The greatest game...the best AI..highest realism
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A Gamer's Manifesto
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· Score: 5, Funny
If you're seriously bored with the lack of AI and realism in current games, have I got the solution for you!
It's called US-Soldier. What a wild game! You don't have to buy it. Just sign up. You start by running around endlessly and having some guy yell at you for trival things. This goes on for weeks while you learn the rules of the game.
Then, the playing action begins. You get physically relocated to some hot-dry shithole on the other side of the world. Surrounded by thousands of the enemy. You can't tell them apart from ordinary people, but it doesn't matter because everyone hates you just for being there. The enemy has hundreds of years experience fighting new gamers like you. They know all the tricks. They communicate in a special language that you or anyone on your game team can't understand. But they know how you think from watching your television shows and movies. They have a secret religion that enables them to kill anyone without remorse and to accept their own and their fellow gamers deaths without hesitation.
Such incredible realism in this game. And your enemy's gaming stategy is based on the experience of a permanent hot war that has been going on there since you were born. They were gaining combat experience while you were watching cartoons. They've already made all the mistakes in this combat game and they won't make them again, but you will.
Just like an arcade game, when you're done playing, you get sent right back to begin again.
And just like every other video game, no matter how good you get, in the end, you always lose.
A lot of the supposed loss that results from espionage is mitigated by the fact that the stolen data simply goes from one inept corporate bureaucracy to another. As much as they'd like to, most lame, ossified organizations can't do much to improve their own position regardless of the strategic worth of stolen competitor's data. It's just 'Spy vs. Spy'; an endless expensive game that changes very little in the real world.
And regarding the use of social engineering to break into secure systems and procure passwords, it too has exagerated importance. The old fashioned tried-and-true methods of blackmail, bribery, kidnapping, and extortion work as well if not better in modern corporate and military environments as they have for hundreds of years. The stricter the corporate punishment for transgressions, the more inflexible the rules, the harder the no-tolerance policy... the cheaper and easier it is to use blackmail and bribery on the target employees. This is why the Americans can't destroy 'the base' (whose Arabic name triggers the NSA internet evesdropping software). They can't be blackmailed, bribed, or persuaded with. Hell, they can't even be found.
You want a secure corporate environment? Trust your people, pay your people reasonably, don't assume that you can judge their moral character by the molecular structure of their urine. In other words, don't act like a stupid paranoid American.
This whole idea that adding bulletproof DRM to entertainment products is going to increase total revenue for the entertainment companies (all five of them) is just so, so wrong.
It is based on the flawed concept that all pieces of entertainment product have the same basic utility to consumers and therefore should have the same price. And, the business model continues, when consumers won't pay that price and seek an alternative, they are stealing from the entertainment companies (all five of them throughout the world) and defrauding them of their legitimate profit.
This model was a convenient fiction in the days not too long ago when entertainment product was sold by individual units of the physical medium through which the product was distributed. But today, it is a fatally flawed perspective. Fatal that is, to the entertainment industry.
Because there is, in reality, a near-infinite number of levels of entertainment value. There is the individual consumer's matrix of taste, i.e. what each person is willing to pay for an individual entertainment title according to their likes. There is the near infinite number of titles of entertainment product. And there are billions of consumers, each with a different entertainment budget.
The entertainment industry has created their present dilemma by having only two prices for their products: High and free.
Ending the free entertainment channel by encrypting product in bulletproof DRM is not going to send greater amounts of entertainment budgets to the consumption of product at the High price! If people wanted to buy entertainment product at the high price, nothing is stopping them from doing it. But they don't want to, they want a flexible pricing structure for entertainment product.
My point is, adding DRM is going to channel discressionary income that was going to buy 20th- century entertainment product into 21st-century products that are not owned, controlled, or understood by the five corporations that currently control the global entertainment industry. I don't really doubt any more that these fools will be successful at creating DRM. It's just that I don't think that they really understand that they will be destroying their own industry when they succeed at finally doing this. The root cause of their problem is the lack of a flexible pricing structure for their product, and DRM is not going to solve that problem.
Be careful what you ask for, 'cause you just might get it!
Personal computers are the only machines that don't turn off and on when you press the on/off switch.
Sometimes I press the off switch and some asshat program pops up a window and says that it won't terminate until I move the mouse to some little point on the window and click it. I can't do that because I've already turned the monitor off. I come back hours later and the fucking machine is still ON!
When I press the OFF switch, I want the stupid machine to turn off. Turn Off Now. No windows, no prompts, no "Are you sure?", no nothing...just turn the fuck off.
Linux is the worst PC operating system in this regard. Press the off key and the system reacts like you're trying to shut down the Defense Department. Page after page of scrolling lines indicating that this and that mickey-mouse section of the OS is exiting. Who gives a fuck? Just turn off! Now!
Turning the PC on is just as bad. It has to load 100 million bytes of code that haven't changed during the last 1000 times that I turned the stupid thing on. Here I have a 128 Megabyte Flash Disk about the size of my little toe and costing $17. So why the fuck can't I have all the OS on the Flash drive? So that it will go on at the moment that I flip the ON switch! C'mon guys, we're not booting from floppies anymore! It's time to leave the 1980's PC mentality!
Turn off and on when the user changes the state of the off/on switch. Such a truly revolutionary and mind-boggling concept!
Of course someone will point out that after months of study, research, experimentation, and trial compiling, (and hours of waiting and staring at the monitor), I could configure the system to do something resembling instant off/on when the switch gets pressed.
So why the fuck is this not the fucking default state of the machine! C'mon, guys, the ENIAC days are gone. This thing on your desk is an appliance. And like all appliances, it should go off and on when you hit the off/on switch!
When the people who are causing the mass murders in your public transport networks have a basic organizational framework but have not yet reached the level of civilization, you are not going to get the best security from surveilence.
It is far better to put resources into infiltration and communication with the leaders of the groups who are sending suicide solders out into your society.
It is important to have these leaders understand that there will be precise, exact, and unavoidable retaliation for specific acts of random mass murder committed by these groups. And (this is quite important) it is imperative to have them understand that the price that they will pay for sending suicide solders into your society will be far greater than any physical or propaganda gain that they will achieve for their cause (either political or religious) resulting from these acts of mass murder.
When the leaders of the mass murder cults realize that the price that they and their cause and their people will pay for having committed these acts is far beyond the gain, then the mass murders will stop and there will be no need for obsessive and intrusive searchs before entering a public space.
This is cold and a basicly inhuman stance. However it is not new. For fifty years the Americans and the Russians have had an understanding that an attack with nuclear weapons on each other's territory would result directly, quickly, and unavoidably in an exchange that would destroy each other's country. It is a brutal, insane, and near omnicidal (the destruction of all human life on earth) policy, but it is the only policy that has worked for this situation. We should not forget that it is still in operation. Of course, it can only fail once.
