Why haven't you posted his real name, e-mail, and home address to slashdot in an article, along with proof that he is in fact a spammer yet? Or given it to that Detroit Free Press reporter?
I'm sure that you'd be allowed to post as anonymous coward for the purpose of posting it here.
If he is so much your real friend that you aren't willing to turn his ass in, do you hang out with pedos and kiddie pr0nsters as well? How about terrorists? Do you like the enemies of humanity in general or do you just have a soft spot for spammers?
Wait until his attorney finds out about the free advertising his client gave him... starting several hours ago.
before naming a business, check
on
The Apple Name Game
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Goods and Services
IC 042. US 100 101. G & S: computer consultation, design, testing, research and advisory services; research and development of computer hardware and
From the USPTO trademark database. Sorry, couldn't give a direct URL for this page, you have to access it via trademark search under apple.
Word Mark
APPLE
software; maintenance and repair of computer software applications; updating of computer software; computer programming services; computer services dealing with providing access to multimedia and interactive computer products; provision of computer databases and on-line information; services relating to downloading of information and data from the Internet; leasing of computers, computer peripherals and computer software. FIRST USE: 19800900. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 19800900
"services relating to downloading..." sounds a lot like telecom to me. However, it would require remarkable prescience to include the word Internet in a trademark app filed in 1980, so I checked the filing date. The filing date on that trademark application is 0ctober 2,2002.
I wonder when the former Apple Telecommunications company was founded, and if Apple Computer actually had a trademark covering telecommunications before the October 2,2002 filing date. Or at any rate, before Apple Telecom was founded.
The question here is if a large company can add items to its trademark coverage specifically so they can sue companies they suddenly discover have a similar name that are working in areas they might want to work in someday.
Get that fixed before you make any further statements about public policy.
It's obvious to anyone who sees your barfing that you have no clue as to what I'm referring to.
The laws I refer to involve regulation of what technology can be designed and sold and it's uses, not laws against making movies. The only accusation that exists about the MPAA making independent movie-making illegal is in the vacuum you think of as your brain.
All the MPAA wants to do is to control the tools by which indie movies will be made in the future with a product quality comparable to that of current Hollywood production, and make effective digital distribution of indie movies impossible. You may make all the 16mm and Super8 or CVD movies you like and snailmail copies to all the film critics whose names you can spell correctly with Jack Valenti's blessing, if your allowance your parents give you will permit this.
Google for CBDTPA and Broadcast Working Group and find someone who can help you with the big words to explain how this legislation in progress is intended to control technology that is publically available.
If advanced technology relating to the graphics required to create movies and the ability to create publically distributable digital content becomes illegal to manufacture or import, your independent moviemaker is stuck with what's on his PC or Mac right now, which isn't up to the drill for making movies for theater distribution, much less cinematic epics such as LOTR, StarWars, etc.
If broadband ISPs bandwidth-cap and refuse to allow users to digitally distribute via servers, your indie film maker is stuck with no way to distribute samples of his material via the Internet unless he can get financial backing to buy T-1 (I mean 1.544mbps, not the first Terminator movie), though he's free to send as many unsolicited 16mm reels or more your speed, Super8 film reels to film critics.
The RIAA/MPAA business model says "You work for us or you have no way to get your work out to the masses." It used to be that technology and monopoly control of radio / in-store / theater distribution enforced this for them. Now that technology now makes it possible for independents to market and distribute directly to the masses, they're using their 0wn3d lawmakers to get through law what technology won't do for them anymore. How is it that you're the only slashdot user that doesn't know this? Well, you know it now.
Congratulations. You've made a fool of yourself publically. You are best off remaining silent and learning from your better-informed fellow slashdot users.
Try your local classical music station to hear FM at its best, they usually don't use drastic audio compression to make the sound seem louder.
Or perhaps your local college or high school radio station. YMMV, of course.
If you actually like Top 20 (as in no accounting for taste), try some audio processing software with dynamic range expansion capabilities, mess around, and see what you get.
Analog FM is about 50Hz-15K with a dynamic range of about 40db IIRC... compare this with RealAudio or 128K MP3.
Ever heard of the DMCA? CBDTPA? Broadcast Working Group? Those items are part of what that money is going for.
You new here or something? Do a Google search on each of the above search terms and get informed. While flaming you would be more fun, you're more useful to the community if somebody hands you a clue. Go do something with it.
actually, "Oh,shit"
on
Cringely on P2P
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
What's the RIAA afraid of?
Look up the word disintermediation.
MP3s sell CDs and everybody in and out of the RIAA knows it. MP3s are not the product, they're a promo item, just as tracks played over the FM radio with comparable quality (actually, I saw FM radio compared to 200K MP3, which might be about right given optimum conditions) are promo items.
The difference? Anybody can distribute MP3s over the Internet.
The RIAA is afraid that the artists who currently are already selling in platinum-level quantities will decide that they can sell CDs via Internet without them quite nicely and keep all the profit instead of a 15% of revenues as calculated using Enron-style economics.
Or the new artists with platinum potential will take a swing at this themselves. Somebody will get all the pieces and market momentum together. It's only a matter of time. Will it be a formula which can be duplicated? Since I'm working with an indie artist myself, I sort of hope so.
If the record industry believed what you were saying, they wouldn't be buying Congress to make laws that allow them to decide what technology gets deployed.
