While I'm not, never have been, nor ever will be a consumer of child pornography, I must disagree. I think these laws banning child pornography will eventually be overturned by the Supreme Court because they're unconstitutional.
Your "argument" is lame because while you find air in EVERYONE's home, you do not find child pornography on everyone's computer. You're on crack if you believe there is not a causal correlation between the desire to own child pornography and the propensity to sexually abuse children. It is not of course a 1 to 1 correlation. But it is sufficient to justify continued and constant efforts to track down the distribution of this filth and jump on the people who trade it with both feet.
This is wrong on multiple accounts. Firstly, where is your proof that even, say, 20% of people that watch child porn have EVER: paid for child pornography, helped produce it, or actually abused a child themselves (in any shape way or form)? I've yet to see anything concrete. If your argument is going to swing around this point, you should at least be able to back it up. Secondly, regardless of what that percentage is, these same claims can be asserted for many rights that we protect. Would you debate that the consumption of extreme racist magazines and newsletters also correlate strongly to some form of hate crime? Do we ban these magazines? NO. Do we even throw the readers in prison to be "reconditioned"? NO. Do we treat the consumption of these papers as being equivalent to actually DOING them? NO. I have absolutely no sympathy for these racists, but we're consistent on that and for good reason: it's a very slippery slope. I could give you further examples of more sympathetic consumers...but I lack the time.
More to the point, if it is real child pornography is produced through the abuse of children and I would argue that anyone supporting shares the guilt of this abuse.
This is not necessarily true, maybe not even in a large percentage of the cases. Does an image of a naked child harm them (especially when it is innocent (e.g., running around on the beach) and anonymous? The people that get sexual pleasure from it may be sick, but that does not mean that the child is harmed in any reasonable way. Furthermore, much of what we call child pornography is still legal in other developed countries and WAS in fact legal in our country in the not too distant past. In addition, with the growth of P2P and other internet technologies, the link between leaching a file and encouraging its production is extremely tenuous. The onus should be on law enforcement to prove that the person at least paid for or exchanged some other good or service for that pornography or at least make a reasonable case for "support." What's more, there are also questions to be raised about intentions. For instance, it's possible to innocently download a file under a given name (as it appears to said user), albeit in appropriately named, in Kazaa (and probably other p2P programs) and download something that bears no relationship to what you think you're downloading...and even have the NAME of that file be totally different (due to the way they handle checksums)....I might pick this up later. I've got to run.
My intention was not to express any disrepect torwards sysadmins. My point was simply that working as a sysadmin, unlike being a student, at an elite institution like MIT doesn't automatically confer a higher degree of intelligence or skill than the average sysadmin. Whether or not "sysadmins" are genenerally more or less skilled than the average person is a whole other debate, though I'd say this debate would be pointless without clarifying the job description of the sysadmin that the arguer has in mind.
Furthermore, the required level of intelligence of the job doesn't necessarily confer any other secondary qualities, e.g., the worth of the person or the job. With respect to your "janitor" phrasing, I'll just say that a close relation of mine happens to own and run a janitorial service of sorts (albeit a very successful one) and I can tell you that, despite the simplicity of the average janitor's job, services such as that are:
a) very important to society b) difficult to run efficiently in practice. just survery the average hospital without contracted services (and even there...only in the case of one or two companies) if you need proof.
Regardless, I think most professions demand some amount of respect, even if not for the (perceived) intellectual demands of the job./. may hold system administration in too high esteem, but that doesn't mean that you need to be so... blunt. (and no, I don't take it personally)
I've never cared for rap. However, I don't quite get how you can single out white suburbia out for creating the demand for the "image." Firstly, many of these rappers come from that mentality. They had it long before their fame and any significant reach to middle class white audiences. Secondly, I don't see any evidence that black consumers are any less demanding of the lifestyle. In fact, I'd say the demand is a little stronger amongst blacks, proportionatly speaking, if anything. Thirdly, even if the demand is responsible for the image that is presented, the fact of the matter is that these same rappers live that lifestyle in their personal lives when they don't need to.
I agree that "rap" is almost entirely sold on image today. However, pinning it on white people or executives strikes me as being rather naive.
Unplug it. If this state is so renegade as to ignore the US government when force is brought to bear, then they could certainly be unplugged or firewalled at the uplink. If the state is this renegade, then they're unlikely to have a substantial amount of bandwidth to spare and they're especially unlikely to have it for a money loosing venture like that. Almost every other government would comply sooner or later though. If it were this easy, then you'd see Napster's servers run on SeaLand or some silliness.
IRC server networks like dalnet, etc can support a large load of peeps. A IRC filesharing front end wouldn't send anything other than a randomly generated nick, channel joins, and play a little ping pong. When someone sends there "uber warez here Trigger: !ubba" you'd do everything p2p after that. Well, almost everything, but the meat of the transfer via DCC wouldn't present a load on the server.
Firstly, I'd point out that many of the larger IRC networks are already in a state of decay and are falling apart without anything of this kind. Secondly, they are not that large, 100k or so. A sudden doubling or quadrupling of users would cripple the networks given their current state (or any future state given their lack of revenue). Thirdly, your !ubba scheme is just the sort of problem that I'm talking about. I'm well aware that the actual media (zip, mp3, whatever) would not be transfered over IRC, but rather over DCC which is essentially a P2P connection, but the point is that your trigger, "!ubba", could not be sent to each and every file serving client, even if it's within a channel, without causing an undue load on them, because they'd all have to recieve every client's query (and probably every client would have to recieve that query too...with a few exceptions that don't solve the problem). Fourthly, given any systematic method that remains in place long enough to adopt a largish user base( e.g.,/join #l33t342342342), the irc administrators could ban, shutdown, or filter. Fifthly, having each server establish a P2P connection just to return a result set would present a large overhead for every mp3 server and would also be hampered by firewall problems and such (and sending it over IRC would definitely be impossible because the mp3 servers would flood themselves off very quickly)... I could go on.
On a small scale this stuff could work well, but once it reaches a certain size, say a couple hundred users in a given channel or mp3 "network", its popularity would certainly kill itself one way or another.
Actually, most informations point to the exact opposite being true. The people doing the most downloading trading are the biggest music fans.
Firstly, I question this "data". Secondly, what you are probably referring to is said users of Napster and like services, which is vastly easier and quicker in comparison to manually using IRC as a searching mechanism and FTP for a file transfer method. Thirdly, if they are so willing to buy music and trade it legitimately, i.e., the CDs, then they are probably not willing to waste it spending useless hours on IRC? Few people that have the time for that kind of activity on IRC also have income of their own. Fourthly, I suspect that the hardcore music fanatics in actuality account for a small part of RIAA's market share. The average fanatic may buy 5x as many CDs as the average "normal" user, but the average user outnumbers the fanatics by 1000 to one. If the fanatics were such a substantial market, then RIAA would almost certainly cater to them much more than they do now (besides just this P2P issue that is). I simply don't see it. What's more, I suspect that much (though not all) of the consumption on the part of these music fans is in trading, selling/buying used CDs, etc...which does little to further RIAA's bottom line.
