> So this version doesn't report its CD key by some means, e.g. when you go to the M$ website
> for updates, where M$ could compare the CD key against a database to see if there are any
> duplicates, then remotely disable the software?
That particular version, called the Devils0wn release or the Corporate version of XP, is actually Microsoft's own version for large OEMS or very large corporations, which is "pre-activated" the moment you enter an accepted CD-Key. For obvious reasons, HP or Compaq or any other huge organizations cannot send icrosoft a big list of machines that need to be activated, and enter the activation codes into each. Instead, this version of Windows is already activated, so that as soon as a customer enters a valid CD-Key off his license--just as he would when buying a new PC from a big OEM--the machine is fully-functional and does not need to be activated again. It might need to be re-activated if you make the required number of changes to your system, but that makes no difference since you can just reinstall at that point and not reactivate.
There were actually two releases, the first being the Devils0wn edition, which came out weeks before XP was even available retail. there was some debate about whether it was the corporate version or an internal final build--the.nfo for the release never said. However, later another release was made of another activation-less version of WinXP, which was listed as being the Corporate version copied from a disc at one of the big OEMs. Comparing the files in each release down to CRCs, it was found that the Corporate release and the Devils0wn release were bit-for-bit identical.
These releases are not to be confused with the various patches that are floating around to patch retail versions of XP to bypass product activation. They are the "real thing"--the pre-activated XP Pro sold by Microsoft for bulk use by large corporations and OEMs.
You and the posters above miss the point. I will not learn anything new JUST TO BE ABLE TO DO THE SAME TASK AT THE SAME EFFICIENCY ON ANOTHER OS. It would not be more efficient merely because it is on Linux. Therefore I have no motivation to expend my time learning how to do the same things, and finding apps that do the same things, which I already do at peak efficiency on Windoze. This is what so many Linux advocates fail to realize. There has to be a bona fide motivation and an advantage for switching, in order for a typical end-user to switch.
Take for example the guy above who seemed to think it was a foregone conclusion that using a CLI is faster and more efficient than using a GUI. For some people it doubtless is. Many others, however, are more visually-oriented and could never be nearly as productive with a CLI as they are with a GUI. It's especially ironic if one would expect a very visually-oriented person who uses his computer for image and video manipulation to resort to a CLI and clunky interfaces, rather than a polished GUI meant for such uses. Hence the popularity of the Macintosh among the graphics and publishing crowd--until OS X the Mac OS couldn't even multitask properly and was way behind Windows much less Linux in technical terms, and yet its GUI and app standardization allowed it to become standard equipment in those venues. The GUI is, therefore, much more important than many Linux folk will ever believe, as is standardization--menus and keyboard shortcuts are uniform on the Mac, or on Windows, but unless an app is part of KDE or GNOME there's no telling what the layout and keyboard shortcuts will be on Linux.
I would need to hunt for apps to replace the ones I use now, and learn new ways of doing the same things, just to regain the same level of efficiency in Linux which I already have in Windows. There is no "more efficiently" as you seem intent on believeing.
Sorry, but the last time I wore an eyepatch and shouted "Aaaargh, mate-eeeeee!" was for some weird sex game my girlfriend wanted. I'm not actually a pirate in real life.
> and a bald-faced
Wrong again. Can't you get anything right? I have a beard. While I admit it does make me look slightly more like a pirate--Redbeard, maybe--it still doesn't negate your first mistake, either.;-)
> thief.
What's that they say about three strikes? Oh yeah: "Yerrrrr OUT!" You cannot steal a bunch of electrons--well, I suppose that you could, but I actually copied them over the network. See, I connected to my news server, which I did pay for since they actually provide me with a useful service and don't try to form a predatory monopoly by stripping away all semblence of fair use and first sale doctrine. They had a bunch of magnetic charges that I liked, and so I arranged some magnetic charges on my computer to be in the same patterns as the magnetic charges on theirs. After that I transferred the pattern of magnetic charges into a pattern of organic splotches on a CD-R medium. Notice that in no phase of this transaction did I actually deprive anyone of property. Therefore, I am not a theif.
> You could very well have bought Win XP and THEN pirated it, fulfilling some minimum standard of ethics
Oh yes, that makes sense. I want to punish Microsoft for depriving consumers of their rights of fair use and first sale, and for strangling the market in general with their monopolistic abuses, so I give them money. Makes perfect sense to me.
And besides, either the act of copying those magnetic charges is wrong, or it isn't--paying Microsoft for a burdened copy of Windows so that I can "pirate" something they refuse to sell me--the unburdened copy--makes no sense yet again.
> Not wanting to support something you disagree with is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. But
> the way you go about it doesn't make sense to me.
No, but it makes sense to me, and that's what counts.:-) Why else would I do it?
> You are still supporting Microsoft--maybe not with your wallet, but by mindshare by using
> their software. Why? There are many alternatives to what they supply
Actually, there are zero alternatives to what they supply. None. That's what a lot of Linux-only users seem to not "get." Here's what I mean:
1) Gaming compatibility. There simply is no alternative to using a Microsoft OS if you want to be able to play the vast majority of games that have been made for the PC in the last 20 years. Sure, you can run *most* DOS games in DR-DOS--but not all of them, and at any rate you'd still have to boot a Windows variant to play all the Windows games. Some Windows games will work under WINE, but the vast majority will not. Hence, as someone with a very huge collection of games spanning 20 years, many of which I actually like to play rather than just have sit there, I need to use a Microsoft OS. Linux will never cut it in that department unless the Win9x codebase is opened, which is of course very unlikely.
2) Application compatibility and continuity. Because Windows has been the dominant platform for many years, people like me are used to using certain applications for certain jobs--they work well for us and we aren't interested in changing to a new OS and trying to find an equivalent which probably is not there in the same fashion. This is especially true since so many Linux apps are enigmatically named (how are we supposed to find them in the first place?) and not geared for GUI users. Most end users like me have no desire to leave a well-mapped-out GUI app with buttons and menus in intuitive places and universal shortcuts (most Windows apps or Mac apps conform to the same shortcut key layouts--Linux apps often do not) for a Linux app that isn't very intuitively layed out because it either caters mostly to CLI users or was coded by CLI users who didn't really put thought into layout for GUI folk. And even if they did, unlike Windows or Mac, there is no real standard layout in Linux. KDE and Gnome are fixing this, but not all the apps I'd need to use are thus GUIfied. Back to the naming thing for a second--why should end users have to learn a whole new vocabulary just to know what their apps do? I mean, Linux apps are very oddly named by Win and Mac standards. Anyone knows instantly what Media Player does--it plays media, like movies and sounds. Great. But how is an end user supposed to know what xanim does? I do, but I'm more literate than the average end user. Even so, I wouldn't know what some things are if I switched to Linux, and my time is too valuable to waste learning.
See, end users who've been around a while develop attachments to their apps. I need ACDSee for viewing pictures, and I won't even touch that crap that comes built-in to WinXP for doing so. I need Gravity and Agent for my USENET groups--I've tried that thing that comes with Mozilla, and I hate it. It has no features compared to Gravity and Agent, which are the top newsreaders by far among the people who know what they're doing on USENET precisely beause of their features and power. I need Photoshop for image editing--The Gimp is okay, and I can do some script-fu with it that I can't under Photoshop, but it isn't as powerful in most respects, is more clunky and difficult to use, and lacks CMYK color separation which is a must for many graphic artists. Likewise, while thwere are many PDF utils for Linux, none of them is as versatile and useful as Acrobat. Plus, there are a dozen small utils I've been using for years for small tasks which are just indispensible for me, and which I would not be able to find replacements I'm comfortable with under Linux.
you see, I'm set in my ways and attached to my apps. I'm efficient on Windows because of this. And I'd wager that most computer-literate Windows users are the same way. It isn't that Windows is any better--if I had learned on Linux, I'd probably be attached to certain old Linux apps and be efficient on that platform and find it indispensable. There would just be too steep a learning curve to make the effort worthwhile. I don't have the time. I use my computer; my computer doesn't use me.
3) Compatibility with the outside world. This isn't important to everyone. Indeed, even Mac users get used to a certain amount of non-interoperability. But to some of us it's damn important. I'm not talking about just the whole Office.doc thing, either--an awful lot of media is Windows-only, for example. There are codecs which will never be available on Linux, but I have no problem finding them for Windows. Why should I put up with not being able to use a film clip, when I could have done so with Windows? Again, not everyone cares, but some of us do. There are some pretty strange and obscure file formats that have been developed over the years, but almost alays there is software for Windows which will handle it. The same just can't be said for Linux, or to a large extent for Mac. That's not to say closed and hard-to-deal-with formats are good--I always try to use open and readily-available formats that anyone can use or view. But there are a lot of people out there who don't do the same and there are also a lot of legacy files to be dealt with.
> If you want to protest against WPA then don't use Microsoft's software, period. Otherwise
> you're not really making a difference.
This is a common sentiment among Linux users, but it's just based on dislike of Microsoft and love of open software rather than logic. The logic is simple: if Microsoft gets my money, I am supporting them. If Microsoft doesn't get my money, I am not supporting them. In the latter case, it makes no difference whether I am personally using Windows or using Linux, as long as whatever comes out of my box is cross-platform. Let's look at it:
A) Chasing Amy uses Linux. Microsoft gets no money from him. Whatever he produces and sends over the net is cross-platform.
B) Chasing Amy uses (pirated) Windows. Microsoft gets no money from him. Whatever he produces and sends over the net is cross-platform.
In either case, the results are the same. Whether I use Linux or not has no bearing at all on anything external to my box. Internally it makes sure that I can use media and documents I wouldn't be able to use with Linux, and it maintains my use of the apps I am familiar with. Externally the world doesn't know or care what I have on my box, as long as whatever I produce is cross-platform--which it is.
That only happens when you burn the ISO incorrectly. Unfortunately, not all CD burning software is configured out-of-the-box to allow long pathdepths and ISO Level 2. This is what leads to the problems the uneducated experience with this particular release.
Of course, if one is too stupid to figure out how to burn a proper ISO, one could always just download ISOBuster and extract the files to his hard disk and install from there.
I've been using the Devils0wn corporate version of XP for over a month with no problem and no compatibility issues, even though I use a lot of legacy software as well as a lot of brand-new software just released for XP. In other words, it works if you know what you're doing.
Yes, but what self-respecting geek gets a new computer (if you change the motherboard and processor, that's pretty much what you've done) and just leaves the same OS installation on his hard drive that he had from the previous computer?
Generally we reinstall at this point, because it is very unseemly and potentially a performance issue if you leave all those old drivers and some of the old registry entries around. Some of the registry entries for some of the old motherboard's components usually hang around in case that component shows up again, bloating the registry and degrading peformance ever so slightly. Old drivers definitely lay around and hog space.
That's why with few exceptions any hardware enthusiast will reinstall his OS when he gets a new computer. With Windows XP, a clean reinstall means going through the hassle of re-activation. That's precisely why I just downloaded a copy of Windows XP from alt.binaries.warez.ibm-pc.os instead of buying one--because I can't buy the corporate version that doesn't require activation at all, but I can pirate it.
I hate to make a hollow-sounding excuse, but in this case, as a hardware enthusiast to whom performance is important and who needs the freedom to frequently reinstall from scratch without the bullshit of product activation each and every time, Microsoft left me little choice but to pirate the corporate/OEM version of Windows XP Pro rather than buying the normal version which requires product activation. I could also go ahead and buy a copy of Pro so that at least I'd be licensed and "moral," but why bother--doing so is just supporting Windows Product Activation, and I don't want to do that.
Sure, I could have gone on using Win98SE--and I still boot into it for games--but not forever. Hardware companies are already dropping support for it--ATI, for example, only officially supports the latest 3 MS OSes, which goes back to WinME. Most ME drivers work under 98 too, but not all. And as soon as MS releases a new OS, that support for the Win9x line disappears from ATI, and from some other vendors as well. Windows 2000 isn't an option for some of us because of its poorer legacy support, and poorer driver support all around.
What that means is that sooner or later every Windows user will have to be using a form of XP, and that those of us with the inclination to reinstall our OS from scratch every once in a while--hardware enthusiasts, geeks, whoever--are going to ant to bypass WPA. That is leading to more piracy, not less, considering the availability of the WPA-less version of XP via USENET, websites, IRC, etc., and the increasing presence of broadband to make downloading it feasible for larger audiences.
Microsoft is just shooting itself in the foot, and silly moves like "Family Licenses" aren't going to help it. I wouldn't be at all surprised, BTW, if this "shortage of Family Licenses" isn't just a Microsoft publicity stunt to get their Family License program in the news. After all, how many of us actually heard about it before now?
As the guy above pointed out, there will be a Linux client download available. So you're not really SOL. But I put a provocative subject line on my post anyway to get people to consider this.
You see, I'm glad that there appears to be one primary platform for computer games. I don't cae that it's Windows. It could just as well be Linux or Mac or whatever for all I care. But I do care that most new computer games are developed for one given OS.
You see, unlike the console world I don't have to have 3 or 4 different expensive bulky boxes in order to be able to play all the cool new releases. I just have to have one expensive bulky box. And I don't have to boot to 3 or 4 different OSes either--I just run Windows when I want to play a game.
Now, sure, I wish all games came out for every OS. Who wouldn't want to be able to just use whatever he likes, be it a Windows or Linux PC, or a Mac running either OS X or OS 9, and run any game he wants? But that will simply never, ever, ever happen, because there is no money in eating into your thin profit margins to make ports to every OS and architecture in existence. Instead, most developers pick the most popular OS--the one with the most users, that is--and code for that.
The result is a unity in the PC gaming world that will probably never come to the console world. I'd like to be able to just buy one next-gen console, and play all the console games on it. I wish I could buy either a PS2 or Gamecube or even an Xbox and use it to play Luigi's Mansion, Munch's Oddysee, Soul Reaver 2, DOA3, and all the other cool console games that are coming out. But I just can't and that's that.
Comparing it to the PC gaming scene, I'm glad I wouldn't similarly have to have Linux, Windows, and a Mac just to play most of the cool new games. Instead, just having a good PC running Windows means I can run almost every cool new PC game I could want. Rare is the really cool game that's Mac or Linux only. Almost all come out for Windows, and almost always first.
Would it be nice if the primary PC gaming platform were Free Software? Of course. But it isn't and I'm fine with that as long as I don't have to boot between many OSes or worse yet keep several different boxes to play different games. Windows 98SE can play almost every game ever written for the PC from the DOS days of the early 80s to the present, and of that I'm glad because I can and do play many of them, old and new. I'm glad that, as outdated and technologically weak Win9x is, it has kept almost-perfect game compatibility. It's like if Nintendo offered a machine which played all games from every console and region from the NES on through the Gamecube. AS a man who likes his games, I think it's perfect for what it is in that respect.
Now of course soon games will start to be targeted for a newer platform. I wish it were Linux or something else free and Free, but it will be WinXP and again I am fine with that as long as it maintains the sort of unity of platform we enjoy in the PC gaming world. Again, we are lucky that it isn't how it is in the console world, where there are several major platforms with exclusive games, which completely change every few years and with the exception of the PS2 completely break all chance for backwards compatability.
Complain all you want, but we have it easy. I'd never complain about having a near-universal gaming platform with nearly universal backwards compatibility. Neither Nintendo nor Sony are any better than Microsoft either when it comes to corporate behavior, so I count myself lucky and look at the good in this PC gaming platform.
I think all the posts I make to newsgroups like alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.pre-teen and alt.binaries.adolescents have already earned me a modicum of attention. I only post text there, mind you, nothing illicit, but nevertheless I'm confident that several law enforcement organizations regularly read postings by me. I went there to research characters for a novel, and stayed because the regs in some of the groups are fun guys to talk with.
As for law enforcement agents reading my posts to those groups, it's kind of nice to know I have such a retarded--err, I mean distinguished--audience.
Oh, and I did get arrested on a felony charge once, too, so I know for sure that I have an FBI file. Otherwise I'd be teaching government at a public high school. We need more teachers like me, you see.;-)
To keep it on-topic, and because it's worth mentioning, I have to say that this whole Surveillance Society we've initiated is quite an animal indeed. Because of that FBI file mentioning an indiscretion I once had when I was an 18 year old high school senior, I can never get a job as a high school teacher, and I have actually not gotten some other various jobs not involving schools or kids at all when they require background checks. All because when I was an 18 year old high school senior, I had consensual sex with a high school junior who was about 16 months younger than I was, and her daddy didn't approve. I wasn't convicted of the felony charge--I copped a plea to a misdemeanor so that I could quickly put it behind me and go on to university--but the arrest is still on my FBI file.
I find it rather obnoxious that the Information Society (classic band, BTW) has progressed to the point that one minor mistake will follow you for the rest of your life, to any and all jurisdictions in the U.S., all because of FBI files and background checks.
Time was when a man could escape his past. That was often a great thing because young people have a capacity to make mistakes which they don't deserve to answer for forever. Moving to a new state, a man could start over with a clean slate.
That came with a price--bad people could exploit that clean slate just as readily as good people could. Hence FBI files and background checks. But I can't help thinking there should have been some middle-ground, rather than going from all to nothing, so that essentially law-abiding citizens could get small one-time transgressions expunged from their FBI files.
But unfortunately, my tax dollars go to the FBI so that people like me can be kept from ever getting a job that requires a clearance, based on harmless youthful follies. Not only that, it also goes to the FBI so that anyone and everyone can now have his TCP/IP packets sniffed, even if he's not under investigation for anything. Not to mention the FBI and ATF crackdowns which lead to the deaths of innocent people like the Weaver family, and all the innocent kids who died along with adults at Waco, probably as an inadvertent result of the pyrotechnic rounds the FBI was using or the tank they were demolishing the building with. It really annoys me that my own money is being used to hurt people both actively and passively.
