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It'd been known early on from Microsoft legal that they would "rather see Sender ID die than back down on their patent claims". Sender ID is going nowhere.

OK, where does it say that firefox mascot dude is a red panda though?

Cute lil' fella. (him not you...)

Woah, hold the presses, since when did firefox have RSS support? I was just fffin around on the thunderbird site sniffing for it...

Mention of FireFox RSS

Now if we can just find out what happend to Netscape v5.

Bah. Im suprised no one has mentioned housecall yet:

http://housecall.antivirus.com

Housecall is a web-based virus scanner that, since it is loaded anew every time, always has the latest virus definitions. Since it installs nothing but temporary cache files, you dont have to worry about it slowing down your machine.

Because of the nature of the application it can't always clean the offending virii/malware, but it will at least alert you to their presence and give you their names so that you can manually remove them. When combined with stinger, spybot and google it's an excellent choice for on-site calls to machines without AV or for your old boxen that just cant afford the extra cycles for full-time AV bloat.

If you prefer to do the offline thing, try the Knoppix anti-virus distribution (weak link I know). Once again it isn't a permanently installed application and since the OS isn't running it can slap down bugs before they're loaded into memory.

Cheers!

Come on, use your real name Stef?

oreilly.com: Stef, what's it like working with a bunch of geeks who don't appreciate the importance of marketing?
Stef: Remember the last time you had a hemorrhoidal flare-up? Same experience.

Actually, if you took the time the time to read the article and then do a little check on the contest organizers you would see that your theory is flawed:

Lets extrapolate the data (we'll make it easier on you and your limited brain capacity, only looking at two of them):

1) Chris Hurley:
A quick google search with the term, "Chris Hurley", Wardriving turns up many useful results. I'll use his short bio at oreilly to prove my point - "Chris Hurley is a Principal Information Security Engineer working in Washington DC on vulnerability assessments, penetration testing, forensics, and incident response on both wired and wireless networks. He is the organizer of the WorldWide WarDrive and has been the subject of several interviews and stories regarding the WWWD. Chris is a primary organizer of DefCon and the DefCon WarDriving Contest."

2) Frank Thornton:
We'll use the same method to find information on Frank Thornton, since it has proven to be useful. - From Oreilly: "Frank Thornton runs his own consulting firm, Blackthorn Systems and as a detective and forensics expert has investigated over 100 homicides and thousands of other crime scenes."

Perhaps it's just me, but from these two gentleman alone, it seems as though they are more than just "computer nerds talking out of their ass".

Please check out this.

Please check out this.

The fact is that WEP is better than no WEP, that if you use WDS you gotta use WEP instead of WPA because of the MAC addresses, and that you should still use higher level encryption layers anyway for sensitive information.

Deploying WEP is easy (and I don't even mean using it with the Wireless wizard in XP SP2 that will deploy passwords for you).

i agree with the parent, and i found these comments to be very interesting. if you are up to date on firmware patches, wep might be enough for you.

if you are trying to protect missile launch codes, i might look elsewhere, but for day-to-day crap...

XP SP2 breaks nmap

This same idea was advanced by a short story called We'll Return, After This Message, by AutoDesk founder John Walker, written in 1989 and published in 1993.

I also mentioned the same general idea in my 2002 OReillyNet weblog item, SETI not through telescopes but microscopes, about how rugged microscopic messages might be the only ones to survive millions of years.

As I recall, the Mandrake 10.0 versions (both community and release) will try and "fix" the MBR and partition table if it sees a Windows XP install on the same drive as the Mandrake install. This results in a broken Windows install - this issue was minimized on the dev lists and wasn't fixed in the release version.

Blew away the MBR and almost had to reinstall until I found the "dd" trick that allows you to rewrite it.

In any case, I fixed it by partitioning manually and loading from the NTLDR in Windows.

See here for a description of the same problem with FC2, here for a description of how to make a dual-boot system with problem work. Lastly, see here for the skinny from Mandrake themselves.

Of course, one should always have backups of any and all valuable data, but it's still a pain to bring a system back from the undead.

