Maybe it's a case of o/~onward Christian moderator, marching as to waro/~ after all he's just simplifying what the article is pointing out, that the Christian Right are the dishonest, corrupt bad guys in this case... hey, I got moderated down once for saying much the same thing.
There's a problem though, what if the "morals" these people profess are just wrong? What if I find a lot of the hatred they preach to be immoral? What if I have a strong code of morality that prohibits the banning of book and ideas just because they happen to disagree with the ideas these people present?
I have no problem with morality, I believe in morality, and will indeed attempt to convince people that my morality is correct.
And according to my morality, these people are evil. According to my morality, these people are trying to take away people's free will (dare I say God-given free will?) and replace it with fear of a government imposed set of rules that have everything to do with giving the FRC power and nothing to do with morality.
Hah! Wildmon, of the FRC, even got the Catholic Church my family attends to go along on one of his crusades. (In this case, against the TV Show, NYPD Blue.) It's absurd, because why would a sane Catholic church allows its members to be led, politically, by a radical fundamentalist of a non-Catholic sect? These are the same people who made certain, recently, that a Catholic would not be chaplain of the House of Representatives, even though he was considered the most qualified for the job. (I'm not going to get into whether I think the office of chaplain is an antiquated and best retired office. The point is that there is one for now, and it is currently not going to be occupied by Catholic priests, if the Religious Right has anything to say about it..)
Catholics who think about religion as a political issue care about only one issue, abortion, really. This type will ask "Is Wildmon anti-abortion?" "Yes." "Then he must be OK." (Ok, I'll admit not all politically active Catholics are like that, but most of the ones I know are willing to ally with the fundamentalists primarily because of this one issue. It's rare I can feel pride in my priests any more, though I did recently when one of them spoke out against all the Halloween bashing that goes on amongst fundamentalists. That sort of thing doesn't happen as often as it should, though.) Catholics who don't follow the church on abortion or other issues don't have a voice, politically, inside the Catholic Church, so they won't influence the decisions of the Catholic Church.
So, I believe that in supporting these people, the Catholic Church is participating in its own destruction but I doubt very much I could convince my priest of that.
I'll admit to not being up on the whole meme thing, but I think that as you've described it, "a mental virus," there may be a meme here.(hmm... I remember reading something like this in a story by Henry Kuttner or L. Sprague DeCamp, I think it was called "the Gingerbread Left." Written during the Second World War, it was about a German language phrase being written which was so catchy, it would drive any German speaking person who heard it insane. It was a weapon to be used by the Allies against the Nazi's in the story.)
You see, people like the Family Research Council have been around for years. When I was a kid, their main occupation (as far as I was concerned) was gathering up Dungeons&Dragon books and burning them. The point is they were around, and they got the idea into there heads was that the best way to assert both that they were good Christians and to give external evidence of Christian power was to purge things from society. I think, that the "mental virus" is that this idea, that good Christians purge "evil thoughts" from society has become so prevalent among some types of Christians that it has overcome the ideals of Christianity. For example, a lot of the stuff these people do cannot be sold to the general public without major lying and dishonesty. Christians used to believe that dishonesty was wrong, especially dishonesty done in the name of God. I mean, lying was considered serious. This is why it is so hard to deal with these people, not only do they ignore the "Thou Shalt Not Lie" and "Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness" commandments, they also ignore Jesus's warning to the scribes and pharisees about religious hypocrisy. This was when He referred to them as "whited sepulchres" who "indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones and all uncleaness." Of course, Jesus was dealing with basically the same political situation as we are now, people who were more interested in maintaining a theocracy than in doing good.
To these people, the idea that the ends justify the means has overcome their suposed religious beliefs, so that the only thing that matters is political victory. If they have to lie to achieve it, well "you can't make an omelet without breking a few eggs." This sort of thing happened before, England under the Rump Parliament (and later "The Parliament of Saints") after the English Civil War is a good example. Political power, cloaked in the guise of religion and justified through an appeal to Christian morality which has no relation to the actions of the political leaders, is what we are seeing here.
Maybe referring to Orwell would be better, whatever the Party leadership did was right because the Party, by definition was acting in the people's interests. People were required to believe it, even though the actions of the Party consistently proved it wasn't true.
I've come to the conclusion that most Windows boxes need serious upgrading to work with Linux, or else patience as Linux adds support for more and more devices. I myself have had a devil of a time gettting my SoundBlaster and my new external US Robotics modem to work. (The guy at Caldera basically said that my pre-installed Winmodem would not be able to work with Linux.)
But... I know I wouldn't have as many problems if it was a Linux box, came with Linux pre-installed and came with a Linux rescue disk. I finally got my Soundblaster working, but still no luck with the modem. I expect to get it working soon, though, it's a realmodem(tm).
Linux has two curses right now it needs to overcome, the evil Winmodem and Web browser problems. (Of course, there is also Opera for Linux and others.) Most people want to be able to use the Internet, I've come to believe that soon the browser problem will be solved by Mozilla. As to Winmodems, well, people who manufacture computers without the accursed things ought to be encouraged to emblaze "contains a real modem" on the box.
Question, are you playing HotDII with a pad or a with a light gun? On an import system or an American system? With a third party gun or with an import Sega gun?
I'm just curious because I heard the import gun was locked out on the US Dreamcast and I was wondering if there was a workaround.
I've used Bleem! and I like Bleem!. The great thing with Bleem! is that you get free upgrades when compatibility improves, and it ignores regional coding. The bad news is some games look terrible or give you "divide by 0" errors. Of course, in some case this can be fixed by tweaking Bleem! (you can shut off unneccessary features and turn on some too.) in the rest you have to wait until they update it.
Patience will pay off with Bleem! though, one day I'm sure they'll have 100% compatibility on their test system, of course that will be less certain on consumer PCs due to configuration issues, hardware differences, etc, but it will probably be close to 100%.
I'm glad to hear this news, here I was thinking that Sony had the law on their side in the Virtual Game Station case, if not the morality. I'm glad they lost, nice when law and morality go hand in hand.
