I've seen similar solutions before, and they are all nice and dandy except for one application: when communicating with businesses.
There's one more aspect to this that both of you seem to have missed; a whitelist assumes that all mail from a specific user is either good or bad. If I buy a part from Acme Widgets, I do want to get things from them like order confirmations and shipping notices. That doesn't mean that I've given them blanket permission to send me ads for their products for the rest of time. Similarly, I might very well want to receive personal email from my relatives but not want to get Aunt Suzy's joke-a-day messages. To eliminate those kinds of messages some kind of content based filtering is necessary.
Not in California. I'm personally very worried about the seismic safety of my current apartment (a 1920's building), and one reason that I'm eager to move is because I'm pretty sure that it's going to fall like a pack of cards as soon as a major earthquake hits. It's been retrofitted, but nothing they do in a retrofit can cure the fact that brick is likely to collapse if the ground starts shaking hard. Nobody could get away with that today. Building codes for seismic safety are constantly being updated because every major quake they discover new problems with older designs.
There's a degree of false sorting in the belief that the things built that long ago are better. Part of the reason that those 100 year old buildings seem to be so well built is because the badly built buildings from the same time period have all been replaced already. The 1900 equivalent of our lousy apartment buildings and cheaply built houses have either been knocked down for those newer developments or have degenerated into the awful old slum housing that you've probably never visited.
Also, when you look at the wonderful 100 year old buildings that impress you so much, you have to remember that they're not necessarily exactly like they were when they were built. Buildings are not static. The structure may remain largely the same but the interiors undergo periodic renovation and reconstruction. In the process, people change the things that annoy them or they think are badly done. Space gets redistributed to different needs, design flaws get smoothed over, and things are generally improved. Many, many buildings become gradually more functional over time as they're adapted to the way that people actually do things, rather than the way that architects imagined that they'd do things.
Signing before encryption would be a countermeasure.
Shouldn't you sign after encryption? The point of the signature is so that you can tell if the contents of the message have been tampered with. This approach requires that the encrypted message be replaced with gibberish, which would include the encrypted signature, too. But if the signature is unencrypted, there would be no excuse for it being turned into gibberish and it would serve as a valid check that the original message had not been tampered with.
Sorry to shatter your faith, but not all papers list the primary author first with futher authorship sorted by merit. Many large collaborations, for instance, couldn't even begin to decide who the most significant authors are, so they just list them in alphabetical order starting at a random place in the list. In some other fields (the one where I work, for instance) the last author is understood to be the Principal Investigator and is put there no matter how much he may have contributed (unless he did enough to justify being primary author). In some other fields, the PI is always listed first, even if he did little beyond writing the grant that funded the project. Conventions on authorship vary a lot, to the point that some journals are now requiring authors to give a brief summary of each person's contribution.
Should the paper come over the top of the roll, or out from under the bottom?
Clearly, over the top is better, because no matter how long or short the loose end is, it is always on the front so you can find it. With the under the bottom system, the loose end can be hanging behind the roll and you have to roll it until you can grab it.
That depends on the number of small children and pets in the household. If you make the free end of the toilet paper too easy to grab, then the simple minded and easily amused (I guess that might include some adults too) will sit there and unroll the whole roll just for the fun of it. It's like many things involving children and pets: making things too convenient can wind up causing problems when those who shouldn't be messing with things have access.
That usually means that a number of other scientists have received the information prior to printing and have determined it is authentic information. Anything that is skeptical is usually performed (read retested) by the reviewing scientists.
Incorrect; you're putting a lot more into peer review than is actually there. In reviewing an article, the reviewers are expected to read it and note any flaws in the article. Those flaws may be methodological flaws in the experiments, futher experiments needed to eliminate alternate explanations for the data, and all sorts of trivial problems like bad grammar, missed references, etc. But there's a limit to how much a reviewer can do to find flaws in a paper. He can't actually see the experimental equipment and note any problems with it, for instance, which might produce unnoticed systematic errors. It's also very important to note that the recommendations of reviewers are just that; a journal editor can publish a paper in spite of bad reviews if he thinks that there's justification for doing so.
Reviewers are also not expected to try replicating experiments themselves. In fact, doing experiments based on what you've seen in papers under review is considered to be at least bad form and may be unethical depending on what exactly you do. In some competitive fields, people have been known to accuse reviewers of trying to copy their experiments while stalling the original paper to get publication priority, and this is viewed as seriously unethical.
