How long will it be before the movie theatre denies entry to people carrying McDonalds in an effort to ensure that they can keep raping the Burger King for rent?
Ahh but they already do ban people from carrying Mcdonalds (or any other non concession stand food) to further twist your movie theater analogy how soon until excite starts limiting or even banning non-concession stand content?
Sadly you are not misinformed. Though I can't say for certain that us Americans are only getting educated to the level of a 14 yr old in the Netherlands, but it sounds about right. Throughout highschool I often knew more than my teachers during daily discussions and lectures. Only very rarely do good teachers manage to survive the system, and by "good" I mean teachers that actually encourage students to think for themselves. 9 times out of 10 in this country teachers are worthless robots who wouldn't know an original thought if it bit them in the ass. Many mask their incompetence by overloading students with needless amounts repetive busywork both in class and as homework. Oh and don't even get me started on the overinflated value placed on student athletics, especially in relation to Art and Music programs...
I wish I could agree it was some kind of age/generational thing, but it just isn't. TMBG were formed in 1983, only two years after Metallica (1981). Dre's first album was released in 1992.
Wow I didn't realize TMBG had been around that long, the earliest I remember hearing them was while in junior high, about ten years ago.
What I'm trying to say is this: Metallica and Dre, regardless of what generation they are in, are the industry
I think that statement better expresses the point I was trying to make, than I managed with my (flawed) generational example. I also contradicted myself when I brought up The Who. I think perhaps more than anything the difference is between true artists that really do connect with their fans, where the music is more of a conversation between musician and fan rather than an unchanging monolouge from the "artist"
I hope you are right about change- but I think that if you expect the change to come from young musicians who retain their values when they strike it rich... well, all I can say is don't hold your breath.
Make no mistake, I'm not counting on artistic ideal to win over profits; I'm counting on artistic ideals to become the most profitable method of making music. That's why I feel that now with the combination of the right technologies (MP3, the Internet, and effient distribution systems) an already large and growing and dedicated fan base (market) plus gobs of high profile attention from mainstream media, it's simply a matter of waiting for the right band to cause a paradigm shift. One band, with the right combination of artistic ideals (and ability) an understanding of technology plus a sound that connects with the masses and we'll see history being made. When that band becomes fabulously rich after eschewing the industry, others will follow, established acts will let contracts die, and many of the big labels will die, unless they change quickly, and some will. The point being that the economics of the internet will invalidate the business model of the current record labels. Artists will still need help getting the music out, but they will enlist technocrats in the future instead of marketdroids and lawyers.
At least that's what I think, but then again I may actually be insane and the above rambelings are simply a fantasy told to me by my neighbors dog through his mind control devices;->
The glaring contrast between Madonna and The Offspring (in respect to their attitudes towards napster) got me thinking about what types of bands seemed most opposed digital music vs those that have seemed to embrace it. Take a look at groups/artists that are anti-digital music: Metallica Dr. Dre (I'd like to know what his Ph.D is in:) Madonna
Some that support digital music and fans: The Offspring Limp Bizkit They Might Be Giants and many more i'm sure...
What common trait do these groups share? The anti-digital music camp is composed of bands that either suck, or are past their prime, while the other side doesn't suck and are all younger and pretty "hip" bands. Now granted TMBG aren't exactly a new act, neither are the Offspring but they definately come from a different generation of artist than Metallica and Madonna. Of course not all pro-digital bands are young, Chuck D has been around a long time and was one of first artists to see the power of digital music, and hell The Who are famous for encourging fans to freely trade their music. Guess some were just ahead of their times. One other interesting thing I noticed in the ten minutes of research I did for this post was that both Limp Bizkit and The Offsprings websites contained a ton of useful and interesting information for fans, both included streaming versions of all of their songs, videos, lyrics and even guitar tabs! Talk about fan oriented groups!
This has gotten me thinking about how the 'net and mp3s will really change everything, it's going to come in phases, but what's really going to finally bring the industry as we know it to it's knees will be when the next Big Thing in music is discovered online and completly circumvents the traditional distro system, tells the major labels to fuck off and goes direct to fans first, online, before releasing a CD. I believe the condidtions for this to happen now exist, the fan base (ie market) online is big enough, the technology is ready and media awareness of the whole deal is there as well. The first band to make a name for themselves entirely online is going to get gobs of free publicity as soon as the traditional media hears of them, and once they start getting mainstream attention, radio broadcasts and the like, it really will signal the terminal phase of the cultural cancer we know as the music industry.
Why the hell was this moderated up? It sure as hell isn't insightful, every article posted on/. about Linux on the 390 has said the same thing as this guy, only much better. No offense to Sp0ng or anything but at least a couple moderators must be smoking crack.
As I've said before in some of the other MS stories, I really don't think MS should be forcibly broken apart by the government, though I personally believe that a voluntary breakup of MS would benefit both investors and society in general, look at the amazing growth of Lucent since it was spun off from ATT Bell Labs, a voluntary seperation. I think a forced breakup of any company no matter how illegal their practices is going way beyond what is necessary.
I believe that the point of anti-trust action should be for the government to do the bare minimum necessary to put the market back in a state where free market forces can take effect again and eventually fully correct the situation. This does not mean a level playing field, no one really wants that and anyone who claims otherwise is a liar, a hypocrit or both. After the remedy is enforced MS should still have a big advantage, they've earned it, but not so big that an underdog can't rise up and knock king bill off of the OS hill.
I've thought about what kind of remedy I'd like to see in this case, one that will leave a healthy and competitive MS but takes away their near omnipitence in the software world. The plan that I have come up with is three-fold. First the types of contract provisions they are allowed to put into OEM contracts should be very limited (ie forced bundeling, things like the so called MS tax, bizzare discount plans based on bundles etc...) Second, during the install of windows users have the option of installing IE or not, for those with it already installed MS should release a free utility (I know one already exists, but not by MS) for stripping (not just hiding, really stripping) IE off of your system. Third (here's the biggie) GPL all OS code, everything in use today and all future OS products for say 5 years. Plus they must release full specs on all file formats and "extended" standards (can you say kerberos?) I kinda doubt that anything like full GPL release of all windows code will ever happen but we may see it in some limited fashion, anything that would make it easier for non-windows (or office) users to work with windows/office users would IMO go along way toward giving consumsers a real choice in OS's. And that's what this is all about isn't it?
