It's not the text rendering quality. It's the fact that in Photoshop, you can write the words on a path, you can twist them and transform them, you can do a number of things very simply. Sure, less simply, you can do that in GIMP as well, but here's the difference. You can't just go in and correct a typo or change the wording on a piece of text, because GIMP's text is raster based while Photoshop's is vector based. Or in other words: It's not the type rendering of plain text but of mushed up, changed text that is the deal killer.
I'm sure the RIAA doesn't have enough good will to put such a plan in action, but... and this is a big but... It's feasible and could be fair. Imagine this:
The fee is not mandated by the government. Instead, ISPs can voluntarily offer it to their customers. The important thing is that it has to be an opt-in service. Sure, an ISP could just raise rates $X and make sure everyone's on it - as a "value-added service" but something like this should remain optional - especially for those of us with no alternative broadband provider.
If you are on the plan, you pay $X/mo extra to your ISP (five is too high, $.25 is too low - come to a decision somewhere in between there.) If you're on the plan, you may download and upload to your hearts content any RIAA material. That means you will not be sued for downloading, OR for uploading.
Music companies and ISPs will want to create ISP-based "music stores." These music stores would offer the entire RIAA catalogue in non-DRM MP3 format, preferably at a high bitrate. If you download it, you own it. It's not a subscription service, you don't pay the fee to access the music store, you pay the fee to access the music. If you prefer a service like Gnutella - say, for example, that you're looking for an ultra-rare remix - you still can't be sued - you have a licence to the RIAA's collected works.
So why the music store in the first place? Well, people are more likely to use a reliable service than P2P or other method, those methods use alot of bandwidth - and most of that is NOT under the ISP's control - which means they have to pay more for it. Additionally, the ISPs and music companies can track which songs are being downloaded, this is so they could pay the labels a fair percentage and the labels could pay the artists a per-download royalty. Finally, the demographic and marketing data (Hmm, turns out 35 year olds DO listen to music...) would advance their business.
Part of that money goes to the artists. Part of that money must go to the artists.
Indie labels will, regrettably, not have the same pull as the RIAA. This is one of the reasons why the RIAA might decide to go this route even though they lose control of the music - it means they regain control of the main method of distribution. However, some indie labels, such as SubPop, are powerful enough that they may also get into the ISP service. However, Indie labels can also set up their own music stores (even form an alliance of source) and they CAN operate under a subscription model. Or perhaps the ISPs will invite indies on board as well.
An alternative way that this could happen is that instead of the RIAA making the first move, the ISPs could set up the music service first - that is, they could say: Our customers have access to a DRM free, pay-by-label, music store. We've already got indie labels on it. You put your price out there for access to your entire catalogue. You want to charge $50, that's fine, but it'll never sell with SubPop charging $0.50. You also do not sue ANY of our customers for copyright infringement.
This model is a workable, feasible, even fair plan, but the problem is that I don't see the RIAA going for anything that's fair - they want their cake and eat it too - which is, like ARIA in Canada, they want their fees for blank CD-R media, and they still want to sue customers.
It would be a beautiful plan. It would make sense. But we've got no reason to trust the RIAA at all in this endeavor. We've got no reason to believe they'd hold up their end of the bargain. We've got no reason to believe they'll play fair. And it has been a decade of bad blood and badwill.
Had the record companies set up something like this in 1998, they wouldn't have been front page on Slashdot for years. Instead, through their own actions, they are dying.
I always thought the first step of dictators to exert more control over the populace (according to historical trends) was invoking a terrifying internal and external enemy, followed by creating a prison system outside the rule of law, developing a paramilitary group of scary young men to terrorize citizens, setting up an internal surveillance system, harass citizens' groups, engage in arbitrary detention and release, target civil servants, artists, and academics with job loss, control the press, cast dissent as treason, and suspend the rule of law.
Confiscating guns seems to me to be, if anything, purely optional, and is almost always done AFTER an armed resistance would have little to no effect anyway.
