Slashdot Mirror

Why not just blog and let archive.org pick it up? For example, take a look at one of my pages: http://web.archive.org/web/20070705205748/http://s chwehr.org/blog/archives/2005-10.html Or maybe looking at the URL, is it not archived? -kurt

Ah, so what you're saying in a nutshell is that everyone you know are horrible thieves who don't care about the artists they are listening to or the music industry in general? Good to know.

There are plenty of artists who understand that making a copy is not theft. They have already provided more music than you could listen to with the rest of your life. See the internet archive's live music depositories and magnatune for a start.

I would rather have a tangible backup for when my hard drive crashes. ... t may take time, but I'm going to be more than happy to re-rip 900 CDs than spend another $900 to buy the albums again.

That is one service the music publishers actually provide. Pressed CDs are tangible and durable. This small service is more than outweighed by predatory practices that screw everyone but a few executives at three big music companies. If you want to look for harm to artists, look no further than the monopoly distorted market for music. They are not doing well in a non-free market. The user is faced with the fact that CDs and albums are the only legal way to get your hands on the vast majority of recorded music history.

I'm not so happy about re-ripping. The beauty of free music is that you can copy your properly ripped and tagged archive as often as you like. My entire music collection is never more than an grsync away from another jukebox.

Their story appears consistent when you check their web-site over time. See the web archive http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.steorn.net

Wikipedia had a useful article "Video games that have been considered the greatest ever" that collected and contrasted numerous BEST EVAR! lists, but after a vote they deleted it. Here's a copy, http://web.archive.org/web/20060829040010/http://e n.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_and_video_games_that _have_been_considered_the_greatest_ever

I can't speak for the GP, but I haven't bought an iPhone; however, that's not a sufficient solution. The problem is that while you and I may be educated enough to know the issue at stake here, most consumers are not.

If you will forgive an analogy, the situation here bears some relation to the situation in the food and drug industry. There are very few people who are willing to educate themselves enough so they can make reasonable food choices. Therefore, the Americans (I don't know what we Canadians do) have the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that monitors the products that corporations want to put on the market to make sure that they are reasonably safe. Had this been left to regular people to sort out, the market would be full of all sorts of crazy chemicals (worse that it already is!) because regular people don't understand their long term effects.

I don't think it would be entirely out-of-place to say that the FSF is somewhat like the FDA; only what the FDA does for foods and drugs, the FSF does for software. The FSF is there to protect users to make sure that they get the freedoms that they ought to have. You may not agree with what freedoms those are or why their important; and I can't convince you either. Eben Moglen gave an awfully good lecture that might explain their point of view.

Perhaps this is the problem

http://web.archive.org/web/20030620163003/http://d ilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20030619 .html

;)

you have just described inforocket.com Archive.org mirror. (something from the 2000-2001 timeframe. The defunct site now redirects to an online psychic network. Get paid to answer burning questions... with a referral network! and your first $5 in questions is free! Dot-com at its best. Guess what happened? Lots of people signing up, blowing through $5 worth of questions, and done. Lots of people signing up, answering lots of those people's $5 worth of questions, then cashing out. Once real cash is involved, it's all about gaming the system. I refer to cashwars.com (Archive.org mirror) and prizegames.com (Archive.org mirror) as further evidence. Yes, I speak from experiece. I pulled a total of about.... $275 from those guys. $350 if you include Archive.org mirror)>funbets.com.

you have just described inforocket.com Archive.org mirror. (something from the 2000-2001 timeframe. The defunct site now redirects to an online psychic network. Get paid to answer burning questions... with a referral network! and your first $5 in questions is free! Dot-com at its best. Guess what happened? Lots of people signing up, blowing through $5 worth of questions, and done. Lots of people signing up, answering lots of those people's $5 worth of questions, then cashing out. Once real cash is involved, it's all about gaming the system. I refer to cashwars.com (Archive.org mirror) and prizegames.com (Archive.org mirror) as further evidence. Yes, I speak from experiece. I pulled a total of about.... $275 from those guys. $350 if you include Archive.org mirror)>funbets.com.

you have just described inforocket.com Archive.org mirror. (something from the 2000-2001 timeframe. The defunct site now redirects to an online psychic network. Get paid to answer burning questions... with a referral network! and your first $5 in questions is free! Dot-com at its best. Guess what happened? Lots of people signing up, blowing through $5 worth of questions, and done. Lots of people signing up, answering lots of those people's $5 worth of questions, then cashing out. Once real cash is involved, it's all about gaming the system. I refer to cashwars.com (Archive.org mirror) and prizegames.com (Archive.org mirror) as further evidence. Yes, I speak from experiece. I pulled a total of about.... $275 from those guys. $350 if you include Archive.org mirror)>funbets.com.

