_Which_ inventions are the "great" ones? The wheel, maybe? Afro-European in origin, IIRC. Arithmetic/mathematics? Same. Organized culture? Afro-European or Chinese. The chair? Same.
Uh yeah. And those transpired over how many thousands of years? Those took how many resources? Which one of them were created either by a team of people working side by side, or by a person commiting most/all of his time, toward the objective of advancement? What percentage of early society's population was dedicated to development of innovative products? Or what percentage was even dedicated to pure research? It doesn't even begin to compare. You're comparing apples to oranges.
The wheel may be an essential concept to our society, but that does not mean that Joe Caveman was on technological par by any measure (i.e., rate, effort, product, etc). Ask yourself: Would you rather be driving on the rudimentary concept of the wheel, or the highly evolved steel-reinforced/synthetic wheel of today that is highly reliable and efficient? I didn't think so.
"Where would our economy be?" The plaintive cry of the capitalist greed-monger. Our economy would be here in the US, just like always. The infrastructure of that economy might be (no, would be) very different if it did not include the wide-spread use of the IC engine, the telephone, etc. But our economy was doing very nicely at the turn of the last century (1900, for those, like me, that still haven't made that adjustment *G*), when such factors were not in existence yet
Oh the idealized 'early' days of revisionist historians. Yes, many more on us would still be working on farms...rising and going to bed with the sun. Toiling behind animals and crude tools. Unemployment? Much higher. Starvation? Much more common place. Hunger? Very common. Death in pregnancy? Common. Infant mortality? High.
Evidently, you take it all for granted. If you really truely believe that life was so much better back then, why don't you move to a farm and try it like they did in the early days? There are still parts of the world that live much like that. It's not too late for you.
. Some folks wouldn't be nearly as unnecessarily wealthy as they are, but so what? When, in all of history, has an insane concentration of monetary capital in the hands of a few (or worse, one) individual benefitted the culture in which it happened?
Many times actually, to a much worse degree. Your problem is that you view the rich having money as being a zero sum game. It's not. Empirically, both the poor and the middle class have been enjoying a higher quality of life on the aggregate. Some what more theoretically, when the rich 'have' a lot of money, what does that really mean?
If I buy a million dollar house, that money does not go into the ground. It goes back into the economy. The contractors, the laborers, and the people the provide the raw materials all benefit. And when I pay a million dollars for a house, I get diminishing returns at best. You think such a house in 10x nicer? 10x bigger? Generally not. You think Bill Gates lives a million times a nicer life than the average person?
It's almost impossible to lock your money away such that it benefits no one, short of burrying under a mattress. The fact is that most people that are 'rich' have most of their money in the capital markets, and that is why they get 'richer'. This money in turns, goes back out into the economy (by definition), and it used to do things like start businesses, or provide loans to the less wealthy, etc, etc etc.
"The benefit of the few who have the wealth" is _not_ equivalent to "the benefit of the culture".
But both HAVE ultimately benefited, empirically and theoretically.
As a matter of fact, a simple overview of history (no deep digging needed) will show that the generalized distribution of capital resources is far more benificent to a culture than concentration. Take the China you attempt to use as a counter-example to vaunted America:
Once again, you're clouding the issues. In China, and in all other similar systems, what little disparities there are, are totally arbitrary. Someone in authority decides who gets what. The result is that no one has any incentive to work. What's more, when there is a 'concentration' of wealth in China, there are no significant capital markets, no multiplier effects, etc. Apples and oranges again.
He knew he couldn't rest on the laurels of his invention because the patent would expire, so he had to keep inventing more things to be prepared-from an economic point of view, of course; Edison was an enterpreneur, not a hacker-type; The hacker-type inventors in the last century are probably largely unknown, as enterpreneurs bought the idea and took the credit, whereas prior to that they probably simply were not recorded at all.)
You're totally pulling this out of your ass. Edison was a great inventor, there is no doubt about it. What's more, since you assert that patent holders are merely sitting on their ass today, where is evidence? All to the contrary. There are many more resources devoted to R&D than before, both as a percentage of revenue and in absolute terms. Do you see it in product either? Nope. The entire tech industry and biotech industry violate everything you say 10x over.
So, anyway, Sure, let's go the patent and restrictive IP laws route. That'll work. We'll end up with the corporations controlling thought instead of the government (the corps'll just use the gummint as a front for the controls - "Don't blame _me_, that's just the way the laws are!". Sure.)
That's another issue with many facets, one which 99% of slashdot has little comprehension of. I generally do advocate IP; however, i'll not get into it here.
More accurately, it's whoever takes the initiative that makes it happen. That doesn't have to be in a monetary framework. For example, an inventor (or programmer) invests time and energy, sometimes in great quantities. S/he's the one who "makes it happen" first. Sometimes a businessperson can help, but the gold they run away with is usually way out of proportion to their contribution
I think you're trying to make too big a distinction between "business people" and the "developers". Many times they're one in the same, at least of those whom I'm referring to. Edison and Ford, for instance, were both great engineers. They merely also had a mind for business, and that is what allowed them to continue refining their ends.
I don't know about you, but I can think of very few projects that have done well without external funding...either from business or, to a much lesser extent from some government/academic center (which is ultimately derived from success of our economy. read: business) You may well banter about things like open source as if it's the holy grail, but it's unproven at best.
How is it that you can claim that business only "sometimes" helps, yet almost every significant innovation in goods or services is organized behind some sort of business? Why would the engineers/programmers/developers/whatever flock to someone that just tends to get in the way? "Err yeah, I'm a great scientist, so I'm going to work for 'The Man' who will do nothing but slow me down and steal all the money". It defies logic; people are more rational than that.
Ummmm, speak for yourself, I have more faith in our culture than that.
If by our culture, you mean our traditional Anglo/Protestant work ethic, I have faith in that too. In fact, I believe that a good part of our success is our work ethic--not just the fact that law allows capitalism to exist. But you miss a major point. The very notion of independence, the freedom that free markets bring, is what has shaped our culture tremendously. In other words, there is something of a symbiotic relationship between law and society. Society shapes law, and law shapes society.
You can't merely transplant a framework of laws and expect it to flourish unless people really believe and follow it. However, you can impose bad laws, and ultimately drag down an entire society...Witness what happened to East Germany.
I think it's more the spirit of taking initiative in general that contributed to whatever the USA is now. Again, that doesn't necessarily mean "free market". I can take initiative to build a log cabin, grow crops, or write a great Web server without money entering the equation
This spirit is certainly a lot of it, but read above. The free market is about more than just incentivising people (though that is a lot of it). It's about allocating resources efficiently. It's about encouraging risk, both economic and social in many different senses.
How many scientists do you know that put their own assets on the lines to promote science with no expectation of getting reimbursed? I'll give you a hint, very few academics do this. They live relatively risk-free lives. They draw a salary. If they fail in their efforts, the odds are they're not going to go bankrupt. What's more, they're not paying other people to work for them. They don't know what it's like to try and meet payroll every month....They're isolated from much of the realities. This is not to say that they have no function in our economy, they do, but they're hardly a substitute for the entreprenuerial spirit....You're comparing Apples to Oranges.
Researching obscurities is not the same as putting your ass on the line. Likewise, building a log cabin is not the same. etc etc etc
It didn't hurt that the USA had vast arable land, a good climate, and two oceans to separate us from invaders. To credit all of our prosperity to merely our economic system is ignoring a lot.
When taken in context with the rest of the world, it's hardly a leap of faith. How do you explain East Germany's utter lack of spark, compared to West Germany's success. North versus South Korea? Socialized contries verus less socialized countries....
What's more, very little of the United State's success comes from our geography. Look at Japan...scarce resources, few arrable lands,...but great success. Or USSR...even more abundant arrable lands (yet much lower yield), even more resources, better location to do international commerce...yet an utter failure.
If you're implying that the only contributions to the world are in the form of profitable inventions, then I respectfully say that you have a lot to learn. That's something I can't explain in one post. But consider music, other art, common sense, human wisdom, family wisdom, spiritual wisdom,... the list goes on.
It's funny that you say that. If _you_ follow history, then you would know that the arts tend to flourish with a certain amount of economic success. For instance, the United States made a great appearance in the arts following WWII. Likewise, throughout history. But in any event, we're talking about the advancement of SCIENCE here. To bring in the "development" of common sense, the arts, or what have you, is to cloud the issue.
