I hear ya. The original idea for the shirt was on black. I expect it's a lot harder to print light colors on dark fabric than dark colors on light -- something to do with the thickness of the ink. Yeah, I'm not sure I'm in love with Cafe Press, but the alternative seems to be a huge investment or nothing at all. Oh well.
I submitted this as a story, but who knows if it'll get accepted? So I'm posting it here.
I'm just as sick of this RIAA nonsense as the rest of you. Here's what I'm doing about it. I had this idea for a t-shirt, and I decided it would be coolest to just put it up on Cafepress and donate the profits to the EFF. So that's what I did.
The shirt is based on the real pirate Bartholomew Roberts' -- aka Black Bart -- flag (one of them), which originally had the letters ABH (a Barbadian's head) and AMH (a Martinican's head) on it. He didn't like those places much, since he was wanted for piracy there, much more aggressively than anywhere else.
I should make it clear that I'm not affiliated with the EFF in any way. I'll just be donating ALL the profits ($5 per item, except for the stickers and mousepad, which generate $2.50 profit) to the EFF as I get checks from Cafepress (in $50 increments, is what they say). No, there's no accountability -- you'll simply have to trust me. I'm just a geek trying to do something good.
In the case of someone getting sued that I feel really got screwed (like Brianna LaHara), I'll be donating the money directly to their paypal recovery fund (assuming they have one) instead of the EFF. As soon as my Cafepress account shows some sales, I'll post the progress on my website, with full disclosure (# of sales, total profits, where they went).
Feel free to post your opinion if you think I'm being too naive -- I'll get screwed by taxes for not filling out some form or something -- but I trust you'll do that anyway;)
What I mean is, there's unsolicited bulk email that people could theoretically want -- i.e. highly targeted. For instance, I'm interested in electronic music. If someone was to send me an unsolicited bulk email saying "check out my ReFills," I wouldn't mind it.
I especially would't mind it if he was giving some away free, maybe to encourage you to buy all of them.
So, if it's targeted, and there's something free behind it, it's not bad at all. If it's either targeted or not targeted but there's something free (for instance, I don't like Dragonball Z, but if I got spam saying "come to the DBZ site for a free episode download", I might give it a chance), then it's not so bad. No big deal -- easy to delete. It's only when it's some random thing that you need to throw money at for any sort of benefit, that it gets to be annoying.
What else, apart from sending spam or selling the list to someone else who'll send spam, would such a list be used for?
It's not about what list-generation software is used for, which is of course spam, it's about if spam is always evil, or okay sometimes.
There's two kinds of spam. I don't know why, but there's a huge divide between the two with nothing in the middle. The first is the "Nigerian scammer enlarge your penis great mortgage rates get yourself out of debt VIAGRA ginsdfsda jenny has sent you $25 in paypal then you open it up to read Get your own fountain of youth! HGH human growth hormone from 21st Century!" type of spam. Everyone I know hates those. I have no idea how they make any money, and I imagine that 10 years down the road when people are a little more savvy, spam like this won't bring much of a return anymore.
But there's another kind of spam. I'm getting a weekly email from a radio station I sent my CD to, saying what their playlist is. Did I ask for it? No. Do I mind it? No. Similiarly, I was just recently introduced to Mac Hall. Let's say they knew the Penny-Arcade guys personally and PA had my email because I'm a member, and PA let them send out a short email to all their members saying "Hey we've been working on this web comic pretty hard, we love it, check it out," would I have minded? No. As long as they provide you with a link to unsubscribe, or the ability to reply with "unsubscribe" in the subject line, these are fine. A hand ful of these type of spams a day is no big deal. It's only when you get 100 of the first category that things start to become a problem.
But for the record, I think the net should be self-policing as much as possible, this arena included. Spam blockers are working wonderfully for me. I would support anti-spam legislation only if it was restricted to massive spammers -- the guys with t1 lines in Nevada, sending out a bazillion emails a day.
