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I can't think of any way to make the "in Soviet Russia" joke work for this story.

Either way, you get clobbered with DRM.

So instead, I'll steal a joke from an earlier article:
In college, you owned a Sony. In Corporate America, SONY own YOU!

I don't feel too bad about stealing that joke though, the /.er who originally made it designed http://www.dixie-chicks.com/ as his personal website.

This looks to be the second article in a row from the esteemed Monsieur Piquepaille that doesn't link to an article in his blog. Check out his story posting history:

Can asbestos help us understand nanotoxicity? Wed Oct 19, '05 12:23 PM
Pillows Dangerous for Your Health Sat Oct 15, '05 12:28 PM
Molecular Gastronomy, The Science of Cooking Mon Aug 29, '05 11:32 AM
The Eyes of the Space Shuttle Wed Aug 03, '05 12:58 PM

BIG gap between the two latest non-self-referential stories, and the weekly shameless self-promotion that used to be his trademark.

I suspect that somebody either gave Mr. P a stern talking-to, or more likely the editors just quit accepting his stories. Now, he's back, chastened and better for it. You've got to admit, the guy has an eye for science stories. He's just got to have confidence that if he posts good stuff, the click-throughs to his main page (linked appropriately to his name) will follow in time.

I'm all for shameless self-promotion, of course, but I'm content with the URL link in the post heading. Well, mostly...

I started a little fan site detailing the history of a country group -- I won't name them, but they became famous and then infamous within the span of 5 years.

User homepage: http://www.dixie-chicks.com/

I have a feeling we all know what band you're talking about. And even then, the article to which you refer talks about them as well.

Ugh, your site gives me a headache. I'm sorry, I really wanted to read the article, but the ugly font, white text on black, and dark blue links on top of black that highlight with puke flourescent green... I just couldnt handle it after about 30 seconds :(

I would have checked out your site by way of comparison, but I'm afraid to click on http://www.poo.com/ at work.

(Of course, I'm now inviting an ad hominem attack on my own site, but I doubt I'll hear anything I don't already know.)

I don't make much from my Google ads, but it's fun to watch the stats. So when my stats tripled -- views, clicks, and cash -- at the start of May, I sent Google a note. No way did I want to be accused of click fraud, that $10 a month (oops, I shouldn't tell you that) takes the place of my dearly-departed CDNow affiliate kickbacks!

I got a nice form letter suggesting I check my referrer logs, but basically brushing me off. Understandable, if frustrating. What did I want them to do, say "OMFG WERE TOAST!"?

Strangely, though, the bump lasted exactly a week. May 1-7 had triple volume or more, then the stats settled down to exactly the pattern they've followed since the site's subject dropped off the face of the planet. I don't know if Google found the problem and fixed it, or if perhaps they were giving me catch-up credit for some previous bug.

All in all, though, they still look like the Good Guys. Hope it can last longer than CDNow.

I'm still wondering if there's a way for a band that has disbanded (heh) to put its material back on garageband.com. I'm particularly interested in a bluegrass group called Big Twang -- for details, see my mirror of their now-defunct site. They had three songs at mp3.com, but since the band was gone by December 19, 2003, I guess there's no way to get their account back.

Of course, the .mp3's are safe... on my hard drive. Don't tell the lawyers!

I'm still wondering if there's a way for a band that has disbanded (heh) to put its material back on garageband.com. I'm particularly interested in a bluegrass group called Big Twang -- for details, see my mirror of their now-defunct site. They had three songs at mp3.com, but since the band was gone by December 19, 2003, I guess there's no way to get their account back.

Of course, the .mp3's are safe... on my hard drive. Don't tell the lawyers!

and now have an angry grudge

Well, duh. This is Slashdot, after all...

(p.s. your website is dixiechicks.com... just making sure you know that)

No, it's not. It's dixie dash chicks dot com. Big difference, at least to us not- popular- in- high- school types.

Interesting service, but how well will it work with independent, non-mainstream artists?

Susan Gibson wrote and originally recorded the song "Wide Open Spaces" It became a hit for the Dixie Chicks. What happens if I put the phone to the radio while a station that knows the difference is playing the original version?

Would an artist like Slaid Cleaves or Mark David Manders, which you won't hear on your local corporate country channel, even be identified?

I suspect the music library won't be broad enough to support the people who actually care about the music enough to use the service.

I could create a brand new, non-obvious email address on one of my domain accounts and put it in as the Admin Contact for a record I own, and use that email address absolutely nowhere else, and I bet that within three months that email address would be getting buckets full of spam.

That's exactly what I did... and had exactly the result you described. Hundreds of spam messages a week to an address used only for domain registrations.