More to the point, I suggest you do some googling for record industry sales numbers. You'll find that the trend is uniformly downward, but look for yourself anyway, the practice with search engines will do you good.
The survivors, or more likely, the new names among both record and eventually, the movie companies will be the ones who know they are in the business of adding value to an artist's content, not trying to extract value at the artist's expense.
They will be the ones with the how-to knowledge in creation / production / distribution / marketing and to a smaller extent, the ones who can loan the artists the high-end tools and venture capital to do a better job than they can do on their own.
I expect that there will be very, very few survivors among either record or movie companies of this shakeout.
Remember the RIAA bust-US Naval Academy?
on
Cringely on P2P
·
· Score: 2
It would be tragic irony if FM tuner cards on PCs were the source of the "illegally downloaded" audio the RIAA got those kids at the US Naval Academy busted for.
Recording off FM radio is explicitly protected "fair use", not stealing, and as far as I know, this doesn't change because the recording media is a chunk of HD instead of analog audio tape.
uh, WHAT planet do you say you're from?
on
Cringely on P2P
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Replace your FM transistor radio with a decent FM stereo tuner and get an outside antenna. You have a surprise coming.
With respect to 28Kbps MP3 files encoded by a retarded chimp on a 386 while smoking crack, I've heard plenty of those.
Where are you getting your download music where you've never heard such? We all want to/. those networks and servers.
The problem most of us have with FM radio is content, not audio quality. But if one is going to the trouble of looking for N'Sync or Backstreet Boys on Kazaa, one should start checking into tuner card specs NOW.
The problem is that MPAA Gets It
on
Cringely on P2P
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Meaning that without real political representation via our own PAC or a high-tech industry PAC, we're all going to get it. Without Vaseline.
Cringely almost gets it, but he's made a major error in forecasting.
Apparently, Jack Valenti isn't quite the techno-illiterate we all thought him. He is no more worried about P2P piracy than Hilary Rosen is, and he's probably gotten plenty of entertainment out of her mistakes. As in the case of the record labels, this isn't about stopping people from distributing low-quality copies of product, it's about control.
MPAA is NOT worried about some kid with a loaded current generation Mac or PC making Terminator 4. Unlike their sister companies in the record industry, their business model is doing very, very well. They're selling an ok to good product at what people believe is a fair price.
They are worried about the next Steven Spielberg or George Lucas graduating from the UCLA Film School 5 years from now with a loaded PC or Mac with a story to tell deciding he wants 25% of the gross and that he doesn't have time to serve out a Hollywood-style apprenticeship.
He makes a rough draft of the movie using a workstation and a render farm in a box, i.e. a bunch of high-end current generation graphics cards. Or maybe he borrows some time on his school's equipment. How does he do crowd scenes? Were you paying attention to the article on the Monster crowd generation package? Like to bet that there won't be one downloadable or off-the-shelf by then?
What does he do with it? He shows it to investors and to a few stars who are either up-and-coming or haven't been selling too well lately and are willing to take a chance on a straight percentage of the gross.
How does he distribute it? Reduced quality copies or samples via P2P or streaming Real Video, via pay-per-download, etc., and actual DVDs to film critics. He pitches it as a TV movie. Once the film is in the can, lots of things he can do with it. He presses a bunch of DVDs and sells them off his Website at $10 a shot. He finds a way to get higher-quality versions (TVD media?) into the movie theaters.
Even if he doesn't, if he makes even a reasonable profit without Hollywood, his next picture will have serious budget behind it and he'll be able to cut a deal with an MPAA company that'll give him the whip hand. Or worse, the ability to have his own auditors check the books unannounced any time they feel like it.
Unless the MPAA locks down the technology and the bandwidth and locks it down now.
The MPAA movie companies know that one can make a high-quality record album using PC-based studio hardware and distribute via the Net if one can find buyers, and they don't plan to let this happen to them.
Though all this means is putting off the inevitable for a few years, if one can't do this in the US market, which is all but inevitable, there are other markets and with new US technology under the control of the RIAA/MPAA, the technologies to enable this will simply appear everywhere except America. The bright young people they're depending on for their next generation of movies will be doing what the ones who want to work in creating high-tech will.
Moving the hell out of the USA to anyplace with a Net connect that isn't under RIAA/MPAA control implemented by the politicians the Hollywood cartel has bought or are buying. What's the MPAA going to do when the hot new movies and video content is all coming from outside the USA?
Watching Americans buy it. Trying to get politicians to use import restrictions to keep it out of the USA either online or as physical DVD product.
I think a manufacturer who can build a vacuum/carpet shampooer for $500 or under who can make one which will actually clean a home or office unattended will make serious money. Hanging a webcam and other security systems on it is optional... and with the shampooer, a $1000 price point might work. A robotic vacuum - $500.
I think what people are waiting for in the area of personal robotics is something with actual everyday practical use.
From what I've been able to see, Libertarianism is more a cult than a coherent ideology with a set of internally self-consistent beliefs, and it's real underlying assumption is "I've got MINE, Jack!", which is more important than their stated beliefs.
It has a couple of good insights, not original, but they've brought them back into public discourse.
The state has no right to regulate victimless crimes and in general, conduct that brings measurable harm to none.
Taxation is in fact a forcible taking at gunpoint.
