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This is actually a much better approach to layoffs than what many dot-coms have been doing. Check out this article from Salon for some stories on how not to do layoffs. I'm sad to see GameCenter go, and I hope that GameSpot changes a little to compensate, but I'm glad that they're at least making their job cuts in a responsible way and helping people find new jobs.

Even in the dotcom world, age does matter.

I think Salon just ran a piece where they were saying that 30 year old CEO's were out, and VC's are looking for a CEO's with grey hair. Perhaps it was reading business2.com on the exercycle that I read this, whatever.

Too many programmers and /.'ers are myopic, they think computer skills are all that matters, when in the real world, people skills, marketing skills, finance skills and networking (not LAN, people to people) skills are just as important, if not more. With just a little reflection, I can list tens of companies that have advanced, technically wonderful ideas that have failed or are failing, ie. Amiga, FreeBSD and even Apple, while companies that have less trendy technologies, but better marketing, are still beating the world, ie. Microsoft.

So, even if your clueless, gray haired manager may not know Perl or PHP, they've been competing in the junglel of business for decades longer than you have, and no a few survival tricks that you don't. Learn from them, respect them and eventually replace them, but if you try to replace them too early, well, look up something called the Children's Crusade, or look up the history of NeXT.

For those afraid of goat sex: http://www.salon.com/comics/boll/2000/08/24/boll/i ndex.html

- subsolar

... of course, there was that Tom the Dancing Bug strip from last August.

Didn't Salon originally run this idea as a cartoon?

Didn't Salon originally run this idea as a cartoon?

Indeed, and those royalties don't often manage to trickle down to the artist whose talent is being sold. Courtney Love gave a very good speech on this - how the artist gets shafted and the record companies get rich.

Yeah, it sounds silly. But then, so does Pillsbury C&Ding a bunch of software developers for use of the term 'bakeoff'.
--

I hope they are going to do it with humans, since for some species, parthenogenesis is the normal way to reproduce.

But let's be honest. We always knew it: Sex is best.

Actually it was in the late 60s and early 70s that Kubrick researched "Napolean". I had never heard of it until I read this Salon article about it. It's too bad, just tragic really, that he never made the film.

The article in the above link tells us that the RIAA wanted something which is technologically impossible, but refused to listen to the techs. They needed a watermarking system, and they want it now.

I think the great thing about these French guys actually publishing their work is actually putting the genie out of the bottle. SDMI tried to prevent that in the agreement of the contest - one was not allowed to publish the hack methods or results and they'll likely enforce this by law. Fortunately, we here in Europe are concious of the fact that US does not apply here - forgetting this is a mistake which US corporates have made before (i.e. DeCSS).

Cluelessness rides again. Indeed, nothing else can wear hats but us, and even that won't help much if the ozone layer collapses entirely - there's an involuntary test group in southern Chile researching this for us right now... :(

Uhm, whatever. First of all, the numbers I've seen suggest that computers have slowed the growth of electricity use in California, because they increase the efficiency with which everything gets done. This article on Salon goes over the information in pretty good detail.

Once you accept that computers actually represent a small %age of California's power burden, you also need to realize that the incremental cost of cooling those computers can't be much higher. Even if it took 2Wh of AC for every 1Wh consumed by a computer, the overall impact on the electricity budget would still be small compared to the rest of the stuff sucking up energy. Stuff like TVs that are left on most of the time, microwave ovens (typically 700W or higher when they're on, as compared to the ~200W a typical computer draws when its crunching away), electric stoves, electric heat, and AC for personal dwellings that would be there regardless of computers.

And don't forget, running computers in the winter cuts your heating costs, to offset the increase in AC costs in the summer...

This has been posted to the Pilsbury http://www.mealtimeideas.com/bulletinboard/

For those of you who don't know, Pilsbury is sending cease and desist orders to a variety of organizations who use the term "bake-off."

The most recent round of such letters went to computer companies who use the term for a state of software testing. Salon has an article about it online. http://www.salon.com/tech/log/2001/01/19/pillsbury /index.html

Your local school could be next!

Anyway, my computer geek background and my considerable cooking skills inspired me to come up with the following recipe for Dough-Boy cakes.

First, you start with a basic pound cake or Mazitpan recipe. If using a pound cake recipe, you need to add flour to create a very dense dough.

Roll the dough into circles for the head, an oval for the chest and smaller ovals for the legs and arms. If you're feeling creative you can even make the hat and add some food coloring.