I have one word for you: Mozilla. One option under Mozilla allows you to disable popups; that alone is sufficient justification for switching from IE. Yes, it doesn't have some of the system integration that IE has, but it's a better browser overall.
I think that RMS's fundamental problem is that he doesn't communicate well in sound bytes. He's somebody who has spend a huge amount of time sitting down and thinking out his views on a variety of topics related to software, and now to various aspects of "intellectual property". Unfortunately, those views are complex (as they should be given the complexity of the subject) and not easily distilled into neat and easily digested statements.
When he tries to turn his views into soundbytes, he winds up emphasizing his ideas that are most radical. This makes him come off like a foaming at the mouth radical who just wants to smash the proprietary software business. When he actually gets a chance to explain his views at length, it's possible to see that he's really thought these things out and that he has real, compelling reasons for his views. Almost any radical idea will sound more reasonable when you get to hear the reasons for it, especially if they're the result of as much thought as Stallman's.
If you used a non-standard lock with a mode of operation that only you knew, that would be security through obscurity. No one can learn to pick it by reading standard locksmith texts. The weaknesses would have to be learned through trial and error by someone on your front porch. Any lockpicker would have to learn not only what key you used but how to use it in the lock.
To carry the analogy a bit further, your lock would probably be very difficult to pick quickly, no matter how skilled the person trying to pick it is in picking other locks- at least until he figured out how it worked. Once the principle of operation of your lock is known, though, the person trying to pick it can develop a standard approach to picking that style of lock.
The problem then is that there's a very good chance that your new lock design will be easier to pick for somebody who knows how it works than a standard lock would be. Chances are you've made a mistake and left in some vital flaw in your design that makes it easier to pick. After all, your lock would not have the decades of dedicated people trying to figure out how to pick it that are needed to find and correct the weaknesses in its design. And if you try to sell your lock to the public, anyone who's interested in learning how to pick it will be able to buy one, take it apart, and spend as much time as he wants trying to figure out how it works.
mp3 is alredy the defacto standard for cd-ripping. Support for Ogg is just too late to matter to anyone except for geeks on this site.
And if CD ripping were the only function of compressed audio, you might have a point. But Vorbis has some genuine, big advantages for streaming audio. A single file, for instance, can be streamed at different bitrates without modification, so you can easily adjust the rate to each user according to his connection speed. There's also no licensing fee, which might be enough to make the difference between being profitable or not to the streaming company. And, of course, Vorbis is supposed to give better sound quality at a given bitrate, so more connections can be supported for a given bandwidth.
As long as a format gives advantages for the producer or distributor of files, there will be a reason for files to be generated in that format. Now that the biggest obstacle to using Vorbis- the lack of ubiquitous players- has been eliminated, those producers and distributors can start taking advantage. It doesn't matter whether Joe User understands why he should want to switch to Vorbis if the people who are generating the files he listens to have already made the decision for him.
Maybe you should try reading the article before blasting Security Focus for spreading FUD. The whole point of the article is that Schmidt is the one who's FUDding, and you shouldn't believe him. That hardly sounds like the message that Symantec would be trying to spread if they were manipulating editorial standards for corporate reasons.
I gotta say though, half of the fun was the music. Where did all the good video game music go anyway? Tetris, Super Mario Bros, Frogger, Zelda. I can't remember the last time a game's theme music was stuck in my head all day.
You forgot to mention Spy Hunter. That's hardly fair, though, because they stole the theme music from Peter Gunn. How many other video games can you think of that have music by a name composer like Mancini?
That said, I think that Half-Life had an absolutely brilliant sound track. The music doesn't get into your head in quite the same way as those earlier games just because it isn't endlessly repeated, but that sound track absolutely kicks ass.
The Earth was just a big bacterial soup for two billion years. Then sex was invented and then things started to get more interesting very quickly.
Just a side note, but bacteria do have sex. It's not necessary for reproduction, of course, and they only exchange a limited amount of genetic information in each exchange, but they do conjugate and exchange plasmids. In fact, they're remarkably promiscuous, exchanging genetic data with very little regard for things like the species of bacterium they're exchanging with.
