The album is called Snapshots, by someone named Matthew O'Reilly, someone I haven't heard of before now. The MP3s can be found at this link.
First off, a hint for the original submitter: You don't need full-bitrate MP3s for a preview. 56Kib/s would have done, and would have been a lot faster to download. Further, it would also encourage people to buy the album if they liked it, just to get something they could get a higher bitrate from.
Tracks:
Drop of a Hat: Okay, so I knew nothing about this album when I started, but I know something from the first moment of this track: There's a banjo.
Now, for the record, the number of albums I have that feature banjo music number approximately zero. I'm not completely sure---there are some suspicious sounds in some of Mannheim Steamroller's stuff that I actually think is a harpsichord, but it's hard to be sure. Thing is, banjo music doesn't do all that much for me.
That said, it's hard not to smile when a banjo starts playing---but it's not necessarily a smile born of fondness.
Fortunately, a piano starts in soon, along with what presumably is the artist's voice rendering a sort of Billy Joel Piano Manesque musician's ballad. Unfortunately (even with the arrival of percussion later on), the artist's voice isn't enough to save this piece. Specifically, his vocal talents are unclear. There are the minor flaws that you expect from a musician early in his or her career, but the bottom line is that this guy needs some training.
I hate to sound like Simon Cowell here, but let's be honest here. The voice is nasal; this comes through even on the long notes when he should be opening up. Any tone that he has is lost in the back of his throat and nose, and never manages to actually get out of the front of his face. This is true throughout the song, occasionally punctuated by loss of pitch and timbre control.
The voice makes the song difficult to listen completely through, and also makes the lyrics difficult to understand in places. But the lyrics I can understand aren't especially strong, and while the tune isn't bad, it's not very catchy. Well, no, that's not entirely true: it's catchy for a few measures, and then it changes its mind. For example, the bit that ends with "Music's horn and I know that I can't stay" [I know that's not right, but that's what it sounds like he's saying] is quite nice, but then it decides to be briefly something else with an awkward meter and mangled melody, and never quite manages to get catchy again.
Then there's the pointless meandering interlude in the middle of the song. Some ideas are merely bad, but others need to be taken out back and beaten soundly for a while. This is one of the latter. This yabble takes up a good 30% of the track before it gets briefly back to the catchy part, and then showcases some of the guy's long notes and bad falsetto.
This is not a great track. It's amateurish. It's the sort of music I used to hear from inflated egos in a small-town high school.
This is not to say that there's not potential here. With some work, he'd be a passable tenor, and might actually sell a few CDs, but this particular CD already has a serious black mark on it. Even if I bought this CD, I'd reburn it without this track. This should not be the first track you have people listen to.
Reluctance: Piano and bass guitar start out this piece very nicely. For eight notes. Yet, even in those eight notes, the pianist bungles the rhythm, losing the beat a bit by rushing the piece. Then hope takes a blow to the head by the arrival of another guitar which overwhelms the artist's voice that follows. This is less a fault with the musicians than it is the studio; this track desperately needs a remix.
Beyond that, this just isn't a good piece. The instrumentation is harsh, the percussion actually detracts, and the piece has some si
I, for one, would be fascinated if animal mutilations---heck, even one---turned out to be of metaphysical origin. But having seen a whole bunch of pictures of alleged mystical occurrences (whether caused by aliens, satanists, radioactive ants, whatever), I gotta tell you, the metaphysical theories just aren't all that compelling.
Take this photo, for example, taken by an Alabama police officer in 1993. The website says, "There is no evidence of scavenging birds, but rather a precise oval incision which removed the udder while leaving the underlying tissues untouched. The entire operation was bloodless."
It's true---there's no evidence of scavenging birds here, but that doesn't mean that this was an "incision" or "operation," either. There are some basic facts which most of these wide-eyed True Believers never seem to pick up on.
In most cases where an animal dies of natural causes, the body stays intact.
Once a body is dead, it doesn't tend to bleed much, even when the skin is punctured, particularly when the wound is caused above ground level.
Skin naturally retracts when cut for some time after death.
Animals (and bugs) tend to go after targets of opportunity with the least possible amount of effort.
