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No need to mod this guy down. But CURRENTLY in modern history individual artists and small companies suffer far greater than the institutions who are members of BPI.

There are victims on both side of this war. And collateral damage. By pulling out the big nuclear weapons BPI and their pals are just harming everyone including themselves.

I'm going to RE-link the best ever article from 1841 on this issue. Because it really is still relevant today.

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/4/25/1345/03329

I don't care how advanced Netflix's architecture and infrastructure are, they still use unsolicited commercial E-mail--spam--to advertise their services. I've seen it. Other people have seen it. I do not do business with spammers. Period.

Homomorphic encryption is scary stuff, one could use it to make malware or drm schemes that would be, for all practical intents and purposes, impossible to reverse engineer:
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2010/12/15/151617/78/

Once you've died, dying isn't scary at all.

You remind me of something I wrote back in 2004. You may find it amusing.

You and the story poster really really really need to go back to school and beef up on your reading comprehension. Card's personal views are evident all over the place. Empire was painfully filled with them. Everything in the Bean series. All of his non-SF is littered with it.

If you want to read a very well written and thought out argument as to why Ender's Game is one of the worst books for adolescents to read, check out John Kessel's thesis. He's not like one of those that says Card didn:t even write Ender's Game

Turtles? How about snails?

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/10/23/13219/110

You must get educated before you are capable of judging how evil either company might be.

And, don't miss the AARD code, either:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/11/05/how_ms_played_the_incompatibility/

K5 was doomed when the K5ARP hung up tehir hat.

Anyway, I'm sure that 2013 will finally see the Collaborative Media Foundation take off.

More proof of Kuro5hin's decline: http://www.kuro5hin.org/user/Trollaxor/stories

The whole point of US copyright is providing works to consumers. Think about it, would a book be of much use if the author was paid but no body ever read it? Paying for it creates dead-weight losses that are necessary under the current system, but ideally should be minimized.

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/1/8/122920/9442

I think I speak for most people when I say "I don't care."

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/4/25/1345/03329

I am so sensible, Sir, of the kindness with which the House has listened to me, that I will not detain you longer. I will only say this, that if the measure before us should pass, and should produce one-tenth part of the evil which it is calculated to produce, and which I fully expect it to produce, there will soon be a remedy, though of a very objectionable kind. Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers. At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot. On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as Robinson Crusoe, or the Pilgrim's Progress, shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress?

I think most people care and most people understand that the monopolies have and are doing more damage then piratical distributers of information.

Your authers are not and have not been compensated fairly for a long time. The works of tolkien were removed from the public domain in 1994 and given to a holding company in trust of tolkiens estate. They are no longer benefiting from his work, we are being punished. And people like Peter Jackson and the hollywood stuidos he works for and represents are the only people who can benifit monetarily from this work.

Yet because of the damage monopolies has caused. And the turning of copywright into personal property to be handed along from institution to institution has done, we and our descendents and all those living now are paying the price far worse then a simple tax or compensation for people who have done work.

The point is that the law is not fair and there is no fair way to change the law. The beast has become to great and we are locked in a death rattle with a python crushing us. Sensible people are not allowed to give voice to defend the public domain and what should be fair, and a fair law.

To answer your question:

"The easiest form of parochialism to fall into is to assume that we are smarter than the past generations, that our thinking is necessarily more sophisticated. This may be true in science and technology, but not necessarily so in wisdom."

That quote is from the introduction to this brilliant essay: "Macaulay on Copyright"
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/4/25/1345/03329

> Hopefully, at some future point, we will evolve beyond such fables ...
Stories will never go away. Why? What is the purpose of a story? To teach a moral -- it doesn't matter if the story historically happened or not IF you learn the lesson.

Besides, the disciple Peter already commented on how scriptures should be used that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam continues to ignore:

The allegorical nature of scipture:

Tell me, you who want to be under the law, are you not aware of what the law says? 22 For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by the slave woman and the other by the free woman. 23 His son by the slave woman was born according to the flesh, but his son by the free woman was born as the result of a divine promise.

24 These things are being taken figuratively: The women represent two covenants. One covenant is from Mount Sinai and bears children who are to be slaves: This is Hagar. 25 Now Hagar stands for Mount Sinai in Arabia and corresponds to the present city of Jerusalem, because she is in slavery with her children. 26 But the Jerusalem that is above is free, and she is our mother.

The contradictions in the scriptures:

For, according to the rule delivered to them, they endeavor to correct the discordances of the Scriptures, if any one, haply not knowing the traditions, is confounded at the various utterances of the prophets. Wherefore they charge no one to teach, unless he has first learned how the Scriptures must be used. And thus they have amongst them one God, one law, one hope."