It turns out that this is a major problem, because it's a key way for bacteria to develop unpleasant features like antibiotic resistence and infectiousness. They don't necessarily evolve those things from scratch. Instead, a whole package of nasty features that have evolved slowly over time- like multiple characteristics that make a bacterium an effective infectious agent, or a whole suite of proteins that convey resistence to a particular antibiotic- can be transmitted in a single genetic exchange. That lets harmless bacteria rapidly change into nasty ones without having to evolve that way from scratch.
There is no such thing as "too user-friendly". If someone buys a surround sound stereo system it's because they want good sound while they watch movies. They really shouldn't be asked to learn the intracacies of stereo system design.
Put another way, the greatness of your product is limited to what the customer can get it to do. It doesn't matter if your gizmo has the greatest technical specs in the universe. If it's so tough to use that the user can't achieve what those specs promise, they're useless. Of course the flip side is also true. If the interface is so dumbed down that the user can't get the product to do what he wants on the high end, that's also a problem.
The problem with this argument is that it's not really unique to the web, but could have been applied (in slightly modified form) to paper publishing, too. Suppose, for instance, that you wrote the same nasty thing about CowboyNeal in your local conspiracy paper, but it's a mimeographed thing with a circulation of just 50 so nobody important reads it. Ten years later somebody from the New York Times happens to find a copy and thinks that your article is the most wonderful thing he's ever seen. He asks the publisher for permission to reprint it, it goes in the next day's Times, and before you know it the quote has become the most popular thing since "All Your Base Are Belong to Us".
In that case you have the same issue of a comment being published but languishing in some out of the way location during the time it takes the statute of limitations to run out and only later getting into wide circulation. There's nothing about something being publishable and only getting widespread publicity much later that's at all unique to the web.
You'd better watch out for the stuff you find on Ebay, though. A lot of it is cheap Hong Kong copies rather than the original stuff. While the ethics of buying copyright violating discs won't bother some people (I'll do it, but only for things that aren't available in the U.S. legitimately, for instance) the quality is often very low. The discs that I've seen have poor transfers and low grade audio. The subtitles are absolutely terrible, too. It's obvious that they were first translated into Chinese and then the Chinese was translated into English.
As such, this piece can never really be recorded (unless you actually record an audience listening to it, and even then, it's not the same thing; once the sound is recorded, it is no longer the same kind of performance), and claiming that a recording of silence is even close to being the same thing as 4'33" is ludicrous.
I find it interesting that this is coming up, if only because I happened to be at a performance of 4'33" on Friday, and that performance most certainly was recorded! (4'33" was actually just a warm up for the main work, a masterful performance of "Sontas and Interludes for Prepared Piano", and it worked very well as a warm up.)
If anything, I'd say that an absolute blank on the disk is closer to Cage's original intent than a recording of a live performance. It forces the listener to strain his ears trying to figure out what's going on, resulting in him listening to ambient sounds. Since that was Cage's exact intent, it seems to me that it really is a copy of his work. It certainly isn't a ridiculous thing to argue about.
Re:time to ditch Microserf XP?
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Gnome 2.0 RC1
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Gee, and I thought that I was using Mozilla on Windows because:
That way I can use the exact same browser on Windows, Mac, and Linux. (And yes, I do use all three routinely).
IE still doesn't support tabbed browsing, while Mozilla does.
IE has large numbers of known security holes.
Mozilla kills popups dead.
Any one is plenty of reason to use Mozilla. The combination is evidence that nobody should be using IE.
There is a project currently out there to open source common sense. It's called OpenCyc and there was even a recent slashdot article discussing the projecct.
How do the open source programmers feed their families ? And don't suggest they sell T-Shirts.
Even if you make the incorrect assumption that it's impossible to make money selling Open Source software, that's not a reason that a profitable company won't spend money on developing it. Many big hardware companies like IBM, Sun, and HP are spending real money on Open Source development because they think that it will help them sell more hardware. Take Sun's development work on GNOME, for instance. Sun feels a need to have a nice, standardized desktop environment available for their hardware because they don't think that it will be as attractive to purchasers without one. It's cheaper for them to hire programmers to work on an existing Open Source project- even though that means giving away their code- than to try to develop one from scratch. So Sun is paying a bunch of programmers to write Open Source code.
Their are other reasons for a company to do that. O'Reilly, for instance, hires Larry Wall to work on PERL, partly because it helps them get the right to sell his books and partly because it gives them credibility. Transmeta seems to have hired Linus Torvalds at least in part because it gave them extra influence in the direction of the Linux kernel. There are admittedly a small number of positions like that available, but they are out there.
