The interesting thing is, does it really matter if you watch the ads or not? Networks' ad revenue is based on how many people watch a show, which is based on Nielson ratings. It is NOT based on how many people buy something after they see an ad, because that is pretty hard to determine.
That statement is slightly incorrect. Networks advertising revenue is based not only on how many people watch a show, but also on the what advertisers are willing to pay to show ads to each viewer. For example, Anheuser-Busch will pay a lot more per viewer to have Budweiser ads shown during an ESPN hockey game than during Oprah Winfrey's show because the two target audiences are different. If technology makes it easier for viewers to skip advertisements, then it can be expected that the advertiser's perecieved value for TV spots will drop, assuming the audience size does not grow. This is a reasonable assumption to make since if even fewer people now than before are viewing an ad, then fewer new sales can be expected as a result of a given television ad campaign. Thus networks will experience a drop in revenue because of this.
On the other hand, calling the user of PVR's theives will not do these networks any good, and risks further alienating people from these outlets' programming. Technology changes: they need to deal with it, and I believe most will do so in the long run. IMO, the pay cable channels like HBO and Showtime have the right idea: produce top-notch, ad-free programming and air popular movies long before any other television outlet (beside PPV), and people will gladly pay $12-15 a month for your product. If a similar premium service came out that aired sports in a similar fashion at a similar price, then I would cancel all of my other basic cable channels in a heartbeat and be happy with over-the-air and two premium services for ~$30/month that I will watch on a nightly basis. Unfortunately, the rules of American sports make explicit allowances for TV timeouts and the like, so a premium ESPN doesn't seem possible for the near future.
I agree that the DMCA is being used to unfairly trample free speech and is being distorted to attack those that the law itself was supposed to exempt (e.g. reverse engineers working on interoperability and ISP's). I also agree that we Slashdotters need to ally with whoever we can to make a strong a legal challenge as possible to this law. However, obviously it won't be easy to do financially, and even if we were to gather enough resources to defend ourselves, victory would be by no means guaranteed.
IANAL, but it seems that you bring up a couple of legal issues that are by no means clear-cut in forming a successful attack of this law. First, to the best of my knowledge, there is no Constitutional guarantee of fair use. Fair use rights have been at times granted by Congress (e.g. the Audio Home Recording Act) and at other times courts have decreed that current American law regarding commerce dictates that certain uses of copyrighted material are in fact legal.
However, if a law were passed by Congress that absolutely prohibited time shifting of television programs, it would probably pass constitutional muster with the courts unless it could be proved that time-shifting materially affected individual Constitutional rights such as the right to free speech, bearing arms, being free from unreasonable searches and seizures, etc. I do think that there is hope of Congress guaranteeing additional fair use rights. Even the Crap-BDTPA would have ensured time-shifting were legal; there are still some in Congress that would be in favor of guaranteeing additional, more important rights like the right to excerpt copyrighted materials in derivative works. The main issue is Congress has been rather slow in awarding additional fair use rights to U.S. citizens, and that laws like the DMCA are being used by technology companies to prevent people from using content in ways that were commonly thought (by both the public and policy-makers) to be fair use but in fact had never been made expressly legal or illegal by previous law.
The second, and more disturbing point, is that large portions of the DMCA may be exempt from constitutional challenges. Aricle VI of the Constitution includes the statement "This Constitution...and all treaties made...under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land." I tried some searches on Google, but could not find any good evidence one way or the other to determine whether treaties could override the Constitution. If treaties can in fact take precedence, anything in the DMCA that parrots language in the WIPO treaties that it was meant to implement would be exempt from constitutionality reviews. If it turns out that such language in fact conflicts with the first Amendment, then in effect the First Amendment's scope will have been reduced. In this case, there would be only two ways to overturn the DMCA: (1) pass a constitutional amendment guaranteeing rights taken away by the DMCA, or (2) withdrawing from the treaty as was done several months ago by President Bush with the ABM treaty. Neither of these actions would be easy, and would be even more difficult than having a court nullifying a unconstitional standard law.
Are there any lawyers out there that could either support or rebut the concerns I made in this post? Hopefully my concerns about the WIPO effectively amending the constitution turn out to be just paranoid ranting. Like I said, I don't mean to imply that getting together and fighting this DMCA in the courts would be useless. It's just that people should understand that there may be legal hurdles to overcome in addition to financial ones involved in lawsuits, and that we should be prepared to do other things in addition to giving money to groups like the EFF in order to get offensive parts and interpretations of the DMCA overturned.
Boy, I always thought I was coming out ahead when I put a fiver in the case and took 18 quarters out of it. Then someone from the dark side exposed me to the concept of multiplication. When he told me what was going on, boy was I pissed! I'm never falling for that again.
Perhaps you misunderstood the intention of my last post.
First of all, the Stalin and Hitler discussions are not FUD. These are facts that, at least in general principle, few if any respected intellectuals will dispute. Sure, there may be some that might say that the 40 million figure I mentioned regarding the size of Stalin's massacres might be incorrect, but even if it turned out to only a few million, the general point holds. Now, if you can come up with a few dictatorships or police states that have (a) significantly mitigated existing threats to their subjects' lives and security compared to the prior state of affairs and (b) did not introduce their own threats to their subjects' lives and security to replace the ones referred to in (a), then you may be able to come up with a reasonable argument. However, to dismiss Hitler's and Stalin's atrocities as FUD does not do justice to the facts and does a great injustice to the victims of those atrocities.
I did not intend in any way to that Israel's actions have inspired the suicide bombing campaigns or that the government is for any reason to blame for them. All I meant was the fact that the suicide bombing has continued and in fact recently has accelerated despite the Israeli government's campaign to stop terrorism. This fact, in addition to the tendancy of individual freedoms to be sacrificed in an attempt to promote common safety, I used as evidence in my previous argument that sacrficing individual freedoms in no way guarantees individual safety.
I did not state that the government should do NOTHING against terrorism; however the attitude that some people have that government should DO EVERYTHING and the governed simply relying on their government to take care of things needs to be eliminated. Everyone in society, including those in government, has a responsibility to confront terrorism. As for the appropriate role for government's in combatting terrorism: I feel that use legally accepted means to determine those who have either comitted acts of terrorism or those that have shown a clear and present intent of performing imminent attacks, apprehend and try them according to legally accepted principles, and if found guilty, appropriately punished as murderers or those involved in a murder conspiracy. Israel's recent actions in the West Bank may in fact be justified if it turns out Israel has evidence supporting their claims that the people they are arresting are in fact militants connected with past acts of terrorism or clearly involved in a conspiracy to conduct future attacks on civilians.
However, I feel that legal principles must be adhered to: if existing principles are broken or new principles created for the purposes of combatting terrorism, then the government is in effect demonstrating the fact that its policies can be manipulated by the terrorists, which in effect encourages further terrorism campaigns. For example, in the U.S., torture is not currently a legally accepted means of collecting evidence in criminal cases. If the U.S. decides to allow torture of those suspected to be connected with terrorism since the government decides it is absolutely essential to collect evidence related to terrorism regardless of the measures used to get it or the quality of evidence collected from these measures, then this step is effectively some degree of capitulation to terrorists.
Furthermore, I feel that in no way that the rights of innocent citizens be restricted in response to terrorism, since this is a more important policy change departure than such a legal change as allowing evidence from tortured people to be introduced in criminal trials. Profiling, on racial or other purely demographic grounds, is unacceptable. Secondary security measures at airports (i.e. those performed on selected passengers in addition to those performed on all passengers) should be done on those selected purely at random, unless a certain individual has demonstrated an increased risk through prior behaviors and connections (such as living with or having frequent contact with known terrorists). Similarly, enacting new laws solely to deal with terrorism without indicating how these new laws will materially reduce risks (e.g. the Patriot Act) is unacceptable. Bottom line regarding my opinion of government's role against terrorism: attacking known conspirators and their logistical supporters using previously acceptable means is OK; using terrorism and FUD as grounds to change laws and social policy is not acceptable, and is more often than not counterproductive.
I do agree with you that the government did not actively play on people's fears in the wake of the attacks. I disagree on the media's actions. Though they might not control the mob, media outlets do have control over what gets shown on their airwaves. And mobs hardly ever get started spontaneously; large groups of people generally need to have some external stimulus that turns them into a mob. I found the coverage on CNN, Headline News, and Fox News to be incredibly sensationalistic in the latter part of September and the early part of October. Replaying one of the planes hitting the WTC or one of the towers falling on Sept. 12 or 13 as part of a story on the attacks is one thing. However, the coverage I saw on CNN one day about two weeks afterwards was horrifying, and from what I could tell, had no journalistic purpose. During my lunch hour at work, they had CNN playing in the cafeteria that day. CNN was interviewing some terrorism expert as part of their 9/11 coverage. Instead of putting showing the expert live or showing the news anchor with a caption along the lines of "On the phone: Dr. " at the bottom of the screen, they showed a sequece of films that from what I could tell served solely to play to people's fears and inspire a mob mentality among the American public. They showed, FIVE TO TEN TIMES per shot, (a) one of the planes hitting the WTC, (b) people jumping from the burning parts of the tower (from what I could tell it was one clip of two people jumping that was being looped), (c) Tower Two's collapse as viewed from off the southern tip of Manhattan, (d) footage of the collapse at street level including shots of those running from the debris, (e) footage of the second tower collapsing. How can this kind of coverage be viewed by a respectable journalist as anything other than fear-mongering? It wasn't like any of the clips they showed were newly televised footage. And even if they were, is it really necessary to play a 5-second clip of one of the planes crashing in a continuous loop?
I didn't watch as much coverage from the three major broadcast networks, but it appears that CBS and ABC were considerably more responsible in how they aired certain material. Yes, they showed the gory stuff too, because it was news. But I certainly don't remember any looping of the planes crashing or the towers falling. In fact, after about two weeks, ABC essentially stopped showing the plane crashes stating that continuing to do so for reasons other than providing important context that other clips could not provided for a story would be insensitive and irresponsible.
So while your point may often be valid about mobs being uncontrollable once they get going, mob action can clearly be instigated by those both inside and outside the eventual mob. The major media outlets are in the best position of anybody in society to evoke emotion in the public. If the media chooses to instill fear into those not directly impacted by the attacks by focusing on the natural fears of those that were there, the media should be held accountable for the consequences of their actions. If I made the proverbial breach of free speech and proceeded to yell "Fire! Oh my God, fire! We're all going to die! Everybody run for your lives!" in the crowded theatre and dozens of people died in the stampede, I would certainly think you would hold me responsible for my actions. Even if there was a fire, I could have announced this fact in a different manner that would have created a much more orderly evacuation, like saying "There's a small fire in this room. Please look around the theater for the nearest exit and walk quickly and calmly out of the building." When hearing or reading a media story, a responsible person should try to take all biases, even unintentional ones that stem from one's background, and motivations into account before simply accepting every story at face value.
People are scared. They are covering their asses, they are not listening with their ears wide open and their minds in full-tilt. They are scared. You must invoke arguments that include their safety, because none of you do, and safety is what the herd of buffalo is worried most about.
Well, how about this for an argument? Let's tell them this herd of buffalo what will happen to their beloved safety if and when the U.S. should ever become a police state.
Example 1: Nazi Germany. Not a hell of a lot of freedom there. Back then, the threat to Germans' livelihoods was not terrorism, it was hyperinflation and the Great Depression. So the Germans made a deal with Hitler to trade their freedoms in exchange for decent employment and material comfort. Well, the safety of 6 million Jews and others Hitler considered enemies were pretty thoroughly compromised between 1933 and 1945.
Example 2: Stalin's Soviet Union. Very similar to Hitler, both in the circumstances leading to his acension to power, and in the way he treated those he felt threatened his power base. As a matter of fact, Stalin may have killed up to 40 million people during his 30 year rule.
Example 3: Twenty-first century Israel. How ironic, considering that within the lifetimes of many of those living there the Jews were themselves the targets of one of history's great atrocities by a police state. And now, by and large, they have become one themselves. Granted, Prime Minister Sharon and his predecessors have not been as evil as Hitler and Stalin, but the tendancy since Israel's founding, and especially since 1967, has been towards increasing government power and declining individual rights for the sake of trying to prevent terrorism. And look where this policy has gotten them: absolutely nowhere. Suicide bombings at supermarkets, on buses, and in nightclubs and restaurants have become literally a weekly occurrence. While Israelis are still certainly freer than many other nations' citizens, they are undeniably less free than they were 35 years ago, and will probably be less free a generation from now than they are today. In fact, if Israel decides that the terrorist situation is worth going to all-out war for, this decline in rights may accelerate. And look how much safer Israelis are now in exchange for giving up many of their rights. Not much, if at all.
Bottom line: Police states tend to be no safer than democratic states, and in the long run can prove to be even less safe than free states. In addition to all the kinds of external threats that free states like the U.S. face, police states usually add one more threat to the mix: citizens' own government. IMHO, the Israeli situtation is a good lesson to Americans that giving up freedoms to the government in exchange for safety is a bargain in which the government usually doesn't hold up its end of the bargain for very long.
Instead of giving up our freedoms, we must find a way to get these herds of buffalo to defend their own interests and directly attack the threats of their safety and freedoms. It can be done. In fact it was done on September 11, where the passengers of Flight 93 gave the hijackers the finger and took control of their own destinies. They made sure that no more Americans on the ground would become additional victims the attacks (the hijacking of 93 came after the crashes in New York and Virginia), even if it meant the deaths of everyone on board that plane.
A couple of months later, the infamous shoe bomber was stopped by people who took personal responsibility over safety and freedom. Imagine how much safer and freer we could be if we could convince everyone to take responsibility for themselves. No, it still won't be a perfect world; once in a while a terror attack will manage to take place despite the best abilities of those best positioned to stop it. The only reason why those on the first three planes did not try to stop Sept. 11 is because they had no way of even imagining the plans of the hijackers. Occasionally sickos will again manage to outimagine sane people and carry out attacks; no government however free or totalitarian is going to stop these attacks either.
