I'm guessing you'd have been one of those early settlers donning a red coat to go with that musket...
Here's something for you to chew on: Copyright is no longer practical. To maintain that it is is asking for government intervention in every aspect of your computing. We cannot have a "war on copying".
If everyone used Napster, both Fred Durst AND Lars Ulrich would be working at McDonalds, probably together, bitching about how they wish they could make money off of their music, instead of having to distribute it for free.
Bullcrap. They'd make plenty of money by touring, and/or selling their music to commercial entities for use in marketing. How would things change? Tours would become more profitable and efficient for the artists, and maybe not as extravagant. Rock stars would put out better music because instead of a windfall of $ from a big contract, they'd have to continue WORKING to make it happen. Less drug abuse, less crappy sophomore albums. Less Britney Spears overhyped crap music, more music popular because of actual ARTISTIC VALUE. And a more efficient society--less of my dollars going to line the pockets of do-nothing record industry people and all their BMW-driving lawyers.
I am not an aerospace engineer. So can anyone tell me why the "space ramp thingy" suggested by Robert Heinlein in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" isn't an option?
what would be the effects of that in a state of war?
Do you mean a state when people would think for themselves, and would be more concerned with self-preservation than the value of their stock portfolio?
I disagree. I think Intel has had more to do with the success of the PC than MS. MS just happened to have good vision at the time.
When a company uses strong-arm tactics like they did in order to crush competition, they are asking to be broken up. They crossed the line. They should have to pay. Making Office compete on the same playing field as WordPerfect and any other office suites will be a good thing for everyone.
The biggest danger here is a government definition of "Operating System."
I also disagree with your claim that "Breaking the company up will harm the average user, since a high level of integration means a greater ease of use." The OS company can and will strive to publish their APIs (to everyone this time) in order to promote this integration.
It's very easy to claim that "govt. should stay out of the software business." This is trumpeted by Joe Blow average user all the time. But most people who are knowledgable about MS's tactics and how OSs and applications work will agree: This is NOT *not* good at all!
"You should, however, understand that it'd be better to have a society with no guns at all."
Oh, please! This is a silly argument, and usually indicates the person using it has spent a little too much time in the university coffee lounge, and not enough time in the real world.
Get this through your head. People are different. There are good people and there are bad people. These different people will come into CONFLICT. Guns are tools of conflict. Moreso, they are equalizers. Even if we (America) took the stick-my-head-in-the-sand guns-should-be-banned approach, there would still be conflict. And those conflicts would be resolved with some other weapon.
I really believe you're holding onto some traditional, outdated view of how musicians are supposed to get paid without considering what kind of REALLY GREAT THINGS may come out of all this. Consider:
--I envision a day when concerts ARE money-makers for artists, and aren't big stupid excuses for 2 tons of pyrotechnics, 100-foot tall inflatable animals, and the associated overstaffed road crews and 10 million dollar insurance policies. In short, tours that are run with efficiency. If you believe that Metallica can't make money charging 20,000 people $30 a piece 200 days a year, you're on crack.
--I envision a day when all music is freely available for personal use, and cheaply licensed by commercial entities for use as "background" music.
--I envision a day when artists don't come into a windfall of $$$, blow their brains out on every drug ever produced, and hang around and suck for 20 years.
--I envision a day when all these buttwipe record executives and their lawyers lose their jobs programming/controlling my local airwaves and MTV, and instead re-educate themselves to do some real work, like teaching children or writing code.
--I envision a day when I don't need to wade through every MP3 available because I'll log into one of the thousands of internet DJ websites, each with a particular genre of music available.
These are good, but I'd prefer a simpler solution:
Non-citizens (businesses, institutions) may not provide to a third party information specific to a private citizen without the express written consent of the private citizen.
Enforced by the Justice and/or Commerce departments, which would investigate following tips provided by whistleblowers.
As I understand, it was debated in the early days of the formation of the U.S. govt. to have another house of congress devoted to removing laws. Too bad they didn't go through with it.
