The my.mp3.com site does introduce the additional question of "ownership" issues. They assume that if you posess a hard copy of the music, then you have a "legal right" to the music in another format. (This is of course subject to future legistation that may or may not affect their service.)
By doing the things you suggested, ripping or burning, you never actually take ownership of the recordings in a legal sense. By using my.mp3.com, the implication is that you now legally own (a copy of) it and can do what you like with it in whatever format - a fairly significant difference.
I wasn't suggesting that "increased population leading to even more increased population" was a bad thing in itself (though I think it will be), but more that if there are more peple alive *at the same time*, there are more resources consumed concurrently, and existing problems get worse. We already have problems with illness, poverty, social security, health care, damage to the environment, etc. with our current population; these things only get worse when you increase the number of people involved. That's the simplest math I can suggest, my anonymous friend.
Curing such things may very well be good for the individual, but what about for our society at large? Less of these illnesses means a longer life span, which means a higher population, which means a denser population, which means a more fertile breeding ground for the development and spread of more fatal diseases and virii.
Nature tends to "find a way" to create balance (often through chaos and destruction) in the world's systems of life. As has happened with many other kinds of virii and bacteria, when we find a "cure" for one strain, another strain emerges that is resistent to our medicine, and is often stronger and more effective.
Curing the common cold is great, but I'm scared that the common cold as we know it may then become a disease that gives us much more to worry about than a few days home in bed.
I co-own a website design company, Summersault, Inc, that also provides hosting services. We mostly do this as a convenience to our design clients so that they can get the "one stop" package. As a result, we don't really bill ourselves as a "100% uptime, able-to-survive-nuclear-winters" service, but instead focus on the personal touch. There's just two of us, but we return all e-mails personally within 24 hours (often sooner), we're on call 24 hours a day, and we have come to think of most of our clients as friends instead of anonymous bill-payers. Sure, maybe we're down a little more often, but still have 99.6% uptime, and we personally care about your hosting account.
People seem to prefer this kind of service over the cheap places that host thousands of domains but don't give you any sort of helping hand or personal service.
I'm also amazed at hosting places that guarantee you service X for life. "E-mail address for life" or "free web hosting for life", etc. just seems like a ridiculous thing to promise in this age, where mergers, changes in technology, and the whims of the end-user changes the standards of service on a daily basis. It's incredible to me that these firms might have considered the long-term resources involved in providing a service to someone who is 20 years old today, guaranteeing that it will be there when they're 80. In many cases, I doubt they *do* have a plan.
I'm curious how he would propose that we, the merry men and women of the Slashdot community, go about stopping the largest corporate merger ever.
Legally, the only people that have the power to stop the merger are the various government organizations that oversee enforcement of antitrust law and the financial issues of mergers. These entities get funding from various government sources, but we can assume such funding is probably regulated by Congress. We can also probably assume that these entities do not have a "consumer hotline" for you to voice your opinion, but rather that they serve the interests of the government and larger corporate america, not the individual citizen. And the media has no say in things like this; hell, AOL and Time Warner ARE the media.
The individual citizen isn't really sending the right signals anyway. Time Warner controls about 25% of music sales in the US, and we keep on buying. Time Warner owns "Friends" and "ER", and we keep on watching. AOL has 20 million subscribers, and more sign up every day. Why would these companies have any reason to think that we don't like the thought of them controlling everything we think, hear, see, and buy? We have not given them any reason to believe otherwise.
Before you go criticizing mergers and takeovers and corporate business plans, I would encourage you to look at the cultural structure that supports these things and their success; I think you'll find that you helped to created it.
Did anyone else see the GOP candidate debate last night on MSNBC? This issue came up in full force, and the various views given by the candidates were interesting and kind of scary.
First they (McCain included) billed the issue as one of "protecting children", that it was not a first ammendment issue. When the moderator asked about the adults who would also be using the library terminals, no one could give a good answer in legal terms, so they started resorting to moral imperatives about removing pornography from our society altogether. One of them (it was either Keyes or Bush, sorry I can't remember which) even declared loudly that his children did *not* have the right to freedom of speech until he said they did.
I think the views of the candidates that make it all the way out to the public through the media are often milder than what these candidates actually believe. In the press they always seem to find some legal justification for their views, but when you listen to them talk, it comes down to their personal, moral, and religious convictions and very little open-minded or logical reasoning.
And for some reason, they think that their convictions are more important, more RIGHT than those of the average adult, average child, or average would-be pornographer. With someone like that representing the country, we can only expect personal freedom to decrease.
