Uh, no. No thanks. I would rather pay them nothing, and see them go away forever. That seems like the best solution to me.
How will the artists get paid? Well, as has been discussed here endlessly, the percentage of musicians who make money from CDs is very, very small. So for most, CDs are a promotional vehicle, a pure cost. They are a means to advertise your music. Under a P2P system, it costs nothing to infinitely replicate your music. You still get the exposure, if you're good, and it costs you nothing. Neither do you have to sign any draconian contracts nor compromise your creative integrity.
Most artists will continue to make money the way they do now, without the RIAA overhead: they will tour and sell band merchandise. If the RIAA is no longer there as the gatekeeper, it seems like musicians will have a lot more power than they have ever had over the direction and scope of their careers. They will decide what to create, not RIAA marketing dept.s; they will decide how many albums to produce, not RIAA contract lawyers; and they will set their own prices, not RIAA business people.
The RIAA as we know it will disappear, and good riddance. But something of it will remain in the form of boutique marketing and production companies. They will be hired by artists to put together marketing campaigns. They will do their bidding as hired guns. The role they will play for bands will be much like the role Madison Avenue plays for Coca-Cola, Inc.
So please, folks, stop using your brain power thinking about how to devise a system that will pay the RIAA anything. They deserve to go, and we should do everything in our power to usher them out. Buy nothing from them. Discourage everyone you know from buying anything from them. Call your representatives and put them on notice that you're really pissed off about what the RIAA is doing, and that if they are complicit you will vote accordingly. (as an aside, it is not futile to call your representative and do this. they will listen because if you're pissed off enough to call, you'll also be pissed off to work in their district against them come election time. and the six degrees of separation work in our favor on this. what if your uncle turns out to be the local union boss that gave him contributions last time? bye-bye, future contributions.)
You can't believe that you alone have the power to end the RIAA, but you can believe that you can do your bit. So do it.
Ian Clarke is an articulate technologist, and Freenet is a cool project. But if Slashdotters and all computer users everywhere don't put their money where their mouth is, then all the clever software in the world won't win this fight.
The RIAA and its employees in Congress will pass more draconian laws because they have power and we don't. They will outlaw computers if they have to, because computers have rendered them irrelevant.
They will only stop, or rather will only be stopped, if all of us choose to exercise our power as consumers and voters. What are those things?
1. As a consumer, stop buying CDs. Stop buying band merchandise. Stop buying concert tickets. CDs and merchandise feed the RIAA. Concert tickets feed ClearChannel. Send them the message that you want out of this abusive relationship. Deprive them of the dollars they pay their lawyers and Congressmen with.
2. Discourage your friends, family, and coworkers from buying CDs and tickets. Offer to burn them copies of the music they want instead. If the 50 million people using P2P in America did that for just 5 other people not online, then that's the entire population of the country that has no more use or dollars for the RIAA.
3. Call your representatives and ask them if they support you or the RIAA. If you don't like what you hear, then don't vote for them. Tell others not to vote for them. Use florid language if you must, because you can be sure that the RIAA won't be afraid to.
Yes, these are little things. Yes, if you're the only one doing them, then how can they possibly make a difference? But a wise man once said, "It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do a little. Do what you can." Besides, you're not alone; you're a member of an army of 50 million people. If each does a little, it amounts to a heck of a lot.
At the very least, the very, very least, stop using the RIAA's language and terms to talk about this issue! Copying files is exchanging information, and exchanging information is NOT stealing. Neither is it piracy. So stop calling it that. You can't convince even the most sympathetic politician that stealing is OK. But you probably could persuade them that file sharing is a good thing. Think about it. Then do it.
If you're a handicapped Windows user
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Hacking the XBox
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· Score: 1, Redundant
hmmm, "handicapped Windows user." rather redundant, don't you think?
calling it this really burns me. theft is really when you take physical property. or, possibly, when you try to pass someone else's writing/novel/music/movie off as your own. or, possibly, when you try to make money by making copies of someone else's work and selling it. no one in p2p is doing any of those. who in the heck would want to download "hard day's night," by bob? who in the heck would pay bob for a download of "hard day's night," by the beatles, when he could get it for free from joe?
