I mean, you don't need the source to make changes to the OS. The guy talking about shunning Linux is obviously a total moron who's too much of an exploitative capitalist pig to support something cooperative like Linux, and who knows nothing about software.
You don't need source code to alter any piece of software--that's what reverse engineering is for, and even the lowly warez-d00dz often have skills enough to alter how programs operate. I've seen the most advanced forms of software protection broken by a little patch, and trojans inserted into otherwise innocuous files.
Having the source code is actually a benefit to prevent tampering, because if you want to be paranoid you could always have your head IT guy compile straight from the source to create binaries which, if you want to be totally paranoid, can be PGP-signed for verification. No fucking way you can do that with Windows, OS/2, or anything else--yeah, you can PGP-sign files once installed for verification later, but who knows what gaping holes are in the original code?
You seem to be an otherwise intelligent, progressive person. But, like too many people, when someone shouts "Won't somebody *please* think of the children," you start to get irrational...
> Censorship is not prudishness
What I said is thet you're advocating censorship due to your own prudishness. The two generally complement and reinforce one another. You just seemed to be so *offended* at the very idea that such things as bondage, barely legal girls, and double penetration are out there on the Net being talked about and depicted. You even lumped them together with (yucky) coprophilia and bestiality.
> I lumped these items together because they are things that a lot of parents would
> have severe objections to their children witnessing.
Sure, of course; but you do make a distinction, don't you? But that's an aside. The real issue is that, as a parent, it's *your* job to teach your kids, from at least 7th grade onward (newest studies show that 1 in 5 middle school kids engage in at least oral sex at least once), what is healthy and what is unhealthy, at least giving them the basics about sex, and telling them what they shouldn't access on the Net if they're going to be around the Net. Bottom line: it's your responsibility as a parent to set out boundaries for your youngster and teach him/her not to cross them, not my responsibility as someone who wants to provide a free Net terminal in my laundromat/restaurant/bookstore/whatever, to make sure I dumb down my Net access just for your kids.
> Bondage may be consensual, and for the most part is play-acting, but real
> dominance in a relationship, particularly when it is usually associated with sadism,
No no no, it isn't associated with sadism; that's why there are two separate terms, B&D and S&M. A B&D relationship usually takes the form of one submissive partner who finds fulfillment and feels loved by giving his/her will over to the dominant partner, much as in an old-fashioned heterosexual marriage the wife supposedly felt comfort and felt loved by trying to make her husband and kids happy. The dominant male or female feels loved by having this huge amount of trust and care placed with him/her, much as in intense hetero relationships the young woman feels like the man is a lover/father figure. It's actually a very caring relationship is you analyze it along those lines, and not unlike old-fashioned marriage philosophies adapted to the 21st century. But I digress, I just wanted to point out an error of yours. Those of us who live in or near big cities know that there's a huge B&D community, which thanks to misconceptions like yours is fairly underground much as the gay and lesbian community was 15 years ago.
> is not normal. "Barely legal" caters to the borderline pedophile, and is the
> pederast's methadone
But your big mistake is in describing Barely Legal, either the magazine/website by Hustler or similar material, that way. I suggest reading http://www.salon.com/health/sex/urge/1999/12/04/un derage/print.html It is natural and healthy for males to be attracted to females who look about 15-25--any good psychology textbook will tell you that. That's why pedophilia is defined as sexual attraction towards pre-teens. Sexual attraction to teenagers is a natural biological force, which we in America have made taboo due to purely cultural forces. We in America try to keep our kids naive children for as long as possible, which to my thinking is the whole root of the problems we have in schools now--kids are given huge responsibilities akin to those of adults, but very few rights, and are expected by parents to be asexual even though their hormones tell them "party time." Nature tells us that, in strictly biological terms, people are physically mature enough for sex within a year of first menses, and thus it's not abnormal at all to be physically attracted to people who are at least adolescents. Of course, people in this country are seldom *emotionally* ready for sex in early adolescence, but attraction is a natural biological force. Why do you think Natalie Portman (later than in *The Professional*), Joey Lauren Adamns, Alicia Silverstone, Kate Moss, etc. etc. were considered so beautiful? The people who were attracted to their youthful features weren't pedophiles, just normal. Attraction to pre-adolescents is what defines pedophilia, not the screwed up Puritanical American tendency to think that 18 is some magic age at which people are suddenly adults.
> But as a libertarian, I greatly object that you wish to ban a class of software for
> use in private.
I never said that. Use whatever you want in private, I don't care.
> Censorware may be morally objectionable to you, but for some
> people it isn't. It is one thing to keep censorware out of publically funded
> libraries, but it is quite another to keep it out of a private laundermat.
I never said that it would be unlawful censorship to use censorware or keyword blocking in a private facility such as that. I just said that it would still be censorship, although a legal non-governmental form, and that word filtering would filter too many useful sites to be truly a good solution, and that it's not the responsibility of the establishment to filter, it's the responsibility of the parent to teach his/her kids what to access, since there are many porn sites which will still come through any effort to filter. The guy who asked this question didn't just ask what to use, he asked complex moral and ethical questions about whether it's right to help set up a filter like this, and I gave him my honest answer that the "right" thing to do is, I think, not to filter, and especially not to use ineffectual word-based filtering as was suggested--because it's not his responsibility to make sure your kids don't go to porn sites, it's *your* responsibility to teach your kids better. And despite your protestation to the contrary, my contention that Americans are prudish does have a place in the discussion: only in America and similarly sexually prudish countries would anyone be having this conversation about whether or not to filter Net access at the terminal.
> It's absolutely stupid to say to a parent "you did a bad job raising your kids so
> you forfeit all rights to keep pornography away from them".
You are so narrow-minded on this issue that you didn't even listen to what I said, you morphed my words way beyond their meaning. You, as a parent, have every right to prevent your kids from doing whatever you don't think they should be doing. Fine. So be it, I don't care. But you do not, do not, do *not* have the right to expect that censorware or word-based filtering will be applied to a public-access Net terminal. The owners of that terminal, as long as it's in a private establishment, can install whatever filtering they wish. But they don't have to if they don't want to, and no one can expect them to. That was all I was saying. That it's the parent's responsibility to make sure kids don't access naughty things, not the owner of a Net terminal. If you don't like the open Net access, don't let your kids go there. .
> What possibly right do you have to pick and choose who is fit to be a parent?
> You, sir, have absolutely no moral, legal or ethical right to tell someone else
> how they should raise their own children
The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America gives me that right. I can tell you or anyone else how to raise your children; you, of course, have the right to ignore me. But, I'm right.;-)
> How dare you!
I dare quite readily and forcefully, thank you, because someone has to be the voice of freedom in the tide of censorship, someone has to say "it's not his responsibility to keep your kids off the Net sites you don't like, it's *your* responsibility." Else, the Net would cease to be a very free and open place, and most of us wouldn't like that. Imagine, billions and billions of AOL content-pages...the horror...
> Before you start accusing us of reducing the net to our own "narrow ideology and
> belief and morality", take a good look at youself. We certainly do not want
> to impose our morality on the net. But you, on the other hand, want to impose your
> morality on people's lives and children.
See how black-and-white it is to you? I haven't advocated pushing any sort of morality, or immorality, on anyone. All I advocated is keeping Net terminals like the one mentioned free of censorware which will block out signal as well as noise. All I advocated is the dialectic that
A) censorware, and especially word filtering, don't work and block many, many legitimate sites, and
B) it is the parents' responsibilty to keep the child off "bad" parts of the Net, not the responsibility of the public terminal owner, therefore
C) the best course might probably be to install a terminal with no filtering.
It's entirely up to the establishment installing the netterm, not up to you or me, but the guy asked our advice and I gave him mine. I have no agenda other than freedom, and keeping people like you who expect everything to be filtered and cleansed and AOLified from being the only people heard. So, keep an open mind next time, instead of not listening and distorting everything someone with a different view says. Libertarian my ass--I'm a libertarian, and you're too narrow minded to see the forest for the trees.
I can't say I'm disappointed that Remarq's free service went bye-bye. Not only was its pay service not known for being among the best in either retention or group availability, but its free service was, IMHO, a mockery of USENET. It didn't carry many of the active groups, and it catered mostly to people who don't really understand USENET or the many ways to access it. As such, I think it dameged "real" USENET providers, by allowing Web users to go to USENET and stay there without learning even the simplest basics about it, and by providing a free alternative just barely good enough to keep newbies there and keep them from joining up with real providers--thus making it harder for real providers to stay in the black.
It's hard for me to make that last statement, since I'm very much in favor of Free Software, but there's a major difference between the big software companies and the big USENET services. Even the "big" USENET services are relatively small, and many have trouble staying afloat; RemarQ cut into an already lean profit margin for some providers, and the cost to the public of the important USENET news services shutting down is, dare I say, more grave than the cost of losing this free and limited RemarQ service.
Also, as I said, services like Remarq allowed people to get onto USENET without learning any of the basics involved, many such people never even realizing that they're not on the Web any more. While I'm a champion of ease-of-use, there comes a point when the ease-of-use of RemarQ does more harm than good. You end up with most of the free RemarQ users--not all, but most--not contributing to the newsgroups they're accessing, never bothering to read the FAQ because RemarQ does all the work for them, and littering them with "me, too"s the likes of which haven't been seen since the horrid AOL invasion of yore. Most of the senseless wastes of bandwidth I've seen on USENET recently, all the "me, too"s and clueless newbies who won't read the FAQ even after you tell them twice, have come from RemarQ.
The loss of RemarQ isn't even that bad, since great premium USENET access can be gotten for between $5.95 and $14.95 a month. Personally, even though the NNTP connection is limited to 33Kbps, I prefer Altopia's service: $12 a month, they have every single newsgroup, and a minimum of a four day retention for binaries (up to 8 days, depending) and longer for text (usually about 7). If you have a cable connection, and down/upload binaries, you can pretty much leave your connection on all the time to make up for the slow connection cap. They also offer 128kbps access, but at a hefty $48/month. One reason I support them so much is that Chris at Altopia seems to be big on freedom and very against censorship--Altopia has never dropped a group, for any reason, that I know of. As long as you're not uploading anything illegal (yeah, *you*, wArEZ d00dz and pedos!) Altopia doesn't care what you do, and is very conscious about not keeping records longer than necessary to prevent abuse. I like their privacy policy, it's absolutely the best. To be fair, I also hear good things about uncensored-news and usenetserver.
But that's just my 2 cents; support a free (as in -dom) USENET by subscribing to a good provider. Please, they need as much help as they can get to keep the news free and uncensored, unlike the Web.
> It's not about being prudish, it's about blocking off what you don't want to see
And that is the very definition of censorship. When you filter based on what you, personally, don't wish to see, and have that choice be applicable to everyone, that's censorship. And in this case it's censorship for the purposes of being prudish. If you don't like something, don't look at it. If someone leaves a terminal pointed to a site you don't like, close the window. It's that simple.
And yes, you're obviously prudish; you lump bondage and "barely legal" in the same category as bestiality and coprophilia. The latter two are considered very unusual perversions, while bondage is a consensual lifestyle choice much like homosexuality or heterosexuality, and "barely legal" is a term usually used to refer either to the Hustler magazine/website of the same name, or to girls 18-22 who look young and girlish--in other words, the type of women most men are naturally sexually attracted to.
> My biggest objection however is the insistance that I can't keep my children away
> from anything that isn't immediately fatal.
You pro censorship types are such blame-shifting imbeciles. Sir, you can keep your kids away from anything you want to. You can keep them from going to public access Internet terminals--hell, you can lock them into AOL-only sites on your home computer, if that's what you want. You can keep them out of standard junior high/high school sex ed classes, if you want to. You can keep your kids away from whatever you choose to keep them away from. My sole point is that ultimately it's a parent's responsibility to teach his or her children well enough so that they don't need useless and inaccurate key-word filtering on public terminals to keep them from looking at inappropriate things. If your kids are raised properly, you don't need to protect them from the Big Bad Internet, they'll know which sites are good and healthy and which sites are negative and unhealthy. But I guess Americans just don't want to take responsibility for raising their kids and teaching them well any more, I guess they want to censor the world in the hopes that their kids won't be exposed to sexuality of any kind, ever. That's why we have insanely high teenage pregnancy rates and sex crime rates compared to France, England, and most of the rest of Europe, where kids are taught about sexuality and taught the difference between constructive and destructive sexuality.
It's very telling that someone modded down my first comment in this thread, which simply pointed out that filtering by words contained on the page is ineffectual, and that ultimately it's a parent's responsibility to raise children who know what they should and should not be looking at on a public access Internet terminal. It's very telling indeed, about the outright Puritanism which is still rearing its ugly head in this nation, holding us back even after centuries.
