I have the same rig. It uses a 2.4Ghz (or something like that) digital transmitter. I had to boost my card output with a small amp to get the s/n ratio that I wanted when sending the signal across several rooms, but I am very happy with the result.
Now for the fun part. This gadget is actually the same send/receive unit they sell for their "DVDAnywhere" video use. My plan now is the following:
Install RCA video out card into the PC
Send sound to the stero, video to the PC
Set up a wireless mouse like they use for presentations (I may need to us an IR/RF adapter since I won't have line-of-site).
Once that is all set up, I can leave the PC in the basement, use any MP3 program I want to select albums & songs, and play them on my living room entertainment center, all without moving my lazy butt off the couch. When I'm done, I can use the x10 remote's power controls to shut everything off downstairs (except the PC itself).
This is worth doing just for the "Gee-wiz" factor alone.:)
As long as we are relying on such a simplistic view (by dismissing the vast unharnest potential of developing agricultural tech), the solution to more people is easy: Kill the other animals that compete with us for resources.
We would kill the cute ones last, of course.
Seriously, though, we already produce far more food than we are able to eat. Malthus based his predictions on the notion that populations would explode exponentially while the resources we developed would grow in a linear fashion. In developed nations, the trend has actually been the opposite, and in the really well-developed nations (like the US), populations would actually be in sharp decline were it not for immigration.
Interesting glimpse at the man behind GNU (which we all love so well), but a little spooky.
For the Free Software Movement, proprietary software is the problem, and free software is the solution. Free software is often very powerful and reliable, and I'm glad that adds to its appeal; but I would choose a bare-bones unreliable free program rather than a featureful and reliable proprietary program that doesn't respect my freedom.
Here is the point where he begins to depart from normal human beings. Setting aside from the hyperbole of closed-sourced products "not respecting his freedom"... I, like most people, am willing to pay for a product that works well enough to justify the cost within my budget. This does not mean that I am a blind fool being exploited by a company that is disrespecting my freedom. It just means that I am not a Cheap Bastard.
I like Free Beer as much as the next guy, and if RMS wants to buy the rounds I'm drinking... but he seems to think that we will all help him overthrow the Csar and build a worker's paradise behind his leadership. Unfortunately for the Revolution, there is no Csar this time. Gates, Jobs, and Ellison are all very rich, but we are completely free to ignore them (and many of us do). Capitalism is not a monarchy, no matter how much you enjoy hating it.
Hey, spewing absolute dogma like this is fun. Maybe I could be a stubborn techno-political pundint like RMS!
I went to Mankato State, where they had a designated EE-major floor (that's right, and entire floor of just geeks in a rurla midwest school).
As a prank, they stole just the hot water handles from the shower on a neighboring women-only floor. A childish prank, but here's the fun part... The handles used hex bolts, which were pretty non-standard back then, to discourage theft. This was not a problem for a bunch of electronics geeks, but it was a safe bet that none of the El-Ed majors on the other floor had never seen an Allen wrench. They left the handles in a box in the corner of the shower room in plain sight, but since none of them had the required tools, they were unable to do anything about it. Cold showers for everybody that morning.
Pretty damned funny, although it did nothing to improve their pathetic hopes of ever getting laid that year.
Re:Corn coping strategies
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Yes, there are beautiful places to stop and look around in Iowa. Iowa City and Des Moines are friendly towns with more nightlife than you would expect in the farm belt. I love the small towns, too.
My point was (just as a nasty aside comment), that Iowa is mind-numbingly dull to drive though. Rows and rows of corn make you feel like you are driving through a tunnel with no roof. It is almost as bad as the wheat fields of Kansas.
There. Now we both posted way off-topic. Happy now?:)
I should also mention that we should not really be too mad at either Metallica or their lawyer, even though the suit looks like BS to us. The problem here is one of copyright law.
If I were to make and sell 100 copies of "...And Justice For All", and then Metallical found out about it and did not sue, then they would lose some control of their rights. A year later, another company might make and sell 10,000 copies of the same album (unlikely, I know, but roll with me...), and defend themselves in court by saying that Metallica did not sue me, so they are being unfairly selective in their enforcement.
In a way, they might be doing us all a favor, by creating a "test case" for MP3 distribution. If Metallica's suit is challenged and they lose , it would establish that copyright protection does not apply to free trading of MP3 duplications. That means that artists would be able to defend their IP against large-scale piracy without worrying about suing every kid with a web server announcing "I got kewl Metallica MP3's on my home page. Metallica Rulz! Woo-hoo!"
Okay, first of all, let me acknowldge the strikes against Napster. Metallica's music is not Free Beer. Lots of money was spent producing their music, and even more was spent promoting it. If I burn 10 CD copies of Ride The Lightning and sell them to my friends, I have committed copyright infringement to the tune of about $130. Even if I just give them away, the argument can be made that I took 10 _potential_ customers away from Metallica's record label. If my friends become new Metallica fans and buy Master Of Puppets and the self-titled album, it doesn't change the fact that what I did was the Wrong Thing.
That said, there is another side of this that Metallica has failed to consider.
