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Sorry to burst your bubble, but there are very few wealthy Christians, although most wealthy people would like you to think they are Christians.

The necktie is Satan's leash, symbol of wealth and power. A "Christian" wearing a necktie or pearls is a wolf in sheep's clothing.

I know you didn't mean to inject flamebait, but your ignorance needs to be corrected. Christians don't act like that, although the churches are filled with hypocrites who are closet athiests and agnostics. Look at Bush - how can a man who would execute more men than any Governor in the history of the state that executes more men than any otrher state, then start a senseless war to enrich his own coffers (he's an oil man, after all) possibly claim to be a Christian? Yet people still believe he is one.

People like him give real Christians a bad name.

-mcgrew

PS: Interestingly, the capcha is "dollar", which is what all rich people worship. Fitting.

I've only seen maybe a handful of games that I would call "art" versus just a pasttime.

Yeah, well, that goes for movies, music, books, even paintings and sculpture as well. Just because it hangs on a wall or stands on a pedistal doesn't make it "art", and just because the industry calls Britney Spears a "recording artist" doesn't make her commercial pap "art" either.

If you want to know if something is "art", wait a hundred years and ask me then. In an art history class I took, the professor showed slides of paintings that hung in the finest New York and Paris galleries when the impressionists were painting, and you've never heard of any of the "artists". The works were crap on a stick. In 2120 nobody will have a fucking clue who "Madonna" was, although they'll probably still know who the Beatles were (but there's no guarantee).

-mcgrew

"follow the standards that have been set before', which is a problem if you want to push the envelope."

As a former art student, I have to comment here. If you're doing it for the money, follow the legal guidelines and forget about making "art". If you're doing it for art's sake, forget about making money, forget about legal guidelines and instead only follow artistic guidelines (when applicable).

Hint: They may call them "recording artists" but neither Britney Spears nor Fiddy Cent are artists in any sense of the word, no matter how many CDs or downloads they sell. Art and commerce are most often at loggerheads; it is a rare work that is both art and salable.

-mcgrew

This fellow expounded on this idea, but you're both missing one very important point: It would work in many countries, where the government is beholden to the voters, but not in the US where the government is beholden to the "campaign contributors". And since there is no law making bribery a crime (or a law against "contributing" to more than one candidate), it doesn't matter which one wins, they're not going to pass a law like you (or I or many other voters) would want them to.

Your vote is is as meaningless as a Nazi vote shortly before WWII or a Soviet vote shortly afterwards. We essentuilly have one party rule, and the party that rules is the banking/corporates.

It's going to take a rebellion, whether armed rebellion or convincing enough people who realise that their vote doesn't count, over half of those eligible, to go to the polls and vote third party.

Until they pass a law outlawing "contribution" to more than one candidate in any race, and another outlawing contributions to candidates one isn't eligibvle to vote for, I'm not voting Republicrat again.

I can hear the two wings of the Republicrat Party scheming now: "Ok, here's the deal - if you Republicans win you get to gut the fourth amendment, if we Democrats win we get to gut the second amendment, and if it's close we'll gut the first. Either way we'll pass bankrupcy reform , the Bono Act and the DMCA."

-mcgrew

I agree with the post completely, but...

1. There is no such thing as "intellectual property" in the US. The very concept is unconstitutional. The "intellectual property" belongs to rthe people. All I, as the writer of this copyrighted comment own, is the publication rights to this comment, which expire after a "limited" time (with the word "limited" having been gutted by the US Supreme Court).

I do not own the songs I write, nor the stories, nor the software. I don't even own the Paxil Diaries. I only own a limited time monopoly on publication of that stuff (but not so limited that I won't be dead before my monopoly expires).

2. The artist doesn't own copyright to their recorded songs; US copyright law says the label owns the copyright, that the artist is just for hire.

This is, after all, the US. We have the best government Corporate Money can buy.

-mcgrew

PS- Yay, Ray!

I agree with the post completely, but...

1. There is no such thing as "intellectual property" in the US. The very concept is unconstitutional. The "intellectual property" belongs to rthe people. All I, as the writer of this copyrighted comment own, is the publication rights to this comment, which expire after a "limited" time (with the word "limited" having been gutted by the US Supreme Court).

I do not own the songs I write, nor the stories, nor the software. I don't even own the Paxil Diaries. I only own a limited time monopoly on publication of that stuff (but not so limited that I won't be dead before my monopoly expires).

2. The artist doesn't own copyright to their recorded songs; US copyright law says the label owns the copyright, that the artist is just for hire.

This is, after all, the US. We have the best government Corporate Money can buy.

-mcgrew

PS- Yay, Ray!

If a non artistically inclined four year old can make it with a box of crayons, it should be public domain...

Overheard in an art museum: "My four year old can draw better than that!" Trademarks aren't awarded on the basis of how difficult a symbol is to render, but how original they are. Your four year old can put the letter "X" inside a circle inside a square, but if nobody has registered that as a trademark, then you can and it's protected.

One of my instructors at college (I was an art major) was fond of saying "I don't know what I like, but I know what art is."

You have no idea how incredibly stupid your remark is.

-mcgrew (same article without pictures but with comments from the public)

Well at lease their knot misusing apostrophe's or homonymns.

More seriously, and actually on-topic, with a liberal dose of commas, I'd like to say it's about fucking time! There is no way to physically harm anyone over the internet, short of selling them drugs or cigarettes or booze or something (and yes, I know cigarettes and booze ARE drugs). Your kid is far more likely to be molested by their coach or Priest*, or harmed by a babysitter than some random stranger, let alone a random stranger from the internet.

