While this sounds like a good idea, any suit like this will be very tough to prosecute. In order to prove the case, you are going to have to show that the major labels are working in concert to fix prices. This may or may not be the case. A more interesting bit of action would be better aimed at the various middlemen like distributors and retailers. The frustrating thing about the price of music is not knowing just where the mark up over reasonable profit comes in. I'd lke to know just who is working with whom to fix prices.
In any case, it is just feasible that the RIAA could face a racketeering charge for its intimidation of the users of new technology. The way I see it is that technology like Napster and Gnutella are essentially file sharing technologies which can be used to distribute and trade all sorts of media--as long as its digital. So, the RIAA sues and bullies the creators of the software, and networks who happen to have users of Napster. This a very thin case in my book because neither of the parties mentioned is responsible for the illicit trade. Its the users. Moreover its not any user of Napster that can be prosecuted, its specifically the ones who trace music illegally. Compare this to the blanket attacks by the RIAA.
Boy, I's sure like to know who gave Katz the figures he cited in the beginning of his piece. I like even more to know who gives that kind of deal. The figure of 50 cents for a cd is ludicrous. If you press in the neighborhood of 10,000 cds, most production houses will charge you about $1.00 per cd. Although this goes down if you do your own mastering, which means you pay the mastering costs yourself. Then you have to pay for art and that runs a fair amount of money. Add to that the legal costs associated with copyrights and trademarks and all that, and you get a cost that comes closer to $2.00 per cd. Of course, this scales better the bigger the label, but there's only so far those economies can go. That said, labels take the real hit in going from production to distribtion, and consumers take the hit from distribution to retail. Like I said in my earlier post to Katz first article, the distributor ain't gonna give a label much better than $6.00 per cd to the label, even if it does get marked up to $17 bucks at retail. This is where your money goes folks: to the middle men.
Enter MP3s, or whatever the digital media du jour is. The enterprising label invests in some decent servers, eliminates the physical production costs, cuts out the middlemen, and presto: Your costs go way down, and your profits go up. People come directly to you site and pay you money directly. And, the best part is that you can deal with other web sites as retailers with no friggin distributor, increasing the availablity of your artists works, while keeping costs real low. If you're smart, you pass this onto the consumer through something like a music subscription service where you grant download rights for a period for a reasonable fee, or you just price stuff real low. For instance, would you rather pay say $5.00 for your favorite artists mp3 collection and burn your own CD, or would you rather pirate it and watch the poor fool go broke? I'm optimistic that with reasonable prices, and free sample pieces, and innovative retail services--like a subscription service--that people would buy into the system. I see this whole digital media thing going the same way that cassettes did; ultimately increasing profits. Two things have to happen first: People need to realize that artists and producers use their money to make works that they put out. And, the music producers have got to realize that the current prices for physical media are outrageous and that they can reduce the costs asociated with physical reproduction by going digital.
Sure Metallica and that other group are big artists with lots of money, but most musicians are not. I don't know if the Slashdot crowd realizes how marginal the music business is for the most part. The big names and big labels are indeed rolling in cash and could use a good loosening up. Most musicians, even fairly well known ones, do not fall into this category. To give you an idea on what the artist gets back, the average rate I've been quoted by pro musicians and industry reps alike is 10% of the wholesale price. Now, the avergage CD retails for something like $14-16 these days, but the best you're gonna get a distributor to go for is $6.00. So, the label sells the cd to the distributor for $6.00 and the the distributor marks it up when they sell it to the retailer, and so on til you wind up paying $16 for a cd these days. The artist gets a whopping sixty cents out of that. Even if they sell like 10,000 cds they only get $6000 out if it. That's pretty damn pathetic if you're trying to eat. Most bands and musicians make their real money touring. Now y'all come in and rip the music, burn your own cds and never spend a cent. Pretty good for you, but for they guy trying to make living with his art, that's really bad.