I agree with you on some points, and you're pretty on track on packet shaping. But "throttling" large use services doesn't seem to me to be the answer. If 99% of your traffic is HTTP traffic, then instead of throttling, put a QOS policy in place that guarantees at least 50% of the available bandwidth for HTTP traffic - don't start pointing at specific protocols and especially not at specific content providers.
Additionally, I think that traffic shaping is a big deal and if there is traffic shaping then traffic shaping policies should be publically accessible to the ISP's customers and potential customers, just like you can't sell a can of Chef Boyardee without listing all the ingredients.
I agree with everything except the French-bashing. The French are actually known for trying out new technologies. The Concorde? The Bullet-Train? The Eiffel Tower? The Metric System? The Guillotine?
Good points all, and you've really got me thinking about that last one:
"the ISP dare not try and do anything to cache/optimise it because they know that the bulk of the traffic is illegal."
I gotta meditate on that.
Well, the problem is that charging for the data isn't going to do anything to resolve bandwidth issues. A user downloading a single large file during peak times at high speeds is going to create more of a bandwidth problem than a user downloading multiple large files via BT staggered over a couple of days. It's because data isn't the limited resource - data is unlimited. It's bandwidth - the capacity of the pipe at any particular time which is limited.
If your neighbor's network is going slower because you're downloading a huge file, that's not a sign of you being a 'bandwidth hog' - it's a sign of improper QoS policies in place. Everybody gets a share of the pipe. If you want a bigger share of that pipe, you can ALREADY pay for more bandwidth, which is the limited resource. Charging for bandwidth AND data is "double dipping"
In my opinion, it's just an excuse to try to maintain the old business models of cable TV (for cable companies) and cellphone/landline (for phone companies) when better alternatives (digital distribution/VoIP) exist.
I was born in 1979, and in 1982, I was three years old and old enough to go with my parents to the New Jersey Shore.
My grandmother on my mother's side owned a small beach house in Bricktown, New Jersey (now known as Brick, New Jersey) and we would travel down there for the summer - both my parents were teachers, so long vacations were the norm. We'd spend the days we weren't at the beach on the boardwalk - this was before the boardwalk was littered with detrius and society started generally collapsing, and we used to go to Seaside Heights most often in those early days, usually starting at the Funtown Pier and working our way to the Casino Pier.
For those of you to never experienced skee-ball, you have missed out on life, for those of you who believe you have played skee-ball in some Dave and Busters somewhere in Milwaukee instead of being there in an open-air arcade with the smell of the salt water and the cool breeze from the ocean wafting in, doubly so.
One of my earliest memories is my father holding me up just as the sun was setting (the time to go home from the boardwalk) as he put a quarter into the Ms. Pac-Man arcade machine - the last game of the beautiful day - and we played together. I still remember the orange walls, the smell of taffy, the music of the arcade playing in my ears, he encouraging me as I avoided, and then chased the ghosts around (I was always afraid of the ghosts and would often go directly from power-pellet to power-pellet, with no sense of strategy or timing, I just hated being on the defensive, I think.)
I don't know why that memory is so strong with me. Maybe it was just a child's unbelievable capacity for joy - something I don't think I have the capacity for now. Maybe it's just that it seems to be a time when I was completely free of fear and harm.
That's probably my earliest memory. Me, Dad, playing the last Ms. Pac-Man game of the day, just outside the arcade, on the boardwalk at Seaside Heights.
I don't know if I could ever go back to the boardwalk today. Even if it was just as grand and glorious as it was that day, I know it could never live up to my memory.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go call my dad and tell him I love him.
We did a story at NetworkPerformanceDaily.com on the appeal of D&D - at least among the IT/Techie set. Yes, it's about pretending to be a wizard or a brawny barbarian - wish fulfillment fantasy... but it's also because the game itself is an aid designed to help creativity by introducing artificial boundaries.
As for starting to play, find a play group and use whatever version of the rules they're using. For D&D, the group is more important than any particular rules set. The best rules won't help you with lousy players, and bad rules are no deterrent for good players. (It's kinda like Monopoly that way.)