The prophets were sent to the spiritual immature minded:

"Since, therefore, both to the Hebrews and to those who are called from the Gentiles, believing in the teachers of truth is of God, while excellent actions are left to every one to do by his own judgment, the reward is righteously bestowed upon those who do well. For there would have been no need of Moses, or of the coming of Jesus, if of themselves they would have understood what is reasonable."

I was going to post an amusing personal coincidence from wikipedia: "the machine became operational in April 1951. It was handed over to the computing group in May 1952."

It's exactly one year older than me; I was born in April 1952. Whoever did the summary isn't very good at math, I'm not 70 years old. This thing was operational 61 years ago. Most of you guys grew up with computers, Computers grew up with me.

It is still a digital computer (as opposed to an analogue computer), as were other non-binary false starts like the Setun which used balanced ternary.

Yes, a base 3 computer would use positive, negative, and off. Seems like one would be a lot more complex to design than a binary computer.

They also had pure analog computers well into the 1960s (maybe even '70s) that used voltage as a "number system". Most were vaccuum tube based. No rounding errors, but noise was the problem.

Oh wow, this takes me back. I remember when this sob story was posted on /. about five years ago and kuro5hin about ten years ago. And it was always a store that had been around for 12 years.

Ah, happy days.

They run even better with less government involvement. Several years ago I was a member of a volunteer fire department. Only the chief was a government employee. Everyone else was an unpaid volunteer. We had one pumper truck, and rest of our vehicles were pickup trucks, parked at the home of a volunteer in each neighborhood. What we lacked in professional training and equipment, we made up with really fast response times

Several years ago my car caught fire. I was on my way down to the St Louis area to see some friends, and was first going to my daughter's in a nearby town who had a volunteer fire department.

It took almost an hour for you yahoos to show up. Had my car caught fire on a weekday I'd not have lost the car (assuming they're as fast as you say). If It had caught fire in Springfield with its city-run professionals I wouldn't have lost it.

Fast, my ass. Maybe yours is, but Chatham's sure isn't. Tell me, why would a volunteer fire department be faster than professionals? I've had to call for an ambulance twice, and in both cases the fire department was there in under five minutes but it took the corporate-run ambulance fifteen (the firetruck and its medics always shows up when you call an ambulance here).

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/12/21/17846/757

LocalRoger wrote several shorts based in this universe. I though they were great, and am still waiting for a book.

... says a discarded seasonal worker.

> Copyright exists because people cannot be trusted to respect the wishes of artists and/or financially support them
False. It was invented by _publishers_ to maintain control by preventing other publishers from making a profit !

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright_law [wikipedia.org]
"The history of copyright law starts with early privileges and monopolies granted to printers of books. The British Statute of Anne 1710, full title "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned", was the first copyright statute. Initially copyright law only applied to the copying of books."

"Pope Alexander VI issued a bull in 1501 against the unlicensed printing of books and in 1559 the Index Expurgatorius, or List of Prohibited Books, was issued for the first time."

"The first copyright privilege in England bears date 1518 and was issued to Richard Pynson, King's Printer, the successor to William Caxton. The privilege gives a monopoly for the term of two years. The date is 15 years later than that of the first privilege issued in France. Early copyright privileges were called "monopolies," ...

"In England the printers, known as stationers, formed a collective organisation, known as the Stationers' Company. In the 16th century the Stationers' Company was given the power to require all lawfully printed books to be entered into its register. Only members of the Stationers' Company could enter books into the register. This meant that the Stationers' Company achieved a dominant position over publishing in 17th century England"

Second, "The easiest form of parochialism to fall into is to assume that we are smarter than the past generations, that our thinking is necessarily more sophisticated. This may be true in science and technology, but not necessarily so in wisdom."
"Macaulay on Copyright"
* http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/4/25/1345/03329

Lastly, good luck with that spiel to the Fashion Industry:
"Johanna Blakley: Lessons from fashion's free culture"
* http://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashion_s_free_culture.html

Kuro5hin posted a new article this morning, on Humanity's Second-Best Hope. Gary Johnson is apparently our best hope, but the Machine won't let him get elected.

I'm quitting smoking

Perhaps I can help.

if you threaten REAL WORLD VIOLENCE: fuck you, throw your ignorant ass in jail

if i ever see the nickname procrasti again on this site or anywhere in my life, i want it to be in an OBITUARY -- circletimessquare

This could easily be considered a threat of real world violence. Someone should throw that ignorant asshole in jail.