The "internet is dangerous!!!!" is like "We must give up our liberty because of teh terrorism!!!!" Do the math: less than 3,000 dead in America this century from Muslim terrorists, while there are half a million from heart attacks and another half million from cancer, and forty thousand from auto accidents every single year! I'd say that Homeland Security money would be better spent on a few guard rails, and maybe if we can outlaw smoking something that slows lung cancer we can outlaw something that causes it? Or at least legalize the one that slows it so the cigarette smokers can legally... oh hell, never mind. This is mainstream media, law and government we're talking about. Logic, reason, and sanity should have nothing to do with the debate.

-mcgrew

*Old joke- A Rabbi, a Priest, and a lawyer are on the Titanic when it hits an iceberg. "Save the children!" screams the Rabbi. "Fuck the children!" snarls the lawyer. The Priest exclaims "No time for that!"

Attitudes like this are why computer security is in such a dismal state

No, Microsoft's attitude is why computer security is in such a dismal state. There are no Linux viruses in the wild, there are no Mac viruses in the wild, there are multitudes of Windows viruses in the wild. When was the last time you saw Firefox or Safari or Konquror able to be crashed with a malformed web page? This shit isn't supposed to happen, and with Mac, Linux, Sun, just about anyone else a bug like this brings red faces and ass chewings. With Microsoft it's "OK, no big deal, we'll get right on that... next Tuesday".

There used to be an IE bug that could crash the browser with... I don't remember it correctly, it was a few years back but something like <post></form>, less than six words. I don't remember exactly what it was but it persisted for litereally YEARS without a fix. I made sure I had it at the end of every page of my site. No, I never cared about pageviews (it was always just a hobby.) and it pissed me off that Microsoft was so unconcerned about its paying customers.

But why should they be concerned? So long as they're raking in cash there's no need for quality.

-mcgrew

(please, by all means, _do_ vote - it's _your_ government, not something imposed on you) I would recommend extreme care on the next elections.

OK, I'll bite. Do I vote for the pro-corporate, anti-(some)drugs, anti-prostitution, pro-RIAA Republicans who are financed by corporations, or do I vote for the pro-corporate, anti-(some)drugs, anti-prostitution, pro-RIAA Democrats who are financed by corporations?

What a choice! Er, I think I'll continue splitting my vote between the Greens and the Libertarians, or just stay home like 55% of Americans wisely do. Why should I waste my vote (or my time voting) for a candidate who not only doesn't have my interests at heart, but is beholden to someone who is anti-me?

-mcgrew

Oh man, I wish I had your optimism. But I'm a geezer, I'm beyond hope.

I personally think that newspapers should develop a 'tech section' where they can throw off the mittens & grade school knowledge that need to be on in order to handle your average reader.

Not me, I cringe every time I see the single weekly article by some so-called "tech guy" in a mainstream newspaper where someone (a non-nerd, obviously) says something like "my internet stopped working, what do I do?" and the answer starts with "first, open Internet Explorer. That's the program that lets you get on the internet"... GAH!!!! Someone will complain about viruses, does the guy ever mention Firefox? The fucktard doesn't seem to have ever HEARD of firefox, Linux, or OSS. Thankfully, the guy linked has retired. Hooray!

I know many newspapers have entire sections devoted to sports--sometimes even just one particular sport if it's in season!

That's because 48% of Americans (99% of males, probably not just Americans but men world-wide) are sometimes jocks and usually overweight wannabe jocks who love nothing better than to sit in front of the boob tube watching sports, memorizing meaningless statistics, and believing that it actually matters whether or not "their" team won the "big game" while not giving two shits or even knowing about warrantless wiretapping, limitless copyrights, the inability to make backups of DVDs they've bought, etc.

Sorry man (for me as well as for you) but it ain't gonna happen, not in my lifetime and not even in yours.

What we need is an article that causes people to seriously ask themselves how we can keep e-mail free and uncensored while at the same time stopping spam.

You're not going to see an article like that in the MSM or even in most so-called "tech" rags or sites. There are a lot of people who think they're geeks (Geek Squad anyone?) just because they own a computer!

So while this article is informational, it does nothing practical for the reader.

Informational for Aunt Gussie, not for you or me. And informing Aunt Gussie is practical.

the best way to stop spam is to stop clicking on it and show others how to do the same.

Ignorance is curable, but unfortunately stupidity is not. There are enough people who know better than to click on spam but are stupid enough to do it anyway. Hell, my oldest daughter is brain damaged with an IQ of 65 but even she is smart enough to not click on spam! But college professors do it anyway.

The situation is hopeless. If enough countries (esp. the US where most of the spam comes from) outlawed commercail unsolicited email with serious prison time for offenders, the spam problem would dry up... just like the "drug problem" has dried up.

It's hopeless.

=(

-mcgrew

That your post would be modded "informative" on a tech site! I would have modded it "interesting" but NOBODY reading slashdot should be "informed" by this. We're supposed to be nerds, we're supposed to know how this stuff works.

Even though Congress doesn't.

You obviously know this (hooray that there is at least ONE nerd at "news for nerds, stuff that matters"), but for the rest of ths slashdot audience who thinks having a new copy of Vista makes you a nerd (mod me flamebait, Congressman!), the "V-Chip" in your TV works because broadcasters have to add codes to the programming.

There is no way that noncommercial content will be able to be covered by a V-chip, unless the chip keeps all noncommercial content off of the device! Hooray for the commercial content producers, their worst nightmare of user-produced content usurping their role as gatekeepers will be over!*

Want to send a clip of your girlfriend to Mom? Sorry mom, this stupid phone you gave me won't let me send or recieve any unauthorized content. MySpace? Well, MySpace will automaticelly be assigned a "TV-14" rating. Google? They'll play ball, with "safesearch" on the kid's searches will get a "G".

