First off, the point spread is like, what.. 10? So, can we infer from this that the "worst" cell provider (Alltel) is only a little worse than the "best"?
Some other problems: they make no differentiation between, for example, AT&T subscribers on the old DAMPS/TDMA network versus the new GSM network. There is also no mention of regional networks like Cricket and metroPCS (and with their all-you-can-eat pricing, it would be interesting to see how they stack up against "real" cellular providers).
Similarly, since cellular service can often vary widely from region to region, a breakdown by metropolitan area is almost a requirement. In Phoenix, SprintPCS was wonderful, while in Los Angeles it's oversold and almost unusable. NexTel also has a wide variance in quality, and I'm sure the pimping out of the service via Boost Mobile in California (a prepaid provider) is pushing their already heavily loaded Los Angeles network over the edge. Also, some of the technologies fare differently in different environments... a dense city like San Francisco is going to be less friendly to some technologies and more friendly to others.
Oh, and a generic note to those who have commented on Virgin Mobile: in the US, it uses the SprintPCS network.
Most bloggers and small website owners, frankly, wouldn't give one load of dingo's kidneys if their stuff was "plagurised".
But plagurism and p2p are two completely different issues. Would your average blogger be offended if a copy of an article they wrote on their website was passed around p2p with their name and website info attached to it? Doubtful. In fact, many bloggers publish their material under a Creative Commons license which typically encourages exactly that.
Which is part of the argument FOR p2p. By allowing content to be widely distributed, you can increase the exposure of your "art", thereby making your live performances (or your website) desirable.
First off, there are many challenges with using a GPS reciever. Just like any other technology, it has limitations, and part of the "sport" of Geocaching is learning to work the limitations. Many caches are hidden in canyons and under forest canopies, where GPS signals are blocked. Other caches require you to solve a puzzle (these are commonly called "multi-caches") to get the final coordinates. Lastly, just because you are following an arrow to the target dosen't mean you can find it.. GPS is not perfectly accurate, and even if both the hider and the seeker have highly accurate recievers and get "perfect" position fixes there can still be a minimum of 20 feet of slop.
Just because you know where something is dosen't mean you know how to get there. Especially in mountanous areas, you just can't start walking where the arrow points. You do have to look at a map.. you could be 300 horizontal feet away from a cache.. but the cache is down on the floor of the Grand Canyon, and you're standing on the rim. If you didn't look at a map beforehand, and don't have a map now, you're probably not logging the find today. Especially if you already walked two miles to get to that point.
Also, some Geocachers (raises hand) do infrequently orienteer to find caches. I have found a couple of caches without a GPS reciever, using some good old map-and-compass methods. A 'cacher in Arizona has been known to use a sextant on low-difficulty caches, and leaves the GPS in the car.
Anything that gets people 1. exploring their world, 2. learning how to use a technology that could potentially save their life and 3. gets people off of the computer and out into the Big Room With The Bright Light is, in my opinion, a GoodThing...
Nope, I went through the same thing with Qwest, except Qwest wouldn't even move me off PairGain to service me themselves. My neighbor(s) have DSL, but I couldn't get it because Qwest provisioned my phone line on PairGain. And, because of a contract Qwest signed with the apartment complex, Cox (the cable company) can't provide any service that's competitive with Qwest (i.e. cable modem or dialtone).
Actually, there is one major piece of software that takes full advantage of Quartz. They even advertize both in their product packaging and in the video they include with the 30-day free trial all the neat things you can do because their software is Quartz-enabled.
The F-Market streetcar line in San Francisco is a little more complicated than that.
First off, the F-Market and Wharves line features many different classes of vintage vehicles, not just PCC streetcars. Also included in regular service are wooden streetcars from Milan, designed by Peter Witt. Also, on weekends and special holidays, the Municipal Railway runs other cars like the Liverpool Boat (an open car that came from Liverpool, England), MUNI's Car # 2 (the oldest operating electric streetcar in the world), and a streetcar that came from Australia.