"Comics are boys club because boys don't want to read soap opera emo trash."
*cough* Sandman *cough*
Right, but "boys" aren't reading the comics. When was the last time you saw a comics shop with kids in it outnumbering the adults?
No, I think you're onto the right thing for the wrong reason. Comics lend themselves well to short, action stories and simple parables because of the nature of the medium. 22 short pages. Very little text. Lots of artwork. And a history of only being able to tell the most bland of stories due to the legacy of the Comics Code.
I do, in fact, see women reading comics - but those comics are manga stories which are usually published in large compilations that can go on for thousands of pages. In the "manga style", you can tell a long story with subtlety, spend pages exploring a single emotion or moment. But guess what, guys read it too.
There are traditional, non-manga comics which can look at these themes, and I'll pass up "Superman" every time to get to them. But those are rare and hard to pick out amongst the TONS of comic book titles.
I mean, if I'm looking for a long, epic story exploring complex themes, I'll rent a 3 hour movie. Or get a TV series on DVD.
How many non-indie artists can you name that are regularly putting out records? Just the 20 or so constantly played on the radio.
Artists aren't leaving in droves, the contracts prevent them from leaving. But contracts aren't getting renewed, artists are giving up the business rather than completing their contracts, and artists now know not to sign with the RIAA's members.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not the text rendering quality. It's the fact that in Photoshop, you can write the words on a path, you can twist them and transform them, you can do a number of things very simply. Sure, less simply, you can do that in GIMP as well, but here's the difference. You can't just go in and correct a typo or change the wording on a piece of text, because GIMP's text is raster based while Photoshop's is vector based. Or in other words: It's not the type rendering of plain text but of mushed up, changed text that is the deal killer.
It makes you wonder why TV shows don't skip the network alltogether and go straight to DVD in the first place.
I miss Carter. :(
I'm sure the RIAA doesn't have enough good will to put such a plan in action, but... and this is a big but... It's feasible and could be fair. Imagine this:
The fee is not mandated by the government. Instead, ISPs can voluntarily offer it to their customers. The important thing is that it has to be an opt-in service. Sure, an ISP could just raise rates $X and make sure everyone's on it - as a "value-added service" but something like this should remain optional - especially for those of us with no alternative broadband provider.
If you are on the plan, you pay $X/mo extra to your ISP (five is too high, $.25 is too low - come to a decision somewhere in between there.) If you're on the plan, you may download and upload to your hearts content any RIAA material. That means you will not be sued for downloading, OR for uploading.
Music companies and ISPs will want to create ISP-based "music stores." These music stores would offer the entire RIAA catalogue in non-DRM MP3 format, preferably at a high bitrate. If you download it, you own it. It's not a subscription service, you don't pay the fee to access the music store, you pay the fee to access the music. If you prefer a service like Gnutella - say, for example, that you're looking for an ultra-rare remix - you still can't be sued - you have a licence to the RIAA's collected works.
So why the music store in the first place? Well, people are more likely to use a reliable service than P2P or other method, those methods use alot of bandwidth - and most of that is NOT under the ISP's control - which means they have to pay more for it. Additionally, the ISPs and music companies can track which songs are being downloaded, this is so they could pay the labels a fair percentage and the labels could pay the artists a per-download royalty. Finally, the demographic and marketing data (Hmm, turns out 35 year olds DO listen to music...) would advance their business.
Part of that money goes to the artists. Part of that money must go to the artists.
Indie labels will, regrettably, not have the same pull as the RIAA. This is one of the reasons why the RIAA might decide to go this route even though they lose control of the music - it means they regain control of the main method of distribution. However, some indie labels, such as SubPop, are powerful enough that they may also get into the ISP service. However, Indie labels can also set up their own music stores (even form an alliance of source) and they CAN operate under a subscription model. Or perhaps the ISPs will invite indies on board as well.