So don't expect them to be reasonable about corporations and businesses. Most Libertarians see Bill Gates as a hero and his activities as "business as usual". There are good reasons why antitrust and securities regulations were developed, as even a cursory analysis of the history of the period where they were invented will readily disclose.
Anyone who knows history also knows that any set of business ethics that businesses actually abide by are enforced at gunpoint, not by markets. The idea of a "free marketplace" means that everyone can become totally informed about the activities of those who they'd do business with.
It frequently takes the threat of armed force (which even a civil suit implicitly means) to get anything remotely close to that kind of information out of a business.
MITRE's fairly well known and has done some useful things... from their site:
MITRE is a not-for-profit national resource that provides systems engineering, research and development, and information technology support to the government. It operates federally funded research and development centers for the DOD, the FAA, and the IRS, with principal locations in Bedford, Massachusetts, and Northern Virginia
Check the site out. Interesting tech publications.
The word "Institute" implies that it's a brain trust of qualified academic researchers, which is bullshit. As far as they've bothered to reveal to the rest of us, The Institute for Software Choice is simply a PR front group. They are in no position to speak authoritatively on any technical issue whatsoever. Their sole purpose for existence is to crank out press releases and hold press conferences if they can find any journalists inexperienced enough to show up. Declan should know better than to print their press releases as news.
The "Institute" would be called The Klingon Alliance or the Ku Klux Klan if MS thought it would help.
Helping the Communists (I can't say Chinese, I know too many of them and so I know it is not a part of Chinese culture no matter what the communists may say) do these things is analogues to wealthy industrialists aiding Hitler in the Holocaust.
And this would bother a Libertarian because?
The amusing thing is that while Libertarians advocate that individuals take responsibility for their actions, this doesn't apply to businesses, whose sole responsibility is to make profit. For them, NOBODY has moral responsibility for the actions of a business.
So you get people willing to make excuses for Cisco, who very definitely was knowingly involved in building the Great Firewall of China.
So if a business chooses to belch megatons of pollution into the atmosphere from its own property, this is OK. If Cisco wants to build products for customers who want to use them to target people for execution, this too is OK. I've seen complaints about pure food and drug laws from any number of Libertarians. The engineering consulting firm that designed the Auschwitz gas chambers is still in business.
One cornerstone of Communist doctrine is that "The capitalists will sell us the rope required to hang them." I am certain that Marx and Lenin had exactly the kind of capitalists discussed above in mind.
My point is that a real Libertarian would look at the above paragraphs and wonder why anyone would think this wasn't OK, mistake me for a socialist, maybe write a lame flame, and go on about his business.
The people here who support Cisco's right to do business in a way that targets people for state-sponsored murder, torture, and imprisonment aren't like the rest of us. It's a religious thing normal people just don't understand.
The good news is that this will keep the Libertarians from ever becoming a major political force in America.
Leaving out the fact that you can't get more mainstream than WalMart, where you can buy PCs run by Open Source, the final price barrier for the low-cost PC market is Microsoft Windows licensing fees. A white box mass market manufacturer who wants to sell a sub $200 PC has no options other than to run the box on Linux and bundle Open Office with it, MS is simply not available unless they want to give MS their entire profit margin.
So who gets priced out of medical care with your "solution"?
Probable results:
a new army of minimum wage clerks
you might die between when that utterly necessary record with the info required to treat you is delayed, screwed up, or lost. Not sure how much of a loss that would be in your case, of course. People involved with technology who don't understand what it's really for should listen carefully to the call of Darwin.
increased costs and reduced efficiency. Remember why they went to computerized records to begin with? It wasn't because of a passionate love for unglamourous back-office technology.
However, that Montana rancher may have one hell of a problem getting to his CitiBank account and that low-tech grape stomper might find a "CLOSED" sign on that farm whose ability to take orders from the companies they supply suddenly got unplugged.
I'm amazed to see comments like yours on a tech forum. Civilization has put its eggs in the internet basket. Basically, because it's cheaper.
Most data traffic having to do with operating the supply chain that gets those grapes to your grocery store in terms of wine and that cattle rancher's product to your store in terms of steak goes through the Internet. Even in the cases where this isn't so, you can bet that at least a few critical links in the supply chain are via Internet.
Could workarounds be found? For the short term, maybe. However, perhaps you'd notice if the price of milk in your grocery store went up 50% or average prices at WalMart went up 100%.
The only people who wouldn't notice the effects of a long-term loss of the Net are so remote from civilization that the international market economy doesn't touch them much, and that doesn't even describe most of the Third World. They might not know why they suddenly can't make a living or the price of anything imported doubled or worse, but they would notice.
They have every right to do this, and I encourage them to do so.
Of course, their remaining online advertisers will shit bricks and demand MASSIVE cuts in ad rates. Most will probably vote by finding other places to advertise. They might get a dozen new subscribers out of this, but they'll be lucky if their advertising revenues are only cut in half.
Perhaps you'll join aol and start posting your new aol address to the world so you can get the content. I'll be watching and laughing.
Their smarter public stockholders will be selling it short as soon as they start doing this.
The wire service stuff they republish one can get anywhere anyway, including direct from the wire services.
Sure he would be shut down PDQ if GW was convinced that spam is the way terrorists keep in touch.How do you know terrorists don't keep in touch that way?
We have a medium where the sender is explicitly trying his best to prevent the origin of his communications from being traced, where the sender is trying to bypass firewalls and content filters wherever possible, and with mailing lists in the millions.
