clealy, sir, the solution is to create stealth binaries groups.
No, the solution is to stop using outdated technology. Usenet binary groups are limited in what you're going to find at any one time; a service like Gnutella or Kazaa or Audiogalaxy has tons of stuff compared to a binary group, and one never has the common Usenet annoyance of wanting to download something that has 1 or 2 sections missing.
By the way, has the "postercomment compression filter" ever heard that brevity is the soul of wit? Calvin Coolidge would have driven himself nuts trying to post here...
If one could devise an inexpensive enough and small enough means to have servers in space and a good way to have them communicate with Earth clients (such as all those wireless networks people are starting), there could be another version of the Internet. My guess is that the smaller they were, the more you could have and the harder it'd be to put them out of commission. I'll leave it for people who know something about all this to work out the details, but I'm sure it's a possibility.
How do propose to pull this off without violating the First Amendment? How can you guarantee me that a government that is censoring things because of youth inappropriate content isn't also going to be censoring something because it exposes things that the powers that be don't want known? What if it's not content in video games or on TV that causes parts of the brain to improperly develop, but the mere act of watching them? (A control group playing a video game of Jeopardy would have been good.) If you ban violent video games, how are you going to stop people from downloading them from out of the the country? And, last of all, how do you figure that the Romans fell from civil corruption when part of their empire lasted to the 1500s, and the people who overran them were even more "corrupt" and "decadent" and took hundreds of years to replace them?
The problem with eliminating jury nullification is that then, who is going to determine whether a jury decided someone's innocence on the facts, or on being against the law? If a judge decides a jury was not ruling on the facts, how could he decide the defendant's guilt without violating the defendant's right to a jury trial? There's really no way of guaranteeing a jury will convict someone based on the evidence.
It sounds to me that this is not really an instance of an area being ruined by corporate greed or the aftermath of colonialism. The real reason there isn't a strong government to try to keep the mining under control is because people are so damned busy fighting each other over ethnic squabbles that the majority of sane people can't keep a stable society going. I wouldn't blame corporations for this. Ultimately, the people who live there are the ones who are either going to insist upon a stable society, or continue on in the mess they have. It's unfortunate and tragic, but there's no way we can make people want to live together peacefully unless they want to. The Middle East, the Balkans and Ireland are examples.
Players? Players? There's TRACKERS!! Modplug tracker is probably the best Windows old-school type tracker (although some people still swear by Impulse tracker. Also out there is a new school tracker called Buzz - at www.buzzmachines.com. It combines a tracker interface with a wide variety of software synths and effects that can be connected in a modular fashion. Oh, and it's free! To find out what music software is being offered online that's of use to trackers or computer musicians www.maz-sound.com is what I check out to keep up on it. This site also offers a 2 cd set called "Mazzive Injection - tracked work '2k" - it sells for around 35 bucks and has nearly 1100 tracked songs and the software to listen to them. It's well worth the money - my copy's right on my computer desk as I write. Some of this music is equal to the electronic music being released commercially - and some isn't. All the songs are in the original source code format so you can not only hear them, but see how they did it.
Excellent post! There's only one thing you left out - that if our government continues to limit and "re-interpret" these rights, then we will have to overthrow it. As far as I can see, our rights are being sold out by congressmen and judges who are whoring themselves for corporate sponsorship.
So, I guess you're willing to defend the "artist's right" to a living by arguing against file copying, but if the artist actually WANTS to promote his music by allowing people to copy files, somehow that right magically disappears. And don't tell me that he can put it up on a web page of his own and get a lot of attention for it - services like Napster are ideal for promoting independant artists and that's the real reason the RIAA has sued Napster and MP3.com - they want to eliminate competition from artists who want to distribute their own work without having to pay their souls to the current music industry to do so. The small record companies of the world are using alternative systems to get heard and the RIAA is trying to stop them. Distributors to music stores are notorious for screwing the little guy in the record business by not paying for product, while majors get their money quickly. Radio stations take bribes to play RIAA music while the little guy has no money to get played. In the 80's the majors even went as far as trying to get zoning ordinances against home businesses passed for the purpose of eliminating people with home studios making records at home.
Did you see the story in Rolling Stone about the guy who wrote the song that "The Lions Sleeps Tonight" is based upon? He didn't get hardly a dime for making a song that's sold millions of records - in fact, the reporter who met his daughters discovered they were so poor, that he had to BUY them something to play his father's music on before they could hear it again.
I'd be interested in trying it if they ported OSX to x86 and if it coexisted nicely with a Win98/linux setup. If there was a lot of things that could be run on it, that is.
... and then slowly connect the loose ends from town to town and end up with a net that will put the current one to shame - or several nets. You know, if the whiners in the business world were smart, they'd think of this themselves. It's a while off, but it'll happen.