However, even in these circumstances, we can minimize the collateral impact of these future attacks by getting our asses immediately back off the canvas, implementing the appropriate measures (I don't consider things like installing Jersey barriers to deter future truck bombings of major buildings to be an assault on liberty) to prevent a similar attack from ever happening again, and moving on with our lives without relying on Uncle Sam to tell us how everything is going to be OK. Determination is the most potent weapon against terror, not guns or bombs. If the government or media can steer this herd of buffalo toward one goal, with time and effort we can steer it toward the goal of protecting both liberty and safety simultaneously. If we manage to do that, then we can all then laugh as Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, and all those who agree with these guys' tactics for expressing their political ideas get caught in the stampede.
Have they actually given serious thought to the possibility that the reason sales are down is because the fanatical followers of bubblegum pop have started to grow up?
(snip)
This is a supply/demand issue. It's quite possible that the listening audience demand has dropped because the supply is drek.
They know what's up right now. They know what they're selling is crap, but are just trying to get Congress to accept their piracy claims on blind faith so that the record labels' profits can be protected from the damage that a competitive marketplace can cause.
There are two main reasons why CD sales have fallen in the past year: the slow economy, which has hurt sales of many other things besides Backstreet Britney CD's, and the fact that the "Next Big Thing" or "killer app" in the music industry hasn't revealed itself yet.
It seems that this is the first time in 50 years that no replacement currently exists for a tiring music phenomenon. Since rock 'n roll came of age in the 1950's, it seems like there was always something ready to take the place of acts and genres that were losing their appeal. Motown and other genres of the early 60's replaced the first generation of major rock stars. Then Beatlemania took over. When the Beatles were on their way to breaking up, so-called classic rock acts took their place in the late 60's and the early to mid 70's. Then there was disco, followed by punk rock, then the pop revolution led by Madonna and Michael Jackson, then teen sensations like Debbie Gibson and the New Kids on the Block in the late 80's, grungers like Pearl Jam and Nirvana in the early to mid 90's, followed by Teen Sensations Part Deux starring 'NSync and Britney Spears. Of course this isn't a comprehensive history of popular music; there are certainly been stars outside of the genres I mentioned that have sold millions of copies of their acts. But I do think the ones I have listed are enough to illustrate the fact that the music industry's demand machine has been running essentially non-stop for half a century. Until now, where for some reason it has temporarily stopped. However, soon enough the industry will figure out what's broken, fix it, and then get it running again.
Ten years ago, the industry was complaining about dual tape decks and DAT as major threats to the viability of the labels. They got some concessions from Congress and the DAT manufacturers, such as collecting taxes on recordable media to offset the effects of piracy and ensuring that digital tapes could be recorded at most to one additional copy before both the original and new copy could not be used as masters for a second-generation copy. Then the economy turned around, "Smells Like Teen Spirit" gave them a new way of milking money from the masses, and everything was all good again. I believe the same situation will occur again in the next year or two. Something new will become wildly popular, and the industry's wolf cry will suddenly become a lot fainter once the cash starts returning in droves.
Actually, a voice vote is the "normal method". The voices are cast, the chair takes an opinion (Of course, this opinion need not be based on the voices in the house he hears, though usually the chairperson will.) If there is any objection, an electronic vote is taken (roll call vote).
Is it just me, or does anyone else find this blatantly unacceptable? I can understand why it wasn't done before the computer age, since if it takes 10 seconds for the chair or speaker to request and receive each House member's vote, it would take over an hour to vote on each bill by going through and asking each member whether he/she votes Yea or Nay on a bill. However, with current technology, an electronic vote should take more than 60 seconds to process.
ABC Television has shown how easily and quickly several hundred people's votes can be tallied; it's been used so select winning videos on "America's Funniest Home Videos" and indicate the crowd's desired response to questions on "Who Wants to be a Millionaire." Install the same equipment in the House and Senate, and votes should be taken much more quickly than they are now. I'm not familiar with how electronic votes are taken now, but the few I've seen on C-SPAN usually take at least 5 minutes, often 10 or more.
Of course this won't happen barring a constitutional amendment; obviously the politicians will keep their freedom to lie to their constituents as to how they voted on a bill by hiding it behind a voice vote. However, I think that this increasing tendancy of legislators to lie about their political actions is a very troubling sign that the U.S. Congress seems to be in the process of turing their country into a Communist state, where decisions are made in closed-door meetings that benefit only those behind those doors and where the governed people have virtually no ability to even observe, let alone change, how their government operates.
I think that the people really need to put Congress back under the control of not just the public as a whole but also the two other branches of government. It's pretty clear that the courts are under-equipped to preserve liberty under an increasing onslaught of legislation that have to enforce. The Presidency held its own against Congress (being commander-in-chief of the worlds most powerful army is useful for that), but I could see that situation change as well if Congress continues to abuse its power of the nation's wallet, the President's power can be eroded as well, leaving the country with a political situation not unlike that of China and pre-1991 Russia.
And don't believe it can't happen. Massachusetts offers a pretty good lesson as to what can happen when the legislative branch is allowed to effectively chop off the balls of the executive and judicial systems. The state now is effectively run by two dictators who have prevented governors from advancing any significant political initiatives since 1995. The last two governors got so frustrated with the legislature who continually prevented gubernatorial bills from even being debated and overriding vetoes that they both resigned to pursue federal positions. (No comment on Jane Swift.:) ) The dictators' response to the state supreme court regarding the unconstitutionality of not funding the state's Clean Elections (campaign finance reform) law: "Fsck you. We know the PIN number for the state's ATM card and you don't. Good luck finding money for this law." In other words, it has been proven that the state courts now only have the power to bitch and moan, and to do so uneffectively. At least the federal government could theoretically intervene if this abuse of power started curtailing people's rights. Good luck trying to get an abusive U.S. federal government to change its ways.
For American Slashdotters, I think it's high time we go back to reading Article V of the Constitution and start trying to check Congress by creating amendments using the other method of proposing them: state legislatures. No federal constituitional covention has ever ocurred since the current Constitution was ratified in 1788. It's going to take quite a long time to get 34 state legislatures concerned enough over an issue to call for amendments in a way that bypasses the U.S. Congress. But unless this happens in the next 10 to 20 years to try to check the burgeoning power of the U.S. Congress, I'm afraid the years of the U.S. as a republic are nearing their end. The content of the DMCA and the sleazy manner in which is was enacted shows just how broken our political system is now and underscores the fact that we need to try to get everybody we possibly can, not just a couple of those who work in a white building with a big dome on top of it in Washington D.C., to understand and eventually accept these concerns over individual rights, or we'll continue to lose our rights at an accelerating rate in the years ahead.
[yes, i'm burning Karma, I need a desire to contribute]
If your intention is to burn Karma, then judging by the +3 ratings of your last two posts, then you're not doing a good job. Try these New and Improved methods for getting rid of that excess Karma fast:
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2.) Repeatedly ask if the post you are about to make is the "first post," even if the bottom line of the story listing on the front page reads "1048 of 1301 comments."
3.) Discuss your love of Britney Spears and Natalie Portman.
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I don't know about you, but I've never considered Web polls to be reliable, and I'm sure most Slashdotters feel the same way. In fact, the disclaimers on the bottom of the Slashdot polls suggest that their polls are inherently unreliable. I remember a couple of years ago there was a poll regarding the best choice for grad school on Slashdot. MIT, CMU, Berkeley, CowboyNeal and a couple of other schools that I don't recall were choices. Ballot stuffing scripts run by CMU and MIT started making their attempts to rig the ballotting. When made aware of the situtation, Slashdot temporarily took down the poll, but re-opened it a day or so later for entertainment value. It was openly a ballot stuffing contest! Anyone who remembers that experience should have two things in mind: (1) anyone who puts any faith in web polls without some good authentication scheme should be considered technologically illiterate, and (2) if you're going to be stuffing an electronic ballot box, don't try to rig a poll using a class B subnet when your chief opposition has a class A to retaliate with. My school (CMU) tried this and we lost miserably.:)
On a more serious note, web polls worth their salt will either have a disclaimer saying that the poll is unscientific and its results should be considered only for entertainment value, or they will force users to be verified in some way (cookies or password authentication or some scheme like that) so that a reasonable attempt is made to ensure a one-person-one-vote system. Granted, just about any such system can be defeated with enough effort, but the effort required to trick a respectable web poll should involve more than writing a two-line Perl script.
Would any of you who live in democracies or republics put any faith in your jurisdiction's elections if one didn't have to register before receiving a ballot? I wouldn't. Pre-election polls are also much more respectable than basic web polls since the sample is not self-selecting, and the pollsters are presumably held to some standards about making as good and effort as practical to ensure uniformity in their samples.
So if you know of anyone who says something like "CowboyNeal is the most popluar operating system ever. I saw a poll on Slashdot where 80% of the people said so," explain to them why these polls are unreliable and why their results should not be taken seriously. If most people understood how web polls worked, then there probably would be much less incentive for a large company to invest effort in rigging them, since the results would be discarded anyway by the public.
I agree that providing Internet access is something the U.S. government should be involved in, let alone being a monopoly provider. However, I feel that some regulation to ensure (almost) universal Internet access is warranted, in the same way as current telecommunications regulations ensure that every U.S. citizen can have telephone service installed in his or her home.
Right now, ISP's are only providing broadband access (either cable or DSL) wherever they feel like it, since profit is their only concern in the current marketplace. Sure this works fine for those who live in densely populated metro areas since they can get broadband for a somewhat lower price than in a regulated market, but why should someone who lives in a rural area be completely denied broadband access simply because he lives more than 3 miles from a Baby Bell's switching station and the monopoly cable company considers his area too bass-ackwards to deserve an investment in providing cable modem access? I think in this instance the marketplace is discriminating against these particular parts of the country. And no, this situation isn't limited to the most remote parts of North Dakota and West Virginia either. The town I live in is less than 15 miles from Boston. Verizon doesn't have any switching offices in Westwood, DSL so isn't available. And AT&T Broadband hasn't moved an inch towards getting cable modem access available here either. So that means if I wanted reasonably priced (up to $60/month) broadband access here, I'm SOL because Verizon and AT&T don't consider my town profitable enough to provide such service. And I'm sure this situation occurs in many other suburban areas as well across the country.
I believe that the market should initially be given a chance to work itself out, but when the final solution provided by the market's providers basically states that some people don't deserve a chance to buy broadband service just because they choose to live in a rural area, something needs to be done by the government to ensure equal access to this technology.
What if back in the first half of the 20th century the government decided to let Ma Bell and the electric utilities deny service to whoever they deemed unprofitable to have as customers? A lot of places that are booming now in the Sun Belt and other parts of the country would still be as dirt poor as they were 100 years ago since the required tools for economic development would not have existed. In the long run, increasing the price of these services on urban customers to ensure universal access benefited the entire country including those affected by the government-imposed surchages by promoting economic growth throught the nation as opposed to certain scattered areas. It is highly probable that broadband Internet access will be as crucial to a successful business 25 years from now as electricity and phone service are to a successful business today, so it is incumbent on the federal government to ensure that businesses in unserved areas have a chance to compete in the future by giving them equal access to this technology. Though it should be a last resort, there are times when the marketplace fails to provide an equitable solution and the federal government has to step into the market for the sake of the common good.
1. I don't have a CD shop anywhere near my work path. (I tend to buy imports and specialty indie stuff)
I think you've hit upon an alternative solution to the problem. If at least a significant portion of your music purchases are from non-RIAA labels and relatively obscure import titles, then you probably won't run into this problem often in the first place. No indie label whose biggest albums struggle to sell 10,000 copies would dare risk their small profits (compared to the Big 5) and possibly their existence on copy protection technology that will probably upset many of its customers. In fact, I'm sure at least some of those labels and their clients wouldn't even mind some piracy of their artist's music, since the exposure created by the "pirated" copies would more than likely result in increased sales
of the albums and increased popularity of the bands involved.
Similarly, the import stuff you buy is probably either (a) from bands with no connection to RIAA labels or (b) music that RIAA labels aren't even releasing for sale in the U.S., meaning that copies of these albums won't affect profits since the labels weren't even selling them in the first place. So this music would either be out of RIAA control in the first case or flying below Hilary Rosen's radar in the second case and thus would not be subject to copy protection technologies now included on some copies of big artists' albums.
If more people started dropping the Backstreet Boys' trash like a hot potato and started buying the music of indie artists and those outside the U.S. like you do, then I'm sure the RIAA would see what's up and stop this sort of nonsense, even if they're down to their last brain cell.
.. treaty signers will be obligated to create legislation, as the UK already has, to force people to disclose passwords and encryption keys to the
authorities. The U.S. may well sign this treaty - we've participated in the drafting process.
You would think that a law like this would violate everyone's '5th Amendment Rights':
nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself... full text [cornell.edu].
Being force to disclose passwords to authorities, IMHO, would be equivalent to testifying agaist yourself...
Here's an even more disturbing part (from Article VI) of the Consitution that may mean that it doesn't, even theoretically, matter whether the government is forcing you to testify against yourself:
This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof;
and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under
the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the
Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
(emphasis added) Unless the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that Constitutional amendments cannot be superceded by international treaties, by ratifying this treaty the U.S. Senate would in fact be directly taking away your rights. (If anyone does know of some precedent surrounding this article one way or the other, I'm sure it would be greatly appreciated by the Slashdot community) One wouldn't have a prayer of overturning this in the courts, since the judge would for all intents and purposes would not even be allowed to take constitutionality into account. Pretty scary, huh?
Similiarly, I fear that getting rid of provisions of the DMCA specified in the WIPO treaty won't be as easy as finding a reasonable judge and having him cast the "unconstitutional" spell on the law to make it go away. At least that treaty, however, allows nations to break it upon providing a certain amount of advance notice (1 year I believe), but that would involve going to the same people who ratified it in the first place...
This provision in the Constitution is why we Americans need to keep pressure on the President and Senate to ensure that treaties that take away Americans' civil liberties like this will not be tolerated by the American public. Unfortunately most of the American public doesn't care about these liberties and probably won't until they're all gone. We need to start teaching others why these treaties and domestic laws like SSSCA are so evil and we need to do it soon, otherwise we'll have no rights to try to defend anymore.
