(Sung by a man driving a truck, accompanied by a cow in the passenger seat...)
The RIAA has you down? You must whip it When Mr. Rosen comes to town You must whip it When they manipulate the facts You must whip it They lobby regulate and tax You must whip it
Here's a box For cheap Good speakers Free blanks Mister Rosen You can shove Senator Hollings Up your ass! We whip ya! We whip ya good!
(Am I the only one here who believes that Gateway is giving the RIAA exactly what they deserve?)
The most powerful lobbying group in Washington right now is the National Rifle Association. They have a ton of cash, and most of it comes from their five million members. The gun manufacturers themselves are miniscule in comparison, and certainly nowhere nearly as rich or powerful as Microsoft, Enron, or General Motors. I doubt there are five million geeks in the US, but a few hundred thousand geeks, throwing in $25 per year each, would create a sizeable war chest.
Has anyone else noticed that virtually all the music they're trying to protect with these lame systems is the type of stuff that no right-minded person would want to copy in the first place?
And why not? Consider:
If the technology fails (and it has), then they lose a ton on R&D but not much on the artist herself, since most of her fans will still buy the CD. They may have even exposed their artist to new markets, although it's doubtful that most computer geeks will buy her crapola.
If the technology succeeds, then they have a proven copy prevention technology to use on their other, more widely copied, artists (e.g., Britney Speers, Metallica, etc.)
Fact is they're probably going to try every hare brained scheme they can to prevent copying. The hare-brained schemes run out when they figure out that they're wasting their goddamn money on technology that doesn't work and laws that get customers pissed at them.
I also find myself having sex more often when coding Java for a living. That's primarily because Java leaves me rather... unsatisfied. OTOH, C++ is better than sex, once you get everything working just right.
Perl is great for quickies. Python is great for quickies where you don't want to experiment too much. OCaml is great for fetishists. FORTH is perfect for masochists. And of course, then there's playing with LaTeX. Pity the poor Visual Basic programmer.. that's got to be like masturbating in the shower.
Maybe we geeks should be happy just to make it at all.
A fourth possibility to consider: if your product is a component or library, you can GPL your code...which will force other projects that use that product to use the GPL as well...and then offer a commercial license for projects that want to remain closed-source. Trolltech does this with Qt, and they seem to be doing A-OK.
Admittedly this does not work in a world where all software is open-source. Frankly, I do not see the day when that will ever happen, simply because some projects have such a small market that you could never make money except with incredibly expensive support contracts...or unless (potential) customers got together to homebrew the software.
Your attempt to frame this as a "liberal" issue will only lose support for you. Keep in mind that the most vocal critic of all this crap is a "liberal whore" as you put it. Pull your head out of your ass and look at reality man. Give the "liberal" shite a freakin' rest already. The rest of us are tired of it.
This is flamebait, but I have to rise (or lower myself) to the occasion. Put simply, you make the typical mistake of college kids and party apparachiks: knee-jerking.
I'm a bigger Liberal than you are, in all probability. I grew up (literally) in the Chicago independent movement, back when the Daley machine was just starting to crack. I grew up in environmental politics. I've marched in and sometimes organized anti-war demonstrations, defended abortion clinics, marched for and lobbied for gay rights protections, written my legislators time and time again about environmental and free speech issues, and was active in embarrassing Bob Barr when he tried to kick pagans out of the military. I've been a member of the ACLU since 1991. The only chink in my "Liberal" record is that I support the right to keep and bear arms; this is, IMO, a natural implication of Liberal thinking, despite Hollywood propoganda to the contrary.
If you think my hypothetical casting of this as a liberal vice is bad, just wait until the campaign season gets really hot. Rush is going to HAMMER the Democrats with this, and the Democrats are going to have a hard time answering back. For good reason, too, since there really is no good answer for this abhomination of a bill.
I did not use the phrase "Liberal Whore." This is an invention of your over-active imagination, which your under-developed logical and language comprehension faculties were unable to put in check.
If the GOP uses this to destroy the careers of several Democratic Senators (Hollings, Feinstein, etc.), then good for the GOP. The Democrats have taken the Liberal left and the ACLU crowd for granted since 1988. The 2000 campaign was a warning shot; if the Democrats don't start acting according to principles, the Left will go Green. Here's a hint: it's already happening.
