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Another blatant plug: distanceed.com . Not a very commercial plug, since the company isn't doing so well, but I think the product is worthwhile.

The part I designed is the mathematical formula renderer, which can also be found at the Aftermath Café integrated into a BBS for students to exchange ideas/answers, and so on. (there is some other random stuff on this page too). All the math teachers I've talked to think the formula renderer is cool, but it hasn't been marketed effectively so the company is going under. Sad for me, since 3 years of work is essentially being lost as a result, and I think it could really help people.

Hey -- I'm a programmer, not a salesman!

If you're running the right browser, the applet version is coolest, but the servlet will run in any browser.

check out my mp3 page

I play in a regional niche folk music band. We sell hundreds of CDs and prefer to use CD-Rs since we can make small runs and replace tracks on future runs if we wish. I'd be ticked (and legally injured) if Sony is using their clout in the CD player industry to deliberatly block CD-Rs in order to protect their "corporate music" industry. Now I'm sure there are more legal hurdles than that, but sounds like its well on the way to an anti-trust suit.

Ob Fact I do believe it is most likely a technical laser issue and not a corporate decision. Just getting the issue raised.

Ob Anarchy Note Yes, you can get my music for free (that which I am legally allowed to give away anyway, most of our songs are not OpenLyrics tm). http://www.mp3.com/ozark. Don't go there and rack up our dollars, just go if you want to listen.

>Of course either 450,000 m/s or 740,000 m/s would give us measurable time/space/mass dilation problems. So you gain a little weight you get a little smaller and you age a littler slower -- basicly you would be young, short, heavy and hauling ass!!!

Even assuming that was a joke (as it probably was), not quite. Light moves at 299792458 m/s, and relativistic effects only become measurable at about 10% of lightspeed, i.e. about 30 Mm/s.

If you have a graphing calculator or a program that can draw graphs (or write your own?), try plotting 1/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2) with v going from 0 to c (excluding c). This is the term that appears in time dilation etc. basic relativity formulas that you're referring to.

Feel free to ignore me, just picking nits with nothing better to do on a Saturday evening. =)

http://mp3.com/jje

>Assume getting off earth is expensive, but a break through tommorow turns up with cheap travel between solar systems. That means that the space station can send probes to do fly-bys of distant planets, and 20 years latter have the satilight return for repairs before going to a diffent solar system. (Of course that would be fairly close).

Even the closest star, that is, as you probably know, Alpha Centauri, is four light years away. You would need a probe that moved at near-lightspeed, and even then the round trip would take over 8 years. As far as I can tell, we're not near the required technological level to accomplish something like that.

http://mp3.com/jje

It won't be, you're forgetting the Mickey Mouse conspiracy =)

http://mp3.com/jje

> Stop buying these devices. It's that simple. These companies want to make money; they're only going to make products that people will buy.

Yes, but they will also do everything they can to take away your freedom of choice on the matter, so that there IS nowhere else to take your money to. They will try (and probably succeed) to make theirs the only standard after which you only really have two options: 1) buy a device and hack it (probably illegal), or 2) give up TV entirely. (not that #2 would be that bad, the only thing even remotely worth watching here in Finland is X-Files)

The reason why they'll succeed is, as others have already pointed out, that the average consumer is not aware of this type of things and will buy the devices anyway. As also has been pointed out, people won't notice if their freedom is taken away in small steps. (Feel free to ignore me, I'm just iterating the obvious here. =)

http://mp3.com/jje

>Anyone who thinks that a good website should depend on a plugin/javascript/animated graphics/java/images with no tags/frames/ or overdesigned pages that take forever to load on a 14.4 connection deserves the complaints from users they will get at the email address listed under 'feedback' on their page.

...assuming that they can see the "feedback" link without the required plugin =)

I agree that it is cool if a site works on Lynx, but you can't really use it to read User Friendly or Dilbert where graphics equals content.

http://mp3.com/jje

...and it was also in The Incredible Machine (can't remember whether it was 1 or 2) in a level where you had to build a machine to fire a rocket. Of course there it was done as MIDI in the age of FM synthesis [shiver!].

http://mp3.com/jje

Why not just log in and ignore them in your preferences? There are probably others here who still read them.

http://mp3.com/jje

Although the Authors Guild is signatory to this letter, I suspect that the whole scenario is similar to the current conflict between musicians and the RIAA on one side and consumers, MP3.com and Napster on the other. In that case, a few, very high profile, musicians have sided with the RIAA to try to eliminate fair use (e.g. My MP3.com) as well as unfair distribution (e.g., Napster) in one fell swoop. The less-well-known authors, or those who are not beholden to a single publishing company (e.g., Stephen King and Orson Scott Card) may very well have no objections to Amazon.com's completely legal and ethical desire to facilitate the transfer of physical copies of copyrighted works from person to person.

