So, as we see here, this could be an interesting arms race (and with the laws being asked for by the industry lobby, not altogether improbable). I, for one, rather look forward to it.
The funny thing about them doing this is their claim that you are not buying a physical product, but rather a "license" to listen to that particular album. If that is the case, should the license not be independent of the media it is recorded on? Shouldn't the cost of the recording be the published cost of the license plus the cost of the physical medium (i.e, CDs would be cheaper than tapes)? If I scratch a CD, shouldn't the distributor be required to replace it at cost? If a new format comes out with better quality, since I already paid for a license of the album, shouldn't they be required to sell me the new, higher quality recording at cost? That's what really gets me -- the fact that they get to screw you on both ends. I do not agree with downloading copyrighted music for free, but if I have a damaged CD, I will not feel the least bit guilty about finding a friend with the same album and copying his CD to recover my "licensed" music.
Then RIAA ups the ante by requiring the speaker to authenticate itself via a proprietary code before the CD can be played. The speaker is wired such that if you so much as open the case, it will refuse to authenticate further. Ball's in your court. What do you do now?
Okay, if Spears/Shakira/Aguilera/BS Boys/N'Sync went off and did their thing on their own, that would be a kick in the nuts to Rosen.
In any case, there is absolutely no danger of this ever happening. A very important pre-requisite for going off and doing your own thing is musical talent, which none of these have (having a soul helps too). They are all just pre-packaged, manufactured pretty faces (and in some cases bosoms) that the labels apply to music written by professional song writers -- whose only job function is to rearrange the tired lyrics and limited collection of rythms in the ol' music pot and crank out the "next big hit" -- and recorded with so much technical wizardry, the actual performance could be (is?) just a digitized computer drone. These kids sign up with the labels because they want to be the next big teen idol, not because they care a thing about music or artistry. Thus, the labels have the real cash cows firmly in the fold, and any real artists who want to go it alone can go be poor and artistic for all they care.
P.S., the statement "a kick in the nuts for Rosen," amuses me to no end.
Actually, the Bad Astronomy guy does answer these questions. Read about a dozen other comments for the link. Also, think about the mirrors on the moon that are used by many scientists to gauge its distance, and the moon rocks that have been studied by many scientists, not one of which, as far as I am aware, has come out and said, "Wait a minute! These rocks are straight out of the Grand Canyon!" Do you really believe that NASA got to all of the scientists in the country and they have all agreed to join in on the Conspiracy?
he rocket would explode on launch and splatter plutonium all over Florida
Of course, this being election time, we must all stop and reflect on the terrible tragedy it would have been if a huge chunk of Florida had been destroyed 5 years ago.
Well, my Windows 2000 Start Menu now has a little Icon that allows me to tell it not to launch Outlook Express, Media Player, MSN Messenger and Internet Explorer every time I move the mouse. That by itself has got to be worth something.
From: Bill Gates (bill.gates@microsoft.com)
To: Geekee (minion2678096138894@microsoft.com)
Subject: Astroturfing
You idiot! Rule 1 of astroturfing is to at least try to sound objective. Otherwise, you just don't have any credibility. "The whole concept of antitrust legislation is an attack on freedom" sounds like something you would hear coming out of the steel cartel early in the early 20th century (on a side note, those guys are like gods to me. Curse the government for screwing them over!). Next time, why don't you just put "ASTROTURF" in the subject line and save readers the trouble!
I don't want to see any more of this crap coming out of Redmond. Next time, say something that sounds reasonable, like "How is having the best product and trying to sell it at a competitive rate coercive strong-arming?" Note how I use a well-established logical fallacy to make a point that is entirely irrelevent to the issue at hand. Now, I'm afraid we're going to have to send you to three more weeks of Astroturf training before we let you out again. Sorry. Report to The Secret Training Vault first thing Monday.
"finding of liability against Microsoft for violation of 2 of the Sherman Act
and the state law counterparts to 2 of the Sherman Act in the states of California, Connecticut,
Florida, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Utah, and West Virginia, the Commonwealth of
Massachusetts, and the District of Columbia"
How's that for you?
