Are you saying the opposition would allow these polling machines to be created WITHOUT being satisfied the voting system will not be rigged (any more than it may currently be...) ?
It's been done. The usual method is for the incumbents to buy off the opposition through poliical favors. . . jobs, high-pay/low-work consult gigs, favorable vendor contracts (and I do NOT mean to the taxpayer).
WASHINGTON--Gigi Sohn hopes that geeks have become so enraged by recent anti-piracy schemes that they'll finally want to fight back.
The 40-year old lawyer, head of the Public Knowledge nonprofit group here, plans to recruit ragtag band of technophiles and train them to become a corps of effective political activists on the Internet front.
To Sohn, this means seizing on widespread discontent created by the attempts of Hollywood and the music labels to curtail file-swapping
networks while promoting sweeping new anti-copying laws and standards.
E-mail campaigns are easily ignored, and transforming online ire into effective political action is hardly a trivial task.
Geek armies have always been eager to vent in online forums and clog the e-mail inboxes of errant congressional types. As far back as 1995,
over 50,000 peeved Netizens signed an electronic petition slamming the Clinton administration's privacy-invasive Clipper Chip. [...]
POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ Like Politech? Make a donation here: http://www.politechbot.com/donate/
What isn't from Declan's post to politech is that Gigi has already raised $1.1M.
At last, we have the chance to work with something with at least the possibility of success.
No, $1.1M isn't enough so we can afford to sit on her asses and let her solve the problems for us. It's only a start. We're going to have to put our own time and effort into this or we won't be making a living in high-tech in the USA.
Will she spend the money she's raised on the heavy artillery we need to back up our grassroots efforts and make them effective? (fax servers, ad purchases, campaign contributions, a top-bracket political lobbyist, political consultants, etc.) We'll see.
The good news is that if those of us trying to make a living at high-tech do get in and pitch and Public Knowledge does the right things, we might wind up with our own lobbying organization line NRA and AARP, and we'll never have to worry about politicians not listening to us again.
I sort of doubt it. I'm planning to switch to a *nix in the next few months on mine and so are most of the Windows power users I know. We're tired of BSODs and we're tired of Microsoft.
WALMART is selling Linux boxes now.
IBM says they've almost recouped the $1B they put into Linux development.
Rasterman really should have read the set of Forbes articles here showing billion-dollar companies switching to Linux to save money including on the desktop.
Linux isn't dead anywhere. Perhaps Rasterman's personal projects didn't work out, but not everything does.
Linux needs some improvements in installation, upgrade, user interface, and more available applications. If you want these problems fixed, write code or support those who do.
Apple has been pronounced dead more than once. They're sitting on $1B in cash and have the first user-friendly unix in existence. We can learn from these people. The first lesson is that "it ain't over 'til it's over".
Remember that while the GOP is working on taking our civil liberties away, they are also the ones who've been telling Hollywood that SSSCA/CBDTPA won't fly.
This isn't because they understand technology, just that Hollywood didn't think the GOP worth buying.
I'm voting in the next election based on candidates' positions on the entertainment industry attempts to take our freedom to use computers and the Internet as WE wish, not as RIAA/MPAA dictates.
My county uses paper ballots.I expect my ballot to be counted accurately and honestly. Too bad nobody in Palm Beach can say the same.
Unlike her, I do believe that fair and accurate election results are possible via voting machine. I believe this requires Open Source voting software and a way by the interested public to verify during the election process that the software that was audited by the public is in fact being used during the election, and that observers chosen by any and all candidates be running be allowed to monitor the internal processes of the counting machinery during the election.
Counting votes is NOT rocket science. Any company that asserts proprietary code and procedures used in counting them is automatically guilty until proven innocent.
You aren't willing to take the word of Microsoft as to the security of their operating systems and you are willing to take the word of a local government IN FLORIDA and of its voting machine vendor about the integrity of a "black box" voting process?
I hope you don't do anything having to do with computer security for anybody I do business with. You sound like a "run IIS right out of the box" kind of guy.