The time has come to make the world of Islam know what exactly they will suffer in exchange for each level of mass murder committed in the future on the West in the name of Islam. This idea that ordinary people the West should be murdered by suicide solders in response for a military operation on Islamic peoples done as a response to a previous mass murder, must simply stop. It will only escalate with each incident until the West decides to utilize its vast stores of biological, nuclear, and chemical weapons against the people who live in Islamic societies. We should never forget that the Americans have enough WMDs to wake up one morning, decide to rid the world of every living Muslem, spend the morning planning it, the afternoon doing it, and the rest of the evening drinking beer and watching football.
So, France doesn't produce much music the world wants to listen to, or many movies they want to watch.
The best way to understand the relationship between Anglo and French cultures is to think of them as parallel universes. There is a lot of great stuff that happens in both that doesn't 'cross the bridge' between them.
French movies tend to be 'small' and not huge CGI blockbusters, but they tend to be the best of all the 'small' movies of the world. During the movie theater era before the VCR revolution of the mid-1980s, French films were widely shown in every major US cities. French directors like Truffaut and Rohmer were known throughout the world.
French music is not only the pop songs of the radio, but also most of Europe outside of the UK. Paris is also the ground zero for the world music movement. Much of the music of Africa is recorded there and many of the best African musicians are based there. Paris is also the center of the European orchestral music movement, both modern and classical. Classical music is rare and modern orchestral music unknown on US radio.
Back to the topic. I believe that the final effect of all the DRM and legal action against the consumers of corporate entertainment product will be the marked decrease in the demand for this product.
This might be beginning to happen with Hollywood movies. The box office revenue growth seen in the past eight years seems to have stopped. This has nothing to do with movie file sharing, because that activity is very small compared to the size of the industry itself. It's more due to high prices at the theaters and unexciting movies.
What we will see, hopefully, is a lot of smaller movies on DVD that rent for 1/2 or 1/3 of the cost of the latest blockbuster. It would seem to management that 20 $1 rentals is a lot worse than 4 $5 rentals, but that isn't so because the consumption of entertainment product creates its own demand for this product. It's a different type of product from, say, food. The more entertainment that you consume, the more that you want and the more money that you will pay for it.
Ipod wasn't really meant for...It's meant for joe-six-pack.
I don't believe that anything from Apple Computer is meant for "Joe Six-Pack". It's made for "Megan and Justin Portfolio" - the generic upper-middle-class arts-creative-type person. They have the money to pay the premium Apple price, the ability to best use the advanced design and interface character of Apple products, the distaste for technical details, and the subtle contempt for those who would feel the need or desire to skirt the restrictions imposed by Apple for the benefit of the product/company/community/class. They truly believe that bypassing DRM is bad because they feel that they are or more likely, someday will be making their well-heeled living off high priced 'intellectual property'.
The "Joe SixPack" type middle-class Chevy-truck Saturday-night-watching-wrestling-on-TV people are using their Walmart CD players for portable music needs. They wouldn't buy Apple products even if they were in the same price range, simply because their inherent social inferiority complex alienates them from image that is created by Apple's advertisements.
The worst password that a Slashdot reader can use is the initials of all the girls that you have made love with since middle school.
Even a simple BASIC program running on an old Commodore could probably crack that one in a few minutes.
Now the initials of all the girls that wouldn't make love with you, no matter how much you begged...that would be a secure password.
How many people are going to be willing to pay $1.00 USD to find out just the name of a song?
And after you do pay the cost for the song title, how do you know that it's correct?
I suspect that they have a couple people who know nothing except pop music on their staff. Some guy (never a woman) just listens for about 10 seconds and say's what he thinks is the name of the song.
The idea that they have some giant database and DSP algorythm that can identify a snippet of recorded pop music from a sample is simply too much for me to believe.
People are getting more money than me for this.
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Television on your Phone
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I have a hard time accepting that people are actually getting paid more than I am to conceive and implement ideas such as this. Paying serious money ($20/month) for the opportunity to watch a limited number of television shows on a 3-cm square handheld screen.
Every technological innovation goes through several stages:
1) First there is the long hard expensive period of research and development of the basic underlying engineering.
2) Then comes the conceptualizing of a possible product and/or application.
3) Then comes the stage when large amounts of resources are put into making a truly stupid product.
4) Then, the nadir. The point of absolute and total despair where the developers realize that they have spent all this time and effort into making something that is truly stupid, unbelievably expensive, and does nothing more than duplicate the function of a simple, common widely-used device that costs a tiny fraction of the new product.
5) Finally, the phoenix. The price of the new technology falls to the point where its secondary benefits make it worth as much and more than the simple common ordinary device that it is replacing. It then becomes the new simple, common ordinary way of doing a task.
This is seen over and over. The word processor replacing the typewriter. Steven Levy in Hackers writes of the despair of the guy who invented the word processor when he realized that he was using a $20000 minicomputer to duplicate the function of a $20 typewriter. Word processors started to make sense when minicomputers started to cost $2. The CD replacing the vinyl phonograph, the energy saver light bulb, the music synthesizer, the television infra-red remote, the list goes on and on. It's a process.
These guys are at the point where they have invested a ton of money to make a truly stupid product but haven't realized it yet. Let's all hope that they survive the coming crash. Yes, guys, you actually did spend millions on the idea that people would give you money to watch a inch-square TV in a television picture on their cell phone. But, cheer up! It's not the end of the world and eventually something really wonderful will come directly from it.
This is another good reason why Microsoft should buy Red Hat. Then Red Hat could focus on making some high-quality commercial tiny component of the 'computer solution to management issues'.
Clueless management Barbies and Kens could claim their total allegiance to dominant monopoly capitalism (every met one that wouldn't?) while the real corporate computer system network could be running with Linux under the control of the technocracy (which is you if you're reading this).
Microsoft Red Hat would provide the means for the Linux community to integrate competence and consistency into corporate computing while still testifying to senior management that they are still using the 'secure, stable, safe, and acceptable' Microsoft solution.
For all their talk, deep down senior management only cares that that their computers work. Fear of Linux is simply the general corporate fear of anything unknown.
The real reason behind the 9-11 attacks was, dare I say it, Islam.
We love to pretend that all religions are positive, equal, beneficial to humanity, comforting to believers, and a positive force in the world.
Bullshit.
Some religions are disfunctional. They just don't work. And they have no function internally to correct themselves and adapt to changing circumstances in their societies.
In the ancient world, the religions of the Greek and Roman gods fell into this category when they could no longer serve the needs of the people and the rulers.