Anyway those are just my thoughts on the subject, flame away if you feel so inclined.;->
Uncle Sam had a plan to do the same up here in alaska back in the 60's (i think) The idea was to use an underground H-Bomb to create a massive deep water harbor in some obscure part of the coast, and (once it was safe) use it as a massive naval depot or something like that, or it may have just been as a feasibility study with plans to build harbors this way in more densely populated areas if it worked well. Fortunatly enough people got wind of this and managed to get it canceled.
That I understand. And at the time, enough guns and you could ruin the government. But now, what kind of gun is going to destroy the government? You can't do it with a gun. Maybe with a nuclear weapon you could overthrow the government. It worked a little more than 50 years ago... Should people have these to defend themselves against a tyrannical government? How a little about sarin gas and anthrax to sweeten the deal?
This is true, no matter how well armed the citizens are the military could still kill the population quite effectively with nuclear or biological weapons. The problem is if you kill all of your citizens you don't have much of a country left to govern. When a goverment becomes tyranical they don't seek to wipe out the population, they seek to control it. Now they may try and eliminate a few undesirable groups (registered gun owners, Jews, programmers, journalists etc...) as a means to controlling the larger population. Now if gun owners aren't liscensed and can easily buy legal weapons it makes it a lot harder for a tyranical government to eliminate them and a heavily armed population is going to be hard to control, resistance groups using guerilla tactics could do a lot of damage with guns. It is also very hard for a forgeign army to occupy a country whose citizens can defend themselves after the regular army has been defeated, so on the off chance that the US is ever invaded and occupied in part or in whole, having a well armed population will make life very hard on the occupying army. The framers of the US Constitution were violent revolutionaries who sucessfully used guns and guerilla tactics to fight off the (at the time) most powerful nation in the world. You can bet they had these concepts in mind when they wrote the second amendment. Guns are as important a part of this country's core ideals as freedom of speech, if you can't accept that then I suggest you leave.
to change the music industry's distibution system. If we want, and I'm assuming we all do, all music to be legally distributed as MP3's on the 'net we are going to have to show the music industry, and the artists that they won't take it in the shorts from massive online piracy as soon as they release an album on MP3. Napster does not help to advance this goal. The type of music trading that goes on via napster is just plain illegal, not even the the broadest interpertation of fair use covers sharing music with 300k of your closest freinds. I've always beleived that as soon as music is legally released on mp3 for sale over the internet (meaning "pure" mp3s, not some distorted SDMI release, and without a complex registration proccess attached) at a reasonable price (say 25 cents per song maybe more/less?) music piracy will dry up almost completely, who would waste a few hours searching for free illegal mp3's (with no gaurentee of quality, from a slow ass site) when you can fork over a quarter for what you want and download from a T3 site? Only handful of losers with way more time than money, no biggie.
If Napster doesn't honor it's promise to block users known to be breaking the law, it pretty much aknowledges that all of us MP3 advocates are just a bunch of pirates too cheap and dishonest to actually buy music we enjoy, and that will get us nowhere.
last week as a matter of fact. it's a little uh unrefined at the moment, just a motherboard, a network card, an awe64 and a pair of elderly hard drives. Sits in the entertainment center under the rest of my stereo stuff, and plugs right into the reciever. It's running Linux and NFS mounts the shared MP3 directory and cdrom on my main file server. The primary interface is a cheesy little Perl/CGI script I hacked together that scans the directory and lets you select whatever songs you want, then passes that list to mpg123 and off we go! it's real basic and I have no playback control and whenever mpg123 hits a mp3 with errors it vomits and I have to reload the script, but it sounds great and I put it together out of spare parts. I've seen nicer jukebox programs on freshmeat before I'll eventually get one of them installed.
It's been a fun project to work on and I've got alot of improvements (like building an actual case for it;->) but the best feature IMO is that it didn't cost anything.
An expectation of privacy and the legal right to privacy are not at all the same thing.
Not true, at least as far as it applies to computer systems. If a user as a "reasonable expectation of privacy" it is a crime to violate that privacy. For example you have a reasonable expectation of privacy concerning the email account you get from your ISP (unless the TOS include bits about sysadmins reading your email every night) and therefore it would be a crime for the sysadmins at your ISP to go through and your read your email, likewise the police would need a court order to legally read your email. Your work email is a different story and case law has been ruling that employees don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy on the email systems owned and operated by their employer.
Furthermore, how exactly are you defining the corporation's "special rights and responsibilities" as seperate from those of individual citizens? Which one of the items in the Bill of Rights is specifically denied to corporations? Speech, assembly, unreasonable search and seizure, due process?
Well for starters corporations can't vote. They are an entity for legal purposes (they pay taxes, can sue, can be sued etc...) but don't enjoy the normal rights of private citizens, as mentioned they don't vote, they aren't counted as citizens in the census. Public corporations have their freedom of speech restricted by SEC rules before an IPO, their finances are open to public scrutiny and last time I check my bank statement. wasn't public knowledge. As far as additional responsibilities a corporation, well actually the management of a corporation, is legally bound to act in the best interest of the shareholders, that is to seek maxium profits. In in extreme cases the management (ie the personification of the corporation) can be fine/imprisoned for essentially doing a really bad job, though they would likely just be fired unless they broke other laws in the proccess.
Wrong on both counts. US corps don't have citizenship, they do have legal status as an entity seperate from the owners, and have their own special rights and responcibilities but nothing approaching citizenship. Based centuries of case law US citizens do have the right to privacy in certian circumstances. Basically if an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy (such as in their own home) then the government has to obtain court order to spy on them. Private citizens (and corporations for that matter) have more leeway in spying on you but it's still illegal to invade the privacy of a person's home.
