My local county public library system has a membership fee for anyone who lives outside the county line (and thus doesn't contribute via taxes to its upkeep).
I don't remember the exact name of it, but you'll find it as a point-of-interest on any St. Louis map. It's got a lot of great scientific exhibits, both look-but-don't-touch and hands-on. (I remember using velcro building blocks to build an arch last time I was there.) And heck, while you're in the area, go see the Arch, and the museum at the foot of it. Watch the documentary on the Arch's construction--it's a truly amazing feat of engineering.
And while you're in St. Louis, don't forget to tour the Budweiser brewery--sure they make crap beer, but it's a fascinating tour as you get to learn all about the fermentation process, see the Clydesdales, and drink some free (-as-in-) beer after it's over. And for a related fun zoological experience, visit Grant's Farm just outside of town.
Oh, come on! This isn't about "alternate distribution channels." This is about blatant copyright infringement, pure and simple. This is about people putting up entire movies, TV series, and bundles of CDs for download on a website. A website with a totally laughable "We don't have any control over what people upload, and upload of copyrighted materials is strictly prohibited!" disclaimer, I might add. (It didn't work for Napster, what made torrentse.cx think it would work for them?)
Regardless of what we might think about the morality of downloading unauthorized content (and though I do like downloading the stuff as much as the next guy, I don't think that the fact that a big corporation put it out makes it right), copyright infringement is against the law, and the copyright-holders are perfectly within their rights to shut them down.
In my opinion, the torrentse.cx people, and all the other ones who use something so blatant as a public website to distribute copyrighted and widely available media--TV series, movies taped out of movie theaters, and so on--are just asking to be prosecuted. I mean, with Kazaa at least there's a veneer of anonymity--they have to subpoena your ISP to find out who you are. But with a website, about all you have to do is whois the domain. A website is still a website, and for crying out loud nobody's distributed copyrighted mp3s from unobfuscated websites for at least five years--they learned their lesson the last time the RIAA sued mp3 distribution websites. Quite frankly, I'm surprised torrentse.cx managed to stay around as long as it did.
...I have to say that this is surely one of the dumbest examples of a dumb Slashdot discussion I have ever seen. It would be nice if Slashdot's editors could at least pretend they're trying to be unbiased. I mean, seriously--putting a story about publishers defending their rights against blatant copyright violation under the heading of "censorship"? Who are they trying to kid, here?
Because that is definitely what this is. Putting any unauthorized non-parody derivative work on the web is every bit!as much a violation of copyright as putting the Harry Potter ebooks on Kazaa. Frankly, I'm surprised that the German translators are doing this publicly, given that, as prior Slashdot stories have shown, apparently in Germany anybody or his dog can sue for copyright violation on behalf of a copyright owner without needing the owner's approval or even knowledge beforehand.
Funny thing is, as the article itself points out, the hype came after the books, and from the other readers instead of the publishers. It's the literary equivalent of the Slashdot effect.
The RIAA's lawsuit tactics are not surprising to me, nor are they particularly new. We've actually seen this whole thing happen at least once already.
Way back in the early days of MP3 swapping, before anyone had ever come up with the idea of peer-to-peer, there used to be a lot of pirate mp3 FTP servers and webpages, there for the taking. I remember using a Windows web spider program called MP3Wolf that scanned the web for mp3 file links and listed them for you to choose from and download. I remember when about a zillion mp3s popped right up in the list, right there for the taking.
But then the RIAA and other powers-that-be started suing folks who ran those websites...and almost overnight, MP3Wolf started turning up zip. The RIAA didn't sue everybody running such a site...but they started suing enough of them that word got around it was distinctly hazardous to one's financial health to run an open mp3 download site...so the mp3s retreated onto IRC channels, leech-ratio FTP sites, and, on the web, behind a maze of warez site lists (of lists of lists of lists of sites, if you were lucky; if not, toss in a few more "lists of" in the middle), pop-up ads, and computer-killing pop-up browser window storms, and it was almost impossible to find a direct link to any mp3 files on the web, because if you could find it, so could the RIAA.
A friend of mine put it that the RIAA and the file swappers had reached a sort of de facto agreement: the swappers made the files nearly impossible to retrieve, and the RIAA pretended not to notice them. A balance was struck, and equilibrium was maintained. Until peer-to-peer came along and knocked the whole thing into a cocked hat.
