The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes,...
...To promote the progress of science
You see, Congress has the power to enact copyright laws, but it is not required to do so.
The first copyright act wasn't passed for some time after the constitution was ratified, it was very limited in scope, and the term was only fourteen years.
I know that in the US at least, there are more people sharing files on peer-to-peer networks than voted for George Bush in 2000. I suspect the numbers are proportional in other countries.
If you work to reform the copyright laws, you can make the sharing of any file legal.
In the US anyway, copyright is not a Constitutional right. I suspect that it's not a fundamental right in most countries.
The reason I ask you to googlebomb my article in my signature here is that I'm trying to educate the peer-to-peer network users. I attract the readers by offerring links to lots of free, legal downloads, but give them a political education while I've got their attention.
I learned in Social Psychology at UCSC that advertising is the most effective when the actual choice of product you might purchase doesn't matter much.
That's why you see all those glitzy TV ads for toilet paper and toothpaste.
Stop for a minute and think about that wad of paper you're about to wipe with, and consider how much of it's purchase price went to pay for its national television advertising campaign.
Then consider the possibility that the toilet paper isn't the real product here, rather the advertising is the product.
They could be selling anything - anything innocuous anyway - the product you purchase is just a vehicle to get you to spend some money in response to the ad.
I heard a talk on the radio, that was given to the National Press Club by Sumner Redstone, the chairman of Viacom.
Viacom owns a lot of entertainment and media companies.
Interestingly, he dismissed the importance of the internet as not being useful to his company. I think this was in 1994 or so. He said it was only of interest to researchers and hobbyists. His only interest in the internet was the possibility of video on demand, which his company had done some market research with, and determined was not going to make viacom any money.
Anyway, the thing that Redstone said that really stuck with me, gave me a chill in fact, was:
It is my objective that every American will be touched each day of their lives by a Viacom product.
You'd think he was being delusional except that he made it apparent in the rest of his speech that he had the means to achieve that goal, and by the looks of it I think he's well on his way their.
It makes you want to go live on a desert island, doesn't it?
I experimented around looking for a spreadsheet that could make graphs that didn't suck, and settled on OpenOffice in part because it made graphs I liked, and I could share files between my Win2k box and my Mac running Debian Linux for PowerPC.
I suspect that in a lot of organizations, even when Linux isn't taking over the desktop, a few people will be using Linux in an otherwise Windows dominated environment. And after the Linux guy spends enough time using OOo around the Windows people, it will start to make sense to them to standardize on one office suite that will cover all the platforms in use at the company.
In
Change the Law, I point out that while the Constitution permits Congress to enact copyright laws, it doesn't actually require Congress to do so. Copyright is not a Constitutional right.
Congress could repeal the copyright laws tomorrow, if you could get enough votes to do so. That's more of a possibility than you might think, if you consider that more Americans use peer-to-peer networks than voted for George Bush.
I want every American peer-to-peer network user to read my article by the time of the elections. Presently it gets about 2000 readers a day, but needs to get read about a hundred times more frequently to achieve my goal. If you feel as I do that what I have to say is important, then you can help by linking to my article from your own website, weblog or from message boards.
You'll see from my sig that I've been asking readers to Googlebomb it with the phrase "free music downloads". This has been pretty successful so far, with my article now ranking #3 at Google for that query. It's getting about 800 search engine referrals each day for "free music downloads".
My article has a Creative Commons license if you'd like to mirror it.
I've been meaning to write this but never seem to find the time. Maybe someone already has, but I haven't been able to find this in open source.
It seems to me it should be pretty easy to use Google's API to find the rank a given page has for a given query.
It's easy to check the rank for a few queries, but I'd like to measure them for dozens, and several different pages too, so it would be very helpful to have it automated.
While I like iRate and free mp3s, I doubt that the submitter is looking for off label CDs.
Very likely you're correct, but a myth I'm working hard to dispel is the notion that the only bands worth listening to are the bands signed with the major labels.
I've discovered some great bands by listening to iRATE, or exploring the websites I list in my article.