Now we need a native Linux Playstation Emulator, unless there is already one out there. I wonder who out their is up to the task... heh, some one should suggest it to MoRE, it'd be a good way to legally spit in Sony's eye.
The article beautifully explains both the problem and what's responsible for it... but it seems to have a rather hopeless note. People always accuse me of being cynical, and I certainly am... but to me "give up, the power of the DVD is unstoppable," is a little absurd. I suppose that's because I'm a guy who doesn't own a lot of movies, but who still sees a lot of movies. (Though, now, of course, I'll see almost none. I support the boycott.)
The truth is, if the CCA had used really good, uncrackable encryption, this whole issue wouldn't have come up for years. We'd have been stuck with the DVDs as is with no way to make our own DVD players. I wouldn't have really opposed this, because after all if another movie format took off and it was unecrypted (think MP3s) it wouldn't matter in the long run.
The problem is, frankly, that the corporations behind DVD are subverting governments in order to enforce their will on consumers. It ought to frighten people, it frightens me. Because if they win this based on the might and power of their money and organizations, then what new battles can they win in the future. I mean, think in terms of Soylent Green the big corporate types got the good food and the average Joe got Soylent Green or starved.
I know, my hysterical, paranoid and "out there" view of a little fight over how we can use our own property for entertainment is going to make most people dismiss me as a wacko. My question is, do we really want the multi-nationals making our laws for us?
So, to put it in extremist terms, does what happens in the end in the DVD fight signal the death of the US Republic (and many other forms of popularly elected government, worldwide), or not? If not, then does it at least signify a significant change in the quality of life for people without stock in Sony or Time/Warner/AOL (c'mon, you have to admit that company name sounds like something out of a Cyberpunk novel!)?
I say fight on, fight through the courts, fight through protests, fight through the ballot box and fight through boycotts. Don't let them win.
Ok, for anyone who doubts the vulnerabilities of Windows machines, especially when combined with cable modems, please read this story.
If a person can get that kind of control over a computer, he/she can do anything with it.
Maybe someday large corporations will use the deterrent effects of "Black IC" to scare people away from attacking their computers. (I mean real Black IC alà Shadowrun and Cyberpunk.) Till then, I'm not expecting to hear about fewer attacks in the future, but more of them (and more damaging and more "interesting," too.)
I think that a lot of the old games hold up partly because what was popular then has been abandoned now. I mean think about it, in the old days you were playing 2D sidescrollers mostly. Nowadays, 2D sidescrollers are an afterthought for most companies, and the graphics are more 'realistic' and less 'cartoony.'
I've had a few games I've really like for the newer consoles, but mostly I feel the same as you. I assume Soul Calibur is good, since Soul Blade is one of the few Playstation games I actually love...
Playstation was originally supposed to be an attachment for Super Nintendo. Nintendo made two huge mistakes in the last console war:
1. Trusting Sony
2. Believing their monopoly status would last forever
Did you ever wonder, for examply, why Namco made nothing for Nintendo? (Well, nothing important, they may have made some unimportant game I don't know about.) It was because Hiroshi Yamauchi deliberately snubbed Masaya Nakamura. I mean, even though the N64 was expensive to develop for, I have to believe it would've been worth it for Namco to port a Tekken game to it, but they didn't. I don't know what was up with Capcom, but I know Nintendo used to ride them pretty hard too. (No Megaman games and no exclusive Street Fighter II: Champion Edition for Genesis.)
Now, the changing of the guard at Nintendo may not be a coincidence, Arakawa is a much nicer and easier going person than Yamauchi. This could be a strategic thing to win back (or win better) support from some of the third parties that had been alienated by Nintendo's heavy handed tactics back in their time of dominance. I don't think the third parties are going to want to see Sony gain absolute dominance, they'll give Nintendo support so that they don't end up with a new, nasty task master. (I'll admit, it might be too late.) I think Nintendo may be ready to come out of the wilderness.
Hey, I for one am sick of Sony's stomping all over my rights as a consumer, so I might consider a Dolphin. I don't really doubt it will be a decent piece of hardware.
As to shareware/freeware, Sony has quasi-shareware promotional disks they send out now and then. I've got a few, basically whatever ten games they are pushing for Christmas. Mods are a much bigger advantage for PCs than freeware. Of course, there is more freeware for PCs that is actually good...
Console Gamers and PC Gamers are just different, they like different things. Sure, PCs are 'superior' but where are all the fighting games! How about anime-style RPG games?
I cross over now and then so I've noticed one big thing about consoles is they are cheap, portable and disposable, which is not true of a top of the line PC.
Of course, what they really need to do is bring back text-based games... (Yeah, yeah, I know they never really left... but I mean back to the age of glory they had when I was a kid..)
Oh, the one thing that console games, especially Sony have as a big negative is that they tend to be, well, created by actually evil companies. You can buy good gaming PCs from nice, pro-gamer people and they won't have lockout chips for foriegn games (at least, not yet).
Speaking of history books, Minoru Arakawa would seem to be a good choice for Nintendo's new leader, if I can go by Game Over by David Sheff. He's been involved in the business since the beginning, and he was very involved in getting the original NES accepted in the US (remember, in those days no one wanted to touch a game console with a ten foot pole.) In fact, Arakawa has long been Yamauchi's hand-picked successor, and not just because he's married to his daughter.
Oh, don't let people who are critical of your article get you down. I thought it was a good article, though a bit long to read in one sitting.
Oh, by the way, I have a Lynx, so I can explain a few of the problems with it. The old version Lynx was a big, clumsy bulky machine. It had great graphics, but ordinary sound. It ran through batteries like crazy. It had a few good games but not enough variety and it couldn't compare to some of the Gameboy games. Oh! And RPGs were practically an impossibility, only password saving was possible. (Also, the less said about RPG atrocities like Viking Child --shudder-- the better. )
The Lynx was a mixed bag, too big to be a portable system, but a top of the line piece of hardware if only it had more software to take advantage of it. Oh, and of course, as mentioned in an aticle I read in Penthouse magazine (really!) it was completely blown away by NECs TurboExpress.
