The climiate mentioned is very different from the Canada than what I'm used to. And to think I thought Canada had rolling hills and farmland--Ontario does anyway. But what do I know, I'm just an ignorant American.
Generation of Light Through Electron Orbital Transitions
This submission summarizes a novel application of quantum mechanical principles through which illumination may be generated. According to the Bohr model of the atom, electrons may only occupy discrete energy levels. When electrons are disturbed through energy incident upon the atom, their orbital level may change. Energy deposited to the atom will shift electrons to higher energy states, and hence higher orbitals. After a time, the electron will relax and fall to its original orbital state relasing a photon of light whose frequency is proportional to the energy original delivered to the electron. While the transitions of a single electron in a single hydrogen atom amount to an insignificant volume of light, economies of scale come into play with multiproton atoms and large aggregates of atoms, producing a usable illumination. Electrons may be stimulated through chemical reactions, electric current, or even photons of light incident upon the atom.
Okay, this is the best I can come up with after not having done Q&M for almost a decade. I toyed with the idea of actually filing this patent after reading about how Pepsi patented the color blue. But, hey, I have car payments to make.
No I'm not some RIAA lobbyist or something. Just hear me out a second. The stance that the universities mentioned is the correct one to take with regard to conduct. That is to say to their students "Okay. y'all are adults now. We're not your mommy. If you do something that violates the copyright law, thats your business, deal with the consequences." However, there's still some reasons why universties are banning Napster. At the University of Michigan, Napster was banned long before the copyright issue came up. I don't know if its still in effect or not, but the reason for our ban was bandwidth. We had a whole mess of students getting into Napster early on and running as servers as well as clients. Well, a lot the Intenet charged on in to share jukeboxes, bringing the network to its knees. So, just because your U. doesn't give into the RIAA, don't take Napster or Guntella for granted. They might find other reasons--valid or not--to ban them.
Excellent point about where the money goes. A small artist or independent label sends most around %60 of their revenues to the distributors. If you doubt this simply email Orchard(www.orchard.com--if I remember right) or another distribitor and tell them you're a band looking to sell cds retail. See what kind of chunk they take. Still, I dunno if I'm with you on the distributors being members of the RIAA. They might be, but check the facts first. Even if they're not members, the companies that are still have very powerful reasons to fight technokogies like Napster. Its not that Napster cheats artists on copyrights--it only cheats them on royalties--, but rather that digital distrbution technology like Napster and Gnutella make a recording label an anachronism. Under the current and almost outdated model, the recording company presses the cds, wrangles with the distributors and retailers, promotes the artist and so on to varying degrees. The varying degress are that if you're a big act you get a lot of support, while smaller acts actually pay for a lot of the above services. So, in exchange for the services of the company, the artist signs over the copyright, and gets a whopping %10 of profits if any as a royalty. So, the record company risks a small amount of money on an artist--$10000 or so to press 10000 cds plus marketing costs--to gain %90 of any profits. Moreover, they own the right to the work. This is an ugly system as the many blues and soul artists screwed by their labels in the 50s and 60s can tell you.
Now we have technologies like the web, Napster, Guntella and who knows what else is on the horizon. Its easy to see Napster having two levels of service: the free music and a music subscrption service. Artists deal directly with Napster, cut out the label and take their own careers into their hands. They assume a little more risk in exchange for keeping their copyrights. It'd also be easy to see Gnutella begin extended to cover subscription sources as well as free ones, or some new technology doing that. In order to release a work all an artists would have to do is pay somone one to set up a site, or do it themselves. This should come in drastically under $10000, provide unlimited copies of the work while keeping the work under the artist's control. So, yeah, these technologies cut out the middleman in a big way. They cut out the need for either a distributor or a recording label.
Info Gap Not Surprising
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I dunno why anyone is surprised at there being this kind of disparity. Even though computers and their associated services have come down drmatically in price, the toll to get on the Internet makes it largely the domain of middle class folks. Add in the knowledge toll to function there, and your average working class or lower person is gonna say the heck with it. They have too many other things to worry about. Get things down to the price of say a vcr and add in true plug and play set up, then this will change. Before we see the information access gap disappear the undlerlying tech has got to become as ubiquitous as cable tv and about as easy to use. This is happening pretty fast, so I'd expect to see a cultural change on Internet again in the next few of years identical to the one when AOL and others companies started providing easy Internet access. In the meantime, you see an Internet population that is pretty well educated and pretty affulent all things considered. So we have a gap today, but I doubt its going to be there for too much longer as the devices and services become cheaper and easier to use.
The real gap is in how people use the access to information. Lots of us here use the Internet as social medium, a place to collaborate on projects be they technical, artistic, political or whatever. We also use the Internet as the world's greatest reference collection. We're very well informed because we know the information is out there and how to look for it. Now, lets look at them. For someone neither technical savvy nor educated will the Internet be anything more than mall? That's where there real gap is going to be: In the ablity of people to use their access to information effectively.
As for the rest of the world: It looks as though those nations that are doing the hard work to achieve political and economic stablity will be able to build the necessary infrastructure for Internet access. The more important gap as the developing world emerges from a century political turmoil will be in what the stable governments allow their citizens to see. Take China for instance. Five years ago the Internet barely existed there. Now, its becoming more and more common in the cities, but the government restricts what the citizens can see. Whether or not their policy is effective I leave to another discussion(read I don't know). We're going to see a drastic difference in the way different geographical regions use the Internet. What will this mean in practical terms? Who knows. Its really too soon to say. In my opinion the gap is not going to be about technology and development, but in cultural and political views about information and ideas. Either way, this sounds like a good book to read.
In terms of the other issues about isolation at work. What the heck cares? In America we've never identified as strongly with an employer as say the Japanese have. We identify with professions. "I am programmer." "I am a geek." "I am a plumber." What we do is much more important than who we do it for. Companies that are effective and successful at their business find ways to get their people to talk to one and other independent of social activities. They don't leave such things to chance or the mercenary attitude of the worker. A justified attitude I might add given the lack of loyalty companies demostrate to their workers, but that's a whole other issue.