It's time to consider the possibility that Islam now has the same problem. The possiblility that it does NOT serve the needs of the believers, does NOT guide how to live and love, and no longer provides a positive force in the world.
Or maybe instead Islam has been stolen by the insane who are using the faith as an excuse to be psychotic murderers.
But what makes Islam different from the other religions is that Islam has always granted the right to believers to murder the non-believers or any person who questions the more oppressive aspects of the faith. It is not a tolerant, multi-cultural religion. At least not the branch followed by the adherents who are always in the news for murdering people.
If you were to hear someone yell "Allah Akbar!" on the street or in a public space, would you feel all warm and cozy upon hearing an affirmation of goodness? Or, would you feel a deep, cold fear that something truly horrible was about to occur to you real soon?
A system of beliefs that primarily exists to create an atmosphere of horror, despair, and oppression simply has no place in the modern world. It is a disfunctional set of beliefs and must be challenged by all intelligent, civilized people such as yourself. It invokes evil. It should not be accepted as simply 'just one more color in the rainbow'.
Is Christianity also like this? Sure, at times. But when some Christians go insane they get challenged by the ones who do don't go crazy. When Moslems go insane, do other Moslems challenge them and demand that they return to the pure teachings of peace, harmony, and justice?
I've never seen it.
Re:Nice Anti-Usian Propaganda, Now Some Facts
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Cuba Switching to Linux
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· Score: 4, Funny
Overall, Cuba has a national GDP of $33.92 billion,
The reality simply is that Cuba is run by a corrupt and incompetant military dictator whose only prior qualification was being a spoiled rich kid and lawyer.
It sounds to me like Big Bill would be quite comfortable here, when he decides to retire. At only $33 Billion, he could just buy the whole place. Imagine him growing out his hair and having his image replacing all those of Che.
He could be just as corrupt and incompetent as he wants to be and no one would notice the difference. He'd have to get used to making eight hour speeches about the evil imperialist Linux worms, but we got pills now that make that no problem.
As for the rest of us, we'd finally get a real high quality English/Spanish translator built into Windows!
All this DRM technology will fail its intended purpose because the MPAA companies are trying to protect a 20th century marketplace that is fading ever more each day.
20th century film marketing was based on the pay-per-view model where a central facility (the movie theater) charged each person a fixed fee (the box office admission) for each showing of the film. It didn't matter which film was showing; customers paid the same entry fee. Unpopular product would not collect as many fees as a more-popular title.
In this model there is no price flexibility for the consumer. It's strictly take-it-or-leave-it. This model works when there is a limited number of viewing openings available (the seats in the theater) and limited product (one print of the film per theater and only a dozen copies of the film in the metro area).
This model fails when there is nearly unlimited product (all film titles from the past 50 years) on DVD or unlimited view openings. What happens in this type of market is that the consumers get to bid on what they will pay and the terms that they will pay for the product. The new technology has changed the marketplace by removing most of the previous restrictions. The new technology is not going away.
DRM is an attempt to force the previous market conditions onto the new business environment. The MPAA companies (the film studios) want to have the highly profitable previous marketplace conditions with the greatly expanded marketplace made available by DVD. Beaucoup bucks if you can make it happen.
But it won't work. What will happen if the MPAA companies actually get DRM to work is that the market for film product will shrink to a small percentage of what it is today.
Successfully integrating DRM into film industry product is not going to bring back the old way of presenting film entertainment product. It's just going to drive the current film consuming public into some other form of entertainment.
One of the reasons that parents are encouraged to read fairy tales to their children is that it is an effective way to get the collective wisdom of the ages passed on to the adults of the modern age who are too vain to listen to good advice coming from any other source. The fairy tale that the MPAA should pay attention to the story of the goose that laid golden eggs. This goose would lay one egg a day of pure gold. The villagers got greedy and decided to kill the goose, cut it open and get all the golden eggs that must be inside. This they did. And they found no gold inside. And they never got any more golden eggs.
Like the villagers, the film studios don't understand the new film market. Adding DRM to the product that is providing their golder eggs will be like killing the goose.
The basic assumption of the MPAA is that their product is the greatest thing on earth. They truly believe that every single living person would rather watch TV shows and Hollywood movies than do anything else. Therefore unprecedented measures must be taken to prevent this "consumption" without "payment", and deep punishments must be inflicted on those who would even attempt to indulge in the transcendental magnificence of their productions.
Uh, maybe so...now.
But if they continue to go to such lengths to harass people showing an interest in their little dramas, they may find that people will take the hint and find something else to do.
Then they will have to reverse their focus and actually come up with ways to get people to watch their shows. For free.
They sell their shows to advertisers and therefore depend on the largest possible audience viewing the show. Then they pass laws with huge fines and lengthy jail terms for anyone watching and distributing their shows.
They want to stop downloading of Hollywood product? Fine, but they should be a little careful about what they ask for, because they just might get it.
What I'd like to see is an itunes enhancement that either apple or other stations streams music and while a song is playing, there's a "buy" button so I can just download it if I like it.
Maybe it's just me, but I'd rather see a button on the radio that will record the song when pressed. Pressing the button would save the previous two minutes of broadcast and the next four minutes, format the recording into a 224kbps MP3 file and store it in internal memory for later download to the PC for editing. It would give the file a title that has the time, date, and radio station frequency.
In the days before Napster, I would put an 8-hour video tape into the VCR and connect the stereo audio to an interesting radio station before going to work. Super slow speed results in inferior quality video but good quality audio. Reviewing the whole 8 hour tape would take about 45 minutes. I would dub wanted songs to audio cassette tape (this was before MP3) and reuse the video tape the next day. I collected several hundred songs this way.
Now I make radio station DVD-ROMs that have the entire playlist of station (@ 800 songs in MP3 format) on a single 40-cent blank DVD-ROM. When I want to listen to a certian type of station, I just copy the DVD to the hard drive and set the MP3 player on random select. The radio experience without the all the horseshit.
write it in advance, take it to the cybercafe on a floppy, pgp it, email it to someone you trust (or an automated publisher)
This wouldn't work in the People's Republics where sending and receiving encrypted messages is illegal. In this case, perhaps encrypting the message and putting the message inside a photograph using a stegnography program would work for a while.
Eventually the police will learn about stegnographic programs and test all photos leaving the country on the web for any messages. There aren't that many commercial steg programs around.
In brutal repressive regimes, the primary means of gathering information on the resistance is through informers. Eventually the police arrest everyone and offer them the deal of either spy on your neighbors and friends or rot in prison forever. The former East Germans were the masters of this. Almost everyone was forced to spy for the secret police. When the government fell the people first burned down the internal security headquarters and the files. The Israelis also use this technique to control Palestine. But they are far too heavy-handed to be effective.
