Seriously, I always thought the N64 controller was *the* masterpiece of ergonomic controller design. Not only did it fit most hands perfectly, but it was versatile, offering three distinct gripping areas, the middle one feeling nicely like a gun for those shooter games.
Now they go and throw it away for a DualShock PSX rip-off? Bah.
I also have to say that a box isn't sexy. It isn't even cute. The design just strikes me as being a boxy and plain Model T type styling. No, looks aren't terribly important in a gaming console--but the PS2 is both simple and sexy. I wish Nintendo had kept their controller along N64 lines and made the console design more sleek. A purple box is just going to look out of place sitting atop my DVD player or VCR, whereas the PS2 looks right at home.
Not that I'm going to buy one. I gave up on consoles. Playstation, N64, Saturn, Dreamcast, PS2, GameCube, X-Box--that's 7 machines in recent times. That's just too many. I want games that I can still play 5 years from now without having to have 7 weird boxes daisy-chained across my entertainment center. That's why I've pledged to go PC-only. I may not get the newest Zelda or Mario or FF games, but I get a lot of cool others--and all the rest will eventually be emulated well enough in time. Let's see, ~3000 arcade games both classic and contemporary, hundreds of old "abandonware" PC games, dozens of my NES and SNES and Genesis favorites, a dozen of my favorite old Mac shareware games courtesy of the open-source Basilisk II emulator, all pulled off the Net for free, plus Bleem! and VGS to play some used PS discs bought for a song, plus whatever cool new PC games I ant to buy like the Quakes and all those mods and customizations which can never all make it to the console ports, the Unreals, lots of Star Trek some of which is actually good like Elite Force and Dominion Wars, Alice, Tomb Raider 37: More of Lara's Tits, etc. etc. etc.
I know the lure of the console and all its exclusives is great. But it would be better for the gaming community in the long run to support only more open platforms, like the PC and Mac, not consoles. It's hard to resist, but when I realize that I don't want dozens of proprietary boxes most of which are outdated cluttering my space just to play games--and even more I don't want to throw away or give away my old games whenever new consoles come out--I don't feel right supporting the console industry. Fuck 'em. My PC is better any day, and will be able to emulate 'em all eventually.
That's all you need to do--introduce them to a place where they could very likely end up having "tinysex"/cybersex with strangers. Try explaining how you let random cyberspace strangers "into the school," in the same hysteric society which runs that horrid commercial warning kids of reporting suspicious people online (horrid because the "online predator" guy is stereotypically a fat guy made up to look really ugly. Yes, let's teach kids to judge by appearance, and to think fat people are ugly and evil and out to molest them).
Once you let them interact with strangers online, you open up a huge can of worms for which you WILL be held responsible the minute someone has cybersex or talks about something "untoward." Not to mention mock-violence like in the classic tale *A Rape in Cyberspace*.
It would be a great idea--if only Americans weren't so paranoid about kids and the Net.
Civ, even the later versions, can be too complicated in terms of interface and scope. I recommend Pharaoh, which is like Civ with a more intuitive interface and simpler options, and obviously a focus on one particular civilization. Like Civ bad stuff can happen--like your city being razed--but it's not inherently violent and is extremely fun and engaging. Personally, I enjoyed it as much as any Civ version I've tried, perhaps because the elegant simplicity lends itself to engaging more casual gamers like myself--and like most of your potential student players.
> Second, BeOS is probably just as well supported as Linux.
Well, the bigger issue isn't about user support, it's about hardware support. Or rather, the lack thereof.
There was a period a couple years ago where I honestly considered going to BeOS. I started with computers in college on Macs, then my college switched to PCs, and when I graduated I wanted a Mac but even the used ones were too expensive. So I bought a used laptop running Windows 95. It died after six months and I decided to buy something new, with a warranty. Obviously it had to be a PC because new Macs, even today, are so much more expensive compared to equally-performing PCs in any given range.
I found a local screwdriver shop with good warranty terms, but decided to buy it OS-less to save the $89 Windows license charge. I had three choices: use Linux, use Be, or pirate Windows.
I tried Linux and at that point in time no fucking way was I going to use such a primitive interface. Remember that this was years ago, before the current KDE/GNOME/Nautilus/etc. advances. I looked at Be, and was beautiful. I liked everything I read about it and when I tried it out on a real machine it was great. But what I couldn't handle was the lack of hardware support.
At that point in time there was exactly ONE sound card supported. There was a very short list of "fully supported" motherboards, with the lackluster assurance that motherboards from other vendors using the same chipsets "should" work but are not officially supported.
I went ahead and borrowed a relative's shiny new Win98 CD. I knew it would work on any hardware. I knew it would support a lot of expansion over the coming years. And it has--I added a new video card and capture board, newer sound card, a DVD-ROM with a Hollywood+ hardware decoder, and other things, none of which would have been completely usable by BeOS if at all.
Obviously things improved quite a bit over the last couple of years, but not that much compared to all the new hardware that's come out. Be never had enough developers to keep up, much less catch up. And that's important.
It's important because, without all that nifty hardware and the software to support it, a PC is just a glorified typewriter and WebTV. Sure, not everyone uses the latest greatest video cards, or wants to interface an MP3 player or PDA, or a special sound board, or a certain DVD player, or buys a motherboard with a new chipset, or wants to use a video capture device that isn't supported by BeOS. But all you have to do is want one of those things, or one of several others, and all of a sudden the OS is not worth the trouble.
And as everyone points out, the problem is magnified on the software side. People can buy any kind of software or game for an MS OS. They can go to Best Buy or Fry's or wherever, and know that the software will work on their PCs 99% of the time. With any alternative OS this is just not the case. But the problem is all the more immense when there's a fair chance your hardware's basic features won't even work, which was the case for a very long time with Be.
> Enough with the focus shift BS. There have been two focus shifts in Be's history.
Hmm...
1) From an integrated hardware/software solution like Apple, to an alternative PPC OS vendor.
2) From an alternative PPC OS vendor to a dual PPC/x86 alternative OS vendor.
3) Dropping new PPC development entirely, and refocusing and redoubling x86 development. This was forced by Apple, but nonetheless happened.
4) Let's give a basic OS away for free for home use, and offer a more complete edition for business and home users willing to pay. A small change in the codebase, but a huge shift in business strategy and, therefore, the company's focus.
5) Roughly contemporaneously with 4 was the development of BeIA. The final focus change is the ascendance of BeIA over the desktop BeOS.
Each of these changes required a big shift in both business strategy and/or in developer assignments and the future of the OS.
At any rate, that's more than 2. And it's an awful lot of shifting for a very young company.
And ultimately, BeOS wasn't doomed by Microsoft's OEM licensing. It was doomed by its inability to run a wide variety of hardware and software demanded by end users. Pointing to BeOS equivalent software isn't good enough since most end users buy their software in a real store, and that software is almost always going to run on either Windows or depending on the store Mac.
If you really want to analyze the situation, Apple killed Be. Be never was prepared to support the wide variety of hardware commonly strewn together in the x86 market, and so while they did produce an x86 OS that ran beautifully on supported hardware, they did not have the hive full of Microsoftian development drones required to support nearly everything, or the similar army of Linux volunteers. Be made a wonderful PPC OS, and could have continued to thrive on that platform since hardware support is a far easier task. But Apple yanked the platfor out from under them by not releasing the specs.
Of course, one has to wonder how Linux manages to run beautifully on new Macs even though Be swore it couldn't. Surely it would have been easier to develop for the new Macs, than to spread the developers thin enough to code all those new and varied x86 drivers? It does make one wonder if Apple's refusal to release their specs was more of a red herring than a real reason to make the x86 switch. I have to suspect that JLG just bit off more than he and his little company could handle, by moving to x86. They might be more alive today if they had devoted those resources to running on Macs, since as I said Linux manages just fine--not to mention *BSD, where the BSD license would have allowed wholesale lifting of code.
So as far as I can see, either Apple killed Be by making them switch to a far more varied platform than they could support, or Be committed suicide by moving to the more varied platform when maybe they should have worked harder on continuing PPC work. Either way, it has nothing to do with Microsoft so much as it has to do with the fact that PC end users want their hardware to work with all its features enabled, and to run software they can get at the store. BGe never filled either requirement, so while elegant, it had no chance at all on the x86 desktop.
> Isn't all property, then, an "artificial construct"? And if so do you mind if I take your
> house, car, and computer? You have no natural right to your property, only an artificial one
> imposed by our society.
You ignore the most basic difference between "intellectual property" and property. Intellectual property can be freely reproduced, and property cannot. If you take my house or car, I have no house or car. If you "take" my idea, my book (the words, not the physical object), or my ROM, I would still have all of those things for myself as well. So you have not actually *taken* anything in the case of "intellectual property."
> You are speaking of an ideal society. We, unfortunately, live in a real one.
And a real society can be ideal if it tries. Ours doesn't. Ours just bases itself on greed and the lowest, basest of human emotions. That needs to change, and it can if we try. It's our job and our duty to do so. You're not a good person if you live by arbitrary rules instead of trying to make the rules as just as possible.
> A real one in which, incidentally, Shakespeare would be allowed to create his works under the
> Constitutional protection which limits the time for which an author is granted exclusive right.
You seem to have no understanding of the issues. When the Constitution was written, the limited term of copyright was set at 14 years. Reasonable, and after that all copyrighted material came into the public domain, became freely usable by the culture and society which bore it--authors and inventors do not labor in a vacuum, and owe the rest of society as much as we owe them, for all ideas and inventions draw on those which came before.
But today copyright lasts even longer than patents. Tody under many circumstances a copyright can be renewed to last in excess of a century after the creator's death--and so, no, Shakespeare could not have written *Romeo and Juliet* and many of his other plays, for many of them draw heavily upon works created within the two centuries preceding him.
> Also, his plays did not use a substatial portion of the originals,
They used the same ideas, characters, many of the same scenes and plot outlines. As a Shakespeare scholar--and I'm not talking just an undergrad course here--I know whereof I speak. Do some research before you spurt nonsense. If you do not think that is enough for them to infringe, then you are uneducated on these matters--cf. the case Vladimir Nabokov's son made against *Lo's Diary* (not sure offhand if that is the official English title of this translated work).
> nor did they influence the market value of any works that he borrowed from.
This is irrelevent to copyright. If it were relevent then your argument would fall apart, since discontinued arcade games, except for a few "classics" that could be translated into collections like Microsoft's "Return of Arcade" for the PC, have absolutely no market value. But as I said, market value is irrelevant to a determination of copyright infringement. It may have an impact on the size of judgements in civil copyright infringement cases, but no bearing whatsoever on whether civil or criminal charges could be filed and substantiated, or whether a work is infringing. You really *are* completely uneducated on this subject.
> That is why we can have spin-off shows on TV like "The Weakest Link", which clearly owes its
> origin to the popularity of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire"
No, you are talking about two completely different shows with completely different occurrences, which are within the same genre. They have absolutely no similarities except that people are asked questions and if they get them right they win money. A concept which has been around since the 1950s to be sure. But if the show were titled "Who Wants to Be Rich" and featured a nearly identical methodology, then the producers of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" would have a very actionable breach of their copyrights. Coming out with one quiz show to capitalize on the popularity of another has nothing to do with "intellectual property" and more than Nike could sue Adidas for making shoes.
> You are missing the point about ROMs. They are not "intellectual" property, because they can be
> easily reproduced without any real intellectual genius.
God you're stupid. This is precisely *why* they are "intellectual property*--they are binary ones and zeros that can be reproduced indefinitely without diminishing the originals. They are in that sense no different from the words of a song or book, which are also "intellectual property".
> Why bother doing something illegal when there are so many fun games to be had freely?
Now that has nothing to do with the subject at all. But to that I'd answer, Why settle for a cheap imitation of the authentic experience, when the original is just as easy to obtain, and without depriving anyone of it since it can be reproduced without "taking" the original from anyone.
Write whatever follow-up you want. I will neither read nor respond to it, since you're an idiot who clearly does not even undertsand the subject matter. Come back when you can actually think like the real Diogenes--again, why should I settle for a cheap knock-off, when it's obvious that the original, coming from when and whence he did and holding the ideas which he did, would have agreed with me.
> Would it be honest if people took his book and copied it instead of paying for it? If enough
> people did this, even if most were not going to buy it anyway, what incentive would my father
> have to ever write another reference?
It is not immoral to "steal" something which belongs to everyone and can be losslessly reproduced ad infinitem. Ideas belong to everyone, and information belongs to everyone.
No one ever said that your father has an inherent right to be given a monetary incentive to create. As I said, "intellectual property" was an artificial construct created to give people an incentive to create. The reason an artificial construct was invented was precisely because there is no "natural right" to have intellectual property. On that point I would refer you to the Jefferson quote I gave.
Are libraries immoral because they spread "intellectual property" without giving a profit to the people who wrote the books? Sure, one copy was sold to the library, but then hundreds or even thousands of people over the years can read those books--for free! How horrible that they don't have to buy them! How immoral and outrageous!
The fact is that the ancient world was so fruitful and full of intellectual life unheard of again until the Renaissance, precisely because of the free echange of ideas, unencumbered from artificial rectrictions like "intellectual property." In Athens, for example, people gathered on the stoa of temples each day to discuss new and exciting ideas. People like Diogenes were willing to devote themselves truly to understanding, without any worthless and stifling "incentives" which in reality encourage writers and artists to cater to the lowest common denominator rather than to truly indulge in art and wisdom. Even worse, the only reason most of the knowledge we still have from the Classical world still exists is because it was freely copied by innumerable people, not allowed to go "out of print" and kept out because of a construct like copyright. The fact is that part of the reason the Renaissance happened was due to the free exchange of ideas and the creation of libraries to enshrine and disseminate that knowledge. If people hadn't had free access to the body of knowledge without having to worry about "intellectual property" most of that period's grat works would never have been written. As just one example, Shakespeare's *Romeo and Juliet* borrows heavily from several earlier works--today, Shakespeare would be sued for copyright infringement or, more likely, would have knows from the start that he couldn't write his great plays. You may be surprised just how many of them were based on earlier, mostly Italian works.
It is honest to read or copy a book you don't own, or a ROM you don't own, precisely because "intellectual property" is artificial and not a natural right. No one has the right to limit the dissemination of knowledge. "Intellectual property" was a kludge whose useful life has ended thanks largely to the corporate greed which seeks to keep "intellectual property" out of circulation even long after its useful life--if a book or article or game even, is out of print or no longer in production, it should be freely distributed in order to preserve it and to share it with the culture which gave so much to its creators in the first place. And then there are "intellectual properties" which have passed into the popular culture yet are stil monopolized by their creators, years after they have turned a very tidy profit and years after they should have been released to the public good. Disney is an example of this--they became the giant they are by using public-domain ideas and characters, like those from Grimm's Fairy Tales, and yet they have contributed absolutely nothing back to that creative pool and indeed fight to extend the term of copyright year after year.
The culture which nurtured people on the ideas which sparked their creations, deserves to have those creations in its own public domain in a reasonable time period. This is no longer the case thanks to greed. Therefore the concept of "intellectual property" must be wiped away for the good of humanity, and we must return to the free exchange of ideas, as Thomas Jefferson would doubtless agree.
You again rely on illegality, and equate illegality with cheating with dishonesty. Illegality and cheating are two separate terms with separate definitions.
