Jennifer Pariser, testified that "when an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song." Copying a song you bought is "a nice way of saying 'steals just one copy,' " she said.
I'm surprised she didn't say "when an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, an innocent kitten is killed". Copying a song you bought is "worse than terrorism. Seriously, even Hitler would be ashamed." she said.
What a lot of people on Slashdot fail to realise is that online advertising is a *massive* industry. Even if you account for click fraud (or even people who just click accidentally or randomly), there are obviously a *lot* of people who see and ad online, click on it, fill out whatever forms, and end up *buying* something. Unlike traditional advertising, companies can track all this easily so they know their advertising is worthwhile.
Just because you ignore adverts, use AdBlock, etc. doesn't mean the rest of the world does. And clearly they don't - just look at some of the figures.
Up until the last year or two, there wasn't much progress (or at least *visible* progress) on Perl 6. If you look now though, there's a fair bit of tangible work being completed, e.g. Parrot 0.5 was just released, along with the Parrot Roadmap.
As with many OSS projects, the main impediment at the moment is not having enough man hours available to complete the work. But I think it's fairly obvious it's not complete vapourware.
If Perl 6 does everything it says it will, and happens to get it's timing right, it could be huge. It might be the first OSS language to take the sort of status the Java has now, and COBOL used to have. Or it could be of little use to anyone. As I said earlier, I don't think anyone really knows.
You may be right, but I don't think anyone (not even the people working on Perl 6) will know for sure until it's been completed and released for a year or two.
Exactly. It's easy to forget that a huge proportion (majority?) of the world's population lives in some degree of poverty. From their point of view, it's not the Internet that's been the revolution in the last decade or so, it's cell phones and satellite TV. These are two technologies that the western world has had in slightly different forms for half a century (or more), are relatively cheap from an infrastructure point of view, and scale extremely well to large populations. The Internet is too expensive in comparison, both to build the infrastructure, and for the end user.
We're only just beginning to understand the impact these technologies are having on our global society. What effect will the spread of all this information have? Most people haven't really even thought about it, let alone attempted to answer the question.
MS would win a lot of fans if they made OS releases they used the same or less resources instead of massive bloatware, or atleast show SOMETHING useful that's hogging the additional memory and CPU time. Maybe, but that would likely upset the OEMs. PCs had enough power about 4-5 years ago for the vast majority of the population. You can run Linux on those boxes, with all the features of Vista with no problems. It's in Microsoft's best interests to make their software bloated and resource hungry. That's one of the problems of monopolies. They don't need to win fans, they don't need to have the interests of the end-user at heart. They win whatever they do.
It's a fairly big day in the UK. In New Zealand, it's still traditional to have a minute's silence at 11am, often done in schools. There are other days to remember, but this is a pretty big one. WWI, in some ways, was a bigger lesson for humanity than WWII. It showed us that with the technology we've developed, no one truly wins when two or more big powers square off against each other. Until then, declaring war against other large powers for no real other reason than to prove your own power was commonplace.
We learnt a lot more lessons from WWII (about what happens when a major power is backed into a corner), and from the Cold War (the fact that there was never a direct war between the two major powers involved shows we *are* learning, albeit slowly). Days like Nov 11th are there to help us remember these lessons, so we don't make the same mistake twice. In a lot of countries, these lessons are "rolled up" into one day, e.g in New Zealand, Anzac Day (25th April) is used to recognise all major wars NZ has been involved in, even though it was originally a WWI rememberance day.
The fact that it's almost 100 years ago since these lessons were first learnt is even *more* reason for us to try to work hard to remember them.
the best thing you can do with that is max out your retirement funds and pay off debt, and then put much of the rest in paying down your mortgage. Most people blow it, though.
Well, that assumes life long financial security is the ultimate goal in life. There were a couple of guys in NZ who won a few hundred grand in the NZ Lotto. Instead of being "sensible", they bought a couple of motorbikes, and drove round the country. Their money lasted about 18 months. They had a blast, and had no regrets.
Just because you don't place financial security as your number one priority, doesn't mean you're necessarily stupid. (Though I do agree, a lot of people have no idea what to do when they win that much money).