Back in the 50's, a few clever record promoters discovered that radio was good for them. A song that got played on the radio sold better than one that didn't. The result of this discovery was something called "Pay-ola"(sp?). Label reps would drive around giving bundles of cash to DJ's who played the music they were promoting. Laws were passed against this, but the tickets that your local radio station gives out in their contests is the grandchild of this practice (those tickets were given to the station by the promoter, not bought).
Music radio is a delivery system that lets people hear low-fi versions (via good, but not perfect, FM broadcast) of comercial music which they did not pay for.
Napster is a delivery system that lets people hear low-fi versions (via good, but not perfect, digital compression) of comercial music which they did not pay for.
With either format, listeners can make a permanent copy of the music, although that copy will not be quite as good as the album itself. Curiously, while the labels once tried to PAY the radio stations to let people hear their music for free, they have chosen to SUE Napster for doing the same thing.
It seems to me to be very important that we redraft copyright law so that it distinguishs between somebody giving away MP3's on Napster, and Taiwanese CD Counterfieters. Until we do, this kind of paradox will continue to be commonplace.
What made him "high profile" was not his crimes. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of crackers like him that you never heard of. Lots of nameless, faceless people are in jail or recently released for criminal use of phones and computers. His kind of capers were fairly commonplace in the 70's and 80's. For example, Jobs and Woz were selling blue boxes to local students before they invented the Apple II and became rich and famous.
What made Mitnick such an infamous celebrity was John Markoff of the New York Times. Markoff has made a lot of money by selling the drama of "Kevin Mitnick the Uberhacker", and so most of the nation see him as some kind of evil genious, while most teenaged hackers and crackers have the mistaken impression that he is some kind of guru.
The truth is that some people (like Congress) wanted to hear him speak because he is well known for breaking into a wide variety of systems, and former hackers usually make very effective security consultants. Others want to see him speak because he has become a poster child for human rights abuse my the Federal criminal justice system. Personally, I am interested in what he has to say for both reasons.
We all gotta deal with this in our own way
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My father publishes a small newsletter using his Windows PC, but is not a "geek" like I am, and he relies on me for tech support. Recently, he was installing Office97 (because the Corel suite he likes lacked a feature he wanted). He clicked through all the usual defaults, and was stunned to discover that his computer started dialing his modem to register the software.
Next time I see him, I intend to discuss UCITA laws (and the anti-consumer behavior of the software giants) and nudge him towards LINUX and open source tools. Not because of the Free Beer (he can afford to buy software), and not because of the stability (he doesn't push his system very hard, and rarely crashes), but because software that makes _all_ source code available to the customer is subjected to peer review and scrutiny. If Red Hat or Debian were to put a "back door" in one of their distros, it would probably be found and posted to places like/. in short order. M$, Apple, and other closed-source companies don't have that kind of accountability (although props to Apple for putting part of OS X out there... not all of what I want to see but a good first step).
I also live near Iowa, and plan on using this news to pressure my legislators (and a certain former pro wrestler in the governor's mansion) to model a similar bomb-shelter law after Iowa's.
So... thank you, Iowa. I might hate driving through your state (nothing to see but corn for miles), but you obviously have some leaders with a Clue.
Looking at the facts of the case, Mitnick basically committed "crimes of trespass" by breaking into systems where he did not belong. He may or may not have stolen some money (never established), and he probably stole a lot of cell phone and long distance time (not convicted, but probably would have been if not for his plea bargain). The "millions" of damage to companies is obviously false, or those companies would have had to report their losses to their shareholders. Oh yea, he also childishly tampered with a now-famous system administrator's system, and made some politically incorrect phone calles taunting him.
For this relatively minor crime, he served 5 years of hard time in a federal prison full of rapists and murderers, almost all of which was served prior to sentencing. His parole forbids him from using any form of computer or including cell phone, which is almost impossible in modern society. Now his right to free speech is being scaled back as an additional condition of his parole.
This news, on top of the Elian raid, the bombing of Sudanese and Afghani Asprin factories, the Waco debacle, and Ruby Ridge leaves me asking myself: Weren't we always told that it was the Republicans that ran fascist Presidential administrations?
When the BATF stormtroopers were using war tactics (sleep deprivation via loud music, etc.) against the religious nuts in Waco, the Davidians hung a bedsheet banner out their window for the press that said "Rodney King: Now we understand." The Mitnick case seems to draw certain parallels. Through the unfair treatment this "infamous" scipt kiddie, the hacker community is getting a good lesson about what it is like to be a black man in America. When powers of enforcement see you as fitting a dangerous profile, you can expect to be treated unfairly.
The loss of rights like "fair use" already had me angry, but this is the last straw for me. This week, I intend to get off the fence finally join the EFF... and while I'm at it, the ACLU, Amnesty International, and maybe even the Libertarian Party. I'm also going to write snail mail to each of my Senators, Rod Grams(R) and Paul Welstone(D) of Minnesota, expressing my concern about the need to curtail Federal power. For my next vacation, I will visit D.C. to persoanlly lobby whatever Reps are willing to talk to me. In the upcoming elections, I will loudly support any legitimate candidate (regardless of party) who shares the concerns of geeks, and fights for our rights. I will also be a noisy pest to those who back the DMCA or the various enforcement excesses of recent years. I hope that many of you will do likewise.
