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I agree, she is quite simply the best. Here's a great salon feature about her: http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/1998/06/cov_22fea ture2.html

The one time I heard one of her interviews go down in flames was when she interviewed Nancy Reagan, and asked about the astrologers in the White House, and loads of political questions. Reagan was unprepared, and, for once, Gross was unprepared for her being unprepared.

It is 'open source news' in a way, after all)
I wouldn't go that far - NPR has been pretty aggressive in lobbying against microbroadcasting, and other independent media. Fearing that microbroadcast operators might threaten its monopoly on community-oriented broadcasting, it lobbied the FCC and Congress to keep low-power operations illegal, narrowing the pool of voices you hear on air.
In a recent article in Seattle's The Stranger, NPR host Ira Glass criticized NPR for being risk-averse and uninnovative, noting there are few young or minority voices in NPR programs.
I used to be a big NPR supporter, until they began to strong arm the government to exclude other community broadcasters.

Here's the email I sent to Amazon.com letting them know how I feel:

To: feedback@amazon.com
Subject: loss of confidence

Your lack of respect for privacy has shaken my confidence in shopping with Amazon.com:

<http://www.salon.com/tech/wire/2001/05/30/amaz on/>

This is a shame, because upto now, I believed Amazon.com was honest and respected my privacy. I trusted Amazon.com and preferred purchasing from you even when you didn't have the best prices. I bought Christmas presents almost exclusively from Amazon.com the last two years.

However, your actions speak louder than your privacy policies. Now I find myself wondering, how else I might have been mislead. What other ways will you violate the letter or the spirit of your policies, especially now that the pressure to turn profitable is at its highest? This will have a chilling effect on Amazon.com and all online commerce. If Amazon.com can't be trusted, who can?

Sincerely disappointed,
Tim

The worst part is, I don't really believe this will accomplish much. I'd like to believe that such behavior does have a chilling effect on ecommerce. More likely, I'm the minority in a sea of lemmings with open pocketbooks.

Anyone who would want to save mother Theresa obviously hasn't read this or any of the other articles or books by Christopher Hitchens on the subject!

Explain this to me. A website that posts the personal information, pictures, "Wanted" posters, and other information that has incited violence against abortion providers doesn't get censored because it is a "free speech" issue, yet the courts see fit to censor 2600 for posting links to DeCSS. So we have to protect corporate intere$ts, but g0d forbid we censor a bunch of militant Christians. I'm not advocating that we censor their site, as I'm all for freedom of speech, but where is the line drawn? Corporate profits are more important than the risk of violence against doctors and their patients?

Yes, sales are up among napster users. But which sales? How are the sales of major labels versus independent labels? Prior to napster, the RIAA pretty much controlled the entire process by means of controlling play time on radio. Which, as this article noted, is unbelievably corrupt. But with P2P, people don't have to listen to the radio - they just search for the song they want to hear and get it immediately, no commercials, no filler, and browse to your heart's content. Grass roots publicity suddenly becomes much easier, there is no cost in time or money to listen to a song once. The trouble with Napster, then, is it puts the big labels on an even playing field with the indy labels, and could thereby suck some of their business away.

More importantly, if you can do almost as well with an indy or even your own label, why the hell would you want to go with a big one? The big labels could still control the manufactured stars, but all the real talent would stay away from them. In other words, the big labels would lose not just consumers but artists as well.

Furthermore, the recording industry clearly doesn't want any competition when it comes to digital distribution. They're not opposed to P2P distribution per se, just that they aren't getting paid for it. If they can sell by the song (or even pay-per-play) they can charge amounts equal to or more than it would take to buy the whole CD without even having the overhead of shipping the physical product.

In a prepared statement, Patrick Naughton says that he also supports the drive for more online privacy, and intends to launch an online privacy initiative in three to ten years.

Invisible Agent

So you are replying to an author's response to a reader's review of that author's analysis of a filmmaker and colabrative author's creative statement about the human condition?