Don't forget the 365 MB MPEG 1 version, which is the only patent unencumbered file other than text. Sad how the formats that save 2/3 of the bandwith are owned.

91MB http://www.archive.org/download/EbenMoglenLectureE dinburghJune2007StreamingVideo384kbits/EbenMoglenL ectureEdinburghJune2007_384kbits_64kb.mp4 210MB http://www.archive.org/download/EbenMoglenLectureE dinburghJune2007StreamingVideo384kbits/EbenMoglenL ectureEdinburghJune2007_384kbits_256kb.mp4

91MB http://www.archive.org/download/EbenMoglenLectureE dinburghJune2007StreamingVideo384kbits/EbenMoglenL ectureEdinburghJune2007_384kbits_64kb.mp4 210MB http://www.archive.org/download/EbenMoglenLectureE dinburghJune2007StreamingVideo384kbits/EbenMoglenL ectureEdinburghJune2007_384kbits_256kb.mp4

The copper, blitter, paula, etc. wasn't all that compared to even early nineties PC hardware, but the Amiga had a clean efficient DMA architecture. Just check out this video about the Amiga and Atari ST from 1985 for details: http://www.archive.org/details/Amigaand1985

The PC caught up/surpassed the old Amiga here with the PCI bus back in '94, just 9 years later ya'know.

Season 1
Season 2
Season 3
Season 4
Season 5

or Google Video RvB seasons if you prefer.

Season 1
Season 2
Season 3
Season 4
Season 5

or Google Video RvB seasons if you prefer.

Season 1
Season 2
Season 3
Season 4
Season 5

or Google Video RvB seasons if you prefer.

Season 1
Season 2
Season 3
Season 4
Season 5

or Google Video RvB seasons if you prefer.

Um from what I can see, Scilab has been providing open software since 1994. That would be 4 years before OSI even existed. So who is flouting who? Not to mention that the term "open" has been in use for decades to describe just about anything in the technical domain...

According to the Internet Archive, Scilab only began calling their software "open source" in 2004, well after the "open source" term had been popularized for software by OSI with a specific meaning that people trusted (cluetrain: the older uses of the term "open source" were primarily for non-software). It sure looks like they were trying to exploit this popularity, even though the result ends up being deceptive because they don't grant the same freedoms that people have come to expect from "open source" code.

The Scilab example points out a huge problem with the OSI's personal definition of "open source", BTW. The point of Scilab is to provide a shared standardized environment for collaborating applications. If they allow anyone to modify the code willy-nilly, there is no standardized environment and the sharing can't happen. This is a case where the developers need to retain control for the good of the user community and the OSI model doesn't allow for that.

Sorry, but this old myth about FLOSS software being vulnerable to forking of incompatible versions has been debunked over and over again. (Think about it for a moment: if this were really a "huge problem", the same thing would have popped up for Python, Perl, PHP, and every other standardized language popularized by free software.) As long as the original author maintains the software and keeps it free/open-source, any incompatible forks will be ignored.

Don't like RIAA's policies and the licensing used by most modern record companies? Don't patronize them! I mean, really, do you whine about Microsoft and Apple charging a license fee for their os's -FOR EACH COMPUTER !!!!OMGBBQ!!!- or do you give them the finger and install FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Linux, FreeDOS, or some other free OS?

        Look, start at the bottom... http://www.archive.org/details/audio and http://music.podshow.com/, then look around for bands and performers that offer music with licensing you approve of. Then, add to it! Make your own, create new versions of public domain music. If you can't play an instrument, use a sequencer! Look up open source projects like Rosegarden, Timidity and Audacity!

        This is _SLASHDOT_ Why am I seeing so many people whining about commercial entities enforcing their copyrights instead of people laughing and showing off their new mp3 of "Ride of the Valkyries", done with guitars, a little keyboard and a heavy bassline at 120BPM? I mean, come ON people, the Creative Commons exists for a REASON!