Beck Bjork Eminem Smashing Pumpkins Bruce Springsteen Nirvana Everything But the Girl William Orbit Thievery Corporation Stereolab Portishead Frank Zappa Mars Volta Beastie Boys Fatboy Slim PJ Harvey Tori Amos Red Hot Chili Peppers Dylan Lou Reed Massive Attack Rolling Stones Kruder & Dorfmeister Neil Young Air Missy Elliott Metallica (Pre-black album, at least)
You're trying to tell me that all these artists, who I would qualify as geniuses, who all have major label contracts and are likely represented by the RIAA, sound the same? You're trying to tell me that all their music is written by their producers? Your argument is only valid if the sample group is "Britney, Christina, NSync and the Backstreet Boys," and even then, they deserve a lot of the revenue their songs generate. They're not in the music industry, per se -- they're in the entertainment industry. They're meant to be fluff. You think it's easy? You think it's a cinch to memorize all those crazy dance moves, and keep your body in tip-top shape, so as to maintain your attractiveness? Take your tinfoil hat out of your ears man.
I'm waiting for the model with mic/line in
on
New iMacs (and iPods)
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
No, there's no actual proof that they're ever going to make one, but c'mon, isn't it the obvious next step? Record your entire classroom lecture for study purposes, record the next Phish show, record your own demos -- with a simple little multitracking app, it could kill portable 4-tracks. Or, plug your iSight into a video in and turn it into a video camera.
Also, with a mic in, you'll be able to use Apple's speech recognition software to give it voice commands -- no more fuddling around with menus, just speak into the mic: "iPod, play Smashing Pumpkins, album Gish" or something like that.
Sandman is the best comic series ever. By far. Gaiman created his own mythology (that's IMHO up there with the Greco-Roman one - well not like he didn't pull from it), and wrote some fucking amazing stories around it. Go to your local library right now and check out the whole series - many have them in graphic novel form.
I stopped reading comics when Sandman ended -- nothing could come close to matching it for me. Then I started up again when I picked up a copy of From Hell, maybe the best $35 you could spend on a single GN. Also good is Road to Perdition, but who really does it for me is Brian Michael Bendis. He's a writer on par with Gaiman, except he's more into precedural crime-type stuff. His GNs Jinx and Goldfish are kick-ass, and also Fire and Torso. He also does Powers, which is great fun to read, Alias, and does or has done Daredevil. Check out his stuff at www.jinxworld.com.
Oh and for a grippingly entertaining and laugh-out-loud funny story about trying to get a screenplay made into a movie, check out Fortune and Glory, also by Bendis.
DRM is used to keep people from "abusing" the digital format and duplicating it all over the place, right? So you could argue that if DRM is there, it puts a set of rules in place, and if you're not breaking them, then it's okay.
Forget about what should or should not be legal. It's like the law -- how do you know if it's not okay to do something? It's against the law. Can I wear a fish on my head? Sure, it's not against the law. Can I shoot someone? No -- it's illegal.
By the same token: can I copy this file onto 4 computers? No, the DRM won't let you. Can I sell it to someone else? Well, if the DRM lets you, obviously it's okay.
Food sells better if you make it taste good, movies would be better if people just wrote good scripts, you can play the piano simply by banging on keys in the right order, and your nose'll stop bleeding if you just keep your finger out of there!
Um, this is about as "extreme" as playing bridge with the Ladies Auxillary. Now, tattooed chicks and Sugar-Ray-esque guys riding Segways on a half-pipe -- I wouldn't put it past 'em.
Wow, that's so fucking cool. That must've been something, sitting on the rock, watching the cattle stampede past. I don't figure you could be any more appreciative towards a rock. I wonder what made them stampede? I'm of course imagining a T. Rex;)
Boss - "My boss says we need some eunuch programmers."
Dilbert - "I think he means UNIX and I already know UNIX."