It doesn't necessarily need many people to support them for the band to stay afloat. It needs a few people to support them with large amounts. How much does a band need to stay afloat anyway? Probably they just need enough money to support themselves, their families, and to pay for studio time, musical gear, and website hosting. Maybe they can even pay a few people to manage and promote them (i.e. have these people work for *them* rather than the other way around, as the RIAA would have it). Not really huge amounts. They may not get rich, but if they're true artists, that won't bother them.
In a lot of ways, this is how the dance music model works. The average Joe going to a club hardly buys any of the music directly (apart from the odd compilation, but a lot of the times DJs will give these out for free). He pays to get in, and drink at the club, money which goes to the club owner and event promoters. They then pay the DJs. The DJs use this to buy music (plus their own funds, most DJs are amatuer). So only a select group of people actually pay the music makers anything. But they tend to pay a reasonable amount (especially if buying vinyl).
There's no DRM on downloads, and it would be easy for DJs to share music amongst each other, but most of the smart ones know this would be foolish. If they don't support the producers, there'll be a lot less music around to buy (and most DJs buy a *lot* of music). Producers very rarely get rich, but a lot of them make enough to get by. And besides, they're not in it for the money (the only people who can make a good living out of this arrangement is the club owners.. the system's not perfect..)
I think this model (with some adjustments) could scale to artisticly sound bands such as Radiohead. People who like these sort of bands will be willing to part with their cash voluntarily to keep the band going. It might not scale to trashy pop, at least it may not provide as much money as it does now. Can't really see that being a bad thing..
English is well known for borrowing words from other languages. It's probably due to the fact that it *is* so widely spoken. It also borrows them in such a way as to keep the spelling and pronounciation in tact, which also helps preserve the original meaning. Your example of "mana" is used a lot in English, especially in New Zealand, and is beginning to spread around the rest of the world.
English is one of the most flexible and expressive languages. Anyone can coin a term and likely be understood. For example, if I were to say "This burger is cheesetastic", you would understand more or less what I'm talking about. Most other languages, this sort of flexibility is impossible.
Again, I don't think this is necessarily an original property of English. I think it's due to many people speaking English as a first and second language, all over the world. Rigid standards of grammmer, spelling etc., such as exist in Spanish and French are not maintained. Most native English speakers have far less trouble understanding foreign English speakers, merely because they are just used to hearing it all the time, as well as all the various dialects of native English. This results in a much more robust, flexible form of communcation. And in the end, who cares if we're maintaining strict rules of grammer, so long as everyone can understand each other?
I think it's important that we preserve other languages, and the efforts in promoting Welsh and Maori prove that it can be done. But I don't think we should try to resist the rise of English as a global language. I don't think we could, even if we tried.
The next programme:) It runs in a 45 minute timeslot, as lots of programs on BBC do (e.g. Doctor Who, which runs to 45 mins so it's easier for overseas broadcasters to fit into their 1 hour slot). Actually, in the case of Heroes, the 15 minute behind the scenes show "Heroes Unmasked" runs immediately afterwards.
They do run trailers for other shows between slots to pad things out a bit.
What's interesting is that with BitTorrent, you can't download something without simultaneously sharing it. I know people who have downloaded the full series of Heroes via BitTorrent. Since, in the UK, it's shown on BBC, and these people pay their TV fee, you could argue they haven't deprived anyone of anything by doing so, i.e. they could have recorded these themselves, and there are no adverts on BBC to miss. (Whether or not that argument would hold up in court is another matter).
Assuming that was deemed legal, could they then be prosecuted for downloading files which they are legally allowed to have, but other people (e.g. outside the UK), aren't? They may have had no intention of sharing them with other people, but the BitTorrent protocol makes that impossible.
Hopefully, when/if these sort of issues start turning up in court, people will begin realising the ridiculous nature of strict IP laws for digital content. But maybe I'm just an optimist...