Well in my case the geek house wasn't planned it just happened. Two geeks in a house--okay, one geek and one doofus, you decide which is which--deciding on whether to get cable. Throw in a geek buddy fleeing the suburban hell that is Fairfax, and the rest just happened. Here's some thoughts on how I'd do it differently: First off one bedroom for everybody and a bigger living room. Of course a full fledged house would be ideal. Two: Wireless LAN. More expensive, but cables running across your living room and down the hall are just tres gauche. If you have cats this might be an essential item. My feline buddies learned about chewing on cables when they were younger; chewed right through a speaker cable with power going through it. Haven't been back since. However, not every cat is as swift. Three: Make sure everyone has a job and pays rent. Seems like a basic, but I've had way too many roomates who don't have clue on this one. Four: Don't even try to have a plan. Improvisation is a lifestyle and an art. And, the realities of living with smart, over educated and overconfident people leads to circumstances which defy the best plans, human logic, and often enough the physical laws of the universe.
Never crashed a Vax? Wow, I'm impressed. I used to crash my lab's vax all the time. Of course I was feeding it things like the logistics equation through poorly written Fortran. I also managed to halt the whole cluster by mailbombing myself with an errant notifier program. Anyway, aside from extreme--as in stupid--computing on poorly maintained clusters, the platform was pretty solid. There were a lot clever features that saved my behind. Like, saving five versions of a file by default. Sounds redundant, sounds stupid. Not when you're a clueless science geek learning how to do real programming. The editor Eve was really cool too. Never did figure out all the things I could do with it.
One of the best places to look for independent labels that are truly independent is in regional venue. There's hundreds of small labels out there that devoted to particular area. They can be hard to find, and sometimes you just trip over them. The one that comes to my mind is School Kids Records--sadly defunct I think. They are or used to be a label that recorded mostly artists in the SE Michigan area. Good luck in finding any of their stuff nationwide. But, if you lived in Ann Arbor, chances are you could find their records in local stores--even the chains. Another example of a regional indy label is Rounder. They may actually be a national label, but I've only heard Californian artists on their albums.
The other place to look for indy labels is in specfic genres. Major lables put out pop, more pop, and pop dressed up as "alternative". They might put out some other stuff just hedge their bets, but musical genres tend to be served by small labels. I'm thinking of Alligator Records which caters to the blues scene. There's also quite a few indy labels in the electronic scene. And, the novelty music genre is largely untouched by major labels. I'm thinking of people like the Residents in this case who used be on Ralph Records. Infact, a lot these labels are run by the artists themselves and represent a brandname more than anything else.
Its been a while since I last did any science, but I was taught that there's quite difference between a conjecture and a theory. Before you say that evolution is only a theory, check your definitions:
hpothesis: A tentative theory or supposition provisionally adopted to explain certain facts, and to guide in the investigation of others; hence, frequently called a working hypothesis.
theory: Systematically organized knowledge applicable in a relatively wide variety of circumstances, especially a system of assumptions, accepted principles, and rules of procedure devised to analyze, predict, or otherwise explain the nature or behavior of a specified set of phenomena.
Law: A formulation describing a relationship observed to be invariable between or among phenomena for all cases in which the specified conditions are met
As you would expect the bar for an idea becoming a scientific law is very high. By comparison we still refer to Newton's work as his "Theory of Gravity", even after hundreds of thousands of high school experiments checking Newton's work--in just our century. Meanwhile the Theory of Evolution is less than two hundred years old. Yet, going with the definitions above, saying that the idea of Evolution is a theory, means that scientists are pretty darn sure this is the way the world works. What keeps Evolution from being a scientific law is the whole invariable clause of the definition of sicentific law. Same reason why neither Newton or Einstien's works are scientific laws--actually, I think relativity has achieved that status now. We probably won't be able to establish the invariance of Evolution until we get out to another planet with life and compare it to our own.
More to the point, people in public leadership positions like this have scrupulously separate their private life from their public life. If he'd been downloading to his own computer and hired a technician to do this upgrade, it'd have been no problem; it'd have been private. Because he's downloading porn onto a computer supplied by his university, he's making his activities public because any technican servicing the computer is answerable to the same organization that the dean answers to. The moral of this story is if the company gives you a computer watch what you put on that thing because the company owns it, and has every right to inspect it at any time. It would be a serious breach in privacy for a company to inspect the computer bought and paid for by its employees with their own money. Now, this is exactly what Nortwest airlines did when their employees attempted to organize a sick out. The Northwest Airlines incident represents one of the most serious erosions of the distinction between a private and public life.
Well, for once Katz put together an op-ed piece that would get a passing grade in a comp class. Seriously though, this one is a lot tighter than his usual ramblings. At the same time he brings up some very good points. One of the biggest threats to privacy is the culture of litigation we live in. Increasingly individuals and organizations--corporate or otherwise--are afraid of getting sued for voicing or endorsing an opinion. The fear comes to some extent from the culture of political correctness, but political correctness itself is a symptom. Used to be, opinions would pretty much slide off of people with no effect, but somewhere along the line an awful lot of people developed fragile egos and have come to see contrary opinions as deadly attacks on their person. Organizations tend to react even stronger to negative opinions directed against them.
I think a large chunk society has lost the notion of free speech and wants special treatment to shield them from critiscism. We got here partially because we have indeed become more sensitive to minority groups and positions. A bigger part is played by the need to appear sensitive to the needs of all groups. For organizations this need is driven by the need to attract and keep customers, and members. For both persons and organizations there's also the basic desire to avoid confrontation so they can get on with whatever it is they do. I mean why risk getting into a nasty arguement when you can just remain silent and get on with your life. Meanwhile organizations don't want to have to fend off suits from offended parties. So, companies and individuals alike sanitize their communications. For individuals working in organizations it means they have their personal privacy invaded so that the company may continue to avoid offending someone. Its ironic how one part of our privacy dilema has stemmed from progress on discrimination issues.