All these posts saying "If it can be heard, it can be copied" and the ilk are missing the point. The publishing industry's agenda for perpetuating their needless existance is something like:

1. Get DRM legally mandated in all new analog and digital recording devices
2. Make it illegal, punishible by heavy fines or prison, to tamper with DRM technolgoies (think Stallman's "Right to Read")
3. Make it illegal to own or use non-DRM-equipped devices. Or better still, wait for a new standard (digital television, higher-density formats, etc) to usher in the new wave of DRM-only devices
4. "Educate" the public about the necessity for "intellectual property" law to stay the way it is (e.g. "this is how it's always been") and discouragement self-publishing ("All MP3's are illegal...", etc)
5. Use their lobby to help in the effort to "harmonize" intellectual property law around the world

It's not going to matter if it can be copied-- simply the act of having the capability to copy will be illegal. If you don't have all DRM-compliant devices, or if you tamper with your DRM-compliant devices, you'll be charged and trucked off to prison.

We need a revolution in "intellectual propery", and we need it quickly. Too many people already fail to understand that the system is a social contract, and the terms of that contract are negotiable by the people-- not dictated by the corporations.

It is no stretch to think that, if they could get it, the DRM helmet is their ultimate goal.

In fact, in the presentation on IronPython at OSCON, they also did the Pie-thon benchmark and IronPython WAS SLOWER than CPython. See the presentation. IP was 70% faster than CPython on the PyStone benchmark, which was what's been written about in the past, but on the Pie-thon benchmark, it came out about 4% slower (slides 24, 25). While IronPython was faster on most of the individual bits of the benchmark, he would have been pied in the face as well.

Its interesting to do a head-to-head comparison of the benchmarks Parrot completed (speedups are relative to CPython):

b1: IronPython 2.1x faster, Parrot 1.2x faster
b2: IP same speed, Parrot 3x faster
b3: IP 1.5x faster, Parrot 2.1x slower
b6: IP 1.2x faster, Parrot 1.5x faster

Score: 2 each. Both authors claim they can improve their benchmarks significantly yet, but you have to feel it will be easier for Dan as he's optimising the VM itself, Jim Hugunin can only optimize his IL output for an existing VM.

" ... Breakfast menu includes pastries & breakfast sandwiches ... "

The pringles can antennas work really well. I've built two of them. There's plenty of really good guides on how to make the antennas and how they work.

Wish I could edit my own posts - just as after I sent this I found an interesting article by Tim O'Reilly. He suggests using book sales to measure market trends.

I don't know if this will turn out to be accurate, but it's at least somewhat objective. A neat idea.

Hey, JavaScript isn't so bad.

• 
  
  I was unwilling to turn my trusty PC into a Linux box, so he popped in a CD with Knoppix, on it, rebooted, and voila -- instant Linux. Knoppix is a free version of Linux that you can boot directly from a CD, available free for downloading and then burning onto CD.

  
  then ... oops ...

  
  
  I was surprised at how simple it was to install and get up to speed on Linux. And the desktop has some nice touches that Windows could learn from. The applications didn't win me over, though. In fact, when it comes to Linux on the desktop, I don't get the point, really. Yes, the desktop is pretty, but I was expecting more than a pretty face. On the desktop, Linux may be more stable than Windows, but with Windows XP, I haven't had problems with Windows crashes. I'm a long-time shareware fan, and there's far more useful and easily available shareware available for Windows than Linux. And given that we live in a Windows-centric world, it just seems like too much labor and work to try and live in desktop Linux.
  
  seems windows users still want to pay for the convenience of MS tools.
  
  
  

Gee that's amazing considering how the web was invented during the time of IPv4. See here for information about IPv5. IPv1 is probably lost to antiquity by now.

I maintain that 99.99% of config options could and should be solved by redesigning the interface. In the case of window focus, probably the best solution is to get rid of the windowing paradigm (which in my opinion has exceeded too far it's useful lifespan).

Read "The humane interface" if you want to learn about a successful interface built from the ground up without windows nor pointing devices. The resulting system is very near in concept to the Command Line interface, but whit 30 years of usability lore added in it; and "Zoomworld" could be a nice replacement for almost all situations where a desktop is better than a command interface.

I use a combination of blosxom, which I also use to write my blog, and blagg, which reads my feeds and generates blog entries of the new entries in a separate "news" category. In fact, I have replaced blagg with a rewrite in Python that I call (obviously) plagg, but I haven't done its web page yet, so stay tuned...

In RFC 2606, example.com, example.net and example.org are reserved for testing. Therefore, I always use [somename]@example.com for my fake e-mail needs.

There's some good info here:

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/4051

and here:

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2606.html

Maybe HailStorm was a step in this direction? :-)

... the emerging phenomenon of wireless mesh networking, which this bill would surely outlaw as well.

I seriously cannot stand Orrin Hatch. I used to be a Sean Hannity listener until he had Hatch on his program (who proceeded to bump me off the line as a caller, btw).