And once those P2P Networks are shut down, how long before the next file sharing network or even new sharing stratagy comes about? It didnt take long after Napster for Kaza and the other larger P2P nets to become popular.
Well I'd argue that despite assertions to the contrary, Kazaa (the best amongst them) and all the others are far inferior replacement to Napster in most respects (except for the swarmed downloads and checksums and such). They may approximate the number of users now (though I think many of those stated stats are either lies or are misconstrued), but the amount fruitfulness of the network is pretty poor. The fasttrack based networks (like Kazaa) depend on centralization significantly and generally on some one with a financial incentive to support that degree of centralization. Once you take them out you will make people depend on protocols like GNUtella (which is worthless). Now maybe someone can invent a totally decentralized protocol that works well (no one has actually implimented one yet to my knowledge), but it has not yet been done. Even if it is, I believe that prompt attacks (e.g., getting the ISP to suspend service for 90 days) on those that share the most files would be a stunning blow to the viability of any such network. While one could certainly attempt to piggy back on IRC to support a file sharing system (I actually started working on this years ago), a network of the size of Napster could never be reached because most IRC networks simply cannot support the traffic and would shut down the channels or whatever SYSTEM of differentiation (e.g., nick names, etc) there is long before that happens. Besides which a psuedo-decentralized IRC based system, i.e., one that does not depend on a handful of bots to index the fileshares, would still have to grapple with the same scaling issues that GNUtella and any other network has...only with greater limitations because relying on 3rd party IRC servers as a transport medium would nly compound problems. Lastly, as long as RIAA keeps the viable networks a moving target (i.e., taking the next Kazaa out), that in and of itself will present a challenge to Napster-like success, because it takes awhile for the users to learn OF and HOW to use and to START using it.
As we all know he didn't say that and as we all know you are parroting FUD, which as we all know is/.'s biggest contribution to the net.
He did too. I watched him say it to Wolf Blitzer on CNN when he said it. Go to http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/goreinternet. htm or search for it yourself if you don't believe me.
The reason that Napster was extremely successful and these P2P apps have been somewhat successful is because they lowered the transaction costs for successfully downloading, i.e., for every CHOSEN file they made it quicker (searching), easier (less work to download), faster (downloading...more servers...higher probability of finding a fast server), and require far less technical ability (the users skill). If you force the users back to IRC, FTP, and such you're going to:
A) Cut out 95% of the users because they won't have the necessary skills to complete most of the downloads they desire.
B) Cut out most of the people that have (or acquire) the skills because finding the files, the sites, and acquiring the trust or the ratios (maybe not necessary in this system, but that is the status quo and human nature). The few that are willing to put up the effort likely are not RIAA's better customers anyways.
C) Reduce the # of downloads of said users, by virtue of the fact that each one simply takes them longer.
If only reality were this simple. While you may be correct that sleep and school are important, the reality is that running a successful business of even mild complexity is VERY demanding of the entrenprenuers time and energy. Delegation IS an important ability in business, but no honest business person will tell you that this is an alternative to being heavily involved in running a business, especially at the earlier stages. Rather, delegation is a supplement, to be used to leverage the entreprenuer's time as the company grows, but not in lieu of it. (Though when a company reaches a critical mass, the workload can lighten with a strong management team, the organization never runs itself) What you fail to realize is that in most successful businesses the entreprenuer is the ONLY person that has the knowledge of all the necessary areas to keep on growing it and is often the only one with the same level of concern. You may delegate to your accountant and various other managers, but there MUST be someone to coordinate it all, to make the tradeoffs, and the critical decisions. Bringing in a single qualified person in is generally not an option, because they don't grow on trees, and because the few that honestly are qualified generally either demand a large amount of equity and/or annual compensation--they simply aren't affordable. The workload presented to most entrepreneuers makes school look like a relatively light burden--it is the very unusual entrepreneur that can afford the time that you speak of.
Clearly, Bruce believes his child, and his freedom is more worth living for than his job at HP.
Why should anyone believe that Bruce (claims) he got fired for stating his principles instead of more selfish concerns? Did you ever consider that maybe it was in his own best financial interest to keep being a thorn in the side?
Firstly, if HP decides to drop Linux, then his job is necessarily obsolete. In other words, it would be in his own best interest to keep Linux afloat at HP.
Secondly, his job was probably questionable at best, more PR than anything else, so his firing may very well have been inevitable. In other words, he had nothing to lose. In fact, he may have been fired, in actuality, because he was a waste of resources.
Thirdly, his longer term "career" prospects would almost certainly have been harmed if he had appeared anything less than a free software zealot (because he has staked this niche out as his bread and butter--just look at his resume).
Fourthly, maybe he cares for his popularity more (made almost exclusively through his position) than his job.
I, at least, don't see any reason to necessarily ascribe any noble purpose to this man, especially given the kinds of behavior that I've seen from him in the past. If a priest got fired from the Catholic church for maintaining and flaunting a theological position (esp. one that he was long associated with), then would you necessarily presume it was because he was principled or because he might have had some thing other in mind? The point is simply that just because he surrounds himself in something that is "not for profit" or "noble" does not make his own personal ends any more noble.
While I have absolutely no problem with wealth per se, I do object to the implication that they must have done something right, as the vast majority on that list simply did not create any wealth. In fact, most had a negative impact by causing money to be diverted from better investments (and from those that deserved it more). What's more, I believe that most of them learned very little from their experiences, unlike other failed entreprenuers. Compared to real entreprenuers they did not: work at the same intensity; put in the same kinds of hours; expose themselves to risk; invest their own money (by and large); have to make hard decisions (e.g., they had enough VC money to do EVERYTHING); live spartan; spend much time at it (2-3 years in many cases); face rejection; and so on...
That they work at private equity firms and are back at business school does not impress me either, because many of my peers are in much the same position and that, in and of itself, means little. About all that I can say for them is that they HAPPEN to be wealthier than the average MBA. Might some of them some day redeem themselves? Maybe. But I'd never hire them (well 99% of them) for their DotCom experience [in fact, I'd say that the naivety/stupidity would be a mark against their intelligence] or because they got lucky enough to walk away with someone else's money.
No, P2P alone isn't, but P2P and Internet Radio and other Net enabled methods of communication with a low cost of entry *are*.
Again, this is your presumption. The evidence that you base this on, the token success of a select few, is a pittance in terms of records sold, audience size, and sales dollars.
You state as fact things that can't be any more than opinions from a dubious source which you seem to be going to a good deal of trouble to render more so.
The central US record-keeping organization of the industry that certifies "gold" and "platinum" is the RIAA. Soundscan primarily tracks brick and mortar retail channel (every record sold via POS in the US is tracked on the Soundscan central databass) and is just beginning to track Internet sales including CD- on-demand. The sales charts for records in Billboard and in mass media and RIAA's numbers all are based on SoundScan. Look it up at Google. If this is news to you, you should become informed before expecting anyone to take your opinions seriously.