What is an AA?

Alcoholics Anonymous. You're anonymous, do you drink?

What's the difference between a drunk and an alcoholic? Alcoholics have to go to meetings! (I saw that on a drunkard's t-shirt once)

I Am Absolutely Serious When I Point Out That Just A Few Days Ago I Tried The Following New Busker's Schtick:

MAD DOCTOR MIKE

ASK ME A QUESTION

Before I go on, let me point out that I really am a Solar Astronomer. It's just that Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans.

So some cute young thing tools up on her Velocipede to ask:

"What would happen if the Sun went out?"

The happy news is that I got a bus ticket out of it. That would be like me asking modus how to be a CyberStalker.

Anyway, a good three solid hours after I stepped away from my own table, I pointed out to Kuro5hin's Almost But Not Quite Yet Newest Member:

"Now you too have Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder."

The reason I am Homeless Like Me is not because I am in any way symptomatic, but because I am Swimming to Patagonia because that is The Land Where the Penguin Knows Her Name.

Yes, Really: Penguins really do know their names, just like cats and dogs do.

I figure naming all of Patagonia's penguins might - just might - be a far better use of my time than spending the rest of my days sweating the fact that the roads and streets all over the Pacific Northwest really don't run from Northwest to Southwest, or from Northeast to Southwest as all the streetsigns assert they do.

It's just that borking all your traffic signs is just what you need to also bork an armed insurrection.

Go Look At Google Maps If You Don't Believe Me.

Occupy WHAT Now?

FUCK THAT!

The President's Analyst starring The Immortal James Coburn will set you back just nine and a half bucks on DVD. C'mon, you'd spend half that much on an unprotected buttfuck from one of my many newfound friends down at the Rescue Mission.

"Would you like to watch a movie?" asked Tani, then a graduate student in Clinical Psychology at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

"I have The President's Analyst."

"NO SHIT?!?!"

"That's my all-time favorite movie!"

"Is it because it speaks to your paranoia?"

I found myself quite puzzled, because while The President's Analyst sinks it to the Paranoia-Laden Hilt, strangeley that has never been the reason.

I know now the reason:

Coburn's Psychoanalyst character knew too much.

So do I right now.

Everybody else will as well, but only if they learn to use Search Engines the way I learned to use Search Engines.

Now that she has her PhD, while strictly speaking she is "Doctor Newell", she still prefers to be referred to as "Tani".

Tani was one of the very first people with whom I correspended regularly after publishing my first explanation of Suicide Cults shortly after the Heaven's Gate Mass Suicide in San Diego in the Spring of 1997.

The entire world recoiled in horror as it tried to contemplate how it could possibly be that more than thirty talented young web designers could be duped into eating Phenobarbital-laced Applesauce and Pudding, then washing their dessert down with hard liquor, shortly after having dropped their - l

I'm 60, but when it comes to tech, 20 years IS the stone age. Twenty years ago you were running DOS on a 486. Twenty years ago, cell phones were 4 years old and only rich people had them. Twenty years ago there were no DVDs, let alone Blu-rays.

Did your car have ABS and air bags 20 years ago? Mine didn't.

Throwing away tech because it's old is dumb (I've written about this, the link is a bit dated), but when a new technology is superior to the old technology (disk brakes rather than drum brakes) the old tech SHOULD die. And this suit seems head and shoulders above the old tech.

• Michael David Crawford

I'm all over The Series of Tubes as I published my first site in 1994, and was on Usenet and mailing lists long before that.

out of 27,300,000 total hits we have at Number Ten and so stil on the first page:

Startup Weekend entrepreneurial event on alert after man threatens explosions, guns
by Molly Young, The Oregonian

More than 150 people at the Startup Weekend entrepreneurial event at Portland State University are on what event organizers described as a "lockdown" after a man who was asked to leave this morning later made threats of violence.

Six police officers were at the PSU Business Accelerator building on 2828 S.W. Corbett Ave. this afternoon.

After the man, Michael David Crawford, was removed this morning, he apparently threatened violence, explosions and guns, co-organizer Jeff Martens told participants at an afternoon meeting announcing the "lockdown." The threats were made on a Twitter account using the hashtag of the event, though the tweets appear to have been deleted.

Participants are allowed to enter and leave through one entrance, and Portland police said the event was not on an official lockdown.

Is British Airways going to treat me like family after they read that?

Here's What Really Happened.

The reason I haven't sued the Startup Weekend corporation, The Oregonian and, because they deleted exculpatory evidence from their site, Twitter for defamation is not because I don't want to or because I don't think I'd win metric boatloads of damages, but because I've been busy fixing up my websites. They were, at least for a whiile, a multitude of sins.

