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I think other people in this discussion have hit the nail on the head when they said it's not about content or dissenting opinions, it's about ad revenue dwindling and vanishing. Look at Keenspot and Sluggy Freelance, both of which have instituted "if you pay us, you'll be supporting our site(s) and you won't have to see banner ads" programs. Look at Themestream, which went belly-up, and TheVines, which looks like it's also headed for extinction. Look at all the free ISPs that have either vanished or consolidated and cut way back on the services they offer. Banner ads just don't work.

There definitely does need to be a new model for websites to earn revenue. The problem is, nobody's really sure just what it is yet. Tipping might work, but only if the tipper is willing to subscribe to the payment service used by the tippee. Micropayments sound good, but there are a whole bunch of hurdles in the way, and there's no more venture capital to develop such a system.

Whatever happens, it seems like ad banners are rapidly becoming so ineffective now that having them at all is tantamount to a superstitious gesture, like crossing your fingers or putting a horseshoe up over the door--it makes you feel better, but doesn't actually do anything.
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Hi Michael, thanks for changing the headline to reflect reality.

click on "market makers" at http://www.e-gold.com/unsecure/links.htm and you'll see the description "independent exchange providers" -- which hopefully clears things up. I can send anyone who wants it info on becoming one, it's an interesting job, and was even before Parker's SS troubles, which didn't begin with the SS but with trying to accept plastic (see his words at: http://www.themestream.com/articles/310965.html?pi d=002401000001). The News section at http://www.e-gold.com/news.html might also be interesting to some of you. Thanks.
JMR

Oh, Wait.

Sometimes I have strange dreams.

(As long as this story about Transformers is up, I should probably plug the rec.toys.transformers.moderated newsgroup which I help to moderate, as well as the article about Transformers fandom that I wrote a while back. And the yearly Transformers convention, BotCon, which will be in Carolina this year.)
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Oh, I agree completely. Life in the US rocks, and everyone else would love to share the fun. I was narrowly criticizing the previous comment for sounding entirely too much like Marie Antoinette . People on the top often forget how rough the other 99% of the world has it.

If we don't do a whole lot more to reduce consumption, there are three possibilities:

1. We destroy the planet
2. China catches up to us, and their copycat consumption destroys the planet
3. Everyone else realizes we're about to destroy the planet, the revolution comes, and we lose our heads

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

It's no different than Id releasing the first level of Doom for free, introduce people to your product. Baen has already been releasing the first 50 to 100 pages of their books on the net for a long time. This just takes it a bit further.

This is a method of publicity, yes--but then, Baen considers its entire Webscription program itself to be little more a method of publicity, as low as the prices are that it charges--and there are those better-known authors who are incensed at having to sell their books so cheaply (and without DRM copy-protection to boot).
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Well, it's easy enough to put them on your Palm if you have one. That's how I read them . . . and then the sequels, after I got hooked on the Bellisarius books and shelled out for the Webscription months containing them. If you don't have a PDA, well, what are you waiting for, go out and get one. ;)
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And the studios will listen. Look at how successful we were with our letter-writing campaign to get Princess Mononoke released with the original Japanese audio track intact.
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And the studios will listen. Look at how successful we were with our letter-writing campaign to get Princess Mononoke released with the original Japanese audio track intact.
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Assuming, of course, the studios' other bright idea--copy-protecting broadcast TV programs--doesn't also go through.
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Now, one of the little cheap ones like the Rio 600, that I can see, sort of. But until those big ones get down into the $200 range, I don't see much use for them save for the early adopters and people with too much money to buy toys.
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Capsule: Great movie, except the plot was a little weak.

Am I the only one amused that critics are suddenly noticing this movie as if it's something brand new, and completely neglecting the fact that it's just one example of a genre they've been content to sneer at up 'til now?
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The capsule for those who don't wish to click through: great DVD, great features (which other anime translators could learn from), great movie.
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The problem is the Linux kernel and its libraries.

I am absolutely fascinated that not a single person in this several-hundred strong thread has commented even once on the most significant part of Hollenshead's complaint: that support for Linux is difficult. Yes, sales aren't good, but support is a nightmare. Not just because of multiple distributions, but because of different kernel versions.

