I'm confused by what seems to me to be a glaring non-sequitur in this post.
You say a lot of fairly sensible things about judgement, about the way that moral convictions are articulated to moral theories; then you say that you hate post-structuralism. But what has post-structuralism got to do with it?
Post-structuralism might have some interesting things to say about the way that judgements connect moral convictions to moral theories; and it might suggest that if the connections were simple and self-evident there would be no work for judgement, as such, to do. Thus: moral theory x does not automatically commit one to moral stance y; it depends somewhat on how things work themselves out in situ. This is why one needs to judge constantly, rather than resorting to pre-judice.
A possible criticism of RMS is that while his moral theory is consistent and his moral commitments are admirable, his judgements are sometimes inconsistent. A post-structuralist might say that it cannot be otherwise, and have some reservations about what seems to be RMS' assumption that the path from his theories to his commitments is a straight and narrow one: perhaps not everything that RMS urges and supports follows directly and incontrovertibly from his moral premisses, and perhaps it would be nice if he were able to recognise this. But this certainly doesn't amount to a denigration of commitment, or an indefinite suspension of judgement on the grounds that one can never get it right once and for all - it's the fact that one can never get it right once and for all that makes judgement necessary...
In the case of the BBC micro, a large part of the machine operating system (such as it was) was on ROMs that Acorn (or whatever they call themselves now - sell-outs that they are) still owns the copyright to. You can get a legal emulator of the machine architecture minus the ROMs, but you can't actually emulate a "BBC Micro" on it without a copy of the ROMs themselves. This is especially annoying because the original (and best! well, apart from the Archimedes version) Elite was written on that platform, and I'd really like to play it again in its original glory - especially as David Braben has agreed to the release of said original as freeware...
I made a tune that just tells you one good place to get th'source code - kind of a musical link. It's getting a bit old now. I'm amazed this is still an issue - but it is!
(splutters) Wiccan soldiers? What the bleep use would they be in a bleeping war?
Christianity was invented back when people didn't know any better. Wicca doesn't have that excuse. It's a religion for people who basically acknowledge that religion is dead but need something to cling to (unlike fundamentalism, which is religion for people who just refuse to acknowledge that religion is dead).
You can call any old bunch of shite a religion. Hell, I worship the moose-god Anthea and her many-angled minions Huey, Dewey, Louie and Arsehole. But any military that wants to let me worship the divine Anthea (makes sign of holy antlers, tightens nipple clamps) apart from the rest of its serving officers is guilty of pandering to my mental enfeeblement, and is basically beeped.
They should burn people who call themselves "witches". That'd give them some justification for all the stupid whining they do about the repressive Judeo-Christian patriarchy...
Re:"Long overdue"? It's been out since 1995!
on
Desire In Cyberspace
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· Score: 2
I don't especially mind either postmodernism (if by that you mean Lyotard, say) or obfuscation, but what I can't stand is cyberdrool - the portentous rhapsodizing of boring people trying to write interestingly. Academics can be especially prone to this, for perhaps obvious reasons; and the web is a real lure for devotees of pretend excitement. I don't know why it is that gushy narcissism has become the predominant tone of highbrow discourse about the web, but it bodes ill...
There's more excitement for me, a non-mathematician and non-computer scientist, in about twenty pages of almost anything by Donald Knuth (even the TeXBook!) than in the whole of Sherry Turkle...
'As you lie there,' said O'Brien, 'you have often wondered you have even asked me -- why the Ministry of Love should expend so much time and trouble on you. And when you were free you were puzzled by what was essentially the same question. You could grasp the mechanics of the Society you lived in, but not its underlying motives. Do you remember writing in your diary, "I understand how: I do not understand why"? It was when you thought about "why" that you doubted your own sanity. You have read the book, Goldstein's book, or parts of it, at least. Did it tell you anything that you did not know already?'
'You have read it?' said Winston.
'I wrote it. That is to say, I collaborated in writing it. No book is produced individually, as you know.'
'Is it true, what it says?'
