Slashdot Mirror

And since nobody knows how to change a person's mind about these things, and it is known how to change a person's body, the body has to be changed.

I think the possibility of being able to change the sex of someone's brain would bring up a much bigger ethical dilemma than changing the sex of that person's body. See a short story about such a thing for an example.

There a are a lot of quirks. For example, All You Need to Know About the Music Business mentions in passing at one point, that until recently, jukebox owners didn't have to pay royalties every time a song got played, because they were legally toys.

Wow, a wooden computer would look really nice with a wooden MIDI keyboard plugged into it (at least, for us music geeks, anyway).

Download free music.

One of the legal uses of P2P networking listed is ringtone sharing, but ringtones are the same as any other form of music: the owner of the copyright dictates whether anyone is allowed to copy them or not. This means that ringtones based on chart music or TV theme tunes, for example, cannot legally be copied.

It's not uncommon these days for a record company to make more money from a ringtone of a single than the actual CD sales, so I wouldn't be surprised if they got upset about them being shared freely.

Free music you can copy

What if a CD copy-protection system was developed, which did not compromise sound quality nor cause compatibility problems...

...The disc will present itself as a CD-ROM to PCs, a Mac CD-ROM to Mac computers, a VCD to DVD players and CDDA disc to audio CD players.

Hmm, something that will be compatible with everything and not compromise sound quality... I couldn't see any mention of VideoCDs in the article, but it's a video format that uses mp3 as the audio layer. Would it feature the music videos as well? Either way, the audio would be lossy. Then there's the Mac and PC (which presumably should be "Windows") compatible layers. Do they have .wav or .flac files on them? Oh no, because anyone can copy those. They'll probably just be very low bitrate lossily compressed files that no one would want to copy as there's no way to stop people copying computer files. So that would be lossy. Then there's the CD audio layer (what's left of it after a fair amount of the space on the disc has been taken up with the other layers). Assuming CD players can actually find and read it, it'll be lossless, but there will be far less room for any actual music.

I seriously doubt this will be compatible with everything and not compromise sound quality. There is a format that is completely lossless and works on all of the above mentioned media players. It's the regular CD audio standard, and it really shouldn't be tampered with.

Free music!

Too bad too few women in [the advert] (maybe 1:50).

I think that's just representational of how much women like computers in general at the moment. Hopefully that will change as people are less into stereotypes when, say, choosing what to buy their kids as Christmas presents (I was lucky enough to have a Commodore +4 when I was about 5 or 6 so grew up with computers).

At any rate, my girlfriend and I are doing our bit to spread the word about Firefox :)

Free music!