I repeat, and pay attention this time: "Yes, there's lots of unhealthy sexuality on the net that I wouldn't want my kids exposed to at an early age. But do you know the best way to keep them from looking at that stuff? It's by having honest discussions with them about adolescence, life, sex, and the difference between sex with love and sex without it, and the difference between healthy sexuality and destructive sexuality. If parents aren't willing to do that, they shouldn't be parents, and you have no responsibility to filter through software what parents should be filtering by education. Censorship "for the good of the children" is no better than cesorship for any other reason. Nazis and NetNannys are two sides of the same coin; it's the parent's responsibility to supervise the child, to raise the child, to teach the child the difference between constructive and destructive sexuality, not to try half-assedly to reduce the Net to their own narrow ideology and belief and morality."
There is absolutely and unequivocally no way that filtering a site according to the words it uses is going to do anyone any good. Here's why:
To begin with, lots of porn sites use no text whatsoever on their main pages--they have each page layed out using GIFs with text on them. Why would they do this? To avoid getting filtered for containing offensive text, of course. Yes, lots of sites use meta tags to attract the search engines--but increasingly they use pages off the main page for that, and have their main pages mostly image-based. Porn site operators aren't idiots, they know how to avoid being filtered.
Secondly, filtering for "harsh" words would also filter out too much signal, not just the noise. For example, what words do you want to filter? Filtering "pussy" will make lots of cat-lover sites off-limits, along with some personal homepages and message boards where "pussy" is used to refer to cats instead of cunts. It'll also block out literature--and yes, there is plenty--which uses the word. Hell, half the classic beat poetry, and some novels I read in 9th grade like *One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest*, would be blocked for using that word.
How about the word *fuck*? It's used in practically every other sentence these days, even by junior high kids, and in lots and lots of literature, so that would block far too much legitimate content to even be considered. What about "cock"? A rooster is a cock, so we'd better forget about accessing agricultural sites, stories about farming, and lots of literature that takes place in rural settings. Versions of "Old McDonald had a farm" would be blocked. "Cock" is also a verb, as in "I cock my head to the right just in time to see Jessie running away." So no, blocking "cock" would be bad.
How about "cum"? I hope no one who ever uses the terminal tries to go someplace with a Latin motto on the page, because "cum" is a common Latin word meaning "with". It's also used in fairly common expressions, like "cum grano salis"--"with a grain of salt." Among erudite people, that expression is more common than saying it in English. And they still teach Latin as an elective in public schools, you know. So blocking "cum" would eliminate a whole lot of good sites, good literature, and any sites that deal with Latin.
What else is there? Leaving those words in would leave a number of sexually oriented sites accessible, and taking them out would render hundreds of thousands of pages of discussion, literature, criticism, commentary, and generally useful and innocuous stuff inaccessible. Quite simply, you cannot effectively filter based on words alone--if you wanted to write complex software to filter based on semantics, then it could be done, but dumb filtering would work terribly and block half the non-porn pages on the Net. Useful sites about educating about sexuality, like www.allaboutsex.org--which every teenager should read, to learn more about the sexual changes they're experiencing--would be rendered mostly inaccessible.
And where would that leave us? Not very well off, since as I said the smart porn site operators have for some time been implementing sites which get around word filtering by laying out the pages as sets of interlocking GIFs with pornographic language and images on them. Plus, there are plenty of non-business porn sites on the Net, operated by people who don't use explicit language. I myself have a section on my homepage with explicit pictures and videos of me having kinky sex with some cute college girls, and if I had a link to my homepage in my Slashdot profile, anyone who reads Slashdot could stumble on it with two clickc and no filtering software would catch it. There are fifty billion ways to find porn on the Net, and kids are smart enough to figure them out just like they always find out where Dad hides his skinmags or adult flicks.
Filtering by words only hurts by blocking useful sites and giving a false sense of security. It's time Americans just stopped being the most prudish and backwards society this side of Bhaghdad, and started taking the responsibility of teaching their kids about sex instead of vainly attempting to keep them from discovering what their bodies start telling them about themselves at adolescence. Yes, there's lots of unhealthy sexuality on the net that I wouldn't want my kids exposed to at an early age. But do you know the best way to keep them from looking at that stuff? It's by having honest discussions with them about adolescence, life, sex, and the difference between sex with love and sex without it, and the difference between healthy sexuality and destructive sexuality. If parents aren't willing to do that, they shouldn't be parents, and you have no responsibility to filter through software what parents should be filtering by education. Censorship "for the good of the children" is no better than cesorship for any other reason. Nazis and NetNannys are two sides of the same coin; it's the parent's responsibility to supervise the child, to raise the child, to teach the child the difference between constructive and destructive sexuality, not to try half-assedly to reduce the Net to their own narrow ideology and belief and morality.
Remember your historical perspective. When the WinChip came along, Intel was still selling the 486 on the low end. WinChips kicked 486 ass, and when the 486 got retired the WinChip you could get for the price of a low end Pentium was significantly faster because you could afford a higher speed WinChip than Pentium, for the same price point. I can remember wishing I'd gotten a computer with a WinChip instead of my Intel 100MHz 486 DX4--the first and only Intel processor I ever owned, and I'd feel guilty about having it now that I know how predatory Intel is, if it weren't for the fact that I bought it second-hand and so didn't give the $$$ directly to Intel.
Getting back to the VIA/Cyrix chips, even though they're not useful for my own purposes, I'm glad they're around. A Cyrix III 533 would be good for the appliance market, if only they could price it low enough. And if they can get the FPU to run at the same frequency as the rest of the core, and slap an L2 on it, it could be even more useful in laptops. But the key here is competition--we went from having a market with 4 or 5 x86 competitors, to a market with only 2. Now, at least if VIA can pull it together, we'll have 3. This is important to keep pressure on Intel, else prices would never come down as they've been doing lately--we'd still be paying about a dollar per MHz on even lower end P!!! chips, yuck. Now, AMD is whomping Intel on both the high end and the midrange, and if VIA plays its cards right, it could take over the low end since AMD is abandoning the K6 lines (except in notebook K6-2+ chips).
You're talking about benchmarks for the current Cyrix III chip, which performs miserably. The reason it performs worse at over 500MHz on FPU intensive apps than a lowly K6 300 is that the Cyrix IIIs FPU is clocked at only half the core speed, so in that light the chip wouldn't do badly at all if the FPU were clocked at the same speed as the rest of the core--its performance is good considering this and the fact that is has no L2 cache whatsoever. If the whole core operated at 1GHz, and it had at least 128k of on-die L2, it would be a great budget chip. But that's not going to happen because of problems with the current FPU reaching high speeds, which is why they need a new design.
But the article makes a significant mistake--its author thinks that this will be a move by VIA/Cyrix into the high-end, making the classic mistake of equating clockspeed with performance. But VIA itself is quoted as saying "Samuel 2 will expand our market, moving into notebooks and information appliances"--not high-end markets. But as a mobile or appliance processor, even a 1GHz Samuel of the current design would do well, even with the FPU clocked only at half speed, considereing that 400-600MHz notebooks are still the lion's share of the notebook market, and the appliance market still uses 180MHz WinChip 2's through low end old Celerons. Not bad for those uses, at all, even a high performance choice for those markets--especially when you consider that laptops don't run at full clock speed unless plugged in or under heavy load, whereas the Cyrix chip can run relatively cool at rated speed. Weird calling a Cyrix chip 'cool', isn't it, considering that you used to be able to fry eggs on the old Cyrix MII.
As for that point made at the start of this thread about "who needs a GHz processor anyway"--considering that the wholesale price of 1 GHz Athlon Thunderbirds was just dropped, and will probably drop again within a month or 2, it'll only be a few months before a 1GHz Athlon can be bought for about $500 or less. Then, when we can afford them and get them, we'll realize how useful it is to have that kind of power to encode MPEG-2 video in real time with a cheap capture card at the same quality it usually costs to have special high-end hardware cards for, how nice it is to make MP3s quickly, and how great it is to playback MP3 files while doing heavy work without having the processor overtaxed enough to distort the playback. That much power may seem like too much to need for everyday stuff, but once you get that much power I bet your everyday habits might just change to accomodate your new abilities. I know mine changed when I moved from 100MHz 486 to a 400MHz K6-2, and I bet they'll change again when I get the cash to fly the Thunderbird. Even if all you'll ever use it for is turning on all the eye candy in Enlightenment or whatever you like to use, without a big performance hit, you can't complain that prices are dropping so steadily that a consumer will soon be able to afford a 1GHz machine--price cuts are good, period.
Just like the subject line says. Of course Netscape 6 sucks ass, it's made by AOL, the same fine folks who brought us that helpdesk nightmare and lawsuit waiting to happen, AOL 5.0. Seriously, no one can blame Mozilla for AOL's incompetence. And, I don't care if Netscape 6PRwhatever is going to be most people's introduction to Mozilla, because there's still plenty of time for Mozilla/Netscape 6 Final to prove themselves. After all, did you ever run Netscape 0.9, the prerelease version of Netscape 1.0? It was horrid, horrid, and evil, and made Mosaic look like the future of the Net. Or, ever run early versions of IE? My GOD, the hooror that was IE before way into version 3.x still haunts me in my dreams.
Fact is, these days people are more adventurous about what software they install, as evidenced by stuff like Neoplanet, the front end for IE which many, many people download just to get skinning functionality, and other eye candy like WindowBlinds (think Enlightenment for Windows). When Mozilla gets final, people will download it, and people will be pleased. They'll not only get skinning, but more/better functionality than IE, and other useful integrated apps. All in all, this snafu has absolutely no effect on the viability of final releases of Mozilla/Netscape and their future popularity, except of course for the fact that AOL will probably fuck it up again when they release Netscape 6.0 final.
And as an aside, why the flying fucking sweet mother of jeezus h. christ would anyone want to install over the net, DSL or no DSL, when the sane thing to do is just download a complete installer and then work from there? that's a very disturbing trend I've been bothered by. For the love of God, you should always download a whole installation program, and store it for possible future use. Why would anyone want to risk getting disconnected during install, or getting a slow connection to the server during install, or having to download the whole thing over again later for a re-install? I think people are getting too used to getting programs for free, that they no longer bother to keep potentially useful installers around. After all, the version you love of a piece of software might be a pain in the ass to find a good ways down the line, but if you keep a local copy you'll never have to download again barring tragic accidents. It especially annoys me when companies make only the barebones installer easy to find, hiding the complete package on the server someplace; Apple has done this with Quicktime, making it difficult to find the full installer, but linking the Net installer all over the place. People ought to complain loudly about such foolishness.
And some of the problems you mentioned were possibly due to poor multitasking by MacOS; as improved as OS 9 is, it still has very poor multitasking. All it takes is too many processes running, and it'll sometimes choke and run too slowly. And, let's see--you were installing over the net, and that's at least two and probably more programs running; two or three programs can usually run fine, but any other running apps could have contributed to a slow system. And then, after it had installed and you were running Netscape 6PR2, how much stuff altogether was running, in addition to Netscape and AIM? AOL deserves most of the blame for their ineptitude, but never underestimate the ability of MacOS to bog down because of poor multitasking, either. OSX will fix that for good, but it's a little late--shitty multitasking in MacOS was one of the big reasons I switched to Windoze.
I'm betting that Carmack's evangelism of the newer Mac platforms will mean a resurgence of Mac gaming. Not that people haven't always been gaming on the Mac, but most of us will admit that Mac ports have been of secondary concern for most of the top games and companies for the past few years. (Of course, as an aside, I'd like to note that my intro to computer gaming was on a Mac, with Wolfenstein 3D and a Mac-only game called Barrack--anyone remember Barrack?)
I've noticed a bit of an increase in Mac ports of big-name games and an increase in advertising for them in Mac sections of ads from CompUSA and the like, and coincidentally(?) I've noticed this spike since a couple months after Carmack started praising the Mac as a game dev platform. Has anyone else noticed this, or have I killed too many brain cells and am now just imagining it? I'm curious as to what others think about this, and how others think Carmack's support might be positively affecting Mac gaming.
Sorry if I overstated my case, but there are certain things one can almost never be too keen on defending, and Constitutional rights to free speech, press, and expression fall under that category. There are those who would gladly give up those rights for fleeting gains, and I'm glad you're not one of them after all.
But there is one thing I do take issue with in your response. I'm not into regulation of sexual behaviour, and in fact think that prostitution is a necessary part of promoting a healthy society--just look at the sexual behaviour of the Bonobo monkeys to see how natural prostitution is. But there are other things which one should not be able to enter into a binding contract for, consenting adults or not.
The classic example is indentured servitude--basically, paid slavery for a term of years to be specified by contract. It was outlawed because just allowing it produces an economic imperative for poor people to become basically slaves--imagine indentured servitude in a modern corporate world, with people signing themselves into slavery to big companies just to be able to get employment. That's why you cannot sign your life away like that, and why it's not considered a violation of your rights--it would be both damaging to yourself, and to all economically underprivileged people. So, there is a damned good reason why consenting adults can't do things which violate certain rights, even if they enter into such contracts "voluntarily."