But addressing the point directly-- Don't be fooled into thinking that communism in China and Russia are the only forms of non-capitalistic economy. Those two are/were merely military regimes. Soviet Russia, for example, actively squashed other more democratic forms of communism that tried to arise, like the Prague Spring in 1968. It's just as possible to have a democratic communist as a democratic capitalist system. (Chile had that with Allende until the US overthrew it and installed a dictator; the same happened with Nicaragua, I believe.
This is irrelevant to my point. The point is that you have no good examples of success. What's more, as I was driving at, where you see increased leaning by government towards socialism, you typically see a lean away from economic, and even scientific, success. Witness Europe and the rest of the world throughout various political regimes, there is a very strong degree of correlation!
You can argue ad nasseum that it's not "proof" of a causal relationship, but the fact is that it's about as good of a gaurantee that you get in this life. But, in any event, it's certainly far better demonstrated than your utopian notions.
For the record, I'm not a communist; I just see serious problems with our current capitalism that need to be addressed. One is the major blind spot that one's wealth measures one's contribution to the world, and the belief that people only create things out of greed. In believing that, we've created a system where it's very difficult to create things other than out of greed.
And where is the evidence of this? If this is the case, why is it that Open Source has enjoyed rapid growth (or at least popularity) only very recently, despite more wealth, patents, etc than ever. Frankly, I see two entirely seperate systems, the proprietary/capitalist system and the utopian/opensource system, that can fail or succeed entirely on their own, with very little necessary interference from one or the other.
I believe economics will ultimately dictate which one is more beneficial to society. The only difference is, I think this is a good thing, whereas you seem to believe, like Lenin, that the only way other things can survive is if other systems are forcfully removed.
It's true that to do R&D, it helps to not have to wonder where your next meal is coming from. In the old days, it helped to have a royal benefactor. But today, we have the means to ensure that few if any go hungry. I'm not talking about a life of luxury, I just mean not desperate. If we did that, more people would be able to research science, write software, create art, etc.
In that case, I encourage you to open your eyes and get a better grasp on history. This has been an ongoing trend for the past 200 years. And it's not a bunch of pure academics/scientists that you have to thank....
I am no fan of Walker, but to group him and all other businessmen as just "businessmen" is ridiculous. What you fail to see is that real invention, innovation, and development go hand in hand with business. Very few of the improvements in this world are the strike of genius; they're generally the result of a lot of effort and, more often than not, resources. Put simply, it is the so-called businessman that makes it happen. It is the so-called businessman who applies the technology and creates a viable product. It is the so-called businessman who obtains the funding. It is the so-called businessman that takes the lionshare of the risk.
I'm not talking about slick VCs, Wall Street types, MBAs, bankers, feeble minded Dot Commers or what have you. I'm talking about people that have their feet on the ground and, more often than not, get their feet wet (to say the least)....the Henry Fords, Thomas Edisons,...or even the Steve Jobs of this world. Without "capitalists" like that...yeah, I think it's pretty safe to say this country would be no where today.
Tell me something, if invention/innovation were merely a spark of inspiration. Where are all the great inventions from China? Russia? Or even, to a lesser extent, Europe? They're few and far between... and it's not for want of education or minds. You think it's just a coincidence that the word business is that much further from their vocabulary? What's more, where do you think most academics/scientists are ultimately deriving their funding from? Without real life products like the internal combustion engine, the telephone, the car, the microprocessor, etc....where would our economy be? Where does all the money come from that allows these "scientists" to research? Do you think it's any coincidence that most early inventors were aristocrats or part of an emerging middle class?
Science and modern day business go hand in hand. It's very much of a chicken-or-the-egg type problem.
I think this account of GNUtella is obvious, but long overdue. Though I've been saying that GNUtella was flawed since day 1, it suprises me how much of slashdot used the "but there's always GNUtella argument". What's more, though somewhat less suprising, has been the tendency of the popular media lately to take this same attitude, acting as if massive piracy is necessarily unstoppable because of the idealized GNUtella.
One thing that I'd like to add to this argument against GNUtella is that, even if it or any of it's cousins could scale, I believe it'll ultimately fall due to the combination of two primary factors, the so-called "tragedy of the commons" and the threat of law. In other words, it's already been established that damn few people are willing to really share. Today, the only primary reasons not to share seem to be bandwidth and CPU concerns.
In the future one thing that will play a dramatic element in the mix, if RIAA must, is fear of lawsuits by the fileservers. Since the beginning of the spread of piracy online, there has been very little fear of enforcement. Put simply, neither the software industry nor the music industry has done much more than attempt to threaten the owner or the uplink of the server. However, if the industry starts prosecuting (or otherwise hurting) the top fileserves, that will mean that anyone who runs a server is putting themselves at risk.
Put it this way, as redherring alluded to, there is very little reward for sharing files. Yet, there are costs (i.e., bandwidth, cpu/hd utilization, and time). So here we have a new emerging cost, the threat of getting busted. If they go after the top 1% of fileservers without fail, I think it is reasonable to assume that most everyone will make sure that they're not in the top 1%. Thus the entire organization will collapse from the top down.
It need not even necessarily be criminal prosecution. If the industry can effectively get a user blackballed from all broadband ISPs, how many users are going to risk it? Think about how many of these servers are either being run off of DSL, cable modem, or universities. I can tell you that most of these authorities can, will, and have, rapidly shutdown offending users services. Those users that share the most, are also most likely to not cope with losing high speed service. It's a significant threat.
The cost benefit ratio for the file servers is very poor as is, so low that I doubt it'll withstand serious additional pressure by industry. I know many of you will clamor, "but one will always pop backup"...but this is flawed logic. Why would any rational individual pop up and make himself a target?
Though it may be true that COLLECTIVELY if no one runs scared, then those industry tactics would be ineffective. But this is thinking too much like a group. It's like saying that automobile traffic would be infinitely better if everyone aheared to a few basic rules (i.e., no cutting other drivers off, left lane for passing only, etc). That is very true, but that doesn't mean that it is better for the individual in the driver seat at that moment. At that moment, the individual is thinking like an individual, not as a group, so, traffic happens. Likewise, "tragedy of the commons" will happen.
I can easily see RIAA coming after all of the top fileservers (no matter what the protocol). So long as the uploader/fileserver is known, they can be targeted.
Yes, I agree, but....IRC should be dead by all rights. It is an inferior protocol implimented on mediocre servers connected haphazardly and administrated mostly by idiots [There is hardly a meritocracy amongst Opers...it's who can kiss ass the most]. The only reason the 3 major IRC networks still survive is for social, not technical reasons. People stay on IRC for the "social" structure or fabric, if you will. Put simply, all their friends are on IRC network X, so they stay put. Even though there are superior alternatives out there for most every application, the loose knit groups can't, or won't, coordinate their movements and move at once. Thus, when the individual is given the choice between using superior protocol A on their lonesome, or using crappy protocol B with their "friends", most will choose B and put up with all the crap they have to endure.
Though I believe there is a lot of truth to that statement, I've also seen it applied to an extent that it hurts overall security. Generally speaking, this world is not nearly so simple. Where systems break, it generally involves a failure on multiple levels. For instance, look at the numerous social engineering scams. Rarely is it just ONE person that broke the entire security, but rather a bunch of different people within the target organization being too careless with information. All those careless bits, in turn, interplayed with one another and allowed the crackers to build up the key to access the desired information. The point is that if each person were just twice as aware as they were before, that could go a long long ways in preventing hackings. The same goes for the vast majority of the hacking incidents. Rarely are they some strike of genius on the part of the hacker, seeing things that no one has seen before. Instead they're previously documented things that could've been avoided with reasonable effort.
I sincerely believe that effective security is attainable, provided enough effort is put into it, even though one may never be 100% theoretically secure. That is to say that if all the key players involved simply payed more attention to security, actual instances of hacking secured sites would be rare. Let's say we have two major layers of security. Each layer had 50 trained professionals go over it for all known bugs, and for anything theoretical they can provide. Assuming the organization keeps up to date on emerging threats, and monitors its security system, and if the source and specific specs on the protocol are closed, the odds of a hacker DISCOVERING two bugs in both layers that none of the pros saw is quite slim [about as good as a gaurantee as you can get in life anyways].
Unfortunately, the only standard that most people have to compare it with is nothing even approaching that. For instance, almost every single operating systems (yes, there are one or two exceptions), including the linux distros, have shipped with well known exploitable bugs. They may not have known there is that specific bug in that specific package/module/whatever, but if they had really double checked for existing bugs, it'd never have shipped like that. Likewise for most of these hacking incidents. They're well documented techniques simply being reapplied. There is simply no excuse for it. One may not be able to gaurantee that no bugs exist, but they can certainly gaurantee that certain conditions don't exist.