There are just too many laws today. And then there are those who think you can never have enough laws, that "progress" in government is the piling on of more and more rules for us to follow. This would make Jefferson roll over in his grave. Meanwhile, we create more and more laws, providing fertile ground for more and more lawyers, and we can't get enough smart people to write code or teach our children.
So, since it doesn't make sense for me to not do what you want, you don't have to legally mandate it in a license.
Mightn't it be smart to mandate that modifications ARE sent back IF the updates are to be used in a commercial (vs. private or custom) distribution? Or would such a situation be impossible under the conventional terms of the GPL?
From what I've heard, my state (Maryland) and all the others are thinking up ways to tax Internet sales. It's only a matter of time before they figure out how, like it or not.
Whether they figure it or not doesn't mean we should lie back and take it. How quickly people accept such a horrible inevitability--why, because "everything else" is taxed? Because there's a perceived "loophole"? When will people wake up and question the system as a whole? The U.S. govt. heaps law upon law, tax code upon tax code--increasing numbers of the smartest people go to law school to make a living off these laws, and we can't get anyone to write decent code or teach our children!
The problem is not that e-commerce businesses operate in some "loophole", but that we've let our elected officials enact overly-complicated tax schemes and regulations that are now showing their deficiencies.
Excuse me? How in the world would anything be DESTROYED????
What we all read for (whether reading/., PC Magazine, or the New York Times) is TRUTH. And when content creators start selling YOUR attention to the highest bidders, there is good chance that you are no longer the most important customer. Your opinions are second-rate, hence the current discussion. So if I can pay $0.05 a week to know that real TRUTH is to be had on/. , I'm there.
And let's be realistic--only professional content creators would even go through the hassle of setting up a micropayment system.
Andover was a web company based on the idea of selling banner ads, and therefore had the very clear of objective of getting as many readers to return here as often as possible.
How frustrating it must be for them to try and get ads (consciousness spam) in front of a crowd technically savvy enough to filter them out. I only see ads on/. when logging in from someone else's machine. Give me a secure, reliable micropayment system, and we can eliminate these discussions of questionable motives altogether.
I live in Detroit, so the story I heard must be true...;)
As I understand, Ford has some fund set up for employee education, but many of the employees work so much overtime that the fund gets little use. So this fund will be used to buy PCs.
I just finished Cryptonomicon; one thing Stephenson mentions that would certainly be a problem would be preventing the navies of various countries from cutting the cables. But they wouldn't call them 'cables', they'd be called 'A Clear and Present Danger'.
Given current trends in the U.S., expect this to happen sometime in the future.
It's about freedom people--the freedom to be able to judge for oneself how best to behave, or in this case, drive.
Our government is currently on an unintended witchhunt to ban all activities which are extremely newsworthy and/or statistically a threat to people's security. The most obvious example is gun control. Statistically, gun accidents are rare. But boy are they newsworthy! This gives self-serving politicians an issue to champion, constitutional amendment or not.
The same arguments will be used to press for mandatory governers in all automobiles and maybe this satellite monitoring system. After that, maybe they'll mandate the use of helmets in all bathtubs. Somewhere, sometime, (at least 20 years into the future) enough clueless voters will be tricked into thinking these are "issues" which need further regulation.
>>>Why does every technology or legislation having great potential for limiting privacy and personal freedom "protect our children" ?
Because we live in an age where the security of most (American) people is so complete that we are systematically eliminating every behavior deemed risky or politically incorrect. The media blasts us with it, a do-gooder/"survivor" steps forward to denounce it, and a politician attempts to legislate against it. American voters (and yes, I am American) are dimwitted enough to think that anything done for "the children" must be a GOOD THING no matter what the consequences.
People really need to realize that this is a fantastic time to be alive, and there's few personal freedoms that need to be governed. Corporate freedoms, on the other hand...
I played in a heavy rock band in Detroit area during the late 80s/early 90s. Our guitar player was phenomenal (important for big-hair heavy rock bands!). We would have had a fair level of prominence on the local scene had girlfriends, wives, children, and internal strife not taken their toll.