There's clearly more than one dynamic at work in the price drops. If the goal were simply to clear out old inventory, you wouldn't see some of the strategies that are actually used. In computer games, for instance, it's common to take an older title, repackage it in the cheapest possible packaging (like just a CD, with all manuals in electronic format), and sell it for a steep discount. Or sometimes game sellers will package several games that previously sold separately in a single package- or even on a single CD- for much less than the price of the games separately. That doesn't make sense as part of inventory reduction, since it involves pressing new disks and making new packaging, but does make sense if the goal is to get money from people unwilling or unable to pay for the latest, greatest games.
Selling boxed sets of CDs or DVDs is pretty much the same thing. A seller will first sell the disks separately. After a some time, they'll see sales dropping and will repackage the individual disks into a single boxed set that's cheaper than buying the disks separately. You'll see this all the time with anime DVDs. A series will be released first as individual disks. About a year after the last disk in the series comes out, they'll come out with a boxed set containing the whole series (or one season, for really long series) that sells for 30-50% less than the individual disks. Those boxed sets keep selling for a long time, so you know it's not just to clear out old inventory. It's because they know that the real fanatics have already bought the thing, and now they can only get money from other people by lowering the price.
But what I do expect is for the MPAA to be competitive. Since there are no other options THAN the MPAA, we are all held up to paying 20-35$ for a DVD, which in all reality may only be worth 15-20$.
But there are alternatives to the MPAA. Not every disk for sale in this country is made by a MPAA member. As people point out routinely in the standard "If/. is so anti-MPAA, why do they get so hyped about Anime DVDs" arguments, most of the small Anime distributors are not MPAA members. Not surprisingly, many of their disks are comparatively cheap, too. Most porn isn't produced by the MPAA, either.
Even a lot of the MPAA-produced disks are pretty reasonable. If you look at older disks and older movies, you can frequently find things in the $10 range- even though they're big studio movies. This is what is always going to happen with products like computer games, DVDs, etc. where the initial cost is high but the unit cost is low. Prices are highest when the product is newly released, to capture as much money as possible from people willing to pay a premium for the newest thing. When the freshness wears off, the prices drop to try to get something from the people who aren't willing to pay that much.
It's pretty disgusting just how heavily he engages in flag waving and emotional appeals rather than any factual evidence. His testimony starts out with a wonderful:
I am merely coming to start off by talking about the American film and television industry, not as an economic enterprise, but as a great national asset to this country, to the U.S. Treasury and the strength of the American dollar.
Excuse me, but isn't it's standing as an asset to the country, to the U.S. Treasury, and the strength of the American dollar because it's an economic enterprise? What a load of overinflated hype. (Not that overinflated hype should be a surprise coming from Hollywood.) The whole rest of his testimony is full of Japan bashing, plain and simple. The issue that he raises is not just that this will hurt the industry, but that it will (gasp) send good American jobs to Japan. When logic fails, I guess you just wrap yourself in the flag and see if that works.
If you only purchase the binaries and choose not to accquire the source, it may be difficult to separate the two classes of software (or even identify the difference).
It had better not be. One of the requirements of the GPL (section 3, b and c) is that distribution in binary only form must contain a notice informing the recipient of how to get the source code. It should be easy enough to grep for those notices and thus figure out which programs are covered by the GPL.
Slashdot Mirror
There's one more aspect to this that both of you seem to have missed; a whitelist assumes that all mail from a specific user is either good or bad. If I buy a part from Acme Widgets, I do want to get things from them like order confirmations and shipping notices. That doesn't mean that I've given them blanket permission to send me ads for their products for the rest of time. Similarly, I might very well want to receive personal email from my relatives but not want to get Aunt Suzy's joke-a-day messages. To eliminate those kinds of messages some kind of content based filtering is necessary.
Not in California. I'm personally very worried about the seismic safety of my current apartment (a 1920's building), and one reason that I'm eager to move is because I'm pretty sure that it's going to fall like a pack of cards as soon as a major earthquake hits. It's been retrofitted, but nothing they do in a retrofit can cure the fact that brick is likely to collapse if the ground starts shaking hard. Nobody could get away with that today. Building codes for seismic safety are constantly being updated because every major quake they discover new problems with older designs.