Copyright holders (especially media copyright holders): Wake the fsck up. Your existing business model has been obviated by technology. No amount of legislation can save it now. FIGURE OUT SOMETHING ELSE.

Many would disagree. O'Reilly wrote up a good piece about the two technologies a while back. Its a good overview of what they offer and the pros and cons of each.

A quick rundown? Zeroconf (Rendezvous) provides a way to discover services and addresses automatically, without address duplication by multiple devices. UPnP does the same thing. The difference is that UPnP also dictates HOW to talk to devices and services, while Zeroconf forces devices to know how to talk to each other.

Taft

I wouldn't call UPNP "superior" by any stretch of the imagination.

Comparisons have been done. I'd rather have low traffic and better service separation vs the "use-http-for-everything" strategy.

This one is not a distance record, but it did span continents and is an interesting article. Here's an article from last year about longer distances, albeit with higher power gear.

The ham radio record for 2.4 GHz is a lot longer, but it's a great start. Here are some results from Region 1, Europe, including Earth-Moon-Earth.

Here's the site for the San Bernadino Microwave Society (Hams). They've been doing this sort of thing for ages.

"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain

os2004 is being held in Portland the last week of July.

He probably shouldn't but it would be interesting to see him add to some of the tutorials or discussion groups.

Thanks for the info - looks interesting.

Fixed URLs (the first two got fscked up):
http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2002/11/22/i tunes_perl.html
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/newsletter s/20021127.html

The only information that is needed for the success of mono is the following: are the relevant ECMA standards 334 and 335 and just RAND, or are they really RAND and royalty free as miguel and others have claimed?

If it is really RAND and royalty free, it will become my favorite development platform. Working with .NET is really very nice and productive. Microsoft will finally have made a valuable and lasting contribution to computer science.

If not, it is just another poisoned fruit by microsoft.
--

Have you actually done it? I have been running Airsnort in my apartment with two encrypted nets visible and have had absolutely no results so far. Probably not enough traffic, but also thought THIS article interesting. Would be nice to hear if anybody has actually been successful or just repeating the 'myth'(?).

This "bash Flash" thread is partially earned and partially geek FUD. In specific response to ".com B4 .storm"s comments...

• You can't bookmark a specific page in Flash unless the DEVELOPER has prepared a way for you to do so. Most don't bother. Ditto with frame-based sites, or sites that use extensive DHTML/JavaScript for UI adjustment. Heck, some form-based sites can't even be bookmarked.
• Again, a drawback with the DEVELOPER, not the TECHNOLOGY. It's ridiculously easy to make a block of text selectable in a Flash movie.
• Accessibility has been a sore spot for Flash, agreed. The most recent versions of Flash provide support for MSAA (Microsoft Access Accessibility) tags for browser readers -- think of it as ALT tags for Flash objects. Of course, it only works in IE on Windows, but it's a start.
• Macromedia has published the specifications for SWF. This O'Reilly's article that points out Flash is closed but SWF is open. That's why Adobe made LiveMotion (now discontinued because it couldn't compete with Flash), or Electric Rain can make Swift3D... the SWF format is available. (I see you conveniently ignored GIF, even though it is far more widely used than PNG... but, alas, it is not an open standard.) Are PostScript and PDF bad because they are not open source? Omigod, what happens if Adobe goes out of business tomorrow? Uh... if you are seriously worried about things like that, you have a very weak grasp of the economy; companies with highly succesful products used by millions of people rarely "go under" without years of forewarning, and even then they are generally bought by others so the successful products can march on. (Flash was originally called FutureSplash, before being bought by Macromedia... Freehand was published by Aldus before Adobe bought the company for PageMaker and sold Freehand to Macromedia... hmmm...) As for the threat of royalties, neither Macromedia or Adobe are that stupid, and you know it.

Finally, of course Flash is not a replacement for HTML, XML and CSS. But those things are not replacements for Flash. None of the open standards you mentioned are even remotely capable of doing the things SWF does. You are not making a useful, level comparison. Next you'll say that DVDs are not as good as CDs because they can't be used to play music in your home stereo.

People need to use iMixes to help each other find the good music from independent musicians. I didn't know the Ben Folds EPs on iTunes weren't backed by the RIAA in some way, but now that I do (if I can confirm it), I'll buy them all. Look at the iMix on that page and maybe you'll find something you like.