Assume that the best scientists and engineers will be working to spy on people. The police can easily arrest these people for imaginary crimes and then offer them special treatment in exchange for their willing co-operation. An excellent novel on how this works is The First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, writing about the slave labor camps for scientists in the Stalinist USSR.
This is an astute comment! "Say, that's astute, Let's get together and form an institute!"
There needs to be a web site called LinuxIsBetter.com that explains exactly why open source is better that the corresponding MS apps and how exactly to configure the plain vanilla OSS ap to be so much better than the MS app.
You just can't have this info scattered all over the web in obscure sites. And please go lightly on the acronyms.
This is a example of the need for offshore ISPs where discussions can be held without harassment. It's an example of how the 'loser' countries of the 20th century can become the winners of the 21st. By being so low on the totem pole (a Pacific Northwest North American Tribal Nation's religious icon that has come to mean in American idiom to be insignificant in a hierarchy) that no one gives you any money so you have nothing to lose by providing a forum for people to air grievances.
An enterprising person in a (relatively) stable nowheresville sets up an uncensored ISP. Then charges micropayments for access. In return the ISP ignores all threats and warnings of civil actions from countries with overdeveloped legal systems. This could be in a country like Nigeria that is super-corrupt and has its own resource base, or UAE in the Gulf where there is so much wealth that they immune to any bullying. Or a place like Botswana that has stability and no money. Or maybe a microstate like Litchenstein that has traditionally provided these various discrete services to their powerful neighbors.
And again, you could fight this in court of law. You do have democracy, freedom of speech, tradition, and all that jazz on your side. But American courts run on money. It would be a lot cheaper in the long run just to hold the discussions on an offshore site in neutral territory. And it would send a strong message to lawyers that in the information age there is a new limit to the extent that they can use legal means to harass and intimidate people just for money.
Let's be short and sweet about this. It's is a contraction of "it is". It's a beautiful day! Its is a posssessive adjective, something belongs to it. The computer crashed again. Its program is wrong.
Mastering the natural language can be as hard as mastering C++. But it's all precision symbol manipulation necessary to understand subtle meanings.
Feel free to mock my intelligence for forgetting the 'address of' & operator or messing up the pointer structure, but I don't want to hear anything about being a grammar Nazi. I only do this to keep people from knowing that you were smoking sinse in 4th grade instead of paying attention in English period.
The RIAA companies stole the public domain. They bribed the politicians to pass laws that indefinitely extend the copyright period on all published materials since the first third of the 20th century.
Under the legal principal that creates the authority of copyright protection, artistic materials must become part of the public domain after a set period of time. Bribing politicians to continously extend this period on materials that have reached the limit of their copyright is stealing from the public. It's like agreeing to pay a certain amount for an item only to find that the seller has doubled the price on the day that last payment is due... extending the number of payments that you have to make for another fifty years into the future.
And they haven't done this just once; they have done it repeatedly. Which establishes a pattern of confirmed criminal behavior in a court of law. And confirmed criminals don't get to decide what the laws are going to be for everyone else.
No civilized people or government should stand for this.
When we copy and freely distribute, we are reclaiming what has been stolen from us already. Reclaiming it from the people who have committed the biggest crime in artistic history; the theft of the public domain.
It must be pointed out over and over again:
The RIAA has no legal, moral, or ethical authority to call anyone criminals.
It bears remembering here that spam filters are not really the problem.
The problem is the spammers.
Kill the spammers (yes, I do mean that, I'm not using that term as a shorthand for denying their bandwidth access) and all the problems with the spam filters will solve themselves.
Spamming is not a free speech issue. It's an issue of people stealing huge amounts of a public good (bandwidth access) for their own private gain.
Spamming is similar to the Islamic and Jewish prohibition against eating pork. This restriction came about not because some God in the sky cursed this one animal, but because pork tastes so good that everyone would want to grow pigs for meat. But pig-raising takes an enormous amount of water and that is the most precious commodity in the desert. Simple commercial restrictions didn't work as the rich would always find ways to overuse supplies of water for pig raising and leave the poor to die from lack of water. The only way to protect this valuable public resource from being overconsumed only for the benefit of a few was to issue a complete prohibition of pig raising and to do it in a religious context. People won't raise pigs secretly when they believe that they will go to hell forever as a result of doing it. The restriction remains even in regions with vast water resources as a symbolic diet restriction used to demonstrate a believer's religious conviction.
So too must we restrict spamming as something that is just not done, and spare no effort to go after the people that do it. It's necessary to be unreasonable about this because it's the only way to protect our resource of limited bandwidth (and by extension, limited attention span).
In the novel Ecotopia the western half of the states of Oregon, Washington, Alaska, and the northern half of California join with the provences of BC and Yukon to form an independent country. They convince the Americans to allow them to leave by threatening them with WMDs at the same time that the USA economy is collapsing and taking Canada with it.
Then it isolates itself from the USA: no visitors, no commerce, no media, nothing for twenty years. Finally a New York Times reporter is allowed to visit. The novel is the collection of his dispatches.
Ecotopia's strict seperation isn't realistic in a US corporate-dominated world, but there is a tiny movement in the Pacific Northwest to consider seperating from the USA and forming an independent republic of Cascadia. As the politicians in Washington DC slip further into dementia and the internet increases economic ties and communications between Cascadia, Europe, and Asia, it's an idea that might start to catch on.
The USSR seperated into seperate countries as did Czechoslovakia. It's possible that the red/blue divide in the USA could crystalize into a permanent political division. Anything's possible in the future, especially considering that the Republicians have made it clear that they will be stealing every presidential election from now on.
Neither Blockbuster nor NetFlix really interests me. Blockbuster is too expensive at $3 a rental when the local supermarket has 24-hour rentals on weeknights for $1. With Netflix, you have to wait for the stupid disks to physically ship back to the warehouse before you get others.
I live on the border between the city and the suburb and can use the public libraries of both. The city library has lots of high quality DVDs that didn't blast the boxoffice. Stuff like David Mamet films and non-Hollywood gems like John Malcovitch's 'The Dancer Upstairs'. The suburban library has multiplex titles like Julia Roberts and Tom Cruise, but even the newest titles sitting on the shelf are about a year old (from opening weekend). It doesn't matter much: last year's Tom Cruise movie is pretty much the same as next year's Tom Cruise movie and 'Buddy Cops VI' isn't a giant leap from 'Buddy Cops IV'. None of it's really worth a $30/month subscription fee or $3 rental.
Libraries are good places to get old Hollywood stuff that you might not want to rent or purchase when you live on a Technician's budget. Stuff like Humphrey Bogart's lesser known films or John Wayne, Hitchcock, silent era films, and so forth.