Even if he meant this, I would disagree. The "porn == evil" concept is unique to our *culture*, not humanity in general. There are plenty of cultures in the world that accept, if not value, the documentation of all aspects of their traditions and lifestyles through writing and drawings.
It is only our culture, the western philosophy of life and human interaction, that demonizes pleasures of the body in such an imperialistic manner.
Wait a minute...am I arguing in favor of pornography and the cultures and lifestyles that surround it? I don't think so. I'm just asking folks to recognize the difference between a belief held by a particular culture versus a belief held by All Humanity.
Its an absolute shame that stuff like this gets front page status on/. I mean is/. all about "emerging sexuality"? What does this have to do with Linux? Is Linux all about "emerging sexuality"? Is/. turning into some sort of political statement?
Well, what does Linux have to do with Slashdot?
That is, I think Jon might reply by saying that Slashdot is, among other things, a vehicle for collecting information about movements, events, software, and people that operate and succeed because they support principles of freedom, openness, and exploration of the previously unthinkable.
Liberal crap, maybe, but very relevant liberal crap if you expect Slashdot to be at all comprehensive in its survey of such phenomenons.
The very notion of pornography is a relatively new concept in human history. It came about in Victorian England when researchers from the British Museum dug up the ruins of Pompeii and were stunned to find artworks of all kinds - carvings, vases, paintings - in the ancient Italian city that featured shockingly explicit sexual activity, from oral sex to bestiality. The researchers were amazed to learn that these drawings were displayed all over the homes of Pompeii.
Doesn't this mean that pornography - "the depiction of erotic behavior (as in pictures or writing) intended to cause sexual excitement" - is a significantly ancient notion?
It's either one of the neatest models I've seen for sharing information in an open fashion, or one of the most creative attempts by the government to track down law breakers. Brilliant: get people to actively and regularly connect to a central location and keep track of A) the songs they're illegaly downloading and B) the songs they're illegaly distributing, all while you run IP-to-Lat/Long conversions on them. Anyone do a sniff on this thing yet?:)
We need folks to work on non-windows/novell accounting packages so that running Quickbooks on Un*x isn't even an issue.
Check out the WebAccountant project, an attempt at organizing folks to write web-based accounting software using Perl and Postgres. It's a little stalled right now, just waiting for some excited and creative programmers to come along and get things going.
There is a great ethical distinction to be made between someone advocating euthanizing handicapped babies, and someone advocating a parent's right to decide to euthanize their handicapped baby.
It's the difference between saying all women should have abortions in all cases and saying that all women should have the right to choose to have an abortion when they see fit; it's the difference between saying that everyone should use Linux all the time, and saying everyone should have the choice to use Linux when it best suits their needs.
The Slashdot headline is misleading and inappropriate.
I'm currently coordinating an open-source project to develop web-based accounting software. We're moving along quite nicely, though still pre-beta ("beta is a state of mind"), and are looking for people to help design and develop the software. There is a mostly working version of the software that's rough but that you're welcome to (attempt to) use.
There's currently a wide gap in the realm of open-source web-based accounting software, and it's just waiting to be filled. I'm sure small business will benefit from the products that emerge as a result.
I think that article needs to clarify several points. I am a website designer, thusly I spend much more than 4 hours a day on the Internet (usually closer to 9), and I don't consider myself addicted. In fact, most of the time I'm perfectly happy to go home at the end of the day and read a book or go outside or do anything but look at a screen. In any case, I make my living off of my so-called addiction.
Surfing the net for extended periods of time is only bad if you're losing touch with yourself, the goings on in the "real world", or are otherwise sacrificing things like friends, family, personal happiness, money, etc., just to get connected and live in that "connected" state.
I'd say in many cases, being online connects you to more people, makes you more aware of the goings on in the real world, and increases your chances for personal happiness. You just have to know how to use it right, and you have to know when to say "okay, I'm turning into a vegetable, time to go do something else."
Making a blanket statement that anyone who spends more than 4 hours online has a mental illness is completely irresponsible.
I started my own business and my business partner and I insure ourselves independently. I pay less than $60 per month for full coverage (life, health, medical, drug card, etc), though I live in a smaller town where the rates are likely to be a little lower than average. You should be able to find something reasonable if you have a decent health history and shop around a little. Don't let anyone sell you dental coverage unless you anticipate more than one visit to the dentist per year.
It's great that read-only storage devices are improving by leaps and bounds, and even read-write storage is making good progress, but will any of this be useful if we don't have similar advances in miniaturizing processing power?
That is, a 400 Gig disk in your wristwatch won't do you much good if you don't have the processing power to make it useful (the example of making voice recordings seems to neglect how the expensive process of encoding voice for transfer to disk might be handled).
