Slashdot Mirror

Now, the way gravity works (in graviton language) is that gravitons can be emitted or absorbed by anything with a nonvanishing stress tensor. (The bigger the stress tensor, the more easily this happens) So say two massive objects are moving along; Alice (having a nonzero stress) emits a graviton, and recoils by conservation of momentum. Bob (also having a nonzero stress) absorbs this graviton, and also recoils. So effectively both Alice and Bob have changed their momentum, i.e. exerted a force on one another.

I'm hoping that someone can clarify this for me: I'm certainly not a Physics major, but if two particles come near each other and recoil from each other as a result of a graviton exchange, wouldn't that be a bit backwards from what actually happens? Namely, gravity is attractive (I think we all can agree on that!) and so it would seem that the absorption of a graviton would cause a particle to accelerate towards whence the graviton came.

Now, in my silly little physics-naive head, the only way to make this work with Conservation of Momentum would be to postulate that gravitons have negative mass. Is this so? Just curious. Last I heard the existance of the graviton proper hadn't yet been affirmed by observation and in fact this whole bit about integrating quantum mechanics and gravity was still causing some fair number of very intelligent people to bang their head against very solid objects.

I'd appreciate it if someone could screw my head on straight with regards to this: how does a graviton work? Might gravity actually not exhibit wave/particle duality? Please shake a clue stick in my direction.

David E. Weekly

David E. Weekly

David E. Weekly

All the same, it would be nice if they actually said when and where we could buy these and how much they will cost. I mean, if it's going to be $1000 for a 75Gb HDD, and they're going to be on sale in Korea in five months, then it's not such an exciting announcment, neh? On the other hand if they're on sale later today at Fry's, Egghead, and Buy.com for $150 each, this is one of the most kickass revolutions in storage history. I'm guessing that the truth is somewhere inbetween those two extremes; I'd just like to know where.

David E. Weekly

How many serious companies do you know claim that their base technologies came from aliens?

They also claim that the fabrication plants are refusing to manufacture their chips or couch for their technology because it would make their other clients obsolete! Smells a bit fishy to me, really...

David E. Weekly

There are, of course, a number of issues that would need to be worked out. A lot of people might try and cheat the system, for instance, so we'd have to figure out a way to implement some sort of trust/verification network. But all-in-all I think that this would make for a fabulously useful product for all of mankind. Most people end up losing their data because frankly off-site backups are quite difficult and/or expensive. We should make the process easy for folks.

There might exist the possibility of combining this technology with a project like Freenet...distributed storage and distributed serving of information aren't that far off from each other in the grand scheme of things...

David E. Weekly

David E. Weekly

David E. Weekly

This is unless, of course, everyone on slashdot requests their FBI file, in which case you throw their data way off. But just to warn you.

David E. Weekly

So the short of it is yes, you're allowed to make tape copies, CD-R burns, MP3 uploads into private lockers, copies from your CD to your hard drive, etc. -- just make sure that it doesn't get passed around too much. (Too much being defined as more than ~$1000 worth of goods in a year as per the Net Copy Act.)

Most relevantly, the RIAA has made public statements that they are not going to after individual consumers who copy their own music for personal use. So regardless of what you think about its actual legality, you will not get in trouble for it.

IANAL, but I have been in this industry for 3 years.

David E. Weekly

David E. Weekly (dew, Think)

From http://david.weekly.org/code/napster.php3 :

"c:\WINDOWS\DESKTOP\mp3s\Nirvana-Lithium.mp3"
[GASP!] Napster SENT the COMPLETE location of the file!!!! Does this mean that there is a way to coax the client to offer up ANY file?


Uhm. Someone should check into this. If a file is not in the user's listed mp3's or their chosen directory, does the napster client still send it?

Also, the article shows that when requesting a file, the client sends the full path name, but no info is given when SENDING a file. I wonder if something like "SEND ../../../../../../../../autoexec.bat" would work.

This could be really bad.

I posted this on superspecialquestions.com, the web BBS that M. Doughty (of the band Soul Coughing) runs.

legislating the number OR i'll chew my audio, thanks.

The 5% nation has switched from offering an mp3-encoded Soul Coughing recording each month in favor of releasing a greater volume of material in the Liquid Audio format -- the catch being that these Liquid Audio files are only playable for 30 days.

The deal, as I understand it, is that more music can be released in the Liquid Audio format, since the 30-day timeout makes a future commercial release of the music more lucrative.

Let me explain why I feel this is a Bad Thing. The issue is complicated, but I'll be as breif as I can.

Liquid Audio is very different from mp3.

First, it's a "secure format". That means that (either by patent or trade secret) only Liquid Audio (the company) and its licensees can make players for these files. It also means that you can't easily convert a Liquid Audio track into another format.

Second, that 30-day time limit is more than just an inconvenience. It raises questions. Clearly I'm not supposed to be able to get around that 30-day limit. But is it a legal restriction, or just a technological one? What's the legal status of a program I might write to to convert a Liquid Audio file into a .wav or .mp3 file? Such programs exist, and they get called "cracks", and talked about as if they're seriously under the table. They're hard to find. Are they illegal? What about the simple solution -- if I get a headphone-plug-to-headphone-plug cable, put one end in the "out" jack on my sound card, put the other end in the "in" jack, and play the Liquid Audio track while I record to a regular wave file? Is that legal? Wave files are easy to encode as mp3s. Am I allowed to redistribute the resulting file?

