Pragmatic reader Crashnbur contributed the below piece, his own take on the world of fair use and software. If you've ever burned a CD of MP3s, you may find yourself in the same philosophical boat -- or you may think that increasingly narrow copy-restricting licenses are the greatest thing possible for software (and music, say) under freer alternative licenses. I'm not sure that software and music licensing are quite this parallel at all, though, or that Microsoft really doesn't mind consumers playing musical upgrades, even on their home machines.

The next major battle between hackers and the Corporate Republic will almost surely involve the relatively unknown fields of steganography and digital watermarking, otherwise known as Information Hiding, a scientific discipline to take very seriously. This is where the big three digital policy issues -- privacy, security and copyright -- all collide head-on with corporatism. If they hated Napster, they'll really go nuts over rapidly evolving research into how to hide data inside data. (Read more.)

Note: Troubled dot-commer Kurt Gray wrote this eloquent and tragic story -- a story all too typical in today's troubled tech market, when even the best ideas can be swept aside by a market that just isn't ready for them. Probably more than a handful of you can sympathize with the havoc that an economic downturn can wreak on what just a few months ago might have been wild success stories.

Save a few bucks and skip this one. The mummy-rising-from-the-crypt theme is one of the oldest scary stories in popular culture, from early radio dramas to a slew of cheesy movies. The idea of dessicated princes of an ancient and proud civilization entombed underground with their families, pets and belongings -- certain they are going to return -- is genuinely unnerving. The crypts and embalming methods of that time incorporated some of the most sophisticated technology yet seen. And computer animation gives directors the chance to re-create such ancient cultures in ways that were never possible. But no myth is so powerful that Stephen Sommers and Universal can't reduce it to an unashamedly stupid movie like The Mummy Returns. SPOILAGE WARNING. (Read more.)

Handheld computers are cute. Someday I'm sure I'll find one that will wean me away from my treasured pen and pad for fast notetaking, and at least partially from my laptop computer. But I don't think a Palm or even a Linux PDA like a Yopy or Agenda will do it. I'm waiting until someone gives me The Finger.

Standing behind a product is the seminal moral responsibility of any manufacturer, both in terms of what's smart and what's right. Customer and tech reps are nose-to-nose with the public when it comes to new technology. That means it's critical to provide genuine, easy-to-access, responsive tech support and service. But the very phrase "tech support" has become an oxymoron, an indictment of an arrogant and elitist industry. And a new survey by Jupiter Media Matrix suggests that tech support and customer service are getting worse, not better. (Read more).

I've been using the deskmount Evolution keyboard from Ergo Interfaces on my main work machine for a couple of months now. I've been doing so both because of some chronic wrist pain, and to try actually using the split-keyboard approach to things. What follows are my own personal tribulations and truimphs using said technology.

Gather round kids and let me tell you a story. A story of "Convergence": a nasty buzzword many of us have dreampt of in hot lusty dreams that we wouldn't admit to our mothers. The dream is the borged media box: combining the functionality of your Tivo, your MP3 Box, DVD Player, CD Player, and so much more. It's not here yet despite lots of trying, but its getting closer.

The war on drugs is expensive, and, like most wars, deadly. But it looks like it isn't going to go away any time soon. With that as a given, why not let those who want to wage war on drugs do it in an online gaming environment? The cost of setting up the servers for "Drug Czar" would be lots less than the cost of all those street arrests, border interdictions, and air intercept missions in Peru and Colombia. And, best of all, no one would get hurt.

Last week Sean, a 16-year-old computer geek and gamer who has never been in serious trouble, was thrown out of a Texas school and ordered into "alternative education" for responding to a year's worth of bullying and harassment, some verbal, some physical. His crime was to fantasize out loud about revenge. He got as much due process as Chinese dissidents get. His father, a Slashdot reader and graphic designer, has pulled his son out of the system and into home schooling. He asks for help and advice. This is a story about life in America's schools these days for people who are "different," who live at the mercy of jerks and cover-your-butt administrators. (Read more.)

Talk about an interactive movie! Christopher Nolan's Memento is the most inventive movie in eons, not as graceful as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon but even more intriguing. Memento starts messing with your head from the opening shot, and since you don't dare stop paying attention for even a second, the film pulls you along in a way that's both rare and exciting. Spoilage warning: plot is talked about, but no endings are given away. (Read more.)