I think the best Lynx games were some of the originals like Gates of Zendocon and Chip's Challenge. Oh, and the version of Ninja Gaiden III for it is good, though it is a clone of the NES version and I'd have preferred Ninja Gaiden II. Oh, and the best accessory for it was a batter pack that you could put 8 D batteries in so you could actually play with it for a while. (Of course, in doing so, your Lynx ceased to even pretend it was in Gameboy territory, a huge heavy battery pack + a huge heavy Lynx, it was fun at picnics though.)
I thought there was a Hello Kitty version of everything. In fact, I'm surprised there isn't an island somewhere like that.... they have everything the rest of the world has except it all has Sanrio characters on it:
We have no idea what kind of people are behind this or what their actual agenda is. Until they do we shouldn't try to make judgements about:
1. Who They Are
2. Why They're Doing It
Honestly, no one is going to like it if it turns out it was members of an underground cult called "The Fourth Reich" operating out of Austria to celebrate the Freedom Party's victory and crush the United States.
I refuse to own these people until I know who they are. I much prefer people who speculate the NSA is behind it, because that would have a more positive outcome if revealed.
Ok, suppose it turns out the they are all freedom-loving Libertarians who love Lunar: Eternal Blue and have decided to take the battle to "the Man?" All that means is that I've now got to worry about being interrogated by Secret Service agents (since I'd fit the profile) and that eBusiness leaders are not going to have much sympathy for hackers. Oh, and Jack Valenti is sure to mention it in his next Op-Ed Piece about the "strange hacker ideology."
I wouldn't be surprised if this turned out to be entirely different than people's speculations about it, so let's keep the "Vivé Le Revolucion" comments to a minimum until we know what "revolution" we are are supporting, ok?
Ok, I'm expecting filters to be put in the library, and for it to be overturned by the courts, provided the courts haven't been utterly corrupted by the time the case gets to them. Unfortunately, we've had far to many political losses which have turned into court victories on the First Amendment. I think these still count as political victories for those behind them. The CDA was a political victory, and because it was overturned in court and not through legislative means, the same battle has to be fought over and over again.
The FRC comes accross in this article as the screeching fanatics we all know them to be (except the people posting here who agree with them). Their rejection of the open letter supposedly for its department would be comical if it were true. Don't worry it isn't, the FRC never had any intention of responding to the open letter unless it reflected well on their cause to do so. They are an 'ends justifies the means' group, and will use whatever unethical or immoral means to win. After all, God will forgive them for lying for His sake right? Obviously they haven't read much about Jesus and the Pharisees, but who cares its their Bible after all, they can choose to ignore it whenever they wish. The fact that behaving this way should utterly destroy any credibility their cause has doesn't matter, they know from history that it won't matter.
Anyone who believes this is about "protecting kids from porn" ought to know better. The best way to protect children from the evils of the Internet would be to restrict access to the Internet to those over 18, not use some half-baked filtering system that doesn't really work. No, this'll serve it's purpose which is to put a notch on the FRCs belt (Next newsletter, "We have forced X number of libraries to install Internet filters," I'm sure) and because any censorship is good censorship as far as they are concerned.
I feel bad for the author of this letter, because he obviously thought he was dealing with decent, reasonable people. Hopefully, now he, and everyone else who matters, knows better. This is a nasty, ruthless political organization and there is essentially no difference between them and every other nasty, rutheless political organization that claimed to have the community's best interests at heart. Well, one difference, these people use the Bible to justify their corrupt behavior rather than some scientific theory. It amazes me that people can use the Bible, which spoke out particularly harshly in the New Testament of the hubris of religious leaders behaving in this way to accomplish these kinds of goals.
It's easy, when someone asks you if you are a capitalist just say:
I'm a free market capitalist, which means that I don't believe that the people who control the state should control the economy. Of course, such a market is impossible in the current system, in which a few oppressive, evil corporations run the government and the economy.
Of course, some people will still call you socialist, in which case you can start quoting Adam Smith about "the wretched spirit of monopoly" at them.
My personal opinion is that the problem is that it is always capitalism, there just aren't any other economic models. We just have to keep and eye on people who would use either the government or the economic system to start opressing people.
I felt a need to respond to something in this post:
I know that a good number of people on Slashdot like to think of themselves as Libertarians. And perhaps the Libertarian Party is the one that best supports the beliefs of our community. Realisticcally, I don't think the Libertarian party has a snowball's chance in hell that it will have a major say in politics, not while the GOP and the Democrats have more money and support.
I just want to make the point that I don't just "think of my self as a Libertarian," I'm registered on my voter registration card as a Libertarian and I'm also registered with the Libertarian party as a Libertarian.
Mainly, I'm worried that people are confusing small "l" libertarians with Libertarians. Plenty of people who are registered in one of the two major parties will consider themselves libertarian on some issues, but that is different than actually being a member of the Libertarian party. Republicans and Democrats are not Libertarians, and never will be, both parties have beliefs that will trump any libertarian feelings in either party.
Basically, I think H-PAC (Hacker Political Action Commitee) is a really good idea, but it is completely seperate from the idea of the two party system or Libertarianism. The NRA, for example, will support Democrats and probably even credible Libertarians who take a strong stand against gun control. Most lobbies cut accross party lines. Now, if the reason you bring up H-PAC is because you want me to start donating money to that instead of the Libertarian party, I'm afraid I can't do that. I'd consider contributing to such an organization along with the Libertarian party (just as I currently donate to the EFF).