The easiest way to illustrate this is to give an example. Laws are arbitrary and can be just or unjust, and following or not follwing them has nothing to do with cheating or dishonesty. Explain to me why it was cheating or dishonesty when my great-great grandfather violated the law by teaching free blacks to read in the South during the period when most blacks were slaves, and teaching any black whether slave or free was illegal in his State.
If you can satisfactorily do so I will concede. If not, I have proven my point--my point being that laws are often arbitrary, not always just, and have no bearing in the final analysis in determining whether something is "right" (just) or "wrong" (unjust), honest or dishonest.
Well "Diogenes", there's a difference between dishonesty and illegality. Laws can be arbitrary and change greatly over time, while honesty is usually thought a simple concept--if you do not lie or cheat or steal, convention holds that you are displaying honesty. There are many definitions of the word, but the one given above generally encompasses most of them. Honesty is interesting in that it is usually defined by a lack of certain behaviours, rather than by the presence of certain behaviours.
So whether a person is "dishonest" or not for using ROMs which they may not be legally entitled too, depends on whether one has lied or cheated or stolen to obtain them. Has one lied? Depends on whether the site had one of those silly "You own this Rom, right?" buttons you have to click or not. If you said you owned a copy of the ROM, but didn't, then you lied and therefore have been dishonest. Otherwise, you have not. The next condition is not cheating. While cheating again has a few disparate definitions, it's safe to say that none of the commonly accepted definitions of cheating are triggered by downloading or possessing a few bits of data.
Stealing is really the crux of the matter. Has a person stolen something by making an electronic copy for himself, i.e., by downloading a ROM? Since the entire idea of "intellectual property" did not exist until within the last few centuries, and since it was devised as a kludge "to encourage the useful arts and sciences" [to concisely paraphrase the U.S. Constitution's reason for institutiong copyright] by giving authors and inventors sole right over reproduction of their works *for a limited time*, it is clearly not "stealing". Stealing refers to theft of tangible goods or services, and always has. Electronically reprodicing a copyrighted work and stealing a physical object have many dissimilarities and are fundamentally different acts. Indeed, the right to tangible property is an innate right in Western civilizations, and to steal it means depriving its owner of a real and measurable item. However, the right to "intellectual property," as I said, was created artificially as an incentive for people to invent stuff, and to copy intellectual property does not deprive the owner of any tangible items. It is therefore not stealing, and therefore there is nothing dishonest about possessing or trading in ROMs.
Q.E.D.
And lastly, here's a taste of Thomas Jefferson:
"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possess the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening mine."--Thomas Jefferson
If you hadn't put that smiley there...
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MAME on X-Box
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If you hadn't put that smiley there, I'd have had to tear you a new one.:-) Not complaining about lack of features, as you doubtless know--just pointing out that the Taco had a pretty good idea.
When I read that part of his pages, I instantly thought--"Ya know, I've wondered myself why it doesn't pause, since there's a menu blocking the screen and all." Just one of those small little things that you never really consciously think about, until someone else notices them too.
Of course, being open-source and all, anyone could write it into their own MAME. But I really think it might be a useful feature in the main distribution. Just MHO though.
Now, complaining about the lack of features in an open-source project would have been if I'd whined about the decision to remove Pong and not accept any more "simulated" games, like the Monaco GP which recently came out. I always thought that it was kind of silly since most of the codebase is dedicated to "simulating" the discrete hardware and processors of the arcade machines so that the ROMs can run on them, so that "simulating" a ROM-less arcade game was really no different on technical terms. I chalked it up to a legal CYA decision, since the old ROM-less games could be played from MAME itself without having to hunt down an external ROM. Of course, I always thought the better choice, and the one which would preserve the oldest games, most in need of preservation and recreation, would be to have the discrete circuitry-based games separated but usable through a sort of module system whereby the code for them would be in separate Zip files just like ROMs.
See, *that's* what a complaint is like! Oh, umm, oops...
Just recently, when I ran across some old Mac floppies, I read them and transferred the graphics files to my PC using MacOS 8.1 running on Basilisk II, then running HFV Explorer from within Windows I transferred all the graphics files from the Mac HFV file to my PC's regular FAT32 file system, then later transferred them to another HFV containing System 7. When I booted System 7 through Basilisk II the files still sometimes opened in JPEGview and sometimes in Graphic Converter. That sort of information should not have survived going from HFS to FAT32 back to HFS if what you say is the entire story. And HFV Explorer can't be responsible since if it were it would have chosen to give all the files of the same type the same type/creator codes.
And the reason I was doing all these transfers, BTW, is that I'm creating a 200MB (or greater, as necessary) HFV file for use with 68k Mac emulators filled with Mac software and files commonly found on a Mac in c. 1994-1995, for historical puposes. Many of those files, and much of that old software, is now nearly impossible to find, so I am archiving as much of it as I can to be released in 2005 as a sort of abandonware homage to the Macs that were in use when the Internet made it mainstream. I find most of it in dusty old subdirectories of academic institution FTPs, which I fear will start cleaning house sooner or later and permanently losing a lot of those archaic files.
At any rate, I have seen type/creator codes, particularly on graphics files, survive on FAT32 systems and on Zip archives I made ages ago.
You may continue to argue all you want, but this has been my experience, the experience of someone who has both FAT32 filesystems, HFS filesystems, and others all on the same computer. What you are saying may or may not be correct, but it is still clearly not the whole picture since it contradicts my direct and extensive experience at transferring files across filesystems.
And one has to wonder if things like the PSX and N64 emulators would ever have gotten to the point of being distributed at all before the hordes of lawyers got a chance to show up, if the DMCA had been in effect back then. Much broader protections for "copyright holders," much more restrictive limits on the potential for reverse engineering. A clickable license agreement and/or ROT-13 level encryption instantly becomes the legal equivalent of an unbreakable Fort Knox vault.
Thanks for your MAME work, BTW. You've got millions of fans, even if most of them don't know it.;-)
Oh, and CmdrTaco had a great idea in his pages, linked in the story above. It *would* be nice if MAME had an option for the Tab key to pause the game as it brings up the menu. Not much reason to keep the game running while the menu is blocking the screen, but plenty of reason to have it pause while the menu is blocking the screen. *cough*
> Current shipping version of Windows (ME) does not allow that. You have to right click on the
> file and get the properties dialog, because....the extensions are hidden.
Bah. No one who knows anything about Windows uses ME. It's just Win98SE, but slower and bloated with more useless features. But even if you *are* using it, just click on the "View" pull-down on any open window, select "Folder Options," click on "View" tab, and un-check the box that says "Hide file extensions for known file types." Then the file extensions will always, always, appear for all files.
Before you complain that that's complicated, you only have to do it once--and anyone with even the most basic skills knows that he needs to customze his preferences when setting up a box, whether Windows, Mac, or *nix. And you also should be aware that Apple has plans to do the same little preference about showing/hiding file extensions in the next OS X release. It's a way to make the extensions invisible to really dumb people who wouldn't know what to do with them and shouldn't be allowed to accidentally change them when they change a file's name, but still allow users with a modicum of experience (enough to un-check a box, which isn't much) to do their magic. And BTW, I did point out in my original comment that showing all file extensions is no longer the Windows default and must be changed by the user.
Therefore, that "arcane" dialog box for changing extensions in WinME is unnecessary once you un-check a prefeence box.
> Just not true. Netscape, IE, all every FTP app I can think of all reset the type and creator
> on download
If that's true, it's insane. Do you know what a CRC or CSV or SFV is? It's a small algorithmically-derived digest of a file, or of an entire set of files, which can be downloaded and automatically check the files to make sure none are corrupted. These are very commonly used to ensure file integrity, whenever there is a file or series of files of some importance which one wants to ensure are completely original and intact. Since type/creator is not in the resource fork, but in the file itself, altering them would alter the file in a very small and usually insignificant way, however the CRC/CSV/SFV would be rendered absolutely useless, since a change of even 1 bit would show up in the digest and therefore the file would be reported as corrupted. That is just insane, if true. My downloading software should IN NO WAY modify my files, without my explicit knowledge and permission. It renders file integrity checking utterly useless.
The last version of Netscape I have ever used, on a Mac or otherwise, is 3.04Gold, so I would not know. I do recall that Netscape had a list of "helper applications" for what app should open what file--but that was only used if you selected within Netscape to "Open" the file upon download, not when just "saving" a file. I now use IE on Windows and Mozilla on Linux, though when Mozilla for Windows gets a bit better and faster, I plan to switch to that too. If what you said is true, though, it is absolutely stupid for the reason I mentioned above. You can't have file verifitcation if your OS midifies the file in any way whatsoever. File verification is especially important when downloading software; the software companies, particularly ones who make security software, often offer CRCs to their customers so that the customer can be confident that he has not received a trojaned or otherwise interfered-with software package.
Second, you may not download much in StuffIt archives (who does)? But I download an awful lot in Zip and RAR archives. Doing that on a Mac would not affect type/creator of the files within the archive. In fact, you will find that Zip is the most commonly used method for transferring multiple files at once.
> you can "Show Info" on a file (same thing as in "Get Info in OS 9) and there is a pull down
> menu that gives the option application. Its very easily noticed.
I know. I don't have OS X on any of my own machines yet, but I've played with a lot. In general, I really love it. I think it's a wonderful evolution of the interface I came to love years ago when I was running System 7 on a scrappy little PowerPC at something like 66MHz. But my point is that in Windows all one needs to do is highlight the filename and change the three-letter extension. No dialog box and pull-down menu necessary. Faster and easier. IMHO, of course.
> If you download a normal everyday file off the internet, odds are not going to get the meta
> information of that file
Maybe I'm weird, but when I used to download with Macs, it happened all the time. Particularly with graphics files. You are of course aware that type/creator is not in the resource fork for Mac files, and so if you download a graphic created with Mac Photoshop, it will usually want to open in Photoshop if you have it installed? Same for Graphic Converter files, and others. That's just my experience. I'm not being disingenuous at all. I also haven't downloaded anything with a Mac since OS 8.1, I now use a Windoze box for my vanilla downloading duties. The case may have changed, but from what I've read from others, doubtful.
> Now if you are heavily using Hotline for exchanging files, then odds are you are a
> pirate and deserve what you get.
Umm, don't you find that an ironic statement from someone who has the.sig line "Burn Hollywood Burn"?;-) So, pirating from Hollywood is the only kind of pirating that's good? hehe.
> I agree that handling metadata in MacOS should be easier. Just a simple command to view and
> edit them would solve most problems. But don't confuse that lack of tools with a fundamental
> problem with the nmeta data concept itself.
The problem is that we already have a much simpler and more elegant solution for the most commonly used metadata, type/creator. I do not think it is at all possible to make it eaiser to access and change type/creator from a GUI, than it is to access and change the file extension. So if there is no advantage to type/creator metadata, there would be no reason to use it at all. I spent the better part of my post above showing why type/creator metadata causes problems when files are exchanged, and how it is just as easy to use the context menu or Send To submenu in a Windows system to launch different files of the same type in different applications. Therefore, I see no reason to have type/creator metadata in the first place, since simple typing by extension with a context menu available on right-click is at least as effective, yet provides more flexibility in terms of the context menu commands or Send To menu apps available to launch the file, and easier and faster access to manipulating the file's actual type.
I think the problem is a narrow-mindedness on the part of *some* Mac users, who have not cared to even learn the Windows way of doing things and so think the Mac's metadata is some huge advantage when in fact the Windows way is easier and more flexible if you give it a chance. The MacOS simply lacks an equivalent context menu and Send To submenu--the context menu it has isn't as powerful and flexible, and so cannot do the job, and so Mac users see anything that relies on a context menu to be suspect if it could be done without. Of course, Apple would have to adopt a standard 2-button mouse before it could implement a system that relied on the centext menu for opening files in alternative ways, and Apple is so unfortunately wedded to the 80s notion that more than one button would be too confusing for new users. Funny how new Windows users seem to get the hang of it...
Point is, I am a Mac fan, but use Windows too and can accurately judge the features of each. And I can say that Windows' simple file extensions are eaiser to use and manipulate, while its adaptive right-click menu gives you almost all the advantages of type/creator metadata with even more flexibility and none of the drawbacks. I'm glad the newer Linux GUI environments are mimicking this aspect of Windows, rather than the metadata of MacOS. As I said, I cannot think of a way to make the metadata as accessible through the GUI as a file extension is.
Well, where I said "I hate editing resource forks" toward the end, I should have said "I hate editing metadata." And though type/creator and the resource fork are separate, they are usually manipulated with the same tools.
However, the first time I said "resource forks" that's exactly what I meant. It's the resource fork that takes up so much extra space on HFS and HFS+ filesystems. And the resource fork is there to store, contrary to what Siracusa says, metadata, not usually data. I think it stems from a weird Mac-centric definition of data he has.
The resource fork is not generally used to store any data within a data file type. An executable file type, and some others, store important *data* in the resource fork, without which they often cannot function. However, any plain data files are stored in their entirety in the...data fork. Go figure.
Things like labels and customized icons are stored in the resource fork. I think these things are clearly metadata--data about the thing in the data fork. For example, the fact that a piece of data is labeled with one of the classic Mac label colors, or that the user wants the file displayed with an icon other than the standard one for that file type, is clearly metadata--not at all an essential part of the file. Unlike what Siracusa said, all basic data file types which I can think of are perfectly usable even when sent from a Mac without their resource fork. Another Mac may not know what to do with them, but on other systems giving them an appropriate extension will immediately let the PC know what they are and what to open/edit/etc. them with if they're clicked on. For example, a ClarisWorks file still has all its data intact, even if the resource fork goes away. A text file will still be intact. A Stuffit file will still be un-stuffable, though I've noticed on OS 8 at least that if the resource fork is not present double-clicking a.sit gets no results, it has to then be manually dropped onto Expander (so it must store *something* interesting there, but nothing absolutely essential). A GIF is still a GIF, etc., and perfectly usable. No essential data is stored in the resource fork for most types of non-executable files. It's almost all inessential metadata, whether Siracusa wants to admit it or not.
Actually, I lied. I don't hate MacOS; I just wanted to get your attention by yelling about it. Now that you're here, though, I have to say that I LOVE the MacOS, and have ever since I first used it, before it was even called MacOS. I started with System 7, which was so attractive and easy to use that it's still my bar for measuring other interfaces.
But if there is one thing I intensely dislike about MacOS, it's the metadata. I know I'm practically alone in the Mac camp, but I hate metadata. I have always thought it was just a space-hogging pain in my ass.
Now, the space issue is no longer a big concern since we have such big, cheap drives that a little filesystem metadata isn't such a burden on capacity. But back in the days of floppies I was pissed that I could fit so few files on a floppy when my friend with DOS could fit noticeably more. I was especially annoyed that even when I formatted a disk as a PC floppy, the Mac would still waste my space by creating and hiding from me files and folders on the disk to constiture the resource forks. I wanted every kilobyte, which counts when you're cramming a lot of small files onto a lot of small disks.
But of course this is no longer the big issue it used to be. But if I were storing large numbers of files and running out of space on a Mac, I'd still silently curse all that metadata wasting my capacity.