Of course now I am replying to ....

In the immortal words of Sparky the Wonder Penguin, "If this gets any more post-modern, my brain is going to explode."
--
#/usr/bin/perl
require 6.0;

Widespread use of flash and macromedia and whatever it's technically called now bugs me, for two reasons. First of all, far too many people are using flash to revert their web pages back to 1995, where a webpage wasn't a webpage unless their was a java applet of wavy water reflecting the sky. The only difference now is that people try to make their wavy water applets themselves, and invariably fail horribly.

There are some exceptions. Those IBM codernaut ads which can be seen occasionally on slashdot are flash, and they work pretty well. Also the mercury ads on Salon most of the time. But those are made by highly paid ad executives and their lackeys. Everyone else sees those ads, thinks hmm, maybe i could make a five minute flash intro to my page which doesn't say anything, ey? Anyway, I know everyone else has already mentioned this, but I haven't, and this seemed like a good opportunity to get it out.

To find out just how deep this corruption has gone, check out this article on Salon: Fighting pay-for-play.

Essentially some "middlemen" get paid by the record companies to promote songs to radio stations.... the way they go about doing this is to essentially pay radio stations a portion of what they get from the record companies for each time a "recommended" song is played. Pretty soon, all a radio station plays is "recommended" (aka paid-for) songs.

I'll take The Man Himself speaking Elvish over Liv Tyler speaking Elvish any day :)

Unfortunately, posting unchecked, sensationalistic articles puts /. in "good company", e.g. the recent treatment of the scandal of the White House vandals.

He has inflicted his ill-researched morality and his ill-researched games technology prowess on Salon readers before. That he has shot off his mouth in a hypocritical rant against the sexual marketing aspects of E3 ("I can't stand its emphasis on sex, but I have to go! Really!") should come as a surprise to no-one.

He has inflicted his ill-researched morality and his ill-researched games technology prowess on Salon readers before. That he has shot off his mouth in a hypocritical rant against the sexual marketing aspects of E3 ("I can't stand its emphasis on sex, but I have to go! Really!") should come as a surprise to no-one.

These people are the worst hypocrites imaginable!... My god, I can't believe that these people are complaining about this... It boggles the mind...

Salon would know a think or two about porn from thier own pay site.

Come on folks, it's the perfect combination! Lets see, we have an extremely grizzly new game like Soldier of Fortune 2. How should we market it...

I know! Sex! Sex and Violence are the two great advertisers that send right wingers running for senate sub-committies! I'm sure it's all some plot to piss off congress-critters. And journalists I might add...

-Ted

1996, you say? Interesting. The High Performance Computing Act of 1991 paid for increasing network backbone infrastructure over the next 5 years. Perhaps there's a connection? However, I seem to remember some guy getting a whole lot of shit for taking credit.

TCP/IP. HTTP. graphical web browsers. What do these things have in common? Answer: they were all created with government funding.

As for music, I'm now buying way more than ever before because I'm listening to the radio instead and hearing way more that I ever heard on MTV.

I hate to burst your bubble but the radio sucks almost as much as MTV. Whereas MTV and VH-1 are owned by one large company (Viacom ?), commercial radio is basically owned by 3 large corporations and the selections are payed for by music companies. I stopped listening years ago and only tune to NPR (National Public Radio) because it is not a commercial for manufactured crap like Britney Spears, Limp Bizkit, Slim Shady, etc. Now college radio stations are cool because they actually play music they like, not based on the dictates of corporate greed.

There was a good Salon article about this a while back.

good ol' salon had an article on this awhile back; essentially, the profit margins in the vaccine trade arn't high enough to justify making them, for some. Read the article.. it's title 'ready for some lockjaw' for a reason.

Linus has,in fact,grown,and explosively-JonKatz

written for a non-technical audience. Very nice.