I'm a software developer too, and I basically agree with what you're saying. *But* there's one way companies have begun to make use of their IT department in a slightly different way. I think it's part of what's driven the recovery since the bust. Basically, it's seeing your IT deptartment not just as a necessary cost centre, which creates tools, and possibly products as directed by the business, but as a group of (hopefully) smart and creative people that can actually drive product and process development. Google are probably the most obvious example of a company that does this, but I think there are plenty of other companies that do this to some extent.
That's not to say IT should call the shots, but they should work in tandem with business to produce something that works on both sides of the equation. It can be a difficult transition for many companies, because they're used to telling the tech team what to do, and many companies are structured so that IT reports into business people, or at least non-technical managers with a much stronger sense of business than technology.
Agile (or if you think that's a dirty word, some form of iterative development) is pretty important for this, so the techies get a chance to have some sort of input at a stage when it's not too late.
I think companies that take this sort of approach may well be the real "red shift" companies. (I certainly don't think it has much to do with buying Sun's hardware:)
Privacy Laws
on
Manhattan 1984
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I think the reason these systems are a little more acceptable in Europe is that there are strong privacy laws in place. Yes, there is a lot of data being collected, which could *potentially* be used malicously, but privacy laws prevent this from happening (for the most part). Every organisation who collects this data has to be open about what they're collecting, and what they're using it for. Any deviation from this can result in severe penalties.
In the end, collecting and analysing data is an extremely valuable and useful thing. It benefits not just the companies who collect it, but potentially society as a whole. For example, the London C-charge records data on vehicles for pretty much the same reason as what's being proposed in Manhattan. The positive impact is a huge reduction in congestion and pollution in central London. These types of benefits have to be weighed against the potential for mis-use.
Unfortunately, in the US, people don't have the same level of legal privacy protection as the rest of the developed world (not just Europe). Perhaps that's the real problem here.
Being a DJ, I download *all* my tracks as.wav file (where available, otherwise highest quality mp3 available). I'll then burn as an audio CD. The difference in quality between uncompressed wav and even 320k mp3s is quite significant, especially on a big club sound system. The bass is much more driving, and the highs much more coherent. I don't even consider myself fussy about sound, there are differences sound engineers get uptight about that - even if I can hear them - don't bother me. But any sort of auotmatic lossy compression is going to have a fairly big effect on the sound.
(BTW, dance music download sites have never resorted to DRM - their customers (mostly DJs) would have no use for DRMed tracks, since they need to burn to CDs, or copy about so they can play them out in clubs. DRM would make downloads useless, and everyone would just go back to vinyl. Guess it's another lesson for the big labels on the pointless nature of DRM).
Slashdot Mirror
What a lot of people on Slashdot fail to realise is that online advertising is a *massive* industry. Even if you account for click fraud (or even people who just click accidentally or randomly), there are obviously a *lot* of people who see and ad online, click on it, fill out whatever forms, and end up *buying* something. Unlike traditional advertising, companies can track all this easily so they know their advertising is worthwhile.
Just because you ignore adverts, use AdBlock, etc. doesn't mean the rest of the world does. And clearly they don't - just look at some of the figures.
Up until the last year or two, there wasn't much progress (or at least *visible* progress) on Perl 6. If you look now though, there's a fair bit of tangible work being completed, e.g. Parrot 0.5 was just released, along with the Parrot Roadmap.
As with many OSS projects, the main impediment at the moment is not having enough man hours available to complete the work. But I think it's fairly obvious it's not complete vapourware.
If Perl 6 does everything it says it will, and happens to get it's timing right, it could be huge. It might be the first OSS language to take the sort of status the Java has now, and COBOL used to have. Or it could be of little use to anyone. As I said earlier, I don't think anyone really knows.
You may be right, but I don't think anyone (not even the people working on Perl 6) will know for sure until it's been completed and released for a year or two.
Some people thought there'd be a world market for about 5 computers, for similar reasons. Wasn't even that long ago either.
Exactly. It's easy to forget that a huge proportion (majority?) of the world's population lives in some degree of poverty. From their point of view, it's not the Internet that's been the revolution in the last decade or so, it's cell phones and satellite TV. These are two technologies that the western world has had in slightly different forms for half a century (or more), are relatively cheap from an infrastructure point of view, and scale extremely well to large populations. The Internet is too expensive in comparison, both to build the infrastructure, and for the end user.