I could list quite a few recent examples, but quite frankly if I began, I wouldn't know where to end. Suffice it to say, the more power the FBI has to surveil, especially against people who are not suspects in an active criminal investigation, the greater the abuses will be. Or am I the only one who remembers how they blackmailed any leftist leaders they could find dirt on back in the 60s and 70s, before we shut down their widespread surveillance programs?
The FBI is evil, but not stupid. If they did it the best way possible, then their software probably replaces a key part of your operating system's networking code, so that even if you knew each and every process running and exactly what it does, you could still have their software installed and never have any way of knowing.
After all, it's doubtful that Microsoft would object to the FBI looking at their source code for such a project, it's doubtful that Apple would object--but even if they did, the lower levels of OS X are open-source Darwin--and of course Linux is open-source anyway. It doesn't seem too difficult for them to do.
It seems that if they were to do it the simpler way, it would be too easy to detect. If they installed it like a simple trojan, it would be trivial to detect, particularly by software such as ZoneAlarm and equivalents which monitor all attempts by programs to access the net. In fact, if it is what they used in the Scarfo case and they are using it now, if it were a simple trojan it would probably have been reported by now. People with something to hide know what software to use to protect them from such things.
For example, "Dr. Who's Encryption and Security FAQ" http://www.slack.net/~hermit/ebook/documents/secur ity.html is standard reading in newsgroups and on websites dedicated to privacy. It is also standard reading in newsgroups and message boards where child pornography is posted. It is probably also known to organized crime and other elements which engage in illicit activities and use computers. It explains in language most people can understand, the use of PGP, firewalls, various encryption and security software, and the threat of keyloggers and trojans and how to use software like ZoneAlarm to secure network access to only those programs you choose to authorize.
Call me crazy, but I think the FBI would take note of this readily available information and come up with a way to counteract it. Writing their trojan into your operating system itself seems like a damn good way to do this. Windows and Mac users and even Linux users expect certain processes to access the network, so why not exploit that to camouflage an "ultimate trojan"?
There would be only one way to counteract it, and this is mentioned in Dr. Who's FAQ: make detached PGP signatures for each important file in your OS that you'd expect not to change, and use a script to check them against the files each time you boot, or each time you choose to run it. If a file has changed, you know something is wrong.
Of course, this is very cumbersome--how many files exactly should you sign? Very tedious. I got to thinking on this some time back, and came to the conclusion that if you want the best possible security against unauthorized changes to your system, the best way might be to install your whole OS and all your apps, configure everything how you like, and immediately transfer the whole system to one file. Then, strip down your OS to the very minimal parts needed to boot and to check the signature on the "big file" and your stripped-down OS files, then decompress/mount then boot the whole OS in your "container" file. If you have lots of cheap RAM, you can decompress the file containing your OS into a RAMdisk to save some time and make the files less persistent. A lengthy process, depending on how big your OS/apps are, but if you want security there will be a price. This way, every file on your system is uncorruptable, untouchable by trojans and FBI spyware.
I experimented with just that using Windows 98SE, and though I don't know exactly how you'd do it with Linux or WinNT/2k/XP it is definitely doable with Win9x. First I installed Windows and all my apps, then made a Zip file (using no compression at all, for speed of unzipping at boot) of the whole system. Then I deleted the system except for minimal DOS command files and a RAM disk creation tool called xmsdsk.exe and a command-line unzip tool, altered Autoexec.bat to call xmsdsk with the parameters to make a 1GB RAM disk (there were 1.5gigs on the machine), called the unzip tool to unzip the file to the RAM disk, and had the config files boot Win98 from that drive. It took fiddling a bit, but finally I got it right and it worked. When my Win98 booted, in the startup folder was a shortcut to check the PGP signatures of all the startup files and the Big File that the system was stored in.
Not ideal. Quite slow to boot up. You can see why I don't actually still do this; it was more or less an experiment. But it did work. When the system was shut down, the RAM disk went away, and so any changes at all to the system would be undone. If the Big File the system came from, or any of the boot files, were modified it would show up the next time I booted when the signatures were checked. It was unweildy, but it did provide full protection of a sort I can't think how to have otherwise.
So, does anyone else have crazy ideas on how to provide security against such intrusions? Preferably ones that don't require a boot time long enough that you can go make breakfast in the intervening minutes.
My problem with the way you seem to want to go about things is that you want to change the meaning of the Constitution as we go along. That turns a fundamental and constant enumeration of rights into a meaningless bunch of words that should be twisted to fit the temper of the times.
Now, for the most part the Constitution has been interpreted to provide a more generous smattering of rights--but it can also be interpreted to provide fewer and more limited rights. Our protection against that is to read the Constitution plainly, and reduce things which did not exist at the time to their fundamental functions in order to compare them to what the Constitution says.
A good example of the dangers of interpreting the Constitution instead of "interpreting modern things," if you want to call it that, is the Court's acceptance of pen rigisters and similar invasions of privacy. Until now they have not been used in directly nefarious full-scale monitoring of the populace, yet new technology has made that a reality, as the new monitoring of all Internet packet headrs demonstrates. Basically, the Court said that law enforcement agencies can look at what phone numbers you call and what addresses you send mail too since that is external to the content of the communication, and since anyone who looks at the outside of an envelope can see the addressing information.
The Court had a few reasons for making these decisions. One is that thanks to new technologies like the telephone, people could communicate faster and more directly and law enforcement would be left out of the loop. They wanted to give some power to law enforcement to at least know who's talking to whom in an investigation. That seems reasonable, and since the Fourth Amendment doesn't address telephones for obvious reson this is a reasonable interpretation right?
But it set us up for letting the FBI do what they are putting into place and planning at this very moment thanks to the PATRIOT and USA legislation. They are using this interpreted power the Court gave them to now apply the same principle to the Internet, but now there's the technological capability to track and monitor everyone who goes to a specific website or who sends or receives e-mail from a specific address, and you name it they can track and log it. There's even a plan to concentrate traffic at a few key points so that they can do precisely this.
The net effect is that the Fourth Amendment ceases to apply the moment you plug in a network cable or turn on a modem. All because the Court wanted to interpret things instead of doing the more logical--drawing an analogy between the new thing and whatever accomplished its function back when the Constitution was written. If you do that, then clearly a person's telephone calls and Internet packet headers are personal effects, covered under the Fourth Amendment from being searched or seized without a reason and a warrant. They are information in the form of electronic signals, no different in function from words on a paper. Can law enforcement stop a courier carrying a letter and read it? Or even read the address on it if it were passed by private courier? No? Then they should not be able to do the same with telephone calls or tcp/ip traffic.
This placement of any interpretation on the modern things to be compared with Constitutional protections, rather than on the Constitutional protections to get them to reference the modern things, results in a better protection of rights in a more unwavering and less subjective way.
Now, none of this prevents operation of what the Framers intended to be the vehicle for changing the Constitution when such changes are needed: amendments. They are hard to pass for a reason--we shouldn't go atround changing the arbiter of our rights willy-nilly, without good reason and reasonable agreement, without time and deliberation and debate. There is a definite, long process for amending the Constitution. And notice, please, how that process is completely short-circuited today through the process of judicial interpretation. Instead of the legislatures reacting to new situations by initiating the long process of debate and compromise to form new amendments when needed, the judiciary just does the same thing with the stroke of a pen, with no public review or discourse or input.
That is the real problem. Legislatures are lazy and inept. They never want to undertake the method of deliberate change provided by the Founders, because it is too hard. Bah. And because the people in every state would have input. Double-bah.
Judicial activism has short-circuited our whole Constitutional system of government in a way. You may not see the dangers inherent with such opportunity for quick and thoughtless change without understanding the long-term consequences, but the Framers did, and that's why they provided a deliberately slow and public and broad-based method of Constitutional change.
Again, there's only room for interpretation if you specifically seek to find wiggle room. The English language is fairly plain and straightforward in this respect, as it is used in the Bill of Rights.
You asked "What constitutes speech?" Well, literally and obviously, it is whatever is spoken. If you say it, it is speech. I thought that was completely obvious. Figuratively of course one can speak using things other than his mouth, such as through looks, gestures, drawings, and other modes of expression. Since this figurative definition was in common usage among literate people long before the Constitution was written, it can and should be included when reading the clause.
People like to think of this inclusive definition as a "modern interpretation", but it is not. Shakespeare wrote that one can speak with a look, and Petrarch wrote that art speaks to the beholder. The inclusive definition of speech was as valid at the time as it is now. Again, if there is any doubt as to what something means, WWTJD.
Your other question was what do they mean by "the press." Again, it's rather obvious. The press is anyone who puts words and/or pictures down onto a tangible medium, such as paper. Pretty straightforward.
If you want to get all historical, when the Constitution was written people did not use the term "the press" to refer to reporters, as they usually do now. It was literally anyone who makes or has made for them any words or images set down on paper or similar materials for distribution or public consumption, be it newspapers, broadsides, woodcut illustrations for hanging on walls, etc.
> So let's say you read the 1st Amendment completely literally. The only things that are
> guaranteed protection are the freedom to speak aloud, and the freedom to write, print, and
> distribute whatever you like. What about... artwork?
You're purposefully seeking a case which requires complicated interpretation, instead of using common sense. Artwork clearly fits into a definition of speech that was valid at the time the Constitution was written, and since it is an image in a tangible medium rather than in a spoken one it is also literally covered under freedom of the press. Of course, you can also create artwork that speaks, in which case that is also less figuratively covered under freedom of speech.;-) Or maybe you use your speaking artwork to say something for you that it doesn't actually say in words, in which case it is figuratively also speech as well as literally speech which is figurative.
See what happens when you try to be needlessly complex! I did that to illustrate the fact that if you want to find ambiguity and complexity, you always can. But why not look for the clarity and simplicity instead? If you want to know what the Founders meant by speech and press, and don't want to merely use common sense and basic English knowledge and your knowledge of Jefferson's writings, there's a simple answer: look at the definitions in dictionaries and encyclodepias commonly found in the libraries of the literate at the time the Constitution was written. Accept all the definitions you find as valid ones, and move on.
Notice how none of this attempts to read new meanings into the words of the Constitution, or even presumes that such new meanings are required when new things are devised which did not exist when the Constitution was written. New meanings ar not required at all. Invent a new form of art, fine--it will still either be in a tangible format or constitute speech, and in either event will be covered safely by the First Amendment.
Notice that if there is any interpretation going on--again I think it's just using common sense, and don't see that it is really interpretation at all--it is interpreting the new things to reduce them to their essential function and purpose, to compare them with the wording of the Constitution. It is not, however, in any way interpreting the words of the Constitution to accomodate the new things. I think that's a very clear differene. In that way, the meaning of the Constitution never changes, and never needs interpreting, which can lend subjectivity to what is supposed to be the ultimate in objective guidelines. New things may be invented, but I cannot think of any new functions that have been created--new inventions still serve the same functions as older ones.
Even now I'm staring at all my little computer program icons lined up on my desktop, trying to think of one single program that does something fundamentally new that did not exist in 1789. Not a one of them does anything new--they just do the same old things in new and easier and better ways. I thought for a second that streaming video was new, but it's not--it;s just a new way of letting me see a performance.
I think there's a lesson in there somewhere--as when Aristotle said over 2000 years ago that "There's nothing new under the Sun." It's true. And I remain convincd that there's no need to interpret when the definitions of the period are sufficient to cover even the newest of inventions, which serve the same core functions that have always existed.
Oh, and if you really need a right that can't be explicitly justified by merely reading the Constitution word for word, remember this Amendment: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." This implicitly refers to the Common Law, and you have all sorts of rights in there that you probably never knew you had. Pity we don't have them anymore, since the Court likes to make things up as it goes instead of relying on the body of knowledge that all colonists and early Americans regarded as being the foundation for their rights. But again, I digress...
> Isnt part of our national infrastructure an international system of commerce?
Umm, no. That would be an *international* infrastructure, which is not authorized by the Constitution. The federal government is of course explicitly authorized to conduct foreign policy and enter into trade agreements, but it is in no way authorized to spend its time and our tax money working for large corporations. Trade agreements are about generic ground rules that individuals and organizations wishing to engage in commerce between two or more nations must follow in order to avoid problems with any of the participating governments--but what our federal government does goes ar beyond this. It brokers special deals and breaks for corporations, which veers off from setting ground rules for trade into actually becoming a first party to that trade. My favorite example of this is how our government gives loans to foreign nations and then arranges to forgive parts of the debt through opening up that area for more of our corporate commerce--the federal government should in no way be giving my tax dollars away in order to negotiate a lower tariff for large corporations.
An e-mail header is definitely an effect, and arguably a paper since it serves precisely the same function as writing words on parchment.
As for Olmstead, the mistake is that once again, those electronic impulses are clearly a person's effects. Therefore warrants would be required even on public easements, because law enforcement would be intercepting your property while it is transit via courier--the courier being the telephone line.
Notice how very simplified that is--quite on purpose. It doesn't take interpretations of what the Founders meant and where their limits were--it just takes reducing any item which did not exist at the time of the Constitution's writing to its most basic functions and seeing whether it is therefore covered or not. One could call this process interpretation--I'd call it using common sense, personally--but if it is interpretation, then it's interpreting the modern item according to its function, not interpreting the Constitution to guess what it would have said about the modern item.
I think our government has become unsound because of two things: the reliance on money and power for becoming a viable candidate to the legislative and executive branches, and the detachment of the judicial branch from the actual letter and intent of the Constitution.
As for the first, it is more or less self-evident. We've had several different political parties come and go over the course of our history--the idea that we are a two-party system and better for it is a relatively new and completely untrue one. In any given geographical area, there were always several parties--groups of people interested in politics who wished to back and promote a candidate who agrees with their ideals. Some of these were directly affiliated with national parties which were the most prominent, such as Democrats or Whigs or later Republicans. While they therefore had an advantage thanks to networking and name recognition and improved fundraising, politics was essentially still local. Local parties had almost equal power to field candidates and get them recognized within a given district. And, an individual with a great reputation and local name recognition could build up his own group of supporters--essentially his own local party--and do damn well.
This is no longer true thanks to the fact that the national party structure is able to raise so much money for paid media advertising, that the national parties have raised the bar for entry of third-party or independant candidates ridiculously high, and that media outlets like television--which is now sadly the only way most people get information--only give coverage to the candidates from the Big Two parties in most cases, being motivated to save their costly airtime, and seldom cover third-party or independant candidates with equal vigor.
The current Big Two parties have secured through legislation their ability to get candidates on the ballot automatically, while anyone else has to work very, very hard to get his name there. In the old days, everyone had to work at the same level. Why give such preferences to an organization simply because it happens to be dominant at a particular time? If the Democrats and the Whigs had done the same thing back when they were the two most prominent parties, well, the Whigs would still be around and the Republicans would never have had a chance to rise to the same level.
Because of this artificial prominence, almost all the money goes to these two parties, since most people believe in the two-party mythos and believe--rightly since the playing field has become so tilted--that very few third-party or independent candidates can win. Such huge warchests and powerful backing and lobbying have been amassed behind the Republicans and Democrats, that few others can compete--television is now the primary medium, and it costs a lot of money to buy a little bit of airtime. Money is therefore primary to getting a candidate elected, whereas originally it was a minor consideration since most campaigning was done in person by stumping and through local newspaper coverage. Now, local newspapers are the things nobody reads that are given away at the grocery store and elsewhere; almost everyone reads their nearest big-city paper instead, which is usually more of a regional or national paper in which local issues aren't the most important, and so local candidates not backed by a major party are given little or no shrift. And nobody really stumps, since they can get more coverage by buying airtime and ads, and doing the occasional speech instead of hurriedly going around the election district trying to explain your beliefs to everyone in person. TV is just so much more effective, and so much more expensive...
The result is entrenched parties which will always be in power thanks to their artificial advantages. Would the Founders believe that two parties with great prominence at a pearticular time should be able to pass legislation to make getting elected harder for everyone else and easier for them? No. To make it worse, as Noam Chomsky points out throughout his writings and videos (though I don't take him seriously on many other things), the Big Two really aren't at all far apart in philosophy. They're both for Big Government and extreme federalism, just to different ends and in different areas. They seem different to the average person, because each party is for or against certain things like abortion--but at the core, they both agree on the same sort of system, the same sort of political philosophy; they only disagree on details, not on major structures. The result is that voters usually get to choose between two sides of the same coin. Where's the party that, for example, wants to reduce federal government to only those things explicitly authorized and reasonably implied by the constitution? Plenty of people want that--yet the artificial obstacles prevent such people from banding together and having any reasonable chance of fielding candidates.
As for the judicial branch, I think it went awry when it started interpreting the Constitution instead of just reading it as literally as possible. Today there is no dispute about whether we should interpret the Constitution or not--there are just "strict constructionists" who try to interpret it narrowly and "loose constructionists" who try to interpret it broadly. Why not just read the damn thing instead? If the Constition says "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."--that's pretty self-explanatory. Congress shouldn't pass any laws regarding religions or churches whatsoever; it can pass no laws which restrict speech or writing; it can pass no law to prevent people from peacefully assembling. What's there to interpret? The Court should just decide what laws do and do not violate this; no interpretation is necessary. Interpretations are used for justifications of decisions, but unfortunately under our system they then become precedent and have the force of law themselves. So, don't interpret at all. Explain why a law violates or does not violate, but don't add or remove meanings by making grand pronouncements about what you think the Constitution means. It's written in plain language after all, and for good reason.
