Their business model fails with today's technology
True, but technology is the means, not the reason. The reason that their business model fails is that they are parasites. The self-proclaimed "content providers" don't produce any content. They buy it (or steal it, usually ripping off the musicians), package it, advertise it, and distribute it.. Technology threatens to make them superfluous, or at least less important than they were. If they actually did anything useful, technology wouldn't be a threat.
Intel is developing a third-generation input/output interconnect specification, code-named Arapahoe, that's up to ten times quicker than today's fast PCI-X bus. PCI-X moves data in parallel along 64 wires, reaching a top speed of about 1GB per second. Arapahoe can employ from 1 to 32 lanes; each lane consists of a pair of wires and can shuffle more than 200MB of data per second between the CPU and add-in cards or integrated parts.
Nonsense. If Ford were just pissed they could've blocked access to their site from fuckgeneralmotors.com. Would've taken 2 minutes if they were slow. Instead they reach for the lawyers. They're not concerned about their trademark, they were trying to establish a precedent they could use to intimidate others.
... everything looks like a nail. "We cannot find anything else to explain it," said EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGST Tibor Gant. There are actually lots of seasonal changes on Mars that make colors and things - geologists and meteorologists have lots of explanations for them.
Bush (not my favorite president to say the least) was struggling with some legitimate moral issues regarding stem cells from aborted fetus.
Aborted fetuses have nothing to do with this. Period. Does that end the discussion?
No? Bush was struggling with the political fallout from^H^H^H^H^H^H^H the difficult moral question of eggs which were fertilized in laboratories. Now, your average female of breeding age flushes dozens of fertilized eggs down the toilet every month, or maybe chucks them in the trash. Very, very, very few fertilized eggs actually wind up becoming babies. If it were possible to strain menstrual blood for fertilized eggs (it isn't for a number of reasons, not all of them gross), would there be some great moral question there? I don't see it.
Boy oh boy, the good Dr. Kraut ("social scientist" - since when is "social" science?) seems to be making a lot of buzz for himself. First he does a study which is widely criticized for being nothing more than a bunch of lazy guess work, then he does a BIGGER study that refutes the results of the first study. I can't believe I'm the only one who's noticed something wrong here.
Favorite quote: "'There was an audible buzz in the room' when Dr. Kraut started to discuss his findings." (The audible buzzes are more pesky than the inaudible ones.) Sounds like Dr Kraut's colleagues found it more interesting to talk among themselves than to listen to him.
Second-favorite quote: "I like to be influenced by the nature of the data rather than having strong preconceptions." Translation: "I have no idea what my preconceptions are, so rather than going through the hard work of sorting them out, I'll just pretend I don't have any."
Look - two studies by Dr Kraut come to opposite conclusions and Dr Kraut (I'm not making this up!) explains this by saying that the research subjects themselves changed in the interim. Why is anybody taking this seriously?
everyone is watching what their buyers are purchasing.. Most grocery stores don't tell you that they are going to do that when you sign up for their "savings cards", how is what Amazon doing any different?
It's different because Amazon was violating their own privacy policy. They stated clearly that they would aggregate the information and not use it to identify individual customers. They lied. They were reprimanded by the FTC for being deceptive, not for being intrusive.
Uighur isn't Indo-European; it's Turkic. There *were* Indo-European speakers in Western China. Their language was Tokharian (actually two varieties, unimaginately named Tokharian A and Tokharian B). Sometimes it's spelled "Tocharian" for extra excitement. It's known from sixth-century manuscripts discovered in Chinese Turkestan.
The subscription fee was negociated with the record companies in return for the companies' dropping their suit that threatened to put Napster permanently out of business. There isn't anybody left to file suit.
... there's lots of (classical) music in easy-to-read editions that's out of copyright. Pretty much everything published by Dover, for example - these are repros of 19th-century editions (for ex., the Bach-Gesellschaft ed. of Bach's complete works). Take a look at the copyright notices in any Dover edition - the preface (if there is one) will be copyrighted, but the music itself won't be.