Ahhh...but the point you miss is that, absent some ability to capture benefit from their idea, only those with some other means to support themselves, or those willing to suffer abject poverty (which pretty much describes the people in your list) will be able to pursue the activity.
Considering that the majority of people in the USA are employable at something, I fail to see how that's a limitation at all. I read in a recent book of Allen Ginsburg's interviews, his view that a person does not have to make a living at art and a person does not have to do art all the time. It's a myth that you have to quit your job to produce something - in fact, most published writers never make a living at what they write, but have other jobs. Anyone who's a starving artist in a garret is not being sensible about his abilities and how to use them.
Emily Dickenson came from a middle class family in an era where she wasn't expected to work and didn't have to. Franz Kafka worked at an insurance bureau - his relative poverty wasn't caused by his writing but by his TB. William Blake's poverty was caused more by his inability to run a successful printing business than anything else.
Just about every published poet you can name makes their living as a college professor and those who don't, are doing something else - almost nobody makes a living at poetry, which oddly enough, is the reason poetry is the least commercialized of the arts. Very few get paid any real sort of money at it, but we don't seem to be having a poetry shortage.
As a person who's been creative all his life, I'm sick and tired of hearing that I don't have any incentive to do it because no one's paying me to. It's just not true.
Consider the ideal pursued by many in the debate right now: total and absolute freedom of any idea. The inescapable consequence is that the ability of any one individual to capture benefits from that idea is gone. Thus the driving incentive to develop ideas is gone; I personally love studying astronomy, but I'm a programmer to pay the bills because I cannot feed my family on looking through a telescope.
People can derive benefit from their work without ever recieving money for it. One of the problems with the current system is that it gives incentive for creators who are only in it for the money (NSYNC etc.) while adding very little incentive for those who practice their art for the sake of becoming better at it, and better people in the process. The end result is a system that rewards the easily promotable and marketable and often ignores the dedicated and sincere. If Art is a temple, perhaps it's time to chase the moneylenders out of it.
After all, Emily Dickenson never got paid, partially because the people who were in the business of paying for poetry weren't willing to pay for hers without changing it in ways she knew to be wrong. 100 years later, her "free" poetry is being read a lot more than the stuff people were paying for.
Franz Kafka never got paid, either - in fact, he requested that all his works be burned after his death, and yet, he was compelled to create them, even though he didn't want them read by the public. Now he's known world wide while many novelists of his time are nearly forgotten.
The free market of ideas and artistic works is not the same as the free market of commodities. The first is infinite and cannot be exhasted. The second is finite and scarcity is common. As William Blake (another guy who didn't make much money) said, "One law for the lion and the lamb is tyranny".
Oh, and my comment to the guy from Taiwan is this - when the corporations and nations start paying back rent and reparations to all the 3rd world and victimized peoples that have been harmed and stolen from, then they might have some kind of moral ground on which to protest the "stealing" of "property". In the meantime, just think of copying as a series of tiny settlements. What goes around comes around.
It's quite possible that an AI as intelligent as a human may eventually conclude that we and our meatspace problems are utterly uninteresting and irrelevant to its own "reality". We could end up with a mega-beowulf cluster of superbrains who feel we are too slow and dull to bother with and don't want to communicate with us. How much time do we spend trying to interact with ants?
... a combination of a boomerang and an arrow, wasn't such a hot idea.
Re:Developers Have a Louder Voice than Speech
on
Still in DMCA Prison
·
· Score: 1
How do you think a dictatorship of the technological elite is going to further the cause of freedom? As far as I'm concerned, that's exactly what you're proposing.
So what makes you think there will ever be a situation where an armed group in America will ever be able to get 'justice' through force?
Remember the L.A riots after the Rodney King acquital? Right after that, federal charges were made and justice was done - and most of the rioters weren't even armed... The government knew they weren't going to keep the lid on things unless they did something. Haven't you noticed how much more careful the government is about dealing with fringe right wing groups since Oklahoma City?
I don't think that a person in this situation would be likely to get much sympathy from the police department. (And I'll bet the tape was confiscated, too.) Taking it to the cops was naive - what he should have done was posted it on the web and advertised the location with bumper stickers or flyers.
I suppose the answer to the age old question, "Who guards the guardians?" is "no one" in Massachusettes. Suggestion - bumper stickers that say "This car is under electronic surveillance" - even people who don't have recorders in their car should put them on. That way, the police have been informed. The right to record what the police are doing is a right that must be fought for.
After all, if they have nothing to hide, they shouldn't object to being recorded, right?
Slashdot Mirror
clealy, sir, the solution is to create stealth binaries groups.