'A description, yes. The programme it sets forth is nonsense. The secret accumulation of knowledge -- a gradual spread of enlightenment -- ultimately a proletarian rebellion -- the overthrow of the Party. You foresaw yourself that that was what it would say. It is all nonsense. The proletarians will never revolt, not in a thousand years or a million. They cannot. I do not have to tell you the reason: you know it already. If you have ever cherished any dreams of violent insurrection, you must abandon them. There is no way in which the Party can be overthrown. The rule of the Party is for ever. Make that the starting-point of your thoughts.'
I haven't yet been unconvinced of what Daniel Dennett's various approaches to this putative "hard problem" originally convinced me of, namely that the reason why the "hard problem" of subjective experience does not have a solution is that it isn't a real problem.
It only ever gets to be a problem because it's persistently invoked as one. If people didn't smuggle it into their discussions of the "soft problems" of neural functioning, etc. (all that "mechanistic" stuff), it would never come up of its own accord. What would a solution to it actually solve? What new things would one be able to account for? ESP? Near-death experiences?
Subjective experience can do all the things it needs to without ever checking out of meatspace, including being that thing about me that I can't imagine being me without. You only need the uber-physical properties of quantum this and microtubular that to explain things I don't believe any consciousness has ever accomplished anyway. This isn't to say that having a quantum supercomputer built into my brain wouldn't be a cool thing: sure I'd like to be able to intuit non-computable things about the nature of ultimate reality. But the only thing that can normally make me do that is THC, and THC only makes me think I'm doing it...
Q: Mr. Newell, having heard all the arguments, will you alter your file-sharing behavior?
Mr. Newell: Game over. Actually, you might say the war has ended, but the battles have just begun. Although the entertainment industry will continue to fight it, the technology is way beyond anyone's control. So, no, I won't stop file sharing. If anything, I'm looking forward to more movies and videos becoming available. The possibilities are limitless. The catch: I *really* need a new computer for all of this. [emphasis mine - DR]
I find this interesting, because it suggests that file-sharing may actually help to drive consumer demand for faster, higher-bandwidth connections, larger hard-drives and more powerful machines.
The fact of the matter is that "the possibilities" are not (currently) limitless, but are actually pretty concretely limited by the shortcomings of the available technology.
Maybe in twenty years' time we'll have a storage medium that can hold every movie Hollywood has ever released in uncompressed form on a small crystal rod you can slide into the "information orifice" of a playback machine capable of instantaneously accessing anything stored on that medium. (OK, I admit it: I was watching Superman II a short while ago...)
What we actually have now falls a long way short of that - and in order to get from here to there we need a lot of consumer investment. People want information to be free; and it looks like we're prepared to pay for its liberation even if we won't pay for the information itself.
Anyway, wouldn't it be kinda ironic if one of the driving forces behind the next few years of technological and economic development (in the consumer ICT market, at least) was the willingness of the public to commit widespread acts of insouciant copyright violation? Like a boom in property development caused by millions of people looking for warehouses to keep all their new stolen goods...
This looks like the (slightly doctored) output of a script (like the Postmodern Essay Generator, for instance). But what script? And where can I get it?
Re:Hacking, Cracking, my opinion.
on
Hackers
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· Score: 1
That's funny...when you mentioned a 'cker' theme, the words that popped into my head were quite different...
The "offensive or otherwise inappropriate" wording used in mp3.com's "song pull" notification is pretty much generic. It covers anything they think they have any reason, usually legal, for not wanting on their site. "Appropriate", we may assume in this case, means "appropriate in the context of mp3.com trying not to get sued any more".
I had a song called "I Don't Believe R Kelly Can Fly" pulled from mp3.com because of issues over use of a famous guy's name in the title. I got the exact same notification. Form letter, see?
I wait with interest to see whether they find my song, Dee Ee Cee Ess Ess, which has just a URL as the lyrics similarly "inappropriate". That's assuming they even notice it; which I wouldn't bet on. Anyone wants to mirror it, tho', be my guest...