i'm real sorry that musicians and record companies feel like they've lost the ability to control your mind and culture, because you can now run about willy nilly sharing ideas and information, but you know what i say to that? tough cookies! again, i say tough cookies! if you come up with a good joke, tell someone, and they like it enough to pass it along, i'm real sorry but it's out there and you ain't takin' it back. and good luck trying to collect royalties on it. you think eddy murphy employs a group of lawyer thugs to punish john q. public everytime he repeats a gag from raw? no, because it's absurd to try.
well, now music and increasingly movies are like that. musicians and artists will have to find another business model to make a living. i'm sorry they have to go through the pain of adjustment. but who among us doesn't have to go through the pain of adjustment? has anyone in the room had to go through painful career adjustments in the last three years? well then, why should musicians be any different?
sharing movies, music, files, and ideas is not illegal. but more than that, it is just not wrong. let me repeat: sharing ideas and culture is not wrong. it is not immoral. it is right, and natural to do so. if it weren't civilization and collective human endeavour simply could not exist.
Copyright is wrong. It is an outdated concept that now directly contradicts First Amendment freedoms. Copyright, not the First Amendment, should go. People who violate copyright (which is itself debatable under the usual "fair use" arguments) are not criminals. They are just people doing what people have always done and should do: share ideas and culture. Painting that as a crime is just as misanthropic and deluded as you could be.
All of you who pontificate about how file-sharers are pirates and criminals and good-for-nothing freeloaders should wake up out of false consciousness and consider the consequences you think we all ought to live in. Information not only wants to be free, it must be free.
Fair Weather Environmentalists
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A Mighty Wind
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· Score: 4, Funny
Bug me. There have been several such stories in the NE about this lately. The other one I can remember was in upstate New York. Rich people there complained about their views being ruined too. Like other posters, I agree that the developer should acquiesce and give them a coal-burning power plant instead.
It makes me think that perhaps the wind-farm developers are going about it all wrong. They should first say they're going to put a nuke power plant in Nantucket, and let the residents get good and riled up about that. Let their faces go beet-red with fury, let them picket the site, and give them tons of air time on the local news channels. Then you throw your hands up in the air and say, "OK, OK, I give up! I'll only build a wind farm! Boy, you environmentalists sure make it hard for honest entrepreneurs to do business..." The locals will say, OK, that's more like it. They'll think they've won, and you get to build your wind farm.
The country's censorship board cited violence which might 'harm social peace', but also said the 'religious themes' of the film's storyline, about the search for the creator and control of the human race, may cause 'crises'. A statement said: 'Despite the high technology and fabulous effects of the movie, it explicitly handles the issue of existence and creation, which are related to the three divine religions, which we all respect and believe in.
The thought of all great movies getting dumbed down to the level of Peoria, IL, always made me cry. Now there can be two levels of mass entertainment: one for the sheep and one for us. I'm looking forward to seeing the extended TTT DVD. Faramir was a great character, and they didn't do him justice in the cinematic release.
Honestly, what's out there that's really worth all this fuss? Or, extended to the rest of mass media, what's really out there that's worth all this hullabaloo? The number of movies worth watching that came out in the last 5 years can be counted on one hand. The number of new bands worth listening to come out in the same time is zero. The only TV worth watching was Babylon 5, and that's on DVD. Just put the remote down and walk away. Go code. Go build. Go play. Go vote. Go live your life instead of letting someone else do it vicariously for you. Sheez!
Sorry, but I thought you could already skip commercials with Tivo. If it's just fast forward, then what's the point? I can already record on that old VCR and fast forward through the commercials, which I do. What's the point of paying a monthly fee for the same functionality? I just don't get it.
Aliens come to earth to take all the water and take humans for food, mice and small birds for snacks. A rag-tag band of rebels fight them and their human collaborators. Eventually, they go up in hot air balloons to pour Red Dust into the ecosystem and make the planet poisonous to the Lizards.
What part of that is an allegory for the Nazis and the Final Solution? The Nazis didn't want to eat the Jews. They rounded them up and exterminated them. The Nazis had weird eugenics programs and notions of racial purity and hierarchy. The Lizards just ate people. The Nazis sought Lebensraum in the East. The Lizards just wanted to eat people. Yes the Lizards were out to smear and control the human scientists, but that's because they were the only ones who could figure out what was going on and prevent them from eating people.