Incidentally, I often play from facsimiles of composer's autographs or 1st editions if I have them (Fuzeau sells some very cheaply). You have to learn some weird clefs, but they're basically legible, of course - the composers (and whomever they wrote for) could read them perfectly well.
Stuart Frankel, Ph.D., musicology (that plus 50 cents will get you a VERY SMALL cup of coffee)
It's due to privatization. The government-regulated system used to work pretty ok. Not perfectly, but pretty ok. The 30 (mostly small) municipally owned power companies in California still work ok. One of them is very large, Los Angeles's; this is selling power to the rest of the state, but of course doesn't have enough to power all of California. It's precisely the private companies that the juvenile Ayn Randians (sorry about the redundancy) have such wet dreams about that aren't able to deliver the goods. They are slurping up huge profits, though.
example: KDE - but where suck goes wrong
on
Lawsuits Suck
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· Score: 1
"We're just coders." Didn't care, don't care that they made a bit of a legal mess; don't see that RMS got them out of the mess they created, and throw temper tantrums when their made-up version of the law of (the way it's s'posed to be) doesn't correspond with reality.
But where Suck goes wrong is assuming that the U.S. legal system rules the world. We're trying to impose it on the world, or at the least "important" part which is that the government should act as the paid agents of multi-national corporations, but haven't managed to succeed quite yet.
If you want to use FSF code, you have to abide by FSF's license. If you don't want to abide by their license, you don't use FSF code. Same thing if you want to use ANY copyrighted material - GPL is a very differente kind of license from most, and some people have ideological objections to it, but that's not the point.
Fact is, that KDE violated the license (they say "only a little bit" and the "whole thing was absurd.") If FSF totally ignored that, that would set a precedent which would jeopardize the entire license. So, after KDE throws in the towel, Stallman says it's ok. THIS IS THE SAME AS FOR ANY OTHER COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL: the copyright holder can grant a license, even retroactively, but if the copyright holder doesn't do that, the copyright itself is jeopardized.
Under our current legal system, that is to say, Stallman did what he had to do.
I challenge you to do a little research. Find out the average cost in money and time it takes to develop a drug and get it to market. Now tell me where that money comes from.
I challenge you to do a little research, yourself. I've already done some. We don't know how much it takes to develop a drug and bring it to market. The drug comapanies give figures like $200 to $400 million dollars, but that includes a lot of expenses for marketing and promotion. The drug companies have consistently refused to break the figures out. We do know that the bulk of basic research is financed by the government and, to a lesser extent, by universities. The New York Times a few weeks ago estimated that between 20% and 40% of the cost of developing a drug is taxpayer money, but the private companies get 100% of the profits.
And the drug companies have nothing to complain about - they've been consistently the most profitable companies relative to their investments of any industry in the world for the last half decade or so.
Record companies have to spend a lot of money to support artists (not to PAY artists neccessarily, but to transport them and promote them and pay their legal fees and all sorts of things)
That's nonsense. The record companies ADVANCE the money to the groups for these expenses, but the musicians are the ones who bear the ultimate cost.
everyone (including napster) keeps saying that the judge ordered napster to be shut down. this is not the case. the judge ordered them to make sure no one is trading copyrighted material
Right and then Boies told the judge that there was no way that Napster could do that without shutting down, that the RIAA couldn't even come up with an accurate list of copyrighted material after having several people work on a SMALL subset of traded material for several days, so it's impossible for Napster to do that in real time. The judge responded that she was sure that the clever people who came up with Napster could find a way to do it. This is according to the NPR report. I hope the reporters got this wrong, because if not, the Judge Patel is living in an alternate universe with hostile intent on ours.
At the end of the day I see no reason why nudity is so frowned upon in the USA.
It's not about protecting children - obviously. Real young 'uns think that sex is icky (when they think about it at all); older ones are already drenched in hormones. It's the grownups who are nervous or scared and are using "protecting kids" as an excuse to avoid deal with their own problems. A lot of popular U.S. culture hasn't outgrown its roots in puritanism and religious psychosis.