Meanwhile on a personal level, people have become very complacent about their personal identity. I thinks this arises largely from the security we've had in this country for the pretty much the whole century. With a few very notable exceptions, this century has been marked by increasing economic security. People have become very confident in their standard of living, and have little to complain about. A lot of folks out there have a hard time imagining that someone might do something dangerous with their personal information.
Well, I guess its a kinder, gentler drug trade where you are. Seriously tho, from what I do know about drug culture the prevalence of spiking and mixing drugs varies quite a bit. Place where I grew up it was quite common for dealers to spike weed with angel dust and who knows what else. I dunno if they were trying to hook people or were just saying "what the hell?". From living in college towns for several years and brushing up against the drug trade in those places, I'd doubt there was much lacing of drugs going on. Kids there basically like their weed and hallucinogens. If you have a real strong class split with entrenched poverty at the bottom end, you get a whole other kind of drug trade thats ruthless and vicious. Those dealers are going to do just about anything to make a buck. As far as coke not being physically addictive, if I remember the neurochemistry behind coke, doesn't it bing with the chemical receptors responsible for pleasure? Given that that releases a lot of dopameine--if I'm wrong, someone correct me--I'd be very surprised if coke was not physically addictive. As for my experience, I not a drug user, never have been. I just grew up in a rough working to lower class neighborhood of LA in the eighties and I saw hard drug use destroy a lot of people. Even so, I'm not naive enough to say that drugs were the cause, only the pathology of much more serious problem.
Just wondering if there's a way to harness this warming and get power. Maybe attach thermocouples to streets and highways? Maybe this effect could be used as a point to argue for solar power developments on building rooftops. I dunno if the pay out would be worth it or not.
And to think you Canadians have it pretty good as far as urban greenspace goes. So far, every major Canadian city I've been in has tons of greenspace interspercing developments. Most American cities in contrast, just sprawl. Can anyone comment on the differing urban planning policies in both countries. Most Canadian cities seem to me to be planned to some degree. I'm curious as to how such philosophies differ between our countries.
Why is that every conspiracy alarmist is focused on the government? Oddly enough the fact that government may be watching me bothers me not nearly so much that other entities are. I mean, there's corporations who aren't really accountable to anyone, then there's any number of political groups, not to mention people on the fringe of questionable stability. And I won't even get started on those guys in black sedan parked out in front of my house. Of course I don't really know where that machine in my head is sending signals to either.
Since when was music free anyway? In ye olde days musicans were supported by a patron who'd give 'em the boot if they didn't like the music. Pieces were also commissoned by the wealthy as public works. Sorry to say, but that type of situation really stifles innovation. Now, step up to the era of the mass printing and emergenece of the middle class--say like the 19th century here. People started owning things like pianos and buying music to play on them. Sheet music was the 19th century equivalent to the CD. That wasn't free by any means, but it was a way for an artist to compose a completely orginal work and reap somewhat of a reward for the trouble. Once we get into the 20th century we have records, tapes and CDs taking the place of sheet music. So, when you say modern music lacks the same spirit it used to, implying that this is because of the money, when was music ever separated from the mondey?
I'll go a little farther out on a limb here to state that we have never had available such a variety of music available as we do today. Yeah, the big labels stifle creativity and all, but take a look at some of the smaller labels out there. There's a lot of them and they are putting some wild stuff out. Of course you do have to go looking for it, but it is out there. Look at what labels like Ninjatune, and Pork records are doing.
Now we get to real issue here. In a utopian society, artists would be supported by the state or by our spoontaneous gratitude. Problem is that nowhere on this planet does this utopian society exist. In reality an artist has to eat, put a roof over her head and somehow pay for equipment and supplies. Yeah atists can get, and most do have a day job, but when do they get a chance to create art? Jobs take up a lot of time and energy. And the worst thing about the muse is that its unpredictible striking in the middle of the night or during the work day, and often abdandoning the artists during the designated 'art time'. So, what else can an artist try to do except sell their work?
I may be a litte out of date here--been a while since I did any networking--, but most people are suprisingly ignorant about SNMP. On you own network, you should be able to use SNMP queries to retrieve the routing tables from routers. In addition many people forget to lock down this protocol on their network, so you poll them as well. The amount of inforation you can get this way is astounding. Applications like Cabletron's Spectrum and HP Openview use this protocol to manage networks. There's even a couple of good free tcl/tk based solutions out there. As far as the ethics go, routers have to share routing information or the Internet doesn't work, so what's the problem with collecting this information? The only practical problem with trying to map the Internet is memory and disk space.
Yep. Looks a lot like what I was thinking about. Now, imagine a company with a lot resources looking to break it down by neighborhoods rather than metropolitan areas. Still, there _has_ to be a better way than scanning the entire Internet. I mean, I tried that once by accident and the map I got was utterly incomprehensible. Quick tech note here: Cabletron's Spectrum uses 0.0.0.0 to 255.255.255.255 as its default setting for mapping. Don't just hit enter:/
Here's a thought about what they're doing. They're pinging and tracerouting to record latencies and packet loss broken down by geographical area and service provider. I know, I know this changes day by day if not hour by bour, but there are persistent trends. So, they might be compiling quality metrics for Internet service in your neighborhood. That would be a very valuable dataset to businesses of all sizes.
Reminds of a shirt I have from a NANOG meeting years ago. The caption read "The Internet will collapse in 8(xed out) 7 days. Repent!" Of course the pressures referenced then were substancially different on a technical level, but on a broader level were portentious. It boils down to this: When the Internet--more precisely NSFNet and Arpanet--was a playground for scientists and academics information and content flowed freely. Mosaic was the beginning of the end. It provided a graphical interface to access the information and interconnectivity of the Internet. Now the average person could use the net. Big private money flowed into the Net shortly thereafter. Money had certain expectations: Wheras, academics largely understood the Internet was a work in progress and tolerated glitches, Money required absolute reliabilty. Lemme tell you, doing first level support from 94 to 96 I saw how the expectations wrought drastic change. Culturally change was happening as well. You had the first movements to censor the net. Now Money's concerns are driving changes as well. Only the concern is very different. Money wants access to its products and services, both to buy and sell, but it also wants exclusivity. The sad thing is that users are going to find ways of circumventing the exclusivity, but the methods of imposing the exclusivity might just destroy web as public medium.