I can't begin to tell you how frustrating using linux as a developer is, particularly if you want to do interesting development at a low level. The kernel devteam seems to have no interest whatsoever in foolish, trivial things like maintaining compatibility with previous APIs, using sane version numbers, etc. Each time a new announcement comes out, every developer cringes and waits to see if their work is going to have to be entirely retrofitted to work for the 5% of users that will be running the new kernel, or the new glibc, or the new version of LinuxThreads, or what have you.

In comparison, the FreeBSD developers seem to have a very good understanding that providing a new feature is not an adequate excuse for breaking existing APIs. And they don't seem to have a problem providing new features without breaking APIs. Maybe that's the benefit of having an operating system that is engineered and designed instead of having one assembled through luck.

Please do not engage in any of these forbidden activities. Thank you.

Next I tried the Happy Hacker Cradle. It worked well enough for what it did, save that even the quietest keyboard I could find for it was just too loud (as well as a bit bulky). I wrote an article about my experiences with it.

After I sold the Palm and cradle to a friend, I finally got my first Stowaway. I accidentally boogered up the latch on it on the first one I got, and had to send it in for an RMA, but the one I got since then works great! It's full-sized, portable, just the neatest little thing . . . and it was actually designed by a media major, like myself. I wrote an article about the Stowaway, too.
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Next I tried the Happy Hacker Cradle. It worked well enough for what it did, save that even the quietest keyboard I could find for it was just too loud (as well as a bit bulky). I wrote an article about my experiences with it.

After I sold the Palm and cradle to a friend, I finally got my first Stowaway. I accidentally boogered up the latch on it on the first one I got, and had to send it in for an RMA, but the one I got since then works great! It's full-sized, portable, just the neatest little thing . . . and it was actually designed by a media major, like myself. I wrote an article about the Stowaway, too.
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Well, well, well. Go to bed one evening and the world turns upside down. It looks like themestream censored my article and threatened to pull it just because there were a few choice words in it. Of course, they didn't bother to tell me what, specifically, was wrong with it. What does slashdot think? Should I stop writing for them? I have redacted the "offensive" (dear Themestream: You are all a bunch of assraping pigfuckers) article, and added a link to the original, uncensored version there.

A brief excerpt:

"TeX (and it's idiot bastard progeny, LaTeX) are a prime example of all that is kludgy, evil and stupid about the Unix world. Its vices include: a poisoned and brain damaged idea of what proper typesetting should be, a fascist attitude towards letting you (god forbid) do anything actually useful without throwing your keyboard across the room several times in disgust, a simply grotesque and repulsive default "typeface," and a complete mishandling of what writing on a computer is all about."

Every couple of years there are a few people that write me mail telling me why I'm wrong, even though I'm not. Then there are a few people that get the joke, and see that I am handing down divinely-inspired wisdom.

Which are you? Read the whole article and decide for yourself. But remember: every time you recommend that someone use LaTeX instead of HTML, or some other program actually designed to get work done, the baby Jesus cries. Yes, there are a few mathemeticians that actually need to use TeX for its formula support. But you know what? You are not one of them.

From the ends of the earth, this is PeterB, signing off.

Executive summary: nice movie, but the glacial pacing was a major mistake. 3.5 stars out of 5.

Ever read any Robin Hood?

For that matter, crime is an accepted fundamental part of our life--or at least our history. You're taught about it in school, how a bunch of terrorist revolutionaries seceded from their mother country over political issues. The Civil War? Heck no, the Revolutionary one.

Besides, it's a matter of degree. I don't think anybody would be lauding a book by a mass murderer, but this is a book about a clever fellow, the dashing rapscallion who never committed a violent crime. That's a very popular heroic archetype in our culture, going all the way back to the aforementioned Robin Hood, continuing with works like The Scarlet Pimpernel, Raffles, Arsene Lupin , Harry Harrison's The Stainless Steel Rat, and so on.

Heck, go all the way back to ancient Greek mythology and you'll find plenty of tales of clever tricksters who won the day through their trickery. Odysseus was a favorite character of this type. (Such cleverness was even more valued among the ancient Greeks than it is today, according to my Greek ancient history teacher. He said that as a coming-of-age ritual, a Greek lad was required to steal one of his neighbor's sheep.)

And when you think about it, even Jesus and his Apostles were regarded as dangerous revolutionaries by the authorities of their day. Paul once had to escape a city in a manner worthy of a thief, being lowered over the city walls in a basket.
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I'll leave my whole spiel on Cooki e angst for another forum (which pays 2 cents per view), but I'm really surprised to read the comments here in Slashdot equating cookies with cracking, or believing that cookies lead to spam, or confusing them for the related but not synonymous "Web bug", or digressing into the topic of "spyware" which is not what the suit is about.