An alternative way that this could happen is that instead of the RIAA making the first move, the ISPs could set up the music service first - that is, they could say: Our customers have access to a DRM free, pay-by-label, music store. We've already got indie labels on it. You put your price out there for access to your entire catalogue. You want to charge $50, that's fine, but it'll never sell with SubPop charging $0.50. You also do not sue ANY of our customers for copyright infringement.
This model is a workable, feasible, even fair plan, but the problem is that I don't see the RIAA going for anything that's fair - they want their cake and eat it too - which is, like ARIA in Canada, they want their fees for blank CD-R media, and they still want to sue customers.
It would be a beautiful plan. It would make sense. But we've got no reason to trust the RIAA at all in this endeavor. We've got no reason to believe they'd hold up their end of the bargain. We've got no reason to believe they'll play fair. And it has been a decade of bad blood and badwill.
Had the record companies set up something like this in 1998, they wouldn't have been front page on Slashdot for years. Instead, through their own actions, they are dying.
Let's not throw them a rope. Let's let them die.
Survive five years of torture? That's nothing. Everyone in America with a brain has survived seven so far.
I'm kind of scared of you now.
I always thought the first step of dictators to exert more control over the populace (according to historical trends) was invoking a terrifying internal and external enemy, followed by creating a prison system outside the rule of law, developing a paramilitary group of scary young men to terrorize citizens, setting up an internal surveillance system, harass citizens' groups, engage in arbitrary detention and release, target civil servants, artists, and academics with job loss, control the press, cast dissent as treason, and suspend the rule of law.
Confiscating guns seems to me to be, if anything, purely optional, and is almost always done AFTER an armed resistance would have little to no effect anyway.
I agree with you on some points, and you're pretty on track on packet shaping. But "throttling" large use services doesn't seem to me to be the answer. If 99% of your traffic is HTTP traffic, then instead of throttling, put a QOS policy in place that guarantees at least 50% of the available bandwidth for HTTP traffic - don't start pointing at specific protocols and especially not at specific content providers.
Additionally, I think that traffic shaping is a big deal and if there is traffic shaping then traffic shaping policies should be publically accessible to the ISP's customers and potential customers, just like you can't sell a can of Chef Boyardee without listing all the ingredients.
Maybe we need an FDA for ISPs.
Here's my question. If the spectrum can be used for Internet connectivity, why bother with having the TV over-the-air channels at all?
As Flash Gordon, one of the worst political possibilities I can think of is voting for Ming the Merciless.
Dude, getting hit in the head with rubber mallet would probably do more for their brain development than watching VeggieTales.
I agree with everything except the French-bashing. The French are actually known for trying out new technologies. The Concorde? The Bullet-Train? The Eiffel Tower? The Metric System? The Guillotine?
Good points all, and you've really got me thinking about that last one: "the ISP dare not try and do anything to cache/optimise it because they know that the bulk of the traffic is illegal." I gotta meditate on that.
Well, the problem is that charging for the data isn't going to do anything to resolve bandwidth issues. A user downloading a single large file during peak times at high speeds is going to create more of a bandwidth problem than a user downloading multiple large files via BT staggered over a couple of days. It's because data isn't the limited resource - data is unlimited. It's bandwidth - the capacity of the pipe at any particular time which is limited.
If your neighbor's network is going slower because you're downloading a huge file, that's not a sign of you being a 'bandwidth hog' - it's a sign of improper QoS policies in place. Everybody gets a share of the pipe. If you want a bigger share of that pipe, you can ALREADY pay for more bandwidth, which is the limited resource. Charging for bandwidth AND data is "double dipping"
In my opinion, it's just an excuse to try to maintain the old business models of cable TV (for cable companies) and cellphone/landline (for phone companies) when better alternatives (digital distribution/VoIP) exist.
You've just perfectly described "Signs."
It is NEVER too late for a Bea Arthur Joke!
Wikiquote to the rescue!
I was born in 1979, and in 1982, I was three years old and old enough to go with my parents to the New Jersey Shore.