Okay Chummers, here's a little chip truth to offset Katz. First off, like others have pointed out Shadowrun while entertaining and errily prescient is not the primary source. Cyberpunk authors looked ahead to this corporatization in the early eighties. I won't even speculate as to who was first. Second, take a look at the Shadowrun product line. Hate to break it to you, but FASA is every bit as corporate as the next guy. While their original sourcebooks were extremely well written, later ones have tended to become formulaic--my opinion only. What I see is the gradual refinement of FASA's marketing strategy to the point where they market image with no substanc. And, they have been rewarded very well by this strategy. So, yeh, you run against corporation, but you do it using equipment created and provided by those same corps. Look at the evolution of the source books: I noticed that every new bit of equipment is becoming more and more customized towards the dedicated shadowrunner. What's going? Well, if I were to take the universe at face value, I'd say the establishment is defusing the revoltion by copting it. In and of itself, that would make for a spooky long term Shadowrun campaign. Problem is that in real life, the corporate world has an excellent record for co-opting and subverting progressive movements by packaging the image of rebellion and subsituting that image for the real thing. (BTW, the comments about the evolution of Shadowrun material, constitute my opinion only, and I'll admit I havn't followed things slavishy, just looked now and again at the bobby store.)
Look at how sub cultures like Punk and Grunge have been co-opted and ultimately destroyed by the forces of marketing. Both cultures had at their core an ethos of self reliance and "do it yourself" that made them special and revolutionary. However, within a few years of their break through, marketers had identified the readily recognizable elements and packaged them into a ready to buy product. The young and would be hip could simply go into a store and buy the outfit rather than having to discover the scene and its ideals. If we're not careful the same things gonna happen to us. Rebellion is always sexy and appealing simply for the fact that its breaking the monotony, but every rebellion has change as its goal. How do you get beyond the image and succeed at making change? That's the important thing.
Now a few comments about Katz' misconceptions about the shadowrun world in particuar. First there's the Lifestyle comment. Almost every system I've played in has a character's lifestly covered to one degree or another. Shadowrun just came up with a good one word term and nearly as concise rule for dealing with everyday reality of living during and in between runs(called adventures for us old timers). Second, we are not even close to the world where mercenaries run para military ops on corporate parks. The Shadowrun world presupposes a set of cataclysms which balkanize and destabilize N. America--and the rest of the world--to same level we see in modern day Africa. Mercernaries and lawlessness flourish in such a situation. And,the only law becomes that whoever can bring the most force to bear in any given location. Corporations would be very sinister in such a world. Third shadowrunners aren't necessarily heretics and revolutionaries. A lot of them are criminals, the poor and desparate, and people who got ground up and spit out by the machine. Waitaminute... Okay, so life does imitate art after all. That said, I agree with Katz thesis about how Shadowrun looks increasingly like a portent for our future rather than a work of fiction.
Yeah, this one confuses me too. Especially in light of a paper I have somewhere that talks about constructive uses for viral code. One of the applications discussed in the paper is upgrading machines across a network. Actually, when you think about that, its really spooky.
The big reason for the 1929 collapse was reckless use of margin to buy stocks. You had investors racking a debt that was worth more than their assets just so they could bet the stock would climb. Stocks fell--not crashed--, and lenders started calling the debts, causing the investors to sell off everything to pay the lenders back. Then the stocks crashed big time.
Meanwhile, today we have much tighter regulations to prevent this scenario, but the simple fact remains: Most investors are stoopid. And now we have more investors than ever. I wish I knew what that kind of mass stupidity would do. If I did, I could make a fortune. Until then, even a conservative stock investing program makes a lot more money than any kind of interest bearing instrument. So, what's a person with a savings to do?
If some fan was so impressed by your work that he scanned "Running to the Mountain"--did I get the title right?--and posted it on his website for all to read for free. That means no payment to your publisher, and no royalty check back to you. That's a pretty fearful thing for someone trying live off their creative work. Sad fact of the matter is that barring a major break through, creative artists make a pretty marginal living, and a lot of us never get to quit our day jobs. Now, I'll come out and say I'm bashing neither Katz nor new technology, but rather trying to get the idea across that this free ride a lot of people have been getting costs the artists. Now, I'm not sure how much it costs, nor if the cost is infact an investment; if the incresed exposure via Napster leads to increased sales, then its a good return indeed. The simple fact is that the technology is out there and you can never undevelop the technology. You're gonna have to live with it and adapt. Question is how? That's what artists, producers and labels are trying to figure out. Some like Metallica are taking the wrong approach; hiding from it behind lawyers and lawsuits. I think they would be much better off using the technology to lower the cost of their music and to make it more available to their fans. That approach will require a radically differnt business plan than the traditional idea of pressing albums and selling them at retail outlets. Still it can be done, and it can be implemented easily. What Metallica and the rest of the old shcoolers need to realize is that with the current retail scheme and its burdensome costs, consumers feel like they are being ripped off--and they're right. So when a technology like Napster or MP3s come out, consumers have no problem in sticking it to 'the man' by trading tunes with friends. Besides this is little different than trading 'mix' tapes with friends. And how many times have we listened to something off a tape like that and said "I must possess this!". Plenty I bet. In closing, if I sound ambivalent about the technology its because I am. I'm a producer who got into the business right as the world changed. The business plan I created last year is being rendered moot by the changing technology and I'm trying to figure out what to do now; trying to figure out how I can help my artists and finance further productions. As crass as it is, money still drives art because the artists need to pay for equipment and everything else, and the producer needs to pay for studio time, mastering, and distribution. Until that much changes money will still be the lifeblood music.
Slashdot Mirror
The climiate mentioned is very different from the Canada than what I'm used to. And to think I thought Canada had rolling hills and farmland--Ontario does anyway. But what do I know, I'm just an ignorant American.