MP3CD a requirement. As impressed as I am with solutions that use harddrives they are useless for those of us in stuck in cold climates. I have to deal with seriously cold weather in the winter and just don't like the idea of spinning up a harddrive when it's -30 out.
Under U.S. case law, courts will usually nix a law on free speech grounds if there are other "less restrictive" alternatives to accomplish the government's goal. For the ACLU, the existence of filtering software -- even with its faults -- is a way to convince judges that there are options other than COPA. In such a case, "government must make use of less drastic means if it would regulate at all," writes constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe in American Constitutional Law. Am I the only one who thinks that the least restrictive actions in the case simply be for parents to decide what is and what isn't harmful to their children and keep them clear of it? Or better yet maybe concerned parents could actually teach their children good judgement and then trust them to do the right things? Are parents in this country so goddamn lazy and ignorant that they no longer want to actually bother with being parents to their children? How on earth do the supporters of these insane laws expect today's children to be respconible, thoughtful adults at some point if they are never trusted to learn about life while they are young? Do congressmen and "concerned" parents really think that when a person turns 18 they magically develope the ability to cope with pictures of naked people (and vote, and fight wars), something they couldn't handle 24 hours earlier, and at 19 are suddenly able to make an informe decision about the long term dangers of tobacco, something they couldn't do while fighting wars and picking our nations leaders (oh yea and legally looking at naked people) oh and to end this series, at 21 suddenly develope a tolerence to alchohol and suddenly know their limits? *sigh* When will people learn that in order for childern to know how to act as adults when the become adults, you have to teach them what it means to be an adult? Dammit.
Sorry for the rant but this kind of "for the good of the childern" crap really gets under my skin.
...one thing these sites do have in common with more male-oriented geek and nerd sites is an obsessive love of pop culture. Chickclick is crammed with TV stories, movie chats and music-sharing discussions.
As a frequent visitor of "male-oriented geek and nerd sites" I'm not seeing this obbessive love of pop culture. Look at it this way isn't any geek or nerd web site by definition not part of mainstream pop culture? I would say that the ultimate geek community site is/. and it's success is due entirely to the fact that it's content isn't obsessed with pop culture. If the slogan around here changed from "news for nerds. stuff that matters" to "news for me and you. stuff that's cool and hip today!" I think we'd all drop/. like a hot potato* What Katz is observing here is nothing special, it is simply one more arm of mainstream society coming online and bringing their values/interests with them. The division will always be between geeks and non-geeks, not between men and women. Us geeks will always flock to places like slashdot regardless of gender, here we will have (mostly) intelligent discourse over issues that concern and interest us. The non-geeks will come online and bring all the shallow tripe that dominates their "real" lives with them. I imagine that the average female slashdotter is about as interested in these "chickclicker" sites as I am in ESPN, that is to say, couldn't care less. Just my thoughts on the subject...
------------------------ * I'd like to apologize for the use of this metaphor, it was completly uncalled for and has no business appearing in this forum. If you feel that you've suffered serious mental health damage due to reading this metaphor I'm afraid you're just going to have to deal with it.
The thing is without government regulation and support these monopolies wouldn't exist, or if they did come into existence in most places they wouldn't last long. It's only when it becomes illegal to compete with monopolies (thanks to freindly government regulation) that the consumers are hurt and are powerless to cut them down to size. The beauty part of capitalism is that if company X has a good deal going exploiting people, company Y will see this, and setup shop and exploit people slightly less than company X, who will then be forced to lower prices/improve service in order to keep exploiting people, then out of the blue company Z comes along, screwing people a little less than X and Y and so on, competing for the ability to exploit people until all the sudden the people have bunches of choices offered by viscous competitors. Our local electric utility government monopoly charges the max of what regulators say they can charge, which is typically higher than what the market would allow if competition existed (and it would if legal) One thing the government does do (at least with phones) is to raise the rates(via the universle service charge) of these services for city dwellers in order to keep rural service cheap, which simply fucks up the system and is a big reason why rural phone service to rural areas of the US sucks donkey balls. The big telcos (with their government supported monopolies) are able to charge an artificially low price for rural service (at a very low quality) thus making it impossible/impracticle for anyone to compete in the rural market with new technologies that would improve the quality of serivice. So people in rural levels are getting nice low government rates for their phones, but also have to deal with the lowest level of phone service the government allows, and have no alternitives.
Time Warner/AOL will choke to death on it's own bile without any help from the government. Specialized sites like/. will spring up for any topic imaginable and provide a much better online experiance to their users. This will take a while and in the interim TM/AOL may get away with alot of shit but in the long run consumers will get what they want, so yea the mindless sheep of the world can read all about Leo's new haircut in People, the rest of us can keep reading/. and the handful of newspapers and magazines written at more than an 8th grade reading level.
First off IANAL but it seems to me your question is more concerned with the use of the code and not the code itself. It would seem to me that distributing the source code for a nasty virus or some "hacker" tool would be considered protected speech, it's the bonehead who compiles it and uses the binaries to cause a little chaos that is in trouble. If the virus writer releases the source and puts the binary into to the wild and starts infecting machines with it then the release of the source is still protected but the release of the binary is not for at least two reasons. First since it's not human readable at that point and only has "practical value" and no "expressive value" without any expressive value it is not considered speech and therefor isn't protected. The second reason I see has to do with message content, assuming that you can argue that even the binary has expressive value when executed, it would still not be considered protected speech because the content is designed for the sole purpose of causing mischief; it's like yelling "fire" in a crowded theater or writing and sending death threats to people, it's considered a malicous(sp?) act and not protected. Of course that's just how I see it and as stated before, IANAL (and proud of it!;-> )
Re:Net did not succeed because gov't left it alone
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The DOD and research universities (alot them using government grants) did indeed fund the beginnings of the Internet. That doesn't mean that the "Government" itself was involved or even aware of what was going on. As far as legistslators and regulators were concerned the 'net was just some nerdy military computer thing. The people building the internet had a free hand to find technical solutions to the problems they were facing.
