A few remarks to people ready to diss the Minitel
system.
The Minitel was designed so that it would
be cheap, since the terminal and some services
were provided for free;
run even for users with a horrible home
installation in some remote village;
be resistant;
have a simple business model;
be usable by most people.
Sure, the technology behind should have been improved. Please note that PCs with 56k modems fit none of the above (although the condition of the phone line may not be relevant anymore, since people tend to have had balky in-house connections replaced and the POTS network is now very high quality).
The fact is that today, many people, including
categories traditionnally found to be allergic
to new technologies, use it and use
electronic commerce. Electronic commerce
has existed in France for 15 years.
Now I pretend that there was a lesson to be taught from there. Thousands of companies started stuff on the Minitel (yeah, start-ups before it was hype to make Internet start-ups). Most of them went belly up. The successful mail-order retailers
were those who:
had a simple, costless Minitel site (0.37 FRF per minute at most);
had warehouses and other systems so that they could deliver the wares quickly;
offered reasonable prices.
boo.com fitted none of the above, and it's no wonder to me it has gone belly up.
It's THOMSON Multimedia, not Thompson.
Thomson is a company making TV sets (and, more importantly as I've heard, TV screens for other manufacturers) and similar equipments.
From the article itself: [...] aggregates the nanotubes into
narrow strips. These strips, a few microns thick and a few millimeters wide, are made up of entangled
nanotubes with a preferred orientation due to the direction of extrusion, as shown under the optical
microscope (Figure 1) and the electron microscope. These strips contract when dried in air and the water they
contain is evacuated by capillary action, forming dense fibers (Figure 2).
This means that the knotted fibers shown as optical
shots are actually kind of bundles of nanotubes. The salient point of those knots
is that normal carbon fibers cannot be twisted
nor knotted, while these can, to some extent.
More accurately: those people fight on land
and influence, something the US has done
several time in this century (imposing
US-friendly dictatorships in Cuba and
south Vietnam, for instance).
A little known fact in the general computing
public is that problems in secure communications
lie more often in the communication protocol
than in the encryption primitives.
There are some classical attacks:
Man-in-the-middle Idea: I can prove
to both Karpov and Kasparov that I'm a great
chess player. I challenge them both in a
play through mail. I use the moves of each
one against the other. Both think I play like
a grandmaster.
Use of old keys Idea: recover some secret data of a previous session (for instance
from old temporary files on a common machine -
after all, many operating systems do not really
erase erased data). Use it in a current session.
It is possible to prevent those attacks by
clever design of the protocol. For instance,
the use of old keys can be prevented by some
"nonce" numbers (generated once) or some
clock data.
It is very difficult to analyse protocols and
prove them correct.
First, a formal model of the protocol,
its environment and what it means for it to
be correct. This is nontrivial, since some
models may just ignore some kinds of attacks.
Then the protocol must be proved correct
with respect to the formal specification.
Alas:
Yahoo has a subsidiary in France, which can
be fined.
Furthermore, it is possible that the matter
takes a while to get settled definitely.
They haven't yet appealed; then they could
appeal to the supreme court
for a question of law or procedure.
Given the chronic overload of the courts,
this could take years!
French law prohibits promoting material that
encourages racial hatred (and other crimes -
for instance you cannot write in the press
that a certain person should be murdered).
The reason why nazi paraphernalia is targeted
like this is that most people do not like
nazis parading. Let me explain a few things
to you:
France was invaded after brutal fighting
that left quite a lot of soldiers dead (on both
sides). Go to any French college, look at
the monument to the dead.
French citizens were routinely rounded
as hostages. Many were forced to work in
Germany.
French and foreign jews were slaughtered
en masse.
All this, admitted, happened because of the
complicity of an ultraconservative puppet
government put into place by the nazis.
Now you understand that when an holocaust
survivor sees nazi stuff, he gets a
bit nervous and wants it banned.
Yes, there are some holocaust survivor still
alive today.
And many people feel the same way.