What I was really referring to on Twitter when I reported that I knew a straightforward way that I myself, from the comfort of my own home, could "make a large industrial facility detonate like a Bunker Buster Bomb" is lucidly explained in Jonathan Swift Sticks it to the Man.

ProTip: Obama and whoever the Prime Minister of Israel fucked up royally when they authorized StuxNet. Just you wait until the Iranians download their free eval copy of the Trihedral Engineering VTS - Visual Tag System - Human Machine Interface / Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition industrial control system software.

HMI / SCADA just about has to be the single most human-life critical software known to man. Wouldn't you think they'd Read The FIne Manual before - at the time I was hired - writing a half million lines of what Trihedral founder Glenn Wadden, a brilliant industrial engineer but an incompetent coder, described as a million line program that's only half complete?

Michael David Crawford, who looks forward to lighting smuggled Cuban cigars with burning hundred dollar bills.

Notice he repeatedly says "format" and never "fdisk". Reformatting a drive won't remove a boot sector virus (fdisk/mbr will, as will running fdisk for a full low-level format) However, you bit the troll. The original was spam, but the trolls have found biters to be easy prey for it. Maybe you should think about joining Biters Anonymous?

No, I'm not trolling, and I do understand that language evolves. But it's "evolving" far faster than it has in the last half century (I know from experience, I was ten a half century ago). "Troll" is from the internet age, it's not nearly old enough to change meaning. And I specifically cited wikipedia because of the fact that it is an evolutionary database. When the meaning of "troll" actually does change, that change will be reflected in wikipedia. But as you see, it hasn't.

Troll still doesn't mean "I disagree with you". I imagine the reason is that would make the term just about meaningless.

I've written a couple of things concerning offline trolling, you may find them amusing.

Fun with offline trolls
(this one actually mentions the evolution of language, specifically the word "gay")
Trolling at the Springfield St. Patrick's Day Parade
Trolling for Dollars (and other Springfield nonsense)
(the offline trolling is at the end)

Here's one about Troll Biting (still the #1 result for a google search for "biters anonymous".)

No, I'm not trolling, and I do understand that language evolves. But it's "evolving" far faster than it has in the last half century (I know from experience, I was ten a half century ago). "Troll" is from the internet age, it's not nearly old enough to change meaning. And I specifically cited wikipedia because of the fact that it is an evolutionary database. When the meaning of "troll" actually does change, that change will be reflected in wikipedia. But as you see, it hasn't.

Troll still doesn't mean "I disagree with you". I imagine the reason is that would make the term just about meaningless.

I've written a couple of things concerning offline trolling, you may find them amusing.

Fun with offline trolls
(this one actually mentions the evolution of language, specifically the word "gay")
Trolling at the Springfield St. Patrick's Day Parade
Trolling for Dollars (and other Springfield nonsense)
(the offline trolling is at the end)

Here's one about Troll Biting (still the #1 result for a google search for "biters anonymous".)

Quite possible.

But it also looks a lot like one of the tactics that got them into trouble for of anti-competitive behavior before. Namely contracts with OEMs that were designed to block or at least hamper the sale of PCs with other operating systems. For instance, see http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/10/23/13219/110.

I wonder what the EU Commission has to say about that ;-)

I've never understood why people think that just because something is newer makes it better.

I wrote a humorous article about that very thing seven years ago -- Useful Dead Technologies. It's a bit out of date; they went back to knobs on radios, and shoelaces are now the best of both nylon and cotton.

Whenever we trade an old technology for a newer one, there are almost always tradeoffs. For example, a guy at Felber's had an old fashioned part for a furnace that cost $25 he was replacing a faulty $250 digital board with. I like my electronic thermostat on my hvac, but the old ones were nice in that they didn't need batteries.

Analog TV suffered ghosting, interference, static, and digital has a much sharper picture, but the interference, rather than making the picture snowy or ghosty or the sound staticy makes the digital picture freeze and the sound echo and stop.

I think way too many folks throw out perfectly good equipment when they could be repurposing it. Throw a couple of NICs and Linux in an old Celeron and you have a router.

So far nearly all the posts have been backing the clean hypothesis. My story is different. I grew up in a semi-rural suburb where I played outside a lot and our family always had dogs and for a while some parakeets as well. I used to catch crayfish and frogs and turtles and snakes and keep them as pets for a while.

I had severe allergies including asthma since I was maybe 6 or 7. It was around that time that I started taking allergy shots (immunotherapy). I took them for at least a few years I think with minimal to no change in the severity of my allergies.