Re:What if they don't find the gravity waves?
on
Examining Gravity Waves
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I think Newton and Einstein had different kinds of genius. They were both brilliant, but at different things. Newton was brilliant at modeling what he observed. He understood what he saw, and in a manner that I don't think we've ever seen before or since. Einstein, on the other hand, did something that I'm not aware of anybody else doing before him: He predicted behavior that he never observed. He was sitting around thinking, "Hey, if some bycicles are approaching a four-way intersection, and they all have headlights on..." and from there, predicted General relativity. What was amazing was that experiments performed after the fact verified the results he predicted.
Could Einstein have come up with the mathematical models if Newton hadn't beat him to it? I don't know, but I'm also not positive that, given the solid foundation Einstein had, Newton could have predicted relativity.
I suppose the thing could have a step-up transformer inside that increases the voltage every time a pixel is changed. I don't know why it would do something stupid like that, but the control system would be fun to design.
I don't know about anybody else, but at my University, all of the near-free MS products are just CDs pressed by the University from a master disk (it even has the University's logo, instead of Microsoft's), and come with Zero documentation or anything else.
Something needs to be done about that woman before she does any more damage. I vote we get her appointed to some civil service post, where she will truly not make any kind of difference to anything. I'd even be willing to allow the government to maintain her current salary level (they waste so much money, nobody would notice the difference), just to get her out of the way. Then we need to figure out how to create an army of undead, headed by Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, that will eradicate the crappy HP PCs, take "Agilent" (Agilent? Come on!) back and re-open the Australian Calculator division.
Yeah, except the techniques people will be using probably aren't that new (we're talking difference equations and monte carlo runs -- anything more innovative than that will get patented before it's uploaded), and they won't be uploading the source code to IBM anyway. You don't want to waste your expensive processor time compiling your code on the supercomputer (I don't know what IBM is planning to charge, but back in the day, people used to pay on the order of $1,000 for an hour of processor time on a mainframe). It will be much cheaper to use a cross-compiler, or just write it in hand-tweaked assembly, on a cheap local machine, and then run the binary on the supercomputer.
could it be that today's bleeding-edge supercomputers have capabilities that desktop pc's (or clusters of desktop PC's) lack?
Of course they can. You can't perform high-fidelity nuclear effects simulations or run models of complex biological processes on you little 2 GHz Dell machine. So you use a supercomputer. Does everyone who needs a supercomputer need it all of the time? Of course not. I think this is a very practical and useful approach, but it's not by any means new or exciting. It's just IBM seeing that there may be a reason to return to the way things used to be. What bugs me is the wank-heavy maketing-speak about "visions coalescing" and this making IBM an industry "benchmark for years." You want to puke reading that article. You could almost forgive it as being a bunch of clueless managers and marketeers picking up on something the engineers told them and getting carried away, except the other thing the article touts is how Palmisano, the new chairman, is more of a techie who has been at IBM since 1973, which means he was doing this 30 years ago when it was popular. The only innovative thing is that he's going after clueless CIOs (see previous rant) as opposed to clueless CEOs (who were stoned business majors in the '70s). So, my opinion is basically "good idea, bad marketing speak."
The difference, I'm guessing, is that they're trying to make it easier/cheaper to get access to this sort of power if you only have a limited or periodic need for it.
Replace "easier/cheaper" with "possible" and you have exactly what it was about the first time around. The only real difference is that they are calling it "metered usage" this time around. My first thought was exactly the same as the parent poster's. This used to be the way things were. Just like everybody else in the computer industry, IBM is "inventing" a new technology that is decades old and wanting to sell it as the "next big thing" to idiot CIOs who were liberal arts majors back in the '70s and who were so busy getting stoned, they have no idea how long this stuff has been around. In other news, Microsoft has invented and patented a revolutionary new disk-saving feature called "symbolic linking," and Sun Microsystems has invented a method for creating geographic redundancy of data with a method called "clustering." I hear HP/Compaq is on the verge of a bold new initiative that will make it affordable for the average American family to have a fully functional "microcomputer" right in their living room -- it sounds almost too good to be true.