Softer parts are usually easier to remove and eat, and some parts can be naturally pulled away from the body with some effort (such as ears, 'nads, and so forth). It's also easier to bite into loose skin, such as that around the belly of an animal.
Protruding parts are usually easier to remove, but nibbling around existing bodily portals is also good if you're not too particular about where your meat comes from, and most animals aren't particularly famous for their keen sense of microbiology.
In that image, I see a soft, protruding body part was removed. I don't see a "precise oval incision"---in fact, the edges are pretty ragged, and the skin has retracted and slumped away from the wound. It wasn't "bloodless"---there's clotted blood on the surface of the wound. It does appear that part of the wound may have been licked clean, but I see nothing inconsistent with a carnivore finding a dead animal, going after an easy tasty morsel, and leaving before the humans showed up.
Skeptics aren't necessarily curmudgeons. I think skeptics just find it tiresome that some of the most vocal promoters of metaphysical explanations aren't at all interested in finding out whether something's actually metaphysical or not---they just move on to the next "possibility" without stopping for even one moment to engage a single neuron. For a good example, see this breathless account on Paranormal News.
Of course, photos abound. Here's a sampling
Cow. No details about this image were available; the article in which it appears doesn't make it clear about what's being claimed for this case. However, it is not "bloodless," and it fits rules #5 and #6 above.
Cow. This comes from the same page referenced above. The article in question gives no details about the image itself---or even mentions it. But I see a fairly clean wound with evidence of retraction (at three o'clock in the image) and tearing (at four o'clock and from seven to nine o'clock). This wasn't a precise operation, and it's not clear what part of the cow this was from. The article purports the image to be of a case that occurred in 2000 in Alberta Canada. The dark area you see in the image (which I would ascribe to oozing tissue permitted to clot and dry in open air) is claimed to be "signs of high heat," whic
Everyone hold hands. This spell is going to be creepy, but it's got to be done. Whatever you do, don't touch the sacred vessel---static discharge, y'know. Everyone's shovels ready?
Ew. I just horked up Esther Dyson.
Okay, here we go. Remember, as soon as the spell's complete, we go dig up Jon Postel.
Well, sure, but that's the UK. They tend to hang on to a lot of things by name long after the original meaning has been lost---"royal family," "British Empire" . . .
There's a commercial version already, for both Mac and Windows, called EarthBrowser. Includes weather, cloud patterns, webcams, earthquakes, volcanoes, and shows the terminator. The demo version is free, but feature-restricted; only costs USD 19.95, though.
Of course, an open-source version could be set up with some really nice plug-ins, and then you'd have a really extensible feature set. I'm looking forward to seeing one someday.
A much simpler one that just shows the terminator, time and position of the sun can be had as a screensaver for Mac OS X: Technichron.
I always find it odd when people resist what is otherwise a good (if initially less comfortable) idea.
It is inevitable that as computers get more advanced, our technical terms will eventually fall out of use. For example, we don't often talk about "words" of memory anymore often even in the technical mainstream (outside of assembly language and code or storage optimization), because all the manufacturers eventually went to an eight-bit byte as a standard. (Eventually, the byte will become less meaningful to the mainstream, and will eventually shift to the "character" as we head towards the Unicode standard. Eventually, we'll be switching/.ebibytes/ for/.ebichars/, and the complaining will probably begin anew.)
Resisting inevitable changes like this just hinders Linux (and *BSD) from making steps towards the mainstream and maintains the perception that it's only suited to technogeeks.
While "mebibyte" sounds too close to "maybebyte" for my tastes, it does make sense to meld "mega" with "binary" in this way. I wish they'd gone farther; I could have dealt more easily with "mibyte" (pronounced either/mee-bite/ or/mih-bite/) rather than "mebibyte." Perhaps that will become the natural phonetic erosion as such terms get adopted, but that's hard to count on.