That said, this situation still isn't Napster's fault. Napster is at worst a file sharing program. Infact, the only reason I could see for banning Napster is the traffic load it can put on network--that's why the UofM banned it here. People have got to get away from the free ride mentality and respect the needs of the musicans they listen to. As a music producer myself, I find the notion of people trading my artists music freely a bit annoying. In my case, I run a real marginal operation and my artists are basically using proceeds from their music to finance their equipment. Free trading like this can break my operation and shutdown my artists. Even larger labels will run into this problem and will dump anyone who can't move CDs, leaving us with nothing besides, oh, the 'Back Street Boys' or whatever trash they decide to push tomorrow.
How do we resolove this situation? First look at the costs for producing an album run of 1000 cds. I'll use my own cost structure as an example. Your mileage will vary. I return 10% of revenue to my artists on the first pressing and increase the share the more we sell. Now lets get some real cost figures here:
Label Art: $500--and only because I happen to know the artist.
Mastering: $500--real easy to master electronica.
Reproducion:$2500--includes packaging and UPC code.
Legal fees $500--copy right and trademark stuff
Total Cost: $4000
Now, I'll turn around and sell that to someone like Amazon or Orhcard--a distributor--for something on the order of $6000 or $7000 depending on how much I wanna soak the customer for. If, and that is the big question, I sell if all, I get back $1400 to $2400. The artist gets $600 or $700. If we get into a second run, prices go down and profits increase. The biggest cost here is the price of reproduction onto physical media. If I could cut that out, I could save $2500. Now, if I can cut out the middleman, I could retain more of my investment. So, selling MP3 downloads is looking real attractive. I still need to work on the figures, but I think MP3 downloads could go down to $3.00 for an entire album. So, looked at one way, the optimistic way, technology like MP3s and Napster even, could represent an opportunity to the industry and a deal for fans.
Re:Maybe genuinely secure laptops make more sense.
on
Laptop Lojack?
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· Score: 1
You don't even have to go as far as encrypting the file system. You can just encrypt the files themselves. Although, that migth still leave plaintext copies laying around in various caches when the user decrypts them to do work. Never mind, encrypted files systems are the way to go on this. What all these incidents leave me wondering is where did the "Orange Book" go? I think carrying info in plaintext outside of the office violates information security guidelines outlined in that document. I think rather than idiot proofing things, hte better counter measure in intel agencies and any organization which deals in senstitive material is to get rid of the idiots. The only way to do that is establish clear information security rules, train, and enforce rigoursly. Lets face it, the value of a laptop is minimal--especially if its insured--compared to the value of the data on it.
Linux may be a work in progress, but at least its progressing. Windows has been stagnating for a long time. I mean, Microsoft is the only party--at least til the penalty phase is complete--that can modify and check its source for bugs and vulnerablities. Linux on the other hand has a small army of people making it better with each revision. All that seems to happen when I upgrade windows is that it takes up more drive space and reserves more memory for itself.
One of the weirdest concerts I have every been to was one where the punk band had a theremin player. Its was cool, this guy had put together a theremin small enough to strap on like a guitar. I can't even begin to describe 'Holiday in Cambodia' as played on a theremin.
Yeah, the bulk of the music out these days is overproduced crap put out by uninspired corp execs, and yes a lot of it is perpetrated with a synth. Is it the Snyth's fault? Nope, the synth is a tool. Whether its tool for evil or good is up to the user. I reccomend exploring some of Tangerine Dream's work--Miracle Mile is personal fav--, Vangelis, Kraftwerk, of course Jean Michaeil Jarre. I also like the Moog Cookbook's take on various pop tunes.
The experiment in which participants bombarded one and other with white noise is suggestive, but may not be measuring agression. Instead it may be measuring acquired reflexes. In 3-D shooters like Wolfenstein, you learn to react quickly to ambush situations, and you learn that it takes more than one hit to put a bad guy down. Therefore, it stands to reason that anyone who's been playing a 3-D shooter will be quicker on any test involving reaction and reflex. It also stands to reason that by virtue of having learned to shoot an opponent several times by keeping the fire key pressed down, the particpant will tend to hold the 'punishment' button down longer. This is a tricky thing to measure. This test may measure agressiveness in most instances, but in dealing with 3d shooter games, especially those that use the keyboard as a controller, the test may simply be measuring a profeciency in game playing which may not indicate agressive tendancies. The rest of the study is very interesting, and merits more research into the connection especially into the behaviors exhbited by different age groups.