No, the solution is to stop using outdated technology. Usenet binary groups are limited in what you're going to find at any one time; a service like Gnutella or Kazaa or Audiogalaxy has tons of stuff compared to a binary group, and one never has the common Usenet annoyance of wanting to download something that has 1 or 2 sections missing.
Ye needeth P2P - OlDgEEzEr.
Out, out, slashdot!
...
By the way, has the "postercomment compression filter" ever heard that brevity is the soul of wit? Calvin Coolidge would have driven himself nuts trying to post here
... to write a day's worth of posts to Slashdot?
They sell you Wonder Bread. Try beaking the real kind. The smell of a loaf of seven-grain about to come out of the oven is better than sex or cocaine.
...
So that's why I keep seeing so many bake sales on the street corners these days
Funny, but I have to stop talking, hang up the phone and dial another number to talk to someone else. Sheesh ...
If one could devise an inexpensive enough and small enough means to have servers in space and a good way to have them communicate with Earth clients (such as all those wireless networks people are starting), there could be another version of the Internet. My guess is that the smaller they were, the more you could have and the harder it'd be to put them out of commission. I'll leave it for people who know something about all this to work out the details, but I'm sure it's a possibility.
I tore the tag off my mattress yesterday.
How do propose to pull this off without violating the First Amendment? How can you guarantee me that a government that is censoring things because of youth inappropriate content isn't also going to be censoring something because it exposes things that the powers that be don't want known? What if it's not content in video games or on TV that causes parts of the brain to improperly develop, but the mere act of watching them? (A control group playing a video game of Jeopardy would have been good.) If you ban violent video games, how are you going to stop people from downloading them from out of the the country? And, last of all, how do you figure that the Romans fell from civil corruption when part of their empire lasted to the 1500s, and the people who overran them were even more "corrupt" and "decadent" and took hundreds of years to replace them?
The problem with eliminating jury nullification is that then, who is going to determine whether a jury decided someone's innocence on the facts, or on being against the law? If a judge decides a jury was not ruling on the facts, how could he decide the defendant's guilt without violating the defendant's right to a jury trial? There's really no way of guaranteeing a jury will convict someone based on the evidence.
It sounds to me that this is not really an instance of an area being ruined by corporate greed or the aftermath of colonialism. The real reason there isn't a strong government to try to keep the mining under control is because people are so damned busy fighting each other over ethnic squabbles that the majority of sane people can't keep a stable society going. I wouldn't blame corporations for this. Ultimately, the people who live there are the ones who are either going to insist upon a stable society, or continue on in the mess they have. It's unfortunate and tragic, but there's no way we can make people want to live together peacefully unless they want to. The Middle East, the Balkans and Ireland are examples.
Players? Players? There's TRACKERS!! Modplug tracker is probably the best Windows old-school type tracker (although some people still swear by Impulse tracker. Also out there is a new school tracker called Buzz - at www.buzzmachines.com. It combines a tracker interface with a wide variety of software synths and effects that can be connected in a modular fashion. Oh, and it's free! To find out what music software is being offered online that's of use to trackers or computer musicians www.maz-sound.com is what I check out to keep up on it. This site also offers a 2 cd set called "Mazzive Injection - tracked work '2k" - it sells for around 35 bucks and has nearly 1100 tracked songs and the software to listen to them. It's well worth the money - my copy's right on my computer desk as I write. Some of this music is equal to the electronic music being released commercially - and some isn't. All the songs are in the original source code format so you can not only hear them, but see how they did it.
Free open source music is great.
Excellent post! There's only one thing you left out - that if our government continues to limit and "re-interpret" these rights, then we will have to overthrow it. As far as I can see, our rights are being sold out by congressmen and judges who are whoring themselves for corporate sponsorship.
So, I guess you're willing to defend the "artist's right" to a living by arguing against file copying, but if the artist actually WANTS to promote his music by allowing people to copy files, somehow that right magically disappears. And don't tell me that he can put it up on a web page of his own and get a lot of attention for it - services like Napster are ideal for promoting independant artists and that's the real reason the RIAA has sued Napster and MP3.com - they want to eliminate competition from artists who want to distribute their own work without having to pay their souls to the current music industry to do so. The small record companies of the world are using alternative systems to get heard and the RIAA is trying to stop them. Distributors to music stores are notorious for screwing the little guy in the record business by not paying for product, while majors get their money quickly. Radio stations take bribes to play RIAA music while the little guy has no money to get played. In the 80's the majors even went as far as trying to get zoning ordinances against home businesses passed for the purpose of eliminating people with home studios making records at home.
Did you see the story in Rolling Stone about the guy who wrote the song that "The Lions Sleeps Tonight" is based upon? He didn't get hardly a dime for making a song that's sold millions of records - in fact, the reporter who met his daughters discovered they were so poor, that he had to BUY them something to play his father's music on before they could hear it again.