Meanwhile my site sill be kid-friendly, meaning NO FUCKING KIDS! Get off my damned lawn! And no you can't have your goddamn ball back! Slashdot? Hooray! No more goddamned fucking kids posting links to goatse! No more frosty piss! No more juvenile... what? Those are twenty seven year grad students from SIU? Crap!

-mcgrew

*It started with the old outlawed Napster. When the major labels found out that Joe Schmoe and the Nuze Bluze Band could get his songs heard without Clearchannel's help, they started suing. Piracy? That was just an excuse. If you want to hear the latest top-40 hit just turn on the radio. If you want a copy of it just plug your radio's headphone jack into your sound card. They aren't trying to keep "WTF Madonna" off your hard drive, they're trying to keep Joe Schmoe out of your ears.

The next threat to the commercial content producers was killing internet radio, because those damned punks kept playing indie music.

Now YouTube has them worried. It's ok though, you can bet they'll find a way to kill that, too. This new V-chip is just another gun in the war against user-produced content.

"The internet has stopped people from going out and being with each other, creating stuff.

"Instead they sit at home and make their own records, which is sometimes OK but it doesn't bode well for long-term artistic vision."

Try creating music that people like

Amen. I'm a geezer, I was 17 in '69 (seventeen in sixty nine should have been a song title), and Elton John's pathetic hackwork came out shortly after I joined the Air Force.

Elton John is one reason I have hope for music in this century.

Because with one or two exceptions, the early seventies' music sucked decaying donkey balls and Elton John was among the apex of the suckage. We'd had rock and roll get loud and exciting with the likes of Blue Cheer, Led Zepplin, Black Sabbath... and then they stationed me in Delaware. Lots of radio from several high-population areas (Maryland, DC, etc) and what did I hear? Elton John, Jethro Tull (a flute player is supposed to be rock and roll????), all sorts of whiney, "please cry for me life's so sad" bullshit that made me want to puke ("There's a hole in daddy's arm where the money goes...").

I'd go back home to St. Louis on leave and KSHE was calling Lynard Skynard, Molly Hatchett, Allman Brothers, and others I would call country music that KSHE was calling "Real Rock Radio". I'd call it "country". But it was a hell of a lot better than Elton John or the Eagles!

But that musical dearth only lasted a few years, and we started hearing ZZ Top, Aerosmnith, Ted Nugent, Montrose (with Sammy Hagar) and the like. ROCK ON!

I was cheered and hopeful this century when I heard Buckcherry, but sadly they seem to be the only new major label band from this century that I could actually call "rock and roll". I'm in Springfield now, and "The Rock Station" here (WQLZ plays a mix of antique music (Zepplin, Van Halen, Def Leppard, Alice in Chains) and the 21st century garbage that is no more Rock than Elton John's pathetic bullshit.

The internet isn't killing music. Simon Cowell and Clear Channel are killing music. Corporations shouldn't be allowed to own media outlets, and nobody shouold be able to own more than five broadcast outlets, period.

But I thank Elton John's shitty early '70s pap for giving me hope that things will improve.

-mcgrew

If as many of my articles got posted on slashdot's front page (not that I've written any in the last couple of years since I left K5) as his, I'd have a job (writing articles instead of what I do now) too.

Despite all logic? No, he's tech's most sucessful troll.

-mcgrew

A Nerd's Guide to Getting Laid (January 03, 2007)
Ask Slashdot: Women (December 05, 2006)

-mcgrew (also known as "Three-eyes".)

I also try not to infringe copyrights

Yeah, mod that guy "funny" but it's insightful as hell.

Say he's trying to find the song The Fog" someone mentioned on slashdot by a midwest jam band called The Station (friends of mine). Say he doesn't know that there's more than one copy on archive.org that was put there by the band itself.

So what does he do? He fires up Kazaa and types in "the fog", downloads the song and... oops, he's violated Radiohead's copyright; a copyright Radiohead holds on a completely different song with the same name. Radiohead's label then goes and files suit against poor Vexorian.

It's not about keeping Radiohead off of P2P, it's about keeping The Station out of your ears.

-mcgrew

Them wanting to keep the latest rap song off of P2P and internet radio is total crap. As Roger McGuinn of the early 60s band "the Byrds" said, the old illegal Napster revitalized his career.

The problem with internet radio and P2P is that the labels can't control it. They want to kill kazaa and bittorrent not because their stuff is on it, but because they can't keep indie stuff off of it like they can the radio.

Face it, if I want the latest pap from the RIAA labels all I have to do is plug my sound card into my radio and sample. I then have ALL the latest hits, at a better quality than the highest bitrate MP3.

They want internet radio and P2P dead because their competetion is on it. It's not about keeping their stuff off P2P, it's about the artists who have discovered that they can make their own CDs in a professional studio and have copies professionally duplicated and packeged for only a few thousand bucks (far cheaper than the labels would chargeback), and promote them via internet radio and P2P.

This is about killing the competition before it kills them, plain and simple.

-mcgrew (AKA "Three-eyes")

"Hungry government officers raided the offices of a Microsoft subsidiary this week, as part of a probe into the company's refrigerators and large soft drink distributors. From the article: 'According to the statement, Microsoft used salt and condiments and offered soft drinks to wash it down - described as large diet pepsis - so they wouldn't offer clients anything but more food products. Such behavior could lead to the exclusion of cooked products from the market and violate European Union obesity guidelines, according to the authority known as the BLT.'"