NDAs are an example of a necessary evil--it's necessary to ensure non-disclosure of certain trade secrets, else the ability to innovate would be undermined. But always remember that although a necessary evil, it's still an evil, and should be avoided whenever possible--the more abilities you give companies to control what employees do, say, write, and think, even outside the office, the more of your rights and the rights of everyone who has a job, you've just given up.
Frankly, I don't care if Apple sues its employees who violate NDAs--it's possibly a mistake depending on their intentions, and the answer to any problem usually shouldn't be lawyers, but it's not violating anyone's rights.
What does violate basic rights is when Apple threatens or sues the press outlets which have run stories about its products. Even if someone has violated an NDA in giving info to that news outlet, the news outlet still has a First Amendment right to run the story, and is not liable for a damned thing. That's what I object to: Apple has been strong-arming the web-based media with their lawyers to keep info under wraps, and is now trying to squeeze the media for info on who broke what NDAs. That's what this suit is about, and that's why Apple is being evil. Now I know that evil tastes like a blueberry G4 cube.;-) Apple is attempting to take away our First Amendment right to freedom of the press, and the right of the media to protect its sources. Why else would they be suing John/Jane Does? in the hopes of forcing media outlets who ran these advance stories into naming their sources.
The subject line here says it all, my dear sir. Fuck having the best economy in the world if you don't have the right to enjoy basic freedoms. Besides which, you're wrong about this:
> if i sign a paper, of my own free will, that you can tie me up and beat me for
> money, then that's the law, pal. likewise an NDA.
You cannot under any circumstances make a legal contract to do an illegal thing. Such a contract is non-binding and not legally enforceable. That's why indentured servitude is illegal, why contracts to provide sex are illegal (except in parts of Nevada), and contracts allowing someone to do bodily harm to you are illegal. Of course, bodily harm can be done to you in the course of a job, and if you've signed a liability waiver then you can't sue over such injury, but you cannot have a legally inforceable contract such that one party is specifically allowed to do bodily harm to another in and of itself, without that merely being a chance of harm in a hazardous job. I'd explain the finer points and look up a case reference or two, but I don't feel like explaining this--it's easier to explain sex to a virgin than to explain the law to a non-attorney.
But getting back to the main issues, yes, Apple can and if it wants to be stupid (and it seems to want to be *extremely* so) does file suit for NDA violations, but it CANNOT and SHOULD NOT ATTEMPT to file suit against the media outlets which ran the leaks. And that's who Apple is always threatening--news sites, the media, *the press*, who have explicit First Amendment rights to run stories on Apple's upcoming products if they wish to. That's who Apple is always threatening, and *that* is why they're evil. A third party has no obligation to obey an NDA, and the press has no obligation to reveal its sources. You obviously care about money more than freedom, and I pity that.
What Apple likes to call "leaks" are what other companies call "expected". Whenever you have a new product or concept in the pipeline, people start talking about it, a few employees drop hints to friends in the media, and then the rumour mill generates this positive expectaion about a product. Normal companies consider it a part of the advertising process, because it's better to build up anticipation about product releases than to just dump them on an unsuspecting world. Publicity is good.
But look at what Apple is doing thanks to that fruity control freak Jobs. The leaks in question happened, most of them, a few days before the product announcement--that's to be expected, and had a positive impact for Apple in that it got people excited and made them anticipate the big revelation, so that on the day of the expo people got online just to see the new Apple products, who otherwise might naver have bothered. That's free advertising. It's a common thing in all industries, and to sue the press and Apple's own fan base is utterly insipid--and that's who these John/Jane Does are going to turn out to be, people who love Apple and wanted to share these great new products, to tell people "look at your favorite tech or Apple sites on expo day, because there's big stuff brewing."
And no, Apple has no right to keep a secret. Case designs released with too little time for a competitor to steal them are not trade secrets. The fact that new products will (would have) carry Radeon graphics is not a trade secret. NDA or not, what Apple is doing is morally and ethically wrong, and business-wise it's completely unsound--foster fan sites, don't make them hate you due to cease-and-desist letters the very night before you're going to announce the fucking product anyway. What complete and utter assholes. Freedom of the press guarantees that as long as the press doesn't sctively induce the breaking of an NDA, that they can run whatever info they want about Apple as long as it isn't libelous. Apple wants to fuck with our fundamental freedoms, then we should fuck Apple right back.
I used to be a big fan of Apple, but now I'm looking forward to other PowerPC based boards. I would never, never, buy a new Apple computer now, after all this misbehaviour. Jobs has just proven that he's still about 12 years old in terms of maturity, what with his lawyer-whoring and his retribution against ATI for minor leaks just a few days before the official announcement. All credit for Apple's coolness and revolutionary nature in the old days will now be given by me to Woz, and I'll just consider Jobs no better than a good car salesman--good at his job, makes a lot of money for his lot, but is still a sleazy piece of scum underneath. If I ever buy any more Apple hardware, it'll be used, so that not a cent goes directly to Apple. If you beleive in freedom of the press, I hope you're with me on this. Cool hardware and a great GUI isn't worth my soul or my principles. Someone ought to start an anti-Apple-lawyer-whoring site and post about it here and elsewhere, in order to get attention to the fact that what Apple is doing now is at least as bad as what IBM was doing back when that famous, unforgettable commercial aired. Way to kill the spirit of your company and its fans, Jobs...
At least with snail mail I can go to my P.O. Box and weed through all the junk mail pretty easily. But I doubt the USPS is prepared for the onslaught of commercial spam such a scheme would engender. They may be used to delivering tons of the tangible stuff every day, but with spam it's always pointed out that it costs nothing to send spam ads so people send more spam e-mail than they could ever send spam snail-mail.
And this brings up a very important point; as a government agency, the USPS wouldn't be able to filter spam. Spammers could complain that it's governmental prior restraint to filter their unsolicited ads. Without the ability to filter spam at all, I suspect that such a system would rapidly buckle under heavy load. Even worse, this is the USPS--they'd probably use a naming system for everyone's addresses, a naming system which is easily guessed by spammers. I imagine that this idea will either go nowhere, or if they do implement it that they fold under the strain or, if they do filter, become a legal target for the Direct Marketing Association, or as I like to call them "the first horseman of the apocalypse." I hate those guys....
> Don't get me started on Carrara. OK, it's a nice app, can do most things > reasonably well, but it is not half of what 3DS or Maya is... some of us actually > need some of the more advanced functions in MAX. But for a quick fun > experimental scene or something, Carrara is great...
Of course you're right about that--Carrara wasn't designed to be a professional 3D app, it was meant more as an enthusiast/light work sort of thing. But like I said, for the uses most people would use something like 3D Studio for, Carrara really shines. If you want to do 3D work but for fun not as a real 3D artist, Carrara is definitely the way to go. Very few people need MAX's more advanced features for light work like modelling for games, so the whole ease-of-use and intuitiveness of Carrara's interface is an attractive feature in that market segment.
I've used MAX and Maya--on an, ahem, unofficial trial basis--and although I'm by no means a slouch when it came to learning them, Carrara just won me over instantly for the sort of enthusiast work I do. What can I say, MetaCreations knows how to make a crisp and intuitive GUI; ever since Kai's Power Tools, I've fallen in love with their software. And for the work I've done on--no, I'm not kidding--box covers for adult videos, KPT Goo is the ultimate tool. Nothing restores the perkiness of breasts that are flattened by horizontal positions so easily as a little supple stretching with Kai's Goo...;-)
But, I digress. For pro 3D work, I'd imagine that Maya 3 would be the ideal, especially since Pixar's RenderMan interfaces with it to speed up and distribute rendering across a network. Any opinions on MAX versus Maya?
You have a good point, but maybe reasoning goes more like this: if people use a stripped-down free version, fewer warez sites will carry a full version which is only more useful to professionals, and therefore the people who would want to pirate the full version will have a much harder time finding it since fewer warez sites bother. That seems like a fair line of reasoning to me, although there's no actual data to back it up. Only time will tell if such strategies will work. But, when you charge several thousand dollars for a program, you've got to expect that only companies and well-to-do pros will buy it; individuals and we poor people [sound of tiny violins] will pirate it.
I truly wonder how much outright piracy is responsible for releases like this. It seems that many companies are offering stripped-down free versions of their software, and my guess is that a large number of such releases are to minimize the desire to pirate the full program. Ontrack/Mijenix, for example, released a free version of some of their products, with limited functionality, and several more companies have started similar measures this past year.
One thing I've noticed is that these products which get limited free versions are usually ones which are heavily pirated. I suppose one line of reasoning is that if a version with all the commonly-used features is freely available, that people will be less likely to pirate the full version with all the less-commonly-used or only-needed-by-professionals features. 3D Studio MAX is among the most commonly pirated 3D apps, despite the dongle protection scheme (which was cracked within weeks). Heck, I even downloaded it to try it out after people were discussing it here on/. in a thread about graphics workstations.
But for the things most people would use it for, there are better tools. My favorite is MetaCreations' 3D package called Carrarra. Carrarra is an integrated offering combining the features of Ray Dream Studio and Infini-D into one easy-to-use and intuitive interface. The thing I've always loved about MetaCreations is that their user interfaces are not only eye candy, they're easy to learn and practically self-explanatory. If anyone is interested in 3D graphics and wants something far easier to use than 3D Studio MAX, but still powerful and versatile, check out http://www.metacreations.com/products/carrara/ for their under-appreciated but very fine product. I use it all the time for making game models, and it'll probably whip the hell out of any stripped down version of MAX.
People are always complaining, "Wah wah, why waste money on [insert interesting pastime here] when there are starving/cold/rusty/disenfranchised/boring/whateve r [insert poor beset-upon sector here] people in [wherever]. Blech. No one starves here in America by necessity. There are always jobs, if you want them. There are plenty of handouts--err, "assistance programs"--as it is, too, so there's no substantial complaint to be made that government doesn't already do enough to support people. So, why not take some of that pork-barrel BS that subsidizes corporate America, or cut some of the bloat and cruft of our bureaucracies, or take some of that NSA money [one Senate member called the classified spending figure "bigger than the Gross Demestic Products of almost all the countries we monitor, combined"], and give Americans something to be proud of? For decades NASA and its far-reaching programs were a source of both national pride and pride in man's accomplishments. Now, what do Americans have to be proud of? The universality of McDonalds? The fact that almost every other country either openly hates us or sniggers behind our backs? The fact that Bill Gates has much more money than NASA does?
All I said is that our space exploration used to be a national pastime, providing many high points in the first decades of our space program. It was something all Americans, and all people, could be proud of. And, I said that we're not going to get any more of that unifying magic out of the space program, if all we do is throw more hunks of metal at Mars and the Jovian moons. So don't give me any of that bleeding heart crap about how the resources should go elsewhere, since most Americans think our government needs to cut back most of its spending on bureaucracy and mismanagement anyway. At least when NASA had a decent budget, they did amazing things that inspired people--you can't say that about the welfare system, corporate tax breaks, bureaucracies which cost ~75% of our tax dollars to manage the other ~25% that actually gets spent on something other than bureaucrats' salaries, etc.
I'm glad we're hurling more objects at Mars and all, but I'm amazed at the slowness with which we're exploring everyone's favourite big red bouncy ball. After all, it's been nearly a third of a century since we first put men on the moon, and yet that's as far as we've sent humans and, what's worse, we haven't even hurled very many probes out to our planetary neighbours. What's the total number? Not many...
It honestly makes me wish there were still a space race going on; at least then we'd still be actively involved in space exploration. Instead of space exploration NASA spends most of its time trying to convince pointy-headed bureaucrats and politicians to give it enough money to survive. Despite recent successes--and failures--it really seems like NASA is suffering a slow and excruciating death by underfunding; a sad state of affairs for a space exploration program which built up such momentum way back in the Kennedy administration.
Think of how many pivotal moments NASA has given us in the twentieth century. Nipping at the heels of the Soviets with our first man in space, and totally outdoing them with the moon landing (my grandparents shot a Polaroid of the television screen the moment Armstrong set foot on the moon); the gripping drama and ultimate redemption of Apollo 13; the public amazement when the Space Shuttles, like the spacefaring planes of science fiction, flew for the first time; the emotional Challenger disaster and the ensuing investigation; the colorful Pathfinder images that captivated the public for weeks. Just about every American can remember at least one of these things, and see it as an important event we'll always remember. Personally, I'll never forget my elementary school teacher hearing about it on her radio and taking the whole class to the school library to watch the live coverage following the Challenger disaster.