This submission summarizes a novel application of quantum mechanical principles through which illumination may be generated. According to the Bohr model of the atom, electrons may only occupy discrete energy levels. When electrons are disturbed through energy incident upon the atom, their orbital level may change. Energy deposited to the atom will shift electrons to higher energy states, and hence higher orbitals. After a time, the electron will relax and fall to its original orbital state relasing a photon of light whose frequency is proportional to the energy original delivered to the electron. While the transitions of a single electron in a single hydrogen atom amount to an insignificant volume of light, economies of scale come into play with multiproton atoms and large aggregates of atoms, producing a usable illumination. Electrons may be stimulated through chemical reactions, electric current, or even photons of light incident upon the atom.
Okay, this is the best I can come up with after not having done Q&M for almost a decade. I toyed with the idea of actually filing this patent after reading about how Pepsi patented the color blue. But, hey, I have car payments to make.
Sorry if there's an empty post with the same title. Slapped the wrong key a second ago. To find out more about the whole royalties things check out B MI. Whether the holder of the copyright is the artist themselves or their label, its BMI that enforces the copyright. Artists and publishers join BMI for a fee, and BMI then tracks down who owes its members royalties. These guys can be like the secret police of the music world. If you're a live musician who plays standards, you have to be careful about what venues you play in larger cities because there might just be a BMI rep in there checking things out. If you publish a song book compiling other people's work, the BMI is there to make sure the original composers get their proper royaties. Same for performances on TV, radio, and now the web. And, as long as BMI has been around, people have been trying to dodge them. On one hand, its great to have an 800 pound gorilla looking out for your intellectual property rights, but on the other its a real drag when you're gigging at jazz clubs and the gorilla sits on you. One trick often employed is making enough of a variation in the song and changing the title that BMI can't say its this original work anymore. This results in some real fun performances. Then there's the near legendary book of standards "The Real Book" which is an underground anthology of standards published so as to avoid BMI royalties. Anyway, right or wrong, it behooves anyone who's distributing or replaying music in anyway to check out BMI and know who they are and what they do.
No I'm not some RIAA lobbyist or something. Just hear me out a second. The stance that the universities mentioned is the correct one to take with regard to conduct. That is to say to their students "Okay. y'all are adults now. We're not your mommy. If you do something that violates the copyright law, thats your business, deal with the consequences." However, there's still some reasons why universties are banning Napster. At the University of Michigan, Napster was banned long before the copyright issue came up. I don't know if its still in effect or not, but the reason for our ban was bandwidth. We had a whole mess of students getting into Napster early on and running as servers as well as clients. Well, a lot the Intenet charged on in to share jukeboxes, bringing the network to its knees. So, just because your U. doesn't give into the RIAA, don't take Napster or Guntella for granted. They might find other reasons--valid or not--to ban them.
Excellent point about where the money goes. A small artist or independent label sends most around %60 of their revenues to the distributors. If you doubt this simply email Orchard(www.orchard.com--if I remember right) or another distribitor and tell them you're a band looking to sell cds retail. See what kind of chunk they take. Still, I dunno if I'm with you on the distributors being members of the RIAA. They might be, but check the facts first. Even if they're not members, the companies that are still have very powerful reasons to fight technokogies like Napster. Its not that Napster cheats artists on copyrights--it only cheats them on royalties--, but rather that digital distrbution technology like Napster and Gnutella make a recording label an anachronism. Under the current and almost outdated model, the recording company presses the cds, wrangles with the distributors and retailers, promotes the artist and so on to varying degrees. The varying degress are that if you're a big act you get a lot of support, while smaller acts actually pay for a lot of the above services. So, in exchange for the services of the company, the artist signs over the copyright, and gets a whopping %10 of profits if any as a royalty. So, the record company risks a small amount of money on an artist--$10000 or so to press 10000 cds plus marketing costs--to gain %90 of any profits. Moreover, they own the right to the work. This is an ugly system as the many blues and soul artists screwed by their labels in the 50s and 60s can tell you.
Now we have technologies like the web, Napster, Guntella and who knows what else is on the horizon. Its easy to see Napster having two levels of service: the free music and a music subscrption service. Artists deal directly with Napster, cut out the label and take their own careers into their hands. They assume a little more risk in exchange for keeping their copyrights. It'd also be easy to see Gnutella begin extended to cover subscription sources as well as free ones, or some new technology doing that. In order to release a work all an artists would have to do is pay somone one to set up a site, or do it themselves. This should come in drastically under $10000, provide unlimited copies of the work while keeping the work under the artist's control. So, yeah, these technologies cut out the middleman in a big way. They cut out the need for either a distributor or a recording label.
I dunno why anyone is surprised at there being this kind of disparity. Even though computers and their associated services have come down drmatically in price, the toll to get on the Internet makes it largely the domain of middle class folks. Add in the knowledge toll to function there, and your average working class or lower person is gonna say the heck with it. They have too many other things to worry about. Get things down to the price of say a vcr and add in true plug and play set up, then this will change. Before we see the information access gap disappear the undlerlying tech has got to become as ubiquitous as cable tv and about as easy to use. This is happening pretty fast, so I'd expect to see a cultural change on Internet again in the next few of years identical to the one when AOL and others companies started providing easy Internet access. In the meantime, you see an Internet population that is pretty well educated and pretty affulent all things considered. So we have a gap today, but I doubt its going to be there for too much longer as the devices and services become cheaper and easier to use.
The real gap is in how people use the access to information. Lots of us here use the Internet as social medium, a place to collaborate on projects be they technical, artistic, political or whatever. We also use the Internet as the world's greatest reference collection. We're very well informed because we know the information is out there and how to look for it. Now, lets look at them. For someone neither technical savvy nor educated will the Internet be anything more than mall? That's where there real gap is going to be: In the ablity of people to use their access to information effectively.