Open Source Advocate Has Yet To Rebut Craig Mundie

Jeff Parns considers himself a model for free software advocacy: helping out at installfests, answering questions on the Central Kansas Free Unix User's Group mailing list, working in his spare time on a user-friendly graphical interface to cron. Why, then, has he yet to write a long-winded essay rebutting Microsoft exec Craig Mundie's recent remarks about open source?

Our crack interviewing team cornerned Parns in his home, where he was conspicuously not combing through the text of Mundie's remarks, just as he had not been in attendance at NYU's Stern School of Business on May 3 to hear Mundie speak. What justified this weird behavior?

"I really think there are enough rebuttals already, " said Parns. "I mean, have you even read all those things? "

Eric S. Raymond, whose two preemptive rebuttals sparked the craze, was pessimistic about the chances for a Parns rebuttal in the future. "Obviously, we can't force him to write a rebuttal to Mundie's wrong-headed remarks about open source," said Raymond. "However, it's possible that my new paper, 'How I Rebutted Craig Mundie's Wrong-Headed Remarks About Open Source In Copious Detail--And How You Can Too' will give him some ideas. In fact, there's sort of a little form rebuttal in Appendix C which he can sign his name to and get it linked from Linux Today."

"As a full-time programmer, my day is pretty busy," said Brian Behlendorf of the Apache Software Foundation, whose anti-Mundie remarks were picked up by Infoworld. "Yet even I managed to stop by Mundie's speech and make a few remarks to the press. I don't think this Parns is even trying. I mean, even Steve Ballmer published a 3000-word Mundie rebuttal. Sic transit gloria Mundie, I guess."

Even Parns' neighbors have begun to notice this gap in the open source ranks. "The way he helped me with my Red Hat install, I was sure he was some sort of hot-shot free software advocate," said Millie Leman, a local dominatrix and mother of two. "But I haven't heard one word from him about this Mundie thing. It makes a person wonder."

"Look, it's spring, my son's about to graduate from junior high, I'm trying to get KCron to 1.0," said Parns, shooing this reporter out his front door. "Just leave me alone."

Will Parns rebut? Already, rebuttals with his name on them have begun showing up, though he denies authorship. Watch for the rebuttal signed with Parns' Gnu Privacy Guard key, and keep reading Segfault.org for complete coverage of every Mundie rebuttal ever written.

Tomorrow: An in-depth look at the rebuttal that Mark Billings of London saved to ~mark/mundie.txt, but never showed to anybody.

(This 'story' was first shown at Segfault.org here, and was written by Leonard Richardson)

The article says more people will listen to and respect Microsoft than Open Source advocates, but I think Microsoft is making a strategic blunder by drawing attention to their competition and transparently displaying their fear.

Mundie's argument is basically "Open Source is bad for our business model, therefore don't use it." He talks about the dangers to the SOFTWARE INDUSTRY, but never names any problems for Open Source software CUSTOMERS.

This Salon article points out that while Open Source software is bad for Microsoft, that doesn't make it bad for software customers.

-jimbo

Here's an mp3 from the interview on which the oft mentioned salon article sprouts from:

http://media.salon.com/mp3s/saltech050701.mp3

!-- begin cut & paste from salon's page --

The programmer's lament: How one overworked, underpaid coder lost his health, his sanity and his faith in the dot-com dream. David Wadler is the author of Coder on the Cross. With music by Aphex Twin. Original interview by Amy Standen.

1. Yes. Of course the very idea of a method for adjusting your monitor settings over the Internet is completely absurd.
2. The part describing the questions the "author" had to answer in his interview was noticably similar to the beginning of a Salon article about a bad experience at a software company we discussed here a short time ago.
3. The Yellow Pages aren't trademarked. This was a famous oversight by Bell Telephone, which is why anyone who wants to can publish a Yellow Pages telephone directory.
4. Do you, personally, know of anyone who made management decisions by rolling a d12?
5. There was this large foot next to the story listing on the front page, which generally indicates a humorous article.

Conclusion: IT'S A PARODY!

Sheesh!