I agree. But on the other hand, there is some great underground music today and the Internet is helping to spread that through sites like mp3.com, the now-defunct riffage, loudwerkz.com (shameless self promotion), etc.

If you're into metal/hardcore/crossover stuff like I am, there are plenty of crap-mainstream bands such as Limp Bizkit and Creed -- on the other hand, there's some great stuff that also happens to have become quite popular (Incubus, Deftones). But some of the best music goes relatively unnoticed: Boy Sets Fire, Nothingface, Chimaira, Thumb, Snake River Conspiracy, One Minute Silence are all somewhat lesser-known major label acts that really rock. And there are tons of unsigned indie acts that are incredible...

Just turn off commercial radio, forgive popular opinion (everyone always just seems to like what MTV tells them to anyway), and check out some of your favorite internet music sites...

ObTopic: Napster can censor whomever they feel like, no one is putting a gun to your head and forcing you to download stuff using their software. Besides, Nazis are like child pornographers; they have no redeeming social value whatsoever. Good for them for censoring Nazis.


---
Santa Claus: "Ho ho ho!"

A few notes:

• Expect a delay of anywhere from 20 to 45 seconds for your disc to be recognized, depending on the amount of songs and complexity of your folder tree. (Folders nested within folders will increase the delay).
• Only the first session of a multisession burn will be recognized.
• On CDs with both audio and MP3 files, only the audio will be recognized.
• Fast-forwarding and rewinding within tracks is disabled for MP3 CDs.
• The random function also is disabled. But you can create a program of music by pulling tracks into a playlist of sorts.
• Navigating to a particular song is nearly impossible. To get from track 50 to 150, you must subject yourself to repetitive stress injuries.
• File names were truncated at eight characters. With CDs burned to support longer names (ISO9660 Level 2 format), the Aiwa can handle the first 14 characters).
• Some but not all VBR tracks were supported.
• At the last song in a folder, it did not skip to the next folder. In other words, all those CDs you burned in folders to be more compatible with your Kenwood Z919 will cause nothing but headaches in this pup.
• If you somehow created CDs with more than 256 songs per disc, they will not play.

A few notes:

• Expect a delay of anywhere from 20 to 45 seconds for your disc to be recognized, depending on the amount of songs and complexity of your folder tree. (Folders nested within folders will increase the delay).
• Only the first session of a multisession burn will be recognized.
• On CDs with both audio and MP3 files, only the audio will be recognized.
• Fast-forwarding and rewinding within tracks is disabled for MP3 CDs.
• The random function also is disabled. But you can create a program of music by pulling tracks into a playlist of sorts.
• Navigating to a particular song is nearly impossible. To get from track 50 to 150, you must subject yourself to repetitive stress injuries.
• File names were truncated at eight characters. With CDs burned to support longer names (ISO9660 Level 2 format), the Aiwa can handle the first 14 characters).
• Some but not all VBR tracks were supported.
• At the last song in a folder, it did not skip to the next folder. In other words, all those CDs you burned in folders to be more compatible with your Kenwood Z919 will cause nothing but headaches in this pup.
• If you somehow created CDs with more than 256 songs per disc, they will not play.

'Course it's no problem to wipe every reference to down1oads.mp3.com, then reload the list...

Then there's other sites that have started using Shockwave and Flash banners (Intel, ZD's TechTV), as well as .asx/.asf banners.

OK, I'll admit that I am karma whorin' a bit, but I think that I wrote a fairly good essay and someone might even like reading it. I wrote this essay for my final project in an english class. While it is not comprehensive, even in my own knowledge, and certainly a small fraction of what is really evil about huge companies it was written to give people who just didn't understand what the big deal was about having large corporations in charge. I wrote it with the average person in mind (dumbed down and not at slashdot level). I do think that is a fairly good essay to show people to give them a solid idea of why you feel anger towards large corporations (if you do) without having to write an essay yourself or give a speech to every person you want to tell. I know that some things might not be entirely accurate but I did try to cover all angles, so don't come down too hard on the mistakes. Also, if you ever wanted to know just how much the big record companies screw artists out of money check out This link It is Steve Albini (producer of In Utero) talking about the manipulations of some recod companies. My point in this is that something like this WILL NOT help consumers, and is only used as a tool for further influence by large corporations. So anyway ...