The "offensive or otherwise inappropriate" wording used in mp3.com's "song pull" notification is pretty much generic. It covers anything they think they have any reason, usually legal, for not wanting on their site. "Appropriate", we may assume in this case, means "appropriate in the context of mp3.com trying not to get sued any more".
I had a song called "I Don't Believe R Kelly Can Fly" pulled from mp3.com because of issues over use of a famous guy's name in the title. I got the exact same notification. Form letter, see?
I wait with interest to see whether they find my song which has just a URL as the lyrics similarly "inappropriate". That's assuming they even notice it; which I wouldn't bet on. Anyone wants to mirror it, tho', be my guest...
J. P. Donleavy, author of The Ginger Man and The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B, advises that the effectiveness of a curt four-letter expletive may be compounded by juxtaposing it with a latinate term of several syllables, e.g.:
You
truculent fucker.
or
You
unconscionable cunt.
(the examples given, as far as I am able to recall, are Donleavy's own).
There's also at least one song (mine) where the lyrics are a link to the decss source code. Much less funny and clever, I know, and what's worse it's on mp3.com 'cos a) I thought it would be funny to put it there, and b) I had nowhere else to put it.
It's called "Dee Ee Cee Ess Ess", and it's on this page:
and it's free to be copied to any other location anyone feels like, and if I ever make more than half a buck on it I promise I'll send the check to the EFF. Way things are going, I might just send them a check anyhow.
A question that often comes to my mind when I read about the discovery of new constituents of mass and matter - like that worrying proliferation of "elementary" particles that Gell-Mann and others (according to the above, which I'm taking entirely at face value) found ways to reduce and simplify - is whether there is a straightforward, or even a complex-but-rigorous, difference between discovering such elements and creating them.
To what extent is a theory that predicts that a Higgs Boson will appear under certain experimental conditions (like the CERN apparatus, plus lots and lots of energy) distinguishable from a recipe for creating Higgs Bosons? To what extent is a theory that states that Higgs Bosons must always be there, irrespective of whether one can see them or not, distinguishable from a recipe that states that every time one follows the recipe one will get a Higgs Boson?
Part of me hopes it's a stupid question; the other part of me wonders just how stupid, and will even welcome an answer that tells me what a complete dolt I am, provided it also tells me why.
This isn't just an honest question - it's a key question.
There are some issues that matter a great deal to a technically literate minority that possibly aren't as much of a big deal as that minority makes them out to be. Compile your own list here. The point is that everyone knows - even geeks know - that geeks' sense of proportion is skewed in some ways by the obsessive quality of their enthusiasms. Anyone who can get hot under the collar about which Unix-based text editor is best is living in a world that John Q. Public is probably better off not caring all that much about.
An unfortunate side-effect of this is that serious infringements of civil liberties can be passed off as inconsequential if the only people protesting against them are geeks: if the opponents of oppression are all certified eccentrics, then its easier to pass the oppression off as good old plain commonsense.
One way or another, people who are even less technically literate than I am need to be persuaded of the importance of this. We need to let people know precisely which liberties are at stake here, and what kind of a difference it would make if those liberties were lost. Talk about toasters or car engines if that makes it easier; just find a way of making this seem not inconsequential, not a minority concern, not a bunch of weird h4xx0rs crying wolf but your genuine civil-liberties-issue-type real deal.
How many video players could play both formats? And how much did it cost to buy one player? IIRC, the choice of VHS / Betamax was fairly exclusive for most consumers: you had one or the other, unless you liked spending money on players for two formats one of which was pretty much guaranteed to be obliterated from the market by the other within a short space of time.
How many formats can Winamp handle? How difficult is it to get Winamp to handle even more formats? How much does it cost to get hold of Winamp? Different story, isn't it?