It happens too in the US. Several
US criminals (take Ira Einhorn, for instance)
have been sentenced to steep civil penalties
so that they can't make money out of money
or film deals. What is the reason?
People do not want criminals to parade,
nor do they want people to parade with
instruments of crime.
Now, perhaps the injunction on Yahoo was clumsy
(I think it is). But you can see it does come
from very understandable human reasons.
Define "French elite". By certain standards,
I am a member of it. Yet, I do not defend
horrors such as cédérom and whatever.
The truth is that we have an aging political
personnel that is a bit backwards. Everybody
has this; think of the amount of Bible-waving
intolerant fundamentalists there are in
the US congress. Do you prefer a guy who
just grumbles about a few foreign words
or one that wants to tell you how to fuck,
drink and how the world was created?
I do have a file of all IP blocks corresponding
to network located in France, extracted from
the RIPE database. It's not based on DNS.
Of course, there are perhaps a few networks
located in France that are not in that file,
but the vast majority of them is inside.
Turning that file into a filter is just
a matter of programming (I have other things
to do now, but I might do it soon if needs be).
Just to mention something: most
polytechnicians I know are pretty well
versed in computer networks, the Internet
and whatever. So I think you picked up a
bad example here.
On the other hand, you have got to take into
account the man in the street, the vision
of the average politician, the vision of
the average journalist. Those people do
not know the intricacies of TCP/IP
networking (as the average man in the US).
They are used to having technical solutions
designed for them as any problem arises.
I think you are wrong on the count of the need for any company you would have to deal with to know your biometric information, or of the need for a biometric database.
You could just use a smart card to check the biometric information (after some preprocessing by the host, since biometric recognition is likely to be too expensive for smart cards at least in the near future). The card would then sign the transaction.
Smart cards signing transactions when the correct PIN is input have been in use in France for more than ten years.
I actually did not want to mean that all Javascript was useless. It is sometimes very useful. On the other hand, very often, it serves no useful purpose (what is the use of replacing a direct link to a site by a script that simply follows that link?).
As for the 28.8: I have an E1 at work (2Mbits/s), but some sites are darn sluggish because of congestion in the middle of the US. Perhaps that if they did not send a 40k page where 3k would be sufficient...
It does not surprise me in the least that companies such as McDonald's, a few years ago, would not even know what registering a domain name means. The truth is that today most big companies make a Web site (because everybody does it) but more often than not it is absolutely pitiful.
Web sites for big business often have the following characteristics:
display in extenso the company's organigram but hide information on products;
are filled with buzzwords ("our middleware system will improve your corporate efficiency by improving synergies between work units" as opposed to "our integrated email/chat server will allow your workers to communicate faster and more efficiently");
do not contain contact information, and if they do, more often than not a phone number only (hint: the Internet has supported email before supporting http/HTML);
contain lots of unnecessary junk like Flash, animated GIFs, sounds and Javascript.
It is funny that those big companies pay so much for PR services that cannot even understand:
that people do not have a whole day to look for information in their badly setup site;
that not everybody has a personal T1 line and that even if they do they might not be willing to install a new browser/plug-ins whatever just to consult a catalogue.
It is interesting to note that after a few years of experience with the Minitel in France, the successful Minitel sites had the following characteristics:
straight to the point;
efficient ordering and order tracking systems;
minimize transmission times.
I guess that corporations do not learn from experience sometimes.
However, as it has been pointed out, the law section is US-centric. It would be interesting to know where in the world the said patents apply. Theoretically, Europe does not allow patents on algorithms and mathematical formulas, but this provision can be circumvented by patenting an overall technique using an algorithm.
I am French, but I spent a little time working in the US. I was struck by the frequent requests for a driving license or a social security number for things that do not have anything with respect to driving or social security.
order a meal with a beer: show your driving license
open a bank account: show your SSN!
Of course, I did not have a SSN. I was then instructed to get one from some obscure agency some thirty miles away. I came back later to the bank, and they told me they after all did not have to take my SSN. Instead they gave me an IRS form that was something like 6 pages of American fiscal legalese! And of course this form threatened me with horrible penalties should I make an error in filling it.