Most of the vintage streetcars are the direct result of the Market Street Railway, a volunteer group that has been instrumental in getting these cars to San Francisco, and keeping them operational. The F-Market and Wharves service is the direct result of the many trolley festivals MSR held in the past, and an experimental Embarcadero service trialed by SFMUNI using Municipal Railway car # 2, a cable car that had been converted to electric locomotion.
San Francisco is the only city in the world where you can ride four different eras of public transit: drawn cable, PCC, "modern" LRV, and high-speed intra-regional subway.. on one trip! Throw in CalTrain (a conventional commuter rail service), and you've got it all.
All we have in Phoenix is one PCC streetcar locked behind a fence at the bus terminal. *sniff*
One major error in the article...
on
The Law and P2P
·
· Score: 2, Informative
...regarding eMusic. In the article, he implies that eMusic's subscription model requires you to continue paying the monthly fee, otherwise your previously downloaded songs stop working.
This is not true. eMusic's files are straight MP3s, with no DRM encumbrances. They do require you to sign up for a minimum 1-year commitment, but after that year you are free to cancel, and all the files you downloaded will continue to work just fine.
Sue IBM, get fingered.
on
SCO DOS'ed
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
This is what happens when demented people play with powerful toys.
Okay. IBM has a lot of bandwidth. IBM has an outsourcing network solutions division. IBM has hired "hackers" at various times to do penetration testing and the like for said division. SCO sues IBM while taking a swipe at Linux. SCO gets DDoSsed into the uucp era.
It's likely completely coincidental, but it is conceptually quite amusing.
The "IRS' 20 points" has nothing to do with the labor regulation legalese of "contractor" vs. "employee." It has to do with whether or not a company must withhold (and submit a W-2) or not (1099). Tax law and labor law are two completely different animals entirely. Think "trademarks" vs. "copyright."
The vast majority of Microsoft "contractors" are employees of outsourcing companies like Aerotek and Adecco: the employees themselves are W-2'd by the agency they work for, and the agency charges MS a "fee" for their services. In most cases, the agency does provide some benefits (like basic health and dental, my agency even provided education reimbursements).
The IRS' regulations have nothing to do with labor standards regarding "contractors" vs. "employees."
As funny as it would be to make a comment about "glowing cyber balls", I will refrain.
As far as doing something like this, it's trivial. If you wanted to be old school, you could do something with a BASIC Stamp and good-old RS-232 out of a PC. Driving LEDs based on values given to it over serial is simple. You could probably drive four or five balls with one Stamp. You could even devise an overly-complicated protocol to communicate between the computer and the stamps. They could even be autonomous.. like adjusting color based on room temperature.
Or, look at A/D converters. They might be cheaper, if less geeky.
Re:Noooooooo! Stay away!
on
Debian NetBSD
·
· Score: 1
I'm sorry if keeping it stable is such a bad thing for you. Fortunately for people who's jobs depend on reliability and stablilty of the systems they maintain, there are people like the Debian developers who think that keeping it stable is a Good Thing.
How quickly we forget that stability is how many of us have sold Linux and *BSD to our employers, and that sudden rash changes and stability problems can leave those who require stability out in a lurch.
I see Debian's methodical approach to "current" as a good thing. Debian is about choice: if you want to be on the bleeding edge, please run unstable, we need the beta testers. If that's not your game, here's the stable tree. If you're really anal (or demented), here's the last version with security patches.
Sounds like a win for everybody. NetBSD gains more users (those who happen to get off on apt-get), Debian gets to work on porting to other kernels (a major cornerstone of the Debian project's defined goals), and everybody gets more choice.
Stay away from system administrators who think that the "latest" is always the "greatest."
Boy, you sure didn't look very hard. There's a real easy to find "Developers" section that has all you need, and need to know, to write software for the Cybikos. That's been the great hallmark of the Cybikos from the beginning: a fairly open SDK.
There are limits to what you can do with the free SDK (they don't allow you to sell applets made with the free one), but it works, and it's real easy to create stuff for the Cyb.
I keep thinking to myself: frotz port.. frotz port.. frotz port..