Unless all bad guys in all stories are really Nazis, because no one else could be, and all underdog good guys in all stories are really Jews, because no one else could be, then it's really hard to make out what you're talking about.
IMHO, this is a story about Lizards wanting to eat people, and the people objecting.
It always amazes me when posts like this actually sound like they really do believe what they're saying, that ideas and culture, yes, your very mind is a product that is bought and sold and that's the way it should be. Well, let me give you a different perspective:
Ideas and culture are the communication medium society needs to function and survive. It's really what separates humans from animals. And it's as natural and as free as breathing. For a while certain among us have found a way to make money be imposing artificial scarcity on that free flow of information. But any attempt to cross basic human nature like the *AA's have is bound to end in failure. Copyright was an experiment, and like communism, which also tried to cross basic human nature, it has failed. What we're seeing now in filesharing is not a massive criminal spree but human nature reasserting itself.
If you really don't want others echoing your ideas and music and poetry, etc., then keep that slow-jam to yourself. Please.
Even better would be a fabric that stops all wavelengths of light save one narrow band. With the right polarized glasses you'd see right through it. Give your girlfriend that snazzy outfit for her birthday, take her to a fancy restaurant, put the glasses on, and you're literally undressing her with your eyes...
I submitted this story earlier today, but it didn't make it. Basically, Sen. Sam Brownback from Kansas is announcing the "Consumer,Schools, and Libraries Digital Rights Management Awareness Act," which will, among other things, require that a copyright holder win a lawsuit in order to obtain the name of an alleged peer-to-peer pirate.
In the meantime, I say turn about's fair play: let's all of us accuse the RIAA of illegally distributing our copyrighted material and invade their privacy without bothering with the courts. Let's rat out every music executive out there who's downloading kiddie porn or sending naughty emails to their mistresses. Hey, if they can do it to us, why can't we do it to them?
my 2 cents...
Great Pedagogical Technique, this
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Stealing the Network
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I think this is an excellent direction to take education in. The difference between book learning and real world knowledge is always context. Book learning teaches you math out of context, teaches you grammar out of context, and what have you. It's the real world that teaches you the actual context for applying the book learning. Whereas a book like this, presenting the knowledge in the way it does, actually takes you back to the original purpose for stories: to teach.
Remember Aesop's Fables? They weren't meant primarily to entertain, but to teach a moral lesson. The same with the little incidental stories we tell each other daily about, for example, how so-and-so got fired because he was surfing porn on the company network. The entertainment value is incidental.
Given that bodies of knowledge, IT and otherwise, are multiplying so rapidly, it seems like the only way to get a reasonable handle on it as a society is to create these kinds of stories to put it in context.
I got another angle from Reloaded that I haven't seen discussed here yet: the interdependence of man and machine and Neo & Smith as mirrors of each other. You have the scene with the Council member in the engineering level in Zion where he muses about who's really in control, man or machine? You have the Oracle and the Architect talking about how they and other special programs are there to keep the Matrix running by keeping human minds in line and accepting of the Matrix.
Then there's Neo who's seeking liberation by entering the realm of the machine in the Matrix, and Smith who's seeking liberation by entering the realm of Man in Zion. Smith is the anti-Neo. They both want the same thing, but from the other side. Maybe the combination of their efforts will break the myth of inevitability?
Neo's love for Trinity being the key to breaking inevitability is a little too cliched for it to be the only message. And the repetition of Neo and the Matrices with his evolving responses points to a refinement of what liberation really is. Given that the Wachowski brothers were heavily influenced by EST ideas (EST being a quasi-Scientology cult), that's the direction I'd say they're headed in.
SCO announced today that after Linus, they're going after von Neuman for having invented the computer. "It's clear that his research was specifically designed to lead to the machine which is responsible for violating our intellectual property rights," SCO spokesmen were quoted as saying.
When asked if SCO had considered that without von Neuman's work they wouldn't have any intellectual property to begin with, the spokesman chided the journalists present for splitting hairs and using legal mumbo jumbo to confuse the issue. "The fact is, everyone in the world owes us a living, and they better pay up before we sue the bejeezus out of them. We have legions of lawyers ready and waiting."