Record companies are not "denying musicians fair compensation"; the musicians voluntarily agreed to the
compensation they are getting when they signed a contract. If they didn't like the terms of the contract, they weren't required to sign
it. Ergo, no denial of compensation. Record companies are also not "price gouging"; you aren't obligated to pay for any album in the
first place, so you can't claim that you were obligated to pay too much. If you think an album is too expensive, don't buy it. Ergo,
not price gouging.
I think you oversimplify things here. True, the artists and CD buyers weren't forced to sign the contracts or pay the prices you speak of. However, the monopoly of music granted by copyright and the near monopsony the "Big 5" record companies enjoy complicates the issue and can lead consumers and musicians who wish to distribute their work into these very unpleasant situations that would not occur in a more competitive market.
Copyright gives the artist a monopoly over the work he or she creates. That's all well and good in principle, since theoretically the artist can sell the music for a profit, which would give him or her to produce more music, which benefits society as a whole. However, the "Big 5" labels (as well as some smaller ones that play along with the big boys) have established quite a stronghold over the U.S. music distribution system, which until recently made it almost impossible for a garage band to offer their music for sale to a large audience. Even now it's very tough, though given enough money for CD-R's or bandwidth one can hundreds or a few thousand people. However, anyone who wants a chance to make it really big still will have to deal with one of the Big 5 companies, since their agreements with many record stores prohibit the stores from selling music from any other labels than those approved by the Big Boys. Thus, the aspiring musicians have at most a handful of distribution companies to sell their work to, putting tremendous bargaining power in the hands of these companies. Thus the labels can get away with creating contracts that (a) give the artist the absolute bare minium he or she's willing to accept for their work and (b) transfer the monopoly control over the music granted by copyright law to the label, eliminating any opportunity for the artist to increase the royalty discussed in part (a), as would be possible in a more competitive marketplace. And given that the "Big 5" doesn't always vigorously compete amongst themselves (for example see this article), the situation can get even worse as the RIAA begins to resemble a cartel. If the government started an anti-trust case against the RIAA, I would think that soon after the situation would soon start to change for the better from the artist's perspective. Though for the effective monopsony to be broken, I believe that either (a) all the exclusive contracts with record stores and other distributors would become invalid, and/or (b) record labels would no longer be able to obtain copyright privileges over any of there clients' future work in order for true competition to be introduced.
These measures would also work on the consumer side, as presumably CD prices would fall if two or more labels had to compete in selling Britney Spears's next album instead of the current $18 or whatever her exclusive distributor figures out what price would make them the most money.
From what I hear, some other company involved in a legal battle is in the news right now for abusing their monopoly. The purpose of anti-trust laws in the U.S. is to ensure that consumers don't have to face these unpleasant choices when deciding whether to buy or not buy a given product by attempting to moderate the bargaining power a monopolist (or multiple parties cooperating as a monopolist) has over an individual with almost no power over a large corporation. Did Microsoft force ISP's to exclusively endorse IE as their official Web browser? Did Microsoft force PC makers to exclusively load Windows onto their PC's? Is Microsoft forcing people to pay $100 for an XP Home license and activate it using an unpopular and possibly suspicious anti-piracy mechanism. The answer to these questions is "no" in all three cases. However, Microsoft knew that no practical alternatives to Windows existed (at least to many people, OSS is not a universal alternative), and that barriers of entry that retard better alternatives from emerging that were erected in part by Microsoft at the least "encouraged " these people to behave in a Microsoft-friendly way as Microsoft knew that they would encounter an unpleasant situation if they had acted otherwise. By removing or lowering these barriers of entry, anti-trust laws benefit consumers and small players in the market by creating a more competitive (and usually more efficient) marketplace. The record labels are abusing their monopolies, too, and deserve the same sort of scrutiny that Microsoft has deservedly received. If some governmental body can sucessfully prove collusion between the labels, then it would be an even stronger case.
If you're such a laissez-faire capitalist that you think anti-trust legislation is inappropriate to prevent, then maybe you should consider your stand on copyright as well, since this is also a government intervention into commerce. Until both sets of laws are eliminated, I think it's the government's responsibility to treat all players in this market equitably, not just the five with the most money.
This seems to me like a golden opportunity for the Mac platform to start taking some more market share from Microsoft.
The consumer has no choice, period. You want a new PC, you get XP shoved down your throat and up your ass. You do not get the option of saying
"no thanks" to XP. You don't get the option of installing your own os that you previously purchased and OWN regardless of what M$ thinks (I buy my
software, not the license to use it...sorry, that's the way it is).
What if we can get the proverbial "Joe Sixpack" to not want a PC and get something else that will suit their needs probably just as effectively as a Windows box. No, Joe probably isn't going to plunge into Open Source OS Land (though that would be nice;). However, Joe will probably seriously consider a Mac running OS X. If Apple can get their act together and get 20% or 30% of new users to go with Macs, then I think Microsoft will get the message loud and clear.
What can't Joe do on a Mac OS box that he can do on a Windows box? Hard-core gaming? That's probably an issue, but gamers these days are just as likely to buy a PS2 or soon an X-box as they are to get a high-end Windows box for their addiction.
As far as other things go, the Mac is just as good or better than Windows. Joe can certainly connect to the net with no problem with all the basic functionality he needs like Web browsing and e-mail. If he's an AOL user, there's no problem there. Multimedia? QuickTime, baby. Word proccessing and spreadsheets? Sure, though unfortunately he still might run into the Microsoft problem there as he would on a PC. I really can't think of any other major types of functionality Joe would use, so unless he loves the "latest and greatest" games, a Mac will give him everything he's looking for.
With OS X, Apple appears to have made a serious effort to attack its reputation for unreliability. Moving from one GUI to another isn't all that hard. Within a few hours just about any Windows user should be able to navigate a Mac without a problem, and new computer users might even have an easier time learning the Mac than Windows. Hey, if Joe's adventurous, he might even start toying with the command line and begin to learn the joys of BSD.;) And Apple certainly isn't in a position to use its OS to spy on its customers.
I'm a Linux user, so I have very little experience with recent Macs, including OS X. However, I do realize that many users would much more readily switch to MacOS than they would any Open Source OS. So if we focus on issues like ease of use, reliability, and privacy, we might be able to attack Microsoft by encouraging those on the fence to consider Apple. Joe Sixpack might not understand arguments like "You should be able to install any OS you want on your PC," but would probably relate more to "You should have the right to make sure no one else can look at your private stuff on your computer" in terms of staying away from an OS that heavily pushes (though not quite forces) a suspect Passport application onto its users. I'm going to tell my parents to get a Mac if they buy another computer since they certainly would not want to contemplate a scenario where 5 years down the road they might have to pay Microsoft an annual fee just to boot their computer.
Come on Apple, I can't think of a better time to hit back at Microsoft than right now. Even "mainstream" users are starting to get fed up with Microsoft's incompetence and arrogance. With a decent marketing campaign, I sincerely believe that Apple could get some Windows users to switch to Mac once they decide they need a new computer of some sort. I think we Slashdotters who don't like Microsoft need to adopt the "an enemy of my enemy is my friend" mantra and try to get people away from Windows in any way possible. When people are completely unfamiliar with or won't trust open source, they probably would be more willing to try a Mac.
Is it censorship? Probably, but its not anything a court will do anything about. Freedom of expression is in the Constitution is to protect you from the government, not some business. You are protected from such businesses by your wallet and freedom to go elsewhere.
What if there are no alternatives. In many places, there's only one choice for high-speed access. If you're in a town that has Adelphia as its sole cable provider and DSL is not available, then you have exactly two choices for broadband access: buy from the Adelphia monopoly or forget about it. Sure you can go back to dialup, but one really can't compare the two types of connections. And in many places, smaller dialup ISP's are folding or being bought up by national giants like Earthlink and AOL, so your dialup choice may be limited to one or two providers as well. Sure the free-market solution is all well and good in a densely populated area that provides at least one cable modem option and several DSL options for high-speed access, but this situation is not universally true.
At least Ma Bell was ordered by the federal government to serve everybody, since they monopolized the U.S. telephone network for decades. In the broadband market, these requirements don't exist yet, even though local and federal regulations often lead to a broadband monopoly. Now some ISP's are shutting off users' accounts for possible (but not always proven) copyright infringment. What if next year Adelphia says: "Multiplayer Quake games are sucking up too much bandwidth. But preventing users from playing multiplayer games, we'll save tremendously on bandwith costs, resulting in higher profits." In a competitive situation, this scenario would be prevented, as the affected users quickly change to another high-speed provider. But in a monopoly, consumers don't have much recourse when their account is terminated because of some nebulous "violation" of a TOS agreement.
In order for the market to work, the government needs to have universal access requirements for monopoly broadband providers and needs to work to eliminate regulatory and technical roadblocks that prevent broadband competition in many U.S. markets. Otherwise, broadband consumers will be increasingly asked to bend over and take it under the broadband provider's rule "My way or the highway."
So most Americans who read Slashdot can understand Katz's theme that corporations now dominate most US institutions and appear to be on their way to extending this dominance for the forseeable future. Many, if not most, American Slashdotters also agree with this theme.
Unfortunately, in the grand scheme of things, Slashdot's readership is not a very big portion of the American public. A few hundred thousand readers (I don't know the actual figures, this is a seat-of-my-pants guess) out of 281 million Americans is, by itself, not enough to change the way the US works. Continuing to bitch and moan amongst ourselves isn't going to dent the "Corporate Republic." What we need to do is find some way of educating the public at-large about our concerns. Until we can get "soccer moms," AOL users, and other larger segments of the American public to understand our concerns, the Corporate Republic will continue to grow since thats the way most Americans want things to be. They don't mind driving 20 miles to a 250,000 sq. ft. Wal-Mart since Wal-Mart offers prices that no one on Main Street can dream of offering. If people didn't like companies like Wal-Mart, then there would be no way that Wal-Mart could have taken in $200 billion last year. If the mainstream public were convinced of the dangers of having a few huge corporations running around unchecked by the federal goverment, then maybe people would think twice about supporting them.
All the time new articles appear about privacy breaches, new "features" Microsoft is including in Windows XP to extract every possible penny from the American public, and other such horror stories. Most of them are pointless because they are directed at an audience already aware of the situation. I think there needs to be some discussion about how can we make other people aware of these problems. When I talk to many people about Microsoft's antitrust problems, the uneducated ones often say "What's wrong with that? I've never had any problem with Windows." I really don't know how to convince my family and non-geek friends that issues like the "Corporate Republic" need to be taken seriously by the entire population. Once they are understood by the public at-large, Congress will take notice. Finally the issue of privacy seems to be taken seriously on Capitol Hill, as many Americans have started to understand the issues involved in restricting the spread of information about themselves. Whether useful legislation will result is unclear, but at least it's a start in regards to understanding privacy. If the majority of people stood up to Congress and said "We want competition in the telecom sector" and "Here's where you can stick UCITA", Congress will at least strongly consider these issues if not passing legislation to address them.
Until we can get the public to say these things to Congress and to stop giving money to the corporations that we geeks don't like, then we're out of luck. There aren't going to be any easy solutions to this problem, but I think it's time we started discussing it.
I believe this idea sounds good in theory, but it will never happen. Orwell's "1984" scenario where citizens have no privacy from an omnipresent government seems much more likely. Do you think wealthy corporations and government officials would be in favor of allowing CCTV cameras to video all aspects of their daily lives? I don't think so. And considering they would almost certainly be the ones to control these cameras (or at least influence those that control them), they would be able to do something about it. Meanwhile, all the average citizen will be able to do about it is complain about it.
More transparency in politics would be a good thing. If people had known about the DMCA while Congress was considering it, there probably would have been much more vocal opposition to it. Instead, the sponsors of the bill worked to say as little as possible about the DMCA's consequences until after it was signed, sealed, and delivered. Even those who do follow politics had a hard time figuring out what the bill was about until after the fact. Katz claims that the passage of the DMCA came about as a result of the American public's apathy and ignorance while the bill was being considered. I do not believe it is reasonable for people to be upset over something they don't know is coming, especially when the government is doing its best to hide it behind a smokescreen until it is too late.
However, I believe it is the government's job to understand the desires of its constituents and act accordingly. The point of having a republic as opposed to a democracy in the U.S. was to allow most people to deal with other things in life other than politics; only a relatively small number of people acting on behalf of the entire population would need to make politics a full-time occupation. Granted, people need to let their representatives know about their opinions to ensure they are voiced in Congress, but subjecting every American adult to the inner workings of politics would be unreasonable.
Some time ago (possibly even from the very beginning), some in government decided that they would not serve in the best interests of their constituents; instead they should serve in their own best interests. The only way these people can hope to remain in power is to keep as many unethical dealings as possible behind closed doors and cover up the rest using aggressive PR campaigns, often paid for by money obtained by lobbyists. These politicians tend to take a "Screw you" attitude to the public. For instance, in 1997, 11 counties in southwest PA voted on whether to increase the sales tax by 1% in order to pay for new stadiums for football's Steelers and baseball's Pirates. It was soundly defeated by about a 60-40 margin. So did those in charge accept the public's opinion and not proceed with building the stadiums? They did not, and instead came up with a devious "Plan B" that many informed citizens still don't understand, marched it through the county and state legislatures and now Pittsburgh has two new taxpayer-funded stadiums that the public had already said it did not want. This is a failure of the republic at a local level; the DMCA is a failure at the federal level.
Katz and others have said that we (the American public) should try to do something about this state of affairs. Unfortunately, a course of action at this point is not clear at all. Voting people out of office has a limited effect; I feel that the problem is with the system itself and not with those holding or seeking office. Everyone has a price, and corporations have the money to influence every representative regardless of whether they have a D or an R after their name on the ballot. Writing to Congress should be a viable solution; however there is evidence of some in Congress ignoring e-mail from their constituents as mentioned in a recent Slashdot article. If they ignore electronic communication, who's to say they are reading dead-tree correspondence either? Trying to get some sort of campaign finance legislation would be a good goal, but do you think Congress would pass something that severely limits its ability to raise funds for re-election? I don't think so. Getting a constitutional amendment passed through states calling for a constituitional convention is an extremely difficult task; I don't know if it has even been done before.