Large Media Corporations are Abusing Their Power By: Simeon Bassett

The larger the corporation, the more collective influence they will have over their industry. There is a point in the rise of power of anything that can work as whole that the power becomes too great, and it is abused. It has happened in every society that has given power to a specific person or a group with similar motives. One example is the emperors of ancient China. One emperor, Quin Shihuangdi wanted himself to be remembered as the first emperor of China, and went on a crusade to erase anything from the past and to make China start over under his rule. He burned literature and destroyed libraries, reminiscent of the thought control portrayed in George Orwell's 1984. He originally wanted to have his personal army buried alive with him after his death to protect himself in the afterlife. This nightmarish example of tyranny seems to be almost cliché in history, but thought is not given seriously to the parallels of the present. The United States of America was founded so that people would have choices throughout their lives when dealing with their religious beliefs and any other elements that affect them. Branches of government were created to balance the power and create subtle conflict so that decisions are not made out of personal interest from a select few in power.

The biggest culprits of corporate over-control and consumer neglect are the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America). Sure, there are companies such as Microsoft, which is under scrutiny because of their monopolistic practices with their huge (90%) user base on desktop computers. Intel, which is out of hot water because of a recent rise of competition, took their time releasing incrementally faster microprocessors until they had someone to compete with (Advance Micro Devices). Cisco, who has a much-overlooked tendency to buy up competition before they turn into a threat, seems like the Microsoft of the networking world, but never seems to be under corporate pressure. All of these are examples of companies that have clearly abused their power in many instances, but they pale in comparison to the two giant alliances of media powers.

To quote Jack Valenti, head of the MPAA, when talking about digital movies: "Our attorneys believe we need to pursue this very cautiously. Industry wide compacts where you sit down and say, `This is what seven or eight companies are going to do' - that's very dangerous ground." To say that this is hypocritical is something of an understatement. Seven giant companies acting collectively is, for the most part, what the MPAA is. It is an organization made up of the following major film companies: Walt Disney Company, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Inc., Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc., Paramount Pictures Corporation, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., Universal Studios, Inc., and Warner Bros. Each one of these companies is a household name and together they make a massive monolith that has influence on almost everyone in the country. Unions of workers were created to give more power to the working class. A union of giants gives exponentially more power back to the titans of the corporate world. You can observe the control of the MPAA yourself by looking for their logo. Have you ever seen the symbol at the end of the credits of a movie with the oval shape, inner oval, and five dots in the middle? If you haven't, look for it and you'll find it - on almost every movie you see.

While I won't go into everything the MPAA has done that crosses the line between business tactics and monopolistic practices, and I won't debate whether or not Ronald Regan was right in cutting the separation of the movie industry and movie theatre chains, I will go into one recent, blatant, and insulting event that has taken place at the hands of the MPAA.

I say recent because the court decision in favor of the MPAA is still in the appeal process, blatant because hopefully it will be easy to see why this is such an extreme violation, and insulting because it flies in the face of the first amendment. A program written by Jon Johansen called DeCSS decrypts (unscrambles) the encoding that the MPAA has put onto all DVD movie discs (more on this later). He put the source code into the public domain, and not only was he attacked by the MPAA, but so were web sites that merely linked to places where the DeCSS source code could be acquired. Source code, which is text describing a program, can be read just as anything else can, and not jut by a computer. So why is it that it is not protected under free speech laws? The MPAA's answer would be that its primary purpose was the unauthorized copying of DVD discs. They maintained this stance throughout the trial even though they could not document one case of piracy due to the program. The intent as stated by the author and the users of the program was that they wanted to create their own DVD movie playing software so that they wouldn't be contained to using the software made by other companies, which is mostly sold commercially. It would enable them to watch the DVD movies they own on any computer they wanted to program for, not just ones sanctioned by the MPAA. This would actually increase the number of potential buyers of DVDs but the MPAA still came down hard. Even if the intent of the software was for copying DVD movies, it should still be considered free speech. If something can be sung in a song, or put on a t-shirt then clearly it can and should be treated as speech. In fact, both of these things were done, the song was taken down from mp3.com for "offensive lyrics" and the retailers of the t-shirts, copyleft.net, were given a subpoena by the MPAA. At least they're consistent.

Even if you overlook all of atrocious logic of the MPAA, the fact still remains that they sued and won their case against 2600 magazine for merely providing a link to the source code of the program. This is the equivalent of one person telling another where to buy gasoline and getting blamed because that person could potentially use it to harm someone. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that the judge presiding over the case, Judge Kaplan, is a former employee of the MPAA. How do they get away with all of this? Maybe it's the huge political involvement they have, from the parties thrown at Republican national conventions to the large amount of financial support for the Democratic Party.