Audio options are a rip-off on all cars. You can ALWAYS do better installing after-market toys. I'm sure the internet options will also be marked way up. Unless Ford plans on making this a "standard option" (read: you can't buy the car without buying it) on the Taurus and Escort (unlikely), the smart consumer will get the "base" model and install the toys they want later.
Add to this the fact that the life-span of a car is at least 15 years, which means that over 90% of the cars on the road are not brand new, and therefore do not have the latest-and-greatest pre-installed toys, and it is obvious to even the most dimwitted of people (who hold a PhD in theoretical physics) that the market for something like this is huge!
Sheesh! I thought most geeks, like me, drove old rust-buckets with kick-butt electronics anyway (until we make our first million). I have a pickup truck with a driver door that barely closes (from a hit-and-run last year), but I refuse spend money on iron that could be spent on silicon.
Also of note, the car makers don't make these toys themselves very often... one could make a gadget like this and sell it to Toyota, GM, etc. and become the next Delco or Alpine. Suddenly, this idea no longer seems like such a Bad Thing, does it?
I just noticed that I made way too many parenthetical remarks in this reply. I hope it is fairly clear anyway (not that I'm all that worried).
I was pondering a similar idea myself, as it appears many others here have been. I'm glad to see somebody is actually doing it, because I will definately want to buy one at the "early adopter" price as soon as they are ready!
One thought I had that would also add value to this thing is removable storage. Design it to use a standard, re-writable PC format (like 2-Gig Jaz, or CDRW if you want to go cheap) and the capacity for this thing skyrockets. I could take my entire 300 CD music collection on the road with me, keeping it in my glove box.
MP3-based removable disks would be like cassette tapes on stroids, holding about 40 albums each! I could listen to the same disks on a "living room" player, a Walkman-style headset, or on my computer, without the need to copy and re-copy my CD's to several different storage formats. "Compress once, play anywhere." Could be your marketing slogan. How cool would THAT be?
(Do you hear that? It's the sound of Sony's Mini-disc division shaking in their boots.)
Seems to me that the best way arround this is Security Through Obfuscation. I would rather not have an ISP telling Lord-knows-who how often I visit 2600 or stickdeath.com or whatever. The best way to frustrate them is to fill them with false information. Set up a script that uses my web browser to visit every bizzare porno site, every mp3 site, every religious site, every nazi site, every animal rights site, etc. Perhaps have it use the decripted blacklist from cphack and go right down the list. Perhaps at the rate of about one web page every 60 seconds.
If all of us were to run something like this as a background task and/or while we sleep (think of it as a practical alternative to SETI-at-home), all ISP log demographics would quickly become useless.
I wonder if anybody has already hacked together a script like this... perhaps to take advantage of those "we pay you to browse" ad-based services. If not, it might be a fun project for me to set up.
Let's be honest here. Even the worst UI choices available *cough*Windows*cough* are pretty damned good. Learning to use a computer effectively takes less time than it takes to learn how to drive a car safely, and driving is a much simpler task (Speed up, slow down, back up, change gears, turn, don't hit anything) than setting up a new ISP connection and exchanging e-mail.
If you really want to improve the user interface, let's talk about improving the actual physical interface between man and machine. The QWERTY keyboard is clumsy, hard to learn, and has injured more than a few of my friends, but so far nobody has managed to get a good replacement thought-to-text vehicle to catch on. Voice-only is not the answer, because we don't talk nearly as fast as we think. Personally, I am hoping that biofeedback labs find a way for us to train ourselves to type with our minds.
It is not as far-fetched as you may think. When we are new-born infants, we learn how to wiggle our feet by watching our hands as our brain tries various electrical impulses. When we stumble on the right "command" for "bend left knee" a few times, our brain remembers it and we can do it without conscious thought. Stroke victims often need to go through the same training over again to route around damaged nerves pathways.
With a good monitoring device (perhaps not an implant... a simple tape-on job over the back of the neck might do the trick), connected to a text screen that offers meaningful feedback, it seems like it should just be a matter of time and effort for the average person to control a text editor as they would an appendage of their own body.
IANACE (I am not a cybernetics engineer), but I find it easy to belive that something like this could happen in our lifetimes. I suspect that it is more likely to come from an overzealous hacker in a garage with $5k startup from selling his/her car than from the Silicon Valley research labs... but that might just be the romantic idealist in me talking. Any thoughts, gang?
I usually read Katz's stuff here, and sometimes even like it, but this time I simply could not get past the first 3 paragraphs. Is it just me, or is there another story every couple months (usually in the pages of Wired... or posts from Slashdot's own ex-pundit-from-Wired) about how the Internet is a radically new paradigm that will Change Everything?