Bush can order his attorney general not to pursue the case or, more probably, to settle on terms that MS won't find too, um, unsettling. That's what Reagan did with the IBM case, much to the disgust of a lot of the career civil servants in the anti-trust division of the Justice Department (a lot of whom quit). That still leaves MS starting at the state suits and all the private, civil suits, but there's no getting around the fact that the feds are the biggies, since they're the only ones that can order a reorganization or breakup. (Well, technically, the state of Washington can revoke MS's corporate charter, but nobody's suggesting that, alas.)
"'If we spend substantial money to build up a site, why should they be able to take that and build their business on the backs of our hard work?' Ticketmaster attorney Robert Platt argued." That's so nifty. They say point blank that the way the legal system should work is that the highest bidder wins. I guess they're going to try and reinstate the complaint because they feel they didn't get their money's worth.
All these companies are corporations, which are chartered by governments. The Disney CORPORATION evidently expects to maintain its Mickey Mouse copyright in perpetuity. As the not-very-socialist Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist once wrote: Corporations have one advantage over individuals - they don't die. Corporations *are* government subsidies. They exist to provide extraordinary legal protection to their officers and sharholders. To say that they "own" anything is a legal fiction - in fact, they're considered "fictious persons" under the law. They have no natural proprietary rights whatsoever, because they are not what the legal types call "natural persons."
Great, until some corporation decides to copyright
on
RNA Computer
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· Score: 1
have to pay license fees to use RNA, it will be illegal to try to "read" it, even in Norway, etc. etc. They've already staked out a proprietary claim on information in the human genome, and this RNA computer has some SERIOUS PROFIT-MAKING POTENTIAL.
Large parts of the US of A were conquered by military action - that is, paid for by the Federal Government (with a complicated system of forts and shock trooops to guard the civilian settlers, etc., etc., etc.). Some of the US of A was bought with Federal money (for ex. a strip of southern Arizona + New Mexico, including present-day Tucson). Somewhere along the way, people got the idea that this land was their "private property," and started fencing it in and building housing developments, etc. Since these people had a huge influence on government, they got the force of the law behind them (zoning regs, etc), and even got outright subsidies (roads, built with general tax revenue). That's exactly what's happening on the internet now.
The situation with land today is that large corporations control most of it, and are trying to gobble up the rest, but it's a big country, and there will probably always be niches for those who don't want to toe the corporate line. Of course, "private property" is a fetish. Anyone who questions it is crank, and nevermind that almost no private land in this country was originally gotten *EXCEPT* with public subsidies.
The first thing to realize is that a corporation is a government-subsidized entity. Corporations are chartered by governments, and their officers and shareholders are given extraordinary legal protection. (If a corporation sues you and wins, you can lose your retirement fund, your savings, your everything. If you sue a corporation and win, the corporate officers just pass the bill to the corporation; their personal fortunes aren't at risk.) That's the reason corporations exist. Their enormous wealth, accumulated over lifetimes (unlike people, corporations don't have to die), gives them extraordinary influence on the governments that created them. Uh oh, I sense a positive feedback loop.
And yes, first post, goddamit, and before my morning cofffeee.
Slashdot Mirror
True, but technology is the means, not the reason. The reason that their business model fails is that they are parasites. The self-proclaimed "content providers" don't produce any content. They buy it (or steal it, usually ripping off the musicians), package it, advertise it, and distribute it.. Technology threatens to make them superfluous, or at least less important than they were. If they actually did anything useful, technology wouldn't be a threat.
/. readers have had another prequel to this with the attack of Barney, the purple Tyrannosaurus rex.
... it gives a whole new meaning to the term "vaporware."
Oh yeah, 200 MB is much faster than 1GB.
Nonsense. If Ford were just pissed they could've blocked access to their site from fuckgeneralmotors.com. Would've taken 2 minutes if they were slow. Instead they reach for the lawyers. They're not concerned about their trademark, they were trying to establish a precedent they could use to intimidate others.
... everything looks like a nail. "We cannot find anything else to explain it," said EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGST Tibor Gant. There are actually lots of seasonal changes on Mars that make colors and things - geologists and meteorologists have lots of explanations for them.
