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Of course, there are few ways (only one, that I know of, but I'm biased as hell) to efficiently pay anyone, anywhere, a dollar's worth of anything (much less ten cents worth) on the internet. The problem, as I've said before, is that in this debate it's a lot more fun to scream "LIAR" and "THIEF" back and forth than to actually do something in the real world of economics about what Courtney Love said, and make yourself ABLE to give her the tip she deserves for her music if she'd just ask me for it. *sigh*
JMR

(Ready to click a million geeks a spot of e-gold, as usual, just send me your account number.)

I just finished reading the "Philosophy" section of Fling's Sourceforge site and I've got that same creepy feeling I always get whenever I see a Randroid running at full tilt. I get the feeling that many geeks latch onto Rand because she appeals to their revenge fantasies.

I have no disagreement with the personal responsibility aspects of Objectivism -- ultimately, each one of us has to sleep in the bed that he or she made. The "me first always" stance really bothers me though. The blanket assumption that the disadvantaged are that way because they earned it or are lazy and incompetent smacks of the purely greedy kind of thinking that may end up being our ultimate demise.

Want a nervous laugh? Go hit the Ayn Rand Institute's site and check out articles such as Sweatshop Opponents want to Violate Worker's Rights, Against Environmentalism, or my all-time favourite, Why Christmas Should Be More Commercial (Even if you're not religious, don't you think we really overdo that holiday's shopping aspect?).

Want some food for thought? Check out author Paulina Barsook and what she has to say about the kind of libertarianism that many people in high-tech are buying into these days.

Protection from criminal actions by governments, and more specifically criminals in governments, big business, financial instituations, etc. who use and write the "law" to protect their own limited criminal interests is vitally important. Equally, protection from individuals who use such protection to justify and protect their own individual thievery and rape of the creative elements in the society is important as well.

What we have is a war between the criminal elements that make up and contribute to the current internet and global culture. It is a war between criminal organisations who want to maintain their monopolies, and individuals who have been driven to criminal behavior by the rip offs in the world around them. It becomes a part of the culture. It is extraordinarily difficult to treat everyone you deal with with some sort of "code of ethics" or "code of honor" if you run into the argument that "only losers pay full price", as noted in a recent Salon Article; or you are trapped in the culture of "Net Slaves"

This is called stealing, and the last time I checked it was against most (all?) major religions, and the laws of most countries.

Well, did you read/hear Courtney Loves rant about the major record labels and how they screw over artists?

Did you read that the Big 5 Music labels settled a case with the FTC basically showing that they were guilty of price fixing?

How about the fact that the Canadian equivalent to the RIAA, the SOCAN, got the Canadian government to institut a blank media levy because they claim all citizens are evil beings who "pirate" music.

Really, if you want to look at this in a religious light, think of Napster as karma, comming back to kick the music industry in the balls.

-- iCEBaLM

Do you recall Courtney Love's lengthy speech to some online entertainment conference? Well she has followed up her words with action. Last week Hole's website posted 50+ rare and live MP3's. Interestingly enough, I met Courtney on a flight from Seattle to LA in January 95, and was lucky enough to have a pen and something to write on handy. She was gracious enough to give me an autograph, and even added a bit of humour to it. It was a Wired magazine cover which she emblazoned "I can uh.... download..." along with her signature. Even in '95 she had a clue - she's obviously taken strides with the changing times and technology.

That said, I agree wholeheartedly that labels spend a lot of time screening in order to find what's most likely to sell. It's a process that's guaranteed to generate mediocrity, really.

Courtney Love made a pretty interesting speech recently. click the link to check it out. Tony

I'll point you to a discussion of the situation by a major artist: http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/love/ index.html. This was on /. a while back...

The vast majority of money that musicianss [sic] receive [sic] now is through live performances and merchandise sales.

The RIAA only has to show the statistics: virtually no unsigned artists are benefitting from Napster. At least, not in comparison to the huge volume of commercial music distributed by the major labels. And Boies himself claims that only 2% of artists are signed. Therefore, by the RIAA's stats, his particular assertion about controlling the means of distribution is unfounded.