As well, I'm sure there will be the usual irresistable pressures from existing CD makers to postpone implementing such technology until they can figure out how to make money off it...
One approach might be to discuss what criteria we'd use to decide if a given document or site would be included (free-form voting or Slashdot discussion won't do it, I'm afraid). For example:
1) Is the document or site well known by a wide variety and large number of people related to the development and culture of the Internet? (e.g. Decl. of Ind. of Cyberspace)
2) Does the document or site provide insight to the development of the Internet, its technologies, and its culture? (e.g. CatB)
3) Did the document in some way influence, impact, or otherwise direct the development of some part of the Internet and/or its culture? (e.g. proposed Communications Decency Act)
4) Is the document or site particularly well-written, interesting, unique, "cool", or noteworthy in format, style, and/or appearance? (e.g. Slashdot's format)
5) Does the document or site address an issue or question that is as yet unresolved, or that deeply affects people and institutions beyond the Internet?
Are there others? Is this a realistic undertaking?
Well, I sure am glad that all of us at Slashdot, and particularly our own Jon Katz, aren't participating in "drowning out other news" and pumping "highly emotional imagery" about celebrity accidents into our discussions. I mean, thank goodness there's not a Slashdot Feature story devoted to the topic - oh, wait. Well, at least Slashdotters aren't spending their time posting 100+ comments on Katz's re-hashing of the mainstream take on this "issue" - oh, wait. Well, at least I'm not gonna be a part of that circus by posting my thoughts - oh, wait.
When will people learn that when journalists and other media types supposedly "check themselves" and question the validity and relevance of their subject matter, they're just practicing appeasement and perpetuating their own sily system of "free press"? More importantly, when will people learn that the media get away with this because we let them? C'mon folks.
It'll be interesting to see how NPR frames the conversation with these folks, especially since Steven Levy was the primary author of Newsweek's recent cover story on "The New Digital Galaxy", a fairly mainstreamed, fluffified and narrow view of the future of PCs and pervasive computing. I know Levy is capable of much better, but he does a good job of bringing it to the masses wrapped in a candy coating. The issue also included an article by Bill Gates on " Why the PC Will Not Die". Possibly good background reading for the NPR bit.
I was dissappointed to see that the initial responses to Mr. Katz's article were directed solely at his comments on the movies he mentioned, rather than on the larger topics he's asking us to think about. Even if you don't agree that the Matrix is a good "litmus test" for geekness, or that the Matrix and The Phantom Menace are comparable in any context, his thoughts are an extremely well-formed attempt to discover and name some of what defines the "geek" and online culture.
This is no small task, mind you. The culture and the lifestyle that Katz discusses and that we participate in is incredibly young, underdeveloped, and misunderstood, even by its own members. If any of you have ever attempted to explain to "an outsider" what it is that causes you to sit in front of your computer for hours on end, searching, reading, programming, exploring, letting the life of the net flow through you, then you know that it can be very difficult from all approaches. Partly this is due to terminology and lack of common reference points between "us" and "them", but partly it's because we ourselves don't necessarily understand what it is that makes us do these things. We can easily place emotional, social, and academic labels on the reasons for our activities, but at the point we realize (as Mr. Katz and many others have) that we're living an almost self-sustaining and self-completing life in this new world, we must strive to understand it at at deeper level than what these labels can offer.
No matter how much you disagree with Mr. Katz or dislike his tone, realize that he his only making his best attempt at achieving this understanding, as we all are in our day-to-day "online" lives. It's not just about what movies we all like and relate to - it's about the deeper reasons that a movie or a thought or a piece of code puts us in "the Zone" together to sort out how we got there. I applaud *any* attempt at achieving such understanding.
Slashdot Mirror
By doing the things you suggested, ripping or burning, you never actually take ownership of the recordings in a legal sense. By using my.mp3.com, the implication is that you now legally own (a copy of) it and can do what you like with it in whatever format - a fairly significant difference.
Got a library card? Wow, you own a lot of music.
I wasn't suggesting that "increased population leading to even more increased population" was a bad thing in itself (though I think it will be), but more that if there are more peple alive *at the same time*, there are more resources consumed concurrently, and existing problems get worse. We already have problems with illness, poverty, social security, health care, damage to the environment, etc. with our current population; these things only get worse when you increase the number of people involved. That's the simplest math I can suggest, my anonymous friend.
Nature tends to "find a way" to create balance (often through chaos and destruction) in the world's systems of life. As has happened with many other kinds of virii and bacteria, when we find a "cure" for one strain, another strain emerges that is resistent to our medicine, and is often stronger and more effective.