An example of what goes wrong when the judiciary interprets instead of simply reading the Constitution word for word is the mess about what the 2nd Amendment "means," hinging around interpretation of the word "militia". "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." Why does this need interpretation? Militia had a very simple meaning at the time--any able-bodied man over the age of majority and under a certain age, who was therefore eligible to serve in a military capacity. But that doesn't matter anyway, because just reading the sentence, any English major can tell you that that sentence is equivalent in meaning to this one, which is easier for modern readers to parse since they no longer teach us so well about subordinate clauses and such: "Because a well regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." Again, unless you are a moron you understand this sentence. It needs no interpretation. It is entirely self-evident. If you believe in gun control, fine--pass a Constitutional amendment to add restrictions; just don't try to read things you want to see into words which are so simple and straightforward. I should add that we can keep convicted felons from owning firearms, though, because felons do not have and never had full rights unless they are restored by legislative action, which is why we can keep them from voting, owning firearms, etc.
This is the cause of much of our legal cruft--people want to interpret the Constitution and the laws to suit their own desires, even when it obviously contradicts them. What they should do is campaign for those changes, not try to twist the Constitution and laws through interpretation to fit those changes. It demeans and diminishes the letter and spirit of those documents, and makes it progressively easier for everyone else to twist and tweak them to fit into their own ideologies and wishes--especially since we have a system of precedent. The Founders wrote the Constitution in very simple language--excruciatingly simple for the day, when flowery embellishments were the norm. It's simple to understand. People need to stop trying to make it conform to their own beliefs. Campaign to change it if you don't agree with it--just don't reduce it to meaninglessness because you want to interpret it to allow your opinions rather than what it clearly says.
Because of this judicial love of interpreting things to avoid the obvious, we've lost the last bastion of our rights. For example, the legislation passed recently to allow law enforcement agencies to read anyone's Net traffic headers without a warrant is blatantly contrary to the Fourth Amendment's admonishment that "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." You have to have a particular reason to look at anything which would otherwise be private, and you have to have a warrant which specifies exactly what you can look at. Pretty simple. But the Court can and will interpret these words however it wants, instead of just reading them literally and if need be asking the simple question WWTJD--What Would Thomas Jefferson Do? After all, he wrote those words. If they seem at all ambiguous--which they don't really--simply honestly thinking about what Jefferson and others directly involved meant by them is the only valid method of clarification. They were amazing people, a generation of thinkers and doers who threw off the bonds of subjugation and created a new and thriving, trend-setting nation. They wrote the Constitution as plainly and unambiguously as they could, to avoid the need for interpreting it.
And the Bill of Rights was an afterthought which many of them thought was unnecessary since such rights were so obvious at the time. It was a time when people and state governments were put ahead of the federal government. It was a time when national government was expected to conduct foreign policy, regulate interstate commerce and interstate disputes, and to otherwise leave us all alone. It was a time when the Ninth and Tenth Amendments still meant something: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." We had the full rights and protections of the Common Law. The federal government was there to assist the people and the states, not to extend its regulations into every facet of our lives.
Now our rights are not so obvious--at least to those full of interpretations and agendas, and to the majority of people who just don't know our proud history and heritage. Anyone who's read the writings of Jefferson and Madison, and Washington's journal, Franklin's papers, etc., knows that they would be appalled at our current system. Again, they were brilliant men, and created a system which still functions better than could be expected even after 200 years of cruft weigh it down and pervert it. There is no single government in the world which has operated for so long without very fundamental changes to its structure. (Before someone mentions England, it changed fundamentally at the beginning of the 20th century, when the House of Lords was finally rendered impotent.)
What I'd like to see is a return to this core. The Constitution should be enforced, not interpreted. The federal government should leave domestic law enforcement (except where it crosses state or national boundaries) and any other function not dealing with what the Constitution explicitly delagates to them, except for a few useful things not enumerated like printing the national currency, to the states. Most of our tax money could be spent at the state level, instead of having a national government dominated by pork barrel politics which loses big chunks of our money while filtering it back down to the states. Why not just have that money go directly to the states through state taxes? Why not have the federal government leave us alone, and just worry about protecting the people and their rights, as the Constitution charges it? Our federal tax dollars should be spent on defense and national infrastructure, not on foreign aid to bolster corporate sales penetration into foreign markets and on tax breaks to whatever interests got the President elected. Big political parties should be given no preferential treatment over small ones--they all need to jump through the same hoops to get on the ballot. Basically, I'd like to see a return to the federal government we had in 1805, with changes, additions, and subtractions only where obviously needed thanks to the changes that have taken place in the intervening years. It would be a small, lean, efficient government. It wouldn't need to hide things from the people. It wouldn't need to promote corporate interests. You wouldn't need to be in the pocket of a big corporate interest just to viably enter it.
But this will never, ever happen without outright revolution. Politicians would never willingly give up their corporate perks. Politicians are not visionary enough to look to the Constitution rather than their petty opinions. Politicians don't want to give up the powers they have which are not enumerated by the Constitution, since most things would become the province of state governments again rather than the national government--for example, abortion would be up to the States to decide individually, since the Constitution does not give the federal government the authority to regulate such things except where they become interstate issues. Unless a state violates a Constitutional right of its people, or an issue involves national defense or foreign policy, the federal government would largely let the state governments and the people who elect them decide what to do.
What I see is a large bureaucratic government that has taken the place of the nimble and responsive government we once had. What I see is a government which seeks to monitor its people, without reason, without probable cause, without warrant. What I see is a government which killed Randy Weaver's family because he advocated gun ownership rights and was therefore branded suspect--and which does similar things all the time albeit with much less publicity. What I see is a government which wants to keep everything about itself secret, even to the point of not letting the public know if toxic nuclear waste is being stored near them. What I see is a government which is owned by corporations, and more directly beholden to them and their money than to the people themselves.
I've gone on and on far too long; everyone gets the point. But right now, I don't see the cruft being removed without a real Jeffersonian revolution. It's time to collect all the information and all the arms while it's still legal to do so, because at some point both may be outlawed just when they're most necessary. I love my country, and I love its history. But I want a real government of the people, by the people, for the people, to take the place once more of our current government of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations. I want accountability where there is none. And I know I'm not alone.
WinME creates problems with DOS games, being that it tries so hard to hide DOS from the user--even going so far as to have Autoexec.bat and Config.sys do nothing, while the "real" files were changed. Plus, all that System Restore crap that eats resources and space--there are ways to turn it off and reclaim your space, but why bother with that bloated cruft anyway?
If you simply HAVE to have WinME, at least install it with 98lite from http://www.98lite.net --it will let you keep Syetm Restore, Web Folders, and a thousand other pieces of bloat from ever getting installed. Despite some complainers who probably used it wrong, I have never had a problem with 98lite, and I use Windows in some very stressing ways.
However, for most things--especially gaming, particularly if you want to run DOS games--Win98SE is better than WinME. WinME has more recent drivers, but any self-respecting computer user downloads the latest drivers for all their hardware from the vendors' websites anyway. Again, installed with 98lite, you can remove a lot of the unnecessary crap, making it more stable and dependable.
I have no loyalty to Bill. I disapprove strongly of Microsoft's business practices. But I also am practical enough to use the right tool for the job, and if you want to game on PCs, that tool is Win9x. That will eventually change when newer games support only the Win2k/XP family, but for now, Win98SE or WinME (properly installed) are ideal. This is why I boot into Win98 for gaming, and have chosen Win98SE as the platform I'm going to use when I build an arcade machine a la MAME, but of course with multiple other non-MAME games available. My Win98SE machine can play all the newest PC titles, a few of which I actually have, almost all of the older PC titles going all the way back to early DOS, a lot of which I have (some of the oldest need a CPU slowdown program, but still run perfectly), most of the unique Mac games from the 68k days thanks to Basilisk II booting OS 8(B2 is also available primarily for Linux, but Linux won't run all those Windoze games, soo...), all the unique Linux games not requiring 3d acceleration thanks to VMware booting Linux Mandrake, all the unique BeOS games not requiring 3d acceleration thanks again to VMWare booting Be, most of the popular and many of the unpopular Playstaion 1 titles thanks to ePSXe and Bleem!, most of the best n64 games, SNES, NES, Genesis, 2600, etc. etc. games thanks to various good emulators, and of course the ubiquitous MAME for many many great arcade titles.
Win98SE is the most versatile solution for gaming. Linux's Win32 compatibility layer will never be perfct, and thus the majority of Windows games will never be playable on Linux, whether a Gaming Edition or not. IMHO, unless someone goes in the opposite direction and finds a way to run Windows' actual Win32 layer on top of Linux, with hardware accelerated drivers and all, it's just throwing dust into the wind to expend effort on getting Windows games to run on Linux.
If you hate Microsoft, pirate their OS for your gaming needs and have the best of all possible worlds--have the most compatible possible gaming machine, while not paying Microsoft anything, while having Linux for your real work. By all means, buy Linux games when and where available, to support gaming on Linux and try to help it become more viable and widespread. But don't deny yourself the world of games that will never play on Linux, even under emulation. You can if you want--but not me.
The thing is, the terrorists already have all the documents they need. When we raided Saddam's nuclear program during the Gulf "conflict" (not much of a war, really, and no formal declaration then as now, which I find stupid), we found declassified documents gotten from the U.S. government printing office for a modest fee, from the early days of our nuclear program. We also found them being put into practice--we found 1940s era (in terms of the tech) cyclotrons being used to make fissionable uranium. We hadn't thought this possible before because the technology can only produce minuscule quantities of the right uranium isotope, so we wrote it off as impractical and declassified the design schemtics and all for the cyclotrons we'd tried with in the early days. Turns out Saddam was more patient than we are.
Such documents have been available for years. Terrorists already have them. They are already on the Internet. Closing the barn door after the horse is gone is needless. We just need to keep from declassifying anything else that ought not to be. Problem is, the three-letter agencies never want to declassify anything, and that would be even worse than declassifying dangerous infrastructure or nuclear information. I don't want terrorists attacking my country. But if my country becomes any more backwards and secretive than the Star Chamber it's already fast becoming, then I wouldn't mind so much if the whole thing gets destroyed and we have to start from the fundamentals again. I believe it was Jefferson who advocated periodic revolutions, to remove the "cruft" that accrues around any government.
In two centuries, we've gone from isolationist "paradise" happy to revel in our beautiful countrysides and stay out of world conflicts for our own good, to the Roman Empire of the modern world. I'm not one of these assholes who whines about how America deserves what it gets--certainly innocent people just going about their daily lives don't deserve to die--but frankly I'm not surprised nor dismayed, either. I don't really like my government. It did worse things than pulling easy-to-get-elsewhere data from libraries, even before Sept. 11. While I lament the deaths of the innocent, part of me hopes our government keeps baring its true fangs until everyone sees what it is and gets fed up with the cruft and corruption. Our government taxes us to death to do worthless things like give 2 BILLION dollars of aid ech year to Egypt, which hates us, hundreds of millions each year to Afghanistan, whose government sponsored terrorism against us, and BILLIONS to several other countries which almost all Americans couldn't care less about. Why should it be the responsibility of a teacher making near-poverty wages to subsidize third-world regimes? That's practically communism. After all, "to share everything and be poor together is madness." Why do we do it? The stock answer, political stability. The real answer, to subsidize regimes that are favorable to U.S. corporate interests, so that people who would cut off U.S. trade don't get into power.
That's what it's all about in the end. Take from the average working class citizen to subsidize corporations, corporations which get tax breaks to "stimulate the economy" (read: get companies to make more stuff and get people to buy more stuff, whether the stuff is necessary or not). The rest of the world objects to so much American stuff floating around and destabilizing their own native industries--and I can't blame them for that; I can sympathize since corporate America's stuff also destabilizes native industries here in America (average citizens can't compete with the Wal-Marts; we all become employees whereas in the old days many, many more of us would be owners, and could work towards being owners). In turn America is hated and attacked, though unfortunately foreign terrorists don't want to make the distinction between American citizens and the government which lords it over them. In turn the government acts even more repressive. The question is if and when we will reach the breaking point, where pressure leads to a breakdown in the economic and social structure. I have to say, I hope so. It would give us a chance we won't have otherwise to return to the core fundamentals of the Constitution, shedding all the strained and bogus interpretations and omissions which have been imposed in the intervening years--such as the fact that the Tenth Amendment is entirely ignored.
There are so many parallels between the U.S. and the Roman Empire--our history and development run along the same lines. Agrarian Republic to world-shaking Empire. True Republic to puppet government controlled almost exclusively by the elites. A country which avoids warfare once it consolidats itself and expands to its natural boundaries, to an Empire which thrives on warfare to promote economic interests.
This has digressed from the small topic of restricting information to the larger issues which have spawned such restriction. But it is undoubtedly an action which is a thread in this larger tapestry. We really ought to examine proactively the reasons behind our government's actions, rather than reacting to them one by one. This is the problem the media has--they promote dwelling on the small issues, while ignoring the bigger picture because it won't fit into a 90-second segment. We really need to examine these themes when incidents arise, instead of treating each as if it existed in a vacuum.
Obviously, Picasso would have dabbled in computer imagery for his displays, because he was an extremely talented man who brought those talents to bear in *every* medium of the day. He wasn't a painter. He was a real artist, like Da Vinci, or Michelangelo, both painter and sculptor and inventor of dazzlingly new things. To imagine that Picasso would *not* have dabbled in computer imagery would be the flawed assumption. Great minds are expansive, and do not deride as your small one does based on the functionality of the medium.
Case in point, Picasso once made a sculpture using little more than some very functionsal and extremely common utilitarian items--an absinthe set. They were everywhere at the time--you could not go to a cafe or restaurant and not see them. And obviously they were "purely functional". Yet Picasso was not above using such commonplace and utilitarian items to create his art.
You show your stripes as an elitist art snob, the ssort who always sneers at the avante-garde, and who is therefore doomed to be mistaken. Impressionism was derided as childish scribbling. Music was considered a trade, not an art. And you sir are the type who made such mistakes. I can tell by the tone of your post, and particularly by this snooty bit: "Give art functionality, and one of the hottest debates on whether it can be any longer accepted as visual art cranks into gear."
Wow, something functional isn't art? So, Greek vases are not art, beause they were used at table? Roman mosaics are not art, because they were carelessly stepped on every day? Italian frescoes are not art, because they were basically Renaissance wallpaper? How about mass-produced woodcuts, the magazines of their day? But what if they were by Durer?
To even suggest that something is not art by virtue of its functionality is to display both an ignorance of the history of art and an arrogance exactly like that shown by the old guar stodgies nobody ever remembers. To Salieri, Mozart was just an ignorant childish bum; yet we only remeber Salieri's name today in the context of his rivalry with Mozart--despite his "superiority" in creating classic pieces as opposed to Mozart's "undisciplined" beer-hall-inspired diddlings, Mozart was the real artist and Salieri more like the tradesman.
Have fun in your snooty arrogance at assuming the argument that functionality precludes art has any merit whatsoever. It is the argument of the has-beens and never-was'. It is the argument of an ignorant elite, and this assertion can be proven by going to any museum of classical ars and looking at their array of perfectly functional ancient tableware. Or by looking at a mass-produced Durer woodcut, or any number of things which the elites would never have considered worthy of the name art.
Tell that to most of the most celebrated modern artists. Picasso used some very strange media, and were he alive today he would doubtless use computer imagery for some of his displays. Or Andy Warhol--don't tell me he wouldn't dabble in computerized forms of art.
Most new forms of art are derided at their inception. Impressionism was just a bunch of chicken scratches. Cubism was anti-aesthetic. Modern art was a bunch of youngsters who didn't want to take the time to learn "real" art.
The people who made such claims are considered shortsigted, narrow minded, and unable to appreciate real art, today. The same will be said about the people who are unable to see video games as art. Indeed, it is far more difficult and takes far more art to create a 3d world like Quake's than it does to make a simple sketch. Anyone who cannot appreciate that is, dare I say, shortsighted, narrow minded, and unable to appreciate real art.
Video games are also art in other, more subtle ways. Just as artists celebrated "pop art" by enshrining elements from everyday life in their works--such as the famous painting of Campbell's Soup cans, or the countless works which used the pixellated dots of the print medium--so are videogames a celebration of their times and the aesthetics of the time.
Take the vector graphics of many early arcade games--they reflect their times, and have their counterparts in films of the day such as *WarGames* where the computer Joshua plays through scenarios on giant vector screens at Norad; they are an enashrinement of the technology of the period, and embody it. Take the vector game Star Wars, and show it beside clips of the same actions that occur in the Star Wars movie, and you have a pop art statement as interesting as any made by the great pop artists.
How about Dragon's Lair as an attempt to express something in a medium that wasn't entirely adequate, resulting in a quirky experience that transcends the limits of the medium even for its shortcomings?
The very design of arcade game machines and game consoles is art, much as authentic furniture from the fifties and sixties is prized today for its aesthetic qualities. Such furniture was designed to be entirely functional, not as art--yet it embodies a style and spirit which is today viewed as a certain artistic style, just as the art nouveau reflected in turn-of-the-century Continental signs and gates and baubles, or the art deco reflected in common household decorations of the twenties and early thirties.
The same sort of art can be seen in these functional bits. Look at the extreme angles in a Defender cab, the sweeping design of a Star Wars cockpit--as worthy of being called art as any art deco figurine. Or, how about setting up an exhibit to contrast the design of home consoles, from the 70s inlaid fake woodgrain and brushed metal of an Atari 2600 to the functional boxiness of a NES to the sleek black of a Genesis to the colorful GameCube.