Call it whatever you will, I frankly don't care. The point is that Freenet depends on this caching/pushing/pulling/whatever for its success--that is how it is presumably going to be able to outscale GNUtella. Its efficiency is inversely proportional to the distance it must go to retrieve the requested file. The more diverse the requested files are, the less able Freenet is to properly mirror them. Likewise, the larger the files are, the less capable Freenet is of mirroring them. To the extent that Freenet is incapable of providing an adequate mirror, the more it reverts to a GNUtella style network--only worse in many ways because it does not travel directly.
The mp3 naming convention comes into play with the diversity. Though Freenet may protect against identical INPUTs of files on the same node, it does nothing to protect against the same song simply being named differently, recorded at a different bit rate, input errors, etc. from different uploaders. If Freenet's users prove incapable of deciding on a standard file per song, that WILL increase the burden.
Where Freenet may work well at distributing a few suddenly popular texts (i.e., DeCSS) [maybe even better than some of these ftp mirrors], I believe it'll fail at the task of distributing mp3s in the manner that napster users expect to be able to use it [even ignoring the lack of search capablities and the like].
Listen, no matter what you want to call it, its function is the same. Freenet's viability DEPENDS on data being sent to hosts that don't even request it. If people want to act as if it's a magic bullet for solving GNUtella's recursive query problems, then they must not ignore its critical nature--they can't have their cake and eat it too. Merely saying it is "caching" does not solve your problems. To put it in Freenet's founder's own words: "Just as systems such as distributed.net enable ordinary users to share unused CPU cycles on their machines, Freenet enables users to share unused disk space." In other words, sharing free HD space/mirroring/caching/pushing is key.
It may perform a few other minor tricks, but that system is what sets it apart from GNUtella. As for "clues", we'll see what you say when it fails to support a viable mp3 community.
I've read the specs. I'm well aware that the user downloads [pulls] the content. But core to its internal workings is a push architecture. The problem with arbitrary names, encoding, sources, and files is that they lend themselves poorly to this architecture, where napster can reasonably get away with it. Napster doesn't have to archive any songs. They just provide you with a link to a file server, so long as the query matches correctly, and napster's central servers can handle the query volume, there are no significant problems with this. That being said, naming, as I indicated earlier, is just one half the problem. The size of all popular music alone, completely ignoring redundancy, makes it highly improbable that Freenet will succeed at that objective.
Freenet, if it even works, is designed in such a way that'll never be able to fulfill the current purpose of either Napster or GNutella. To boil the concept down to its essentials, Freenet works on a philosophy of PUSHING highly requested data around to its servers and can only be requested by a unique identifier; whereas GNUtella essentially works on a query and pull concept. It may work well for relatively small, yet infamous, text files and the like (i.e., DeCSS). But it'll simply never be able to rise the occassion of distributing gigabytes upon gigabytes of data. For one, even without redundancy, all the the popular music is still at least 800 gigabytes. Secondly, since there is no standard naming or provider of these files, there is a high degree of redundancy. i.e., hundreds of people will encode differently and give it a different file name. So we're really talking about terabytes of data to get it all. The problem is that, given the ad hoc strucure of mp3 suppliers/servers and listeners, all of this data must be pushed around (i.e., transfered) and stored. It simply can't work.
It is as risky as I put it, even more so. They win on the aggregate because they take such a large share from the few bread winners.
In any event, can you prove that 15b dollar figure? Or is that just conjecture? Pull out their balance sheets and show me, and make sure how you label "they". There are a lot of different agents in the game, they're not all the same party.
I, also, ask you to explain away how the labels still exist if they do nothing? I've yet to hear a credible reason. Why do artists still sign with the labels today, with the nominal distribution costs of the internet? Marketing is the reason.
It's both. The labels front the artist cash before they've actually made any money to pay for certain expenses. The real money, the bulk of it, the marketing costs are generally never considered a loan. But in any event, no one can argue that the label can ever expect to recoup millions of dollars from failed artists--"loan" or no. It's risky for the label no matter how you name it. Now maybe they win on the aggregate, but that's only because they take such a large share on the few positive outcomes.
I don't have to. You're the one bringing up the argument, it's your job to prove that all artists are hurting. It's also your job to prove that there is a superior alternative for the artist. Can you prove that people are getting richer and more famous with mp3.com or any other alternatives? I think not. At most you've had nominal success with mp3.com, what've you made, 1 thousand? 2 thousand? Not much more i'm sure.
Before you trump out numerous failures, let me also remind you that I also couldn't name the latest Lottery winners, yet I have no doubt that all of them are [or would be] recieving their annuities [were it not for their own failures]. Yet it's also well known that something like 9 in 10 of them go bankrupt within 2 or 3 years; not because the state fails to pay them, but because of their own stupidity.
I propose to you that 95% artists' problems are due to the very nature of the beast, marketing. In order to become a popular artist, you need millions of dollars in marketing expenditures. Human eyes are scarce because they tend to cluster to tightly, I doubt the net will have a significant impact--almost by definition. Today the radio and television is the primary marketing vehicle. Tomorrow it may be some internet sites, but as those eyes grow there, so will the competition for those few spots, and we'll be back in much the same situation. The players may change, but the positions will remain the same.
What we are really talking about here is business, not art. Anyone can produce art; but business is tough. The vast majority of restraunts, for instance, go out of business, not necessarily for want to culinary ability, but for lack of resources, cash flows, poor location, etc. There are a thousand woes in every industry. The only difference, in my mind, is that the odds are tougher, but the stakes are correspondingly higher too.
Though you may have had an argument 20, 30, 40 years ago, that the labels merely had a lock on distribution, this simply is no longer the case. With the growth of the internet, getting access to the customer is no longer a question per se. Any artist with a couple dollars in his pocket can deliver his songs to any consumer with access to the internet, so long as the customer is willing. It's a question of eyes, not of hands. Despite claims to the contrary, the labels don't have a lock on those eyes. They gain access to consumers' eyes by shelling out cash. You should view the labels more as financiers/investors, albeit highly specialized ones, than as producers or distributors.
You ask what the labels do to deserve their share of the money? Well you should also ask what any banker does to deserve their share of the money. Money is scarce, that's simply a reality of this world. It's something that everyone who has ever operated a successfull business understands, it may not be fair, but it's hardly the labels fault, any more than it is the bankers fault. Now maybe the labels are assholes sometimes. Maybe their invest poorly. But so do bankers and other investors.
Artists compete for scarce resources like everyone in this world. The only difference is that they are vastly more visible to consumers, especially young impressionable ones. So we hear their woes amplified many times over, but that doesn't mean they're "right". They complain about the labels, when what they really should be complaining about is life itself.
'of their own dollars'? What are you smoking? Read a real contract. It is _your_ dollars they spend- every penny right down to the dishes of mixed nuts in the lobby is 'recoupable', meaning that it comes out of your royalties. It is A LOAN, not a gift. Repeat, A LOAN. Is this so hard to understand? Have you ever taken out a loan? When you do, is the bank 'giving you its own dollars'? I'd say it was your future dollars they are giving you, betting that you'll be good for it. This is not even getting into the fact that you'll be damned lucky to get five grand- basically, to get this sort of loan against royalties you will need to spend about as much of your own money in building a buzz as you expect to be loaned. If you can't spend five grand looking good for the record label you're unlikely to even see five grand out of the record company. You are _very_ far from reality here, talk to some professionals and ask them how much an artist like you describe could expect to be advanced against royalties.
Uhuh a "loan" against future sales, not a loan against your own assets. Maybe it's a bit unfair, but it doesn't change the fact that it is the labels cash that funds the promotional efforts, not the artist's cash. There is no way a failed artist is going to be able to repay a so-called "loan" in the millions of dollars. No matter what you want to call it, it's a shortfall in the label's pocket. Both sides are willing participants.