We have senders who by definition have no personal ethics and presumably have no problem with payment via grocery bags full of $100 bills for content ranging from scans to kiddie porn.
Let's say you're Abdul "Joe' Sixpack wanting to communicate to your worldwide network. Go find Alan, tell him to send your message and add this disk full of names to the list.
As for content, it has to look like... spam. Names, product names, telephones, or those random alphanumeric strings could be used to convey codebook type content, and I've even seen multiline strings in these e-mails... perhaps these ARE crypto content.
I was joking when I started this. I'm not kidding anymore, this is a very real possibility.
Interesting to see that even a spammer can have friends. I consider your choice of associates... unfortunate at best, and if this person is a business associate of yours as well as a friend, you're likely to be a target for whatever action is taken, from hammering his servers on upwards.
Personally, I regard a major-league spammer as simply a declared enemy of humanity, making his income across deliberate harassment of people en masse. I see no moral problem against people striking back against them by any means necessary. They're at war with the rest of us.
Apparently I'm not the only person who thinks so, that news article with how-to info on locating its subject was checked at least by an editor before it got printed and in this case, probably all the way up the newspaper hierarchy and by legal counsel as well. They obviously didn't have a problem with the content, what's yours?
If anything unpleasant happens to one, I'd consider throwing a party to celebrate, and I think there's be celebrations around the world. I wouldn't participate in violence against one, but it's quite possible I'd put in a few bucks towards the legal defense fund of anyone who got caught doing so.
If he actually has a family... it's called collateral damage. Of course, if they're old enough to know what he does for a living, I'm a lot less sympathetic. Usama bin Laden has a family, too. Does he get sympathy points over it? Only from the weak-minded.
While I respect their work, even if they had more money than the Hollywood cartel does, we'd still be looking at bad law coming out of Congress.
The EFF is a non-profit and forbidden to spend a single dollar on political campaigning. Even with a billion dollars, they can't get rid of Fritz "Hollywood" Hollings and the rest of our enemies.
Without somebody making sure the firehose of bad law gets turned off in DC, all EFF can do is give some of us who make good test cases a bit of shelter from the flood, and when they occasionally win, the rest of us will get help. At least those of us who can afford legal counsel when the C&Ds show up will. Also remember not all the laws that threaten our rights and our jobs are actually unconstitutional, just dangerously stupid, and that no matter how good the Constitutional arguments are at the Supreme Court level, the Supremes are not especially friendly towards the rights of individuals against that of either the government or major corporations.
The people including Lessig who think non-profit traditional geek activism has the slightest chance of protecting us against what's coming down are living in a fantasy world.
A political action committee (PAC) created by credible people (credible means they're raised $1M before announcing their public existence) is the only solution that will get us permanent relief from bad law. We have to punish our enemies and reward our friends. That's the only thing that'll make this problem stop.
Looks like Sony is trying to lead the lemmings over the cliff with new technology instead of following the herd with the old new Super-S3cr3t l33t tech capable of withstanding anyting but a Sharpie ink pen.
They're up against one very simple fact.
No music industry business model that's based on an unending stream of platinum records from somebody or other either can survive or deserves to, regardless of the DRM technology or how many legislators they can bribe to support it.
The declining economy in general and the fragmentation of the music market (metal alone has broken up into at least a dozen sub-genres) dwarfs anything that either law or technology can do about it. The days when everybody listened to American Bandstand, MTV, and even FM radio and bought everything they heard are in the past and aren't coming back. The idea that they can keep us buying only the products of our record labels via payola-based FM radio and by unplugging Napster and Internet Radio has run into what for them, is ugly reality. The idea that people will pay more for audio CDs than movies was a stupid one to begin with.
So they're trying to plug the holes in the dike with law and technology, not admitting to themselves that the real problem is that the tide is coming in over it, they're going to be next to that dike when the water comes in, and no human agency can save their "right" to do "business as usual" at the expense of the public and the artists they allegedly serve.
What they need is a business model that takes advantage of the Internet, new technology, and genre fragmentation, not tries to use law and technology to hide from it.
They need to figure out how to profit from the work of thousands of new artists at a time selling a few thousand records a year, not pray that a few of the latest batch of albums from their estabilished artists who suddenly can't automatically deliver platinum, or they can hype a 'just discovered' Britney Spears clone into platinum so they can break even in time for the next 10Q report or at least reduce their losses enough to enable them to keep their jobs.
They should work out of what they claim their strength is, finding new artists we will actually want to listen to and finding lots of them that are worth listening to in every subgenre category with even a few thousand listeners. They also need to make all their backlists available in a minimal cost way so they can realize income on it. A record master on a shelf produces no income.
They need to reduce the cost of signing on new artists drastically and drastically reduce the financial risk to signing any individual artist. This also means they're going to have to reduce the amount of advance money paid per artist and give the artist technical and marketing support of the sort they allegedly can't get anywhere but from 'the experts' but make the artists do more of their own work, to sink or swim in the marketplace according to their real skill, ability, and willingness to work.
Do they really have the expertise they claim in music or marketing, or are they a hollow shell filled with hot air only kept alive by monopoly control over mass media and brick and mortar distribution? If they really believe they do, why are they trying to shut out competition?