The games themselves can be displayed in a similar manner, with demos running to show the simplicity of Pong's attempt to represent tennis in a 2d world on through Star Wars' attempt to represent the cutting-edge 3d technology of the film through simple vector displays on to the ever more complex and imaginative titles which left simply trying to recreate reality in the 80s and went on to create whole new worlds and fantasies--the Mario of Donkey Kong and Super Mario Brothers as a simplified representation of the hero saving the princess; Pac Man best expressed by the hunger which his Japanese creator in interviews says is the driving (pizza-inspired) idea behind him; Doom's attempt to put the player in a post-apocalyptic world as the protagonist, whereas films have always kept the viewer as a third party to the action; Quake 3 or UT's realism, while portraying the same post-apocalyptic sort of dystopia; the dizzying multi-axis world of the Descent games; Tomb Raider's attempt to make everyone an Indiana Jones; House of the Dead, in the words of the judge who recently struck down a local ban on violent arcade games, who noted it has creativity and even instills a positive message of protecting the innocent by attacking the evil; Duke Nukem and his countless fan levels as the epitome of masculine stereotypes; Discworld the videogames as concrete visual implementations of the world created by the Discworld novels; etc. etc.
To distill my longwinded claptrap: yes, videogames are obviously art.
Don't criminalize speech. Expose it. That's how we got rid of organizations like the Klan here in America, which still exists but is so hated and ostracized in this country that they no longer say or do anything publicly. The reason they don't have a public influence isn't that they aren't allowed to--they can have all the parades and get on TV as much as they want--but because they choose not to exercise their rights, knowing that they will be publicly ridiculed and attacked for it, and lose even more influence.
The perfect example of this is the march that Klansmen and Aryan Nation type white supremacists were supposed to have in Washington, D.C. a couple years ago. A white supremacist leader called for a public protest and march in D.C., to show the country that they could do the same thing black people did in the Million Man March and such. It got a lot of newspaper and newscast coverage for weeks before the event; he got on TV, calling for all white people to come join him in a show of strength against the "niggers" and Jews who have "taken over" the government. He got so much publicity, that he expected thousands of people to show up from all over the country. The D.C. police even hired extra workers from nearby police departments to come in that day to help keep the peace between these thousands of white supremacists and the people who would show up againts them.
Guess what? Less than 20 people came to this "demonstration," most of whom were this guy's friends. Nobody came. Despite coverage for weeks ahead of time of this white supremacist leader calling for all white people with his ideas to show up that day, nobody came. In contrast, there were far more peple who showed up to protest *against* the white supremacist march, than the under 20 who showed up for it. In the end, the guys who showed up left very soon after they got there, realizing that they just looked stupid and made people realize that so few people have these racist views.
The lesson there is that giving these morons enough rope to hang themselves publicly does more to discourage their racism than banning it ever would. Things grow in the underground. Things are given a mystiue and aura which draws people to them, when they are verboten. Pick up any rock and you'll find all sorts of nasty little creatures congregating in the darkness. Yet expose the same patch of ground to the penetrating sunlight, and nothing dares linger there, knowing it will be exposed and vulnerable.
This is how the white supremacist groups were driven out of public view in the U.S.--not by censorship, but by letting them make fools of themselves in public. In the 1980s and early 1990s, we had some very boisterous and exploitive talk shows in this country--Geraldo, Sally Jessy, Donahue, etc. Some of the shows still exist, but they have toned themselves down over the years and become more "respectble," not trying to shock as much as they used to. But back then, white supremacists, Klansmen and Aryan Nations skinheads would be on these shows about every week. Some of the shows would have them "confronted" by strong blacks or jews--and some broke out in violence on the stage, like the famous show where Geraldo Rivera got his nose broken.
Now, the upshot of all this open coverage is that people saw these white supremacists for what they truly were--ignorant, inbred, uneducated fools. They were laughed at and scorned, and used for entertainment as we mocked them in public on these talk shows. None of them ever had a good reason for their beliefs, and almost all of them were buffoons. After that, who would want to join them? Who would want to be mocked and scorned as they were? No one. And so, all the coverage they got worked against them. Klan membership fell. Aryan Nations membership fell. And except for occasional rallies in very uneducated redneck backwaters, and very occasional people who come on talk shows and get ridiculed in public, none of these groups ever shows itself in public any more.
There are still racially motivated killings here, like the black man who was dragge behind a truck in Texas a couple years ago. But they are much more rare then they were in the 1970s and 1980s, before we started ridiculing racists in public with their own words. And we can never completely eliminate hate and the crimes that come from it--it is as impossible as eliminating murder, rape, or any crime. But we have a much smaller problem with it than people in Germany do, where such ideas and speech is hidden away and given a mystique it does not deserve.
You see, in the U.S. I can go into any bookstore and buy a copy of *Mein Kampf*. I own a copy myself, not because I am a racist, but because I wantd to know how evil and foolish Hitler really was, from his own words. And yet, we have no great swell of neo-Nazism--because we expose neo-Nazis publicly for the fools they are. In the late 80s there was an upswing in neo-Nazi organizations in the U.S. The cure was letting them make fools of themselves in public on those talk shows I mentioned, and ever since they have no longer been growing in percentage. They are seen by almost everyone as uneducated idiots.
Germany has done the opposite, which is why they have a real danger today from neo-Nazis. You drive them underground instead of exposing them, which gives them power. It has an allure for some German young people, like a secret fraternity would. Some are interested only because of this mystique, this forbiddenness, and that draws them in. As you know, many teenagers will do something only because they're told not to. These groups also provide friendships and togetherness that is attractive to young people. But if you exposed them in public like we did and do in the U.S., they would not be attractive. Who would want friendship and togetherness with people who are made fun of and ridiculed and thought stupid and laughed at? Instead of mocking them, you fear them. That is why they have strength in Germany and France, but not in the U.S. The Klan used to be in the U.S. just like the Nazis in Germany--but while Germany faces increasing neo-Nazism, the U.S. does not face increasing Klan membership. The difference, once again, is that we expose it to the light of truth, while Germany hides it under a dark rock and allows it to grow.
Also, Germany is foolish for allowing so many immigrants to work there while there's so much unemployment. It is a recipe for disaster when you have so many Turks and other non-citizens (some are citizens, but most are not) working while so many citizens go unemployed. This immigration is allowed in Germany to please the rich, who would rather import skilled foreigners than invest in teaching skills to German youth. That is deplorable, and that feeds the fascism which seems to be the only faction truly devoted to keeping German jobs and German money for Germans. If Germany were to stop allowing so much immigration, and force employers to train young Germans to be skilled workers at a living wage instead of importing foreigners to work at a lesser wage, then that would take much of the force out of neo-Nazism. In a way, I can't blame many of the young people who are seduced by neo-Nazism in Germany and to some extent France--their own governments do not care enough about them to protect their jobs from lower-waged foreigners, so naturally they come to resent those foreigners. The U.S. allows even more immigration, but the difference is that even now in our recession, we don't have such high unemployment rates as you do in Germany and some other countries in the area. If your governments do not wake up and take care of your citizens and giving them the opportunity to work instead of importing cheaper foreign labor, you deserve the backlash you're getting. The foreigners don't deserve the hate crimes, but your governments do deserve the threat to their survival, since they are catering to the wealthy business owners and the foreign immigrants instead of to the average citizens.
A movie would look TERRIBLE at the "right" frame rate of 24 FPS. The reason for this is that the effective framerate of a standard film on a standard projector is really 48 FPS.
Basically, it was discovered early on in creating the film medium that anything 30 FPS or above tends to look fairly smooth and natural in movement, and around 50 FPS and above looks very smooth and natural, but the 24 FPS of standard film looks jerky and unnatural when there's a lot of movement involved.
So, that's why the "flicker" of the movie projectors was introduced. Rather than waste an extra 6 FPS of very expensive film stock, which adds up quickly, to get the smooth motion of 30 FPS, it was discovered that introducing a very brief flicker in the middle of each frame--originally produced by passing a small wire or small disc or square of metal through the aperture of the projector 24 times per second, spaced timewise in the middle of each frame--would produce an optical effect which "tricked" the brain of the viewer into seeing the film at 48 FPS. Motion looked smooth enough because each frame was being interrupted by the flicker, so that the brain of the viewer would naturally group half of two frames together and create the sense of movement, instead of grouping it frame by frame and seeing the choppiness. An optical illusion, really. This is continued to the present day in every standard film projector, in one way or another.
So, seeing a "flat" 24 FPS film without the flicker would show the true choppiness of this very old format which lacks a high enough frame rate.
The easiest way to see this yourself is to find a high quality movie on the Net encoded at 25 FPS progressive from a deinterlaced PAL source, which is of course normally 25 FPS interlaced. People used to watching NTSC 30 FPS (29.97, but close enough) video on their monitors will definitely notice the difference in scenes involving fast motion. That extra 5 FPS is at an important threshold, as any PC gamer could tell you.
Of course, both NTSC and PAL use the trick of interlacing to make motion look even smoother, bringing the effective frame rates up to 60 FPS and 50 FPS respectively. This looked wonderful on standard TV sets, which lacked high resolution and make the signal into a more diffuse and softened display anyway; but it becomes a problem when the material is shown in its original interlaced form on a high definition monitor and looks pretty bad, or gets deinterlaced and the motion appears choppy (for PAL at least). Definitely a problem.
But film, at 24 FPS, would look even worse on a high definition monitor in its natural raw format, in terms of motion looking choppy. It would be noticeably like the purposefully choppy scenes in *Gladiator*--not quite so bad, but still not good. The ideal solution would be to present films in their original 24 FPS speed, but with the display introducing a minute "artificial flicker" to produce the same optical effect we get at the theater with projectors.
We've reached a plateau with this legislation, really. It's so bad that if it were worse, it would only still be at the same level of bad. Or something like that...
This legislation makes it legal for the FBI to read every line of every header on every packet that ever goes out on the Internet, without a warrant. That means that the FBI can legally quite easily maintain lists of who visits what websites, who sends whom e-mail, etc. This is analogous to how the FBI used to send people to follow dissidents and people with political beliefs they didn't like, and wait for them to do something they could exploit publicly to embarrass someone, or privately to blackmail someone (like they did to Martin Luther King, Jr., with his affair). Do you ever do anything at all online that you wouldn't want everyone in the world to know about? Then don't speak out too loudly against whatever ever-more-draconian things the FBI wants, or you may get on their radar. Ever do anything that's technically illegal, or can otherwise get you into trouble, even though whether it should is debatable? Like, gamble, protest (just ask the WTO protesters how often they get arrested for exercising this *right*, even peacefully), visit European or Asian pr0n sites where some of the models are 16 because it's perfectly legal in that given country, be gay and in the military, tear the tag off the mattress at the store, write literature or have performances that get deemed a violation of your community's standards, etc.? Just don't say anything about it or e-mail anything about it or visit any sites related to it, on the Internet.
Oh, and if you ever gamble online, you're helping terrorists to launder money, BTW, and don't be surprised if it gets you into a lot of trouble. Granted, no one has ever maintained that any major online offshore gambling houses are actually being used by terrorists to launder anything; this was just moralizing rightwingers using terrorism as an excuse to foist their morality on everyone else. And that is despicable.
And don't ever visit online boards filled with political dissidents and prograssives, like the Independent Media Center which is somethimes the only source of good information on and from protests--unless you want to get on a McCarthyesque list or get detained for questioning by the FBI. After all, they served the IMC with a search warrant this year after the WTO/IMF protest in Canada, which would have forced them to turn over all server logs so that the FBI could find out who was posting updates from the protest so that they could interrogate those people about some documents or somesuch which were taken from a police car (IIRC), and a gag order to prevent them from revealing it to site visitors. They warrant was quashed, being unconstitutional and all. But now, THEY DON"T NEED A WARRANT. They have license to gather all that data for themselves by directly bugging the Internet backbone. And if something they want slips through, or is encrypted and has its path scrambled by something like a Mixmaster remailer, then this legislation makes it very easy for them to get a warrant and search logs or install password sniffers while you're away without even telling you they were ever there.
Slashdot has already carried a story about the FBI's proposal to concentrate all Internet traffic at a few key points to that it can do just that sort of broad monitoring of every Internet user everywhere. Funny thing is, it's an idea which came to the FBI 2 years ago. Interesting how something the FBI has been secretly lusting after for years is now the answer to the present situation, eh? They're just opportunists who have been wanting this power, and the current situation gives them an excuse for circumventing the Constitution with only a single senator voting against their power grab.
And once the FBI has its closed boxes installed throughout the Internet backbone, is there any way to really prevent them from looking at more than just the header data that they can now get, legally, without a warrant? Recent studies indicate that there are thousands of illegal telephone wiretaps performed by law enforcement agencies each year in the U.S. With the power to instantly see what anyone is doing on the Net, probably with no one ever being the wiser, that is an even greater temptation to abuse. They will implement such capabilities into their closed and secret boxes under the auspices of needing the capabilities for when they get search warrants to read the data itself, not just its headers; and then no one is there looking over their shoulders to make sure they don't take peeks whenever they want, without warrants, or with a warrant that's just a rubber stamp from a judge in their pocket who makes it a secret warrant under this new law, that no one ever need know about?
And what is the FBI if not an agency which has proven its capacity to abuse power, along with its sister agencies like the ATF? The entire Reno administration in the DOJ was one long abuse of the people, from using pyrotechnic devices at Waco and lying about it for 8 years until it was proven by their own photographs and documents which had been conveniently misplaced, to the murder of two innocent people at Ruby Ridge (the man they came to arrest won a million+ dollar lawsuit against them), to deporting a minor child on very dubious grounds while his custody proceedings were still moving forward in a state Court, just to prove a political point, to lying to the U.S. Army to get military training for agents under a law that says agents can get military training only when preparing for an international drug bust, when those agents were serving a warrant for 1 count of selling a shotgun with a too-short barrel, to inventing allegations of child abuse in several cases which were later disproved, for the purposes of making a defendant who would have been vindicated look bad. And the Ashcroft DOJ is looking at least as bad.
Don't forget that Hoover may be dead, but his training and indoctrination methods are still very much alive at the FBI, where new agents are still taught according to principles he established. Terrorism isn't the greatest threat to freedom in this country; the DOJ is.
Ponder this Vietnam-era quote:
"The mushrooming of surveillance has been explained by the sense of panic
and crisis felt throughout the government during this period of extremely
vocal dissent, large demonstrations, political and campus violence, and
what at the time seemed the inauguration of a period of wide- spread
anarchy. While officials... suggested that these crises justified the
surveillance, they failed to recognize that the rights guaranteed by the
constitution are constant and unbending to the temper of the times..."
--Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, 1973
And how about these old stand-bys:
"Implicit in the term 'national defense' is the notion of defending those
values and ideals which set this Nation apart... It would indeed be
ironic if, in the name of national defense, we would sanction the
subversion of one of those liberties... which makes the defense of the
Nation worthwhile."--Chief Justice Earl Warren, U.S. Supreme Court, US v Robel
"An elective despotism was not the government we fought for." -- Thomas Jefferson
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the
argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."--William Pitt to the House of Commons, November 18, 1783
"Man did not enter into society to become worse than he was before, nor
to have fewer rights than he had before, but to have those rights better
secured."--Thomas Paine, 1791
"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty
when the government's purposes are beneficient . . . the greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding."--Justice Louis Brandeis, U.S. Supreme Court
"Contemplate the mangled bodies of your countrymen, and then say, What should be the reward of such sacrifices?... If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquillity of servitude than the animating contest of freedom--go from us in peace. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you."--Sam Adams
"When people fear the government, there is tyranny. When government fears the people, there is liberty."-- Thomas Paine
"You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get
yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is
to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding
fathers used in the great struggle for independence."--Charles Austin Beard, 1874 - 1948
These are my "stock quotes" that I drag out on discussion boards and on USENET whenever I see a well-intioned post which goes against these words of wisdom from men greater than you or me, men who established or defended and defined the rights which we now enjoy as proud Americans. But I am not proud of my country at this. We have set a precedent which is terrible, and tommorrow when the President signs the bill into law we will have lost rights which it may take generations to recover--if we ever do. Sure, it's meant to be temporary--but it can be passed again, permanently, after we've gotten used to having no more 4th Amendment rights the moment we turn on a computer. Remember that the income tax which we now all pay so copiously was passed as a temporary measure to fund the Spanish-American War. Remember that Social Security, which we all still have to pay with no opt-out option, was a temporary measure to help soften the Depression.
Temporary things have a habit of becoming permanent in this country. Just ask the people who had to foment a Revolution to get out from under the burden of so many "temporary" taxes the English imposed upon their Colonies.
This is the sort of invasion of liberties which, historically, has slowly caused armed revolutions. Three hundred years from now, they may be studying this and similar events in high schools much as we study the small erosions of freedom which by themselves were considered nothing, but which together are considered the genesis of the American Revolution. Strong words? No, strong legislation. At best, history will judge the next years under this law as being not unlike a new McCarthyism.
Doesn't it make you wonder what sort of hardware they have behind goatse.cx, to survive the/. effect so well?;-) I mean just the/. newbies alone who go to the site not knowing what it is, have to produce considerable traffic.
I'd like to see goatse.cx guy's hardware and bandwidth statistics. Lord knows it would be a lot better than what he's been showing us...
Slashdot Mirror
> Humans can not live on human biomass alone....
Yes we can. Or didn't you know the answer to all our problems? Soylent Green!
SOYLENT GREEN IS MADE OF PEOPLE!! IT'S MADE OF PEOPLE!!!
Sorry. Someone had to say it...
