I'm sorry. This _is_ an analogy between the internet and a virus. She says "On the internet . . . " and then she says after some yada yada "It's been going on a long time in viruses." Forget all the stuff in between. When you compare one class of things to another class of things and extrapolate you are making an analogy. Your succeeding statements only prove that it's a shitty analogy. And that this stuff is a bunch of airheaded nonsense, which is what almost everyone is saying.
I find it interesting that people can refer to work as 'dirty.' What work would be dirty in a society where all resources were free? What would be so undesirable that you could not do it yourself?
If you could hear your mp3's played on an actual stereo system, without the constant whine of the computer in the background, you would be able to tell the difference. Unless, that is, your hearing is semi-damaged and you don't notice the missing frequencies (mostly in the bass range).
I'm not saying that you're deaf -- every human being alive loses about a semitone on the top and bottom of their hearing range for each year of life. So you might miss those 10 hZ fundamental bass tones if you were a four-year-old child -- but what four-year-old cares about sound quality that much?
Even without all that, you will still notice the distortion. Depending on the quality of the compression routine used, you get varying degrees of what sounds like a faint "flange" or phase-shifting effect. I can hear it on all compressed formats, even the highest-quality mp3. Use headphones and compare a CD to the mp3 if you still disagree.
This is where a true "meritocracy" starts. Right now we have a "squatterocracy" where you make money because you are controlling the means of production. When the means of production are almost free, as in the case of digital music, one no longer requires a record company to get music. And since the record companies don't actually make music, they aren't required anymore. All of those talentless people are now just squatters on territory that has, almost overnight, become worthless.
If this became true with the production of something like food, the revolution that would result might be nearly catastrophic to certain sectors of society. And I'm not talking about farmers. I'm talking about huge companies like Nabisco and Proctor & Gamble . . .
The resulting society, if it survived the explosion, would be based on the ability to contribute something useful, rather than the ability to keep someone else from getting it. "Open source" indeed
What qualification does a degree in Economics give you to spend someone else's money? What special knowledge do they have that allows them to correctly decide that, for example, $2 billion should go to an airplane that cannot be exposed to rain, or that $15,000 is a good price for a screwdriver? Are these the people you're talking about? Or am I mistaking them for someone else who perhaps has ever displayed a modicum of competence? Just a question.
So why was Ellen Degeneres taken off the air almost immediately after she publicly "came out?" Ordinary sex and violence aren't controversial. Having "cops" on your TV is a mindless distraction. Increased foul language is not controversial, it generates ratings. Four-year-olds know what those words are. They aren't shocking anymore. They haven't been for thirty years. Jerry Springer isn't controversial, he's a circus performer. Things are _regressing_, if you'll notice. Television becomes more simpleminded, lower towards the most common denominator. This is not more liberalized, more open-minded or broad-viewed. It's more _popularized_.
The best way for me to prove my point is have you read two books and watch two movies. The two books are Stephen King; one is a short story called "The Running Man." NOT the movie. The book is much better and more revealing. The other is called "The Long Walk." It's very much like "The Running Man." It's available as part of the Bachman Books, published under a pseudonym. When I read those I think about the gladiators in Rome. How far are we away from killing human beings for entertainment? I think less than 50 years.
The two movies are both by Ridley Scott, and if you're a nerd at all you've seen them. Alien and Blade Runner. Both show a future where individual concerns for privacy and freedom are nullified. Blade Runner in particular shows a very decadent culture of the future (now only 17 years away, and damn if it doesn't look familiar now) where again human life and privacy and freedom are all for sale.
I think decadent is by far the best word to describe our culture with. Our cultural pastimes are all about self-pleasure and thrill seeking. Internal gratification, serving of the self, and instant forgetfulness.
It would be shocking and controversial to NOT show the circus sideshow freaks of the media. We've come to expect that that's how the world is; black and white, completely good people vs. completely bad people. Showing a shade of gray would confuse the mindless viewers. That's why the internet is so upsetting. There are so many shades of gray.