From a very young age I grew up having to carry an inhaler with me everywhere and not being able to find it when I couldn't breathe was truly awful. Even now, in my 40s, I cannot sleep through the night without waking up because I'm not getting enough oxygen. This is despite the fact that I take large doses of inhaled corticosteroids (budesonide).

I've always been highly allergic to cats, but in my late teen years I became fascinated by them and decided to try to keep one. So I bought an 8 week old kitten and kept it for about a year before I gave up and finally gave her away. The reason I was able to keep the cat for so long was that I would bathe her at least once a week. Sometimes twice a week. Kittens are also known to be less allergenic than adult cats. I even tried one more time with a pure bred Devon Rex kitten and it did seem to make a significant difference, but I had to eventually sell her as well. Keeping a cat for an extended period of time did not seem to cure my allergies to them. It may have lessened them a little, but it's hard to say.

As an adult I have mainly kept parrots and an environment with birds isn't the cleanest one either. There was no shortage of down or feathers. I owned parrots for many years. I am only slightly allergic to them, but I am allergic to them and keeping them for years didn't change that. I also tend to live in a dirty environment with lots of dust and it hasn't improved my allergies. In fact over time my allergies seem to have been getting worse and worse.

My sister grew up in the same environment as I and she has never had any allergies. Not even hay fever. So I think congratulating ourselves that we have shown clean environments to be the cause of allergies is a bit premature.

OTOH there is this guy. He went to Cameroon to infect himself with hookworms and miraculously it seems to have worked for him. Based on my own experience, I think we are on the right track with the clean hypothesis, but we aren't there yet. I think the causes will eventually be shown to be a genetic predisposition to an overachieving immune system that makes you more likely to develop some kind of autoimmune disorder in your life combined with some specific triggers. Where I live now is certainly no more 'clean' in terms of dust and dirt than most of the homes I have visited in very poor countries. In fact I think it is less clean. I am not referring to huts with a dirt floor. I've never been inside one of those. I mean the regular housing in which average people live in the poor countries where I've lived.

I'm thinking in terms of some specific things like not washing your hands before eating. I have nearly always washed my hands before I touched food. In fact I probably started doing that around the same time that I developed allergies as a young kid. Clean water may be another trigger. In the poor countries I lived the water supply was not 100% clean all the time. Some people would always boil the water they used for drinking, but almost no one would use purified/boiled water for things like washing vegetables and dishes or tooth brushing or showering.

Nicotine is actually beneficial to your overall health, only not if you ingest it by inhaling burning tobacco smoke

Then why do people who chew tobacco get mouth, throat, and esophagus cancers?

Anyway, nicotine does have a physical dependency, but the withdrawal is a steady, mild craving that lasts about a week.

I quite smoking ten years ago, and I can tell you from experience that whoever told you that is wrong.

A Kuro5hin classic: HOWTO: write bad documentation that looks good.

Do the youth in Russia protesting understand exactly how free they are compared with the American's slandering them? Consider the facts.

Sorry, but the opinion of the uneducated is of no interest whatever to me. Your "journalist" should learn when, and more importantly when NOT, to use simple punctuation and I'll read his tripe. But what an aliterate says is of no value to me. I'm surprised you'd quote such a rag.

If it was meant as a possessive it should have read "compared with the Americans' slandering of them."

Six Corporations control the American press

Wrong. They do have undue influence, but I just linked to a newspaper (yes, they print paper editions as well) that is not connected to any of them.

Freedom of the press has always been for those with the money to buy a press -- which today, is almost anyone, since the 21st century printing press is a laser printer and the internet.

the American president recently authorized the assassination of an American citizen who was known for recording tapes and CDs denouncing America's policies as immoral, and oppressive.

Link? Oh, there are none. Funny, that.

Frequently in the last several decades children have had to rely on parents taking schools to court to avail themselves of the right to pray; Churches and Mosques are frequently having to show up in court to preserve their rights to call people to prayer, ring bells, or even maintain a cross that happens to be visible from a public highway.

And again, no link. Your Russian newspaper is full of shit. We have Christian churches, Jewish Synagogues, Islamic Mosques, and even a Bhuddist temple in this small city of 110k. Oh yeah, lots of atheists and agnostics as well.

American's Pay Almost 50% of their income in Taxes

There's that misused apostrophe again. Tell that stupid illiterate blogger to go back to the 6th grade. Hell, you'd have done better to link to this. At least I'm literate. Your Ruskie blog reads like it was written by a fourth grader.

What about my group? I didn't grow up with computers, Computers grew up with me.