Boss - "Well, if the company nurse comes by, tell her I said never mind."
For once, I RTFA. And what do I get? About 5 more words than the Slashdot blurb. No pictures, no nothing. That's it -- it's hearsay and conjecture from now on.
PITA = Pain In The Ass FIDA = Fucked In Da Ass? RIATA = Rodent Inserted And Turned Around? CONSTANTLY = Citizen Of Norway Shoved Through Ass, Never To Leave You?
From the article: Copyright lawyers said it remains unresolved whether consumers can legally download copies of songs on a CD they purchased rather than making digital copies themselves.
So it's still up in the air. But here's where I get confused:
For example, the industry disclosed its use of a library of digital fingerprints, called "hashes," that it said can uniquely identify MP3 music files that had been traded on the Napster service as far back as May 2000.
By comparing the fingerprints of music files on a person's computer against its library, the RIAA believes it can determine in some cases whether someone recorded a song from a legally purchased CD or downloaded it from someone else over the Internet.
Okay, how? Only way I can see is if they have a HUGE-ASS library of mp3s downloaded from Napster that they can check every file against. Seems unlikely that "nycfashiongirl's" copy of "Beat It" would match exactly with one in the RIAA's library.
The recording industry also disclosed that it is examining so-called "metadata" tags, hidden snippets of information embedded within many MP3 music files. In this case, lawyers wrote, they found evidence that others -- including one user who called himself "Atomic Playboy" -- had recorded the music files and that some songs had been downloaded from known pirate Web sites.
Now it's making more sense. I don't think they're using hashes at all. I think they're checking the ID3 tags for stuff like "ripped by 4t0m1c P14b0y - www.atomicplayboy.com."
So really it should read something like "Using a surprisingly astute technical procedure, the RIAA examined song files with an advanced file analysis application, iTunes, and found evidence of references to Atomic Playboy." The article of course, doesn't mention whether it was possible for them to plant the evidence, which it would've been if they were simply allowed to possess her hard drive and weren't required to make any backup copies for the judge.
Of course, if, in her defense, she counters with "well yeah, not all of them were ripped from the physical CDs, lots of times I'd want to listen to one of my CDs, and I couldn't find it, so I'd just download it -- but here is my CD collection for evidence, your honor," then there's going to be an interesting precedent set -- is it okay to download songs that you already own on CD?
Also, she's in court not so much for downloading, but for uploading, which is much more of a crime (have they even sued anyone for just downloading yet?), and it really doesn't matter where she got the songs, just that she was sharing them.
Binary is the building blocks of existence
on
Beyond Binary Computing?
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
Think about it: male/female, life/death, something/nothing; it goes back ages into daoist philosophy, and you all know the yin/yang, right? If there was no male/female, we'd all be at a bacterial level. Now look closer at the 1 and the 0. 1 = phallus, 0 = hole (vagina).
And when you get down to the quantum level (and correct me if I'm wrong (and I'm sure you will), because I'm no quantum physicist), you find that electrons sort of blink in and out of existence -- you can only measure them in terms of probability of them existing at a certain point in time. It seems like reality as we know it is based on a binary system.
Add to that how computers are affecting just about every way of life, even after being around a mere half century. There's some sort of big interconnectedness going on here, I think. Binary all the way.
Slashdot Mirror
I hear ya. The original idea for the shirt was on black. I expect it's a lot harder to print light colors on dark fabric than dark colors on light -- something to do with the thickness of the ink. Yeah, I'm not sure I'm in love with Cafe Press, but the alternative seems to be a huge investment or nothing at all. Oh well.
I submitted this as a story, but who knows if it'll get accepted? So I'm posting it here.
;)
I'm just as sick of this RIAA nonsense as the rest of you. Here's what I'm doing about it. I had this idea for a t-shirt, and I decided it would be coolest to just put it up on Cafepress and donate the profits to the EFF. So that's what I did.