This isn't an isolated problem either; the RIAA is just as bad or worse than the MPAA. They're recent bought with digital music distribution methods like Napster, have been much publicized by the media, but the sheer legal aggression that they have shown in their battle to maintain their current revenue stream without increasing their quality of service, has been passed over for the most part. To quote the RIAA website directly: "RIAA® members create, manufacture and/or distribute approximately 90% of all legitimate sound recordings produced and sold in the United States." Ninety percent control is a lot. Especially when it covers the entire industry. Microsoft has about a ninety percent control over the operating systems of desktop computers (the program that keeps everything running) with Windows, but a parallel example would be if they controlled ninety percent of all the software commercially sold. To be fair, the RIAA is composed of many more companies than the MPAA. Any record label that meets their requirements can apply. This should make everything fine as long as being a part of the group doesn't require monopolistic practices like price control. But it does. They even have an acronym for it - MAP. MAP stands for Minimum Advertised Price scheme. It says that no company can advertise CD's for below a certain price. Shouldn't the FCC step in and do something about this? They are, and it's about time. Deals have been struck out of court so that companies that don't agree with advertising for a certain price, like Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and Circuit City don't get angry. But now the FCC is finally stepping up and alleging that fixed pricing schemes have cost consumers $480 million.

This is a typical pattern for the RIAA; they seem to want both ends of every deal. Another example would be that they receive royalties from any blank CD sold. This is supposedly to compensate for anticipated piracy, but the cost is spread around to everyone who buys CD-R discs, whether they use the blank CD's to copy and resell music or not. If I as a musician want to make music and distribute it recorded on CD-R discs, then I am not only paying the company that made the disk, I am paying the RIAA, my major competitor, with every CD I create. You would think that they would be satisfied, but they have still created large-scale efforts against supposed music piracy. I guess the compensation isn't enough.

One such effort is the ongoing lawsuits against music distributors such as mp3.com and Napster. Napster has made no money at all from its efforts at the time of this writing and even though they distribute no music themselves, and the people that do distribute music do it with no money changing hands at any point, the RIAA still feels that they are a threat created through illegal means. Even more odd, is that Napster should technically be shielded by the Home Audio Recording Act of 1992, which states that any distribution of music that is not being sold by any standard is legal. It was meant to facilitate the copying of music between friends and such, and at the same time, compensate the RIAA with royalties from the mediums of choice. Now that there is no medium, as with network file sharing, there are no royalties and the piece of legislation that the RIAA personally created, lobbied for, and oversaw through congress, is now Napster's suit (pun intended) of armor, and what the RIAA is fighting against.

Another battle being waged is over mp3.com. A service offered by mp3.com allowed people to listen to music they owned whenever they were at a computer connected to the Internet. This was seen as a violation of the RIAA's property and mp3.com was attacked in a lawsuit, which they lost, and which crippled the entire company. Now mp3.com must pay royalties on every song that is "owned" by the RIAA and that the service offers, which has forced them into charging fees for the users (the service was originally free). In the end people are paying more money to listen to songs they already own. Could all this tight control be that the RIAA is looking out for the interests of the artist? Not likely. Steve Albini, who produced Nirvana's "In Utero", stated in an essay that in a typical situation with a hot band the money is distributed as follows: Lawyer: $12,000, Agent: $7,500, Previous Label: $50,000, Studio: $52,000, Manager: 51,000, Producer: $90,000, Record Company: $710,000, Band member net income each: $4,031. That's a total of $976,531 that the band has made. It is unfortunate that each band member gets 00.41% of the money they create. Yes, less than half of a percent comes back to each band member.

The RIAA and MPAA do not care about the consumer, or the artists that are making them rich. They have used tactics and business practices that go far beyond the limits of capitalism. As I have alluded to, there is much more to the story and many more instances of the RIAA, MPAA, and many other large companies flexing their corporate muscle to gain an unfair advantage in their industry, and to ultimately exploit consumers.


Bibliography 1. Music retailers irked by CD discounting (2000). 5 Dec. 2000. http://www.cnn.com/2000/SHOWBIZ/Music/12/05/cds.re ut/index.html

2. Who we are (2000). href="http://www.riaa.com/About-Who.cfm

3. Cave, Damien. A hacker crackdown? (2000). 7 Aug. 2000 http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/08/07/yoink _napster/index.html

4. Sabin, Rob. The Movie's Digital Future is in Sight and it Works (2000). 26 Nov. 2000 http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/26/arts/26SABI.html ?pagewanted=6

5. Albini, Steve. The Problem With Music. href="http://www.negativland.com/albini.html.

6. Gross, Robin D. Court Uphold Right to Digital Music (1999). 29 June. 1999 href="http://www.mp3.com/news/283.html?lang=eng

If you ask me the CD-access feature is the least interesting thing about my.mp3.com. The thing that is really cool about mp3.com is the access to a bajillion independent musical artists from around the whole world.

I could not agree more. My.mp3.com is a red herring. The salient feature of mp3.com is its indie music. With their current playback royalty scheme, mp3.com is paying large amounts of hard cash to unsigned, independent musicians. There is an 18-year-old in Minnesota who's been making like $8,000 a month by producing techno music on a SoundBlaster Live card. This is the only functioning alternative to the big-music-label hegemony that I've ever seen. Give it some credit and stop whining about their my.mp3 program. Even Towel Daddy himself makes a bit of change with his rocking-yet-commercially-unmarketable music at mp3.com. RD

I started using my.mp3.com after they disabled the "listen to your CDs" feature.