Everytime you plunk your change down for iTunes, CDs, DVDs, whatever, remember that a portion of that goes not only to supporting multimedia conglomerates that control everything it also goes to supporting DRM, lawsuits against others, and lavish parties where people enjoy laughing at you for buying their shitty music.

BTW, the Windows crowd might not be as clueless about BSD as some think: Windows Services for UNIX (SFU) 3.5. Apparently it is based on BSD (OpenBSD according to this OSNews.com thread). Its free now, and in some ways I like it a bit better than Cygwin. When I need to be on a Windows box, I tend to install either SFU or Cygwin. SFU is very handy once you get some of the stuff from the Interop UNIX tools warehouse installed.

The difference between your speculations and reality is that "Pringles cantennas" simply use the Pringles can as a housing for a "shotgun" Yagi antenna. Anything which relies solely on the Pringles can will do a whole lot of nothing, but it's possible to use several different varieties of ordinary cans (Pringles, beef soup, etc) to house a good antenna.

While it's certainly better for anyone just looking for gain without any hassle to get a premanufactured product like the Super Cantenna, a large part of geekdom is the ability (or at least desire) to MacGyver things like a high-gain directional antenna from parts obtained at the hardware and grocery stores. Believe it or not, some people would rather spend 20 hours and $50 designing, building, tuning and tweaking an antenna rather than simply dropping $20 on a premanufactured one. Some people would simply rather do things themselves.

Today, if you want a freely available desktop-oriented Linux distribution, you have to hunt far and wide. If you looked a week ago, you would have Fedora Core 2, which suffers from this major bug, Mandrake 10 Community - which is a pain to update. Knoppix is good but it's not really meant for installation though it can be done. A quick look on SuSe's downloads page shows that they do offer it free (minus commercial components), but it's either in LiveCD format or has to be installed via FTP.

So, unfortunately today, we don't have the luxury we used to of being able to simply grab the 3 iso's for RedHat and installing them onto our system. Sure we could use Debian, or Gentoo, or even go out on a limb and try FreeBSD - but none of these are desktop-oriented, though you can achieve a nice desktop system if you work at it.

I think that's what he's talking about. :)

The real meat of the whole thing starts here.

A really, really long chain of postings between the guy who wrote the article and a guy who seems to know OSX rendering pretty well.

My take on this is that OSX has tacked a lot of issues with making vector display practical, and trying to maintain a good balance between "everything is a vector and you all need new computers to run the OS" and "everything is a bitmap and you can run this on a 286". Personally I think a lot of graphic designers will be aghast at the limitations an all-vector approach will impose for things like icons - you can see guys spending days tweaking pixels. You may think you've done them a favor by taking that options away, but these are the guys that make your interfaces look good! Treat them nice, I say.

I would also say each is holding his own pretty well in this argument, it did not get too far into name calling and the like (gets more technical as you progress - my link takes you pretty much to the point wher ethey drop the childish bits). I do think the Avalon guy is a little more ignorant of what is going on in OS X rendering-wise than the OS X is of Avalon - the OS X guy for a while was unwilling to believe that anyone would actually take an approach with only vectors, but understood fully that aspect later on.

The Avalon guy has a good point that it's cheaper to send a lot of vectors to the GPU than to calculate very high DPI images for display... but I think the OS X guy has a good point that you can't have the GPU do everything.

Here's a simply summary from my read (not comprehensive):

Article guy: Maintains the vector retained model is the only scalable UI solution. UI's should only be collections of vectors (including all icons and the like) with everything, even text, being rendered by a GPU on your video card.

Also maintains that parts of OSX are not really PDF/DPS based, and therefore will not scale.

Has not yet answered if he thinks it's a good idea for the GPU to be doing typography (like kerning).

Longhorn will require new GPU's for sure, from everyone.

Avalon target is display showing about 10,000 primitives.

Avalon targeting high (300dpi+) displays, only path to good performance is feeding vectors to a video card.

OSX Guy: OSX does use PDF/DPS model correctly, elements will scale - renderer can be set to any DPI. To use the GPU for all drawing operations is madness - OS X has quick operations for things like video, and slower but much more exact operations for things like 2D operations. To use GPU for all operations is going to be a disaster as they cannot handle quality 2D operations (like exact text rendering) all that well.

Showed how saving a window as PDF yields scalable elements (not just a raw bitmap).

Maintains that OS X can support high DPI displays, you just change the rendering target.

Can rotate window contents in real time.

Expose is not supposed to be an exact vector resizing as such an operation should be very fast, not exact.