Many people feel that making government more transparent would be a good thing for society in order to make it more accountable to the its citizens. However, making this happen is going to be very difficult. Anyone have any ideas as to how we can do this?
Don't bother downloading the tarball and running the install script. That's way too complicated. The latest distributions of Linux (and I would imagine most other UNIX flavors) have instant, 100% compression already built in.
To configure it, as root run the command:
ln -s/bin/rm/usr/local/bin/lzip
If your not root, run this after adding . to your path:
ln -s/bin/rm ~/lzip
Volia! Compress away! You can even recursively compress entire trees. Try this as root for amazing disk space savings:
lzip -rf /
I think you'll agree that once you try it, you'll never have to worry about downloading third-party compression tools again.
I think that this is another of where some (gasp!) government regulation is required in regards to privacy on the Internet.
Government should not dictate specific policies in regards to what companies can or cannot do with customer information, but should require that companies doing business on the Web create their own policies and post them in "laymen's terms" on their Web site. Companies should be obligated to link to this policy as well as other Terms and Conditions on all pages of a site, or at the very least on all pages that request users for personal information or that allow a user to consummate a transaction. There should be some standard elements in regards to what a policy must address: use of cookies, "web bugs" and other automated tracking devices; how databases containing credit card numbers, e-mail addresses and other user-provided information are accessed, stored, and protected; to whom and under what circumstances this information can be provided to third parties.
I feel that the government should not dictate privacy policy, but must enforce whatever policy is generated by the private sector. For example, if General Motors were to not pay to repair a broken transmission on a 2000 Chevrolet with 5000 miles on it, the owner of that car could take GM to court. The owner would show the warranty stating that all major parts of the car were guaranteed for 3 years and 36,000 miles, and since the car was bought with the understanding that GM would honor this warranty for the stated term, the judge would order GM to pay for the required repairs. Yet the government has to this date done very little to make sure promises made by web sites like "we'll never sell or give out your e-mail address or credit card information" are upheld. Since promises like these are crucial to many online transactions, it is imperitive that the government step in and make sure these promises are kept and punish violators harshly enough to deter future violations.
Moreover, the government should give consumers recourse in the event that a company's privacy policy change. Customers should be given the right to insist that all information given to the company under previous privacy policies be removed on pain of serious fines and other penalties. Granted, enforcing such a regulation may be difficult, but many reputable companies would comply, and most others would follow if a violator were to receive a multi-million dollar fine from a judge.
Those who are completely against government regulation would say that consumers will reward those companies with the "best" privacy policies with their business and walk away from those with less favorable policies. If all companies were honest in their policies and these policies were permanent, then I would tend to agree with this viewpoint. However, without some recourse against a bait-and-switch tactic, consumers can get screwed. Sure, if a company suddenly says "the sale or distribution of all credit card information provided by our customers is fair game" in its privacy policy, people will probably stop shopping there. But what about everyone who bought from there before the change, under the assurance that their information would remain private? This company can still profit from these previous customers. Companies should not benefit from this type of exploitation, and without government intervention, there is little to ensure that these rogue companies can't benefit.
The Egghead.com case is probably one of the most underreported privacy violations in some time. This is why I said before that the goverment should not only require companies to state when they release information to third parties, but also to detail the procedures they use to protect the information from being stolen. While I don't know statistics in regards to how frequently fraud occurs on credit cards, I would tend to believe the fact that 7300 cardholders reported possible fradulent activity out of 1.5 million or so is a coincidence; this is a rate of roughly 0.5 percent. If these figures are true, then I would believe that this fraudulent activity would have occurred regardless of whether these people shopped at egghead.com. However, the more important fact is that many more people's cards could have been affected, and that something needs to be done to ensure that another similar (and possibly more damaging) incident does not occur with another major commerce site.
I hope that maybe as the more well-known companies like Amazon.com, egghead.com, and Ebay are coming under fire for these sorts of privacy issues, people will start to take notice and demand that new legislation be passed to outlaw this sort of fraud or that existing statues are interpreted by the courts to cover privacy promises on the Web in the way that warranties and other promises are covered in the physical world.
Go into Deja's archives of comp.os.ms-windows.setup.win3x, and several posts under the "win 3.x" thread discuss the fact that Microsoft has gone after people serving copies of Win 3.x on their sites. So, apparently they're doing what you thought even they wouldn't dare to do.
IMO, stories like these help call for the repeal of the Sonny Bono Act and other legislation that has extended copyright to 100+ years on new works. The point of copyright is to promote creativity by allowing authors to capitalize on their works for a period of time, and then have the work pass into the public domain. Thus both the author and society as a whole benefit. Unfortunately, this has changed, and society's benefits are limited to the quickly eroding "fair use" principle during the first century after a new work is published.
When, as in the case of Win 3.1, an old Sega game, or any other product has lived through its useful lifetime of making money for its producer, it should be released into the public domain. Look at ID Software as an example. They made a lot of money off Dooms I and II and Quake I, and when the point where these products would no longer sell was reached, Id released these products to the public. Because of the initial protections of copyright, Id had the incentive to produce these games, while the public at-large received the benfit of having these products go into public domain. This is what copyright is all about.
When a company tries to restrict the spread of a product that no longer has any commercial value, everyone loses. Why should a software company care whether someone can download a copy a 10-year old product on a web site, after the product has no more commercial value? Current copyright legislation allows this situation to occur.
Ideally, I would suggest that the best system for copyright and IP would be to offer an initial 7 year period where the author controls all rights to a work. With today's technology, this allows an author or publisher to capitalize on the work. After 7 years, the author would have the choice of either having the work pass into the public domain or applying for an extension. If the author can prove to a judge or some other authority to be determined that an extension would benefit both the author and society, the copyright should be extended for another 7 years. Otherwise, the application is denied and protection is lost.
Of course, the real world and the ideal world differ significantly, and barring lots and lots of $$, it's going to take a long time to transform IP law into something most/.ers can deal with.
I believe it was M.A. Mortenson's fault for not negotiating a better contract with Timberline, specifically one that replaces the shrinkwrap license with some other license that would make the software company responsible for bugs.
As an individual, I don't care all that much as to whether I can't reverse engineer my word processor or distribute copies of the game I just bought. I'm willing to accept some of these terms in a license agreement in exchange for a more inexpensive product. Nothing I do a product I purchase on my own is mission critical. The only thing I believe should be included in shrinkwrap license agreements for individual products is language that states that once effective, the contract cannot be changed and that a product takes reasonable steps to ensure that a bug in its code does not harm other aspects of the system it runs on. (One example of a product failing to take these reasonable steps is the "I Love You" problem that made headlines around the world. It would have been nice if Microsoft could be held liable for letting a flaw in its Outlook Express software destroy unrelated data and cause unnecessary network traffic.) I believe that only changes in the law will be able to ensure that this sort of language gets placed in individual agreements.
On the other hand, if I was going to be buying a lot (say $100K or more) of software from a vendor for tasks that my company depends on to do business, I think I would be a good position to tell the vendor that my company won't buy any copies of this product until you agree to replace clauses A, B, and C in the shrinkwrap agreement with X, Y, and Z. A software company would be stupid not to consider a reasonable such offer if not accepting it would mean losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue. If the vendor rejects an agreement that would make them liable for damages their product causes, then as the customer, I would get the impression that they feel the product has serious flaws that could lead to damages in a lawsuit that exceed the amount of money I would be giving them to purchase the product. In this case, I would look at competing products, and failing that, "rolling my own" solution. If the large company goes ahead and buys a product as is and bugs in the product cause the customer major damages, then I believe it's the customer's own fault.
I believe that one of the key reasons that Microsoft's market position has eroded at least somewhat is the DOJ's actions. The very threat of being sued allowed several national ISPs (AOL, CompuServe, AT&T, and a couple of others) to have their access software included alongside MSN in Windows 95. This allowed competition to occur in this arena, and to this day AOL's subscriber base dwarfs that of the Microsoft Network. Had the DOJ not harassed Microsoft on this issue, there is no way these ISPs' icons would have appeared on the Windows 95 desktop, and who knows, Microsoft may have gone even further to ensure that the only ISP s Windows 9x users could use were MSN and smaller companies that paid Microsoft a lot of money so that they could count Win 9x users among their subscribers.
I am also convinced that the DOJ acted just in time to prevent Microsoft from really throwing its weight around hardware vendors. When I say "hardware vendors", I mean companies that make processors, video cards, sound cards, and other components, not OEMs like Compaq and Dell. I imagine many of you Linux users have been ticked off when you found that your favorite component you used under Windows won't work under Linux because only Windows drivers have been released, and the part's specs are under an NDA. I see no reason why a company with as many connections and resources as Microsoft would not have been able pressure most hardware vendors into producing only Windows-capable products after learning about potential OS threats on the x86 platform like Linux and BeOS. One way this could happen is if Windows simply refused to interact with a component not on some list of approved parts. A component would be approved if only Windows drivers existed for it and the vendor promised to keep enough information secret about it to make rolling one's own driver an extremely difficult task. While this approach probably would not have worked on the large companies like Intel and Creative Labs, I believe enough smaller companies could have been coereced by Microsoft's tactics to ensure Linux and other OS's could not thrive on the Intel platform. Now that the proverbial Linux horse is out of the barn, Microsoft really can't do much to suppress it by using this or any other unfair tactic. By investigating Microsoft for grounds for serious antitrust charges, the DOJ deterred Microsoft from leveraging their OS monopoly in this manner. I would imagine that if Microsoft considered this technique, the punishment would have been more swift and severe than anything that will come out of the browser trial. If it weren't for the DOJ, there would have been no deterrent for this action, and as a result Microsoft could have gained an even tighter hold on the desktop than they have ever previously enjoyed.
Also, consider the PR fiascos that have taken place during the trial itself. The DOJ has already shown that Microsoft executives habitually lied during the investigation, and in some cases, even under oath in the courtroom. The prosecution made it pretty clear that Microsoft is now mostly about protecting their monopolies at all costs, and are not concerned about who suffers to fulfill this goal. Now that Microsoft's public respect has been greatly diminished, competitors have been embolded to attack them, now that they know that they are less likely to alienate Joe User by going after Microsoft. This has caused further damage to Microsoft's dominance of the PC.
In conclusion, the DOJ has done quite a lot already to curb Microsoft's behavior through its consent agreements and now the antitrust trial. With a guilty verdict and a substantial penalty against the company, Microsoft's fall from the top may be complete. However, the outcome now is in the hands of the judge, and we must accept the verdict no matter how it turns out. While some may argue the DOJ stepped too late to stop Microsoft from crushing Netscape, it was and still is an open legal question as to what "tying" and "integrating" mean in terms of the Sherman Act. The prosecution had to wait until they had at least a decent chance of conviction before suing, otherwise the trial would simply be a waste of taxpayer money. And Microsoft has already won in other arenas, like office suites. It's too late to undo the damage that's been done here. However, if Microsoft were allowed to use this same behavior pattern to gain a monopoly on the ISP market, the results would have a much greater disaster than anything that's happened previously. DOJ action prevented this from happening, and now as result of threatened legal action, Linux has taken advantage of its opportunity to become a fast growing, viable OS on the x86 platform. Five years ago, no such product existed (outside of the very small Linux community at the time), and Microsoft was in a position to make sure that no such product could ever exist. However, current antitrust legislation prevented Microsoft from sufficiently leveraging their market share to meet this goal. So this trial is not the end-all-be-all that many have proposed it to be. Well a guilty verdict will most likely be the last straw that breaks MS's stranglehold once and for all, one must look at what's already come out of this case even if the judge finds that Microsoft has done nothing legally wrong.
For the short term, I would agree that the companies have their best interests at mind. However, as far as the long run goes, the RIAA may be digging its own grave here.
In recent years the RIAA and other major players in the entertainment industry have cried wolf over what they've called "piracy concerns" facilitated by new technologies like MP3 and DVD. I am of the opinion that "piracy" is merely a euphamism for "profit". At least in the U.S., piracy has little if any discernable impact on the bottom line of record companies and movie studios. Even if audio quality may be below that of the original, I would think that if piracy in the music industry were a problem, there would be people willing to pay $4 for an CD copied onto tape that would cost $15 at a record store. Audio cassettes and VCR's have been around for 20 years, and yet these recordable technologies did not hurt the profits of the entertainment industry, in fact they made these companies more profitable than ever. When adopted properly, I'm sure the music industry will find MP3 (or some future open standard) a boon to their interests, as the movie industry has started to do with DVD.
What has changed since the advent of the Internet is that the companies in the RIAA are losing their privilege of holding an oligopoly in regards to the worldwide distribution of music. Hence, it would seem reasonable that the trend for the forseeable future is that a larger share of the profits in the music industry will go to the content creators (the artists) at the expense of the distributors (the RIAA). As a result of the RIAA's reactionary stance regarding MP3 and other developments in digital music, there is a high risk of the general public becoming disillusioned with the state of the music industry. In a few years, it will probably be possible for an artist to record studio-quality music independently and distribute it wherever he or she wants via the Internet. Or, if it remains prohibitively expensive to do the recording, this artist could easily go to a smaller record label and receive a much more favorable contract than what one of the major labels would offer. The point is that an artist would no longer have to go to a $100 billion company for the purpose of distrubing copies of their music worldwide. When this happens, prices for music from independent and smaller-label artists will probably be lower than music from major labels, as the cut taken for distribution will be much smaller. Consumers then would prefer this music to that of the major labels, which would then pose a serious threat to the profitability of the RIAA members. The major record labels would then have to provide some additional service to the artists in order to keep new artists from going solo or joining a smaller company.
While the RIAA will still have the advantage of controlling most of the conventional media for a somewhat longer time, this scenario is also likely to change when broadband Internet becomes more popular in the U.S. and elsewhere.
Therefore, if I were a consultant to the RIAA, I would recommend they rethink their recent stands on new technologies and not let concern for next quarter's earnings threaten the long-term viability of its members.