Friends of mine also get fed up with being asked for an SSN to do just about anything. Ask for a phone line? Give me your SSN.
In France, I only give my SSN for things having to deal with social security (and employment, because they have to pay for social security). I only show an ID when I cross the border, pay by personal check or attend an university exam.
US citizens have a much higher level of protection from their own government (e.g., nothing more than the sig of a managing police officer needed for a wiretap in France).
False. Wiretaps are actually classified in two categories:
judiciary ones; those must concern relatively severe felonies and be ordered by a judge investigating the felony;
"administrative" ones; those must concern very specific areas, like national security, must be asked for by security services then endorsed by the prime minister; they are reviewed by a commission to check for possible abuses of power.
I see nothing in this talking of a managing police officer; if a managing police officer did as you said, he'd be liable for prosecution (wiretapping outside of the above conditions is a felony).
It might sound silly at first sight, but... Some people claim that the truly important invention for everyday life and women's rights was the washing machine. It freed housewives from one of the most tedious chores that exist: washing clothes by hand.
I do not see any improvement of that magnitude with computers. Sure, it has transformed the office environment - but there is evidence that what was gained with word processors vs typewriters was partly lost by an ever increasing tendency to write paper. In the old days, bureaucrats did not dare to ask people for three copies of documents, or 30-page reports, since they were difficult and costly to produce. Nowadays, it is customary to ask for tons of stuff, assuming the copy machine takes care of them.
Computers have changed the way many technical professions work, though, And that's very important. But have they really changed the everyday life of common people in a significant way?
The question is: what is a "good idea" and how can an "idea exchange environment for good ideas" not degenerate into an endless stream of flame-wars?
This problem is as old as the Usenet newsgroups. Sometimes, people get pretty opinionated about stuff, turning any technical or social question into a religious issue. Add some incompetency, some hot heads, and you get the usual stream of sneering, insults and anger that's so prevalent in Slashdot or the newsgroup.
The real question is: how to keep it from getting out of hand? Some sites, including Slashdot, have chosen moderation. Moderation has basic technical problems: moderators can get overwhelmed by the traffic. Moderated newsgroups or mailing-lists are often late in transmitting messages because the moderator has to exhaust a backlog; in systems where moderation happens after the message has been posted, such as Slashdot, idiots can post messages faster than the moderators can bring them down. Furthermore, moderation tends to promote established ideologies on the detriment of minority opinion. The notion of what is irrelevant rant tends to be belief-dependent. Think of this: a libertarian will tend to moderate down communist speech as irrelevant, stupid flamebait; a Linux advocate will moderate down Windows advocacy as irrelevant flamebait etc.. etc..
The question remains: how to keep public Internet forums readable? Think of this: in the old days, researchers would read scientific newsgroups. Nowadays, few do, since many scientific newsgroups are filled with spam, crackpots claiming they solved , teenagers asking people to solve their homework, and American politics.
Let's begin with facts, if you please. A local French court has issued a questionable judgment. The matter has not even been to appeal, nor has any official (cabinet minister, for instance) declared he supported the decision.
Given those facts, it seems that some people are overreacting a bit. Every time some wacko US court issues some wacko decision about the Internet (look at the DeCSS cases), we do not see messages such as "The US is stupid, the US government is a bunch of morons, they do not get the future of the Internet, they are still in the 50's where there was director Hoover of the FBI.". When I read that some southern US lawmakers were proposing laws that would make it an offence to question publicly the quality of food produced in their state, I did not run a story saying "US government imposes censorship on their citizens, chances of a military dictatorship soon!".
What is the current situation of France with respect to the Internet is as follows:
laws that were designed for the written press or television are awkwardly applied to Internet-related cases;
laws on encryption (>128 bit requires authorization) are not effectively enforced;
the government (executive branch) is moving many services online;
businesses are moving services online (that is not that big of a change, France has had online commerce for the last 15 years or so).