There are plenty of open source solutions for setting up a mesh network, some of which are covered here.

Thomas Krag & Co. also maintain a wiki that you may find useful.

Mobile Mesh runs in user-land and is covered by the GPL. It seems to get the best reviews.

-- Douglas

I work in a web development role in an IT services division at a University in New Zealand and we've been plogging in this very way for around two and half years now. We began using a couple of copies of Radio Userland with one machine syndicating the output of another and pushing the merged content out to our team intranet site, but as more team members got the blog-bug we moved onto MovableType (MT) which we still run now.

Blogging is now an essential part of our team and project management culture. We create seperate blogs for different projects, we setup, host and skin blogs for other teams and projects around campus, and still maintain a core blog for our own webteam which we use as a kind of change-control notification point and issues register.

After a couple of years of use the corpus of blog posts and articles has become a knowledge-base for our teams and projects and a great resource to search against, kind of a common shared Inbox. No more searching through Outlook public-folders or file-systems for some obscure note you made a year ago.

We've recently begun using the XML-RPC interface to MT to make automated remote posts into various blogs from cron jobs or watcher scripts running on web or application servers to let us know when certain events have happened (e.g. performance issues, resource use, change control events/migrations).

Although we dont allow non-authenticated publishing into our blogs we do use category archiving in MT to render certain posts out to locations that are publically available or less restrictive so other interested parties (e.g. pointy-haired types) can get a handle on project progress etc.

It used to take a little evangelising till people saw past a blog as being nothing more than a personal publishing tool, but the culture is now well established and ideas for other uses of the blog facilty pop up regularly.

One feature that's hardly ever used tho (which kinda suprised me) is commenting. I'd say fewer that 5% of posts are ever commented on, the blog tends to be a snapshot in time on a specific subject and further discussion often goes on through email or in project meetings between interested parties following which someone will often make a followup (ie new) post. This sounds a little unstructured but it makes for easier reading than your classic heirachichal threaded discussion which tends to drift out of context.

Despite the articles mention of the issue 'blogorrhea' we've found exactly the opposite in that the volume of pesky emails in the Inbox is now a fraction of what it used to be. We're now disciplined enough to browse blogs of relevance to us for posts by others regarding projects we may be involved with.

I attended the O'Reilly OpenSource convention in 2002 and sat in on a birds-of-a-feather session on blogging while I was there (company included Rael Dornfest and Ben and Mena Trott). At one point during the discussion I asked who else was using their blog for this project management purpose and noone was, pretty much everyone was publishing a personal blog or building a blogging mechanism.

Netscape DID invent JavaScript. They called it LiveScript. "Partly in response to SUN's Java" is inaccurate. Most people say "entirely because of Java". At the time SUN and Netscape were closely allied. SUN had just released Java. But there were problems with Java - it was considered "too hard". To make manipulating Java applets easier, Brendan Eich came up with LiveScript. Netscape later renamed LiveScript to JavaScript - a marketing decision (partly to capitalize on the buzz of Java; partly to emphasize that it was a scripting language designed to make using Java easier). JavaScript was officially released - with press releases from Netscape and SUN - December 4, 1995 (okay, I googled for that date. http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/2001/04 /06/js_history.html)

Little bit more history, while we're at it: remember that Java was originally intended for client side applets - not server side servlets. The whole server side thing came later.

JavaScript/LiveScript was intended to give access to page elements so that the page elements could be tied into applets. The law of unintended consequences kicked in - and developers began using JavaScript as a client side scripting language to manipulate images and document contents, not applets as intended.

Meanwhile, MicroSoft releases JScript (and VBScript for the browser). And Netscape submits JavaScript to ECMA.

All that said, there have been security issues in both Netscape and MicroSoft's implementation of JavaScript/Jscript. My personal opinion is that MicroSoft has made the issues worse with ActiveX controls, etc. Security in JavaScript has improved greatly in the past 8 years; most of today's problems can be laid firmly at the feet of bad implementation of security by the developers of the browser.

I have no idea who could have thought that using executable scripts was a good idea. It was probably the same people who thought up those annoying frames and then used their massive 85% marketshare monopoly to force everyone else to comply. I hope someone will someday give them what they have coming.

freq. hopping : you mean like the first 802.11b cards ? ;)

See this link...

Blogger thinks so

Text:

A wonderful spoof of the Segway (nee "ginger") well worth the bits its printed on. The Megway runs on water , folds for easy transport and storage, and sports a "20 petaflop bioelectrical computer," "Opposable Digits Technology," and "HOT RACING ACTION (action, action, action...)!!!" Also be sure to catch the groovy Megway movie.