The shirt is based on the real pirate Bartholomew Roberts' -- aka Black Bart -- flag (one of them), which originally had the letters ABH (a Barbadian's head) and AMH (a Martinican's head) on it. He didn't like those places much, since he was wanted for piracy there, much more aggressively than anywhere else.
I should make it clear that I'm not affiliated with the EFF in any way. I'll just be donating ALL the profits ($5 per item, except for the stickers and mousepad, which generate $2.50 profit) to the EFF as I get checks from Cafepress (in $50 increments, is what they say). No, there's no accountability -- you'll simply have to trust me. I'm just a geek trying to do something good.
In the case of someone getting sued that I feel really got screwed (like Brianna LaHara), I'll be donating the money directly to their paypal recovery fund (assuming they have one) instead of the EFF. As soon as my Cafepress account shows some sales, I'll post the progress on my website, with full disclosure (# of sales, total profits, where they went).
Feel free to post your opinion if you think I'm being too naive -- I'll get screwed by taxes for not filling out some form or something -- but I trust you'll do that anyway
What I mean is, there's unsolicited bulk email that people could theoretically want -- i.e. highly targeted. For instance, I'm interested in electronic music. If someone was to send me an unsolicited bulk email saying "check out my ReFills," I wouldn't mind it.
I especially would't mind it if he was giving some away free, maybe to encourage you to buy all of them.
So, if it's targeted, and there's something free behind it, it's not bad at all. If it's either targeted or not targeted but there's something free (for instance, I don't like Dragonball Z, but if I got spam saying "come to the DBZ site for a free episode download", I might give it a chance), then it's not so bad. No big deal -- easy to delete. It's only when it's some random thing that you need to throw money at for any sort of benefit, that it gets to be annoying.
"The law had thwarted my earlier attempt to take candy from a baby, but with the DMCA, I was free to wallow in my own crapulence."
The RIAA tells Brianna in the flashback to drop the lollipop.
"But the old axiom was misleading: taking the candy proved exceedingly difficult."
Who knows? Maybe Torres will just shoot all of them. C'mon, no jury in the world's going to convict a 12-year-old girl. Mmm...maybe Texas.
What else, apart from sending spam or selling the list to someone else who'll send spam, would such a list be used for?
It's not about what list-generation software is used for, which is of course spam, it's about if spam is always evil, or okay sometimes.
There's two kinds of spam. I don't know why, but there's a huge divide between the two with nothing in the middle. The first is the "Nigerian scammer enlarge your penis great mortgage rates get yourself out of debt VIAGRA ginsdfsda jenny has sent you $25 in paypal then you open it up to read Get your own fountain of youth! HGH human growth hormone from 21st Century!" type of spam. Everyone I know hates those. I have no idea how they make any money, and I imagine that 10 years down the road when people are a little more savvy, spam like this won't bring much of a return anymore.
But there's another kind of spam. I'm getting a weekly email from a radio station I sent my CD to, saying what their playlist is. Did I ask for it? No. Do I mind it? No. Similiarly, I was just recently introduced to Mac Hall. Let's say they knew the Penny-Arcade guys personally and PA had my email because I'm a member, and PA let them send out a short email to all their members saying "Hey we've been working on this web comic pretty hard, we love it, check it out," would I have minded? No. As long as they provide you with a link to unsubscribe, or the ability to reply with "unsubscribe" in the subject line, these are fine. A hand ful of these type of spams a day is no big deal. It's only when you get 100 of the first category that things start to become a problem.
But for the record, I think the net should be self-policing as much as possible, this arena included. Spam blockers are working wonderfully for me. I would support anti-spam legislation only if it was restricted to massive spammers -- the guys with t1 lines in Nevada, sending out a bazillion emails a day.