Since nobody seems to want to post it, the "old reliable" interpeter for Z-Code games, Frotz, is available for darn near all UNIX platforms. Many Linux distributions have a UnixFrotz package.. Debian's is actually fairly up to date. Or, you can get the source yourself from the current UnixFrotz maintainer. His page also has links to the IFArchives and other ZCode interpeter projects.
Disclaimers: I help the maintainer with cross-platform issues. Also, UnixFrotz is now GNU GPL.
Maybe it's a good thing the news media hasn't picked up the story.
For starters, the software company in question is also responsible for production of some address harvesting software and other tools commonly used by spammers. There is some circumstantial evidence that says that Dmitri might also have been involved with the production of this software.
The "news media" aren't dumb. If the mainstream media picks up that this guy in jail is a Russian, a "hacker", AND a spam apologist (or at least works for one)... it might not be pretty. Joe Internet-user is more likely to say "let the schmuck rot in hell/jail" rather than hear our side of the story once the spam connection is made. I know I'M not comfortable with the connection.. I can only imagine how it'll sell in Sheboygan.
But, then of course, to know that Dmitri's software company is involved in spam would have required research, something that the mainstream media seems to do a lot more than JonKatz does.
And it wasn't even paint, it was water-soluble chalk.
Please remove your head from the rectal position.
It was supposed to be water-soluable chalk. It was, in fact, spray enamel (at least here in San Francisco, according to the local paper it was Krylon Enamel). That was the problem.
In my own neighborhood, there are many areas where the sidewalk was damaged by the attempted removal of the enamel. I have photographs of this, which will be on a website as soon as Ritz gives them back to me.
Chalk would have presented no problem. This wasn't chalk.
Does nobody around here see how IBM has permanently harmed Linux enthusiasts with this? I live in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, and I've had to defend Linux to more than one of my neighbors because of this whole thing. And I tragically must admit that their anger is justified: IBM smearing their logo feces on our neighborhood is an abomination. What's worse is that in some areas (like in the brick-paved sidewalks of Market Street), the spraypaint proved to be difficult to remove. It makes me cry, literally, that my beautiful city has become permanently stained by this. In the eyes of many in the general public, IBM has made Linux enthusiasts a street gang, full of "taggers" who (like dogs) mark their territory by urinating on everybody else's property.
IBM needs to do more than pay a measly fine. IBM needs to serve "jail time" in the form of forfietting 30 days of corporate profits to CleanSF and similar organizations in cities they crapped on... groups that spend their time and energy trying to keep the streets of our towns clean. IBM needs to publically apologize with large, full page ads in local newspapers.
But most importantly, IBM needs to apologize to the Linux community, for making us look bad in the eyes of our neighbors and friends.
$18,000? Pshaw. That's the price for ONE of the billboards they placed along the 101 Freeway. IBM needs to truly pay for this crime, otherwise they're just another corporate criminal, who's gonna rape Linux for all it's worth and leave us out in the cold.
... and he missed that by excluding Debian completely from his analysis. Debian does make security patches to their distribution on a timely basis. The Debian folk also run one of the better Linux security sites (mentioned previously, security.debian.org). The fact that, if I install Debian off the network, I'm getting not just "stable", but "stable patched", means that by excluding Debian, he flawed the entire study.
Technically, what this guy is doing is "illegal". If you record, say, a Britney Spears song and then rename it to say "Weird Al", and then distribute it, you have actually committed fraud under the legal definition.
That's not even bringing into account the trademark issues...
While I agree with the premise that piracy hurts the little guy more than the major labels, I think that the author here is a little bit clueless as to people's motivations behind piracy.
First off, as somebody who's interested in a lot of "small label" stuff, and as somebody who has used both Napster and GNUtella for finding MP3s, I believe the assertion that it comes down to "free vs. pay" is a bit simplistic. Anybody who's tried finding an obscure artist through Napster can tell you that it is not as easy as typing "Wally Western and the Electrics" in there and downloading the CD. There may be fewer than 10,000 copies of the CD out there, and even today, the majority of people who own the CD may not even have a computer (case in point: the band name above actually existed in the late 80's and early 90's... we self produced three CDs that total sold around 10,000 copies in the Los Angeles area. I'll pay someone $50 if they find an MP3 of our music on Napster [mostly because I don't have copies of a lot of our material myself!]).