98 is _slightly_ more stable, and if you want to build your own PC and install it yourself, and you want to have USB and large hard drives, (not to mention native OpenGL drivers), it's the only way to fly. Those features were available only under OSR2 of Windows 95, which unless you're an OEM or a really big company, you can't just get and install.
Win2k DOES have a safe mode. I have used it. I installed virus scanner and it blew up my cdudf driver. I booted into safe mode, removed the offending virus scanner, and went on my way. Not happy about the no virus scan, but then again I don't run outlook as my mail client . . .
There never has been any DOS running under any version of NT. There are TWO different kinds of windows. NT and 9x. NT does not have any 16-bit kernel, no direct access to hardware, no wide-open ports, nothing. It never has. From version 3.x on up it's been like that. I've installed and used everything from 3.51 on up and it's always been the same. Windows 9x, on the other hand, is essentially a 32-bit shell over the top of a 16-bit i/o scheme, but it runs in protected mode by default, yada yada yada. Even though I have not yet seen ME, I'm sure you can still shut down to DOS. It will just require a little hacking. All MS has likely done is remove the options from all visible menu items in order to make it appear that DOS is finally gone. You can probably still start up a command.com prompt . . .
On even the best mp3's I also hear a faint 'flanging' effect, no doubt an artifact of the compression. It additionally distorts and compresses the lower frequencies, clipping the bass from the original. All in all, they are nowhere near CD quality. You might not be able to tell if you listen to your CD originals side by side with your MP3's on PC speakers. Even on the highest-end PC speakers you're still fighting with the sound of the PC and monitor. The dull roar of the fans and the hum of the monitor are going to cover up a lot of defects that you would otherwise pick out instantly in a quieter environment.
The whole reason that Napster scares the shit out of record companies is precisely described in your post, yet you fail to even grasp the implications. "Actually, most of it goes to the record companies (which I'm sure you've heard thousands of times). The artist's royalties never change."
Let's examine who the problem is here: What do the record companies provide to the artists? 1. A medium of expression. What do the record companies provide to the buying public? 2. A cultural filter of what's "hot" and "happening."
What do they take in return? 1. Almost all of the artist's money, self-respect, and creative freedom. 2. Almost all of the variety out of the music-buying public's hands, replacing it with the lowest common denominator, sacrificing a cultural exchange and blocking the corridors of musical discourse with piles of shiny junk. Britney Spears does not qualify as art. The Backstreet Boys are not representatives of anything except an image-making machine. The rare artist who gets through this miasma with the ability to create at will has to be unusually lucky, smart, savvy, and endowed with the patience of a saint.
A tool such as Napster is a direct assault on this entire facade! What the record companies are NOT worried about is the relatively minor leakage of cash from so-called "piracy." What has probably got them shaking in their boots at night in RAVENING TERROR is the idea that an artist will become popular, well-known, and insanely rich by releasing selected songs as mp3's free for download on the internet.
The internet does not have distribution channels. There are no middlemen on the internet. There are no aisles for pop/country/hip-hop/alternative on the internet. There is no fucking Billboard 100 to consult. There are no sales representatives asking if you are finding everything fucking OK. In short, Napster breaks every artificial barrier the parisitical record companies have erected between the music-playing artists and their music-listening audience.
This is why I am boycotting Metallica and anyone else who gets behind this. Music is dying a slow, painful death at the hands of the record industry. The stuff I hear on the radio most of the time is just shit. It's not worth two seconds of anyone's time. It's elevator music, background filler, soundtrack for a meaningless culture. It MUST die.
I used to respect Metallica, despite the fact that I never actually cared for their music. They have a really repetitive style, and none of them are what I would call more than barely competent at playing.
I remember listening one day to one of their songs on the radio (forget which one, they all sound the same) and Lars was doing his 'off-beats' thing, where he drops what he believes are unusual and interesting accents in off-rhythms. But I had the bass turned down quite a bit and for some reason it took the veneer off Lars' playing. The guy sounded like he didn't know the song and was just fucking around. It in fact sounded like he'd forgotten where the downbeat was and was riffing while he tried to find it again. And honestly I can't imagine him playing a song the same way twice with that approach.