The interview was cut short when a copy of an otherworldly book dropped out of the sky and landed on the stage with a thump. When examined it appeared to be an almanac or encyclopedia of otherwordly origin, and curiously enough it had fallen open on the following entry: "SCO: a dirty bunch of swindlers whose backs were first against the wall when the revolution came."
about a great many things. Taping songs from the radio and giving it to friends is not now and never has been illegal. It's called Fair Use. I refer you to any given post from any given article ever posted on Slashdot about this topic. It has been repeated so many times that I am frankly just astonished that anyone could still be ignorant of it.
Second, the rights of corporations that you deem equal to those of the individual are in fact quite different and lesser. In the Western legal tradition the rights of man are considered to be "natural rights" and are granted to him by god. That is, they cannot be granted, only taken away. (I refer you to any course on the Western intellectual tradition.) Corporate rights, such as copyright and corporate personhood are completely artificial and are allowances granted by the body public for the purpose of furthering the public good. If the public later reconsiders that allowance, it is quite a different thing entirely to alter it than it is to attempt to alter, say, a natural right like the freedom of expression. In other words, the two are certainly not equal. Natural rights trump all others.
So if Sen. Hollings, Hilary Rosen, and their ilk think that their artificial rights should trump natural rights, then it is they who should be afraid. They will be corrected in the error of their ways easiest by bankruptcy and removal from office, but ultimately by violent reminder.
It is essential to remember that we as citizens are not governed by laws imposed upon us from above, as though from a celestial power, but by conventions we agree to abide by. If that agreement goes away, as it demonstrably has in the case of music consumption, then that law or convention that forbids it loses all force. Imposing laws upon populations where no agreement to abide by such is the province of tyrants, and we all know what happens to tyrants.
I have thought about this a lot, being horribly addicted to video games and having woken up at the end of many a fourteen hour binge feeling empty like I had wasted precious life. Boy wouldn't it be great to become completely immersed in a game at the end of which you wound up speaking fluent Chinese or having acquired some other skill useful in the real world? I know that there are plenty of kids' learning games out there to teach phonics and stuff like that, but that's not what I'm talking about. Those are too pedantic.
What I had in mind was something more in the direction of Cyberchase, were the skill being learned was important, but almost incidental to the game play. For example, take all those Everquest-y RPG-y games out there where you're an ancient Greek warrior or a spy or something, and gradually require the player to understand what the characters are saying in their native tongue in order to advance, and after that require the player to speak back in the language. Presto at the end of the game you come out with basic understanding of French grammar and a vocabulary of 1000 words.
I know it wouldn't be easy to walk the line between educational and fun, but if someone managed it I'd be a slavishly devoted fan.
A buddy of mine was a lieutenant in charge of logistics for the 101st airborne based in Kentucky. He said on their training maneuvers they were expected to use what he called "War for Windows" to route supplies to battalions in the field and things commonly wound up on the exact opposite part of the map from where they were supposed to arrive. He said the temptation to inform his superior officers that they had been forced to reboot the system with an M-16 was overwhelming.
On a separate note, it was interesting to read Gibson referring to threads on Slashdot in his blog. Creatives have been talking to the hoi poloi for a long time, sure (e.g. J.M.S. talking to Babylon 5 fans back in the pure Usenet days), but to publicly mention the memes of this site as a subject of intellectual discussion struck me. Journalists in trade papers occasionally refer to the Linux fanatics on Slashdot, but it's not everyday I read or hear about a public figure referring to/. as an entity.
Most days it feels like we're all just voices in the wilderness out here. Feels good to know that's changing.
Sour Grapes Saturate Slashdot
on
Rent a Segway
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
Wow, what stinging resentment from the same crowd that was drooling over these things 18 months ago. Why is that? Is it because they didn't magically go on sale at every corner market and WalMart in the country for $20?
The arc of this meme was 1) Wow, this is the niftiest thing ever gimme gimme gimme. 2) Well gee I just got laid off from my dot-com and $3K is, well, just unfair. 3) What self-respecting American would trade in a gas-guzzling SUV for a goofy thing like this? and finally, 4) I am so socially insecure that I'm going to pile on and pan something that I still secretly think is awesome and would love to have but can't afford.
Well, I thought these things were awesome when they came out, and still do. If I could afford one, I'd buy it. I live in New York, and having these things replace cars would be a godsend. There's nothing more maddening than being in Midtown in rush hour or the Village on the weekends with guidos from Jersey trying to run you down in their I-Roc Z's.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, no. No thanks. I would rather pay them nothing, and see them go away forever. That seems like the best solution to me.