Well, it's happening again. Granted, it's taking a bit longer than it did back then, as the record companies couldn't directly attack the legality of webpages and FTP sites so they had to cut right to the chase, but I think we're going to see a dramatic decline in the quantity and selection of songs flying around on KaZaa as the chilling effect brought on by the first round of lawsuits hits. Rhetoric of "dammit, we have a right to steal music! And it's not 'stealing' anyway because of (car analogy, furniture analogy)" Slashdotters notwithstanding, most file-sharers out there would rather not be prosecuted, even if they think they aren't doing anything wrong. If you don't know who's going to get slammed with a lawsuit, then you're not going to risk being one of them. And that's what the RIAA is after.
It won't be the end of it, of course; in a couple years or so, folks will come up with the next file-sharing paradigm (perhaps something Freenet-style, where there's almost no way to tell who's sharing what) and do an end-run around these lawsuits. And then the RIAA will try to work out how to counter that. And so it goes. To quote a Shirley Bassey/Propellerheads song that's floating around out there on peer to peer right now, "That's just a little bit of history repeating."
For what it's worth, I've been contacted by their customer service dept now and they reset my account so I could re-enter my card info. We'll see what happens now.
I just signed up for Greencine and found something annoying. Apparently I must have made an error in my credit card information when I signed up, because I got an email notice that it rejected...and now I'm expected to contact them via email to correct that information--and until I do, I'm locked out of the greencine.com website so I can't get in and correct it there.
They'd damn well better have some method of me getting my card number to them that is not in the clear over email if they want to keep my business.
Uh...except for in states where you don't have more than one LATA, typically there are intra-LATA charges no matter what phone company you're with. It's called Local Toll calling.
I suppose it could be considered a sort of short cut to avoid having to do a credit check, as major phone companies tend to do credit checks before they provide local service. Or proof that you were established where you said you were. Or something.
The problem with getting new numbers, or moving numbers, when you're a CLEC like MCI is that no matter what you do, you have to work through the repair department of the local Bell company, who may or may not be inclined to cooperate. Sort of like how wearing thick gloves reduces your dexterity considerably. Which is why the standard timeframe for such things is "up to 60 days." Most customers aren't too pleased about that.
If I wanted to get MCI service installed, I'd have the local company install it and then call MCI to switch it over. If I wanted to move my MCI number to a new location, I'd migrate the local service back to the Bell company, have them move me, then migrate back to MCI. I can understand that's an awful lot of rigamarole for someone to want to go through, though.
See if you can hitch a ride to Springfield, MO, and apply there; they seem to be hiring customer service reps for Zorro/Small Business like there's no tomorrow. And former MCI-ness can surely only count positively, especially if the decision to leave wasn't yours.
Technically, only about $4 of that $10 would be taxes; $6 of it would be the Network Access Fee, which is not a tax but a flat fee that anyone who has a phone line ends up paying. It compensates the local company for the cost of maintaining the hardware that makes up the phone network.
Another good reason to have no landline whatsoever and go with cablemodem.
I work for MCI, in a customer service call center. (Though what I say here is my own personal opinion; I don't speak for the company.) From what they tell us, that rep wasn't doing his job properly. Since, even if the other company does have a better rate, we're still supposed to try offering a promotion, like free Saturdays or some amount off their next invoice, to get them to switch anyway.
It's too bad, really, that I don't use land-line phone and don't make that many long distance calls; I'd be happy to use MCI's $50-60 (not including taxes & surcharges) Neighborhood Complete plan that makes every call in the USA the equivalent in cost of a local call. (Especially since, for $50 on top of that, I could get 256kilobit/1.5 megabit DSL, iffenwhen it becomes available in my area, and I would also get a $25/mo discount for MCI service.) But I don't really call that much, and it'd be ridiculous to spend that amount of money on a landline when I already get free LD with my cellphone.
Yeah. The funniest thing about that article is that it doesn't devote any attention at all to the actual merits of the case. It dismisses Linux zealots as "crunchies" (heh, as if they were some sort of granola hippies or something) who are invariably wrong simply because they're zealots.
Funny, you would think a business publication would be more aware of the stock market aphorism "past performance is no indicator of future results."
Thanks. I was rather proud of that one myself. I'm moderately disappointed that they changed the subject line as I submitted it, though. "Rocket eBook Crashes, Burns" reads much better. ("rocket...crashes, burns").