Beck
Bjork
Eminem
Smashing Pumpkins
Bruce Springsteen
Nirvana
Everything But the Girl
William Orbit
Thievery Corporation
Stereolab
Portishead
Frank Zappa
Mars Volta
Beastie Boys
Fatboy Slim
PJ Harvey
Tori Amos
Red Hot Chili Peppers
Dylan
Lou Reed
Massive Attack
Rolling Stones
Kruder & Dorfmeister
Neil Young
Air
Missy Elliott
Metallica (Pre-black album, at least)
You're trying to tell me that all these artists, who I would qualify as geniuses, who all have major label contracts and are likely represented by the RIAA, sound the same? You're trying to tell me that all their music is written by their producers? Your argument is only valid if the sample group is "Britney, Christina, NSync and the Backstreet Boys," and even then, they deserve a lot of the revenue their songs generate. They're not in the music industry, per se -- they're in the entertainment industry. They're meant to be fluff. You think it's easy? You think it's a cinch to memorize all those crazy dance moves, and keep your body in tip-top shape, so as to maintain your attractiveness? Take your tinfoil hat out of your ears man.
No, there's no actual proof that they're ever going to make one, but c'mon, isn't it the obvious next step? Record your entire classroom lecture for study purposes, record the next Phish show, record your own demos -- with a simple little multitracking app, it could kill portable 4-tracks. Or, plug your iSight into a video in and turn it into a video camera.
Also, with a mic in, you'll be able to use Apple's speech recognition software to give it voice commands -- no more fuddling around with menus, just speak into the mic: "iPod, play Smashing Pumpkins, album Gish" or something like that.
22% reported feeling odd when the infrasound was playing.
Hell, I feel odd right now. I wonder how many of those people are unemployed dot-commers? 22% sounds about right.
Is he related to Fagamemnon?
sorry... *ducks*
The article says that they were bored and decided to shoot at the sides of tractor trailers.
"I didn't want to hurt anyone," Joshua wrote. "This will stick with me the rest of my life."
Obviously, we need to blame the parents for not teaching them how to shoot well.
Joke in the subject line -- no need to mod this or even open it!
Root# Records -- streamlining your Slashdot reading since 20 seconds from now.
So, what were you doing at mannotincluded.com? ;)
Sandman is the best comic series ever. By far. Gaiman created his own mythology (that's IMHO up there with the Greco-Roman one - well not like he didn't pull from it), and wrote some fucking amazing stories around it. Go to your local library right now and check out the whole series - many have them in graphic novel form.
I stopped reading comics when Sandman ended -- nothing could come close to matching it for me. Then I started up again when I picked up a copy of From Hell, maybe the best $35 you could spend on a single GN. Also good is Road to Perdition, but who really does it for me is Brian Michael Bendis. He's a writer on par with Gaiman, except he's more into precedural crime-type stuff. His GNs Jinx and Goldfish are kick-ass, and also Fire and Torso. He also does Powers, which is great fun to read, Alias, and does or has done Daredevil. Check out his stuff at www.jinxworld.com.
Oh and for a grippingly entertaining and laugh-out-loud funny story about trying to get a screenplay made into a movie, check out Fortune and Glory, also by Bendis.
He's paying $20 for his 15 minutes of fame.
He's lucky his name's not Eunuchs -- because that's how much trouble he's going to have to go through if he wins and the RIAA finds about him.
DRM is used to keep people from "abusing" the digital format and duplicating it all over the place, right? So you could argue that if DRM is there, it puts a set of rules in place, and if you're not breaking them, then it's okay.
Forget about what should or should not be legal. It's like the law -- how do you know if it's not okay to do something? It's against the law. Can I wear a fish on my head? Sure, it's not against the law. Can I shoot someone? No -- it's illegal.
By the same token: can I copy this file onto 4 computers? No, the DRM won't let you. Can I sell it to someone else? Well, if the DRM lets you, obviously it's okay.
Food sells better if you make it taste good, movies would be better if people just wrote good scripts, you can play the piano simply by banging on keys in the right order, and your nose'll stop bleeding if you just keep your finger out of there!