However, I seem to have found a solution. A poster in the hallowed halls of Slashdot was trying to determine the level of email harvesting, but wasn't getting any bites. But the word "spam" was in his email address... so I tried a new domain registration email address that also has "spam" in it.

Results after about a month: no spam to the "domspam@..." address. I don't know if perhaps they're sending mail to "dom@...", 'cause I'm not monitoring it. But the only messages I've recieved at "domspam" are valid messages from the registrars.

Of course, I haven't bothered to update my snail mail address since I moved. I hope the folks who bought our house are enjoying the offers for low-cost hosting and convenient "renewals". I guess I'll have to add that to my growing dossier of criminal activities...

dude, a lot more than 500 PEOPLE died over there...

Well, duh, I knew that when I posted. But I was trying to post about the space program and the concept of relative risk. I simply wanted to point out that US leadership has no problem expending a lot of lives for a goal with dubious merit. Look where it got me -- an instant +5, then a kick back down to 3 by knee-jerk anti-politicos. It's as if I linked to some radical country group, for crying out loud. :)

For the record:

* 500 troops vastly understates the issue, even if all you care about are US casualties. Last I heard, there were 2000+ troops injured, and we're talking debilitating injuries like limbs, eyes, and parts of brains blown away. Give Bush enough time, and he'll top the WTC numbers.

* Of course, Bush has clearly topped the WTC tally when you count the number of Iraqis killed since we invaded. But relatively few of those deaths are due to direct US action -- they're mostly due to the chaos we caused by invading.

* Even so, it may yet turn out that the 5-year death toll among Iraqis is less than it would have been under Saddam, who was an unmitigated bastard.

* But even if Saddam was a bastard, Bush could have tried not lying about WMDs, and he sure as heck could have planned ahead for the complete lack of order everyone knew our entry would cause. He could have simply asked NPR's Anne Garrels, whose book shows that she had better on-the-ground intelligence than Bush's sources.

* No thanks to Bush, the troops are performing as well as can be expected in the situation they've been ordered into.

So, in your esteemed opinion, have I redeemed my Green Party credentials?

Opening a restaurant called MickDonalds wouldn't be acceptable nor would a WaltMart.

Actually, on I-20 between Terrell and Canton, Texas, there's a barbeque joint named "McDonald's", or possibly "Mac Donald's", that has nothing to do with any golden arches. It's a fair assumption that they serve hamburgers and fries as well.

The signs for the joint are rather small, and make no reference to any other hamburger joint. And I haven't been able to locate the place online -- the closest I've come is a place called the Interstate Cafe that looks like it's in the right location (Superpages link).

It's entirely possible that the joint has been contacted by the "other" McD and entered into some sort of agreement. But they probably got their lawyers involved from the get-go, a suggestion noted by many in this discussion.

I didn't hire a lawyer when I got my own Cease and Desist letter. I did the same thing as this poor guy... sent my own non-vetted letter back, and contacted the media. My situation worked out fine -- I never heard back from the lawyers -- but I'll be more careful if it ever happens again.

I wish I'd found this topic before it had picked up 1000+ replies, but in case anyone is still reading, here's my "you can't say that":

Natalie Maines, lead singer of the Dixie Chicks, throws out an off-the-cuff quip while on tour in England. She said, "Just so you know, we're ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas." Country radio stations, especially the corporate soundalikes, pull the Chicks' "Travelin' Soldier" -- a song about war and sacrifice in the Vietnam era.

Of course, this leaves people with the impression that country listeners are uneducated rednecks with a shotgun in the truck window and truck balls hanging from the bumper. That's not the case... not all country fans steamrollered their CDs, and those that did probably bought more (the album's 4x platinum). But it's hard to listen if the radio doesn't play something... so as long as Clear Channel & co. treat their listeners like fools, the Chicks won't get play.

Meanwhile, with a dozen Americans a week dying in Iraq (and my cousin serving in Tikrit to boot), I can't say I'm terribly proud of the Texan in the White House, myself.

Just try to ignore the fact that the fastest way to reach the widest possible audience, and also the best way, happens to lie in the realm of the lowly web developer

You're right, of course! I reach 500-700 individuals daily on my web site. And thanks to Google AdSense, I'm now raking in... about 25c, on a good day (though technically, I'm not supposed to tell you that).

On the other hand, probably a couple hundred people in the world have ever used my software, and not a single one knows my name. But I do see my name ever two weeks where it counts... not in lights, but in black text on a tamper-proof background, in the "Pay To:" field of my paycheck.

Tough choice!

The AC says: I'd like to know what you consider as an intuitive wedesign

Well, I'd send you to my own site, but I'm afraid that what it lacks in flashy, useless graphics is more than made up for by its difficult navigation, dead links, and outdated information...