The truly great (and, sadly, late) guitarist Howard Roberts once observed, "People don't know what they like-- they like what they know." That's why RIAA-controlled acts overwhelmingly dominate Napster traffic; obviously, people are sharing what's popular.

And why is it popular? Because the RIAA's member companies fund the "independent" promotion which buys that popularity. Reread Courtney Love does the math and Steve Albini's The Problem With Music . In that sense, the RIAA already controls Napster, just as it controls the longer-established distribution channels-- illegally, immorally, and (at least to this point) untouchably. Whether Boies can establish this in court is another matter.

As an unsigned artist, I've considered making my music available on Napster, but what good would it do me? Even if all mention of RIAA-controlled acts vanished from Napster servers overnight, how would a Napster user find me tomorrow? How would s/he know what search terms to use?

Sadly, about the only promotion method available to unknown, unsigned artists like myself is shameless, if subtle, spamming, such as this.
--
syrynx

Ha. Little you know. I've been in the SCA 10+yrs, and where you thought

Making high-tech swords? I think these people need girlfriends.

Making high-tech swords? Some people will do anything to get a girlfriend.

I commend metallurgy highly to you. :)

Ha. Little you know. I've been in the SCA 10+yrs, and where you thought

Making high-tech swords? I think these people need girlfriends.

Making high-tech swords? Some people will do anything to get a girlfriend.

I commend metallurgy highly to you. :)

I'm glad the above article was moderated up, but why did it got moderated "funny"?

Jeez, the author of the IT article was painfully confused -- if anyone took the time to read it, you'd discover that "C.G.I. programs are easily exploited by network attackers", and are "invasive of users privacy". Criminy -- since its impossible for the client to know if the server just served up a CGI or a static page, the only solution would be to ban HTTP entirely too. Oh my god! It's The Death of The Internet as We Know It!!! (tm). Think of the Children!!!!! (tm).

The original author demonstrated painful cluelessness in the article, and it's impossible for me to guess what Simson L. Garfinkel had in mind from the misunderstood snippets the article's author has presented us. Why are any of us spending any time on this?

BTW -- do any of us remember Simson Garfinkel, the guy from salon who told us about Mattel Spyware just two weeks ago? Does anyone read or think about these articles?

The idea that we're suddenly going to be having "franken-babies" any time soon is
laugh-out-loud funny for those who have even the slightest inkling of what we don't
know in cellular mechanics (or, to translate into hype-speak: nano-biology)

Salon magazine recently had a good primer on the reasons why this nightmare scenario
ain't happening any time soon. You can find it here.

The idea that we're suddenly going to be having "franken-babies" any time soon is
laugh-out-loud funny for those who have even the slightest inkling of what we don't
know in cellular mechanics (or, to translate into hype-speak: nano-biology)

Salon magazine recently had a good primer on the reasons why this nightmare scenario
ain't happening any time soon. You can find it here.

Courtney Love does the math

You said it right there Guy. Intent is the key. But to know the intent means you can get into someone's head, which is impossible. You can say I had malicious intent all you want and unless I agree with you you really have no proof because I can just plead the 5th. It's your responsibilty during discovery to find and show facts that can hint at my intent.

The issue that most slashdotters are getting at, whether or not they know it, is "What constitutes Aiding and Abetting?" The RIAA is trying to set precedent such that all file-sharing is made illegal on the premise that file-sharing leads to the illegal distribution of MP3s or The-Next-Big-Thing. There are a lot of companies who will be in trouble if/when these precendents are set; consider M$, Novell, Banyan, (all the) Unix's, etc. They all have the potential to allow someone to pirate music. The only thing is that Napster makes it easier to find music (that I should be able to try before i buy since it costs so damn much). My argument is that the legality of linking should not be in question as the problem is the RIAA and the music industry themselves. Or didn't you read the article that Courtney Love wrote. Oh thats right, my story never got posted.

bob

There is *no* obvious, or even semi-obvious, way to turn off the pop-up ads

Go to keyword "Marketing Preferences" and uncheck it. It's on the New User Tour (or at least used to be).