But what's going on in music right now is way overdue. Had this technological revolution been happening then, the sleazy producers who then had the studio knowhow and took our $$ for it wouldn't have held us back; the local radio stations wouldn't have prevented more people from hearing us. It would have been more efficient. And that's what technology is all about--efficiency.
I have a vision of a time when middlemen no longer exist in the music industry--or are much reduced in their roles. Bands put their music on the net and fans learn about it through genre-based sites and download it. A standard EULA for music allows personal usage for free, but commercial usage requires payment to the artist. And artists who are particularly popular and ambitious can gain additional revenue by going on tour. The notion that touring will not make $$ is wrong; current practices simply need updating.
The gross windfalls that many popular artists have received are often a curse. Elvis, Aerosmith, Kiss etc. etc. etc. all have been victims of their own excesses. Good music is not written for $, it is written to express emotion. Now Aerosmith pumps out insincere crap because they are status quo establishment artists. Tom Petty was quoted as saying when his music gets old, he promises not to "hand around and suck." Aerosmith, are you listening?
You're correct--they have much to be frightened of.
Why do we surf here so often? Well, for me it's because main-stream media outlets don't provide enough GOOD NEWS while/. provides plenty. I'm tired of reading their megahype about so-and-so's funeral or the statistically insignificant shooting, plane crash, or other "tragedy." I want news that affects ME, and so I surf here first thing every morning.
Another great thing about this site is the instant analysis. Though many highly moderated comments aren't well-polished, they usually represent at least two or more sides of each story--which you often don't get from John Dvorak, et al.
Katz posted an article a while back about a site providing dynamic, custom news and was dogged pretty hard about it. But as multimedia technology and bandwidth permit, I think we'll see the eventual death of traditional media. No longer will Brokaw, Jennings, and Rather and their handlers decide what is newsworthy--we will.
Slashdot Mirror
www.thesatorieffect.com
Well said!!!
I'm guessing you'd have been one of those early settlers donning a red coat to go with that musket...
Here's something for you to chew on: Copyright is no longer practical. To maintain that it is is asking for government intervention in every aspect of your computing. We cannot have a "war on copying".
Bullcrap. They'd make plenty of money by touring, and/or selling their music to commercial entities for use in marketing. How would things change? Tours would become more profitable and efficient for the artists, and maybe not as extravagant. Rock stars would put out better music because instead of a windfall of $ from a big contract, they'd have to continue WORKING to make it happen. Less drug abuse, less crappy sophomore albums. Less Britney Spears overhyped crap music, more music popular because of actual ARTISTIC VALUE. And a more efficient society--less of my dollars going to line the pockets of do-nothing record industry people and all their BMW-driving lawyers.
It's a win/win situation for almost everyone!
I am not an aerospace engineer. So can anyone tell me why the "space ramp thingy" suggested by Robert Heinlein in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" isn't an option?
Do you mean a state when people would think for themselves, and would be more concerned with self-preservation than the value of their stock portfolio?
An End to the Microsoft Monopoly, of course!
I disagree. I think Intel has had more to do with the success of the PC than MS. MS just happened to have good vision at the time.
When a company uses strong-arm tactics like they did in order to crush competition, they are asking to be broken up. They crossed the line. They should have to pay. Making Office compete on the same playing field as WordPerfect and any other office suites will be a good thing for everyone.
The biggest danger here is a government definition of "Operating System."
I also disagree with your claim that "Breaking the company up will harm the average user, since a high level of integration means a greater ease of use." The OS company can and will strive to publish their APIs (to everyone this time) in order to promote this integration.
It's very easy to claim that "govt. should stay out of the software business." This is trumpeted by Joe Blow average user all the time. But most people who are knowledgable about MS's tactics and how OSs and applications work will agree: This is NOT *not* good at all!