But instead of great moments like these, we can look forward to much smaller events and less publicly enthralling ones. Quite sad, when our government spends $3 *T*rillion a year, that we "don't have the money" to explore space as vigorously as we did in the first decades of the space program. I'm beginning to think that we'll never see a manned mission to Mars in my lifetime, at this rateand before anyone complains about high expenditures for small returns, remember that there's always been more to the space program (til recently) than just scientific data. There's been national pride for Americans, and more general pride in the accomplishments of mankind; there's been old-fashioned adventure, space really being the final frontier, the last place man hasn't set foot; space *travel*, actual exploration by humans, is what fascinated us, not data from a probe. The budget of the NSA alone would probably be enough to keep sending men further into space for some time, maybe even enough to start planning a lengthy manned Mars mission. But instead we spend it on Echelon and corporate espionage. It's disappointing to say the least. I don't think, short of provably finding extraterrestrial microbes with one of its landers, there's anything NASA can do to captivate the public interest and spark public excitement any more. Nothing that can be done with a mere probe can top the Pathfinder images, except for finding Martian or Ionian or Europan life. But, here's hoping...
When is *BSD going to get as easy to install as Linux? I'd gladly take it for a test drive, but installing it is such a chore. I always thought install routines should be the easiest part of getting an OS up and running, with tweaking later being the most time-consuming part, but last I heard about *BSD you set up, get dumped to a command line, and then have to manually set up X. Yuck. Has this changed in recent releases, or is there an option to configure X during install yet? I'm not asking for some shiny graphical install routine, just something as user-friendly as Mandrake 6.0, with its lists of choices for setting up X if you want X. I tell ya, if there's one nice thing about Solaris, it's that the CDE desktop gets installed by default and it works like a charm with no black magic needed...:-)
Without those sheep, there wouldn't be such a large supply of music available. Before Napster, I used USENET to find mp3s and unfortunately never could find much of what I wanted, because largely a few people post what they themselves like. A small number of USENET people take requests for mp3s, and I always felt bad for asking since I'm on an ass-slow connection and can't upload easily.
Then came Napster, and Napster was good. Type in a song title and artist, and the odds were that it was there. The key was sheer volume of users whose entire collections were available at any given time. Being a faithful/. reader, I tried Gnutella when it was available. My conclusion? Why bother using it for mp3s, when using Napster produced more results, and greater chances of finding a high-quality 192kpps or greater version (I may be on a slow connection, but I can't stand crummy low bitrate stuff; I'm half-blind, but my hearing is great...). Plus, there's nothing wrong with ease of use. I will never understand why some people around here are practically *offended* by ease of use. Why use a more complicated system if an easier-to-use one, which saves the user's time and effort for other pursuits, is available? If I wanted files other than mp3s, Gnutella or Freenet is the tool of choice, but for mp3s nothing can beat Napster for both variety and for saving my precious time (until the plug is pulled, at least).
Try getting something terribly specific like "When I Fall" and the other tracks from *Martinis & Bikinis* by Sam Phillips on USENET or Gnutella; not very likely, whereas I pieced it together from Napster after a little nightly diligence. I repeat: those "sheep" you condescendingly talk about are the reason for that, since sheer number provides greater chance for finding the files you want. Please, stop being such elitists, some of you. Most people on/. are nice down-to-earth people, but some have these Sysadmin=God complexes, and look down on people who appreciate ease of use and such principles. Quite frankly, we have the Mac to thank for making computers popular and sparking interest of the generation which spawned the Net, and cheap x86 boxes with Windows to thank for turning the Net into the common ground of immense possibilities which it is today. While *nix owned the Net on the server side, without those Windows and Mac users the Net would still be a small playground for a few comp sci majors and academics.
Napster is now belittled by some around here for bringing this sort of file sharing to the masses. Nothing personal, but those few who dislike anything made for the masses ought to stop actingng like such l337 hax0r chillun. There's a difference between the mind-numbing stupidity fostered by AOL, and stuff that's just easy to use as opposed to stuff which actively promotes stupidity. Not everyone is or wants to be a guru, try to understand that and don't belittle something merely because of its ease-of-use or shininess. What is actually bad about what Napster has done (aside from the debate over morality of mp3 trading)?
Personally, I never got into the IM thing. I always preferred e-mail or USENET or other forums for real discussions, since you can mull over what you're going to say first. What really seems odd to me is when people in the same town IM each other, instead of making a telephone call--it's much better to actually hear someone's voice, and it beats the hell out of typing furiously to get the same WPM.
But if you really have to communicate on-line in real time with someone--what's the matter with TALK? I miss it. People hardly use it any more, I guess because a shiny AIM interface is prettier than TALKing through telnet or whatever. Just never caught on with the non-geek and non-college-student crowd, I guess, especially with AIM out there. I pray for the day that AOL goes under, though I fear it'll never happen. "AOL: We're the Largest Censor on the Net, With Over 20 Million Subscribers Under Our Heel!"
It may be closed, but at least it's affordable. The annoying thing about Zip disks is that they're unaccountably expensive. The drives themselves are coming in at a decent price, *finally*, since you can get a remanufactures ATAPI ZIP unit for $49.95 at CompUSA, but the disks are still way too expensive to be all that useful considering capacity of 100MB (the 250 MB drives and disks are both even more $$$).
I bought a parallel port unit a few years ago when I got my first computer, an ancient 486DX4/100 laptop. Aside from the 5-pack that came with it, I only ever bought 2 more disks--Fuji brand Zip 2-pack for $25. I finally got a real computer and added a CD burner, and the Zip unit sits atop my computer still, unused for at least a year and a half. The sad part is, until the last few months, Zip drives were still retailing for the same price I bought mine at a couple years ago, and disk prices have come down a bit but not much.
I'm really not a fan of Iomega: overpriced is their best descriptor. My friends with LS-120 SuperDisk drives actually use them a lot, what with much more affordable media and all, and the drives themselves have been at a great price for a while. Plus, they double as your floppy drive which is cool, saves space, and sounds better than a regular floppy drive (not quite as gratingly noisy with the seeks and transfers).
The above post is probably just flamebait, but sadly enough there are many people who actually hold similar beliefs. The reality is that trading DivX and mp3 files is not only very minor--there are even conflicting studies as to whether it hurts or helps CD sales--but these days it's also arguably a form of civil disobedience.
I consider it a protest against the perversion of copyright and other IP laws by big corporations which are insinuating themselves into positions of undue influence in government; corporations have vastly more resources than individuals, and as such individuals can no longer influence their government to such a great extent as corporations can.
The whole notion that IP no longer passes into the public domain after a reasonable period of time in which its creators can derive profit, but instead remains locked up for 100 years after the death of the creator, is deplorable. Corporations like Disney made their fortunes by using public domain IP (half of Disney's cartoons are from other people's stories, used for free) which they'd have never been able to use under the IP law they've now implemented to keep their own creations indefinitely instead of giving back to the public domain they so richly borrowed from. The music industry is similarly guilty.
As such, it's a valid form of protest to pirate mp3s and DivX of songs and films created by companies which have taken from public domain IP but never contributed back. Real cybercrime involves matters more serious than trading mp3s privately rather than for profit.
Even more, I object to the notion in the paper referenced that it's a bad thing that "many countries do not share the urgency to combat cyber-crime for many reasons, including different values concerning piracy and espionage or the need to address more pressing social problems." That's one of the things I dislike most about the U.S.: cultural imperialism. The U.S. government has a tendency to try to push its own values and legal precepts onto other nations, and that's just plain wrong. Unless human rights are being violated in a very fundamental way, the U.S. has no right to attempt to coerce other countries into accepting our own cultural values.
For example, if a sovereign nation wants to adopt a policy which makes all IP public domain within a few years, that's the right of that nation to do so. Originally, copyrights in the U.S. lasted only 14 years. But instead the U.S. tries to put pressure on such countries, or else bribes them with "humanitarian" grants into accepting the U.S. position. Would we allow the largest corporation in the U.S. to bully all others into adopting particular strategies, dividing up markets, and bribing competitors into submission? No. So, why is the U.S. allowed to dictate its values to the rest of the world?
This is important because "cybercrime" as it's defined now in the U.S. includes matters which are legal in other nations, and the U.S. is attempting to pressure other nations into accepting U.S. offenses as international ones. Most of this pressure comes from the far right in this country, who are campaigning against pornography and recreational narcotics as well as trying to extend corporate hegemony.
One of the prime examples is the U.S. characterization of the Netherlands as being the largest producer of child pornography and a major point of interest in drug trafficking. Since the Reagan-Meese morality policing of the 80s, The Netherlands has been in FBI reports as the largest producer of child pornography, because the age of consent for porn in The Netherlands is 16 rather than 18. Rather skewed to call that child pornography, merely because cultural attitudes toward sex are more permissive in one country than in the most puritanical one on the planet. Also, The Netherlands actually has very strict controls placed on marijuana, which is legal to purchase in certain locales even though it's not legally easily exportable or even transportable within the country itself. That's similarly no reason for FBI reports to classify The Netherlands as a notable place for drug trafficking.
The Netherlands was replaced by Japan in FBI reports on cybercrime as the largest producer of child pornography, despite the fact that once again a cultural difference comes into play. Japan has never suffered the same sexual repression/oppression that some Western nations such as the U.S. have suffered, due to huge religious and cultural differences, hance the age of consent for pornography was lower than 18. The U.S. applied economic and political pressure to force the sovereign nation of Japan to raise its own internal age of consent for pornography production, which regardless of one's own attitudes towards sex or pornography is an inappropriate thing for one nation to do to another. Japan happily has no stigma attached to sex, and no Puritanical expectation of chastity until marriage. To include what is legal in its own nation and hosted in its own nation in cybercrime statistics is both cylturally imperialistic and dishonest.
This hasn't even touched upon the Chinese attitudes toward piracy of music and film, which would never be allowed by the U.S. to continue were it not for the fact that China is one of the most powerful nations. Were it a small, average country, the U.S. would have pressured them and economically blackmailed or bribed them already to buy into U.S. cultural values on the subject.
While the paper's details about various cracking exploits and their relationships with applicable federal laws is informative, I find its nonchalant inclusion of software piracy together with extortion and money laundering and fraud to be laughable, and its comments about laws which diverge in other countries from U.S. law to be downright offensive. It's extremely selfish and culturally imperialistic to assume that American ways are right and any others are wrong and still to be considered illegal even when permitted in the country in question. And anyone who wants to know why I harped on the differing definition of child pornography in the U.S. and in other nations, it's because the FBI likes to artificially inflate those figures in order to make the threat appear more significant than it is, in order to secure more of our tax dollars and to get away with more abuses of civil rights--after all, when anyone mentions children people start being emotional instead of rational. More about that here at this link.
There's a film about him called, creatively enough, *Leadbelly*. I highly recommend it if you're interested in one of the most unique stories behind the music. But I'll briefly give you some highlights:
Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbedder(sp?) was a travelling musician in the 20s and 30s in the mostly-rural South. Like most musicians of the day he made his money by playing in bars and saloons, at village festivals and the like. But he was unusually good, and played a 12-string guitar so fiercely that he sounded like a whole band all by himself. He also composed some of his own great lyrics, despite complete lack of education, in addition to playing the old stand-bys that everyone back then knew (House of the Rising Sun, Midnight Special, and a bunch of other now-famous tunes). He was in prison twice, if memory serves once for assaulting a white man who assaulted him first, and once for murdering one who also probably deserved it. One time he was in jail in Texas, and he was allowed to have his guitar in prison--the governor's summer house happened to be right across from the prison, so Leadbelly was brought over to play all the governor's parties. He impressed everyone there, and even played a song once whose lyrics were a plea to the governor to pardon him; Governor Pat Neff was so impressed, that he said the last thing he'd do before leaving office was to sign Leadbelly's pardon. True to his word, the day the governor left office Leadbelly was pardoned. He went back to his old life as a travelling musician, before landing in prison again after he went back to his hometown and some white men picked a fight with him. That's when some people from the Smithsonian Institution, who were on a project to preserve folk music through recordings, heard about him and interviewed and recorded him in prison. When he was released, he'd become a minor folk celebrity and was able to do recording sessions with a bunch of the small studios that existed back then, as well as make money from playing in public. By this time he was older and the fire in his belly wasn't so uncontrollable, and he became the kind of middle-aged gentleman who, even though he may live in a fleabag motel, dresses immaculately and wears $50 shoes--in the 1950s, $50 shoes were beyond merely expensive.
His recordings got passed down over the years in ever-degrading forms, copies of copies of copies of the original acetate and glass recordings, and if you get older recordings of him they'll often sound terrible. A few years ago though the Smithsonian started restoring and remastering its collection of folk recordings, and then publishing them. So, Smithsonian Folkways has put out the CDs of the best of Leadbelly's recordings, and they sound nice and crisp. The one caveat is that Leadbelly sang in the old tradition, and his stuff sounds far more original, far more rough and surprising than today's music. It takes some getting used to him, since we've been raised on sameness and often blandness in our music, but he's the best damned guitar player this side of Robert Johnson (the 20s bluesman who, the story goes, made a deal with the devil at a crossroads, in order to become the best guitar player ever--cf. the movie *Crossroads* with Ralph Macchio for a Hollywood version of his story).