Why is it, do you think, that in arguing its side of the debate over music downloading, that the RIAA and its member labels never mention the option one has to download music both legally and for free? Why is it that all the major press articles I see about legal downloading are about services which charge a fee, like iTunes and BuyMusic?
Why are the kinds of downloads I discuss in my article never mentioned? Wouldn't it solve the controversy if everyone downloaded the music I listen to? No one's copyright would be infringed.
But you see, if that were to happen, the RIAA labels would make no money at all, because in general the artists who provide free, legal downloads are not signed with RIAA member companies. If a fan likes an MP3 so much that she buys a CD, the major labels won't be making money.
Interesting, isn't it, how the RIAA has framed the debate to completely exclude the option I discuss in my article. Interesting, indeed.
Both tracks are available for free download. Furthermore, The Bomb's first track,
Running Scared is released under the new
Fitehouse General Public Music License, which goes further than the Creative Commons or EFF Open Audio Licenses in that it requires the release of the studio master tracks from which a piece of music is composed: also on The Bomb's download piece are uncompressed WAV files with the raw, unmixed audio of each of the instrumental and vocal parts.
So if you like, you could record yourself singing and mix it with the other tracks from Running Scared.
iRATE's 0.3 version for Mac OS X is not yet listed in the stable downloads page, but the version that I'm quite sure will become 0.3 is in iRATE's
testing downloads page.
You don't need to worry about getting sued by
the Recording Industry
Assocation of America or
arrested by the FBI if you download legal music. Many
independent and unsigned
musicians offer downloads of their music in
hopes of attracting more fans. Here's some music from my friends
Oliver Brown
and
Rick Walker's Loop.pooL.
If everyone started downloading legal music instead of violating
copyright with the file sharing programs, we
would make short work of the RIAA, because people would start
buying CDs directly
from the artists and seeing their shows instead
of enriching the major labels by buying CDs from the bands the
labels have chosen for us to listen to.
The RIAA would also have no cause to complain -
these music downloads do not infringe copyright because
the artists give you permission to download them.
In particular, you should be listening to iRATE radio. It downloads and plays those legal MP3s that the artists have on their websites, so you don't have to go hunting for them. If you've already tried out iRATE, note that version 0.3 was just released, so get the update if you don't already have it.
AltaVista used to be a great search engine before they started taking paid listings.
Many other search engines - most of which you're not likely to have ever heard of - have always taken paid listings.
Users quickly find that search engines that use paid placement do not return relevant search results.
Yahoo might make a few quick bucks at first, but once users figure out that it's not giving them the most relevant results, they'll go find a different search engine that works better.
I think the way Google does it, with the adwords select self-service ads, is probably the best way a search engine can make money. One reason it works so well is that the user can distinguish easily between paid and unpaid placement.
Maybe it's just me, but I am quite convinced that possessing a faster development machine would not make me a more productive programmer. Not in the slightest.
My 667 Mhz Pentium III is considerably faster than what I require for all the development work I've done since I bought it in 2000.
There was a time when it mattered to programmers to have high-end equipment, because computers of that day were so constrained for resources. There was a time I was overjoyed to have bought a used 135 MB (you read that right) hard drive off the Usenet News, because it meant I could develop code on my Mac Plus without being limited to two floppy drives and no hard drive.
Sure, a faster machine would mean faster compiles - but how much of your time is spent waiting for a compile, as opposed to the time you spend thinking about your code?
The great nightmare that all the hardware vendors have is that the day will come when everybody realizes their machines are fast enough, so they don't need to upgrade anymore. The result of this is that both Apple and Microsoft are putting more and more CPU-intensive eyecandy into their products, to burn up those cycles.
not as a professor, but as a teaching assistant. I taught numerical analysis when I was an undergrad at caltech, and kept teaching right after my first visit to a psych ward.
In grad school at UCSC, I was teaching physics lab, and ended up in the psych ward again.
One reason to be afraid to try out a new kernel is that a bug in any of the kernel code can result in a corrupt filesystem.
While I'm sure you can see how buggy filesystem code might cause this, perhaps you don't see how this could happen from any code in the kernel at all.