The part that still bothers me, now that capacity is no longer a substantial issue, is that in Windows or *nix I can instantly change file types from the interface, but not with Mac. It comes up a lot--many times a day. Click a filename, change three letters, and a text file is recognized as a script or batch file to be executed rather than opened. A click and three letters, and a file I just downloaded from USENET goes from text to UUencoded so that when I double-click it will be decoded for me. A click and three letters is all it takes to change a file's type and its application association from the GUI, without having to resort to some clunky special editor. And it's even better if I need to change the type/association of a great number of files--just open a CLI and type a quick line, and it's all done. What a pain it would be to have to use a metadata editor instead of just manipulating three letters in filenames. Simple file extensions put more power over the file within easy, simple, even automatable reach.
The advantage of metadata is something many Mac users, and theoretists like this article's author, seem to believe in, but I cannot see it. For instance, it's thought a great advantage that you can set a file to open with any application, despite the filetype. I hate downloading things on a Mac because of this. Some idjit will have a file set to open in an application I don't have, and the computer may be too stupid to know that I always open that file type in Application X. A dialog pops up on any reasonably modern MacOS to help, but it's still a big pain in the ass compared to having a PC automatically know what I open that file type with. Even more annoying is when I really do have the application the file is set to open with installed, but I always want that file type to open in a different app. This most often happens with graphics files--I do not under any circumstances want to have Photoshop or Graphic Converter open a graphics file, just because that's what it was created in. I have a simple image viewer for viewing images. If I want to edit them, *then* I open them in Photoshop. Same for Premiere and others--I do not want a big, slow editor to open my files just because that's what they were created with; we have smaller-footprint and more versatile file viewers for that.
The other part of it is that the "simplistic" (sometimes the most simple designs are the most elegant, while the more complex are just gaudy) file typing systems also solve the problem of opening certain files of a given type in one application but others of the same type in another application. Metadata proponents always point out how "great" it is to have one, for example, JPEG open in JPEGview or whatever, while another JPEG opens in Photoshop; one.wav opens in a player, while another opens in an editor or burner. Well, I think the solution offered by Windows and by some *nix environments is better, easier, simpler, more elegant. A simple context menu, brought up by right or center-clicking, provides any options you could want. That way to open something in my viewer application, I just double-click--I know on my Windoze box that all image files (except.psd) will automatically open in my viewer, ACDSee (which recently became available for Mac, too)--no surprises, no metadata editors needed. If I want to edit it, I just right-click and choose the command "Edit" from the menu, which is set to open images with Photoshop. Same with.wav and other such--double-clicking opens in WinAMP, right-clicking and choosing "edit" opens in SoundForge. You can create any action, and choose any app to be associated with that action, for each file type--and then a list of all the possible actions for that file type will be displayed when you right-click a given file. But it will open in whatever your set to be your standard viewer, by default, if double-clicked. Much better than relying on hidden metadata. But even better and simpler than having to set up the actions and associations in the Folder Options dialog, is just using the Send To sub-menu that is brought up on right-click--just drop shortcuts to the apps you usually use into the Windows\SendTo folder, and those apps will appear on the Send To submenu when you right-click. That way I can easily open any file with any application, by using only one right-click and one left-click. In terms of launching files, it's like having the flexibility of a CLI, but within the ease-of-use of a GUI. That's one feature the Windows GUI actually got right, and got right very early on. MacOS can keep its metadata, but this is easier, simpler, better. I love the Send To submenu, though it's usually under-utilized by most people.
I hate to say it, but the metadata folks are IMHO going the wrong way. I want more power and flexibility within my clicks, not less. I hate having to edit metadata when a simple three-letter change is all that would be needed in *nix and 'doze. And as I said, the advantages of metadata in terms of application/file association are entirely negated by the right-click menu and its Send To submenu in Windows, and similar functionality in some *nix GUIs. Metadata may have good uses, but none I can think of that can't be done more simply and elegantly. I also dislike the idea of my filesystem hiding things fom me, which unfortunately is exactly what MacOS does and what the newer NTFS in Win2k and up can do (I believe Ars had an article when Win2k came out about the new NTFS and some of the still-largely-unused metadata fields). Ext2 or FAT32 all the way, baby--and before you poo-poo FAT32, it may have almost no modern features, but it is straightforward, simple, and actually very fast in performance (thanks to the fact that it implements no real modern features); I recall it beating out NTFS in terms of raw speed in an old Ars article. Poor crash recovery is its main weakness.
I like to keep things as easy to manipulate as possible. And contrary to what many make the mistake of thinking, file extensions are not just easy for CLIs--as I said, it makes sense in a GUI too, since it can be directly manipulated from within the GUI's file browser, without having to open the file in a metadata editor. It also makes the type of file crystal-clear--especially important if you don't want to accidentally run an executable that has an icon to make it look like a file. Unless OS X has some way which I haven't noticed to visually set executables apart from other file types, even when they're on the desktop or somewhere else that doesn't show details, I can't wait for someone to create lots of OS X viruses that have common file icons. That's already a case in the Windows world, where you'll find files called Report.doc.exe that have Word icons, but if you notice the trailing extension you won't mistakenly execute them (though the "show extensions for all file types" option isn't the Windows default anyomore, alas). How can you tell by a glance in OS X, or any other place where metadata rules instead of file extensions?
Oh well. Windows may not have a lot right--but it does have its use of simple file extensions and simple context menus right. I always hated editing resource forks. It's just another *unnecessary* layer getting between a man and his hardware. Tell me one very useful thing that can be done with filesystem metadata, that can't be done easier and put more in direct control of the user. And before you say "labeling," like MacOS prior to X used to have--that's what folders/directories are for.:-)
Why define an OS that way? It's just dumb. The OS at its most basic form is a command interpreter of some sort, which can be just a kernel. Why specify that an OS must contain libraries that can run C programs? Don't people use languages other than C? And how about straight assembly? If someone writes something that functions as an OS, but it doesn't have C libraries and must be coded for by other means, it's still an OS. Or are we going to start arbitrarily defining things by what languages and libraries they use? Doesn't a piece of software serve the same function, whether it's written in C or Java or Python or whatever? Then stop defining an OS by a compiler or a library. If you want to see an OS at its most basic, just put an ancient DOS command.com on an empty drive, along with whatever text config files that version of DOS will require to load itself. Sure, DOS usually has other files for "external commands" and for access to upper memory, etc.,--but they aren't necessary to do the absolute basics.
It's just stupid, and besides many people use OSes who wouldn't use a compiler and wouldn't know or care what libraries their software is linked to. An OS, like it or not, is defined by its kernel.
Let me lather, rinse, and repeat: an OS is defined by its kernel. And here's where I prove it: If I run a Solaris box and install and link to a bunch of GNU stuff, does that magically transform my OS into GNU/Solaris? NO.
This is why I think Stallman should be largely ignored now that he has already made his historic contribution of the GNU tools. He will go down in history for that accomplishment. But at the moment he's a hindrance, not a help. He has passed his prime, made his contribution, and is now being a petty bitch who squabbles about naming an OS he didn't write. He is actively trying to harm Linux, what with his devotion to the HURD. Anyone who doubts this, should read the post referenced in this story where the Linux glibc porter/maintainer states that Stallman tried to push him into working on glibc for Hurd instead of for Linux.
It should be obvious that Linux is RMS's "bastard child"--it's the first OS born from the GNU tools, and it has made the Free Software movement what it is today as well as helping spawn Open Source. Without Linux, Free Software would still be a tiny little movemwent instead of being on so many desktops and servers. Yet Stallman doesn't care about Linux, he cares about finally building the kernel for his GNU/HURD dream and eventually putting Linux out to pasture. And that's fine. But don't be a schmuck and think Stallman cares about Linux or should be listened to about a damned thing that has to do with Linux. If it were up to him, all Linux developers would drop their work and start on the Hurd. Things like the attempted coup mentioned in this story just go to show that RMS is slowly sabotaging Linux, in order to promote his Hurd. And before marking this as flamebait, at least read the account linked in the story.
Now, there's an example of one little letter, or the lack thereof, *completely* changing the meaning and context of a phrase! Jumpin'-Jeezus-on-a-Pogo-Stick, I almost fell out of my seat in embarrassment when I read my own typo.:-)
First off, that page you linked to coincided with attempts by someone to attempt to probe my PC all three times I loaded the page. Coincidence? Or is that Java applet that loads an attempt to search someone's hard drive for suspicious filenames? I don't have time to look into it, but I've heard of such things, so if you go to that site have a firewall unless you don't care about nosy people. As I said, I haven't the time to determine whether it's coincidence--but three times is suspicious.
Guess what, Mr. Mindless Zealot? The Internet *is* taking care of this problem by itself, and *NO ONE* is making money off of the rape of children. That's just baseless propaganda.
As someone who has researched child pornography through interviewing both law enforcement agents and consumers and producers of child pornography, I can tell you one thing with absolute seriousness: there is *NO* commercial distribution of hardcore child pornography at this time. By that I mean that there are no organized distribution channels--it is possible that one person may meet another person in a somewhat random fashion, and sell him child pornography. But that is a one-on-one transaction which does not count as commercial distribution, and by definition rarely if ever occurs.
The reality is that hardcore child pornography is distributed by "hobbyist" collectors to one another, for free, in chat rooms and newsgroups, and sometimes on free webpage accounts, not sold commercially. Furthermore, about 99.9% of hardcore child pornography distributed on the Internet is "old"; that is, scans from magazines or captures from videos that were legal in the 1970s when they were produced by the commercial child pornography producers which existed and were legal back then, or come from Japan where child pornography was perfectly legal until the U.S. pressured them to pass laws against it last year. It's not exactly fair to equate things that were legal where and when they were created, with child-rape. In most if not all cases the actors and actresses were fairly compensated for their performances and did the material voluntarily--they were not forced. Whether they could give legal consent is of course a good question, but most of the material was made by professionals in parts of Europe in the 1970s and Japan in the 1990s, where and when it was largely legal. As such, it isn't a clear-cut case of right versus wrong.
A few images of actual child-rape have been circulating on the Internet, but not commercially--such images have been uploaded by pedophiles gratis. They also are considered to be sick and disgusting by most pedophiles, and when such an image is posted on a pedophile newsgroup, it always raises complaints. Even pedophiles are not happy with child-rape, the same way heterosexuals are not happy with adult rape. Such images are few and far between, and not popular at all.
Now, the softcore child pornography business is a different matter entirely. It used to be extinct since 1982, when the last Danish producer was put out of business just as the hardcore had been stamped out by the authorities--except of course in Japan, which has a different culture where young sexuality is more acceptable, and where to this day there is a "Lolicon" cultural subset. With the global Internet came an uinterest by the West in Japan's legal (in their own country, of course, not in the U.S.) child pornography. Between 1995 and 2000, a large amount of Japanese softcore child magazines--very common in their own country--were scanned and uploaded to the Net, but almost exclusively by enthusiasts, not by commercial ventures. The U.S. made agreements with Japan to stem the tide of Japanese child pornography, and while my Japanese friends tell me the books and videos can still easily be purchased in any big city, people no longer scan and post to the Net like they used to, so that it is out of sight and mind to the Puritanical Americans. But about the same time, there was a rebirth in the commercial softcore business--Russia and the Eastern Bloc nations, in need of money, and not as Puritanical as Americans are about sexuality and the young, and with the backing of the Russian Mafia, started giving birth to a new breed: the commercial softcore child pornography website.
Actually, the first such website, as far as anyone can recall to me, was a Paraguayan website called tinyamericans.com or somesuch; but it folded quickly when the owner/photographer, a man named Milton Xiscati, got into legal trouble after the U.S. customs authorities formally complained tabout the site and put pressure on Paraguayan authorities. But the Russians followed suit at about the same time in mid-2000, and had better success since the Russian authorities don't really care what the U.S. thinks or wants, and are being paid off by the Russian mob anyway. Several websites exist where a credit card number gets access to softcore images of nude children posed in a Playboy style--not very graphic, from what I'm told. These images are not illegal under Russian law, though they probably are under U.S. law. Posing in these very softcore images does not, by the accounts of those in Russia who take the pictures, cause any harm, and indeed the money generated from the site is used to feed and clothe the girls and their families, who are rather poor and without much means of supporting themselves.
To listen to the accounts of the Russians who produce this very soft stuff, it is almost humanitarian--poor girls and families get lots of money, and all that they have to do in return is a simple Playboy-like shoot. While I am in the U.S. and cannot see the images myself for legal reasons, I recently was given some very innocent clothed images of the families and the girls at a barbeque party thrown for them by the producers. They all seemed very happy and healthy, normal kids. In addition, some other innocent images were given to me of the girls being taught on new computers at a school set up for them inside the studio. Apparently a fair percentage of the money made off these Playboy-style images is being used to give the girls, who range in age from about 7 to 16, educational and vocational opportunities they could not otherwise afford. I am also told that some of the images distributed at the sites are actually taken by some of the older girls, who are learning professional photographic skills, as well as computers and Web design and other skills they wouldn't learn in an ordinary Russian school.
That doesn't sound so bad, now does it? If I were a poor Russian kid right about now, I think posing for some Playboy-style artsy nudes wouldn't be a bad idea if it would get me a classroom full of new computers and someone to teach me skills to use them, and other marketable skills I could not learn otherwise, as well as some money for my family. So what if a few decadent Western perverts whack off to them?
And yet, when I interviewed the Innocent Images task force under press credentials, they made things like that seem like the end of civilization as we know it. Funny then how the websites hosting the images are still, as far as I know, active and from what I hear updated daily now. If the FBI or U.S. Customs *really* wanted to shut down these websites, I'm sure they could do something about it. Talk U.S. Internet companies into purging their URLs from DNS databases, maybe. But no, they still exist, at the same addresses as they've been at for a year or so. The FBI also played up the prevalence of hardcore child pornography on the Internet, and yet my own experience of reading the text-only messages in newsgroups like alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.pre-teen tells me that this is false, that the hardcore stuff is rarely posted and when it is, it is almost exclusively 1970s or Japanese stuff that used to be legal, and it draws criticisms from some--and if force is being used, it draws near-universal criticism. I can only conclude that the FBI was blowing smoke up my arse, and that indeed there is very little hardcore CP on the Net, there is no commercial hardcore CP (the only sites that offer it are FBI or Customs stings, or Russian Mob scams which aren't distributing anything, they're hjust stealing credit card numbers of stupid people), and that the softcore Playboy-type stuff that is common is hurting no one and definitely helping the girls and their families.
So, why would the FBI lie about child pornography? Simple: to get gullible people like you to applaud them and gladly forfeit each and every one of your civil rights the moment you log on to the newest and most powerful medium in the world. The FBI doesn't actually care about child pornography--they care about making the public believe they need to give up all their rights in order to protect their children from the phantom menace of pedophiles, who contrary to popular belief seem to be just like heterosexuals or homosexuals, in that it is a matter of being attracted to a certain group of people, not a matter of rape. Just as only a small percentage of heterosexuals rape women, only a small percentage of pedophiles rape children. Most pedophiles are content to jerk off to the Disney Channel, Sears catalogues, or pictures of nude Russian girls, realizing that touching a child in a sexual way is not good for the child or for the pedophile. It is only a small portion of them who do stupid things like trying to seduce young girls or boys online, and the FBI is doing its job to try to stop them--albeit I have to question my tax dollars being spent to have people chatting on IRC all day pretending to be 12 to entrap stupid potential abusers. Seems like a waste of my tax dollars, and it seems like illicit entrapment to me--but hey, I can't complain too much; the idea behind it is to be pro-active, instead of re-active, and I respect the motive if not the method.
