It's not an awesome idea because as much as it has it's good use there is also the darker side with pedophile, snuff and other crap that should not be tolerated.
Snuff films are not real. And the problem with pedophilia isn't the transmission of images of the sexual abuse of children, it's when actual sexual abuse of children goes on.
Freedom has risks. If you have free elections, the "wrong" guys might win. If you have secure communications, "terrorists" might use them to make plans. If you have the right to keep and bear arms, "bad guys" may have guns.
But if you believe in freedom, you're very very wary of the state getting to define who the "wrong" guys, the "terrorists", the "bad guys", are. Consider that Martin Luther King Jr. was a target of COINTELPRO; consider Nixon's "enemies list"; consider the Fugitive Slave Act, the Dredd Scott decision, the Alien and Sedition acts, the Red Scares, the concentration camps for Japanese Americans...
you cant have a place where you can bend the rules forever, that's anarchy!
And? "Anarchy" means no ruling hierarchy. Some people think that's a good idea, especially when it comes to communication. As Robert Anton Wilson put it, "A monopoly on the means of communication may define a ruling elite more precisely than the celebrated Marxian formula of `monopoly in the means of production.' Since man extends his nervous system though channels of communication like the written word, the telephone, radio, etc., he who controls these media controls part of the nervous system of every member of society. The contents of these media become part of the contents of every individual's brain."
We know a great deal about the people who have or tried to attack airliners. We have age ranges, ethnic backgrounds, countries of origin, and other factors. Unfortunately its not nice to use these in the process.
Do you think that only Muslims of Middle Eastern origin commit acts of "terrorism"?
Racial and ethnic profiling isn't just politically incorrect and a violation of the legal requirement of equal protection, it's a bad security practice, another example of "reifighting the last war".
limit the session to the IP-address of the visiting user.
Unfortunately, that's not reliable. It has been known to happen that some networks use a load-balancing proxy scheme, such that subsequent requests from the same user can come from different IP addresses.
Once you put this on the internet, you are essentially broadcasting.
So what? I'm not broadcasting the song, not a performance or recording of it. I am broadcasting information about the song.
Dangerous guy that I am, I'll do some more: "You Ain't Nothin' But A Hound Dog" is a 12-bar blues. "Can't Help Falling in Love" is in the key of F, as are many other great love songs (like "Romeo and Juliet" and "Punk Rock Girl"). A reasonable approximation to the opening riff to "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)" can be played something like:
E aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa B a5a3aaa3aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa5a3aaa3a5 G aaaaa4aaa2a2a4a2aaa4a2aaaaa4aaaa D aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa4aaaaaaaaaaaaaa
That's the sort of ASCII tab in question, by the way, for those not familiar, modified to pass/.'s lameness filter; replace all "a"s with - to see how it would usually look.
Note that it is not a complete representation of the performance, as it does not contain timing information. Also note that this is not in any way, shape, or form a copy, but a "by-ear" transcription, my own take on how to play a set of notes that sound like the riff in question.
This is all information about songs, not songs themselves.
You'r not just chatting to a few friends any more than singing a song on stage in front of thousands is the same as singing along to your iPod.
If you're in front of even one paying customer, singing along to your iPod is still a public performance requiring payment. Under the right circumstances, singing a song on stage in front of a large audience could be non-commercial. (I sang a Ween song on a "stage" in front of at least 100 people at the national Rainbow Gathering last year, a very non-commercial venue.)
If I'm playing in a bar with one guy drinking, royalties are required; if I'm playing for free at a friend's party with 100 people there, royalties are not required.
Size of the audience is not relevant.
Same goes with teaching a song. What, if I'm at that party with 100 people and I tell everyone what the chords to "Louie, Louie" are (and that they're the same as "Wild Thing"), I owe somebody a nickel? No way. That's a factual statement, covered by my free speech rights.
And it doesn't matter if there are 1,000 people at that party, or 10,000.
And if I post that information to the internet - the chords are A, D, E, D, repeat (and the break on Wild Thing is G - A - G - A) - that's still my free speech right.