Am I cheap? Yeah, sure. Do I give a fuck? Not really anymore. This is the new America, the old rules no longer make any sense.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're seriously bored with the lack of AI and realism in current games, have I got the solution for you!
It's called US-Soldier. What a wild game! You don't have to buy it. Just sign up. You start by running around endlessly and having some guy yell at you for trival things. This goes on for weeks while you learn the rules of the game.
Then, the playing action begins. You get physically relocated to some hot-dry shithole on the other side of the world. Surrounded by thousands of the enemy. You can't tell them apart from ordinary people, but it doesn't matter because everyone hates you just for being there. The enemy has hundreds of years experience fighting new gamers like you. They know all the tricks. They communicate in a special language that you or anyone on your game team can't understand. But they know how you think from watching your television shows and movies. They have a secret religion that enables them to kill anyone without remorse and to accept their own and their fellow gamers deaths without hesitation.
Such incredible realism in this game. And your enemy's gaming stategy is based on the experience of a permanent hot war that has been going on there since you were born. They were gaining combat experience while you were watching cartoons. They've already made all the mistakes in this combat game and they won't make them again, but you will.
Just like an arcade game, when you're done playing, you get sent right back to begin again.
And just like every other video game, no matter how good you get, in the end, you always lose.
Sign up now!
A lot of the supposed loss that results from espionage is mitigated by the fact that the stolen data simply goes from one inept corporate bureaucracy to another. As much as they'd like to, most lame, ossified organizations can't do much to improve their own position regardless of the strategic worth of stolen competitor's data.
It's just 'Spy vs. Spy'; an endless expensive game that changes very little in the real world.
And regarding the use of social engineering to break into secure systems and procure passwords, it too has exagerated importance. The old fashioned tried-and-true methods of blackmail, bribery, kidnapping, and extortion work as well if not better in modern corporate and military environments as they have for hundreds of years. The stricter the corporate punishment for transgressions, the more inflexible the rules, the harder the no-tolerance policy... the cheaper and easier it is to use blackmail and bribery on the target employees. This is why the Americans can't destroy 'the base' (whose Arabic name triggers the NSA internet evesdropping software). They can't be blackmailed, bribed, or persuaded with. Hell, they can't even be found.
You want a secure corporate environment? Trust your people, pay your people reasonably, don't assume that you can judge their moral character by the molecular structure of their urine. In other words, don't act like a stupid paranoid American.
This whole idea that adding bulletproof DRM to entertainment products is going to increase total revenue for the entertainment companies (all five of them) is just so, so wrong.
It is based on the flawed concept that all pieces of entertainment product have the same basic utility to consumers and therefore should have the same price. And, the business model continues, when consumers won't pay that price and seek an alternative, they are stealing from the entertainment companies (all five of them throughout the world) and defrauding them of their legitimate profit.
This model was a convenient fiction in the days not too long ago when entertainment product was sold by individual units of the physical medium through which the product was distributed. But today, it is a fatally flawed perspective. Fatal that is, to the entertainment industry.
Because there is, in reality, a near-infinite number of levels of entertainment value. There is the individual consumer's matrix of taste, i.e. what each person is willing to pay for an individual entertainment title according to their likes. There is the near infinite number of titles of entertainment product. And there are billions of consumers, each with a different entertainment budget.
The entertainment industry has created their present dilemma by having only two prices for their products: High and free.
Ending the free entertainment channel by encrypting product in bulletproof DRM is not going to send greater amounts of entertainment budgets to the consumption of product at the High price! If people wanted to buy entertainment product at the high price, nothing is stopping them from doing it.
But they don't want to, they want a flexible pricing structure for entertainment product.
My point is, adding DRM is going to channel discressionary income that was going to buy 20th- century entertainment product into 21st-century products that are not owned, controlled, or understood by the five corporations that currently control the global entertainment industry. I don't really doubt any more that these fools will be successful at creating DRM. It's just that I don't think that they really understand that they will be destroying their own industry when they succeed at finally doing this.
The root cause of their problem is the lack of a flexible pricing structure for their product, and DRM is not going to solve that problem.
Be careful what you ask for, 'cause you just might get it!
Personal computers are the only machines that don't turn off and on when you press the on/off switch.
Sometimes I press the off switch and some asshat program pops up a window and says that it won't terminate until I move the mouse to some little point on the window and click it. I can't do that because I've already turned the monitor off. I come back hours later and the fucking machine is still ON!
When I press the OFF switch, I want the stupid machine to turn off. Turn Off Now. No windows, no prompts, no "Are you sure?", no nothing...just turn the fuck off.
Linux is the worst PC operating system in this regard. Press the off key and the system reacts like you're trying to shut down the Defense Department. Page after page of scrolling lines indicating that this and that mickey-mouse section of the OS is exiting. Who gives a fuck? Just turn off! Now!
Turning the PC on is just as bad. It has to load 100 million bytes of code that haven't changed during the last 1000 times that I turned the stupid thing on. Here I have a 128 Megabyte Flash Disk about the size of my little toe and costing $17. So why the fuck can't I have all the OS on the Flash drive? So that it will go on at the moment that I flip the ON switch! C'mon guys, we're not booting from floppies anymore! It's time to leave the 1980's PC mentality!
Turn off and on when the user changes the state of the off/on switch. Such a truly revolutionary and mind-boggling concept!
Of course someone will point out that after months of study, research, experimentation, and trial compiling, (and hours of waiting and staring at the monitor), I could configure the system to do something resembling instant off/on when the switch gets pressed.
So why the fuck is this not the fucking default state of the machine! C'mon, guys, the ENIAC days are gone. This thing on your desk is an appliance. And like all appliances, it should go off and on when you hit the off/on switch!
When the people who are causing the mass murders in your public transport networks have a basic organizational framework but have not yet reached the level of civilization, you are not going to get the best security from surveilence.
It is far better to put resources into infiltration and communication with the leaders of the groups who are sending suicide solders out into your society.
It is important to have these leaders understand that there will be precise, exact, and unavoidable retaliation for specific acts of random mass murder committed by these groups. And (this is quite important) it is imperative to have them understand that the price that they will pay for sending suicide solders into your society will be far greater than any physical or propaganda gain that they will achieve for their cause (either political or religious) resulting from these acts of mass murder.
When the leaders of the mass murder cults realize that the price that they and their cause and their people will pay for having committed these acts is far beyond the gain, then the mass murders will stop and there will be no need for obsessive and intrusive searchs before entering a public space.
This is cold and a basicly inhuman stance. However it is not new. For fifty years the Americans and the Russians have had an understanding that an attack with nuclear weapons on each other's territory would result directly, quickly, and unavoidably in an exchange that would destroy each other's country. It is a brutal, insane, and near omnicidal (the destruction of all human life on earth) policy, but it is the only policy that has worked for this situation. We should not forget that it is still in operation. Of course, it can only fail once.