We're only just beginning to understand the impact these technologies are having on our global society. What effect will the spread of all this information have? Most people haven't really even thought about it, let alone attempted to answer the question.
It's a fairly big day in the UK. In New Zealand, it's still traditional to have a minute's silence at 11am, often done in schools. There are other days to remember, but this is a pretty big one. WWI, in some ways, was a bigger lesson for humanity than WWII. It showed us that with the technology we've developed, no one truly wins when two or more big powers square off against each other. Until then, declaring war against other large powers for no real other reason than to prove your own power was commonplace.
We learnt a lot more lessons from WWII (about what happens when a major power is backed into a corner), and from the Cold War (the fact that there was never a direct war between the two major powers involved shows we *are* learning, albeit slowly). Days like Nov 11th are there to help us remember these lessons, so we don't make the same mistake twice. In a lot of countries, these lessons are "rolled up" into one day, e.g in New Zealand, Anzac Day (25th April) is used to recognise all major wars NZ has been involved in, even though it was originally a WWI rememberance day.
The fact that it's almost 100 years ago since these lessons were first learnt is even *more* reason for us to try to work hard to remember them.
Well, that assumes life long financial security is the ultimate goal in life. There were a couple of guys in NZ who won a few hundred grand in the NZ Lotto. Instead of being "sensible", they bought a couple of motorbikes, and drove round the country. Their money lasted about 18 months. They had a blast, and had no regrets.
Just because you don't place financial security as your number one priority, doesn't mean you're necessarily stupid. (Though I do agree, a lot of people have no idea what to do when they win that much money).
It doesn't necessarily need many people to support them for the band to stay afloat. It needs a few people to support them with large amounts. How much does a band need to stay afloat anyway? Probably they just need enough money to support themselves, their families, and to pay for studio time, musical gear, and website hosting. Maybe they can even pay a few people to manage and promote them (i.e. have these people work for *them* rather than the other way around, as the RIAA would have it). Not really huge amounts. They may not get rich, but if they're true artists, that won't bother them.
In a lot of ways, this is how the dance music model works. The average Joe going to a club hardly buys any of the music directly (apart from the odd compilation, but a lot of the times DJs will give these out for free). He pays to get in, and drink at the club, money which goes to the club owner and event promoters. They then pay the DJs. The DJs use this to buy music (plus their own funds, most DJs are amatuer). So only a select group of people actually pay the music makers anything. But they tend to pay a reasonable amount (especially if buying vinyl).
There's no DRM on downloads, and it would be easy for DJs to share music amongst each other, but most of the smart ones know this would be foolish. If they don't support the producers, there'll be a lot less music around to buy (and most DJs buy a *lot* of music). Producers very rarely get rich, but a lot of them make enough to get by. And besides, they're not in it for the money (the only people who can make a good living out of this arrangement is the club owners.. the system's not perfect..)
I think this model (with some adjustments) could scale to artisticly sound bands such as Radiohead. People who like these sort of bands will be willing to part with their cash voluntarily to keep the band going. It might not scale to trashy pop, at least it may not provide as much money as it does now. Can't really see that being a bad thing..
English is well known for borrowing words from other languages. It's probably due to the fact that it *is* so widely spoken. It also borrows them in such a way as to keep the spelling and pronounciation in tact, which also helps preserve the original meaning. Your example of "mana" is used a lot in English, especially in New Zealand, and is beginning to spread around the rest of the world.
English is one of the most flexible and expressive languages. Anyone can coin a term and likely be understood. For example, if I were to say "This burger is cheesetastic", you would understand more or less what I'm talking about. Most other languages, this sort of flexibility is impossible.
Again, I don't think this is necessarily an original property of English. I think it's due to many people speaking English as a first and second language, all over the world. Rigid standards of grammmer, spelling etc., such as exist in Spanish and French are not maintained. Most native English speakers have far less trouble understanding foreign English speakers, merely because they are just used to hearing it all the time, as well as all the various dialects of native English. This results in a much more robust, flexible form of communcation. And in the end, who cares if we're maintaining strict rules of grammer, so long as everyone can understand each other?