What's really annoying is that now AOL resets your marketing preferences every year, so you have to uncheck them annually.

Linux has become political. Period. The part that really annoys me is how pretentious Linux and the whole OpenSource movement had become. The high profile of Linux as the next great challenger to Darth Gates and his evil Windows empire, had caused too many non-technical punditsto wax eloquent about the state of OSes and IT in general. Oy veh!

Here's some of the best newlywed advice, I've ever seen.

What is really needed is something half way between Napster and the established music industry.

There was actually a really interesting thread on /. a few days ago, it never made it to the front page and now has about 15 comments...

It is about an article by Courtney Love (worth reading) on Salon . From what she says it sounds like pretty much anything would be better than the current Music Biz...

DrEldarion wrote "They've already done experiements where they put electrodes on a guy and he was able to move a cursor around the screen just by thinking about it... (sorry, I forgot where I read that... no link :/ ) "

Here's some links to articles about that:

• Brain Implant Allows Paralyzed Man To Control Computer
• Implant Lets Computer, Paralyzed Man's Brain 'Talk'
• Brain Implant Helps Quadroplegics Communicate
• Medical Marvel Links A Brain And A Computer
• New Brain Implant Connects To Nervous System
• Thought-Activated Computing
• Brain Implant allows Paralysed Man To Communicate With Computer

• Also, a Slashdot article:

• Brain Implants Control Computers

" Anyways, I'm sure that eventually you'll just have a DataJack in your head (just like in ShadowRun!) where you'll just plug in a cable and you're all set. "

Sounds like fun to me! ;-)

Impossible means no one's done it yet.

I vowed to stop reading Salon in disgust over the Henry Hyde smear job. I couldn't resist, though -- there was just too much good stuff to pass up.

Recently, I realized that I haven't looked at Salon, or even thought about it, in months. It's turned into a cross between the Nation, a really boring issue of Penthouse Forum and the columns in "alternative" newspapers where the writers think they're geniuses because they say "fuck" in every other sentence. Remember that google-part series by the Chinese call-girl/writer? Snore...

Looking now out of curiosity, I see they've now added a whole "Sex" section to their main page. I think Zico's right about them getting desperate. Hint to Salon: the sex angle is good, just don't write any more about Richard Stallman's sex life, OK?

This is a common Microsoft marketing strategy. If there's something interesting that might become the "next wave" that someone else is doing, they say "Hogwash! Our strategy is the best, and it will rule forever." Quietly though, they copy and improve on the "next wave" strategy, and eventually present it as their own.

Sometimes this presentation is real, and sometimes it is vapor just to scare incoming competitors away. I'm not sure which one this is. Historically, Microsoft is quite predictable.

But mostly, I just like this picture. Half Third Reich, half Pansygates.

Run! Run for your lives!

Salon magazine has an article article about the announcement and their take on this...it's not even *predicted* by MS to be out by 2002 so don't hold your breath:

Doesn't mean that they didn't act like a bunch of clueless jerks in the first place.

And before anyone tries it, I don't care about "But I use it to preview music for my next CD purchase" arguments... all evidence I've seen is biased and anecdotal. What someone says and what they do are often two different worlds.

A difficult thing to poll, don't you think?

I use Napster a lot, but you know what? It's STILL not as useful as the binaries newsgroups. Why? Because the demographics of Napster are much more limited. Everybody has the same songs.

I do pull down music, and some I keep without buying. But it's important to understand I *hate* corporate, commercialized crap. Of the CD's I *do* buy, they are INFLUENCED by Napster and the Newsgroups. Here are some examples I bought based on Napster traffic:

King Missile (yes, they have more than one song), FrontLine assembly, some old Devo, Slade, Front 242, Atari Teenage Riot, and John Zorn (!!). Great stuff that would never pass the corporate filters on the FM...