As for the rest of the world: It looks as though those nations that are doing the hard work to achieve political and economic stablity will be able to build the necessary infrastructure for Internet access. The more important gap as the developing world emerges from a century political turmoil will be in what the stable governments allow their citizens to see. Take China for instance. Five years ago the Internet barely existed there. Now, its becoming more and more common in the cities, but the government restricts what the citizens can see. Whether or not their policy is effective I leave to another discussion(read I don't know). We're going to see a drastic difference in the way different geographical regions use the Internet. What will this mean in practical terms? Who knows. Its really too soon to say. In my opinion the gap is not going to be about technology and development, but in cultural and political views about information and ideas. Either way, this sounds like a good book to read.
In terms of the other issues about isolation at work. What the heck cares? In America we've never identified as strongly with an employer as say the Japanese have. We identify with professions. "I am programmer." "I am a geek." "I am a plumber." What we do is much more important than who we do it for. Companies that are effective and successful at their business find ways to get their people to talk to one and other independent of social activities. They don't leave such things to chance or the mercenary attitude of the worker. A justified attitude I might add given the lack of loyalty companies demostrate to their workers, but that's a whole other issue.
Well in my case the geek house wasn't planned it just happened. Two geeks in a house--okay, one geek and one doofus, you decide which is which--deciding on whether to get cable. Throw in a geek buddy fleeing the suburban hell that is Fairfax, and the rest just happened. Here's some thoughts on how I'd do it differently: First off one bedroom for everybody and a bigger living room. Of course a full fledged house would be ideal. Two: Wireless LAN. More expensive, but cables running across your living room and down the hall are just tres gauche. If you have cats this might be an essential item. My feline buddies learned about chewing on cables when they were younger; chewed right through a speaker cable with power going through it. Haven't been back since. However, not every cat is as swift. Three: Make sure everyone has a job and pays rent. Seems like a basic, but I've had way too many roomates who don't have clue on this one. Four: Don't even try to have a plan. Improvisation is a lifestyle and an art. And, the realities of living with smart, over educated and overconfident people leads to circumstances which defy the best plans, human logic, and often enough the physical laws of the universe.
Never crashed a Vax? Wow, I'm impressed. I used to crash my lab's vax all the time. Of course I was feeding it things like the logistics equation through poorly written Fortran. I also managed to halt the whole cluster by mailbombing myself with an errant notifier program. Anyway, aside from extreme--as in stupid--computing on poorly maintained clusters, the platform was pretty solid. There were a lot clever features that saved my behind. Like, saving five versions of a file by default. Sounds redundant, sounds stupid. Not when you're a clueless science geek learning how to do real programming. The editor Eve was really cool too. Never did figure out all the things I could do with it.
One of the best places to look for independent labels that are truly independent is in regional venue. There's hundreds of small labels out there that devoted to particular area. They can be hard to find, and sometimes you just trip over them. The one that comes to my mind is School Kids Records--sadly defunct I think. They are or used to be a label that recorded mostly artists in the SE Michigan area. Good luck in finding any of their stuff nationwide. But, if you lived in Ann Arbor, chances are you could find their records in local stores--even the chains. Another example of a regional indy label is Rounder. They may actually be a national label, but I've only heard Californian artists on their albums.
The other place to look for indy labels is in specfic genres. Major lables put out pop, more pop, and pop dressed up as "alternative". They might put out some other stuff just hedge their bets, but musical genres tend to be served by small labels. I'm thinking of Alligator Records which caters to the blues scene. There's also quite a few indy labels in the electronic scene. And, the novelty music genre is largely untouched by major labels. I'm thinking of people like the Residents in this case who used be on Ralph Records. Infact, a lot these labels are run by the artists themselves and represent a brandname more than anything else.
Its been a while since I last did any science, but I was taught that there's quite difference between a conjecture and a theory. Before you say that evolution is only a theory, check your definitions:
hpothesis: A tentative theory or supposition provisionally adopted to explain certain facts, and to guide in the investigation of others; hence, frequently called a working hypothesis.
theory: Systematically organized knowledge applicable in a relatively wide variety of circumstances, especially a system of assumptions, accepted principles, and rules of procedure devised to analyze, predict, or otherwise explain the nature or behavior of a specified set of phenomena.Law: A formulation describing a relationship observed to be invariable between or among phenomena for all cases in which the specified conditions are met
As you would expect the bar for an idea becoming a scientific law is very high. By comparison we still refer to Newton's work as his "Theory of Gravity", even after hundreds of thousands of high school experiments checking Newton's work--in just our century. Meanwhile the Theory of Evolution is less than two hundred years old. Yet, going with the definitions above, saying that the idea of Evolution is a theory, means that scientists are pretty darn sure this is the way the world works. What keeps Evolution from being a scientific law is the whole invariable clause of the definition of sicentific law. Same reason why neither Newton or Einstien's works are scientific laws--actually, I think relativity has achieved that status now. We probably won't be able to establish the invariance of Evolution until we get out to another planet with life and compare it to our own.
More to the point, people in public leadership positions like this have scrupulously separate their private life from their public life. If he'd been downloading to his own computer and hired a technician to do this upgrade, it'd have been no problem; it'd have been private. Because he's downloading porn onto a computer supplied by his university, he's making his activities public because any technican servicing the computer is answerable to the same organization that the dean answers to. The moral of this story is if the company gives you a computer watch what you put on that thing because the company owns it, and has every right to inspect it at any time. It would be a serious breach in privacy for a company to inspect the computer bought and paid for by its employees with their own money. Now, this is exactly what Nortwest airlines did when their employees attempted to organize a sick out. The Northwest Airlines incident represents one of the most serious erosions of the distinction between a private and public life.
I think a large chunk society has lost the notion of free speech and wants special treatment to shield them from critiscism. We got here partially because we have indeed become more sensitive to minority groups and positions. A bigger part is played by the need to appear sensitive to the needs of all groups. For organizations this need is driven by the need to attract and keep customers, and members. For both persons and organizations there's also the basic desire to avoid confrontation so they can get on with whatever it is they do. I mean why risk getting into a nasty arguement when you can just remain silent and get on with your life. Meanwhile organizations don't want to have to fend off suits from offended parties. So, companies and individuals alike sanitize their communications. For individuals working in organizations it means they have their personal privacy invaded so that the company may continue to avoid offending someone. Its ironic how one part of our privacy dilema has stemmed from progress on discrimination issues.