I don't think it was being warm blooded which allowed the ancestors of mammals to survive, it was size. If I remember my palentology right--not likely since I have degree in physics--about the only critters to survive the extinction were tiny ones. This makes a bit of sense if you think about it in terms of the asteroid collison. The ejecta probably created a huge cloud of dust in hte atmosphere, blocking sunlight, causing a huge plant die off. The only critters that could survive that environment were ones with minimal food requirments.
Y'know, I was going to rip into this over the hill fool. Then I read the article. Too bad his comments were edited down and chopped. I would have liked to hear more of what he said, just so I felt sure I understood his posistion. He's pointing out that libraries are focal points of the physical world community and that we should be reluctant to give traditional libraries up. He's also saying that the Internet has a very short history compared to print. There's some serious questions about the longevity of material in digital format. First, there's the question of how to read the format a bit down the road, then there's issues of the media decay. For instance, a well kept book written on acid free--better yet hemp--paper, will last over a hundred years. A CD will undergo chemical changes that render the plastic opaque within twenty years. Then there's the issue of what happens to the availablity of virtual works. Take for example the Hornet server. Anyone form the demo/tracking scene a few years back remembers this place. It was host to some of the most original music and art on the net. Fans and artists simply assumed it would be around forever. Then one day, the guy running it came to a point where he couldn't continue to do so--I don't know the details. Poof! An unique archive of artisic works is gone just like that. I think Billington is concerned with these issues and is resisting change for its own sake.
That said, I still think he's wrong. I don't know if we're all gonna be curling up with our favorite CRT to read the latest Stephen King anytime soon. Waitaminute.... Anyway, whether or not the age of the virtual novel is upon us, the net is an ideal place to distribute reference materials; the kinda materials where we turn pages to look for the fact we want to find. I also think that the web could easily replace coffee table book for that matter. As for the issue of preservation, Billington ignore the fact that preserving works for posterity is an active process that societies take because they value the result. Look back in history: One of the reason we have so many books from antiquity is that monks transcribed them from the originals and made copies by hand, and later by press. Digital media doesn't change this fact. It may even make the process of transcription easier. So, I think Billington needs to get with the times.
I'll go one better here. I've always looked at some of the MIT people with their borg style home brew wearables, and thought, now if I didn't have a full time job and still had more money than I do noew, I could make something cool like that. With this thing, they've done a lot of the hard work. Put this together with those VR glasses you see in computer catalogs and you have a lazy man's wearable. For a power supply, I'd go into Performance Bicycle's catalog and look at those NiCad and LiH batteries for bicycle lights. I don't know too much about their power characteristics, but I do know those buggers pack a lot of use time in 'em. You could fit the PC, battery and CD into a hip sack. Jand Mounteering even makes a hipsack with a set of elastic bands for securing stuff internally. Now the question of what to do with it comes up, but that's the pereninal question for wearables: what are they good for? That's someone else's problem they're still cool in the meantime. Heay, waitaminute; cameras! Ooh, the possibilities.
Another good point. The same thing is true in Detroit where the governor basically disolved the board over long standing issues of corruption. Way too strong armed in my opinion because I think the mayor and citizens were mobilizing to deal wth it. When I think of it, I know several communities in just my state where the state came in to assume control over areas with defecient test scores. Not a bad thing necessarily, but it does concentrate control and distance the decision making bodies from the people affect by their decisions. It makes it easier for the Pinkertons to pitch WAVE. So, as concerned citizes we have to be even more vigilant, and more expressive to the elected officals who make decisons. I think an issues like this needs to be brough to the school board and hte mayor's attention.
If anyone is interested, I just set up a preliminary mailing list: freakpower@umich.edu To join, send email to freakpower-request@umich.edu. Sorry for the name, but it's what popped into my head as a catchy title that wouldn't already be taken.