The time has come to make the world of Islam know what exactly they will suffer in exchange for each level of mass murder committed in the future on the West in the name of Islam. This idea that ordinary people the West should be murdered by suicide solders in response for a military operation on Islamic peoples done as a response to a previous mass murder, must simply stop. It will only escalate with each incident until the West decides to utilize its vast stores of biological, nuclear, and chemical weapons against the people who live in Islamic societies. We should never forget that the Americans have enough WMDs to wake up one morning, decide to rid the world of every living Muslem, spend the morning planning it, the afternoon doing it, and the rest of the evening drinking beer and watching football.
They shouldn't forget it either.
So, France doesn't produce much music the world wants to listen to, or many movies they want to watch.
The best way to understand the relationship between Anglo and French cultures is to think of them as parallel universes. There is a lot of great stuff that happens in both that doesn't 'cross the bridge' between them.
French movies tend to be 'small' and not huge CGI blockbusters, but they tend to be the best of all the 'small' movies of the world. During the movie theater era before the VCR revolution of the mid-1980s, French films were widely shown in every major US cities. French directors like Truffaut and Rohmer were known throughout the world.
French music is not only the pop songs of the radio, but also most of Europe outside of the UK. Paris is also the ground zero for the world music movement. Much of the music of Africa is recorded there and many of the best African musicians are based there. Paris is also the center of the European orchestral music movement, both modern and classical. Classical music is rare and modern orchestral music unknown on US radio.
Back to the topic. I believe that the final effect of all the DRM and legal action against the consumers of corporate entertainment product will be the marked decrease in the demand for this product.
This might be beginning to happen with Hollywood movies. The box office revenue growth seen in the past eight years seems to have stopped. This has nothing to do with movie file sharing, because that activity is very small compared to the size of the industry itself. It's more due to high prices at the theaters and unexciting movies.
What we will see, hopefully, is a lot of smaller movies on DVD that rent for 1/2 or 1/3 of the cost of the latest blockbuster. It would seem to management that 20 $1 rentals is a lot worse than 4 $5 rentals, but that isn't so because the consumption of entertainment product creates its own demand for this product. It's a different type of product from, say, food. The more entertainment that you consume, the more that you want and the more money that you will pay for it.
Ipod wasn't really meant for ...It's meant for joe-six-pack.
I don't believe that anything from Apple Computer is meant for "Joe Six-Pack". It's made for "Megan and Justin Portfolio" - the generic upper-middle-class arts-creative-type person. They have the money to pay the premium Apple price, the ability to best use the advanced design and interface character of Apple products, the distaste for technical details, and the subtle contempt for those who would feel the need or desire to skirt the restrictions imposed by Apple for the benefit of the product/company/community/class. They truly believe that bypassing DRM is bad because they feel that they are or more likely, someday will be making their well-heeled living off high priced 'intellectual property'.
The "Joe SixPack" type middle-class Chevy-truck Saturday-night-watching-wrestling-on-TV people are using their Walmart CD players for portable music needs. They wouldn't buy Apple products even if they were in the same price range, simply because their inherent social inferiority complex alienates them from image that is created by Apple's advertisements.
The worst password that a Slashdot reader can use is the initials of all the girls that you have made love with since middle school.
Even a simple BASIC program running on an old Commodore could probably crack that one in a few minutes.
Now the initials of all the girls that wouldn't make love with you, no matter how much you begged...that would be a secure password.
How many people are going to be willing to pay $1.00 USD to find out just the name of a song?
And after you do pay the cost for the song title, how do you know that it's correct?
I suspect that they have a couple people who know nothing except pop music on their staff. Some guy (never a woman) just listens for about 10 seconds and say's what he thinks is the name of the song.
The idea that they have some giant database and DSP algorythm that can identify a snippet of recorded pop music from a sample is simply too much for me to believe.
I have a hard time accepting that people are actually getting paid more than I am to conceive and implement ideas such as this. Paying serious money ($20/month) for the opportunity to watch a limited number of television shows on a 3-cm square handheld screen.
Every technological innovation goes through several stages:
1) First there is the long hard expensive period of research and development of the basic underlying engineering.
2) Then comes the conceptualizing of a possible product and/or application.
3) Then comes the stage when large amounts of resources are put into making a truly stupid product.
4) Then, the nadir. The point of absolute and total despair where the developers realize that they have spent all this time and effort into making something that is truly stupid, unbelievably expensive, and does nothing more than duplicate the function of a simple, common widely-used device that costs a tiny fraction of the new product.
5) Finally, the phoenix. The price of the new technology falls to the point where its secondary benefits make it worth as much and more than the simple common ordinary device that it is replacing. It then becomes the new simple, common ordinary way of doing a task.
This is seen over and over. The word processor replacing the typewriter. Steven Levy in Hackers writes of the despair of the guy who invented the word processor when he realized that he was using a $20000 minicomputer to duplicate the function of a $20 typewriter. Word processors started to make sense when minicomputers started to cost $2. The CD replacing the vinyl phonograph, the energy saver light bulb, the music synthesizer, the television infra-red remote, the list goes on and on. It's a process.
These guys are at the point where they have invested a ton of money to make a truly stupid product but haven't realized it yet. Let's all hope that they survive the coming crash. Yes, guys, you actually did spend millions on the idea that people would give you money to watch a inch-square TV in a television picture on their cell phone. But, cheer up! It's not the end of the world and eventually something really wonderful will come directly from it.
Someday.
This is another good reason why Microsoft should buy Red Hat. Then Red Hat could focus on making some high-quality commercial tiny component of the 'computer solution to management issues'.
Clueless management Barbies and Kens could claim their total allegiance to dominant monopoly capitalism (every met one that wouldn't?) while the real corporate computer system network could be running with Linux under the control of the technocracy (which is you if you're reading this).
Microsoft Red Hat would provide the means for the Linux community to integrate competence and consistency into corporate computing while still testifying to senior management that they are still using the 'secure, stable, safe, and acceptable' Microsoft solution.
For all their talk, deep down senior management only cares that that their computers work. Fear of Linux is simply the general corporate fear of anything unknown.
The real reason behind the 9-11 attacks was, dare I say it, Islam.
We love to pretend that all religions are positive, equal, beneficial to humanity, comforting to believers, and a positive force in the world.
Bullshit.
Some religions are disfunctional. They just don't work. And they have no function internally to correct themselves and adapt to changing circumstances in their societies.
In the ancient world, the religions of the Greek and Roman gods fell into this category when they could no longer serve the needs of the people and the rulers.
It's time to consider the possibility that Islam now has the same problem. The possiblility that it does NOT serve the needs of the believers, does NOT guide how to live and love, and no longer provides a positive force in the world.