Vorbis isn't going to have the problem that users of mp3 aren't going to be able to play Vorbis streams, so mindshare won't be determined on the basis of ruthless winner-takes-all competition.
mp3.com still has links you can click on to get mp3 players and encoders. When the site started, not everybody could play mp3 format files - but all it takes is one short download, or grabbing the software of a magazine coverdisk. The fact that most people now have mp3 players needn't discourage anybody setting up a new music site (or managing an old one) from moving over to Vorbis and placing links for Vorbis players and encoders. More music, better quality, lower bandwidth? Ta very much...
Gosh, a post on/. about something I actually know something about...and it contains a mistake I can correct, too! The previous poster appears to think that pomo/deconstruction/whatever's take on gender is just a rehashed "sex is 100% biology, and trivial; gender is 100% social construction and way interesting" Standard Social Sciences Model spiel...uh-uh...
Anyone who's at all curious about the state of the art over in th'dismal, unscientific, head-in-the-sand humanities could do worse than have a go at reading Judith Butler's Bodies that Matter, which really gives this topic a proper working-over.
Butler argues that the way we see and talk about gender determines (tho' not exhaustively) the way we approach the "materiality" of bodies and sexes and other supposedly non-languagey stuff, and tries to show how the confusion or subversion of gender norms makes our understanding of bodily, biological sex less "stable". We never think about sexed bodies without bringing along some of the habits of thought that come from our social experiences as gendered persons, and we never go along to social functions without bringing our sexed bodies with us, so it kind of makes sense that disorders and uncertainties get passed back and forth between the two.
As for the mutilated boy who couldn't / wouldn't be raised as a girl, I don't know that this is really a case of nature triumphant over culture - rather a tangled story of culture getting its knickers in a twist over nature. What's with this idea that you have to be one thing or another anyhow? If a boy can be a boy "really" without all his boy bits, then doesn't this suggest that boyhood depends on more than a full anatomical checklist after all? Moving the focus of what defines "real" boyhood from the genitals to the brain only displaces the problem: brains can get messed up, too. The search for an anatomical focus of masculinity might very well turn out to be like the search for the organ which contains the soul...
Indeed. And incidentally, wtf is an "mp3 worm"? Any idea how you'd code one of those? Is there something special about the mp3 format I don't know, or is this as meaningless as talking about a "gif worm"...or maybe a "txt worm"?
Better still: get them hooked on text-based adventure games, and get them a copy of the INFORM compiler used by Infocom.
Why? Because the code you write with it is object-orientated, compiled, and runs on a virtual machine (the "Z"-machine). This introduces some interesting ideas about compilation, emulation and so on - things which are fascinating, and also very tough from a beginner's viewpoint, so you can go on thinking about them for a long, long time...
Also because writing INFORM code means - usually - setting puzzles for other people to solve, which introduces a social element into the coding process from day 1: you have to think about how an "end-user" is going to interact with what you write, and you will be dealing with design issues at several different levels.
When they're not coding, they can be designing level maps, plotting adventures, finding ways to diagram puzzles and getting hopelessly lost in some of the most literate and witty adventure games ever written - games like CHRISTMINSTER and CURSES.
The programming language, the compiler, the "Z"-machine and the rudiments of game design are all generously documented, and it's all free!
I'm impressed, though not at all surprised, by the quality of Lars' response, and I'm glad he gave his time to talk about these things.
It's clear that Metallica regard the Napster issue as one which concerns their integrity, and not only their sales revenue. That in itself makes a lot of the flak (I'm thinking of a certain cartoon in particular) the band has taken over this look spiteful and mean. Whatever else the Napster lawsuit may be about, it's not about Lars' personal greed.
Napster's corporate revenue is another matter. What the comparison I and others made with home taping left out of the equation was the extent to which the trading of files on Napster depends on a large and highly profitable third-party maintained infrastructure, for which there is no analogy I can think of in the world of home-taping. I criticised Metallica for intervening in the admittedly illegal activity of its teenage fanbase - the activity of swapping and listening to pirated music - which I argued was part of the culture out of which Metallica has gotten most of its lifelong devotees. I do not think that the band should be criticised, however, for holding the corporate maintainers of that infrastructure to account for the way they make their money out of, amongst other things, Metallica's music.