Just once, I would like to see somebody hash out a column that says something like this:
"The Internet has reached its high water mark. What was once thought to be the means to a harmonious world-wide community of people holding virtual hands across the sea turned out to be nothing more than a new marketing scheme to sell crap through the mail. Far from empowering individuals and realizing the dreams of Ayn Rand readers, the benefits of this new technology have favored large corporations, centralized governments, and pro-wrestling fans, while the dreamers and the inventors of the world continue to be ignored and abused. In a few short months people will drop their AOL accounts, dot-coms will close up shop, and HTML authors will be relegated to the status of ham radio operators while the rest of us wait for the Next Big Thing. What finally killed the Internet is that it is a means of advancing communication, and most people have nothing interesting to say."
Hyperbole? Yes... but no more than Jon's post, and at least this would be new hyperbole.
I love the Mac, but I think Apple is going a little nuts this time. It's not the first time, either.
Does anybody else remember the Franklin? It was an Apple II clone that was sued into oblivion back in the 80's. I think the victory over the early knock-offs gave Apple an unwise confidence in their lawyers. When they sued Microsoft over Windows, all they did was give Windows more street cred than it deserved. ("It's so much like the Macintosh that Apple is suing them!")
I think they have a legitimate beef with the various eMachine sellers over "trade dress". These companies are obviously slapping together shoddy knock-offs of the iMac (running DOS 98) in order to fool the grandmothers that see the iMac in those "She-Comes-In-Colors-Everywhere" Gap-style TV ads.
This argument does not apply at all in the case of these spunky new AMD boxes, which no reasonable person could possible mistake for an iMac. They will sell (or not) based on their own merits, and Apple simply has no leg to stand on this time.
After a couple months of giving it a fair chance, trying several different hand positions, I have concluded that I absolutely hate the funky little "hockey puck" mouse. At the same time, I am glad that it is the one that Apple included with my G3. Why? Because a mouse is really a matter of taste (no one design will please everybody). Given that you can't sell computers these days without including a mouse and keyboard, I would much rather have them include a $15 mouse that I hate than an $80 mouse that I still don't like. Either way, I end up buying the nifty Microsoft optical mouse, so if Apple is going to cut corners anywhere for the sake of price, the mouse is a good place to start. (Yes, M$ is my favorite mouse-maker... although I might feel differently if I was left-handed.)
In spite of my earlier comments ribbing Katz for putting his name of a book of stuff he didn't really write, I agree that behind the facade of alarmist headlines of teen violence there are more important stories being ignored.
When one looks at the shootings that have saturated the air over the last year or so, there is a common thread. In all of these cases, various political groups, promoting various agendas, have blamed Bill Clinton, the NRA, video games, violent movies, "goth" kids, the Internet, public education, Republicans that cut public education funding, bad parents, apathetic parents, student social cliques, or whatever promotes their agenda best. In nearly every case, the killers were mentally unstable children who often needed to rely on powerful medication to even function in society.
While Katz's "Hellmouth" stories occationally fell into the trap of scapegoating the bullies and cheerleaders of America, I really hope his insights are read by thoughtful people, even those of us who disagree with his conclusions. I completely reject the notion that these killer kids are misfits lashing out at a cruel system, but the conversation that Katz has started has called attention to how dreadful the lives of teens in America has become.
The baby boomers, for all their nostalgia of rejecting the "older generation", must at least recognize that they were raised by adults that doted on them. In the early 60's, all of American cutlure was shaped around teenaged whims. Mass media followed them through college and onward. For decades, the childred on the Baby Boom have been the center of society.
As a Gen X'er, I was lucky enough to coast in the wake of the boom. We were never the center of attention and people did not take us very seriously (Boomers stopped saying "Don't trust anybody over 30" at the exact moment you would expect), but society was not really hostile to us, for the most part we were ignored. The term "latch-key kids" became common in those days for a reason. For us geeks, escape from teen angst was very easy. We could hack code in our basement all night and nobody bothered us.
However, I must admit that I fear for the so-called "Generation Y". The reason why so many of us find shows like South Park to be so disturbinly funny is that the nasty humor often veils an even nastier truth that we are a little uncomfortable admitting. Kids today are unwelcome guests in a world that revolves around the desires of graying, self-centered adults. The "Hellmouth" stories call attention to this trend in a way that few other publications have. There are plenty of reason to pick on Katz, but this book merits at least that much credit.
Just to remove all doubt, I hereby give Slashdot, Mr. Katz, Andover, and anybody else the right to use this post any way they see fit.
Better yet, only charge for the cost of printing the paper, give the rest to a popular charity. You may not get directly rich, but think of the prestige!
You could say that you are the editor of a geek-centric publication. Then, as your popularity grows, maybe those bastards at Wired News will finally regret that they fired you.
(For best results, coin a hip new buzz-word or two, like "corporatism", and then steal a motif from a popular show like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That should make it a lead-pipe cinch!)