Will we see it in Mountain Dew commercials?
Um, this is about as "extreme" as playing bridge with the Ladies Auxillary. Now, tattooed chicks and Sugar-Ray-esque guys riding Segways on a half-pipe -- I wouldn't put it past 'em.
Wow, that's so fucking cool. That must've been something, sitting on the rock, watching the cattle stampede past. I don't figure you could be any more appreciative towards a rock. I wonder what made them stampede? I'm of course imagining a T. Rex ;)
Okay, you've got my attention. How on earth did you manage to get caught in a cattle stampede? It must be a good story.
Boss - "My boss says we need some eunuch programmers." Dilbert - "I think he means UNIX and I already know UNIX." Boss - "Well, if the company nurse comes by, tell her I said never mind."
For once, I RTFA. And what do I get? About 5 more words than the Slashdot blurb. No pictures, no nothing. That's it -- it's hearsay and conjecture from now on.
PITA = Pain In The Ass
FIDA = Fucked In Da Ass?
RIATA = Rodent Inserted And Turned Around?
CONSTANTLY = Citizen Of Norway Shoved Through Ass, Never To Leave You?
ah, nothing like some stupid ass jokes...
From the article:
Copyright lawyers said it remains unresolved whether consumers can legally download copies of songs on a CD they purchased rather than making digital copies themselves.
So it's still up in the air. But here's where I get confused:
For example, the industry disclosed its use of a library of digital fingerprints, called "hashes," that it said can uniquely identify MP3 music files that had been traded on the Napster service as far back as May 2000.
By comparing the fingerprints of music files on a person's computer against its library, the RIAA believes it can determine in some cases whether someone recorded a song from a legally purchased CD or downloaded it from someone else over the Internet.
Okay, how? Only way I can see is if they have a HUGE-ASS library of mp3s downloaded from Napster that they can check every file against. Seems unlikely that "nycfashiongirl's" copy of "Beat It" would match exactly with one in the RIAA's library.
The recording industry also disclosed that it is examining so-called "metadata" tags, hidden snippets of information embedded within many MP3 music files. In this case, lawyers wrote, they found evidence that others -- including one user who called himself "Atomic Playboy" -- had recorded the music files and that some songs had been downloaded from known pirate Web sites.
Now it's making more sense. I don't think they're using hashes at all. I think they're checking the ID3 tags for stuff like "ripped by 4t0m1c P14b0y - www.atomicplayboy.com."
So really it should read something like "Using a surprisingly astute technical procedure, the RIAA examined song files with an advanced file analysis application, iTunes, and found evidence of references to Atomic Playboy." The article of course, doesn't mention whether it was possible for them to plant the evidence, which it would've been if they were simply allowed to possess her hard drive and weren't required to make any backup copies for the judge.
Of course, if, in her defense, she counters with "well yeah, not all of them were ripped from the physical CDs, lots of times I'd want to listen to one of my CDs, and I couldn't find it, so I'd just download it -- but here is my CD collection for evidence, your honor," then there's going to be an interesting precedent set -- is it okay to download songs that you already own on CD?
Also, she's in court not so much for downloading, but for uploading, which is much more of a crime (have they even sued anyone for just downloading yet?), and it really doesn't matter where she got the songs, just that she was sharing them.
Think about it: male/female, life/death, something/nothing; it goes back ages into daoist philosophy, and you all know the yin/yang, right? If there was no male/female, we'd all be at a bacterial level. Now look closer at the 1 and the 0. 1 = phallus, 0 = hole (vagina).
And when you get down to the quantum level (and correct me if I'm wrong (and I'm sure you will), because I'm no quantum physicist), you find that electrons sort of blink in and out of existence -- you can only measure them in terms of probability of them existing at a certain point in time. It seems like reality as we know it is based on a binary system.
Add to that how computers are affecting just about every way of life, even after being around a mere half century. There's some sort of big interconnectedness going on here, I think. Binary all the way.