-steve (honest, I really am Steve!

Most of those old bromides are complete and utter bullshit. You don't always get what you pay for. Sometimes you pay and don't get anything. But you usually pay for what you get. A horse is a four legged animal does NOT mean that a four legged animal is a horse. You pay for what you get if you don't get screwed! And often you pay LESS for a superior product. When a salesman tells you "you get what you pay for" hold on to your wallet, because you and your money are likely going to be taken for a ride.

"The way to a man's heart is through his stomach". Bullshit, the way to a man's heart is through his dick.

"There's no such thing as a free lunch." Whoever said that never had a grandmother, or knew that polk and dandelion leaves are edible.

"Money doesn't grow on trees!" Tell that to an orchard owner, whose entire income grows on trees!

Mindlessly accepting what someone tells you is mindless.

-mcgrew

They don't though, so their patented GM genes end up in the crops of people who chose not to use their seeds. Since the genes are their property, they feel that they are entitled to money for them, and end up suing the farmers who used their products either unknowingly, or even unwillingly.

The same can be said of the RIAA affiliated record companies and their copyrighted songs. Say I'm looking for the song The Fog by The Station. The link is to the actual song on archive.org. Now, say I'm trying to find it on bittorrent or kazaa. I'm very likely to download "The Fog" by Radiohead by mistake. Note that until I made this post I didn't know Radiohead had a song with that name, nor any of the other bands on the linked Google search. Guess what? I was looking for a song that an indie band wants you to hear, and I'm in danger of being sued by Radiohead's label!

Note that Dave and the guys from The Station are friends of mine, which is why I use them as an example ;) but the same could be said of any of the other thousands of bands out there who are begging for you to hear them!

Bow to the corporations, their lawyers, and the US government that they own.

-mcgrew/a

URL: http://mcgrew.info/Art/
Title: Steve's School of Fine Art
Date: Report run on Wed Jul 25 09:10:42CDT2007

Total HTML: 1
Total HTML Images: 13
Total CSS Images: 0
Total Images: 13
Total Scripts: 1
Total CSS imports: 0
Total Frames: 0
Total Iframes: 0

Connection Rate Download Time
14.4K 384.00 seconds [wow that's six minutes! But as height and width attributes of the graphics are specified, the text loads first]
28.8K 193.50 seconds
33.6K 166.28 seconds
56K 100.97 seconds
ISDN 128K 33.00 seconds
T1 1.44Mbps 5.60 seconds

• TOTAL_HTML - Congratulations, the total number of HTML files on this page (including the main HTML file) is 1 which most browsers can multithread. Minimizing HTTP requests is key for web site optimization.
  
• TOTAL_OBJECTS - Warning! The total number of objects on this page is 15 - consider reducing this to a more reasonable number. Combine, refine, and optimize your external objects. Replace graphic rollovers with CSS rollovers to speed display and minimize HTTP requests.
  
• TOTAL_IMAGES - Warning! The total number of images on this page is 13 , consider reducing this to a more reasonable number. Combine, refine, and optimize your graphics. Replace graphic rollovers with CSS rollovers to speed display and minimize HTTP requests.
  
• TOTAL_SIZE - Warning! The total size of this page is 491579 bytes, which will load in 100.97 seconds on a 56Kbps modem. Consider reducing total page size to less than 30K to achieve sub eight second response times on 56K connections. Pages over 100K exceed most attention thresholds at 56Kbps, even with feedback. Consider contacting us about our optimization services.
  
• TOTAL_SCRIPT - Congratulations, the total number of external script files on this page is 1 . External scripts are less reliably cached than CSS files so consider combining scripts into one, or even embedding them into high-traffic pages. [google ad, added later]
  
• HTML_SIZE - Caution. The total size of this HTML file is 27045 bytes, which is above 20K but below 100K. With a 10K ad and a logo this means that your page will load in over 8.6 seconds. Consider optimizing your HTML and eliminating unnecessary features. To give your users feedback, consider layering your page or using positioning to display useful content within the first two seconds.
  
• IMAGES_SIZE - Warning! The total size of your images is 460375 bytes, which is over 30K. Consider optimizing your images for size, combining them, and replacing graphic rollovers with CSS. [no redundant images or image rollovers here!]
  
• SCRIPT_SIZE - Caution. The total size of your external scripts is 4159 bytes, which is above 4080 bytes and less than 8K. Consider optimizing your scripts and eliminating features to reduce this to a more reasonable size. [blame Google!]
  
• MULTIM_SIZE - Congratulations, the total size of all your external multimedia files is 0 bytes, which is less than 4K.

how Microsoft has succeeded in crushing innovation in personal computers. CLICK HERE FOR PAGE TWO

That was utter bullshit. I wish my fellow nerds would stop submitting stories with 20 four paragraph pages. When I'm supposed to be seeing an interview with someone, and I don't see a single word from whoever is being interviewed before "click here for page two" it means it's a fluff piece that they're trying to shove as many worthless words into for revenue as tey can. The first page had absolutely no content whatever, why should I expect any content further on? I not only stop reading, but I put that web site on my "never log on again" list.

We've all got broadband now, especially nerds. We all have plenty of RAM. This isn't 1998 anymore. There is absolutely no reason whatever to span an article across multiple pages, except for more ad revenue. Your site may be there for ad revenue, but that's not what I'm there for. And you're not going to get my eyeballs by treating me like a commodity.

Fuck that! And fuck the assholes who created that shitty site, and the horses they rode in on. I'm hoping someone further down posts a link to a "printer friendly" version.