Meanwhile on a personal level, people have become very complacent about their personal identity. I thinks this arises largely from the security we've had in this country for the pretty much the whole century. With a few very notable exceptions, this century has been marked by increasing economic security. People have become very confident in their standard of living, and have little to complain about. A lot of folks out there have a hard time imagining that someone might do something dangerous with their personal information.
Well, I guess its a kinder, gentler drug trade where you are. Seriously tho, from what I do know about drug culture the prevalence of spiking and mixing drugs varies quite a bit. Place where I grew up it was quite common for dealers to spike weed with angel dust and who knows what else. I dunno if they were trying to hook people or were just saying "what the hell?". From living in college towns for several years and brushing up against the drug trade in those places, I'd doubt there was much lacing of drugs going on. Kids there basically like their weed and hallucinogens. If you have a real strong class split with entrenched poverty at the bottom end, you get a whole other kind of drug trade thats ruthless and vicious. Those dealers are going to do just about anything to make a buck. As far as coke not being physically addictive, if I remember the neurochemistry behind coke, doesn't it bing with the chemical receptors responsible for pleasure? Given that that releases a lot of dopameine--if I'm wrong, someone correct me--I'd be very surprised if coke was not physically addictive. As for my experience, I not a drug user, never have been. I just grew up in a rough working to lower class neighborhood of LA in the eighties and I saw hard drug use destroy a lot of people. Even so, I'm not naive enough to say that drugs were the cause, only the pathology of much more serious problem.
Just wondering if there's a way to harness this warming and get power. Maybe attach thermocouples to streets and highways? Maybe this effect could be used as a point to argue for solar power developments on building rooftops. I dunno if the pay out would be worth it or not.
And to think you Canadians have it pretty good as far as urban greenspace goes. So far, every major Canadian city I've been in has tons of greenspace interspercing developments. Most American cities in contrast, just sprawl. Can anyone comment on the differing urban planning policies in both countries. Most Canadian cities seem to me to be planned to some degree. I'm curious as to how such philosophies differ between our countries.
Why is that every conspiracy alarmist is focused on the government? Oddly enough the fact that government may be watching me bothers me not nearly so much that other entities are. I mean, there's corporations who aren't really accountable to anyone, then there's any number of political groups, not to mention people on the fringe of questionable stability. And I won't even get started on those guys in black sedan parked out in front of my house. Of course I don't really know where that machine in my head is sending signals to either.
Since when was music free anyway? In ye olde days musicans were supported by a patron who'd give 'em the boot if they didn't like the music. Pieces were also commissoned by the wealthy as public works. Sorry to say, but that type of situation really stifles innovation. Now, step up to the era of the mass printing and emergenece of the middle class--say like the 19th century here. People started owning things like pianos and buying music to play on them. Sheet music was the 19th century equivalent to the CD. That wasn't free by any means, but it was a way for an artist to compose a completely orginal work and reap somewhat of a reward for the trouble. Once we get into the 20th century we have records, tapes and CDs taking the place of sheet music. So, when you say modern music lacks the same spirit it used to, implying that this is because of the money, when was music ever separated from the mondey?
I'll go a little farther out on a limb here to state that we have never had available such a variety of music available as we do today. Yeah, the big labels stifle creativity and all, but take a look at some of the smaller labels out there. There's a lot of them and they are putting some wild stuff out. Of course you do have to go looking for it, but it is out there. Look at what labels like Ninjatune, and Pork records are doing.
Now we get to real issue here. In a utopian society, artists would be supported by the state or by our spoontaneous gratitude. Problem is that nowhere on this planet does this utopian society exist. In reality an artist has to eat, put a roof over her head and somehow pay for equipment and supplies. Yeah atists can get, and most do have a day job, but when do they get a chance to create art? Jobs take up a lot of time and energy. And the worst thing about the muse is that its unpredictible striking in the middle of the night or during the work day, and often abdandoning the artists during the designated 'art time'. So, what else can an artist try to do except sell their work?
I may be a litte out of date here--been a while since I did any networking--, but most people are suprisingly ignorant about SNMP. On you own network, you should be able to use SNMP queries to retrieve the routing tables from routers. In addition many people forget to lock down this protocol on their network, so you poll them as well. The amount of inforation you can get this way is astounding. Applications like Cabletron's Spectrum and HP Openview use this protocol to manage networks. There's even a couple of good free tcl/tk based solutions out there. As far as the ethics go, routers have to share routing information or the Internet doesn't work, so what's the problem with collecting this information? The only practical problem with trying to map the Internet is memory and disk space.
Yep. Looks a lot like what I was thinking about. Now, imagine a company with a lot resources looking to break it down by neighborhoods rather than metropolitan areas. Still, there _has_ to be a better way than scanning the entire Internet. I mean, I tried that once by accident and the map I got was utterly incomprehensible. Quick tech note here: Cabletron's Spectrum uses 0.0.0.0 to 255.255.255.255 as its default setting for mapping. Don't just hit enter :/
Here's a thought about what they're doing. They're pinging and tracerouting to record latencies and packet loss broken down by geographical area and service provider. I know, I know this changes day by day if not hour by bour, but there are persistent trends. So, they might be compiling quality metrics for Internet service in your neighborhood. That would be a very valuable dataset to businesses of all sizes.
Reminds of a shirt I have from a NANOG meeting years ago. The caption read "The Internet will collapse in 8(xed out) 7 days. Repent!" Of course the pressures referenced then were substancially different on a technical level, but on a broader level were portentious. It boils down to this: When the Internet--more precisely NSFNet and Arpanet--was a playground for scientists and academics information and content flowed freely. Mosaic was the beginning of the end. It provided a graphical interface to access the information and interconnectivity of the Internet. Now the average person could use the net. Big private money flowed into the Net shortly thereafter. Money had certain expectations: Wheras, academics largely understood the Internet was a work in progress and tolerated glitches, Money required absolute reliabilty. Lemme tell you, doing first level support from 94 to 96 I saw how the expectations wrought drastic change. Culturally change was happening as well. You had the first movements to censor the net. Now Money's concerns are driving changes as well. Only the concern is very different. Money wants access to its products and services, both to buy and sell, but it also wants exclusivity. The sad thing is that users are going to find ways of circumventing the exclusivity, but the methods of imposing the exclusivity might just destroy web as public medium.