I'm not asking for industry certified numbers. However, when it is certain that the industry sells billions of dollars worth of music every year, you should at least be able to come up with concrete proof of, say, 10m USD in P2P-based success if you wish to be taken seriously.
Never said that they were. Perhaps in the America you'd like to see, no garage band could exist without registering with the Department of Homeland Security or getting permission from the RIAA to exist. We don't live there yet.
Again with the ad hominem attacks. I'm not asking for every last one of them. Certainly if these independents had even 10% of RIAA's market, then we would expect to see reasonably concrete evidence of at least a couple million dollars worth of revenues. That you can only name of handful of bands with anything even close to substantial revenues means you have a weak position. This is especially true when we would expect the top few of them to contain the bulk of the sales and that many of these same bands can be said to have enjoyed a significant amount of fame due to their prior relationship with RIAA.
Strike one. RIAA is a record label industry association. Artists are neither invited nor welcome to join, though if they own their own record labels qualifying according to RIAA criteria, their labels might be welcome to join. They don't provide services to individual artists any more than the BSA provides end-user support. If you don't know this, why should anything else you say be taken seriously?
Please. You know full well what I meant. If you don't, then I invite you to search for my previous posts referencing this.
Strike two. Which world do you live in? Try googling mp3.com and lawsuit and see how many hits you get. I got 11,600
The world where mp3.com only was attacked for using RIAA's music. The world where mp3.com still exists, distributing independent artists just the same. The world where there are a thousand different kinds of services that can be setup. I have no beef with Internet Radio, in fact, that's basically what I meant when I was referring to mp3.com and other solutions, nor is there any evidence of RIAA attacking either, except when their own content is under the gun. No one has done it though because the demand for independent artists is NOT that great.
The goal of P2P is file distribution. The content of the files is the business of the users. Why should a file sharing network have any other goals?
So that they can actually offer value to this world and potentially profit? If RIAA kills them for failing to do it, then they only have themselves to blame. If they can't merely share any file (whether or not you believe that is fair) and the real market for their service is the legitimate sharing of independent music (in actuality), then this simply makes sense. No one has done this though, because there simply isn't much demand for independent artists on P2P. They'd far rather take their chances riding the wave of 99% of their traffic which is blatant piracy.
Explain how. Not that it matters, but I want to see you make a fool of yourself in public.
Two Words: Asymetrical cryptography. Look it up.
If the primary 128K MP3 value is to provide an advance sample of the CD listening experience, just why is this important? People are NOT trading almost CD-quality 256K MP3s to any significant extent. Just let the "Jolly Roger" flag recede into your hallucinations now.
Well for one it is RIAA's intellectual property and their decision to make. For another, for most kinds of music most people cannot tell the difference between the original CD and 128K mp3. There was plenty of higher quality mp3s thuogh and the capability always existed, but most people do not regard themselves as audiophiles, so they were not nearly as popular as the default levels (around 128k). As for your Jolly Roger crap, I happen to know about this because I adopted mp3s long before most geeks even. I actually founded #mp3 on undernet and efnet (IRC) and I knew Napster (Fanning) long before his fame. I actually have considered writing my own P2P app (for the challenge and the desire to improve my pool) before Napster (I may have even mentioned mine to him)...but after Napster created Napster and the mass popularity that ensued I could not countenance faciliting that kind of outright piracy on such a scale.
You conflate two entirely different questions. You don't know why RIAA labels can only effectively service artists capable of selling 1M records and above? AND YOU ARE EXPLAINING THE MUSIC INDUSTRY TO US?
Buster, you say multi-platinum, which technically means more than 2M (and much more than this in your implication), since platinum is 1. It is a fact that the industry profits on artists that sell less than 2M. Now I don't debate that their survival depends on HITS, but not quite on the scale. What's more, RIAA uses these mega-expensive marketing methods because that was, and still largely is, where almost ALL the money is, i.e., consumers are not responsive to anything less. It stands to reason that if consumers behavior starts to change, to be more responsive to relatively smaller artists, that promotional costs won't be quite as great and nor will RIAA's. But just because they might become substantially smaller does not mean that the costs and the necessary skills to successfully promote yourself will demand anything less than a major player.
ALL the big 5 RIAA labels are in trouble. Due to "piracy"? Only in the imaginations of RIAA publicists and those naive enough to believe them. Care to look in a mirror before you continue to read this?Music sales as a whole dropped right after Napster closed. The difference appears to be lack of promotion via a mass-market P2P channel... say, the equivalent of several Clear Channel FM radio stations in major markets getting blown up.
Clearly you need to learn the difference between cause and correlation. The same kinds of arguments that you (or those like you) assault RIAA for you, yourself, use against RIAA.
For the RIAA labels, P2P is a way that independent musicians can get around the FM radio monopoly to reach the general public....Where's the room for compromise? They either stop P2P (remember Internet Radio?) or die
All of this rests, a priori, on your presumption that P2P is such an effective alternative to RIAA's marketing and financial backing that it fundamentally threatens RIAA. Merely putting your wares out on a file server is not equivalent to marketing. How many albums have been sold by artists using P2P and non-RIAA means exclusively to market? It exists, but it is still very much of a fringe thing. You cannot even show that these independent artists are any more numerous or more successful than they were pre-P2P or internet. Where is the evidence that RIAA's services are any less in demand? Why isn't there any real decline in the # of artists to signing with RIAA? Why should anyone believe that RIAA's real agenda for attacking P2P is killing alternative distribution/marketing (given how irrelevant it is today) and not for the fact that 99% of the services' traffic is their goods being pirated, especially when services that do NOT serve piracy so effectively are left alone by and large (e.g., mp3.com et. al)? If legitimate promotion and distribution of independent artists is really the goal of P2P, then Napster and all of its followers could have served that end, and simultaneously avoid RIAA's harrasment, by only allowing enumerated artists on its network after they sign an agreement stating that they are willing to have their goods traded in such a fashion. That could have been done very easily, yet it was not and has not yet been done.
Oh yeah, and why do you assume that RIAA can only do FM radio and multi-platinum artists? MTV? Product placement in movies? Sports? Major websites? Streaming servers? They have a lot of cash, experience, and they specialize in this stuff. They can and will adapt...even if it's not RIAA as we know them, there will always be a need for some major backing of this kind. The reason is simple: it is impossible for everyone to have everyones ear. Unless our media fractures into such small niche groups (which it has not and we have no reason to believe it will) there will be a market for the finite mindshare of consumers. That market is necessarily expensive because the demand is so great and the supply is so little.
I (sadly) only started using Napster about a year before it got shut down, but I never found it a particularly good source for downloading an entire album, especially one in the same bitrate and overall quality. I thought that was nearly impossible.
I'd say overall that only about 75% of the stuff was worth keeping (eg, 128kbps+, no skips/cutoffs/distortion) and I searched for mostly mainstream stuff (rock n roll). I got a fair amount of cutoff tunes, tunes with skips in the middle or just bad overall audio quality.