Some artists don't mind being "not tipped", if they can overthrow their RIAA pimps and gain access to the audience at the same time. Perhaps lost sales will be recovered in new fans? See Courney's article at Salon.

After reading her article, I have newfound respect for artists who buck the system. Most of them are treated as badly as immigrant housekeepers in Southern California, and can die just as poor even if they generate "hits".

You should read her article. Here's a link:

http://www.salon.com/t ech/feature/2000/06/14/love/index.html

While artists aren't obligated to sign a contract with a record company, there's almost no other way to get your albums distributed. And since there's only a handful of record companies, they can easily make unreasonable demands of the artists, at least until the artist has gotten big and their contract runs out... then they might have some negotiating power. But by then they've already lost ownership of all the music they made up to that point. You can blame artists for signing contracts, but it's silly to think they do it because they don't read the contract or they don't understand the contract. They do, they just know that they don't really have a choice if they want to get distributed.

It all comes down to control. The artist should be in control because it's their copyright.

But right now, it's not the artist's copyright. It's the record label's. Now, an artist is considered a 'work for hire' and the record label owns all of the rights to all of the songs that were recorded while the artist is under contract, for perpetuity. For more on this, see Courtney Love's article on Salon.com.

It all comes down to control. The artist should be in control because it's their copyright.

But right now, it's not the artist's copyright. It's the record label's. Now, an artist is considered a 'work for hire' and the record label owns all of the rights to all of the songs that were recorded while the artist is under contract, for perpetuity. For more on this, see Courtney Love's article on Salon.com.

--

BSD 4.4 is neither FreeBSD nor OpenBSD (nor NetBSD for that matter). However, it was the last official release of BSD by Berkeley, and is the code that today's BSD's are based upon (with quite a few twists and turns along the way).

For a excellent, if a bit dry, history of BSD check out: Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution

For a more narrative, though less inclusive, story of BSD try: BSD Unix: Power to the people, from the code

--locust

There seems to be two major movements, in terms of windowing agents, for linux. Down one path is the usability managers, window maker, blackbox, and possibly gnome. Down the other, enlightenment, and other such projects. With the current surge of money into such open source ventures, by companies such as VA linux systems and RedHat, there is a drive to take linux from its current niche market, and move it into the mainstream. And with this..comes much confusion and debate.

Many smaller projects are being integrated into far larger ones, and bloatware is not too hard to come by, even in our stability/usability driven unix world. The end user may not always want something which is usable, and want something pretty. The whole idea of theming, along with general extensibility, is pretty active in the open source community. Well, we _do_ have access to the source, and can change the feel of our applications, along with the feel of our desktops in general. Bad thing, or good thing? WinAmp and Mozilla are both very popular theming items, read: http://www.salon.com/tech/fea ture/1999/05/19/desktop/

But in this theme and customization driven market place, where a few vendors have taken hold of many consumerization-tactics that drive many of America's other industries, where do we find our usability? Surely, gnome and KDE are both very usable desktop environments, but neither addresses some of the major easy of use problems in linux.

Nautilus is a bitch to compile, and is NO where near being finished right now, as to why this article was posted, I know not--It only reflects poorly on the work which the gnome-team and Eazel have done....It just often seems that the level of easy we need, ends up being a more limited system in general. I'm not really sure of linux's future as a true desktop Operating System, but as long as there's companies like Eazel out there, trying and trying, I'm sure we'll get somewhere...

However, I like the idea of using a computer, I would be using computers even if they werem't as exciting or popular. So because of this, and because I am willing to take charge of my own experience, I don't like to run a complete Desktop-Experience, such as gnome or KDE. Whatever gets the job done, boys.

The necessary post full of other links....

Salon article
"End of the tech world" piece from AnchorDesk
a "So What?" peice from E-Commerce Times
Forbes says sell the stock...
...but StarTribune say keep it
MS and hardware
And last, but certainly not least, Ballmer says if they're broken up, prices will rise.