In short, you're a moron. Do yourself a favor and get an education before you embarrass the Left like that again.
Enron isn't really relevant to the lives of most voters -- or at least they don't think it's relevant, which amounts to the same thing for political purposes. The collapse of Enron really has no effect on the life of the average American.
That's going to vary by geography. The Enron debacle has created a major mess here in Oregon, where PGE (an Enron company) increased our rates 30% just prior to the colapse (coincidence?) and thousands of people lost their retirement savings. That and the rotten economy (8% unemployment, lots of empty store fronts) are going to hurt Sen. Gordon Smith's (R-OR) chances in November.
Your average voter in, say, Kansas probably won't care about Enron either way. It's just too complicated.
Similarly, the Republicans will be nuts to play the CBDTPA card; unless El Rushbo picks his words very carefully, most GOP faithful won't have the first damn clue what the hell CBDTPA even does. They (like most Democrat faithful) might assume that it's there to make cable TV cheaper or to put criminals out of work. Some of 'em might even say it's no big deal, since everyone uses Windows anyway.
Try a right-wing talk show host. A few of those guys up in arms ("The Liberal media whores are out to destroy your right to use your computer!") could turn a couple of elections.
Then you need to target your congresspeople for un-election. That means spreading the word, through posters, mass mailings, leaflets, whatever, that your elected representatives support or sponsored an anti-consumer, anti-free-speech law. Do it right now before the vote. Be sure to forward a leaflet to their local offices. Scare the living crap out of them.
It would also help to publish their names here. We need to destroy their careers. Nothing else will sufficiently teach Congress to never again cross this line.
Right now HIV basically treatable, at least for those with enough money. For thie reason and this reason alone, you're not going to see much of a huge push for HIV research for a few years.
The BIG event is still coming up: an HIV vaccine (AIDSVAX) is currently undergong phase III clinical trials, and gods willing, will hit the market in a couple of years. How much would you pay for such a vaccine?
A cure is maybe a couple of decades away...this virus is a tough nut to crack. The only way we're going to slow it down in Africa and Asia is through education and changing attitudes; both of these are hard, but nowhere nearly as hard as finding a cure for this damn thing.
Commercial dual-layer discs are made by "burning" (actually pressing) two separate layers and then glueing them together with a special adhesive that will allow the light through. One layer clearly has to be semitransparent (no pun intended) so that the laser can read the second layer.
OK, so now I really don't get it. If this is true then it should be impossible for someone to create a bit-for-bit copy of a DVD and burn it using technology that doesn't require a huge investment. What, then, is MPAA's excuse for outlawing DeCSS? It would be far better, with less negative PR, for them to crack down on big operations; small operations could only produce an inferior product, which would give anyone who actually cares about product quality (90% of all DVD buyers) sufficient incentive not to buy pirated copies.
Are they afraid of someone in China creating a virtual (2GB or so file) DVD and posting it for download? Notice how much a similar phenomenon has hurt the music industry: they're making more money now than they did before Napster.
Honestly, it sounds to me like Valenti and company are just plain greedy, and in particular are gunning for the international market in a big bad way. I had recently heard that the MPAA was lobbying WTO to reclassify movies as industrial, rather than cultural, products, which would make it illegal for any nation to place restrictions on import or sale of movies...bye bye local motion picture industries. Hello, more really weird, somewhat bland movies with easily translatable international appeal. Billion dollar revenues suddenly become commonplace. Makes sense.
J (note caps) to append the next line to the end of the present line
U (note caps) to undo the last command.
:1,$ sub/oldphrase/newphrase/ to replace oldphrase with newphrase throughout a document
:syntax on with VIM, for syntax highlighting
:cd to change current working directory
:e! file to edit file file
CTRL-W n to create a split window...sometimes useful if you're writing code and want to have the header file right in front of you.
CTRL-W w to switch from one split window to another
:set sw=num and:set softtabstop=num to set how far your tab key indents (in spaces). I use four spaces, and this is set automatically by putting these lines in my.vimrc and.gvimrc files.