I don't. If a band-aid fix to W98 was possible to make it run *well*, Microsoft would have done it themselves and probably would have delayed their plans of converging server/workstation that became W2000 simply for the sake of being able to sell a Windows project with the slogan "It just works".
If they'd managed that, we probably wouldn't be here having this discussion.
If MS made decent quality software, Linux would be a mere curiosity. The growing enthusiasm for Open Source is based on millions of people seeing hundreds of millions of BSODs.
Yes. Start now. The more you know when you start the program, the more advantage you can take of the facilities offered to you. Get serious about getting started now and when your fellow classmates are learning Ohm's Law, you can be building stuff.
All I'm saying is that I think this sucks, but it isn't necessarily a power grab to create a society based on "1984".
I suggest getting up to speed on current events. The goal of the terrorists with respect to what they want our societies to look like has a lot in common with the goals of our "democratically" elected officials.
America already has imprisonment without trial, the reason why our crypto is still unregulated enough to be useful is that even our boneheads have figured out that without encryption, e-commerce is impossible, and that could cost a lot of their campaign contributors a lot of money.
I can see a day coming very soon where I won't be making statements like this publically because of a reasonable fear of "disappearing".
We can be outraged, but do we have another method they can use?
We don't have to in order to demostrate that the authorities want to take our civil liberties in exchange for even more insecurity than we had to begin with.
The only use a central repository of database keys for a government is to give the government a tool with which its honest citizens can be attacked and another charge to hang on a suspected terrorist, as if conspiracy to commit murder, etc. isn't enough.
Will we eventually see cases where a poor baffled user is arrested and charged with illegal encryption, when what they really did was order a pair of socks from llbean.com?
Probably, but it'll because they want the user for something else.
People always get the local governments they deserve.
E.E. "Doc" Smith
What does this kind of crypto law say about the residents of the EU?
The cable companies have made it clear that what they want people to do with their broadband is Websurf, send e-mail, and download an occasional MP3 from an "approved source" and watch TV in a real small RA or WMP window.
In other words, what they want is for people to pay a lot more per month to do very little more than they can do with dialup.
If they manage to prevent via port/IP blocking and/or AUP the use of their system for anything more, even Joe Sixpack from Deadfish, ID might start wondering why the hell he's paying $50-70/month for the kind of interactivity he was paying $20/month for.
Do you have any new sort of things that might be worth trying with broadband of the sort that might be the next killer app... the thing that will make everybody realize that they can't live without broadband?
Try it with a cablemodem and you might have the police or FBI kicking down your door.
If you have anything more interesting than a P2P server in mind, think in terms of relocating to a place where you can get citiLEC service or of creative DIY alternatives... find an ISP willing to let you stick a microwave antenna on their roof or do the other end of a DIY DSL setup. Or start looking for dot.com investors and get yourself a T1.
While I don't expect this to happen, it might not be all that expensive to push fiber to most curbs.
While what I've been hearing is about municipally-owned power companies building their own fiber optics networks for internal use and suddenly realizing that they had a cash cow they could tap by simply opening public access, I would assume that the commercially owned utilities have done the same thing.
Give them access to long-term public bond financing for the purpose of getting service from the utility poles to the home/business and a mandate to use it.
Of course, this would force cable companies and telco DSL either to compete on price and service or go out of business.
So far, in the places where citiLECs have been built, I haven't heard of any companies going out of business, just discovering that they can provide good, reasonably priced service once the customers realize that they don't have to accept excuses for bad service, they can pick up a phone and get the good stuff.
What I actually expect to happen is that the emerging centers of new technological growth are going where the cheap bandwidth is. That leaves out Silicon Valley and most of the rest of the US. The broadband apps everyone will discover they need will come. And everyone outside these cheap bandwidth areas will be paying cablemodem / telco retail for them.
About one in 100 (somewhere between 1 in 50 and one in 200) people in the general population is a psychopath. This is a (set of?) brain disfunction(s) that amounts to "no conscience". (Think "colorblind" but with respect to harm-to-others. But it's not known yet whether it's genetic, foetal insult, or what.) Additionally there are "sociopaths" - similar symptoms but as a result of training and social factors rather than an organic problem.