However, the FBI seems to be doing nothing to stop child pornography. Newsgroups are posted to with near-impunity, and as I said those half-dozen or so Russian sites are still going strong. From what I'm told, there are Yahoo groups devoted to questionable images which can last for weeks or months before shut-down. It would seem that the FBI could do more about it if they wanted to. My conclusion is that they don't want to--they don't care, as long as the child porn stays segregated to these "ghettos" so that everyday yokels don't find them and raise hell. They just care about instilling a public perception that child pornography is pervasive and dangerous, so that people will react irrationally and forfeit their rights "for the sake of the children."
This is borne out by another observation I made: there is a third class of child pornography, a class which i made right here in the U.S., but which is only considered child pornography here in the U.S. That is, "clothed child pornography." A few years ago the Court ruled that images of a clothed minor can still be considered child pornography if the primary purpose of the images was to inspire sexual feelings in the viewer, and the images had the minor posed in a provocative position or focused on a sexual area of the body such as the buttocks, crotch, breast, or thigh. And yet, a type of site has grown in the U.S. itself which specializes in such images. They are "modeling" sites which offer images of clothed minors in underwear, swimsuits, leotards, vinyl fetish wear, etc., ostensibly for the purposes of promoting modeling careers for the girls, but which are really there to sell site memberships so that pedophiles can jerk off to attractive young American girls posed to titillate and sexually excite. Clothing or no clothing, many of these images should qualify as child pornography under U.S. law--although the rest of the world would laugh at us for it. Yet the FBI and Customs do nothing about these sites, which are hosted in the U.S., which feature American minors, etc. This further bolsters my argument that the FBI really cares more about promoting the fear of child pornography, than about eliminating it from the Net. Just look at what the FBI is asking for in next year's budget--a HUGE cybercrime spending package. They want more funding and more power, and child pornography is the red herring to get it for them.
Lastly, just for the heck of it, here is a response to a troll/thumper who posted in alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.pre-teen , where as I said I read all the text-only postings. Originally I read the group's text for research, and now I read it because the regs are funny as hell and I like hanging out there. Anyway, here's the message, which is relevant to your ideas:
In article ,
shaunlamoureux@hotmail.com bestowed from atop the mount his words of wisdom
upon mankind, speaking thusly in tongues:
> I would like to appologize to all the young girls in these pictures.
> I have done something morally wrong by looking at these photos. Although
> it my seem like no one is harmed by this practice there are real people
> suffering during and after this sexual abuse. I know these pictures are
> inanimate and remove the viewers from actual abuse but this is no
> excuse. There are still people
> being hurt and by downloading photos one is just as guilty as he or she is
> perpetuating abuse of innocent children.
>
> Next time you are looking ask yourself why? All forms of behavior sexual
> or not have roots in the past.
>
> Once again I am sorry. Please forgive me
>
> For the young victims.
Why Child Pornography Isn't Inherently "Bad"
You know, just looking at images harms no one. Images are not actions,
they are mere information, binary ones and zeros just like anything else in
cyberspace. There is a huge difference between passively looking at an
image and actively doing whatever an image may depict.
An image is not good or bad. It may depict something good or bad, but the
image is neutral. Images depicting torture and genocide have won Pulitzer
Prizes and other awards, and are not considered illegal or evil just
because what they depict may be illegal or evil. We do not feel remorse
for looking at images, even if they depict horrors such as the famous photo
of the nude Vietnamese woman running from her burning village as her flesh
is melting. This is because the image just shows a moment in time; we are
not responsible for that moment just because we have seen a representation
of it.
So, if you have been looking at images of children in sexual and possibly
abusive situations, as you say, why should you feel bad for it? That
moment would have happened whether or not you looked at the image 20 years
or 20 minutes after whatever happened, happened. You are no more
responsible for that moment just because you saw an image of it, than I am
responsible for war crimes for looking at that famous image of a North
Vietnamese man with a gun to his head, crying as he was about to be
executed. And what if you enjoyed looking at an image of a girl in a
questionable situation? You have no more engaged in the situation than I
have engaged in the situation whenever I watch Annette Haven get reamed in
the classic porn film *Co-Ed Fever*--although I wish it were me reaming
Annette Haven, but I digress.;-)
The fallacy so many people--particularly overzealous LEA--fall for is
believing that child pornography promotes child abuse. But it's untrue,
and a notion founded entirely on emotive propaganda not fact. As I said,
the things depicted in images would go on whether or not you view the
images. Do you really think a child molester would stop molesting if no
one would look at his pictures? Of course not; most child molesters do
what they do without posting images on the Net. The motivation is primal,
sexual, and the images are mostly for his own enjoyment, and sharing them
with others is entirely secondary. So where is the harm if someone sees
such an image and is excited by it? They are not vicariously contributing
to the scene depicted--that would have happened no matter what.
Another argument some make is that seeing child pornography may make people
more likely to emulate what is depicted. Well, that argument is quite
groundless. In a society which condems adult-child sex as much as ours
does, no one is going to think sex with children is OK just because they
run across, or even collect, some pictures of it. Do people who see that
picture of a Vietnamese man with a gun to his head suddenly start thinking
that it's okay to go around killing people? Heck, our films and television
shows and video games are laden with more pure violence than ever before,
and despite right-wing propaganda and rhetoric, the Justice Department's
own aggregate statistics say that violent crimes among teenagers--surely
the most impressionable demographic--have been on the decline overall for
10 years. The only thing that causes people to think there's a problem is
media exploitation--the media broadcasts disproportionately about crimes
involving youngsters because it increases their ratings. The statistics
show the truth. Likewise with child porn--people believe it's a problem
because the media tells them so. But the reality is that no one is going
to go out and have sex with a 10 year old just because they see it in a
picture or film. Would you go out and have sex with a dog if you see that
on film? Of course not, unless it were something you were going to go out
and do anyway.
That last statement is the key. There is *no* causal link between child
porn and sex with children; the only reason some people may think so is
based on the fact that the type of people who would collect child porn are
the type of people who are attracted to children sexually in the first
place. So, naturally a percentage of them are going to have sex with
children; the child porn they may happen to possess is merely an indication
of their attractions--not a cause, an effect. And it cannot be denied that
child porn is for some pedophiles the same as adult porn is for some
heterosexuals--a release valve for sexual tensions, something to masterbate
to which ultimately decreases sexual desires, not increases them. Hence,
child pornography (in a limited, semi-underground form, at least) is good
for society, not bad, since it provides people who might otherwise seek
juvenile sexual partners with a healthy, inanimate outlet for those needs.
The other argument against child pornography, and the one most often touted
by law enforcement agencies, is that child pornography can be used as a
"recruitment tool" for pedophiles and child molesters who may try
to convince children that adult-child sex is OK by showing them such
images. This last argument is perhaps the thinnest, least believable,
because anything can be used for a nefarious purpose--just because plastic
baggies can be used to hold drugs, does not mean they don't have more
positive uses, or that they need to be made illegal. I'd concede fully
that child porn can and has been used in that capacity; just the other day
I watched a news program about a guy who used it that way. But regular
adult pornography is just as effective a recruitment tool, because people
interested in seducing young girls (or boys) don't rely on being able to
convince them sex with adults is all right--they're taught at school if not
by their parents that it isn't--but rather they rely on the youngster's
natural curiosity about sex and natural desires to do things that feel
good. Adult pornography arouses curiosity and desire in the potential
subject just as much. A child rapist is just going to rape, regardless of
what the child wants, so he does not usually use any pornography in finding
a victim, and it is not at all important in enabling him to do what he
does. Pornography is only really used in this context by non-rapists who
want to seduce or otherwise broach the subject of sex with children. This
can just as easily--if not more easily--be done with adult pornography as
with child pornography. It is also safer, since the adult can leave
regular adult pornography in places the child is sure to find it and wonder
about it, and if the child reports the porn to his or her parents, the
adult can make an excuse about accidentally leaving it in an accessible
place; the same is not true of child pornography, which the parents are
going to report if their child reports seeing it. My researches into the
subject (for a book, which may or may not ever get published) indicate that
adult pornography is used for seducing children far, far more often than
child pornography is. Therefore to blame such seductions on child
pornography is ludicrous, since adult pornography, which is perfectly legal
to possess, serves exactly the same purpose. In this context, child
pornography is not at all different from or more useful than regular porn.
If there are any other arguments for why merely possessing or viewing child
pornography is somehow inherently "bad", bring them up and I'll refute
them. Face it: the only reason you feel bad about looking at what you say
you've looked at, is a pathological Puritan guilt about sex. That's why
the U.S. has such a high rate of sex crimes compared to the rest of the
world--an unhealthy Puritan outlook on sex leads to an unhealthy sex life
and a potential for sexual pathologies.
The common English word "Illustrator" belongs to Adobe as a trademark the same way the common English word "Office" belongs to Microsoft as a trademark. I.e., only under very, very narrow and restrictive circumstances could they claim an infringement.
Case in point, I used many a year ago an Amiga app called Illustrator. I can't say how popular it was, and if the Amigans are still using a version of it, but it was, gee imagine, a program for creating illustrations. How shocking that one would call such a program Illustrator. It definitely predated Adobe's application, and it did a related thing. A thing that that English word commonly describes.
Adobe could only justifiably claim an infringement if the other product using the word Illustrator in its name were deliberately confusing customers by adopting a "confusingly similar" name. No one is going to confuse a Linux app named KIllustrator with a Mac/Windows app named Illustrator.
If your logic held, then Microsoft would be turning the thumbscrews on KOffice, which we *know* they'd love to do. But they aren't, because they'd be laughed out of Court. Much as Adobe would be laughed out of Court, at least here in the U.S. So, KIllustrator and other potential targets of shitty sheister German lawyer fuckheads should be headquartered in countries which, backward as they may be in some respects, still have a judicial branch which isn't *entirely* controlled by the trial lawyers' associations. (BTW, I for one am glad that GWB has said that he will not be employing the Bar Association to review his Court appointees, unlike his predecessors; that would be like the corrupt policing the corrupt.)
Oops, the link to the whole thread, rather than just the one article, is http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&safe=off&ic= 1&th=e9b6e9e75ee34377,8&seekm=8o02ps%242no%240%40d osa.alt.net#p My pasting hand was quicker than my masturbating ha--err, my thought process.:-) Hehe. The whole thread is quite informative about the issues involved.
Mr. Gielda and his Cotse service are really the black sheep of the remailer community. All you have to do to see this is spend some time in the venerable group alt.privacy.anon-server , where remailer operators (remops) and others interested in security and privacy congregate. Gielda has his supporters, but nearly everyone in the community views him with suspicion. After all, he admits to keeping tracking data on his users, which is the opposite of what remailers are for. They were designed to prevent tracking. If I chain a message through good remailers, I know that that message is untraceable, and that my speech, however unpopular, is protected. If I send a message through Gielda's shitty Cotse thing, then the minute my unpopular speech results in the government asking him who I am, with a warrant (all too easy to get today--just recall the Independant Media Center case recently), he'll fold like a cheap suit. That in no way equates to protecting free speech, which is what a real remailer does.
For a good discussion on the opinions of both sides, I recommend a thread I posted in under another nic some time ago. http://groups.google.com/groups?as_ugroup=alt.priv acy.anon-server&as_uauthors=carbonymous&num=100 I'm the one named "Carbonymous Howard" and unfortunately Google truncates each article in the thread so that you'll have to click on some links to get the rest of the articles.
At any rate, Gielda isn't exactly a beloved guy in the privacy field, and it's sad to see him get the spotlight when there are plenty of *real* privacy and free speech advocates who deserve it more. To meet them, just hang out in alt.privacy.anon-server for a while.
Most people simply don't know how to access USENET in the most productive way, which is why they dismiss it like you do. Why would you need to sort through the spam and BS? Let your software do it for you.
The best newsreader by far is a Windoze program called Gravity by a company named Microplanet. I'm sure there's probably something for Linux which does a comparable job, but at any rate it automatically sorts all similar messages together in a much more effective way than the most popular newsreader, Forte Agent, does. Therefore, with a few clicks, all the spam is gone. If you don't even want to spare a few clicks, then you can easily set up personal spam filters to automatically get rid of almost all spam messages. After all, most spam is crossposted to several groups or displays other signs which can set it apart for filtering.
And if you're too fucking lazy to set up spam filters and then just read the groups, you can always get a feed from a provider who filters the spam for you. There are several, some of which have great spam-filtering capabilities. The interested can try http://www.exit109.com/~jeremy/news/providers/prov iders.html for a list of providers and features, and http://www.newsreaders.com/ for lists of readers, servers, and all sorts of stuff.
Personally, I much prefer USENET to the Web any day. It's far more free and far easier to maintain privacy. A group for every subject and every subject for a group. Some communities are filled with old hands who can tell you more than the mostly-youngsters here on/. any day. Other communities have wonderful traditions and initiations that are older than most MOOs or MUDs still in operation.
And don't even get me started with the art of forging headers on any server willing to let you supply your own values (like Altopia). It's fun and provides a level of privacy that's hard to get on the Web.
But, I digress. My point is, the sludge and loonies are easily taken care of with filters and killfiles, and USENET is as vibrant as ever. The only thing about USENET that's bad is the high traffic in binaries which are easily obtainable on the Web or via protocols more suited to binary transfer. The MP3 groups especially piss me off since 99% of what gets posted was easy to find on Napster and is still easy to find on the Web or via Gnutella, Audiogalaxy, and other sources better suited for binary transfers. But, ah well...
If you want a DVD-ROM that's near-silent while playing DVDs and CDs and such, then the Pioneer 10x slot-loading DVD-ROM is the one you want. It whines like a bitch when you first insert media, I guess because it tries to determine whether it's a CD, DVD, CD-R, or CD-RW, but after the initial squeaks for a few seconds it's smooth and quiet, even during moderate seeking.
A distinct bonus is that you can easily find upgraded firmware on the big DVD hacking sites that will disable the drive's region coding. That's true of several drives, but make sure whatever drive you get isn't region-locked unless a good hacked firmware is available; that is, if you like to import DVDs, which I personally do. Fuck, they still haven't released an anamorphic version of *True Romance* in the U.S., and they refuse to make an "uncut" version of Kubrick's love-it-or-hate-it masterpiece *Eyes Wide Shut* in America. But I digress...
They not only rate drive performance, they rate quietness. Personally, my latest drive is a Quantum Fireball 1ct which, as the site says, is incredibly quiet. Maxtor just bought out Quantum a little while back, so buy 'em while you can.
Actually, Maxtor has been selling the excess inventory of Quantum drives as store brand drives for places like CompUSA, where I bought mine as a CompUSA branded on the outside, but Quantum 1ct on the inside, drive. Of course, you can't quite guarantee a Quantum drive will be in the box unless you can talk the store clerk into letting you take a peek, but right now it might be worth it if you want one of these near-silent drives: CompUSA has a sale on the 30GB store brand model for 50-something dollars after rebate. Always needing more backups of my mp3s and pr0n as I do, I'm heading there soon myself.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, I always thought the N64 controller was *the* masterpiece of ergonomic controller design. Not only did it fit most hands perfectly, but it was versatile, offering three distinct gripping areas, the middle one feeling nicely like a gun for those shooter games.