I think it's important that we preserve other languages, and the efforts in promoting Welsh and Maori prove that it can be done. But I don't think we should try to resist the rise of English as a global language. I don't think we could, even if we tried.
The next programme :) It runs in a 45 minute timeslot, as lots of programs on BBC do (e.g. Doctor Who, which runs to 45 mins so it's easier for overseas broadcasters to fit into their 1 hour slot). Actually, in the case of Heroes, the 15 minute behind the scenes show "Heroes Unmasked" runs immediately afterwards.
They do run trailers for other shows between slots to pad things out a bit.
What's interesting is that with BitTorrent, you can't download something without simultaneously sharing it. I know people who have downloaded the full series of Heroes via BitTorrent. Since, in the UK, it's shown on BBC, and these people pay their TV fee, you could argue they haven't deprived anyone of anything by doing so, i.e. they could have recorded these themselves, and there are no adverts on BBC to miss. (Whether or not that argument would hold up in court is another matter).
Assuming that was deemed legal, could they then be prosecuted for downloading files which they are legally allowed to have, but other people (e.g. outside the UK), aren't? They may have had no intention of sharing them with other people, but the BitTorrent protocol makes that impossible.
Hopefully, when/if these sort of issues start turning up in court, people will begin realising the ridiculous nature of strict IP laws for digital content. But maybe I'm just an optimist...
I'm a software developer too, and I basically agree with what you're saying. *But* there's one way companies have begun to make use of their IT department in a slightly different way. I think it's part of what's driven the recovery since the bust. Basically, it's seeing your IT deptartment not just as a necessary cost centre, which creates tools, and possibly products as directed by the business, but as a group of (hopefully) smart and creative people that can actually drive product and process development. Google are probably the most obvious example of a company that does this, but I think there are plenty of other companies that do this to some extent.
:)
That's not to say IT should call the shots, but they should work in tandem with business to produce something that works on both sides of the equation. It can be a difficult transition for many companies, because they're used to telling the tech team what to do, and many companies are structured so that IT reports into business people, or at least non-technical managers with a much stronger sense of business than technology.
Agile (or if you think that's a dirty word, some form of iterative development) is pretty important for this, so the techies get a chance to have some sort of input at a stage when it's not too late.
I think companies that take this sort of approach may well be the real "red shift" companies. (I certainly don't think it has much to do with buying Sun's hardware
I think the reason these systems are a little more acceptable in Europe is that there are strong privacy laws in place. Yes, there is a lot of data being collected, which could *potentially* be used malicously, but privacy laws prevent this from happening (for the most part). Every organisation who collects this data has to be open about what they're collecting, and what they're using it for. Any deviation from this can result in severe penalties.
In the end, collecting and analysing data is an extremely valuable and useful thing. It benefits not just the companies who collect it, but potentially society as a whole. For example, the London C-charge records data on vehicles for pretty much the same reason as what's being proposed in Manhattan. The positive impact is a huge reduction in congestion and pollution in central London. These types of benefits have to be weighed against the potential for mis-use.
Unfortunately, in the US, people don't have the same level of legal privacy protection as the rest of the developed world (not just Europe). Perhaps that's the real problem here.
How is the NZ government going to continue to function now? Surely 80% of our computing power is now sitting in a musuem! (The rest is owned by Weta)
Being a DJ, I download *all* my tracks as .wav file (where available, otherwise highest quality mp3 available). I'll then burn as an audio CD. The difference in quality between uncompressed wav and even 320k mp3s is quite significant, especially on a big club sound system. The bass is much more driving, and the highs much more coherent. I don't even consider myself fussy about sound, there are differences sound engineers get uptight about that - even if I can hear them - don't bother me. But any sort of auotmatic lossy compression is going to have a fairly big effect on the sound.
(BTW, dance music download sites have never resorted to DRM - their customers (mostly DJs) would have no use for DRMed tracks, since they need to burn to CDs, or copy about so they can play them out in clubs. DRM would make downloads useless, and everyone would just go back to vinyl. Guess it's another lesson for the big labels on the pointless nature of DRM).