It's within Napster's power to make it a lot more difficult for Napster users to trade Metallica's music using their system. I don't think anyone would argue that it's possible for them to prevent it outright, but by doing nothing they not only implicitly sanction that use of their system but show themselves to be content to profit by it.
Home-taping wasn't killing music, and I doubt whether even the most unscrupulous use of Napster/Gnutella/Whatever-Comes-Along-Next will do so either, in the long run. It is more likely that they will continue to subtend, rather than subvert, the commercial culture that enables bands like Metallica to achieve the fame, stature and popularity that they now enjoy. Nevertheless, the responsibilities of corporate third-parties such as Napster should not be overlooked; and the novelty and popularity of the technology they employ should not be used as an excuse for disregarding those responsibilities.
Thanks again to Lars for showing that Metallica are willing to participate in the very necessary debates around these issues, and are not content - as so many others are - to settle for technical ignorance backed by bludgeoning legal firepower.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm confused by what seems to me to be a glaring non-sequitur in this post.
You say a lot of fairly sensible things about judgement, about the way that moral convictions are articulated to moral theories; then you say that you hate post-structuralism. But what has post-structuralism got to do with it?
Post-structuralism might have some interesting things to say about the way that judgements connect moral convictions to moral theories; and it might suggest that if the connections were simple and self-evident there would be no work for judgement, as such, to do. Thus: moral theory x does not automatically commit one to moral stance y; it depends somewhat on how things work themselves out in situ. This is why one needs to judge constantly, rather than resorting to pre-judice.A possible criticism of RMS is that while his moral theory is consistent and his moral commitments are admirable, his judgements are sometimes inconsistent. A post-structuralist might say that it cannot be otherwise, and have some reservations about what seems to be RMS' assumption that the path from his theories to his commitments is a straight and narrow one: perhaps not everything that RMS urges and supports follows directly and incontrovertibly from his moral premisses, and perhaps it would be nice if he were able to recognise this. But this certainly doesn't amount to a denigration of commitment, or an indefinite suspension of judgement on the grounds that one can never get it right once and for all - it's the fact that one can never get it right once and for all that makes judgement necessary...
In the case of the BBC micro, a large part of the machine operating system (such as it was) was on ROMs that Acorn (or whatever they call themselves now - sell-outs that they are) still owns the copyright to. You can get a legal emulator of the machine architecture minus the ROMs, but you can't actually emulate a "BBC Micro" on it without a copy of the ROMs themselves. This is especially annoying because the original (and best! well, apart from the Archimedes version) Elite was written on that platform, and I'd really like to play it again in its original glory - especially as David Braben has agreed to the release of said original as freeware...
I made a tune that just tells you one good place to get th'source code - kind of a musical link. It's getting a bit old now. I'm amazed this is still an issue - but it is!
"Forget about your silly whim, it doesn't fit the plan"
2112?
(splutters) Wiccan soldiers? What the bleep use would they be in a bleeping war?
Christianity was invented back when people didn't know any better. Wicca doesn't have that excuse. It's a religion for people who basically acknowledge that religion is dead but need something to cling to (unlike fundamentalism, which is religion for people who just refuse to acknowledge that religion is dead).
You can call any old bunch of shite a religion. Hell, I worship the moose-god Anthea and her many-angled minions Huey, Dewey, Louie and Arsehole. But any military that wants to let me worship the divine Anthea (makes sign of holy antlers, tightens nipple clamps) apart from the rest of its serving officers is guilty of pandering to my mental enfeeblement, and is basically beeped.
They should burn people who call themselves "witches". That'd give them some justification for all the stupid whining they do about the repressive Judeo-Christian patriarchy...
I don't especially mind either postmodernism (if by that you mean Lyotard, say) or obfuscation, but what I can't stand is cyberdrool - the portentous rhapsodizing of boring people trying to write interestingly. Academics can be especially prone to this, for perhaps obvious reasons; and the web is a real lure for devotees of pretend excitement. I don't know why it is that gushy narcissism has become the predominant tone of highbrow discourse about the web, but it bodes ill...