At any rate, though I never really cared for their music I respected their tenacity. They had gone through quite a bit and endured and were at least trying to make what I at the time believed was art.
But again, like in the car that one day, the veneer has come off. They don't really seem to be interested in their art as art's sake, and instead are spending their efforts attacking a movement that in the past would have embraced them and their attitudes.
It's ironic and amusing. And I really think -- they are now officially sell-outs, greedy, corporatized and have totally destroyed their underdog, outsider image. They can no longer convincingly rail about the dehumanization of society (or whatever, did they ever mean what their lyrics seemed to say?) becuase they are now that machine, servants of that machine, masters of that machine. Well, good riddance.
"English today and english 500 years ago aren't comparable in this context because they didn't diverge."
Go pick up a copy of Chaucer's Cantebury Tales in the original Middle English (c. 1400). Read the prologue out loud. Then come back and say that again. Or if you're feeling really ambitious, go then and read a copy of Beowulf in the original, circa 1,000 A.D. Same language?
It's called, bizzarely enough, NTFS. And yes it is a transaction-based journalling filesystem. But NT also runs on FAT. Which isn't a journalling filesystem. And if you continually abort chkvol (you do so by pressing any key within some 10 seconds or something), it will continually rerun until you let it finish. Oddly enough.
That's not the point. As with the DMCA, it's really not about copyright at all. It's the fact that you, the user, can go to a public place and make fun and laugh at someone's serious corporate image, mis-using the corporate image, and generally being obnoxious with it.
I managed to break free after finishing the first fucking several hundred page monotonous drone and realizing that for however long I'd been reading the piece of shit not one goddamn thing had happened!. His 'satire' wasn't funny or interesting at all.
My sympathies to you for wading through the whole thing.
The state provides education to give citizens the ability to vote. You cannot vote intelligently unless you can read the ballot. You cannot pretend that people who are illiterate can understand the implications of the laws that the government imposes on them. I hold the state RESPONSIBLE for the education of my children, because I can (theoretically) control them.
Ask this, if you think it's such a great idea: would you allow the same people who control your cable or phone service to control your child's education? If you found the quality of the education to be unsatisfactory, would you be able to hold them accountable WITHOUT a bunch of lawyers and money?
Apparently they cannot view anything as sarcastic or funny without little neticons or tags. See the above post and try to read it a little more carefully before you slam that -1 on it.
If we follow this line of reasoning too far, then system logs would be considered legal. A honeypot can be either a system to figure out what the hacker is doing, or a decoy to keep him away from your real stuff. In any case, it's more like having a video camera in your convenience store. The installer of the honeypot does not explicitly invite hackers into his system. He simply puts it up there to see what happens. He's entitled to that -- it's _his_ system, after all.
You might want to consider that there are two other things that deCSS bypasses, which to most people's mind constitute 'fair use.' One is region encoding. There is no legal agreement in any way shape or form that you sign that forces you to follow the region encoding scheme of the distributor. You as the purchaser of a DVD can take it wherever you like. You should be able to watch it whether you live in Taiwan or the US, or anywhere in between.
The other, and to my mind, far more insulting and irritating feature that's been added to DVD are the advertisements, which as I understand you cannot skip through due to the CSS encoding. Now as a consumer I believe I have a right when I buy a video recording in any form, and that is not only the right to WATCH it when and where I like, but to SKIP OVER the crap that I do not want to watch. The DVD manufacturers are ensuring that their advertising dollar gets in the door with this. However, I as the consumer do not care if their advertisments are successful. I as the consumer am not responsible for the success of their ad campaign. I as the consumer have paid for a PRODUCT not the MOTHER FUCKING COMMERCIALS that go with it, and I should be entitled to skip them.
For these reasons, I remain a DVD holdout. I will not buy them, Sam I Am.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry. This _is_ an analogy between the internet and a virus. She says "On the internet . . . " and then she says after some yada yada "It's been going on a long time in viruses." Forget all the stuff in between. When you compare one class of things to another class of things and extrapolate you are making an analogy. Your succeeding statements only prove that it's a shitty analogy. And that this stuff is a bunch of airheaded nonsense, which is what almost everyone is saying.