On a personal level, clearing up the distinction would at least make things less annoying as far as my life goes. My mother still doesn't understand this whole powers-of-two thing, or even the concept of bits versus bytes, and I don't expect she ever will ("But the modem is 56K, and I'm only transferring at 5K!"). I don't know why I bought a 75GB disk six months ago (75 GiB, to be precise), and then bought an 80GB disk from the same manufacturer last month at about the same price to find myself with exactly the same amount of storage as last time (75 GiB). That ticks me off---I could have used the extra five/Gi?B/. It's really going to tick me off if memory manufacturers start playing similar games. At least unifying this usage will reduce the confusion in the marketplace. (I'd also quit wondering whether a transfer rate of "49K per second" meant 382,812, 384,000, 392,000, 393,216 or 401,408 bits per second. Fortunately, I don't wonder that often, but still.)
I say, let's adopt/[KMGTPA]iB/ as a standard, call 'em/kib/,/mib/,/gib/,/tib/,/pib/ and, uh,/eyeb/, and be done with it. Maybe if we do that, we'll be one step closer to adopting the metric system as well.
Vivendi Vice Chairman Edgar Bronfman Jr. said, "With the extent of piracy and the extent of CD (copying) that's going on, we have no choice but to protect our artists and our rights holders." [...] Record labels, already reeling from weaker sales, have been fiercely fighting Napster and other start-ups that enable Internet users to download digital copies of music files from one another's computers. At the same time, pirated CDs have also taken hundreds of millions of dollars out of record labels revenues, the labels say.
From IMDB StudioBrief, September 26, 2001:
Following days of gloomy earnings forecasts by leading media players, Vivendi Universal said Tuesday that it expects to achieve its previously announced goal of a 35 percent gain on cash flow and a 10 percent gain in gross revenue. Nevertheless, in a conference call on Tuesday, Vivendi Universal CEO Jean Marie Messier warned that sales in 2002 were likely to fall in the aftermath of what he called "the recent tragedy." Vivendi Universal rivals AOL Time Warner, Walt Disney, Viacom, and General Electric have all issued profit warnings in recent days.
So which is it? Lost sales? Or record sales?
(I also think that predicting a drop in music sales due to The Attack is disingenuous---I actually suspect that music sales won't be affected at all, and may even increase a little.)
Having been a witness to the scourge of spam that hit Usenet, it still surprises me that at least two years before Spamford really got started, Usenet was getting blanketed with spam by none other than Michael Wolff.
Yes, that Michael Wolff, author of Burn Rate and other tripe. As part of his self-promotion campaign, he pumped out thousands of messages, individually to each and every newsgroup. When people complained about the messages being identical and off-topic, he did the same thing, only leading off with a customized line mentioning the newsgroup name. He did the same thing many, many more times.
I don't buy his books, or read his columns---I've never managed to forgive him for being one of the first to really screw up Usenet.
The delight to easter eggs is derived from the same delight behind the real thing: the surprise of discovery. It's hard to hide a delightful surprise in open-source code without severely obfuscating the code.
The other danger, of course, in a less-controlled open-source project is that the program will become more easter eggs than actual functionality. I don't see this happening with, say, Perl, which has a strong central clearinghouse for source code, but it could well happen with other projects that are controlled by a fairly large group. I know I'd hate to see an otherwise useful project for Linux or *BSD get bogged down due to source bloat and programmer distraction.
Easter eggs have also changed through the years. They used to be fairly easy to get to, and they used to do fairly simple things. Excel's easter eggs, for example (last I checked, anyway) were getting completely out of hand, and it's (a) hard not to resent the code bloat in Excel as it is, and (b) it's so obscure to get to that I don't think anyone would have figured it out if it hadn't leaked out of Redmond.
Now, perhaps in a strong-clearinghouse type of project, the clearinghouse might opt to maintain one bit of code that isn't immediately open source---at least, not until the next significant release (as deemed by the clearinghouse). That code would control both how the easter egg is accessed and what it is, and as soon as it's changed, the old version is released.
It's sort of an odd way to look at open source, I realize, but it would provide an environment that provides for the delight of easter eggs, and also not let them get too much out of control.
History has shown that most MS and AOL have a generally sloppy attitude towards security.
However, history has also shown that MS is willing to say pretty much anything about competitors, backed up only by anecdote or flawed studies, in order to put the desired spin on any business decision they make.