-mcgrew (ONE page per article there! Not that there are any new ones... and BTW it's pretty content-free too, don't bother clicking;)

These sorry ass bastards put rootkits on music CDs for God's sake! Do you think a factory-installed hardware rootkit would be easy to find? How in the hell could anybody trust this company after a stunt like that?

After having my daughter unknowingly install Sony's rootkit, which caused me to spend time and money cleaning up the mess, you couldn't pay me to buy a Sony anything, let alone a PC. I can't for the life of me figure out why anyone else would either; at least, anyone who heard about the rootkits (let alone someone like me who was victimized by Sony with this shitware).

If you think this post was a flame, read what I blogged last year after I cleaned up the mess Sony's God damned evil shit made of my computer. THAT was a flame!

Die Sony DIE!!!

-mcgrew

A teeny bit OT but
It's no different, really, than stating that populations who do not vote self-select against being represented in government.

I would argue that populations (in the US at least) who do not contribute millions of dollars to the major party candidates self-select against being represented in government.

That great American corporation Sony, for example, can give ten million bucks to the Democrat Senator and nine million bucks to the Republican running against him (or vice versa if the incumbent is a Republican) and be guranteed representation. Sony's lobbyists will be invited to the post-election Senator's office regardless of who wins.

Meanwhile, all you can do (in the words of Mojo Nixon in the song Burn Down the Mall) is to "vote for one fool or another". Good luck getting your sorry ass into Senator Dollargrabber's office to hear what YOU have to say! You'll be lucky to get one of his staffers to read your email.

I see two badly needed reforms that don't have a snowball's chance in hell of ever getting passed.

First, the above mentioned practice of "donating" to more than one candidate in any given race should be a felony punishable by prison time, as these "contributions" are barely disguised bribes. Is any honest person actually FOR legalized bribery?

Second, it should be illegal to donate to anyone you're not eligible to vote for. I live in Illinois. Why should Bill Gates or Larry Ellison have greater access to MY "representatives" than I do? He shouldn't be allowed to contribute to any candidate that isn't on his ballot in Washington state.

1st amendment? Giving money is "speech"? What kind of doublespeak is that???? A donation is NOT speech any more than a 170 year copyright is in any way "limited time", no matter what the Supreme Court says.

I have no representation whatsoever, and neither do most of my fellow citizens. The Bono act is IMO a sad crime against the populace in general and creative persons in particular. The bankrupcy "reform" measure hurts citizens while helping usarious credit card companies. I want drugs, prostitution, and gambling legalized. What candidates support MY views? I have no representation, yet I vote in every single election. If I want to vote for a candidate who has any chance at all of winning, I must vote for a candidate who is guaranteed to vote against my interests.

I've finally come to the conclusion that I should never again waste my vote on a Republicrat. A couple of elections ago I started splitting my vote between the Greens and the Libertarians. Like I said, I want drugs, gambling, and prostitution (when was the last time YOU got laid?) legalized and so do the Libertarians. OTOH I'd like to see a curb on corporations spewing poison into my air and water, and the Greens are with me there. The Republicrats give lip service to liberty while writing laws restricting it, as they give lip service to the environment while giving their corporate sponsors loopholes allowing them to fuck up my world.

They say folks who don't vote are apathetic. Well lets see, the Republican wants marijuana to stay illegal, but the Democrat, on the other hand, would rather marijuana to be against the law. Who to vote for??? Why shouldn't they be apathetic?

Sorry for the kinda OT rant but the shit just pisses me off. This stuff bothers me a lot more than my web site's Page Rank. Which, uh, well, isn't that a fat better indicator of a site's popularity than a tool that you have to be dumb enought to install spyware to use?

-mcgrew

even if all corn grown in the US was used for fuel, it would only offset 15% of the country's gasoline use, according to the study. The same reduction could be achieved by a 3.5-mile-per-gallon increase in fuel efficiency standards for all cars and light trucks, according a federal figures cited in the report.

And using corn-derived ethanol does not necessarily even reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A number of recent studies have attempted to assess the total carbon footprint - from the field to the tailpipe - of the biofuel. Conclusions vary widely from being worse than gasoline to being about the same. [emphasis mine]
...
...cellulosic ethanol could reduce emissions by 87% compared to gasoline. Cellulosic ethanol produces fuel from non-food sources such as prairie grasses and woody plants, but production is still under development.

I still don't see why the Slashdot crowd cares one way or the other about the length of copyright terms

Because most of us produce creative resources of one sort or another. There are an awful lot of computer programmers here, for instance, and every one of those programs is protected by copyright. I've registered two of them and have ISBNs. One program is now technologically obsolete (the computer in question hasn't been manufactured for twenty five years now) and I've posted the other one on the internet. Yes, I'm now giving it away, and so long as I get credit and you don't make profit on it (lets be fair here) you can have a copy.

Many of us also write articles, short stories and blogs, etc. Creativity is one hallmark of the nerd, after all.

We are concerned by copyright length because creation cannot be done in a vaccuum. As Bernard of Chartres and Sir Isaac Newton said, "If I see farther than most men, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants." Every creative work draws on the works that came before it, and with perpetual copyrights there can be no further creation by anyone not employed by the multinational corporations who hold all the world's intellectual "property".

-mcgrew

1. Record musician
2. Buy rootkit
3. Install rootkit on music CD
4. Sell CDs
5. Infect customers with rootkit
6. Be sued by attorneys general
7. Be sued by customers
8. Lose many, many formerly faithful customers who were burned by rootkit (like me for instance)
9. ???????????
10. Sue rootkit developer
11. Profit!