Now they go and throw it away for a DualShock PSX rip-off? Bah.
I also have to say that a box isn't sexy. It isn't even cute. The design just strikes me as being a boxy and plain Model T type styling. No, looks aren't terribly important in a gaming console--but the PS2 is both simple and sexy. I wish Nintendo had kept their controller along N64 lines and made the console design more sleek. A purple box is just going to look out of place sitting atop my DVD player or VCR, whereas the PS2 looks right at home.
Not that I'm going to buy one. I gave up on consoles. Playstation, N64, Saturn, Dreamcast, PS2, GameCube, X-Box--that's 7 machines in recent times. That's just too many. I want games that I can still play 5 years from now without having to have 7 weird boxes daisy-chained across my entertainment center. That's why I've pledged to go PC-only. I may not get the newest Zelda or Mario or FF games, but I get a lot of cool others--and all the rest will eventually be emulated well enough in time. Let's see, ~3000 arcade games both classic and contemporary, hundreds of old "abandonware" PC games, dozens of my NES and SNES and Genesis favorites, a dozen of my favorite old Mac shareware games courtesy of the open-source Basilisk II emulator, all pulled off the Net for free, plus Bleem! and VGS to play some used PS discs bought for a song, plus whatever cool new PC games I ant to buy like the Quakes and all those mods and customizations which can never all make it to the console ports, the Unreals, lots of Star Trek some of which is actually good like Elite Force and Dominion Wars, Alice, Tomb Raider 37: More of Lara's Tits, etc. etc. etc.
I know the lure of the console and all its exclusives is great. But it would be better for the gaming community in the long run to support only more open platforms, like the PC and Mac, not consoles. It's hard to resist, but when I realize that I don't want dozens of proprietary boxes most of which are outdated cluttering my space just to play games--and even more I don't want to throw away or give away my old games whenever new consoles come out--I don't feel right supporting the console industry. Fuck 'em. My PC is better any day, and will be able to emulate 'em all eventually.
That's all you need to do--introduce them to a place where they could very likely end up having "tinysex"/cybersex with strangers. Try explaining how you let random cyberspace strangers "into the school," in the same hysteric society which runs that horrid commercial warning kids of reporting suspicious people online (horrid because the "online predator" guy is stereotypically a fat guy made up to look really ugly. Yes, let's teach kids to judge by appearance, and to think fat people are ugly and evil and out to molest them).
Once you let them interact with strangers online, you open up a huge can of worms for which you WILL be held responsible the minute someone has cybersex or talks about something "untoward." Not to mention mock-violence like in the classic tale *A Rape in Cyberspace*.
It would be a great idea--if only Americans weren't so paranoid about kids and the Net.
Civ, even the later versions, can be too complicated in terms of interface and scope. I recommend Pharaoh, which is like Civ with a more intuitive interface and simpler options, and obviously a focus on one particular civilization. Like Civ bad stuff can happen--like your city being razed--but it's not inherently violent and is extremely fun and engaging. Personally, I enjoyed it as much as any Civ version I've tried, perhaps because the elegant simplicity lends itself to engaging more casual gamers like myself--and like most of your potential student players.
> Second, BeOS is probably just as well supported as Linux.
Well, the bigger issue isn't about user support, it's about hardware support. Or rather, the lack thereof.
There was a period a couple years ago where I honestly considered going to BeOS. I started with computers in college on Macs, then my college switched to PCs, and when I graduated I wanted a Mac but even the used ones were too expensive. So I bought a used laptop running Windows 95. It died after six months and I decided to buy something new, with a warranty. Obviously it had to be a PC because new Macs, even today, are so much more expensive compared to equally-performing PCs in any given range.
I found a local screwdriver shop with good warranty terms, but decided to buy it OS-less to save the $89 Windows license charge. I had three choices: use Linux, use Be, or pirate Windows.
I tried Linux and at that point in time no fucking way was I going to use such a primitive interface. Remember that this was years ago, before the current KDE/GNOME/Nautilus/etc. advances. I looked at Be, and was beautiful. I liked everything I read about it and when I tried it out on a real machine it was great. But what I couldn't handle was the lack of hardware support.
At that point in time there was exactly ONE sound card supported. There was a very short list of "fully supported" motherboards, with the lackluster assurance that motherboards from other vendors using the same chipsets "should" work but are not officially supported.
I went ahead and borrowed a relative's shiny new Win98 CD. I knew it would work on any hardware. I knew it would support a lot of expansion over the coming years. And it has--I added a new video card and capture board, newer sound card, a DVD-ROM with a Hollywood+ hardware decoder, and other things, none of which would have been completely usable by BeOS if at all.
Obviously things improved quite a bit over the last couple of years, but not that much compared to all the new hardware that's come out. Be never had enough developers to keep up, much less catch up. And that's important.
It's important because, without all that nifty hardware and the software to support it, a PC is just a glorified typewriter and WebTV. Sure, not everyone uses the latest greatest video cards, or wants to interface an MP3 player or PDA, or a special sound board, or a certain DVD player, or buys a motherboard with a new chipset, or wants to use a video capture device that isn't supported by BeOS. But all you have to do is want one of those things, or one of several others, and all of a sudden the OS is not worth the trouble.
And as everyone points out, the problem is magnified on the software side. People can buy any kind of software or game for an MS OS. They can go to Best Buy or Fry's or wherever, and know that the software will work on their PCs 99% of the time. With any alternative OS this is just not the case. But the problem is all the more immense when there's a fair chance your hardware's basic features won't even work, which was the case for a very long time with Be.
> Enough with the focus shift BS. There have been two focus shifts in Be's history.
Hmm...
1) From an integrated hardware/software solution like Apple, to an alternative PPC OS vendor.
2) From an alternative PPC OS vendor to a dual PPC/x86 alternative OS vendor.
3) Dropping new PPC development entirely, and refocusing and redoubling x86 development. This was forced by Apple, but nonetheless happened.
4) Let's give a basic OS away for free for home use, and offer a more complete edition for business and home users willing to pay. A small change in the codebase, but a huge shift in business strategy and, therefore, the company's focus.
5) Roughly contemporaneously with 4 was the development of BeIA. The final focus change is the ascendance of BeIA over the desktop BeOS.
Each of these changes required a big shift in both business strategy and/or in developer assignments and the future of the OS.
At any rate, that's more than 2. And it's an awful lot of shifting for a very young company.
And ultimately, BeOS wasn't doomed by Microsoft's OEM licensing. It was doomed by its inability to run a wide variety of hardware and software demanded by end users. Pointing to BeOS equivalent software isn't good enough since most end users buy their software in a real store, and that software is almost always going to run on either Windows or depending on the store Mac.
If you really want to analyze the situation, Apple killed Be. Be never was prepared to support the wide variety of hardware commonly strewn together in the x86 market, and so while they did produce an x86 OS that ran beautifully on supported hardware, they did not have the hive full of Microsoftian development drones required to support nearly everything, or the similar army of Linux volunteers. Be made a wonderful PPC OS, and could have continued to thrive on that platform since hardware support is a far easier task. But Apple yanked the platfor out from under them by not releasing the specs.
Of course, one has to wonder how Linux manages to run beautifully on new Macs even though Be swore it couldn't. Surely it would have been easier to develop for the new Macs, than to spread the developers thin enough to code all those new and varied x86 drivers? It does make one wonder if Apple's refusal to release their specs was more of a red herring than a real reason to make the x86 switch. I have to suspect that JLG just bit off more than he and his little company could handle, by moving to x86. They might be more alive today if they had devoted those resources to running on Macs, since as I said Linux manages just fine--not to mention *BSD, where the BSD license would have allowed wholesale lifting of code.
So as far as I can see, either Apple killed Be by making them switch to a far more varied platform than they could support, or Be committed suicide by moving to the more varied platform when maybe they should have worked harder on continuing PPC work. Either way, it has nothing to do with Microsoft so much as it has to do with the fact that PC end users want their hardware to work with all its features enabled, and to run software they can get at the store. BGe never filled either requirement, so while elegant, it had no chance at all on the x86 desktop.
> Isn't all property, then, an "artificial construct"? And if so do you mind if I take your
> house, car, and computer? You have no natural right to your property, only an artificial one
> imposed by our society.
You ignore the most basic difference between "intellectual property" and property. Intellectual property can be freely reproduced, and property cannot. If you take my house or car, I have no house or car. If you "take" my idea, my book (the words, not the physical object), or my ROM, I would still have all of those things for myself as well. So you have not actually *taken* anything in the case of "intellectual property."
> You are speaking of an ideal society. We, unfortunately, live in a real one.
And a real society can be ideal if it tries. Ours doesn't. Ours just bases itself on greed and the lowest, basest of human emotions. That needs to change, and it can if we try. It's our job and our duty to do so. You're not a good person if you live by arbitrary rules instead of trying to make the rules as just as possible.
> A real one in which, incidentally, Shakespeare would be allowed to create his works under the
> Constitutional protection which limits the time for which an author is granted exclusive right.
You seem to have no understanding of the issues. When the Constitution was written, the limited term of copyright was set at 14 years. Reasonable, and after that all copyrighted material came into the public domain, became freely usable by the culture and society which bore it--authors and inventors do not labor in a vacuum, and owe the rest of society as much as we owe them, for all ideas and inventions draw on those which came before.
But today copyright lasts even longer than patents. Tody under many circumstances a copyright can be renewed to last in excess of a century after the creator's death--and so, no, Shakespeare could not have written *Romeo and Juliet* and many of his other plays, for many of them draw heavily upon works created within the two centuries preceding him.
> Also, his plays did not use a substatial portion of the originals,
They used the same ideas, characters, many of the same scenes and plot outlines. As a Shakespeare scholar--and I'm not talking just an undergrad course here--I know whereof I speak. Do some research before you spurt nonsense. If you do not think that is enough for them to infringe, then you are uneducated on these matters--cf. the case Vladimir Nabokov's son made against *Lo's Diary* (not sure offhand if that is the official English title of this translated work).
> nor did they influence the market value of any works that he borrowed from.
This is irrelevent to copyright. If it were relevent then your argument would fall apart, since discontinued arcade games, except for a few "classics" that could be translated into collections like Microsoft's "Return of Arcade" for the PC, have absolutely no market value. But as I said, market value is irrelevant to a determination of copyright infringement. It may have an impact on the size of judgements in civil copyright infringement cases, but no bearing whatsoever on whether civil or criminal charges could be filed and substantiated, or whether a work is infringing. You really *are* completely uneducated on this subject.
> That is why we can have spin-off shows on TV like "The Weakest Link", which clearly owes its
> origin to the popularity of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire"
No, you are talking about two completely different shows with completely different occurrences, which are within the same genre. They have absolutely no similarities except that people are asked questions and if they get them right they win money. A concept which has been around since the 1950s to be sure. But if the show were titled "Who Wants to Be Rich" and featured a nearly identical methodology, then the producers of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" would have a very actionable breach of their copyrights. Coming out with one quiz show to capitalize on the popularity of another has nothing to do with "intellectual property" and more than Nike could sue Adidas for making shoes.
> You are missing the point about ROMs. They are not "intellectual" property, because they can be
> easily reproduced without any real intellectual genius.
God you're stupid. This is precisely *why* they are "intellectual property*--they are binary ones and zeros that can be reproduced indefinitely without diminishing the originals. They are in that sense no different from the words of a song or book, which are also "intellectual property".
> Why bother doing something illegal when there are so many fun games to be had freely?
Now that has nothing to do with the subject at all. But to that I'd answer, Why settle for a cheap imitation of the authentic experience, when the original is just as easy to obtain, and without depriving anyone of it since it can be reproduced without "taking" the original from anyone.
Write whatever follow-up you want. I will neither read nor respond to it, since you're an idiot who clearly does not even undertsand the subject matter. Come back when you can actually think like the real Diogenes--again, why should I settle for a cheap knock-off, when it's obvious that the original, coming from when and whence he did and holding the ideas which he did, would have agreed with me.
> Would it be honest if people took his book and copied it instead of paying for it? If enough
> people did this, even if most were not going to buy it anyway, what incentive would my father
> have to ever write another reference?
It is not immoral to "steal" something which belongs to everyone and can be losslessly reproduced ad infinitem. Ideas belong to everyone, and information belongs to everyone.
No one ever said that your father has an inherent right to be given a monetary incentive to create. As I said, "intellectual property" was an artificial construct created to give people an incentive to create. The reason an artificial construct was invented was precisely because there is no "natural right" to have intellectual property. On that point I would refer you to the Jefferson quote I gave.
Are libraries immoral because they spread "intellectual property" without giving a profit to the people who wrote the books? Sure, one copy was sold to the library, but then hundreds or even thousands of people over the years can read those books--for free! How horrible that they don't have to buy them! How immoral and outrageous!
The fact is that the ancient world was so fruitful and full of intellectual life unheard of again until the Renaissance, precisely because of the free echange of ideas, unencumbered from artificial rectrictions like "intellectual property." In Athens, for example, people gathered on the stoa of temples each day to discuss new and exciting ideas. People like Diogenes were willing to devote themselves truly to understanding, without any worthless and stifling "incentives" which in reality encourage writers and artists to cater to the lowest common denominator rather than to truly indulge in art and wisdom. Even worse, the only reason most of the knowledge we still have from the Classical world still exists is because it was freely copied by innumerable people, not allowed to go "out of print" and kept out because of a construct like copyright. The fact is that part of the reason the Renaissance happened was due to the free exchange of ideas and the creation of libraries to enshrine and disseminate that knowledge. If people hadn't had free access to the body of knowledge without having to worry about "intellectual property" most of that period's grat works would never have been written. As just one example, Shakespeare's *Romeo and Juliet* borrows heavily from several earlier works--today, Shakespeare would be sued for copyright infringement or, more likely, would have knows from the start that he couldn't write his great plays. You may be surprised just how many of them were based on earlier, mostly Italian works.
It is honest to read or copy a book you don't own, or a ROM you don't own, precisely because "intellectual property" is artificial and not a natural right. No one has the right to limit the dissemination of knowledge. "Intellectual property" was a kludge whose useful life has ended thanks largely to the corporate greed which seeks to keep "intellectual property" out of circulation even long after its useful life--if a book or article or game even, is out of print or no longer in production, it should be freely distributed in order to preserve it and to share it with the culture which gave so much to its creators in the first place. And then there are "intellectual properties" which have passed into the popular culture yet are stil monopolized by their creators, years after they have turned a very tidy profit and years after they should have been released to the public good. Disney is an example of this--they became the giant they are by using public-domain ideas and characters, like those from Grimm's Fairy Tales, and yet they have contributed absolutely nothing back to that creative pool and indeed fight to extend the term of copyright year after year.
The culture which nurtured people on the ideas which sparked their creations, deserves to have those creations in its own public domain in a reasonable time period. This is no longer the case thanks to greed. Therefore the concept of "intellectual property" must be wiped away for the good of humanity, and we must return to the free exchange of ideas, as Thomas Jefferson would doubtless agree.
You again rely on illegality, and equate illegality with cheating with dishonesty. Illegality and cheating are two separate terms with separate definitions.