        Don't pirate, don't whine, create something and make it freely available, advocate PD, Creative Commons, "Open Source", and other fairly licensed works!

        Apple, Microsoft and the entire software industry now takes *BSD and Linux seriously because the community did that with operating systems, so darn it, learn from a victory and do it with music, books, and movies! Where are the sections for those on Slashdot? Where are the announcements of them, the articles, the links, the ADVOCACY?

        Vote with your dollars and your attention, show them how they are alienating you by supporting the changes needed in the market!

        Ignore RIAA and the MPAA, and focus on independents! -BECOME- an independent!

STATEMENT TO MP3 SITE OPERATORS
The Grateful Dead and our managing organizations have long encouraged the purely non-commercial exchange of music taped at our concerts and those of our individual members. That a new medium of distribution has arisen - digital audio files being traded over the Internet - does not change our policy in this regard. Our stipulations regarding digital distribution are merely extensions of those long-standing principles and they are as follow:

No commercial gain may be sought by websites offering digital files of our music, whether through advertising, exploiting databases compiled from their traffic, or any other means.
All participants in such digital exchange acknowledge and respect the copyrights of the performers, writers and publishers of the music.
This notice should be clearly posted on all sites engaged in this activity.
We reserve the ability to withdraw our sanction of non-commercial digital music should circumstances arise that compromise our ability to protect and steward the integrity of our work.

According to Wikipedia, the name "Podcast" was first suggested in this article in February 2004.

By the way, anyone who blames Apple for the name "Podcast" should note that Apple didn't get on board the Podcasting bandwagon until over a year later. Of course Apple is happy with the name, and Microsoft hates it.

...while I really do hate the RIAA and the music industry...

You could have fooled me.


She also feels a need to support the artists

Then she should forget Bryan Adams and listen to indie music, where the artist actually gets paid more than a pittance. Sure, megastars like Adams or Metallica or Ted "if Jimmy Buffet had my money he'd declare Chapter 11" Nugent get filthy rich, but most musicians live on subsistance wages. Very little money comes from sales of anything but concert tickets and merchandise.

Really, DRM free on iTunes is predicated on the fact that the recording industry must feel like it is getting some sort of handle on musical file sharing - that is, RIAA lawsuits to music downloaders must actually be working.

Don't believe everything you read. The lawsuits aren't what is getting people to switch to paid services; most people would have gladly paid at the start had there been a legal alternative. Now that there is iTunes and other legal venues, it doesn't make much sense to use P2P. If the lawsuits had anything to do with it, file sharing would have declined earlier and people would stop using illegal drugs. You can go to prison for marijuana, but millions of people smoke it anyway.

Were there REALLY no DMCA or copyright controls on music, though, someone would eventually make something with a really cool user interface, like iTunes, but where music would be genuinely free. Then, musicians would starve.

First, lets not confuse copyright, which COULD be a good thing if its term limits were what previous generations had (12-30 years) rather than the present calamity, and the DMCA.

Secondly, Roger McGuinn, an early '60s rocker (the Byrds) stated that the old, illegal Napster revitalized his career!

Many artists DO give music away. The link is to free recordings of live shows in lossless format of some friends of mine. They've released two CDs (the first one is their best) and play all over the midwest. here is a bluegrass version of a rap song(!!), while here is a cover of an Allman Brother's song. However, that's not their usual style. Links are lossless, but there are MP3 and Ogg versions available.

I link them because these are friends of mine, but there are literally thousands of artists who are giving it away, as the money isn't in selling recordings, but rather in performing. This is the megastars as well as the little guys. And the only ones who are starving are the ones that suck.

And if the CD you bought only has one good song, guess what? They suck!

-mcgrew

...while I really do hate the RIAA and the music industry...

You could have fooled me.


She also feels a need to support the artists

Then she should forget Bryan Adams and listen to indie music, where the artist actually gets paid more than a pittance. Sure, megastars like Adams or Metallica or Ted "if Jimmy Buffet had my money he'd declare Chapter 11" Nugent get filthy rich, but most musicians live on subsistance wages. Very little money comes from sales of anything but concert tickets and merchandise.

