" and you'd be over after your fifteen minutes were up.)

That kind of cross-genre theft usually works out better for everyone when individual artists are stealing the best ideas and running off with them into new genres. Now we have a stodgy industry that effectively regulates public access to art, music, and culture. It guides and interferes with the development of all three. It maintains genres within specific tracks and looks for acts and performers that fit stereotypes known to be profitable. It prefers safe investments and dislikes experiments. You don't see many songs like Bohemian Rhapsody anymore. A musical genre like the blues was able to develop and refine itself with little interference. Rock got a nice start in the fifties before things got totally ridiculous. Rap got strangled in its crib. Its widening audience achieved modern corporate notice in the eighties. They came in with their money and marketing and they scientifically minstrelized the genre to appeal to the widest, most profitable audience possible. Now we have "gangsta" rap which is not as good. It's become self-mocking and ridiculous. Meanwhile rock has been going through its own atrophy. Many appreciate good music, but most prefer crap. Music just hasn't been the same ever since spreadsheets were invented.

Go look through http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://moller.com/

Yep - I'll believe it when I see it.

There's a big difference between personally sharing some music and making a business out of copyright infringement. Copyright was initially an industrial regulation - applying to physical products on a shelf in a store or warehouse. I'd be perfectly willing to support that sort of law, assuming a reasonable copyright term. On the other hand, trying to apply the same law to private individuals acting non-commercially is absurd.

I'm not the only one who holds this position. As you can see in the following videos, both Eben Moglen (of the Free Software movement) and Rick Falkvinge (of the Swedish Pirate Party) hold somewhat similar views. Rick even covers the "free software with less copyright" question.

• Eben Moglen in Edinburgh
• Rick Falkvinge at Google

Everyone with any interest in this topic should seriously watch both of these videos from beginning to end. The speakers present their positions reasonably clearly, which should serve to advance the overall discussion beyond the over-asked basic questions.

Hmm, looks like ProtectFairUse.org went away in the tail end of 2005. Last update appears to have been one month after its sponsor, 321 Studios, maker of DVD X Copy, closed its doors, then disappeared about year later.

Meanwhile, unsolicited commercial e-mails (spam) to unique addresses given only to 321 Studios have continued.

You might want to check to see if a copy of the page exists at the Internet Archive.

Either you can provide the service as advertised or you can't, which is it? Time to fess up so we know not to ever consider your service again.

That's what I asked Comcast after they terminated my account in January. I even pointed out this is looking like a bait and switch since the advertisement was VERY clear. We purchased a residential account with "Unlimited use for a flat monthly fee". Most people have sufficient grasp of the English language to understand what this means.

Hopefully we can bring more competition in to our city and put Comcast in it's place.

With the majority of music in existence now belonging to the RIAA in some way

If you're counting all the 20th century music by all those dead people, perhaps. But if you only count new music (lets say from the present century), most of it is indie.

In the last century, a bar band needed a label to record; studios, pressing, and distribution were all controlled by the labels. But we have computers now; five hundred bucks for a machine more powerful than the biggest supercomputer in existance when CDs were invented.

Hell, I have friends with CDs out, and none of them have an RIAA contract. A label tried to to sign Joe and he told them to go to hell. The link is to a blog posting with links to MP3s of live recordings (acoustics in the clubs aren't good; find a copy of Posamist's CD for quality). Some other friends have 2 CDs out and SHNs at Archive.org. And those are just a couple of my friends; here is a Michael Craford article linking to thousands of FREE MP3s. The article is several years old, there are more free MP3s posted on the internet every day!

"Piracy" is a red herring. You can "download" the entire top 40 in a few hours by plugging your radio's headphone jack into your PC's sound card and sampling the RIAA dreck. The RIAA's problem is that they control radio and empty-v, but they can't keep Joe and Dave and the other thousands of bands Mike linked to off of P2P or internet radio. That's the real reason they have attacked both of those outlets (and very sucessfully, too).

It's not about copyright infringement. It's about destroying the major labels' competetion. There is no reason whatever to download or upload top 40 crap with P2P; it's easier to sample it from the radio. Old John Lee Hooker tunes, and indie music, are what P2P is for.

-mcgrew

... don't consume data controlled by people who have the extreme opposite view. Even better, create your own data, and license it in a way that you approve of.

Ah, but there's already an infinite supply of canned music. Those 42,000 concerts listened to one a day would take 115 years. If you include the other music and movies there, you could spend every waking moment of the rest of your life and not hear and see it all.

The value is not in the can. It's beautiful and it takes real skill to make and can it, but the value is in the sharing. Going to a concert is fun, and it's profitable for the musician. Sharing what's in the can with your friends is fun. Making your own is even more fun. When you get over the music and movie industry hype, what you realize is that a song and dance can be both priceless and worthless at the same time.

This kind of lawsuit has got to be the most disgusting abuse possible for music. A $40,000 judgment for making a song available. How do the lawyers sleep at night knowing that their victims have just had their life savings wiped out? Will the judge go help them move out of their home when the bank comes to take it? How can they feel justified? Fuck the industry by never giving it another cent for entertainment they don't know how to enjoy themselves. Discover and support real artists instead.

You seem to think this is a simple issue. It isn't.

The question of software licensing has been complex and even controversial for decades. That apparently seems silly to you. That might even be a valid conclusion, but you're going to need a much more extensive understanding of the topic before you can convince anyone to agree.

If you're actually interested in understanding the topic so you can discuss it intelligently, I suggest actually reading / watching the following (completely):

• The Wikipedia Article on EULAs
• Eben Moglen on the GPL and Copyright

Also note that in (1), the "work" is not "individual copy of the work," but rather the abstract notion of the work itself. For example, my copy of Santa Clause Defeats the Martians is not the work, but rather the concept/idea/production/etc. of the most amazing and wonderful film.

Do you mean Santa Claus Conquers the Martians? It's in the public domain now and can be downloaded from archive.org

I heard about this many years ago (probably on Slashdot). I believe the article was called something like "the cd that was too loud", but I can't be certain. I know the author was complaining about the mastering of some Rush album.

Aha! Here we are; the article's from 2002. There are some pretty charts demonstrating the problem.

I think this Encyclopedia Britannica Film says it all.
Despotism

Plenty good? How about plenty free too.

Nice to see someone finally poke a hole in this. The Packet Sniffers talked about this in episode 4:
http://www.packetsniffers.org/

Show link: http://www.archive.org/download/tps_episode_04/tps _episode_04_en_lo.wmv

Watch out sister, watch out brother
Watch our children while they kill each other
With a gun they bought at Wal-Mart discount stores

Theres also a bunch of audio books on archive.org, some are read by my dad, Roy Trumbull......(had to plug !!!) He has made a hobby recording public domain works and posting them
on the internet.
oz on archive.org audio