Many of the files on Napster (also GNUtella, and the 'old sk00l' way of distributing music.. usenet) are fundamentally broken in some way. Some are downright lousy rips, many are missing bits, all are encoded using MP3... which is quite simply inferior in quality to a CD, even one created from an analog source. Assuming you can find a copy of "Andee Joyce - Love's Not The Thing That Hurts.mp3" at all on these services, there's no guarantee that the MP3 is of reasonable quality. In the above case, it's on MP3.com, but the audio quality is worse than the analog [tape] source, largely due to limitations of a 128kbps MP3. (Disclaimer: it's my wife, BTW)
The movie industry figured out a long time ago that the best way to prevent piracy isn't necessarily elaborate copy protection schemes, gimmiky promotions, etc. but to simply price the product at a point where it's simply not worth pirating. This is the reason why VHS copies of movies went from being US$80 per copy to around US$20. The reason the MPAA is afraid of DeCSS isn't because they're afraid of a "new" piracy problem.. they're afraid that the "cost" of pirating a DVD may fall below a price point that they are unwilling (not necessarily unable) to go below. They are trying to keep the price of DVD content artificially high.
If good quality CDs of independant artists were available through MP3.com (or a similar venue) for $8, I doubt small artists would ever be hurt by piracy. The problem is, MP3.com has no mechanism to produce a "high quality" CD. DAM discs, unfortuantely, are nothing more than crummy 128kbps MP3s written to an audio track. Big deal. A 128k MP3 can never equal the quality of a true "CD" digital audio file.
So, it's a cost/quality issue. Offer better quality at an $8 per disc price, and you'll find piracy no longer being an issue.
All this BS generated by idiots who haven't even downloaded the code and looked at it is really getting out of hand. For the last time, it is NOT GPL'ed.
I did not put any GPL notices on the portions of the package that I wrote, I did not intend my work to be GPL, and I did not lie to the plaintiffs about what rights I owned or could assign to them.
Can we mark this entire news item as irrelevant? Can somebody in Slashdot-land research this issue a little better before perpetuating the theory that this code is GPL'ed? This will NOT be a test of the GPL. Period. Everybody needs to remove their head from the cranial-rectal position and RESEARCH WHAT THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT before posting.
The Wired reporter is wrong, as is anybody else who's claiming that the code is GPL'ed. Even if you wanted to claim that the one piece of code that contains the words "Released under the GPL" is GPL'ed, it is doubtful that the courts would agree that the license applies: none of the terms stated in the GNU GPL have been met (no displayed copyright notice, no disclaimer of warranty, no copy of the LICENSE text file).
Slashdot Mirror
First off, the point spread is like, what.. 10? So, can we infer from this that the "worst" cell provider (Alltel) is only a little worse than the "best"?
Some other problems: they make no differentiation between, for example, AT&T subscribers on the old DAMPS/TDMA network versus the new GSM network. There is also no mention of regional networks like Cricket and metroPCS (and with their all-you-can-eat pricing, it would be interesting to see how they stack up against "real" cellular providers).
Similarly, since cellular service can often vary widely from region to region, a breakdown by metropolitan area is almost a requirement. In Phoenix, SprintPCS was wonderful, while in Los Angeles it's oversold and almost unusable. NexTel also has a wide variance in quality, and I'm sure the pimping out of the service via Boost Mobile in California (a prepaid provider) is pushing their already heavily loaded Los Angeles network over the edge. Also, some of the technologies fare differently in different environments... a dense city like San Francisco is going to be less friendly to some technologies and more friendly to others.
Oh, and a generic note to those who have commented on Virgin Mobile: in the US, it uses the SprintPCS network.
But plagurism and p2p are two completely different issues. Would your average blogger be offended if a copy of an article they wrote on their website was passed around p2p with their name and website info attached to it? Doubtful. In fact, many bloggers publish their material under a Creative Commons license which typically encourages exactly that.