Well, I would kind of expect this kind of behavior from CNN, since they deal in fear and hysteria (as do most mainstream news organizations). The big question is did Kevin get paid for his appearance, because if I were him no way I'd ever appear on CNN for free. If they did agree to pay him, then it is pretty obvious he'd have to agree to be interviewed, considering the post-prison conditions levied against him. (The guy has to eat, and whenever I see the huge hatred levied against him on this forum I realize that people who read Slashdot aren't as unaffected by media propaganda as I'd like to think. I mean really, he's not even the worst cracker out there, there were some in Germany who got less prison time than him for selling American military secrets to the KGB, there was a Nova episode about it. But you won't here the kind of vitriol against them that you get against Kevin. He's like the Emmanuel Goldstien of modern US techno-politics (No offence to 2600's Emmanuel Goldstien he may achieve this level of notoriety if the judge in New York has his way.)
The next question is, did Mitnick aquit himself well or did he appear as the monster big corporations and the government need him to be to justify the upcoming "War on Hackers?" (The sequel to "War on Drugs"). I'm hoping he came off well, like he did in the 60 Minutes special and that Suzie whatever came off as a shrill disgrace.
I'd love it if it turns out that this "DoS" was a bad router. Of course, if it was we probably won't find out for years from now as Yahoo! denies it so they won't look bad to their investors and the government/media/corporate complex collude with them to hide the truth because it will help turn the public against hackers even more than they already are.
My Mom used to work in a college library that kept Playboy behind the counter for lending. This is not as ridiculous as it sounds, think about it, it's college where they may have nude models in art classes. The nudity in Playboy wasn't considered objectionable enough to offset the stories and articles published in it.
Of course, they did end up getting it out of the library because someone complained, and that's really a shame. I remember in my history of Germany class, I read an interview Playboy did with an ex-Nazi (he was fairly prominent in the during the war, an architect). There were no pictures, the article was photocopied and placed in the handout, but it was useful to an understanding of German history. (This was at a different school.)
--Begin Rant
Besides, which, the people who are in charge of the censorship brigades are mostly low grade morons who will believe whatever riduculous urban legend you tell them. Since these people allow their spokespeople to sound either like raving lunatics or ignorant idiots, I can't respect them or think they ought to have any power at all and certainly not the power to censor. These are the same gibbering buffoons who blamed Heavy Metal and Dungeons and Dragons for teen suicide. The same slack jawed yokels who blamed Doom for the Columbine massacre and who think one of the teletubbies is a homosexual (knowledgable as they are about the secret sex lives of puppets).
Sure, people could argue that there ought to be reasonable community standards at a library, but these aren't the people, they probably put pagan and Wicca sites at the top of their lists when they aren't out denouncing those Satanic Harry Potter books. I mean, really, I wonder if the site about the Blue-Footed Booby was really banned for supposed sexual content or if they were afraid that someone might learn something about the Black Arts of biology, which they recently managed to take out of the school curriculum in Kansas.
Frankly, I'm quite sick of people taking these people seriously or thinking of them as rational. Enough of them behave as frothing nutcases that I think we can say, "Put a lid on those guys first, then we'll talk." Wildmon's goal is to be the "Witchfinder General" of the United States (see the movie with Vincent Price for a reference), and I say that instead of taking these people seriously we should be laughing them out of the room.
It's interesting the Jon Katz seems to equate increases in technology with increases in freedom. I tend, in what I hope is a measured and non-hysterical way, to look at technology as being potentially dangerous to freedom. In other words, I take the dystopian view rather than the utopian view. I see potential not for some perfect future of individual rights and dignity but as the potential for something resembling 1984 (take a drink ^_-). I am not quite as bleak at to think it is inevitable, I think the real danger comes when the Enemy has access to hugely advanced technology that the public doesn't. In fact, technology is an armament, all the same arguements people make for and against gun control can be made for and against the clipper chip (for example).
The solution, of course, is that we can never have the right to pursue technological knowledge taken out of the hands of the people. Once it becomes illegal to learn how things work unless you are an authorized person, you've basically made a certain level of technological illiteracy mandatory. Illiterate people are not as effective at opposing injustive as literate people, and this goes for the technological realm as well as any other.
I believe that the small battles (and they are small. Nasty though the battle against the MPAA is, it is no where near as nasty as future battles will be if this precedent is set) we are fighting now will determine what kind of future we are going to have. In the past, governments were more limited in what they could do, but technology is changing that. The crime rate is falling not because people are better now than they had been, but because it has become far easier for the state to track you down if you oppose it. New technologies are going to increase the power of the state by a huge factor. If we want we can make a future in which even the most minor and mild infraction of any law will take an infinitesmal amount of resources to stop, the only price we will pay is the freedom to live without state interference.
It occurs to me that we need certain rights encoded (or rather re-encoded) firmly into law, because things are happening now that didn't use to be possible. In the past, the only thing people had to fear from books, movies and music was persecution for consuming content that was on the censor's hit list. But now corporations are trying to change "you bought the book" to "you've bought the right to read our book." If this becomes truth, then it will be a fundemental change to human life, and a bad one.
There are only two ways I know of that I differ from normal people with regards to this particular issue. The first is that I take no intoxicants, including alcohol, but that choice is made because my family has a history of alcohol abuse, and my grandfather died due to complications related to alcohol. The other is in my large consumption of chocolate, particularly in the form of chocolate milk. I'm not sure if this is a real "addiction" or not, what I do know is that I have a hard time getting through the day with no chocolate, whether it is mixed with milk or not. I consider chocolate a food, not a drug, but some people would disagree with this.
Some drugs (notably opium) were thought to improve imagination. Drug use has been part of science fiction for a long time, from "The Hound of Tindalous" to Dune to Cyberpunk. My personal opinion of drugs is that there are too many variables involved with the taking of them for it to be advisable. For example, if some drug were said to increase intelligence or concentration, my thought would be "Yes, but what else does it do?" In fact, I am notorious for not taking my perscribed medications for the same reason (before anyone gets ideas about me, heh, I'm talking about pain medication I got after I had a tooth removed and the like).
I suppose if I were a pharmicological expert, I would approach the subject with less trepidation. As it is, I'm perfectly happy as a sex addict not to need any other expensive addictions in my life ^_^ (Not to mention my gaming addiction...)