Really, DRM free on iTunes is predicated on the fact that the recording industry must feel like it is getting some sort of handle on musical file sharing - that is, RIAA lawsuits to music downloaders must actually be working.

Don't believe everything you read. The lawsuits aren't what is getting people to switch to paid services; most people would have gladly paid at the start had there been a legal alternative. Now that there is iTunes and other legal venues, it doesn't make much sense to use P2P. If the lawsuits had anything to do with it, file sharing would have declined earlier and people would stop using illegal drugs. You can go to prison for marijuana, but millions of people smoke it anyway.

Were there REALLY no DMCA or copyright controls on music, though, someone would eventually make something with a really cool user interface, like iTunes, but where music would be genuinely free. Then, musicians would starve.

First, lets not confuse copyright, which COULD be a good thing if its term limits were what previous generations had (12-30 years) rather than the present calamity, and the DMCA.

Secondly, Roger McGuinn, an early '60s rocker (the Byrds) stated that the old, illegal Napster revitalized his career!

Many artists DO give music away. The link is to free recordings of live shows in lossless format of some friends of mine. They've released two CDs (the first one is their best) and play all over the midwest. here is a bluegrass version of a rap song(!!), while here is a cover of an Allman Brother's song. However, that's not their usual style. Links are lossless, but there are MP3 and Ogg versions available.

I link them because these are friends of mine, but there are literally thousands of artists who are giving it away, as the money isn't in selling recordings, but rather in performing. This is the megastars as well as the little guys. And the only ones who are starving are the ones that suck.

And if the CD you bought only has one good song, guess what? They suck!

-mcgrew

...while I really do hate the RIAA and the music industry...

You could have fooled me.


She also feels a need to support the artists

Then she should forget Bryan Adams and listen to indie music, where the artist actually gets paid more than a pittance. Sure, megastars like Adams or Metallica or Ted "if Jimmy Buffet had my money he'd declare Chapter 11" Nugent get filthy rich, but most musicians live on subsistance wages. Very little money comes from sales of anything but concert tickets and merchandise.

Really, DRM free on iTunes is predicated on the fact that the recording industry must feel like it is getting some sort of handle on musical file sharing - that is, RIAA lawsuits to music downloaders must actually be working.

Don't believe everything you read. The lawsuits aren't what is getting people to switch to paid services; most people would have gladly paid at the start had there been a legal alternative. Now that there is iTunes and other legal venues, it doesn't make much sense to use P2P. If the lawsuits had anything to do with it, file sharing would have declined earlier and people would stop using illegal drugs. You can go to prison for marijuana, but millions of people smoke it anyway.

Were there REALLY no DMCA or copyright controls on music, though, someone would eventually make something with a really cool user interface, like iTunes, but where music would be genuinely free. Then, musicians would starve.

First, lets not confuse copyright, which COULD be a good thing if its term limits were what previous generations had (12-30 years) rather than the present calamity, and the DMCA.

Secondly, Roger McGuinn, an early '60s rocker (the Byrds) stated that the old, illegal Napster revitalized his career!

Many artists DO give music away. The link is to free recordings of live shows in lossless format of some friends of mine. They've released two CDs (the first one is their best) and play all over the midwest. here is a bluegrass version of a rap song(!!), while here is a cover of an Allman Brother's song. However, that's not their usual style. Links are lossless, but there are MP3 and Ogg versions available.

I link them because these are friends of mine, but there are literally thousands of artists who are giving it away, as the money isn't in selling recordings, but rather in performing. This is the megastars as well as the little guys. And the only ones who are starving are the ones that suck.

And if the CD you bought only has one good song, guess what? They suck!

-mcgrew

...while I really do hate the RIAA and the music industry...

You could have fooled me.


She also feels a need to support the artists

Then she should forget Bryan Adams and listen to indie music, where the artist actually gets paid more than a pittance. Sure, megastars like Adams or Metallica or Ted "if Jimmy Buffet had my money he'd declare Chapter 11" Nugent get filthy rich, but most musicians live on subsistance wages. Very little money comes from sales of anything but concert tickets and merchandise.

Really, DRM free on iTunes is predicated on the fact that the recording industry must feel like it is getting some sort of handle on musical file sharing - that is, RIAA lawsuits to music downloaders must actually be working.