Yet I have hours of music stored there. This is all music that was put on mp3.com for public consumption by the artists themselves.

If you ask me the CD-access feature is the least interesting thing about my.mp3.com. The thing that is really cool about mp3.com is the access to a bajillion independent musical artists from around the whole world.

I've discovered bands and even whole genres of music that I love and would never have known about otherwise. Gretchen Lieberum, Planet Delirium, 12 Majestik -- I've currently got tracks by 43 different artists on my personal playlists.

Hell, I even made my own station so I could turn some of my friends on to this stuff:

I can share all this music freely. Copyright is not an issue, because the artists made the music available themselves.

All this quibbling about the issues surrounding copyrighted music at mp3.com and napster just bores me silly.

Just as a point of information, my.mp3.com is free for up to 25 CDs. I don't know if you can change your set of 25 over time. For $50 a year you can store up to 500 "with more functionality and less advertising".

In addition, it looks like those of you already have my.mp3.com accounts can keep listening to your old tracks. You still have a "free" account, and the music you've already signed up for doesn't count against the new 25-CD limit.

See the press release for more details.

... you cannot just close it.

MP3.com attempt to charge for the storage of your already-paid-for music is not going to work. The box is open, and a more creative solution that just being an e-harddisk should be done if they want to attract users.

I belive more in the Napster attempt to make money besides advertising. Legal and profitable peer-to-peer music sharing can be done in an easy way:

1.- Person A adquires a legal CD and register his own copy on MyMusic.com for FREE (or whatever site you want it to be)
2.- Person B pays MyMusic.com a small fee (let's say the US$5/mo that is belive Napster would charge)
3.- Mr. B can temporarily download Mr. A legal .mp3 in order to listen if he likes or not the CD
4.- MyMusic pays some fee (an small fraction of the fee paid by Mr. B) to the CD's MusicHouse who published it.
5.- After some time, let's say 2 weeks, the mp3 downloaded by Mr. B stops working
6.- If Mr. B liked the CD, then he/she/it buys it and pays the MusicHouse. If Mr. B dislike the CD, he/she/it does not.
In this way, Mr. B is not paying for something that doesn't want, but at same time the MusicHouse is earning some revenue from the music sharing

The final question would be if $5/mo for downloading ~100 songs will seem attractive for the MusicHouse (5 cents/song); which I believe they will because 5cents is better than nothing.
And, if Mr. B only wants to listen to the today-popular-tomorrow-forgotten music (let's say KidRock, Britney or Eminem), Mr. B is getting a good deal for just $5...

Welp, as a musician, the RIAA does'nt pay me crap. I've had more folks contact me from ID3 tags on napster downloads & free songs on mp3.com, than i could have ever gotten without those mediums. The other thing is, these struggling musicians are losing _NOTHING_, the downloads they get are generally from folks who would never pay for the song, because they've never heard it. I use both napster & mp3.com the way they should be used, to distribute my music, and to look for new music that i may be interested in buying, and I'll be one pissed-off puppy if the RIAA tries to get between me and possible fans. www.mp3.com/monoglot

8 Bits of Power

still couldn't match the power of GORTICIAN.

Despite IBMs reticence, and this setback, Crusoe chips continue to be very compelling. The dopest web tablet at Comdex was in Be's suite: a wireless, color, touchscreen web browser that weighed less than two pounds, with a battery life of six hours. It was powered by a Transmeta Crusoe, and was running BeIA. BeIA, of course, is the nicest embedded OS for web devices, packing complete WWW functionality in only 6 meg of memory...

If you take the current situation as static, sure your response is quite reasonable. Fortuantely our current state is hardly static, i assert that we are in the midst of a revolution. Several points influencing the entual outcome:
a. Consumers have fair-use rights that include "space-shifting"! (covers translating formats for personal convenience, CD->mp3, etc.).
b. Media is information: bits, not atoms. Physical media is a doomed commodity (music first, then the rest). Welcome to the network.
c. The intent of U.S. copyright law is and (imo) will continue to be valid and important. The letter of the law on the other hand, is archaic and in severe need of explicit re-interpretation.