Furthermore, this is one hell of a big country, and the vast majority of its surface area is rural. How are your network signals gonna propagate without nodes in the network to pass them on? Heck, you can't get cellular signals everywhere, and those are paid networks. How are you gonna get signals all the way from California to New York with all that rurality in between?
Yeah, and while we're at it, what's the point of the government subsidizing a grand postal network that delivers to everyone in the country, so you can send a letter to or from even the most rural of locations for little more than 1/3 of a dollar? Do you know just how much more economical and profitable it would be for the postal service not to deliver to those areas?
The only reason we have a postal service at all is because it's a government-mandated and subsidized monopoly. If we had businesses doing it, you can bet that they'd stick to the cities where all the money is, and all those people out in the country can just drive to the nearest population center to post their letters. Likewise with the phone service. Who's going to want to string thousands of miles of cable out to hicksville if they don't have a darned good economic reason? But for network effects, and for public safety (can't call 911 if there's no phone out there), it's important that folks everywhere have at least the opportunity to get phone service.
Maybe someday, after it's considered more of a necessity of life the way that mail and phone service are now, they'll subsidize high-speed Internet to rural communities. Wouldn't that be something?
...or at least, that's what my employers at the phone company have told me. At least insofar as we pass it on to the customers, it's a surcharge, because the govt doesn't charge the phone customers directly--it charges the telcos, and we have the right to decide to pass that on to our customers or not.
And incidentally, it could be higher than 9.1%. Until a few months ago, it was 10.5%. It's currently 9.1% for residential customers, 9.3% for businesses.
Re:Dvorak Predicts Death of Linux
on
SCO SCO SCO!
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· Score: 1
As long as we're linking net pundits, here's Cringely's latest Pulpit on the SCO/IBM thingie. He has an interesting take on the rationale behind Microsoft's licensing from SCO.
But even if it were rewritten, the source of every kernel all the way back to the beginning is still out there for FTP from a zillion servers. So it's not like they'd have any difficulty showing that Linux did contain said code.
Re:you *can* read the salon story freely...
on
SCO SCO SCO!
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· Score: 1
And it seems to me to be rather bad grace on the part of the story submitter/editor in not linking to the Salon story anyway, given that it's easy enough to read it for free.
Slashdot Mirror
My local county public library system has a membership fee for anyone who lives outside the county line (and thus doesn't contribute via taxes to its upkeep).
I don't remember the exact name of it, but you'll find it as a point-of-interest on any St. Louis map. It's got a lot of great scientific exhibits, both look-but-don't-touch and hands-on. (I remember using velcro building blocks to build an arch last time I was there.) And heck, while you're in the area, go see the Arch, and the museum at the foot of it. Watch the documentary on the Arch's construction--it's a truly amazing feat of engineering.
And while you're in St. Louis, don't forget to tour the Budweiser brewery--sure they make crap beer, but it's a fascinating tour as you get to learn all about the fermentation process, see the Clydesdales, and drink some free (-as-in-) beer after it's over. And for a related fun zoological experience, visit Grant's Farm just outside of town.
Didn't your mama ever tell you "two wrongs don't make a right"?
Oh, come on! This isn't about "alternate distribution channels." This is about blatant copyright infringement, pure and simple. This is about people putting up entire movies, TV series, and bundles of CDs for download on a website. A website with a totally laughable "We don't have any control over what people upload, and upload of copyrighted materials is strictly prohibited!" disclaimer, I might add. (It didn't work for Napster, what made torrentse.cx think it would work for them?)
Regardless of what we might think about the morality of downloading unauthorized content (and though I do like downloading the stuff as much as the next guy, I don't think that the fact that a big corporation put it out makes it right), copyright infringement is against the law, and the copyright-holders are perfectly within their rights to shut them down.
In my opinion, the torrentse.cx people, and all the other ones who use something so blatant as a public website to distribute copyrighted and widely available media--TV series, movies taped out of movie theaters, and so on--are just asking to be prosecuted. I mean, with Kazaa at least there's a veneer of anonymity--they have to subpoena your ISP to find out who you are. But with a website, about all you have to do is whois the domain. A website is still a website, and for crying out loud nobody's distributed copyrighted mp3s from unobfuscated websites for at least five years--they learned their lesson the last time the RIAA sued mp3 distribution websites. Quite frankly, I'm surprised torrentse.cx managed to stay around as long as it did.