/phrase to search forward for phrase phrase; / alone to search again for that same phrase. ? searches backwards.
That's just off the top of my head. Things beside these I can usually find in New Riders' book Vi IMproved -- Vim
Good luck. I use VIM almost exclusively for my editing needs; over the last ten years it has been my constant companion through thick and thin. I wouldn't work without it.
Playing with the Supreme Court like this is a very dicey proposition, and may very well backfire dangerously. By dangerously, I mean that our right to run the software we choose on our computers could be ruined for generations.
The best way to prevent violations of our rights is to strangle this bill in the crib. That means writing and calling all of our legislators, and targeting for un-election the sponsors of this bill. Once we do that, they'll never try to pass this legislation again.
You can't buy a machinegun in any Wal-Mart in the country. Machine guns are destructive devices and require a Class III permit, obtained by the BATF, to own. The application process includes a thorough background check (not a five minute phone deal), fingerprinting, and signatures from local law enforcement officials, plus $200. Such permits are not easy to obtain. And most states simply ban machine-gun ownership. Then you may obtain one such gun, from a Class III dealer, at insane prices.
Also, you can buy tear gas, pepper spray, tasers, mace, etc. in most states. New York and Massachusetts are exceptions.
As far as the firearms industry goes, they don't pull in anywhere near the cash of Hollywood or any of the major media outlets. A lot of them have nearly gone broke because of declining sales, and Smith and Wesson pretty much destroyed themselves by making a deal with HUD two years ago. Most of these companies have gone broke because gun owners (that is, persons who legally own and carry firearms for whatever reason) prefer quality over price, and because, frankly, a lot of gun manufacturers produced crap (e.g., Lorcin).
In fact, the major lobbying group for gun rights isn't gun manufactuers, it's the National Rifle Association and their almost five million dues-paying members. Most of those members joined the NRA precisely for the same reason that you're advocating that geeks band together: the laws proposed to control the technology we use are stupid, ill-considered, and badly written. We know it, our opponents don't, and because our opponents have powerful allies, we need to band together and fight like hell.
In conclusion, proponents of gun control would probably be more effective if they actually understood what they were talking about.
I run Ximian GNOME and Red Hat 7.2 on a relatively old box: Pentium 233 MMX with 96 megs of RAM and 20 gig hard drive (the old 1 gig drive finally died.). It's a little slow; sometimes it takes a few seconds for a menu to be displayed. On the other hand, the "user experience" is very smooth. I wouldn't want to use anything else: not Windows, not KDE. (This is a matter of personal prefernce; ymmv).
My only major complaint is that Galeon isn't a part of the Ximian GNOME package. They have Mozilla, which is good, but Galeon simply has a smaller resource footprint and a better user interface. Obviously it's trivial to install the appropriate Galeon RPMs; OTOH, I often wonder why Ximian hasn't adopted this browser as a part of their standard packages. I look forward to the day when this changes.
The real issue (against using open source software) is economic, though. If we use an open source product, we have no one to modify that product (bug fixes, enhancements, etc.) and no timetable on which to operate. Ultimately, we have to either (1) rely on garnering support in the open source community or (2) fork the code on our own. Neither of which is particularly effective for us.
I can think of several companies (Red Hat, IBM, Ximian) that would be more than happy to enter into a contract with your bank to modify open source software as required, and stick to a time table to do so. In fact, part of the beauty of Open Source Software is that Red Hat and IBM (for example) have the talent available to modify Open Source software that they do not own. They can do this, precisely because of the way Open Source software is licensed.
Additionally, there's quite a bit of open source software (e.g., MySQL) that is owned and produced by companies whose whole business is that particular project.
Finally, if you find a piece of Open Source software that you like, but which doesn't have support from a corporation, you can set up an agreement with a consulting firm to maintain that software. Admittedly, you'd have to really like that program to do this, but it can be done.
In short: there are plenty of ties for your bank to grab, even if you use open source software.
Now, please understand: I'm not saying that there is an open source application that meets your needs, right now. I am saying that your stated objections don't make sense. A big bank is going to have ties to grab whether the software is open source or closed source.
A plane would be a problem for the reasons already mentioned.