There's more excitement for me, a non-mathematician and non-computer scientist, in about twenty pages of almost anything by Donald Knuth (even the TeXBook!) than in the whole of Sherry Turkle...
To be precise:
Except that he never existed, and his book was written by O'Brien...
Do you mean Lanier? Or do you mean Larson?& lt;/p>
I haven't yet been unconvinced of what Daniel Dennett's various approaches to this putative "hard problem" originally convinced me of, namely that the reason why the "hard problem" of subjective experience does not have a solution is that it isn't a real problem.
It only ever gets to be a problem because it's persistently invoked as one. If people didn't smuggle it into their discussions of the "soft problems" of neural functioning, etc. (all that "mechanistic" stuff), it would never come up of its own accord. What would a solution to it actually solve? What new things would one be able to account for? ESP? Near-death experiences?
Subjective experience can do all the things it needs to without ever checking out of meatspace, including being that thing about me that I can't imagine being me without. You only need the uber-physical properties of quantum this and microtubular that to explain things I don't believe any consciousness has ever accomplished anyway. This isn't to say that having a quantum supercomputer built into my brain wouldn't be a cool thing: sure I'd like to be able to intuit non-computable things about the nature of ultimate reality. But the only thing that can normally make me do that is THC, and THC only makes me think I'm doing it...
I find this interesting, because it suggests that file-sharing may actually help to drive consumer demand for faster, higher-bandwidth connections, larger hard-drives and more powerful machines.
The fact of the matter is that "the possibilities" are not (currently) limitless, but are actually pretty concretely limited by the shortcomings of the available technology.
Maybe in twenty years' time we'll have a storage medium that can hold every movie Hollywood has ever released in uncompressed form on a small crystal rod you can slide into the "information orifice" of a playback machine capable of instantaneously accessing anything stored on that medium. (OK, I admit it: I was watching Superman II a short while ago...)
What we actually have now falls a long way short of that - and in order to get from here to there we need a lot of consumer investment. People want information to be free; and it looks like we're prepared to pay for its liberation even if we won't pay for the information itself.
Anyway, wouldn't it be kinda ironic if one of the driving forces behind the next few years of technological and economic development (in the consumer ICT market, at least) was the willingness of the public to commit widespread acts of insouciant copyright violation? Like a boom in property development caused by millions of people looking for warehouses to keep all their new stolen goods...
This looks like the (slightly doctored) output of a script (like the Postmodern Essay Generator, for instance). But what script? And where can I get it?
That's funny...when you mentioned a 'cker' theme, the words that popped into my head were quite different...
That sounds right to me: both the Unabomber and the Cultural Revolutionwere misguided.
Or take the Khmer Rouge...
The "offensive or otherwise inappropriate" wording used in mp3.com's "song pull" notification is pretty much generic. It covers anything they think they have any reason, usually legal, for not wanting on their site. "Appropriate", we may assume in this case, means "appropriate in the context of mp3.com trying not to get sued any more".
I had a song called "I Don't Believe R Kelly Can Fly" pulled from mp3.com because of issues over use of a famous guy's name in the title. I got the exact same notification. Form letter, see?
I wait with interest to see whether they find my song, Dee Ee Cee Ess Ess, which has just a URL as the lyrics similarly "inappropriate". That's assuming they even notice it; which I wouldn't bet on. Anyone wants to mirror it, tho', be my guest...
The "offensive or otherwise inappropriate" wording used in mp3.com's "song pull" notification is pretty much generic. It covers anything they think they have any reason, usually legal, for not wanting on their site. "Appropriate", we may assume in this case, means "appropriate in the context of mp3.com trying not to get sued any more".
I had a song called "I Don't Believe R Kelly Can Fly" pulled from mp3.com because of issues over use of a famous guy's name in the title. I got the exact same notification. Form letter, see?