ONLY if the performer is buying the rights to public performance via sheet music or other arrangements with the publisher.
No. Buying sheet music has nothing to do with performance rights.
Venues pay money to ASCAP, BMI, et cetera, which then do various sampling to see what songs are being played, and distribute money to songwriters. Performers don't buy performance rights, venues do.
I'd hazard a guess that large percentage of people who do perform others' songs learned via free tab sites do not have the legal right to perform that music in public.
Performers don't buy performance rights, venues do. Otherwise open mic nights would be impossible..."Ok, before you come up to the stage, we need to see your performance licences." (In theory, street musicians would need to pay ASCAP, etc., but no one enforces this.)
No, it hasn't. Teaching people songs is fair use. If we're jamming at a party and I tell you, "Let's play `Knocking on Heaven's Door'. Oh, you don't know it? It G, D, and a little Am7/C hammer on thing," that's the way music works. Are you going to put a gag order on every guitarist?
Songwriters get paid royalties when people sing their songs in for-profit performaces. (Yes, the details are tricky, but the idea is IMHO basically sound.) OLGA is not just fair use, its existance is actively in songwriter's interests. Neil Young gets a nickel every time I play "Needle and the Damage Done", which I learned off of OLGA, at one of my gigs. (But not if I sing it in the shower, or at a party where I'm playing just for fun.) The people against this are parasitic "music publishers". Fsck them.
We've been through this before. (Note the date on that article.) OLGA's contents have long since been distributed to scores of other tab sites.
It's not that people past 30 can't think, it's just that it's slightly harder for them to learn. It's not that they can't learn either, it's just harder.
I went back to school to study shiatsu ("acupressure massage") when I was 33. This involved a rigorous study of both Western anatomy and the principles of Chinese medicine. This year, at 36, I took my first class in the Japanese language.
I found it easier to learn now than I did when I was in college or graduate school. I had a richer variety of knowledge and experience to which to tie new ideas; I had clearer motivation; and I certainly had better study skills.
I think the idea that older people have difficulty learning comes from observing people who go to school in their youth, then stop any significant learning for many years; and then try to pick it up again.
The ability to learn is like anything else - use it or lose it. Be a lifelong learner. In those years between graduate school and massage school, I'd taught myself C++, PHP, SQL, a bit of Perl, Java, and Javascript, and some more general technical stuff; I continued to study karate and music and poetry and history and politics and philosophy; taught myself to juggle devil sticks, at least enough to impress young kids...I think I kept the grey matter tuned up enough that new learning is no problem.
There are some areas where certain modes of perception can be best shaped while the brain is still young, language and music for example, but it seems that "young" in this case means single digits. There's a big difference between starting to learn a new language at 5 versus 15, but I think little difference between 15 and 35.
"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then - to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn." -- The Once and Future King, T. H. White
you could protect your lungs by using a bong or a waterpipe
Actually a waterpipe does very little to filter the smoke, it only cools it. In fact, some claim that the water tends to absorb cannabinoids preferentially to tars, so that you end up having to smoke more, and inhale more junk, to get the same dose relative to a pipe or joint. I haven't investigated that claim, though.
if the evil drug warriors hadn't banned the things and made people switch over to those little tiny easily-hidden pipes
Anybody can make a bong out of, say, a one-liter soda bottle with a hole in the side, some hollow metal tubing stuck through that hole at a downward sloping angle, and some sort of small cup or socket that fits over the end of the tubing (peruse the aisles of your local hardward store for something appropriate). Not that I'm encouraging breaking the law or anything. Kids, don't do drugs. Adults, make up your own mind.
If you want to use cannabis on a regular basis (which, for purposes of this post, I'm neither advising nor condemning) a vaporizer would be most lung-healthy. (Brownies or other forms of oral ingestion can sneak up on you in unpleasant ways, or so my friends tell me, and are certainly not very useful for people using cannabis medically for anti-nausea and for appetite stimilation.)
when you are hauling ass down the interstate in your 18-wheeler hopped up on meth and coke and you plow into a busload of kids or worse you plow into me.