Cookies are a part of the Web. They require compliance on your part. Your browser must cooperate with the server asking to set or read a cookie. The advertising networks take advantage of the fact that the default setting on most browsers is wide open and most naive users never know about it or bother to learn. The best part of this suit is that it will expose more people to the issue, leading more to seek and demand greater control over their Web browsing. Explorer, particularly v5.5 with the Privacy Enhancement, has the best set of options (though Netscape 6.0 has a pretty good built-in cookie manager). Explorer has so many other privacy worries though, not the least of which is the potential for abusing the DHTML Persistence "feature" of 5.0 and later.

Cookies aren't the issue. It's what Engage, 24/7Media, Doubleclick, Matchlogic, AvenueA, et.al. are doing with the data they gather that's the bother. But I don't know if being "bothered" or "annoyed" is worthy of a suit. If it was, I'd like to go after the telemarketers first. I despise that tactic more than Web profiling.

Good point. My wife expresses a similar opinion in her article "DARE to Admit It Doesn't Work". DARE is a joke in many schools. It focuses student's lives around being "drug-free"--- and then misinforms them about the effects of drugs. When students finally realize they've been treated like idiots, there is bound to be some backlash.

But maybe now with the way computers have shaped the world, maybe not so much.
Just because anybody can make games for your console doesn't guarantee that it will rule the market. A market flooded with second rate games is what killed the Atari. Check out Joystic Nation.

(Sorry, posted anonymously by mistake.)

I'm surprised so many in the media ignore this. A vote for Nader is a vote for federal campaign funding for the Greens! Hardly a wasted vote in the long term... that is, if you want the Green party to succeed.

My wife has a simila r argument to yours--- voting for one of the big parties is not going to change their policies. They already have your vote. Voting in large numbers for somebody else is the only way to attract attention.

dang, and I thought my dreams were weird.

Eric Lee has written an article on ICANN and others called Who rules cyberspace?, it's written from a labour movement perspecive.

At the time, that was a joke, I think.

They're good folks there, real smart, and have managed to scramble to stay competitive. I've always been thankful that they sent me to really cool conferences in San Jose pretty often. And the networking group was always top notch.

One of the center directors had this great description of a supercomputer being a time machine. All it did was solve certain classes of problems faster than the current computers of the day. Everyone who buys a supercomputer knows that they could just wait 5 years for the microprocessors to catch up -- but presumably, if you're spending that many millions of dollars on something, it is because you need to solve the problem now, and not 5 years from now.

Time machines for sale on eBay. We are living in the future, aren't we?

I publish a privacy information site. I installed some affiliate code that include some 1x1 GIFs. I thought I'd checked them for cookies...even highlighted them with a border to illustrate the concept to my audience. I was shocked to discover that they had started serving cookies. So I yanked them. Was I guilty of anything other than carelessness. Did I scar my privacy-conscious audience. I certainly hope not, because cookies aren't virii. They aren't little demons that get inside your circuits. They were simple impression trackers, but I removed them out of principle since they offered no advantage to the visitor.

The point is that we needn't go around fearing crap like this. There are much more important privacy issues pending. Users have, and are gaining, greater control all the time. All it takes is education, not fomenting irrational fears about an innocuous and easily defeated cookie. (Believe it or not, many people who are aware of cookies value them, and actually try to preserve them by including them in their backup routines.)

The whole industry is trying to come to grips with these technologies, as are the consumers themselves. Readers of Slashdot are light years beyond where the bulk of the 'Net population is in terms of knowledge and understanding. I think we shouldn't be contributing to the hysteria.

More of my views if you care to read

I need to update my article on Jon Katz to that effect . . . "seems to exhibit a fixation toward certain topics, such as how the 'new media' is destined to kill off the 'old media.' Likes to coin new words like 'mediascape'."
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If you're writing something that people would like to see, putting it somewhere that pays you is just good sense. And there's actually a decent Linux section there...check it out.

Martin

Nope. Here it is.

This is not true. Yes, there is a 'real' peterb. Yes, I am he. Yes, the Forum 2000 SOMAD was based on me (or more accurately, on the entire output of my usenet postings and postings to internal CMU bulletin boards over 10 years ago). But that does not accurately reflect who I am, or what I do. The guys at Intelleq thought it would be cute to use my reviews as input to the matrix, and I agreed, but that's about the extent of it.