I don't necessarily disagree, I just want to know where I can find the numbers, I might want to cite them some time.
Short of genocide against psychopaths we will continue to have a plague of spammers for at least
Why not limit the genocide to repeat spammers?Or simply remove all the civil rights of repeat spammers and let Darwin deal with them.
This isn't a matter of wait and see, the bill stinks so badly that even the sponsors claim to oppose it.
The Webcaster exemption is meaningless unless legislation is passed that overrides the Library of Congress CARP decision that makes Webcasting financially impossible for any US-based operation. Don't expect the bill to have this provision added, it was not written for our benefit either as consumers or as content distributors
Unfortunately, this is a draft, so there is no bill number we can add to this to so we can tell our Congresscritters which bill we want dumped into the bitbucket. Yet.
What can we do?
When the bill we don't want becomes available, we need to contact our Congressmen and Senators and tell them that WE DO NOT WANT IT. We need to tell our Congressman and Senators to VOTE YES on Rick Boucher's Music Online Competition Act .
The best way to do this is with a fax gateway set up specifically to enable us and anyone else who's interested to easily contact our elected representatives. When it becomes available, we then need to point, click, and make our points known.
Letters are obsolete in this context. Due to worry about anthrax, they are going through extensive decontamination and a letter might take months to get there if it shows up at all. Phone calls are good, but this works best because it's easy for someone to casually participate. What we need are hundreds of thousands of contacts between us and our elected representatives, and it's been proven that this works.
The ACLU uses this approach and it frequently works, despite the unpopularity of the ACLU itself and civil liberties in general.
Who lives in Washington,DC who is willing to dedicate a telephone line to this and is willing to maintain a fax server limited to local calls within the DC area?
The software required to run a Web-to-fax gateway already exists, check http://www.tpc.int for more information. The site seems to be down right now. If it doesn't come back up, there are other possibilities. Or start an Open Source project at Sourceforge and write one.
Given the basic gateway software, a front end is needed that does what we need to do.
The main requirement is that it allow users to submit their zip codes and automatically return a response that will direct their faxes with our canned message and anything users want to add to the fax number corresponding to their Congresscritter.
The ACLU has this kind of setup that should be easy to duplicate. To see the user interface, click here and enter your zip code. Go through with the rest of the process if you agree with what they want public support for, but the important part is to see how such a thing works.
The hardest part is gathering the list of several hundred fax numbers. While there is such a list, it's a couple of years old and needs updating before it is used. Fixing this just takes being willing to put in a few hours comparing the list against the current list of Congresscritters and going to individual web pages for new additions to the list.
Based on the previous performance of the geek community, The Register says essentially that we as a community are too stupid to mobilize to cover our own asses,preferring the practice of pure Libertarian cult dogma to any approach that can work in the real world. Maybe they're right. I'm writing this in case they aren't.
Is our freedom worth a spare server, the price of a phone line, a bit of code writing, and being willing to point and click a few times as these bills hit various points in the legislative process?
It's up to you now. If The Register is right, and we can't mobilize to protect ourselves, we don't deserve to be free and we don't deserve to be able to use our computers and the Net we will instead of as appliances whose posssiblities are limited to what Hollywood, the Feds, and Microsoft give us permission for.
As luck would have it, urban apartment dwellers have a lot of broadband capacity right under their noses, courtesy of Kepco, the public power utility, which developed a network of fiber-optic cables for its own use years ago. In 1996, South Korea allowed Kepco to lease the unused 90 percent of its capacity, giving upstart providers a cheap, instant last-mile solution. Sharp competition with Korea Telecom, which the government forced to open its network in the early '90s, has driven broadband prices down to the world's lowest levels. All-you-can-eat service is available for as little as $25 a month.
This is the most important part of the article, how they did it.
This has been done in the USA in a few places. A few lucky people have cheap fiber optic to the curb thanks to their local/regional municipal power companies. Their prices are comparable to South Korea's.
This isn't happening here because in most states, the cable and telcos have bought legislatures to prevent this from providing their current customers with superior competition.