If we don't ask questions like these, they're going to be answered the way record companies want rather than the way we (as either fans or musicians) might want. Explaining why those answers aren't likely to be the same is a little bit of a task. I'll do the best I can, and provide links. If you're interested, they'll cover the topic much more thoroughly than I'm going to here.

About Mp3:
There is a political battle being fought over the mp3 format. Mp3, like many formats to come (trust me here), makes it possible to store and transfer high-quality audio recordings digitally within reasonable a size range and with reasonable transfer speed. This is becomes increasingly true as storage and network technologies allow for larger and larger files to be reasonable for storage and transfer. Suddenly, it's physically possible to receive and entire albums in digital format over the internet. No one needs to manufacture a CD. No one needs to ship CDs to stores. No one needs to run stores, and no one needs to go out to stores to get music. Record companies are terrified. That's because the business of physically distributing music media is very profitable, and in the near future, it will probably be very outdated -- unless record companies get their way and are able to create an artificial demand for the distribution of music. They've banded together as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to fight mp3. One of the most effective arguments they're using to convince people that such a system needs to be put in place deals with artist compensation and copyright protection. But before I get into that, here are some links for information on mp3 and what record companies are doing about it:

http://www.riaa.com/
http://slashdot.org/ (search for "RIAA")
http://david.weekly.org/writings/sdmi.php3

About Copyright:
There was a time when Copyright made perfect sense. When printing presses were the only way to copy a publishable work, the trade-off was universally beneficial. Printing presses were expensive. Copyright made it possible for people with printing presses to profit from publishing a peice of writing, and didn't limit the rights of people who didn't have printing presses, since they had no reasonable way to copy printed works anyway. People with printing presses were happy, people without printing presses lost nothing of value, and authors could be rewarded for their efforts. When we stretch copyright to cover digital media, however, things get a lot more complicated. Anyone can copy a computer file. In fact, copying digital media is implicit in doing a lot of things that we have other metaphors for as well. To view this web page, for example, you've got to copy it from a server on the Internet. In its journey from that server to your computer, it is copyied between many other computers on the internet that you never have to pay attention to. When it arrives at your computer, it is copied around several times in RAM to get it into a format that will make sense to you, and it is probably copied from the RAM onto your disk for temporary storage to speed things up if you want to view it again in the near future. Then it's copied to a special place in the RAM, which is read by your video card, which then transforms it into the light you're seeing. Then it gets copied about in very similar ways in your eyes, your optic nerves, and in your brain. Worse, the whole web page, like any Liquid Audio track, image, or computer program, is represented within your computer as a number. What are the consequenses of legislating the rights people have over numbers and how they chose to interpret them? Copyright in the present day has become a very complicated issue. It's obviously still important to reward artists and authors for their work, but it's not at all clear how we should do it. Here are some links to pages which talk about what's wrong with the kind of Copyright that many record companies (and software companies before them) are in favor of:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/reevaluating-copyrig ht.html
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/dat.html
http://www.public-domain.org/old.html

Because of the mp3s released via the 5% nation, I used to count Soul Coughing amoungst the most politically progressive bands in terms of digital media policy. Such venerable (and notably non-major-record-label-affiliated) musicians as Frank Black and They Might Be Giants have released entire albums in the mp3 format. While I'm not sure it's really up to musicians to keep tabs on issues like these, it's certainly nice to see.

and this is an exerpt from a later post in the thread:

// I enjoy it when people like my music, but it's MY music. I did it. I put myself into it, and it's mine. I have a right to be compensated for it if you want to use it. The free distribution of mp3's takes away that right//

I can go out on the street right now and start selling fire. I can make the fire by banging some rocks together near some dry leaves, and I can sell it on sticks. If you've ever actually tried to start a fire by banging rocks together, you know that it's pretty difficult. So it would take a lot of hard work to make that fire. But if someone bought my fire from me, they could just turn around and start spreading it onto other sticks, and giving it away! Shouldn't I have some kind of right to profit from the fire I worked so hard to make? I don't think so. It was just a bad investment. Anyone can make fire cheap, and once fire is made, anyone can spread it cheap. What right do I have to stop them?

It comes back to the issue of how we're goinging to make music something someone can reasonably do for a living. I don't know how we should do that, but I know that a situation in which musicians get paid because people aren't allowed to do something which is essentially very easy to do will never work out. Getting controlled substances is considerably harder than copying digital media, and look how well the War on Drugs is doing. So why don't we drop that idea and start thinking very hard about what we can do instead?

http://david.weekly.org/kde/
David E. Weekly (dew)

Keep in mind that MP3 is not actually an "open" system as in "open source software." You still have to license it from Fraunhofer/Thomson.

Links to a Mac version of Yamaha SoundVQ can be found at VQF Kingdom.

Currently there is NOT a Linux version, perhaps a Japanese-speaking Linux nerd can talk with the folks at NTT about licensing TwinVQ.

There is a hardware VQF player coming out in Japan in fall 1999 called SolidAudio. You can read a review of the prototype here.

I found this In the latest Be newsletter. I nearly peed my pants reading it. Enjoy!
David E. Weekly (dew)