Okay Chummers, here's a little chip truth to offset Katz. First off, like others have pointed out Shadowrun while entertaining and errily prescient is not the primary source. Cyberpunk authors looked ahead to this corporatization in the early eighties. I won't even speculate as to who was first. Second, take a look at the Shadowrun product line. Hate to break it to you, but FASA is every bit as corporate as the next guy. While their original sourcebooks were extremely well written, later ones have tended to become formulaic--my opinion only. What I see is the gradual refinement of FASA's marketing strategy to the point where they market image with no substanc. And, they have been rewarded very well by this strategy. So, yeh, you run against corporation, but you do it using equipment created and provided by those same corps. Look at the evolution of the source books: I noticed that every new bit of equipment is becoming more and more customized towards the dedicated shadowrunner. What's going? Well, if I were to take the universe at face value, I'd say the establishment is defusing the revoltion by copting it. In and of itself, that would make for a spooky long term Shadowrun campaign. Problem is that in real life, the corporate world has an excellent record for co-opting and subverting progressive movements by packaging the image of rebellion and subsituting that image for the real thing. (BTW, the comments about the evolution of Shadowrun material, constitute my opinion only, and I'll admit I havn't followed things slavishy, just looked now and again at the bobby store.)
Look at how sub cultures like Punk and Grunge have been co-opted and ultimately destroyed by the forces of marketing. Both cultures had at their core an ethos of self reliance and "do it yourself" that made them special and revolutionary. However, within a few years of their break through, marketers had identified the readily recognizable elements and packaged them into a ready to buy product. The young and would be hip could simply go into a store and buy the outfit rather than having to discover the scene and its ideals. If we're not careful the same things gonna happen to us. Rebellion is always sexy and appealing simply for the fact that its breaking the monotony, but every rebellion has change as its goal. How do you get beyond the image and succeed at making change? That's the important thing.
Now a few comments about Katz' misconceptions about the shadowrun world in particuar. First there's the Lifestyle comment. Almost every system I've played in has a character's lifestly covered to one degree or another. Shadowrun just came up with a good one word term and nearly as concise rule for dealing with everyday reality of living during and in between runs(called adventures for us old timers). Second, we are not even close to the world where mercenaries run para military ops on corporate parks. The Shadowrun world presupposes a set of cataclysms which balkanize and destabilize N. America--and the rest of the world--to same level we see in modern day Africa. Mercernaries and lawlessness flourish in such a situation. And ,the only law becomes that whoever can bring the most force to bear in any given location. Corporations would be very sinister in such a world. Third shadowrunners aren't necessarily heretics and revolutionaries. A lot of them are criminals, the poor and desparate, and people who got ground up and spit out by the machine. Waitaminute... Okay, so life does imitate art after all. That said, I agree with Katz thesis about how Shadowrun looks increasingly like a portent for our future rather than a work of fiction.
Yeah, this one confuses me too. Especially in light of a paper I have somewhere that talks about constructive uses for viral code. One of the applications discussed in the paper is upgrading machines across a network. Actually, when you think about that, its really spooky.
The big reason for the 1929 collapse was reckless use of margin to buy stocks. You had investors racking a debt that was worth more than their assets just so they could bet the stock would climb. Stocks fell--not crashed--, and lenders started calling the debts, causing the investors to sell off everything to pay the lenders back. Then the stocks crashed big time.
Meanwhile, today we have much tighter regulations to prevent this scenario, but the simple fact remains: Most investors are stoopid. And now we have more investors than ever. I wish I knew what that kind of mass stupidity would do. If I did, I could make a fortune. Until then, even a conservative stock investing program makes a lot more money than any kind of interest bearing instrument. So, what's a person with a savings to do?
If some fan was so impressed by your work that he scanned "Running to the Mountain"--did I get the title right?--and posted it on his website for all to read for free. That means no payment to your publisher, and no royalty check back to you. That's a pretty fearful thing for someone trying live off their creative work. Sad fact of the matter is that barring a major break through, creative artists make a pretty marginal living, and a lot of us never get to quit our day jobs. Now, I'll come out and say I'm bashing neither Katz nor new technology, but rather trying to get the idea across that this free ride a lot of people have been getting costs the artists. Now, I'm not sure how much it costs, nor if the cost is infact an investment; if the incresed exposure via Napster leads to increased sales, then its a good return indeed. The simple fact is that the technology is out there and you can never undevelop the technology. You're gonna have to live with it and adapt. Question is how? That's what artists, producers and labels are trying to figure out. Some like Metallica are taking the wrong approach; hiding from it behind lawyers and lawsuits. I think they would be much better off using the technology to lower the cost of their music and to make it more available to their fans. That approach will require a radically differnt business plan than the traditional idea of pressing albums and selling them at retail outlets. Still it can be done, and it can be implemented easily. What Metallica and the rest of the old shcoolers need to realize is that with the current retail scheme and its burdensome costs, consumers feel like they are being ripped off--and they're right. So when a technology like Napster or MP3s come out, consumers have no problem in sticking it to 'the man' by trading tunes with friends. Besides this is little different than trading 'mix' tapes with friends. And how many times have we listened to something off a tape like that and said "I must possess this!". Plenty I bet. In closing, if I sound ambivalent about the technology its because I am. I'm a producer who got into the business right as the world changed. The business plan I created last year is being rendered moot by the changing technology and I'm trying to figure out what to do now; trying to figure out how I can help my artists and finance further productions. As crass as it is, money still drives art because the artists need to pay for equipment and everything else, and the producer needs to pay for studio time, mastering, and distribution. Until that much changes money will still be the lifeblood music.