The easiest way to illustrate this is to give an example. Laws are arbitrary and can be just or unjust, and following or not follwing them has nothing to do with cheating or dishonesty. Explain to me why it was cheating or dishonesty when my great-great grandfather violated the law by teaching free blacks to read in the South during the period when most blacks were slaves, and teaching any black whether slave or free was illegal in his State.
If you can satisfactorily do so I will concede. If not, I have proven my point--my point being that laws are often arbitrary, not always just, and have no bearing in the final analysis in determining whether something is "right" (just) or "wrong" (unjust), honest or dishonest.
Well "Diogenes", there's a difference between dishonesty and illegality. Laws can be arbitrary and change greatly over time, while honesty is usually thought a simple concept--if you do not lie or cheat or steal, convention holds that you are displaying honesty. There are many definitions of the word, but the one given above generally encompasses most of them. Honesty is interesting in that it is usually defined by a lack of certain behaviours, rather than by the presence of certain behaviours.
So whether a person is "dishonest" or not for using ROMs which they may not be legally entitled too, depends on whether one has lied or cheated or stolen to obtain them. Has one lied? Depends on whether the site had one of those silly "You own this Rom, right?" buttons you have to click or not. If you said you owned a copy of the ROM, but didn't, then you lied and therefore have been dishonest. Otherwise, you have not. The next condition is not cheating. While cheating again has a few disparate definitions, it's safe to say that none of the commonly accepted definitions of cheating are triggered by downloading or possessing a few bits of data.
Stealing is really the crux of the matter. Has a person stolen something by making an electronic copy for himself, i.e., by downloading a ROM? Since the entire idea of "intellectual property" did not exist until within the last few centuries, and since it was devised as a kludge "to encourage the useful arts and sciences" [to concisely paraphrase the U.S. Constitution's reason for institutiong copyright] by giving authors and inventors sole right over reproduction of their works *for a limited time*, it is clearly not "stealing". Stealing refers to theft of tangible goods or services, and always has. Electronically reprodicing a copyrighted work and stealing a physical object have many dissimilarities and are fundamentally different acts. Indeed, the right to tangible property is an innate right in Western civilizations, and to steal it means depriving its owner of a real and measurable item. However, the right to "intellectual property," as I said, was created artificially as an incentive for people to invent stuff, and to copy intellectual property does not deprive the owner of any tangible items. It is therefore not stealing, and therefore there is nothing dishonest about possessing or trading in ROMs.
Q.E.D.
And lastly, here's a taste of Thomas Jefferson:
"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possess the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening mine."--Thomas Jefferson
If you hadn't put that smiley there, I'd have had to tear you a new one. :-) Not complaining about lack of features, as you doubtless know--just pointing out that the Taco had a pretty good idea.
:-)
When I read that part of his pages, I instantly thought--"Ya know, I've wondered myself why it doesn't pause, since there's a menu blocking the screen and all." Just one of those small little things that you never really consciously think about, until someone else notices them too.
Of course, being open-source and all, anyone could write it into their own MAME. But I really think it might be a useful feature in the main distribution. Just MHO though.
Now, complaining about the lack of features in an open-source project would have been if I'd whined about the decision to remove Pong and not accept any more "simulated" games, like the Monaco GP which recently came out. I always thought that it was kind of silly since most of the codebase is dedicated to "simulating" the discrete hardware and processors of the arcade machines so that the ROMs can run on them, so that "simulating" a ROM-less arcade game was really no different on technical terms. I chalked it up to a legal CYA decision, since the old ROM-less games could be played from MAME itself without having to hunt down an external ROM. Of course, I always thought the better choice, and the one which would preserve the oldest games, most in need of preservation and recreation, would be to have the discrete circuitry-based games separated but usable through a sort of module system whereby the code for them would be in separate Zip files just like ROMs.
See, *that's* what a complaint is like! Oh, umm, oops...
Hehe.
Then explain to me how this happened:
Just recently, when I ran across some old Mac floppies, I read them and transferred the graphics files to my PC using MacOS 8.1 running on Basilisk II, then running HFV Explorer from within Windows I transferred all the graphics files from the Mac HFV file to my PC's regular FAT32 file system, then later transferred them to another HFV containing System 7. When I booted System 7 through Basilisk II the files still sometimes opened in JPEGview and sometimes in Graphic Converter. That sort of information should not have survived going from HFS to FAT32 back to HFS if what you say is the entire story. And HFV Explorer can't be responsible since if it were it would have chosen to give all the files of the same type the same type/creator codes.
And the reason I was doing all these transfers, BTW, is that I'm creating a 200MB (or greater, as necessary) HFV file for use with 68k Mac emulators filled with Mac software and files commonly found on a Mac in c. 1994-1995, for historical puposes. Many of those files, and much of that old software, is now nearly impossible to find, so I am archiving as much of it as I can to be released in 2005 as a sort of abandonware homage to the Macs that were in use when the Internet made it mainstream. I find most of it in dusty old subdirectories of academic institution FTPs, which I fear will start cleaning house sooner or later and permanently losing a lot of those archaic files.
At any rate, I have seen type/creator codes, particularly on graphics files, survive on FAT32 systems and on Zip archives I made ages ago.
You may continue to argue all you want, but this has been my experience, the experience of someone who has both FAT32 filesystems, HFS filesystems, and others all on the same computer. What you are saying may or may not be correct, but it is still clearly not the whole picture since it contradicts my direct and extensive experience at transferring files across filesystems.
And one has to wonder if things like the PSX and N64 emulators would ever have gotten to the point of being distributed at all before the hordes of lawyers got a chance to show up, if the DMCA had been in effect back then. Much broader protections for "copyright holders," much more restrictive limits on the potential for reverse engineering. A clickable license agreement and/or ROT-13 level encryption instantly becomes the legal equivalent of an unbreakable Fort Knox vault.
;-)
Thanks for your MAME work, BTW. You've got millions of fans, even if most of them don't know it.
Oh, and CmdrTaco had a great idea in his pages, linked in the story above. It *would* be nice if MAME had an option for the Tab key to pause the game as it brings up the menu. Not much reason to keep the game running while the menu is blocking the screen, but plenty of reason to have it pause while the menu is blocking the screen. *cough*
> Current shipping version of Windows (ME) does not allow that. You have to right click on the
> file and get the properties dialog, because....the extensions are hidden.
Bah. No one who knows anything about Windows uses ME. It's just Win98SE, but slower and bloated with more useless features. But even if you *are* using it, just click on the "View" pull-down on any open window, select "Folder Options," click on "View" tab, and un-check the box that says "Hide file extensions for known file types." Then the file extensions will always, always, appear for all files.
Before you complain that that's complicated, you only have to do it once--and anyone with even the most basic skills knows that he needs to customze his preferences when setting up a box, whether Windows, Mac, or *nix. And you also should be aware that Apple has plans to do the same little preference about showing/hiding file extensions in the next OS X release. It's a way to make the extensions invisible to really dumb people who wouldn't know what to do with them and shouldn't be allowed to accidentally change them when they change a file's name, but still allow users with a modicum of experience (enough to un-check a box, which isn't much) to do their magic. And BTW, I did point out in my original comment that showing all file extensions is no longer the Windows default and must be changed by the user.
Therefore, that "arcane" dialog box for changing extensions in WinME is unnecessary once you un-check a prefeence box.
> Just not true. Netscape, IE, all every FTP app I can think of all reset the type and creator
> on download
If that's true, it's insane. Do you know what a CRC or CSV or SFV is? It's a small algorithmically-derived digest of a file, or of an entire set of files, which can be downloaded and automatically check the files to make sure none are corrupted. These are very commonly used to ensure file integrity, whenever there is a file or series of files of some importance which one wants to ensure are completely original and intact. Since type/creator is not in the resource fork, but in the file itself, altering them would alter the file in a very small and usually insignificant way, however the CRC/CSV/SFV would be rendered absolutely useless, since a change of even 1 bit would show up in the digest and therefore the file would be reported as corrupted. That is just insane, if true. My downloading software should IN NO WAY modify my files, without my explicit knowledge and permission. It renders file integrity checking utterly useless.
The last version of Netscape I have ever used, on a Mac or otherwise, is 3.04Gold, so I would not know. I do recall that Netscape had a list of "helper applications" for what app should open what file--but that was only used if you selected within Netscape to "Open" the file upon download, not when just "saving" a file. I now use IE on Windows and Mozilla on Linux, though when Mozilla for Windows gets a bit better and faster, I plan to switch to that too. If what you said is true, though, it is absolutely stupid for the reason I mentioned above. You can't have file verifitcation if your OS midifies the file in any way whatsoever. File verification is especially important when downloading software; the software companies, particularly ones who make security software, often offer CRCs to their customers so that the customer can be confident that he has not received a trojaned or otherwise interfered-with software package.
Second, you may not download much in StuffIt archives (who does)? But I download an awful lot in Zip and RAR archives. Doing that on a Mac would not affect type/creator of the files within the archive. In fact, you will find that Zip is the most commonly used method for transferring multiple files at once.
> you can "Show Info" on a file (same thing as in "Get Info in OS 9) and there is a pull down
.sig line "Burn Hollywood Burn"? ;-) So, pirating from Hollywood is the only kind of pirating that's good? hehe.
> menu that gives the option application. Its very easily noticed.
I know. I don't have OS X on any of my own machines yet, but I've played with a lot. In general, I really love it. I think it's a wonderful evolution of the interface I came to love years ago when I was running System 7 on a scrappy little PowerPC at something like 66MHz. But my point is that in Windows all one needs to do is highlight the filename and change the three-letter extension. No dialog box and pull-down menu necessary. Faster and easier. IMHO, of course.
> If you download a normal everyday file off the internet, odds are not going to get the meta
> information of that file
Maybe I'm weird, but when I used to download with Macs, it happened all the time. Particularly with graphics files. You are of course aware that type/creator is not in the resource fork for Mac files, and so if you download a graphic created with Mac Photoshop, it will usually want to open in Photoshop if you have it installed? Same for Graphic Converter files, and others. That's just my experience. I'm not being disingenuous at all. I also haven't downloaded anything with a Mac since OS 8.1, I now use a Windoze box for my vanilla downloading duties. The case may have changed, but from what I've read from others, doubtful.
> Now if you are heavily using Hotline for exchanging files, then odds are you are a
> pirate and deserve what you get.
Umm, don't you find that an ironic statement from someone who has the
> I agree that handling metadata in MacOS should be easier. Just a simple command to view and
> edit them would solve most problems. But don't confuse that lack of tools with a fundamental
> problem with the nmeta data concept itself.
The problem is that we already have a much simpler and more elegant solution for the most commonly used metadata, type/creator. I do not think it is at all possible to make it eaiser to access and change type/creator from a GUI, than it is to access and change the file extension. So if there is no advantage to type/creator metadata, there would be no reason to use it at all. I spent the better part of my post above showing why type/creator metadata causes problems when files are exchanged, and how it is just as easy to use the context menu or Send To submenu in a Windows system to launch different files of the same type in different applications. Therefore, I see no reason to have type/creator metadata in the first place, since simple typing by extension with a context menu available on right-click is at least as effective, yet provides more flexibility in terms of the context menu commands or Send To menu apps available to launch the file, and easier and faster access to manipulating the file's actual type.
I think the problem is a narrow-mindedness on the part of *some* Mac users, who have not cared to even learn the Windows way of doing things and so think the Mac's metadata is some huge advantage when in fact the Windows way is easier and more flexible if you give it a chance. The MacOS simply lacks an equivalent context menu and Send To submenu--the context menu it has isn't as powerful and flexible, and so cannot do the job, and so Mac users see anything that relies on a context menu to be suspect if it could be done without. Of course, Apple would have to adopt a standard 2-button mouse before it could implement a system that relied on the centext menu for opening files in alternative ways, and Apple is so unfortunately wedded to the 80s notion that more than one button would be too confusing for new users. Funny how new Windows users seem to get the hang of it...
Point is, I am a Mac fan, but use Windows too and can accurately judge the features of each. And I can say that Windows' simple file extensions are eaiser to use and manipulate, while its adaptive right-click menu gives you almost all the advantages of type/creator metadata with even more flexibility and none of the drawbacks. I'm glad the newer Linux GUI environments are mimicking this aspect of Windows, rather than the metadata of MacOS. As I said, I cannot think of a way to make the metadata as accessible through the GUI as a file extension is.
Well, where I said "I hate editing resource forks" toward the end, I should have said "I hate editing metadata." And though type/creator and the resource fork are separate, they are usually manipulated with the same tools.
.sit gets no results, it has to then be manually dropped onto Expander (so it must store *something* interesting there, but nothing absolutely essential). A GIF is still a GIF, etc., and perfectly usable. No essential data is stored in the resource fork for most types of non-executable files. It's almost all inessential metadata, whether Siracusa wants to admit it or not.
However, the first time I said "resource forks" that's exactly what I meant. It's the resource fork that takes up so much extra space on HFS and HFS+ filesystems. And the resource fork is there to store, contrary to what Siracusa says, metadata, not usually data. I think it stems from a weird Mac-centric definition of data he has.
The resource fork is not generally used to store any data within a data file type. An executable file type, and some others, store important *data* in the resource fork, without which they often cannot function. However, any plain data files are stored in their entirety in the...data fork. Go figure.
Things like labels and customized icons are stored in the resource fork. I think these things are clearly metadata--data about the thing in the data fork. For example, the fact that a piece of data is labeled with one of the classic Mac label colors, or that the user wants the file displayed with an icon other than the standard one for that file type, is clearly metadata--not at all an essential part of the file. Unlike what Siracusa said, all basic data file types which I can think of are perfectly usable even when sent from a Mac without their resource fork. Another Mac may not know what to do with them, but on other systems giving them an appropriate extension will immediately let the PC know what they are and what to open/edit/etc. them with if they're clicked on. For example, a ClarisWorks file still has all its data intact, even if the resource fork goes away. A text file will still be intact. A Stuffit file will still be un-stuffable, though I've noticed on OS 8 at least that if the resource fork is not present double-clicking a
Actually, I lied. I don't hate MacOS; I just wanted to get your attention by yelling about it. Now that you're here, though, I have to say that I LOVE the MacOS, and have ever since I first used it, before it was even called MacOS. I started with System 7, which was so attractive and easy to use that it's still my bar for measuring other interfaces.
.wav opens in a player, while another opens in an editor or burner. Well, I think the solution offered by Windows and by some *nix environments is better, easier, simpler, more elegant. A simple context menu, brought up by right or center-clicking, provides any options you could want. That way to open something in my viewer application, I just double-click--I know on my Windoze box that all image files (except .psd) will automatically open in my viewer, ACDSee (which recently became available for Mac, too)--no surprises, no metadata editors needed. If I want to edit it, I just right-click and choose the command "Edit" from the menu, which is set to open images with Photoshop. Same with .wav and other such--double-clicking opens in WinAMP, right-clicking and choosing "edit" opens in SoundForge. You can create any action, and choose any app to be associated with that action, for each file type--and then a list of all the possible actions for that file type will be displayed when you right-click a given file. But it will open in whatever your set to be your standard viewer, by default, if double-clicked. Much better than relying on hidden metadata. But even better and simpler than having to set up the actions and associations in the Folder Options dialog, is just using the Send To sub-menu that is brought up on right-click--just drop shortcuts to the apps you usually use into the Windows\SendTo folder, and those apps will appear on the Send To submenu when you right-click. That way I can easily open any file with any application, by using only one right-click and one left-click. In terms of launching files, it's like having the flexibility of a CLI, but within the ease-of-use of a GUI. That's one feature the Windows GUI actually got right, and got right very early on. MacOS can keep its metadata, but this is easier, simpler, better. I love the Send To submenu, though it's usually under-utilized by most people.