So what's the truth? Honestly, I don't even care. I don't think that AIM or MMS is the answer. If any of you open-sourcers are devoting any resources to AIM-based or MMS-based stuff, I would encourage you to donate a little time to the Jabber project (http://www.jabber.org), a messaging system with an open protocol and (IMHO, of course) a better design than either of the commercial competitors. The product has been languishing a bit in the last several months, and it would be nice to see a surge of interest in it. If you like, check out the most recent release (as of 1999/11/09), 0.7pre4 (which can be found at http://download.jabber.org/0.7pre4.html).
One of the worst things about browsers in general is that I can't conveniently choose what cookies to accept and which I'd rather reject.
Wouldn't it be nice if I could tell my browser "Please accept all cookies from sites x and y that are sent back to themselves" rather than just making it a blanket statement about all sites?
I do like the "ask me before accepting a cookie" option, but I wish I had a lot more control. I'd like to set up my browser to auto-expire cookies after a certain time since the last visit to particular sites. I'd like a convenient way to delete all cookies from a particular site and ban cookies from that site henceforth. And some sites (hi, Slashdot!) I'd like to freely accept cookies from--as long as they were being sent back to Slashdot. I'd also like "ask me before reading one of my cookies" as an option to help me evaluate whether to allow that site to store cookies on my system.
And while I'm at it, I'd like my own F-16. Sigh.
I don't mind cookies being attached to GIFs so much. I just want control of the cookies. After all, it's my dang system--not theirs.
Privacy may not be a natural right as defined by Locke, granted, but it was addressed in the Bill of Rights, and I do think that it's a natural extension of the notion of property as defined by Jefferson, applied to the information age.
This isn't going to be a long rebuttal--I'm waiting for a compile--but you have to remember that in Jefferson's time, privacy was easy to obtain. Records were few, information travelled slowly, and for the most part, all you really had to do to ensure privacy was to keep your mouth shut. It wasn't a perfect system--Jefferson was lambasted in the media for a number of things, including an alleged relationship with one of his slaves (never proven)--but it worked for the most part.
The industrial age led to larger-scale processes, which required much more extensive and organized record-keeping. Transportation became easier. And once communication lost its fetters and became light and electricity, indiscriminate prying became a real problem.
From the first, the Bill of Rights (or, for non-US people, the original ten amendments to the US Constitution which spelled out specific incontrovertable rights granted by the government to its citizens) do address issues of property (the third amendment, which addresses a situation where soldiers used to be able to force homeowners to give them quarter in their house without their consent) and privacy (the fourth amendment, which states the right of "people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures . . . and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized").
I'm not so sure that it's so much of an obsession in this country as it is the perception that privacy is one of the basic privileges of being a citizen of the US, and the expectation that it's supposed to apply to everyone equally. Violations of privacy are taken fairly badly over here; unfortunately, they're happening more and more regularly.
And yet, there are times to violate privacy; as the fourth amendment says, there are situations where it may lawfully be violated with probable cause.
I'm not sure what the ultimate answer is. At heart, I'm a libertarian, but I also feel that society may never be mature enough to handle it as a form of government. I believe in privacy, but I also believe in busting the Patrick McNaughtons of the world, too. I don't know a government can accomplish both without some form of compromise, but compromise can breed abuse. Encryption is the best way we have of preventing the casual abuse of this compromise.
Slashdot Mirror
The album is called Snapshots, by someone named Matthew O'Reilly, someone I haven't heard of before now. The MP3s can be found at this link.
First off, a hint for the original submitter: You don't need full-bitrate MP3s for a preview. 56Kib/s would have done, and would have been a lot faster to download. Further, it would also encourage people to buy the album if they liked it, just to get something they could get a higher bitrate from.
Tracks:
Now, for the record, the number of albums I have that feature banjo music number approximately zero. I'm not completely sure---there are some suspicious sounds in some of Mannheim Steamroller's stuff that I actually think is a harpsichord, but it's hard to be sure. Thing is, banjo music doesn't do all that much for me.
That said, it's hard not to smile when a banjo starts playing---but it's not necessarily a smile born of fondness.