In the past, companies located next to cheap resources, mainly power and raw materials. In the future, companies will be looking for cheap broadband data access. South Korea will be one of these places.
The cities and rural areas with public power who have sense enough to leverage this into broadband public data access will be the hypergrowth areas in the future.
That growth will come at the expense of the areas whose people allow themselves to be governed by tards whose law-making capability is at the disposal of the highest bidder.
"People always get the local governments they deserve." E.E. "Doc" Smith
The situation we have is a broadband duopoly, if the consumer is lucky. At best, the average user gets a choice between bad cablemodem service and bad DSL service unless he's very lucky.
While some innovative municipal utility companies have rolled out fiber optic to the curb, both the telcos and cable companies have purchased legislation to insure that can't happen in many states, California among them.
The alternatives unless one can economically justify T1 are... if you can find a dialup ISP willing to experiment, build a point-to-point 802.11 / microwave link with the other end on their roof or DIY DSL renting a "dry pair" (aka alarm circuit, etc.)...
From my POV, I take these threads as simply a warning to avoid cablemodems from major broadband companies no matter how attractive the pricing or sales pitch.
The Romans had a saying about situations like this: "Let the Gods avenge Themselves"
We know that apparently, Madonna hasn't done anything about the site in person. The site was closed down by armed thugs working for a government, not with a lightning bolt directed against either the server or the owners.
This means Madonna doesn't exist, is not offended, or doesn't have the power to do anything about the site content.
If She doesn't exist, there's no cause for action and the Italian government has brought shame upon itself for nothing.
If She doesn't have the power to do anything about it without the help of armed government thugs, why is anyone worshipping Her?
If She does exist and either is not offended or likes the site, where is there a cause for action?
The Roman attitude expressed in "Let the Gods avenge themselves" is wise and based on common sense. The action of the Italian government is based on simple superstition of the sort that should have been left behind when our ancestors climbed down from the trees.
Of course, that last sentence would have put slashdot's existence in danger if its servers and owners were in a primitive country.
However, the same crowd would be outraged if I said that "Bin Laden is a hero" or that "the WTC people deserved to die for being ignorant/arrogant americans."
So? Very few here would call for removal of your Website if it said things like that, and anyone who did demand that your pro-binLaden site be taken down would be eyeballs deep in flames. Those of us capable of outrage expect to be outraged by some of what we see on the Net. If we don't like something, we click another URL like an adult can be expected to.
whenever we're discussing social issues (as opposed to tech. ones) I can't help feeling disgusted by some of the expressed opinions.
My problem with social-technological issues here is that most of the opinions here on matters of greater social importance than P4 vs Athlon are usually based on willful ignorance and that offends me. However, while I might have that problem with you, I don't have that problem with the slashdot population in this case.
Everybody here knows what censorship issues are and I agree with the consensus that those would tell us what we can read on the Net or think or see need to be destroyed. Perhaps if you ever advance beyond the wannabe category in censorship, we will be expressing a wish for your destruction.
Your opinion disgusts me, but I don't suggest that you be removed from slashdot.
I was going to suggest creating a cool logo which can be displayed as a banner by artists who are not with RIAA... but unless your people have the resources to trademark it, major labels will grab it immediately to stick on lesser known artist sites.
I'm working with an independent artist NOW, but I don't want our site slashdotted unless her CDs (we're doing CD-on-demand via third party vendor)are ready to go... that's weeks from now.
I don't know the music scene well enough to give you such a list of independent artists... but I agree one is necessary. In the meantime, I suggest that you put somewhere prominent on your site a contact address for artists who aren't RIAA.
Shutting down P2P and Internet Radio isn't about protecting artist royalties or even record label royalties.
It is about control. The RIAA record labels want to close down any venue that is easily accessible to the public where the independent (as in unsigned by major record label) artist can upload her own music without having to go through a gatekeeper under record label control.
The ability of RIAA record label suits to make a living depends on their being able to say "You can't make a living without us."
With easily available CD on demand and band merchandise on demand, all a musician needs if his/her material is any good is exposure... a musician no longer needs record labels and record stores to sell CDs and T-shirts.