Oh, please! This is a silly argument, and usually indicates the person using it has spent a little too much time in the university coffee lounge, and not enough time in the real world.
Get this through your head. People are different. There are good people and there are bad people. These different people will come into CONFLICT. Guns are tools of conflict. Moreso, they are equalizers. Even if we (America) took the stick-my-head-in-the-sand guns-should-be-banned approach, there would still be conflict. And those conflicts would be resolved with some other weapon.
Tell me, exactly how are guns bad for society?
http://www.freep.com/news/locway/qbaby 15.htm
Short version: a busy professor leaves his baby in a hot car and it dies.
I really believe you're holding onto some traditional, outdated view of how musicians are supposed to get paid without considering what kind of REALLY GREAT THINGS may come out of all this. Consider:
--I envision a day when concerts ARE money-makers for artists, and aren't big stupid excuses for 2 tons of pyrotechnics, 100-foot tall inflatable animals, and the associated overstaffed road crews and 10 million dollar insurance policies. In short, tours that are run with efficiency. If you believe that Metallica can't make money charging 20,000 people $30 a piece 200 days a year, you're on crack.
--I envision a day when all music is freely available for personal use, and cheaply licensed by commercial entities for use as "background" music.
--I envision a day when artists don't come into a windfall of $$$, blow their brains out on every drug ever produced, and hang around and suck for 20 years.
--I envision a day when all these buttwipe record executives and their lawyers lose their jobs programming/controlling my local airwaves and MTV, and instead re-educate themselves to do some real work, like teaching children or writing code.
--I envision a day when I don't need to wade through every MP3 available because I'll log into one of the thousands of internet DJ websites, each with a particular genre of music available.
Freedom. Efficiency. Less BS. I can't wait.
I am disgusted by this, and I encourage any youngsters out there subjected to this to spam this system with the names of ALL your classmates.
They're all dangerous!!! They're all dangerous!!!
How about it Bill? Saylor isn't worth 1/2 of you!
These are good, but I'd prefer a simpler solution:
Non-citizens (businesses, institutions) may not provide to a third party information specific to a private citizen without the express written consent of the private citizen.
Enforced by the Justice and/or Commerce departments, which would investigate following tips provided by whistleblowers.
As I understand, it was debated in the early days of the formation of the U.S. govt. to have another house of congress devoted to removing laws. Too bad they didn't go through with it.
There are just too many laws today. And then there are those who think you can never have enough laws, that "progress" in government is the piling on of more and more rules for us to follow. This would make Jefferson roll over in his grave. Meanwhile, we create more and more laws, providing fertile ground for more and more lawyers, and we can't get enough smart people to write code or teach our children.
That government is best which governs least.
Mightn't it be smart to mandate that modifications ARE sent back IF the updates are to be used in a commercial (vs. private or custom) distribution? Or would such a situation be impossible under the conventional terms of the GPL?
Whether they figure it or not doesn't mean we should lie back and take it. How quickly people accept such a horrible inevitability--why, because "everything else" is taxed? Because there's a perceived "loophole"? When will people wake up and question the system as a whole? The U.S. govt. heaps law upon law, tax code upon tax code--increasing numbers of the smartest people go to law school to make a living off these laws, and we can't get anyone to write decent code or teach our children!
The problem is not that e-commerce businesses operate in some "loophole", but that we've let our elected officials enact overly-complicated tax schemes and regulations that are now showing their deficiencies.
Excuse me? How in the world would anything be DESTROYED????
/., PC Magazine, or the New York Times) is TRUTH. And when content creators start selling YOUR attention to the highest bidders, there is good chance that you are no longer the most important customer. Your opinions are second-rate, hence the current discussion. So if I can pay $0.05 a week to know that real TRUTH is to be had on /. , I'm there.
What we all read for (whether reading
And let's be realistic--only professional content creators would even go through the hassle of setting up a micropayment system.
How frustrating it must be for them to try and get ads (consciousness spam) in front of a crowd technically savvy enough to filter them out. I only see ads on /. when logging in from someone else's machine. Give me a secure, reliable micropayment system, and we can eliminate these discussions of questionable motives altogether.