More seriously, three questions:
1. When is Sony going to give me the money (including my time) it cost me to repair my PC after my daughter infected it with their rootkit?
2. Why in the HELL did nobody go to prison for this? If I installed rootkits on their computers you can bet your ass I'd be in the slammer!
3. Why in the HELL is this company still in business? After infecting MUSIC CDs with rootkits people still buy their COMPUTERS!!! WTF??? And I thought Microsoft and SCO were evil! They're pikers when it comes to being EVIL.

-mcgrew

Usually his stuff is informitave, even valuable, but Neilson's off his rocker with this one. "Blog" is a contraction of "web log". Whether it's a well thought out, long, expletitive laden rant, a short opinion piece attached to a slashdot story or an informative article it's still a damned web log; a log (written piece) posted on the web. Is This Chicago Tribune editorial by Trib staffer Eric Zorn a blog? Of course it is! It's opinion, it's on the web, it even has comments attached (unlike my own now-defunct log). But this guy is a real journalist, unlike me, who studied journalism in school, also unlike me. He even has editors and proofreaders, unlike me. But It's a blog, even though it's posted in the dead tree Tribune as well as the 'net. Nielson got this one 100% wrong.

-mcgrew (like you couldn't guess...)

how about misuse of CSS period???

A screen is NOT a piece of paper. When you're designing for a newspaper or a magazine or other 12th century text/graphics format, then you can be exact, and put stuff exactly where you want it and the size you want it. Granted, if you're a sharp-eyed twenty year old (or have a CrystaLens eye implant) you can be stupid and make your text so small that geezers without that Accommodating IOL curse the day you were born, but only if you're a retarded child.

That goes triple for web pages! At home I'm using Firefox under Linux on an old 12 inch screen that's wearing out and won't even use all twelve inches. Even with my good eye I have trouble reading some of these idiots' pages, and still would if I were fifteen like they must be.

There are all sizes and resolutions of screens, and no two are going to look the same. There are all sorts of browsers and they all render differently, ESPECIALLY internet exploiter which doesn't do CSS very well at all.

Now how fucking stupid is that, over 75% of people use a browser that won't properly impliment the CSS you insist on using? I'm stuck with IE at work, and consequently I see all sorts of idiots' web sites where the graphics overwrite the text. Maybe these pages work fine on their monitor and their version of IE at their resolution, but I can't read the goddamned thing because the graphic covers the text!

That's why I write my pages using good old fashioned HTML. And note that the linked page renders more or less the same on any screen size in any browser at any resolution, and the fucking graphics do NOT cover the text in any browser at any resolution!

Yes, it uses more modern stuff (or at least other pages do, that one was written in 1997 and was only updated with a google ad at the bottom) but the damned things WORK.

CSS is so if you redesign your site, you don't have to redesign every single page, only the style sheet. Theoretically it will reduce server/client load by only loading the style sheet instead of every element for every page loaded, but the reality is most people are only going to see one page of your site per visit anyway. Besides, if that worked, why do the newspapers' pages take so damned long to load and mine load so fast?

-mcgrew

ps- get off my lawn!

I love my knife! It cuts my bread.
I love my knife! There's nothing instead.
I love my knife! It whittles my wood.
I love my knife! It does what it should
I love my knife! It's a very good tool.
I love my knife! 'cause I ain't no fool
I love my knife! And you know that it's wrong
When the law says I can't sing it in my song.

©2007 mcgrew

I had a "eureka" moment a few years ago about a method of lossless compression of sound and possibly other data samples. I checked on patenting this, but found out that a patent costs several thousands of dollars at a minimum and can't be done without a lawyer and lasts for twenty years.

Contrast this to the copyright system - copyrights are automatic, free, and can be registered with the government for twenty dollars, and live longer than you will, despite the Constitution's admonishment that they be for "limited times".

The biggest problem with copyright (excluding the DMCA) is that it lasts too long. It should be twenty years, just like patents. The biggest problem with patents (excluding the fact that obvious things can be patented) is the fact that they ate too expensive. There is no reason why patents couldn't be filed without a lawyer and for only twenty bucks, just like copyrights.

Now, here is my method of "compression", which really doesn't compress at all, just a different way of storing the samples. In most likelihood it's already in use by existing lossless compression schemes. But if nobody has indeed thought of this (unlikely), here it is.

It occurres to me that storing the absolute value of a sample is limiting and wasteful. If you decide on sixteen bit samples, as with CDs, you are limited to sixteen bits of resolution. Also, you must store two bytes, even if your sample is zero or one.

Rather than storing the sample, store the difference between the present sample and the previous sample. You will wind up storing only a few bits per sample, and could recreate your 16 bit 44k CD's size to four or eight bits and still have the exact same output as your original CD. Plus, if you increase the sample rate, your sample size will become smaller as there will be less of a difference between samples. You would, of course, need a byte or two at the very beginning of the file to show the number of bits stored. In many cases you could have 24 bit resolution stored two samples per byte!

My two cents worth. Or maybe that's my two thousand dollars worth.

-mcgrew

Well, the gorillas in all the bars in town not only don't seem to have a problem with MegaTouch games, they put dollars in them and keep doing so.

They run on Linux, too, as I noticed one day when the bartender cold booted one. I'm still waiting for my Dillinger desk.

However, at home I just use my wireless optical mouse with a CD case as a mouse pad when I'm on the couch using the 42 inch TV as a monitor. Beats getting up to touch the screen!

-mcgrew

Oh for Christ's sake! ...but thank you for posting it.