The last choke point that allows RIAA labels a chance to make money off artists and the public is exposure to masses of people. Internet Radio and P2P allowed an easy way for the independent artist to get to the people.
When people say "I bought CDs from bands I never heard of thanks to Napster, etc.", this doesn't make the RIAA want to keep P2P / Internet Radio open, their business is to make sure you only buy from RIAA artists... to find RIAA artists, turn on any Clear Channel radio station. Where an independent without a major promotion budget isn't going to be heard.
No. Buy CDs ONLY from artists who are selling their own music, either at gigs or via the Web AT THEIR OWN WEBSITES. Not ones created by major labels for them, ones made by the artists themselves. (or usually, by Web authors paid by the artists) Figuring out which is which isn't rocket science.
That is one of the best ways to make sure that the artist gets compensated, not the drug dealers who sell to the suits at major record labels.
Slashdot Mirror
It's been done. The usual method is for the incumbents to buy off the opposition through poliical favors. . . jobs, high-pay/low-work consult gigs, favorable vendor contracts (and I do NOT mean to the taxpayer).
Date: Mon, 15 Jul 2002 11:40:47 -0400
From: Declan McCullagh
To: politech@politechbot.com
Subject: FC: Public Knowledge hopes to turn geeks into, well, geektivists
X-URL: Politech is at http://www.politechbot.com/
Bring in the geeks
By Declan McCullagh
July 15, 2002, 4:00 AM PT
WASHINGTON--Gigi Sohn hopes that geeks have become so enraged by recent anti-piracy schemes that they'll finally want to fight back.
The 40-year old lawyer, head of the Public Knowledge nonprofit group here, plans to recruit ragtag band of technophiles and train them to become a corps of effective political activists on the Internet front.
To Sohn, this means seizing on widespread discontent created by the attempts of Hollywood and the music labels to curtail file-swapping networks while promoting sweeping new anti-copying laws and standards.
E-mail campaigns are easily ignored, and transforming online ire into effective political action is hardly a trivial task.
Geek armies have always been eager to vent in online forums and clog the e-mail inboxes of errant congressional types. As far back as 1995, over 50,000 peeved Netizens signed an electronic petition slamming the Clinton administration's privacy-invasive Clipper Chip.
[...]
POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list
You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice.
To subscribe to Politech:
http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html
This message is archived at
http://www.politechbot.com/
Declan McCullagh's photographs are at
http://www.mccullagh.org/
Like Politech? Make a donation here:
http://www.politechbot.com/donate/
What isn't from Declan's post to politech is that Gigi has already raised $1.1M.
At last, we have the chance to work with something with at least the possibility of success.
No, $1.1M isn't enough so we can afford to sit on her asses and let her solve the problems for us. It's only a start. We're going to have to put our own time and effort into this or we won't be making a living in high-tech in the USA.
Will she spend the money she's raised on the heavy artillery we need to back up our grassroots efforts and make them effective? (fax servers, ad purchases, campaign contributions, a top-bracket political lobbyist, political consultants, etc.) We'll see.
The good news is that if those of us trying to make a living at high-tech do get in and pitch and Public Knowledge does the right things, we might wind up with our own lobbying organization line NRA and AARP, and we'll never have to worry about politicians not listening to us again.
WALMART is selling Linux boxes now.
IBM says they've almost recouped the $1B they put into Linux development.
Rasterman really should have read the set of Forbes articles here showing billion-dollar companies switching to Linux to save money including on the desktop.
Linux isn't dead anywhere. Perhaps Rasterman's personal projects didn't work out, but not everything does.
Linux needs some improvements in installation, upgrade, user interface, and more available applications. If you want these problems fixed, write code or support those who do.
Apple has been pronounced dead more than once. They're sitting on $1B in cash and have the first user-friendly unix in existence. We can learn from these people. The first lesson is that "it ain't over 'til it's over".
This isn't because they understand technology, just that Hollywood didn't think the GOP worth buying.