They need to develop a new technology to make CD distribution to allow electronic distribution of CD content to record stores to drastically reduce the risk in expanding their musician base. (yes, it's possible) They need to reduce their marketing costs per artist drastically, and they can only do this via effective Internet marketing and by putting an permanent end to payola. Effective Internet marketing means they need to encourage and leverage as many Internet Radio and P2P as possible, not just the ones they control, admit that the real product is the CD and that MP3s and streaming audio are simply marketing giveaways just like the songs of comparable audio quality they've been bribing radio stations to play for generations.
The COMDEX speech is a celebration of their victory over the political power of US high technology companies and the high tech community, and like the Microsoft antitrust victory, means they think the officials they bought have granted them the eternal right to keep on doing monopoly business as usual. In other words, the recording industry has drunk the antifreeze, not the Kool-Aid.
So what they'll really do is to continue to use DRM and public insults to drive customers away, reduce the number of artists they actively support so they can concentrate more marketing dollars on each, and in general, find entertaining ways to bleed out in a flood of red ink so that some smart investors will be able to buy their catalogues and artist contracts up at fire sale prices when their parent corporations say "ENOUGH!", followed by adopting new business policies designed to give customers and artists what they want, i.e. doing business like non-monopolies do. I'd be equally surprised to see this take less than 2 years or more than 5.
If you can't figure out why this needs to be protected with a password enabled-SSL link and a firewall built into the microserver, you're invited to hook your hot tub to one (and PLEASE point a webcam at it), hook it up to the Net, post the IPs for both the webcam and the hot tub here, and climb in for a nice, long, relaxing soak.
Request to/. editors, if anyone actually does this, PLEASE make sure the article goes up IMMEDIATELY.
If the designer didn't think of this, he should be the first one to try this.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure that you'd be allowed to post as anonymous coward for the purpose of posting it here.
If he is so much your real friend that you aren't willing to turn his ass in, do you hang out with pedos and kiddie pr0nsters as well? How about terrorists? Do you like the enemies of humanity in general or do you just have a soft spot for spammers?
Wait until his attorney finds out about the free advertising his client gave him... starting several hours ago.
Word Mark
APPLE
software; maintenance and repair of computer software applications; updating of computer software; computer programming services; computer services dealing with providing access to multimedia and interactive computer products; provision of computer databases and on-line information; services relating to downloading of information and data from the Internet; leasing of computers, computer peripherals and computer software. FIRST USE: 19800900. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 19800900
"services relating to downloading..." sounds a lot like telecom to me. However, it would require remarkable prescience to include the word Internet in a trademark app filed in 1980, so I checked the filing date. The filing date on that trademark application is 0ctober 2,2002.
I wonder when the former Apple Telecommunications company was founded, and if Apple Computer actually had a trademark covering telecommunications before the October 2,2002 filing date. Or at any rate, before Apple Telecom was founded.
The question here is if a large company can add items to its trademark coverage specifically so they can sue companies they suddenly discover have a similar name that are working in areas they might want to work in someday.
Get that fixed before you make any further statements about public policy.
It's obvious to anyone who sees your barfing that you have no clue as to what I'm referring to.
The laws I refer to involve regulation of what technology can be designed and sold and it's uses, not laws against making movies. The only accusation that exists about the MPAA making independent movie-making illegal is in the vacuum you think of as your brain.
All the MPAA wants to do is to control the tools by which indie movies will be made in the future with a product quality comparable to that of current Hollywood production, and make effective digital distribution of indie movies impossible. You may make all the 16mm and Super8 or CVD movies you like and snailmail copies to all the film critics whose names you can spell correctly with Jack Valenti's blessing, if your allowance your parents give you will permit this.
Google for CBDTPA and Broadcast Working Group and find someone who can help you with the big words to explain how this legislation in progress is intended to control technology that is publically available.
If advanced technology relating to the graphics required to create movies and the ability to create publically distributable digital content becomes illegal to manufacture or import, your independent moviemaker is stuck with what's on his PC or Mac right now, which isn't up to the drill for making movies for theater distribution, much less cinematic epics such as LOTR, StarWars, etc.
If broadband ISPs bandwidth-cap and refuse to allow users to digitally distribute via servers, your indie film maker is stuck with no way to distribute samples of his material via the Internet unless he can get financial backing to buy T-1 (I mean 1.544mbps, not the first Terminator movie), though he's free to send as many unsolicited 16mm reels or more your speed, Super8 film reels to film critics.
The RIAA/MPAA business model says "You work for us or you have no way to get your work out to the masses." It used to be that technology and monopoly control of radio / in-store / theater distribution enforced this for them. Now that technology now makes it possible for independents to market and distribute directly to the masses, they're using their 0wn3d lawmakers to get through law what technology won't do for them anymore. How is it that you're the only slashdot user that doesn't know this? Well, you know it now.
Congratulations. You've made a fool of yourself publically. You are best off remaining silent and learning from your better-informed fellow slashdot users.
Or perhaps your local college or high school radio station. YMMV, of course.
If you actually like Top 20 (as in no accounting for taste), try some audio processing software with dynamic range expansion capabilities, mess around, and see what you get.
Analog FM is about 50Hz-15K with a dynamic range of about 40db IIRC... compare this with RealAudio or 128K MP3.
Ever heard of the DMCA? CBDTPA? Broadcast Working Group? Those items are part of what that money is going for.