Once the web began to take off in the mid nineties and the great unwashed masses began coming online in droves the internet and the computer industry to support it grew at an amazing rate. During it's explosive growth (which continues today) online commerce flourished for a variety of reasons, for one it was a lot cheaper for consumers to gather more information about products and prices from more sellers. At the same time no one was paying sales taxes on these goods, ordering from outside your home {town|state|country} became easier than driving to the local mall. I'm not saying this is all due to the lack of government intervention, had the US gov been more involved I think these same events still would've taken place in spite of regulation, but to a lesser degree.
Look at what happened when ATT was broken up into baby bells and regulatory maze that followed, which eventually gave the baby bells and the LEC's regional monopolies for local service and in-state LD. In trying to stop one monopoply and help out consumers the gov instead created, and supported several regional monopolies that have fleeced cusomters as bad or worse than ATT ever did, notice how even today IN STATE long distance costs more than out of state LD in most areas, though that is changing now that phone regulations have been relaxed in the last 5 years, permitting competition in local markets. Just as an aside deregulation has really changed the telco market here in anchorage, we now have three companies providing local service, at least four or five potentional LD carries to choose from, two broaband providers (cable modems and DSL) all since and because the government STOPPED regulating an industry.
What I fear is that legislators will use this as an excuse, just as they have used "protecting the childern" as an excuse for trying to censor internet communications.
Is this really a good thing?
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I'm not so sure myself. This scares me. The whole tech industry has flourished (in the US) partly because no one government paid attention to us at all and pretty much let all problems be solved by technical means and by market forces. Now a great many people who don't understand the technology involved think they understand this industry well enough to meddle, this may bring increased regulation to all parts of the tech industry. Now I personally dislike Windows, alot, and prefer Linux so much more that my home machine spends less than 5 hours a month running windows, and then only for games. And I certianly won't defend some of their business practices that came to light during the trial, but I'll take a MS monopoly with all it's power, bad software and underhaned practices any day over bad laws written by myopic legislators, designed to fix a problem that will have corrected itself by the time the bill is signed into law. I prefer the monopoly because I can openly defy a monopoly by using or writing (if i ever become a talented enough programmer) free software and they can do nothing to me. If I openly defy a bad government I'll be arrested.
To make matters worse, once an industry becomes regulated someone has to do the regulating. Human beings are called upon, often underpaid, overworked civil servants are called upon to enforce laws written by legislators who need lots of money to get re-elected, who are subject to a little push or suggestion from those with money, and an agenda. You can bet that large companies in regulated industries have an agenda, and the money to help fund campaigns. So what happens? The regulations intended to protect the people from the big evil corporations end up being twisted into a tool used to maintain monopoly power. Now all of the sudden it is illegal to openly defy a powerful monopoly by using or writing free software (can you say DeCSS?)
Now I think we can all agree that MS should breakup, not be forcably broken apart by the justice dept, but completly on their own. If their applications and developement tools divisions wern't forced to not only limit themselves to windows, but to also tightly integrate with windows I think MS would be able to produce some very high quality software. The problems is they know that Windows (all flavors) cannot stand on their own as they are if it wern't for the massive application and tools support they enjoy. People put up with windows because they want/need to use Office, or play AOE. If MS spun off it's major divisions into say: OS's Applications/Games Tools
Then I think the computing world would be a much better place. However this has to happen voluntarily or it won't work old loyalties will die hard and bitterness will be pervasive. No this is a change MS has to go through on it's own, before they fall down too far. Just remember folks once upon a time IBM was the Big Evil Corporation (tm) that was choking the life out of the computer industry, today we sing their praises as cool and hip for understanding and embracing our beloved Linux better and faster than any other established company. Remember things change, and usually for the better if those involved are left to sort them out on their own.
I don't really see how this would be any better for home networking than Ethernet. Your still going to have to setup the interface somehow, right? If your want to use a cablemodem to connect to the Internet your still going to have to use ethernet somewhere (well for the time being since AFAIK all cablemodems use an ethernet connection). I think that fast (and later gigabit) ethernet will satisfy the needs of home networks (and most corporate ones) for the foreseeable future.
The big potentional I see for firewire is networking regular consumer electronics with computers. Having sort of plug'n'play networking for things like your TV, VCR, DVD player, stereo etc... so that you could control them from your PC and move data between them easily, then that would be cool. Like caputing your home movies and vaction pictures onto your house server then being able to pull them off from any TV in the house, or being able to play MP3's from any stereo in the house all off of a central server, or taping Quake matches to your VCR (or hell just setting it for spectators to watch them live;-> ) Well you get the idea it'd be cool, though I imagine the MPAA and the RIAA might want to start sueing people or charging royalties for these devices since they are of course opposed to any nifty technologies that make both general consumers and us geeks go "hey cool";->
Just my rambeling late night thoughts on what I'd like to be able to do with this kinda technology.
Yup I knew someone would let me know about barcode readers that for some reason or another wouldn't work under linux.;-> Do you know if any of the Wyse terminals were using Citrix?
Linux didn't have adequate support from companies that made bar-code readers, scanners, printers and other hardware with which the thin clients had to be able to communicate.
Ok I agree scanner support is way lame, printing under linux can be a pain in the ass but what the hell kind of bar code readers even need drivers? I work in the IT dept of my university's library we have alot of bar code readers and I've had to support at least half a dozen different brands and models produced over the last decade from light weight hand held scanners to one pretty indrustrial (and expensive) unit. Not a single one of them has required a driver of any type. Every single bar code reader I've setup has simply fit inbetween the keyboard and the PC and every barcode scanned sent the PC as standard keyboard input, works in DOS, Windows, and Linux no problems.
Sorry for the rant but Linux does have enough real issues of hardware support to work on as it is and it really bugs the shit out of me when people start going off about things they don't really understand. Stories like this hurt the credibility of author (for not checking his facts) and hurts Linux's reputation (to those who have have never had to work with the technologies involved) Ack.