As for free speech, basically everything is permitted (in any language, contrary to what some punchdrunk US journalists may have written) as long as:
you are not libelling (like accusing somebody of a crime without any clue or proof)
you are not advocating crimes (you can't do a public call to murder)
you are not advocating racial or religious hatred;
Recent chipsets from Intel (see the doc) contain a hardware random number generator. This is interesting as an additionnal source of randomness, especially in servers where the usual randomness provider (i.e. the user in front of the keyboard and mouse) is not there. [Granted, a server is connected to a network, which tends to supply randomness too.]
What is the common wisdom on that new "feature"? Should it be trusted?
I am not too sure on this, but weren't the accidents with Thalidomide in the 70's caused by the fact that while one of the enantiomers was an efficient curing drug, the other one caused gross birth defects if the drug was taken by a pregnant woman?
This shows the importance of separating enantiomers. This is a difficult but vital process in the "fine" chemical industry.
A first note: Lars Ulrich has well expressed the fact that Metallica is a for-profit band that works inside the system. So much for youthful rebellion! But at least he's honest with it (plus, they have made some pretty decent music).
Now we are again at the starting point: how to reward authors of "virtual goods" (music, source code, novels...) that can be copied ad infinitum without loss of quality and at little marginal cost?
Lars Ulrich is very right at comparing a record company with a bank. It is even more than a bank: it is essentially a company that takes care of all the industrial aspects of music for the masses (to the point, sometimes, of swindling the artists themselves...). They sure lose a lot of money of artists that never succeed, or on artists whose second record is a total failure. On the other hand, they make a decent profit.
The idea of short-cutting intermediaries is not new. The trend in retail has been to reduce intermediary overhead: instead of small shops buying from wholesale retailers buying from producers, we have supermarket chains directly buying from the producers. It is therefore a tempting idea to short-cut the music publishers.
One other advantage, apart from making products cheaper, of using Internet servers to deliver music, is the alleged jump-start it gives to small bands. Alas, as Lars contends, this is bogus to a large extent: people look for well-known stuff.
The same goes for novel etc... publishing. While it's tempting to remove publishers out of the game, so that even unknown authors can get published, the common behaviour on the Net seems to be only looking for famour stuff. This can hardly be helped: for one interesting novel, how many semiliterate ramblings, boring short stories and ersatz sci-fi novels?
So, at least in the near future, it does not seem that the Net can make the life of small bands or authors much better. Even more annoying, there remains the question of how to fund the content producers.
Some people contend that artists could live on money raised in gigs. I do not know the economics of a band such as Metallica, but I bet that gig tours are not that interesting financially (some tours of famous bands have actually lost money). Furthermore, not every artist can afford to spend most of his life on the road (yes, they can have a life, children etc...).
So in the end, a question: how to fund artists if people download their songs? What about micropayments?
Slashdot Mirror
A few remarks to people ready to diss the Minitel system. The Minitel was designed so that it would
- be cheap, since the terminal and some services
were provided for free;
- run even for users with a horrible home
installation in some remote village;
- be resistant;
- have a simple business model;
- be usable by most people.
Sure, the technology behind should have been improved. Please note that PCs with 56k modems fit none of the above (although the condition of the phone line may not be relevant anymore, since people tend to have had balky in-house connections replaced and the POTS network is now very high quality). The fact is that today, many people, including categories traditionnally found to be allergic to new technologies, use it and use electronic commerce. Electronic commerce has existed in France for 15 years.Now I pretend that there was a lesson to be taught from there. Thousands of companies started stuff on the Minitel (yeah, start-ups before it was hype to make Internet start-ups). Most of them went belly up. The successful mail-order retailers were those who:
- had a simple, costless Minitel site (0.37 FRF per minute at most);
- had warehouses and other systems so that they could deliver the wares quickly;
- offered reasonable prices.
boo.com fitted none of the above, and it's no wonder to me it has gone belly up.It's THOMSON Multimedia, not Thompson. Thomson is a company making TV sets (and, more importantly as I've heard, TV screens for other manufacturers) and similar equipments.