You new here or something? Do a Google search on each of the above search terms and get informed. While flaming you would be more fun, you're more useful to the community if somebody hands you a clue. Go do something with it.
Look up the word disintermediation.
MP3s sell CDs and everybody in and out of the RIAA knows it. MP3s are not the product, they're a promo item, just as tracks played over the FM radio with comparable quality (actually, I saw FM radio compared to 200K MP3, which might be about right given optimum conditions) are promo items.
The difference? Anybody can distribute MP3s over the Internet.
The RIAA is afraid that the artists who currently are already selling in platinum-level quantities will decide that they can sell CDs via Internet without them quite nicely and keep all the profit instead of a 15% of revenues as calculated using Enron-style economics.
Or the new artists with platinum potential will take a swing at this themselves. Somebody will get all the pieces and market momentum together. It's only a matter of time. Will it be a formula which can be duplicated? Since I'm working with an indie artist myself, I sort of hope so.
If the record industry believed what you were saying, they wouldn't be buying Congress to make laws that allow them to decide what technology gets deployed.
More to the point, I suggest you do some googling for record industry sales numbers. You'll find that the trend is uniformly downward, but look for yourself anyway, the practice with search engines will do you good.
They will be the ones with the how-to knowledge in creation / production / distribution / marketing and to a smaller extent, the ones who can loan the artists the high-end tools and venture capital to do a better job than they can do on their own.
I expect that there will be very, very few survivors among either record or movie companies of this shakeout.
Recording off FM radio is explicitly protected "fair use", not stealing, and as far as I know, this doesn't change because the recording media is a chunk of HD instead of analog audio tape.
With respect to 28Kbps MP3 files encoded by a retarded chimp on a 386 while smoking crack, I've heard plenty of those.
Where are you getting your download music where you've never heard such? We all want to /. those networks and servers.
The problem most of us have with FM radio is content, not audio quality. But if one is going to the trouble of looking for N'Sync or Backstreet Boys on Kazaa, one should start checking into tuner card specs NOW.
Cringely almost gets it, but he's made a major error in forecasting.
Apparently, Jack Valenti isn't quite the techno-illiterate we all thought him. He is no more worried about P2P piracy than Hilary Rosen is, and he's probably gotten plenty of entertainment out of her mistakes. As in the case of the record labels, this isn't about stopping people from distributing low-quality copies of product, it's about control.
MPAA is NOT worried about some kid with a loaded current generation Mac or PC making Terminator 4. Unlike their sister companies in the record industry, their business model is doing very, very well. They're selling an ok to good product at what people believe is a fair price.
They are worried about the next Steven Spielberg or George Lucas graduating from the UCLA Film School 5 years from now with a loaded PC or Mac with a story to tell deciding he wants 25% of the gross and that he doesn't have time to serve out a Hollywood-style apprenticeship.
He makes a rough draft of the movie using a workstation and a render farm in a box, i.e. a bunch of high-end current generation graphics cards. Or maybe he borrows some time on his school's equipment. How does he do crowd scenes? Were you paying attention to the article on the Monster crowd generation package? Like to bet that there won't be one downloadable or off-the-shelf by then?
What does he do with it? He shows it to investors and to a few stars who are either up-and-coming or haven't been selling too well lately and are willing to take a chance on a straight percentage of the gross.
How does he distribute it? Reduced quality copies or samples via P2P or streaming Real Video, via pay-per-download, etc., and actual DVDs to film critics. He pitches it as a TV movie. Once the film is in the can, lots of things he can do with it. He presses a bunch of DVDs and sells them off his Website at $10 a shot. He finds a way to get higher-quality versions (TVD media?) into the movie theaters.
Even if he doesn't, if he makes even a reasonable profit without Hollywood, his next picture will have serious budget behind it and he'll be able to cut a deal with an MPAA company that'll give him the whip hand. Or worse, the ability to have his own auditors check the books unannounced any time they feel like it.
Unless the MPAA locks down the technology and the bandwidth and locks it down now.
The MPAA movie companies know that one can make a high-quality record album using PC-based studio hardware and distribute via the Net if one can find buyers, and they don't plan to let this happen to them.
Though all this means is putting off the inevitable for a few years, if one can't do this in the US market, which is all but inevitable, there are other markets and with new US technology under the control of the RIAA/MPAA, the technologies to enable this will simply appear everywhere except America. The bright young people they're depending on for their next generation of movies will be doing what the ones who want to work in creating high-tech will.
Moving the hell out of the USA to anyplace with a Net connect that isn't under RIAA/MPAA control implemented by the politicians the Hollywood cartel has bought or are buying. What's the MPAA going to do when the hot new movies and video content is all coming from outside the USA?
Watching Americans buy it. Trying to get politicians to use import restrictions to keep it out of the USA either online or as physical DVD product.
I think what people are waiting for in the area of personal robotics is something with actual everyday practical use.
It has a couple of good insights, not original, but they've brought them back into public discourse.
- The state has no right to regulate victimless crimes and in general, conduct that brings measurable harm to none.
- Taxation is in fact a forcible taking at gunpoint.
So don't expect them to be reasonable about corporations and businesses. Most Libertarians see Bill Gates as a hero and his activities as "business as usual". There are good reasons why antitrust and securities regulations were developed, as even a cursory analysis of the history of the period where they were invented will readily disclose.Anyone who knows history also knows that any set of business ethics that businesses actually abide by are enforced at gunpoint, not by markets. The idea of a "free marketplace" means that everyone can become totally informed about the activities of those who they'd do business with.