Heh, with my luck I'll get a dozen replies pointing to websites of barcode readers that in fact have windows only drivers.;->
Waste of money to buy another, why not just drop the $200 on an Apex? Easier to unlock the regions plus it plays MP3's and also disables Macrovision. Oh yea and you can get Apex DVD's players in the US already.;->
Or would you rather he moved into the city and brought milk prices up to those comparable with liquor. The same thing would happen to the price of bread, cereal, anything with soy in it and most vegetables. I personally would rather subsidize the electricity and not pay later at the grocery store, wouldn't you?
Wrong. If DC stopped subsidizing rural phone/electricity/internet access those farmers that really want those things would pay the market value for what they cost in rural areas. Yes in the short run this would really hurt some farmers, and drive some out of business (and into the cities where utils are cheaper) the next growing season with less produce being sold we would see a price increase for food and stuff in urban areas (that reflected the new higher costs of farming) but it would only be paid by those who consume food products not by those who use phones. For every other business in the country utility costs are part of doing business and factor into production costs and eventually price. I don't see any reason why it should be any different for the farming business. Besides we'll probably end up paying less in the long run if we let the market handle the allocation of resources rather than the government simply because of government overhead and innefficiency. That and by subsidising the regional monopolies service to rural areas we are actually preventing any competitors from developing an effective low cost method of getting quality service to rural areas.
Here in the US you can already get in-dash DVD players for GPS navigation or movie watching. Check out Alpine's website I've seen them at a local car electronics shop, very cool and very expensive.;->
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Ahh but they already do ban people from carrying Mcdonalds (or any other non concession stand food) to further twist your movie theater analogy how soon until excite starts limiting or even banning non-concession stand content?
Sadly you are not misinformed. Though I can't say for certain that us Americans are only getting educated to the level of a 14 yr old in the Netherlands, but it sounds about right. Throughout highschool I often knew more than my teachers during daily discussions and lectures. Only very rarely do good teachers manage to survive the system, and by "good" I mean teachers that actually encourage students to think for themselves. 9 times out of 10 in this country teachers are worthless robots who wouldn't know an original thought if it bit them in the ass. Many mask their incompetence by overloading students with needless amounts repetive busywork both in class and as homework. Oh and don't even get me started on the overinflated value placed on student athletics, especially in relation to Art and Music programs...
Wow I didn't realize TMBG had been around that long, the earliest I remember hearing them was while in junior high, about ten years ago.
What I'm trying to say is this: Metallica and Dre, regardless of what generation they are in, are the industry
I think that statement better expresses the point I was trying to make, than I managed with my (flawed) generational example. I also contradicted myself when I brought up The Who. I think perhaps more than anything the difference is between true artists that really do connect with their fans, where the music is more of a conversation between musician and fan rather than an unchanging monolouge from the "artist"
I hope you are right about change- but I think that if you expect the change to come from young musicians who retain their values when they strike it rich... well, all I can say is don't hold your breath.
Make no mistake, I'm not counting on artistic ideal to win over profits; I'm counting on artistic ideals to become the most profitable method of making music. That's why I feel that now with the combination of the right technologies (MP3, the Internet, and effient distribution systems) an already large and growing and dedicated fan base (market) plus gobs of high profile attention from mainstream media, it's simply a matter of waiting for the right band to cause a paradigm shift. One band, with the right combination of artistic ideals (and ability) an understanding of technology plus a sound that connects with the masses and we'll see history being made. When that band becomes fabulously rich after eschewing the industry, others will follow, established acts will let contracts die, and many of the big labels will die, unless they change quickly, and some will. The point being that the economics of the internet will invalidate the business model of the current record labels. Artists will still need help getting the music out, but they will enlist technocrats in the future instead of marketdroids and lawyers.
At least that's what I think, but then again I may actually be insane and the above rambelings are simply a fantasy told to me by my neighbors dog through his mind control devices ;->
The glaring contrast between Madonna and The Offspring (in respect to their attitudes towards napster) got me thinking about what types of bands seemed most opposed digital music vs those that have seemed to embrace it. Take a look at groups/artists that are anti-digital music: :)
Metallica
Dr. Dre (I'd like to know what his Ph.D is in
Madonna
Some that support digital music and fans:
The Offspring
Limp Bizkit
They Might Be Giants
and many more i'm sure...
What common trait do these groups share? The anti-digital music camp is composed of bands that either suck, or are past their prime, while the other side doesn't suck and are all younger and pretty "hip" bands. Now granted TMBG aren't exactly a new act, neither are the Offspring but they definately come from a different generation of artist than Metallica and Madonna. Of course not all pro-digital bands are young, Chuck D has been around a long time and was one of first artists to see the power of digital music, and hell The Who are famous for encourging fans to freely trade their music. Guess some were just ahead of their times.
One other interesting thing I noticed in the ten minutes of research I did for this post was that both Limp Bizkit and The Offsprings websites contained a ton of useful and interesting information for fans, both included streaming versions of all of their songs, videos, lyrics and even guitar tabs! Talk about fan oriented groups!
This has gotten me thinking about how the 'net and mp3s will really change everything, it's going to come in phases, but what's really going to finally bring the industry as we know it to it's knees will be when the next Big Thing in music is discovered online and completly circumvents the traditional distro system, tells the major labels to fuck off and goes direct to fans first, online, before releasing a CD. I believe the condidtions for this to happen now exist, the fan base (ie market) online is big enough, the technology is ready and media awareness of the whole deal is there as well. The first band to make a name for themselves entirely online is going to get gobs of free publicity as soon as the traditional media hears of them, and once they start getting mainstream attention, radio broadcasts and the like, it really will signal the terminal phase of the cultural cancer we know as the music industry.
Why the hell was this moderated up? It sure as hell isn't insightful, every article posted on /. about Linux on the 390 has said the same thing as this guy, only much better. No offense to Sp0ng or anything but at least a couple moderators must be smoking crack.