Ha! I suggest talking to your bank manager. Build a relationship and build credit through taking small loans and paying them back responsibly to show that you can forecast cashflow effectively. Then when you need a million dollars you've done your homework, you're talking to the _right_ people and you'll get one _hell_ of a lot better terms than you'd get off the record labels. Think of record label advances as credit cards- except the rates are significantly worse, and the terms are a bear. Credit cards don't tend to forbid you to work- label contracts will tend to forbid you to record or perform for anybody else. If the label's refusing to fund you 'cause you didn't recoup, you not only owe them vast sums and won't get paid but you have to come up with your own money just to continue working as a musician, recording and promoting the albums you're not going to be paid for. Labels do not think long term these days- except that they'll happily sign you for a ten CD contract- give you 5-10K to make and promote the first one- then if you are a monster hit, they cash in, and if you stiff, you gotta pay for the other nine albums yourself, but they will take all the proceeds until the advance is recouped. Oh what a deal:P
Bull, bankers are some of the most risk averse people you can find. I assure you, no bank will ever loan a starving artist that is working part time as a dishwasher (or what have you) a million+ dollars because they like the sound of their music. If bankers are such a great alternative, why don't you see the popular artists flocking to them? Gee, maybe because all the artists that are popular need lots of cash to get that way.
Hope you know a damned good lawyer. Careful- if you let the record label find you a lawyer, this is what often happens- if ever you sue the record label, you are surprised to find that your lawyer declines to help you much- but shows up bright and early in court- on the OTHER side. Yes this is conflict of interest, your point? You expected _better_ ethics than the Mafia? This really happens, be careful. If you're not really well represented, forget it- you'll never see any money. You might be famous until the next sucker comes along without a good lawyer. Why do you think so many famous music superstars, now and in the past, are _children_
Though there is no excuse for that kind of behavior, I demand proof that all of them are wilfully guilty before I paint them all with a broadbrush. That being said, this really doesn't change the core aspects here.
OK, now we are in pure fantasy territory. If you're really making a million you _are_ likely to want more, but that's because the kind of person capable of doing that isn't likely to stop at a million. Nobody capable of earning that much would be this dumb about the music industry- naivete does not earn a million dollars, unless you mean 'earning it for somebody else
Ah bull. There are plenty of naive millionares, artists and not alike. In any event, this isn't really naivety as much as it is greed and tunnelvission. I've known plenty of very smart people who lack the common sense when it comes to issues that don't serve themselves. People can convince themselves of almost anything, especially when it serves them well.
Actually the batting average is hugely worse than 9 out of 10- more like 9999 out of ten thousand. And again, you're talking 5K advances mostly- the figures here are waaaay out of whack. Courtney L's term of 'sharecropping' for the situation is a lot more accurate- what gives you the idea that these labels are so indispensable? (never mind the amusing notion that they 'give you a slice of the profits'! Were you listening about the recouping?) What is with this claim of 'you cannot function as a working musician without the record labels'? It's a business, not a system of royalty. It may be that the labels so tightly control all record stores and radio that you're substantially handicapped if you try to create your own network- it's true that where once new labels sprang up in a free-market sort of way, now they mostly don't exist, they are vanity imprints of the majors. Even so, other avenues for promotion and distribution open up. The closest you'll get to a label that 'made' its artists is the heyday of Motown- and even then, they were fortunate to stumble across the right artists to mold and control.
Well I'd say the promotional resources are scaled in proportion to the artists believed potential. In certain areas, it may well be 9 in 10. I don't really know the exact odds here. But I do know well enough that they're slim. So slim that the risk is very real.
Good: capitalism and a free market only work when there is decent information getting out. Though it took me way too long to realise that your 'you' is Courtney L. herself. Okay, so I am Courtney Love. Does that make you a fat, middle-aged record company executive? Or just a deluded fool?*
Oh please. Every would-be artist knows this, and has heard these complaints since day 0. Yet the fact remains that at least some of the artists that do sign get both rich and famous. Those which don't, don't see either (well damn rarely). So the would-be popular artists sign. Those that don't, those that choose to believe in the mythical power of mp3.com and the like, simply don't see diddly squat. Sure there might be a few flickers of hope, but I'll believe it when I see it.
Ok so maybe this isn't always the case, but here is an alternative:
1) You're a starving artist who has spent the past 5 years going no where because you can't promote yourself, not even online.
2) A label, or "The Man" (take your pick), offers to spend millions of their own dollars promoting your music. The only condition is that not only do they own that album, but they own your future works too, under such and such conditions.
3) You sign, realizing the alternative is worse.
4) You get famous, and then rich.
5) A year or two later you realize that a million dollars really isn't so much money, you want more.
6) You get greedy, because it doesn't occur to you that the labels MADE you. You ignore that you could have just have easily failed, and the label would have been short millions. You ignore the fact that, indeed, 9 in 10 of those million dollar investments fail. You ignore the fact that the labels need to maximize their profits on those few success stories. That means they NEED to own all of your professional efforts and just give you a slice of the profits. You ignore the fact that if you were allowed to walk today, you, the starving artist of yesterday, would've NEVER had the option to sign in the first place. So despite the fact that fact that you can promote yourself today and theoretically enjoy a fatter slice of the profits, the you of today is contingent on the signing and fulfilment of those documents yesterday. You can't have one without the other, but that doesn't matter. you're bitter*
7) You, the disgruntled artist, tell the world about just how little artists get. You use your notoriety to post your diatribes with the intention of compelling your label to cut you in on a bigger piece of the action. Or maybe you're just plain bitter, but it doesn't matter, reason has failed you.
* Now maybe the labels are assholes, but I believe in the function of the markets. If things were as easy as people made them out to be, there would be other options--you certainly wouldn't sign a document that only gives you a slice of the profits if there were better alternatives available. But there aren't. Those are your options, you can take them or leave them. By destroying the labels methods of profit, you risk the popular artist, whether or not the current iterations of them realize it. If you want to destroy the labels, do it through competition, not through destruction of contract. **
** Caution: Flamebait. Anything that lacks the sweet aroma of idealism gets toasted by the wee ragdotties.
Fertile soil is created, by nature and by good husbandry
Only to a very limited extent. Some land is simply too inhospitable to support extensive agriculture. What's more water is finite. Some land needs to be externally irrigated, but there simply isn't enough to go around. What you are saying is equivelent to saying that people can make themselves athletic. Sure, to a certain extent. You might see miraculous improvements, but only a few people have the necessary genetics to make it to the Olympics. The Amish are on the Olympics of land. They've done a good job preserving what they have, but they choose the most fertile land they could when they got here.
...and destroyed by bad farming practice
I don't disagree with this. One can do great damage to fertile land. But that doesn't mean the inverse is true, that we can take any land and make it sufficiently arrable.
This planet could support a population of 12,000,000,000, using essentially 19th century technology
I sincerely doubt that. Based on your previously blatent miscontruing of the facts, I doubt your premises.
I know little of Kansas
I don't live in Kansas, I live outside Philly. But I know enough about agriculture and history to know most of the Indians lacked based agricultural skills.
...but in the Australian outback one family often struggles to make a living (grow enough to feed themselves and earn enough to pay for other necessities), on land that once supported more than 200 Aboriganal Australians
Sounds awefully bubbly to me. Though I'm not terribly familiar with the Australian Aboriganess, I suspect they were more hunter-gatherer than they were agricultural, especially given the conditions. So what does it really mean to say on the "same" land. They, most likely, took an entirely different approach to the land. Exploiting and eating things that no Westerner would dream of. Furthermore, I doubt they confined their activities to a single acre...and even if they did, it's not as self-confined as, say, farming can be. You kill a wild animal on your land, and that has an impact on the surrounding area. Though there may be been clusters/tribes/city-states of these Aboriginees, their overall lack of density would allow for certain practices that couldn't be practiced today.
As for the American Indians "primitive agricultural skills", we are talking about a people who lived in harmony with their land for thousands of years.
We're also talking about a people whose population was curbed by the constant threat of infant mortality, starvation, sickness, etc. Yes, in their limited sizes I would agree that they didn't "rape" the land. Because they didn't farm any land, they couldn't easily damage any land. However, without farming they simply could never has sustained a large population. The analogy is a poor one.
I think some agricultural problems today definetly need to be addressed, but it is foolish to assert that the primitive cultures produced more food per acre [or rather that they could have sustained our populations]. You certainly have not made a convincing argument for it. You can't demonstrate that the vastly inhospitable lands in this world can suddenly be turned around into an idealistic Amish community. And you certainly can't demonstrate that ALL [or even most] land can do this.
Uh well. For one, most of the Amish live on some of the most fertile soil in the United States. Secondly, they're not entirely independent, they sell much of their wares so they can buy certain goods and services. Thirdly, it's a mistake to compare the Amish which support relatively small populations on large plots of land to the even small populations on even larger plots, because those farmers are generating most of the food for people in cities. The Amish simply don't need to produce nearly as much food per acre.