I wait with interest to see whether they find my song which has just a URL as the lyrics similarly "inappropriate". That's assuming they even notice it; which I wouldn't bet on. Anyone wants to mirror it, tho', be my guest...
J. P. Donleavy, author of The Ginger Man and The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B, advises that the effectiveness of a curt four-letter expletive may be compounded by juxtaposing it with a latinate term of several syllables, e.g.:
or
(the examples given, as far as I am able to recall, are Donleavy's own).It's called "Dee Ee Cee Ess Ess", and it's on this page:
http://www.mp3.com/wtrem
and it's free to be copied to any other location anyone feels like, and if I ever make more than half a buck on it I promise I'll send the check to the EFF. Way things are going, I might just send them a check anyhow.
To what extent is a theory that predicts that a Higgs Boson will appear under certain experimental conditions (like the CERN apparatus, plus lots and lots of energy) distinguishable from a recipe for creating Higgs Bosons? To what extent is a theory that states that Higgs Bosons must always be there, irrespective of whether one can see them or not, distinguishable from a recipe that states that every time one follows the recipe one will get a Higgs Boson?
Part of me hopes it's a stupid question; the other part of me wonders just how stupid, and will even welcome an answer that tells me what a complete dolt I am, provided it also tells me why.
This isn't just an honest question - it's a key question.
There are some issues that matter a great deal to a technically literate minority that possibly aren't as much of a big deal as that minority makes them out to be. Compile your own list here. The point is that everyone knows - even geeks know - that geeks' sense of proportion is skewed in some ways by the obsessive quality of their enthusiasms. Anyone who can get hot under the collar about which Unix-based text editor is best is living in a world that John Q. Public is probably better off not caring all that much about.
An unfortunate side-effect of this is that serious infringements of civil liberties can be passed off as inconsequential if the only people protesting against them are geeks: if the opponents of oppression are all certified eccentrics, then its easier to pass the oppression off as good old plain commonsense.
One way or another, people who are even less technically literate than I am need to be persuaded of the importance of this. We need to let people know precisely which liberties are at stake here, and what kind of a difference it would make if those liberties were lost. Talk about toasters or car engines if that makes it easier; just find a way of making this seem not inconsequential, not a minority concern, not a bunch of weird h4xx0rs crying wolf but your genuine civil-liberties-issue-type real deal.
Otherwise, expect more verdicts like the above...
How many video players could play both formats? And how much did it cost to buy one player? IIRC, the choice of VHS / Betamax was fairly exclusive for most consumers: you had one or the other, unless you liked spending money on players for two formats one of which was pretty much guaranteed to be obliterated from the market by the other within a short space of time.
How many formats can Winamp handle? How difficult is it to get Winamp to handle even more formats? How much does it cost to get hold of Winamp? Different story, isn't it?
Vorbis isn't going to have the problem that users of mp3 aren't going to be able to play Vorbis streams, so mindshare won't be determined on the basis of ruthless winner-takes-all competition.
mp3.com still has links you can click on to get mp3 players and encoders. When the site started, not everybody could play mp3 format files - but all it takes is one short download, or grabbing the software of a magazine coverdisk. The fact that most people now have mp3 players needn't discourage anybody setting up a new music site (or managing an old one) from moving over to Vorbis and placing links for Vorbis players and encoders. More music, better quality, lower bandwidth? Ta very much...
Gosh, a post on /. about something I actually know something about...and it contains a mistake I can correct, too! The previous poster appears to think that pomo/deconstruction/whatever's take on gender is just a rehashed "sex is 100% biology, and trivial; gender is 100% social construction and way interesting" Standard Social Sciences Model spiel...uh-uh...
Anyone who's at all curious about the state of the art over in th'dismal, unscientific, head-in-the-sand humanities could do worse than have a go at reading Judith Butler's Bodies that Matter, which really gives this topic a proper working-over.
