I have seen a lot of bitching about the RIAA and record companies, from music fans and "artists" alike. This is the first one I've seen that actually proposes what can be done about it, beyond the casual "fishing for ideas" phase in which most strident RIAA detractors seem mired.
For those who haven't read the article, she basically proposes that the big record companies, rather than waste their time competing with one another, should just cooperate and set up a single web site that offers all of their music for download. Meanwhile, they would stop selling compact discs entirely. They would sell these songs on a nickel-per-download basis (as she points out, if the record industry had a nickel for every time someone stole one of its songs, they'd have made $150 million a year!), and make tons more money than they do selling music the old fashioned way.
While she doesn't mention small labels, or people who lack broadband or computers, I'm sure there are simple ways of dealing with these problems. The gist in the end is that piracy-hungry consumers pose a bigger threat to the record industry as a whole than each record company does to one another. Just as the American colonies once banded together to expel their English masters, to the benefit of England and the United States alike, so must the record industry unite for the benefit of us all.
I'm always getting my digital rights all messed up. Especially when stealing movies on LimeWire, my time shifting tends to get tangled in my fair use, and since information wants to be free I end up with data all over the floor. This plugin will help me manage my digital rights, so I can finally focus on what matters: ripping off starving artists.
It's good to see that we're not shying away from our ability (and, I would argue, obligation) to improve the human race through cybernetics and nanotechnology. Evolution works great when you have no one at the helm, but with Man's awareness of self, and the related ability to perceive our place in the world around us, we are capable of directing our own destiny. This is why we can (and should!) develop things like electronic enhancements. I look forward to a future when everyone is at least part computer, technology is embraced, and the worst and most dangerous jobs (e.g., soldiering) will be performed by mindless clones grown for the task rather than real people. We alone in the history of the world have the capability of determining our own destiny. Let us hope we don't squander it.
I wholeheartedly agree with you. Festival is a particularly good text-to-speech program. It sounds like an English butler, so you will feel wealthy and pampered while listening to it.
Another benefit of this is that it can be modified with minimal effort to give you audio versions of not just any web site, but any plain text source, whether it be email, your grocery list, your "to do" list (so you can get in the right mindset before arriving at work), yesterday's server stats.
I first learnt of text-to-speech when my uncle lost his eyes in a fishing boat accident. He's a computer enthusiast, and I was soon impressed with his neat new software. Since then, I've noticed that many of the "accessibility" mechanisms put in place for the handicapped can be beneficial to normal people as well. I frequently browse the 'web with no images, and just use ALT tags (intended for the blind). Certain city intersections that "chirp" for blind people when the light is green allow me to cross the street while reading. Wheelchair ramps are easy on the knees, and handicapped parking spaces are usually open and very close to my destination. Text-to-speech may be your first step into a larger, more convenient world.
I don't know, this almost sounds like they want to create a sovereign nation ruled by robots. Haven't we learned the lessons taught us by science fiction? This could only lead to border hostilities, and eventually all-out warfare, Man vs. Machine. I don't like our chances.
I couldn't believe this story. At first I was ready to read about another amusing, if charmingly disappointing, attempt at the Turing Test. But it transpires that GRACE actually function independently and managed to register for and deliver a lecture at a crowded academic conference! I was floored.
Look at how far we've come. The mechanics for her locomotion are only about a century old. The silicon electronical parts of her brains have only been around a few decades. And I'm even calling her "her!" She's a machine! That a handful of scientists and antisocial grad students have accomplished what it took evolution millions of years to do (create life) gives me hope for the future of mankind.
As I look at these articles, I'm reminded of what my parents told me: "You can do anything." And now I'm realizing that that wasn't just "you" as in "me" (tps12), but also "you" as in the entire human race. We are reaching for the stars, we are playing with the origins of life and the very fabric of our Universe. We are playing God. If we don't end up destroying ourselves in the process, then we're in for one hell of a ride.
As a small business owner in the Internet information propogation industry, and like many of the members of Slashdot, I hate SPAM. I would like to submit a list of anti-SPAM proponents, in the form of a Slashdot thread. So, if you support the prosecution of SPAMers, please post a response to this message containing a valid email address so that we may avoid any chance of identity theft. Thank you for your help. Down with SPAM!