I'm voting in the next election based on candidates' positions on the entertainment industry attempts to take our freedom to use computers and the Internet as WE wish, not as RIAA/MPAA dictates.
My county uses paper ballots.I expect my ballot to be counted accurately and honestly. Too bad nobody in Palm Beach can say the same.
I'm sure that political incumbents find this a very important reason to buy the hardware.
I'll also add that you are assuming competence on the part of the civil servants.
Wish I had my mod points today, this is one of the funniest posts I've ever seen on slashdot. Thanks, I needed a good laugh today.
Ever heard of comp.risks? She's had a lot to say about this subject in the past.
Read it here
Unlike her, I do believe that fair and accurate election results are possible via voting machine. I believe this requires Open Source voting software and a way by the interested public to verify during the election process that the software that was audited by the public is in fact being used during the election, and that observers chosen by any and all candidates be running be allowed to monitor the internal processes of the counting machinery during the election.
Counting votes is NOT rocket science. Any company that asserts proprietary code and procedures used in counting them is automatically guilty until proven innocent.
I hope you don't do anything having to do with computer security for anybody I do business with. You sound like a "run IIS right out of the box" kind of guy.
If they'd managed that, we probably wouldn't be here having this discussion.
If MS made decent quality software, Linux would be a mere curiosity. The growing enthusiasm for Open Source is based on millions of people seeing hundreds of millions of BSODs.
Yes. Start now. The more you know when you start the program, the more advantage you can take of the facilities offered to you. Get serious about getting started now and when your fellow classmates are learning Ohm's Law, you can be building stuff.
I suggest getting up to speed on current events. The goal of the terrorists with respect to what they want our societies to look like has a lot in common with the goals of our "democratically" elected officials.
America already has imprisonment without trial, the reason why our crypto is still unregulated enough to be useful is that even our boneheads have figured out that without encryption, e-commerce is impossible, and that could cost a lot of their campaign contributors a lot of money.
I can see a day coming very soon where I won't be making statements like this publically because of a reasonable fear of "disappearing".
We can be outraged, but do we have another method they can use?
We don't have to in order to demostrate that the authorities want to take our civil liberties in exchange for even more insecurity than we had to begin with.
The only use a central repository of database keys for a government is to give the government a tool with which its honest citizens can be attacked and another charge to hang on a suspected terrorist, as if conspiracy to commit murder, etc. isn't enough.
Probably, but it'll because they want the user for something else.
People always get the local governments they deserve.
E.E. "Doc" Smith
What does this kind of crypto law say about the residents of the EU?
In other words, what they want is for people to pay a lot more per month to do very little more than they can do with dialup.
If they manage to prevent via port/IP blocking and/or AUP the use of their system for anything more, even Joe Sixpack from Deadfish, ID might start wondering why the hell he's paying $50-70/month for the kind of interactivity he was paying $20/month for.
Do you have any new sort of things that might be worth trying with broadband of the sort that might be the next killer app... the thing that will make everybody realize that they can't live without broadband?
Try it with a cablemodem and you might have the police or FBI kicking down your door.
If you have anything more interesting than a P2P server in mind, think in terms of relocating to a place where you can get citiLEC service or of creative DIY alternatives... find an ISP willing to let you stick a microwave antenna on their roof or do the other end of a DIY DSL setup. Or start looking for dot.com investors and get yourself a T1.
Hint: you'll have to reinstall your OS to do it.
While what I've been hearing is about municipally-owned power companies building their own fiber optics networks for internal use and suddenly realizing that they had a cash cow they could tap by simply opening public access, I would assume that the commercially owned utilities have done the same thing.
Give them access to long-term public bond financing for the purpose of getting service from the utility poles to the home/business and a mandate to use it.
Of course, this would force cable companies and telco DSL either to compete on price and service or go out of business.
So far, in the places where citiLECs have been built, I haven't heard of any companies going out of business, just discovering that they can provide good, reasonably priced service once the customers realize that they don't have to accept excuses for bad service, they can pick up a phone and get the good stuff.