I believe that the point of anti-trust action should be for the government to do the bare minimum necessary to put the market back in a state where free market forces can take effect again and eventually fully correct the situation. This does not mean a level playing field, no one really wants that and anyone who claims otherwise is a liar, a hypocrit or both. After the remedy is enforced MS should still have a big advantage, they've earned it, but not so big that an underdog can't rise up and knock king bill off of the OS hill.
I've thought about what kind of remedy I'd like to see in this case, one that will leave a healthy and competitive MS but takes away their near omnipitence in the software world. The plan that I have come up with is three-fold. First the types of contract provisions they are allowed to put into OEM contracts should be very limited (ie forced bundeling, things like the so called MS tax, bizzare discount plans based on bundles etc...) Second, during the install of windows users have the option of installing IE or not, for those with it already installed MS should release a free utility (I know one already exists, but not by MS) for stripping (not just hiding, really stripping) IE off of your system. Third (here's the biggie) GPL all OS code, everything in use today and all future OS products for say 5 years. Plus they must release full specs on all file formats and "extended" standards (can you say kerberos?) I kinda doubt that anything like full GPL release of all windows code will ever happen but we may see it in some limited fashion, anything that would make it easier for non-windows (or office) users to work with windows/office users would IMO go along way toward giving consumsers a real choice in OS's. And that's what this is all about isn't it?
Anyway those are just my thoughts on the subject, flame away if you feel so inclined. ;->
Uncle Sam had a plan to do the same up here in alaska back in the 60's (i think) The idea was to use an underground H-Bomb to create a massive deep water harbor in some obscure part of the coast, and (once it was safe) use it as a massive naval depot or something like that, or it may have just been as a feasibility study with plans to build harbors this way in more densely populated areas if it worked well. Fortunatly enough people got wind of this and managed to get it canceled.
This is true, no matter how well armed the citizens are the military could still kill the population quite effectively with nuclear or biological weapons. The problem is if you kill all of your citizens you don't have much of a country left to govern. When a goverment becomes tyranical they don't seek to wipe out the population, they seek to control it. Now they may try and eliminate a few undesirable groups (registered gun owners, Jews, programmers, journalists etc...) as a means to controlling the larger population. Now if gun owners aren't liscensed and can easily buy legal weapons it makes it a lot harder for a tyranical government to eliminate them and a heavily armed population is going to be hard to control, resistance groups using guerilla tactics could do a lot of damage with guns. It is also very hard for a forgeign army to occupy a country whose citizens can defend themselves after the regular army has been defeated, so on the off chance that the US is ever invaded and occupied in part or in whole, having a well armed population will make life very hard on the occupying army. The framers of the US Constitution were violent revolutionaries who sucessfully used guns and guerilla tactics to fight off the (at the time) most powerful nation in the world. You can bet they had these concepts in mind when they wrote the second amendment. Guns are as important a part of this country's core ideals as freedom of speech, if you can't accept that then I suggest you leave.
to change the music industry's distibution system. If we want, and I'm assuming we all do, all music to be legally distributed as MP3's on the 'net we are going to have to show the music industry, and the artists that they won't take it in the shorts from massive online piracy as soon as they release an album on MP3. Napster does not help to advance this goal. The type of music trading that goes on via napster is just plain illegal, not even the the broadest interpertation of fair use covers sharing music with 300k of your closest freinds. I've always beleived that as soon as music is legally released on mp3 for sale over the internet (meaning "pure" mp3s, not some distorted SDMI release, and without a complex registration proccess attached) at a reasonable price (say 25 cents per song maybe more/less?) music piracy will dry up almost completely, who would waste a few hours searching for free illegal mp3's (with no gaurentee of quality, from a slow ass site) when you can fork over a quarter for what you want and download from a T3 site? Only handful of losers with way more time than money, no biggie.
If Napster doesn't honor it's promise to block users known to be breaking the law, it pretty much aknowledges that all of us MP3 advocates are just a bunch of pirates too cheap and dishonest to actually buy music we enjoy, and that will get us nowhere.
last week as a matter of fact. it's a little uh unrefined at the moment, just a motherboard, a network card, an awe64 and a pair of elderly hard drives. Sits in the entertainment center under the rest of my stereo stuff, and plugs right into the reciever. It's running Linux and NFS mounts the shared MP3 directory and cdrom on my main file server. The primary interface is a cheesy little Perl/CGI script I hacked together that scans the directory and lets you select whatever songs you want, then passes that list to mpg123 and off we go! it's real basic and I have no playback control and whenever mpg123 hits a mp3 with errors it vomits and I have to reload the script, but it sounds great and I put it together out of spare parts. I've seen nicer jukebox programs on freshmeat before I'll eventually get one of them installed.
;->) but the best feature IMO is that it didn't cost anything.
It's been a fun project to work on and I've got alot of improvements (like building an actual case for it
Not true, at least as far as it applies to computer systems. If a user as a "reasonable expectation of privacy" it is a crime to violate that privacy. For example you have a reasonable expectation of privacy concerning the email account you get from your ISP (unless the TOS include bits about sysadmins reading your email every night) and therefore it would be a crime for the sysadmins at your ISP to go through and your read your email, likewise the police would need a court order to legally read your email. Your work email is a different story and case law has been ruling that employees don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy on the email systems owned and operated by their employer.
Furthermore, how exactly are you defining the corporation's "special rights and responsibilities" as seperate from those of individual citizens? Which one of the items in the Bill of Rights is specifically denied to corporations? Speech, assembly, unreasonable search and seizure, due process?
Well for starters corporations can't vote. They are an entity for legal purposes (they pay taxes, can sue, can be sued etc...) but don't enjoy the normal rights of private citizens, as mentioned they don't vote, they aren't counted as citizens in the census. Public corporations have their freedom of speech restricted by SEC rules before an IPO, their finances are open to public scrutiny and last time I check my bank statement. wasn't public knowledge.
As far as additional responsibilities a corporation, well actually the management of a corporation, is legally bound to act in the best interest of the shareholders, that is to seek maxium profits. In in extreme cases the management (ie the personification of the corporation) can be fine/imprisoned for essentially doing a really bad job, though they would likely just be fired unless they broke other laws in the proccess.