Well, one way is for a pointer error in, say, a network driver to overwrite some disk data buffers with random garbage. Then the data gets saved to disk.
I've read of this happening on the linux-kernel list.
Even journaling filesystems won't help for this. While journals can protect against power loss or crashes, the filesystems do make the assumption that any metadata committed to disk is correct.
I'm interested to try 2.6 out on my PowerPC Macintosh, which I presently run Debian testing on.
But the Mac is a production machine for me, it would be bad to have something like filesystem corruption happen. It would be great if I could test it with a distro like Knoppix, but I would need it to have all powerpc binaries.
Slashdot Mirror
The first copyright act wasn't passed for some time after the constitution was ratified, it was very limited in scope, and the term was only fourteen years.
If you work to reform the copyright laws, you can make the sharing of any file legal.
Here are some steps you can take to do this:
-
Speak Out
-
Vote
-
Write to Your Elected Representatives
-
Donate Money to Political Campaigns
-
Support Campaign Finance Reform
-
Join the Electronic Frontier Foundation
-
Practice Civil Disobedience
In the US anyway, copyright is not a Constitutional right. I suspect that it's not a fundamental right in most countries.The reason I ask you to googlebomb my article in my signature here is that I'm trying to educate the peer-to-peer network users. I attract the readers by offerring links to lots of free, legal downloads, but give them a political education while I've got their attention.
That's why you see all those glitzy TV ads for toilet paper and toothpaste.
Stop for a minute and think about that wad of paper you're about to wipe with, and consider how much of it's purchase price went to pay for its national television advertising campaign.
Then consider the possibility that the toilet paper isn't the real product here, rather the advertising is the product.
They could be selling anything - anything innocuous anyway - the product you purchase is just a vehicle to get you to spend some money in response to the ad.
-
Google - 199 hits
-
MSN - 121 hits
-
Yahoo - 304 hits
Surprisingly few pages mention Ballmer's monkey dance.Viacom owns a lot of entertainment and media companies.
Interestingly, he dismissed the importance of the internet as not being useful to his company. I think this was in 1994 or so. He said it was only of interest to researchers and hobbyists. His only interest in the internet was the possibility of video on demand, which his company had done some market research with, and determined was not going to make viacom any money.
Anyway, the thing that Redstone said that really stuck with me, gave me a chill in fact, was:
You'd think he was being delusional except that he made it apparent in the rest of his speech that he had the means to achieve that goal, and by the looks of it I think he's well on his way their.It makes you want to go live on a desert island, doesn't it?
I suspect that in a lot of organizations, even when Linux isn't taking over the desktop, a few people will be using Linux in an otherwise Windows dominated environment. And after the Linux guy spends enough time using OOo around the Windows people, it will start to make sense to them to standardize on one office suite that will cover all the platforms in use at the company.
Congress could repeal the copyright laws tomorrow, if you could get enough votes to do so. That's more of a possibility than you might think, if you consider that more Americans use peer-to-peer networks than voted for George Bush.
My article suggests a number of steps you can take to bring about much needed copyright reform, ranging from speaking out to practicing civil disobedience.
I want every American peer-to-peer network user to read my article by the time of the elections. Presently it gets about 2000 readers a day, but needs to get read about a hundred times more frequently to achieve my goal. If you feel as I do that what I have to say is important, then you can help by linking to my article from your own website, weblog or from message boards.
You'll see from my sig that I've been asking readers to Googlebomb it with the phrase "free music downloads". This has been pretty successful so far, with my article now ranking #3 at Google for that query. It's getting about 800 search engine referrals each day for "free music downloads".
My article has a Creative Commons license if you'd like to mirror it.
It seems to me it should be pretty easy to use Google's API to find the rank a given page has for a given query.
It's easy to check the rank for a few queries, but I'd like to measure them for dozens, and several different pages too, so it would be very helpful to have it automated.
Is there such a program?
It's still in development, but you can boot it and run some programs on it already.