What I actually expect to happen is that the emerging centers of new technological growth are going where the cheap bandwidth is. That leaves out Silicon Valley and most of the rest of the US. The broadband apps everyone will discover they need will come. And everyone outside these cheap bandwidth areas will be paying cablemodem / telco retail for them.
I don't necessarily disagree, I just want to know where I can find the numbers, I might want to cite them some time.
Short of genocide against psychopaths we will continue to have a plague of spammers for at least
Why not limit the genocide to repeat spammers?Or simply remove all the civil rights of repeat spammers and let Darwin deal with them.
And the TPC fax gateway Website is running now.
NOTHING.
This isn't a matter of wait and see, the bill stinks so badly that even the sponsors claim to oppose it.
The Webcaster exemption is meaningless unless legislation is passed that overrides the Library of Congress CARP decision that makes Webcasting financially impossible for any US-based operation. Don't expect the bill to have this provision added, it was not written for our benefit either as consumers or as content distributors
Unfortunately, this is a draft, so there is no bill number we can add to this to so we can tell our Congresscritters which bill we want dumped into the bitbucket. Yet.
What can we do?
When the bill we don't want becomes available, we need to contact our Congressmen and Senators and tell them that WE DO NOT WANT IT. We need to tell our Congressman and Senators to VOTE YES on Rick Boucher's Music Online Competition Act .
The best way to do this is with a fax gateway set up specifically to enable us and anyone else who's interested to easily contact our elected representatives. When it becomes available, we then need to point, click, and make our points known.
Letters are obsolete in this context. Due to worry about anthrax, they are going through extensive decontamination and a letter might take months to get there if it shows up at all. Phone calls are good, but this works best because it's easy for someone to casually participate. What we need are hundreds of thousands of contacts between us and our elected representatives, and it's been proven that this works.
The ACLU uses this approach and it frequently works, despite the unpopularity of the ACLU itself and civil liberties in general.
Who lives in Washington,DC who is willing to dedicate a telephone line to this and is willing to maintain a fax server limited to local calls within the DC area?
The software required to run a Web-to-fax gateway already exists, check http://www.tpc.int for more information. The site seems to be down right now. If it doesn't come back up, there are other possibilities. Or start an Open Source project at Sourceforge and write one.
Given the basic gateway software, a front end is needed that does what we need to do.
The main requirement is that it allow users to submit their zip codes and automatically return a response that will direct their faxes with our canned message and anything users want to add to the fax number corresponding to their Congresscritter.
The ACLU has this kind of setup that should be easy to duplicate. To see the user interface, click here and enter your zip code. Go through with the rest of the process if you agree with what they want public support for, but the important part is to see how such a thing works.
The hardest part is gathering the list of several hundred fax numbers. While there is such a list, it's a couple of years old and needs updating before it is used. Fixing this just takes being willing to put in a few hours comparing the list against the current list of Congresscritters and going to individual web pages for new additions to the list.
Based on the previous performance of the geek community, The Register says essentially that we as a community are too stupid to mobilize to cover our own asses,preferring the practice of pure Libertarian cult dogma to any approach that can work in the real world. Maybe they're right. I'm writing this in case they aren't.
Is our freedom worth a spare server, the price of a phone line, a bit of code writing, and being willing to point and click a few times as these bills hit various points in the legislative process?
It's up to you now. If The Register is right, and we can't mobilize to protect ourselves, we don't deserve to be free and we don't deserve to be able to use our computers and the Net we will instead of as appliances whose posssiblities are limited to what Hollywood, the Feds, and Microsoft give us permission for.
This is the most important part of the article, how they did it.
This has been done in the USA in a few places. A few lucky people have cheap fiber optic to the curb thanks to their local/regional municipal power companies. Their prices are comparable to South Korea's. This isn't happening here because in most states, the cable and telcos have bought legislatures to prevent this from providing their current customers with superior competition.
In the past, companies located next to cheap resources, mainly power and raw materials. In the future, companies will be looking for cheap broadband data access. South Korea will be one of these places.
The cities and rural areas with public power who have sense enough to leverage this into broadband public data access will be the hypergrowth areas in the future.