Incidentally, I'm a Libertarian, so I disagree with the whole war on drugs thing even though I think some drugs are probably bad for people. (So is banging your head against the wall, but I wouldn't criminalize that, either.)
Spam death isn't like heat death, it won't last. My hope is that someday soon, the spammers are going to think, "Why are we wasting our time with this antiquated relic when we can do far better by sending saucy gifs to people's AOL accounts?" So, basically, stories like this are good because the people who we want to think Usenet is dead are the evil commercial entities. Once they figure, "the gold is all strip-mined out of here, time to move on to richer veins" the Usenet landscape will start to heal and be a cool place to be again. Frankly, I don't want certain political lobbying groups to care about Usenet either... I can just see them thinking "alt.sex.teletubbies?!? Won't somebody think of the children?!?" and trying to pass the Usenet Decency Act.
The downside, of course, is you won't get the volume you get on Web based discussion boards. Of course, the upside is you won't get the volume you get on Web based discussion boards...
As long as Usenet continues to actually exist, it will continue to be useful, even if it never achieves the volume of people accessing the Web. Now, does anybody think Usenet is going to just up and disappear?
From the article, it appears that the biggest problem Usenet is having right now is the binaries, but we'll see, maybe Napster (or something Napster like) will take care of that problem (on the other hand the most hardcore Usenet user I know spends his time looking for binaries of pictures.... but if he had a simpler and more straightforward way to get them, he'd probably use it. See, this is what happens when we make people too ashamed to get subscriptions to Penthouse...)
At anyrate, I'm not worried about Usenet really dying... the big problem is more when ISPs like netzero (and my school) prevent access...
Actually, the current assault on Fair Use began with a new business model, a business model which began only after things like:
1. Encryption
2. Cheap Modems
and 3. Massive Databases
Became available to business. The new business model I refer to? Divx. Divx was intended to change (or rather truncate) the entire concept of ownership when it came to intellectual property. If Divx had suceeded, as opposed to DVD, even tighter controls on where, when and how you could use your DVD (all a Divx disk was was an "enhanced" DVD) would have been imposed. The court cases we're having wouldn't be over whether a Linux box could be created for Linux, but whether that "gold Divx" version of The Little Mermaid that you bought would have to be rebought after you let your account at Circuit City expire for a few years.
Of course, digital video enthusiasts caught on to Divx right away, and had to fight some nasty lies in order to defeat the concept. I think most digital video enthusiasts understood the dangers of the Divx model, stuff like the Nosferatu effect (Bram Stoker's widow thought Nosferatu was to close to Dracula and successfully got many copies of the film destroyed. If the Divx age had come to pass, all she would've had to do was have her lawyer send a letter off to Richard Sharp, and the movie would effectively cease to exist.)
This business model isn't dead, it's just resting. Divx II won't be called Divx II but it'll show up as long as people in the content industry believe it will promise "a vast expanse of gold as far as the eye can see."
Basically, technology hasn't been seen by Big Business as any reason to abandon content control, but as a method to increase it to the greatest degree possible. I'm not sure how far it will go, but I was one of the foolish people who sighed with relief when I realized Divx was dead. I've seen now that it will take something big to turn back the tide of increased (rather than decreased) content control on the part of Big Business.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe it's a case of o/~onward Christian moderator, marching as to waro/~ after all he's just simplifying what the article is pointing out, that the Christian Right are the dishonest, corrupt bad guys in this case... hey, I got moderated down once for saying much the same thing.
I have no problem with morality, I believe in morality, and will indeed attempt to convince people that my morality is correct.
And according to my morality, these people are evil. According to my morality, these people are trying to take away people's free will (dare I say God-given free will?) and replace it with fear of a government imposed set of rules that have everything to do with giving the FRC power and nothing to do with morality.
Catholics who think about religion as a political issue care about only one issue, abortion, really. This type will ask "Is Wildmon anti-abortion?" "Yes." "Then he must be OK." (Ok, I'll admit not all politically active Catholics are like that, but most of the ones I know are willing to ally with the fundamentalists primarily because of this one issue. It's rare I can feel pride in my priests any more, though I did recently when one of them spoke out against all the Halloween bashing that goes on amongst fundamentalists. That sort of thing doesn't happen as often as it should, though.) Catholics who don't follow the church on abortion or other issues don't have a voice, politically, inside the Catholic Church, so they won't influence the decisions of the Catholic Church.
So, I believe that in supporting these people, the Catholic Church is participating in its own destruction but I doubt very much I could convince my priest of that.
I'll admit to not being up on the whole meme thing, but I think that as you've described it, "a mental virus," there may be a meme here.(hmm... I remember reading something like this in a story by Henry Kuttner or L. Sprague DeCamp, I think it was called "the Gingerbread Left." Written during the Second World War, it was about a German language phrase being written which was so catchy, it would drive any German speaking person who heard it insane. It was a weapon to be used by the Allies against the Nazi's in the story.)
You see, people like the Family Research Council have been around for years. When I was a kid, their main occupation (as far as I was concerned) was gathering up Dungeons&Dragon books and burning them. The point is they were around, and they got the idea into there heads was that the best way to assert both that they were good Christians and to give external evidence of Christian power was to purge things from society. I think, that the "mental virus" is that this idea, that good Christians purge "evil thoughts" from society has become so prevalent among some types of Christians that it has overcome the ideals of Christianity. For example, a lot of the stuff these people do cannot be sold to the general public without major lying and dishonesty. Christians used to believe that dishonesty was wrong, especially dishonesty done in the name of God. I mean, lying was considered serious. This is why it is so hard to deal with these people, not only do they ignore the "Thou Shalt Not Lie" and "Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness" commandments, they also ignore Jesus's warning to the scribes and pharisees about religious hypocrisy. This was when He referred to them as "whited sepulchres" who "indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones and all uncleaness." Of course, Jesus was dealing with basically the same political situation as we are now, people who were more interested in maintaining a theocracy than in doing good.