The more sadistic among us can shape the head with skeleton features to indicate a cooked Dough-Boy who met a gruesome end, as in the picture here: http://members.tripod.com/laffs/images/Doughboy.jp g

Serve and enjoy.

http://www.matthewmiller.net

I'm not shocked that Card would model him after Card, at least subconsiously since he reports in this salon article that "My reading of 'The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich' -- when I was 10 -- probably has more to do with my returning to issues of violence [in my books]."

Care about freedom?

"Latent homosexuality" in Ender's Game seems unlikely since osc is admittedly anti-gay. See the Salon article which says, among other things that he is "disgustingly outspoken homophobe." And where Card is quoted as saying "Gay rights is a collective delusion." Ouch.

Care about freedom?

In Taiwan, twenty guys are going to pull a 747 with their penises

Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.

First, about the merger itself, some reactions from a few known and lesser-known people, and lastly a bit of content about what this means for competitive news&webcontent enterprises.

First, about the merger itself, some reactions from a few known and lesser-known people, and lastly a bit of content about what this means for competitive news&webcontent enterprises.

First, about the merger itself, some reactions from a few known and lesser-known people, and lastly a bit of content about what this means for competitive news&webcontent enterprises.

The California House and Senate have passed legislation to deregulate the state's electric industry and to force California ratepayers and taxpayers to pay $27 billion to bail out the state's three investor-owned utilities. The measure represents a major victory for the utility industry and Wall Street, and a major setback for consumers and local communities, who face a decade of utility bill surcharges and restrictions that will prevent most Californians from getting access to competitively priced power.

The bill passed unanimously in both the Assembly and Senate. But many parties feel blindsided after expeting the bill to die. Although the $27 billion bailout made in the bill bill compares to the Savings and Loan crisis in sheer dollar volume, it received little press coverage the following day other than reports of a promised ten percent rate reduction for residents and small businesses.

The Bill, allegedly giving customers a "choice" about electricity suppliers, contains provisions which lock residents and small businesses with the monopoly utilities until 2002. Beyond 2002 the Bill adds hurdles that customers must jump before leaving the monopoly, making it likely that only a few will benefit even then.

The California law requiring competition for electric service by January 1998 will lead to little meaningful competition for the small business or residential customer during 1998.

The report, compiled after a 26-day survey of 132 electric service providers registered with California Public Utilities Commission, will serve as the first of an on-going evaluation of the electric market.

Of the 132 companies contacted:

- 20% of the registered companies are not providing service at all;
- 17% of the companies plan to provide service exclusively to business customers;
- 34% of the companies are difficult to contact and did not return UCAN's' phone calls (we called each provider at least two times).
- 21% (28 in total) companies are offering electric service to residential customers in California.

Of the 28 companies that are providing service to residential customers:

- 32% of the companies have no information on planned rates;
- 26% of the companies have viable service offers;
- 74% of the companies have questionable or extremely questionable service offers;
- 18% of the companies are offering "green" power only

But in California, Pennsylvania, Illinois and other state legislatures, consumer and environmental interests have so far been routed by utility lobbyists.

What galls California consumer groups most is AB1890's $28.5 billion stranded-cost bailout, much of which is for PG&E's Diablo Canyon reactors and Southern California Edison's San Onofre nuclear plant. "The manufacturers cut a backroom deal granting themselves preferential rates and giving the utilities a massive nuclear bailout, plus all sorts of corporate welfare, before the public had the slightest idea of what was going on," says Dan Berman, an energy expert and co-author of Who Owns the Sun?

The legislature's package contains no funding for consumer advocacy groups, but it does allow a staggering $89 million for industry advertising.

With California as a model, the pro-utility tide at the state level has thus far been overwhelming. "AB1890 was a mugging," says Charlie Higley, a senior energy analyst with Public Citizen's Critical Mass Energy Project. "Then Pennsylvania was a mugging. Massachusetts was a mugging. The industry just owns too many state legislatures."

Representative Tom DeLay of Texas last year [1997?] proposed what some call the "Enron Bill," which would ban stranded costs from being passed along altogether, a position shared by the right-wing, "free market" Heritage Foundation. Enron had bitterly opposed stranded costs as a barrier to competition in California. But then it bought Oregon's Portland Gas & Electric, which wants a bailout for its failed Trojan reactor. Demonstrating the complexity of cross-interests, observers note that "suddenly Enron's attack on stranded costs has been muted."

An epic $30 million-plus California electoral war over billions in utility subsidies has bitterly divided the national environmental community.

It also handed the state's three dominant utilities -- Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric -- some $28.5 billion to subsidize capitalinvestments in generators unable to produce electricity cheap enough to sell competitively in a market increasingly dominated by inexpensive natural gas. In the California market, the investments were concentrated in two nuclear reactors at San Onofre, between San Diego and Los Angeles, and two more at Diablo Canyon, outside San Luis Obispo. According to their owners, these plants would almost certainly shut down in the face of cheaper juice coming from generators powered by methane.