As a CMU junior in CS, I agree with the fact that Pittsburgh is in serious trouble as a major city. After the steel mills started closing after World War II, nothing really came in to replace them. As people lost their jobs, they went elsewhere for work. Hence, Pittsburgh lost more than half its population since 1960, and the county has lost about 10% of its people since 1990. Only recently from what I understand has there been any serious effort to bring high tech to the region; and while there are a few major companies in the area, the effort has thus far had limited success. In my opinion, here are a few problems that would keep geeks from working Pittsburgh. (1) High income and sales taxes, especially in Pittsburgh itself, but also in Allegheny County. While they may be lower than in CA, they are certainly higher than they are in MA, which has a reputation of being a high-tax state. These taxes are the reason why Pittsburgh's standard of living is overall lower than in many other areas, despite low cost of living. (2) The primarily low wages that employers here offer. Even when adjusted for cost of living, one can find much better deals elsewhere. (3) The lack of social life for young adults to participate in. While there are a fair number of bars around, especially in the South Side, if you're not a 40-something die-hard Steelers fan you probably won't feel at home in a lot of them. Cities like NYC and Boston put Pittsburgh to same as far as theatre and other nightlife things go. (4) The amount of urban decay the city has already suffered through. While this city is relatively safe, most young professionals would find all but the most affluent parts of the city unattractive to live in. The small suburban area around the city is not much more enticing. Problems like these are serious enough right now outweigh what Pittsburgh has going for it, including a low cost of living and the presence of many students in technical fields. There is a reason why one can find a place to live so cheaply: while supply has remained the same, demand has fallen off sharply as there are so few people left! So, if you bought a house in some parts of the city 20 years ago, you probably lost some money on it if you've sold it recently. All over the area, one can see signs "We buy empty houses"; these companies are often the only ones interested. While the situation isn't good right now, there is some hope. Places like Cleveland, a city 15 years ago in a situation similar to Pittsburgh's, have made a decent recovery. However, it's not going to be easy. By giving incentives for more tech companies to relocate here and for startups founded by college grads here to stay, perhaps in 2010 Pittsburgh could be in a better economic situation than it is now. Unfortunately, the city has instead been more focused on giving tax money for new sports stadiums (both the Pirates and Steelers will have new homes by 2003) instead of focusing on more worthwhile enterprises to support. My $.02; perhaps a Pittsburgh native will have more to say on this matter.
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The interesting thing is, does it really matter if you watch the ads or not? Networks' ad revenue is based on how many people watch a show, which is based on Nielson ratings. It is NOT based on how many people buy something after they see an ad, because that is pretty hard to determine.
That statement is slightly incorrect. Networks advertising revenue is based not only on how many people watch a show, but also on the what advertisers are willing to pay to show ads to each viewer. For example, Anheuser-Busch will pay a lot more per viewer to have Budweiser ads shown during an ESPN hockey game than during Oprah Winfrey's show because the two target audiences are different. If technology makes it easier for viewers to skip advertisements, then it can be expected that the advertiser's perecieved value for TV spots will drop, assuming the audience size does not grow. This is a reasonable assumption to make since if even fewer people now than before are viewing an ad, then fewer new sales can be expected as a result of a given television ad campaign. Thus networks will experience a drop in revenue because of this.
On the other hand, calling the user of PVR's theives will not do these networks any good, and risks further alienating people from these outlets' programming. Technology changes: they need to deal with it, and I believe most will do so in the long run. IMO, the pay cable channels like HBO and Showtime have the right idea: produce top-notch, ad-free programming and air popular movies long before any other television outlet (beside PPV), and people will gladly pay $12-15 a month for your product. If a similar premium service came out that aired sports in a similar fashion at a similar price, then I would cancel all of my other basic cable channels in a heartbeat and be happy with over-the-air and two premium services for ~$30/month that I will watch on a nightly basis. Unfortunately, the rules of American sports make explicit allowances for TV timeouts and the like, so a premium ESPN doesn't seem possible for the near future.
I agree that the DMCA is being used to unfairly trample free speech and is being distorted to attack those that the law itself was supposed to exempt (e.g. reverse engineers working on interoperability and ISP's). I also agree that we Slashdotters need to ally with whoever we can to make a strong a legal challenge as possible to this law. However, obviously it won't be easy to do financially, and even if we were to gather enough resources to defend ourselves, victory would be by no means guaranteed.
IANAL, but it seems that you bring up a couple of legal issues that are by no means clear-cut in forming a successful attack of this law. First, to the best of my knowledge, there is no Constitutional guarantee of fair use. Fair use rights have been at times granted by Congress (e.g. the Audio Home Recording Act) and at other times courts have decreed that current American law regarding commerce dictates that certain uses of copyrighted material are in fact legal.
However, if a law were passed by Congress that absolutely prohibited time shifting of television programs, it would probably pass constitutional muster with the courts unless it could be proved that time-shifting materially affected individual Constitutional rights such as the right to free speech, bearing arms, being free from unreasonable searches and seizures, etc. I do think that there is hope of Congress guaranteeing additional fair use rights. Even the Crap-BDTPA would have ensured time-shifting were legal; there are still some in Congress that would be in favor of guaranteeing additional, more important rights like the right to excerpt copyrighted materials in derivative works. The main issue is Congress has been rather slow in awarding additional fair use rights to U.S. citizens, and that laws like the DMCA are being used by technology companies to prevent people from using content in ways that were commonly thought (by both the public and policy-makers) to be fair use but in fact had never been made expressly legal or illegal by previous law.
The second, and more disturbing point, is that large portions of the DMCA may be exempt from constitutional challenges. Aricle VI of the Constitution includes the statement "This Constitution...and all treaties made...under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land." I tried some searches on Google, but could not find any good evidence one way or the other to determine whether treaties could override the Constitution. If treaties can in fact take precedence, anything in the DMCA that parrots language in the WIPO treaties that it was meant to implement would be exempt from constitutionality reviews. If it turns out that such language in fact conflicts with the first Amendment, then in effect the First Amendment's scope will have been reduced. In this case, there would be only two ways to overturn the DMCA: (1) pass a constitutional amendment guaranteeing rights taken away by the DMCA, or (2) withdrawing from the treaty as was done several months ago by President Bush with the ABM treaty. Neither of these actions would be easy, and would be even more difficult than having a court nullifying a unconstitional standard law.
Are there any lawyers out there that could either support or rebut the concerns I made in this post? Hopefully my concerns about the WIPO effectively amending the constitution turn out to be just paranoid ranting. Like I said, I don't mean to imply that getting together and fighting this DMCA in the courts would be useless. It's just that people should understand that there may be legal hurdles to overcome in addition to financial ones involved in lawsuits, and that we should be prepared to do other things in addition to giving money to groups like the EFF in order to get offensive parts and interpretations of the DMCA overturned.
Boy, I always thought I was coming out ahead when I put a fiver in the case and took 18 quarters out of it. Then someone from the dark side exposed me to the concept of multiplication. When he told me what was going on, boy was I pissed! I'm never falling for that again.
Perhaps you misunderstood the intention of my last post.
First of all, the Stalin and Hitler discussions are not FUD. These are facts that, at least in general principle, few if any respected intellectuals will dispute. Sure, there may be some that might say that the 40 million figure I mentioned regarding the size of Stalin's massacres might be incorrect, but even if it turned out to only a few million, the general point holds. Now, if you can come up with a few dictatorships or police states that have (a) significantly mitigated existing threats to their subjects' lives and security compared to the prior state of affairs and (b) did not introduce their own threats to their subjects' lives and security to replace the ones referred to in (a), then you may be able to come up with a reasonable argument. However, to dismiss Hitler's and Stalin's atrocities as FUD does not do justice to the facts and does a great injustice to the victims of those atrocities.
I did not intend in any way to that Israel's actions have inspired the suicide bombing campaigns or that the government is for any reason to blame for them. All I meant was the fact that the suicide bombing has continued and in fact recently has accelerated despite the Israeli government's campaign to stop terrorism. This fact, in addition to the tendancy of individual freedoms to be sacrificed in an attempt to promote common safety, I used as evidence in my previous argument that sacrficing individual freedoms in no way guarantees individual safety.
I did not state that the government should do NOTHING against terrorism; however the attitude that some people have that government should DO EVERYTHING and the governed simply relying on their government to take care of things needs to be eliminated. Everyone in society, including those in government, has a responsibility to confront terrorism. As for the appropriate role for government's in combatting terrorism: I feel that use legally accepted means to determine those who have either comitted acts of terrorism or those that have shown a clear and present intent of performing imminent attacks, apprehend and try them according to legally accepted principles, and if found guilty, appropriately punished as murderers or those involved in a murder conspiracy. Israel's recent actions in the West Bank may in fact be justified if it turns out Israel has evidence supporting their claims that the people they are arresting are in fact militants connected with past acts of terrorism or clearly involved in a conspiracy to conduct future attacks on civilians.
However, I feel that legal principles must be adhered to: if existing principles are broken or new principles created for the purposes of combatting terrorism, then the government is in effect demonstrating the fact that its policies can be manipulated by the terrorists, which in effect encourages further terrorism campaigns. For example, in the U.S., torture is not currently a legally accepted means of collecting evidence in criminal cases. If the U.S. decides to allow torture of those suspected to be connected with terrorism since the government decides it is absolutely essential to collect evidence related to terrorism regardless of the measures used to get it or the quality of evidence collected from these measures, then this step is effectively some degree of capitulation to terrorists.
Furthermore, I feel that in no way that the rights of innocent citizens be restricted in response to terrorism, since this is a more important policy change departure than such a legal change as allowing evidence from tortured people to be introduced in criminal trials. Profiling, on racial or other purely demographic grounds, is unacceptable. Secondary security measures at airports (i.e. those performed on selected passengers in addition to those performed on all passengers) should be done on those selected purely at random, unless a certain individual has demonstrated an increased risk through prior behaviors and connections (such as living with or having frequent contact with known terrorists). Similarly, enacting new laws solely to deal with terrorism without indicating how these new laws will materially reduce risks (e.g. the Patriot Act) is unacceptable. Bottom line regarding my opinion of government's role against terrorism: attacking known conspirators and their logistical supporters using previously acceptable means is OK; using terrorism and FUD as grounds to change laws and social policy is not acceptable, and is more often than not counterproductive.
I do agree with you that the government did not actively play on people's fears in the wake of the attacks. I disagree on the media's actions. Though they might not control the mob, media outlets do have control over what gets shown on their airwaves. And mobs hardly ever get started spontaneously; large groups of people generally need to have some external stimulus that turns them into a mob. I found the coverage on CNN, Headline News, and Fox News to be incredibly sensationalistic in the latter part of September and the early part of October. Replaying one of the planes hitting the WTC or one of the towers falling on Sept. 12 or 13 as part of a story on the attacks is one thing. However, the coverage I saw on CNN one day about two weeks afterwards was horrifying, and from what I could tell, had no journalistic purpose. During my lunch hour at work, they had CNN playing in the cafeteria that day. CNN was interviewing some terrorism expert as part of their 9/11 coverage. Instead of putting showing the expert live or showing the news anchor with a caption along the lines of "On the phone: Dr. " at the bottom of the screen, they showed a sequece of films that from what I could tell served solely to play to people's fears and inspire a mob mentality among the American public. They showed, FIVE TO TEN TIMES per shot, (a) one of the planes hitting the WTC, (b) people jumping from the burning parts of the tower (from what I could tell it was one clip of two people jumping that was being looped), (c) Tower Two's collapse as viewed from off the southern tip of Manhattan, (d) footage of the collapse at street level including shots of those running from the debris, (e) footage of the second tower collapsing. How can this kind of coverage be viewed by a respectable journalist as anything other than fear-mongering? It wasn't like any of the clips they showed were newly televised footage. And even if they were, is it really necessary to play a 5-second clip of one of the planes crashing in a continuous loop?
I didn't watch as much coverage from the three major broadcast networks, but it appears that CBS and ABC were considerably more responsible in how they aired certain material. Yes, they showed the gory stuff too, because it was news. But I certainly don't remember any looping of the planes crashing or the towers falling. In fact, after about two weeks, ABC essentially stopped showing the plane crashes stating that continuing to do so for reasons other than providing important context that other clips could not provided for a story would be insensitive and irresponsible.
So while your point may often be valid about mobs being uncontrollable once they get going, mob action can clearly be instigated by those both inside and outside the eventual mob. The major media outlets are in the best position of anybody in society to evoke emotion in the public. If the media chooses to instill fear into those not directly impacted by the attacks by focusing on the natural fears of those that were there, the media should be held accountable for the consequences of their actions. If I made the proverbial breach of free speech and proceeded to yell "Fire! Oh my God, fire! We're all going to die! Everybody run for your lives!" in the crowded theatre and dozens of people died in the stampede, I would certainly think you would hold me responsible for my actions. Even if there was a fire, I could have announced this fact in a different manner that would have created a much more orderly evacuation, like saying "There's a small fire in this room. Please look around the theater for the nearest exit and walk quickly and calmly out of the building." When hearing or reading a media story, a responsible person should try to take all biases, even unintentional ones that stem from one's background, and motivations into account before simply accepting every story at face value.
Example 1: Nazi Germany. Not a hell of a lot of freedom there. Back then, the threat to Germans' livelihoods was not terrorism, it was hyperinflation and the Great Depression. So the Germans made a deal with Hitler to trade their freedoms in exchange for decent employment and material comfort. Well, the safety of 6 million Jews and others Hitler considered enemies were pretty thoroughly compromised between 1933 and 1945.
Example 2: Stalin's Soviet Union. Very similar to Hitler, both in the circumstances leading to his acension to power, and in the way he treated those he felt threatened his power base. As a matter of fact, Stalin may have killed up to 40 million people during his 30 year rule.