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I mean, you don't need the source to make changes to the OS. The guy talking about shunning Linux is obviously a total moron who's too much of an exploitative capitalist pig to support something cooperative like Linux, and who knows nothing about software.
You don't need source code to alter any piece of software--that's what reverse engineering is for, and even the lowly warez-d00dz often have skills enough to alter how programs operate. I've seen the most advanced forms of software protection broken by a little patch, and trojans inserted into otherwise innocuous files.
Having the source code is actually a benefit to prevent tampering, because if you want to be paranoid you could always have your head IT guy compile straight from the source to create binaries which, if you want to be totally paranoid, can be PGP-signed for verification. No fucking way you can do that with Windows, OS/2, or anything else--yeah, you can PGP-sign files once installed for verification later, but who knows what gaping holes are in the original code?
You seem to be an otherwise intelligent, progressive person. But, like too many people, when someone shouts "Won't somebody *please* think of the children," you start to get irrational...
n derage/print.html It is natural and healthy for males to be attracted to females who look about 15-25--any good psychology textbook will tell you that. That's why pedophilia is defined as sexual attraction towards pre-teens. Sexual attraction to teenagers is a natural biological force, which we in America have made taboo due to purely cultural forces. We in America try to keep our kids naive children for as long as possible, which to my thinking is the whole root of the problems we have in schools now--kids are given huge responsibilities akin to those of adults, but very few rights, and are expected by parents to be asexual even though their hormones tell them "party time." Nature tells us that, in strictly biological terms, people are physically mature enough for sex within a year of first menses, and thus it's not abnormal at all to be physically attracted to people who are at least adolescents. Of course, people in this country are seldom *emotionally* ready for sex in early adolescence, but attraction is a natural biological force. Why do you think Natalie Portman (later than in *The Professional*), Joey Lauren Adamns, Alicia Silverstone, Kate Moss, etc. etc. were considered so beautiful? The people who were attracted to their youthful features weren't pedophiles, just normal. Attraction to pre-adolescents is what defines pedophilia, not the screwed up Puritanical American tendency to think that 18 is some magic age at which people are suddenly adults.
;-)
> Censorship is not prudishness
What I said is thet you're advocating censorship due to your own prudishness. The two generally complement and reinforce one another. You just seemed to be so *offended* at the very idea that such things as bondage, barely legal girls, and double penetration are out there on the Net being talked about and depicted. You even lumped them together with (yucky) coprophilia and bestiality.
> I lumped these items together because they are things that a lot of parents would
> have severe objections to their children witnessing.
Sure, of course; but you do make a distinction, don't you? But that's an aside. The real issue is that, as a parent, it's *your* job to teach your kids, from at least 7th grade onward (newest studies show that 1 in 5 middle school kids engage in at least oral sex at least once), what is healthy and what is unhealthy, at least giving them the basics about sex, and telling them what they shouldn't access on the Net if they're going to be around the Net. Bottom line: it's your responsibility as a parent to set out boundaries for your youngster and teach him/her not to cross them, not my responsibility as someone who wants to provide a free Net terminal in my laundromat/restaurant/bookstore/whatever, to make sure I dumb down my Net access just for your kids.
> Bondage may be consensual, and for the most part is play-acting, but real
> dominance in a relationship, particularly when it is usually associated with sadism,
No no no, it isn't associated with sadism; that's why there are two separate terms, B&D and S&M. A B&D relationship usually takes the form of one submissive partner who finds fulfillment and feels loved by giving his/her will over to the dominant partner, much as in an old-fashioned heterosexual marriage the wife supposedly felt comfort and felt loved by trying to make her husband and kids happy. The dominant male or female feels loved by having this huge amount of trust and care placed with him/her, much as in intense hetero relationships the young woman feels like the man is a lover/father figure. It's actually a very caring relationship is you analyze it along those lines, and not unlike old-fashioned marriage philosophies adapted to the 21st century. But I digress, I just wanted to point out an error of yours. Those of us who live in or near big cities know that there's a huge B&D community, which thanks to misconceptions like yours is fairly underground much as the gay and lesbian community was 15 years ago.
> is not normal. "Barely legal" caters to the borderline pedophile, and is the
> pederast's methadone
But your big mistake is in describing Barely Legal, either the magazine/website by Hustler or similar material, that way. I suggest reading http://www.salon.com/health/sex/urge/1999/12/04/u
> But as a libertarian, I greatly object that you wish to ban a class of software for
> use in private.
I never said that. Use whatever you want in private, I don't care.
> Censorware may be morally objectionable to you, but for some
> people it isn't. It is one thing to keep censorware out of publically funded
> libraries, but it is quite another to keep it out of a private laundermat.
I never said that it would be unlawful censorship to use censorware or keyword blocking in a private facility such as that. I just said that it would still be censorship, although a legal non-governmental form, and that word filtering would filter too many useful sites to be truly a good solution, and that it's not the responsibility of the establishment to filter, it's the responsibility of the parent to teach his/her kids what to access, since there are many porn sites which will still come through any effort to filter. The guy who asked this question didn't just ask what to use, he asked complex moral and ethical questions about whether it's right to help set up a filter like this, and I gave him my honest answer that the "right" thing to do is, I think, not to filter, and especially not to use ineffectual word-based filtering as was suggested--because it's not his responsibility to make sure your kids don't go to porn sites, it's *your* responsibility to teach your kids better. And despite your protestation to the contrary, my contention that Americans are prudish does have a place in the discussion: only in America and similarly sexually prudish countries would anyone be having this conversation about whether or not to filter Net access at the terminal.
> It's absolutely stupid to say to a parent "you did a bad job raising your kids so
> you forfeit all rights to keep pornography away from them".
You are so narrow-minded on this issue that you didn't even listen to what I said, you morphed my words way beyond their meaning. You, as a parent, have every right to prevent your kids from doing whatever you don't think they should be doing. Fine. So be it, I don't care. But you do not, do not, do *not* have the right to expect that censorware or word-based filtering will be applied to a public-access Net terminal. The owners of that terminal, as long as it's in a private establishment, can install whatever filtering they wish. But they don't have to if they don't want to, and no one can expect them to. That was all I was saying. That it's the parent's responsibility to make sure kids don't access naughty things, not the owner of a Net terminal. If you don't like the open Net access, don't let your kids go there. .
> What possibly right do you have to pick and choose who is fit to be a parent?
> You, sir, have absolutely no moral, legal or ethical right to tell someone else
> how they should raise their own children
The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America gives me that right. I can tell you or anyone else how to raise your children; you, of course, have the right to ignore me. But, I'm right.
> How dare you!
I dare quite readily and forcefully, thank you, because someone has to be the voice of freedom in the tide of censorship, someone has to say "it's not his responsibility to keep your kids off the Net sites you don't like, it's *your* responsibility." Else, the Net would cease to be a very free and open place, and most of us wouldn't like that. Imagine, billions and billions of AOL content-pages...the horror...
> Before you start accusing us of reducing the net to our own "narrow ideology and
> belief and morality", take a good look at youself. We certainly do not want
> to impose our morality on the net. But you, on the other hand, want to impose your
> morality on people's lives and children.
See how black-and-white it is to you? I haven't advocated pushing any sort of morality, or immorality, on anyone. All I advocated is keeping Net terminals like the one mentioned free of censorware which will block out signal as well as noise. All I advocated is the dialectic that
A) censorware, and especially word filtering, don't work and block many, many legitimate sites, and
B) it is the parents' responsibilty to keep the child off "bad" parts of the Net, not the responsibility of the public terminal owner, therefore
C) the best course might probably be to install a terminal with no filtering.
It's entirely up to the establishment installing the netterm, not up to you or me, but the guy asked our advice and I gave him mine. I have no agenda other than freedom, and keeping people like you who expect everything to be filtered and cleansed and AOLified from being the only people heard. So, keep an open mind next time, instead of not listening and distorting everything someone with a different view says. Libertarian my ass--I'm a libertarian, and you're too narrow minded to see the forest for the trees.
I can't say I'm disappointed that Remarq's free service went bye-bye. Not only was its pay service not known for being among the best in either retention or group availability, but its free service was, IMHO, a mockery of USENET. It didn't carry many of the active groups, and it catered mostly to people who don't really understand USENET or the many ways to access it. As such, I think it dameged "real" USENET providers, by allowing Web users to go to USENET and stay there without learning even the simplest basics about it, and by providing a free alternative just barely good enough to keep newbies there and keep them from joining up with real providers--thus making it harder for real providers to stay in the black.
It's hard for me to make that last statement, since I'm very much in favor of Free Software, but there's a major difference between the big software companies and the big USENET services. Even the "big" USENET services are relatively small, and many have trouble staying afloat; RemarQ cut into an already lean profit margin for some providers, and the cost to the public of the important USENET news services shutting down is, dare I say, more grave than the cost of losing this free and limited RemarQ service.
Also, as I said, services like Remarq allowed people to get onto USENET without learning any of the basics involved, many such people never even realizing that they're not on the Web any more. While I'm a champion of ease-of-use, there comes a point when the ease-of-use of RemarQ does more harm than good. You end up with most of the free RemarQ users--not all, but most--not contributing to the newsgroups they're accessing, never bothering to read the FAQ because RemarQ does all the work for them, and littering them with "me, too"s the likes of which haven't been seen since the horrid AOL invasion of yore. Most of the senseless wastes of bandwidth I've seen on USENET recently, all the "me, too"s and clueless newbies who won't read the FAQ even after you tell them twice, have come from RemarQ.
The loss of RemarQ isn't even that bad, since great premium USENET access can be gotten for between $5.95 and $14.95 a month. Personally, even though the NNTP connection is limited to 33Kbps, I prefer Altopia's service: $12 a month, they have every single newsgroup, and a minimum of a four day retention for binaries (up to 8 days, depending) and longer for text (usually about 7). If you have a cable connection, and down/upload binaries, you can pretty much leave your connection on all the time to make up for the slow connection cap. They also offer 128kbps access, but at a hefty $48/month. One reason I support them so much is that Chris at Altopia seems to be big on freedom and very against censorship--Altopia has never dropped a group, for any reason, that I know of. As long as you're not uploading anything illegal (yeah, *you*, wArEZ d00dz and pedos!) Altopia doesn't care what you do, and is very conscious about not keeping records longer than necessary to prevent abuse. I like their privacy policy, it's absolutely the best. To be fair, I also hear good things about uncensored-news and usenetserver.
But that's just my 2 cents; support a free (as in -dom) USENET by subscribing to a good provider. Please, they need as much help as they can get to keep the news free and uncensored, unlike the Web.
> It's not about being prudish, it's about blocking off what you don't want to see
And that is the very definition of censorship. When you filter based on what you, personally, don't wish to see, and have that choice be applicable to everyone, that's censorship. And in this case it's censorship for the purposes of being prudish. If you don't like something, don't look at it. If someone leaves a terminal pointed to a site you don't like, close the window. It's that simple.
And yes, you're obviously prudish; you lump bondage and "barely legal" in the same category as bestiality and coprophilia. The latter two are considered very unusual perversions, while bondage is a consensual lifestyle choice much like homosexuality or heterosexuality, and "barely legal" is a term usually used to refer either to the Hustler magazine/website of the same name, or to girls 18-22 who look young and girlish--in other words, the type of women most men are naturally sexually attracted to.
> My biggest objection however is the insistance that I can't keep my children away
> from anything that isn't immediately fatal.
You pro censorship types are such blame-shifting imbeciles. Sir, you can keep your kids away from anything you want to. You can keep them from going to public access Internet terminals--hell, you can lock them into AOL-only sites on your home computer, if that's what you want. You can keep them out of standard junior high/high school sex ed classes, if you want to. You can keep your kids away from whatever you choose to keep them away from. My sole point is that ultimately it's a parent's responsibility to teach his or her children well enough so that they don't need useless and inaccurate key-word filtering on public terminals to keep them from looking at inappropriate things. If your kids are raised properly, you don't need to protect them from the Big Bad Internet, they'll know which sites are good and healthy and which sites are negative and unhealthy. But I guess Americans just don't want to take responsibility for raising their kids and teaching them well any more, I guess they want to censor the world in the hopes that their kids won't be exposed to sexuality of any kind, ever. That's why we have insanely high teenage pregnancy rates and sex crime rates compared to France, England, and most of the rest of Europe, where kids are taught about sexuality and taught the difference between constructive and destructive sexuality.
It's very telling that someone modded down my first comment in this thread, which simply pointed out that filtering by words contained on the page is ineffectual, and that ultimately it's a parent's responsibility to raise children who know what they should and should not be looking at on a public access Internet terminal. It's very telling indeed, about the outright Puritanism which is still rearing its ugly head in this nation, holding us back even after centuries.