It frequently takes the threat of armed force (which even a civil suit implicitly means) to get anything remotely close to that kind of information out of a business.
MITRE is a not-for-profit national resource that provides systems engineering, research and development, and information technology support to the government. It operates federally funded research and development centers for the DOD, the FAA, and the IRS, with principal locations in Bedford, Massachusetts, and Northern Virginia
Check the site out. Interesting tech publications.
The word "Institute" implies that it's a brain trust of qualified academic researchers, which is bullshit. As far as they've bothered to reveal to the rest of us, The Institute for Software Choice is simply a PR front group. They are in no position to speak authoritatively on any technical issue whatsoever. Their sole purpose for existence is to crank out press releases and hold press conferences if they can find any journalists inexperienced enough to show up. Declan should know better than to print their press releases as news.
The "Institute" would be called The Klingon Alliance or the Ku Klux Klan if MS thought it would help.
And this would bother a Libertarian because?
The amusing thing is that while Libertarians advocate that individuals take responsibility for their actions, this doesn't apply to businesses, whose sole responsibility is to make profit. For them, NOBODY has moral responsibility for the actions of a business.
So you get people willing to make excuses for Cisco, who very definitely was knowingly involved in building the Great Firewall of China. So if a business chooses to belch megatons of pollution into the atmosphere from its own property, this is OK. If Cisco wants to build products for customers who want to use them to target people for execution, this too is OK. I've seen complaints about pure food and drug laws from any number of Libertarians. The engineering consulting firm that designed the Auschwitz gas chambers is still in business.
One cornerstone of Communist doctrine is that "The capitalists will sell us the rope required to hang them." I am certain that Marx and Lenin had exactly the kind of capitalists discussed above in mind.
My point is that a real Libertarian would look at the above paragraphs and wonder why anyone would think this wasn't OK, mistake me for a socialist, maybe write a lame flame, and go on about his business.
The people here who support Cisco's right to do business in a way that targets people for state-sponsored murder, torture, and imprisonment aren't like the rest of us. It's a religious thing normal people just don't understand.
The good news is that this will keep the Libertarians from ever becoming a major political force in America.
Leaving out the fact that you can't get more mainstream than WalMart, where you can buy PCs run by Open Source, the final price barrier for the low-cost PC market is Microsoft Windows licensing fees. A white box mass market manufacturer who wants to sell a sub $200 PC has no options other than to run the box on Linux and bundle Open Office with it, MS is simply not available unless they want to give MS their entire profit margin.
Probable results:
I'm amazed to see comments like yours on a tech forum. Civilization has put its eggs in the internet basket. Basically, because it's cheaper.
Most data traffic having to do with operating the supply chain that gets those grapes to your grocery store in terms of wine and that cattle rancher's product to your store in terms of steak goes through the Internet. Even in the cases where this isn't so, you can bet that at least a few critical links in the supply chain are via Internet.
Could workarounds be found? For the short term, maybe. However, perhaps you'd notice if the price of milk in your grocery store went up 50% or average prices at WalMart went up 100%.
The only people who wouldn't notice the effects of a long-term loss of the Net are so remote from civilization that the international market economy doesn't touch them much, and that doesn't even describe most of the Third World. They might not know why they suddenly can't make a living or the price of anything imported doubled or worse, but they would notice.
Of course, their remaining online advertisers will shit bricks and demand MASSIVE cuts in ad rates. Most will probably vote by finding other places to advertise. They might get a dozen new subscribers out of this, but they'll be lucky if their advertising revenues are only cut in half.
Perhaps you'll join aol and start posting your new aol address to the world so you can get the content. I'll be watching and laughing.
Their smarter public stockholders will be selling it short as soon as they start doing this.
The wire service stuff they republish one can get anywhere anyway, including direct from the wire services.
We have a medium where the sender is explicitly trying his best to prevent the origin of his communications from being traced, where the sender is trying to bypass firewalls and content filters wherever possible, and with mailing lists in the millions.
We have senders who by definition have no personal ethics and presumably have no problem with payment via grocery bags full of $100 bills for content ranging from scans to kiddie porn.
Let's say you're Abdul "Joe' Sixpack wanting to communicate to your worldwide network. Go find Alan, tell him to send your message and add this disk full of names to the list.
As for content, it has to look like ... spam. Names, product names, telephones, or those random alphanumeric strings could be used to convey codebook type content, and I've even seen multiline strings in these e-mails... perhaps these ARE crypto content.
I was joking when I started this. I'm not kidding anymore, this is a very real possibility.
Personally, I regard a major-league spammer as simply a declared enemy of humanity, making his income across deliberate harassment of people en masse. I see no moral problem against people striking back against them by any means necessary. They're at war with the rest of us.
Apparently I'm not the only person who thinks so, that news article with how-to info on locating its subject was checked at least by an editor before it got printed and in this case, probably all the way up the newspaper hierarchy and by legal counsel as well. They obviously didn't have a problem with the content, what's yours?
If anything unpleasant happens to one, I'd consider throwing a party to celebrate, and I think there's be celebrations around the world. I wouldn't participate in violence against one, but it's quite possible I'd put in a few bucks towards the legal defense fund of anyone who got caught doing so.