No doubt there's always someone higher the food chain, but the school board is the entry level. Unless pro monitoring activists can muster the support to sponsor a statewide movement, these things often--not always as M-G points out--get implemented at the local level. Opinions on issues like monitoring often vary immensely from community to community in any give state--your mileage may differ, as I'm used to states with largely urban environments. For instance in Michigan, Jackson might be for WAVE, while Ann Arbor and Detroit might be ready to secede from the state over it. Of course, every state does make decisons about education differently, but a lot does happen at the municipal level, and it is a great way to get your foot in the door.
Meanwhile the higher on the food chain point gets a little scary. The governor can issue statewide mandates that carry all the way down. I'm worried that in my state--and in quite a few others--that the governor and his administration is fundamentally disconnected from the people. Its would be all to likely a scenario for Pinkerton to market its program directly to the governor. To a lot of conservative governors, law and order, figures very highly in their worldview, and by virtue of being big and popular enough to win elections, the issues around abuse of power towards minorities is not something they canot see without help. In this case, I use the term minority to refer to anyone who exists outside of the mainstream. Lets face it, a lot of the people reading this could be considered a cultural minority. Anyway, this problem with someone higher on the foodchain being disconnected is someting to watch out for very closely. Of course, it can also be an important check and balance to short sighted school boards if those higher up are progressive. Definitely something to bear in mind in either case.
As if extremists on school boards banning the teaching of evolution wasn't enough, this WAVE thing points out how important it is to check out what's going in local school boards. The local school board is one of the most ignored public decison making entities in the entire US system of government. This is where decisons like implementing WAVE are being made and affirmed. I think we all need to locate our school board reps and write them some letters expressing our concerns. Sitting in on the open meetings is a darned good idea too. Running for school board is another really good idea. In a lot of cities and counties, board members often run unopposed due to the overall lack of interest. Great place for a concenred geek looking to get into politics to start. At the same time, this lack of interest is dangerous. Decisons to implement programs like WAVE often happen without any attention being paid. We're lucky it got noticed this time. At the same time, we have an opportunity to make a real difference here. Due to the scale involved here, your input as a citizen has a big impact, and if you should decide to run, you might get elected. It'd be good to have some technically savvy people resident in these decision making bodies. It'd be even better to have level headed, analyical people making good decisons.
Wake up folks! The NSF net was turned off about six years ago. The Internet is an instrument of the public now. It has been for a long time. There are no longer such things as outsiders. You want an exclusive little playground, fine, run a private ip network behind a firewall. That said, the newcomers need a serious education in the concepts behind references. Us academics love references because in terms of a print document it tells you where the author got his/her information and points the way to related works. The original idea on the web was to make to make this kind of research work instaneous. Want to check a reference to get more information? Click on the link. Much quicker than journal searches and inter-library loans. Now, we've gone from the Net being the playground of a few weird scientists to a medium where money changes hands. Now we have to make distinction between private and public. Fortunately, the technology exists to accomplish that. Having all the capitalists and other such unwashed barbarians on the net doesn't destroy it by any means, but it does mean we need think about things like property.
When this debate first surfaced, it had me scratching my head. The sites I run, I'm real glad to have someone hit 'em. I don't really care how they get there, just that the web statistics keep justifying the salary I get. I'd think the same thing would apply to commerce sites like E-Bay. Who care if someone out there indexes your site? It brings people to your site who will click on your banner ads, and use any fee based services you might have. It seems like the deeplinkers are actually providing a service to a lot of sites. In the real world, people make money and get perks for refering someone to a company. Why shouldn't the same thing apply on the web? If your site does have stuff you don't want people linking to, then I imagine you can protect that with a little creative javascript or something else like cgi. I've even done this on my own sites--mainly to make sure people didn't fill out a huge application form out of sequence. So, again, why are these corp people upset about deeplinking when it effectively refers customers to them?