I think this is funnier if you have read this slahsdot post, and this article.

This certainly matches my experience with DSL vs. cable, but for various reasons you're probably familiar with, DSL can be a better way to connect

Some reasons why DSL is better than cable:

• competition between vendors

Some reasons why Cable is better than DSL:

• faster
• better basic infrastructure. Whatever you say, twisted pair can not compare with shielded coaxial cable as far as signal quality. And in most cases, the coaxial cable is much shorter than the average twisted pair. After that the service runs on fiber.
• no distance limitations. If you're connected to the cable company and the service is deployed, then you get the service. None of this well my next door neighbor got the service, but I'm too far out to qualify.

Some false reasons whey DSL is better than cable:

• DSL provides guaranteed bandwidth. While, technically this is true, it's really misleading. DSL's guaranteed bandwidth is only to the CO or the exchange. After that, all the bandwidth is shared.
• DSL's private bandwidth provides better security. This is also misleading. Remember, you're connecting to the Internet. Your next door neighbor can still scan and attack your machine. On top of that, most cable systems provide encryption between the cable modem and the cable router at the provider.

For a more eloquant summary of the differences see: Simson Garfinkle's excellent review. It's a bit dated (Sept 1999) but it's still does a good job of cutting through much of the rhetoric.

But it hass a passing resemblence to this Salon.com article:

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/05/02/sacri fice/index.html

You might as well cruise on over to Salon and read this article on the subject of Charles Darwin and the state of Louisiana. It seems they have condemned Darwin as a racist and the root cause of all worldwide racist activities from the Holocaust to the Klan. It gives them a wonderful reason for quashing the teaching of evolution in their excellent public schools.

Apparently this idea has caught on in many quarters, so it's predicted to be a tough year for evolution. The ironies of Louisiana condemning anybody as racist are just too subtle and numerous to comment on.

Cheers,
Annie

You might as well cruise on over to Salon and read this article on the subject of Charles Darwin and the state of Louisiana. It seems they have condemned Darwin as a racist and the root cause of all worldwide racist activities from the Holocaust to the Klan. It gives them a wonderful reason for quashing the teaching of evolution in their excellent public schools.

Apparently this idea has caught on in many quarters, so it's predicted to be a tough year for evolution. The ironies of Louisiana condemning anybody as racist are just too subtle and numerous to comment on.

Cheers,
Annie

Courtney Love gave a speech to the Digital Hollywood online entertainment conference almost exactly one year ago in which she defended Napster and excoriated the recording industry. It's shockingly articulate. The full transcript is available at Salon.com.

Courtney Love also spoke out against the RIAA attack on Napster.

"Piracy is the act of stealing an artist's work without any intention of paying for it.
I'm not talking about Napster-type software.
I'm talking about major label recording contracts. "

Today I want to talk about piracy and music. What is piracy? Piracy is the act of stealing an artist's work without any intention of paying for it. I'm not talking about Napster-type software.

I'm talking about major label recording contracts.

A classic treatise from the e-pen of noted intellectual Courtney Love.

If we make Napster-like free file sharing illegal, we'll have to rid ourselves of either computers or democracy.

You can't have both.

This one's from the heart of rock'n'roll's Mr Wild, Jared Lanier.

I doubt Love would get out of bed for less than a Hollywood ransom and a noseful of gak. Might luck out with Lanier, though, if you can contact him in Virtuality before the imminent Eighties revival kicks in.

8 am - begin commute

9 am - arrive at work check suck.com, salon.com, and, of course, slashdot.org

11 am - check email

12 pm - go to lunch

1 pm - check email and slashdot.org again

2 pm - shit, better get to work (stare out the window for an hour)

3 pm - check email and slashdot.org. If I'm really bored, play an hour or two of Zangband.

5 pm - most everybody else is going home ("look at that hard-working programmer still at his desk, that's that 'hackor ethic!' I've heard about", they whisper in reverent tones...) time to check out the pr0n sites!