I find it interesting that people can refer to work as 'dirty.' What work would be dirty in a society where all resources were free? What would be so undesirable that you could not do it yourself?
If you could hear your mp3's played on an actual stereo system, without the constant whine of the computer in the background, you would be able to tell the difference. Unless, that is, your hearing is semi-damaged and you don't notice the missing frequencies (mostly in the bass range).
I'm not saying that you're deaf -- every human being alive loses about a semitone on the top and bottom of their hearing range for each year of life. So you might miss those 10 hZ fundamental bass tones if you were a four-year-old child -- but what four-year-old cares about sound quality that much?
Even without all that, you will still notice the distortion. Depending on the quality of the compression routine used, you get varying degrees of what sounds like a faint "flange" or phase-shifting effect. I can hear it on all compressed formats, even the highest-quality mp3. Use headphones and compare a CD to the mp3 if you still disagree.
Shit . . . you might have to do some of that yourself. Imagine that, washing your own windows!
This is where a true "meritocracy" starts. Right now we have a "squatterocracy" where you make money because you are controlling the means of production. When the means of production are almost free, as in the case of digital music, one no longer requires a record company to get music. And since the record companies don't actually make music, they aren't required anymore. All of those talentless people are now just squatters on territory that has, almost overnight, become worthless.
If this became true with the production of something like food, the revolution that would result might be nearly catastrophic to certain sectors of society. And I'm not talking about farmers. I'm talking about huge companies like Nabisco and Proctor & Gamble . . .
The resulting society, if it survived the explosion, would be based on the ability to contribute something useful, rather than the ability to keep someone else from getting it. "Open source" indeed
What qualification does a degree in Economics give you to spend someone else's money? What special knowledge do they have that allows them to correctly decide that, for example, $2 billion should go to an airplane that cannot be exposed to rain, or that $15,000 is a good price for a screwdriver? Are these the people you're talking about? Or am I mistaking them for someone else who perhaps has ever displayed a modicum of competence? Just a question.
So why was Ellen Degeneres taken off the air almost immediately after she publicly "came out?" Ordinary sex and violence aren't controversial. Having "cops" on your TV is a mindless distraction. Increased foul language is not controversial, it generates ratings. Four-year-olds know what those words are. They aren't shocking anymore. They haven't been for thirty years. Jerry Springer isn't controversial, he's a circus performer. Things are _regressing_, if you'll notice. Television becomes more simpleminded, lower towards the most common denominator. This is not more liberalized, more open-minded or broad-viewed. It's more _popularized_.
The best way for me to prove my point is have you read two books and watch two movies. The two books are Stephen King; one is a short story called "The Running Man." NOT the movie. The book is much better and more revealing. The other is called "The Long Walk." It's very much like "The Running Man." It's available as part of the Bachman Books, published under a pseudonym. When I read those I think about the gladiators in Rome. How far are we away from killing human beings for entertainment? I think less than 50 years.
The two movies are both by Ridley Scott, and if you're a nerd at all you've seen them. Alien and Blade Runner. Both show a future where individual concerns for privacy and freedom are nullified. Blade Runner in particular shows a very decadent culture of the future (now only 17 years away, and damn if it doesn't look familiar now) where again human life and privacy and freedom are all for sale.
I think decadent is by far the best word to describe our culture with. Our cultural pastimes are all about self-pleasure and thrill seeking. Internal gratification, serving of the self, and instant forgetfulness.
It would be shocking and controversial to NOT show the circus sideshow freaks of the media. We've come to expect that that's how the world is; black and white, completely good people vs. completely bad people. Showing a shade of gray would confuse the mindless viewers. That's why the internet is so upsetting. There are so many shades of gray.
98 is _slightly_ more stable, and if you want to build your own PC and install it yourself, and you want to have USB and large hard drives, (not to mention native OpenGL drivers), it's the only way to fly. Those features were available only under OSR2 of Windows 95, which unless you're an OEM or a really big company, you can't just get and install.