"Has unlawful possession and use of firearms." Uhhm... Is it just me, or should yoube calling 911 emergency police and not the WAVE hotline on this one? How do law enforcement agencies feel about this? Reading the rest of the imminent warning signs, I notice that most of the acts covered are distinctly criminal in nature and are covered under the criminal code in most states. The only ones that aren't covered uniformly are detailed threats--most states regard detailed an explicit threats as a criminal act of varying degree-- and the suicidal stuff. Rage is covered under the first ammendment I guess. So the question here is why does Pinkerton want a kid to call them and not the appropriate law enforcement agency? I have to wonder what their aims really are in this case. On the other hand it'd be great to have good counseling hotline to call in and get advice on what to do with a suicidcal classmate. In any case, I simply don't think Pinkerton's really out to serve the community.
Like, Jon Katz, I too am impressed that Pinkerton has actually taken the time to read the Slashdot comments, but something in this responsiveness bothers me. That being the they're meeting with Katz. In and of itself its not a bad thing; taking the time to have face to face contact with a journalist is a good sign. However, if they believe they are speaking to a representative of the community that their program targets, they are mistaken. Katz does not represent that community even if he strongly advocates for that community. The only thing that represents the community is the community itself. The point being that Pinkerton needs to have hearings open to the public on their program. As/.ers have noted, there are serious concerns about privacy, the incentive structure, the accuracy of the reports and the impact such reporting will have on those singled out as problems. As I commented on the previous story, this reporting program does not have to be a bad thing at all; it can save lives if propoerly administered. If poorly run this program will be nothing more than Mcarthy style witch hunt aimed at a vulnerable and legally defensless culture. I cannot stress that last point enough. This program targets minors! Under the law in most states minors have very few rights and no access to due process. In the case of minors, a simple accusation is often enough to justify all manner of 'corrective' action ranging from school suspension and expulsion to compulsory mental treatment. The consequences of being falsely labeled or mistakenly labeled as a problem youth can be devastating. While parents are supposed to represent their children in such matters, the truth is that parents are often bullied by the system and even when they do stand tall, the find that there is not much they can do.
Another problem I have is with Katz himself. I'll just chalk this up to my paranoid and anti authoritarian nature. It seems that Katz is taking on the mantle of sage or religous leader for the oppressed geeks of the US. I'm just a bit worried that the meeting of minds here is nothing more than a clueless, disconnected corporation meeting with a demagogue who claims to represent the community impacted by WAVE. I would encourage people to speak up to Pinkerton as individuals rather than let Katz speak for us. He probably is fighting the good fight and all, but lets keep him honest.
Some of the values I've seen tossed around so far are ridiculous. Look at the web site as a small business. $20K/yr in earnings is pretty small. Its a healthy contribution to an overall bottom line, but it'd better be one of many projects. Look at it this way: If you're lucky you'll get five years out of your current business plan--the way the web changes I figure very lucky. So, any perspective buyer is going to want get a few years of profit on this thing. I'd figure around $60k on a site that earns $20k/yr. If I as a buyer were able to bring more traffic onto the site I'd get the value of advertising up, but thats very iffy. So, I'd be scale my offering price to something that would pay itself off in a couple of year and start earning a profit after that. The other question I'd have to ask on the business level is what does your business--the web site--produce. Right now the value of banner advertising seems to be a very cheap commodity because every one is jumping on the bandwagon. Not to mention, who knows how that market is going to change in the next single year, let alone the next several years?
Yeah, I mean its not like depression is very well understood by the vast majority of adults in this country. I made the mistake of letting an employer know that I was seeking help for depression, and, did I ever regret it. I found that the people in the office regarded me as a potential serial killer or something. I also started hearing nasty jokes told when they thought I wasn't around. I finally put a stop to it all by having my shrink write up a document "certifying" that I was sane. Did it up one of those award templates all fancy. I should have framed it. I presented that at a staff meeting and told all present that I was the only person there who was certifiably sane and that I would have no more of the jokes and ostracism. It worked suprisingly well. I was lucky. Sadly, mental illness still carries a stigma and too many people like to pretend there is no such thing as depression, or they treat it as moral failing. Or worse they fear it on the same level as demonic possession. So now we have a program that puts depressed people in an database of suspicious persons. Great. Just what we need to encourage people to go get help.