I repeat, and pay attention this time: "Yes, there's lots of unhealthy sexuality on the net that I wouldn't want my kids exposed to at an early age. But do you know the best way to keep them from looking at that stuff? It's by having honest discussions with them about adolescence, life, sex, and the difference between sex with love and sex without it, and the difference between healthy sexuality and destructive sexuality. If parents aren't willing to do that, they shouldn't be parents, and you have no responsibility to filter through software what parents should be filtering by education. Censorship "for the good of the children" is no better than cesorship for any other reason. Nazis and NetNannys are two sides of the same coin; it's the parent's responsibility to supervise the child, to raise the child, to teach the child the difference between constructive and destructive sexuality, not to try half-assedly to reduce the Net to their own narrow ideology and belief and morality."
There is absolutely and unequivocally no way that filtering a site according to the words it uses is going to do anyone any good. Here's why:
To begin with, lots of porn sites use no text whatsoever on their main pages--they have each page layed out using GIFs with text on them. Why would they do this? To avoid getting filtered for containing offensive text, of course. Yes, lots of sites use meta tags to attract the search engines--but increasingly they use pages off the main page for that, and have their main pages mostly image-based. Porn site operators aren't idiots, they know how to avoid being filtered.
Secondly, filtering for "harsh" words would also filter out too much signal, not just the noise. For example, what words do you want to filter? Filtering "pussy" will make lots of cat-lover sites off-limits, along with some personal homepages and message boards where "pussy" is used to refer to cats instead of cunts. It'll also block out literature--and yes, there is plenty--which uses the word. Hell, half the classic beat poetry, and some novels I read in 9th grade like *One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest*, would be blocked for using that word.
How about the word *fuck*? It's used in practically every other sentence these days, even by junior high kids, and in lots and lots of literature, so that would block far too much legitimate content to even be considered. What about "cock"? A rooster is a cock, so we'd better forget about accessing agricultural sites, stories about farming, and lots of literature that takes place in rural settings. Versions of "Old McDonald had a farm" would be blocked. "Cock" is also a verb, as in "I cock my head to the right just in time to see Jessie running away." So no, blocking "cock" would be bad.
How about "cum"? I hope no one who ever uses the terminal tries to go someplace with a Latin motto on the page, because "cum" is a common Latin word meaning "with". It's also used in fairly common expressions, like "cum grano salis"--"with a grain of salt." Among erudite people, that expression is more common than saying it in English. And they still teach Latin as an elective in public schools, you know. So blocking "cum" would eliminate a whole lot of good sites, good literature, and any sites that deal with Latin.
What else is there? Leaving those words in would leave a number of sexually oriented sites accessible, and taking them out would render hundreds of thousands of pages of discussion, literature, criticism, commentary, and generally useful and innocuous stuff inaccessible. Quite simply, you cannot effectively filter based on words alone--if you wanted to write complex software to filter based on semantics, then it could be done, but dumb filtering would work terribly and block half the non-porn pages on the Net. Useful sites about educating about sexuality, like www.allaboutsex.org--which every teenager should read, to learn more about the sexual changes they're experiencing--would be rendered mostly inaccessible.
And where would that leave us? Not very well off, since as I said the smart porn site operators have for some time been implementing sites which get around word filtering by laying out the pages as sets of interlocking GIFs with pornographic language and images on them. Plus, there are plenty of non-business porn sites on the Net, operated by people who don't use explicit language. I myself have a section on my homepage with explicit pictures and videos of me having kinky sex with some cute college girls, and if I had a link to my homepage in my Slashdot profile, anyone who reads Slashdot could stumble on it with two clickc and no filtering software would catch it. There are fifty billion ways to find porn on the Net, and kids are smart enough to figure them out just like they always find out where Dad hides his skinmags or adult flicks.
Filtering by words only hurts by blocking useful sites and giving a false sense of security. It's time Americans just stopped being the most prudish and backwards society this side of Bhaghdad, and started taking the responsibility of teaching their kids about sex instead of vainly attempting to keep them from discovering what their bodies start telling them about themselves at adolescence. Yes, there's lots of unhealthy sexuality on the net that I wouldn't want my kids exposed to at an early age. But do you know the best way to keep them from looking at that stuff? It's by having honest discussions with them about adolescence, life, sex, and the difference between sex with love and sex without it, and the difference between healthy sexuality and destructive sexuality. If parents aren't willing to do that, they shouldn't be parents, and you have no responsibility to filter through software what parents should be filtering by education. Censorship "for the good of the children" is no better than cesorship for any other reason. Nazis and NetNannys are two sides of the same coin; it's the parent's responsibility to supervise the child, to raise the child, to teach the child the difference between constructive and destructive sexuality, not to try half-assedly to reduce the Net to their own narrow ideology and belief and morality.
Remember your historical perspective. When the WinChip came along, Intel was still selling the 486 on the low end. WinChips kicked 486 ass, and when the 486 got retired the WinChip you could get for the price of a low end Pentium was significantly faster because you could afford a higher speed WinChip than Pentium, for the same price point. I can remember wishing I'd gotten a computer with a WinChip instead of my Intel 100MHz 486 DX4--the first and only Intel processor I ever owned, and I'd feel guilty about having it now that I know how predatory Intel is, if it weren't for the fact that I bought it second-hand and so didn't give the $$$ directly to Intel.
Getting back to the VIA/Cyrix chips, even though they're not useful for my own purposes, I'm glad they're around. A Cyrix III 533 would be good for the appliance market, if only they could price it low enough. And if they can get the FPU to run at the same frequency as the rest of the core, and slap an L2 on it, it could be even more useful in laptops. But the key here is competition--we went from having a market with 4 or 5 x86 competitors, to a market with only 2. Now, at least if VIA can pull it together, we'll have 3. This is important to keep pressure on Intel, else prices would never come down as they've been doing lately--we'd still be paying about a dollar per MHz on even lower end P!!! chips, yuck. Now, AMD is whomping Intel on both the high end and the midrange, and if VIA plays its cards right, it could take over the low end since AMD is abandoning the K6 lines (except in notebook K6-2+ chips).
You're talking about benchmarks for the current Cyrix III chip, which performs miserably. The reason it performs worse at over 500MHz on FPU intensive apps than a lowly K6 300 is that the Cyrix IIIs FPU is clocked at only half the core speed, so in that light the chip wouldn't do badly at all if the FPU were clocked at the same speed as the rest of the core--its performance is good considering this and the fact that is has no L2 cache whatsoever. If the whole core operated at 1GHz, and it had at least 128k of on-die L2, it would be a great budget chip. But that's not going to happen because of problems with the current FPU reaching high speeds, which is why they need a new design.
But the article makes a significant mistake--its author thinks that this will be a move by VIA/Cyrix into the high-end, making the classic mistake of equating clockspeed with performance. But VIA itself is quoted as saying "Samuel 2 will expand our market, moving into notebooks and information appliances"--not high-end markets. But as a mobile or appliance processor, even a 1GHz Samuel of the current design would do well, even with the FPU clocked only at half speed, considereing that 400-600MHz notebooks are still the lion's share of the notebook market, and the appliance market still uses 180MHz WinChip 2's through low end old Celerons. Not bad for those uses, at all, even a high performance choice for those markets--especially when you consider that laptops don't run at full clock speed unless plugged in or under heavy load, whereas the Cyrix chip can run relatively cool at rated speed. Weird calling a Cyrix chip 'cool', isn't it, considering that you used to be able to fry eggs on the old Cyrix MII.
As for that point made at the start of this thread about "who needs a GHz processor anyway"--considering that the wholesale price of 1 GHz Athlon Thunderbirds was just dropped, and will probably drop again within a month or 2, it'll only be a few months before a 1GHz Athlon can be bought for about $500 or less. Then, when we can afford them and get them, we'll realize how useful it is to have that kind of power to encode MPEG-2 video in real time with a cheap capture card at the same quality it usually costs to have special high-end hardware cards for, how nice it is to make MP3s quickly, and how great it is to playback MP3 files while doing heavy work without having the processor overtaxed enough to distort the playback. That much power may seem like too much to need for everyday stuff, but once you get that much power I bet your everyday habits might just change to accomodate your new abilities. I know mine changed when I moved from 100MHz 486 to a 400MHz K6-2, and I bet they'll change again when I get the cash to fly the Thunderbird. Even if all you'll ever use it for is turning on all the eye candy in Enlightenment or whatever you like to use, without a big performance hit, you can't complain that prices are dropping so steadily that a consumer will soon be able to afford a 1GHz machine--price cuts are good, period.
Just like the subject line says. Of course Netscape 6 sucks ass, it's made by AOL, the same fine folks who brought us that helpdesk nightmare and lawsuit waiting to happen, AOL 5.0. Seriously, no one can blame Mozilla for AOL's incompetence. And, I don't care if Netscape 6PRwhatever is going to be most people's introduction to Mozilla, because there's still plenty of time for Mozilla/Netscape 6 Final to prove themselves. After all, did you ever run Netscape 0.9, the prerelease version of Netscape 1.0? It was horrid, horrid, and evil, and made Mosaic look like the future of the Net. Or, ever run early versions of IE? My GOD, the hooror that was IE before way into version 3.x still haunts me in my dreams.
Fact is, these days people are more adventurous about what software they install, as evidenced by stuff like Neoplanet, the front end for IE which many, many people download just to get skinning functionality, and other eye candy like WindowBlinds (think Enlightenment for Windows). When Mozilla gets final, people will download it, and people will be pleased. They'll not only get skinning, but more/better functionality than IE, and other useful integrated apps. All in all, this snafu has absolutely no effect on the viability of final releases of Mozilla/Netscape and their future popularity, except of course for the fact that AOL will probably fuck it up again when they release Netscape 6.0 final.
And as an aside, why the flying fucking sweet mother of jeezus h. christ would anyone want to install over the net, DSL or no DSL, when the sane thing to do is just download a complete installer and then work from there? that's a very disturbing trend I've been bothered by. For the love of God, you should always download a whole installation program, and store it for possible future use. Why would anyone want to risk getting disconnected during install, or getting a slow connection to the server during install, or having to download the whole thing over again later for a re-install? I think people are getting too used to getting programs for free, that they no longer bother to keep potentially useful installers around. After all, the version you love of a piece of software might be a pain in the ass to find a good ways down the line, but if you keep a local copy you'll never have to download again barring tragic accidents. It especially annoys me when companies make only the barebones installer easy to find, hiding the complete package on the server someplace; Apple has done this with Quicktime, making it difficult to find the full installer, but linking the Net installer all over the place. People ought to complain loudly about such foolishness.
And some of the problems you mentioned were possibly due to poor multitasking by MacOS; as improved as OS 9 is, it still has very poor multitasking. All it takes is too many processes running, and it'll sometimes choke and run too slowly. And, let's see--you were installing over the net, and that's at least two and probably more programs running; two or three programs can usually run fine, but any other running apps could have contributed to a slow system. And then, after it had installed and you were running Netscape 6PR2, how much stuff altogether was running, in addition to Netscape and AIM? AOL deserves most of the blame for their ineptitude, but never underestimate the ability of MacOS to bog down because of poor multitasking, either. OSX will fix that for good, but it's a little late--shitty multitasking in MacOS was one of the big reasons I switched to Windoze.
I'm betting that Carmack's evangelism of the newer Mac platforms will mean a resurgence of Mac gaming. Not that people haven't always been gaming on the Mac, but most of us will admit that Mac ports have been of secondary concern for most of the top games and companies for the past few years. (Of course, as an aside, I'd like to note that my intro to computer gaming was on a Mac, with Wolfenstein 3D and a Mac-only game called Barrack--anyone remember Barrack?)
I've noticed a bit of an increase in Mac ports of big-name games and an increase in advertising for them in Mac sections of ads from CompUSA and the like, and coincidentally(?) I've noticed this spike since a couple months after Carmack started praising the Mac as a game dev platform. Has anyone else noticed this, or have I killed too many brain cells and am now just imagining it? I'm curious as to what others think about this, and how others think Carmack's support might be positively affecting Mac gaming.
Sorry if I overstated my case, but there are certain things one can almost never be too keen on defending, and Constitutional rights to free speech, press, and expression fall under that category. There are those who would gladly give up those rights for fleeting gains, and I'm glad you're not one of them after all.
But there is one thing I do take issue with in your response. I'm not into regulation of sexual behaviour, and in fact think that prostitution is a necessary part of promoting a healthy society--just look at the sexual behaviour of the Bonobo monkeys to see how natural prostitution is. But there are other things which one should not be able to enter into a binding contract for, consenting adults or not.
The classic example is indentured servitude--basically, paid slavery for a term of years to be specified by contract. It was outlawed because just allowing it produces an economic imperative for poor people to become basically slaves--imagine indentured servitude in a modern corporate world, with people signing themselves into slavery to big companies just to be able to get employment. That's why you cannot sign your life away like that, and why it's not considered a violation of your rights--it would be both damaging to yourself, and to all economically underprivileged people. So, there is a damned good reason why consenting adults can't do things which violate certain rights, even if they enter into such contracts "voluntarily."