There's a degree of false sorting in the belief that the things built that long ago are better. Part of the reason that those 100 year old buildings seem to be so well built is because the badly built buildings from the same time period have all been replaced already. The 1900 equivalent of our lousy apartment buildings and cheaply built houses have either been knocked down for those newer developments or have degenerated into the awful old slum housing that you've probably never visited.
Also, when you look at the wonderful 100 year old buildings that impress you so much, you have to remember that they're not necessarily exactly like they were when they were built. Buildings are not static. The structure may remain largely the same but the interiors undergo periodic renovation and reconstruction. In the process, people change the things that annoy them or they think are badly done. Space gets redistributed to different needs, design flaws get smoothed over, and things are generally improved. Many, many buildings become gradually more functional over time as they're adapted to the way that people actually do things, rather than the way that architects imagined that they'd do things.
Shouldn't you sign after encryption? The point of the signature is so that you can tell if the contents of the message have been tampered with. This approach requires that the encrypted message be replaced with gibberish, which would include the encrypted signature, too. But if the signature is unencrypted, there would be no excuse for it being turned into gibberish and it would serve as a valid check that the original message had not been tampered with.
Sorry to shatter your faith, but not all papers list the primary author first with futher authorship sorted by merit. Many large collaborations, for instance, couldn't even begin to decide who the most significant authors are, so they just list them in alphabetical order starting at a random place in the list. In some other fields (the one where I work, for instance) the last author is understood to be the Principal Investigator and is put there no matter how much he may have contributed (unless he did enough to justify being primary author). In some other fields, the PI is always listed first, even if he did little beyond writing the grant that funded the project. Conventions on authorship vary a lot, to the point that some journals are now requiring authors to give a brief summary of each person's contribution.
That depends on the number of small children and pets in the household. If you make the free end of the toilet paper too easy to grab, then the simple minded and easily amused (I guess that might include some adults too) will sit there and unroll the whole roll just for the fun of it. It's like many things involving children and pets: making things too convenient can wind up causing problems when those who shouldn't be messing with things have access.
Incorrect; you're putting a lot more into peer review than is actually there. In reviewing an article, the reviewers are expected to read it and note any flaws in the article. Those flaws may be methodological flaws in the experiments, futher experiments needed to eliminate alternate explanations for the data, and all sorts of trivial problems like bad grammar, missed references, etc. But there's a limit to how much a reviewer can do to find flaws in a paper. He can't actually see the experimental equipment and note any problems with it, for instance, which might produce unnoticed systematic errors. It's also very important to note that the recommendations of reviewers are just that; a journal editor can publish a paper in spite of bad reviews if he thinks that there's justification for doing so.
Reviewers are also not expected to try replicating experiments themselves. In fact, doing experiments based on what you've seen in papers under review is considered to be at least bad form and may be unethical depending on what exactly you do. In some competitive fields, people have been known to accuse reviewers of trying to copy their experiments while stalling the original paper to get publication priority, and this is viewed as seriously unethical.
I have one word for you: Mozilla. One option under Mozilla allows you to disable popups; that alone is sufficient justification for switching from IE. Yes, it doesn't have some of the system integration that IE has, but it's a better browser overall.
I think that RMS's fundamental problem is that he doesn't communicate well in sound bytes. He's somebody who has spend a huge amount of time sitting down and thinking out his views on a variety of topics related to software, and now to various aspects of "intellectual property". Unfortunately, those views are complex (as they should be given the complexity of the subject) and not easily distilled into neat and easily digested statements.
When he tries to turn his views into soundbytes, he winds up emphasizing his ideas that are most radical. This makes him come off like a foaming at the mouth radical who just wants to smash the proprietary software business. When he actually gets a chance to explain his views at length, it's possible to see that he's really thought these things out and that he has real, compelling reasons for his views. Almost any radical idea will sound more reasonable when you get to hear the reasons for it, especially if they're the result of as much thought as Stallman's.
To carry the analogy a bit further, your lock would probably be very difficult to pick quickly, no matter how skilled the person trying to pick it is in picking other locks- at least until he figured out how it worked. Once the principle of operation of your lock is known, though, the person trying to pick it can develop a standard approach to picking that style of lock.