And while I happen to think Debbie Does Dallas is a fine movie, pornography is certainly not the only thing -- or even the majority of -- the so rts of movies I review.

While on the one hand the notoriety has been great, it's really kind of irritating when the SOMAD acts like a sex pig in public and then I get email from some strange woman wanting to know why I said those awful things to her. Trust me. Notoriety is overrated.

I found powerOne Finance, and I liked it so much--well, I didn't buy the company, but I did write a review of the program on Themestream explaining what it does, how to use it, and how it helped me so much in that class.

85-90% of the problems in that class involved Time Value of Money, and powerOne's TVM worksheet put me one up on all the people who had to enter one line at a time into those stinky little business calculators. Worked great!
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I've also written opinion pieces on the M100 (my opinion: uglier than heck!) and the Claudia Schiffer Palm Vx (my opinion: why???).

(Full disclosure: Yes, they are Themestream articles.)
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I've also written opinion pieces on the M100 (my opinion: uglier than heck!) and the Claudia Schiffer Palm Vx (my opinion: why???).

(Full disclosure: Yes, they are Themestream articles.)
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I've also written opinion pieces on the M100 (my opinion: uglier than heck!) and the Claudia Schiffer Palm Vx (my opinion: why???).

(Full disclosure: Yes, they are Themestream articles.)
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I've also written opinion pieces on the M100 (my opinion: uglier than heck!) and the Claudia Schiffer Palm Vx (my opinion: why???).

(Full disclosure: Yes, they are Themestream articles.)
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I've also written opinion pieces on the M100 (my opinion: uglier than heck!) and the Claudia Schiffer Palm Vx (my opinion: why???).

(Full disclosure: Yes, they are Themestream articles.)
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My letter, with Mr. Jessen's address at the top, is right here.
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That being said, however, it is worth noting that it is not necessarily the case that dubbed anime is less faithful to the original text than subtitled anime. And on that note, please let me again shamelessly whore^H^H^H^H^H^share with the community my take on the dubs versus subtitles controversy.

I reviewed X-men also, and you are welcome to read it. My quick summary is that I thought they did a great job of making a fun movie without being either completely unfaithful to the comic book or being slavishly faithful where that would have hurt the movie. I liked that they gave Magneto a good reason to hate normal people.

My only excuse is that I haven't had my coffee yet. Mea culpa. Mea culpa!

Hey, as long as I'm talking about animé (this isn't offtopic! Er, not much.) I watched an animé porno movie the other day and reviewed it. It is called F3: Frantic, Frustrated, and Female. Enjoy.

There are also 3 Tenchi movies. In English, they are called Tenchi Muyo in Love, Tenchi Muyo 2: The Daughters of Darkness, and Tenchi Forever. They are all good, but my personal favorite was Tenchi Forever, since it was in my opinion the one that dealt with issues of love and sexuality in the most mature fashion.

The women of Tenchi are each worth a book in themselves, and it would take too long to list them here, but I'll put in a plug for my favorite, Ryoko the silver-haired asskicking space pirate.

Both the dubbed and subtitled versions of the Tenchi material is good (although I don't like the English actor who does Tenchi's voice.) The American actor who dubs Ryoko is fabulous. On this topic, by the way, I have written an article discussing why I prefer dubs to subtitled animé movies when the dubs are good quality. If you take a look, please let me know what you think!

I wrote an article about the Princess Mononoke DVD situation and decided to donate the proceeds to Nausicaa.net. It got posted to Slashdot, and boom!. Over $182 worth of donations. I also write a column about the Palm that makes a respectable amount of money.
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I wrote an article about the Princess Mononoke DVD situation and decided to donate the proceeds to Nausicaa.net. It got posted to Slashdot, and boom!. Over $182 worth of donations. I also write a column about the Palm that makes a respectable amount of money.
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I wrote an article about the Princess Mononoke DVD situation and decided to donate the proceeds to Nausicaa.net. It got posted to Slashdot, and boom!. Over $182 worth of donations. I also write a column about the Palm that makes a respectable amount of money.
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(Sorry, I couldn't resist. :)

It's funny that the more columns Jon Katz writes, the more he seems to keep saying the same thing...
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