I don't quite get your argument about Kansas. Though I sincerely doubt the indians were able to support high population densities given their primitive agricultural skills, the fact is that Kansas EXPORTS most of their product. So that's a bogus analogy too. In any event, if the Amish lifestyle is so ideal, why don't you join them? I'm sure they'd take you.
He probably does, but gods why should he? There are far more important issues. GNUtella can't scale to support any more than 2k people [and poorly at that], most of which would have access to free sh1t anyways. Napster, on the other hand, is an entirely different animal due to its proven size, scalability, and ease of use.
I fail to see how that saying that and saying bugs are difficult to find are mututally exclusive. Some of my dumbest users find bugs, that doesn't mean I'd want a million of them trying to patch the code. Nor does that mean that the leader developer alone could necessarily detect the bug. When you program, you develop a certain ingrained approach to what you're developing--you implicitely assume on some level that your testing efforts are going to be inclusive of all the users. Thus it is easy to develop certain blind spots, it's hard to look at something with a totally fresh set of eyes. Even if "fixing" the individual bugs is trivial, you have concurrency issues that CVS and the like can only go so far to solve. This is especially true when bugs, as they often do, require a higher level fix than just in the place where it makes itself known.
I'll believe it when I see it. The modularization that I refer to is not just an issue of organization, the issue (as I see it) is that it requires less effort/drive than a simple highly modularized driver does. Modularization in Linux's scope allows for a certain lackadaisical approach, that I don't believe larger [ even modularized] parts can. There is only so much that one can modularize away before it becomes excessively costly to performance.
The "structure" is necessary not just to restrict additions that don't conform, but to drive, motivate, and encourage. Not every project is going to be particularly thrilling to the developer, sometimes it requires something a little more than the self-motivated desire to "scratch an itch". It's not even necessarily about greed. A developer may well think their efforts are better directed towards something else of their choosing; sometimes they may be right, but I've also known a number of situations where someone with the requisite skills must be/told/ to do it, and/told/ to do it a certain way. Modularizing and laying out a frame work can only go so far; they don't fully describe a path in the way that a manager can. Granted, there may be some significantly large and complex parts to Linux, but a modern day RDBMS requires a certain level of singularly sustained effort.
I feel this will be especially true when the open source developers efforts fade more and more into the background amongst many others. When say, Alan Cox writes a driver for my particular piece of hardware, he's sure to recieve plenty of thanks, especially if it's fast. But when one modification of one condition of an INSERT statement that is just.01% less likely to fail ACID compliance test, who is going to thank that developer for that, for spending the past 2 weeks of his time to attain a level of safety that only a large corporation is apt to notice [and only then, when things go bad].
I realize many people will disagree with me there, but I remain skeptical. So I reiterate, I'll believe it when I see it. There may be a way, but not the way popular "Open Source" is envisioned.
I agree with his central argument, that structure is key, but I'd drive it even further. I'd say that the amount of necessary structure is directly proportional to the amount you can get away with it. Linux and other similar projects, due to their high degree of modularization or lack of size and scope, can afford a relatively loose structure. I do not believe that significantly more involved projects (i.e., development of a high end RDBMS) can afford any of the commonly praised open source management styles.
Though I believe Open Source may some day make great inroads against proprietary software, I think that'll come almost inevitably where structured is lent by those with resources. i.e., corporations. For instance, I briefly read an article in some IT magazine awhile ago that IBM, Redhat, VALinux, and few other corporations were going to build a PARC-like facility where they'd cooperate in the development and improvement of Linux with the intent to create a universal replacement of windows. Assuming the corporations can agree on committing the necessary resources, hiring enough programmers, giving the right amount of force, I could see it succeeding beatifully. But I don't believe we'll ever see Linux, as it is popularly envisioned, usurping the windows hegemony.
Do you really believe you have a reasonable expectation of privacy? You put it online for the world to see. Just because some parties are a little more interested than others doesn't mean they're violating your privacy.
As for searching beyond the request of robots.txt's and _really aggressively_ searching, that strikes me as being something of a different issue. It seems to me that robots.txt is more of a practical and protectionary issue, than it is one of privacy. It's more of a request not to bother you, than it is a request for privacy, at least in my opinion. Also, failure to adequately process and obey robots.txt can easily be the fault of programming error or ignorance, not necessarily a willful or particularly unreasonable act--one need not neccessarily take special measures to circumvent its intention.
This is not to say that I can't sympathize with parties that get hammered by such spiders, but I don't believe the privacy argument per se holds any water. I see legitimate complaints on both sides of the issue. For instance, let's say you're a software company and you find a LINKED and self-proclaimed warez page, but the hosting site doesn't allow spidering. Is that still so criminal? Even if the desire is to simply catalogue and document all of it?
Slashdot Mirror
If not, please provide a link or something.
The wheel may be an essential concept to our society, but that does not mean that Joe Caveman was on technological par by any measure (i.e., rate, effort, product, etc). Ask yourself: Would you rather be driving on the rudimentary concept of the wheel, or the highly evolved steel-reinforced/synthetic wheel of today that is highly reliable and efficient? I didn't think so.
Oh the idealized 'early' days of revisionist historians. Yes, many more on us would still be working on farms...rising and going to bed with the sun. Toiling behind animals and crude tools. Unemployment? Much higher. Starvation? Much more common place. Hunger? Very common. Death in pregnancy? Common. Infant mortality? High.
Evidently, you take it all for granted. If you really truely believe that life was so much better back then, why don't you move to a farm and try it like they did in the early days? There are still parts of the world that live much like that. It's not too late for you.
Many times actually, to a much worse degree. Your problem is that you view the rich having money as being a zero sum game. It's not. Empirically, both the poor and the middle class have been enjoying a higher quality of life on the aggregate. Some what more theoretically, when the rich 'have' a lot of money, what does that really mean?
If I buy a million dollar house, that money does not go into the ground. It goes back into the economy. The contractors, the laborers, and the people the provide the raw materials all benefit. And when I pay a million dollars for a house, I get diminishing returns at best. You think such a house in 10x nicer? 10x bigger? Generally not. You think Bill Gates lives a million times a nicer life than the average person?
It's almost impossible to lock your money away such that it benefits no one, short of burrying under a mattress. The fact is that most people that are 'rich' have most of their money in the capital markets, and that is why they get 'richer'. This money in turns, goes back out into the economy (by definition), and it used to do things like start businesses, or provide loans to the less wealthy, etc, etc etc.
But both HAVE ultimately benefited, empirically and theoretically.
Once again, you're clouding the issues. In China, and in all other similar systems, what little disparities there are, are totally arbitrary. Someone in authority decides who gets what. The result is that no one has any incentive to work. What's more, when there is a 'concentration' of wealth in China, there are no significant capital markets, no multiplier effects, etc. Apples and oranges again.
You're totally pulling this out of your ass. Edison was a great inventor, there is no doubt about it. What's more, since you assert that patent holders are merely sitting on their ass today, where is evidence? All to the contrary. There are many more resources devoted to R&D than before, both as a percentage of revenue and in absolute terms. Do you see it in product either? Nope. The entire tech industry and biotech industry violate everything you say 10x over.
That's another issue with many facets, one which 99% of slashdot has little comprehension of. I generally do advocate IP; however, i'll not get into it here.
I don't know about you, but I can think of very few projects that have done well without external funding...either from business or, to a much lesser extent from some government/academic center (which is ultimately derived from success of our economy. read: business) You may well banter about things like open source as if it's the holy grail, but it's unproven at best.
How is it that you can claim that business only "sometimes" helps, yet almost every significant innovation in goods or services is organized behind some sort of business? Why would the engineers/programmers/developers/whatever flock to someone that just tends to get in the way? "Err yeah, I'm a great scientist, so I'm going to work for 'The Man' who will do nothing but slow me down and steal all the money". It defies logic; people are more rational than that.
If by our culture, you mean our traditional Anglo/Protestant work ethic, I have faith in that too. In fact, I believe that a good part of our success is our work ethic--not just the fact that law allows capitalism to exist. But you miss a major point. The very notion of independence, the freedom that free markets bring, is what has shaped our culture tremendously. In other words, there is something of a symbiotic relationship between law and society. Society shapes law, and law shapes society.
You can't merely transplant a framework of laws and expect it to flourish unless people really believe and follow it. However, you can impose bad laws, and ultimately drag down an entire society...Witness what happened to East Germany.
This spirit is certainly a lot of it, but read above. The free market is about more than just incentivising people (though that is a lot of it). It's about allocating resources efficiently. It's about encouraging risk, both economic and social in many different senses.