Example 3: Twenty-first century Israel. How ironic, considering that within the lifetimes of many of those living there the Jews were themselves the targets of one of history's great atrocities by a police state. And now, by and large, they have become one themselves. Granted, Prime Minister Sharon and his predecessors have not been as evil as Hitler and Stalin, but the tendancy since Israel's founding, and especially since 1967, has been towards increasing government power and declining individual rights for the sake of trying to prevent terrorism. And look where this policy has gotten them: absolutely nowhere. Suicide bombings at supermarkets, on buses, and in nightclubs and restaurants have become literally a weekly occurrence. While Israelis are still certainly freer than many other nations' citizens, they are undeniably less free than they were 35 years ago, and will probably be less free a generation from now than they are today. In fact, if Israel decides that the terrorist situation is worth going to all-out war for, this decline in rights may accelerate. And look how much safer Israelis are now in exchange for giving up many of their rights. Not much, if at all.
Bottom line: Police states tend to be no safer than democratic states, and in the long run can prove to be even less safe than free states. In addition to all the kinds of external threats that free states like the U.S. face, police states usually add one more threat to the mix: citizens' own government. IMHO, the Israeli situtation is a good lesson to Americans that giving up freedoms to the government in exchange for safety is a bargain in which the government usually doesn't hold up its end of the bargain for very long.
Instead of giving up our freedoms, we must find a way to get these herds of buffalo to defend their own interests and directly attack the threats of their safety and freedoms. It can be done. In fact it was done on September 11, where the passengers of Flight 93 gave the hijackers the finger and took control of their own destinies. They made sure that no more Americans on the ground would become additional victims the attacks (the hijacking of 93 came after the crashes in New York and Virginia), even if it meant the deaths of everyone on board that plane.
A couple of months later, the infamous shoe bomber was stopped by people who took personal responsibility over safety and freedom. Imagine how much safer and freer we could be if we could convince everyone to take responsibility for themselves. No, it still won't be a perfect world; once in a while a terror attack will manage to take place despite the best abilities of those best positioned to stop it. The only reason why those on the first three planes did not try to stop Sept. 11 is because they had no way of even imagining the plans of the hijackers. Occasionally sickos will again manage to outimagine sane people and carry out attacks; no government however free or totalitarian is going to stop these attacks either.
However, even in these circumstances, we can minimize the collateral impact of these future attacks by getting our asses immediately back off the canvas, implementing the appropriate measures (I don't consider things like installing Jersey barriers to deter future truck bombings of major buildings to be an assault on liberty) to prevent a similar attack from ever happening again, and moving on with our lives without relying on Uncle Sam to tell us how everything is going to be OK. Determination is the most potent weapon against terror, not guns or bombs. If the government or media can steer this herd of buffalo toward one goal, with time and effort we can steer it toward the goal of protecting both liberty and safety simultaneously. If we manage to do that, then we can all then laugh as Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, and all those who agree with these guys' tactics for expressing their political ideas get caught in the stampede.
There are two main reasons why CD sales have fallen in the past year: the slow economy, which has hurt sales of many other things besides Backstreet Britney CD's, and the fact that the "Next Big Thing" or "killer app" in the music industry hasn't revealed itself yet.
It seems that this is the first time in 50 years that no replacement currently exists for a tiring music phenomenon. Since rock 'n roll came of age in the 1950's, it seems like there was always something ready to take the place of acts and genres that were losing their appeal. Motown and other genres of the early 60's replaced the first generation of major rock stars. Then Beatlemania took over. When the Beatles were on their way to breaking up, so-called classic rock acts took their place in the late 60's and the early to mid 70's. Then there was disco, followed by punk rock, then the pop revolution led by Madonna and Michael Jackson, then teen sensations like Debbie Gibson and the New Kids on the Block in the late 80's, grungers like Pearl Jam and Nirvana in the early to mid 90's, followed by Teen Sensations Part Deux starring 'NSync and Britney Spears. Of course this isn't a comprehensive history of popular music; there are certainly been stars outside of the genres I mentioned that have sold millions of copies of their acts. But I do think the ones I have listed are enough to illustrate the fact that the music industry's demand machine has been running essentially non-stop for half a century. Until now, where for some reason it has temporarily stopped. However, soon enough the industry will figure out what's broken, fix it, and then get it running again.
Ten years ago, the industry was complaining about dual tape decks and DAT as major threats to the viability of the labels. They got some concessions from Congress and the DAT manufacturers, such as collecting taxes on recordable media to offset the effects of piracy and ensuring that digital tapes could be recorded at most to one additional copy before both the original and new copy could not be used as masters for a second-generation copy. Then the economy turned around, "Smells Like Teen Spirit" gave them a new way of milking money from the masses, and everything was all good again. I believe the same situation will occur again in the next year or two. Something new will become wildly popular, and the industry's wolf cry will suddenly become a lot fainter once the cash starts returning in droves.
ABC Television has shown how easily and quickly several hundred people's votes can be tallied; it's been used so select winning videos on "America's Funniest Home Videos" and indicate the crowd's desired response to questions on "Who Wants to be a Millionaire." Install the same equipment in the House and Senate, and votes should be taken much more quickly than they are now. I'm not familiar with how electronic votes are taken now, but the few I've seen on C-SPAN usually take at least 5 minutes, often 10 or more.
Of course this won't happen barring a constitutional amendment; obviously the politicians will keep their freedom to lie to their constituents as to how they voted on a bill by hiding it behind a voice vote. However, I think that this increasing tendancy of legislators to lie about their political actions is a very troubling sign that the U.S. Congress seems to be in the process of turing their country into a Communist state, where decisions are made in closed-door meetings that benefit only those behind those doors and where the governed people have virtually no ability to even observe, let alone change, how their government operates.
I think that the people really need to put Congress back under the control of not just the public as a whole but also the two other branches of government. It's pretty clear that the courts are under-equipped to preserve liberty under an increasing onslaught of legislation that have to enforce. The Presidency held its own against Congress (being commander-in-chief of the worlds most powerful army is useful for that), but I could see that situation change as well if Congress continues to abuse its power of the nation's wallet, the President's power can be eroded as well, leaving the country with a political situation not unlike that of China and pre-1991 Russia.
And don't believe it can't happen. Massachusetts offers a pretty good lesson as to what can happen when the legislative branch is allowed to effectively chop off the balls of the executive and judicial systems. The state now is effectively run by two dictators who have prevented governors from advancing any significant political initiatives since 1995. The last two governors got so frustrated with the legislature who continually prevented gubernatorial bills from even being debated and overriding vetoes that they both resigned to pursue federal positions. (No comment on Jane Swift.
For American Slashdotters, I think it's high time we go back to reading Article V of the Constitution and start trying to check Congress by creating amendments using the other method of proposing them: state legislatures. No federal constituitional covention has ever ocurred since the current Constitution was ratified in 1788. It's going to take quite a long time to get 34 state legislatures concerned enough over an issue to call for amendments in a way that bypasses the U.S. Congress. But unless this happens in the next 10 to 20 years to try to check the burgeoning power of the U.S. Congress, I'm afraid the years of the U.S. as a republic are nearing their end. The content of the DMCA and the sleazy manner in which is was enacted shows just how broken our political system is now and underscores the fact that we need to try to get everybody we possibly can, not just a couple of those who work in a white building with a big dome on top of it in Washington D.C., to understand and eventually accept these concerns over individual rights, or we'll continue to lose our rights at an accelerating rate in the years ahead.
1.) Talk about how Microsoft should be considered the epitome of 21st century business and why the current antitrust case against them should be dropped. And don't worry about forming a valid and consistent argument to back it up; regardless of the quality of your argument you'll get modded down. So why waste the effort?
2.) Repeatedly ask if the post you are about to make is the "first post," even if the bottom line of the story listing on the front page reads "1048 of 1301 comments."
3.) Discuss your love of Britney Spears and Natalie Portman.
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I don't know about you, but I've never considered Web polls to be reliable, and I'm sure most Slashdotters feel the same way. In fact, the disclaimers on the bottom of the Slashdot polls suggest that their polls are inherently unreliable. I remember a couple of years ago there was a poll regarding the best choice for grad school on Slashdot. MIT, CMU, Berkeley, CowboyNeal and a couple of other schools that I don't recall were choices. Ballot stuffing scripts run by CMU and MIT started making their attempts to rig the ballotting. When made aware of the situtation, Slashdot temporarily took down the poll, but re-opened it a day or so later for entertainment value. It was openly a ballot stuffing contest! Anyone who remembers that experience should have two things in mind: (1) anyone who puts any faith in web polls without some good authentication scheme should be considered technologically illiterate, and (2) if you're going to be stuffing an electronic ballot box, don't try to rig a poll using a class B subnet when your chief opposition has a class A to retaliate with. My school (CMU) tried this and we lost miserably. :)
On a more serious note, web polls worth their salt will either have a disclaimer saying that the poll is unscientific and its results should be considered only for entertainment value, or they will force users to be verified in some way (cookies or password authentication or some scheme like that) so that a reasonable attempt is made to ensure a one-person-one-vote system. Granted, just about any such system can be defeated with enough effort, but the effort required to trick a respectable web poll should involve more than writing a two-line Perl script.
Would any of you who live in democracies or republics put any faith in your jurisdiction's elections if one didn't have to register before receiving a ballot? I wouldn't. Pre-election polls are also much more respectable than basic web polls since the sample is not self-selecting, and the pollsters are presumably held to some standards about making as good and effort as practical to ensure uniformity in their samples.
So if you know of anyone who says something like "CowboyNeal is the most popluar operating system ever. I saw a poll on Slashdot where 80% of the people said so," explain to them why these polls are unreliable and why their results should not be taken seriously. If most people understood how web polls worked, then there probably would be much less incentive for a large company to invest effort in rigging them, since the results would be discarded anyway by the public.
I agree that providing Internet access is something the U.S. government should be involved in, let alone being a monopoly provider. However, I feel that some regulation to ensure (almost) universal Internet access is warranted, in the same way as current telecommunications regulations ensure that every U.S. citizen can have telephone service installed in his or her home.
Right now, ISP's are only providing broadband access (either cable or DSL) wherever they feel like it, since profit is their only concern in the current marketplace. Sure this works fine for those who live in densely populated metro areas since they can get broadband for a somewhat lower price than in a regulated market, but why should someone who lives in a rural area be completely denied broadband access simply because he lives more than 3 miles from a Baby Bell's switching station and the monopoly cable company considers his area too bass-ackwards to deserve an investment in providing cable modem access? I think in this instance the marketplace is discriminating against these particular parts of the country. And no, this situation isn't limited to the most remote parts of North Dakota and West Virginia either. The town I live in is less than 15 miles from Boston. Verizon doesn't have any switching offices in Westwood, DSL so isn't available. And AT&T Broadband hasn't moved an inch towards getting cable modem access available here either. So that means if I wanted reasonably priced (up to $60/month) broadband access here, I'm SOL because Verizon and AT&T don't consider my town profitable enough to provide such service. And I'm sure this situation occurs in many other suburban areas as well across the country.
I believe that the market should initially be given a chance to work itself out, but when the final solution provided by the market's providers basically states that some people don't deserve a chance to buy broadband service just because they choose to live in a rural area, something needs to be done by the government to ensure equal access to this technology.
What if back in the first half of the 20th century the government decided to let Ma Bell and the electric utilities deny service to whoever they deemed unprofitable to have as customers? A lot of places that are booming now in the Sun Belt and other parts of the country would still be as dirt poor as they were 100 years ago since the required tools for economic development would not have existed. In the long run, increasing the price of these services on urban customers to ensure universal access benefited the entire country including those affected by the government-imposed surchages by promoting economic growth throught the nation as opposed to certain scattered areas. It is highly probable that broadband Internet access will be as crucial to a successful business 25 years from now as electricity and phone service are to a successful business today, so it is incumbent on the federal government to ensure that businesses in unserved areas have a chance to compete in the future by giving them equal access to this technology. Though it should be a last resort, there are times when the marketplace fails to provide an equitable solution and the federal government has to step into the market for the sake of the common good.
Similarly, the import stuff you buy is probably either (a) from bands with no connection to RIAA labels or (b) music that RIAA labels aren't even releasing for sale in the U.S., meaning that copies of these albums won't affect profits since the labels weren't even selling them in the first place. So this music would either be out of RIAA control in the first case or flying below Hilary Rosen's radar in the second case and thus would not be subject to copy protection technologies now included on some copies of big artists' albums.
If more people started dropping the Backstreet Boys' trash like a hot potato and started buying the music of indie artists and those outside the U.S. like you do, then I'm sure the RIAA would see what's up and stop this sort of nonsense, even if they're down to their last brain cell.
Similiarly, I fear that getting rid of provisions of the DMCA specified in the WIPO treaty won't be as easy as finding a reasonable judge and having him cast the "unconstitutional" spell on the law to make it go away. At least that treaty, however, allows nations to break it upon providing a certain amount of advance notice (1 year I believe), but that would involve going to the same people who ratified it in the first place...
This provision in the Constitution is why we Americans need to keep pressure on the President and Senate to ensure that treaties that take away Americans' civil liberties like this will not be tolerated by the American public. Unfortunately most of the American public doesn't care about these liberties and probably won't until they're all gone. We need to start teaching others why these treaties and domestic laws like SSSCA are so evil and we need to do it soon, otherwise we'll have no rights to try to defend anymore.
I think you oversimplify things here. True, the artists and CD buyers weren't forced to sign the contracts or pay the prices you speak of. However, the monopoly of music granted by copyright and the near monopsony the "Big 5" record companies enjoy complicates the issue and can lead consumers and musicians who wish to distribute their work into these very unpleasant situations that would not occur in a more competitive market.
Copyright gives the artist a monopoly over the work he or she creates. That's all well and good in principle, since theoretically the artist can sell the music for a profit, which would give him or her to produce more music, which benefits society as a whole. However, the "Big 5" labels (as well as some smaller ones that play along with the big boys) have established quite a stronghold over the U.S. music distribution system, which until recently made it almost impossible for a garage band to offer their music for sale to a large audience. Even now it's very tough, though given enough money for CD-R's or bandwidth one can hundreds or a few thousand people. However, anyone who wants a chance to make it really big still will have to deal with one of the Big 5 companies, since their agreements with many record stores prohibit the stores from selling music from any other labels than those approved by the Big Boys. Thus, the aspiring musicians have at most a handful of distribution companies to sell their work to, putting tremendous bargaining power in the hands of these companies. Thus the labels can get away with creating contracts that (a) give the artist the absolute bare minium he or she's willing to accept for their work and (b) transfer the monopoly control over the music granted by copyright law to the label, eliminating any opportunity for the artist to increase the royalty discussed in part (a), as would be possible in a more competitive marketplace. And given that the "Big 5" doesn't always vigorously compete amongst themselves (for example see this article), the situation can get even worse as the RIAA begins to resemble a cartel. If the government started an anti-trust case against the RIAA, I would think that soon after the situation would soon start to change for the better from the artist's perspective. Though for the effective monopsony to be broken, I believe that either (a) all the exclusive contracts with record stores and other distributors would become invalid, and/or (b) record labels would no longer be able to obtain copyright privileges over any of there clients' future work in order for true competition to be introduced.