To these people, the idea that the ends justify the means has overcome their suposed religious beliefs, so that the only thing that matters is political victory. If they have to lie to achieve it, well "you can't make an omelet without breking a few eggs." This sort of thing happened before, England under the Rump Parliament (and later "The Parliament of Saints") after the English Civil War is a good example. Political power, cloaked in the guise of religion and justified through an appeal to Christian morality which has no relation to the actions of the political leaders, is what we are seeing here.
Maybe referring to Orwell would be better, whatever the Party leadership did was right because the Party, by definition was acting in the people's interests. People were required to believe it, even though the actions of the Party consistently proved it wasn't true.
But... I know I wouldn't have as many problems if it was a Linux box, came with Linux pre-installed and came with a Linux rescue disk. I finally got my Soundblaster working, but still no luck with the modem. I expect to get it working soon, though, it's a realmodem(tm).
Linux has two curses right now it needs to overcome, the evil Winmodem and Web browser problems. (Of course, there is also Opera for Linux and others.) Most people want to be able to use the Internet, I've come to believe that soon the browser problem will be solved by Mozilla. As to Winmodems, well, people who manufacture computers without the accursed things ought to be encouraged to emblaze "contains a real modem" on the box.
I'm just curious because I heard the import gun was locked out on the US Dreamcast and I was wondering if there was a workaround.
Patience will pay off with Bleem! though, one day I'm sure they'll have 100% compatibility on their test system, of course that will be less certain on consumer PCs due to configuration issues, hardware differences, etc, but it will probably be close to 100%.
I'm glad to hear this news, here I was thinking that Sony had the law on their side in the Virtual Game Station case, if not the morality. I'm glad they lost, nice when law and morality go hand in hand.
Now we need a native Linux Playstation Emulator, unless there is already one out there. I wonder who out their is up to the task... heh, some one should suggest it to MoRE, it'd be a good way to legally spit in Sony's eye.
The truth is, if the CCA had used really good, uncrackable encryption, this whole issue wouldn't have come up for years. We'd have been stuck with the DVDs as is with no way to make our own DVD players. I wouldn't have really opposed this, because after all if another movie format took off and it was unecrypted (think MP3s) it wouldn't matter in the long run.
The problem is, frankly, that the corporations behind DVD are subverting governments in order to enforce their will on consumers. It ought to frighten people, it frightens me. Because if they win this based on the might and power of their money and organizations, then what new battles can they win in the future. I mean, think in terms of Soylent Green the big corporate types got the good food and the average Joe got Soylent Green or starved.
I know, my hysterical, paranoid and "out there" view of a little fight over how we can use our own property for entertainment is going to make most people dismiss me as a wacko. My question is, do we really want the multi-nationals making our laws for us?
So, to put it in extremist terms, does what happens in the end in the DVD fight signal the death of the US Republic (and many other forms of popularly elected government, worldwide), or not? If not, then does it at least signify a significant change in the quality of life for people without stock in Sony or Time/Warner/AOL (c'mon, you have to admit that company name sounds like something out of a Cyberpunk novel!)?
I say fight on, fight through the courts, fight through protests, fight through the ballot box and fight through boycotts. Don't let them win.
If a person can get that kind of control over a computer, he/she can do anything with it.
Maybe someday large corporations will use the deterrent effects of "Black IC" to scare people away from attacking their computers. (I mean real Black IC alà Shadowrun and Cyberpunk.) Till then, I'm not expecting to hear about fewer attacks in the future, but more of them (and more damaging and more "interesting," too.)
I've had a few games I've really like for the newer consoles, but mostly I feel the same as you. I assume Soul Calibur is good, since Soul Blade is one of the few Playstation games I actually love...
Playstation was originally supposed to be an attachment for Super Nintendo. Nintendo made two huge mistakes in the last console war:
1. Trusting Sony
2. Believing their monopoly status would last forever
Did you ever wonder, for examply, why Namco made nothing for Nintendo? (Well, nothing important, they may have made some unimportant game I don't know about.) It was because Hiroshi Yamauchi deliberately snubbed Masaya Nakamura. I mean, even though the N64 was expensive to develop for, I have to believe it would've been worth it for Namco to port a Tekken game to it, but they didn't. I don't know what was up with Capcom, but I know Nintendo used to ride them pretty hard too. (No Megaman games and no exclusive Street Fighter II: Champion Edition for Genesis.)
Now, the changing of the guard at Nintendo may not be a coincidence, Arakawa is a much nicer and easier going person than Yamauchi. This could be a strategic thing to win back (or win better) support from some of the third parties that had been alienated by Nintendo's heavy handed tactics back in their time of dominance. I don't think the third parties are going to want to see Sony gain absolute dominance, they'll give Nintendo support so that they don't end up with a new, nasty task master. (I'll admit, it might be too late.) I think Nintendo may be ready to come out of the wilderness.
Hey, I for one am sick of Sony's stomping all over my rights as a consumer, so I might consider a Dolphin. I don't really doubt it will be a decent piece of hardware.
Obviously, you just don't know the right people.
As to shareware/freeware, Sony has quasi-shareware promotional disks they send out now and then. I've got a few, basically whatever ten games they are pushing for Christmas. Mods are a much bigger advantage for PCs than freeware. Of course, there is more freeware for PCs that is actually good...
Console Gamers and PC Gamers are just different, they like different things. Sure, PCs are 'superior' but where are all the fighting games! How about anime-style RPG games?
I cross over now and then so I've noticed one big thing about consoles is they are cheap, portable and disposable, which is not true of a top of the line PC.
Of course, what they really need to do is bring back text-based games... (Yeah, yeah, I know they never really left... but I mean back to the age of glory they had when I was a kid..)
Oh, the one thing that console games, especially Sony have as a big negative is that they tend to be, well, created by actually evil companies. You can buy good gaming PCs from nice, pro-gamer people and they won't have lockout chips for foriegn games (at least, not yet).