> So this version doesn't report its CD key by some means, e.g. when you go to the M$ website
.nfo for the release never said. However, later another release was made of another activation-less version of WinXP, which was listed as being the Corporate version copied from a disc at one of the big OEMs. Comparing the files in each release down to CRCs, it was found that the Corporate release and the Devils0wn release were bit-for-bit identical.
> for updates, where M$ could compare the CD key against a database to see if there are any
> duplicates, then remotely disable the software?
That particular version, called the Devils0wn release or the Corporate version of XP, is actually Microsoft's own version for large OEMS or very large corporations, which is "pre-activated" the moment you enter an accepted CD-Key. For obvious reasons, HP or Compaq or any other huge organizations cannot send icrosoft a big list of machines that need to be activated, and enter the activation codes into each. Instead, this version of Windows is already activated, so that as soon as a customer enters a valid CD-Key off his license--just as he would when buying a new PC from a big OEM--the machine is fully-functional and does not need to be activated again. It might need to be re-activated if you make the required number of changes to your system, but that makes no difference since you can just reinstall at that point and not reactivate.
There were actually two releases, the first being the Devils0wn edition, which came out weeks before XP was even available retail. there was some debate about whether it was the corporate version or an internal final build--the
These releases are not to be confused with the various patches that are floating around to patch retail versions of XP to bypass product activation. They are the "real thing"--the pre-activated XP Pro sold by Microsoft for bulk use by large corporations and OEMs.
You and the posters above miss the point. I will not learn anything new JUST TO BE ABLE TO DO THE SAME TASK AT THE SAME EFFICIENCY ON ANOTHER OS. It would not be more efficient merely because it is on Linux. Therefore I have no motivation to expend my time learning how to do the same things, and finding apps that do the same things, which I already do at peak efficiency on Windoze. This is what so many Linux advocates fail to realize. There has to be a bona fide motivation and an advantage for switching, in order for a typical end-user to switch.
Take for example the guy above who seemed to think it was a foregone conclusion that using a CLI is faster and more efficient than using a GUI. For some people it doubtless is. Many others, however, are more visually-oriented and could never be nearly as productive with a CLI as they are with a GUI. It's especially ironic if one would expect a very visually-oriented person who uses his computer for image and video manipulation to resort to a CLI and clunky interfaces, rather than a polished GUI meant for such uses. Hence the popularity of the Macintosh among the graphics and publishing crowd--until OS X the Mac OS couldn't even multitask properly and was way behind Windows much less Linux in technical terms, and yet its GUI and app standardization allowed it to become standard equipment in those venues. The GUI is, therefore, much more important than many Linux folk will ever believe, as is standardization--menus and keyboard shortcuts are uniform on the Mac, or on Windows, but unless an app is part of KDE or GNOME there's no telling what the layout and keyboard shortcuts will be on Linux.
I would need to hunt for apps to replace the ones I use now, and learn new ways of doing the same things, just to regain the same level of efficiency in Linux which I already have in Windows. There is no "more efficiently" as you seem intent on believeing.
> You're a pirate
;-)
Sorry, but the last time I wore an eyepatch and shouted "Aaaargh, mate-eeeeee!" was for some weird sex game my girlfriend wanted. I'm not actually a pirate in real life.
> and a bald-faced
Wrong again. Can't you get anything right? I have a beard. While I admit it does make me look slightly more like a pirate--Redbeard, maybe--it still doesn't negate your first mistake, either.
> thief.
What's that they say about three strikes? Oh yeah: "Yerrrrr OUT!" You cannot steal a bunch of electrons--well, I suppose that you could, but I actually copied them over the network. See, I connected to my news server, which I did pay for since they actually provide me with a useful service and don't try to form a predatory monopoly by stripping away all semblence of fair use and first sale doctrine. They had a bunch of magnetic charges that I liked, and so I arranged some magnetic charges on my computer to be in the same patterns as the magnetic charges on theirs. After that I transferred the pattern of magnetic charges into a pattern of organic splotches on a CD-R medium. Notice that in no phase of this transaction did I actually deprive anyone of property. Therefore, I am not a theif.
> You could very well have bought Win XP and THEN pirated it, fulfilling some minimum standard of ethics
Oh yes, that makes sense. I want to punish Microsoft for depriving consumers of their rights of fair use and first sale, and for strangling the market in general with their monopolistic abuses, so I give them money. Makes perfect sense to me.
And besides, either the act of copying those magnetic charges is wrong, or it isn't--paying Microsoft for a burdened copy of Windows so that I can "pirate" something they refuse to sell me--the unburdened copy--makes no sense yet again.
At least *try* to make sense next time.
> Not wanting to support something you disagree with is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. But
:-) Why else would I do it?
.doc thing, either--an awful lot of media is Windows-only, for example. There are codecs which will never be available on Linux, but I have no problem finding them for Windows. Why should I put up with not being able to use a film clip, when I could have done so with Windows? Again, not everyone cares, but some of us do. There are some pretty strange and obscure file formats that have been developed over the years, but almost alays there is software for Windows which will handle it. The same just can't be said for Linux, or to a large extent for Mac. That's not to say closed and hard-to-deal-with formats are good--I always try to use open and readily-available formats that anyone can use or view. But there are a lot of people out there who don't do the same and there are also a lot of legacy files to be dealt with.
> the way you go about it doesn't make sense to me.
No, but it makes sense to me, and that's what counts.
> You are still supporting Microsoft--maybe not with your wallet, but by mindshare by using
> their software. Why? There are many alternatives to what they supply
Actually, there are zero alternatives to what they supply. None. That's what a lot of Linux-only users seem to not "get." Here's what I mean:
1) Gaming compatibility. There simply is no alternative to using a Microsoft OS if you want to be able to play the vast majority of games that have been made for the PC in the last 20 years. Sure, you can run *most* DOS games in DR-DOS--but not all of them, and at any rate you'd still have to boot a Windows variant to play all the Windows games. Some Windows games will work under WINE, but the vast majority will not. Hence, as someone with a very huge collection of games spanning 20 years, many of which I actually like to play rather than just have sit there, I need to use a Microsoft OS. Linux will never cut it in that department unless the Win9x codebase is opened, which is of course very unlikely.
2) Application compatibility and continuity. Because Windows has been the dominant platform for many years, people like me are used to using certain applications for certain jobs--they work well for us and we aren't interested in changing to a new OS and trying to find an equivalent which probably is not there in the same fashion. This is especially true since so many Linux apps are enigmatically named (how are we supposed to find them in the first place?) and not geared for GUI users. Most end users like me have no desire to leave a well-mapped-out GUI app with buttons and menus in intuitive places and universal shortcuts (most Windows apps or Mac apps conform to the same shortcut key layouts--Linux apps often do not) for a Linux app that isn't very intuitively layed out because it either caters mostly to CLI users or was coded by CLI users who didn't really put thought into layout for GUI folk. And even if they did, unlike Windows or Mac, there is no real standard layout in Linux. KDE and Gnome are fixing this, but not all the apps I'd need to use are thus GUIfied. Back to the naming thing for a second--why should end users have to learn a whole new vocabulary just to know what their apps do? I mean, Linux apps are very oddly named by Win and Mac standards. Anyone knows instantly what Media Player does--it plays media, like movies and sounds. Great. But how is an end user supposed to know what xanim does? I do, but I'm more literate than the average end user. Even so, I wouldn't know what some things are if I switched to Linux, and my time is too valuable to waste learning.
See, end users who've been around a while develop attachments to their apps. I need ACDSee for viewing pictures, and I won't even touch that crap that comes built-in to WinXP for doing so. I need Gravity and Agent for my USENET groups--I've tried that thing that comes with Mozilla, and I hate it. It has no features compared to Gravity and Agent, which are the top newsreaders by far among the people who know what they're doing on USENET precisely beause of their features and power. I need Photoshop for image editing--The Gimp is okay, and I can do some script-fu with it that I can't under Photoshop, but it isn't as powerful in most respects, is more clunky and difficult to use, and lacks CMYK color separation which is a must for many graphic artists. Likewise, while thwere are many PDF utils for Linux, none of them is as versatile and useful as Acrobat. Plus, there are a dozen small utils I've been using for years for small tasks which are just indispensible for me, and which I would not be able to find replacements I'm comfortable with under Linux.
you see, I'm set in my ways and attached to my apps. I'm efficient on Windows because of this. And I'd wager that most computer-literate Windows users are the same way. It isn't that Windows is any better--if I had learned on Linux, I'd probably be attached to certain old Linux apps and be efficient on that platform and find it indispensable. There would just be too steep a learning curve to make the effort worthwhile. I don't have the time. I use my computer; my computer doesn't use me.
3) Compatibility with the outside world. This isn't important to everyone. Indeed, even Mac users get used to a certain amount of non-interoperability. But to some of us it's damn important. I'm not talking about just the whole Office
> If you want to protest against WPA then don't use Microsoft's software, period. Otherwise
> you're not really making a difference.
This is a common sentiment among Linux users, but it's just based on dislike of Microsoft and love of open software rather than logic. The logic is simple: if Microsoft gets my money, I am supporting them. If Microsoft doesn't get my money, I am not supporting them. In the latter case, it makes no difference whether I am personally using Windows or using Linux, as long as whatever comes out of my box is cross-platform. Let's look at it:
A) Chasing Amy uses Linux. Microsoft gets no money from him. Whatever he produces and sends over the net is cross-platform.
B) Chasing Amy uses (pirated) Windows. Microsoft gets no money from him. Whatever he produces and sends over the net is cross-platform.
In either case, the results are the same. Whether I use Linux or not has no bearing at all on anything external to my box. Internally it makes sure that I can use media and documents I wouldn't be able to use with Linux, and it maintains my use of the apps I am familiar with. Externally the world doesn't know or care what I have on my box, as long as whatever I produce is cross-platform--which it is.
That only happens when you burn the ISO incorrectly. Unfortunately, not all CD burning software is configured out-of-the-box to allow long pathdepths and ISO Level 2. This is what leads to the problems the uneducated experience with this particular release.
Of course, if one is too stupid to figure out how to burn a proper ISO, one could always just download ISOBuster and extract the files to his hard disk and install from there.
I've been using the Devils0wn corporate version of XP for over a month with no problem and no compatibility issues, even though I use a lot of legacy software as well as a lot of brand-new software just released for XP. In other words, it works if you know what you're doing.
Yes, but what self-respecting geek gets a new computer (if you change the motherboard and processor, that's pretty much what you've done) and just leaves the same OS installation on his hard drive that he had from the previous computer?
Generally we reinstall at this point, because it is very unseemly and potentially a performance issue if you leave all those old drivers and some of the old registry entries around. Some of the registry entries for some of the old motherboard's components usually hang around in case that component shows up again, bloating the registry and degrading peformance ever so slightly. Old drivers definitely lay around and hog space.
That's why with few exceptions any hardware enthusiast will reinstall his OS when he gets a new computer. With Windows XP, a clean reinstall means going through the hassle of re-activation. That's precisely why I just downloaded a copy of Windows XP from alt.binaries.warez.ibm-pc.os instead of buying one--because I can't buy the corporate version that doesn't require activation at all, but I can pirate it.
I hate to make a hollow-sounding excuse, but in this case, as a hardware enthusiast to whom performance is important and who needs the freedom to frequently reinstall from scratch without the bullshit of product activation each and every time, Microsoft left me little choice but to pirate the corporate/OEM version of Windows XP Pro rather than buying the normal version which requires product activation. I could also go ahead and buy a copy of Pro so that at least I'd be licensed and "moral," but why bother--doing so is just supporting Windows Product Activation, and I don't want to do that.
Sure, I could have gone on using Win98SE--and I still boot into it for games--but not forever. Hardware companies are already dropping support for it--ATI, for example, only officially supports the latest 3 MS OSes, which goes back to WinME. Most ME drivers work under 98 too, but not all. And as soon as MS releases a new OS, that support for the Win9x line disappears from ATI, and from some other vendors as well. Windows 2000 isn't an option for some of us because of its poorer legacy support, and poorer driver support all around.
What that means is that sooner or later every Windows user will have to be using a form of XP, and that those of us with the inclination to reinstall our OS from scratch every once in a while--hardware enthusiasts, geeks, whoever--are going to ant to bypass WPA. That is leading to more piracy, not less, considering the availability of the WPA-less version of XP via USENET, websites, IRC, etc., and the increasing presence of broadband to make downloading it feasible for larger audiences.
Microsoft is just shooting itself in the foot, and silly moves like "Family Licenses" aren't going to help it. I wouldn't be at all surprised, BTW, if this "shortage of Family Licenses" isn't just a Microsoft publicity stunt to get their Family License program in the news. After all, how many of us actually heard about it before now?
As the guy above pointed out, there will be a Linux client download available. So you're not really SOL. But I put a provocative subject line on my post anyway to get people to consider this.
You see, I'm glad that there appears to be one primary platform for computer games. I don't cae that it's Windows. It could just as well be Linux or Mac or whatever for all I care. But I do care that most new computer games are developed for one given OS.
You see, unlike the console world I don't have to have 3 or 4 different expensive bulky boxes in order to be able to play all the cool new releases. I just have to have one expensive bulky box. And I don't have to boot to 3 or 4 different OSes either--I just run Windows when I want to play a game.
Now, sure, I wish all games came out for every OS. Who wouldn't want to be able to just use whatever he likes, be it a Windows or Linux PC, or a Mac running either OS X or OS 9, and run any game he wants? But that will simply never, ever, ever happen, because there is no money in eating into your thin profit margins to make ports to every OS and architecture in existence. Instead, most developers pick the most popular OS--the one with the most users, that is--and code for that.
The result is a unity in the PC gaming world that will probably never come to the console world. I'd like to be able to just buy one next-gen console, and play all the console games on it. I wish I could buy either a PS2 or Gamecube or even an Xbox and use it to play Luigi's Mansion, Munch's Oddysee, Soul Reaver 2, DOA3, and all the other cool console games that are coming out. But I just can't and that's that.
Comparing it to the PC gaming scene, I'm glad I wouldn't similarly have to have Linux, Windows, and a Mac just to play most of the cool new games. Instead, just having a good PC running Windows means I can run almost every cool new PC game I could want. Rare is the really cool game that's Mac or Linux only. Almost all come out for Windows, and almost always first.
Would it be nice if the primary PC gaming platform were Free Software? Of course. But it isn't and I'm fine with that as long as I don't have to boot between many OSes or worse yet keep several different boxes to play different games. Windows 98SE can play almost every game ever written for the PC from the DOS days of the early 80s to the present, and of that I'm glad because I can and do play many of them, old and new. I'm glad that, as outdated and technologically weak Win9x is, it has kept almost-perfect game compatibility. It's like if Nintendo offered a machine which played all games from every console and region from the NES on through the Gamecube. AS a man who likes his games, I think it's perfect for what it is in that respect.
Now of course soon games will start to be targeted for a newer platform. I wish it were Linux or something else free and Free, but it will be WinXP and again I am fine with that as long as it maintains the sort of unity of platform we enjoy in the PC gaming world. Again, we are lucky that it isn't how it is in the console world, where there are several major platforms with exclusive games, which completely change every few years and with the exception of the PS2 completely break all chance for backwards compatability.
Complain all you want, but we have it easy. I'd never complain about having a near-universal gaming platform with nearly universal backwards compatibility. Neither Nintendo nor Sony are any better than Microsoft either when it comes to corporate behavior, so I count myself lucky and look at the good in this PC gaming platform.
I think all the posts I make to newsgroups like alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.pre-teen and alt.binaries.adolescents have already earned me a modicum of attention. I only post text there, mind you, nothing illicit, but nevertheless I'm confident that several law enforcement organizations regularly read postings by me. I went there to research characters for a novel, and stayed because the regs in some of the groups are fun guys to talk with.
;-)
As for law enforcement agents reading my posts to those groups, it's kind of nice to know I have such a retarded--err, I mean distinguished--audience.
Oh, and I did get arrested on a felony charge once, too, so I know for sure that I have an FBI file. Otherwise I'd be teaching government at a public high school. We need more teachers like me, you see.
To keep it on-topic, and because it's worth mentioning, I have to say that this whole Surveillance Society we've initiated is quite an animal indeed. Because of that FBI file mentioning an indiscretion I once had when I was an 18 year old high school senior, I can never get a job as a high school teacher, and I have actually not gotten some other various jobs not involving schools or kids at all when they require background checks. All because when I was an 18 year old high school senior, I had consensual sex with a high school junior who was about 16 months younger than I was, and her daddy didn't approve. I wasn't convicted of the felony charge--I copped a plea to a misdemeanor so that I could quickly put it behind me and go on to university--but the arrest is still on my FBI file.
I find it rather obnoxious that the Information Society (classic band, BTW) has progressed to the point that one minor mistake will follow you for the rest of your life, to any and all jurisdictions in the U.S., all because of FBI files and background checks.
Time was when a man could escape his past. That was often a great thing because young people have a capacity to make mistakes which they don't deserve to answer for forever. Moving to a new state, a man could start over with a clean slate.
That came with a price--bad people could exploit that clean slate just as readily as good people could. Hence FBI files and background checks. But I can't help thinking there should have been some middle-ground, rather than going from all to nothing, so that essentially law-abiding citizens could get small one-time transgressions expunged from their FBI files.
But unfortunately, my tax dollars go to the FBI so that people like me can be kept from ever getting a job that requires a clearance, based on harmless youthful follies. Not only that, it also goes to the FBI so that anyone and everyone can now have his TCP/IP packets sniffed, even if he's not under investigation for anything. Not to mention the FBI and ATF crackdowns which lead to the deaths of innocent people like the Weaver family, and all the innocent kids who died along with adults at Waco, probably as an inadvertent result of the pyrotechnic rounds the FBI was using or the tank they were demolishing the building with. It really annoys me that my own money is being used to hurt people both actively and passively.