How many scientists do you know that put their own assets on the lines to promote science with no expectation of getting reimbursed? I'll give you a hint, very few academics do this. They live relatively risk-free lives. They draw a salary. If they fail in their efforts, the odds are they're not going to go bankrupt. What's more, they're not paying other people to work for them. They don't know what it's like to try and meet payroll every month....They're isolated from much of the realities. This is not to say that they have no function in our economy, they do, but they're hardly a substitute for the entreprenuerial spirit....You're comparing Apples to Oranges.
Researching obscurities is not the same as putting your ass on the line. Likewise, building a log cabin is not the same. etc etc etc
When taken in context with the rest of the world, it's hardly a leap of faith. How do you explain East Germany's utter lack of spark, compared to West Germany's success. North versus South Korea? Socialized contries verus less socialized countries....
What's more, very little of the United State's success comes from our geography. Look at Japan...scarce resources, few arrable lands,...but great success. Or USSR...even more abundant arrable lands (yet much lower yield), even more resources, better location to do international commerce...yet an utter failure.
It's funny that you say that. If _you_ follow history, then you would know that the arts tend to flourish with a certain amount of economic success. For instance, the United States made a great appearance in the arts following WWII. Likewise, throughout history. But in any event, we're talking about the advancement of SCIENCE here. To bring in the "development" of common sense, the arts, or what have you, is to cloud the issue.
This is irrelevant to my point. The point is that you have no good examples of success. What's more, as I was driving at, where you see increased leaning by government towards socialism, you typically see a lean away from economic, and even scientific, success. Witness Europe and the rest of the world throughout various political regimes, there is a very strong degree of correlation!
You can argue ad nasseum that it's not "proof" of a causal relationship, but the fact is that it's about as good of a gaurantee that you get in this life. But, in any event, it's certainly far better demonstrated than your utopian notions.
And where is the evidence of this? If this is the case, why is it that Open Source has enjoyed rapid growth (or at least popularity) only very recently, despite more wealth, patents, etc than ever. Frankly, I see two entirely seperate systems, the proprietary/capitalist system and the utopian/opensource system, that can fail or succeed entirely on their own, with very little necessary interference from one or the other.
I believe economics will ultimately dictate which one is more beneficial to society. The only difference is, I think this is a good thing, whereas you seem to believe, like Lenin, that the only way other things can survive is if other systems are forcfully removed.
In that case, I encourage you to open your eyes and get a better grasp on history. This has been an ongoing trend for the past 200 years. And it's not a bunch of pure academics/scientists that you have to thank....
I am no fan of Walker, but to group him and all other businessmen as just "businessmen" is ridiculous. What you fail to see is that real invention, innovation, and development go hand in hand with business. Very few of the improvements in this world are the strike of genius; they're generally the result of a lot of effort and, more often than not, resources. Put simply, it is the so-called businessman that makes it happen. It is the so-called businessman who applies the technology and creates a viable product. It is the so-called businessman who obtains the funding. It is the so-called businessman that takes the lionshare of the risk.
...or even the Steve Jobs of this world. Without "capitalists" like that...yeah, I think it's pretty safe to say this country would be no where today.
I'm not talking about slick VCs, Wall Street types, MBAs, bankers, feeble minded Dot Commers or what have you. I'm talking about people that have their feet on the ground and, more often than not, get their feet wet (to say the least)....the Henry Fords, Thomas Edisons,
Tell me something, if invention/innovation were merely a spark of inspiration. Where are all the great inventions from China? Russia? Or even, to a lesser extent, Europe? They're few and far between... and it's not for want of education or minds. You think it's just a coincidence that the word business is that much further from their vocabulary? What's more, where do you think most academics/scientists are ultimately deriving their funding from? Without real life products like the internal combustion engine, the telephone, the car, the microprocessor, etc....where would our economy be? Where does all the money come from that allows these "scientists" to research? Do you think it's any coincidence that most early inventors were aristocrats or part of an emerging middle class?
Science and modern day business go hand in hand. It's very much of a chicken-or-the-egg type problem.
I think this account of GNUtella is obvious, but long overdue. Though I've been saying that GNUtella was flawed since day 1, it suprises me how much of slashdot used the "but there's always GNUtella argument". What's more, though somewhat less suprising, has been the tendency of the popular media lately to take this same attitude, acting as if massive piracy is necessarily unstoppable because of the idealized GNUtella.
One thing that I'd like to add to this argument against GNUtella is that, even if it or any of it's cousins could scale, I believe it'll ultimately fall due to the combination of two primary factors, the so-called "tragedy of the commons" and the threat of law. In other words, it's already been established that damn few people are willing to really share. Today, the only primary reasons not to share seem to be bandwidth and CPU concerns.
In the future one thing that will play a dramatic element in the mix, if RIAA must, is fear of lawsuits by the fileservers. Since the beginning of the spread of piracy online, there has been very little fear of enforcement. Put simply, neither the software industry nor the music industry has done much more than attempt to threaten the owner or the uplink of the server. However, if the industry starts prosecuting (or otherwise hurting) the top fileserves, that will mean that anyone who runs a server is putting themselves at risk.
Put it this way, as redherring alluded to, there is very little reward for sharing files. Yet, there are costs (i.e., bandwidth, cpu/hd utilization, and time). So here we have a new emerging cost, the threat of getting busted. If they go after the top 1% of fileservers without fail, I think it is reasonable to assume that most everyone will make sure that they're not in the top 1%. Thus the entire organization will collapse from the top down.
It need not even necessarily be criminal prosecution. If the industry can effectively get a user blackballed from all broadband ISPs, how many users are going to risk it? Think about how many of these servers are either being run off of DSL, cable modem, or universities. I can tell you that most of these authorities can, will, and have, rapidly shutdown offending users services. Those users that share the most, are also most likely to not cope with losing high speed service. It's a significant threat.
The cost benefit ratio for the file servers is very poor as is, so low that I doubt it'll withstand serious additional pressure by industry. I know many of you will clamor, "but one will always pop backup"...but this is flawed logic. Why would any rational individual pop up and make himself a target?
Though it may be true that COLLECTIVELY if no one runs scared, then those industry tactics would be ineffective. But this is thinking too much like a group. It's like saying that automobile traffic would be infinitely better if everyone aheared to a few basic rules (i.e., no cutting other drivers off, left lane for passing only, etc). That is very true, but that doesn't mean that it is better for the individual in the driver seat at that moment. At that moment, the individual is thinking like an individual, not as a group, so, traffic happens. Likewise, "tragedy of the commons" will happen.
I can easily see RIAA coming after all of the top fileservers (no matter what the protocol). So long as the uploader/fileserver is known, they can be targeted.
Yes, I agree, but....IRC should be dead by all rights. It is an inferior protocol implimented on mediocre servers connected haphazardly and administrated mostly by idiots [There is hardly a meritocracy amongst Opers...it's who can kiss ass the most]. The only reason the 3 major IRC networks still survive is for social, not technical reasons. People stay on IRC for the "social" structure or fabric, if you will. Put simply, all their friends are on IRC network X, so they stay put. Even though there are superior alternatives out there for most every application, the loose knit groups can't, or won't, coordinate their movements and move at once. Thus, when the individual is given the choice between using superior protocol A on their lonesome, or using crappy protocol B with their "friends", most will choose B and put up with all the crap they have to endure.
BEGIN RANT/
Though I believe there is a lot of truth to that statement, I've also seen it applied to an extent that it hurts overall security. Generally speaking, this world is not nearly so simple. Where systems break, it generally involves a failure on multiple levels. For instance, look at the numerous social engineering scams. Rarely is it just ONE person that broke the entire security, but rather a bunch of different people within the target organization being too careless with information. All those careless bits, in turn, interplayed with one another and allowed the crackers to build up the key to access the desired information. The point is that if each person were just twice as aware as they were before, that could go a long long ways in preventing hackings. The same goes for the vast majority of the hacking incidents. Rarely are they some strike of genius on the part of the hacker, seeing things that no one has seen before. Instead they're previously documented things that could've been avoided with reasonable effort.
I sincerely believe that effective security is attainable, provided enough effort is put into it, even though one may never be 100% theoretically secure. That is to say that if all the key players involved simply payed more attention to security, actual instances of hacking secured sites would be rare. Let's say we have two major layers of security. Each layer had 50 trained professionals go over it for all known bugs, and for anything theoretical they can provide. Assuming the organization keeps up to date on emerging threats, and monitors its security system, and if the source and specific specs on the protocol are closed, the odds of a hacker DISCOVERING two bugs in both layers that none of the pros saw is quite slim [about as good as a gaurantee as you can get in life anyways].