Fortunately, a piano starts in soon, along with what presumably is the artist's voice rendering a sort of Billy Joel Piano Manesque musician's ballad. Unfortunately (even with the arrival of percussion later on), the artist's voice isn't enough to save this piece. Specifically, his vocal talents are unclear. There are the minor flaws that you expect from a musician early in his or her career, but the bottom line is that this guy needs some training.
I hate to sound like Simon Cowell here, but let's be honest here. The voice is nasal; this comes through even on the long notes when he should be opening up. Any tone that he has is lost in the back of his throat and nose, and never manages to actually get out of the front of his face. This is true throughout the song, occasionally punctuated by loss of pitch and timbre control.
The voice makes the song difficult to listen completely through, and also makes the lyrics difficult to understand in places. But the lyrics I can understand aren't especially strong, and while the tune isn't bad, it's not very catchy. Well, no, that's not entirely true: it's catchy for a few measures, and then it changes its mind. For example, the bit that ends with "Music's horn and I know that I can't stay" [I know that's not right, but that's what it sounds like he's saying] is quite nice, but then it decides to be briefly something else with an awkward meter and mangled melody, and never quite manages to get catchy again.
Then there's the pointless meandering interlude in the middle of the song. Some ideas are merely bad, but others need to be taken out back and beaten soundly for a while. This is one of the latter. This yabble takes up a good 30% of the track before it gets briefly back to the catchy part, and then showcases some of the guy's long notes and bad falsetto.
This is not a great track. It's amateurish. It's the sort of music I used to hear from inflated egos in a small-town high school.
This is not to say that there's not potential here. With some work, he'd be a passable tenor, and might actually sell a few CDs, but this particular CD already has a serious black mark on it. Even if I bought this CD, I'd reburn it without this track. This should not be the first track you have people listen to.
Beyond that, this just isn't a good piece. The instrumentation is harsh, the percussion actually detracts, and the piece has some si
I, for one, would be fascinated if animal mutilations---heck, even one---turned out to be of metaphysical origin. But having seen a whole bunch of pictures of alleged mystical occurrences (whether caused by aliens, satanists, radioactive ants, whatever), I gotta tell you, the metaphysical theories just aren't all that compelling.
Take this photo, for example, taken by an Alabama police officer in 1993. The website says, "There is no evidence of scavenging birds, but rather a precise oval incision which removed the udder while leaving the underlying tissues untouched. The entire operation was bloodless."
It's true---there's no evidence of scavenging birds here, but that doesn't mean that this was an "incision" or "operation," either. There are some basic facts which most of these wide-eyed True Believers never seem to pick up on.
In that image, I see a soft, protruding body part was removed. I don't see a "precise oval incision"---in fact, the edges are pretty ragged, and the skin has retracted and slumped away from the wound. It wasn't "bloodless"---there's clotted blood on the surface of the wound. It does appear that part of the wound may have been licked clean, but I see nothing inconsistent with a carnivore finding a dead animal, going after an easy tasty morsel, and leaving before the humans showed up.
Skeptics aren't necessarily curmudgeons. I think skeptics just find it tiresome that some of the most vocal promoters of metaphysical explanations aren't at all interested in finding out whether something's actually metaphysical or not---they just move on to the next "possibility" without stopping for even one moment to engage a single neuron. For a good example, see this breathless account on Paranormal News.
Of course, photos abound. Here's a sampling
Everyone hold hands. This spell is going to be creepy, but it's got to be done. Whatever you do, don't touch the sacred vessel---static discharge, y'know. Everyone's shovels ready? Ew. I just horked up Esther Dyson. Okay, here we go. Remember, as soon as the spell's complete, we go dig up Jon Postel.
Well, sure, but that's the UK. They tend to hang on to a lot of things by name long after the original meaning has been lost---"royal family," "British Empire" . . .
By simply filtering out all e-mails that have the word [REST OF MESSAGE ELIDED]
For some reason, I couldn't read that. Could you post it again, only inserting <!-- x --> after every character?
There's a commercial version already, for both Mac and Windows, called EarthBrowser. Includes weather, cloud patterns, webcams, earthquakes, volcanoes, and shows the terminator. The demo version is free, but feature-restricted; only costs USD 19.95, though.