Legally, no U.S. citizen has a right to privacy.
Wrong on both counts. US corps don't have citizenship, they do have legal status as an entity seperate from the owners, and have their own special rights and responcibilities but nothing approaching citizenship.
Based centuries of case law US citizens do have the right to privacy in certian circumstances. Basically if an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy (such as in their own home) then the government has to obtain court order to spy on them. Private citizens (and corporations for that matter) have more leeway in spying on you but it's still illegal to invade the privacy of a person's home.
MP3CD a requirement. As impressed as I am with solutions that use harddrives they are useless for those of us in stuck in cold climates. I have to deal with seriously cold weather in the winter and just don't like the idea of spinning up a harddrive when it's -30 out.
Sorry for the rant but this kind of "for the good of the childern" crap really gets under my skin.
As a frequent visitor of "male-oriented geek and nerd sites" I'm not seeing this obbessive love of pop culture. Look at it this way isn't any geek or nerd web site by definition not part of mainstream pop culture? I would say that the ultimate geek community site is /. and it's success is due entirely to the fact that it's content isn't obsessed with pop culture. If the slogan around here changed from "news for nerds. stuff that matters" to "news for me and you. stuff that's cool and hip today!" I think we'd all drop /. like a hot potato*
What Katz is observing here is nothing special, it is simply one more arm of mainstream society coming online and bringing their values/interests with them. The division will always be between geeks and non-geeks, not between men and women. Us geeks will always flock to places like slashdot regardless of gender, here we will have (mostly) intelligent discourse over issues that concern and interest us. The non-geeks will come online and bring all the shallow tripe that dominates their "real" lives with them. I imagine that the average female slashdotter is about as interested in these "chickclicker" sites as I am in ESPN, that is to say, couldn't care less.
Just my thoughts on the subject...
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* I'd like to apologize for the use of this metaphor, it was completly uncalled for and has no business appearing in this forum. If you feel that you've suffered serious mental health damage due to reading this metaphor I'm afraid you're just going to have to deal with it.
The thing is without government regulation and support these monopolies wouldn't exist, or if they did come into existence in most places they wouldn't last long. It's only when it becomes illegal to compete with monopolies (thanks to freindly government regulation) that the consumers are hurt and are powerless to cut them down to size. The beauty part of capitalism is that if company X has a good deal going exploiting people, company Y will see this, and setup shop and exploit people slightly less than company X, who will then be forced to lower prices/improve service in order to keep exploiting people, then out of the blue company Z comes along, screwing people a little less than X and Y and so on, competing for the ability to exploit people until all the sudden the people have bunches of choices offered by viscous competitors.
/. will spring up for any topic imaginable and provide a much better online experiance to their users. This will take a while and in the interim TM/AOL may get away with alot of shit but in the long run consumers will get what they want, so yea the mindless sheep of the world can read all about Leo's new haircut in People, the rest of us can keep reading /. and the handful of newspapers and magazines written at more than an 8th grade reading level.
Our local electric utility government monopoly charges the max of what regulators say they can charge, which is typically higher than what the market would allow if competition existed (and it would if legal) One thing the government does do (at least with phones) is to raise the rates(via the universle service charge) of these services for city dwellers in order to keep rural service cheap, which simply fucks up the system and is a big reason why rural phone service to rural areas of the US sucks donkey balls. The big telcos (with their government supported monopolies) are able to charge an artificially low price for rural service (at a very low quality) thus making it impossible/impracticle for anyone to compete in the rural market with new technologies that would improve the quality of serivice. So people in rural levels are getting nice low government rates for their phones, but also have to deal with the lowest level of phone service the government allows, and have no alternitives.
Time Warner/AOL will choke to death on it's own bile without any help from the government. Specialized sites like
First off IANAL but it seems to me your question is more concerned with the use of the code and not the code itself. It would seem to me that distributing the source code for a nasty virus or some "hacker" tool would be considered protected speech, it's the bonehead who compiles it and uses the binaries to cause a little chaos that is in trouble. If the virus writer releases the source and puts the binary into to the wild and starts infecting machines with it then the release of the source is still protected but the release of the binary is not for at least two reasons. First since it's not human readable at that point and only has "practical value" and no "expressive value" without any expressive value it is not considered speech and therefor isn't protected. The second reason I see has to do with message content, assuming that you can argue that even the binary has expressive value when executed, it would still not be considered protected speech because the content is designed for the sole purpose of causing mischief; it's like yelling "fire" in a crowded theater or writing and sending death threats to people, it's considered a malicous(sp?) act and not protected. ;-> )
Of course that's just how I see it and as stated before, IANAL (and proud of it!
The DOD and research universities (alot them using government grants) did indeed fund the beginnings of the Internet. That doesn't mean that the "Government" itself was involved or even aware of what was going on. As far as legistslators and regulators were concerned the 'net was just some nerdy military computer thing. The people building the internet had a free hand to find technical solutions to the problems they were facing.
Once the web began to take off in the mid nineties and the great unwashed masses began coming online in droves the internet and the computer industry to support it grew at an amazing rate. During it's explosive growth (which continues today) online commerce flourished for a variety of reasons, for one it was a lot cheaper for consumers to gather more information about products and prices from more sellers. At the same time no one was paying sales taxes on these goods, ordering from outside your home {town|state|country} became easier than driving to the local mall. I'm not saying this is all due to the lack of government intervention, had the US gov been more involved I think these same events still would've taken place in spite of regulation, but to a lesser degree.
Look at what happened when ATT was broken up into baby bells and regulatory maze that followed, which eventually gave the baby bells and the LEC's regional monopolies for local service and in-state LD. In trying to stop one monopoply and help out consumers the gov instead created, and supported several regional monopolies that have fleeced cusomters as bad or worse than ATT ever did, notice how even today IN STATE long distance costs more than out of state LD in most areas, though that is changing now that phone regulations have been relaxed in the last 5 years, permitting competition in local markets. Just as an aside deregulation has really changed the telco market here in anchorage, we now have three companies providing local service, at least four or five potentional LD carries to choose from, two broaband providers (cable modems and DSL) all since and because the government STOPPED regulating an industry.