Add it all up and what do you have?
Big media companies kicking, screaming, and tripping into the digital world. Those who take off their blinders and "get it right" will be rewarded; those who attempt to re-implement the old paradigms in the new world will suffer.
No one yet knows what models will prosper.
Mp3.com has paid out nearly 200 million in settlement bucks to the big 5 labels for their jukebox in the sky implementation (merely streams music back to those who can verify posession of the CD!). Well, actually, they were penalized for creating a database of music with the aforementioned intent... a real technicality based on an inflexible interpretation of CR law. I think that this in itself demonstrates that we have a long way to go and a fight on our hands just to retain our reasonable fair-use rights in the digital age. I can't imagine losing though, holding back this revolution is like holding back the ocean.
keep on rockin in the freak world,
stu.

Very strange...

I've been researching the Neo for three days, and I finally broke down and ordered one from SSI today. I check Slashdot a while later ... and there it is!

One thing I did learn--the Neo's pretty persnickety about the hard drive you put in it. Maxtor and Western Digital drives (apparently) draw too much power to spin up. SSI recommends Seagate, Quantum, and IBM drives. I just ordered the Neo with the drive built in. It was actually a decent price on the drive ($150 for a 30 gigger) and I figured they'd know what would be most reliable.

If anyone's thinking of buying one, the best resources I've found are:

The Unofficial Neo Web Site
http://www.barncow.com/neo/
Has instructions, links to the new firmware, and a very active messageboard. A great site--well maintained and very informative.

The Neo "User Reviews" at MP3.com
http://bboard1.mp3.com/hardware/liststory/?topic_i d=38&month=200008
A pretty good forum with real-world performance reports.

Could you ever find any obscure bands? Occasionally. Could you always find forty copies of N'Sync's latest POS? Always.

And this is Napster's fault how, exactly?

Napster doesn't tell people what to make available over their service. The idea from the beginning was to provide a way for people to share what they had and wanted to share. In its own way, it was democratic, in that the more popular artists were going to be found on the service more frequently.

Ironically, this made obscure bands obscure because they were obscure. You could fill your personal share-space with the highest quality recordings of the best garage-band indy music you ever heard. People who you play it for would instantly fall in love with it. But very few on Napster would know about it because, of course, they wouldn't know to look for it in the first place.

In that way, I consider Napster a failure because of its fans. mp3.com at least makes an effort to point people at new kinds of music.

"Sanitized", you say? If that means the new Napster won't have mp3s with all the skips and blips we've come to hate, then by all means!

Yes, a fully corporate Napster might have better quality recordings. But then you might end up with other controls too, like prohibiting songs with 'obscene' lyrics and 'unwholesome' ideals. You'll end up with an online music service that's almost Disneyworldesque -- high quality, happy, bright, shiny, and totally intolerant to anything that falls outside the narrow scope of its preferences. What If Woodstock Were Held In Singapore.

This further corporate involvement in an already corporate enterprise can only improve the quality of the service.

As a corporate enterprise, Old Napster was almost anarchic, and willing to let users do as they please. They could post music from any source (not counting those pesky copyright problems), and download music from any user who had what they wanted. And they could do it for *free*.

New Napster will be reorganized, regimented, and improved so that it actually makes money. Guess who it's going to make it from? If not the users paying fees to listen to the music, then from the artists paying fees to make their music available on the networks' play lists. And maybe both, if they're both willing to pay.

I will agree on one particular point: Napster's time has come. And gone. I look forward to the Next Thing, especially if it's antithetical to big corporate involvement.
---

That wasn't the case in many of my schools...but then, I had the advantage of dressing and looking the part of the cool, even though I couldn't act that way. I also had the advantage of parents who genuinely cared about me, who had been there before themselves when they were children, and took time out of their lives. Despite all that, school was a living nightmare for me most of the time...and the first year of undergrad wasn't wonderful, either.

To all the disenchanted, the loners, the free-thinkers out there, my heart goes out to you. It sucks, but success ... and you will find it ... is the best revenge.

--- Free industrial/goth and electronic classical mp3's by yours truly ---

MP3[.com] is paying for the rights to license the songs for a limited time, so that they can stream them like one would stream a radio station. However, Napster is licensing in a different way - they are allowing people to download the songs, and keep them permanently.

There's no difference between the MP3 that you can download and the one that's streamed over TCP.

If you want to download (save a copy of) an MP3 that mp3.com doesn't have a download link for, all you have to do is tell your MP3 player to save it.

Example using mp3.com and xmms: click the "hi-fi play" button in the web browser; wait for xmms to get the URL; click the PL button in xmms; hold down the Load List button in the lower-right corner of the new window, and drag the mouse up to select Save List; in the resulting dialog, type some file name. The file name that you just typed will now contain the URL for the 128 kbps MP3 file -- you can do wget `cat file` or whatever.

The simple fact is, you can't prevent people from saving copies of things that you send them. If you have a web page, you can't prevent people from reading its source, because you send them the source every time they request the page. (CGI is different; you're sending the output of a program instead of a static file). The same applies to audio streams, video streams, etc. If you send the data to someone, that person has the data. Even if my xmms example didn't work, it would still be possible to use a wrapper program that writes the incoming MP3 encoded audio stream to a file and also sends that audio stream to the real xmms.