These measures would also work on the consumer side, as presumably CD prices would fall if two or more labels had to compete in selling Britney Spears's next album instead of the current $18 or whatever her exclusive distributor figures out what price would make them the most money.
From what I hear, some other company involved in a legal battle is in the news right now for abusing their monopoly. The purpose of anti-trust laws in the U.S. is to ensure that consumers don't have to face these unpleasant choices when deciding whether to buy or not buy a given product by attempting to moderate the bargaining power a monopolist (or multiple parties cooperating as a monopolist) has over an individual with almost no power over a large corporation. Did Microsoft force ISP's to exclusively endorse IE as their official Web browser? Did Microsoft force PC makers to exclusively load Windows onto their PC's? Is Microsoft forcing people to pay $100 for an XP Home license and activate it using an unpopular and possibly suspicious anti-piracy mechanism. The answer to these questions is "no" in all three cases. However, Microsoft knew that no practical alternatives to Windows existed (at least to many people, OSS is not a universal alternative), and that barriers of entry that retard better alternatives from emerging that were erected in part by Microsoft at the least "encouraged " these people to behave in a Microsoft-friendly way as Microsoft knew that they would encounter an unpleasant situation if they had acted otherwise. By removing or lowering these barriers of entry, anti-trust laws benefit consumers and small players in the market by creating a more competitive (and usually more efficient) marketplace. The record labels are abusing their monopolies, too, and deserve the same sort of scrutiny that Microsoft has deservedly received. If some governmental body can sucessfully prove collusion between the labels, then it would be an even stronger case.
If you're such a laissez-faire capitalist that you think anti-trust legislation is inappropriate to prevent, then maybe you should consider your stand on copyright as well, since this is also a government intervention into commerce. Until both sets of laws are eliminated, I think it's the government's responsibility to treat all players in this market equitably, not just the five with the most money.
What can't Joe do on a Mac OS box that he can do on a Windows box? Hard-core gaming? That's probably an issue, but gamers these days are just as likely to buy a PS2 or soon an X-box as they are to get a high-end Windows box for their addiction.
As far as other things go, the Mac is just as good or better than Windows. Joe can certainly connect to the net with no problem with all the basic functionality he needs like Web browsing and e-mail. If he's an AOL user, there's no problem there. Multimedia? QuickTime, baby. Word proccessing and spreadsheets? Sure, though unfortunately he still might run into the Microsoft problem there as he would on a PC. I really can't think of any other major types of functionality Joe would use, so unless he loves the "latest and greatest" games, a Mac will give him everything he's looking for.
With OS X, Apple appears to have made a serious effort to attack its reputation for unreliability. Moving from one GUI to another isn't all that hard. Within a few hours just about any Windows user should be able to navigate a Mac without a problem, and new computer users might even have an easier time learning the Mac than Windows. Hey, if Joe's adventurous, he might even start toying with the command line and begin to learn the joys of BSD.
I'm a Linux user, so I have very little experience with recent Macs, including OS X. However, I do realize that many users would much more readily switch to MacOS than they would any Open Source OS. So if we focus on issues like ease of use, reliability, and privacy, we might be able to attack Microsoft by encouraging those on the fence to consider Apple. Joe Sixpack might not understand arguments like "You should be able to install any OS you want on your PC," but would probably relate more to "You should have the right to make sure no one else can look at your private stuff on your computer" in terms of staying away from an OS that heavily pushes (though not quite forces) a suspect Passport application onto its users. I'm going to tell my parents to get a Mac if they buy another computer since they certainly would not want to contemplate a scenario where 5 years down the road they might have to pay Microsoft an annual fee just to boot their computer.
Come on Apple, I can't think of a better time to hit back at Microsoft than right now. Even "mainstream" users are starting to get fed up with Microsoft's incompetence and arrogance. With a decent marketing campaign, I sincerely believe that Apple could get some Windows users to switch to Mac once they decide they need a new computer of some sort. I think we Slashdotters who don't like Microsoft need to adopt the "an enemy of my enemy is my friend" mantra and try to get people away from Windows in any way possible. When people are completely unfamiliar with or won't trust open source, they probably would be more willing to try a Mac.
What if there are no alternatives. In many places, there's only one choice for high-speed access. If you're in a town that has Adelphia as its sole cable provider and DSL is not available, then you have exactly two choices for broadband access: buy from the Adelphia monopoly or forget about it. Sure you can go back to dialup, but one really can't compare the two types of connections. And in many places, smaller dialup ISP's are folding or being bought up by national giants like Earthlink and AOL, so your dialup choice may be limited to one or two providers as well. Sure the free-market solution is all well and good in a densely populated area that provides at least one cable modem option and several DSL options for high-speed access, but this situation is not universally true.
At least Ma Bell was ordered by the federal government to serve everybody, since they monopolized the U.S. telephone network for decades. In the broadband market, these requirements don't exist yet, even though local and federal regulations often lead to a broadband monopoly. Now some ISP's are shutting off users' accounts for possible (but not always proven) copyright infringment. What if next year Adelphia says: "Multiplayer Quake games are sucking up too much bandwidth. But preventing users from playing multiplayer games, we'll save tremendously on bandwith costs, resulting in higher profits." In a competitive situation, this scenario would be prevented, as the affected users quickly change to another high-speed provider. But in a monopoly, consumers don't have much recourse when their account is terminated because of some nebulous "violation" of a TOS agreement.
In order for the market to work, the government needs to have universal access requirements for monopoly broadband providers and needs to work to eliminate regulatory and technical roadblocks that prevent broadband competition in many U.S. markets. Otherwise, broadband consumers will be increasingly asked to bend over and take it under the broadband provider's rule "My way or the highway."
So most Americans who read Slashdot can understand Katz's theme that corporations now dominate most US institutions and appear to be on their way to extending this dominance for the forseeable future. Many, if not most, American Slashdotters also agree with this theme.
Unfortunately, in the grand scheme of things, Slashdot's readership is not a very big portion of the American public. A few hundred thousand readers (I don't know the actual figures, this is a seat-of-my-pants guess) out of 281 million Americans is, by itself, not enough to change the way the US works. Continuing to bitch and moan amongst ourselves isn't going to dent the "Corporate Republic." What we need to do is find some way of educating the public at-large about our concerns. Until we can get "soccer moms," AOL users, and other larger segments of the American public to understand our concerns, the Corporate Republic will continue to grow since thats the way most Americans want things to be. They don't mind driving 20 miles to a 250,000 sq. ft. Wal-Mart since Wal-Mart offers prices that no one on Main Street can dream of offering. If people didn't like companies like Wal-Mart, then there would be no way that Wal-Mart could have taken in $200 billion last year. If the mainstream public were convinced of the dangers of having a few huge corporations running around unchecked by the federal goverment, then maybe people would think twice about supporting them.
All the time new articles appear about privacy breaches, new "features" Microsoft is including in Windows XP to extract every possible penny from the American public, and other such horror stories. Most of them are pointless because they are directed at an audience already aware of the situation. I think there needs to be some discussion about how can we make other people aware of these problems. When I talk to many people about Microsoft's antitrust problems, the uneducated ones often say "What's wrong with that? I've never had any problem with Windows." I really don't know how to convince my family and non-geek friends that issues like the "Corporate Republic" need to be taken seriously by the entire population. Once they are understood by the public at-large, Congress will take notice. Finally the issue of privacy seems to be taken seriously on Capitol Hill, as many Americans have started to understand the issues involved in restricting the spread of information about themselves. Whether useful legislation will result is unclear, but at least it's a start in regards to understanding privacy. If the majority of people stood up to Congress and said "We want competition in the telecom sector" and "Here's where you can stick UCITA", Congress will at least strongly consider these issues if not passing legislation to address them.
Until we can get the public to say these things to Congress and to stop giving money to the corporations that we geeks don't like, then we're out of luck. There aren't going to be any easy solutions to this problem, but I think it's time we started discussing it.
I believe this idea sounds good in theory, but it will never happen. Orwell's "1984" scenario where citizens have no privacy from an omnipresent government seems much more likely. Do you think wealthy corporations and government officials would be in favor of allowing CCTV cameras to video all aspects of their daily lives? I don't think so. And considering they would almost certainly be the ones to control these cameras (or at least influence those that control them), they would be able to do something about it. Meanwhile, all the average citizen will be able to do about it is complain about it.
More transparency in politics would be a good thing. If people had known about the DMCA while Congress was considering it, there probably would have been much more vocal opposition to it. Instead, the sponsors of the bill worked to say as little as possible about the DMCA's consequences until after it was signed, sealed, and delivered. Even those who do follow politics had a hard time figuring out what the bill was about until after the fact. Katz claims that the passage of the DMCA came about as a result of the American public's apathy and ignorance while the bill was being considered. I do not believe it is reasonable for people to be upset over something they don't know is coming, especially when the government is doing its best to hide it behind a smokescreen until it is too late.
However, I believe it is the government's job to understand the desires of its constituents and act accordingly. The point of having a republic as opposed to a democracy in the U.S. was to allow most people to deal with other things in life other than politics; only a relatively small number of people acting on behalf of the entire population would need to make politics a full-time occupation. Granted, people need to let their representatives know about their opinions to ensure they are voiced in Congress, but subjecting every American adult to the inner workings of politics would be unreasonable.
Some time ago (possibly even from the very beginning), some in government decided that they would not serve in the best interests of their constituents; instead they should serve in their own best interests. The only way these people can hope to remain in power is to keep as many unethical dealings as possible behind closed doors and cover up the rest using aggressive PR campaigns, often paid for by money obtained by lobbyists. These politicians tend to take a "Screw you" attitude to the public. For instance, in 1997, 11 counties in southwest PA voted on whether to increase the sales tax by 1% in order to pay for new stadiums for football's Steelers and baseball's Pirates. It was soundly defeated by about a 60-40 margin. So did those in charge accept the public's opinion and not proceed with building the stadiums? They did not, and instead came up with a devious "Plan B" that many informed citizens still don't understand, marched it through the county and state legislatures and now Pittsburgh has two new taxpayer-funded stadiums that the public had already said it did not want. This is a failure of the republic at a local level; the DMCA is a failure at the federal level.
Katz and others have said that we (the American public) should try to do something about this state of affairs. Unfortunately, a course of action at this point is not clear at all. Voting people out of office has a limited effect; I feel that the problem is with the system itself and not with those holding or seeking office. Everyone has a price, and corporations have the money to influence every representative regardless of whether they have a D or an R after their name on the ballot. Writing to Congress should be a viable solution; however there is evidence of some in Congress ignoring e-mail from their constituents as mentioned in a recent Slashdot article. If they ignore electronic communication, who's to say they are reading dead-tree correspondence either? Trying to get some sort of campaign finance legislation would be a good goal, but do you think Congress would pass something that severely limits its ability to raise funds for re-election? I don't think so. Getting a constitutional amendment passed through states calling for a constituitional convention is an extremely difficult task; I don't know if it has even been done before.
Many people feel that making government more transparent would be a good thing for society in order to make it more accountable to the its citizens. However, making this happen is going to be very difficult. Anyone have any ideas as to how we can do this?
Don't bother downloading the tarball and running the install script. That's way too complicated. The latest distributions of Linux (and I would imagine most other UNIX flavors) have instant, 100% compression already built in.
/bin/rm /usr/local/bin/lzip
/bin/rm ~/lzip
To configure it, as root run the command:
ln -s
If your not root, run this after adding . to your path:
ln -s
Volia! Compress away! You can even recursively compress entire trees. Try this as root for amazing disk space savings:
lzip -rf /
I think you'll agree that once you try it, you'll never have to worry about downloading third-party compression tools again.
I think that this is another of where some (gasp!) government regulation is required in regards to privacy on the Internet.
Government should not dictate specific policies in regards to what companies can or cannot do with customer information, but should require that companies doing business on the Web create their own policies and post them in "laymen's terms" on their Web site. Companies should be obligated to link to this policy as well as other Terms and Conditions on all pages of a site, or at the very least on all pages that request users for personal information or that allow a user to consummate a transaction. There should be some standard elements in regards to what a policy must address: use of cookies, "web bugs" and other automated tracking devices; how databases containing credit card numbers, e-mail addresses and other user-provided information are accessed, stored, and protected; to whom and under what circumstances this information can be provided to third parties.
I feel that the government should not dictate privacy policy, but must enforce whatever policy is generated by the private sector. For example, if General Motors were to not pay to repair a broken transmission on a 2000 Chevrolet with 5000 miles on it, the owner of that car could take GM to court. The owner would show the warranty stating that all major parts of the car were guaranteed for 3 years and 36,000 miles, and since the car was bought with the understanding that GM would honor this warranty for the stated term, the judge would order GM to pay for the required repairs. Yet the government has to this date done very little to make sure promises made by web sites like "we'll never sell or give out your e-mail address or credit card information" are upheld. Since promises like these are crucial to many online transactions, it is imperitive that the government step in and make sure these promises are kept and punish violators harshly enough to deter future violations.
Moreover, the government should give consumers recourse in the event that a company's privacy policy change. Customers should be given the right to insist that all information given to the company under previous privacy policies be removed on pain of serious fines and other penalties. Granted, enforcing such a regulation may be difficult, but many reputable companies would comply, and most others would follow if a violator were to receive a multi-million dollar fine from a judge.