A lot of people have griped that their precious words might have been reprinted in this book without permission, and Hemos has adroitly pointed out, correctly, that since/. is a "public forum", all comments are fair game to be quoted in other publications. Now consider this: If you would like to publish a book called "Pointless Flames: The Red Hat vs. Debian Debate", or "The Phantom Menace Should Be On DVD", or even "Hot Grits!", all you need to do is cut-and-paste your favorite comments from this site, and reprint it with a few of your own comments. Presto! Free (as in beer) content for your next best-seller! I doubt Andover would object, but if they did, Hemos just provided your legal defense for you. Neat, huh? (This is my first contribution to/., so I have no.sig file yet... I will have to think about it for a while.)
Media are not species, and thus are not bound by the laws governing organisms!
That's a very good point. Media probably are, on the other hand, bound by the laws governing complex chaotic systems. An article along those lines would have been more interesting, but chaos theory is harder to understand than Darwinism, and every software engineer knows that the ideal tool for the job is the one that you personally know best, right?:)
Our own interest level (or apathy) regulates what is read on-line. 90% of self-endulgent nonsense on the web is ignored by almost everybody. The author may as well have printed their thoughts on paper and thrown them into a waste bin, never to be seen. Thus, while there is lots of information available on-line, most of it is not actually consumed... All arts fail to exist without an audience, so there is your natural selection.
The only way content which should be weeded out remains is if the writer has been established as a popular content provider. For example, a unique look at school environments following the Columbine shooting could give a writer enough street cred to collect a check for months and months of useless drivel about the nature of "Open Media". However, if that writer does not produce anything worth reading or discussing long enough, people will eventually drift away.
If a writer pontificates on the web and it gets no no hits, is he really being published?
"Science makes much of its rules and legendary peer review procedures, but personal vanity, contemporary politics, greed, stupidity, personal vanity and incompetence all pop up in these shocking episodes."
Looking at the old posts is an interesting reminder of something. Katz used to interact with the crowd on/. a lot more.
These days, he just barks back at the first few flamers with a "you obviously didn't take the time to read my article" comment... if he posts at all. He no longer seems to give any acknowledgement of reading the reactions to his stories, and might as well be writing his stuff in print magazines, given how far from "Open" or "Interactive" or "New Media" he is these days. In fact, he probably secretly would prefer being a mainstream journalist, if only somebody would hire him.
Perhaps the trolls are right. Perhaps the real Jon Katz died a long time ago, and was replaced with a "jonkatz.pl" script.
Based entirely on the momentum of the main song on each album (and the videos which allow Ms. Spears to be seen in a few more outfits for marketing purposes.)
Her two mega-hits drove the sale of all other material, which was clearly held up to a lower standard when the songs were produced.
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Now for the fun part. This gadget is actually the same send/receive unit they sell for their "DVDAnywhere" video use. My plan now is the following:
Install RCA video out card into the PC
Send sound to the stero, video to the PC
Set up a wireless mouse like they use for presentations (I may need to us an IR/RF adapter since I won't have line-of-site).
Once that is all set up, I can leave the PC in the basement, use any MP3 program I want to select albums & songs, and play them on my living room entertainment center, all without moving my lazy butt off the couch. When I'm done, I can use the x10 remote's power controls to shut everything off downstairs (except the PC itself).
This is worth doing just for the "Gee-wiz" factor alone. :)
We would kill the cute ones last, of course.
Seriously, though, we already produce far more food than we are able to eat. Malthus based his predictions on the notion that populations would explode exponentially while the resources we developed would grow in a linear fashion. In developed nations, the trend has actually been the opposite, and in the really well-developed nations (like the US), populations would actually be in sharp decline were it not for immigration.
For the Free Software Movement, proprietary software is the problem, and free software is the solution. Free software is often very powerful and reliable, and I'm glad that adds to its appeal; but I would choose a bare-bones unreliable free program rather than a featureful and reliable proprietary program that doesn't respect my freedom.
Here is the point where he begins to depart from normal human beings. Setting aside from the hyperbole of closed-sourced products "not respecting his freedom"... I, like most people, am willing to pay for a product that works well enough to justify the cost within my budget. This does not mean that I am a blind fool being exploited by a company that is disrespecting my freedom. It just means that I am not a Cheap Bastard.
I like Free Beer as much as the next guy, and if RMS wants to buy the rounds I'm drinking... but he seems to think that we will all help him overthrow the Csar and build a worker's paradise behind his leadership. Unfortunately for the Revolution, there is no Csar this time. Gates, Jobs, and Ellison are all very rich, but we are completely free to ignore them (and many of us do). Capitalism is not a monarchy, no matter how much you enjoy hating it.
Hey, spewing absolute dogma like this is fun. Maybe I could be a stubborn techno-political pundint like RMS!
As a prank, they stole just the hot water handles from the shower on a neighboring women-only floor. A childish prank, but here's the fun part... The handles used hex bolts, which were pretty non-standard back then, to discourage theft. This was not a problem for a bunch of electronics geeks, but it was a safe bet that none of the El-Ed majors on the other floor had never seen an Allen wrench. They left the handles in a box in the corner of the shower room in plain sight, but since none of them had the required tools, they were unable to do anything about it. Cold showers for everybody that morning.
Pretty damned funny, although it did nothing to improve their pathetic hopes of ever getting laid that year.