Of course that would be so much better if you were drunk instead of high on methampthamine or cocaine.
Unless you live in an Islamic theocracy, that vast majority of the people around you have easy access to mood enhancing drugs and use said drugs regularly.
Hey, it was the Muslims who invented coffee, the most abused addictive drug in the U.S.; and khat is also used by Muslims.
I'm not sure if this is actually the case. Since smoking just about anything is hardly likely to do your lungs much good.
It is the case that no one has ever died from overdose of cannabis. It's simply not possible, it would take smoking or eating something on the order of hundreds of pounds of the stuff.
There are, however, other ways to administer cannabis. It can be eaten (though this causes a delayed onset of effects that makes for unpredictability); or the cannabinoids can be vaporized by applying heat, and then inhaled. These methods are quite safe.
Fortunately the crazy jews are a minority, and not in charge of the Israeli government, and the racist's parties (e.g. David Duke's KKK, Black Panthers) are not terribly popular or powerful in the US.
I think it's pretty clear that the people in charge of the Israeli government value the lives of Israelis over those of innocent Palestinians or Lebanese, and that the United States government values the lives of Americans over those of innocent Iraqis (and the lives of Israelis over those of innocent Palestinians or Lebanese).
Okay-- and what about the 2 billion plus people who are not "people of the book"?
I can only say that I am openly not a "person of the book", what with the pentacle earring and tattoo and all, and I have never encountered any hostility from the Muslims I have met. I've had Muslims co-workers and had no difficulty. I've trained with Muslim karateka, sat down to meals with them, had one stay in my home for a few days.
Of course these are not the same Muslims who have historically faced oppression by Britian, Israel, and America; those folks may be a bit more hostile. That hostility has little to do with Islam, and everything to do with geopolitics.
(No, I am not calling for the destruction of Israel. Its existance is a fait accompli, even though (much like the U.S.) it was founded by stealing land based a sense of divine right. But there will not be peace in that region until it is acknowledged by all that stealing land, from the Balfour doctrine to the present, was a crime, and Israel (and it's primary sponsor, the U.S.) and Britian pay restitution to those displaced and their immediate descendents.)
"American Muslims have consistently condemned all acts of terrorism, whether carried out by individuals, groups or states. We repudiate anyone or any group that plans or carries out a terrorist act. We welcome early actions by law enforcement authorities against credible threats to the safety of the traveling public.
"The American Muslim community has always been dedicated to the protection of our national security. It is also important that our fellow Americans understand that Muslims are law-abiding citizens who should not be targeted or singled out because of their faith or national origin.
"We have been contacted by federal law enforcement authorities who are taking steps to ensure that there is no backlash against the American Muslim community. We commend them for their pro-active efforts. We ask local Muslim communities to step up security measures at mosques and other Islamic institutions. We also urge local law enforcement agencies to coordinate with Muslim leaders to deter hate crimes.
If these aren't the sort of voices of Islam that the corporate media is bringing you, I think you can figure out who's to blame.
you are ignoring the fact that real people die from terrorist attacks
No, I'm not ignoring it. But the color-coded terror alert system has fuck-all to do with preventing people from dying in terrorist attacks.
I'm objecting to the obscene political profiteering towards which those deaths have been used, and the scare-mongering that has taken place instead of real steps toward security.
And I don't feel "smug" about it, I feel outraged and saddened and frightened.
And I doubt the terrorists will care if a Democrat is elected or the 'neocons' lose power.
Over the long term, certainly the defeat of the neoconservatives and their dream of American hegemony can only lead to a foreign policy less likely to inspire such radical hatred. Will it entirely remove nutcases? Of course not.
I'm pretty sure that my veternarian, or the many wonderful Muslim karateka from South Africa, or the handful of black Muslim poets that I've met, would object if someone suggested chopping off my head.
The main beef is that we do not worship Allah and so we are not human and so it is okay to kill us.