Curing the common cold is great, but I'm scared that the common cold as we know it may then become a disease that gives us much more to worry about than a few days home in bed.
People seem to prefer this kind of service over the cheap places that host thousands of domains but don't give you any sort of helping hand or personal service.
I'm also amazed at hosting places that guarantee you service X for life. "E-mail address for life" or "free web hosting for life", etc. just seems like a ridiculous thing to promise in this age, where mergers, changes in technology, and the whims of the end-user changes the standards of service on a daily basis. It's incredible to me that these firms might have considered the long-term resources involved in providing a service to someone who is 20 years old today, guaranteeing that it will be there when they're 80. In many cases, I doubt they *do* have a plan.
I'm curious how he would propose that we, the merry men and women of the Slashdot community, go about stopping the largest corporate merger ever.
Legally, the only people that have the power to stop the merger are the various government organizations that oversee enforcement of antitrust law and the financial issues of mergers. These entities get funding from various government sources, but we can assume such funding is probably regulated by Congress. We can also probably assume that these entities do not have a "consumer hotline" for you to voice your opinion, but rather that they serve the interests of the government and larger corporate america, not the individual citizen. And the media has no say in things like this; hell, AOL and Time Warner ARE the media.
The individual citizen isn't really sending the right signals anyway. Time Warner controls about 25% of music sales in the US, and we keep on buying. Time Warner owns "Friends" and "ER", and we keep on watching. AOL has 20 million subscribers, and more sign up every day. Why would these companies have any reason to think that we don't like the thought of them controlling everything we think, hear, see, and buy? We have not given them any reason to believe otherwise.
Before you go criticizing mergers and takeovers and corporate business plans, I would encourage you to look at the cultural structure that supports these things and their success; I think you'll find that you helped to created it.
First they (McCain included) billed the issue as one of "protecting children", that it was not a first ammendment issue. When the moderator asked about the adults who would also be using the library terminals, no one could give a good answer in legal terms, so they started resorting to moral imperatives about removing pornography from our society altogether. One of them (it was either Keyes or Bush, sorry I can't remember which) even declared loudly that his children did *not* have the right to freedom of speech until he said they did.
I think the views of the candidates that make it all the way out to the public through the media are often milder than what these candidates actually believe. In the press they always seem to find some legal justification for their views, but when you listen to them talk, it comes down to their personal, moral, and religious convictions and very little open-minded or logical reasoning.
And for some reason, they think that their convictions are more important, more RIGHT than those of the average adult, average child, or average would-be pornographer. With someone like that representing the country, we can only expect personal freedom to decrease.
It is only our culture, the western philosophy of life and human interaction, that demonizes pleasures of the body in such an imperialistic manner.
Wait a minute...am I arguing in favor of pornography and the cultures and lifestyles that surround it? I don't think so. I'm just asking folks to recognize the difference between a belief held by a particular culture versus a belief held by All Humanity.
Well, what does Linux have to do with Slashdot?
That is, I think Jon might reply by saying that Slashdot is, among other things, a vehicle for collecting information about movements, events, software, and people that operate and succeed because they support principles of freedom, openness, and exploration of the previously unthinkable.
Liberal crap, maybe, but very relevant liberal crap if you expect Slashdot to be at all comprehensive in its survey of such phenomenons.
The very notion of pornography is a relatively new concept in human history. It came about in Victorian England when researchers from the British Museum dug up the ruins of Pompeii and were stunned to find artworks of all kinds - carvings, vases, paintings - in the ancient Italian city that featured shockingly explicit sexual activity, from oral sex to bestiality. The researchers were amazed to learn that these drawings were displayed all over the homes of Pompeii.
Doesn't this mean that pornography - "the depiction of erotic behavior (as in pictures or writing) intended to cause sexual excitement" - is a significantly ancient notion?
"I'm not paranoid, they're just after me."
Check out the WebAccountant project, an attempt at organizing folks to write web-based accounting software using Perl and Postgres. It's a little stalled right now, just waiting for some excited and creative programmers to come along and get things going.
Your question might be better answered on a site more oriented towards software, e.g. Freshmeat.
World Population By Decade, 1950-2050*
Do you want to live in a world with 9 billion other people? The outlook is not good.
*Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census, International Data Base
It's the difference between saying all women should have abortions in all cases and saying that all women should have the right to choose to have an abortion when they see fit; it's the difference between saying that everyone should use Linux all the time, and saying everyone should have the choice to use Linux when it best suits their needs.
The Slashdot headline is misleading and inappropriate.
For more information, visit the project website at http://www.webaccountant.org/.