How will the artists get paid? Well, as has been discussed here endlessly, the percentage of musicians who make money from CDs is very, very small. So for most, CDs are a promotional vehicle, a pure cost. They are a means to advertise your music. Under a P2P system, it costs nothing to infinitely replicate your music. You still get the exposure, if you're good, and it costs you nothing. Neither do you have to sign any draconian contracts nor compromise your creative integrity.
Most artists will continue to make money the way they do now, without the RIAA overhead: they will tour and sell band merchandise. If the RIAA is no longer there as the gatekeeper, it seems like musicians will have a lot more power than they have ever had over the direction and scope of their careers. They will decide what to create, not RIAA marketing dept.s; they will decide how many albums to produce, not RIAA contract lawyers; and they will set their own prices, not RIAA business people.
The RIAA as we know it will disappear, and good riddance. But something of it will remain in the form of boutique marketing and production companies. They will be hired by artists to put together marketing campaigns. They will do their bidding as hired guns. The role they will play for bands will be much like the role Madison Avenue plays for Coca-Cola, Inc.
So please, folks, stop using your brain power thinking about how to devise a system that will pay the RIAA anything. They deserve to go, and we should do everything in our power to usher them out. Buy nothing from them. Discourage everyone you know from buying anything from them. Call your representatives and put them on notice that you're really pissed off about what the RIAA is doing, and that if they are complicit you will vote accordingly. (as an aside, it is not futile to call your representative and do this. they will listen because if you're pissed off enough to call, you'll also be pissed off to work in their district against them come election time. and the six degrees of separation work in our favor on this. what if your uncle turns out to be the local union boss that gave him contributions last time? bye-bye, future contributions.)
You can't believe that you alone have the power to end the RIAA, but you can believe that you can do your bit. So do it.
but the ultimate solution is political.
Ian Clarke is an articulate technologist, and Freenet is a cool project. But if Slashdotters and all computer users everywhere don't put their money where their mouth is, then all the clever software in the world won't win this fight.
The RIAA and its employees in Congress will pass more draconian laws because they have power and we don't. They will outlaw computers if they have to, because computers have rendered them irrelevant.
They will only stop, or rather will only be stopped, if all of us choose to exercise our power as consumers and voters. What are those things?
1. As a consumer, stop buying CDs. Stop buying band merchandise. Stop buying concert tickets. CDs and merchandise feed the RIAA. Concert tickets feed ClearChannel. Send them the message that you want out of this abusive relationship. Deprive them of the dollars they pay their lawyers and Congressmen with.
2. Discourage your friends, family, and coworkers from buying CDs and tickets. Offer to burn them copies of the music they want instead. If the 50 million people using P2P in America did that for just 5 other people not online, then that's the entire population of the country that has no more use or dollars for the RIAA.
3. Call your representatives and ask them if they support you or the RIAA. If you don't like what you hear, then don't vote for them. Tell others not to vote for them. Use florid language if you must, because you can be sure that the RIAA won't be afraid to.
Yes, these are little things. Yes, if you're the only one doing them, then how can they possibly make a difference? But a wise man once said, "It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do a little. Do what you can." Besides, you're not alone; you're a member of an army of 50 million people. If each does a little, it amounts to a heck of a lot.
At the very least, the very, very least, stop using the RIAA's language and terms to talk about this issue! Copying files is exchanging information, and exchanging information is NOT stealing. Neither is it piracy. So stop calling it that. You can't convince even the most sympathetic politician that stealing is OK. But you probably could persuade them that file sharing is a good thing. Think about it. Then do it.
hmmm, "handicapped Windows user." rather redundant, don't you think?
calling it this really burns me. theft is really when you take physical property. or, possibly, when you try to pass someone else's writing/novel/music/movie off as your own. or, possibly, when you try to make money by making copies of someone else's work and selling it. no one in p2p is doing any of those. who in the heck would want to download "hard day's night," by bob? who in the heck would pay bob for a download of "hard day's night," by the beatles, when he could get it for free from joe?