Win2k DOES have a safe mode. I have used it. I installed virus scanner and it blew up my cdudf driver. I booted into safe mode, removed the offending virus scanner, and went on my way. Not happy about the no virus scan, but then again I don't run outlook as my mail client . . .
There never has been any DOS running under any version of NT. There are TWO different kinds of windows. NT and 9x. NT does not have any 16-bit kernel, no direct access to hardware, no wide-open ports, nothing. It never has. From version 3.x on up it's been like that. I've installed and used everything from 3.51 on up and it's always been the same. Windows 9x, on the other hand, is essentially a 32-bit shell over the top of a 16-bit i/o scheme, but it runs in protected mode by default, yada yada yada. Even though I have not yet seen ME, I'm sure you can still shut down to DOS. It will just require a little hacking. All MS has likely done is remove the options from all visible menu items in order to make it appear that DOS is finally gone. You can probably still start up a command.com prompt . . .
No, that would be the UNsafety dance, since they were Men WITHOUT Hats.
On even the best mp3's I also hear a faint 'flanging' effect, no doubt an artifact of the compression. It additionally distorts and compresses the lower frequencies, clipping the bass from the original. All in all, they are nowhere near CD quality. You might not be able to tell if you listen to your CD originals side by side with your MP3's on PC speakers. Even on the highest-end PC speakers you're still fighting with the sound of the PC and monitor. The dull roar of the fans and the hum of the monitor are going to cover up a lot of defects that you would otherwise pick out instantly in a quieter environment.
The whole reason that Napster scares the shit out of record companies is precisely described in your post, yet you fail to even grasp the implications.
"Actually, most of it goes to the record companies (which I'm sure you've heard thousands of times). The artist's royalties never change."
Let's examine who the problem is here: What do the record companies provide to the artists?
1. A medium of expression.
What do the record companies provide to the buying public?
2. A cultural filter of what's "hot" and "happening."
What do they take in return?
1. Almost all of the artist's money, self-respect, and creative freedom.
2. Almost all of the variety out of the music-buying public's hands, replacing it with the lowest common denominator, sacrificing a cultural exchange and blocking the corridors of musical discourse with piles of shiny junk. Britney Spears does not qualify as art. The Backstreet Boys are not representatives of anything except an image-making machine. The rare artist who gets through this miasma with the ability to create at will has to be unusually lucky, smart, savvy, and endowed with the patience of a saint.
A tool such as Napster is a direct assault on this entire facade! What the record companies are NOT worried about is the relatively minor leakage of cash from so-called "piracy." What has probably got them shaking in their boots at night in RAVENING TERROR is the idea that an artist will become popular, well-known, and insanely rich by releasing selected songs as mp3's free for download on the internet.
The internet does not have distribution channels. There are no middlemen on the internet. There are no aisles for pop/country/hip-hop/alternative on the internet. There is no fucking Billboard 100 to consult. There are no sales representatives asking if you are finding everything fucking OK. In short, Napster breaks every artificial barrier the parisitical record companies have erected between the music-playing artists and their music-listening audience.
This is why I am boycotting Metallica and anyone else who gets behind this. Music is dying a slow, painful death at the hands of the record industry. The stuff I hear on the radio most of the time is just shit. It's not worth two seconds of anyone's time. It's elevator music, background filler, soundtrack for a meaningless culture. It MUST die.
I used to respect Metallica, despite the fact that I never actually cared for their music. They have a really repetitive style, and none of them are what I would call more than barely competent at playing.
I remember listening one day to one of their songs on the radio (forget which one, they all sound the same) and Lars was doing his 'off-beats' thing, where he drops what he believes are unusual and interesting accents in off-rhythms. But I had the bass turned down quite a bit and for some reason it took the veneer off Lars' playing. The guy sounded like he didn't know the song and was just fucking around. It in fact sounded like he'd forgotten where the downbeat was and was riffing while he tried to find it again. And honestly I can't imagine him playing a song the same way twice with that approach.
At any rate, though I never really cared for their music I respected their tenacity. They had gone through quite a bit and endured and were at least trying to make what I at the time believed was art.
But again, like in the car that one day, the veneer has come off. They don't really seem to be interested in their art as art's sake, and instead are spending their efforts attacking a movement that in the past would have embraced them and their attitudes.