The problem then is that there's a very good chance that your new lock design will be easier to pick for somebody who knows how it works than a standard lock would be. Chances are you've made a mistake and left in some vital flaw in your design that makes it easier to pick. After all, your lock would not have the decades of dedicated people trying to figure out how to pick it that are needed to find and correct the weaknesses in its design. And if you try to sell your lock to the public, anyone who's interested in learning how to pick it will be able to buy one, take it apart, and spend as much time as he wants trying to figure out how it works.
And if CD ripping were the only function of compressed audio, you might have a point. But Vorbis has some genuine, big advantages for streaming audio. A single file, for instance, can be streamed at different bitrates without modification, so you can easily adjust the rate to each user according to his connection speed. There's also no licensing fee, which might be enough to make the difference between being profitable or not to the streaming company. And, of course, Vorbis is supposed to give better sound quality at a given bitrate, so more connections can be supported for a given bandwidth.
As long as a format gives advantages for the producer or distributor of files, there will be a reason for files to be generated in that format. Now that the biggest obstacle to using Vorbis- the lack of ubiquitous players- has been eliminated, those producers and distributors can start taking advantage. It doesn't matter whether Joe User understands why he should want to switch to Vorbis if the people who are generating the files he listens to have already made the decision for him.
Maybe you should try reading the article before blasting Security Focus for spreading FUD. The whole point of the article is that Schmidt is the one who's FUDding, and you shouldn't believe him. That hardly sounds like the message that Symantec would be trying to spread if they were manipulating editorial standards for corporate reasons.
You forgot to mention Spy Hunter. That's hardly fair, though, because they stole the theme music from Peter Gunn. How many other video games can you think of that have music by a name composer like Mancini?
That said, I think that Half-Life had an absolutely brilliant sound track. The music doesn't get into your head in quite the same way as those earlier games just because it isn't endlessly repeated, but that sound track absolutely kicks ass.
Just a side note, but bacteria do have sex. It's not necessary for reproduction, of course, and they only exchange a limited amount of genetic information in each exchange, but they do conjugate and exchange plasmids. In fact, they're remarkably promiscuous, exchanging genetic data with very little regard for things like the species of bacterium they're exchanging with.
It turns out that this is a major problem, because it's a key way for bacteria to develop unpleasant features like antibiotic resistence and infectiousness. They don't necessarily evolve those things from scratch. Instead, a whole package of nasty features that have evolved slowly over time- like multiple characteristics that make a bacterium an effective infectious agent, or a whole suite of proteins that convey resistence to a particular antibiotic- can be transmitted in a single genetic exchange. That lets harmless bacteria rapidly change into nasty ones without having to evolve that way from scratch.
Put another way, the greatness of your product is limited to what the customer can get it to do. It doesn't matter if your gizmo has the greatest technical specs in the universe. If it's so tough to use that the user can't achieve what those specs promise, they're useless. Of course the flip side is also true. If the interface is so dumbed down that the user can't get the product to do what he wants on the high end, that's also a problem.
The problem with this argument is that it's not really unique to the web, but could have been applied (in slightly modified form) to paper publishing, too. Suppose, for instance, that you wrote the same nasty thing about CowboyNeal in your local conspiracy paper, but it's a mimeographed thing with a circulation of just 50 so nobody important reads it. Ten years later somebody from the New York Times happens to find a copy and thinks that your article is the most wonderful thing he's ever seen. He asks the publisher for permission to reprint it, it goes in the next day's Times, and before you know it the quote has become the most popular thing since "All Your Base Are Belong to Us".
In that case you have the same issue of a comment being published but languishing in some out of the way location during the time it takes the statute of limitations to run out and only later getting into wide circulation. There's nothing about something being publishable and only getting widespread publicity much later that's at all unique to the web.
You'd better watch out for the stuff you find on Ebay, though. A lot of it is cheap Hong Kong copies rather than the original stuff. While the ethics of buying copyright violating discs won't bother some people (I'll do it, but only for things that aren't available in the U.S. legitimately, for instance) the quality is often very low. The discs that I've seen have poor transfers and low grade audio. The subtitles are absolutely terrible, too. It's obvious that they were first translated into Chinese and then the Chinese was translated into English.
I find it interesting that this is coming up, if only because I happened to be at a performance of 4'33" on Friday, and that performance most certainly was recorded! (4'33" was actually just a warm up for the main work, a masterful performance of "Sontas and Interludes for Prepared Piano", and it worked very well as a warm up.)