i'm real sorry that musicians and record companies feel like they've lost the ability to control your mind and culture, because you can now run about willy nilly sharing ideas and information, but you know what i say to that? tough cookies! again, i say tough cookies! if you come up with a good joke, tell someone, and they like it enough to pass it along, i'm real sorry but it's out there and you ain't takin' it back. and good luck trying to collect royalties on it. you think eddy murphy employs a group of lawyer thugs to punish john q. public everytime he repeats a gag from raw? no, because it's absurd to try.
well, now music and increasingly movies are like that. musicians and artists will have to find another business model to make a living. i'm sorry they have to go through the pain of adjustment. but who among us doesn't have to go through the pain of adjustment? has anyone in the room had to go through painful career adjustments in the last three years? well then, why should musicians be any different?
sharing movies, music, files, and ideas is not illegal. but more than that, it is just not wrong. let me repeat: sharing ideas and culture is not wrong. it is not immoral. it is right, and natural to do so. if it weren't civilization and collective human endeavour simply could not exist.
Can we please, please, please beat these *AA people with sticks now?
Copyright is wrong. It is an outdated concept that now directly contradicts First Amendment freedoms. Copyright, not the First Amendment, should go. People who violate copyright (which is itself debatable under the usual "fair use" arguments) are not criminals. They are just people doing what people have always done and should do: share ideas and culture. Painting that as a crime is just as misanthropic and deluded as you could be.
All of you who pontificate about how file-sharers are pirates and criminals and good-for-nothing freeloaders should wake up out of false consciousness and consider the consequences you think we all ought to live in. Information not only wants to be free, it must be free.
can we beat these people with sticks yet?
Bug me. There have been several such stories in the NE about this lately. The other one I can remember was in upstate New York. Rich people there complained about their views being ruined too. Like other posters, I agree that the developer should acquiesce and give them a coal-burning power plant instead.
It makes me think that perhaps the wind-farm developers are going about it all wrong. They should first say they're going to put a nuke power plant in Nantucket, and let the residents get good and riled up about that. Let their faces go beet-red with fury, let them picket the site, and give them tons of air time on the local news channels. Then you throw your hands up in the air and say, "OK, OK, I give up! I'll only build a wind farm! Boy, you environmentalists sure make it hard for honest entrepreneurs to do business..." The locals will say, OK, that's more like it. They'll think they've won, and you get to build your wind farm.
The country's censorship board cited violence which might 'harm social peace', but also said the 'religious themes' of the film's storyline, about the search for the creator and control of the human race, may cause 'crises'. A statement said: 'Despite the high technology and fabulous effects of the movie, it explicitly handles the issue of existence and creation, which are related to the three divine religions, which we all respect and believe in.
--John Ashcroft, Atty. General, U.S.
The thought of all great movies getting dumbed down to the level of Peoria, IL, always made me cry. Now there can be two levels of mass entertainment: one for the sheep and one for us. I'm looking forward to seeing the extended TTT DVD. Faramir was a great character, and they didn't do him justice in the cinematic release.
Honestly, what's out there that's really worth all this fuss? Or, extended to the rest of mass media, what's really out there that's worth all this hullabaloo? The number of movies worth watching that came out in the last 5 years can be counted on one hand. The number of new bands worth listening to come out in the same time is zero. The only TV worth watching was Babylon 5, and that's on DVD. Just put the remote down and walk away. Go code. Go build. Go play. Go vote. Go live your life instead of letting someone else do it vicariously for you. Sheez!
Sorry, but I thought you could already skip commercials with Tivo. If it's just fast forward, then what's the point? I can already record on that old VCR and fast forward through the commercials, which I do. What's the point of paying a monthly fee for the same functionality? I just don't get it.
Aliens come to earth to take all the water and take humans for food, mice and small birds for snacks. A rag-tag band of rebels fight them and their human collaborators. Eventually, they go up in hot air balloons to pour Red Dust into the ecosystem and make the planet poisonous to the Lizards.
What part of that is an allegory for the Nazis and the Final Solution? The Nazis didn't want to eat the Jews. They rounded them up and exterminated them. The Nazis had weird eugenics programs and notions of racial purity and hierarchy. The Lizards just ate people. The Nazis sought Lebensraum in the East. The Lizards just wanted to eat people. Yes the Lizards were out to smear and control the human scientists, but that's because they were the only ones who could figure out what was going on and prevent them from eating people.