Instead, maybe you'd want to try a wheeled vehicle, either remote-controlled or (once the technology gets there) autonomous with obstacle-avoidance, road-following and tornado-seeking behaviors. Give it all-terrain drive, lots of kevlar, and a goodamn resilient camera. It would help to test a prototype by shooting it with a.308 a few times to see whether the different assemblies take damage. This vehicle should be literally bulletproof. Use a wheeled vehicle to take advantage of local roads that the tornado may cross. Using this you should be able to drive the vehicle (or it should be able to drive itself) either near or into the tornado's path. Just lay it down on a closed highway and go.
Of course, this vehicle may also be useful for military reconaissance work, given some modifications to its software.
He didn't break the law. Fair use allows for the copying of copyrighted works for research purposes. Assuming that the kids didn't keep the 6000 songs, it was all "research".
If you're right, then I want a judge to say you're right. Otherwise, I want that criminal hacker music pirate bastard nailed to the goddamn wall for stealing intellectual property and stealing the food out of artists' mouths.
When peaceful legal avenues are closed, the only recourses left are violent and/or illegal. What we have here is more like a "software mafia" than legal corporations.
This is crazy. Let me tell you exactly what we can do to hurt Microsoft the most once this trial is over: we can continue developing, documenting, supporting and advocating Linux and Linux-compatible free software. With a very few exceptions (e.g., reading DVDs), don't have to do anything violent or illegal to stick it to them. That may change when/if SSSCA becomes law, but not just as a result of Ashcroft bending over for Bill Gates.
Slashdot Mirror
I see...so then by linking Xenu.net under the name Scientology, I can increase raise the ranking of Xenu.net in Google's Scientology search pages. Wow! What a great way to stick it to the Church of Scientology and the Scientologists! I wonder what such famous Scientologists as John Travolta and Tom Cruise would think of that?
So let me get this straight...by Linking to Xenu.net we can up its rankings? That's pretty interesting.
I don't think enough of Ms. Rosen to get her gender right, so II'm not going to worry myself abour her marital status.
Thanks!!
Hm. I guess I should replace "Mister" with "Mizzus" then. Blah.
(Sung by a man driving a truck, accompanied by a cow in the passenger seat...)
The RIAA has you down?
You must whip it
When Mr. Rosen comes to town
You must whip it
When they manipulate the facts
You must whip it
They lobby regulate and tax
You must whip it
Here's a box
For cheap
Good speakers
Free blanks
Mister Rosen
You can shove
Senator Hollings
Up your ass!
We whip ya!
We whip ya good!
(Am I the only one here who believes that Gateway is giving the RIAA exactly what they deserve?)
Note: totally off topic, my apologies.
Dude, I'm such a huge fan of your site, ever since my friend Lux told me she posed. I'd be a paying customer if I weren't broke and unemployed :).
The most powerful lobbying group in Washington right now is the National Rifle Association. They have a ton of cash, and most of it comes from their five million members. The gun manufacturers themselves are miniscule in comparison, and certainly nowhere nearly as rich or powerful as Microsoft, Enron, or General Motors. I doubt there are five million geeks in the US, but a few hundred thousand geeks, throwing in $25 per year each, would create a sizeable war chest.
And why not? Consider:
Fact is they're probably going to try every hare brained scheme they can to prevent copying. The hare-brained schemes run out when they figure out that they're wasting their goddamn money on technology that doesn't work and laws that get customers pissed at them.
I also find myself having sex more often when coding Java for a living. That's primarily because Java leaves me rather ... unsatisfied. OTOH, C++ is better than sex, once you get everything working just right.
Perl is great for quickies. Python is great for quickies where you don't want to experiment too much. OCaml is great for fetishists. FORTH is perfect for masochists. And of course, then there's playing with LaTeX. Pity the poor Visual Basic programmer .. that's got to be like masturbating in the shower.
Maybe we geeks should be happy just to make it at all.
A fourth possibility to consider: if your product is a component or library, you can GPL your code...which will force other projects that use that product to use the GPL as well...and then offer a commercial license for projects that want to remain closed-source. Trolltech does this with Qt, and they seem to be doing A-OK.