Don't believe everything you read. The lawsuits aren't what is getting people to switch to paid services; most people would have gladly paid at the start had there been a legal alternative. Now that there is iTunes and other legal venues, it doesn't make much sense to use P2P. If the lawsuits had anything to do with it, file sharing would have declined earlier and people would stop using illegal drugs. You can go to prison for marijuana, but millions of people smoke it anyway.

Were there REALLY no DMCA or copyright controls on music, though, someone would eventually make something with a really cool user interface, like iTunes, but where music would be genuinely free. Then, musicians would starve.

First, lets not confuse copyright, which COULD be a good thing if its term limits were what previous generations had (12-30 years) rather than the present calamity, and the DMCA.

Secondly, Roger McGuinn, an early '60s rocker (the Byrds) stated that the old, illegal Napster revitalized his career!

Many artists DO give music away. The link is to free recordings of live shows in lossless format of some friends of mine. They've released two CDs (the first one is their best) and play all over the midwest. here is a bluegrass version of a rap song(!!), while here is a cover of an Allman Brother's song. However, that's not their usual style. Links are lossless, but there are MP3 and Ogg versions available.

I link them because these are friends of mine, but there are literally thousands of artists who are giving it away, as the money isn't in selling recordings, but rather in performing. This is the megastars as well as the little guys. And the only ones who are starving are the ones that suck.

And if the CD you bought only has one good song, guess what? They suck!

-mcgrew

Here's an important list of science databases. Don't forget CiteSeer, PubMed Central, Google Scholar, Science Direct, American Chemical Society, Institute of Physics, IEEE, EBSCO Host, etc. Also, an older discussion might be useful, and this one and online science information portals.

"Ass to ass!"

"ASS TO ASS!!!"

http://web.archive.org/web/20060520021824/http://w ww.141empire.com/141cinema/ass2assguy.htm

A link would have been helpful. I initially thought you were confused and referring to Walter Reed Memorial Hospital. However, I did some digging and at least found this: http://renovation.pentagon.mil/history-condition.h tm

Yes. It's from the Pentagon website itself, so you should be skeptical of the contents. However, it seemed fairly frank and honest. And the content has been available since at least Dec 6, 2001. http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://renovation.pen tagon.mil/history-condition.htm So it's not as if the Discovery Channel did some amazing piece of research and "broke" the big story. Unless, of course, the Discovery Channel piece was old. But - again - I wasn't able to find any info on it via Google.

The Power of Nightmares is available at the Internet Archive.

>"2) Standard PC hardware with fancy plastic that is much more overpriced than the same hardware minus fancy plastic" You're going by old info. You can configure a Dell and an Apple with the same specs and the prices are quite close.

He said minus the fancy plastic. Try pricing it on pricewatch and building it yourself. Yes, most people wouldn't do that. No, that vast majority of linux users would build it themselves, hence the vast majority of people reading your reply would build it themselves, being that the vast majority of people visiting slashdot have used linux in their lives.

The thing is you *can* buy a Mac Mini for $500, but how does it compare to even a name brand PC from Dell at that price? It might have the performance, but any additional item you want in there (save a stick of RAM) will have to be external. And upgrading it is going to be impossible in the same way you can upgrade a PC (Don't like the motherboard? Fine, throw in a new one. Don't like the hard drive? Buy a 3.5" drive anywhere and *ADD* (not just upgrade) 500 GB. One of the 44% of Americans with Dial Up? Throw in a $9.99 special. Etc, etc.

You have to go apples for apples (pun intended). Compare a Mac that has the same upgradeability and additional hardware installation ability as a PC. Hard to do and come out with as sweet a price, eh? Powermacs are what, about $1,000? Yikes!

>"3) A OS that is more expensive over it's life that even Winblows - and Apple CURRENTLY charges serious coin for major OS updates" $129 is serious coin? And remember, this is for the MAJOR updates. Also, they're lax on the DRM, since you usually have to have the hardware to run the OS.

Yes, considering windows is about $50 OEM, and is updated for features for about 5 years and for security for about 10 years. How many updates to OS X have there been in that time that have required purchasing the new OS? Plenty.

>"4) A secure coding and patch release methodology that is *years* behind MS" Patch and release when it's found, not once a month?

Yes, there's a lot of bugs in Microsoft software. But that's not his point. His point is that Microsoft can (and does) push updates onto their machines automatically without (much, sometimes none) user interaction.