Also, I should point out the obvious possibility that the person asking the question is a stalker trying to find a resource to help him track down his victim.
Ask Slashdot: I'm an alcoholic who can't figure out how to work my PDA when being given someone's fake number at the seedy bar down the street. Can someone help me? Anyone?
Isn't this the end result of all Free Software? At some point, in every product category, the Free program will surpass all the commercial competitors (as has been proven by ESR and RMF on multiple occaisions). Once that happens, the commercial companies will have no choice but to start distributing the Free alternative with minor alterations. This is the goal for which we should be working.
It is sad times indeed when our youth can't maintain a train of thought long enough to finish a haiku. In the spirit of setting a good example, I offer this final line: AOL is broke.
It's too bad to see AOL caving to this kind of pressure, which is one step away from piracy. We're all comfortable with advertising, whether on billboards, the sides of busses, the Slashdot PT Cruiser, television or radio. Viewing advertisements is half of an implicit contract that allows you to enjoy free or inexpensive services. AOL users who complain about pop-ups or, worse, try to subvert the advertisements' technology, are ruining the Internet for everyone. They should be treated like the hackers they are and banned from the Internet before it's too late.
A great story? I thought Flatland was pretty cool from an historical standpoint, and it had some good stuff about visualizing higher-order geometry, but the story was pretty weak. IIRC, it was about a square who got squashed by a sphere and poked by some triangles. Not exactly edge-of-your-seat material.
Finally we have used Science to absolve Dungeons & Dragons, goth culture, mp3 stealing, and video games from responsibility for school shootings. Hopefully this will shut up that element in American society that believes that censorship can ever put an end to the kind of violence that has plagued our society for the last few years.
This comes as a great relief to those of us who are of a civil libertarian bent. It seems that the effects of so-called "evil" media and entertainment are what we've always claimed: figments of the imaginations of people looking for a scapegoat. Now we can go about jailing these genetically predetermined killers before they can do any harm to society. Another triumph for Science.
I wonder if this is perhaps due to the ongoing mettling of mankind with Nature? Perhaps are great steel mills, automobiles, lead paints, and electromagnetic communications devices are finally taking their toll.
Just remember that if this trend continues, we may end up destroying one of the things that make human civilization possible (compasses). In that case, we'll either be wiped out or have to start again from scratch. Come to think of it, maybe the Universe would be better off without us.
I was so angry when my new dual G4 wouldn't boot under my OS of choice, System 4.1. Grudgingly, I upgraded to 6.0.8 (ugh, I just hate the inefficiency of MultiFinder!). If Apple tries to force me to use even later operating systems, I'm through with them. I'll just get a Pentium 4 and a copy of Windows 3.11.
Wow, now that strikes me as a lot of FUD. Do you work for Microsoft? Okay, I will deal with these complaints one at a time.
He said they'd found massive security issues with Linux
Okay, fine. But what operating system hasn't had massive security issues? It's the nature of the beast. If you've been paying attention to Slashdot lately, you'll know that even the ultra-secure OpenBSD has its share of security holes.
He said the reliability wasn't quite high enough for those mission critical items we performed
Well, given that this was in 1998, he may have had a point. But Linux has improved quite a bit since then. 2.2 was a very stable and reliable kernel, and since the 2.5 branch, I've been using the latest kernel on all of my high demand enterprise servers.
He said their was nobody to call when it broke
Yeah, except for Red Hat, SuSe, Caldera, Debian... Next!
He said that the haphazardly "open" way it had been developed practically guaranteed the existence of bugs
Yes, but they are shallow bugs. Read RMS's article, the Cathedral in the Bizarre, located here for more details.
He also said that the licensing issues prevented our lab from putting the results of our experiments in the public domain
Hahahahahahaahhaha. That's a good one. Maybe you haven't heard about the GPL, but under Linux's license you actually are required to release your experiments to the public. Try doing that in Windows!
I hope you are now educated and will not go believing any more FUD of this sort.
I've been rebooting my laptop to WC3, so maybe I'll give this a shot. I bought a subscription originally in part due to their misleading Sims compatibility claims, but this looks like it finally is truly emulating top windows games.
Uh, no, it is not emulating any Windows games. It is providing a compatibility layer so that the Windows games can run under Linux.