6pm - begin commute

7 pm - arrive home

Let's add that up. I guess I work about 40 (50 if your count the commute) hours a week, like most people. ;-)

Meanwhile, Microsoft's plaintive wail over the future of innovation is just a smoke screen. What Microsoft really wants are new markets to dominate, whether they be overseas or on the Net. And apparently the company sees the GPL as standing in the way. But each attempt to demonize the GPL as the enemy of Microsoft-style capitalism risks making the free-software movement stronger instead.

As far as radio goes, I live in one of the best areas of the country... around Boston. There's lots of selection in many genres (unless you like country), but there's still not a damn thing on worth listening to. It's all so boring. The few bands that are worth listening to don't get any radio play. Even WBRU has gone down hill in the last couple of years...

And satellite radio is supposed to be a good thing? It'll be the worst that traditional radio has to offer.

-S

From salon.com

"Others have written to us wondering whether today's Premium is simply a nose-in-the-tent kind of deal, preparing the way for an entirely subscribers-only site in the future. (An erroneous media report misquoting our founder, David Talbot, outlining such a plan helped fan such suspicions.) That's not our plan."

The rest of the article can be found here: http://www.salon.com/letters/editor/2001/05/02/pre mium_progress/index.html

However, those people with a half-a-clue are realising that alternative distribution models exists as software moves the relative power back to the artists and performers away from promoters and managers (unless they consolidate their distirbution channels and demand payola aka gateway fees). So what is likely to happen? I nthe long run you'll probably see more variety and different intermediatories but in the short term, its likely to be a scorched earth policy with ISPs being in the front line trenches squeezed between content holders (who want to pass the cost of enforcement onto someone else ... e.g. public law) and communications infrastructure providers who want to extract every last cent from providing bandwidth. In short the mom and pop UUCP and message boards are going to disappear as they don't have the intellectual or financial firepower to survive the coming firestorm (MS .NET initiative notwithstanding).

Note that this is not new. Whenever a scarce resource becomes cheap, whoever's interest buildt on faulty assumptions starts screaming. For example, when radio stations were limited in NZ several decades ago, some entrepreneurs put raio masts on a ship outside the nautical exclusion zones and beamed "pirate" broadcsts inland. The internet is even easier as the infrastructure is outside the immediate juristiction and you cannot restrict people moving around except through controlling their access software (cough*AOL-AIM*cough).

Maybe, just maybe, companies will actually support grass-roots artistic development instead of flogging over-hyped teenage boppers or overpriced dead rockers. On the other hand, cynics would note that money talks, bullshit walks.

LL

Posted without attribution again, as usual. Sigh.

Courtney love didn't justify Napster, oh no she said "Fuck napster" from Courtney Love takes on RIAA on Salon Technology is not piracy This opinion is one I really haven't formed yet, so as I speak about Napster now, please understand that I'm not totally informed. I will be the first in line to file a class action suit to protect my copyrights if Napster or even the far more advanced Gnutella doesn't work with us to protect us. I'm on [Metallica drummer] Lars Ulrich's side, in other words, and I feel really badly for him that he doesn't know how to condense his case down to a sound-bite that sounds more reasonable than the one I saw today.

Janelle Brown has an interesting article on Salon arguing that Prof. Felten's move not to publish will help the EFF's legal challenge against DMCA's constitutionality. Felten's decision not to publish may be a brilliant ploy designed to help convince the court that the DMCA actually impinges on academic freedom.

A blatantly untrue statement. Or rather it is true to the extent that the creep does not claim that they did not threaten legal action, merely claiming that the threats made were unfounded. However as the Salon article points out the RIAA realized it had screwed up big time.

With the first ammendment implications of the DMCA being debated next week the last thing the RIAA needs is a proof that the act is unconstitutional and being used to chill free speech.

Proof that the RIAA and SDMI folk are not as smart as the cryptographers. Which is pretty much as expected. I mean if you are going to pick stupid fights best not choose folk whose entire mindset is attack and counter measure to six or seven degrees out.