While I agree that Napster was hardly ideal at this, it was VASTLY better than the current alternatives and it was actually quite workable if you knew how to take advantage of it. Namely, you find all the users that have a good organized collection of kinds of files that you're interested in on a decent network connection, add them to your hotlist, browse their lists directly, and download exclusively from them. I discovered these users, in the first place, by improving my search method by searching for directories (folders), rather than files, and by searching for higher bit rate mp3s (since high quality tends to imply a more caring user). When you sort by path and/or username it becomes quite evident when someone has a large collection of good music. Of course, this kind of technique was out of the technical reach of most of napster's users at the time...but it was effective. These same techniques are crippled on today's "P2P" networks because you have (in reality, not their claims) a much much smaller set of users to search from, horrible latency, and volatility of the network makes finding a user 5 minutes later, never mind a couple weeks later, quite unlikely....plus the bad searching and listing interfaces...ick.
This seems to be the option which involves the least technological action. However, randomly wouldn't work, if it were only because the P2P users don't all live in the same country, hence different laws apply. So some sort of not-so-random selection proces has to be implemented.
I disagree. I think this would be a highly effective means, should it become necessary. Once you eliminate US based servers you've already removed some 90% of the acceptible providers for US citizens. When you further remove those highly developed countries that have close ties with the United States, which are apt to go along with RIAA when force is brought to bear, then you will leave the remaining pool of servers to 1% or so of what it was. That 1% cannot sustain even 1% though, because the demand will be so high that it will effectively block all practical use. Now, mind you, this cooperation need not require super-active law enforcement or anything to that effect. In fact, I would argue that the the relatively simple complusion of prompt response from the servers' ISPs for suspension of service for, say, 90 days suspension of service would be more than enough to deter the file servers given that there is no benefit for being a file server and every reason not to be.
Modern P2P programs support downloading files from multiple sources. If someone downloads such a fake file and discovers it, the file will almost always be deleted. So, these files will not propagate through the network, or at least not as fast and as much as the correct files. So a search where one file can be downloaded from many sources is in this case preferable before one with not many nodes serving the same file.
Again, I disagree. It has been my experience than many users do not delete damaged files, they simply leave them. The so-called swarmed downloads only further expose the downloads to corruption since all it really takes is one corrupt segment to either cause the program to crash or at least play really unbearable sound (or whatever media). To further compound the problem, the industry could use their cash and their legitimacy to be the most available and desirable servers (so that your swarmed downloads are almost certain to select its servers).
Now this is an interesting thing. The makers of the P2P programs who are being targeted by fake queries could ban such users, or could build in a feature where the user of a P2P program can ban a host his/herself, so that it will be excluded in further searche
This is impossible in any current decentralized P2P scheme, don't you get it? How is any routing servent to know that the other servent it is connected to is not passing legitmate requests the hosts it is purporting to represent? It can't. It might attempt to throttle the traffic of any from any given node, but then that would necessarily mean throttling the ENTIRE network, which would be self-defeating.
Some users carry gigs and gigs of files, but that doesn't mean they're very popular. If I setup a server where I host my 20CD collection of Mozart works I'll probably won't get as much traffic as when I publish the Billboard 100. It's not the quantity, but the content of the files served that counts. Search for Britney and you'll receive 1000's of hits. Search for Planisphere and a lot less results will show up.
While it is almost certainly true that only 1% of the content accounts for 99% of the traffic, it is also true that only 10% of the hosts account for almost all of the servers. Of those 10%, roughly half of them, (those that HAVE the popular files, are SHARING, are on truly HIGH speed network, and are NOT FIREWALLED) account for the majority of it. If you take the biggest servers out first, you will have a big impact. What's more, once it becomes established that there are likely consequences for being an effective server of files, the industry need not literally attack every last one of them. They need only use fear to their advantage and allow the servers' own self-interest to take over.
If this is what people are forced to do to achieve Napster-like results, then RIAA et. al have basically won all that they set out to achieve. By raising the bar high enough and by forcing higher transaction costs on the users, industry effectively shuts internet piracy out for 99.9% of the population. Of course people like me, that 1% or whatever it is, will always be able to circumvent whatever they throw in my path (presuming that I'm willing and wanting to do so of course). However, that number is so small that they really would not bother spending much effort to enforce from a simple cost / benefit point of view. Why spend millions in legal and related fees to track down a group of consumers that only account for half that amount? They won't bother, like they didn't really before Napster came along.
In fact, I would further argue, against the conventional wisdom on slashdot, that RIAA has basically won the war against P2P and other forms of mass piracy. At least once they shut out networks such as Fasttrack, and let it be known that there will no financial return for those that fund the development of piracy networks. Certainly the average Schmoe can download that super popular song via GNUtella with some effort, but getting much more than that like, say, the entire album at decent quality from same artist, is like trying to extract blood from a rock. That is not to say that they will retire their guns, but rather that it will just be an on-going series of small battles, more like maintenance, to hammer down any network, system, or device that pops up and starts to hemmorage their intellectual property.
Since your ignorance leaves you in bliss, I see no particular reason to attempt to enlighten you further. Though a mental health professional may help you explain to yourself your desire to protect bad management practices both in terms of physical and computer security.
Perhaps you aspire to become one of those bad managers, more interested in executive perks than earning your pay. Perhaps you are one of those bad managers and you fear public exposure.
Anyone defending the proposition that "security by obscurity" is a good thing has to assume a burden of proof you are obviously incapable of meeting.
Since I'm sure the subject of security in some context will be coming up again on slashdot, I'm sure I'll be encountering you again. Try to come up with better arguments next time.
You still can't muster anything more than the a priori assertion that all openness is good and much-loved ad hominem attacks. The entire premise of your "security through exposure" philosophy rests on the assumption that something reasonable can be done after and as a result of the exposure to make what is being exposed more secure than it was previously. That is to say that the respected advocates of this position openly admit that exposure has its draw backs (namely, that the so-called black hats will now _certainly_ use it), but that they believe its benefits out weigh the drawbacks. The trouble is that in implimentation in the real world, meaningful action is not always attainable, and is sometimes unadvisable. For instance, in the world of computer security, if you were running an embedded system that you could not remove from service and you could not fix, then you would not want to publicize its flaws (or the existence and locations of the devices). Let us further say the flaw is one someone being able to crash the device by sending it a peculiar arrangement of data. Well then taking it out of service, the only solution, is worse than the problem. Would you publicize this flaw? Would you further make the exploit public? Would you describe how easy it is to execute it and write a HOWTO for the average Joe? This is essentially what the media does time and time again.
Publication may make sense when you are talking about the latest bug in Microsoft's IIS, but that does not mean that it makes sense to practically deliver the latest flooding tool (to be distinguished from a "flaw" in any particular implimentation) to the hands of script kiddies when there is nothing that can just be fixed. Look up the smurf.c fiasco to get a feel for the reality of this. It pretty much parallels what the media does on a day to day basis.