With Pluribus, you can build a cineplex-quality image using a handful of ordinary, $1,000 PC projectors--in less time than it takes to pop the popcorn

A handful of $1000 projectors? Great idea - if your ame is Bill Gates or Lars Ulrich. For those of us who live on a paycheck and don't have unlimited sources of funding, this just ain't gonna happen. Next?

It's a bit like the Wii remote--only more accurate and far easier to use.

Why stop there? Why not just let me point at the giant Imax sized screen in my giant imax sized house with my bare finger? Don't these guys have any imagination?

Extreme Peer-to-Peer
<yawn>

The Man-Made Brain
How many beads do I have to string on my abacus before it becomes self-aware? After all, your computer is nothing more than a binary abacus with billions of beads. Your brain is electrochemical (with emphasis on the chemical). True thought is a chemical reaction. You can simulate anything, but flying your Microsoft Flight Simulator won't really make you move an inch.

This last one has been predicted as long as flying cars. Now, if they make computers out of biological substances I might change my mind about this.

If you want my turing machine, here it is. The original one was written on a TS1000 with 16K (that's kilo not mega) of memory in 1984. The PC version (1987, runs on DOS) is about 400k, but most of that is compiler overhead, it's not signifigantly different than the TS1000 version or the Apple IIe version.

Mine, "Artificial Insanity", is a turing debunker written on the premise that humans get tired, drunk, crazy, don't pay attenbtion, are smartasses, and have attitudes. So it does too. Warning: Its answers pissed one friend off so much he broke his keyboard typing back at it.

-mcgrew

I spell blog "blagh" in my blog that I haven't updated since... well, the last ice age. Although I guess you could call my slashdot journal a blog (which I haven't updated since the stone age), which means, I guess, that my blagh is part of the blaghosphere. Actually I hate the word "sphere" so let's call it a blaghoball.

"Mashup" doesn't bother me at all. It seems like a logically coined new word for a new thing, the combination of different songs or media all mashed up. Unlike "wifi", what fucktard came up with that one? "Hifi" at least is a shortening of "high fidelity" but wifi is absofuckinglutely meaningless.

But what I really REALLY hate, you looser losers, is mashing two words toghether that don't belong together. I saw one in a car advertisement where some auto manufacturer said they had "the most popular carline". God damn it, people, there is no such word as "carline"!!!! And I see you illiterate goofs at slashdot do it too. WTF? The space bar is the single biggest thing on your keyboard, fercrissakes!

Actually what grates even more on me (you "loosers" would say "greats on me more", huh? Kinda changes the meaning of the sentence some, don't it?) is shit like "their in there car over they're so you might loose money". God damn spell checkers have turned us all into semiliterate simians!

But the two words that most grate on me like nails on a blackboard are "Blagojevich" and "Bush".

-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

Because my old printer hung on for so long, I was rather abruptly thrust into this brave new world of ink pricing and vendor lock in. It's sad to realize that the five year old printer I had, because of the availability of third party ink cartridges, was a far better product than anything I could buy today

You're a geezer, aren't you?

-mcgrew

(There's a copy of the article on my own site. Weirdly, Google lists my copy but you have to really dig to find the original K5 copy. Weird because nobody ever goes to my site.)

Jesus H. Christ, how damned stupid! I'm getting really, really tired of this crap. I've been ranting against the incredibly ignorant notion that computers will someday "think" for years. BUt I've been ranting against it for this very reason; that some addled backward besotted brainless daft dense dim-witted doltish dumb feeble-minded half-witted imbecilic indolent insensate moronic numskulled obtuse scatterbrained simple-minded slow thick unintellectual vacuous wearisome witless twit will anthrophomphise that machines can think or feel and pass some really stupid "machine rights" law like TFA speaks of.
</rant>

A machine is only going to demand human rights if some mentally perverted retard programs one to demand rights.

They have been calling computers "thinking machines" since a pocket calculator took a three story building to house back in the forties. But they don't think, never will think.

We don't even know what thought is. Sure, we can simulate thought - you can simulate anything. But your flight simulator won't take you to London, and you won't die when you've been shot in a counterstrike game. There is no radiation released in a simulation of an atom blast, and no structural damage even to the building that houses it, let alone destruction of a city.

Thought is not binary, it's analog, as everything in nature is. It is electrochemical, not electronic. If you kick your robot, the only thing that will hurt is your foot.

If you think a computer will ever think, you know little or nothing about how computers work, how the mind works, or either.

I wrote a Turing Test program way back in 1983 on a Timex Sinclair computer with no hard drive and only 20k of ram just to demonstrate how stupid the idea of machine thought is. The premise of the program is that people get tired, cranky, make mistakes, and are smartasses, so my thought simulatior is a tired, cranky smartass that makes mistakes. It answers your questions and statements in context. Curse at it and see what happens. I ported it to DOS back in 1989; that version is mostly identical to the TS1000 version, except I converted it from BASIC to Clipper. The Clipper source is about 20k, but compiler overhead expanded it to about 400k (about as small a file as Clipper would write). You can download a free copy at http://mcgrew.info/ArtificialInsanity.htm ; I no longer charge for it (but if you charge for a copy or make money on it, I'll have my lawyer on your ass; I've registered the copyright).

But remember that the original version was written on an incredibly primitive computer; your phone is far, far more powerful than the computer it was originally written for.

Have none of you read Dune? "Thinking machines" were outlawed because evil men used them to enslave other men, which is exactly what this nonsense will lead to.

TFA's author is a fucking lawyer! WTF does a lawyer know about computers or animal brains? Thank God I'll be safely dead in fifty years before this insanity gets worse!