Which is part of the argument FOR p2p. By allowing content to be widely distributed, you can increase the exposure of your "art", thereby making your live performances (or your website) desirable.
First off, there are many challenges with using a GPS reciever. Just like any other technology, it has limitations, and part of the "sport" of Geocaching is learning to work the limitations. Many caches are hidden in canyons and under forest canopies, where GPS signals are blocked. Other caches require you to solve a puzzle (these are commonly called "multi-caches") to get the final coordinates. Lastly, just because you are following an arrow to the target dosen't mean you can find it.. GPS is not perfectly accurate, and even if both the hider and the seeker have highly accurate recievers and get "perfect" position fixes there can still be a minimum of 20 feet of slop.
Just because you know where something is dosen't mean you know how to get there. Especially in mountanous areas, you just can't start walking where the arrow points. You do have to look at a map.. you could be 300 horizontal feet away from a cache.. but the cache is down on the floor of the Grand Canyon, and you're standing on the rim. If you didn't look at a map beforehand, and don't have a map now, you're probably not logging the find today. Especially if you already walked two miles to get to that point.
Also, some Geocachers (raises hand) do infrequently orienteer to find caches. I have found a couple of caches without a GPS reciever, using some good old map-and-compass methods. A 'cacher in Arizona has been known to use a sextant on low-difficulty caches, and leaves the GPS in the car.
Anything that gets people 1. exploring their world, 2. learning how to use a technology that could potentially save their life and 3. gets people off of the computer and out into the Big Room With The Bright Light is, in my opinion, a GoodThing...
Let's see. Runs on Windows only.
Yep, that would be iChat on crack.
Nope, I went through the same thing with Qwest, except Qwest wouldn't even move me off PairGain to service me themselves. My neighbor(s) have DSL, but I couldn't get it because Qwest provisioned my phone line on PairGain. And, because of a contract Qwest signed with the apartment complex, Cox (the cable company) can't provide any service that's competitive with Qwest (i.e. cable modem or dialtone).
I moved.
bar-ra-try - The offense of persistently instigating lawsuits, typically groundless ones.
Actually, there is one major piece of software that takes full advantage of Quartz. They even advertize both in their product packaging and in the video they include with the 30-day free trial all the neat things you can do because their software is Quartz-enabled.
That would be Microsoft Office.
The F-Market streetcar line in San Francisco is a little more complicated than that.
First off, the F-Market and Wharves line features many different classes of vintage vehicles, not just PCC streetcars. Also included in regular service are wooden streetcars from Milan, designed by Peter Witt. Also, on weekends and special holidays, the Municipal Railway runs other cars like the Liverpool Boat (an open car that came from Liverpool, England), MUNI's Car # 2 (the oldest operating electric streetcar in the world), and a streetcar that came from Australia.
Most of the vintage streetcars are the direct result of the Market Street Railway, a volunteer group that has been instrumental in getting these cars to San Francisco, and keeping them operational. The F-Market and Wharves service is the direct result of the many trolley festivals MSR held in the past, and an experimental Embarcadero service trialed by SFMUNI using Municipal Railway car # 2, a cable car that had been converted to electric locomotion.
San Francisco is the only city in the world where you can ride four different eras of public transit: drawn cable, PCC, "modern" LRV, and high-speed intra-regional subway.. on one trip! Throw in CalTrain (a conventional commuter rail service), and you've got it all.
All we have in Phoenix is one PCC streetcar locked behind a fence at the bus terminal. *sniff*
...regarding eMusic. In the article, he implies that eMusic's subscription model requires you to continue paying the monthly fee, otherwise your previously downloaded songs stop working.
This is not true. eMusic's files are straight MP3s, with no DRM encumbrances. They do require you to sign up for a minimum 1-year commitment, but after that year you are free to cancel, and all the files you downloaded will continue to work just fine.
This is what happens when demented people play with powerful toys.
Okay. IBM has a lot of bandwidth. IBM has an outsourcing network solutions division. IBM has hired "hackers" at various times to do penetration testing and the like for said division. SCO sues IBM while taking a swipe at Linux. SCO gets DDoSsed into the uucp era.