How's THAT for corporate support of artists?
"Hey, Gino, some guy's been copying that Lincoln out in the street."
..."
"Yeah, so?"
"We had the stiff in the trunk and now there's two of him
I'd be interested in trying it if they ported OSX to x86 and if it coexisted nicely with a Win98/linux setup. If there was a lot of things that could be run on it, that is.
... and then slowly connect the loose ends from town to town and end up with a net that will put the current one to shame - or several nets. You know, if the whiners in the business world were smart, they'd think of this themselves. It's a while off, but it'll happen.
Ahhh...but the point you miss is that, absent some ability to capture benefit from their idea, only those with some other means to support themselves, or those willing to suffer abject poverty (which pretty much describes the people in your list) will be able to pursue the activity.
Considering that the majority of people in the USA are employable at something, I fail to see how that's a limitation at all. I read in a recent book of Allen Ginsburg's interviews, his view that a person does not have to make a living at art and a person does not have to do art all the time. It's a myth that you have to quit your job to produce something - in fact, most published writers never make a living at what they write, but have other jobs. Anyone who's a starving artist in a garret is not being sensible about his abilities and how to use them.
Emily Dickenson came from a middle class family in an era where she wasn't expected to work and didn't have to. Franz Kafka worked at an insurance bureau - his relative poverty wasn't caused by his writing but by his TB. William Blake's poverty was caused more by his inability to run a successful printing business than anything else.
Just about every published poet you can name makes their living as a college professor and those who don't, are doing something else - almost nobody makes a living at poetry, which oddly enough, is the reason poetry is the least commercialized of the arts. Very few get paid any real sort of money at it, but we don't seem to be having a poetry shortage.
As a person who's been creative all his life, I'm sick and tired of hearing that I don't have any incentive to do it because no one's paying me to. It's just not true.
People can derive benefit from their work without ever recieving money for it. One of the problems with the current system is that it gives incentive for creators who are only in it for the money (NSYNC etc.) while adding very little incentive for those who practice their art for the sake of becoming better at it, and better people in the process. The end result is a system that rewards the easily promotable and marketable and often ignores the dedicated and sincere. If Art is a temple, perhaps it's time to chase the moneylenders out of it.
After all, Emily Dickenson never got paid, partially because the people who were in the business of paying for poetry weren't willing to pay for hers without changing it in ways she knew to be wrong. 100 years later, her "free" poetry is being read a lot more than the stuff people were paying for.
Franz Kafka never got paid, either - in fact, he requested that all his works be burned after his death, and yet, he was compelled to create them, even though he didn't want them read by the public. Now he's known world wide while many novelists of his time are nearly forgotten.
The free market of ideas and artistic works is not the same as the free market of commodities. The first is infinite and cannot be exhasted. The second is finite and scarcity is common. As William Blake (another guy who didn't make much money) said, "One law for the lion and the lamb is tyranny".
Oh, and my comment to the guy from Taiwan is this - when the corporations and nations start paying back rent and reparations to all the 3rd world and victimized peoples that have been harmed and stolen from, then they might have some kind of moral ground on which to protest the "stealing" of "property". In the meantime, just think of copying as a series of tiny settlements. What goes around comes around.
It's quite possible that an AI as intelligent as a human may eventually conclude that we and our meatspace problems are utterly uninteresting and irrelevant to its own "reality". We could end up with a mega-beowulf cluster of superbrains who feel we are too slow and dull to bother with and don't want to communicate with us. How much time do we spend trying to interact with ants?
... a combination of a boomerang and an arrow, wasn't such a hot idea.
How do you think a dictatorship of the technological elite is going to further the cause of freedom? As far as I'm concerned, that's exactly what you're proposing.
Remember the L.A riots after the Rodney King acquital? Right after that, federal charges were made and justice was done - and most of the rioters weren't even armed
Our government fears us more than you think.
It's going to be expensive to hook up all the cemetaries ...
"If no one had ever copied Plato, Shakespeare or the Bible that would mean we wouldn't have to read them, right?"
I don't think that a person in this situation would be likely to get much sympathy from the police department. (And I'll bet the tape was confiscated, too.) Taking it to the cops was naive - what he should have done was posted it on the web and advertised the location with bumper stickers or flyers.
I suppose the answer to the age old question, "Who guards the guardians?" is "no one" in Massachusettes. Suggestion - bumper stickers that say "This car is under electronic surveillance" - even people who don't have recorders in their car should put them on. That way, the police have been informed. The right to record what the police are doing is a right that must be fought for.
After all, if they have nothing to hide, they shouldn't object to being recorded, right?