Re:Like Hollywood doesn't have enough problems
on
Superhero Smackdown
·
· Score: 2
Not even the radio Shadow could fly. He was a gifted linguist, but could not just start speaking a language he had never heard (for example, in the novel Six Men of Evil he finds an isolated South American tribe with their own language. After a time, he is able to grasp a few rudimentary words, and using those and hand signals communicates), and like I mentioned in the reply to the other post, the clouding minds thing was unique to the silly radio program. A group of loyal agents is hardly a super power. It just means that he recognized he could not be in many places at one time (a human limitation). As far as not being in the DC universe, I was just trying to spoil the party for everybody who thought Batman was such a big deal by pointing out that he is basically a rip-off of a character that appeared years earlier. Incidentally, The Shadow does, in fact, appear in one issue of the Batman comic, and they solve some case together, so techincally, he is included in the DC Universe.
Re:Like Hollywood doesn't have enough problems
on
Superhero Smackdown
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The stupid radio version of The Shadow, and The Shadow in the 1994 Alec Baldwin movie (which was kind of a mixture of elements of the pulp Shadow and the radio Shadow) had the ability to cloud men's minds, making himself essentially invisible. This is the primary reason the radio Shadow is stupid. He never had to use his amazing wits to clean up a case in 30 minutes. He just made himself invisible and did what he needed to do. I think the clouding minds thing is a taken from one of the pulps, in which The Shadow's one truly formidable enemy (Shiwan Khan, featured in the 1994 movie) had enlisted the aid of naljorpa in one of his plans, and a certain naljorpa guru demonstrated the ability to make himself unseen (since he was a guru, he could also extend this near-invisibility to other people). However, it was not nearly as blanket effective as the movie and radio shows made it out to be since a drunk guy immediately saw the "hidden" guru. The pulp Shadow, on the other hand, was "invisible" because he was very adapt at hiding in the darkness and was a master of stealth. He had actualy skills as opposed to cheap tricks. So, when I talk about how cool The Shadow is, I am referring strictly to the pulp Shadow, who was very much mortal.
P.S. The biggest difference between Batman and The Shadow is that Batman is a brooding billionnaire who fights crime on a quest for vengeance, whereas The Shadow is a former military aviator and spy who has appropriated the fortune of another man (Lamont Cranston, who allows The Shadow to assume his identity while he is off running around the globe), and basically fights crime for the thrill of it (he got bored after WWI ended).
Re:Like Hollywood doesn't have enough problems
on
Superhero Smackdown
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
1) He's the world's best fighter, hands down. 2) He's the world's smartest detective, hands down. And he has a third advantage, he's not a superhero, he's a normal human.
Batman is just a wannabe, "me too" rip-off of The Shadow, the original non-super-hero master of the night. The Shadow is a better fighter than Batman, a better detective, much smarter, and doesn't go around with silly body armor (which is really just a shoe-in for super powers). He'd kick all of their butts before they so much as knew that he was there. All they'd know is "after we got our butts kicked, we heard this really creepy, mirthless laughter."
Slashdot Mirror
So, as we see here, this could be an interesting arms race (and with the laws being asked for by the industry lobby, not altogether improbable). I, for one, rather look forward to it.
The funny thing about them doing this is their claim that you are not buying a physical product, but rather a "license" to listen to that particular album. If that is the case, should the license not be independent of the media it is recorded on? Shouldn't the cost of the recording be the published cost of the license plus the cost of the physical medium (i.e, CDs would be cheaper than tapes)? If I scratch a CD, shouldn't the distributor be required to replace it at cost? If a new format comes out with better quality, since I already paid for a license of the album, shouldn't they be required to sell me the new, higher quality recording at cost? That's what really gets me -- the fact that they get to screw you on both ends. I do not agree with downloading copyrighted music for free, but if I have a damaged CD, I will not feel the least bit guilty about finding a friend with the same album and copying his CD to recover my "licensed" music.
Then RIAA ups the ante by requiring the speaker to authenticate itself via a proprietary code before the CD can be played. The speaker is wired such that if you so much as open the case, it will refuse to authenticate further. Ball's in your court. What do you do now?
At least not until the CBDTPA gets passed.
P.S., the statement "a kick in the nuts for Rosen," amuses me to no end.
Was this back in the day, when he was testifying before Congress? I must have missed that priceless gem. Any links to it?
You're in good shape, then, as long as you don't mind your trophy wife having flings with guys who are half your age and twice your size.