This is curious. At first I was going to write this off as yet another natural phenomenon I don't understand. But now I'm thinking that it's pretty odd how the Earth is suddenly "changing direction" like that.
Could this be another example of the effects of mankind on the planet? Perhaps all of our oil drilling and coal mining is destroying the ground beneath our feet as much as the air we breathe! It would make sense that when we remove the Earth's contents from the ground, we destablize the Earth's crust, thus causing expansion, which is exaggerated at the equator.
How long before we finally go to far, and the Earth dissolves entirely? In a few hundred years, we might just be an asteroid belt between Mars and Venus. Now that I think about it, the Universe might be better off with out us. Something to think about.
Those pictures look like they were rendered in 3DMax or so. I cannot view the videos, since I run Linux (Linux forever!), but I'm skeptical...do they have a prototype, or just some pretty animations?
While I agree that the spooks tend to run a little thick at these events, and that their supervision is often unwarranted (literally!), I don't know if you can really complain about that. I know I am setting myself for a huge loss of karma, but I'd like to speak my mind irregardless.
Now I don't mean to imply that you deserve such measures, but to a certain extent, I think you (and other attendants of DefCon and similar events, like H2K2 and SIGGRAPH) bring it on yourselves. The world has changed a lot since 9/11, and there is a ton of evidence pointing to computer hackers' involvement in terrorist activity. Obviously, the vast majority of people interested in computers are "good guys." But I don't think it's uncalled-for for the fibbies to pay a little, uh, extra attention to those who show an unusual interest in security, especially if it is not immediately relevant to their career. Remember, people called it "paranoia" when Jews fled Germany in 1937...sometimes such fear and extreme measures are necessary.
Just something to think about. Any other thoughts?
Linus Torvalds, widely respected throughout the industry (yay open source!) as a programmer par excellence, has stated in public that debuggers are for wimps.
Thanks to Linus, we of the Free Software community can rest assured in the knowledge that we have the most stable, most secure operating system in the world. And to what is it that makes Linux so great? Why, the fact that it was debugged entirely with printf's.
Slashdot Mirror
phsyical interfaces will be the next evolution in how we interact with machines
Isn't this how things worked before we had computers?
I have seen a lot of bitching about the RIAA and record companies, from music fans and "artists" alike. This is the first one I've seen that actually proposes what can be done about it, beyond the casual "fishing for ideas" phase in which most strident RIAA detractors seem mired.
For those who haven't read the article, she basically proposes that the big record companies, rather than waste their time competing with one another, should just cooperate and set up a single web site that offers all of their music for download. Meanwhile, they would stop selling compact discs entirely. They would sell these songs on a nickel-per-download basis (as she points out, if the record industry had a nickel for every time someone stole one of its songs, they'd have made $150 million a year!), and make tons more money than they do selling music the old fashioned way.
While she doesn't mention small labels, or people who lack broadband or computers, I'm sure there are simple ways of dealing with these problems. The gist in the end is that piracy-hungry consumers pose a bigger threat to the record industry as a whole than each record company does to one another. Just as the American colonies once banded together to expel their English masters, to the benefit of England and the United States alike, so must the record industry unite for the benefit of us all.
I'm always getting my digital rights all messed up. Especially when stealing movies on LimeWire, my time shifting tends to get tangled in my fair use, and since information wants to be free I end up with data all over the floor. This plugin will help me manage my digital rights, so I can finally focus on what matters: ripping off starving artists.
It's good to see that we're not shying away from our ability (and, I would argue, obligation) to improve the human race through cybernetics and nanotechnology. Evolution works great when you have no one at the helm, but with Man's awareness of self, and the related ability to perceive our place in the world around us, we are capable of directing our own destiny. This is why we can (and should!) develop things like electronic enhancements. I look forward to a future when everyone is at least part computer, technology is embraced, and the worst and most dangerous jobs (e.g., soldiering) will be performed by mindless clones grown for the task rather than real people. We alone in the history of the world have the capability of determining our own destiny. Let us hope we don't squander it.
I wholeheartedly agree with you. Festival is a particularly good text-to-speech program. It sounds like an English butler, so you will feel wealthy and pampered while listening to it.
Another benefit of this is that it can be modified with minimal effort to give you audio versions of not just any web site, but any plain text source, whether it be email, your grocery list, your "to do" list (so you can get in the right mindset before arriving at work), yesterday's server stats.