Very likely you're correct, but a myth I'm working hard to dispel is the notion that the only bands worth listening to are the bands signed with the major labels.
I've discovered some great bands by listening to iRATE, or exploring the websites I list in my article.
Why is it, do you think, that in arguing its side of the debate over music downloading, that the RIAA and its member labels never mention the option one has to download music both legally and for free? Why is it that all the major press articles I see about legal downloading are about services which charge a fee, like iTunes and BuyMusic?
Why are the kinds of downloads I discuss in my article never mentioned? Wouldn't it solve the controversy if everyone downloaded the music I listen to? No one's copyright would be infringed.
But you see, if that were to happen, the RIAA labels would make no money at all, because in general the artists who provide free, legal downloads are not signed with RIAA member companies. If a fan likes an MP3 so much that she buys a CD, the major labels won't be making money.
Interesting, isn't it, how the RIAA has framed the debate to completely exclude the option I discuss in my article. Interesting, indeed.
Both tracks are available for free download. Furthermore, The Bomb's first track, Running Scared is released under the new Fitehouse General Public Music License, which goes further than the Creative Commons or EFF Open Audio Licenses in that it requires the release of the studio master tracks from which a piece of music is composed: also on The Bomb's download piece are uncompressed WAV files with the raw, unmixed audio of each of the instrumental and vocal parts.
So if you like, you could record yourself singing and mix it with the other tracks from Running Scared.
From the introduction:
In particular, you should be listening to iRATE radio. It downloads and plays those legal MP3s that the artists have on their websites, so you don't have to go hunting for them. If you've already tried out iRATE, note that version 0.3 was just released, so get the update if you don't already have it.Many other search engines - most of which you're not likely to have ever heard of - have always taken paid listings.
Users quickly find that search engines that use paid placement do not return relevant search results.
Yahoo might make a few quick bucks at first, but once users figure out that it's not giving them the most relevant results, they'll go find a different search engine that works better.
I think the way Google does it, with the adwords select self-service ads, is probably the best way a search engine can make money. One reason it works so well is that the user can distinguish easily between paid and unpaid placement.
"eclectic online rock radio".
- WARNING! Buying This CD Funds Lawsuits Against Children and Families
$10.00 for a pack of one hundred, including postage. Alternately the page has artwork you can download to print your own.My 667 Mhz Pentium III is considerably faster than what I require for all the development work I've done since I bought it in 2000.
There was a time when it mattered to programmers to have high-end equipment, because computers of that day were so constrained for resources. There was a time I was overjoyed to have bought a used 135 MB (you read that right) hard drive off the Usenet News, because it meant I could develop code on my Mac Plus without being limited to two floppy drives and no hard drive.
Sure, a faster machine would mean faster compiles - but how much of your time is spent waiting for a compile, as opposed to the time you spend thinking about your code?
The great nightmare that all the hardware vendors have is that the day will come when everybody realizes their machines are fast enough, so they don't need to upgrade anymore. The result of this is that both Apple and Microsoft are putting more and more CPU-intensive eyecandy into their products, to burn up those cycles.
- Legal Torrents - net label mp3 releases
Enjoy.In grad school at UCSC, I was teaching physics lab, and ended up in the psych ward again.
But I got good reviews from my students.
email me if you want to talk about it some more.
-
Trip to the Emergency Room
In summary, sometimes I think the cops are after me, because flashes of light look to me like the lights on a police car.But you know, I'm still a productive member of society and all.
I've been working for quite some time to change that.
While I'm sure you can see how buggy filesystem code might cause this, perhaps you don't see how this could happen from any code in the kernel at all.
Well, one way is for a pointer error in, say, a network driver to overwrite some disk data buffers with random garbage. Then the data gets saved to disk.
I've read of this happening on the linux-kernel list.
Even journaling filesystems won't help for this. While journals can protect against power loss or crashes, the filesystems do make the assumption that any metadata committed to disk is correct.
But the Mac is a production machine for me, it would be bad to have something like filesystem corruption happen. It would be great if I could test it with a distro like Knoppix, but I would need it to have all powerpc binaries.
Is there such a beast?