From the article itself: [...] aggregates the nanotubes into narrow strips. These strips, a few microns thick and a few millimeters wide, are made up of entangled nanotubes with a preferred orientation due to the direction of extrusion, as shown under the optical microscope (Figure 1) and the electron microscope. These strips contract when dried in air and the water they contain is evacuated by capillary action, forming dense fibers (Figure 2). This means that the knotted fibers shown as optical shots are actually kind of bundles of nanotubes. The salient point of those knots is that normal carbon fibers cannot be twisted nor knotted, while these can, to some extent.
More accurately: those people fight on land and influence, something the US has done several time in this century (imposing US-friendly dictatorships in Cuba and south Vietnam, for instance).
A little known fact in the general computing public is that problems in secure communications lie more often in the communication protocol than in the encryption primitives.
There are some classical attacks:
It is possible to prevent those attacks by clever design of the protocol. For instance, the use of old keys can be prevented by some "nonce" numbers (generated once) or some clock data.
It is very difficult to analyse protocols and prove them correct.
First, a formal model of the protocol, its environment and what it means for it to be correct. This is nontrivial, since some models may just ignore some kinds of attacks.
Then the protocol must be proved correct with respect to the formal specification. Alas:
I have made some research on these topics. For more information, see for instance Jon Millen's page.
Yahoo has a subsidiary in France, which can be fined.
Furthermore, it is possible that the matter takes a while to get settled definitely. They haven't yet appealed; then they could appeal to the supreme court for a question of law or procedure. Given the chronic overload of the courts, this could take years!
French law prohibits promoting material that encourages racial hatred (and other crimes - for instance you cannot write in the press that a certain person should be murdered).
The reason why nazi paraphernalia is targeted like this is that most people do not like nazis parading. Let me explain a few things to you:
All this, admitted, happened because of the complicity of an ultraconservative puppet government put into place by the nazis.
Now you understand that when an holocaust survivor sees nazi stuff, he gets a bit nervous and wants it banned. Yes, there are some holocaust survivor still alive today. And many people feel the same way.
It happens too in the US. Several US criminals (take Ira Einhorn, for instance) have been sentenced to steep civil penalties so that they can't make money out of money or film deals. What is the reason? People do not want criminals to parade, nor do they want people to parade with instruments of crime.
Now, perhaps the injunction on Yahoo was clumsy (I think it is). But you can see it does come from very understandable human reasons.
Define "French elite". By certain standards, I am a member of it. Yet, I do not defend horrors such as cédérom and whatever.
The truth is that we have an aging political personnel that is a bit backwards. Everybody has this; think of the amount of Bible-waving intolerant fundamentalists there are in the US congress. Do you prefer a guy who just grumbles about a few foreign words or one that wants to tell you how to fuck, drink and how the world was created?
It's possible to get a file containing all IP blocks registered by a French organization. Just extract it from the RIPE database. Proof: I did it.
I do have a file of all IP blocks corresponding to network located in France, extracted from the RIPE database. It's not based on DNS. Of course, there are perhaps a few networks located in France that are not in that file, but the vast majority of them is inside.
Turning that file into a filter is just a matter of programming (I have other things to do now, but I might do it soon if needs be).
Just to mention something: most polytechnicians I know are pretty well versed in computer networks, the Internet and whatever. So I think you picked up a bad example here.
On the other hand, you have got to take into account the man in the street, the vision of the average politician, the vision of the average journalist. Those people do not know the intricacies of TCP/IP networking (as the average man in the US). They are used to having technical solutions designed for them as any problem arises.
I think you are wrong on the count of the need for any company you would have to deal with to know your biometric information, or of the need for a biometric database.
You could just use a smart card to check the biometric information (after some preprocessing by the host, since biometric recognition is likely to be too expensive for smart cards at least in the near future). The card would then sign the transaction.
Smart cards signing transactions when the correct PIN is input have been in use in France for more than ten years.
Silly question, but what is the actual legal basis of this? The actual allegations? Slander? Libel?
I actually did not want to mean that all Javascript was useless. It is sometimes very useful. On the other hand, very often, it serves no useful purpose (what is the use of replacing a direct link to a site by a script that simply follows that link?).