I was online in 1983. It was CumpuServe and it really sucked. At 300 baud it was text-only and there was little there.

BBSes were better. They were 9600 baud and FREE!

I wasn't on the real internet until 1997. 33k modem, WOW What speed!

Man, it was primitive...

While our first modem was 300 baud, one of the first BBSes I connected to was 110 baud. My dad had a CompuServe account, but it was expensive, so he rarely let me use it. Later, I would buy $25 introductory kits to CompuServe in the book store, since the 5 hours free they came with were a bargain compared to the hourly rate. I'd get a new UID every 5 hours of use. I also remember they charged variable rates for awhile depending on connect speed, so I settled on a speed compromise, since the fastest available was too expensive, but I could read faster than 300 baud.

Soon, there were enough local BBSes with large file libraries, good conversations, and FidoNet that I could stay entertained without paying by the hour, and I usually ran a BBS myself as well. I did hang out on Prodigy years after that when it came out... till I got banned for joining the uproar over the email limit with the 25 cent charge for going above 30 messages sent in a month.

What about my group? I didn't grow up with computers, Computers grew up with me.

I was online in 1983. It was CumpuServe and it really sucked. At 300 baud it was text-only and there was little there.

BBSes were better. They were 9600 baud and FREE!

I wasn't on the real internet until 1997. 33k modem, WOW What speed!

Man, it was primitive...

In an interview with Hollywood Reporter, [Dodd] said that Hollywood and the technology industry 'need to come to an understanding' about new copyright legislation.

Here's the understanding, Chris: Computers copy data. Period. End of novel; no sequel coming. It is a fact of the landscape that is not going to change.

And that, as far as any clear-thinking technologist is concerned, is the end of the discussion. Business models must be constructed around this reality. (And if your business model is not based on reality, but instead on a la-la fairy land where every computer is under MPAA/RIAA/SPAA control, unsanctioned copies never happen, every view is metered, and directors and actors work for naught but "exposure"... Well, they have anti-psychotics that can help with that now.)

BTW, anyone hoping to debate the merits of copyright policy is REQUIRED to read this speech by Thomas Babington Macaulay -- it will easily be among the most enlightening forty-odd minutes of your life.

Schwab

Dude, I have to quote myself here. From Good Riddance to Bad Tech:

This sorry piece of crap is proof positive of American stupidity. The cassette - the (now obsolete) four track, two-spindle, 1/8th inch, 1 /78 IPS shirt pocket sized tape cassette was produced before the 8-track. The four track cassette was originally made as a dictation device, but advances in tape manufacture and head design soon gave them a frequency response that came close to human hearing's limit, signal to noise ratio low enough that you had to turn it up very loud to hear the hiss, and inaudible harmonic distortion which made them ideal for music.

Nevertheless, the 8-track was born anyway. With its transport speed at twice the 4-track cassette's speed, it should have been audibly superior. However, the "powers that be" decided that 8-tracks were going to be for automobiles, which at the time were not as well insulated from outside sounds and wind as today's cars, and with the auto's horrible acoustics, it was OK for a car's music to sound like effluent.

But the deliberately bad sound wasn't bad enough. The eight track tape had a single spindle, a very clever design where the tape fed from the center of the spindle, around a capstain roller inside the housing and back to the outside of the roll of tape. This made for an expensive setup, and one that was prone to wow and flutter, as well as having the tape get "eaten" by the tape player. And unlike a cassette, if your 8-track got ate, you might as well throw it in the trash.

But wait, there's more! This thing was deemed to be for the car, while cassettes were going to be (by about 1970 or so) for the home.

This made no sense whatever, since the "portable" eight track took up as much space as four cassettes, without being able to play any longer than a cassette. In fact, you could buy a longer playing cassette than 8-track.

But the one thing more than anything else that made 8-tracks suck like a Hoover was the fact that it had to change tracks four times during an album. This usually necessitated at least one song and usually more being interrupted in the middle!

Folks finally, after about ten years, started figuring this stuff out for themselves and replaced their 8-track cartriges with 4 track cassettes. Me? I never had an 8-track, although all my friends did. I, the geek, used the far more logical cassettes since about 1966 or 7. Hah! The geek gets the last laugh again!

They made cassette decks that you didn't have to flip, in fact I still have one in my '02 car (has cassette and a 4 CD changer). I had one way back in 1972, about the time 8-tracks were becoming popular.

Actually it was only 672 bytes - the 1024 byte memory had to include the screen memory also, much like shared video memory today - could take up to 768 of the 1024 bytes for a full 32x24 screen! (the chess game only used an 11-line screen for the board etc)

And it's even considered by some to be the greatest program ever written.