I first learnt of text-to-speech when my uncle lost his eyes in a fishing boat accident. He's a computer enthusiast, and I was soon impressed with his neat new software. Since then, I've noticed that many of the "accessibility" mechanisms put in place for the handicapped can be beneficial to normal people as well. I frequently browse the 'web with no images, and just use ALT tags (intended for the blind). Certain city intersections that "chirp" for blind people when the light is green allow me to cross the street while reading. Wheelchair ramps are easy on the knees, and handicapped parking spaces are usually open and very close to my destination. Text-to-speech may be your first step into a larger, more convenient world.
I don't know, this almost sounds like they want to create a sovereign nation ruled by robots. Haven't we learned the lessons taught us by science fiction? This could only lead to border hostilities, and eventually all-out warfare, Man vs. Machine. I don't like our chances.
* Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about.
I couldn't believe this story. At first I was ready to read about another amusing, if charmingly disappointing, attempt at the Turing Test. But it transpires that GRACE actually function independently and managed to register for and deliver a lecture at a crowded academic conference! I was floored.
Look at how far we've come. The mechanics for her locomotion are only about a century old. The silicon electronical parts of her brains have only been around a few decades. And I'm even calling her "her!" She's a machine! That a handful of scientists and antisocial grad students have accomplished what it took evolution millions of years to do (create life) gives me hope for the future of mankind.
As I look at these articles, I'm reminded of what my parents told me: "You can do anything." And now I'm realizing that that wasn't just "you" as in "me" (tps12), but also "you" as in the entire human race. We are reaching for the stars, we are playing with the origins of life and the very fabric of our Universe. We are playing God. If we don't end up destroying ourselves in the process, then we're in for one hell of a ride.
As a small business owner in the Internet information propogation industry, and like many of the members of Slashdot, I hate SPAM. I would like to submit a list of anti-SPAM proponents, in the form of a Slashdot thread. So, if you support the prosecution of SPAMers, please post a response to this message containing a valid email address so that we may avoid any chance of identity theft. Thank you for your help. Down with SPAM!
Also, I should point out the obvious possibility that the person asking the question is a stalker trying to find a resource to help him track down his victim.
Ask Slashdot: I'm an alcoholic who can't figure out how to work my PDA when being given someone's fake number at the seedy bar down the street. Can someone help me? Anyone?
Isn't this the end result of all Free Software? At some point, in every product category, the Free program will surpass all the commercial competitors (as has been proven by ESR and RMF on multiple occaisions). Once that happens, the commercial companies will have no choice but to start distributing the Free alternative with minor alterations. This is the goal for which we should be working.
It is sad times indeed when our youth can't maintain a train of thought long enough to finish a haiku. In the spirit of setting a good example, I offer this final line: AOL is broke.
It's too bad to see AOL caving to this kind of pressure, which is one step away from piracy. We're all comfortable with advertising, whether on billboards, the sides of busses, the Slashdot PT Cruiser, television or radio. Viewing advertisements is half of an implicit contract that allows you to enjoy free or inexpensive services. AOL users who complain about pop-ups or, worse, try to subvert the advertisements' technology, are ruining the Internet for everyone. They should be treated like the hackers they are and banned from the Internet before it's too late.
A great story? I thought Flatland was pretty cool from an historical standpoint, and it had some good stuff about visualizing higher-order geometry, but the story was pretty weak. IIRC, it was about a square who got squashed by a sphere and poked by some triangles. Not exactly edge-of-your-seat material.
Finally we have used Science to absolve Dungeons & Dragons, goth culture, mp3 stealing, and video games from responsibility for school shootings. Hopefully this will shut up that element in American society that believes that censorship can ever put an end to the kind of violence that has plagued our society for the last few years.
This comes as a great relief to those of us who are of a civil libertarian bent. It seems that the effects of so-called "evil" media and entertainment are what we've always claimed: figments of the imaginations of people looking for a scapegoat. Now we can go about jailing these genetically predetermined killers before they can do any harm to society. Another triumph for Science.
I wonder if this is perhaps due to the ongoing mettling of mankind with Nature? Perhaps are great steel mills, automobiles, lead paints, and electromagnetic communications devices are finally taking their toll.