...I have to say that this is surely one of the dumbest examples of a dumb Slashdot discussion I have ever seen. It would be nice if Slashdot's editors could at least pretend they're trying to be unbiased. I mean, seriously--putting a story about publishers defending their rights against blatant copyright violation under the heading of "censorship"? Who are they trying to kid, here?
Because that is definitely what this is. Putting any unauthorized non-parody derivative work on the web is every bit!as much a violation of copyright as putting the Harry Potter ebooks on Kazaa. Frankly, I'm surprised that the German translators are doing this publicly, given that, as prior Slashdot stories have shown, apparently in Germany anybody or his dog can sue for copyright violation on behalf of a copyright owner without needing the owner's approval or even knowledge beforehand.
"When we get the transient facts, we will feel the info high..."
Funny thing is, as the article itself points out, the hype came after the books, and from the other readers instead of the publishers. It's the literary equivalent of the Slashdot effect.
The RIAA's lawsuit tactics are not surprising to me, nor are they particularly new. We've actually seen this whole thing happen at least once already.
Way back in the early days of MP3 swapping, before anyone had ever come up with the idea of peer-to-peer, there used to be a lot of pirate mp3 FTP servers and webpages, there for the taking. I remember using a Windows web spider program called MP3Wolf that scanned the web for mp3 file links and listed them for you to choose from and download. I remember when about a zillion mp3s popped right up in the list, right there for the taking.
But then the RIAA and other powers-that-be started suing folks who ran those websites...and almost overnight, MP3Wolf started turning up zip. The RIAA didn't sue everybody running such a site...but they started suing enough of them that word got around it was distinctly hazardous to one's financial health to run an open mp3 download site...so the mp3s retreated onto IRC channels, leech-ratio FTP sites, and, on the web, behind a maze of warez site lists (of lists of lists of lists of sites, if you were lucky; if not, toss in a few more "lists of" in the middle), pop-up ads, and computer-killing pop-up browser window storms, and it was almost impossible to find a direct link to any mp3 files on the web, because if you could find it, so could the RIAA.
A friend of mine put it that the RIAA and the file swappers had reached a sort of de facto agreement: the swappers made the files nearly impossible to retrieve, and the RIAA pretended not to notice them. A balance was struck, and equilibrium was maintained. Until peer-to-peer came along and knocked the whole thing into a cocked hat.
Well, it's happening again. Granted, it's taking a bit longer than it did back then, as the record companies couldn't directly attack the legality of webpages and FTP sites so they had to cut right to the chase, but I think we're going to see a dramatic decline in the quantity and selection of songs flying around on KaZaa as the chilling effect brought on by the first round of lawsuits hits. Rhetoric of "dammit, we have a right to steal music! And it's not 'stealing' anyway because of (car analogy, furniture analogy)" Slashdotters notwithstanding, most file-sharers out there would rather not be prosecuted, even if they think they aren't doing anything wrong. If you don't know who's going to get slammed with a lawsuit, then you're not going to risk being one of them. And that's what the RIAA is after.
It won't be the end of it, of course; in a couple years or so, folks will come up with the next file-sharing paradigm (perhaps something Freenet-style, where there's almost no way to tell who's sharing what) and do an end-run around these lawsuits. And then the RIAA will try to work out how to counter that. And so it goes. To quote a Shirley Bassey/Propellerheads song that's floating around out there on peer to peer right now, "That's just a little bit of history repeating."
For what it's worth, I've been contacted by their customer service dept now and they reset my account so I could re-enter my card info. We'll see what happens now.
I just signed up for Greencine and found something annoying. Apparently I must have made an error in my credit card information when I signed up, because I got an email notice that it rejected...and now I'm expected to contact them via email to correct that information--and until I do, I'm locked out of the greencine.com website so I can't get in and correct it there.
They'd damn well better have some method of me getting my card number to them that is not in the clear over email if they want to keep my business.
All of them.
Uh...except for in states where you don't have more than one LATA, typically there are intra-LATA charges no matter what phone company you're with. It's called Local Toll calling.
I suppose it could be considered a sort of short cut to avoid having to do a credit check, as major phone companies tend to do credit checks before they provide local service. Or proof that you were established where you said you were. Or something.
The problem with getting new numbers, or moving numbers, when you're a CLEC like MCI is that no matter what you do, you have to work through the repair department of the local Bell company, who may or may not be inclined to cooperate. Sort of like how wearing thick gloves reduces your dexterity considerably. Which is why the standard timeframe for such things is "up to 60 days." Most customers aren't too pleased about that.