As for the 28.8: I have an E1 at work (2Mbits/s), but some sites are darn sluggish because of congestion in the middle of the US. Perhaps that if they did not send a 40k page where 3k would be sufficient...
It does not surprise me in the least that companies such as McDonald's, a few years ago, would not even know what registering a domain name means. The truth is that today most big companies make a Web site (because everybody does it) but more often than not it is absolutely pitiful.
Web sites for big business often have the following characteristics:
It is funny that those big companies pay so much for PR services that cannot even understand:
It is interesting to note that after a few years of experience with the Minitel in France, the successful Minitel sites had the following characteristics:
I guess that corporations do not learn from experience sometimes.
I browsed this book last month and found it informative and quite well-written.
The author explains the thorny issues of patents pertaining to MP3. Two corporations have patents on MP3 technologies:
However, as it has been pointed out, the law section is US-centric. It would be interesting to know where in the world the said patents apply. Theoretically, Europe does not allow patents on algorithms and mathematical formulas, but this provision can be circumvented by patenting an overall technique using an algorithm.
I am French, but I spent a little time working in the US. I was struck by the frequent requests for a driving license or a social security number for things that do not have anything with respect to driving or social security.
Of course, I did not have a SSN. I was then instructed to get one from some obscure agency some thirty miles away. I came back later to the bank, and they told me they after all did not have to take my SSN. Instead they gave me an IRS form that was something like 6 pages of American fiscal legalese! And of course this form threatened me with horrible penalties should I make an error in filling it.
Friends of mine also get fed up with being asked for an SSN to do just about anything. Ask for a phone line? Give me your SSN.
In France, I only give my SSN for things having to deal with social security (and employment, because they have to pay for social security). I only show an ID when I cross the border, pay by personal check or attend an university exam.
US citizens have a much higher level of protection from their own government (e.g., nothing more than the sig of a managing police officer needed for a wiretap in France).
False. Wiretaps are actually classified in two categories:I see nothing in this talking of a managing police officer; if a managing police officer did as you said, he'd be liable for prosecution (wiretapping outside of the above conditions is a felony).
Please check your information before posting.
Do you think being able to answer instantaneously by mail to the other side of the globe is of tremendous importance for the average person?
It might sound silly at first sight, but... Some people claim that the truly important invention for everyday life and women's rights was the washing machine. It freed housewives from one of the most tedious chores that exist: washing clothes by hand.
I do not see any improvement of that magnitude with computers. Sure, it has transformed the office environment - but there is evidence that what was gained with word processors vs typewriters was partly lost by an ever increasing tendency to write paper. In the old days, bureaucrats did not dare to ask people for three copies of documents, or 30-page reports, since they were difficult and costly to produce. Nowadays, it is customary to ask for tons of stuff, assuming the copy machine takes care of them.
Computers have changed the way many technical professions work, though, And that's very important. But have they really changed the everyday life of common people in a significant way?
The question is: what is a "good idea" and how can an "idea exchange environment for good ideas" not degenerate into an endless stream of flame-wars?
This problem is as old as the Usenet newsgroups. Sometimes, people get pretty opinionated about stuff, turning any technical or social question into a religious issue. Add some incompetency, some hot heads, and you get the usual stream of sneering, insults and anger that's so prevalent in Slashdot or the newsgroup.
The real question is: how to keep it from getting out of hand? Some sites, including Slashdot, have chosen moderation. Moderation has basic technical problems: moderators can get overwhelmed by the traffic. Moderated newsgroups or mailing-lists are often late in transmitting messages because the moderator has to exhaust a backlog; in systems where moderation happens after the message has been posted, such as Slashdot, idiots can post messages faster than the moderators can bring them down. Furthermore, moderation tends to promote established ideologies on the detriment of minority opinion. The notion of what is irrelevant rant tends to be belief-dependent. Think of this: a libertarian will tend to moderate down communist speech as irrelevant, stupid flamebait; a Linux advocate will moderate down Windows advocacy as irrelevant flamebait etc.. etc..