I live in Detroit, so the story I heard must be true... ;)
As I understand, Ford has some fund set up for employee education, but many of the employees work so much overtime that the fund gets little use. So this fund will be used to buy PCs.
I just finished Cryptonomicon; one thing Stephenson mentions that would certainly be a problem would be preventing the navies of various countries from cutting the cables. But they wouldn't call them 'cables', they'd be called 'A Clear and Present Danger'.
Given current trends in the U.S., expect this to happen sometime in the future.
It's about freedom people--the freedom to be able to judge for oneself how best to behave, or in this case, drive.
Our government is currently on an unintended witchhunt to ban all activities which are extremely newsworthy and/or statistically a threat to people's security. The most obvious example is gun control. Statistically, gun accidents are rare. But boy are they newsworthy! This gives self-serving politicians an issue to champion, constitutional amendment or not.
The same arguments will be used to press for mandatory governers in all automobiles and maybe this satellite monitoring system. After that, maybe they'll mandate the use of helmets in all bathtubs. Somewhere, sometime, (at least 20 years into the future) enough clueless voters will be tricked into thinking these are "issues" which need further regulation.
>>>Why does every technology or legislation having great potential for limiting privacy and personal freedom "protect our children" ?
Because we live in an age where the security of most (American) people is so complete that we are systematically eliminating every behavior deemed risky or politically incorrect. The media blasts us with it, a do-gooder/"survivor" steps forward to denounce it, and a politician attempts to legislate against it. American voters (and yes, I am American) are dimwitted enough to think that anything done for "the children" must be a GOOD THING no matter what the consequences.
People really need to realize that this is a fantastic time to be alive, and there's few personal freedoms that need to be governed. Corporate freedoms, on the other hand...
I played in a heavy rock band in Detroit area during the late 80s/early 90s. Our guitar player was phenomenal (important for big-hair heavy rock bands!). We would have had a fair level of prominence on the local scene had girlfriends, wives, children, and internal strife not taken their toll.
But what's going on in music right now is way overdue. Had this technological revolution been happening then, the sleazy producers who then had the studio knowhow and took our $$ for it wouldn't have held us back; the local radio stations wouldn't have prevented more people from hearing us. It would have been more efficient. And that's what technology is all about--efficiency.
I have a vision of a time when middlemen no longer exist in the music industry--or are much reduced in their roles. Bands put their music on the net and fans learn about it through genre-based sites and download it. A standard EULA for music allows personal usage for free, but commercial usage requires payment to the artist. And artists who are particularly popular and ambitious can gain additional revenue by going on tour. The notion that touring will not make $$ is wrong; current practices simply need updating.
The gross windfalls that many popular artists have received are often a curse. Elvis, Aerosmith, Kiss etc. etc. etc. all have been victims of their own excesses. Good music is not written for $, it is written to express emotion. Now Aerosmith pumps out insincere crap because they are status quo establishment artists. Tom Petty was quoted as saying when his music gets old, he promises not to "hand around and suck." Aerosmith, are you listening?
General consensus around here is that they're all freaky!
Scott (former tech writer)
You're correct--they have much to be frightened of.
/. provides plenty. I'm tired of reading their megahype about so-and-so's funeral or the statistically insignificant shooting, plane crash, or other "tragedy." I want news that affects ME, and so I surf here first thing every morning.
Why do we surf here so often? Well, for me it's because main-stream media outlets don't provide enough GOOD NEWS while
Another great thing about this site is the instant analysis. Though many highly moderated comments aren't well-polished, they usually represent at least two or more sides of each story--which you often don't get from John Dvorak, et al.
Katz posted an article a while back about a site providing dynamic, custom news and was dogged pretty hard about it. But as multimedia technology and bandwidth permit, I think we'll see the eventual death of traditional media. No longer will Brokaw, Jennings, and Rather and their handlers decide what is newsworthy--we will.