Nothing whatever. I wouldn't pay a dollar for a song even if the major labels were producing anything I'd want to listen to, anyway. I buy CDs from local bands, and occasionally a used title from Recycled Records or a garage sale and rip it to MP3.

That said, Sony still got me with their "DRM" rootkit when my daughter played a CD she bought at the record store she worked at in it. Wound up costing me $100 for XP (I was running 98 'cause Linux won't work in this box and video drivers were unavailable for 98) and a new sound card. But Sony's rootkit isn't really DRM... is it? DRM is something that trashes your computer?

If I'd examined my daughter's Sony-BMG rootkit CD I would have made a safe copy of it for her to play.

The only problem I have with DRM (besides Sony's rootkit, I mean) is DVDs and the DMCA.

"Sorry, the page you requested was not found." IE, 404. So to assuage the disappointment of those who went to the geocities page you gave a URL to, here's a shameless plug for some of my buds.

Here is an old page; their hosting ran out so it only links to the (loathed by slashdot) MySpace page (warning - music plays when the page loads). Here is a shitload of MP3s from them. Here are some more musician friends and here is a half dozen CDs worth of losslessly compressed music from them.

Free music, courtesy of my friends here in Springfield; I've known and partied with these guys for years. Posamist is playing the Illinois State Fair tonight at the Bud tent, if you're in central Illinois go on out.

Give me a nice list of all the legitimate (read: legal) uses for LimeWire, and I'll believe you.

All? You want ALL the legit reasons for using Limewire?

Do you have any idea how many bands out there WANT their stuff shared? I'll give you a hint: it's damned near every single one with a non-major label CD. And there are ten times as many of those as there are RIAA bands.

The labels don't want to stop your sharing "Staynd". You can sample a better MP3 of it off the radio, if you actually wanted to hear that whiney minor key shit.

No, they want to kill P2P so my friends, who are competetitors to the majors' bands, can't get THEIR music out!

Here, Have some free MP3s (scroll to the bottom for 4 CDs worth). Or if you prefer lossless, here are some more friends in a different band.

Two are by no means "all" but it should give you a start.

Hosting those multimegabyte files is expensive. P2P is free. Every unsigned band is a legitimate reason for Limewire.

The problem, which Cory points out, is that when you de-DRM songs by burning an audio CD, and re-import as MP3, you have to manually re-enter meta data. I don't mind the slightdrop in quality doing this round-trip, but the meta data manual entering is a nuisance.

I rip my vinyl to CD and MP3 and find that you can get really obscure albums on Wikipedia and copy and paste the metadata right in to your MP3s.

I wrote an article about it- How to rip from vinyl or tape

OK, not "all", a few of you seem to have your heads on straight. But most of you seem to be deeply in denial. I don't blame you; most of your blogs are likely BAD (Sorry, Joe, but your page is entirely unreadable).

Nielson's views have changed as his research (real research using scientifically sound principles). For example, in the last century he advocated, based on studies of users, that long pages were bad design. Folks didn't know how to scroll, and long pages ate some of the primitive browsers (and computers) of the time.

He's changed this. Scrolling is now part of computing, and computers can handle it. Someone please tell ZD Net and CNET and the Chicago Tribune!

I'm a former art student (note that page was written 8 years ago, and yes, not having line breaks between paragraphs IS bad design). Admittedly my instructors were minimalists. One design principle they taught is universally ignored these days: Form follow function.

One poster above mentioned designing for your prospective audience, and that's exactly correct.

My old, long-gone (it's still in the wayback machine) Quake site broke quite a few design principles, but the broken rules were broken for concrete reasons... well, usually. Some things got complaints from readers, like the animated Strogg dancing to the Quake theme. I eventually moved the music to a different page. And got rid of one of the Stroggs.

Content is king! Nobody goes to your site for the way it looks. The Prisoner's number two was right- "we want information". (and porn;)

Some of you even deny your own perceptions. Nielson is exactly right; if it's animated, it's an ad and is dismissed. I know I'm like that, and eye tracking studies show that everyone else is, too. He's done the fcking research! There's no way you can contradict that, except by pointing to conflicting research. I haven't seen any of you do that.

My old Quake site was pretty popular, considering how sparsely populated the web was, and that it was a niche site. I had a Google Pagerank of 7. Its "cheats" page is still widely plagairized (I should hire a lawyer?) and I attribute a large part of its success to the fact that I wanted it to be useable. When people wrote bitch letters, I listened and considered what they were saying.

I got a lot more letters saying how much the site rocked than how shitty it was, and quite a few mentioned how easy it was to find INFORMATION (and humor and music and gossip and links and... and...).

Slashdot has always been pretty useable.

If you have a web site or blog, you ignore useability at your own peril. Nielson has done his homework. Few of you seem to have. The major newspapers certainly haven't.

I suspect they've ratcheted up the "popular" part of the search to the exclusion of actually matching keywords.

My crappy little site,, doesn't get any hits of the first 4 pages for a search of "mcgrew", despite the fact that the word "McGrew" is in the URL, the copyright notice, an alt tag, an there's even a copy of "Dangerous Dan McGrew" on the site.

I used to have another site back in the last century that regularly got linked by Blue's News, Planet Quake, sCary's, and tons of small sites. Five years ago "mcgrew" would have brought up the first page.

My pagerank is a negative number now? =(

Well, not negative; if I put in "antique sheet music mcgrew" it comes up after five other results, none of which contains the word "mcgrew." So it's listed, it's just ignoring some of your search words in favor of popularity (of which I've lost all of mine apparently).

I prefer "blagh", as in "Ralph Blagh".

(MRC="offered")