Admittedly this does not work in a world where all software is open-source. Frankly, I do not see the day when that will ever happen, simply because some projects have such a small market that you could never make money except with incredibly expensive support contracts...or unless (potential) customers got together to homebrew the software.
Yeah, almost as amazing as a Republican that still believes in the Constitution.
This is flamebait, but I have to rise (or lower myself) to the occasion. Put simply, you make the typical mistake of college kids and party apparachiks: knee-jerking.
In short, you're a moron. Do yourself a favor and get an education before you embarrass the Left like that again.
That's going to vary by geography. The Enron debacle has created a major mess here in Oregon, where PGE (an Enron company) increased our rates 30% just prior to the colapse (coincidence?) and thousands of people lost their retirement savings. That and the rotten economy (8% unemployment, lots of empty store fronts) are going to hurt Sen. Gordon Smith's (R-OR) chances in November.
Your average voter in, say, Kansas probably won't care about Enron either way. It's just too complicated.
Similarly, the Republicans will be nuts to play the CBDTPA card; unless El Rushbo picks his words very carefully, most GOP faithful won't have the first damn clue what the hell CBDTPA even does. They (like most Democrat faithful) might assume that it's there to make cable TV cheaper or to put criminals out of work. Some of 'em might even say it's no big deal, since everyone uses Windows anyway.
Try a right-wing talk show host. A few of those guys up in arms ("The Liberal media whores are out to destroy your right to use your computer!") could turn a couple of elections.
Then you need to target your congresspeople for un-election. That means spreading the word, through posters, mass mailings, leaflets, whatever, that your elected representatives support or sponsored an anti-consumer, anti-free-speech law. Do it right now before the vote. Be sure to forward a leaflet to their local offices. Scare the living crap out of them. It would also help to publish their names here. We need to destroy their careers. Nothing else will sufficiently teach Congress to never again cross this line.
The BIG event is still coming up: an HIV vaccine (AIDSVAX) is currently undergong phase III clinical trials, and gods willing, will hit the market in a couple of years. How much would you pay for such a vaccine?
A cure is maybe a couple of decades away...this virus is a tough nut to crack. The only way we're going to slow it down in Africa and Asia is through education and changing attitudes; both of these are hard, but nowhere nearly as hard as finding a cure for this damn thing.
OK, so now I really don't get it. If this is true then it should be impossible for someone to create a bit-for-bit copy of a DVD and burn it using technology that doesn't require a huge investment. What, then, is MPAA's excuse for outlawing DeCSS? It would be far better, with less negative PR, for them to crack down on big operations; small operations could only produce an inferior product, which would give anyone who actually cares about product quality (90% of all DVD buyers) sufficient incentive not to buy pirated copies.
Are they afraid of someone in China creating a virtual (2GB or so file) DVD and posting it for download? Notice how much a similar phenomenon has hurt the music industry: they're making more money now than they did before Napster.
Honestly, it sounds to me like Valenti and company are just plain greedy, and in particular are gunning for the international market in a big bad way. I had recently heard that the MPAA was lobbying WTO to reclassify movies as industrial, rather than cultural, products, which would make it illegal for any nation to place restrictions on import or sale of movies...bye bye local motion picture industries. Hello, more really weird, somewhat bland movies with easily translatable international appeal. Billion dollar revenues suddenly become commonplace. Makes sense.
That's just off the top of my head. Things beside these I can usually find in New Riders' book Vi IMproved -- Vim
Good luck. I use VIM almost exclusively for my editing needs; over the last ten years it has been my constant companion through thick and thin. I wouldn't work without it.
Playing with the Supreme Court like this is a very dicey proposition, and may very well backfire dangerously. By dangerously, I mean that our right to run the software we choose on our computers could be ruined for generations.
The best way to prevent violations of our rights is to strangle this bill in the crib. That means writing and calling all of our legislators, and targeting for un-election the sponsors of this bill. Once we do that, they'll never try to pass this legislation again.
You can't buy a machinegun in any Wal-Mart in the country. Machine guns are destructive devices and require a Class III permit, obtained by the BATF, to own. The application process includes a thorough background check (not a five minute phone deal), fingerprinting, and signatures from local law enforcement officials, plus $200. Such permits are not easy to obtain. And most states simply ban machine-gun ownership. Then you may obtain one such gun, from a Class III dealer, at insane prices.