I could list quite a few recent examples, but quite frankly if I began, I wouldn't know where to end. Suffice it to say, the more power the FBI has to surveil, especially against people who are not suspects in an active criminal investigation, the greater the abuses will be. Or am I the only one who remembers how they blackmailed any leftist leaders they could find dirt on back in the 60s and 70s, before we shut down their widespread surveillance programs?
The FBI is evil, but not stupid. If they did it the best way possible, then their software probably replaces a key part of your operating system's networking code, so that even if you knew each and every process running and exactly what it does, you could still have their software installed and never have any way of knowing.
r ity.html is standard reading in newsgroups and on websites dedicated to privacy. It is also standard reading in newsgroups and message boards where child pornography is posted. It is probably also known to organized crime and other elements which engage in illicit activities and use computers. It explains in language most people can understand, the use of PGP, firewalls, various encryption and security software, and the threat of keyloggers and trojans and how to use software like ZoneAlarm to secure network access to only those programs you choose to authorize.
After all, it's doubtful that Microsoft would object to the FBI looking at their source code for such a project, it's doubtful that Apple would object--but even if they did, the lower levels of OS X are open-source Darwin--and of course Linux is open-source anyway. It doesn't seem too difficult for them to do.
It seems that if they were to do it the simpler way, it would be too easy to detect. If they installed it like a simple trojan, it would be trivial to detect, particularly by software such as ZoneAlarm and equivalents which monitor all attempts by programs to access the net. In fact, if it is what they used in the Scarfo case and they are using it now, if it were a simple trojan it would probably have been reported by now. People with something to hide know what software to use to protect them from such things.
For example, "Dr. Who's Encryption and Security FAQ" http://www.slack.net/~hermit/ebook/documents/secu
Call me crazy, but I think the FBI would take note of this readily available information and come up with a way to counteract it. Writing their trojan into your operating system itself seems like a damn good way to do this. Windows and Mac users and even Linux users expect certain processes to access the network, so why not exploit that to camouflage an "ultimate trojan"?
There would be only one way to counteract it, and this is mentioned in Dr. Who's FAQ: make detached PGP signatures for each important file in your OS that you'd expect not to change, and use a script to check them against the files each time you boot, or each time you choose to run it. If a file has changed, you know something is wrong.
Of course, this is very cumbersome--how many files exactly should you sign? Very tedious. I got to thinking on this some time back, and came to the conclusion that if you want the best possible security against unauthorized changes to your system, the best way might be to install your whole OS and all your apps, configure everything how you like, and immediately transfer the whole system to one file. Then, strip down your OS to the very minimal parts needed to boot and to check the signature on the "big file" and your stripped-down OS files, then decompress/mount then boot the whole OS in your "container" file. If you have lots of cheap RAM, you can decompress the file containing your OS into a RAMdisk to save some time and make the files less persistent. A lengthy process, depending on how big your OS/apps are, but if you want security there will be a price. This way, every file on your system is uncorruptable, untouchable by trojans and FBI spyware.
I experimented with just that using Windows 98SE, and though I don't know exactly how you'd do it with Linux or WinNT/2k/XP it is definitely doable with Win9x. First I installed Windows and all my apps, then made a Zip file (using no compression at all, for speed of unzipping at boot) of the whole system. Then I deleted the system except for minimal DOS command files and a RAM disk creation tool called xmsdsk.exe and a command-line unzip tool, altered Autoexec.bat to call xmsdsk with the parameters to make a 1GB RAM disk (there were 1.5gigs on the machine), called the unzip tool to unzip the file to the RAM disk, and had the config files boot Win98 from that drive. It took fiddling a bit, but finally I got it right and it worked. When my Win98 booted, in the startup folder was a shortcut to check the PGP signatures of all the startup files and the Big File that the system was stored in.
Not ideal. Quite slow to boot up. You can see why I don't actually still do this; it was more or less an experiment. But it did work. When the system was shut down, the RAM disk went away, and so any changes at all to the system would be undone. If the Big File the system came from, or any of the boot files, were modified it would show up the next time I booted when the signatures were checked. It was unweildy, but it did provide full protection of a sort I can't think how to have otherwise.
So, does anyone else have crazy ideas on how to provide security against such intrusions? Preferably ones that don't require a boot time long enough that you can go make breakfast in the intervening minutes.
My problem with the way you seem to want to go about things is that you want to change the meaning of the Constitution as we go along. That turns a fundamental and constant enumeration of rights into a meaningless bunch of words that should be twisted to fit the temper of the times.
Now, for the most part the Constitution has been interpreted to provide a more generous smattering of rights--but it can also be interpreted to provide fewer and more limited rights. Our protection against that is to read the Constitution plainly, and reduce things which did not exist at the time to their fundamental functions in order to compare them to what the Constitution says.
A good example of the dangers of interpreting the Constitution instead of "interpreting modern things," if you want to call it that, is the Court's acceptance of pen rigisters and similar invasions of privacy. Until now they have not been used in directly nefarious full-scale monitoring of the populace, yet new technology has made that a reality, as the new monitoring of all Internet packet headrs demonstrates. Basically, the Court said that law enforcement agencies can look at what phone numbers you call and what addresses you send mail too since that is external to the content of the communication, and since anyone who looks at the outside of an envelope can see the addressing information.
The Court had a few reasons for making these decisions. One is that thanks to new technologies like the telephone, people could communicate faster and more directly and law enforcement would be left out of the loop. They wanted to give some power to law enforcement to at least know who's talking to whom in an investigation. That seems reasonable, and since the Fourth Amendment doesn't address telephones for obvious reson this is a reasonable interpretation right?
But it set us up for letting the FBI do what they are putting into place and planning at this very moment thanks to the PATRIOT and USA legislation. They are using this interpreted power the Court gave them to now apply the same principle to the Internet, but now there's the technological capability to track and monitor everyone who goes to a specific website or who sends or receives e-mail from a specific address, and you name it they can track and log it. There's even a plan to concentrate traffic at a few key points so that they can do precisely this.
The net effect is that the Fourth Amendment ceases to apply the moment you plug in a network cable or turn on a modem. All because the Court wanted to interpret things instead of doing the more logical--drawing an analogy between the new thing and whatever accomplished its function back when the Constitution was written. If you do that, then clearly a person's telephone calls and Internet packet headers are personal effects, covered under the Fourth Amendment from being searched or seized without a reason and a warrant. They are information in the form of electronic signals, no different in function from words on a paper. Can law enforcement stop a courier carrying a letter and read it? Or even read the address on it if it were passed by private courier? No? Then they should not be able to do the same with telephone calls or tcp/ip traffic.
This placement of any interpretation on the modern things to be compared with Constitutional protections, rather than on the Constitutional protections to get them to reference the modern things, results in a better protection of rights in a more unwavering and less subjective way.
Now, none of this prevents operation of what the Framers intended to be the vehicle for changing the Constitution when such changes are needed: amendments. They are hard to pass for a reason--we shouldn't go atround changing the arbiter of our rights willy-nilly, without good reason and reasonable agreement, without time and deliberation and debate. There is a definite, long process for amending the Constitution. And notice, please, how that process is completely short-circuited today through the process of judicial interpretation. Instead of the legislatures reacting to new situations by initiating the long process of debate and compromise to form new amendments when needed, the judiciary just does the same thing with the stroke of a pen, with no public review or discourse or input.
That is the real problem. Legislatures are lazy and inept. They never want to undertake the method of deliberate change provided by the Founders, because it is too hard. Bah. And because the people in every state would have input. Double-bah.
Judicial activism has short-circuited our whole Constitutional system of government in a way. You may not see the dangers inherent with such opportunity for quick and thoughtless change without understanding the long-term consequences, but the Framers did, and that's why they provided a deliberately slow and public and broad-based method of Constitutional change.
Again, there's only room for interpretation if you specifically seek to find wiggle room. The English language is fairly plain and straightforward in this respect, as it is used in the Bill of Rights.
;-) Or maybe you use your speaking artwork to say something for you that it doesn't actually say in words, in which case it is figuratively also speech as well as literally speech which is figurative.
You asked "What constitutes speech?" Well, literally and obviously, it is whatever is spoken. If you say it, it is speech. I thought that was completely obvious. Figuratively of course one can speak using things other than his mouth, such as through looks, gestures, drawings, and other modes of expression. Since this figurative definition was in common usage among literate people long before the Constitution was written, it can and should be included when reading the clause.
People like to think of this inclusive definition as a "modern interpretation", but it is not. Shakespeare wrote that one can speak with a look, and Petrarch wrote that art speaks to the beholder. The inclusive definition of speech was as valid at the time as it is now. Again, if there is any doubt as to what something means, WWTJD.
Your other question was what do they mean by "the press." Again, it's rather obvious. The press is anyone who puts words and/or pictures down onto a tangible medium, such as paper. Pretty straightforward.
If you want to get all historical, when the Constitution was written people did not use the term "the press" to refer to reporters, as they usually do now. It was literally anyone who makes or has made for them any words or images set down on paper or similar materials for distribution or public consumption, be it newspapers, broadsides, woodcut illustrations for hanging on walls, etc.
> So let's say you read the 1st Amendment completely literally. The only things that are
> guaranteed protection are the freedom to speak aloud, and the freedom to write, print, and
> distribute whatever you like. What about... artwork?
You're purposefully seeking a case which requires complicated interpretation, instead of using common sense. Artwork clearly fits into a definition of speech that was valid at the time the Constitution was written, and since it is an image in a tangible medium rather than in a spoken one it is also literally covered under freedom of the press. Of course, you can also create artwork that speaks, in which case that is also less figuratively covered under freedom of speech.
See what happens when you try to be needlessly complex! I did that to illustrate the fact that if you want to find ambiguity and complexity, you always can. But why not look for the clarity and simplicity instead? If you want to know what the Founders meant by speech and press, and don't want to merely use common sense and basic English knowledge and your knowledge of Jefferson's writings, there's a simple answer: look at the definitions in dictionaries and encyclodepias commonly found in the libraries of the literate at the time the Constitution was written. Accept all the definitions you find as valid ones, and move on.
Notice how none of this attempts to read new meanings into the words of the Constitution, or even presumes that such new meanings are required when new things are devised which did not exist when the Constitution was written. New meanings ar not required at all. Invent a new form of art, fine--it will still either be in a tangible format or constitute speech, and in either event will be covered safely by the First Amendment.
Notice that if there is any interpretation going on--again I think it's just using common sense, and don't see that it is really interpretation at all--it is interpreting the new things to reduce them to their essential function and purpose, to compare them with the wording of the Constitution. It is not, however, in any way interpreting the words of the Constitution to accomodate the new things. I think that's a very clear differene. In that way, the meaning of the Constitution never changes, and never needs interpreting, which can lend subjectivity to what is supposed to be the ultimate in objective guidelines. New things may be invented, but I cannot think of any new functions that have been created--new inventions still serve the same functions as older ones.
Even now I'm staring at all my little computer program icons lined up on my desktop, trying to think of one single program that does something fundamentally new that did not exist in 1789. Not a one of them does anything new--they just do the same old things in new and easier and better ways. I thought for a second that streaming video was new, but it's not--it;s just a new way of letting me see a performance.
I think there's a lesson in there somewhere--as when Aristotle said over 2000 years ago that "There's nothing new under the Sun." It's true. And I remain convincd that there's no need to interpret when the definitions of the period are sufficient to cover even the newest of inventions, which serve the same core functions that have always existed.
Oh, and if you really need a right that can't be explicitly justified by merely reading the Constitution word for word, remember this Amendment: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." This implicitly refers to the Common Law, and you have all sorts of rights in there that you probably never knew you had. Pity we don't have them anymore, since the Court likes to make things up as it goes instead of relying on the body of knowledge that all colonists and early Americans regarded as being the foundation for their rights. But again, I digress...
> Isnt part of our national infrastructure an international system of commerce?
Umm, no. That would be an *international* infrastructure, which is not authorized by the Constitution. The federal government is of course explicitly authorized to conduct foreign policy and enter into trade agreements, but it is in no way authorized to spend its time and our tax money working for large corporations. Trade agreements are about generic ground rules that individuals and organizations wishing to engage in commerce between two or more nations must follow in order to avoid problems with any of the participating governments--but what our federal government does goes ar beyond this. It brokers special deals and breaks for corporations, which veers off from setting ground rules for trade into actually becoming a first party to that trade. My favorite example of this is how our government gives loans to foreign nations and then arranges to forgive parts of the debt through opening up that area for more of our corporate commerce--the federal government should in no way be giving my tax dollars away in order to negotiate a lower tariff for large corporations.
Again, just my opinion on the matter...
An e-mail header is definitely an effect, and arguably a paper since it serves precisely the same function as writing words on parchment.
As for Olmstead, the mistake is that once again, those electronic impulses are clearly a person's effects. Therefore warrants would be required even on public easements, because law enforcement would be intercepting your property while it is transit via courier--the courier being the telephone line.
Notice how very simplified that is--quite on purpose. It doesn't take interpretations of what the Founders meant and where their limits were--it just takes reducing any item which did not exist at the time of the Constitution's writing to its most basic functions and seeing whether it is therefore covered or not. One could call this process interpretation--I'd call it using common sense, personally--but if it is interpretation, then it's interpreting the modern item according to its function, not interpreting the Constitution to guess what it would have said about the modern item.
Just the way I see it, though...
I think our government has become unsound because of two things: the reliance on money and power for becoming a viable candidate to the legislative and executive branches, and the detachment of the judicial branch from the actual letter and intent of the Constitution.
As for the first, it is more or less self-evident. We've had several different political parties come and go over the course of our history--the idea that we are a two-party system and better for it is a relatively new and completely untrue one. In any given geographical area, there were always several parties--groups of people interested in politics who wished to back and promote a candidate who agrees with their ideals. Some of these were directly affiliated with national parties which were the most prominent, such as Democrats or Whigs or later Republicans. While they therefore had an advantage thanks to networking and name recognition and improved fundraising, politics was essentially still local. Local parties had almost equal power to field candidates and get them recognized within a given district. And, an individual with a great reputation and local name recognition could build up his own group of supporters--essentially his own local party--and do damn well.
This is no longer true thanks to the fact that the national party structure is able to raise so much money for paid media advertising, that the national parties have raised the bar for entry of third-party or independant candidates ridiculously high, and that media outlets like television--which is now sadly the only way most people get information--only give coverage to the candidates from the Big Two parties in most cases, being motivated to save their costly airtime, and seldom cover third-party or independant candidates with equal vigor.
The current Big Two parties have secured through legislation their ability to get candidates on the ballot automatically, while anyone else has to work very, very hard to get his name there. In the old days, everyone had to work at the same level. Why give such preferences to an organization simply because it happens to be dominant at a particular time? If the Democrats and the Whigs had done the same thing back when they were the two most prominent parties, well, the Whigs would still be around and the Republicans would never have had a chance to rise to the same level.
Because of this artificial prominence, almost all the money goes to these two parties, since most people believe in the two-party mythos and believe--rightly since the playing field has become so tilted--that very few third-party or independent candidates can win. Such huge warchests and powerful backing and lobbying have been amassed behind the Republicans and Democrats, that few others can compete--television is now the primary medium, and it costs a lot of money to buy a little bit of airtime. Money is therefore primary to getting a candidate elected, whereas originally it was a minor consideration since most campaigning was done in person by stumping and through local newspaper coverage. Now, local newspapers are the things nobody reads that are given away at the grocery store and elsewhere; almost everyone reads their nearest big-city paper instead, which is usually more of a regional or national paper in which local issues aren't the most important, and so local candidates not backed by a major party are given little or no shrift. And nobody really stumps, since they can get more coverage by buying airtime and ads, and doing the occasional speech instead of hurriedly going around the election district trying to explain your beliefs to everyone in person. TV is just so much more effective, and so much more expensive...
The result is entrenched parties which will always be in power thanks to their artificial advantages. Would the Founders believe that two parties with great prominence at a pearticular time should be able to pass legislation to make getting elected harder for everyone else and easier for them? No. To make it worse, as Noam Chomsky points out throughout his writings and videos (though I don't take him seriously on many other things), the Big Two really aren't at all far apart in philosophy. They're both for Big Government and extreme federalism, just to different ends and in different areas. They seem different to the average person, because each party is for or against certain things like abortion--but at the core, they both agree on the same sort of system, the same sort of political philosophy; they only disagree on details, not on major structures. The result is that voters usually get to choose between two sides of the same coin. Where's the party that, for example, wants to reduce federal government to only those things explicitly authorized and reasonably implied by the constitution? Plenty of people want that--yet the artificial obstacles prevent such people from banding together and having any reasonable chance of fielding candidates.
As for the judicial branch, I think it went awry when it started interpreting the Constitution instead of just reading it as literally as possible. Today there is no dispute about whether we should interpret the Constitution or not--there are just "strict constructionists" who try to interpret it narrowly and "loose constructionists" who try to interpret it broadly. Why not just read the damn thing instead? If the Constition says "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."--that's pretty self-explanatory. Congress shouldn't pass any laws regarding religions or churches whatsoever; it can pass no laws which restrict speech or writing; it can pass no law to prevent people from peacefully assembling. What's there to interpret? The Court should just decide what laws do and do not violate this; no interpretation is necessary. Interpretations are used for justifications of decisions, but unfortunately under our system they then become precedent and have the force of law themselves. So, don't interpret at all. Explain why a law violates or does not violate, but don't add or remove meanings by making grand pronouncements about what you think the Constitution means. It's written in plain language after all, and for good reason.