Unless all bad guys in all stories are really Nazis, because no one else could be, and all underdog good guys in all stories are really Jews, because no one else could be, then it's really hard to make out what you're talking about.
IMHO, this is a story about Lizards wanting to eat people, and the people objecting.
It always amazes me when posts like this actually sound like they really do believe what they're saying, that ideas and culture, yes, your very mind is a product that is bought and sold and that's the way it should be. Well, let me give you a different perspective:
Ideas and culture are the communication medium society needs to function and survive. It's really what separates humans from animals. And it's as natural and as free as breathing. For a while certain among us have found a way to make money be imposing artificial scarcity on that free flow of information. But any attempt to cross basic human nature like the *AA's have is bound to end in failure. Copyright was an experiment, and like communism, which also tried to cross basic human nature, it has failed. What we're seeing now in filesharing is not a massive criminal spree but human nature reasserting itself.
If you really don't want others echoing your ideas and music and poetry, etc., then keep that slow-jam to yourself. Please.
Even better would be a fabric that stops all wavelengths of light save one narrow band. With the right polarized glasses you'd see right through it. Give your girlfriend that snazzy outfit for her birthday, take her to a fancy restaurant, put the glasses on, and you're literally undressing her with your eyes...
I submitted this story earlier today, but it didn't make it. Basically, Sen. Sam Brownback from Kansas is announcing the "Consumer,Schools, and Libraries Digital Rights Management Awareness Act," which will, among other things, require that a copyright holder win a lawsuit in order to obtain the name of an alleged peer-to-peer pirate.
In the meantime, I say turn about's fair play: let's all of us accuse the RIAA of illegally distributing our copyrighted material and invade their privacy without bothering with the courts. Let's rat out every music executive out there who's downloading kiddie porn or sending naughty emails to their mistresses. Hey, if they can do it to us, why can't we do it to them?
my 2 cents...
I think this is an excellent direction to take education in. The difference between book learning and real world knowledge is always context. Book learning teaches you math out of context, teaches you grammar out of context, and what have you. It's the real world that teaches you the actual context for applying the book learning. Whereas a book like this, presenting the knowledge in the way it does, actually takes you back to the original purpose for stories: to teach.
Remember Aesop's Fables? They weren't meant primarily to entertain, but to teach a moral lesson. The same with the little incidental stories we tell each other daily about, for example, how so-and-so got fired because he was surfing porn on the company network. The entertainment value is incidental.
Given that bodies of knowledge, IT and otherwise, are multiplying so rapidly, it seems like the only way to get a reasonable handle on it as a society is to create these kinds of stories to put it in context.
Great work, guys.
I got another angle from Reloaded that I haven't seen discussed here yet: the interdependence of man and machine and Neo & Smith as mirrors of each other. You have the scene with the Council member in the engineering level in Zion where he muses about who's really in control, man or machine? You have the Oracle and the Architect talking about how they and other special programs are there to keep the Matrix running by keeping human minds in line and accepting of the Matrix.
Then there's Neo who's seeking liberation by entering the realm of the machine in the Matrix, and Smith who's seeking liberation by entering the realm of Man in Zion. Smith is the anti-Neo. They both want the same thing, but from the other side. Maybe the combination of their efforts will break the myth of inevitability?
Neo's love for Trinity being the key to breaking inevitability is a little too cliched for it to be the only message. And the repetition of Neo and the Matrices with his evolving responses points to a refinement of what liberation really is. Given that the Wachowski brothers were heavily influenced by EST ideas (EST being a quasi-Scientology cult), that's the direction I'd say they're headed in.
about a quip involving stellar flatulence and the consumption of inordinate quantities of n-dimensional beans, but it was too nebulous...
SCO announced today that after Linus, they're going after von Neuman for having invented the computer. "It's clear that his research was specifically designed to lead to the machine which is responsible for violating our intellectual property rights," SCO spokesmen were quoted as saying.
When asked if SCO had considered that without von Neuman's work they wouldn't have any intellectual property to begin with, the spokesman chided the journalists present for splitting hairs and using legal mumbo jumbo to confuse the issue. "The fact is, everyone in the world owes us a living, and they better pay up before we sue the bejeezus out of them. We have legions of lawyers ready and waiting."