That is certainly not a teaching of Islam.
It is a toxic death worshipping faith that is completely intolerant of other faiths.
Are there extremist Muslims that are completely intolerant of other faiths? Yep. The same can be said of Christians, Jews, Hindus...I'll bet there are even intolerant Buddhists and atheists out there, though you'd have to look harder.
Mainstream Islam, however, looks to the example of Mohammad, who tolerated Christians and Jews as fellow "people of the book". Hell, there are even Islamic anarchists, poosed to all force execept self-defense.
I have a simple rule - I don't respect any culture that does not give equal rights and protections to people irregardless of their sex, race, and age.
Great, so you oppose both the Islamic extremists, and the American neoconservatives wwho believe that Iraqi lives are worth less than those of Americans, and those Isrealis who beleive that Jews are a "chosen people". Right?
I do really love to see all of these Arab leaders begging for C. Rice to come save them from Israel though.
You do of course understand that not all Muslims are intolerant, and that indeed not all Arabs are Muslims. Right?
Slashdot Mirror
Snuff films are not real. And the problem with pedophilia isn't the transmission of images of the sexual abuse of children, it's when actual sexual abuse of children goes on.
Freedom has risks. If you have free elections, the "wrong" guys might win. If you have secure communications, "terrorists" might use them to make plans. If you have the right to keep and bear arms, "bad guys" may have guns.
But if you believe in freedom, you're very very wary of the state getting to define who the "wrong" guys, the "terrorists", the "bad guys", are. Consider that Martin Luther King Jr. was a target of COINTELPRO; consider Nixon's "enemies list"; consider the Fugitive Slave Act, the Dredd Scott decision, the Alien and Sedition acts, the Red Scares, the concentration camps for Japanese Americans...
And? "Anarchy" means no ruling hierarchy. Some people think that's a good idea, especially when it comes to communication. As Robert Anton Wilson put it, "A monopoly on the means of communication may define a ruling elite more precisely than the celebrated Marxian formula of `monopoly in the means of production.' Since man extends his nervous system though channels of communication like the written word, the telephone, radio, etc., he who controls these media controls part of the nervous system of every member of society. The contents of these media become part of the contents of every individual's brain."
The polygraph is not a real lie detector. It's an authoritarian psuedo-science gimmick, and this is just another incarnation of it.
Do you think that only Muslims of Middle Eastern origin commit acts of "terrorism"?
How quickly we forgot Oklahoma City.
Of if you want to limit it to airline attacks, don't forget the classic "fly this plane to Cuba!" hijackings, or Sam Byck's attempt to kill Nixon by hijacking and crashing a plane.
Racial and ethnic profiling isn't just politically incorrect and a violation of the legal requirement of equal protection, it's a bad security practice, another example of "reifighting the last war".
Unfortunately, that's not reliable. It has been known to happen that some networks use a load-balancing proxy scheme, such that subsequent requests from the same user can come from different IP addresses.
So what? I'm not broadcasting the song, not a performance or recording of it. I am broadcasting information about the song.
Dangerous guy that I am, I'll do some more: "You Ain't Nothin' But A Hound Dog" is a 12-bar blues. "Can't Help Falling in Love" is in the key of F, as are many other great love songs (like "Romeo and Juliet" and "Punk Rock Girl"). A reasonable approximation to the opening riff to "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)" can be played something like:
That's the sort of ASCII tab in question, by the way, for those not familiar, modified to pass /.'s lameness filter; replace all "a"s with - to see how it would usually look.
Note that it is not a complete representation of the performance, as it does not contain timing information. Also note that this is not in any way, shape, or form a copy, but a "by-ear" transcription, my own take on how to play a set of notes that sound like the riff in question.
This is all information about songs, not songs themselves.
What are you people talking about? It's "Mother Very Efficiently Made Jelly Sandwiches Under No Protest." Geez.