My point was (just as a nasty aside comment), that Iowa is mind-numbingly dull to drive though. Rows and rows of corn make you feel like you are driving through a tunnel with no roof. It is almost as bad as the wheat fields of Kansas.
There. Now we both posted way off-topic. Happy now? :)
If I were to make and sell 100 copies of "...And Justice For All", and then Metallical found out about it and did not sue, then they would lose some control of their rights. A year later, another company might make and sell 10,000 copies of the same album (unlikely, I know, but roll with me...), and defend themselves in court by saying that Metallica did not sue me, so they are being unfairly selective in their enforcement.
In a way, they might be doing us all a favor, by creating a "test case" for MP3 distribution. If Metallica's suit is challenged and they lose , it would establish that copyright protection does not apply to free trading of MP3 duplications. That means that artists would be able to defend their IP against large-scale piracy without worrying about suing every kid with a web server announcing "I got kewl Metallica MP3's on my home page. Metallica Rulz! Woo-hoo!"
That said, there is another side of this that Metallica has failed to consider.
Back in the 50's, a few clever record promoters discovered that radio was good for them. A song that got played on the radio sold better than one that didn't. The result of this discovery was something called "Pay-ola"(sp?). Label reps would drive around giving bundles of cash to DJ's who played the music they were promoting. Laws were passed against this, but the tickets that your local radio station gives out in their contests is the grandchild of this practice (those tickets were given to the station by the promoter, not bought).
Music radio is a delivery system that lets people hear low-fi versions (via good, but not perfect, FM broadcast) of comercial music which they did not pay for.
Napster is a delivery system that lets people hear low-fi versions (via good, but not perfect, digital compression) of comercial music which they did not pay for.
With either format, listeners can make a permanent copy of the music, although that copy will not be quite as good as the album itself. Curiously, while the labels once tried to PAY the radio stations to let people hear their music for free, they have chosen to SUE Napster for doing the same thing.
It seems to me to be very important that we redraft copyright law so that it distinguishs between somebody giving away MP3's on Napster, and Taiwanese CD Counterfieters. Until we do, this kind of paradox will continue to be commonplace.
What made Mitnick such an infamous celebrity was John Markoff of the New York Times. Markoff has made a lot of money by selling the drama of "Kevin Mitnick the Uberhacker", and so most of the nation see him as some kind of evil genious, while most teenaged hackers and crackers have the mistaken impression that he is some kind of guru.
The truth is that some people (like Congress) wanted to hear him speak because he is well known for breaking into a wide variety of systems, and former hackers usually make very effective security consultants. Others want to see him speak because he has become a poster child for human rights abuse my the Federal criminal justice system. Personally, I am interested in what he has to say for both reasons.
Next time I see him, I intend to discuss UCITA laws (and the anti-consumer behavior of the software giants) and nudge him towards LINUX and open source tools. Not because of the Free Beer (he can afford to buy software), and not because of the stability (he doesn't push his system very hard, and rarely crashes), but because software that makes _all_ source code available to the customer is subjected to peer review and scrutiny. If Red Hat or Debian were to put a "back door" in one of their distros, it would probably be found and posted to places like /. in short order. M$, Apple, and other closed-source companies don't have that kind of accountability (although props to Apple for putting part of OS X out there... not all of what I want to see but a good first step).
I also live near Iowa, and plan on using this news to pressure my legislators (and a certain former pro wrestler in the governor's mansion) to model a similar bomb-shelter law after Iowa's.
So... thank you, Iowa. I might hate driving through your state (nothing to see but corn for miles), but you obviously have some leaders with a Clue.
For this relatively minor crime, he served 5 years of hard time in a federal prison full of rapists and murderers, almost all of which was served prior to sentencing. His parole forbids him from using any form of computer or including cell phone, which is almost impossible in modern society. Now his right to free speech is being scaled back as an additional condition of his parole.
This news, on top of the Elian raid, the bombing of Sudanese and Afghani Asprin factories, the Waco debacle, and Ruby Ridge leaves me asking myself: Weren't we always told that it was the Republicans that ran fascist Presidential administrations?
When the BATF stormtroopers were using war tactics (sleep deprivation via loud music, etc.) against the religious nuts in Waco, the Davidians hung a bedsheet banner out their window for the press that said "Rodney King: Now we understand." The Mitnick case seems to draw certain parallels. Through the unfair treatment this "infamous" scipt kiddie, the hacker community is getting a good lesson about what it is like to be a black man in America. When powers of enforcement see you as fitting a dangerous profile, you can expect to be treated unfairly.
The loss of rights like "fair use" already had me angry, but this is the last straw for me. This week, I intend to get off the fence finally join the EFF... and while I'm at it, the ACLU, Amnesty International, and maybe even the Libertarian Party. I'm also going to write snail mail to each of my Senators, Rod Grams(R) and Paul Welstone(D) of Minnesota, expressing my concern about the need to curtail Federal power. For my next vacation, I will visit D.C. to persoanlly lobby whatever Reps are willing to talk to me. In the upcoming elections, I will loudly support any legitimate candidate (regardless of party) who shares the concerns of geeks, and fights for our rights. I will also be a noisy pest to those who back the DMCA or the various enforcement excesses of recent years. I hope that many of you will do likewise.