An example of what goes wrong when the judiciary interprets instead of simply reading the Constitution word for word is the mess about what the 2nd Amendment "means," hinging around interpretation of the word "militia". "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." Why does this need interpretation? Militia had a very simple meaning at the time--any able-bodied man over the age of majority and under a certain age, who was therefore eligible to serve in a military capacity. But that doesn't matter anyway, because just reading the sentence, any English major can tell you that that sentence is equivalent in meaning to this one, which is easier for modern readers to parse since they no longer teach us so well about subordinate clauses and such: "Because a well regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." Again, unless you are a moron you understand this sentence. It needs no interpretation. It is entirely self-evident. If you believe in gun control, fine--pass a Constitutional amendment to add restrictions; just don't try to read things you want to see into words which are so simple and straightforward. I should add that we can keep convicted felons from owning firearms, though, because felons do not have and never had full rights unless they are restored by legislative action, which is why we can keep them from voting, owning firearms, etc.
This is the cause of much of our legal cruft--people want to interpret the Constitution and the laws to suit their own desires, even when it obviously contradicts them. What they should do is campaign for those changes, not try to twist the Constitution and laws through interpretation to fit those changes. It demeans and diminishes the letter and spirit of those documents, and makes it progressively easier for everyone else to twist and tweak them to fit into their own ideologies and wishes--especially since we have a system of precedent. The Founders wrote the Constitution in very simple language--excruciatingly simple for the day, when flowery embellishments were the norm. It's simple to understand. People need to stop trying to make it conform to their own beliefs. Campaign to change it if you don't agree with it--just don't reduce it to meaninglessness because you want to interpret it to allow your opinions rather than what it clearly says.
Because of this judicial love of interpreting things to avoid the obvious, we've lost the last bastion of our rights. For example, the legislation passed recently to allow law enforcement agencies to read anyone's Net traffic headers without a warrant is blatantly contrary to the Fourth Amendment's admonishment that "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." You have to have a particular reason to look at anything which would otherwise be private, and you have to have a warrant which specifies exactly what you can look at. Pretty simple. But the Court can and will interpret these words however it wants, instead of just reading them literally and if need be asking the simple question WWTJD--What Would Thomas Jefferson Do? After all, he wrote those words. If they seem at all ambiguous--which they don't really--simply honestly thinking about what Jefferson and others directly involved meant by them is the only valid method of clarification. They were amazing people, a generation of thinkers and doers who threw off the bonds of subjugation and created a new and thriving, trend-setting nation. They wrote the Constitution as plainly and unambiguously as they could, to avoid the need for interpreting it.
And the Bill of Rights was an afterthought which many of them thought was unnecessary since such rights were so obvious at the time. It was a time when people and state governments were put ahead of the federal government. It was a time when national government was expected to conduct foreign policy, regulate interstate commerce and interstate disputes, and to otherwise leave us all alone. It was a time when the Ninth and Tenth Amendments still meant something: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." We had the full rights and protections of the Common Law. The federal government was there to assist the people and the states, not to extend its regulations into every facet of our lives.
Now our rights are not so obvious--at least to those full of interpretations and agendas, and to the majority of people who just don't know our proud history and heritage. Anyone who's read the writings of Jefferson and Madison, and Washington's journal, Franklin's papers, etc., knows that they would be appalled at our current system. Again, they were brilliant men, and created a system which still functions better than could be expected even after 200 years of cruft weigh it down and pervert it. There is no single government in the world which has operated for so long without very fundamental changes to its structure. (Before someone mentions England, it changed fundamentally at the beginning of the 20th century, when the House of Lords was finally rendered impotent.)
What I'd like to see is a return to this core. The Constitution should be enforced, not interpreted. The federal government should leave domestic law enforcement (except where it crosses state or national boundaries) and any other function not dealing with what the Constitution explicitly delagates to them, except for a few useful things not enumerated like printing the national currency, to the states. Most of our tax money could be spent at the state level, instead of having a national government dominated by pork barrel politics which loses big chunks of our money while filtering it back down to the states. Why not just have that money go directly to the states through state taxes? Why not have the federal government leave us alone, and just worry about protecting the people and their rights, as the Constitution charges it? Our federal tax dollars should be spent on defense and national infrastructure, not on foreign aid to bolster corporate sales penetration into foreign markets and on tax breaks to whatever interests got the President elected. Big political parties should be given no preferential treatment over small ones--they all need to jump through the same hoops to get on the ballot. Basically, I'd like to see a return to the federal government we had in 1805, with changes, additions, and subtractions only where obviously needed thanks to the changes that have taken place in the intervening years. It would be a small, lean, efficient government. It wouldn't need to hide things from the people. It wouldn't need to promote corporate interests. You wouldn't need to be in the pocket of a big corporate interest just to viably enter it.
But this will never, ever happen without outright revolution. Politicians would never willingly give up their corporate perks. Politicians are not visionary enough to look to the Constitution rather than their petty opinions. Politicians don't want to give up the powers they have which are not enumerated by the Constitution, since most things would become the province of state governments again rather than the national government--for example, abortion would be up to the States to decide individually, since the Constitution does not give the federal government the authority to regulate such things except where they become interstate issues. Unless a state violates a Constitutional right of its people, or an issue involves national defense or foreign policy, the federal government would largely let the state governments and the people who elect them decide what to do.
What I see is a large bureaucratic government that has taken the place of the nimble and responsive government we once had. What I see is a government which seeks to monitor its people, without reason, without probable cause, without warrant. What I see is a government which killed Randy Weaver's family because he advocated gun ownership rights and was therefore branded suspect--and which does similar things all the time albeit with much less publicity. What I see is a government which wants to keep everything about itself secret, even to the point of not letting the public know if toxic nuclear waste is being stored near them. What I see is a government which is owned by corporations, and more directly beholden to them and their money than to the people themselves.
I've gone on and on far too long; everyone gets the point. But right now, I don't see the cruft being removed without a real Jeffersonian revolution. It's time to collect all the information and all the arms while it's still legal to do so, because at some point both may be outlawed just when they're most necessary. I love my country, and I love its history. But I want a real government of the people, by the people, for the people, to take the place once more of our current government of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations. I want accountability where there is none. And I know I'm not alone.
WinME creates problems with DOS games, being that it tries so hard to hide DOS from the user--even going so far as to have Autoexec.bat and Config.sys do nothing, while the "real" files were changed. Plus, all that System Restore crap that eats resources and space--there are ways to turn it off and reclaim your space, but why bother with that bloated cruft anyway?
If you simply HAVE to have WinME, at least install it with 98lite from http://www.98lite.net --it will let you keep Syetm Restore, Web Folders, and a thousand other pieces of bloat from ever getting installed. Despite some complainers who probably used it wrong, I have never had a problem with 98lite, and I use Windows in some very stressing ways.
However, for most things--especially gaming, particularly if you want to run DOS games--Win98SE is better than WinME. WinME has more recent drivers, but any self-respecting computer user downloads the latest drivers for all their hardware from the vendors' websites anyway. Again, installed with 98lite, you can remove a lot of the unnecessary crap, making it more stable and dependable.
I have no loyalty to Bill. I disapprove strongly of Microsoft's business practices. But I also am practical enough to use the right tool for the job, and if you want to game on PCs, that tool is Win9x. That will eventually change when newer games support only the Win2k/XP family, but for now, Win98SE or WinME (properly installed) are ideal. This is why I boot into Win98 for gaming, and have chosen Win98SE as the platform I'm going to use when I build an arcade machine a la MAME, but of course with multiple other non-MAME games available. My Win98SE machine can play all the newest PC titles, a few of which I actually have, almost all of the older PC titles going all the way back to early DOS, a lot of which I have (some of the oldest need a CPU slowdown program, but still run perfectly), most of the unique Mac games from the 68k days thanks to Basilisk II booting OS 8(B2 is also available primarily for Linux, but Linux won't run all those Windoze games, soo...), all the unique Linux games not requiring 3d acceleration thanks to VMware booting Linux Mandrake, all the unique BeOS games not requiring 3d acceleration thanks again to VMWare booting Be, most of the popular and many of the unpopular Playstaion 1 titles thanks to ePSXe and Bleem!, most of the best n64 games, SNES, NES, Genesis, 2600, etc. etc. games thanks to various good emulators, and of course the ubiquitous MAME for many many great arcade titles.
Win98SE is the most versatile solution for gaming. Linux's Win32 compatibility layer will never be perfct, and thus the majority of Windows games will never be playable on Linux, whether a Gaming Edition or not. IMHO, unless someone goes in the opposite direction and finds a way to run Windows' actual Win32 layer on top of Linux, with hardware accelerated drivers and all, it's just throwing dust into the wind to expend effort on getting Windows games to run on Linux.
If you hate Microsoft, pirate their OS for your gaming needs and have the best of all possible worlds--have the most compatible possible gaming machine, while not paying Microsoft anything, while having Linux for your real work. By all means, buy Linux games when and where available, to support gaming on Linux and try to help it become more viable and widespread. But don't deny yourself the world of games that will never play on Linux, even under emulation. You can if you want--but not me.
The thing is, the terrorists already have all the documents they need. When we raided Saddam's nuclear program during the Gulf "conflict" (not much of a war, really, and no formal declaration then as now, which I find stupid), we found declassified documents gotten from the U.S. government printing office for a modest fee, from the early days of our nuclear program. We also found them being put into practice--we found 1940s era (in terms of the tech) cyclotrons being used to make fissionable uranium. We hadn't thought this possible before because the technology can only produce minuscule quantities of the right uranium isotope, so we wrote it off as impractical and declassified the design schemtics and all for the cyclotrons we'd tried with in the early days. Turns out Saddam was more patient than we are.
Such documents have been available for years. Terrorists already have them. They are already on the Internet. Closing the barn door after the horse is gone is needless. We just need to keep from declassifying anything else that ought not to be. Problem is, the three-letter agencies never want to declassify anything, and that would be even worse than declassifying dangerous infrastructure or nuclear information. I don't want terrorists attacking my country. But if my country becomes any more backwards and secretive than the Star Chamber it's already fast becoming, then I wouldn't mind so much if the whole thing gets destroyed and we have to start from the fundamentals again. I believe it was Jefferson who advocated periodic revolutions, to remove the "cruft" that accrues around any government.
In two centuries, we've gone from isolationist "paradise" happy to revel in our beautiful countrysides and stay out of world conflicts for our own good, to the Roman Empire of the modern world. I'm not one of these assholes who whines about how America deserves what it gets--certainly innocent people just going about their daily lives don't deserve to die--but frankly I'm not surprised nor dismayed, either. I don't really like my government. It did worse things than pulling easy-to-get-elsewhere data from libraries, even before Sept. 11. While I lament the deaths of the innocent, part of me hopes our government keeps baring its true fangs until everyone sees what it is and gets fed up with the cruft and corruption. Our government taxes us to death to do worthless things like give 2 BILLION dollars of aid ech year to Egypt, which hates us, hundreds of millions each year to Afghanistan, whose government sponsored terrorism against us, and BILLIONS to several other countries which almost all Americans couldn't care less about. Why should it be the responsibility of a teacher making near-poverty wages to subsidize third-world regimes? That's practically communism. After all, "to share everything and be poor together is madness." Why do we do it? The stock answer, political stability. The real answer, to subsidize regimes that are favorable to U.S. corporate interests, so that people who would cut off U.S. trade don't get into power.
That's what it's all about in the end. Take from the average working class citizen to subsidize corporations, corporations which get tax breaks to "stimulate the economy" (read: get companies to make more stuff and get people to buy more stuff, whether the stuff is necessary or not). The rest of the world objects to so much American stuff floating around and destabilizing their own native industries--and I can't blame them for that; I can sympathize since corporate America's stuff also destabilizes native industries here in America (average citizens can't compete with the Wal-Marts; we all become employees whereas in the old days many, many more of us would be owners, and could work towards being owners). In turn America is hated and attacked, though unfortunately foreign terrorists don't want to make the distinction between American citizens and the government which lords it over them. In turn the government acts even more repressive. The question is if and when we will reach the breaking point, where pressure leads to a breakdown in the economic and social structure. I have to say, I hope so. It would give us a chance we won't have otherwise to return to the core fundamentals of the Constitution, shedding all the strained and bogus interpretations and omissions which have been imposed in the intervening years--such as the fact that the Tenth Amendment is entirely ignored.
There are so many parallels between the U.S. and the Roman Empire--our history and development run along the same lines. Agrarian Republic to world-shaking Empire. True Republic to puppet government controlled almost exclusively by the elites. A country which avoids warfare once it consolidats itself and expands to its natural boundaries, to an Empire which thrives on warfare to promote economic interests.
This has digressed from the small topic of restricting information to the larger issues which have spawned such restriction. But it is undoubtedly an action which is a thread in this larger tapestry. We really ought to examine proactively the reasons behind our government's actions, rather than reacting to them one by one. This is the problem the media has--they promote dwelling on the small issues, while ignoring the bigger picture because it won't fit into a 90-second segment. We really need to examine these themes when incidents arise, instead of treating each as if it existed in a vacuum.
Obviously, Picasso would have dabbled in computer imagery for his displays, because he was an extremely talented man who brought those talents to bear in *every* medium of the day. He wasn't a painter. He was a real artist, like Da Vinci, or Michelangelo, both painter and sculptor and inventor of dazzlingly new things. To imagine that Picasso would *not* have dabbled in computer imagery would be the flawed assumption. Great minds are expansive, and do not deride as your small one does based on the functionality of the medium.
Case in point, Picasso once made a sculpture using little more than some very functionsal and extremely common utilitarian items--an absinthe set. They were everywhere at the time--you could not go to a cafe or restaurant and not see them. And obviously they were "purely functional". Yet Picasso was not above using such commonplace and utilitarian items to create his art.
You show your stripes as an elitist art snob, the ssort who always sneers at the avante-garde, and who is therefore doomed to be mistaken. Impressionism was derided as childish scribbling. Music was considered a trade, not an art. And you sir are the type who made such mistakes. I can tell by the tone of your post, and particularly by this snooty bit: "Give art functionality, and one of the hottest debates on whether it can be any longer accepted as visual art cranks into gear."
Wow, something functional isn't art? So, Greek vases are not art, beause they were used at table? Roman mosaics are not art, because they were carelessly stepped on every day? Italian frescoes are not art, because they were basically Renaissance wallpaper? How about mass-produced woodcuts, the magazines of their day? But what if they were by Durer?
To even suggest that something is not art by virtue of its functionality is to display both an ignorance of the history of art and an arrogance exactly like that shown by the old guar stodgies nobody ever remembers. To Salieri, Mozart was just an ignorant childish bum; yet we only remeber Salieri's name today in the context of his rivalry with Mozart--despite his "superiority" in creating classic pieces as opposed to Mozart's "undisciplined" beer-hall-inspired diddlings, Mozart was the real artist and Salieri more like the tradesman.
Have fun in your snooty arrogance at assuming the argument that functionality precludes art has any merit whatsoever. It is the argument of the has-beens and never-was'. It is the argument of an ignorant elite, and this assertion can be proven by going to any museum of classical ars and looking at their array of perfectly functional ancient tableware. Or by looking at a mass-produced Durer woodcut, or any number of things which the elites would never have considered worthy of the name art.
Tell that to most of the most celebrated modern artists. Picasso used some very strange media, and were he alive today he would doubtless use computer imagery for some of his displays. Or Andy Warhol--don't tell me he wouldn't dabble in computerized forms of art.
Most new forms of art are derided at their inception. Impressionism was just a bunch of chicken scratches. Cubism was anti-aesthetic. Modern art was a bunch of youngsters who didn't want to take the time to learn "real" art.
The people who made such claims are considered shortsigted, narrow minded, and unable to appreciate real art, today. The same will be said about the people who are unable to see video games as art. Indeed, it is far more difficult and takes far more art to create a 3d world like Quake's than it does to make a simple sketch. Anyone who cannot appreciate that is, dare I say, shortsighted, narrow minded, and unable to appreciate real art.
Video games are also art in other, more subtle ways. Just as artists celebrated "pop art" by enshrining elements from everyday life in their works--such as the famous painting of Campbell's Soup cans, or the countless works which used the pixellated dots of the print medium--so are videogames a celebration of their times and the aesthetics of the time.
Take the vector graphics of many early arcade games--they reflect their times, and have their counterparts in films of the day such as *WarGames* where the computer Joshua plays through scenarios on giant vector screens at Norad; they are an enashrinement of the technology of the period, and embody it. Take the vector game Star Wars, and show it beside clips of the same actions that occur in the Star Wars movie, and you have a pop art statement as interesting as any made by the great pop artists.
How about Dragon's Lair as an attempt to express something in a medium that wasn't entirely adequate, resulting in a quirky experience that transcends the limits of the medium even for its shortcomings?
The very design of arcade game machines and game consoles is art, much as authentic furniture from the fifties and sixties is prized today for its aesthetic qualities. Such furniture was designed to be entirely functional, not as art--yet it embodies a style and spirit which is today viewed as a certain artistic style, just as the art nouveau reflected in turn-of-the-century Continental signs and gates and baubles, or the art deco reflected in common household decorations of the twenties and early thirties.
The same sort of art can be seen in these functional bits. Look at the extreme angles in a Defender cab, the sweeping design of a Star Wars cockpit--as worthy of being called art as any art deco figurine. Or, how about setting up an exhibit to contrast the design of home consoles, from the 70s inlaid fake woodgrain and brushed metal of an Atari 2600 to the functional boxiness of a NES to the sleek black of a Genesis to the colorful GameCube.