The 120+ mile range of the gen 2 EV1 (and 4 hour charge time) is admittedly not good for road trips, but it's perfectly good for most commutes.
Few people drive straight onto their destinations. But even so, for me and many people in region (Philadelphia area) it's not even enough to handle the regular weekend commute down to the shore.
You have obviously never driven an EV1. VROOOOOOM!
Besides the fact that an 8 seconds for 0-60 is not that hot, this kind of driving is too demanding on such a feeble power source. A top speed of 80mph may sound mighty fast to you, but it's easily 5 - 10 mph slower than the average speed driven on many of the routes I drive (speed limits be damned) and that's even assuming you can safely maintain that speed.
Unfortunately, that's not true. First, there is a market. Despite putting essentially no effort (some might say negative effort) into promoting the EV1, GM has always had a long waiting list for the car. They simply never produced enough to meet demand. Now, despite having drivers who like the cars well enough to extend the leases and assume all maintenance costs, or buy them outright, they are taking the cars back and crushing them.
Prove it. You say that you have long waiting list... but a) a waiting list is not a binding commitment to buy (often only a fraction of those choose to actually buy in my experience) b) that website's waiting list # is pure speculation c) that website's # is SMALL by the measure of any major manufacturer and is NOT economical for producation (even for far less complicated and expensive production). d) where is the evidence of secondary markets for cars where the demand is so great?...
Second, from the perspective of short-term profitablity, it may make sense for car makers to avoid selling EVs even though there is a market for them, since, by selling EVs, they are competing against their own (profitable) product line. On the assumption that someone who does not buy an EV will by an IC car, the most profitable thing to do is not sell EVs until forced to do so by regulation or competition. This does not even require an active conspiracy, just a small enough number of car makers, each doing what maximizes short-term profits. The American car makers have been doing the very minimum to conform to California law, and give every appearance of sabotaging their own efforts, to create the false impression that there is no demand. The Japanese manufacturers, rather than whining, are selling the cars. Does this remind anyone of the 1980s?
This is hogwash. For one, producing such a car is almost certainly non-canibalistic because GM sells so few cars that appeal to anywhere near the same set of people. Even if it were nominally cannibalistic on a line of their cars, the EV1s supposed superiority would give them an advantage because they'd get the whole market for that sort of car rather than settling on the 10% or whatever they have. Why is it despite great competition in car manufacturing, no one has even come close to what GM has done? They don't see the market either. Even GM managed to make such a great car with such little effort, then why can't BMW or some other manufacturer that has absolutely NO market to cannibalize take a shot at it? You speak of short term profits and simultaneously speak of great demand for an already EV1. If GM were really that preoccupied with short term profits then they would sooner sink their money in the ALREADY existing EV1 with HUGE demand than the numerous other R&D commitments. Of course we all know that GM continues to sink money into long term designs. The flaw in this logic, of course, is your premise of demand. It does not exist.
but reports from would-be buyers suggests that the demand was high, and one survey [evworld.com] suggests that as many of 33% of California car buyers are interested in buying EVs.
This is about the extent of your argument, a survey or two. Ask any statistician, experienced marketer/sales person, and they'll tell you about the lack of accuracy of these. (esp. suspect when conducted by a group that is obviously biased pro-EV)
is when you start trying to hurl personal invective into an argument. Meanwhile you completely ignore mountains of empirical evidence, leave huge gaps in your logic, and so on. How precisely does one fix the thousands of miles of open borders? What magical band aid is there for simultaneously allowing reasonably expedient international commerce and preserving high security at the same time? How is anyone helped by the media announcing the location of say, gamma radiation detectors (for the detection of nuclear materials)? What good has come of any of these announcements?... No facts, just dogma.
Like in the world of computers, there are many targets and the idea that one might actually get off one's ass and perform just because someone says you have a problem seems very remote.
Yeah sure. Columbine and similarly modelled attacks happened within weeks of each other. This of course was just chance, right? And man, our security is so much better now for all of the coverage of the flaws in high school security. Pfft.
Real World != Computer Security.
Perhaps if you knew anything about the real world and got your opinions somewhere other than TV news and here, you wouldn't be wasting people's time with crap posts like yours.
You should stop posting on public policy until after you learn something about how government and society works, should you happen to be capable of doing so. While you have a right to your opinion, you have no right to have it respected.
Besides the fact that this stream of invective is pointless and demonstrates your insecurity, you could not be further from the truth. If you wish to compare resumes, education, intelligence, information sources, or what have you, then please step to the plate.
While it MIGHT make sense in the case of computer security to always publicize everything (though I would argue this in some cases), the reverse is often true in the real world. That Joe Schmoe can pull a machine gun and kill 50 people at locations all across the country isn't the result of a bug that can be practically fixed. Maybe we can hire enough security people to stop those same psychos at a handful of locations, but the fact remains that we simply CANNOT do it at enough locations to make a difference. It is NOT economically feasible. Therefore publicizing it does not help; all it does is give inspiration to those few crackpots in this country. Do you really want to tell me that the media didn't play a huge role in the string of massacres that happened? Please. Before you shoot off at the hip and nit pick, think about what you are saying. The media has made numerous stories that practically give a recipe for the terrorists and/or pyschos, and often glean information that a terrorist could not get (by using press credentials to extract information from supposedly respectable anonymous sources in mid level government and what not). Some things are better off left unpublished, unhyped, and undescribed. Perhaps the evil doers can obtain that same data themselves, but there is a difference in the inspiration (i.e., they would have to think of it themselves), the ease of the data collected, and so on. Not publicizing it makes a difference and this case is easily demonstrated empirically.
Oh yeah, and the fact that Lamo's case might be an apt example of where obscurity by openness works only strengthens my argument.
Ok, so you and a handful of other people are willing to lease (maybe not even BUY) an EV-1. This does not mean that there is a viable market for them. You have no plausible reason to believe otherwise. For one, it is almost certainly economically unviable to run the manufacturing facilities in such small quantities. For another, honoring the warranties, training people, overhead, on going engineering, etc to support these cars also may very well be costing GM a lot more than they could ever sell.
As long as you are counting in the hundreds, you are not going to appeal to GM or any other worthwhile car maker. Now I'm sorry, but I simply don't believe that this is going to happen, because Americans aren't willing to put up with EVs in any sizable number. The fact of the matter is that we have standard cars that get 3x times the gas milage of the most popular cars today, without half the drawbacks of EVs and most of the supposed benefits (I'd argue they're probably even better), and they aren't exactly moving swiftly. What's more, we also see evidence of unwillingess to make really measurable sacrifices for the environment in numerous other ways, from CHOICE of driving distance, to not carpooling or taking mass transit, to living in an inefficient house, to simply owning an obselete highly polluting car (like so many so-called environmentals), and so on.