Unfortunately, the only standard that most people have to compare it with is nothing even approaching that. For instance, almost every single operating systems (yes, there are one or two exceptions), including the linux distros, have shipped with well known exploitable bugs. They may not have known there is that specific bug in that specific package/module/whatever, but if they had really double checked for existing bugs, it'd never have shipped like that. Likewise for most of these hacking incidents. They're well documented techniques simply being reapplied. There is simply no excuse for it. One may not be able to gaurantee that no bugs exist, but they can certainly gaurantee that certain conditions don't exist.
/END RANT
Call it whatever you will, I frankly don't care. The point is that Freenet depends on this caching/pushing/pulling/whatever for its success--that is how it is presumably going to be able to outscale GNUtella. Its efficiency is inversely proportional to the distance it must go to retrieve the requested file. The more diverse the requested files are, the less able Freenet is to properly mirror them. Likewise, the larger the files are, the less capable Freenet is of mirroring them. To the extent that Freenet is incapable of providing an adequate mirror, the more it reverts to a GNUtella style network--only worse in many ways because it does not travel directly.
The mp3 naming convention comes into play with the diversity. Though Freenet may protect against identical INPUTs of files on the same node, it does nothing to protect against the same song simply being named differently, recorded at a different bit rate, input errors, etc. from different uploaders. If Freenet's users prove incapable of deciding on a standard file per song, that WILL increase the burden.
Where Freenet may work well at distributing a few suddenly popular texts (i.e., DeCSS) [maybe even better than some of these ftp mirrors], I believe it'll fail at the task of distributing mp3s in the manner that napster users expect to be able to use it [even ignoring the lack of search capablities and the like].
Listen, no matter what you want to call it, its function is the same. Freenet's viability DEPENDS on data being sent to hosts that don't even request it. If people want to act as if it's a magic bullet for solving GNUtella's recursive query problems, then they must not ignore its critical nature--they can't have their cake and eat it too. Merely saying it is "caching" does not solve your problems. To put it in Freenet's founder's own words: "Just as systems such as distributed.net enable ordinary users to share unused CPU cycles on their machines, Freenet enables users to share unused disk space." In other words, sharing free HD space/mirroring/caching/pushing is key.
It may perform a few other minor tricks, but that system is what sets it apart from GNUtella. As for "clues", we'll see what you say when it fails to support a viable mp3 community.
I've read the specs. I'm well aware that the user downloads [pulls] the content. But core to its internal workings is a push architecture. The problem with arbitrary names, encoding, sources, and files is that they lend themselves poorly to this architecture, where napster can reasonably get away with it. Napster doesn't have to archive any songs. They just provide you with a link to a file server, so long as the query matches correctly, and napster's central servers can handle the query volume, there are no significant problems with this. That being said, naming, as I indicated earlier, is just one half the problem. The size of all popular music alone, completely ignoring redundancy, makes it highly improbable that Freenet will succeed at that objective.
but I'll be proven correct. ;)
Freenet, if it even works, is designed in such a way that'll never be able to fulfill the current purpose of either Napster or GNutella. To boil the concept down to its essentials, Freenet works on a philosophy of PUSHING highly requested data around to its servers and can only be requested by a unique identifier; whereas GNUtella essentially works on a query and pull concept. It may work well for relatively small, yet infamous, text files and the like (i.e., DeCSS). But it'll simply never be able to rise the occassion of distributing gigabytes upon gigabytes of data. For one, even without redundancy, all the the popular music is still at least 800 gigabytes. Secondly, since there is no standard naming or provider of these files, there is a high degree of redundancy. i.e., hundreds of people will encode differently and give it a different file name. So we're really talking about terabytes of data to get it all. The problem is that, given the ad hoc strucure of mp3 suppliers/servers and listeners, all of this data must be pushed around (i.e., transfered) and stored. It simply can't work.
It is as risky as I put it, even more so. They win on the aggregate because they take such a large share from the few bread winners.
In any event, can you prove that 15b dollar figure? Or is that just conjecture? Pull out their balance sheets and show me, and make sure how you label "they". There are a lot of different agents in the game, they're not all the same party.
I, also, ask you to explain away how the labels still exist if they do nothing? I've yet to hear a credible reason. Why do artists still sign with the labels today, with the nominal distribution costs of the internet? Marketing is the reason.
It's both. The labels front the artist cash before they've actually made any money to pay for certain expenses. The real money, the bulk of it, the marketing costs are generally never considered a loan. But in any event, no one can argue that the label can ever expect to recoup millions of dollars from failed artists--"loan" or no. It's risky for the label no matter how you name it. Now maybe they win on the aggregate, but that's only because they take such a large share on the few positive outcomes.
Before you trump out numerous failures, let me also remind you that I also couldn't name the latest Lottery winners, yet I have no doubt that all of them are [or would be] recieving their annuities [were it not for their own failures]. Yet it's also well known that something like 9 in 10 of them go bankrupt within 2 or 3 years; not because the state fails to pay them, but because of their own stupidity.
I propose to you that 95% artists' problems are due to the very nature of the beast, marketing. In order to become a popular artist, you need millions of dollars in marketing expenditures. Human eyes are scarce because they tend to cluster to tightly, I doubt the net will have a significant impact--almost by definition. Today the radio and television is the primary marketing vehicle. Tomorrow it may be some internet sites, but as those eyes grow there, so will the competition for those few spots, and we'll be back in much the same situation. The players may change, but the positions will remain the same.
What we are really talking about here is business, not art. Anyone can produce art; but business is tough. The vast majority of restraunts, for instance, go out of business, not necessarily for want to culinary ability, but for lack of resources, cash flows, poor location, etc. There are a thousand woes in every industry. The only difference, in my mind, is that the odds are tougher, but the stakes are correspondingly higher too.
Though you may have had an argument 20, 30, 40 years ago, that the labels merely had a lock on distribution, this simply is no longer the case. With the growth of the internet, getting access to the customer is no longer a question per se. Any artist with a couple dollars in his pocket can deliver his songs to any consumer with access to the internet, so long as the customer is willing. It's a question of eyes, not of hands. Despite claims to the contrary, the labels don't have a lock on those eyes. They gain access to consumers' eyes by shelling out cash. You should view the labels more as financiers/investors, albeit highly specialized ones, than as producers or distributors.
You ask what the labels do to deserve their share of the money? Well you should also ask what any banker does to deserve their share of the money. Money is scarce, that's simply a reality of this world. It's something that everyone who has ever operated a successfull business understands, it may not be fair, but it's hardly the labels fault, any more than it is the bankers fault. Now maybe the labels are assholes sometimes. Maybe their invest poorly. But so do bankers and other investors.
Artists compete for scarce resources like everyone in this world. The only difference is that they are vastly more visible to consumers, especially young impressionable ones. So we hear their woes amplified many times over, but that doesn't mean they're "right". They complain about the labels, when what they really should be complaining about is life itself.
Bull, bankers are some of the most risk averse people you can find. I assure you, no bank will ever loan a starving artist that is working part time as a dishwasher (or what have you) a million+ dollars because they like the sound of their music. If bankers are such a great alternative, why don't you see the popular artists flocking to them? Gee, maybe because all the artists that are popular need lots of cash to get that way.
Though there is no excuse for that kind of behavior, I demand proof that all of them are wilfully guilty before I paint them all with a broadbrush. That being said, this really doesn't change the core aspects here.
Ah bull. There are plenty of naive millionares, artists and not alike. In any event, this isn't really naivety as much as it is greed and tunnelvission. I've known plenty of very smart people who lack the common sense when it comes to issues that don't serve themselves. People can convince themselves of almost anything, especially when it serves them well.
Well I'd say the promotional resources are scaled in proportion to the artists believed potential. In certain areas, it may well be 9 in 10. I don't really know the exact odds here. But I do know well enough that they're slim. So slim that the risk is very real.
Oh please. Every would-be artist knows this, and has heard these complaints since day 0. Yet the fact remains that at least some of the artists that do sign get both rich and famous. Those which don't, don't see either (well damn rarely). So the would-be popular artists sign. Those that don't, those that choose to believe in the mythical power of mp3.com and the like, simply don't see diddly squat. Sure there might be a few flickers of hope, but I'll believe it when I see it.
that'll make your world brighter.
Ok so maybe this isn't always the case, but here is an alternative:
1) You're a starving artist who has spent the past 5 years going no where because you can't promote yourself, not even online.