Aborted fetuses have nothing to do with this. Period. Does that end the discussion?
No? Bush was struggling with the political fallout from^H^H^H^H^H^H^H the difficult moral question of eggs which were fertilized in laboratories. Now, your average female of breeding age flushes dozens of fertilized eggs down the toilet every month, or maybe chucks them in the trash. Very, very, very few fertilized eggs actually wind up becoming babies. If it were possible to strain menstrual blood for fertilized eggs (it isn't for a number of reasons, not all of them gross), would there be some great moral question there? I don't see it.
Favorite quote: "'There was an audible buzz in the room' when Dr. Kraut started to discuss his findings." (The audible buzzes are more pesky than the inaudible ones.) Sounds like Dr Kraut's colleagues found it more interesting to talk among themselves than to listen to him.
Second-favorite quote: "I like to be influenced by the nature of the data rather than having strong preconceptions." Translation: "I have no idea what my preconceptions are, so rather than going through the hard work of sorting them out, I'll just pretend I don't have any."
Look - two studies by Dr Kraut come to opposite conclusions and Dr Kraut (I'm not making this up!) explains this by saying that the research subjects themselves changed in the interim. Why is anybody taking this seriously?
It's different because Amazon was violating their own privacy policy. They stated clearly that they would aggregate the information and not use it to identify individual customers. They lied. They were reprimanded by the FTC for being deceptive, not for being intrusive.
Uighur isn't Indo-European; it's Turkic. There *were* Indo-European speakers in Western China. Their language was Tokharian (actually two varieties, unimaginately named Tokharian A and Tokharian B). Sometimes it's spelled "Tocharian" for extra excitement. It's known from sixth-century manuscripts discovered in Chinese Turkestan.
mirrors:
http://near-mirror.jpl.nasa.gov/news/index.html
http://near-mirror.boulder.swri.edu/news/index.h tm l
The subscription fee was negociated with the record companies in return for the companies' dropping their suit that threatened to put Napster permanently out of business. There isn't anybody left to file suit.
... there's lots of (classical) music in easy-to-read editions that's out of copyright. Pretty much everything published by Dover, for example - these are repros of 19th-century editions (for ex., the Bach-Gesellschaft ed. of Bach's complete works). Take a look at the copyright notices in any Dover edition - the preface (if there is one) will be copyrighted, but the music itself won't be. Incidentally, I often play from facsimiles of composer's autographs or 1st editions if I have them (Fuzeau sells some very cheaply). You have to learn some weird clefs, but they're basically legible, of course - the composers (and whomever they wrote for) could read them perfectly well. Stuart Frankel, Ph.D., musicology (that plus 50 cents will get you a VERY SMALL cup of coffee)
It's due to privatization. The government-regulated system used to work pretty ok. Not perfectly, but pretty ok. The 30 (mostly small) municipally owned power companies in California still work ok. One of them is very large, Los Angeles's; this is selling power to the rest of the state, but of course doesn't have enough to power all of California. It's precisely the private companies that the juvenile Ayn Randians (sorry about the redundancy) have such wet dreams about that aren't able to deliver the goods. They are slurping up huge profits, though.
But where Suck goes wrong is assuming that the U.S. legal system rules the world. We're trying to impose it on the world, or at the least "important" part which is that the government should act as the paid agents of multi-national corporations, but haven't managed to succeed quite yet.
Fact is, that KDE violated the license (they say "only a little bit" and the "whole thing was absurd.") If FSF totally ignored that, that would set a precedent which would jeopardize the entire license. So, after KDE throws in the towel, Stallman says it's ok. THIS IS THE SAME AS FOR ANY OTHER COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL: the copyright holder can grant a license, even retroactively, but if the copyright holder doesn't do that, the copyright itself is jeopardized.
Under our current legal system, that is to say, Stallman did what he had to do.
see ya!