Excuse me, this is Slashdot--I think you might have followed the wrong bookmark.

Always wanted to try the Uberman http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/4/15/103358/720

Unfortunately, other people that I have to work with did not approve.

I've tried as well. The highly fragmented sleep posed a serious detriment to my ability to function, and also the scheduling would be very conflicting with much of my daily activities. Even for moments of my life when I had next to nothing to do it would still cause issues.

The best way to perform it is with larger fragments of sleep, with 2 I've found (as well as discovered in research) as being the most expedient. This article here is especially intriguing to me, because it correlates with my previous research and personal experience on it. Two 3-hour sessions of sleep (I've found before and after work) are very refreshing, and even if my schedule does not allow 3 hours during that day, I can adjust to have a larger period at night and a shorter power nap during the day after work and it offers just as much. Given that from what I've learned from sleep psychology that the body performs a full sleep cycle in around 3 1/2 hours only to repeat it again during a standard period of 7-8 hours of sleep, I can see why this would be the more natural approach.

Always wanted to try the Uberman http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/4/15/103358/720

Unfortunately, other people that I have to work with did not approve.

So true. I wrote this on Mon Dec 15, 2003:

Monday reared its dreary head this morning in anticipation of the pending divorce. I went to the courtroom, put my stuff in the tray, shoved my coat into the X-Ray box, and walked through the metal detector as half a dozen or more armed people stood around directing more normal, unarmed people.

I found my way to the same floor I had been on during the previous hearing, and found when asking that I was on the wrong floor.

I got to the seventh floor and found the courtroom, and sat in front of a very unattractive woman who smiled at me broadly, as to say "fuck me now!"

I shuddered, and smiled weakly back and sat down.

The hearing was at nine, and by ten after I didn't see my lawyer or the judge.

Finally a bailiff said "all rise" and the judge said "sit down". The judge then spoke to lawyers and the court reporter and somebody said something about some guy in jail.

I asked the bailiff if I was in the right courtroom. He checked with the court reporter, and I was indeed in the right place. No lawyer.

They brought a long haired, bearded prisoner wearing blue jeans and a flannel shirt from a side door. The guy had spent the last three weeks in jail over a typo!

This fellow was adamant that his child support payments were taken out of his paycheck just like the court order said.

After the court reporter and a District Attorney and some other guys in suits who I couldn't figure out talked about and mulled over a piece of paper on the judge's bench, the judge finally said "but look here, this Court Order is obviously in error."

It seems from what I could gather, not being a lawyer and all, that they were only taking half the amount from his paycheck, but the payroll slip reflected what the judge had said.

"Calm down," the judge said, "you're getting out. But if you're not here on January 15th we'll put out another bench warrant on you."

They took him out a door on the other side.

"Is there anybody here for... McGrew?"

I stood up and walked forward. Its lawyer wasn't here, either!

"Yes sir, uh, your oner. I, uh, my lawyer's not here, I think she's..."

"Ok, ok," says the judge. Who's next?

I sat back down, and some black fellow got divorced. His ex wasn't there, nor did he have a lawyer. It took five minutes.

I should have done that! Although you have to be separated for over two years before you can get divorced without your wife's permission.

My lawyer finally came in, along with Satan's lawyer. The black guy was free from slavery, and I was next!

The judge made me raise my hand and swear, although no bible was evident to swear on.

The service, marriage, divorce... I hate raising my right hand!

My lawyer asked my name, age, where I was married (the Old Cahokia Courthouse, oldest court house in or west of the Mississippi Valley) and was I sure that counseling would not make me want to change my mind.

"We tried counseling. That's when I found out about her adultery, which is in fact what our 'irreconsilable differences' are."

"Oh," the judge says.

"I have no further questions, your honor."

"No Questions," Lucifer's shyster said at the judge's nod.

And it was over. There is to be one more hearing before the first of the year, and I'll be completely single, after over a year after she left. And then speaking with my lawyer afterward- Evil X gets part of my pension! Yep, that's law. And my daughter Patty gets no child support, since Leila's living with her mother and still going to high school, even though she's 18.

The bank will be taking my house at a completely unrelated hearing tomorrow morning. They already repossessed my van (which had a broken transmission anyway).

But... freedom! Liberty! At the cost of most of everything I own, at the cost of personal bankruptcy, at the cost of about fourteen hundred bucks in legal fees IF I don't fight for custody...

I took an extra happy pill when I got back to work. It didn't work too well.