The question remains: how to keep public Internet forums readable? Think of this: in the old days, researchers would read scientific newsgroups. Nowadays, few do, since many scientific newsgroups are filled with spam, crackpots claiming they solved , teenagers asking people to solve their homework, and American politics.
Let's begin with facts, if you please. A local French court has issued a questionable judgment. The matter has not even been to appeal, nor has any official (cabinet minister, for instance) declared he supported the decision.
Given those facts, it seems that some people are overreacting a bit. Every time some wacko US court issues some wacko decision about the Internet (look at the DeCSS cases), we do not see messages such as "The US is stupid, the US government is a bunch of morons, they do not get the future of the Internet, they are still in the 50's where there was director Hoover of the FBI.". When I read that some southern US lawmakers were proposing laws that would make it an offence to question publicly the quality of food produced in their state, I did not run a story saying "US government imposes censorship on their citizens, chances of a military dictatorship soon!".
What is the current situation of France with respect to the Internet is as follows:
As for free speech, basically everything is permitted (in any language, contrary to what some punchdrunk US journalists may have written) as long as:
- you are not libelling (like accusing somebody of a crime without any clue or proof)
- you are not advocating crimes (you can't do a public call to murder)
- you are not advocating racial or religious hatred;
- you are not putting into doubt the nazi crimes.
I admit the latter is a bit stupid. If you do not agree with it, please do not flame the French in general but the lobbyists that caused this law to be voted and sued Yahoo (that's the French association of Jewish students).Recent chipsets from Intel (see the doc) contain a hardware random number generator. This is interesting as an additionnal source of randomness, especially in servers where the usual randomness provider (i.e. the user in front of the keyboard and mouse) is not there. [Granted, a server is connected to a network, which tends to supply randomness too.]
What is the common wisdom on that new "feature"? Should it be trusted?
I am not too sure on this, but weren't the accidents with Thalidomide in the 70's caused by the fact that while one of the enantiomers was an efficient curing drug, the other one caused gross birth defects if the drug was taken by a pregnant woman?
This shows the importance of separating enantiomers. This is a difficult but vital process in the "fine" chemical industry.
A first note: Lars Ulrich has well expressed the fact that Metallica is a for-profit band that works inside the system. So much for youthful rebellion! But at least he's honest with it (plus, they have made some pretty decent music).
Now we are again at the starting point: how to reward authors of "virtual goods" (music, source code, novels...) that can be copied ad infinitum without loss of quality and at little marginal cost?
Lars Ulrich is very right at comparing a record company with a bank. It is even more than a bank: it is essentially a company that takes care of all the industrial aspects of music for the masses (to the point, sometimes, of swindling the artists themselves...). They sure lose a lot of money of artists that never succeed, or on artists whose second record is a total failure. On the other hand, they make a decent profit.
The idea of short-cutting intermediaries is not new. The trend in retail has been to reduce intermediary overhead: instead of small shops buying from wholesale retailers buying from producers, we have supermarket chains directly buying from the producers. It is therefore a tempting idea to short-cut the music publishers.
One other advantage, apart from making products cheaper, of using Internet servers to deliver music, is the alleged jump-start it gives to small bands. Alas, as Lars contends, this is bogus to a large extent: people look for well-known stuff.
The same goes for novel etc... publishing. While it's tempting to remove publishers out of the game, so that even unknown authors can get published, the common behaviour on the Net seems to be only looking for famour stuff. This can hardly be helped: for one interesting novel, how many semiliterate ramblings, boring short stories and ersatz sci-fi novels?
So, at least in the near future, it does not seem that the Net can make the life of small bands or authors much better. Even more annoying, there remains the question of how to fund the content producers.
Some people contend that artists could live on money raised in gigs. I do not know the economics of a band such as Metallica, but I bet that gig tours are not that interesting financially (some tours of famous bands have actually lost money). Furthermore, not every artist can afford to spend most of his life on the road (yes, they can have a life, children etc...).
So in the end, a question: how to fund artists if people download their songs? What about micropayments?