Napster is making a valiant effort to be perceived as a medium for new music, but they do not seem to be doing nearly as well as MP3.com is doing. MP3.com offers free music from independent artists, and has a built in system for promotions and rewards, rather than the Napster approach, which is simply to mention a new band on their home page now and then.

Fuck the Communists (w/ full facial)
Death Metal for Geeks

A few of these I am sure are wandering the universe, bouncing among the planets.

Oh, and science has already brought you talking fruit. It is called LSD-25.

www.mp3.com/Undocumented

It's at my mp3 site, inspired by Joe Wecker's sung version.

Unless i'm mistaken Napster isn't new techology. It's glorified IRC. People have been putting MP3's on BBS's for years, with searching, albeit centralised storage. But prior to Napster's sucess there were many peer-to-peer systems (DCC anyone?).

Now Napster doesn't allow people to break copyright anymore than the phone system allows criminals to break laws. When telephone systems came out many politicians wanted the things dismantled as criminals could use them to coordinate their devious plots. It's the devious plots that are wrong, not the telephone.

Napster doesn't "allow" as that's the wrong word - it's completely agnostic. Wrapster showed that it doesn't even have anything to do with MP3's necessarily, Napster just involves a searchable database of filenames, chat, and direct connections.

Now as for piracy being your definition of "illegally make use of resources without paying for them". Well, "illegally" is the word at play here - and that's very different to empowering the artist for what they want.

Radio stations, for years, have been playing music regardless of whether the artist wants their music distributed. Artists are powerless in this regard. Radio stations pay some fee to the government, the artists don't get a cent.

AFAIK, Artists have never been able to "track the authorship of the clips" and it's unreasonible to expect such a thing. From minstrels singing each other's tunes, to someone just playing music loudly, to our local radio stations having "TAPE THIS!" nights. Artists have never been able to track it once it goes out of their hands.

I prefer the web for music too. But if only servers weren't so scared of hosting the evil MP3 format. My friend's band had to move to MP3 dot Communist after the free host kept deleting that files. She should have just gave them the .pdf extension and asked her audience to rename the bloody things.

ps. The AC who's talking about swashbuckling parrots and eyepatches and such - don't be such a wanker - Arrr! arrr! ARRR!

Yes, please sign this loyalty oath, too. Otherwise you are not loyal to our cause.

No one gets paid under the current digital music system. MP3 went out of business last week & none of the artists got paid a dime.

I think artists are embracing the Internet. I think record executives are the ones who are not embracing the Internet.

That's because the interest of record executives and artists are *different*.

Are you a record executive, um... Lucas? Why do you keep pretending that record executives must get paid in order for artists to get paid?

Second, I wouldn't mind one of these mp3 cd players. They also plays VCD, and are fairly inexpensive.

Finally, for sheer coolness factor and utility, I would take a Ricoh RDC-7 "Image Capture Device". This thing is amazing! It can fit in a shirt pocket, has a very high-res 2" LCD, zoom to 3x optically, and can record movies with sound or just sound alone (with a built-in speaker for playback). It also has a 3 megapixel CCD chip with two focusing modes which makes it a very capable digital camera. Need to become an international spy? This thing quickly sucks up highly compressed blank and white .tif files for OCR. As if that's not enough, it also places the CCD on a special piezo-electric mount so that it can shift it by a half a pixel and combine two exposures into a 7 megapixel image for when you need that extra, extra, extra fine detail. Phew! I've got to stop talking about it. Just go to either here or here for a review. And it only ranges from around $600 to $900, too! Just don't expect to have too much manual photographic control over aperture or shutter speed. But screw a Handspring, I'd take one of those and keep all my documents on it! Just think of it as a pocket size tape recorder, digital camera, camcorder, scanner, and taker of big-ass 7 megapixel files. (And the unreleased successer in Japan has wireless Internet access, a touchscreen, and PDA functionality! Imagine that...)

You can listen to it through the included stethescope headphones, but what you really need is this slick little amp from Danelectro (I have one, and it sounds pretty amazing for it's size), about $30.

Now if you wanna play, but have no patience, here is a cool thing I saw in the store the other day, called the Strumstick. It is essentially a 3 string dulcimer, designed to be so easy to play that anyone can pick it up and start playing. I tried one out, and it was pretty magical how you could get decent tunes out of it with no practice or lessons. Goes for around $100, a little more if you want fancy inlays around the soundhole.