The games themselves can be displayed in a similar manner, with demos running to show the simplicity of Pong's attempt to represent tennis in a 2d world on through Star Wars' attempt to represent the cutting-edge 3d technology of the film through simple vector displays on to the ever more complex and imaginative titles which left simply trying to recreate reality in the 80s and went on to create whole new worlds and fantasies--the Mario of Donkey Kong and Super Mario Brothers as a simplified representation of the hero saving the princess; Pac Man best expressed by the hunger which his Japanese creator in interviews says is the driving (pizza-inspired) idea behind him; Doom's attempt to put the player in a post-apocalyptic world as the protagonist, whereas films have always kept the viewer as a third party to the action; Quake 3 or UT's realism, while portraying the same post-apocalyptic sort of dystopia; the dizzying multi-axis world of the Descent games; Tomb Raider's attempt to make everyone an Indiana Jones; House of the Dead, in the words of the judge who recently struck down a local ban on violent arcade games, who noted it has creativity and even instills a positive message of protecting the innocent by attacking the evil; Duke Nukem and his countless fan levels as the epitome of masculine stereotypes; Discworld the videogames as concrete visual implementations of the world created by the Discworld novels; etc. etc.
To distill my longwinded claptrap: yes, videogames are obviously art.
Don't criminalize speech. Expose it. That's how we got rid of organizations like the Klan here in America, which still exists but is so hated and ostracized in this country that they no longer say or do anything publicly. The reason they don't have a public influence isn't that they aren't allowed to--they can have all the parades and get on TV as much as they want--but because they choose not to exercise their rights, knowing that they will be publicly ridiculed and attacked for it, and lose even more influence.
The perfect example of this is the march that Klansmen and Aryan Nation type white supremacists were supposed to have in Washington, D.C. a couple years ago. A white supremacist leader called for a public protest and march in D.C., to show the country that they could do the same thing black people did in the Million Man March and such. It got a lot of newspaper and newscast coverage for weeks before the event; he got on TV, calling for all white people to come join him in a show of strength against the "niggers" and Jews who have "taken over" the government. He got so much publicity, that he expected thousands of people to show up from all over the country. The D.C. police even hired extra workers from nearby police departments to come in that day to help keep the peace between these thousands of white supremacists and the people who would show up againts them.
Guess what? Less than 20 people came to this "demonstration," most of whom were this guy's friends. Nobody came. Despite coverage for weeks ahead of time of this white supremacist leader calling for all white people with his ideas to show up that day, nobody came. In contrast, there were far more peple who showed up to protest *against* the white supremacist march, than the under 20 who showed up for it. In the end, the guys who showed up left very soon after they got there, realizing that they just looked stupid and made people realize that so few people have these racist views.
The lesson there is that giving these morons enough rope to hang themselves publicly does more to discourage their racism than banning it ever would. Things grow in the underground. Things are given a mystiue and aura which draws people to them, when they are verboten. Pick up any rock and you'll find all sorts of nasty little creatures congregating in the darkness. Yet expose the same patch of ground to the penetrating sunlight, and nothing dares linger there, knowing it will be exposed and vulnerable.
This is how the white supremacist groups were driven out of public view in the U.S.--not by censorship, but by letting them make fools of themselves in public. In the 1980s and early 1990s, we had some very boisterous and exploitive talk shows in this country--Geraldo, Sally Jessy, Donahue, etc. Some of the shows still exist, but they have toned themselves down over the years and become more "respectble," not trying to shock as much as they used to. But back then, white supremacists, Klansmen and Aryan Nations skinheads would be on these shows about every week. Some of the shows would have them "confronted" by strong blacks or jews--and some broke out in violence on the stage, like the famous show where Geraldo Rivera got his nose broken.
Now, the upshot of all this open coverage is that people saw these white supremacists for what they truly were--ignorant, inbred, uneducated fools. They were laughed at and scorned, and used for entertainment as we mocked them in public on these talk shows. None of them ever had a good reason for their beliefs, and almost all of them were buffoons. After that, who would want to join them? Who would want to be mocked and scorned as they were? No one. And so, all the coverage they got worked against them. Klan membership fell. Aryan Nations membership fell. And except for occasional rallies in very uneducated redneck backwaters, and very occasional people who come on talk shows and get ridiculed in public, none of these groups ever shows itself in public any more.
There are still racially motivated killings here, like the black man who was dragge behind a truck in Texas a couple years ago. But they are much more rare then they were in the 1970s and 1980s, before we started ridiculing racists in public with their own words. And we can never completely eliminate hate and the crimes that come from it--it is as impossible as eliminating murder, rape, or any crime. But we have a much smaller problem with it than people in Germany do, where such ideas and speech is hidden away and given a mystique it does not deserve.
You see, in the U.S. I can go into any bookstore and buy a copy of *Mein Kampf*. I own a copy myself, not because I am a racist, but because I wantd to know how evil and foolish Hitler really was, from his own words. And yet, we have no great swell of neo-Nazism--because we expose neo-Nazis publicly for the fools they are. In the late 80s there was an upswing in neo-Nazi organizations in the U.S. The cure was letting them make fools of themselves in public on those talk shows I mentioned, and ever since they have no longer been growing in percentage. They are seen by almost everyone as uneducated idiots.
Germany has done the opposite, which is why they have a real danger today from neo-Nazis. You drive them underground instead of exposing them, which gives them power. It has an allure for some German young people, like a secret fraternity would. Some are interested only because of this mystique, this forbiddenness, and that draws them in. As you know, many teenagers will do something only because they're told not to. These groups also provide friendships and togetherness that is attractive to young people. But if you exposed them in public like we did and do in the U.S., they would not be attractive. Who would want friendship and togetherness with people who are made fun of and ridiculed and thought stupid and laughed at? Instead of mocking them, you fear them. That is why they have strength in Germany and France, but not in the U.S. The Klan used to be in the U.S. just like the Nazis in Germany--but while Germany faces increasing neo-Nazism, the U.S. does not face increasing Klan membership. The difference, once again, is that we expose it to the light of truth, while Germany hides it under a dark rock and allows it to grow.
Also, Germany is foolish for allowing so many immigrants to work there while there's so much unemployment. It is a recipe for disaster when you have so many Turks and other non-citizens (some are citizens, but most are not) working while so many citizens go unemployed. This immigration is allowed in Germany to please the rich, who would rather import skilled foreigners than invest in teaching skills to German youth. That is deplorable, and that feeds the fascism which seems to be the only faction truly devoted to keeping German jobs and German money for Germans. If Germany were to stop allowing so much immigration, and force employers to train young Germans to be skilled workers at a living wage instead of importing foreigners to work at a lesser wage, then that would take much of the force out of neo-Nazism. In a way, I can't blame many of the young people who are seduced by neo-Nazism in Germany and to some extent France--their own governments do not care enough about them to protect their jobs from lower-waged foreigners, so naturally they come to resent those foreigners. The U.S. allows even more immigration, but the difference is that even now in our recession, we don't have such high unemployment rates as you do in Germany and some other countries in the area. If your governments do not wake up and take care of your citizens and giving them the opportunity to work instead of importing cheaper foreign labor, you deserve the backlash you're getting. The foreigners don't deserve the hate crimes, but your governments do deserve the threat to their survival, since they are catering to the wealthy business owners and the foreign immigrants instead of to the average citizens.
Food for thought.
A movie would look TERRIBLE at the "right" frame rate of 24 FPS. The reason for this is that the effective framerate of a standard film on a standard projector is really 48 FPS.
Basically, it was discovered early on in creating the film medium that anything 30 FPS or above tends to look fairly smooth and natural in movement, and around 50 FPS and above looks very smooth and natural, but the 24 FPS of standard film looks jerky and unnatural when there's a lot of movement involved.
So, that's why the "flicker" of the movie projectors was introduced. Rather than waste an extra 6 FPS of very expensive film stock, which adds up quickly, to get the smooth motion of 30 FPS, it was discovered that introducing a very brief flicker in the middle of each frame--originally produced by passing a small wire or small disc or square of metal through the aperture of the projector 24 times per second, spaced timewise in the middle of each frame--would produce an optical effect which "tricked" the brain of the viewer into seeing the film at 48 FPS. Motion looked smooth enough because each frame was being interrupted by the flicker, so that the brain of the viewer would naturally group half of two frames together and create the sense of movement, instead of grouping it frame by frame and seeing the choppiness. An optical illusion, really. This is continued to the present day in every standard film projector, in one way or another.
So, seeing a "flat" 24 FPS film without the flicker would show the true choppiness of this very old format which lacks a high enough frame rate.
The easiest way to see this yourself is to find a high quality movie on the Net encoded at 25 FPS progressive from a deinterlaced PAL source, which is of course normally 25 FPS interlaced. People used to watching NTSC 30 FPS (29.97, but close enough) video on their monitors will definitely notice the difference in scenes involving fast motion. That extra 5 FPS is at an important threshold, as any PC gamer could tell you.
Of course, both NTSC and PAL use the trick of interlacing to make motion look even smoother, bringing the effective frame rates up to 60 FPS and 50 FPS respectively. This looked wonderful on standard TV sets, which lacked high resolution and make the signal into a more diffuse and softened display anyway; but it becomes a problem when the material is shown in its original interlaced form on a high definition monitor and looks pretty bad, or gets deinterlaced and the motion appears choppy (for PAL at least). Definitely a problem.
But film, at 24 FPS, would look even worse on a high definition monitor in its natural raw format, in terms of motion looking choppy. It would be noticeably like the purposefully choppy scenes in *Gladiator*--not quite so bad, but still not good. The ideal solution would be to present films in their original 24 FPS speed, but with the display introducing a minute "artificial flicker" to produce the same optical effect we get at the theater with projectors.
Of course, anyone has permission to redistribute anything I write, for any purpose whatsoever.
;-)
Consider all my comments to be GPL'd.
We've reached a plateau with this legislation, really. It's so bad that if it were worse, it would only still be at the same level of bad. Or something like that...
... If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquillity of servitude than the animating contest of freedom--go from us in peace. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you."--Sam Adams
This legislation makes it legal for the FBI to read every line of every header on every packet that ever goes out on the Internet, without a warrant. That means that the FBI can legally quite easily maintain lists of who visits what websites, who sends whom e-mail, etc. This is analogous to how the FBI used to send people to follow dissidents and people with political beliefs they didn't like, and wait for them to do something they could exploit publicly to embarrass someone, or privately to blackmail someone (like they did to Martin Luther King, Jr., with his affair). Do you ever do anything at all online that you wouldn't want everyone in the world to know about? Then don't speak out too loudly against whatever ever-more-draconian things the FBI wants, or you may get on their radar. Ever do anything that's technically illegal, or can otherwise get you into trouble, even though whether it should is debatable? Like, gamble, protest (just ask the WTO protesters how often they get arrested for exercising this *right*, even peacefully), visit European or Asian pr0n sites where some of the models are 16 because it's perfectly legal in that given country, be gay and in the military, tear the tag off the mattress at the store, write literature or have performances that get deemed a violation of your community's standards, etc.? Just don't say anything about it or e-mail anything about it or visit any sites related to it, on the Internet.
Oh, and if you ever gamble online, you're helping terrorists to launder money, BTW, and don't be surprised if it gets you into a lot of trouble. Granted, no one has ever maintained that any major online offshore gambling houses are actually being used by terrorists to launder anything; this was just moralizing rightwingers using terrorism as an excuse to foist their morality on everyone else. And that is despicable.
And don't ever visit online boards filled with political dissidents and prograssives, like the Independent Media Center which is somethimes the only source of good information on and from protests--unless you want to get on a McCarthyesque list or get detained for questioning by the FBI. After all, they served the IMC with a search warrant this year after the WTO/IMF protest in Canada, which would have forced them to turn over all server logs so that the FBI could find out who was posting updates from the protest so that they could interrogate those people about some documents or somesuch which were taken from a police car (IIRC), and a gag order to prevent them from revealing it to site visitors. They warrant was quashed, being unconstitutional and all. But now, THEY DON"T NEED A WARRANT. They have license to gather all that data for themselves by directly bugging the Internet backbone. And if something they want slips through, or is encrypted and has its path scrambled by something like a Mixmaster remailer, then this legislation makes it very easy for them to get a warrant and search logs or install password sniffers while you're away without even telling you they were ever there.
Slashdot has already carried a story about the FBI's proposal to concentrate all Internet traffic at a few key points to that it can do just that sort of broad monitoring of every Internet user everywhere. Funny thing is, it's an idea which came to the FBI 2 years ago. Interesting how something the FBI has been secretly lusting after for years is now the answer to the present situation, eh? They're just opportunists who have been wanting this power, and the current situation gives them an excuse for circumventing the Constitution with only a single senator voting against their power grab.
And once the FBI has its closed boxes installed throughout the Internet backbone, is there any way to really prevent them from looking at more than just the header data that they can now get, legally, without a warrant? Recent studies indicate that there are thousands of illegal telephone wiretaps performed by law enforcement agencies each year in the U.S. With the power to instantly see what anyone is doing on the Net, probably with no one ever being the wiser, that is an even greater temptation to abuse. They will implement such capabilities into their closed and secret boxes under the auspices of needing the capabilities for when they get search warrants to read the data itself, not just its headers; and then no one is there looking over their shoulders to make sure they don't take peeks whenever they want, without warrants, or with a warrant that's just a rubber stamp from a judge in their pocket who makes it a secret warrant under this new law, that no one ever need know about?
And what is the FBI if not an agency which has proven its capacity to abuse power, along with its sister agencies like the ATF? The entire Reno administration in the DOJ was one long abuse of the people, from using pyrotechnic devices at Waco and lying about it for 8 years until it was proven by their own photographs and documents which had been conveniently misplaced, to the murder of two innocent people at Ruby Ridge (the man they came to arrest won a million+ dollar lawsuit against them), to deporting a minor child on very dubious grounds while his custody proceedings were still moving forward in a state Court, just to prove a political point, to lying to the U.S. Army to get military training for agents under a law that says agents can get military training only when preparing for an international drug bust, when those agents were serving a warrant for 1 count of selling a shotgun with a too-short barrel, to inventing allegations of child abuse in several cases which were later disproved, for the purposes of making a defendant who would have been vindicated look bad. And the Ashcroft DOJ is looking at least as bad.
Don't forget that Hoover may be dead, but his training and indoctrination methods are still very much alive at the FBI, where new agents are still taught according to principles he established. Terrorism isn't the greatest threat to freedom in this country; the DOJ is.
Ponder this Vietnam-era quote:
"The mushrooming of surveillance has been explained by the sense of panic
and crisis felt throughout the government during this period of extremely
vocal dissent, large demonstrations, political and campus violence, and
what at the time seemed the inauguration of a period of wide- spread
anarchy. While officials... suggested that these crises justified the
surveillance, they failed to recognize that the rights guaranteed by the
constitution are constant and unbending to the temper of the times..."
--Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, 1973
And how about these old stand-bys:
"Implicit in the term 'national defense' is the notion of defending those
values and ideals which set this Nation apart... It would indeed be
ironic if, in the name of national defense, we would sanction the
subversion of one of those liberties... which makes the defense of the
Nation worthwhile."--Chief Justice Earl Warren, U.S. Supreme Court, US v Robel
"An elective despotism was not the government we fought for." -- Thomas Jefferson
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the
argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."--William Pitt to the House of Commons, November 18, 1783
"Man did not enter into society to become worse than he was before, nor
to have fewer rights than he had before, but to have those rights better
secured."--Thomas Paine, 1791
"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty
when the government's purposes are beneficient . . . the greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding."--Justice Louis Brandeis, U.S. Supreme Court
"Contemplate the mangled bodies of your countrymen, and then say, What should be the reward of such sacrifices?
"When people fear the government, there is tyranny. When government fears the people, there is liberty."-- Thomas Paine
"You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get
yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is
to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding
fathers used in the great struggle for independence."--Charles Austin Beard, 1874 - 1948
These are my "stock quotes" that I drag out on discussion boards and on USENET whenever I see a well-intioned post which goes against these words of wisdom from men greater than you or me, men who established or defended and defined the rights which we now enjoy as proud Americans. But I am not proud of my country at this. We have set a precedent which is terrible, and tommorrow when the President signs the bill into law we will have lost rights which it may take generations to recover--if we ever do. Sure, it's meant to be temporary--but it can be passed again, permanently, after we've gotten used to having no more 4th Amendment rights the moment we turn on a computer. Remember that the income tax which we now all pay so copiously was passed as a temporary measure to fund the Spanish-American War. Remember that Social Security, which we all still have to pay with no opt-out option, was a temporary measure to help soften the Depression.
Temporary things have a habit of becoming permanent in this country. Just ask the people who had to foment a Revolution to get out from under the burden of so many "temporary" taxes the English imposed upon their Colonies.
This is the sort of invasion of liberties which, historically, has slowly caused armed revolutions. Three hundred years from now, they may be studying this and similar events in high schools much as we study the small erosions of freedom which by themselves were considered nothing, but which together are considered the genesis of the American Revolution. Strong words? No, strong legislation. At best, history will judge the next years under this law as being not unlike a new McCarthyism.
Doesn't it make you wonder what sort of hardware they have behind goatse.cx, to survive the /. effect so well? ;-) I mean just the /. newbies alone who go to the site not knowing what it is, have to produce considerable traffic.
I'd like to see goatse.cx guy's hardware and bandwidth statistics. Lord knows it would be a lot better than what he's been showing us...