NDAs are an example of a necessary evil--it's necessary to ensure non-disclosure of certain trade secrets, else the ability to innovate would be undermined. But always remember that although a necessary evil, it's still an evil, and should be avoided whenever possible--the more abilities you give companies to control what employees do, say, write, and think, even outside the office, the more of your rights and the rights of everyone who has a job, you've just given up.
Frankly, I don't care if Apple sues its employees who violate NDAs--it's possibly a mistake depending on their intentions, and the answer to any problem usually shouldn't be lawyers, but it's not violating anyone's rights.
;-) Apple is attempting to take away our First Amendment right to freedom of the press, and the right of the media to protect its sources. Why else would they be suing John/Jane Does? in the hopes of forcing media outlets who ran these advance stories into naming their sources.
What does violate basic rights is when Apple threatens or sues the press outlets which have run stories about its products. Even if someone has violated an NDA in giving info to that news outlet, the news outlet still has a First Amendment right to run the story, and is not liable for a damned thing. That's what I object to: Apple has been strong-arming the web-based media with their lawyers to keep info under wraps, and is now trying to squeeze the media for info on who broke what NDAs. That's what this suit is about, and that's why Apple is being evil. Now I know that evil tastes like a blueberry G4 cube.
The subject line here says it all, my dear sir. Fuck having the best economy in the world if you don't have the right to enjoy basic freedoms. Besides which, you're wrong about this:
> if i sign a paper, of my own free will, that you can tie me up and beat me for
> money, then that's the law, pal. likewise an NDA.
You cannot under any circumstances make a legal contract to do an illegal thing. Such a contract is non-binding and not legally enforceable. That's why indentured servitude is illegal, why contracts to provide sex are illegal (except in parts of Nevada), and contracts allowing someone to do bodily harm to you are illegal. Of course, bodily harm can be done to you in the course of a job, and if you've signed a liability waiver then you can't sue over such injury, but you cannot have a legally inforceable contract such that one party is specifically allowed to do bodily harm to another in and of itself, without that merely being a chance of harm in a hazardous job. I'd explain the finer points and look up a case reference or two, but I don't feel like explaining this--it's easier to explain sex to a virgin than to explain the law to a non-attorney.
But getting back to the main issues, yes, Apple can and if it wants to be stupid (and it seems to want to be *extremely* so) does file suit for NDA violations, but it CANNOT and SHOULD NOT ATTEMPT to file suit against the media outlets which ran the leaks. And that's who Apple is always threatening--news sites, the media, *the press*, who have explicit First Amendment rights to run stories on Apple's upcoming products if they wish to. That's who Apple is always threatening, and *that* is why they're evil. A third party has no obligation to obey an NDA, and the press has no obligation to reveal its sources. You obviously care about money more than freedom, and I pity that.
What Apple likes to call "leaks" are what other companies call "expected". Whenever you have a new product or concept in the pipeline, people start talking about it, a few employees drop hints to friends in the media, and then the rumour mill generates this positive expectaion about a product. Normal companies consider it a part of the advertising process, because it's better to build up anticipation about product releases than to just dump them on an unsuspecting world. Publicity is good.
But look at what Apple is doing thanks to that fruity control freak Jobs. The leaks in question happened, most of them, a few days before the product announcement--that's to be expected, and had a positive impact for Apple in that it got people excited and made them anticipate the big revelation, so that on the day of the expo people got online just to see the new Apple products, who otherwise might naver have bothered. That's free advertising. It's a common thing in all industries, and to sue the press and Apple's own fan base is utterly insipid--and that's who these John/Jane Does are going to turn out to be, people who love Apple and wanted to share these great new products, to tell people "look at your favorite tech or Apple sites on expo day, because there's big stuff brewing."
And no, Apple has no right to keep a secret. Case designs released with too little time for a competitor to steal them are not trade secrets. The fact that new products will (would have) carry Radeon graphics is not a trade secret. NDA or not, what Apple is doing is morally and ethically wrong, and business-wise it's completely unsound--foster fan sites, don't make them hate you due to cease-and-desist letters the very night before you're going to announce the fucking product anyway. What complete and utter assholes. Freedom of the press guarantees that as long as the press doesn't sctively induce the breaking of an NDA, that they can run whatever info they want about Apple as long as it isn't libelous. Apple wants to fuck with our fundamental freedoms, then we should fuck Apple right back.
I used to be a big fan of Apple, but now I'm looking forward to other PowerPC based boards. I would never, never, buy a new Apple computer now, after all this misbehaviour. Jobs has just proven that he's still about 12 years old in terms of maturity, what with his lawyer-whoring and his retribution against ATI for minor leaks just a few days before the official announcement. All credit for Apple's coolness and revolutionary nature in the old days will now be given by me to Woz, and I'll just consider Jobs no better than a good car salesman--good at his job, makes a lot of money for his lot, but is still a sleazy piece of scum underneath. If I ever buy any more Apple hardware, it'll be used, so that not a cent goes directly to Apple. If you beleive in freedom of the press, I hope you're with me on this. Cool hardware and a great GUI isn't worth my soul or my principles. Someone ought to start an anti-Apple-lawyer-whoring site and post about it here and elsewhere, in order to get attention to the fact that what Apple is doing now is at least as bad as what IBM was doing back when that famous, unforgettable commercial aired. Way to kill the spirit of your company and its fans, Jobs...
At least with snail mail I can go to my P.O. Box and weed through all the junk mail pretty easily. But I doubt the USPS is prepared for the onslaught of commercial spam such a scheme would engender. They may be used to delivering tons of the tangible stuff every day, but with spam it's always pointed out that it costs nothing to send spam ads so people send more spam e-mail than they could ever send spam snail-mail.
And this brings up a very important point; as a government agency, the USPS wouldn't be able to filter spam. Spammers could complain that it's governmental prior restraint to filter their unsolicited ads. Without the ability to filter spam at all, I suspect that such a system would rapidly buckle under heavy load. Even worse, this is the USPS--they'd probably use a naming system for everyone's addresses, a naming system which is easily guessed by spammers. I imagine that this idea will either go nowhere, or if they do implement it that they fold under the strain or, if they do filter, become a legal target for the Direct Marketing Association, or as I like to call them "the first horseman of the apocalypse." I hate those guys....
> Don't get me started on Carrara. OK, it's a nice app, can do most things
;-)
> reasonably well, but it is not half of what 3DS or Maya is... some of us actually
> need some of the more advanced functions in MAX. But for a quick fun
> experimental scene or something, Carrara is great...
Of course you're right about that--Carrara wasn't designed to be a professional 3D app, it was meant more as an enthusiast/light work sort of thing. But like I said, for the uses most people would use something like 3D Studio for, Carrara really shines. If you want to do 3D work but for fun not as a real 3D artist, Carrara is definitely the way to go. Very few people need MAX's more advanced features for light work like modelling for games, so the whole ease-of-use and intuitiveness of Carrara's interface is an attractive feature in that market segment.
I've used MAX and Maya--on an, ahem, unofficial trial basis--and although I'm by no means a slouch when it came to learning them, Carrara just won me over instantly for the sort of enthusiast work I do. What can I say, MetaCreations knows how to make a crisp and intuitive GUI; ever since Kai's Power Tools, I've fallen in love with their software. And for the work I've done on--no, I'm not kidding--box covers for adult videos, KPT Goo is the ultimate tool. Nothing restores the perkiness of breasts that are flattened by horizontal positions so easily as a little supple stretching with Kai's Goo...
But, I digress. For pro 3D work, I'd imagine that Maya 3 would be the ideal, especially since Pixar's RenderMan interfaces with it to speed up and distribute rendering across a network. Any opinions on MAX versus Maya?
You have a good point, but maybe reasoning goes more like this: if people use a stripped-down free version, fewer warez sites will carry a full version which is only more useful to professionals, and therefore the people who would want to pirate the full version will have a much harder time finding it since fewer warez sites bother. That seems like a fair line of reasoning to me, although there's no actual data to back it up. Only time will tell if such strategies will work. But, when you charge several thousand dollars for a program, you've got to expect that only companies and well-to-do pros will buy it; individuals and we poor people [sound of tiny violins] will pirate it.
I truly wonder how much outright piracy is responsible for releases like this. It seems that many companies are offering stripped-down free versions of their software, and my guess is that a large number of such releases are to minimize the desire to pirate the full program. Ontrack/Mijenix, for example, released a free version of some of their products, with limited functionality, and several more companies have started similar measures this past year.
/. in a thread about graphics workstations.
One thing I've noticed is that these products which get limited free versions are usually ones which are heavily pirated. I suppose one line of reasoning is that if a version with all the commonly-used features is freely available, that people will be less likely to pirate the full version with all the less-commonly-used or only-needed-by-professionals features. 3D Studio MAX is among the most commonly pirated 3D apps, despite the dongle protection scheme (which was cracked within weeks). Heck, I even downloaded it to try it out after people were discussing it here on
But for the things most people would use it for, there are better tools. My favorite is MetaCreations' 3D package called Carrarra. Carrarra is an integrated offering combining the features of Ray Dream Studio and Infini-D into one easy-to-use and intuitive interface. The thing I've always loved about MetaCreations is that their user interfaces are not only eye candy, they're easy to learn and practically self-explanatory. If anyone is interested in 3D graphics and wants something far easier to use than 3D Studio MAX, but still powerful and versatile, check out http://www.metacreations.com/products/carrara/ for their under-appreciated but very fine product. I use it all the time for making game models, and it'll probably whip the hell out of any stripped down version of MAX.
People are always complaining, "Wah wah, why waste money on [insert interesting pastime here] when there are starving/cold/rusty/disenfranchised/boring/whateve r [insert poor beset-upon sector here] people in [wherever]. Blech. No one starves here in America by necessity. There are always jobs, if you want them. There are plenty of handouts--err, "assistance programs"--as it is, too, so there's no substantial complaint to be made that government doesn't already do enough to support people. So, why not take some of that pork-barrel BS that subsidizes corporate America, or cut some of the bloat and cruft of our bureaucracies, or take some of that NSA money [one Senate member called the classified spending figure "bigger than the Gross Demestic Products of almost all the countries we monitor, combined"], and give Americans something to be proud of? For decades NASA and its far-reaching programs were a source of both national pride and pride in man's accomplishments. Now, what do Americans have to be proud of? The universality of McDonalds? The fact that almost every other country either openly hates us or sniggers behind our backs? The fact that Bill Gates has much more money than NASA does?
All I said is that our space exploration used to be a national pastime, providing many high points in the first decades of our space program. It was something all Americans, and all people, could be proud of. And, I said that we're not going to get any more of that unifying magic out of the space program, if all we do is throw more hunks of metal at Mars and the Jovian moons. So don't give me any of that bleeding heart crap about how the resources should go elsewhere, since most Americans think our government needs to cut back most of its spending on bureaucracy and mismanagement anyway. At least when NASA had a decent budget, they did amazing things that inspired people--you can't say that about the welfare system, corporate tax breaks, bureaucracies which cost ~75% of our tax dollars to manage the other ~25% that actually gets spent on something other than bureaucrats' salaries, etc.
I'm glad we're hurling more objects at Mars and all, but I'm amazed at the slowness with which we're exploring everyone's favourite big red bouncy ball. After all, it's been nearly a third of a century since we first put men on the moon, and yet that's as far as we've sent humans and, what's worse, we haven't even hurled very many probes out to our planetary neighbours. What's the total number? Not many...
It honestly makes me wish there were still a space race going on; at least then we'd still be actively involved in space exploration. Instead of space exploration NASA spends most of its time trying to convince pointy-headed bureaucrats and politicians to give it enough money to survive. Despite recent successes--and failures--it really seems like NASA is suffering a slow and excruciating death by underfunding; a sad state of affairs for a space exploration program which built up such momentum way back in the Kennedy administration.
Think of how many pivotal moments NASA has given us in the twentieth century. Nipping at the heels of the Soviets with our first man in space, and totally outdoing them with the moon landing (my grandparents shot a Polaroid of the television screen the moment Armstrong set foot on the moon); the gripping drama and ultimate redemption of Apollo 13; the public amazement when the Space Shuttles, like the spacefaring planes of science fiction, flew for the first time; the emotional Challenger disaster and the ensuing investigation; the colorful Pathfinder images that captivated the public for weeks. Just about every American can remember at least one of these things, and see it as an important event we'll always remember. Personally, I'll never forget my elementary school teacher hearing about it on her radio and taking the whole class to the school library to watch the live coverage following the Challenger disaster.