If anything, I'd say that an absolute blank on the disk is closer to Cage's original intent than a recording of a live performance. It forces the listener to strain his ears trying to figure out what's going on, resulting in him listening to ambient sounds. Since that was Cage's exact intent, it seems to me that it really is a copy of his work. It certainly isn't a ridiculous thing to argue about.
Gee, and I thought that I was using Mozilla on Windows because:
Any one is plenty of reason to use Mozilla. The combination is evidence that nobody should be using IE.
There is a project currently out there to open source common sense. It's called OpenCyc and there was even a recent slashdot article discussing the projecct.
Even if you make the incorrect assumption that it's impossible to make money selling Open Source software, that's not a reason that a profitable company won't spend money on developing it. Many big hardware companies like IBM, Sun, and HP are spending real money on Open Source development because they think that it will help them sell more hardware. Take Sun's development work on GNOME, for instance. Sun feels a need to have a nice, standardized desktop environment available for their hardware because they don't think that it will be as attractive to purchasers without one. It's cheaper for them to hire programmers to work on an existing Open Source project- even though that means giving away their code- than to try to develop one from scratch. So Sun is paying a bunch of programmers to write Open Source code.
Their are other reasons for a company to do that. O'Reilly, for instance, hires Larry Wall to work on PERL, partly because it helps them get the right to sell his books and partly because it gives them credibility. Transmeta seems to have hired Linus Torvalds at least in part because it gave them extra influence in the direction of the Linux kernel. There are admittedly a small number of positions like that available, but they are out there.
There's clearly more than one dynamic at work in the price drops. If the goal were simply to clear out old inventory, you wouldn't see some of the strategies that are actually used. In computer games, for instance, it's common to take an older title, repackage it in the cheapest possible packaging (like just a CD, with all manuals in electronic format), and sell it for a steep discount. Or sometimes game sellers will package several games that previously sold separately in a single package- or even on a single CD- for much less than the price of the games separately. That doesn't make sense as part of inventory reduction, since it involves pressing new disks and making new packaging, but does make sense if the goal is to get money from people unwilling or unable to pay for the latest, greatest games.
Selling boxed sets of CDs or DVDs is pretty much the same thing. A seller will first sell the disks separately. After a some time, they'll see sales dropping and will repackage the individual disks into a single boxed set that's cheaper than buying the disks separately. You'll see this all the time with anime DVDs. A series will be released first as individual disks. About a year after the last disk in the series comes out, they'll come out with a boxed set containing the whole series (or one season, for really long series) that sells for 30-50% less than the individual disks. Those boxed sets keep selling for a long time, so you know it's not just to clear out old inventory. It's because they know that the real fanatics have already bought the thing, and now they can only get money from other people by lowering the price.
But there are alternatives to the MPAA. Not every disk for sale in this country is made by a MPAA member. As people point out routinely in the standard "If /. is so anti-MPAA, why do they get so hyped about Anime DVDs" arguments, most of the small Anime distributors are not MPAA members. Not surprisingly, many of their disks are comparatively cheap, too. Most porn isn't produced by the MPAA, either.
Even a lot of the MPAA-produced disks are pretty reasonable. If you look at older disks and older movies, you can frequently find things in the $10 range- even though they're big studio movies. This is what is always going to happen with products like computer games, DVDs, etc. where the initial cost is high but the unit cost is low. Prices are highest when the product is newly released, to capture as much money as possible from people willing to pay a premium for the newest thing. When the freshness wears off, the prices drop to try to get something from the people who aren't willing to pay that much.
It's pretty disgusting just how heavily he engages in flag waving and emotional appeals rather than any factual evidence. His testimony starts out with a wonderful:
Excuse me, but isn't it's standing as an asset to the country, to the U.S. Treasury, and the strength of the American dollar because it's an economic enterprise? What a load of overinflated hype. (Not that overinflated hype should be a surprise coming from Hollywood.) The whole rest of his testimony is full of Japan bashing, plain and simple. The issue that he raises is not just that this will hurt the industry, but that it will (gasp) send good American jobs to Japan. When logic fails, I guess you just wrap yourself in the flag and see if that works.
It had better not be. One of the requirements of the GPL (section 3, b and c) is that distribution in binary only form must contain a notice informing the recipient of how to get the source code. It should be easy enough to grep for those notices and thus figure out which programs are covered by the GPL.