Oh, don't let people who are critical of your article get you down. I thought it was a good article, though a bit long to read in one sitting.
Oh, by the way, I have a Lynx, so I can explain a few of the problems with it. The old version Lynx was a big, clumsy bulky machine. It had great graphics, but ordinary sound. It ran through batteries like crazy. It had a few good games but not enough variety and it couldn't compare to some of the Gameboy games. Oh! And RPGs were practically an impossibility, only password saving was possible. (Also, the less said about RPG atrocities like Viking Child --shudder-- the better. )
The Lynx was a mixed bag, too big to be a portable system, but a top of the line piece of hardware if only it had more software to take advantage of it. Oh, and of course, as mentioned in an aticle I read in Penthouse magazine (really!) it was completely blown away by NECs TurboExpress.
I think the best Lynx games were some of the originals like Gates of Zendocon and Chip's Challenge. Oh, and the version of Ninja Gaiden III for it is good, though it is a clone of the NES version and I'd have preferred Ninja Gaiden II. Oh, and the best accessory for it was a batter pack that you could put 8 D batteries in so you could actually play with it for a while. (Of course, in doing so, your Lynx ceased to even pretend it was in Gameboy territory, a huge heavy battery pack + a huge heavy Lynx, it was fun at picnics though.)
Correcting malformed URL ^n_n^....?
We have no idea what kind of people are behind this or what their actual agenda is. Until they do we shouldn't try to make judgements about:
1. Who They Are
2. Why They're Doing It
Honestly, no one is going to like it if it turns out it was members of an underground cult called "The Fourth Reich" operating out of Austria to celebrate the Freedom Party's victory and crush the United States.
I refuse to own these people until I know who they are. I much prefer people who speculate the NSA is behind it, because that would have a more positive outcome if revealed.
Ok, suppose it turns out the they are all freedom-loving Libertarians who love Lunar: Eternal Blue and have decided to take the battle to "the Man?" All that means is that I've now got to worry about being interrogated by Secret Service agents (since I'd fit the profile) and that eBusiness leaders are not going to have much sympathy for hackers. Oh, and Jack Valenti is sure to mention it in his next Op-Ed Piece about the "strange hacker ideology."
I wouldn't be surprised if this turned out to be entirely different than people's speculations about it, so let's keep the "Vivé Le Revolucion" comments to a minimum until we know what "revolution" we are are supporting, ok?
The FRC comes accross in this article as the screeching fanatics we all know them to be (except the people posting here who agree with them). Their rejection of the open letter supposedly for its department would be comical if it were true. Don't worry it isn't, the FRC never had any intention of responding to the open letter unless it reflected well on their cause to do so. They are an 'ends justifies the means' group, and will use whatever unethical or immoral means to win. After all, God will forgive them for lying for His sake right? Obviously they haven't read much about Jesus and the Pharisees, but who cares its their Bible after all, they can choose to ignore it whenever they wish. The fact that behaving this way should utterly destroy any credibility their cause has doesn't matter, they know from history that it won't matter.
Anyone who believes this is about "protecting kids from porn" ought to know better. The best way to protect children from the evils of the Internet would be to restrict access to the Internet to those over 18, not use some half-baked filtering system that doesn't really work. No, this'll serve it's purpose which is to put a notch on the FRCs belt (Next newsletter, "We have forced X number of libraries to install Internet filters," I'm sure) and because any censorship is good censorship as far as they are concerned.
I feel bad for the author of this letter, because he obviously thought he was dealing with decent, reasonable people. Hopefully, now he, and everyone else who matters, knows better. This is a nasty, ruthless political organization and there is essentially no difference between them and every other nasty, rutheless political organization that claimed to have the community's best interests at heart. Well, one difference, these people use the Bible to justify their corrupt behavior rather than some scientific theory. It amazes me that people can use the Bible, which spoke out particularly harshly in the New Testament of the hubris of religious leaders behaving in this way to accomplish these kinds of goals.
My personal opinion is that the problem is that it is always capitalism, there just aren't any other economic models. We just have to keep and eye on people who would use either the government or the economic system to start opressing people.
Mainly, I'm worried that people are confusing small "l" libertarians with Libertarians. Plenty of people who are registered in one of the two major parties will consider themselves libertarian on some issues, but that is different than actually being a member of the Libertarian party. Republicans and Democrats are not Libertarians, and never will be, both parties have beliefs that will trump any libertarian feelings in either party.
Basically, I think H-PAC (Hacker Political Action Commitee) is a really good idea, but it is completely seperate from the idea of the two party system or Libertarianism. The NRA, for example, will support Democrats and probably even credible Libertarians who take a strong stand against gun control. Most lobbies cut accross party lines. Now, if the reason you bring up H-PAC is because you want me to start donating money to that instead of the Libertarian party, I'm afraid I can't do that. I'd consider contributing to such an organization along with the Libertarian party (just as I currently donate to the EFF).
The next question is, did Mitnick aquit himself well or did he appear as the monster big corporations and the government need him to be to justify the upcoming "War on Hackers?" (The sequel to "War on Drugs"). I'm hoping he came off well, like he did in the 60 Minutes special and that Suzie whatever came off as a shrill disgrace.
I'd love it if it turns out that this "DoS" was a bad router. Of course, if it was we probably won't find out for years from now as Yahoo! denies it so they won't look bad to their investors and the government/media/corporate complex collude with them to hide the truth because it will help turn the public against hackers even more than they already are.
I wonder how many people who are spitting out anti-Kevin rhetoric on this site have visited the Free Kevin site I mean, it would be close minded not to get both sides of the story, don't you think?
...think about it.
My Mom used to work in a college library that kept Playboy behind the counter for lending. This is not as ridiculous as it sounds, think about it, it's college where they may have nude models in art classes. The nudity in Playboy wasn't considered objectionable enough to offset the stories and articles published in it.