Correcty me if I'm wrong, but didn't linuxcare already go bankrupt (or nearly so) once during the DotCom flameout? I seem to recall them having an IPO planned and then canning the IPO and laying off a large portion of their staff in the same week. The only useful thing I remember from them was their bootable business card rescue CDs.

Heck, google doesn't even have a snapshot of text for linuxcare.com indicating it's been down for a while and was recently brought back up. In fact, the top hit for which there is a snippet is an article about linuxcare laying people off.

Seems like some people are getting a bit too excited about the Google IPO and thinking that once again companies with no real business plan can do IPOs worth hundreds of millions of dollars. I'm sorry, but you're going to check your enthusiasm in favor or results for a little while at least.

1. You're absolutely right about the 4.01 spec... but the only relevant "non-visual media" output devices I can think of are braile and text-to-speech browsers. And those can deal with tables that are properly tagged...with headers and scope.

2. From: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/synd/20 01/11/30/accessibility.html?page=2

Screen readers read text linearly; that is, they read across the line from left to right. That causes a problem when attempting to render tables meaningfully for assistive technologies. To solve this problem for simple tables, the guidelines call for labeling of table headers.

Use the summary attribute to indicate the meaning of the table and the headers attribute to associate data cells with their proper row or column. In the following example, notice the use of id attribute in the table headers. Each cell in the body of the table then has a headers attribute which relates it to a specific column.

A speech synthesizer might render this table as follows:

"Caption: Web pages Analyzed by Agency Heads
Summary: This table charts the number of Web pages analyzed by each agency head, what kind of media the pages contain, and whether or not the page is part of the Executive Branch.
Name: A. Jackson, number of pages: 20, Type: text, images, Executive Branch: No
Name: B. Franklin, number of pages: 10, Type: text, images, video, Executive Branch: Yes"

3. See also: http://www.access-board.gov/sec508/guide/1194.22.h tm#(g), produced by The Access Board, "a federal agency committed to accessible design."

(1) I don't personally believe in copying CDs illegally-- but I think we should avoid using unkind words like "piracy" to describe those that do -- instead, we should describe it as an "infringement", much like a parking infringement.

Objection: In an argument, he who gets to define the terms in any way that suits him usually wins. Let us use established legal terms such as "infringement" since they are unambiguous and uncharged with emotional baggage. Let us also point out that creative works do not belong to the "author" of such, but rather belong to the PEOPLE - and that the people, through their representative, the government, have generously provided a limited term of exclusive rights of distribution of the work to the author. You don't own a song/text/movie, you merely have been granted the right to distribute it for a time. It belongs to us, the people... but of course, you would like us to conveniently forget that so you can continue selling us what is already ours over and over again.

(3) I believe that piracy is driven by "overpriced CDs" even though CDs have dropped in price over the years.

Simply put, this is an untrue statement. The price of a CD has held steady, and in fact the profit per unit has RISEN - using the RIAA's own numbers! http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/2496

What a focus on total revenue hides is that the per unit revenue rose almost 7%, from $13.27 to $14.19. (In inflation-adjusted 1992 dollars, the price rose a less dramatic 0.8% from $11.42 to $11.60) That puts in familiar economic territory, where a price increase leads to a decline in quantity purchased. I think that even Ms. Rosen would agree with the theory that if the price rises, we should expect quantity to fall. If she could dig out her introductory economics textbook, I am sure she would find that if the price of an elastic good rises, the total revenue falls. (If she still doesn't believe me, I'll loan her my textbook, or have her call up airline industry executives or restauranteurs.)

I conducted an analysis of the RIAA's market data from 1992 through 2001. After adjusting their market figures for inflation using the Consumer Price Index, I found that the industry has experienced an average price elasticity of 6.3 (CDs taken alone have an average price elasticity over the period of 2.8). 2001's price elasticity was broadly in line with historical norms.

What is the real issue? Perhaps it's that in 1998, the recording industry was able to eke out both a small inflation-adjusted price increase and an increase in unit shipments, and desperately wants to believe that the return to historic norms was due to illicit file sharing rather than the market returning to historical norms of the past decade.

(4) I believe that piracy is driven by overly long copyright duration, even though most pirated works are recent releases.

Overlong copyright does in fact drive piracy on current works. http://www.baen.com/library/palaver4.htm

Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will (long copyright terms) be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers. At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such di