[Q: What is the current status of these generators?]

"Prop. 9 voids the bond sale on which the phony rebate is based," says Gunther. "It ends the stranded cost rip-off. It demands the utilities compete on an even playing field, which they obviously don't want to do." Prop. 9 also has the support of the Sierra Club, Consumer's Union and the League of Women Voters.

According to campaign filings, the utilities have already raised almost $30 million to defeat Prop. 9, and have lined up some 2,000 organizations, including industrial and retail trade organizations, chambers of commerce, both major parties, most elected officials, the state's major unions and many of its civic and ethnic coalitions as well as certain environmental groups. "They've called in every favor they've bought over many years of carefully giving out donations," says Gunther. "They've gone all out."

Prop. 9's supporters have raised well under $500,000, and Gunther predicts the utilities will "outspend us 100 to 1, maybe more. It shows how much they stand to gain."

"The utilities have spent so much now the only thing they might prove is you can buy a referendum with unlimited money," says Hauter.

Scott Rosenberg, managing editor of Salon, has written a followup article" to 'Information Poisoning': if you were thinking about flaming Salon in email try reading this first, as they have been pretty swamped with outraged letters :)

Until next time,

Anne Marie

Here are some other stories about IT if you're interested in doing some more investigating:

http://www.salon.com/books/wire/2001/01/09/ginger/ index.html
http://www.inside.com/jcs/Story?article_id=20218&p od_id=8

Link given above was broken due to the magic of "spacedot," the combination of lazy perl code and a narrow text-entry box that adds rand om sp a ces to lon g wor ds, as if mySQL or Perl or HTML really had such wordwrapping limits.

Fixed:
http://www.salon.com/books/wire/2001/01/09/ginger/ index.html

But if you do a Google search on "ginger dean kamen", you get nothing. Not even any wack rumors. Deja doesn't turn up anything either.

So, it's got me curious, which is a pretty good PR trick if nothing else.

--Seen

As soon as Attorney General Ashcroft is in charge, there will be a sweet settlement with a light slap on MS's wrist (see Salon article -- they have a good point).

I don't know what to think of this guy. Okay, right-winger puritan, but for privacy and reduced government interference, pro free speech but believes in severe restrictions when the speech is against his puritanical bent.

Ah, forget it, can't be any worse than Reno.

• Although there is a FreeBSD smp project, they expect support only by mid-2001...

According to this story the F.B.I. recently arrested some script kiddies under suspicion, not evidence, but suspicion, that they were going to create denials of service attacks. These script kiddiots in turn turned over some other Israeli script kiddiots in an effort perhaps to save their own ass.

So ponder this question a bit and toss it into a conspiracy theory if you want; The F.B.I. who can track down the persons responsible for bombing the U.S.S. Cole can't keep track of script kiddies?

I think the bigger picture should be clear that certain agencies know damn well who these kids are and allow them do wreck havoc until damages of hundreds perhaps millions of dollars occur and then they use them as script kiddiot snitches in hopes of catching more morons to make themselves look good.

If you take a few minutes to view the cases at Cybercrime you can notice that most arrests occur monthly and the damage done on these crimes are at a very high price with the perps often getting little to no time as is seen in Coolio's case in which he's getting sentenced for misdemeanors while commiting felonies at an adult age. There is a lot more going on behind the scenes than most people realize or maybe care to know.

As for minors securing a network I don't see how exactly the intend on allowing this to fully materialize when half of these rootards don't even understand the meanings of IS-IS, IPSec, ISAKMP, CA, let alone fully understand upper crust protocols.

Theres a lot more thats happening thats not being mentioned here.

removing the dot in dot.com

Here's a link to a story I just read at Salon.com - about a train in Norway that wouldn't start because of a belated Y2K date problem. Seems it went to 31/12/00!

'nuff said.

I've sold a Lego set or two on the Internet (via Usenet) before. I might even have hit a hundred transactions over the eight or so years I've been on Usenet. But a thousand is incredible!

Yet not unfathomable. Imagine a long-time sports-card collector or dealer who's whittling down their collection. Been to a card show? Some of them have multiple truckloads of boxes of cards. Just one example...

Do these people just sit around all day and sell crap online? Is it a business? Or are these folks just bored soccer moms? Are they dealers? New age pawn shops?

There was an interesting take on one possible answer to that question in an article on Salon a while ago. In some cases, people were scouring the surrounding regions (flea markets, estate sales, meatspace auctions, etc.) to find stuff to sell on eBay, sometimes for hefty profits. In some cases, they did turn it into a small-business enterprise.