There's currently a wide gap in the realm of open-source web-based accounting software, and it's just waiting to be filled. I'm sure small business will benefit from the products that emerge as a result.
Traditional Virgo Traits:
Modest and shy
Meticulous and reliable
Practical and diligent
Intelligent and analytical
On the dark side:
Fussy and a worrier
Overcritical and harsh
Perfectionist and conservative
Hmm.
Surfing the net for extended periods of time is only bad if you're losing touch with yourself, the goings on in the "real world", or are otherwise sacrificing things like friends, family, personal happiness, money, etc., just to get connected and live in that "connected" state.
I'd say in many cases, being online connects you to more people, makes you more aware of the goings on in the real world, and increases your chances for personal happiness. You just have to know how to use it right, and you have to know when to say "okay, I'm turning into a vegetable, time to go do something else."
Making a blanket statement that anyone who spends more than 4 hours online has a mental illness is completely irresponsible.
I started my own business and my business partner and I insure ourselves independently. I pay less than $60 per month for full coverage (life, health, medical, drug card, etc), though I live in a smaller town where the rates are likely to be a little lower than average. You should be able to find something reasonable if you have a decent health history and shop around a little. Don't let anyone sell you dental coverage unless you anticipate more than one visit to the dentist per year.
That is, a 400 Gig disk in your wristwatch won't do you much good if you don't have the processing power to make it useful (the example of making voice recordings seems to neglect how the expensive process of encoding voice for transfer to disk might be handled).
As well, I'm sure there will be the usual irresistable pressures from existing CD makers to postpone implementing such technology until they can figure out how to make money off it...
1) Is the document or site well known by a wide variety and large number of people related to the development and culture of the Internet? (e.g. Decl. of Ind. of Cyberspace)
2) Does the document or site provide insight to the development of the Internet, its technologies, and its culture? (e.g. CatB)
3) Did the document in some way influence, impact, or otherwise direct the development of some part of the Internet and/or its culture? (e.g. proposed Communications Decency Act)
4) Is the document or site particularly well-written, interesting, unique, "cool", or noteworthy in format, style, and/or appearance? (e.g. Slashdot's format)
5) Does the document or site address an issue or question that is as yet unresolved, or that deeply affects people and institutions beyond the Internet?
Are there others? Is this a realistic undertaking?
When will people learn that when journalists and other media types supposedly "check themselves" and question the validity and relevance of their subject matter, they're just practicing appeasement and perpetuating their own sily system of "free press"? More importantly, when will people learn that the media get away with this because we let them? C'mon folks.
It'll be interesting to see how NPR frames the conversation with these folks, especially since Steven Levy was the primary author of Newsweek's recent cover story on "The New Digital Galaxy", a fairly mainstreamed, fluffified and narrow view of the future of PCs and pervasive computing. I know Levy is capable of much better, but he does a good job of bringing it to the masses wrapped in a candy coating. The issue also included an article by Bill Gates on " Why the PC Will Not Die". Possibly good background reading for the NPR bit.
I was dissappointed to see that the initial responses to Mr. Katz's article were directed solely at his comments on the movies he mentioned, rather than on the larger topics he's asking us to think about. Even if you don't agree that the Matrix is a good "litmus test" for geekness, or that the Matrix and The Phantom Menace are comparable in any context, his thoughts are an extremely well-formed attempt to discover and name some of what defines the "geek" and online culture.
This is no small task, mind you. The culture and the lifestyle that Katz discusses and that we participate in is incredibly young, underdeveloped, and misunderstood, even by its own members. If any of you have ever attempted to explain to "an outsider" what it is that causes you to sit in front of your computer for hours on end, searching, reading, programming, exploring, letting the life of the net flow through you, then you know that it can be very difficult from all approaches. Partly this is due to terminology and lack of common reference points between "us" and "them", but partly it's because we ourselves don't necessarily understand what it is that makes us do these things. We can easily place emotional, social, and academic labels on the reasons for our activities, but at the point we realize (as Mr. Katz and many others have) that we're living an almost self-sustaining and self-completing life in this new world, we must strive to understand it at at deeper level than what these labels can offer.
No matter how much you disagree with Mr. Katz or dislike his tone, realize that he his only making his best attempt at achieving this understanding, as we all are in our day-to-day "online" lives. It's not just about what movies we all like and relate to - it's about the deeper reasons that a movie or a thought or a piece of code puts us in "the Zone" together to sort out how we got there. I applaud *any* attempt at achieving such understanding.
I agree wholeheartedly. I think that having a thorough and honest personal website serves this end greatly as well.