2) A label, or "The Man" (take your pick), offers to spend millions of their own dollars promoting your music. The only condition is that not only do they own that album, but they own your future works too, under such and such conditions.
3) You sign, realizing the alternative is worse.
4) You get famous, and then rich.
5) A year or two later you realize that a million dollars really isn't so much money, you want more.
6) You get greedy, because it doesn't occur to you that the labels MADE you. You ignore that you could have just have easily failed, and the label would have been short millions. You ignore the fact that, indeed, 9 in 10 of those million dollar investments fail. You ignore the fact that the labels need to maximize their profits on those few success stories. That means they NEED to own all of your professional efforts and just give you a slice of the profits. You ignore the fact that if you were allowed to walk today, you, the starving artist of yesterday, would've NEVER had the option to sign in the first place. So despite the fact that fact that you can promote yourself today and theoretically enjoy a fatter slice of the profits, the you of today is contingent on the signing and fulfilment of those documents yesterday. You can't have one without the other, but that doesn't matter. you're bitter*
7) You, the disgruntled artist, tell the world about just how little artists get. You use your notoriety to post your diatribes with the intention of compelling your label to cut you in on a bigger piece of the action. Or maybe you're just plain bitter, but it doesn't matter, reason has failed you.
* Now maybe the labels are assholes, but I believe in the function of the markets. If things were as easy as people made them out to be, there would be other options--you certainly wouldn't sign a document that only gives you a slice of the profits if there were better alternatives available. But there aren't. Those are your options, you can take them or leave them. By destroying the labels methods of profit, you risk the popular artist, whether or not the current iterations of them realize it. If you want to destroy the labels, do it through competition, not through destruction of contract. **
** Caution: Flamebait. Anything that lacks the sweet aroma of idealism gets toasted by the wee ragdotties.
I don't disagree with this. One can do great damage to fertile land. But that doesn't mean the inverse is true, that we can take any land and make it sufficiently arrable.
I sincerely doubt that. Based on your previously blatent miscontruing of the facts, I doubt your premises.
I don't live in Kansas, I live outside Philly. But I know enough about agriculture and history to know most of the Indians lacked based agricultural skills.
Sounds awefully bubbly to me. Though I'm not terribly familiar with the Australian Aboriganess, I suspect they were more hunter-gatherer than they were agricultural, especially given the conditions. So what does it really mean to say on the "same" land. They, most likely, took an entirely different approach to the land. Exploiting and eating things that no Westerner would dream of. Furthermore, I doubt they confined their activities to a single acre...and even if they did, it's not as self-confined as, say, farming can be. You kill a wild animal on your land, and that has an impact on the surrounding area. Though there may be been clusters/tribes/city-states of these Aboriginees, their overall lack of density would allow for certain practices that couldn't be practiced today.
We're also talking about a people whose population was curbed by the constant threat of infant mortality, starvation, sickness, etc. Yes, in their limited sizes I would agree that they didn't "rape" the land. Because they didn't farm any land, they couldn't easily damage any land. However, without farming they simply could never has sustained a large population. The analogy is a poor one.
I think some agricultural problems today definetly need to be addressed, but it is foolish to assert that the primitive cultures produced more food per acre [or rather that they could have sustained our populations]. You certainly have not made a convincing argument for it. You can't demonstrate that the vastly inhospitable lands in this world can suddenly be turned around into an idealistic Amish community. And you certainly can't demonstrate that ALL [or even most] land can do this.
Uh well. For one, most of the Amish live on some of the most fertile soil in the United States. Secondly, they're not entirely independent, they sell much of their wares so they can buy certain goods and services. Thirdly, it's a mistake to compare the Amish which support relatively small populations on large plots of land to the even small populations on even larger plots, because those farmers are generating most of the food for people in cities. The Amish simply don't need to produce nearly as much food per acre.
I don't quite get your argument about Kansas. Though I sincerely doubt the indians were able to support high population densities given their primitive agricultural skills, the fact is that Kansas EXPORTS most of their product. So that's a bogus analogy too. In any event, if the Amish lifestyle is so ideal, why don't you join them? I'm sure they'd take you.
He probably does, but gods why should he? There are far more important issues. GNUtella can't scale to support any more than 2k people [and poorly at that], most of which would have access to free sh1t anyways. Napster, on the other hand, is an entirely different animal due to its proven size, scalability, and ease of use.
I fail to see how that saying that and saying bugs are difficult to find are mututally exclusive. Some of my dumbest users find bugs, that doesn't mean I'd want a million of them trying to patch the code. Nor does that mean that the leader developer alone could necessarily detect the bug. When you program, you develop a certain ingrained approach to what you're developing--you implicitely assume on some level that your testing efforts are going to be inclusive of all the users. Thus it is easy to develop certain blind spots, it's hard to look at something with a totally fresh set of eyes. Even if "fixing" the individual bugs is trivial, you have concurrency issues that CVS and the like can only go so far to solve. This is especially true when bugs, as they often do, require a higher level fix than just in the place where it makes itself known.
I'll believe it when I see it. The modularization that I refer to is not just an issue of organization, the issue (as I see it) is that it requires less effort/drive than a simple highly modularized driver does. Modularization in Linux's scope allows for a certain lackadaisical approach, that I don't believe larger [ even modularized] parts can. There is only so much that one can modularize away before it becomes excessively costly to performance.
/told/ to do it, and /told/ to do it a certain way. Modularizing and laying out a frame work can only go so far; they don't fully describe a path in the way that a manager can. Granted, there may be some significantly large and complex parts to Linux, but a modern day RDBMS requires a certain level of singularly sustained effort.
.01% less likely to fail ACID compliance test, who is going to thank that developer for that, for spending the past 2 weeks of his time to attain a level of safety that only a large corporation is apt to notice [and only then, when things go bad].
The "structure" is necessary not just to restrict additions that don't conform, but to drive, motivate, and encourage. Not every project is going to be particularly thrilling to the developer, sometimes it requires something a little more than the self-motivated desire to "scratch an itch". It's not even necessarily about greed. A developer may well think their efforts are better directed towards something else of their choosing; sometimes they may be right, but I've also known a number of situations where someone with the requisite skills must be
I feel this will be especially true when the open source developers efforts fade more and more into the background amongst many others. When say, Alan Cox writes a driver for my particular piece of hardware, he's sure to recieve plenty of thanks, especially if it's fast. But when one modification of one condition of an INSERT statement that is just
I realize many people will disagree with me there, but I remain skeptical. So I reiterate, I'll believe it when I see it. There may be a way, but not the way popular "Open Source" is envisioned.
I agree with his central argument, that structure is key, but I'd drive it even further. I'd say that the amount of necessary structure is directly proportional to the amount you can get away with it. Linux and other similar projects, due to their high degree of modularization or lack of size and scope, can afford a relatively loose structure. I do not believe that significantly more involved projects (i.e., development of a high end RDBMS) can afford any of the commonly praised open source management styles.
Though I believe Open Source may some day make great inroads against proprietary software, I think that'll come almost inevitably where structured is lent by those with resources. i.e., corporations. For instance, I briefly read an article in some IT magazine awhile ago that IBM, Redhat, VALinux, and few other corporations were going to build a PARC-like facility where they'd cooperate in the development and improvement of Linux with the intent to create a universal replacement of windows. Assuming the corporations can agree on committing the necessary resources, hiring enough programmers, giving the right amount of force, I could see it succeeding beatifully. But I don't believe we'll ever see Linux, as it is popularly envisioned, usurping the windows hegemony.
Do you really believe you have a reasonable expectation of privacy? You put it online for the world to see. Just because some parties are a little more interested than others doesn't mean they're violating your privacy.
As for searching beyond the request of robots.txt's and _really aggressively_ searching, that strikes me as being something of a different issue. It seems to me that robots.txt is more of a practical and protectionary issue, than it is one of privacy. It's more of a request not to bother you, than it is a request for privacy, at least in my opinion. Also, failure to adequately process and obey robots.txt can easily be the fault of programming error or ignorance, not necessarily a willful or particularly unreasonable act--one need not neccessarily take special measures to circumvent its intention.
This is not to say that I can't sympathize with parties that get hammered by such spiders, but I don't believe the privacy argument per se holds any water. I see legitimate complaints on both sides of the issue. For instance, let's say you're a software company and you find a LINKED and self-proclaimed warez page, but the hosting site doesn't allow spidering. Is that still so criminal? Even if the desire is to simply catalogue and document all of it?