Some time ago, in several of the computer hardware categories, you could find quite a few sellers who had a large quantity of sales-by-auction under their belts, and numerous items up at any one time. Several of these were small to mid-size computer shops, clearing out older inventory for which there wasn't a local market, but for which some general demand did exist. (One fella used a little rubber frog named "Skippee" and had lots of old Mac and Apple stuff. Cute.)

he other thing I always wanted to ask was: Is it me, or are a lot of these things being bought and sold again, and bought and sold again, over and over again? ie, are people making money by rehashing the same auction items repeatedly?

There's some of that, too, both by small-time sellers and the power-sellers. It's really no different than speculation of any other kind to try and make a profit - it just seems like that's too much work for the general eBay going price.

I've sold a Lego set or two on the Internet (via Usenet) before. I might even have hit a hundred transactions over the eight or so years I've been on Usenet. But a thousand is incredible!

Yet not unfathomable. Imagine a long-time sports-card collector or dealer who's whittling down their collection. Been to a card show? Some of them have multiple truckloads of boxes of cards. Just one example...

Do these people just sit around all day and sell crap online? Is it a business? Or are these folks just bored soccer moms? Are they dealers? New age pawn shops?

There was an interesting take on one possible answer to that question in an article on Salon a while ago. In some cases, people were scouring the surrounding regions (flea markets, estate sales, meatspace auctions, etc.) to find stuff to sell on eBay, sometimes for hefty profits. In some cases, they did turn it into a small-business enterprise.

Some time ago, in several of the computer hardware categories, you could find quite a few sellers who had a large quantity of sales-by-auction under their belts, and numerous items up at any one time. Several of these were small to mid-size computer shops, clearing out older inventory for which there wasn't a local market, but for which some general demand did exist. (One fella used a little rubber frog named "Skippee" and had lots of old Mac and Apple stuff. Cute.)

he other thing I always wanted to ask was: Is it me, or are a lot of these things being bought and sold again, and bought and sold again, over and over again? ie, are people making money by rehashing the same auction items repeatedly?

There's some of that, too, both by small-time sellers and the power-sellers. It's really no different than speculation of any other kind to try and make a profit - it just seems like that's too much work for the general eBay going price.

A relatively small portion of the magazine itself is devoted to "God's creation" (aka. naked and semi-naked women); The rest is horribly LIBERAL and SECULAR writing with no XTIAN MESSG in them. I bet that's what they really dont want you to get at.

Anyone know if they also filter out Salon for printing negative articles on the church and its views?

There are musicians everywhere who demonstrate every day that you can make a perfectly respectable living doing nothing but selling tickets to live shows. Most corporate-owned bands don't make anything off their record sales any way, as you can find explained in places like Courtney Love's kooky rant in Salon. We already know that you can make money writing free software, though you probably will never make so much that your old friends no longer know you.

It is certainly necessary to prevent unlicensed copying if movie studios are to recoup the costs of $125 million-plus special effects blockbusters like "Dante's Peak" or "Titanic," or for record companies to finance Keith Richard's drug habit. The console video games that 13-year olds can't get enough of would take quite at hit as well if the games could be easily copied. The world's most popular PC operating system is another example of one of our civilization's achievements that might not exist without intellectual property protection.

I don't see what difference the laws will make. The only hope they have to continue centralized control of information is to build copy prevention into every kind of storage device in the world, which seems impractical at best.

Salon has a more balanced article, based on real life experience. The author's experience echoes my own:

• curiosity in a novel, intuitively appealing layout
• experimentation, which gets nowhere until I start using it on the job
• confusion, during which time I can type neither Sholes nor Dvorak
• breakthrough after about a month

The wording of that statement is a little confusing to me, but in any case it doesn't sound like the study was limited to 2-hour-per-month users.

However, if I may go off on a rant here, the thing I don't understand about this issue is why anybody actually cares, other than to get into arguments at cocktail parties and here on Slashdot. If you are worried about your cell phone causing cancer, then don't use it, or use it less, or get a phone with lower emissions levels. I suppose if we eventually discover that cell-phone use increases the risk of developing a brain tumor by 2%, lots of people will run around screaming and decide to stop using them -- even though many of those same people would (were there no cancer risk) happily chat on their cell phone while driving, an activity that probably causes an order-of-magnitude increase in the likelihood of an accident. Or maybe Congress will pass legislation so that every U.S. cell-phone buyer will get a Surgeon General's warning, like a pack of cigarettes... every time you turn it, and once every six hours thereafter, the display will say "Warning: Using this device may be hazardous to your health. If you agree to accept this risk, press SEND to continue."