>"5) Apple regularly lies about the performance capabilities of its' machines" For example? I'd love to see some examples here.

That's easy (an oldie, but such a goldie!) enough.

>"6) Apple uses Solaris and Windows (Apple china ran it until 03) because of their superior stability compared to OS X." Proof please.

I'll give you this one, I can't find anything solid one way or the other, but even so, the last time I could find references to Apple using solaris were from ages ago... to the point they might not have even had OS X in full deployment. :-)

Duck and Cover: Watch on youtube / Download at archive.org (avi/mpg/mp4) / Wikipedia article
Nowadays we can laugh about it but consider that people might laugh in 30 years about what we think now.

If you don't know what Cmd-Shift-1 and Cmd-Shift-2 are for, GTFO.
If you think Firefox is a decent Mac application, GTFO.
If you're still looking for the "maximize" button, GTFO.
If you don't know Clarus from Carl Sagan, GTFO.

Bandwagon jumpers are not welcome among real Mac users. Keep your filthy PC fingers to yourself.

I followed your suggestion and went to look. However, it seems to say this:

"How can I remove my site's pages from the Wayback Machine?

The Internet Archive is not interested in preserving or offering access to Web sites or other Internet documents of persons who do not want their materials in the collection. By placing a simple robots.txt file on your Web server, you can exclude your site from being crawled as well as exclude any historical pages from the Wayback Machine."

and further down it says:

"Sometimes a web site owner will contact us directly and ask us to stop crawling or archiving a site, and we endevor to comply with these requests. When you come accross a 'blocked site error' message, that means that a siteowner has made such a request and it has been honored."

http://www.archive.org/about/faqs.php#The_Wayback_ Machine

Having dug up some dirty old web sites on friends, I'm sure we all know about the wayback machine at http://www.archive.org/web/web.php.

I wonder if these goons also create a robots.txt file on the server that they are trying to clean up? It would be hard to remove content from the wayback machine that you do not own.

The Internet Archive has an earlier version of the document which is less focused but interesting to compare. Especially the motive of chafing under the yoke of AOL, which required a certain featureset from the Suite for Netscape, if memory serves.

This is from material straight from that archives.

"Obvious now, but was it obvious in 1996 when they filed for it?"

Yes, in 1998 I was doing search by location for the automobile industry.
http://web.archive.org/web/19980128024655/http://w ww.111cars.com/

I'm sure I was doing it before that doing ZIP code, Area code and Geographic location searches.

Hmm... How about http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.superpages .com . Lets see, there's an entry for Dec 26th, 1996. Follow that and you get to http://web.archive.org/web/19961230224759/yp.gte.n et/ which shows that superpages.com had a way to search by zip code way back in 1996, before the filing date of the patent. Weird its almost as if someone saw that functionality online and then tried to patent it after the fact.

Hmm... How about http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.superpages .com . Lets see, there's an entry for Dec 26th, 1996. Follow that and you get to http://web.archive.org/web/19961230224759/yp.gte.n et/ which shows that superpages.com had a way to search by zip code way back in 1996, before the filing date of the patent. Weird its almost as if someone saw that functionality online and then tried to patent it after the fact.

Besides that, what is really up with this love theme in music? There is around zero pop songs that isn't about sex, love, boyfriends, breakup etc. If you name one I will give you a cookie.

I've often thought that, myself. On reading your comment, I decided to find out.

Billboard's Top 40 track #2 (was #1 last week) is Nickelback's "If Everyone Cared". It's some hippy crap, saying "everybody be nice to eachother and cooperate and the world will be a better place". It does seem to mention romantic love but that isn't the main theme.

LOL! #3 is Maroon 5's "Makes Me Wonder" and it is about sex and/or love, but the lyrics are so funny that I have to share them.

For comparison, I googled for Pantera lyrics and got this, an album with ten songs, one of which is not about love or sex. Okay, a newer album has not a single song about love.