My grandmother on my mother's side owned a small beach house in Bricktown, New Jersey (now known as Brick, New Jersey) and we would travel down there for the summer - both my parents were teachers, so long vacations were the norm. We'd spend the days we weren't at the beach on the boardwalk - this was before the boardwalk was littered with detrius and society started generally collapsing, and we used to go to Seaside Heights most often in those early days, usually starting at the Funtown Pier and working our way to the Casino Pier.
For those of you to never experienced skee-ball, you have missed out on life, for those of you who believe you have played skee-ball in some Dave and Busters somewhere in Milwaukee instead of being there in an open-air arcade with the smell of the salt water and the cool breeze from the ocean wafting in, doubly so.
One of my earliest memories is my father holding me up just as the sun was setting (the time to go home from the boardwalk) as he put a quarter into the Ms. Pac-Man arcade machine - the last game of the beautiful day - and we played together. I still remember the orange walls, the smell of taffy, the music of the arcade playing in my ears, he encouraging me as I avoided, and then chased the ghosts around (I was always afraid of the ghosts and would often go directly from power-pellet to power-pellet, with no sense of strategy or timing, I just hated being on the defensive, I think.)
I don't know why that memory is so strong with me. Maybe it was just a child's unbelievable capacity for joy - something I don't think I have the capacity for now. Maybe it's just that it seems to be a time when I was completely free of fear and harm.
That's probably my earliest memory. Me, Dad, playing the last Ms. Pac-Man game of the day, just outside the arcade, on the boardwalk at Seaside Heights.
I don't know if I could ever go back to the boardwalk today. Even if it was just as grand and glorious as it was that day, I know it could never live up to my memory.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go call my dad and tell him I love him.
Shakrai, don't worry about it. It's just Dalek Caan trolling Slashdot while waiting for the batteries to charge.
Hell, on a domestic flight, they don't even X-ray your carryon!
I wouldn't vote for a Republican ever, and that includes Hillary Clinton.
Killjoy_NL:
We did a story at NetworkPerformanceDaily.com on the appeal of D&D - at least among the IT/Techie set. Yes, it's about pretending to be a wizard or a brawny barbarian - wish fulfillment fantasy... but it's also because the game itself is an aid designed to help creativity by introducing artificial boundaries.
As for starting to play, find a play group and use whatever version of the rules they're using. For D&D, the group is more important than any particular rules set. The best rules won't help you with lousy players, and bad rules are no deterrent for good players. (It's kinda like Monopoly that way.)
"Comics are boys club because boys don't want to read soap opera emo trash."
*cough* Sandman *cough*
Right, but "boys" aren't reading the comics. When was the last time you saw a comics shop with kids in it outnumbering the adults?
No, I think you're onto the right thing for the wrong reason. Comics lend themselves well to short, action stories and simple parables because of the nature of the medium. 22 short pages. Very little text. Lots of artwork. And a history of only being able to tell the most bland of stories due to the legacy of the Comics Code.
I do, in fact, see women reading comics - but those comics are manga stories which are usually published in large compilations that can go on for thousands of pages. In the "manga style", you can tell a long story with subtlety, spend pages exploring a single emotion or moment. But guess what, guys read it too.
There are traditional, non-manga comics which can look at these themes, and I'll pass up "Superman" every time to get to them. But those are rare and hard to pick out amongst the TONS of comic book titles.
I mean, if I'm looking for a long, epic story exploring complex themes, I'll rent a 3 hour movie. Or get a TV series on DVD.
How many non-indie artists can you name that are regularly putting out records? Just the 20 or so constantly played on the radio.
Artists aren't leaving in droves, the contracts prevent them from leaving. But contracts aren't getting renewed, artists are giving up the business rather than completing their contracts, and artists now know not to sign with the RIAA's members.
Uh, it's not the Titanic of tech history. No one on the Titanic was going: "We did NOT hit an iceberg, the ship is NOT sinking."
It's the Bush Administration of tech history.
At $0.12 a share, I'm wondering if we can't all buy one as a souvenir...