Of course, an open-source version could be set up with some really nice plug-ins, and then you'd have a really extensible feature set. I'm looking forward to seeing one someday.
A much simpler one that just shows the terminator, time and position of the sun can be had as a screensaver for Mac OS X: Technichron.
I always find it odd when people resist what is otherwise a good (if initially less comfortable) idea.
It is inevitable that as computers get more advanced, our technical terms will eventually fall out of use. For example, we don't often talk about "words" of memory anymore often even in the technical mainstream (outside of assembly language and code or storage optimization), because all the manufacturers eventually went to an eight-bit byte as a standard. (Eventually, the byte will become less meaningful to the mainstream, and will eventually shift to the "character" as we head towards the Unicode standard. Eventually, we'll be switching /.ebibytes/ for /.ebichars/, and the complaining will probably begin anew.)
Resisting inevitable changes like this just hinders Linux (and *BSD) from making steps towards the mainstream and maintains the perception that it's only suited to technogeeks.
While "mebibyte" sounds too close to "maybebyte" for my tastes, it does make sense to meld "mega" with "binary" in this way. I wish they'd gone farther; I could have dealt more easily with "mibyte" (pronounced either /mee-bite/ or /mih-bite/) rather than "mebibyte." Perhaps that will become the natural phonetic erosion as such terms get adopted, but that's hard to count on.
On a personal level, clearing up the distinction would at least make things less annoying as far as my life goes. My mother still doesn't understand this whole powers-of-two thing, or even the concept of bits versus bytes, and I don't expect she ever will ("But the modem is 56K, and I'm only transferring at 5K!"). I don't know why I bought a 75GB disk six months ago (75 GiB, to be precise), and then bought an 80GB disk from the same manufacturer last month at about the same price to find myself with exactly the same amount of storage as last time (75 GiB). That ticks me off---I could have used the extra five /Gi?B/. It's really going to tick me off if memory manufacturers start playing similar games. At least unifying this usage will reduce the confusion in the marketplace. (I'd also quit wondering whether a transfer rate of "49K per second" meant 382,812, 384,000, 392,000, 393,216 or 401,408 bits per second. Fortunately, I don't wonder that often, but still.)
I say, let's adopt /[KMGTPA]iB/ as a standard, call 'em /kib/, /mib/, /gib/, /tib/, /pib/ and, uh, /eyeb/, and be done with it. Maybe if we do that, we'll be one step closer to adopting the metric system as well.
From the CNet article, September 25, 2001:
From IMDB StudioBrief, September 26, 2001:
So which is it? Lost sales? Or record sales?
(I also think that predicting a drop in music sales due to The Attack is disingenuous---I actually suspect that music sales won't be affected at all, and may even increase a little.)
Having been a witness to the scourge of spam that hit Usenet, it still surprises me that at least two years before Spamford really got started, Usenet was getting blanketed with spam by none other than Michael Wolff.
Yes, that Michael Wolff, author of Burn Rate and other tripe. As part of his self-promotion campaign, he pumped out thousands of messages, individually to each and every newsgroup. When people complained about the messages being identical and off-topic, he did the same thing, only leading off with a customized line mentioning the newsgroup name. He did the same thing many, many more times.
I don't buy his books, or read his columns---I've never managed to forgive him for being one of the first to really screw up Usenet.
The delight to easter eggs is derived from the same delight behind the real thing: the surprise of discovery. It's hard to hide a delightful surprise in open-source code without severely obfuscating the code.
The other danger, of course, in a less-controlled open-source project is that the program will become more easter eggs than actual functionality. I don't see this happening with, say, Perl, which has a strong central clearinghouse for source code, but it could well happen with other projects that are controlled by a fairly large group. I know I'd hate to see an otherwise useful project for Linux or *BSD get bogged down due to source bloat and programmer distraction.
Easter eggs have also changed through the years. They used to be fairly easy to get to, and they used to do fairly simple things. Excel's easter eggs, for example (last I checked, anyway) were getting completely out of hand, and it's (a) hard not to resent the code bloat in Excel as it is, and (b) it's so obscure to get to that I don't think anyone would have figured it out if it hadn't leaked out of Redmond.