It's likely completely coincidental, but it is conceptually quite amusing.
The "IRS' 20 points" has nothing to do with the labor regulation legalese of "contractor" vs. "employee." It has to do with whether or not a company must withhold (and submit a W-2) or not (1099). Tax law and labor law are two completely different animals entirely. Think "trademarks" vs. "copyright."
The vast majority of Microsoft "contractors" are employees of outsourcing companies like Aerotek and Adecco: the employees themselves are W-2'd by the agency they work for, and the agency charges MS a "fee" for their services. In most cases, the agency does provide some benefits (like basic health and dental, my agency even provided education reimbursements).
The IRS' regulations have nothing to do with labor standards regarding "contractors" vs. "employees."
As funny as it would be to make a comment about "glowing cyber balls", I will refrain.
As far as doing something like this, it's trivial. If you wanted to be old school, you could do something with a BASIC Stamp and good-old RS-232 out of a PC. Driving LEDs based on values given to it over serial is simple. You could probably drive four or five balls with one Stamp. You could even devise an overly-complicated protocol to communicate between the computer and the stamps. They could even be autonomous.. like adjusting color based on room temperature.
Or, look at A/D converters. They might be cheaper, if less geeky.
One man's "outdated" is another man's "stable."
'Nuff said.
How quickly we forget that stability is how many of us have sold Linux and *BSD to our employers, and that sudden rash changes and stability problems can leave those who require stability out in a lurch.
I see Debian's methodical approach to "current" as a good thing. Debian is about choice: if you want to be on the bleeding edge, please run unstable, we need the beta testers. If that's not your game, here's the stable tree. If you're really anal (or demented), here's the last version with security patches.
Sounds like a win for everybody. NetBSD gains more users (those who happen to get off on apt-get), Debian gets to work on porting to other kernels (a major cornerstone of the Debian project's defined goals), and everybody gets more choice.
Stay away from system administrators who think that the "latest" is always the "greatest."
There are limits to what you can do with the free SDK (they don't allow you to sell applets made with the free one), but it works, and it's real easy to create stuff for the Cyb.
I keep thinking to myself: frotz port.. frotz port.. frotz port..
Of course. With the quality that Microsoft is famous for, they would NEVER release a defective product.
Disclaimers: I help the maintainer with cross-platform issues. Also, UnixFrotz is now GNU GPL.
For starters, the software company in question is also responsible for production of some address harvesting software and other tools commonly used by spammers. There is some circumstantial evidence that says that Dmitri might also have been involved with the production of this software.
The "news media" aren't dumb. If the mainstream media picks up that this guy in jail is a Russian, a "hacker", AND a spam apologist (or at least works for one)... it might not be pretty. Joe Internet-user is more likely to say "let the schmuck rot in hell/jail" rather than hear our side of the story once the spam connection is made. I know I'M not comfortable with the connection.. I can only imagine how it'll sell in Sheboygan.
But, then of course, to know that Dmitri's software company is involved in spam would have required research, something that the mainstream media seems to do a lot more than JonKatz does.
If /. can't even tell the difference, we're screwed.
Please remove your head from the rectal position.
It was supposed to be water-soluable chalk. It was, in fact, spray enamel (at least here in San Francisco, according to the local paper it was Krylon Enamel). That was the problem.
In my own neighborhood, there are many areas where the sidewalk was damaged by the attempted removal of the enamel. I have photographs of this, which will be on a website as soon as Ritz gives them back to me.
Chalk would have presented no problem. This wasn't chalk.
IBM needs to do more than pay a measly fine. IBM needs to serve "jail time" in the form of forfietting 30 days of corporate profits to CleanSF and similar organizations in cities they crapped on... groups that spend their time and energy trying to keep the streets of our towns clean. IBM needs to publically apologize with large, full page ads in local newspapers.
But most importantly, IBM needs to apologize to the Linux community, for making us look bad in the eyes of our neighbors and friends.