That growth will come at the expense of the areas whose people allow themselves to be governed by tards whose law-making capability is at the disposal of the highest bidder.
"People always get the local governments they deserve."
E.E. "Doc" Smith
While some innovative municipal utility companies have rolled out fiber optic to the curb, both the telcos and cable companies have purchased legislation to insure that can't happen in many states, California among them.
The alternatives unless one can economically justify T1 are ... if you can find a dialup ISP willing to experiment, build a point-to-point 802.11 / microwave link with the other end on their roof or DIY DSL renting a "dry pair" (aka alarm circuit, etc.)...
From my POV, I take these threads as simply a warning to avoid cablemodems from major broadband companies no matter how attractive the pricing or sales pitch.
"Let the Gods avenge Themselves"
We know that apparently, Madonna hasn't done anything about the site in person. The site was closed down by armed thugs working for a government, not with a lightning bolt directed against either the server or the owners.
This means Madonna doesn't exist, is not offended, or doesn't have the power to do anything about the site content.
If She doesn't exist, there's no cause for action and the Italian government has brought shame upon itself for nothing.
If She doesn't have the power to do anything about it without the help of armed government thugs, why is anyone worshipping Her?
If She does exist and either is not offended or likes the site, where is there a cause for action?
The Roman attitude expressed in "Let the Gods avenge themselves" is wise and based on common sense. The action of the Italian government is based on simple superstition of the sort that should have been left behind when our ancestors climbed down from the trees.
Of course, that last sentence would have put slashdot's existence in danger if its servers and owners were in a primitive country.
So? Very few here would call for removal of your Website if it said things like that, and anyone who did demand that your pro-binLaden site be taken down would be eyeballs deep in flames. Those of us capable of outrage expect to be outraged by some of what we see on the Net. If we don't like something, we click another URL like an adult can be expected to.
whenever we're discussing social issues (as opposed to tech. ones) I can't help feeling disgusted by some of the expressed opinions.
My problem with social-technological issues here is that most of the opinions here on matters of greater social importance than P4 vs Athlon are usually based on willful ignorance and that offends me. However, while I might have that problem with you, I don't have that problem with the slashdot population in this case.
Everybody here knows what censorship issues are and I agree with the consensus that those would tell us what we can read on the Net or think or see need to be destroyed. Perhaps if you ever advance beyond the wannabe category in censorship, we will be expressing a wish for your destruction.
Your opinion disgusts me, but I don't suggest that you be removed from slashdot.
I'm working with an independent artist NOW, but I don't want our site slashdotted unless her CDs (we're doing CD-on-demand via third party vendor)are ready to go... that's weeks from now.
I don't know the music scene well enough to give you such a list of independent artists... but I agree one is necessary. In the meantime, I suggest that you put somewhere prominent on your site a contact address for artists who aren't RIAA.
It is about control. The RIAA record labels want to close down any venue that is easily accessible to the public where the independent (as in unsigned by major record label) artist can upload her own music without having to go through a gatekeeper under record label control.
The ability of RIAA record label suits to make a living depends on their being able to say "You can't make a living without us."
With easily available CD on demand and band merchandise on demand, all a musician needs if his/her material is any good is exposure... a musician no longer needs record labels and record stores to sell CDs and T-shirts.
The last choke point that allows RIAA labels a chance to make money off artists and the public is exposure to masses of people. Internet Radio and P2P allowed an easy way for the independent artist to get to the people.
When people say "I bought CDs from bands I never heard of thanks to Napster, etc.", this doesn't make the RIAA want to keep P2P / Internet Radio open, their business is to make sure you only buy from RIAA artists... to find RIAA artists, turn on any Clear Channel radio station. Where an independent without a major promotion budget isn't going to be heard.
No. Buy CDs ONLY from artists who are selling their own music, either at gigs or via the Web AT THEIR OWN WEBSITES. Not ones created by major labels for them, ones made by the artists themselves. (or usually, by Web authors paid by the artists) Figuring out which is which isn't rocket science.
That is one of the best ways to make sure that the artist gets compensated, not the drug dealers who sell to the suits at major record labels.