Who, other then you and a handful of people that spend a lot of time fretting over such things, really want to put up with all the potential bugs (engineering 101, you make a lot of changes to time tested designs, you're going to have a lot more bugs), limited driving range, poor acceleration, costlier maintenance, numerous drawbacks of owning a lighter, smaller, and often weaker car, and so on just to save the environment a couple liters of pollution? A lot of people may clamour for it (mostly those on forums like this), but the money isn't following it. If there were a market there, or even one that could be easily developed, the major car manufacturers would have pounced on it (esp. those that are desperate for growth). What we have instead is a handful of companies that have made pretty damn impressive efforts...but they are all ultimate failures because there are not enough buyers.
It's ok to publicize the flaws of airport security, how easy it is to build a bomb, and numerous other cases where some psycho can be encouraged to kill hundreds of people. They do so nominally under the justification that exposing the flaws helps society (as if government can and will simply just put a stopper in the hole). However, when it comes to exposing the flaws in their own computer network they get philosophical all of the sudden. Funny how that works.
Slashdot Mirror
This is wrong on multiple accounts. Firstly, where is your proof that even, say, 20% of people that watch child porn have EVER: paid for child pornography, helped produce it, or actually abused a child themselves (in any shape way or form)? I've yet to see anything concrete. If your argument is going to swing around this point, you should at least be able to back it up. Secondly, regardless of what that percentage is, these same claims can be asserted for many rights that we protect. Would you debate that the consumption of extreme racist magazines and newsletters also correlate strongly to some form of hate crime? Do we ban these magazines? NO. Do we even throw the readers in prison to be "reconditioned"? NO. Do we treat the consumption of these papers as being equivalent to actually DOING them? NO. I have absolutely no sympathy for these racists, but we're consistent on that and for good reason: it's a very slippery slope. I could give you further examples of more sympathetic consumers...but I lack the time.
This is not necessarily true, maybe not even in a large percentage of the cases. Does an image of a naked child harm them (especially when it is innocent (e.g., running around on the beach) and anonymous? The people that get sexual pleasure from it may be sick, but that does not mean that the child is harmed in any reasonable way. Furthermore, much of what we call child pornography is still legal in other developed countries and WAS in fact legal in our country in the not too distant past. In addition, with the growth of P2P and other internet technologies, the link between leaching a file and encouraging its production is extremely tenuous. The onus should be on law enforcement to prove that the person at least paid for or exchanged some other good or service for that pornography or at least make a reasonable case for "support." What's more, there are also questions to be raised about intentions. For instance, it's possible to innocently download a file under a given name (as it appears to said user), albeit in appropriately named, in Kazaa (and probably other p2P programs) and download something that bears no relationship to what you think you're downloading...and even have the NAME of that file be totally different (due to the way they handle checksums)....I might pick this up later. I've got to run.
I don't know about that. Very funny, yes, but I think the one where he "interviewed" the starwars fans waiting outside the theater is the best.
My intention was not to express any disrepect torwards sysadmins. My point was simply that working as a sysadmin, unlike being a student, at an elite institution like MIT doesn't automatically confer a higher degree of intelligence or skill than the average sysadmin. Whether or not "sysadmins" are genenerally more or less skilled than the average person is a whole other debate, though I'd say this debate would be pointless without clarifying the job description of the sysadmin that the arguer has in mind.
/. may hold system administration in too high esteem, but that doesn't mean that you need to be so ... blunt. (and no, I don't take it personally)
Furthermore, the required level of intelligence of the job doesn't necessarily confer any other secondary qualities, e.g., the worth of the person or the job. With respect to your "janitor" phrasing, I'll just say that a close relation of mine happens to own and run a janitorial service of sorts (albeit a very successful one) and I can tell you that, despite the simplicity of the average janitor's job, services such as that are:
a) very important to society
b) difficult to run efficiently in practice. just survery the average hospital without contracted services (and even there...only in the case of one or two companies) if you need proof.
Regardless, I think most professions demand some amount of respect, even if not for the (perceived) intellectual demands of the job.
You are mistaken though. He was not an MIT student. He merely worked for MIT as a sysadmin.
;)
I'd argue that many MIT students are not necessarily "smart"...but that's another debate entirely.
I've never cared for rap. However, I don't quite get how you can single out white suburbia out for creating the demand for the "image." Firstly, many of these rappers come from that mentality. They had it long before their fame and any significant reach to middle class white audiences. Secondly, I don't see any evidence that black consumers are any less demanding of the lifestyle. In fact, I'd say the demand is a little stronger amongst blacks, proportionatly speaking, if anything. Thirdly, even if the demand is responsible for the image that is presented, the fact of the matter is that these same rappers live that lifestyle in their personal lives when they don't need to.
I agree that "rap" is almost entirely sold on image today. However, pinning it on white people or executives strikes me as being rather naive.
Unplug it. If this state is so renegade as to ignore the US government when force is brought to bear, then they could certainly be unplugged or firewalled at the uplink. If the state is this renegade, then they're unlikely to have a substantial amount of bandwidth to spare and they're especially unlikely to have it for a money loosing venture like that. Almost every other government would comply sooner or later though. If it were this easy, then you'd see Napster's servers run on SeaLand or some silliness.
On a small scale this stuff could work well, but once it reaches a certain size, say a couple hundred users in a given channel or mp3 "network", its popularity would certainly kill itself one way or another.
The reason that Napster was extremely successful and these P2P apps have been somewhat successful is because they lowered the transaction costs for successfully downloading, i.e., for every CHOSEN file they made it quicker (searching), easier (less work to download), faster (downloading...more servers...higher probability of finding a fast server), and require far less technical ability (the users skill). If you force the users back to IRC, FTP, and such you're going to:
A) Cut out 95% of the users because they won't have the necessary skills to complete most of the downloads they desire.
B) Cut out most of the people that have (or acquire) the skills because finding the files, the sites, and acquiring the trust or the ratios (maybe not necessary in this system, but that is the status quo and human nature). The few that are willing to put up the effort likely are not RIAA's better customers anyways.
C) Reduce the # of downloads of said users, by virtue of the fact that each one simply takes them longer.
Very effective.
If only reality were this simple. While you may be correct that sleep and school are important, the reality is that running a successful business of even mild complexity is VERY demanding of the entrenprenuers time and energy. Delegation IS an important ability in business, but no honest business person will tell you that this is an alternative to being heavily involved in running a business, especially at the earlier stages. Rather, delegation is a supplement, to be used to leverage the entreprenuer's time as the company grows, but not in lieu of it. (Though when a company reaches a critical mass, the workload can lighten with a strong management team, the organization never runs itself) What you fail to realize is that in most successful businesses the entreprenuer is the ONLY person that has the knowledge of all the necessary areas to keep on growing it and is often the only one with the same level of concern. You may delegate to your accountant and various other managers, but there MUST be someone to coordinate it all, to make the tradeoffs, and the critical decisions. Bringing in a single qualified person in is generally not an option, because they don't grow on trees, and because the few that honestly are qualified generally either demand a large amount of equity and/or annual compensation--they simply aren't affordable. The workload presented to most entrepreneuers makes school look like a relatively light burden--it is the very unusual entrepreneur that can afford the time that you speak of.