If I wanted to get MCI service installed, I'd have the local company install it and then call MCI to switch it over. If I wanted to move my MCI number to a new location, I'd migrate the local service back to the Bell company, have them move me, then migrate back to MCI. I can understand that's an awful lot of rigamarole for someone to want to go through, though.
See if you can hitch a ride to Springfield, MO, and apply there; they seem to be hiring customer service reps for Zorro/Small Business like there's no tomorrow. And former MCI-ness can surely only count positively, especially if the decision to leave wasn't yours.
Technically, only about $4 of that $10 would be taxes; $6 of it would be the Network Access Fee, which is not a tax but a flat fee that anyone who has a phone line ends up paying. It compensates the local company for the cost of maintaining the hardware that makes up the phone network.
Another good reason to have no landline whatsoever and go with cablemodem.
I work for MCI, in a customer service call center. (Though what I say here is my own personal opinion; I don't speak for the company.) From what they tell us, that rep wasn't doing his job properly. Since, even if the other company does have a better rate, we're still supposed to try offering a promotion, like free Saturdays or some amount off their next invoice, to get them to switch anyway.
It's too bad, really, that I don't use land-line phone and don't make that many long distance calls; I'd be happy to use MCI's $50-60 (not including taxes & surcharges) Neighborhood Complete plan that makes every call in the USA the equivalent in cost of a local call. (Especially since, for $50 on top of that, I could get 256kilobit/1.5 megabit DSL, iffenwhen it becomes available in my area, and I would also get a $25/mo discount for MCI service.) But I don't really call that much, and it'd be ridiculous to spend that amount of money on a landline when I already get free LD with my cellphone.
Yeah. The funniest thing about that article is that it doesn't devote any attention at all to the actual merits of the case. It dismisses Linux zealots as "crunchies" (heh, as if they were some sort of granola hippies or something) who are invariably wrong simply because they're zealots.
Funny, you would think a business publication would be more aware of the stock market aphorism "past performance is no indicator of future results."
Thanks. I was rather proud of that one myself. I'm moderately disappointed that they changed the subject line as I submitted it, though. "Rocket eBook Crashes, Burns" reads much better. ("rocket...crashes, burns").
Furthermore, this is one hell of a big country, and the vast majority of its surface area is rural. How are your network signals gonna propagate without nodes in the network to pass them on? Heck, you can't get cellular signals everywhere, and those are paid networks. How are you gonna get signals all the way from California to New York with all that rurality in between?
Yeah, and while we're at it, what's the point of the government subsidizing a grand postal network that delivers to everyone in the country, so you can send a letter to or from even the most rural of locations for little more than 1/3 of a dollar? Do you know just how much more economical and profitable it would be for the postal service not to deliver to those areas?
The only reason we have a postal service at all is because it's a government-mandated and subsidized monopoly. If we had businesses doing it, you can bet that they'd stick to the cities where all the money is, and all those people out in the country can just drive to the nearest population center to post their letters. Likewise with the phone service. Who's going to want to string thousands of miles of cable out to hicksville if they don't have a darned good economic reason? But for network effects, and for public safety (can't call 911 if there's no phone out there), it's important that folks everywhere have at least the opportunity to get phone service.
Maybe someday, after it's considered more of a necessity of life the way that mail and phone service are now, they'll subsidize high-speed Internet to rural communities. Wouldn't that be something?
...or at least, that's what my employers at the phone company have told me. At least insofar as we pass it on to the customers, it's a surcharge, because the govt doesn't charge the phone customers directly--it charges the telcos, and we have the right to decide to pass that on to our customers or not.
And incidentally, it could be higher than 9.1%. Until a few months ago, it was 10.5%. It's currently 9.1% for residential customers, 9.3% for businesses.
As long as we're linking net pundits, here's Cringely's latest Pulpit on the SCO/IBM thingie. He has an interesting take on the rationale behind Microsoft's licensing from SCO.
But even if it were rewritten, the source of every kernel all the way back to the beginning is still out there for FTP from a zillion servers. So it's not like they'd have any difficulty showing that Linux did contain said code.
And it seems to me to be rather bad grace on the part of the story submitter/editor in not linking to the Salon story anyway, given that it's easy enough to read it for free.