Metal kicks ass, partly because the usually incomprehensible lyrics can sometimes be interesting, but mostly because of the music. Since you're into non-love lyrics, you might want to consider some alt country music too. There's quite a bit of metal crossover. Hank Williams III has been in lots of metal and punk bands, and has his own metal band Assjack, but his country music with his Damn Band is hardcore. Listen to the song "Bad Magick" by Shooter Jennings to feel like you're hearing a dusty old recording of Led Zeppelin collaborating with Bad Company. Shooter Jennings effortlessly segues from country to metal and back in the song "Busted In Baylor County", playing part of Black Sabbath's "Sweet Leaf" (the Live At Irving Plaza version has a much longer portion of "Sweet Leaf" than the album version). Rebel Meets Rebel is said to be the last project Dimebag Darrel did before he was killed; it has The Cowboys From Hell playing and aging country outlaw David Allan Coe on lead vocals (and the song "Get Out Of My Life" has Hank III in it too). Jay Berndt of Kilgore Smudge now fronts a country band called The Brimstone Assembly, which offers a style of hardcore country similar to that of Hank III.

Holy shit. I need to get a life.

In the '50s, they told people to "Duck and Cover" in the event of a nuclear explosion.
Should people now, in the 21st century, just "Unplug and Cower" when something on the evil Internet rears its ugly head and comes for them?

it must be something other than file sharing that induces this manufacturing

The naive answer is that they want a market that is Not driven by the quality of the product, feeding people a blob of music+public image+gossip+merchandise which is easier to control and keep away from external influence. With a market driven by quality you'd have most good musicians doing whatever they want on their own label as soon as the first hit give 'em some money.

The less naive answer is that mainstream music is too good as a propaganda vehicle to have been overlooked. So, even if artists and music writer themselves think they are on top of the star system when they are successful, it's their usefulness in that particular moment that keeps them there. Punk, black metal and gangsta rap stuff is no more rebellious than britney spears: writing free software, refusing the culture of debt, considering money produced by banks through fractional reserve as a big scam instead of the only way modern society can work: these are examples of rebellions that actually can accomplish something.

This first of four parts, all at archive.org can explain how propaganda works in the western world.
http://www.archive.org/details/AdaCurtisCenturyoft heSelf_0

If the MAFIAA provides a valuable service to you, and expects money in exchange, it seems reasonable that you should give them money. If they aren't providing a valueable service, then don't pirate their garbage. Jerks like you give the rest of us who oppose the current copyright regime a bad name.

John Carmack's keynotes from the last three QuakeCons are available here. You won't get any solid answers on their next title, but in the 2006 speech you can get some clues when John Carmack starts elaborating on his game design philosophies.

Apologies in advance for what is about to be a match to an evolution vs. creation flamewar, but I'm in a bit of a cheeky mood and feel like "getting some back" in this old argument.

Specifically, I've been getting a bit tired of hearing the old "science disproves the existence of a higher being" B.S. that's constantly thrown around. I recall it starting with the baseless Human Genome Confirms Evolution (archive) story a few years back. The author of the article was quick to jump to the conclusion that finding fewer genes than expected *proved* that man must have evolved. (Too bad we never saw his formal proof of that. Would have been fascinating to see how well it stood up to scrutiny.)

Now that's not to say that the theological side of the argument hasn't made some pretty dumb steps itself. e.g. Intelligent Design can't be a true scientific theory, because science can only deal with that which is inside our universe. If we are positing the existence of an extra-universal being who set the universe in motion, then science does not have the reach to make that determination. Science is restricted to the laws of the Universe in which we inhabit. It would be very poor form for a being who trancends time to be an inhabitant of a universe that would forcably constrain Him. Therefore "God" is a concept that must be dealt with in Theology, not the investigation of the laws of nature. (Even Newton was smart enough to know this!)

However, this argument usually gets a "thinking logically, if X happened, is it not more likely that it was a natural occurance rather than the hand of an almighty being?" Which, of course, completely misses the point. (And spurs quite a few eyerolls.) If we are in a Universe put in motion by an extra-universal being, then the laws of nature are *His* laws of nature. They work according to how He says they should work.

Again, since I'm feeling cheeky, I figured it would be fun to respond with a similarly goofy argument:

It seems to me that if man is hardwired with an sense of altruism and a desire to believe in a super-being, there can be no other answer to this question than the existence of a Creator.

Ok, go have fun tearing each other up over that. I guarantee that you'll get nowhere, but it might be fun to watch. Lame noodly-appendage references and ID arguments, HO!

Maybe it's just me, but I don't even listen to music on my genuine IPod