I usually hate puns... but that was pretty darn funny. I wish I was moderating so the people reading at +1 could see your post, AC.
Audio options are a rip-off on all cars. You can ALWAYS do better installing after-market toys. I'm sure the internet options will also be marked way up. Unless Ford plans on making this a "standard option" (read: you can't buy the car without buying it) on the Taurus and Escort (unlikely), the smart consumer will get the "base" model and install the toys they want later.
Add to this the fact that the life-span of a car is at least 15 years, which means that over 90% of the cars on the road are not brand new, and therefore do not have the latest-and-greatest pre-installed toys, and it is obvious to even the most dimwitted of people (who hold a PhD in theoretical physics) that the market for something like this is huge!
Sheesh! I thought most geeks, like me, drove old rust-buckets with kick-butt electronics anyway (until we make our first million). I have a pickup truck with a driver door that barely closes (from a hit-and-run last year), but I refuse spend money on iron that could be spent on silicon.
Also of note, the car makers don't make these toys themselves very often... one could make a gadget like this and sell it to Toyota, GM, etc. and become the next Delco or Alpine. Suddenly, this idea no longer seems like such a Bad Thing, does it?
I just noticed that I made way too many parenthetical remarks in this reply. I hope it is fairly clear anyway (not that I'm all that worried).
One thought I had that would also add value to this thing is removable storage. Design it to use a standard, re-writable PC format (like 2-Gig Jaz, or CDRW if you want to go cheap) and the capacity for this thing skyrockets. I could take my entire 300 CD music collection on the road with me, keeping it in my glove box.
MP3-based removable disks would be like cassette tapes on stroids, holding about 40 albums each! I could listen to the same disks on a "living room" player, a Walkman-style headset, or on my computer, without the need to copy and re-copy my CD's to several different storage formats. "Compress once, play anywhere." Could be your marketing slogan. How cool would THAT be?
(Do you hear that? It's the sound of Sony's Mini-disc division shaking in their boots.)
If all of us were to run something like this as a background task and/or while we sleep (think of it as a practical alternative to SETI-at-home), all ISP log demographics would quickly become useless.
I wonder if anybody has already hacked together a script like this... perhaps to take advantage of those "we pay you to browse" ad-based services. If not, it might be a fun project for me to set up.
If you really want to improve the user interface, let's talk about improving the actual physical interface between man and machine. The QWERTY keyboard is clumsy, hard to learn, and has injured more than a few of my friends, but so far nobody has managed to get a good replacement thought-to-text vehicle to catch on. Voice-only is not the answer, because we don't talk nearly as fast as we think. Personally, I am hoping that biofeedback labs find a way for us to train ourselves to type with our minds.
It is not as far-fetched as you may think. When we are new-born infants, we learn how to wiggle our feet by watching our hands as our brain tries various electrical impulses. When we stumble on the right "command" for "bend left knee" a few times, our brain remembers it and we can do it without conscious thought. Stroke victims often need to go through the same training over again to route around damaged nerves pathways.
With a good monitoring device (perhaps not an implant... a simple tape-on job over the back of the neck might do the trick), connected to a text screen that offers meaningful feedback, it seems like it should just be a matter of time and effort for the average person to control a text editor as they would an appendage of their own body.
IANACE (I am not a cybernetics engineer), but I find it easy to belive that something like this could happen in our lifetimes. I suspect that it is more likely to come from an overzealous hacker in a garage with $5k startup from selling his/her car than from the Silicon Valley research labs... but that might just be the romantic idealist in me talking. Any thoughts, gang?
Just once, I would like to see somebody hash out a column that says something like this:
"The Internet has reached its high water mark. What was once thought to be the means to a harmonious world-wide community of people holding virtual hands across the sea turned out to be nothing more than a new marketing scheme to sell crap through the mail. Far from empowering individuals and realizing the dreams of Ayn Rand readers, the benefits of this new technology have favored large corporations, centralized governments, and pro-wrestling fans, while the dreamers and the inventors of the world continue to be ignored and abused. In a few short months people will drop their AOL accounts, dot-coms will close up shop, and HTML authors will be relegated to the status of ham radio operators while the rest of us wait for the Next Big Thing. What finally killed the Internet is that it is a means of advancing communication, and most people have nothing interesting to say."
Hyperbole? Yes... but no more than Jon's post, and at least this would be new hyperbole.
Does anybody else remember the Franklin? It was an Apple II clone that was sued into oblivion back in the 80's. I think the victory over the early knock-offs gave Apple an unwise confidence in their lawyers. When they sued Microsoft over Windows, all they did was give Windows more street cred than it deserved. ("It's so much like the Macintosh that Apple is suing them!")
I think they have a legitimate beef with the various eMachine sellers over "trade dress". These companies are obviously slapping together shoddy knock-offs of the iMac (running DOS 98) in order to fool the grandmothers that see the iMac in those "She-Comes-In-Colors-Everywhere" Gap-style TV ads.