Actually, the Bad Astronomy guy does answer these questions. Read about a dozen other comments for the link. Also, think about the mirrors on the moon that are used by many scientists to gauge its distance, and the moon rocks that have been studied by many scientists, not one of which, as far as I am aware, has come out and said, "Wait a minute! These rocks are straight out of the Grand Canyon!" Do you really believe that NASA got to all of the scientists in the country and they have all agreed to join in on the Conspiracy?
2. ???
3. Profit!
Also...
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of conspiracy theorists' brains! That would have the approximate computing power of... an old Commodore 64!
That should just about take care of it.
Well, my Windows 2000 Start Menu now has a little Icon that allows me to tell it not to launch Outlook Express, Media Player, MSN Messenger and Internet Explorer every time I move the mouse. That by itself has got to be worth something.
To: Geekee (minion2678096138894@microsoft.com)
Subject: Astroturfing
You idiot! Rule 1 of astroturfing is to at least try to sound objective. Otherwise, you just don't have any credibility. "The whole concept of antitrust legislation is an attack on freedom" sounds like something you would hear coming out of the steel cartel early in the early 20th century (on a side note, those guys are like gods to me. Curse the government for screwing them over!). Next time, why don't you just put "ASTROTURF" in the subject line and save readers the trouble!
I don't want to see any more of this crap coming out of Redmond. Next time, say something that sounds reasonable, like "How is having the best product and trying to sell it at a competitive rate coercive strong-arming?" Note how I use a well-established logical fallacy to make a point that is entirely irrelevent to the issue at hand. Now, I'm afraid we're going to have to send you to three more weeks of Astroturf training before we let you out again. Sorry. Report to The Secret Training Vault first thing Monday.
Sincerely,
Dread Lord Bill
How's that for you?
Could Einstein have come up with the mathematical models if Newton hadn't beat him to it? I don't know, but I'm also not positive that, given the solid foundation Einstein had, Newton could have predicted relativity.
I suppose the thing could have a step-up transformer inside that increases the voltage every time a pixel is changed. I don't know why it would do something stupid like that, but the control system would be fun to design.
I don't know about anybody else, but at my University, all of the near-free MS products are just CDs pressed by the University from a master disk (it even has the University's logo, instead of Microsoft's), and come with Zero documentation or anything else.
Which makes sense, since she's the devil.
Something needs to be done about that woman before she does any more damage. I vote we get her appointed to some civil service post, where she will truly not make any kind of difference to anything. I'd even be willing to allow the government to maintain her current salary level (they waste so much money, nobody would notice the difference), just to get her out of the way. Then we need to figure out how to create an army of undead, headed by Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, that will eradicate the crappy HP PCs, take "Agilent" (Agilent? Come on!) back and re-open the Australian Calculator division.
Hey, buddy, that's GNU/BSD... oh, wait. Nevermind.
Yeah, except the techniques people will be using probably aren't that new (we're talking difference equations and monte carlo runs -- anything more innovative than that will get patented before it's uploaded), and they won't be uploading the source code to IBM anyway. You don't want to waste your expensive processor time compiling your code on the supercomputer (I don't know what IBM is planning to charge, but back in the day, people used to pay on the order of $1,000 for an hour of processor time on a mainframe). It will be much cheaper to use a cross-compiler, or just write it in hand-tweaked assembly, on a cheap local machine, and then run the binary on the supercomputer.
Not even the radio Shadow could fly. He was a gifted linguist, but could not just start speaking a language he had never heard (for example, in the novel Six Men of Evil he finds an isolated South American tribe with their own language. After a time, he is able to grasp a few rudimentary words, and using those and hand signals communicates), and like I mentioned in the reply to the other post, the clouding minds thing was unique to the silly radio program. A group of loyal agents is hardly a super power. It just means that he recognized he could not be in many places at one time (a human limitation). As far as not being in the DC universe, I was just trying to spoil the party for everybody who thought Batman was such a big deal by pointing out that he is basically a rip-off of a character that appeared years earlier. Incidentally, The Shadow does, in fact, appear in one issue of the Batman comic, and they solve some case together, so techincally, he is included in the DC Universe.
P.S. The biggest difference between Batman and The Shadow is that Batman is a brooding billionnaire who fights crime on a quest for vengeance, whereas The Shadow is a former military aviator and spy who has appropriated the fortune of another man (Lamont Cranston, who allows The Shadow to assume his identity while he is off running around the globe), and basically fights crime for the thrill of it (he got bored after WWI ended).