Sometimes, it really baffles me that people get paid to write some of this stuff.

There's a whole bunch of really insightful posts at salon.com as follows:

Are two Microsofts better than one?

Court to Microsoft: This is for real!

Microsoft owes everything to Justice (how MSFT was lucky about IBM)

The main tech page, of course, is at http://www.salon.com/tech/

There's a whole bunch of really insightful posts at salon.com as follows:

Are two Microsofts better than one?

Court to Microsoft: This is for real!

Microsoft owes everything to Justice (how MSFT was lucky about IBM)

The main tech page, of course, is at http://www.salon.com/tech/

There's a whole bunch of really insightful posts at salon.com as follows:

Are two Microsofts better than one?

Court to Microsoft: This is for real!

Microsoft owes everything to Justice (how MSFT was lucky about IBM)

The main tech page, of course, is at http://www.salon.com/tech/

Actually, there was a very good book a couple years ago (I wish I could remember the title) about how all this "individualism" and "anti-corporatism" was the direct and intended result of corporate campaigns of the 50's and 60's.

You're probably thinking of

"The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism"
By Thomas Frank University of Chicago Press, 287 pages

The review is at Salon.

George

If you thought you were cool because you were no brands, in this Salon piece "Consumed by consumption" you will learn that you are just telling "I am so rich that I don't have to buy class with brands"
__

Interesting. There is a very important thesis in the book Class by Paul Fussell which pertains here.

He presents a paradigm of American society in which there are 12 social classes, which are as much cultures as economic brackets. One of the many things he discusses is the idea of "legible clothing", that is to say, clothing with words printed on it. Displaying the brand names on your clothing is a way of asserting which social class you belong to, or wish to belong to.

In the four lower classes, "impressive" brands are largely inaccessible because of cost. However, when a member of the lower classes can afford clothing of such a brand, s/he gravitates towards clothing which flaunts its brand, in as big, bold letters and icons as it possibly can; this communicates to other members of the same class "I am more wealthy than you".

The upper four classes prefer clothing with either no brands apparent or extremely subtle branding. Wearing prominent logos is vulgar. Also, this turns the identification of the brand into a test of the viewer's class: it allows the wearer to test whether they are dealing with someone familiar enough with, say, Versace gowns as to be able to tell one when they see one.

It is the middle three classes who consume "designer" and "branded" clothing the most. They can afford it, and they are often insecure about their class status: there is nothing worse for someone in the middle classes than to be mistaken for someone in the lower classes. Wearing designer jeans, e.g., back in the 1980s, was a way for middle class school girls especially to differentiate themselves from their lower class classmates.

For an absolutely fascinating (IMHO) look at this, check out this Salon article "Consumed by Consumption".

At any point, the reason I mention this is two-fold (beyond the obvious one that it might amuse you, gentle readers).

First, if you've ever aspired to either climb the class lader or merely become better at your Sherlock Holmes-style disguises, this provides a very nifty little heuristic. Only one part of many, but a vital part.

Second, brand watching -- wrt people's clothing -- doesn't merely tell you the penetration of corporatism into private life. It also is an at-a-glance rough measure of the class demographics in a social environment. Analysts and pundits are always saying things like "the middle class is disappearing" etc. Well, go collect your own qualitative data. See for yourself what the class distrubution is like in your area.

I think you mean Slate. Salon hasn't tried to charge for access in my memory.

"Don't blame me! I voted for Kodos!"

Of course, feel free to insert your own argument about how those who would commit the mortal sin of piracy (or "sharing") aren't likely to want to pay to pirate music.

B

• "Most people are bad programmers," says Joy. "The honest truth
  is that having a lot of people staring at the code does not find the
  really nasty bugs. The really nasty bugs are found by a couple of
  really smart people who just kill themselves. Most people looking at
  the code won't see anything ... You can't have thousands of people
  contributing and achieve a high standard."

Salon had an article last year about the number stations.
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