I challenge you to do a little research, yourself. I've already done some. We don't know how much it takes to develop a drug and bring it to market. The drug comapanies give figures like $200 to $400 million dollars, but that includes a lot of expenses for marketing and promotion. The drug companies have consistently refused to break the figures out. We do know that the bulk of basic research is financed by the government and, to a lesser extent, by universities. The New York Times a few weeks ago estimated that between 20% and 40% of the cost of developing a drug is taxpayer money, but the private companies get 100% of the profits.
And the drug companies have nothing to complain about - they've been consistently the most profitable companies relative to their investments of any industry in the world for the last half decade or so.
Record companies have to spend a lot of money to support artists (not to PAY artists neccessarily, but to transport them and promote them and pay their legal fees and all sorts of things)
That's nonsense. The record companies ADVANCE the money to the groups for these expenses, but the musicians are the ones who bear the ultimate cost.
Right and then Boies told the judge that there was no way that Napster could do that without shutting down, that the RIAA couldn't even come up with an accurate list of copyrighted material after having several people work on a SMALL subset of traded material for several days, so it's impossible for Napster to do that in real time. The judge responded that she was sure that the clever people who came up with Napster could find a way to do it. This is according to the NPR report. I hope the reporters got this wrong, because if not, the Judge Patel is living in an alternate universe with hostile intent on ours.
It's not about protecting children - obviously. Real young 'uns think that sex is icky (when they think about it at all); older ones are already drenched in hormones. It's the grownups who are nervous or scared and are using "protecting kids" as an excuse to avoid deal with their own problems. A lot of popular U.S. culture hasn't outgrown its roots in puritanism and religious psychosis.
Bush can order his attorney general not to pursue the case or, more probably, to settle on terms that MS won't find too, um, unsettling. That's what Reagan did with the IBM case, much to the disgust of a lot of the career civil servants in the anti-trust division of the Justice Department (a lot of whom quit). That still leaves MS starting at the state suits and all the private, civil suits, but there's no getting around the fact that the feds are the biggies, since they're the only ones that can order a reorganization or breakup. (Well, technically, the state of Washington can revoke MS's corporate charter, but nobody's suggesting that, alas.)
"'If we spend substantial money to build up a site, why should they be able to take that and build their business on the backs of our hard work?' Ticketmaster attorney Robert Platt argued." That's so nifty. They say point blank that the way the legal system should work is that the highest bidder wins. I guess they're going to try and reinstate the complaint because they feel they didn't get their money's worth.
All these companies are corporations, which are chartered by governments. The Disney CORPORATION evidently expects to maintain its Mickey Mouse copyright in perpetuity. As the not-very-socialist Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist once wrote: Corporations have one advantage over individuals - they don't die. Corporations *are* government subsidies. They exist to provide extraordinary legal protection to their officers and sharholders. To say that they "own" anything is a legal fiction - in fact, they're considered "fictious persons" under the law. They have no natural proprietary rights whatsoever, because they are not what the legal types call "natural persons."
have to pay license fees to use RNA, it will be illegal to try to "read" it, even in Norway, etc. etc. They've already staked out a proprietary claim on information in the human genome, and this RNA computer has some SERIOUS PROFIT-MAKING POTENTIAL.
The situation with land today is that large corporations control most of it, and are trying to gobble up the rest, but it's a big country, and there will probably always be niches for those who don't want to toe the corporate line. Of course, "private property" is a fetish. Anyone who questions it is crank, and nevermind that almost no private land in this country was originally gotten *EXCEPT* with public subsidies.
The first thing to realize is that a corporation is a government-subsidized entity. Corporations are chartered by governments, and their officers and shareholders are given extraordinary legal protection. (If a corporation sues you and wins, you can lose your retirement fund, your savings, your everything. If you sue a corporation and win, the corporate officers just pass the bill to the corporation; their personal fortunes aren't at risk.) That's the reason corporations exist. Their enormous wealth, accumulated over lifetimes (unlike people, corporations don't have to die), gives them extraordinary influence on the governments that created them. Uh oh, I sense a positive feedback loop.
And yes, first post, goddamit, and before my morning cofffeee.