So yes, I'm PKB'ing.

I'm almost sad to see that the parent is currently modded 0, Flamebait. Someone has to play Devil's Advocate, even if it's to argue a patently ridiculous point.

At the risk of feeding a troll, I'll point out a couple of things:

AFAIK they have allways delivered a decent service at decent price to their customers. Compared to normal bussiness practise they are just very ethical in their behavior. As a long time customer I must say that they are nice to deal with compared to many of those unethical companies that you find on the internet that just want to scam you.

An excellent analogy! Verisign is not as unethical as the companies that sell snake oil and redirect your phone call to Vanuatu. That's like saying I should be happy to just be beaten up in a robbery, 'cause I could have been killed outright. Thanks, I feel much better.

My only dealing with NSI (in the pre-Verisign buyout days) was when they wouldn't transfer my domain to me from the original owner because of an obscure missing piece of paper (full story here). I got around the problem by transferring the domain to Domain Direct (affiliate link) and then to the much cheaper Gandi (no kickback), and I've never looked back.

Here's my stats of email virii filtered out by Postini:

* Virus Alert
These virus-infected messages have been quarantined BEFORE they reached your email inbox. You can safely view the text of the message by clicking on the subject.
Messages
Message 1 - 10 of 491 | Next

The only problem I have with Postini is that they send me a note for every single virus email they filter out, and I can't seem to turn that off (like I can the spam notification). So I still have ~620 messages in my inbox, about a hundred of which are bogus "You sent a virus" messages.

I get a lot of those -- generated by infected people who have my email address somewhere on their PC. That's a pretty high number, if the virus mines email addies from web sites like mine that the victim has recently visited.

You'd think the sysadmins would realize that it does no good anymore to tell the sender that they sent a virus, since the "sender" probably had nothing to do with it. [Insert M$-bashing comment about default operation here]

What are your views on the RIAA's recent actions to protect their copyrights?

Although it's a cool question, I doubt this one will make the cut. Copyright law is a federal issue, not a state issue.

Contract law, on the other hand, is indeed written at the state level. In September 2001, artists from Courtney Love to LeeAnn Rimes testified in Sacramento about artists' rights issues. Also in the state capitol that day were the Dixie Chicks, before they became a hot political topic for other reasons.

I agree with other posters that the article seems high in fluff and low in content (understandable, since anything else would be a technical paper, not an article). But the things that stood out for me when I read the article were the part mentioned in the parent ("go to the core of the Internet and make radical changes"), and this:

"This is about pooling resources and to build out the infrastructure, but in the end this about lowering the barrier to entry to developing on the Internet," Peterson said.

"Lowering the barrier?" My goodness, my 12-year-old daughter could be designing Flash-enabled websites if she weren't so busy on AIM. What "barrier" are they talking about? I'd almost suggest we need higher "barriers" to keep out the "wELCOM tO MY wEBSIGHTE" kiddies.

Now read that last sentence again.

Maybe I'm letting paranoia run loose, but there are more than a few folks in industry that would also like to keep those kiddies off the 'net, raise the bar, have an Internet that is "more useful everyday," as Bill would say. The net effect, though, is to remove the internet gadflies that make the 'net such a democratizing medium.

The web's success isn't due to the Microsofts and the AOLs -- it's the little guys like me and you who rub the fat cats the wrong way.

With "high-tech companies... key to the project's success" (and Intel and HP specifically mentioned), I'm afraid their goal is to make the 'net better for those high-tech companies... and to leave the rest of the masses out of the "New Internet".

But maybe I'm just being paranoid.

I'm a second-generation programmer. I'm in my mid-30s, and I've done little more than play Startrek on a mainframe terminal... I started out with TRS-80's and followed that track.

The first generation of programmers would be represented by my mother. She started working with computers before there was even such a thing as a "Computer Science" degree -- she has a Master's in mathematics. She was big iron, all the way... when I was a kid, she showed me the washing-machine hard drives and taught me to play the aforementioned Startrek.

She retired just a year or two ago, and she was nervously counting the days. Despite being in the airline reservations industry -- home of some of the biggest iron of all -- her skills and experience were held in less and less esteem as client-server and GUI became the buzzwords. Her biggest fear was that some beancounter would declare her mainframe expertise redundant before the magic date arrived.

On the other hand, at about the time the previous generation was sweating it out, my PC-based experience and VB credentials were all the rage, a ticket to ride the Rapid Application Development gravy train.

So here we are... GUI programmers (thankfully, not myself) frantically searching the want ads, and mainframers in demand. Go figure.

Or to put it another way, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose! (Yes, I'm a French-speaking Dixie Chicks fan. Call John Ashcroft!)