There's another mp3 from tolkien on that site.
It's an Elvish poem. Great stuff.
Elvish poem

Greetings,
Merlinz

Salon also has a link to one of his poems in Elvish.

Enjoy...

Here's a much better version of the link: http://media.salon.com/mp3s/tolkien1.mp3
------------

MP3 without annoying pop-up


Refrag

There was an interesting article on Salon.com the other day about the Telex machine. http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/12/05/telex /index.html

This trend doesn't surprise me -- porn sites have been doing obnoxious things with ads for years. I've been told that porn drives all new media technology, and this seems as good a proof of that as anything.

I'm looking around at both cards and access points with linux compatibility, here's what I've found. It seems 802.11b wireless networking is definitely getting cheaper and a number of decent products have been showing up at half previous typical prices. D-Link and SMC are leading the low end of the market with decent quality products and at least stated linux support and Orinico/Lucent and Aironet/Cisco are the leaders if you want a more robust feature set for your access point (in particular, support for external antennas).

PCMCIA Cards

• For cards, the cheapest decent card I've been able to find is the D-Link DWL-650, which can be had for around $120 from a reputable web retailer. However, while D-Link claims linux support in their FAQ, I can't find a driver to download from their FTP and a google search didn't reveal anything elsewhere. Haven't really looked hard, but dubious with that in mind. I should also note that the D-Link claims shorter ranges (1,000 ft. v. 1,500) than most of the other cards/access points, but I suspect that has little real world relevance.
• The next best option seems to be the SMC 2632W, which has linux drivers available for download (haven't tried them out, though). It tends to run about $20-30 more from similar sources, but looks like a good product and appears to have better support.
• After that, its a tossup in the $200-300 range from the major networking manufacturers. I don't see a clear advantage of any of them over the cheaper products, but haven't looked at power consumption levels and comparison tests from major publications aren't new enough to include these products (that I've seen).

Access Points

For those who are also interested in what's going on with access points, including linux support on configuration:

• Currently thinking about the D-Link DWL-1000AP which goes for a little under $300 if you look around for a good web retailer. Main downside is a lack of linux support in configuration software (needed to set static IPs by address), though this isn't a big deal for me as I run a mixed network. Too bad it doesn't have a nice mini-web server for management like my HP printer (LaserJet 2100NT). They list telnet support in the data sheet, but its not clear to me if you can telnet to the hub to make changes ...
• Another potentially good and cheap model is the SMC 2652W, but supply seems to be limited on this right now. Again, no linux configuration utilities, but you can console connect via RS-232, which the D-Link doesn't have. SMC has linux drivers available for its PCMCIA card now.

Unfortunately, neither of these have the antenna adapter that some of the Lucent Orinoco (formerly WaveLAN) access points feature, but they also don't cost $700+ (its more for the 2 radio model). Not really much of an issue for household use (unless you have a multilevel apartment with concrete flooring), but if you want to cover multiple houses, roam around farther outdoors, or set up a free wireless LAN (slashdot discussion) for people in the area [SF for me] (I could run a really popular access point, living across the street from Moscone). There are a number of other good access points from Cisco/Aironet, HP, Intel, etc., but these are the standouts for price/performance in my research.

Regards, RJS

We're talking about different things. In theory, the author controls enforcement of his own GPL'd code. In practice, other people can create huge headaches for projects that have used GPL code whether or not the author himself has any objections. In fact, they can create those headaches even if no GPL code was used at all, if a sufficiently well-connected person wants to beat up on a project.

Only 171 commments? Six months ago there would have been at least 800 on this story. I'm thinking Andrew Leonard was right.

As the year 2000 limps to a close, the days when Slashdot's name was at the tip of every tech pundit's tongue, and Linux's rise to world domination seemed a foregone conclusion, are suddenly long gone. The prominence of free software in the tech and financial press has sharply declined. I mean, you know the buzz is fading fast when media outlets become so bored that they can't even muster the energy to harp on the declining stock prices of Linux companies. Sure, the dot-com downturn is responsible for a lot of the deflation, as is the normal news cycle that treats yesterday's news as, well, yesterday's news, but was it really only a year ago that VA Linux was breaking all records for IPO debuts?

Gore never said what most people think he did. He was taken way out of context.

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/12/05/telex /index.html

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

And remember what he said about Y2K?

I admire and like Eric--he's an uber-hacker--but I think in his zeal to sell "Open Source", he's become too confident in his theories.

Will the real dot-communists...

please stand up?

Seriously, folks. What happens when they get really mad and quit the chanting?

a quiet geek is a dangerous geek...

;)