The interview was cut short when a copy of an otherworldly book dropped out of the sky and landed on the stage with a thump. When examined it appeared to be an almanac or encyclopedia of otherwordly origin, and curiously enough it had fallen open on the following entry: "SCO: a dirty bunch of swindlers whose backs were first against the wall when the revolution came."
about a great many things. Taping songs from the radio and giving it to friends is not now and never has been illegal. It's called Fair Use. I refer you to any given post from any given article ever posted on Slashdot about this topic. It has been repeated so many times that I am frankly just astonished that anyone could still be ignorant of it.
Second, the rights of corporations that you deem equal to those of the individual are in fact quite different and lesser. In the Western legal tradition the rights of man are considered to be "natural rights" and are granted to him by god. That is, they cannot be granted, only taken away. (I refer you to any course on the Western intellectual tradition.) Corporate rights, such as copyright and corporate personhood are completely artificial and are allowances granted by the body public for the purpose of furthering the public good. If the public later reconsiders that allowance, it is quite a different thing entirely to alter it than it is to attempt to alter, say, a natural right like the freedom of expression. In other words, the two are certainly not equal. Natural rights trump all others.
So if Sen. Hollings, Hilary Rosen, and their ilk think that their artificial rights should trump natural rights, then it is they who should be afraid. They will be corrected in the error of their ways easiest by bankruptcy and removal from office, but ultimately by violent reminder.
It is essential to remember that we as citizens are not governed by laws imposed upon us from above, as though from a celestial power, but by conventions we agree to abide by. If that agreement goes away, as it demonstrably has in the case of music consumption, then that law or convention that forbids it loses all force. Imposing laws upon populations where no agreement to abide by such is the province of tyrants, and we all know what happens to tyrants.
Chew and digest...
I have thought about this a lot, being horribly addicted to video games and having woken up at the end of many a fourteen hour binge feeling empty like I had wasted precious life. Boy wouldn't it be great to become completely immersed in a game at the end of which you wound up speaking fluent Chinese or having acquired some other skill useful in the real world? I know that there are plenty of kids' learning games out there to teach phonics and stuff like that, but that's not what I'm talking about. Those are too pedantic.
What I had in mind was something more in the direction of Cyberchase, were the skill being learned was important, but almost incidental to the game play. For example, take all those Everquest-y RPG-y games out there where you're an ancient Greek warrior or a spy or something, and gradually require the player to understand what the characters are saying in their native tongue in order to advance, and after that require the player to speak back in the language. Presto at the end of the game you come out with basic understanding of French grammar and a vocabulary of 1000 words.
I know it wouldn't be easy to walk the line between educational and fun, but if someone managed it I'd be a slavishly devoted fan.
A buddy of mine was a lieutenant in charge of logistics for the 101st airborne based in Kentucky. He said on their training maneuvers they were expected to use what he called "War for Windows" to route supplies to battalions in the field and things commonly wound up on the exact opposite part of the map from where they were supposed to arrive. He said the temptation to inform his superior officers that they had been forced to reboot the system with an M-16 was overwhelming.
On a separate note, it was interesting to read Gibson referring to threads on Slashdot in his blog. Creatives have been talking to the hoi poloi for a long time, sure (e.g. J.M.S. talking to Babylon 5 fans back in the pure Usenet days), but to publicly mention the memes of this site as a subject of intellectual discussion struck me. Journalists in trade papers occasionally refer to the Linux fanatics on Slashdot, but it's not everyday I read or hear about a public figure referring to /. as an entity.
Most days it feels like we're all just voices in the wilderness out here. Feels good to know that's changing.
Wow, what stinging resentment from the same crowd that was drooling over these things 18 months ago. Why is that? Is it because they didn't magically go on sale at every corner market and WalMart in the country for $20?
The arc of this meme was 1) Wow, this is the niftiest thing ever gimme gimme gimme. 2) Well gee I just got laid off from my dot-com and $3K is, well, just unfair. 3) What self-respecting American would trade in a gas-guzzling SUV for a goofy thing like this? and finally, 4) I am so socially insecure that I'm going to pile on and pan something that I still secretly think is awesome and would love to have but can't afford.
Well, I thought these things were awesome when they came out, and still do. If I could afford one, I'd buy it. I live in New York, and having these things replace cars would be a godsend. There's nothing more maddening than being in Midtown in rush hour or the Village on the weekends with guidos from Jersey trying to run you down in their I-Roc Z's.