Firstly, if HP decides to drop Linux, then his job is necessarily obsolete. In other words, it would be in his own best interest to keep Linux afloat at HP.
Secondly, his job was probably questionable at best, more PR than anything else, so his firing may very well have been inevitable. In other words, he had nothing to lose. In fact, he may have been fired, in actuality, because he was a waste of resources.
Thirdly, his longer term "career" prospects would almost certainly have been harmed if he had appeared anything less than a free software zealot (because he has staked this niche out as his bread and butter--just look at his resume).
Fourthly, maybe he cares for his popularity more (made almost exclusively through his position) than his job.
I, at least, don't see any reason to necessarily ascribe any noble purpose to this man, especially given the kinds of behavior that I've seen from him in the past. If a priest got fired from the Catholic church for maintaining and flaunting a theological position (esp. one that he was long associated with), then would you necessarily presume it was because he was principled or because he might have had some thing other in mind? The point is simply that just because he surrounds himself in something that is "not for profit" or "noble" does not make his own personal ends any more noble.
While I have absolutely no problem with wealth per se, I do object to the implication that they must have done something right, as the vast majority on that list simply did not create any wealth. In fact, most had a negative impact by causing money to be diverted from better investments (and from those that deserved it more). What's more, I believe that most of them learned very little from their experiences, unlike other failed entreprenuers. Compared to real entreprenuers they did not: work at the same intensity; put in the same kinds of hours; expose themselves to risk; invest their own money (by and large); have to make hard decisions (e.g., they had enough VC money to do EVERYTHING); live spartan; spend much time at it (2-3 years in many cases); face rejection; and so on...
That they work at private equity firms and are back at business school does not impress me either, because many of my peers are in much the same position and that, in and of itself, means little. About all that I can say for them is that they HAPPEN to be wealthier than the average MBA. Might some of them some day redeem themselves? Maybe. But I'd never hire them (well 99% of them) for their DotCom experience [in fact, I'd say that the naivety/stupidity would be a mark against their intelligence] or because they got lucky enough to walk away with someone else's money.
I'm not asking for industry certified numbers. However, when it is certain that the industry sells billions of dollars worth of music every year, you should at least be able to come up with concrete proof of, say, 10m USD in P2P-based success if you wish to be taken seriously.
Again with the ad hominem attacks. I'm not asking for every last one of them. Certainly if these independents had even 10% of RIAA's market, then we would expect to see reasonably concrete evidence of at least a couple million dollars worth of revenues. That you can only name of handful of bands with anything even close to substantial revenues means you have a weak position. This is especially true when we would expect the top few of them to contain the bulk of the sales and that many of these same bands can be said to have enjoyed a significant amount of fame due to their prior relationship with RIAA.
Please. You know full well what I meant. If you don't, then I invite you to search for my previous posts referencing this.
The world where mp3.com only was attacked for using RIAA's music. The world where mp3.com still exists, distributing independent artists just the same. The world where there are a thousand different kinds of services that can be setup. I have no beef with Internet Radio, in fact, that's basically what I meant when I was referring to mp3.com and other solutions, nor is there any evidence of RIAA attacking either, except when their own content is under the gun. No one has done it though because the demand for independent artists is NOT that great.
So that they can actually offer value to this world and potentially profit? If RIAA kills them for failing to do it, then they only have themselves to blame. If they can't merely share any file (whether or not you believe that is fair) and the real market for their service is the legitimate sharing of independent music (in actuality), then this simply makes sense. No one has done this though, because there simply isn't much demand for independent artists on P2P. They'd far rather take their chances riding the wave of 99% of their traffic which is blatant piracy.
Two Words: Asymetrical cryptography. Look it up.
Well for one it is RIAA's intellectual property and their decision to make. For another, for most kinds of music most people cannot tell the difference between the original CD and 128K mp3. There was plenty of higher quality mp3s thuogh and the capability always existed, but most people do not regard themselves as audiophiles, so they were not nearly as popular as the default levels (around 128k). As for your Jolly Roger crap, I happen to know about this because I adopted mp3s long before most geeks even. I actually founded #mp3 on undernet and efnet (IRC) and I knew Napster (Fanning) long before his fame. I actually have considered writing my own P2P app (for the challenge and the desire to improve my pool) before Napster (I may have even mentioned mine to him)...but after Napster created Napster and the mass popularity that ensued I could not countenance faciliting that kind of outright piracy on such a scale.
Buster, you say multi-platinum, which technically means more than 2M (and much more than this in your implication), since platinum is 1. It is a fact that the industry profits on artists that sell less than 2M. Now I don't debate that their survival depends on HITS, but not quite on the scale. What's more, RIAA uses these mega-expensive marketing methods because that was, and still largely is, where almost ALL the money is, i.e., consumers are not responsive to anything less. It stands to reason that if consumers behavior starts to change, to be more responsive to relatively smaller artists, that promotional costs won't be quite as great and nor will RIAA's. But just because they might become substantially smaller does not mean that the costs and the necessary skills to successfully promote yourself will demand anything less than a major player.
Clearly you need to learn the difference between cause and correlation. The same kinds of arguments that you (or those like you) assault RIAA for you, yourself, use against RIAA.
Oh yeah, and why do you assume that RIAA can only do FM radio and multi-platinum artists? MTV? Product placement in movies? Sports? Major websites? Streaming servers? They have a lot of cash, experience, and they specialize in this stuff. They can and will adapt...even if it's not RIAA as we know them, there will always be a need for some major backing of this kind. The reason is simple: it is impossible for everyone to have everyones ear. Unless our media fractures into such small niche groups (which it has not and we have no reason to believe it will) there will be a market for the finite mindshare of consumers. That market is necessarily expensive because the demand is so great and the supply is so little.
Again, I disagree. It has been my experience than many users do not delete damaged files, they simply leave them. The so-called swarmed downloads only further expose the downloads to corruption since all it really takes is one corrupt segment to either cause the program to crash or at least play really unbearable sound (or whatever media). To further compound the problem, the industry could use their cash and their legitimacy to be the most available and desirable servers (so that your swarmed downloads are almost certain to select its servers).
This is impossible in any current decentralized P2P scheme, don't you get it? How is any routing servent to know that the other servent it is connected to is not passing legitmate requests the hosts it is purporting to represent? It can't. It might attempt to throttle the traffic of any from any given node, but then that would necessarily mean throttling the ENTIRE network, which would be self-defeating.
While it is almost certainly true that only 1% of the content accounts for 99% of the traffic, it is also true that only 10% of the hosts account for almost all of the servers. Of those 10%, roughly half of them, (those that HAVE the popular files, are SHARING, are on truly HIGH speed network, and are NOT FIREWALLED) account for the majority of it. If you take the biggest servers out first, you will have a big impact. What's more, once it becomes established that there are likely consequences for being an effective server of files, the industry need not literally attack every last one of them. They need only use fear to their advantage and allow the servers' own self-interest to take over.