If you're in front of even one paying customer, singing along to your iPod is still a public performance requiring payment. Under the right circumstances, singing a song on stage in front of a large audience could be non-commercial. (I sang a Ween song on a "stage" in front of at least 100 people at the national Rainbow Gathering last year, a very non-commercial venue.)
If I'm playing in a bar with one guy drinking, royalties are required; if I'm playing for free at a friend's party with 100 people there, royalties are not required.
Size of the audience is not relevant.
Same goes with teaching a song. What, if I'm at that party with 100 people and I tell everyone what the chords to "Louie, Louie" are (and that they're the same as "Wild Thing"), I owe somebody a nickel? No way. That's a factual statement, covered by my free speech rights. And it doesn't matter if there are 1,000 people at that party, or 10,000.
And if I post that information to the internet - the chords are A, D, E, D, repeat (and the break on Wild Thing is G - A - G - A) - that's still my free speech right.
No. Buying sheet music has nothing to do with performance rights.
Venues pay money to ASCAP, BMI, et cetera, which then do various sampling to see what songs are being played, and distribute money to songwriters. Performers don't buy performance rights, venues do.
Performers don't buy performance rights, venues do. Otherwise open mic nights would be impossible..."Ok, before you come up to the stage, we need to see your performance licences." (In theory, street musicians would need to pay ASCAP, etc., but no one enforces this.)
Songwriters still get paid performance royalties via ASCAP, BMI, or SESAC when someone plays a song they learned off of OLGA.
No, it hasn't. Teaching people songs is fair use. If we're jamming at a party and I tell you, "Let's play `Knocking on Heaven's Door'. Oh, you don't know it? It G, D, and a little Am7/C hammer on thing," that's the way music works. Are you going to put a gag order on every guitarist?
Songwriters get paid royalties when people sing their songs in for-profit performaces. (Yes, the details are tricky, but the idea is IMHO basically sound.) OLGA is not just fair use, its existance is actively in songwriter's interests. Neil Young gets a nickel every time I play "Needle and the Damage Done", which I learned off of OLGA, at one of my gigs. (But not if I sing it in the shower, or at a party where I'm playing just for fun.) The people against this are parasitic "music publishers". Fsck them.
We've been through this before. (Note the date on that article.) OLGA's contents have long since been distributed to scores of other tab sites.
I went back to school to study shiatsu ("acupressure massage") when I was 33. This involved a rigorous study of both Western anatomy and the principles of Chinese medicine. This year, at 36, I took my first class in the Japanese language.
I found it easier to learn now than I did when I was in college or graduate school. I had a richer variety of knowledge and experience to which to tie new ideas; I had clearer motivation; and I certainly had better study skills.
I think the idea that older people have difficulty learning comes from observing people who go to school in their youth, then stop any significant learning for many years; and then try to pick it up again.
The ability to learn is like anything else - use it or lose it. Be a lifelong learner. In those years between graduate school and massage school, I'd taught myself C++, PHP, SQL, a bit of Perl, Java, and Javascript, and some more general technical stuff; I continued to study karate and music and poetry and history and politics and philosophy; taught myself to juggle devil sticks, at least enough to impress young kids...I think I kept the grey matter tuned up enough that new learning is no problem.
There are some areas where certain modes of perception can be best shaped while the brain is still young, language and music for example, but it seems that "young" in this case means single digits. There's a big difference between starting to learn a new language at 5 versus 15, but I think little difference between 15 and 35.
Actually a waterpipe does very little to filter the smoke, it only cools it. In fact, some claim that the water tends to absorb cannabinoids preferentially to tars, so that you end up having to smoke more, and inhale more junk, to get the same dose relative to a pipe or joint. I haven't investigated that claim, though.
Anybody can make a bong out of, say, a one-liter soda bottle with a hole in the side, some hollow metal tubing stuck through that hole at a downward sloping angle, and some sort of small cup or socket that fits over the end of the tubing (peruse the aisles of your local hardward store for something appropriate). Not that I'm encouraging breaking the law or anything. Kids, don't do drugs. Adults, make up your own mind.
