[DECtalk] Welcome new members!

[Jayson Smith]

Hello,
I'd like to take a short break from our current discussions about copyright,
adult material and the like to welcome all our new members!  I sent an
announcement about this list changing domain names to Top Tech Tidbits on
Thursday, a weekly newsletter.  If some of you here are interested let me
know and I'll provide a subscribe address.  Anyway, it seems that this
announcement got to some people who didn't otherwise know about this list.
So welcome!  Also, the correct address to use when writing to the list is
dectalk at bluegrasspals.com and you should ignore any references to
jaybird.no-ip.info.
Now, for those of you who don't know, all this recent discussion has
centered around the unofficial DECtalk archive.  This is a collection of
MP3, wav and other files where DECtalk and other speech synthesizers are
singing and doing other funny things.  There are also many hardware
synthesizer demos.  Just two nights ago I tried to get Planetmirror to
mirror the archive.  All was going well, then someone at Planetmirror was
looking through the transfer logs and saw files in the Talking Dictionary
directory which, from filenames alone, would appear to be illegal copies of
popular and definitely copyrighted songs.  Even though these files are, in
fact, really stupid files of MIDI/Karaoke music mixed with dictionary voices
speaking the lyrics to the songs, and even though the www.dictionaraoke.org
site thinks this is legal under fair use, this mirror may still get pulled.
They haven't updated the mirror in nearly a day, and it's supposed to update
four times a day.  So that's what all this discussion has been about.
Anyway, greetings to all the new members and feel free to chime in or ask
questions!
Jayson.