TheKompany has released a few programs that will surely interest KDE users and Linux users in general. Click below to read about their new software releases. (If you don't know what -- or who -- TheKompany is, you can read Linux.com's interview with TheKompany president Shawn Gordon.)

For more than a week now, two of the world's superpowers have been nose-to-nose, endangering not only global security but their own valuable and increasingly important economic relationship, because one culture can't apologize for an obvious accident and the other culture insists that only an apology can end the crisis. Anyone who still harbors Utopian fantasies about the Virtual State -- you know, the Net and Web, global community, the digital economy and interactivity all combining to shatter existing boundaries, etc. -- should find the current U.S.-China confrontation finishing them off. The state is hyperreal -- it operates like software. It seems stable enough while the power is on and it hasn't run into any major bugs, but interrupt the power supply or corrupt it, and the state falls apart. (Read more.)

2001 does not look like a good year for computer and Internet businesses, but I expect 2002 to be decent, if not spectacular, for a number of reasons including IRS policies. I also predict that Microsoft's software leasing concept will be more acceptable to businesses than you might expect, as will Red Hat Network and other subscription-based software support schemes. But before we go on, let's accept the fact that 1998 and 1999 were unusually good, and that we're unlikely to see anything like those years again in our lifetimes. We not only had Internet companies popping up all over the place -- much faster than they should have, in my opinion -- but we also had a major pre-Y2K hardware and software buying frenzy.

Blow is a good movie. The minute George Jung (played by Johnny Depp) says in a voice-over that "everything is perfect," you know the roller coaster that is his life is about to start rocketing downhill. From The French Connection to Traffic to this week's example, drug movies are almost always apocalyptic, with dizzying rizes and falls. And the falls are always -- always -- signaled by DEA and FBI blue-helmeted SWAT teams battering down doors and shrieking "go, go, go!," one of the standard cinematic cliches of our time. Hollywood -- where drugs are probably as popular as in any other neighborhood, if you believe the police blotter -- never quite knows what to make of drugs, or how to portray the drug culture. In some ways, this movie is about that mixed message. Spoilage warning: plot is discussed, not endings. Add your own review. (Read more.)

The media is so stuffed with Tech Slump stories these days, that many people might not know just how many online subcultures online are booming -- auctions, women's communities, gaming, Open Source, entertainment, p2p, Weblogs and, most of all, sex. There is no slump in sex sites, says Robert P. Libbon of American Demographics Magazine. He cites a report from sextracker.com that the number of free adult Web sites grew from 22,100 in l997 to 280,300 last year. Sex-for-pay sites grew from 230 to 1,100 during the same period. (Read more.)

Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies from O'Reilly, presents p2p as the next great thing on the Internet. Maybe. (Please - jump into this discussion). This book will tell you every technical detail you ever dreamed of knowing about peer-to-peer, but it fails to make the case that this complex, collaborative, subterranean technology will have much impact or appeal beyond the tech elite obsessively engaged in making and touting it. And, of course, keeping free -- some will say stolen -- music alive.(Read more).

Mark 'Nurgle' Collins contributes the piece below on some of the factors which undeniably influence the state of Linux games, espcially for developers hoping to make money by selling them. I haven't been there in a few months (been hooked on various Free games instead), but I know I bought Quake III Arena from dedicated shelf space at EB -- so Mark's optimism can't be that far off the mark.

After Columbine, many Americans blamed the Net for the massacre. "Are videogames turning your kids into killers?" asked the cover of one newsmagazine. Last friday, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft said video games contribute to an "ethic of violence." The truth is, many more kids kill themselves then others, often because of bullying, a subject about which Ashcroft had nothing to say. The question really is whether vicious kids and hostile school environments are turning kids into killers. It's a question neither politicians nor the media seem to want to ask. (Read more.)

Collaborative filtering and comment programs are all the rage these days on the Net, a symbol of empowerment, choice, freedom, self-policing, even protection. Thanks to automated software, and to addictively-gamelike moderation systems, media are becoming increasingly personalized: "me media." But as usual with things technological, people are sometimes drawn to neat stuff without spending much time mulling the consequences. republic.com, an important new book by Constitutional scholar Cass Sunstein argues that there is such a thing as a citizen -- and that filtering programs may undermine citizenship and a democratic culture. According to Sunstein, software is helping us talk only to ourselves. This will be heresy to some, but he's got a point. (Read more).