It's total bullshit. This guy has been following my posts for literally months. The list of people's he's accused me of being grows every time. I'm now apparently almost 20 people astroturfing Slashdot for every company that he doesn't like.

His claim about me karma whoring for mod points is also bullshit; I can't even get mod points because I posted in "the post" many years ago. I don't even know what the mod interface looks like because I've never seen it.

Normally, I wouldn't care, but my post was originally at +5, then this troll got modded up to +5 Interesting instead of -1 Offtopic like it deserves, and now my innocuous post is modded down for no reason. In fact, I think he's the one with multiple accounts abusing moderation points and subverting the comment system.

Robert Rozeboom at geek.net has told me that Slashdot's moderation system is one of many things they plan to revamp soon. It really can't come soon enough.

Posted anonymously because this is all totally offtopic.

- bonch

In my experience, once somebody finds out how easy it is to get stuff for free, they never pay again.

That's not been my experience. We were copying LPs onto cassettes way back when, and the RIAA screamed bloody murder about it, even though it was legal. But just because you could record your buddy's LP didn't keep anyone from buying LPs.

I will pay for music, software, and DVDs out of principle

See? There's one more in my experience. Also, studies have shown that your sample of one is faulty, that music pirates spend much more on music than non-pirates.

Now, if you're trying to sell something that used to be free, like music, you're going to have a rough sell. Music was always free; it was the container that costs. You didn't buy a song, you bought a 45. A piece of round plastic with grooves on it with a cardboard or paper container to keep it safe. You didn't buy the 1812 overture, you bought an LP. If you wanted free music you could record it off the radio. I recorded tons of stuff off the radio, KSHE's been playing full albums every week for over 40 years.

You're responding to a repaste of a classic troll post from ten years ago.

K5 was... of its time. I'm still stoked about the the inaugural meeting of the Collaborative Media Foundation. Any day now!

Musicians want to be paid. Music will always be sold.

Music has never been sold, ever, in history. The closest you come to selling music is selling sheet music, or selling your copyright. Before the 20th century the only form of recorded music was piano rolls.

During the 20th century you still didn't buy music, you bought records and later tapes, then CDs. You never bought the music, you bought the physical item.

Nobody used to complain about recording your LP to a cassette, or even recording your friend's LPs to cassette.

Then came the 21st century and Napster, and the recording insustry (NOT the "music industry") blew it badly. They should have sent their marketing teams to use Napster's free music to sell CDs; marketers are very good a convincing people to buy stuff. And people LIKE buying "stuff". Yes, in some cases you can charge a premium for convinience, but anything more than a couple of bucks people want something to show for their money.

And you still can't buy music. You can only rent it.

Concerts are tough to profit from and are generally used to promote record/song sales.

Bullshit. It's exactly the opposite.

No offense, but you have no clue about the music industry. I grew up with musicians, they want paid.

I've been playing guitar since I was 12, that was 47 years ago. Half my friends are musicians. I'm an amateur, but most I know are professionals. The non-independant, RIAA labels are the clueless ones.

Live performances are great but they are NOT profitable. It is common to lose money on them if they are not managed with precision.

There's no profit if your band sucks or, like you say, your manager sucks.

Of course musicians want to be paid, everybody needs money. But not every musician deserves to be paid.

Musicians want to be paid. Music will always be sold.

Music has never been sold, ever, in history. The closest you come to selling music is selling sheet music, or selling your copyright. Before the 20th century the only form of recorded music was piano rolls.

During the 20th century you still didn't buy music, you bought records and later tapes, then CDs. You never bought the music, you bought the physical item.

Nobody used to complain about recording your LP to a cassette, or even recording your friend's LPs to cassette.

Then came the 21st century and Napster, and the recording insustry (NOT the "music industry") blew it badly. They should have sent their marketing teams to use Napster's free music to sell CDs; marketers are very good a convincing people to buy stuff. And people LIKE buying "stuff". Yes, in some cases you can charge a premium for convinience, but anything more than a couple of bucks people want something to show for their money.

And you still can't buy music. You can only rent it.

Concerts are tough to profit from and are generally used to promote record/song sales.

Bullshit. It's exactly the opposite.

No offense, but you have no clue about the music industry. I grew up with musicians, they want paid.

I've been playing guitar since I was 12, that was 47 years ago. Half my friends are musicians. I'm an amateur, but most I know are professionals. The non-independant, RIAA labels are the clueless ones.

Live performances are great but they are NOT profitable. It is common to lose money on them if they are not managed with precision.

There's no profit if your band sucks or, like you say, your manager sucks.

Of course musicians want to be paid, everybody needs money. But not every musician deserves to be paid.