But instead of great moments like these, we can look forward to much smaller events and less publicly enthralling ones. Quite sad, when our government spends $3 *T*rillion a year, that we "don't have the money" to explore space as vigorously as we did in the first decades of the space program. I'm beginning to think that we'll never see a manned mission to Mars in my lifetime, at this rateand before anyone complains about high expenditures for small returns, remember that there's always been more to the space program (til recently) than just scientific data. There's been national pride for Americans, and more general pride in the accomplishments of mankind; there's been old-fashioned adventure, space really being the final frontier, the last place man hasn't set foot; space *travel*, actual exploration by humans, is what fascinated us, not data from a probe. The budget of the NSA alone would probably be enough to keep sending men further into space for some time, maybe even enough to start planning a lengthy manned Mars mission. But instead we spend it on Echelon and corporate espionage. It's disappointing to say the least. I don't think, short of provably finding extraterrestrial microbes with one of its landers, there's anything NASA can do to captivate the public interest and spark public excitement any more. Nothing that can be done with a mere probe can top the Pathfinder images, except for finding Martian or Ionian or Europan life. But, here's hoping...
When is *BSD going to get as easy to install as Linux? I'd gladly take it for a test drive, but installing it is such a chore. I always thought install routines should be the easiest part of getting an OS up and running, with tweaking later being the most time-consuming part, but last I heard about *BSD you set up, get dumped to a command line, and then have to manually set up X. Yuck. Has this changed in recent releases, or is there an option to configure X during install yet? I'm not asking for some shiny graphical install routine, just something as user-friendly as Mandrake 6.0, with its lists of choices for setting up X if you want X. I tell ya, if there's one nice thing about Solaris, it's that the CDE desktop gets installed by default and it works like a charm with no black magic needed... :-)
Without those sheep, there wouldn't be such a large supply of music available. Before Napster, I used USENET to find mp3s and unfortunately never could find much of what I wanted, because largely a few people post what they themselves like. A small number of USENET people take requests for mp3s, and I always felt bad for asking since I'm on an ass-slow connection and can't upload easily.
/. reader, I tried Gnutella when it was available. My conclusion? Why bother using it for mp3s, when using Napster produced more results, and greater chances of finding a high-quality 192kpps or greater version (I may be on a slow connection, but I can't stand crummy low bitrate stuff; I'm half-blind, but my hearing is great...). Plus, there's nothing wrong with ease of use. I will never understand why some people around here are practically *offended* by ease of use. Why use a more complicated system if an easier-to-use one, which saves the user's time and effort for other pursuits, is available? If I wanted files other than mp3s, Gnutella or Freenet is the tool of choice, but for mp3s nothing can beat Napster for both variety and for saving my precious time (until the plug is pulled, at least).
/. are nice down-to-earth people, but some have these Sysadmin=God complexes, and look down on people who appreciate ease of use and such principles. Quite frankly, we have the Mac to thank for making computers popular and sparking interest of the generation which spawned the Net, and cheap x86 boxes with Windows to thank for turning the Net into the common ground of immense possibilities which it is today. While *nix owned the Net on the server side, without those Windows and Mac users the Net would still be a small playground for a few comp sci majors and academics.
Then came Napster, and Napster was good. Type in a song title and artist, and the odds were that it was there. The key was sheer volume of users whose entire collections were available at any given time. Being a faithful
Try getting something terribly specific like "When I Fall" and the other tracks from *Martinis & Bikinis* by Sam Phillips on USENET or Gnutella; not very likely, whereas I pieced it together from Napster after a little nightly diligence. I repeat: those "sheep" you condescendingly talk about are the reason for that, since sheer number provides greater chance for finding the files you want. Please, stop being such elitists, some of you. Most people on
Napster is now belittled by some around here for bringing this sort of file sharing to the masses. Nothing personal, but those few who dislike anything made for the masses ought to stop actingng like such l337 hax0r chillun. There's a difference between the mind-numbing stupidity fostered by AOL, and stuff that's just easy to use as opposed to stuff which actively promotes stupidity. Not everyone is or wants to be a guru, try to understand that and don't belittle something merely because of its ease-of-use or shininess. What is actually bad about what Napster has done (aside from the debate over morality of mp3 trading)?
Personally, I never got into the IM thing. I always preferred e-mail or USENET or other forums for real discussions, since you can mull over what you're going to say first. What really seems odd to me is when people in the same town IM each other, instead of making a telephone call--it's much better to actually hear someone's voice, and it beats the hell out of typing furiously to get the same WPM.
But if you really have to communicate on-line in real time with someone--what's the matter with TALK? I miss it. People hardly use it any more, I guess because a shiny AIM interface is prettier than TALKing through telnet or whatever. Just never caught on with the non-geek and non-college-student crowd, I guess, especially with AIM out there. I pray for the day that AOL goes under, though I fear it'll never happen. "AOL: We're the Largest Censor on the Net, With Over 20 Million Subscribers Under Our Heel!"
It may be closed, but at least it's affordable. The annoying thing about Zip disks is that they're unaccountably expensive. The drives themselves are coming in at a decent price, *finally*, since you can get a remanufactures ATAPI ZIP unit for $49.95 at CompUSA, but the disks are still way too expensive to be all that useful considering capacity of 100MB (the 250 MB drives and disks are both even more $$$).
I bought a parallel port unit a few years ago when I got my first computer, an ancient 486DX4/100 laptop. Aside from the 5-pack that came with it, I only ever bought 2 more disks--Fuji brand Zip 2-pack for $25. I finally got a real computer and added a CD burner, and the Zip unit sits atop my computer still, unused for at least a year and a half. The sad part is, until the last few months, Zip drives were still retailing for the same price I bought mine at a couple years ago, and disk prices have come down a bit but not much.
I'm really not a fan of Iomega: overpriced is their best descriptor. My friends with LS-120 SuperDisk drives actually use them a lot, what with much more affordable media and all, and the drives themselves have been at a great price for a while. Plus, they double as your floppy drive which is cool, saves space, and sounds better than a regular floppy drive (not quite as gratingly noisy with the seeks and transfers).
The above post is probably just flamebait, but sadly enough there are many people who actually hold similar beliefs. The reality is that trading DivX and mp3 files is not only very minor--there are even conflicting studies as to whether it hurts or helps CD sales--but these days it's also arguably a form of civil disobedience.
I consider it a protest against the perversion of copyright and other IP laws by big corporations which are insinuating themselves into positions of undue influence in government; corporations have vastly more resources than individuals, and as such individuals can no longer influence their government to such a great extent as corporations can.
The whole notion that IP no longer passes into the public domain after a reasonable period of time in which its creators can derive profit, but instead remains locked up for 100 years after the death of the creator, is deplorable. Corporations like Disney made their fortunes by using public domain IP (half of Disney's cartoons are from other people's stories, used for free) which they'd have never been able to use under the IP law they've now implemented to keep their own creations indefinitely instead of giving back to the public domain they so richly borrowed from. The music industry is similarly guilty.
As such, it's a valid form of protest to pirate mp3s and DivX of songs and films created by companies which have taken from public domain IP but never contributed back. Real cybercrime involves matters more serious than trading mp3s privately rather than for profit.
Even more, I object to the notion in the paper referenced that it's a bad thing that "many countries do not share the urgency to combat cyber-crime for many reasons, including different values concerning piracy and espionage or the need to address more pressing social problems." That's one of the things I dislike most about the U.S.: cultural imperialism. The U.S. government has a tendency to try to push its own values and legal precepts onto other nations, and that's just plain wrong. Unless human rights are being violated in a very fundamental way, the U.S. has no right to attempt to coerce other countries into accepting our own cultural values.
For example, if a sovereign nation wants to adopt a policy which makes all IP public domain within a few years, that's the right of that nation to do so. Originally, copyrights in the U.S. lasted only 14 years. But instead the U.S. tries to put pressure on such countries, or else bribes them with "humanitarian" grants into accepting the U.S. position. Would we allow the largest corporation in the U.S. to bully all others into adopting particular strategies, dividing up markets, and bribing competitors into submission? No. So, why is the U.S. allowed to dictate its values to the rest of the world?
This is important because "cybercrime" as it's defined now in the U.S. includes matters which are legal in other nations, and the U.S. is attempting to pressure other nations into accepting U.S. offenses as international ones. Most of this pressure comes from the far right in this country, who are campaigning against pornography and recreational narcotics as well as trying to extend corporate hegemony.
One of the prime examples is the U.S. characterization of the Netherlands as being the largest producer of child pornography and a major point of interest in drug trafficking. Since the Reagan-Meese morality policing of the 80s, The Netherlands has been in FBI reports as the largest producer of child pornography, because the age of consent for porn in The Netherlands is 16 rather than 18. Rather skewed to call that child pornography, merely because cultural attitudes toward sex are more permissive in one country than in the most puritanical one on the planet. Also, The Netherlands actually has very strict controls placed on marijuana, which is legal to purchase in certain locales even though it's not legally easily exportable or even transportable within the country itself. That's similarly no reason for FBI reports to classify The Netherlands as a notable place for drug trafficking.
The Netherlands was replaced by Japan in FBI reports on cybercrime as the largest producer of child pornography, despite the fact that once again a cultural difference comes into play. Japan has never suffered the same sexual repression/oppression that some Western nations such as the U.S. have suffered, due to huge religious and cultural differences, hance the age of consent for pornography was lower than 18. The U.S. applied economic and political pressure to force the sovereign nation of Japan to raise its own internal age of consent for pornography production, which regardless of one's own attitudes towards sex or pornography is an inappropriate thing for one nation to do to another. Japan happily has no stigma attached to sex, and no Puritanical expectation of chastity until marriage. To include what is legal in its own nation and hosted in its own nation in cybercrime statistics is both cylturally imperialistic and dishonest.
This hasn't even touched upon the Chinese attitudes toward piracy of music and film, which would never be allowed by the U.S. to continue were it not for the fact that China is one of the most powerful nations. Were it a small, average country, the U.S. would have pressured them and economically blackmailed or bribed them already to buy into U.S. cultural values on the subject.
While the paper's details about various cracking exploits and their relationships with applicable federal laws is informative, I find its nonchalant inclusion of software piracy together with extortion and money laundering and fraud to be laughable, and its comments about laws which diverge in other countries from U.S. law to be downright offensive. It's extremely selfish and culturally imperialistic to assume that American ways are right and any others are wrong and still to be considered illegal even when permitted in the country in question. And anyone who wants to know why I harped on the differing definition of child pornography in the U.S. and in other nations, it's because the FBI likes to artificially inflate those figures in order to make the threat appear more significant than it is, in order to secure more of our tax dollars and to get away with more abuses of civil rights--after all, when anyone mentions children people start being emotional instead of rational. More about that here at this link.
There's a film about him called, creatively enough, *Leadbelly*. I highly recommend it if you're interested in one of the most unique stories behind the music. But I'll briefly give you some highlights:
Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbedder(sp?) was a travelling musician in the 20s and 30s in the mostly-rural South. Like most musicians of the day he made his money by playing in bars and saloons, at village festivals and the like. But he was unusually good, and played a 12-string guitar so fiercely that he sounded like a whole band all by himself. He also composed some of his own great lyrics, despite complete lack of education, in addition to playing the old stand-bys that everyone back then knew (House of the Rising Sun, Midnight Special, and a bunch of other now-famous tunes). He was in prison twice, if memory serves once for assaulting a white man who assaulted him first, and once for murdering one who also probably deserved it. One time he was in jail in Texas, and he was allowed to have his guitar in prison--the governor's summer house happened to be right across from the prison, so Leadbelly was brought over to play all the governor's parties. He impressed everyone there, and even played a song once whose lyrics were a plea to the governor to pardon him; Governor Pat Neff was so impressed, that he said the last thing he'd do before leaving office was to sign Leadbelly's pardon. True to his word, the day the governor left office Leadbelly was pardoned. He went back to his old life as a travelling musician, before landing in prison again after he went back to his hometown and some white men picked a fight with him. That's when some people from the Smithsonian Institution, who were on a project to preserve folk music through recordings, heard about him and interviewed and recorded him in prison. When he was released, he'd become a minor folk celebrity and was able to do recording sessions with a bunch of the small studios that existed back then, as well as make money from playing in public. By this time he was older and the fire in his belly wasn't so uncontrollable, and he became the kind of middle-aged gentleman who, even though he may live in a fleabag motel, dresses immaculately and wears $50 shoes--in the 1950s, $50 shoes were beyond merely expensive.
His recordings got passed down over the years in ever-degrading forms, copies of copies of copies of the original acetate and glass recordings, and if you get older recordings of him they'll often sound terrible. A few years ago though the Smithsonian started restoring and remastering its collection of folk recordings, and then publishing them. So, Smithsonian Folkways has put out the CDs of the best of Leadbelly's recordings, and they sound nice and crisp. The one caveat is that Leadbelly sang in the old tradition, and his stuff sounds far more original, far more rough and surprising than today's music. It takes some getting used to him, since we've been raised on sameness and often blandness in our music, but he's the best damned guitar player this side of Robert Johnson (the 20s bluesman who, the story goes, made a deal with the devil at a crossroads, in order to become the best guitar player ever--cf. the movie *Crossroads* with Ralph Macchio for a Hollywood version of his story).