$18,000? Pshaw. That's the price for ONE of the billboards they placed along the 101 Freeway. IBM needs to truly pay for this crime, otherwise they're just another corporate criminal, who's gonna rape Linux for all it's worth and leave us out in the cold.
... and he missed that by excluding Debian completely from his analysis. Debian does make security patches to their distribution on a timely basis. The Debian folk also run one of the better Linux security sites (mentioned previously, security.debian.org). The fact that, if I install Debian off the network, I'm getting not just "stable", but "stable patched", means that by excluding Debian, he flawed the entire study.
Technically, what this guy is doing is "illegal". If you record, say, a Britney Spears song and then rename it to say "Weird Al", and then distribute it, you have actually committed fraud under the legal definition.
That's not even bringing into account the trademark issues...
First off, as somebody who's interested in a lot of "small label" stuff, and as somebody who has used both Napster and GNUtella for finding MP3s, I believe the assertion that it comes down to "free vs. pay" is a bit simplistic. Anybody who's tried finding an obscure artist through Napster can tell you that it is not as easy as typing "Wally Western and the Electrics" in there and downloading the CD. There may be fewer than 10,000 copies of the CD out there, and even today, the majority of people who own the CD may not even have a computer (case in point: the band name above actually existed in the late 80's and early 90's... we self produced three CDs that total sold around 10,000 copies in the Los Angeles area. I'll pay someone $50 if they find an MP3 of our music on Napster [mostly because I don't have copies of a lot of our material myself!]).
Many of the files on Napster (also GNUtella, and the 'old sk00l' way of distributing music.. usenet) are fundamentally broken in some way. Some are downright lousy rips, many are missing bits, all are encoded using MP3... which is quite simply inferior in quality to a CD, even one created from an analog source. Assuming you can find a copy of "Andee Joyce - Love's Not The Thing That Hurts.mp3" at all on these services, there's no guarantee that the MP3 is of reasonable quality. In the above case, it's on MP3.com, but the audio quality is worse than the analog [tape] source, largely due to limitations of a 128kbps MP3. (Disclaimer: it's my wife, BTW)
The movie industry figured out a long time ago that the best way to prevent piracy isn't necessarily elaborate copy protection schemes, gimmiky promotions, etc. but to simply price the product at a point where it's simply not worth pirating. This is the reason why VHS copies of movies went from being US$80 per copy to around US$20. The reason the MPAA is afraid of DeCSS isn't because they're afraid of a "new" piracy problem.. they're afraid that the "cost" of pirating a DVD may fall below a price point that they are unwilling (not necessarily unable) to go below. They are trying to keep the price of DVD content artificially high.
If good quality CDs of independant artists were available through MP3.com (or a similar venue) for $8, I doubt small artists would ever be hurt by piracy. The problem is, MP3.com has no mechanism to produce a "high quality" CD. DAM discs, unfortuantely, are nothing more than crummy 128kbps MP3s written to an audio track. Big deal. A 128k MP3 can never equal the quality of a true "CD" digital audio file.
So, it's a cost/quality issue. Offer better quality at an $8 per disc price, and you'll find piracy no longer being an issue.
Don't believe me? Look at Matt's own site, http://www.islandnet.com/~mskala/:
I did not put any GPL notices on the portions of the package that I wrote, I did not intend my work to be GPL, and I did not lie to the plaintiffs about what rights I owned or could assign to them.
Can we mark this entire news item as irrelevant? Can somebody in Slashdot-land research this issue a little better before perpetuating the theory that this code is GPL'ed? This will NOT be a test of the GPL. Period. Everybody needs to remove their head from the cranial-rectal position and RESEARCH WHAT THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT before posting.
The Wired reporter is wrong, as is anybody else who's claiming that the code is GPL'ed. Even if you wanted to claim that the one piece of code that contains the words "Released under the GPL" is GPL'ed, it is doubtful that the courts would agree that the license applies: none of the terms stated in the GNU GPL have been met (no displayed copyright notice, no disclaimer of warranty, no copy of the LICENSE text file).
IT'S NOT GPL'ED!!