If he actually has a family... it's called collateral damage. Of course, if they're old enough to know what he does for a living, I'm a lot less sympathetic. Usama bin Laden has a family, too. Does he get sympathy points over it? Only from the weak-minded.
The EFF is a non-profit and forbidden to spend a single dollar on political campaigning. Even with a billion dollars, they can't get rid of Fritz "Hollywood" Hollings and the rest of our enemies.
Without somebody making sure the firehose of bad law gets turned off in DC, all EFF can do is give some of us who make good test cases a bit of shelter from the flood, and when they occasionally win, the rest of us will get help. At least those of us who can afford legal counsel when the C&Ds show up will. Also remember not all the laws that threaten our rights and our jobs are actually unconstitutional, just dangerously stupid, and that no matter how good the Constitutional arguments are at the Supreme Court level, the Supremes are not especially friendly towards the rights of individuals against that of either the government or major corporations.
The people including Lessig who think non-profit traditional geek activism has the slightest chance of protecting us against what's coming down are living in a fantasy world.
A political action committee (PAC) created by credible people (credible means they're raised $1M before announcing their public existence) is the only solution that will get us permanent relief from bad law. We have to punish our enemies and reward our friends. That's the only thing that'll make this problem stop.
They're up against one very simple fact.
No music industry business model that's based on an unending stream of platinum records from somebody or other either can survive or deserves to, regardless of the DRM technology or how many legislators they can bribe to support it.
The declining economy in general and the fragmentation of the music market (metal alone has broken up into at least a dozen sub-genres) dwarfs anything that either law or technology can do about it. The days when everybody listened to American Bandstand, MTV, and even FM radio and bought everything they heard are in the past and aren't coming back. The idea that they can keep us buying only the products of our record labels via payola-based FM radio and by unplugging Napster and Internet Radio has run into what for them, is ugly reality. The idea that people will pay more for audio CDs than movies was a stupid one to begin with.
So they're trying to plug the holes in the dike with law and technology, not admitting to themselves that the real problem is that the tide is coming in over it, they're going to be next to that dike when the water comes in, and no human agency can save their "right" to do "business as usual" at the expense of the public and the artists they allegedly serve.
What they need is a business model that takes advantage of the Internet, new technology, and genre fragmentation, not tries to use law and technology to hide from it.
They need to figure out how to profit from the work of thousands of new artists at a time selling a few thousand records a year, not pray that a few of the latest batch of albums from their estabilished artists who suddenly can't automatically deliver platinum, or they can hype a 'just discovered' Britney Spears clone into platinum so they can break even in time for the next 10Q report or at least reduce their losses enough to enable them to keep their jobs.
They should work out of what they claim their strength is, finding new artists we will actually want to listen to and finding lots of them that are worth listening to in every subgenre category with even a few thousand listeners. They also need to make all their backlists available in a minimal cost way so they can realize income on it. A record master on a shelf produces no income.
They need to reduce the cost of signing on new artists drastically and drastically reduce the financial risk to signing any individual artist. This also means they're going to have to reduce the amount of advance money paid per artist and give the artist technical and marketing support of the sort they allegedly can't get anywhere but from 'the experts' but make the artists do more of their own work, to sink or swim in the marketplace according to their real skill, ability, and willingness to work.
Do they really have the expertise they claim in music or marketing, or are they a hollow shell filled with hot air only kept alive by monopoly control over mass media and brick and mortar distribution? If they really believe they do, why are they trying to shut out competition?
They need to develop a new technology to make CD distribution to allow electronic distribution of CD content to record stores to drastically reduce the risk in expanding their musician base. (yes, it's possible) They need to reduce their marketing costs per artist drastically, and they can only do this via effective Internet marketing and by putting an permanent end to payola. Effective Internet marketing means they need to encourage and leverage as many Internet Radio and P2P as possible, not just the ones they control, admit that the real product is the CD and that MP3s and streaming audio are simply marketing giveaways just like the songs of comparable audio quality they've been bribing radio stations to play for generations.
The COMDEX speech is a celebration of their victory over the political power of US high technology companies and the high tech community, and like the Microsoft antitrust victory, means they think the officials they bought have granted them the eternal right to keep on doing monopoly business as usual. In other words, the recording industry has drunk the antifreeze, not the Kool-Aid.
So what they'll really do is to continue to use DRM and public insults to drive customers away, reduce the number of artists they actively support so they can concentrate more marketing dollars on each, and in general, find entertaining ways to bleed out in a flood of red ink so that some smart investors will be able to buy their catalogues and artist contracts up at fire sale prices when their parent corporations say "ENOUGH!", followed by adopting new business policies designed to give customers and artists what they want, i.e. doing business like non-monopolies do. I'd be equally surprised to see this take less than 2 years or more than 5.
Didn't you see the article about the guy who figured out how to extract audio info off a scan of a high-res image of a vinyl LP?
So where's the SSL and the firewall?
If you can't figure out why this needs to be protected with a password enabled-SSL link and a firewall built into the microserver, you're invited to hook your hot tub to one (and PLEASE point a webcam at it), hook it up to the Net, post the IPs for both the webcam and the hot tub here, and climb in for a nice, long, relaxing soak.
Request to /. editors, if anyone actually does this, PLEASE make sure the article goes up IMMEDIATELY.
If the designer didn't think of this, he should be the first one to try this.