:-)
But if there is one thing I intensely dislike about MacOS, it's the metadata. I know I'm practically alone in the Mac camp, but I hate metadata. I have always thought it was just a space-hogging pain in my ass.
Now, the space issue is no longer a big concern since we have such big, cheap drives that a little filesystem metadata isn't such a burden on capacity. But back in the days of floppies I was pissed that I could fit so few files on a floppy when my friend with DOS could fit noticeably more. I was especially annoyed that even when I formatted a disk as a PC floppy, the Mac would still waste my space by creating and hiding from me files and folders on the disk to constiture the resource forks. I wanted every kilobyte, which counts when you're cramming a lot of small files onto a lot of small disks.
But of course this is no longer the big issue it used to be. But if I were storing large numbers of files and running out of space on a Mac, I'd still silently curse all that metadata wasting my capacity.
The part that still bothers me, now that capacity is no longer a substantial issue, is that in Windows or *nix I can instantly change file types from the interface, but not with Mac. It comes up a lot--many times a day. Click a filename, change three letters, and a text file is recognized as a script or batch file to be executed rather than opened. A click and three letters, and a file I just downloaded from USENET goes from text to UUencoded so that when I double-click it will be decoded for me. A click and three letters is all it takes to change a file's type and its application association from the GUI, without having to resort to some clunky special editor. And it's even better if I need to change the type/association of a great number of files--just open a CLI and type a quick line, and it's all done. What a pain it would be to have to use a metadata editor instead of just manipulating three letters in filenames. Simple file extensions put more power over the file within easy, simple, even automatable reach.
The advantage of metadata is something many Mac users, and theoretists like this article's author, seem to believe in, but I cannot see it. For instance, it's thought a great advantage that you can set a file to open with any application, despite the filetype. I hate downloading things on a Mac because of this. Some idjit will have a file set to open in an application I don't have, and the computer may be too stupid to know that I always open that file type in Application X. A dialog pops up on any reasonably modern MacOS to help, but it's still a big pain in the ass compared to having a PC automatically know what I open that file type with. Even more annoying is when I really do have the application the file is set to open with installed, but I always want that file type to open in a different app. This most often happens with graphics files--I do not under any circumstances want to have Photoshop or Graphic Converter open a graphics file, just because that's what it was created in. I have a simple image viewer for viewing images. If I want to edit them, *then* I open them in Photoshop. Same for Premiere and others--I do not want a big, slow editor to open my files just because that's what they were created with; we have smaller-footprint and more versatile file viewers for that.
The other part of it is that the "simplistic" (sometimes the most simple designs are the most elegant, while the more complex are just gaudy) file typing systems also solve the problem of opening certain files of a given type in one application but others of the same type in another application. Metadata proponents always point out how "great" it is to have one, for example, JPEG open in JPEGview or whatever, while another JPEG opens in Photoshop; one
I hate to say it, but the metadata folks are IMHO going the wrong way. I want more power and flexibility within my clicks, not less. I hate having to edit metadata when a simple three-letter change is all that would be needed in *nix and 'doze. And as I said, the advantages of metadata in terms of application/file association are entirely negated by the right-click menu and its Send To submenu in Windows, and similar functionality in some *nix GUIs. Metadata may have good uses, but none I can think of that can't be done more simply and elegantly. I also dislike the idea of my filesystem hiding things fom me, which unfortunately is exactly what MacOS does and what the newer NTFS in Win2k and up can do (I believe Ars had an article when Win2k came out about the new NTFS and some of the still-largely-unused metadata fields). Ext2 or FAT32 all the way, baby--and before you poo-poo FAT32, it may have almost no modern features, but it is straightforward, simple, and actually very fast in performance (thanks to the fact that it implements no real modern features); I recall it beating out NTFS in terms of raw speed in an old Ars article. Poor crash recovery is its main weakness.
I like to keep things as easy to manipulate as possible. And contrary to what many make the mistake of thinking, file extensions are not just easy for CLIs--as I said, it makes sense in a GUI too, since it can be directly manipulated from within the GUI's file browser, without having to open the file in a metadata editor. It also makes the type of file crystal-clear--especially important if you don't want to accidentally run an executable that has an icon to make it look like a file. Unless OS X has some way which I haven't noticed to visually set executables apart from other file types, even when they're on the desktop or somewhere else that doesn't show details, I can't wait for someone to create lots of OS X viruses that have common file icons. That's already a case in the Windows world, where you'll find files called Report.doc.exe that have Word icons, but if you notice the trailing extension you won't mistakenly execute them (though the "show extensions for all file types" option isn't the Windows default anyomore, alas). How can you tell by a glance in OS X, or any other place where metadata rules instead of file extensions?
Oh well. Windows may not have a lot right--but it does have its use of simple file extensions and simple context menus right. I always hated editing resource forks. It's just another *unnecessary* layer getting between a man and his hardware. Tell me one very useful thing that can be done with filesystem metadata, that can't be done easier and put more in direct control of the user. And before you say "labeling," like MacOS prior to X used to have--that's what folders/directories are for.
Why define an OS that way? It's just dumb. The OS at its most basic form is a command interpreter of some sort, which can be just a kernel. Why specify that an OS must contain libraries that can run C programs? Don't people use languages other than C? And how about straight assembly? If someone writes something that functions as an OS, but it doesn't have C libraries and must be coded for by other means, it's still an OS. Or are we going to start arbitrarily defining things by what languages and libraries they use? Doesn't a piece of software serve the same function, whether it's written in C or Java or Python or whatever? Then stop defining an OS by a compiler or a library. If you want to see an OS at its most basic, just put an ancient DOS command.com on an empty drive, along with whatever text config files that version of DOS will require to load itself. Sure, DOS usually has other files for "external commands" and for access to upper memory, etc.,--but they aren't necessary to do the absolute basics.
It's just stupid, and besides many people use OSes who wouldn't use a compiler and wouldn't know or care what libraries their software is linked to. An OS, like it or not, is defined by its kernel.
Let me lather, rinse, and repeat: an OS is defined by its kernel. And here's where I prove it: If I run a Solaris box and install and link to a bunch of GNU stuff, does that magically transform my OS into GNU/Solaris? NO.
This is why I think Stallman should be largely ignored now that he has already made his historic contribution of the GNU tools. He will go down in history for that accomplishment. But at the moment he's a hindrance, not a help. He has passed his prime, made his contribution, and is now being a petty bitch who squabbles about naming an OS he didn't write. He is actively trying to harm Linux, what with his devotion to the HURD. Anyone who doubts this, should read the post referenced in this story where the Linux glibc porter/maintainer states that Stallman tried to push him into working on glibc for Hurd instead of for Linux.
It should be obvious that Linux is RMS's "bastard child"--it's the first OS born from the GNU tools, and it has made the Free Software movement what it is today as well as helping spawn Open Source. Without Linux, Free Software would still be a tiny little movemwent instead of being on so many desktops and servers. Yet Stallman doesn't care about Linux, he cares about finally building the kernel for his GNU/HURD dream and eventually putting Linux out to pasture. And that's fine. But don't be a schmuck and think Stallman cares about Linux or should be listened to about a damned thing that has to do with Linux. If it were up to him, all Linux developers would drop their work and start on the Hurd. Things like the attempted coup mentioned in this story just go to show that RMS is slowly sabotaging Linux, in order to promote his Hurd. And before marking this as flamebait, at least read the account linked in the story.
Umm, in the post above, where it reads:
:-)
> a class which i made right here in the U.S.
it should actually say:
> a class which is made right here in the U.S.
Now, there's an example of one little letter, or the lack thereof, *completely* changing the meaning and context of a phrase! Jumpin'-Jeezus-on-a-Pogo-Stick, I almost fell out of my seat in embarrassment when I read my own typo.
First off, that page you linked to coincided with attempts by someone to attempt to probe my PC all three times I loaded the page. Coincidence? Or is that Java applet that loads an attempt to search someone's hard drive for suspicious filenames? I don't have time to look into it, but I've heard of such things, so if you go to that site have a firewall unless you don't care about nosy people. As I said, I haven't the time to determine whether it's coincidence--but three times is suspicious.
;-)
Guess what, Mr. Mindless Zealot? The Internet *is* taking care of this problem by itself, and *NO ONE* is making money off of the rape of children. That's just baseless propaganda.
As someone who has researched child pornography through interviewing both law enforcement agents and consumers and producers of child pornography, I can tell you one thing with absolute seriousness: there is *NO* commercial distribution of hardcore child pornography at this time. By that I mean that there are no organized distribution channels--it is possible that one person may meet another person in a somewhat random fashion, and sell him child pornography. But that is a one-on-one transaction which does not count as commercial distribution, and by definition rarely if ever occurs.
The reality is that hardcore child pornography is distributed by "hobbyist" collectors to one another, for free, in chat rooms and newsgroups, and sometimes on free webpage accounts, not sold commercially. Furthermore, about 99.9% of hardcore child pornography distributed on the Internet is "old"; that is, scans from magazines or captures from videos that were legal in the 1970s when they were produced by the commercial child pornography producers which existed and were legal back then, or come from Japan where child pornography was perfectly legal until the U.S. pressured them to pass laws against it last year. It's not exactly fair to equate things that were legal where and when they were created, with child-rape. In most if not all cases the actors and actresses were fairly compensated for their performances and did the material voluntarily--they were not forced. Whether they could give legal consent is of course a good question, but most of the material was made by professionals in parts of Europe in the 1970s and Japan in the 1990s, where and when it was largely legal. As such, it isn't a clear-cut case of right versus wrong.
A few images of actual child-rape have been circulating on the Internet, but not commercially--such images have been uploaded by pedophiles gratis. They also are considered to be sick and disgusting by most pedophiles, and when such an image is posted on a pedophile newsgroup, it always raises complaints. Even pedophiles are not happy with child-rape, the same way heterosexuals are not happy with adult rape. Such images are few and far between, and not popular at all.
Now, the softcore child pornography business is a different matter entirely. It used to be extinct since 1982, when the last Danish producer was put out of business just as the hardcore had been stamped out by the authorities--except of course in Japan, which has a different culture where young sexuality is more acceptable, and where to this day there is a "Lolicon" cultural subset. With the global Internet came an uinterest by the West in Japan's legal (in their own country, of course, not in the U.S.) child pornography. Between 1995 and 2000, a large amount of Japanese softcore child magazines--very common in their own country--were scanned and uploaded to the Net, but almost exclusively by enthusiasts, not by commercial ventures. The U.S. made agreements with Japan to stem the tide of Japanese child pornography, and while my Japanese friends tell me the books and videos can still easily be purchased in any big city, people no longer scan and post to the Net like they used to, so that it is out of sight and mind to the Puritanical Americans. But about the same time, there was a rebirth in the commercial softcore business--Russia and the Eastern Bloc nations, in need of money, and not as Puritanical as Americans are about sexuality and the young, and with the backing of the Russian Mafia, started giving birth to a new breed: the commercial softcore child pornography website.
Actually, the first such website, as far as anyone can recall to me, was a Paraguayan website called tinyamericans.com or somesuch; but it folded quickly when the owner/photographer, a man named Milton Xiscati, got into legal trouble after the U.S. customs authorities formally complained tabout the site and put pressure on Paraguayan authorities. But the Russians followed suit at about the same time in mid-2000, and had better success since the Russian authorities don't really care what the U.S. thinks or wants, and are being paid off by the Russian mob anyway. Several websites exist where a credit card number gets access to softcore images of nude children posed in a Playboy style--not very graphic, from what I'm told. These images are not illegal under Russian law, though they probably are under U.S. law. Posing in these very softcore images does not, by the accounts of those in Russia who take the pictures, cause any harm, and indeed the money generated from the site is used to feed and clothe the girls and their families, who are rather poor and without much means of supporting themselves.
To listen to the accounts of the Russians who produce this very soft stuff, it is almost humanitarian--poor girls and families get lots of money, and all that they have to do in return is a simple Playboy-like shoot. While I am in the U.S. and cannot see the images myself for legal reasons, I recently was given some very innocent clothed images of the families and the girls at a barbeque party thrown for them by the producers. They all seemed very happy and healthy, normal kids. In addition, some other innocent images were given to me of the girls being taught on new computers at a school set up for them inside the studio. Apparently a fair percentage of the money made off these Playboy-style images is being used to give the girls, who range in age from about 7 to 16, educational and vocational opportunities they could not otherwise afford. I am also told that some of the images distributed at the sites are actually taken by some of the older girls, who are learning professional photographic skills, as well as computers and Web design and other skills they wouldn't learn in an ordinary Russian school.
That doesn't sound so bad, now does it? If I were a poor Russian kid right about now, I think posing for some Playboy-style artsy nudes wouldn't be a bad idea if it would get me a classroom full of new computers and someone to teach me skills to use them, and other marketable skills I could not learn otherwise, as well as some money for my family. So what if a few decadent Western perverts whack off to them?
And yet, when I interviewed the Innocent Images task force under press credentials, they made things like that seem like the end of civilization as we know it. Funny then how the websites hosting the images are still, as far as I know, active and from what I hear updated daily now. If the FBI or U.S. Customs *really* wanted to shut down these websites, I'm sure they could do something about it. Talk U.S. Internet companies into purging their URLs from DNS databases, maybe. But no, they still exist, at the same addresses as they've been at for a year or so. The FBI also played up the prevalence of hardcore child pornography on the Internet, and yet my own experience of reading the text-only messages in newsgroups like alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.pre-teen tells me that this is false, that the hardcore stuff is rarely posted and when it is, it is almost exclusively 1970s or Japanese stuff that used to be legal, and it draws criticisms from some--and if force is being used, it draws near-universal criticism. I can only conclude that the FBI was blowing smoke up my arse, and that indeed there is very little hardcore CP on the Net, there is no commercial hardcore CP (the only sites that offer it are FBI or Customs stings, or Russian Mob scams which aren't distributing anything, they're hjust stealing credit card numbers of stupid people), and that the softcore Playboy-type stuff that is common is hurting no one and definitely helping the girls and their families.
So, why would the FBI lie about child pornography? Simple: to get gullible people like you to applaud them and gladly forfeit each and every one of your civil rights the moment you log on to the newest and most powerful medium in the world. The FBI doesn't actually care about child pornography--they care about making the public believe they need to give up all their rights in order to protect their children from the phantom menace of pedophiles, who contrary to popular belief seem to be just like heterosexuals or homosexuals, in that it is a matter of being attracted to a certain group of people, not a matter of rape. Just as only a small percentage of heterosexuals rape women, only a small percentage of pedophiles rape children. Most pedophiles are content to jerk off to the Disney Channel, Sears catalogues, or pictures of nude Russian girls, realizing that touching a child in a sexual way is not good for the child or for the pedophile. It is only a small portion of them who do stupid things like trying to seduce young girls or boys online, and the FBI is doing its job to try to stop them--albeit I have to question my tax dollars being spent to have people chatting on IRC all day pretending to be 12 to entrap stupid potential abusers. Seems like a waste of my tax dollars, and it seems like illicit entrapment to me--but hey, I can't complain too much; the idea behind it is to be pro-active, instead of re-active, and I respect the motive if not the method.