Or maybe instead Islam has been stolen by the insane who are using the faith as an excuse to be psychotic murderers.
But what makes Islam different from the other religions is that Islam has always granted the right to believers to murder the non-believers or any person who questions the more oppressive aspects of the faith. It is not a tolerant, multi-cultural religion. At least not the branch followed by the adherents who are always in the news for murdering people.
If you were to hear someone yell "Allah Akbar!" on the street or in a public space, would you feel all warm and cozy upon hearing an affirmation of goodness? Or, would you feel a deep, cold fear that something truly horrible was about to occur to you real soon?
A system of beliefs that primarily exists to create an atmosphere of horror, despair, and oppression simply has no place in the modern world. It is a disfunctional set of beliefs and must be challenged by all intelligent, civilized people such as yourself. It invokes evil. It should not be accepted as simply 'just one more color in the rainbow'.
Is Christianity also like this? Sure, at times. But when some Christians go insane they get challenged by the ones who do don't go crazy. When Moslems go insane, do other Moslems challenge them and demand that they return to the pure teachings of peace, harmony, and justice?
I've never seen it.
Overall, Cuba has a national GDP of $33.92 billion,
The reality simply is that Cuba is run by a corrupt and incompetant military dictator whose only prior qualification was being a spoiled rich kid and lawyer.
It sounds to me like Big Bill would be quite comfortable here, when he decides to retire. At only $33 Billion, he could just buy the whole place. Imagine him growing out his hair and having his image replacing all those of Che.
He could be just as corrupt and incompetent as he wants to be and no one would notice the difference. He'd have to get used to making eight hour speeches about the evil imperialist Linux worms, but we got pills now that make that no problem.
As for the rest of us, we'd finally get a real high quality English/Spanish translator built into
Windows!
All this DRM technology will fail its intended purpose because the MPAA companies are trying to protect a 20th century marketplace that is fading ever more each day.
20th century film marketing was based on the pay-per-view model where a central facility (the movie theater) charged each person a fixed fee (the box office admission) for each showing of the film. It didn't matter which film was showing; customers paid the same entry fee. Unpopular product would not collect as many fees as a more-popular title.
In this model there is no price flexibility for the consumer. It's strictly take-it-or-leave-it. This model works when there is a limited number of viewing openings available (the seats in the theater) and limited product (one print of the film per theater and only a dozen copies of the film in the metro area).
This model fails when there is nearly unlimited product (all film titles from the past 50 years) on DVD or unlimited view openings. What happens in this type of market is that the consumers get to bid on what they will pay and the terms that they will pay for the product. The new technology has changed the marketplace by removing most of the previous restrictions. The new technology is not going away.
DRM is an attempt to force the previous market conditions onto the new business environment. The MPAA companies (the film studios) want to have the highly profitable previous marketplace conditions with the greatly expanded marketplace made available by DVD. Beaucoup bucks if you can make it happen.
But it won't work. What will happen if the MPAA companies actually get DRM to work is that the market for film product will shrink to a small percentage of what it is today.
Successfully integrating DRM into film industry product is not going to bring back the old way of presenting film entertainment product. It's just going to drive the current film consuming public into some other form of entertainment.
One of the reasons that parents are encouraged to read fairy tales to their children is that it is an effective way to get the collective wisdom of the ages passed on to the adults of the modern age who are too vain to listen to good advice coming from any other source. The fairy tale that the MPAA should pay attention to the story of the goose that laid golden eggs. This goose would lay one egg a day of pure gold. The villagers got greedy and decided to kill the goose, cut it open and get all the golden eggs that must be inside. This they did. And they found no gold inside. And they never got any more golden eggs.
Like the villagers, the film studios don't understand the new film market. Adding DRM to the product that is providing their golder eggs will be like killing the goose.
The basic assumption of the MPAA is that their product is the greatest thing on earth. They truly believe that every single living person would rather watch TV shows and Hollywood movies than do anything else. Therefore unprecedented measures must be taken to prevent this "consumption" without "payment", and deep punishments must be inflicted on those who would even attempt to indulge in the transcendental magnificence of their productions.
Uh, maybe so...now.
But if they continue to go to such lengths to harass people showing an interest in their little dramas, they may find that people will take the hint and find something else to do.
Then they will have to reverse their focus and actually come up with ways to get people to watch their shows. For free.
They sell their shows to advertisers and therefore depend on the largest possible audience viewing the show. Then they pass laws with huge fines and lengthy jail terms for anyone watching and distributing their shows.
They want to stop downloading of Hollywood product? Fine, but they should be a little careful about what they ask for, because they just might get it.
What I'd like to see is an itunes enhancement that either apple or other stations streams music and while a song is playing, there's a "buy" button so I can just download it if I like it.
Maybe it's just me, but I'd rather see a button on the radio that will record the song when pressed. Pressing the button would save the previous two minutes of broadcast and the next four minutes, format the recording into a 224kbps MP3 file and store it in internal memory for later download to the PC for editing. It would give the file a title that has the time, date, and radio station frequency.
In the days before Napster, I would put an 8-hour video tape into the VCR and connect the stereo audio to an interesting radio station before going to work. Super slow speed results in inferior quality video but good quality audio. Reviewing the whole 8 hour tape would take about 45 minutes. I would dub wanted songs to audio cassette tape (this was before MP3) and reuse the video tape the next day. I collected several hundred songs this way.
Now I make radio station DVD-ROMs that have the entire playlist of station (@ 800 songs in MP3 format) on a single 40-cent blank DVD-ROM. When I want to listen to a certian type of station, I just copy the DVD to the hard drive and set the MP3 player on random select. The radio experience without the all the horseshit.
write it in advance, take it to the cybercafe on a floppy, pgp it, email it to someone you trust (or an automated publisher)
This wouldn't work in the People's Republics where sending and receiving encrypted messages is illegal.
In this case, perhaps encrypting the message and putting the message inside a photograph using a stegnography program would work for a while.
Eventually the police will learn about stegnographic programs and test all photos leaving the country on the web for any messages. There aren't that many commercial steg programs around.
In brutal repressive regimes, the primary means of gathering information on the resistance is through informers. Eventually the police arrest everyone and offer them the deal of either spy on your neighbors and friends or rot in prison forever. The former East Germans were the masters of this. Almost everyone was forced to spy for the secret police. When the government fell the people first burned down the internal security headquarters and the files. The Israelis also use this technique to control Palestine. But they are far too heavy-handed to be effective.
Assume that the best scientists and engineers will be working to spy on people. The police can easily arrest these people for imaginary crimes and then offer them special treatment in exchange for their willing co-operation. An excellent novel on how this works is The First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, writing about the slave labor camps for scientists in the Stalinist USSR.