If this is what people are forced to do to achieve Napster-like results, then RIAA et. al have basically won all that they set out to achieve. By raising the bar high enough and by forcing higher transaction costs on the users, industry effectively shuts internet piracy out for 99.9% of the population. Of course people like me, that 1% or whatever it is, will always be able to circumvent whatever they throw in my path (presuming that I'm willing and wanting to do so of course). However, that number is so small that they really would not bother spending much effort to enforce from a simple cost / benefit point of view. Why spend millions in legal and related fees to track down a group of consumers that only account for half that amount? They won't bother, like they didn't really before Napster came along.
In fact, I would further argue, against the conventional wisdom on slashdot, that RIAA has basically won the war against P2P and other forms of mass piracy. At least once they shut out networks such as Fasttrack, and let it be known that there will no financial return for those that fund the development of piracy networks. Certainly the average Schmoe can download that super popular song via GNUtella with some effort, but getting much more than that like, say, the entire album at decent quality from same artist, is like trying to extract blood from a rock. That is not to say that they will retire their guns, but rather that it will just be an on-going series of small battles, more like maintenance, to hammer down any network, system, or device that pops up and starts to hemmorage their intellectual property.
Publication may make sense when you are talking about the latest bug in Microsoft's IIS, but that does not mean that it makes sense to practically deliver the latest flooding tool (to be distinguished from a "flaw" in any particular implimentation) to the hands of script kiddies when there is nothing that can just be fixed. Look up the smurf.c fiasco to get a feel for the reality of this. It pretty much parallels what the media does on a day to day basis.
Besides the fact that an 8 seconds for 0-60 is not that hot, this kind of driving is too demanding on such a feeble power source. A top speed of 80mph may sound mighty fast to you, but it's easily 5 - 10 mph slower than the average speed driven on many of the routes I drive (speed limits be damned) and that's even assuming you can safely maintain that speed.
Prove it. You say that you have long waiting list... but a) a waiting list is not a binding commitment to buy (often only a fraction of those choose to actually buy in my experience) b) that website's waiting list # is pure speculation c) that website's # is SMALL by the measure of any major manufacturer and is NOT economical for producation (even for far less complicated and expensive production). d) where is the evidence of secondary markets for cars where the demand is so great?
This is hogwash. For one, producing such a car is almost certainly non-canibalistic because GM sells so few cars that appeal to anywhere near the same set of people. Even if it were nominally cannibalistic on a line of their cars, the EV1s supposed superiority would give them an advantage because they'd get the whole market for that sort of car rather than settling on the 10% or whatever they have. Why is it despite great competition in car manufacturing, no one has even come close to what GM has done? They don't see the market either. Even GM managed to make such a great car with such little effort, then why can't BMW or some other manufacturer that has absolutely NO market to cannibalize take a shot at it? You speak of short term profits and simultaneously speak of great demand for an already EV1. If GM were really that preoccupied with short term profits then they would sooner sink their money in the ALREADY existing EV1 with HUGE demand than the numerous other R&D commitments. Of course we all know that GM continues to sink money into long term designs. The flaw in this logic, of course, is your premise of demand. It does not exist.
This is about the extent of your argument, a survey or two. Ask any statistician, experienced marketer/sales person, and they'll tell you about the lack of accuracy of these. (esp. suspect when conducted by a group that is obviously biased pro-EV)
Yeah sure. Columbine and similarly modelled attacks happened within weeks of each other. This of course was just chance, right? And man, our security is so much better now for all of the coverage of the flaws in high school security. Pfft.
Real World != Computer Security.
Besides the fact that this stream of invective is pointless and demonstrates your insecurity, you could not be further from the truth. If you wish to compare resumes, education, intelligence, information sources, or what have you, then please step to the plate.
While it MIGHT make sense in the case of computer security to always publicize everything (though I would argue this in some cases), the reverse is often true in the real world. That Joe Schmoe can pull a machine gun and kill 50 people at locations all across the country isn't the result of a bug that can be practically fixed. Maybe we can hire enough security people to stop those same psychos at a handful of locations, but the fact remains that we simply CANNOT do it at enough locations to make a difference. It is NOT economically feasible. Therefore publicizing it does not help; all it does is give inspiration to those few crackpots in this country. Do you really want to tell me that the media didn't play a huge role in the string of massacres that happened? Please. Before you shoot off at the hip and nit pick, think about what you are saying. The media has made numerous stories that practically give a recipe for the terrorists and/or pyschos, and often glean information that a terrorist could not get (by using press credentials to extract information from supposedly respectable anonymous sources in mid level government and what not). Some things are better off left unpublished, unhyped, and undescribed. Perhaps the evil doers can obtain that same data themselves, but there is a difference in the inspiration (i.e., they would have to think of it themselves), the ease of the data collected, and so on. Not publicizing it makes a difference and this case is easily demonstrated empirically.
Oh yeah, and the fact that Lamo's case might be an apt example of where obscurity by openness works only strengthens my argument.
Ok, so you and a handful of other people are willing to lease (maybe not even BUY) an EV-1. This does not mean that there is a viable market for them. You have no plausible reason to believe otherwise. For one, it is almost certainly economically unviable to run the manufacturing facilities in such small quantities. For another, honoring the warranties, training people, overhead, on going engineering, etc to support these cars also may very well be costing GM a lot more than they could ever sell.
As long as you are counting in the hundreds, you are not going to appeal to GM or any other worthwhile car maker. Now I'm sorry, but I simply don't believe that this is going to happen, because Americans aren't willing to put up with EVs in any sizable number. The fact of the matter is that we have standard cars that get 3x times the gas milage of the most popular cars today, without half the drawbacks of EVs and most of the supposed benefits (I'd argue they're probably even better), and they aren't exactly moving swiftly. What's more, we also see evidence of unwillingess to make really measurable sacrifices for the environment in numerous other ways, from CHOICE of driving distance, to not carpooling or taking mass transit, to living in an inefficient house, to simply owning an obselete highly polluting car (like so many so-called environmentals), and so on.
Who, other then you and a handful of people that spend a lot of time fretting over such things, really want to put up with all the potential bugs (engineering 101, you make a lot of changes to time tested designs, you're going to have a lot more bugs), limited driving range, poor acceleration, costlier maintenance, numerous drawbacks of owning a lighter, smaller, and often weaker car, and so on just to save the environment a couple liters of pollution? A lot of people may clamour for it (mostly those on forums like this), but the money isn't following it. If there were a market there, or even one that could be easily developed, the major car manufacturers would have pounced on it (esp. those that are desperate for growth). What we have instead is a handful of companies that have made pretty damn impressive efforts...but they are all ultimate failures because there are not enough buyers.
It's ok to publicize the flaws of airport security, how easy it is to build a bomb, and numerous other cases where some psycho can be encouraged to kill hundreds of people. They do so nominally under the justification that exposing the flaws helps society (as if government can and will simply just put a stopper in the hole). However, when it comes to exposing the flaws in their own computer network they get philosophical all of the sudden. Funny how that works.