Butler argues that the way we see and talk about gender determines (tho' not exhaustively) the way we approach the "materiality" of bodies and sexes and other supposedly non-languagey stuff, and tries to show how the confusion or subversion of gender norms makes our understanding of bodily, biological sex less "stable". We never think about sexed bodies without bringing along some of the habits of thought that come from our social experiences as gendered persons, and we never go along to social functions without bringing our sexed bodies with us, so it kind of makes sense that disorders and uncertainties get passed back and forth between the two.
As for the mutilated boy who couldn't / wouldn't be raised as a girl, I don't know that this is really a case of nature triumphant over culture - rather a tangled story of culture getting its knickers in a twist over nature. What's with this idea that you have to be one thing or another anyhow? If a boy can be a boy "really" without all his boy bits, then doesn't this suggest that boyhood depends on more than a full anatomical checklist after all? Moving the focus of what defines "real" boyhood from the genitals to the brain only displaces the problem: brains can get messed up, too. The search for an anatomical focus of masculinity might very well turn out to be like the search for the organ which contains the soul...
Indeed. And incidentally, wtf is an "mp3 worm"? Any idea how you'd code one of those? Is there something special about the mp3 format I don't know, or is this as meaningless as talking about a "gif worm"...or maybe a "txt worm"?
Better still: get them hooked on text-based adventure games, and get them a copy of the INFORM compiler used by Infocom.
Why? Because the code you write with it is object-orientated, compiled, and runs on a virtual machine (the "Z"-machine). This introduces some interesting ideas about compilation, emulation and so on - things which are fascinating, and also very tough from a beginner's viewpoint, so you can go on thinking about them for a long, long time...
Also because writing INFORM code means - usually - setting puzzles for other people to solve, which introduces a social element into the coding process from day 1: you have to think about how an "end-user" is going to interact with what you write, and you will be dealing with design issues at several different levels.
When they're not coding, they can be designing level maps, plotting adventures, finding ways to diagram puzzles and getting hopelessly lost in some of the most literate and witty adventure games ever written - games like CHRISTMINSTER and CURSES.
The programming language, the compiler, the "Z"-machine and the rudiments of game design are all generously documented, and it's all free!
Here's a URL for starters: The Inform 6 Homepage, maintained by Graham Nelson.
Good luck!
I'm impressed, though not at all surprised, by the quality of Lars' response, and I'm glad he gave his time to talk about these things.
It's clear that Metallica regard the Napster issue as one which concerns their integrity, and not only their sales revenue. That in itself makes a lot of the flak (I'm thinking of a certain cartoon in particular) the band has taken over this look spiteful and mean. Whatever else the Napster lawsuit may be about, it's not about Lars' personal greed.
Napster's corporate revenue is another matter. What the comparison I and others made with home taping left out of the equation was the extent to which the trading of files on Napster depends on a large and highly profitable third-party maintained infrastructure, for which there is no analogy I can think of in the world of home-taping. I criticised Metallica for intervening in the admittedly illegal activity of its teenage fanbase - the activity of swapping and listening to pirated music - which I argued was part of the culture out of which Metallica has gotten most of its lifelong devotees. I do not think that the band should be criticised, however, for holding the corporate maintainers of that infrastructure to account for the way they make their money out of, amongst other things, Metallica's music.
It's within Napster's power to make it a lot more difficult for Napster users to trade Metallica's music using their system. I don't think anyone would argue that it's possible for them to prevent it outright, but by doing nothing they not only implicitly sanction that use of their system but show themselves to be content to profit by it.
Home-taping wasn't killing music, and I doubt whether even the most unscrupulous use of Napster/Gnutella/Whatever-Comes-Along-Next will do so either, in the long run. It is more likely that they will continue to subtend, rather than subvert, the commercial culture that enables bands like Metallica to achieve the fame, stature and popularity that they now enjoy. Nevertheless, the responsibilities of corporate third-parties such as Napster should not be overlooked; and the novelty and popularity of the technology they employ should not be used as an excuse for disregarding those responsibilities.
Thanks again to Lars for showing that Metallica are willing to participate in the very necessary debates around these issues, and are not content - as so many others are - to settle for technical ignorance backed by bludgeoning legal firepower.