Also, you can buy tear gas, pepper spray, tasers, mace, etc. in most states. New York and Massachusetts are exceptions.
As far as the firearms industry goes, they don't pull in anywhere near the cash of Hollywood or any of the major media outlets. A lot of them have nearly gone broke because of declining sales, and Smith and Wesson pretty much destroyed themselves by making a deal with HUD two years ago. Most of these companies have gone broke because gun owners (that is, persons who legally own and carry firearms for whatever reason) prefer quality over price, and because, frankly, a lot of gun manufacturers produced crap (e.g., Lorcin).
In fact, the major lobbying group for gun rights isn't gun manufactuers, it's the National Rifle Association and their almost five million dues-paying members. Most of those members joined the NRA precisely for the same reason that you're advocating that geeks band together: the laws proposed to control the technology we use are stupid, ill-considered, and badly written. We know it, our opponents don't, and because our opponents have powerful allies, we need to band together and fight like hell.
In conclusion, proponents of gun control would probably be more effective if they actually understood what they were talking about.
I run Ximian GNOME and Red Hat 7.2 on a relatively old box: Pentium 233 MMX with 96 megs of RAM and 20 gig hard drive (the old 1 gig drive finally died.). It's a little slow; sometimes it takes a few seconds for a menu to be displayed. On the other hand, the "user experience" is very smooth. I wouldn't want to use anything else: not Windows, not KDE. (This is a matter of personal prefernce; ymmv).
My only major complaint is that Galeon isn't a part of the Ximian GNOME package. They have Mozilla, which is good, but Galeon simply has a smaller resource footprint and a better user interface. Obviously it's trivial to install the appropriate Galeon RPMs; OTOH, I often wonder why Ximian hasn't adopted this browser as a part of their standard packages. I look forward to the day when this changes.
I can think of several companies (Red Hat, IBM, Ximian) that would be more than happy to enter into a contract with your bank to modify open source software as required, and stick to a time table to do so. In fact, part of the beauty of Open Source Software is that Red Hat and IBM (for example) have the talent available to modify Open Source software that they do not own. They can do this, precisely because of the way Open Source software is licensed.
Additionally, there's quite a bit of open source software (e.g., MySQL) that is owned and produced by companies whose whole business is that particular project.
Finally, if you find a piece of Open Source software that you like, but which doesn't have support from a corporation, you can set up an agreement with a consulting firm to maintain that software. Admittedly, you'd have to really like that program to do this, but it can be done.
In short: there are plenty of ties for your bank to grab, even if you use open source software.
Now, please understand: I'm not saying that there is an open source application that meets your needs, right now. I am saying that your stated objections don't make sense. A big bank is going to have ties to grab whether the software is open source or closed source.
A plane would be a problem for the reasons already mentioned.
Instead, maybe you'd want to try a wheeled vehicle, either remote-controlled or (once the technology gets there) autonomous with obstacle-avoidance, road-following and tornado-seeking behaviors. Give it all-terrain drive, lots of kevlar, and a goodamn resilient camera. It would help to test a prototype by shooting it with a .308 a few times to see whether the different assemblies take damage. This vehicle should be literally bulletproof. Use a wheeled vehicle to take advantage of local roads that the tornado may cross. Using this you should be able to drive the vehicle (or it should be able to drive itself) either near or into the tornado's path. Just lay it down on a closed highway and go.
Of course, this vehicle may also be useful for military reconaissance work, given some modifications to its software.
(My eventual ambition is to work with robots)
Hope this helps.
If you're right, then I want a judge to say you're right. Otherwise, I want that criminal hacker music pirate bastard nailed to the goddamn wall for stealing intellectual property and stealing the food out of artists' mouths.
This is crazy. Let me tell you exactly what we can do to hurt Microsoft the most once this trial is over: we can continue developing, documenting, supporting and advocating Linux and Linux-compatible free software. With a very few exceptions (e.g., reading DVDs), don't have to do anything violent or illegal to stick it to them. That may change when/if SSSCA becomes law, but not just as a result of Ashcroft bending over for Bill Gates.