However, the FBI seems to be doing nothing to stop child pornography. Newsgroups are posted to with near-impunity, and as I said those half-dozen or so Russian sites are still going strong. From what I'm told, there are Yahoo groups devoted to questionable images which can last for weeks or months before shut-down. It would seem that the FBI could do more about it if they wanted to. My conclusion is that they don't want to--they don't care, as long as the child porn stays segregated to these "ghettos" so that everyday yokels don't find them and raise hell. They just care about instilling a public perception that child pornography is pervasive and dangerous, so that people will react irrationally and forfeit their rights "for the sake of the children."
This is borne out by another observation I made: there is a third class of child pornography, a class which i made right here in the U.S., but which is only considered child pornography here in the U.S. That is, "clothed child pornography." A few years ago the Court ruled that images of a clothed minor can still be considered child pornography if the primary purpose of the images was to inspire sexual feelings in the viewer, and the images had the minor posed in a provocative position or focused on a sexual area of the body such as the buttocks, crotch, breast, or thigh. And yet, a type of site has grown in the U.S. itself which specializes in such images. They are "modeling" sites which offer images of clothed minors in underwear, swimsuits, leotards, vinyl fetish wear, etc., ostensibly for the purposes of promoting modeling careers for the girls, but which are really there to sell site memberships so that pedophiles can jerk off to attractive young American girls posed to titillate and sexually excite. Clothing or no clothing, many of these images should qualify as child pornography under U.S. law--although the rest of the world would laugh at us for it. Yet the FBI and Customs do nothing about these sites, which are hosted in the U.S., which feature American minors, etc. This further bolsters my argument that the FBI really cares more about promoting the fear of child pornography, than about eliminating it from the Net. Just look at what the FBI is asking for in next year's budget--a HUGE cybercrime spending package. They want more funding and more power, and child pornography is the red herring to get it for them.
Lastly, just for the heck of it, here is a response to a troll/thumper who posted in alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.pre-teen , where as I said I read all the text-only postings. Originally I read the group's text for research, and now I read it because the regs are funny as hell and I like hanging out there. Anyway, here's the message, which is relevant to your ideas:
In article ,
shaunlamoureux@hotmail.com bestowed from atop the mount his words of wisdom
upon mankind, speaking thusly in tongues:
> I would like to appologize to all the young girls in these pictures.
> I have done something morally wrong by looking at these photos. Although
> it my seem like no one is harmed by this practice there are real people
> suffering during and after this sexual abuse. I know these pictures are
> inanimate and remove the viewers from actual abuse but this is no
> excuse. There are still people
> being hurt and by downloading photos one is just as guilty as he or she is
> perpetuating abuse of innocent children.
>
> Next time you are looking ask yourself why? All forms of behavior sexual
> or not have roots in the past.
>
> Once again I am sorry. Please forgive me
>
> For the young victims.
Why Child Pornography Isn't Inherently "Bad"
You know, just looking at images harms no one. Images are not actions,
they are mere information, binary ones and zeros just like anything else in
cyberspace. There is a huge difference between passively looking at an
image and actively doing whatever an image may depict.
An image is not good or bad. It may depict something good or bad, but the
image is neutral. Images depicting torture and genocide have won Pulitzer
Prizes and other awards, and are not considered illegal or evil just
because what they depict may be illegal or evil. We do not feel remorse
for looking at images, even if they depict horrors such as the famous photo
of the nude Vietnamese woman running from her burning village as her flesh
is melting. This is because the image just shows a moment in time; we are
not responsible for that moment just because we have seen a representation
of it.
So, if you have been looking at images of children in sexual and possibly
abusive situations, as you say, why should you feel bad for it? That
moment would have happened whether or not you looked at the image 20 years
or 20 minutes after whatever happened, happened. You are no more
responsible for that moment just because you saw an image of it, than I am
responsible for war crimes for looking at that famous image of a North
Vietnamese man with a gun to his head, crying as he was about to be
executed. And what if you enjoyed looking at an image of a girl in a
questionable situation? You have no more engaged in the situation than I
have engaged in the situation whenever I watch Annette Haven get reamed in
the classic porn film *Co-Ed Fever*--although I wish it were me reaming
Annette Haven, but I digress.
The fallacy so many people--particularly overzealous LEA--fall for is
believing that child pornography promotes child abuse. But it's untrue,
and a notion founded entirely on emotive propaganda not fact. As I said,
the things depicted in images would go on whether or not you view the
images. Do you really think a child molester would stop molesting if no
one would look at his pictures? Of course not; most child molesters do
what they do without posting images on the Net. The motivation is primal,
sexual, and the images are mostly for his own enjoyment, and sharing them
with others is entirely secondary. So where is the harm if someone sees
such an image and is excited by it? They are not vicariously contributing
to the scene depicted--that would have happened no matter what.
Another argument some make is that seeing child pornography may make people
more likely to emulate what is depicted. Well, that argument is quite
groundless. In a society which condems adult-child sex as much as ours
does, no one is going to think sex with children is OK just because they
run across, or even collect, some pictures of it. Do people who see that
picture of a Vietnamese man with a gun to his head suddenly start thinking
that it's okay to go around killing people? Heck, our films and television
shows and video games are laden with more pure violence than ever before,
and despite right-wing propaganda and rhetoric, the Justice Department's
own aggregate statistics say that violent crimes among teenagers--surely
the most impressionable demographic--have been on the decline overall for
10 years. The only thing that causes people to think there's a problem is
media exploitation--the media broadcasts disproportionately about crimes
involving youngsters because it increases their ratings. The statistics
show the truth. Likewise with child porn--people believe it's a problem
because the media tells them so. But the reality is that no one is going
to go out and have sex with a 10 year old just because they see it in a
picture or film. Would you go out and have sex with a dog if you see that
on film? Of course not, unless it were something you were going to go out
and do anyway.
That last statement is the key. There is *no* causal link between child
porn and sex with children; the only reason some people may think so is
based on the fact that the type of people who would collect child porn are
the type of people who are attracted to children sexually in the first
place. So, naturally a percentage of them are going to have sex with
children; the child porn they may happen to possess is merely an indication
of their attractions--not a cause, an effect. And it cannot be denied that
child porn is for some pedophiles the same as adult porn is for some
heterosexuals--a release valve for sexual tensions, something to masterbate
to which ultimately decreases sexual desires, not increases them. Hence,
child pornography (in a limited, semi-underground form, at least) is good
for society, not bad, since it provides people who might otherwise seek
juvenile sexual partners with a healthy, inanimate outlet for those needs.
The other argument against child pornography, and the one most often touted
by law enforcement agencies, is that child pornography can be used as a
"recruitment tool" for pedophiles and child molesters who may try
to convince children that adult-child sex is OK by showing them such
images. This last argument is perhaps the thinnest, least believable,
because anything can be used for a nefarious purpose--just because plastic
baggies can be used to hold drugs, does not mean they don't have more
positive uses, or that they need to be made illegal. I'd concede fully
that child porn can and has been used in that capacity; just the other day
I watched a news program about a guy who used it that way. But regular
adult pornography is just as effective a recruitment tool, because people
interested in seducing young girls (or boys) don't rely on being able to
convince them sex with adults is all right--they're taught at school if not
by their parents that it isn't--but rather they rely on the youngster's
natural curiosity about sex and natural desires to do things that feel
good. Adult pornography arouses curiosity and desire in the potential
subject just as much. A child rapist is just going to rape, regardless of
what the child wants, so he does not usually use any pornography in finding
a victim, and it is not at all important in enabling him to do what he
does. Pornography is only really used in this context by non-rapists who
want to seduce or otherwise broach the subject of sex with children. This
can just as easily--if not more easily--be done with adult pornography as
with child pornography. It is also safer, since the adult can leave
regular adult pornography in places the child is sure to find it and wonder
about it, and if the child reports the porn to his or her parents, the
adult can make an excuse about accidentally leaving it in an accessible
place; the same is not true of child pornography, which the parents are
going to report if their child reports seeing it. My researches into the
subject (for a book, which may or may not ever get published) indicate that
adult pornography is used for seducing children far, far more often than
child pornography is. Therefore to blame such seductions on child
pornography is ludicrous, since adult pornography, which is perfectly legal
to possess, serves exactly the same purpose. In this context, child
pornography is not at all different from or more useful than regular porn.
If there are any other arguments for why merely possessing or viewing child
pornography is somehow inherently "bad", bring them up and I'll refute
them. Face it: the only reason you feel bad about looking at what you say
you've looked at, is a pathological Puritan guilt about sex. That's why
the U.S. has such a high rate of sex crimes compared to the rest of the
world--an unhealthy Puritan outlook on sex leads to an unhealthy sex life
and a potential for sexual pathologies.
The common English word "Illustrator" belongs to Adobe as a trademark the same way the common English word "Office" belongs to Microsoft as a trademark. I.e., only under very, very narrow and restrictive circumstances could they claim an infringement.
Case in point, I used many a year ago an Amiga app called Illustrator. I can't say how popular it was, and if the Amigans are still using a version of it, but it was, gee imagine, a program for creating illustrations. How shocking that one would call such a program Illustrator. It definitely predated Adobe's application, and it did a related thing. A thing that that English word commonly describes.
Adobe could only justifiably claim an infringement if the other product using the word Illustrator in its name were deliberately confusing customers by adopting a "confusingly similar" name. No one is going to confuse a Linux app named KIllustrator with a Mac/Windows app named Illustrator.
If your logic held, then Microsoft would be turning the thumbscrews on KOffice, which we *know* they'd love to do. But they aren't, because they'd be laughed out of Court. Much as Adobe would be laughed out of Court, at least here in the U.S. So, KIllustrator and other potential targets of shitty sheister German lawyer fuckheads should be headquartered in countries which, backward as they may be in some respects, still have a judicial branch which isn't *entirely* controlled by the trial lawyers' associations. (BTW, I for one am glad that GWB has said that he will not be employing the Bar Association to review his Court appointees, unlike his predecessors; that would be like the corrupt policing the corrupt.)
Oops, the link to the whole thread, rather than just the one article, is http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&safe=off&ic= 1&th=e9b6e9e75ee34377,8&seekm=8o02ps%242no%240%40d osa.alt.net#p My pasting hand was quicker than my masturbating ha--err, my thought process. :-) Hehe. The whole thread is quite informative about the issues involved.
Mr. Gielda and his Cotse service are really the black sheep of the remailer community. All you have to do to see this is spend some time in the venerable group alt.privacy.anon-server , where remailer operators (remops) and others interested in security and privacy congregate. Gielda has his supporters, but nearly everyone in the community views him with suspicion. After all, he admits to keeping tracking data on his users, which is the opposite of what remailers are for. They were designed to prevent tracking. If I chain a message through good remailers, I know that that message is untraceable, and that my speech, however unpopular, is protected. If I send a message through Gielda's shitty Cotse thing, then the minute my unpopular speech results in the government asking him who I am, with a warrant (all too easy to get today--just recall the Independant Media Center case recently), he'll fold like a cheap suit. That in no way equates to protecting free speech, which is what a real remailer does.
v acy.anon-server&as_uauthors=carbonymous&num=100 I'm the one named "Carbonymous Howard" and unfortunately Google truncates each article in the thread so that you'll have to click on some links to get the rest of the articles.
For a good discussion on the opinions of both sides, I recommend a thread I posted in under another nic some time ago. http://groups.google.com/groups?as_ugroup=alt.pri
At any rate, Gielda isn't exactly a beloved guy in the privacy field, and it's sad to see him get the spotlight when there are plenty of *real* privacy and free speech advocates who deserve it more. To meet them, just hang out in alt.privacy.anon-server for a while.
Most people simply don't know how to access USENET in the most productive way, which is why they dismiss it like you do. Why would you need to sort through the spam and BS? Let your software do it for you.
v iders.html for a list of providers and features, and http://www.newsreaders.com/ for lists of readers, servers, and all sorts of stuff.
/. any day. Other communities have wonderful traditions and initiations that are older than most MOOs or MUDs still in operation.
The best newsreader by far is a Windoze program called Gravity by a company named Microplanet. I'm sure there's probably something for Linux which does a comparable job, but at any rate it automatically sorts all similar messages together in a much more effective way than the most popular newsreader, Forte Agent, does. Therefore, with a few clicks, all the spam is gone. If you don't even want to spare a few clicks, then you can easily set up personal spam filters to automatically get rid of almost all spam messages. After all, most spam is crossposted to several groups or displays other signs which can set it apart for filtering.
And if you're too fucking lazy to set up spam filters and then just read the groups, you can always get a feed from a provider who filters the spam for you. There are several, some of which have great spam-filtering capabilities. The interested can try http://www.exit109.com/~jeremy/news/providers/pro
Personally, I much prefer USENET to the Web any day. It's far more free and far easier to maintain privacy. A group for every subject and every subject for a group. Some communities are filled with old hands who can tell you more than the mostly-youngsters here on
And don't even get me started with the art of forging headers on any server willing to let you supply your own values (like Altopia). It's fun and provides a level of privacy that's hard to get on the Web.
But, I digress. My point is, the sludge and loonies are easily taken care of with filters and killfiles, and USENET is as vibrant as ever. The only thing about USENET that's bad is the high traffic in binaries which are easily obtainable on the Web or via protocols more suited to binary transfer. The MP3 groups especially piss me off since 99% of what gets posted was easy to find on Napster and is still easy to find on the Web or via Gnutella, Audiogalaxy, and other sources better suited for binary transfers. But, ah well...
If you want a DVD-ROM that's near-silent while playing DVDs and CDs and such, then the Pioneer 10x slot-loading DVD-ROM is the one you want. It whines like a bitch when you first insert media, I guess because it tries to determine whether it's a CD, DVD, CD-R, or CD-RW, but after the initial squeaks for a few seconds it's smooth and quiet, even during moderate seeking.
A distinct bonus is that you can easily find upgraded firmware on the big DVD hacking sites that will disable the drive's region coding. That's true of several drives, but make sure whatever drive you get isn't region-locked unless a good hacked firmware is available; that is, if you like to import DVDs, which I personally do. Fuck, they still haven't released an anamorphic version of *True Romance* in the U.S., and they refuse to make an "uncut" version of Kubrick's love-it-or-hate-it masterpiece *Eyes Wide Shut* in America. But I digress...
They not only rate drive performance, they rate quietness. Personally, my latest drive is a Quantum Fireball 1ct which, as the site says, is incredibly quiet. Maxtor just bought out Quantum a little while back, so buy 'em while you can.
:-)
Actually, Maxtor has been selling the excess inventory of Quantum drives as store brand drives for places like CompUSA, where I bought mine as a CompUSA branded on the outside, but Quantum 1ct on the inside, drive. Of course, you can't quite guarantee a Quantum drive will be in the box unless you can talk the store clerk into letting you take a peek, but right now it might be worth it if you want one of these near-silent drives: CompUSA has a sale on the 30GB store brand model for 50-something dollars after rebate. Always needing more backups of my mp3s and pr0n as I do, I'm heading there soon myself.