This is an astute comment! "Say, that's astute, Let's get together and form an institute!"
There needs to be a web site called LinuxIsBetter.com that explains exactly why open source is better that the corresponding MS apps and how exactly to configure the plain vanilla OSS ap to be so much better than the MS app.
You just can't have this info scattered all over the web in obscure sites. And please go lightly on the acronyms.
MOD -10 for explaining "totem pole."
Slashdot is a global forum. Many people here would not understand obscure American expressions.
This is a example of the need for offshore ISPs where discussions can be held without harassment. It's an example of how the 'loser' countries of the 20th century can become the winners of the 21st. By being so low on the totem pole (a Pacific Northwest North American Tribal Nation's religious icon that has come to mean in American idiom to be insignificant in a hierarchy) that no one gives you any money so you have nothing to lose by providing a forum for people to air grievances.
An enterprising person in a (relatively) stable nowheresville sets up an uncensored ISP. Then charges micropayments for access. In return the ISP ignores all threats and warnings of civil actions from countries with overdeveloped legal systems. This could be in a country like Nigeria that is super-corrupt and has its own resource base, or UAE in the Gulf where there is so much wealth that they immune to any bullying. Or a place like Botswana that has stability and no money. Or maybe a microstate like Litchenstein that has traditionally provided these various discrete services to their powerful neighbors.
And again, you could fight this in court of law. You do have democracy, freedom of speech, tradition, and all that jazz on your side. But American courts run on money. It would be a lot cheaper in the long run just to hold the discussions on an offshore site in neutral territory. And it would send a strong message to lawyers that in the information age there is a new limit to the extent that they can use legal means to harass and intimidate people just for money.
Let's be short and sweet about this. It's is a contraction of "it is". It's a beautiful day!
Its is a posssessive adjective, something belongs to it. The computer crashed again. Its program is wrong.
Mastering the natural language can be as hard as mastering C++. But it's all precision symbol manipulation necessary to understand subtle meanings.
Feel free to mock my intelligence for forgetting the 'address of' & operator or messing up the pointer structure, but I don't want to hear anything about being a grammar Nazi. I only do this to keep people from knowing that you were smoking sinse in 4th grade instead of paying attention in English period.
The RIAA companies stole the public domain. They bribed the politicians to pass laws that indefinitely extend the copyright period on all published materials since the first third of the 20th century.
Under the legal principal that creates the authority of copyright protection, artistic materials must become part of the public domain after a set period of time. Bribing politicians to continously extend this period on materials that have reached the limit of their copyright is stealing from the public. It's like agreeing to pay a certain amount for an item only to find that the seller has doubled the price on the day that last payment is due... extending the number of payments that you have to make for another fifty years into the future.
And they haven't done this just once; they have done it repeatedly. Which establishes a pattern of confirmed criminal behavior in a court of law. And confirmed criminals don't get to decide what the laws are going to be for everyone else.
No civilized people or government should stand for this.
When we copy and freely distribute, we are reclaiming what has been stolen from us already. Reclaiming it from the people who have committed the biggest crime in artistic history; the theft of the public domain.
It must be pointed out over and over again:
The RIAA has no legal, moral, or ethical authority to call anyone criminals.
Plain and simple in any culture, at any time.
It bears remembering here that spam filters are not really the problem.
The problem is the spammers.
Kill the spammers (yes, I do mean that, I'm not using that term as a shorthand for denying their bandwidth access) and all the problems with the spam filters will solve themselves.
Spamming is not a free speech issue. It's an issue of people stealing huge amounts of a public good (bandwidth access) for their own private gain.
Spamming is similar to the Islamic and Jewish prohibition against eating pork. This restriction came about not because some God in the sky cursed this one animal, but because pork tastes so good that everyone would want to grow pigs for meat. But pig-raising takes an enormous amount of water and that is the most precious commodity in the desert. Simple commercial restrictions didn't work as the rich would always find ways to overuse supplies of water for pig raising and leave the poor to die from lack of water. The only way to protect this valuable public resource from being overconsumed only for the benefit of a few was to issue a complete prohibition of pig raising and to do it in a religious context. People won't raise pigs secretly when they believe that they will go to hell forever as a result of doing it. The restriction remains even in regions with vast water resources as a symbolic diet restriction used to demonstrate a believer's religious conviction.
So too must we restrict spamming as something that is just not done, and spare no effort to go after the people that do it. It's necessary to be unreasonable about this because it's the only way to protect our resource of limited bandwidth (and by extension, limited attention span).
In the novel Ecotopia the western half of the states of Oregon, Washington, Alaska, and the northern half of California join with the provences of BC and Yukon to form an independent country. They convince the Americans to allow them to leave by threatening them with WMDs at the same time that the USA economy is collapsing and taking Canada with it.
Then it isolates itself from the USA: no visitors, no commerce, no media, nothing for twenty years. Finally a New York Times reporter is allowed to visit. The novel is the collection of his dispatches.
Ecotopia's strict seperation isn't realistic in a US corporate-dominated world, but there is a tiny movement in the Pacific Northwest to consider seperating from the USA and forming an independent republic of Cascadia. As the politicians in Washington DC slip further into dementia and the internet increases economic ties and communications between Cascadia, Europe, and Asia, it's an idea that might start to catch on.
The USSR seperated into seperate countries as did Czechoslovakia. It's possible that the red/blue divide in the USA could crystalize into a permanent political division. Anything's possible in the future, especially considering that the Republicians have made it clear that they will be stealing every presidential election from now on.
Neither Blockbuster nor NetFlix really interests me. Blockbuster is too expensive at $3 a rental when the local supermarket has 24-hour rentals on weeknights for $1. With Netflix, you have to wait for the stupid disks to physically ship back to the warehouse before you get others.
I live on the border between the city and the suburb and can use the public libraries of both. The city library has lots of high quality DVDs that didn't blast the boxoffice. Stuff like David Mamet films and non-Hollywood gems like John Malcovitch's 'The Dancer Upstairs'. The suburban library has multiplex titles like Julia Roberts and Tom Cruise, but even the newest titles sitting on the shelf are about a year old (from opening weekend). It doesn't matter much: last year's Tom Cruise movie is pretty much the same as next year's Tom Cruise movie and 'Buddy Cops VI' isn't a giant leap from 'Buddy Cops IV'.
None of it's really worth a $30/month subscription fee or $3 rental.
Libraries are good places to get old Hollywood stuff that you might not want to rent or purchase when you live on a Technician's budget. Stuff like Humphrey Bogart's lesser known films or John Wayne, Hitchcock, silent era films, and so forth.
Am I cheap? Yeah, sure. Do I give a fuck? Not really anymore. This is the new America, the old rules no longer make any sense.