Of course, they did end up getting it out of the library because someone complained, and that's really a shame. I remember in my history of Germany class, I read an interview Playboy did with an ex-Nazi (he was fairly prominent in the during the war, an architect). There were no pictures, the article was photocopied and placed in the handout, but it was useful to an understanding of German history. (This was at a different school.)
--Begin Rant
Besides, which, the people who are in charge of the censorship brigades are mostly low grade morons who will believe whatever riduculous urban legend you tell them. Since these people allow their spokespeople to sound either like raving lunatics or ignorant idiots, I can't respect them or think they ought to have any power at all and certainly not the power to censor. These are the same gibbering buffoons who blamed Heavy Metal and Dungeons and Dragons for teen suicide. The same slack jawed yokels who blamed Doom for the Columbine massacre and who think one of the teletubbies is a homosexual (knowledgable as they are about the secret sex lives of puppets).
Sure, people could argue that there ought to be reasonable community standards at a library, but these aren't the people, they probably put pagan and Wicca sites at the top of their lists when they aren't out denouncing those Satanic Harry Potter books. I mean, really, I wonder if the site about the Blue-Footed Booby was really banned for supposed sexual content or if they were afraid that someone might learn something about the Black Arts of biology, which they recently managed to take out of the school curriculum in Kansas.
Frankly, I'm quite sick of people taking these people seriously or thinking of them as rational. Enough of them behave as frothing nutcases that I think we can say, "Put a lid on those guys first, then we'll talk." Wildmon's goal is to be the "Witchfinder General" of the United States (see the movie with Vincent Price for a reference), and I say that instead of taking these people seriously we should be laughing them out of the room.
--End Rant
The solution, of course, is that we can never have the right to pursue technological knowledge taken out of the hands of the people. Once it becomes illegal to learn how things work unless you are an authorized person, you've basically made a certain level of technological illiteracy mandatory. Illiterate people are not as effective at opposing injustive as literate people, and this goes for the technological realm as well as any other.
I believe that the small battles (and they are small. Nasty though the battle against the MPAA is, it is no where near as nasty as future battles will be if this precedent is set) we are fighting now will determine what kind of future we are going to have. In the past, governments were more limited in what they could do, but technology is changing that. The crime rate is falling not because people are better now than they had been, but because it has become far easier for the state to track you down if you oppose it. New technologies are going to increase the power of the state by a huge factor. If we want we can make a future in which even the most minor and mild infraction of any law will take an infinitesmal amount of resources to stop, the only price we will pay is the freedom to live without state interference.
It occurs to me that we need certain rights encoded (or rather re-encoded) firmly into law, because things are happening now that didn't use to be possible. In the past, the only thing people had to fear from books, movies and music was persecution for consuming content that was on the censor's hit list. But now corporations are trying to change "you bought the book" to "you've bought the right to read our book." If this becomes truth, then it will be a fundemental change to human life, and a bad one.
Some drugs (notably opium) were thought to improve imagination. Drug use has been part of science fiction for a long time, from "The Hound of Tindalous" to Dune to Cyberpunk. My personal opinion of drugs is that there are too many variables involved with the taking of them for it to be advisable. For example, if some drug were said to increase intelligence or concentration, my thought would be "Yes, but what else does it do?" In fact, I am notorious for not taking my perscribed medications for the same reason (before anyone gets ideas about me, heh, I'm talking about pain medication I got after I had a tooth removed and the like).
I suppose if I were a pharmicological expert, I would approach the subject with less trepidation. As it is, I'm perfectly happy as a sex addict not to need any other expensive addictions in my life ^_^ (Not to mention my gaming addiction...)
Incidentally, I'm a Libertarian, so I disagree with the whole war on drugs thing even though I think some drugs are probably bad for people. (So is banging your head against the wall, but I wouldn't criminalize that, either.)
The downside, of course, is you won't get the volume you get on Web based discussion boards. Of course, the upside is you won't get the volume you get on Web based discussion boards...
As long as Usenet continues to actually exist, it will continue to be useful, even if it never achieves the volume of people accessing the Web. Now, does anybody think Usenet is going to just up and disappear?
From the article, it appears that the biggest problem Usenet is having right now is the binaries, but we'll see, maybe Napster (or something Napster like) will take care of that problem (on the other hand the most hardcore Usenet user I know spends his time looking for binaries of pictures.... but if he had a simpler and more straightforward way to get them, he'd probably use it. See, this is what happens when we make people too ashamed to get subscriptions to Penthouse...)
At anyrate, I'm not worried about Usenet really dying... the big problem is more when ISPs like netzero (and my school) prevent access...
1. Encryption
2. Cheap Modems
and 3. Massive Databases
Became available to business. The new business model I refer to? Divx. Divx was intended to change (or rather truncate) the entire concept of ownership when it came to intellectual property. If Divx had suceeded, as opposed to DVD, even tighter controls on where, when and how you could use your DVD (all a Divx disk was was an "enhanced" DVD) would have been imposed. The court cases we're having wouldn't be over whether a Linux box could be created for Linux, but whether that "gold Divx" version of The Little Mermaid that you bought would have to be rebought after you let your account at Circuit City expire for a few years.
Of course, digital video enthusiasts caught on to Divx right away, and had to fight some nasty lies in order to defeat the concept. I think most digital video enthusiasts understood the dangers of the Divx model, stuff like the Nosferatu effect (Bram Stoker's widow thought Nosferatu was to close to Dracula and successfully got many copies of the film destroyed. If the Divx age had come to pass, all she would've had to do was have her lawyer send a letter off to Richard Sharp, and the movie would effectively cease to exist.)
This business model isn't dead, it's just resting. Divx II won't be called Divx II but it'll show up as long as people in the content industry believe it will promise "a vast expanse of gold as far as the eye can see."
Basically, technology hasn't been seen by Big Business as any reason to abandon content control, but as a method to increase it to the greatest degree possible. I'm not sure how far it will go, but I was one of the foolish people who sighed with relief when I realized Divx was dead. I've seen now that it will take something big to turn back the tide of increased (rather than decreased) content control on the part of Big Business.