It's ironic and amusing. And I really think -- they are now officially sell-outs, greedy, corporatized and have totally destroyed their underdog, outsider image. They can no longer convincingly rail about the dehumanization of society (or whatever, did they ever mean what their lyrics seemed to say?) becuase they are now that machine, servants of that machine, masters of that machine. Well, good riddance.
"English today and english 500 years ago aren't comparable in this context because they didn't diverge."
Go pick up a copy of Chaucer's Cantebury Tales in the original Middle English (c. 1400). Read the prologue out loud. Then come back and say that again. Or if you're feeling really ambitious, go then and read a copy of Beowulf in the original, circa 1,000 A.D. Same language?
It's called, bizzarely enough, NTFS. And yes it is a transaction-based journalling filesystem. But NT also runs on FAT. Which isn't a journalling filesystem. And if you continually abort chkvol (you do so by pressing any key within some 10 seconds or something), it will continually rerun until you let it finish. Oddly enough.
//whoops! I guess this thing ate some of my code
//forgot to put it extrans
//command-line hello world for windows
#include <iostream.h>
int main()
{
cout << "Hello World" << endl;
return 0;
}
//and here is the graphical hello world for windows
#include <windows.h>
int main()
{
MessageBox(NULL, "Hello world", "Hello",MB_OK);
return 0;
}
//A 'couple of lines'
//hello world written for a windows console:
#include
int main()
{
cout
int main()
{
MessageBox(NULL, "Hello world", "Hello", MB_OK);
return 0;
}
//It pays to know whereof you speak
That's not the point. As with the DMCA, it's really not about copyright at all. It's the fact that you, the user, can go to a public place and make fun and laugh at someone's serious corporate image, mis-using the corporate image, and generally being obnoxious with it.
What a bunch of assholes.
My sympathies to you for wading through the whole thing.
BUT WAIT! You're mildly depressed? That's a WARNING SIGN!! AHHH! EVERYONE RUN AWAY!!!
The state provides education to give citizens the ability to vote. You cannot vote intelligently unless you can read the ballot. You cannot pretend that people who are illiterate can understand the implications of the laws that the government imposes on them. I hold the state RESPONSIBLE for the education of my children, because I can (theoretically) control them.
Ask this, if you think it's such a great idea: would you allow the same people who control your cable or phone service to control your child's education? If you found the quality of the education to be unsatisfactory, would you be able to hold them accountable WITHOUT a bunch of lawyers and money?
Apparently they cannot view anything as sarcastic or funny without little neticons or tags. See the above post and try to read it a little more carefully before you slam that -1 on it.
If we follow this line of reasoning too far, then system logs would be considered legal. A honeypot can be either a system to figure out what the hacker is doing, or a decoy to keep him away from your real stuff. In any case, it's more like having a video camera in your convenience store. The installer of the honeypot does not explicitly invite hackers into his system. He simply puts it up there to see what happens. He's entitled to that -- it's _his_ system, after all.
You might want to consider that there are two other things that deCSS bypasses, which to most people's mind constitute 'fair use.' One is region encoding. There is no legal agreement in any way shape or form that you sign that forces you to follow the region encoding scheme of the distributor. You as the purchaser of a DVD can take it wherever you like. You should be able to watch it whether you live in Taiwan or the US, or anywhere in between.
The other, and to my mind, far more insulting and irritating feature that's been added to DVD are the advertisements, which as I understand you cannot skip through due to the CSS encoding. Now as a consumer I believe I have a right when I buy a video recording in any form, and that is not only the right to WATCH it when and where I like, but to SKIP OVER the crap that I do not want to watch. The DVD manufacturers are ensuring that their advertising dollar gets in the door with this. However, I as the consumer do not care if their advertisments are successful. I as the consumer am not responsible for the success of their ad campaign. I as the consumer have paid for a PRODUCT not the MOTHER FUCKING COMMERCIALS that go with it, and I should be entitled to skip them.
For these reasons, I remain a DVD holdout. I will not buy them, Sam I Am.