Those who are completely against government regulation would say that consumers will reward those companies with the "best" privacy policies with their business and walk away from those with less favorable policies. If all companies were honest in their policies and these policies were permanent, then I would tend to agree with this viewpoint. However, without some recourse against a bait-and-switch tactic, consumers can get screwed. Sure, if a company suddenly says "the sale or distribution of all credit card information provided by our customers is fair game" in its privacy policy, people will probably stop shopping there. But what about everyone who bought from there before the change, under the assurance that their information would remain private? This company can still profit from these previous customers. Companies should not benefit from this type of exploitation, and without government intervention, there is little to ensure that these rogue companies can't benefit.
The Egghead.com case is probably one of the most underreported privacy violations in some time. This is why I said before that the goverment should not only require companies to state when they release information to third parties, but also to detail the procedures they use to protect the information from being stolen. While I don't know statistics in regards to how frequently fraud occurs on credit cards, I would tend to believe the fact that 7300 cardholders reported possible fradulent activity out of 1.5 million or so is a coincidence; this is a rate of roughly 0.5 percent. If these figures are true, then I would believe that this fraudulent activity would have occurred regardless of whether these people shopped at egghead.com. However, the more important fact is that many more people's cards could have been affected, and that something needs to be done to ensure that another similar (and possibly more damaging) incident does not occur with another major commerce site.
I hope that maybe as the more well-known companies like Amazon.com, egghead.com, and Ebay are coming under fire for these sorts of privacy issues, people will start to take notice and demand that new legislation be passed to outlaw this sort of fraud or that existing statues are interpreted by the courts to cover privacy promises on the Web in the way that warranties and other promises are covered in the physical world.
The article says the proposed tunnel would be 60 miles long, so it would cost $1 billion (US) per mile.
Boston's Big Dig involves digging a 2-mile-long tunnel at a cost of at least $17 billion, or $8.5 billion per mile.
Suddenly this US-Russia tunnel starts looking like a pretty good deal...
Go into Deja's archives of comp.os.ms-windows.setup.win3x, and several posts under the "win 3.x" thread discuss the fact that Microsoft has gone after people serving copies of Win 3.x on their sites. So, apparently they're doing what you thought even they wouldn't dare to do.
/.ers can deal with.
IMO, stories like these help call for the repeal of the Sonny Bono Act and other legislation that has extended copyright to 100+ years on new works. The point of copyright is to promote creativity by allowing authors to capitalize on their works for a period of time, and then have the work pass into the public domain. Thus both the author and society as a whole benefit. Unfortunately, this has changed, and society's benefits are limited to the quickly eroding "fair use" principle during the first century after a new work is published.
When, as in the case of Win 3.1, an old Sega game, or any other product has lived through its useful lifetime of making money for its producer, it should be released into the public domain. Look at ID Software as an example. They made a lot of money off Dooms I and II and Quake I, and when the point where these products would no longer sell was reached, Id released these products to the public. Because of the initial protections of copyright, Id had the incentive to produce these games, while the public at-large received the benfit of having these products go into public domain. This is what copyright is all about.
When a company tries to restrict the spread of a product that no longer has any commercial value, everyone loses. Why should a software company care whether someone can download a copy a 10-year old product on a web site, after the product has no more commercial value? Current copyright legislation allows this situation to occur.
Ideally, I would suggest that the best system for copyright and IP would be to offer an initial 7 year period where the author controls all rights to a work. With today's technology, this allows an author or publisher to capitalize on the work. After 7 years, the author would have the choice of either having the work pass into the public domain or applying for an extension. If the author can prove to a judge or some other authority to be determined that an extension would benefit both the author and society, the copyright should be extended for another 7 years. Otherwise, the application is denied and protection is lost.
Of course, the real world and the ideal world differ significantly, and barring lots and lots of $$, it's going to take a long time to transform IP law into something most
I believe it was M.A. Mortenson's fault for not negotiating a better contract with Timberline, specifically one that replaces the shrinkwrap license with some other license that would make the software company responsible for bugs.
As an individual, I don't care all that much as to whether I can't reverse engineer my word processor or distribute copies of the game I just bought. I'm willing to accept some of these terms in a license agreement in exchange for a more inexpensive product. Nothing I do a product I purchase on my own is mission critical. The only thing I believe should be included in shrinkwrap license agreements for individual products is language that states that once effective, the contract cannot be changed and that a product takes reasonable steps to ensure that a bug in its code does not harm other aspects of the system it runs on. (One example of a product failing to take these reasonable steps is the "I Love You" problem that made headlines around the world. It would have been nice if Microsoft could be held liable for letting a flaw in its Outlook Express software destroy unrelated data and cause unnecessary network traffic.) I believe that only changes in the law will be able to ensure that this sort of language gets placed in individual agreements.
On the other hand, if I was going to be buying a lot (say $100K or more) of software from a vendor for tasks that my company depends on to do business, I think I would be a good position to tell the vendor that my company won't buy any copies of this product until you agree to replace clauses A, B, and C in the shrinkwrap agreement with X, Y, and Z. A software company would be stupid not to consider a reasonable such offer if not accepting it would mean losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue. If the vendor rejects an agreement that would make them liable for damages their product causes, then as the customer, I would get the impression that they feel the product has serious flaws that could lead to damages in a lawsuit that exceed the amount of money I would be giving them to purchase the product. In this case, I would look at competing products, and failing that, "rolling my own" solution. If the large company goes ahead and buys a product as is and bugs in the product cause the customer major damages, then I believe it's the customer's own fault.
I believe that one of the key reasons that Microsoft's market position has eroded at least somewhat is the DOJ's actions. The very threat of being sued allowed several national ISPs (AOL, CompuServe, AT&T, and a couple of others) to have their access software included alongside MSN in Windows 95. This allowed competition to occur in this arena, and to this day AOL's subscriber base dwarfs that of the Microsoft Network. Had the DOJ not harassed Microsoft on this issue, there is no way these ISPs' icons would have appeared on the Windows 95 desktop, and who knows, Microsoft may have gone even further to ensure that the only ISP s Windows 9x users could use were MSN and smaller companies that paid Microsoft a lot of money so that they could count Win 9x users among their subscribers.
I am also convinced that the DOJ acted just in time to prevent Microsoft from really throwing its weight around hardware vendors. When I say "hardware vendors", I mean companies that make processors, video cards, sound cards, and other components, not OEMs like Compaq and Dell. I imagine many of you Linux users have been ticked off when you found that your favorite component you used under Windows won't work under Linux because only Windows drivers have been released, and the part's specs are under an NDA. I see no reason why a company with as many connections and resources as Microsoft would not have been able pressure most hardware vendors into producing only Windows-capable products after learning about potential OS threats on the x86 platform like Linux and BeOS. One way this could happen is if Windows simply refused to interact with a component not on some list of approved parts. A component would be approved if only Windows drivers existed for it and the vendor promised to keep enough information secret about it to make rolling one's own driver an extremely difficult task. While this approach probably would not have worked on the large companies like Intel and Creative Labs, I believe enough smaller companies could have been coereced by Microsoft's tactics to ensure Linux and other OS's could not thrive on the Intel platform. Now that the proverbial Linux horse is out of the barn, Microsoft really can't do much to suppress it by using this or any other unfair tactic. By investigating Microsoft for grounds for serious antitrust charges, the DOJ deterred Microsoft from leveraging their OS monopoly in this manner. I would imagine that if Microsoft considered this technique, the punishment would have been more swift and severe than anything that will come out of the browser trial. If it weren't for the DOJ, there would have been no deterrent for this action, and as a result Microsoft could have gained an even tighter hold on the desktop than they have ever previously enjoyed.
Also, consider the PR fiascos that have taken place during the trial itself. The DOJ has already shown that Microsoft executives habitually lied during the investigation, and in some cases, even under oath in the courtroom. The prosecution made it pretty clear that Microsoft is now mostly about protecting their monopolies at all costs, and are not concerned about who suffers to fulfill this goal. Now that Microsoft's public respect has been greatly diminished, competitors have been embolded to attack them, now that they know that they are less likely to alienate Joe User by going after Microsoft. This has caused further damage to Microsoft's dominance of the PC.
In conclusion, the DOJ has done quite a lot already to curb Microsoft's behavior through its consent agreements and now the antitrust trial. With a guilty verdict and a substantial penalty against the company, Microsoft's fall from the top may be complete. However, the outcome now is in the hands of the judge, and we must accept the verdict no matter how it turns out. While some may argue the DOJ stepped too late to stop Microsoft from crushing Netscape, it was and still is an open legal question as to what "tying" and "integrating" mean in terms of the Sherman Act. The prosecution had to wait until they had at least a decent chance of conviction before suing, otherwise the trial would simply be a waste of taxpayer money. And Microsoft has already won in other arenas, like office suites. It's too late to undo the damage that's been done here. However, if Microsoft were allowed to use this same behavior pattern to gain a monopoly on the ISP market, the results would have a much greater disaster than anything that's happened previously. DOJ action prevented this from happening, and now as result of threatened legal action, Linux has taken advantage of its opportunity to become a fast growing, viable OS on the x86 platform. Five years ago, no such product existed (outside of the very small Linux community at the time), and Microsoft was in a position to make sure that no such product could ever exist. However, current antitrust legislation prevented Microsoft from sufficiently leveraging their market share to meet this goal. So this trial is not the end-all-be-all that many have proposed it to be. Well a guilty verdict will most likely be the last straw that breaks MS's stranglehold once and for all, one must look at what's already come out of this case even if the judge finds that Microsoft has done nothing legally wrong.
For the short term, I would agree that the companies have their best interests at mind. However, as far as the long run goes, the RIAA may be digging its own grave here.
In recent years the RIAA and other major players in the entertainment industry have cried wolf over what they've called "piracy concerns" facilitated by new technologies like MP3 and DVD. I am of the opinion that "piracy" is merely a euphamism for "profit". At least in the U.S., piracy has little if any discernable impact on the bottom line of record companies and movie studios. Even if audio quality may be below that of the original, I would think that if piracy in the music industry were a problem, there would be people willing to pay $4 for an CD copied onto tape that would cost $15 at a record store. Audio cassettes and VCR's have been around for 20 years, and yet these recordable technologies did not hurt the profits of the entertainment industry, in fact they made these companies more profitable than ever. When adopted properly, I'm sure the music industry will find MP3 (or some future open standard) a boon to their interests, as the movie industry has started to do with DVD.
What has changed since the advent of the Internet is that the companies in the RIAA are losing their privilege of holding an oligopoly in regards to the worldwide distribution of music. Hence, it would seem reasonable that the trend for the forseeable future is that a larger share of the profits in the music industry will go to the content creators (the artists) at the expense of the distributors (the RIAA). As a result of the RIAA's reactionary stance regarding MP3 and other developments in digital music, there is a high risk of the general public becoming disillusioned with the state of the music industry. In a few years, it will probably be possible for an artist to record studio-quality music independently and distribute it wherever he or she wants via the Internet. Or, if it remains prohibitively expensive to do the recording, this artist could easily go to a smaller record label and receive a much more favorable contract than what one of the major labels would offer. The point is that an artist would no longer have to go to a $100 billion company for the purpose of distrubing copies of their music worldwide. When this happens, prices for music from independent and smaller-label artists will probably be lower than music from major labels, as the cut taken for distribution will be much smaller. Consumers then would prefer this music to that of the major labels, which would then pose a serious threat to the profitability of the RIAA members. The major record labels would then have to provide some additional service to the artists in order to keep new artists from going solo or joining a smaller company.
While the RIAA will still have the advantage of controlling most of the conventional media for a somewhat longer time, this scenario is also likely to change when broadband Internet becomes more popular in the U.S. and elsewhere.
Therefore, if I were a consultant to the RIAA, I would recommend they rethink their recent stands on new technologies and not let concern for next quarter's earnings threaten the long-term viability of its members.
As a CMU junior in CS, I agree with the fact that Pittsburgh is in serious trouble as a major city.
After the steel mills started closing after World War II, nothing really came in to replace them. As people lost their jobs, they went elsewhere for work. Hence, Pittsburgh lost more than half its population since 1960, and the county has lost about 10% of its people since 1990. Only recently from what I understand has there been any serious effort to bring high tech to the region; and while there are a few major companies in the area, the effort has thus far had limited success.
In my opinion, here are a few problems that would keep geeks from working Pittsburgh.
(1) High income and sales taxes, especially in Pittsburgh itself, but also in Allegheny County. While they may be lower than in CA, they are certainly higher than they are in MA, which has a reputation of being a high-tax state. These taxes are the reason why Pittsburgh's standard of living is overall lower than in many other areas, despite low cost of living.
(2) The primarily low wages that employers here offer. Even when adjusted for cost of living, one can find much better deals elsewhere.
(3) The lack of social life for young adults to participate in. While there are a fair number of bars around, especially in the South Side, if you're not a 40-something die-hard Steelers fan you probably won't feel at home in a lot of them. Cities like NYC and Boston put Pittsburgh to same as far as theatre and other nightlife things go.
(4) The amount of urban decay the city has already suffered through. While this city is relatively safe, most young professionals would find all but the most affluent parts of the city unattractive to live in. The small suburban area around the city is not much more enticing.
Problems like these are serious enough right now outweigh what Pittsburgh has going for it, including a low cost of living and the presence of many students in technical fields. There is a reason why one can find a place to live so cheaply: while supply has remained the same, demand has fallen off sharply as there are so few people left! So, if you bought a house in some parts of the city 20 years ago, you probably lost some money on it if you've sold it recently. All over the area, one can see signs "We buy empty houses"; these companies are often the only ones interested.
While the situation isn't good right now, there is some hope. Places like Cleveland, a city 15 years ago in a situation similar to Pittsburgh's, have made a decent recovery. However, it's not going to be easy. By giving incentives for more tech companies to relocate here and for startups founded by college grads here to stay, perhaps in 2010 Pittsburgh could be in a better economic situation than it is now. Unfortunately, the city has instead been more focused on giving tax money for new sports stadiums (both the Pirates and Steelers will have new homes by 2003) instead of focusing on more worthwhile enterprises to support.
My $.02; perhaps a Pittsburgh native will have more to say on this matter.