That's the reality of the telecom infrastructure folks. Wireline infrastructure involves massive expenditures that can only be absorbed by the companies that originally had heavy government funding to install the infrastructure in the first place.

Did AT&T, in the US, have government funding, or did they merely have (regulated) monopoly status and profits?

What about Bell Canada (which, according to this item on Bell Canada's timeline, was a private company since Day One)?

In Europe, most of the telephone systems were, I think, Government-run (typically by the post office, I think), although, at least according to one of Andrew Leonard's articles on Salon.com, Finland's government "chose to grant licenses to operate telephone companies to all applicants" so that the Tsar of all the Russias would have to take over a whole bunch of telephone companies in order to control phone service in the Autonomous Duchy of Finland.

It will be interesting to see how local loop unbundling works in Europe.

best of all, no one would get hurt.

Does that mean the Peruvians no longer get to shoot down purveyors of "the opiate of the masses?"

Interesting article in today's Salon.com pointing out Bush's hypocracy:

When then-candidate George W. Bush answered questions during the presidential campaign about whether he had ever used illegal drugs, he refused to give a yes or no answer, claiming that his past was irrelevant. "I am asking people to judge me for who I am today," he said in a September 1999 interview. "I hope it doesn't cost me the election. I hope people understand." That nonanswer was good enough to get Bush into the White House, but it wouldn't be good enough to get him a student loan under his administration's higher education policy. On Tuesday, the Department of Education announced that it would enforce a law that would deny financial aid to students who answer "yes" -- or refuse to answer at all -- to one simple question: "Have you ever been convicted of selling or possessing drugs?"

I was under the impression that "encryption research" was specifically excepted under the DMCA anti-circumvention clause. Does this letter take that into account? I would love to see this go to court, even though today's (apparently bought and paid for) federal courts give me little reason for optimism.

Have you seen read any record contracts lately? The terms these artists are getting, are piss poor. As simple as that.

TLC had AFAIK the best selling RNB record EVER. They still went bankrupt - and this was prior to Napstermania. The record company got nearly all their dough. Take a listen to Courtney Love, and her rundown of the economics of a record deal.

Sure, it's not nice to download MP3s that are copyrighted. However, it's an excellent way for me to make sure the record I wanna try out is not a total piece of crap. I honestly don't want waste 18 bucks on ONE good song.

Since I found mp3s, the quality of my record collection has kept up, even though I spend less time reading reviews and articles and such. If I see a review that tickles my imagination, I'll just jump online and check it out.

There is no way to control this. However, you might wanna follow the numbers. Has CD sales gone up or down since napster started to get popular? Up? Maybe I'm not the only one using it in an ethical manner?

Since you sound fairly conservative, I'll bring out the big gun - gun laws. Guns are designed to kill. People use them to kill. Still, they are legal, since they CAN be used in an ethical manner - which means self defense and against out-of-line police. I see that as a fairly utilitarian justification. My justification for mp3s and napster and gnutella is equally utilitarian. I want to keep it because it can be used in an ethical manner, and because evidence suggest that it is mainly being used in an ethical manner. Those punks that never buy anything they have on mp3s are like the criminals that are allowed access to guns since we the lawabiding citizens also want the right to protect ourselves. We the lawabiding mp3-users want the right to make sure we're not bying crap. This generalizes directly to movies.

Do you now feel vaguely better about napster and gnutella?

It's no surprise, of course. Even the name "StarWars" itself conveys a message of conflict and carnage. A New Hope is, at bottom, a story about armed rebellion by rabble against a benevolent legal order, precisely the sort of communistic message we had come so close to defeating in Vietnam.

Maybe this is a good time to bring up David Brin's Star Wars despots vs. Star Trek populists again.

There was a very interesting article on salon.com about this when Episode I was released. Although it somewhat compared Star Wars to Star Trek, it showed some of the grotesque morals implanted in the SW-movies.

Something to think about.