This argument does not apply at all in the case of these spunky new AMD boxes, which no reasonable person could possible mistake for an iMac. They will sell (or not) based on their own merits, and Apple simply has no leg to stand on this time.
After a couple months of giving it a fair chance, trying several different hand positions, I have concluded that I absolutely hate the funky little "hockey puck" mouse. At the same time, I am glad that it is the one that Apple included with my G3. Why? Because a mouse is really a matter of taste (no one design will please everybody). Given that you can't sell computers these days without including a mouse and keyboard, I would much rather have them include a $15 mouse that I hate than an $80 mouse that I still don't like. Either way, I end up buying the nifty Microsoft optical mouse, so if Apple is going to cut corners anywhere for the sake of price, the mouse is a good place to start. (Yes, M$ is my favorite mouse-maker... although I might feel differently if I was left-handed.)
When one looks at the shootings that have saturated the air over the last year or so, there is a common thread. In all of these cases, various political groups, promoting various agendas, have blamed Bill Clinton, the NRA, video games, violent movies, "goth" kids, the Internet, public education, Republicans that cut public education funding, bad parents, apathetic parents, student social cliques, or whatever promotes their agenda best. In nearly every case, the killers were mentally unstable children who often needed to rely on powerful medication to even function in society.
While Katz's "Hellmouth" stories occationally fell into the trap of scapegoating the bullies and cheerleaders of America, I really hope his insights are read by thoughtful people, even those of us who disagree with his conclusions. I completely reject the notion that these killer kids are misfits lashing out at a cruel system, but the conversation that Katz has started has called attention to how dreadful the lives of teens in America has become.
The baby boomers, for all their nostalgia of rejecting the "older generation", must at least recognize that they were raised by adults that doted on them. In the early 60's, all of American cutlure was shaped around teenaged whims. Mass media followed them through college and onward. For decades, the childred on the Baby Boom have been the center of society.
As a Gen X'er, I was lucky enough to coast in the wake of the boom. We were never the center of attention and people did not take us very seriously (Boomers stopped saying "Don't trust anybody over 30" at the exact moment you would expect), but society was not really hostile to us, for the most part we were ignored. The term "latch-key kids" became common in those days for a reason. For us geeks, escape from teen angst was very easy. We could hack code in our basement all night and nobody bothered us.
However, I must admit that I fear for the so-called "Generation Y". The reason why so many of us find shows like South Park to be so disturbinly funny is that the nasty humor often veils an even nastier truth that we are a little uncomfortable admitting. Kids today are unwelcome guests in a world that revolves around the desires of graying, self-centered adults. The "Hellmouth" stories call attention to this trend in a way that few other publications have. There are plenty of reason to pick on Katz, but this book merits at least that much credit.
Just to remove all doubt, I hereby give Slashdot, Mr. Katz, Andover, and anybody else the right to use this post any way they see fit.
You could say that you are the editor of a geek-centric publication. Then, as your popularity grows, maybe those bastards at Wired News will finally regret that they fired you.
(For best results, coin a hip new buzz-word or two, like "corporatism", and then steal a motif from a popular show like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That should make it a lead-pipe cinch!)
A lot of people have griped that their precious words might have been reprinted in this book without permission, and Hemos has adroitly pointed out, correctly, that since /. is a "public forum", all comments are fair game to be quoted in other publications. Now consider this: If you would like to publish a book called "Pointless Flames: The Red Hat vs. Debian Debate", or "The Phantom Menace Should Be On DVD", or even "Hot Grits!", all you need to do is cut-and-paste your favorite comments from this site, and reprint it with a few of your own comments. Presto! Free (as in beer) content for your next best-seller! I doubt Andover would object, but if they did, Hemos just provided your legal defense for you. Neat, huh? (This is my first contribution to /., so I have no .sig file yet... I will have to think about it for a while.)
That's a very good point. Media probably are, on the other hand, bound by the laws governing complex chaotic systems. An article along those lines would have been more interesting, but chaos theory is harder to understand than Darwinism, and every software engineer knows that the ideal tool for the job is the one that you personally know best, right? :)
The only way content which should be weeded out remains is if the writer has been established as a popular content provider. For example, a unique look at school environments following the Columbine shooting could give a writer enough street cred to collect a check for months and months of useless drivel about the nature of "Open Media". However, if that writer does not produce anything worth reading or discussing long enough, people will eventually drift away.
If a writer pontificates on the web and it gets no no hits, is he really being published?
"Umm... you said personal vanity twice."
"I like personal vanity!"
These days, he just barks back at the first few flamers with a "you obviously didn't take the time to read my article" comment... if he posts at all. He no longer seems to give any acknowledgement of reading the reactions to his stories, and might as well be writing his stuff in print magazines, given how far from "Open" or "Interactive" or "New Media" he is these days. In fact, he probably secretly would prefer being a mainstream journalist, if only somebody would hire him.
Perhaps the trolls are right. Perhaps the real Jon Katz died a long time ago, and was replaced with a "jonkatz.pl" script.
Her two mega-hits drove the sale of all other material, which was clearly held up to a lower standard when the songs were produced.