So your friends are even less talented, you can always buy them pre-played music. But in light of the way the big labels are holding the money while the artists fight for every penny, why not check out the little guys? Rather than buy commercial CDs for your friends, how about checking out some of the fine talent on mp3.com or other online places. You can buy CDs for between $5 and $10 that have both CD audio and mp3 versions of the songs. Makes for good gifts, and is a good way to promote little known, but talented musicians (the artists get 50% of the purchase price, a pretty good deal).

Disclaimer: Sarge doesn't work for any of the companies pointed to in this post, they were just convenient URLs. Also, extraneous semicolons and spaces are slashdot errors, I don't know why it keeps inserting those things at random in my html

See the BBC's story about MP3.com' s 'e-mail march' where MP3 is launching a 'million e-mail march' in support of an American bill which could end legal action against it.
Richy C.
--

MP3 StorySprawl

You can read and write the stories and links over at StorySprawl.com.

tunesmith

Hmm...

I type my zip code into this page and it sends me to this page listing my Representatives and Senators. I can now send them a form letter or...click on one of the ProfileHis email address!

Hmm...

I type my zip code into this page and it sends me to this page listing my Representatives and Senators. I can now send them a form letter or...click on one of the ProfileHis email address!

Hmm...

I type my zip code into this page and it sends me to this page listing my Representatives and Senators. I can now send them a form letter or...click on one of the ProfileHis email address!

You may not know that there is a big number of online labels existing, and distributing free mp3s (legal mp3s) on the net.

The existence of those labels makes it easier to find music of your taste:

• monotonik -- Highly acclaimed internet label releasing IDM/experimental materials from all around the world. They were showcasing at the recent Ars Electronica.
• noise -- Noise is releasing all kinds of fine ambient, techno, drum'n'bass, with always a focus on experimentation and quality. (Some jewels were released there by Stereoman (now esem), Saag...)
• theralite -- Since theralite started releasing mp3s their focus got more and more on diversity and quality. Releases are ranging between trip-hop, drum'n'bass and house. (check THERA001 and THERA012 for some very nice trip hop tunes)
• tokyodawn -- a label focusing on triphop and drum'n'bass.
• tokyo2051 -- sub label of tokyodawn, releasing mainly techno materials.
• you also have kahvi collective releasing idm, techno, ambient, milk releasing experimental finnish techno, reaktio...

There are also tons of stuff on mp3.com or vitaminic.

Even laurent garnier's website has some mp3s which were selectionned after a remix competition...

You can get also some infos and more links on the scene news website noerror

The conclusion is that you can find tons of legal mp3s on the net, (I hardly listen to anything but what I get on the net) It's just a bit harder to find and know about the artists and labels around.. but if you're interested, you will find.

You may not know that there is a big number of online labels existing, and distributing free mp3s (legal mp3s) on the net.

The existence of those labels makes it easier to find music of your taste:

• monotonik -- Highly acclaimed internet label releasing IDM/experimental materials from all around the world. They were showcasing at the recent Ars Electronica.
• noise -- Noise is releasing all kinds of fine ambient, techno, drum'n'bass, with always a focus on experimentation and quality. (Some jewels were released there by Stereoman (now esem), Saag...)
• theralite -- Since theralite started releasing mp3s their focus got more and more on diversity and quality. Releases are ranging between trip-hop, drum'n'bass and house. (check THERA001 and THERA012 for some very nice trip hop tunes)
• tokyodawn -- a label focusing on triphop and drum'n'bass.
• tokyo2051 -- sub label of tokyodawn, releasing mainly techno materials.
• you also have kahvi collective releasing idm, techno, ambient, milk releasing experimental finnish techno, reaktio...

There are also tons of stuff on mp3.com or vitaminic.

Even laurent garnier's website has some mp3s which were selectionned after a remix competition...

You can get also some infos and more links on the scene news website noerror

The conclusion is that you can find tons of legal mp3s on the net, (I hardly listen to anything but what I get on the net) It's just a bit harder to find and know about the artists and labels around.. but if you're interested, you will find.

I get the vast majority of my legal downloads from mp3.com. The mainstream Top X charts all blow. The music on MP3.com is orginial and interesting. Admittedly, there's quite a bit of junk in there, but find one or two genres you really like and your hit rate should be pretty high. If you like Electronica I have about 38 highlighted tracks from assorted artists at my MP3.com station, and a bunch of news on solid state audio players. There'll be a review of my brand new MP3 player for the Ericsson T28 after I've had it for a week -- around next Wednesday. (Look'n good so far)

How about MP3.com?


---

A better rant is here.

Steve Albini knows what he's talking about, having been an Artist, Producer and Engineer in the record label equation.

-nme!

Now, Let me get this straight.

DeCSS code in an MP3 is "offensive lyrics".

But, having the nerve to publically claim on http://www.mp3.com/songworm that God wrote the Earth in LISP is not as much of a crime?

Clearly Christian fundamentalists do not run MP3.com. ;)