Now, perhaps in a strong-clearinghouse type of project, the clearinghouse might opt to maintain one bit of code that isn't immediately open source---at least, not until the next significant release (as deemed by the clearinghouse). That code would control both how the easter egg is accessed and what it is, and as soon as it's changed, the old version is released.
It's sort of an odd way to look at open source, I realize, but it would provide an environment that provides for the delight of easter eggs, and also not let them get too much out of control.
Just a thought.
History has shown that most MS and AOL have a generally sloppy attitude towards security.
However, history has also shown that MS is willing to say pretty much anything about competitors, backed up only by anecdote or flawed studies, in order to put the desired spin on any business decision they make.
So what's the truth? Honestly, I don't even care. I don't think that AIM or MMS is the answer. If any of you open-sourcers are devoting any resources to AIM-based or MMS-based stuff, I would encourage you to donate a little time to the Jabber project (http://www.jabber.org), a messaging system with an open protocol and (IMHO, of course) a better design than either of the commercial competitors. The product has been languishing a bit in the last several months, and it would be nice to see a surge of interest in it. If you like, check out the most recent release (as of 1999/11/09), 0.7pre4 (which can be found at http://download.jabber.org/0.7pre4.html).
One of the worst things about browsers in general is that I can't conveniently choose what cookies to accept and which I'd rather reject.
Wouldn't it be nice if I could tell my browser "Please accept all cookies from sites x and y that are sent back to themselves" rather than just making it a blanket statement about all sites?
I do like the "ask me before accepting a cookie" option, but I wish I had a lot more control. I'd like to set up my browser to auto-expire cookies after a certain time since the last visit to particular sites. I'd like a convenient way to delete all cookies from a particular site and ban cookies from that site henceforth. And some sites (hi, Slashdot!) I'd like to freely accept cookies from--as long as they were being sent back to Slashdot. I'd also like "ask me before reading one of my cookies" as an option to help me evaluate whether to allow that site to store cookies on my system.
And while I'm at it, I'd like my own F-16. Sigh.
I don't mind cookies being attached to GIFs so much. I just want control of the cookies. After all, it's my dang system--not theirs.
Privacy may not be a natural right as defined by Locke, granted, but it was addressed in the Bill of Rights, and I do think that it's a natural extension of the notion of property as defined by Jefferson, applied to the information age.
This isn't going to be a long rebuttal--I'm waiting for a compile--but you have to remember that in Jefferson's time, privacy was easy to obtain. Records were few, information travelled slowly, and for the most part, all you really had to do to ensure privacy was to keep your mouth shut. It wasn't a perfect system--Jefferson was lambasted in the media for a number of things, including an alleged relationship with one of his slaves (never proven)--but it worked for the most part.
The industrial age led to larger-scale processes, which required much more extensive and organized record-keeping. Transportation became easier. And once communication lost its fetters and became light and electricity, indiscriminate prying became a real problem.
From the first, the Bill of Rights (or, for non-US people, the original ten amendments to the US Constitution which spelled out specific incontrovertable rights granted by the government to its citizens) do address issues of property (the third amendment, which addresses a situation where soldiers used to be able to force homeowners to give them quarter in their house without their consent) and privacy (the fourth amendment, which states the right of "people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures . . . and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized").
I'm not so sure that it's so much of an obsession in this country as it is the perception that privacy is one of the basic privileges of being a citizen of the US, and the expectation that it's supposed to apply to everyone equally. Violations of privacy are taken fairly badly over here; unfortunately, they're happening more and more regularly.
And yet, there are times to violate privacy; as the fourth amendment says, there are situations where it may lawfully be violated with probable cause.
I'm not sure what the ultimate answer is. At heart, I'm a libertarian, but I also feel that society may never be mature enough to handle it as a form of government. I believe in privacy, but I also believe in busting the Patrick McNaughtons of the world, too. I don't know a government can accomplish both without some form of compromise, but compromise can breed abuse. Encryption is the best way we have of preventing the casual abuse of this compromise.