What I fear is that legislators will use this as an excuse, just as they have used "protecting the childern" as an excuse for trying to censor internet communications.
I'm not so sure myself. This scares me. The whole tech industry has flourished (in the US) partly because no one government paid attention to us at all and pretty much let all problems be solved by technical means and by market forces. Now a great many people who don't understand the technology involved think they understand this industry well enough to meddle, this may bring increased regulation to all parts of the tech industry. Now I personally dislike Windows, alot, and prefer Linux so much more that my home machine spends less than 5 hours a month running windows, and then only for games. And I certianly won't defend some of their business practices that came to light during the trial, but I'll take a MS monopoly with all it's power, bad software and underhaned practices any day over bad laws written by myopic legislators, designed to fix a problem that will have corrected itself by the time the bill is signed into law. I prefer the monopoly because I can openly defy a monopoly by using or writing (if i ever become a talented enough programmer) free software and they can do nothing to me. If I openly defy a bad government I'll be arrested.
To make matters worse, once an industry becomes regulated someone has to do the regulating. Human beings are called upon, often underpaid, overworked civil servants are called upon to enforce laws written by legislators who need lots of money to get re-elected, who are subject to a little push or suggestion from those with money, and an agenda. You can bet that large companies in regulated industries have an agenda, and the money to help fund campaigns. So what happens? The regulations intended to protect the people from the big evil corporations end up being twisted into a tool used to maintain monopoly power. Now all of the sudden it is illegal to openly defy a powerful monopoly by using or writing free software (can you say DeCSS?)
Now I think we can all agree that MS should breakup, not be forcably broken apart by the justice dept, but completly on their own. If their applications and developement tools divisions wern't forced to not only limit themselves to windows, but to also tightly integrate with windows I think MS would be able to produce some very high quality software. The problems is they know that Windows (all flavors) cannot stand on their own as they are if it wern't for the massive application and tools support they enjoy. People put up with windows because they want/need to use Office, or play AOE. If MS spun off it's major divisions into say:
OS's
Applications/Games
Tools
Then I think the computing world would be a much better place. However this has to happen voluntarily or it won't work old loyalties will die hard and bitterness will be pervasive. No this is a change MS has to go through on it's own, before they fall down too far. Just remember folks once upon a time IBM was the Big Evil Corporation (tm) that was choking the life out of the computer industry, today we sing their praises as cool and hip for understanding and embracing our beloved Linux better and faster than any other established company. Remember things change, and usually for the better if those involved are left to sort them out on their own.
I don't really see how this would be any better for home networking than Ethernet. Your still going to have to setup the interface somehow, right? If your want to use a cablemodem to connect to the Internet your still going to have to use ethernet somewhere (well for the time being since AFAIK all cablemodems use an ethernet connection). I think that fast (and later gigabit) ethernet will satisfy the needs of home networks (and most corporate ones) for the foreseeable future.
;-> ) Well you get the idea it'd be cool, though I imagine the MPAA and the RIAA might want to start sueing people or charging royalties for these devices since they are of course opposed to any nifty technologies that make both general consumers and us geeks go "hey cool" ;->
The big potentional I see for firewire is networking regular consumer electronics with computers. Having sort of plug'n'play networking for things like your TV, VCR, DVD player, stereo etc... so that you could control them from your PC and move data between them easily, then that would be cool. Like caputing your home movies and vaction pictures onto your house server then being able to pull them off from any TV in the house, or being able to play MP3's from any stereo in the house all off of a central server, or taping Quake matches to your VCR (or hell just setting it for spectators to watch them live
Just my rambeling late night thoughts on what I'd like to be able to do with this kinda technology.
Yup I knew someone would let me know about barcode readers that for some reason or another wouldn't work under linux. ;-> Do you know if any of the Wyse terminals were using Citrix?
Ok I agree scanner support is way lame, printing under linux can be a pain in the ass but what the hell kind of bar code readers even need drivers? I work in the IT dept of my university's library we have alot of bar code readers and I've had to support at least half a dozen different brands and models produced over the last decade from light weight hand held scanners to one pretty indrustrial (and expensive) unit. Not a single one of them has required a driver of any type. Every single bar code reader I've setup has simply fit inbetween the keyboard and the PC and every barcode scanned sent the PC as standard keyboard input, works in DOS, Windows, and Linux no problems.
Sorry for the rant but Linux does have enough real issues of hardware support to work on as it is and it really bugs the shit out of me when people start going off about things they don't really understand. Stories like this hurt the credibility of author (for not checking his facts) and hurts Linux's reputation (to those who have have never had to work with the technologies involved) Ack.
Heh, with my luck I'll get a dozen replies pointing to websites of barcode readers that in fact have windows only drivers. ;->
Waste of money to buy another, why not just drop the $200 on an Apex? Easier to unlock the regions plus it plays MP3's and also disables Macrovision. Oh yea and you can get Apex DVD's players in the US already. ;->
Wrong. If DC stopped subsidizing rural phone/electricity/internet access those farmers that really want those things would pay the market value for what they cost in rural areas. Yes in the short run this would really hurt some farmers, and drive some out of business (and into the cities where utils are cheaper) the next growing season with less produce being sold we would see a price increase for food and stuff in urban areas (that reflected the new higher costs of farming) but it would only be paid by those who consume food products not by those who use phones. For every other business in the country utility costs are part of doing business and factor into production costs and eventually price. I don't see any reason why it should be any different for the farming business. Besides we'll probably end up paying less in the long run if we let the market handle the allocation of resources rather than the government simply because of government overhead and innefficiency. That and by subsidising the regional monopolies service to rural areas we are actually preventing any competitors from developing an effective low cost method of getting quality service to rural areas.
Here in the US you can already get in-dash DVD players for GPS navigation or movie watching. Check out Alpine's website I've seen them at a local car electronics shop, very cool and very expensive. ;->