If you want to use cannabis on a regular basis (which, for purposes of this post, I'm neither advising nor condemning) a vaporizer would be most lung-healthy. (Brownies or other forms of oral ingestion can sneak up on you in unpleasant ways, or so my friends tell me, and are certainly not very useful for people using cannabis medically for anti-nausea and for appetite stimilation.)
Of course that would be so much better if you were drunk instead of high on methampthamine or cocaine.
Hey, it was the Muslims who invented coffee, the most abused addictive drug in the U.S.; and khat is also used by Muslims.
It is the case that no one has ever died from overdose of cannabis. It's simply not possible, it would take smoking or eating something on the order of hundreds of pounds of the stuff.
Smoking cannabis may contribute to lung disease, though less so than smoking tobacco - cannabis is a bronchodilatator, opening up the airway, while tobacco is a bronchoconstrictor. (One recent study found no increased risk of lung cancer for cannbis smokers.)
There are, however, other ways to administer cannabis. It can be eaten (though this causes a delayed onset of effects that makes for unpredictability); or the cannabinoids can be vaporized by applying heat, and then inhaled. These methods are quite safe.
I think it's pretty clear that the people in charge of the Israeli government value the lives of Israelis over those of innocent Palestinians or Lebanese, and that the United States government values the lives of Americans over those of innocent Iraqis (and the lives of Israelis over those of innocent Palestinians or Lebanese).
I can only say that I am openly not a "person of the book", what with the pentacle earring and tattoo and all, and I have never encountered any hostility from the Muslims I have met. I've had Muslims co-workers and had no difficulty. I've trained with Muslim karateka, sat down to meals with them, had one stay in my home for a few days.
Of course these are not the same Muslims who have historically faced oppression by Britian, Israel, and America; those folks may be a bit more hostile. That hostility has little to do with Islam, and everything to do with geopolitics.
(No, I am not calling for the destruction of Israel. Its existance is a fait accompli, even though (much like the U.S.) it was founded by stealing land based a sense of divine right. But there will not be peace in that region until it is acknowledged by all that stealing land, from the Balfour doctrine to the present, was a crime, and Israel (and it's primary sponsor, the U.S.) and Britian pay restitution to those displaced and their immediate descendents.)
A quote attributed to Ahmad. He denies saying it.
It took me all of 30 seconds with Google to find sane and rational Muslim leaders:
If these aren't the sort of voices of Islam that the corporate media is bringing you, I think you can figure out who's to blame.
No, I'm not ignoring it. But the color-coded terror alert system has fuck-all to do with preventing people from dying in terrorist attacks.
I'm objecting to the obscene political profiteering towards which those deaths have been used, and the scare-mongering that has taken place instead of real steps toward security.
And I don't feel "smug" about it, I feel outraged and saddened and frightened.
Over the long term, certainly the defeat of the neoconservatives and their dream of American hegemony can only lead to a foreign policy less likely to inspire such radical hatred. Will it entirely remove nutcases? Of course not.
And how many Muslims do you know?
I'm pretty sure that my veternarian, or the many wonderful Muslim karateka from South Africa, or the handful of black Muslim poets that I've met, would object if someone suggested chopping off my head.
...and walk four blocks to the next stop and get on there.
It's all about the appearance of safety, not actual safety.
That is certainly not a teaching of Islam.
Are there extremist Muslims that are completely intolerant of other faiths? Yep. The same can be said of Christians, Jews, Hindus...I'll bet there are even intolerant Buddhists and atheists out there, though you'd have to look harder.
Mainstream Islam, however, looks to the example of Mohammad, who tolerated Christians and Jews as fellow "people of the book". Hell, there are even Islamic anarchists, poosed to all force execept self-defense.
Great, so you oppose both the Islamic extremists, and the American neoconservatives wwho believe that Iraqi lives are worth less than those of Americans, and those Isrealis who beleive that Jews are a "chosen people". Right?
You do of course understand that not all Muslims are intolerant, and that indeed not all Arabs are Muslims. Right?