Just remember that if this trend continues, we may end up destroying one of the things that make human civilization possible (compasses). In that case, we'll either be wiped out or have to start again from scratch. Come to think of it, maybe the Universe would be better off without us.
I was so angry when my new dual G4 wouldn't boot under my OS of choice, System 4.1. Grudgingly, I upgraded to 6.0.8 (ugh, I just hate the inefficiency of MultiFinder!). If Apple tries to force me to use even later operating systems, I'm through with them. I'll just get a Pentium 4 and a copy of Windows 3.11.
Wow, now that strikes me as a lot of FUD. Do you work for Microsoft? Okay, I will deal with these complaints one at a time.
He said they'd found massive security issues with Linux
Okay, fine. But what operating system hasn't had massive security issues? It's the nature of the beast. If you've been paying attention to Slashdot lately, you'll know that even the ultra-secure OpenBSD has its share of security holes.
He said the reliability wasn't quite high enough for those mission critical items we performed
Well, given that this was in 1998, he may have had a point. But Linux has improved quite a bit since then. 2.2 was a very stable and reliable kernel, and since the 2.5 branch, I've been using the latest kernel on all of my high demand enterprise servers.
He said their was nobody to call when it broke
Yeah, except for Red Hat, SuSe, Caldera, Debian... Next!
He said that the haphazardly "open" way it had been developed practically guaranteed the existence of bugs
Yes, but they are shallow bugs. Read RMS's article, the Cathedral in the Bizarre, located here for more details.
He also said that the licensing issues prevented our lab from putting the results of our experiments in the public domain
Hahahahahahaahhaha. That's a good one. Maybe you haven't heard about the GPL, but under Linux's license you actually are required to release your experiments to the public. Try doing that in Windows!
I hope you are now educated and will not go believing any more FUD of this sort.
I've been rebooting my laptop to WC3, so maybe I'll give this a shot. I bought a subscription originally in part due to their misleading Sims compatibility claims, but this looks like it finally is truly emulating top windows games.
Uh, no, it is not emulating any Windows games. It is providing a compatibility layer so that the Windows games can run under Linux.
Enough! This thread is supposed to be about fish factories. This is no place for philosophical debate.
This is curious. At first I was going to write this off as yet another natural phenomenon I don't understand. But now I'm thinking that it's pretty odd how the Earth is suddenly "changing direction" like that.
Could this be another example of the effects of mankind on the planet? Perhaps all of our oil drilling and coal mining is destroying the ground beneath our feet as much as the air we breathe! It would make sense that when we remove the Earth's contents from the ground, we destablize the Earth's crust, thus causing expansion, which is exaggerated at the equator.
How long before we finally go to far, and the Earth dissolves entirely? In a few hundred years, we might just be an asteroid belt between Mars and Venus. Now that I think about it, the Universe might be better off with out us. Something to think about.
Those pictures look like they were rendered in 3DMax or so. I cannot view the videos, since I run Linux (Linux forever!), but I'm skeptical...do they have a prototype, or just some pretty animations?
While I agree that the spooks tend to run a little thick at these events, and that their supervision is often unwarranted (literally!), I don't know if you can really complain about that. I know I am setting myself for a huge loss of karma, but I'd like to speak my mind irregardless.
Now I don't mean to imply that you deserve such measures, but to a certain extent, I think you (and other attendants of DefCon and similar events, like H2K2 and SIGGRAPH) bring it on yourselves. The world has changed a lot since 9/11, and there is a ton of evidence pointing to computer hackers' involvement in terrorist activity. Obviously, the vast majority of people interested in computers are "good guys." But I don't think it's uncalled-for for the fibbies to pay a little, uh, extra attention to those who show an unusual interest in security, especially if it is not immediately relevant to their career. Remember, people called it "paranoia" when Jews fled Germany in 1937...sometimes such fear and extreme measures are necessary.
Just something to think about. Any other thoughts?
Linus Torvalds, widely respected throughout the industry (yay open source!) as a programmer par excellence, has stated in public that debuggers are for wimps.
Thanks to Linus, we of the Free Software community can rest assured in the knowledge that we have the most stable, most secure operating system in the world. And to what is it that makes Linux so great? Why, the fact that it was debugged entirely with printf's.