In so far as the recent episodes of school violence represent anomalies, this monitoring program is uncalled for. However, violence in US schools has been a problem. This has been especially true in the so called innter city where gangs have been the main culprits behind the violence. In my own school for instance, the existence of an anonymous hotline could stopped two nasty incidents I can think of. Lots of us knew these kids had guns and knives and those of us on the peripheries of the gangs knew something was up, but it wasn't clear who to tell, and it was less clear if we could remain anonymous. And with the gangs, this anonymity is a matter of life and death. So, yeah, having a hotline would be a good thing, but who would run it? As this is a law enforcement issue, it should be run through police and sheriff's depts with effective liason to the schools. Having a private company administer and run this type of system is a bad idea for several reasons. First, public agencies are accountable to the community--at least in theory--whereas private companies are not. They are accountable only to their owners; owners whose interests may or may not conflict with the community interests. Second, private programs like this can be set up and marketed with no public input. And, that brings up the question or just what the true aim of the program is. Lastly, there's the question of oversight: Who checks up on WAVE to make sure they aren't defaming individuals? As a private program, no one does.
The last point, I want to make to the/. community is don't take Katz' word for this. He is essentially writing an opionon piece here, even if it does bring some necessary information. Like any bit of journalism these days, you cannot take it at face value. Before condemning this program out of hand, check it out. Find out more and make your own judgements. My own comments are merely first impressions based on the article. I need to find out more to really judge. Still, if Katz is right, this program is evil on the level of Mcarthyism. Thats the closest precedent we have to this thing.
Reading the abstract, this guy is not patenting faster than light anything. He's patenting electro magnetic waves. At least thats if you read the abstract. Go into the background and summary and you get way deep into nutdom here. If I understand the patent right, he's saying that by putting a magnet in front of a heat lamp, you open a wormhole into hyperspace. Yeah... I wanna get the drawings from the USPTO so I can build my own. It'd be a great conversion piece. In the meantime, set your oven on clean, run two wires paralell to the heating elements, and put current going in opposite directions, and you too can communicate with friendly aliens in the Peliades cluster. And, your plants will grow faster too. Does it cure baldness and help with hemoroids too?
In and of itself, this case of improper search and seizure is not terribly interesing. What is interesting is the set of misconceptions about computer technologies the feds had on this case. I'd reccomend reading the write up on Steve Jackson Games web site. The other thing that was intersting was the apparently sincere fear of the law enforcement agencies that GURPS Cyberpunk was a how to guide for hackers. Seriously. The tragic side of this story was how the agencies involved were unable to admit their mistake and how the whole thing escalated to precedent setting case. This whole case is a must read for anyone getting into the criminal/legal issues of technology. A cautionary read.
Take a look at the companies you mention and compare behavior. Thats why slashdotters rail against certain companies and not others. When a company does well by making a good product, or service, everyone likes 'em. When they're conduct restricts the way companies and individuals pursue their interests, then we're up in arms. Look at this patent: They patented a technology that they neither pioneered nor created. The technology--if you can even call it that--has been in use for years. Just about anyone who uses persistent cookies has done something similar if not identical to Amazon's one-click shopping. In that case, why should Amazon get exclusive control of a trick that's already in every web developer's bag?
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While this sounds like a good idea, any suit like this will be very tough to prosecute. In order to prove the case, you are going to have to show that the major labels are working in concert to fix prices. This may or may not be the case. A more interesting bit of action would be better aimed at the various middlemen like distributors and retailers. The frustrating thing about the price of music is not knowing just where the mark up over reasonable profit comes in. I'd lke to know just who is working with whom to fix prices.
In any case, it is just feasible that the RIAA could face a racketeering charge for its intimidation of the users of new technology. The way I see it is that technology like Napster and Gnutella are essentially file sharing technologies which can be used to distribute and trade all sorts of media--as long as its digital. So, the RIAA sues and bullies the creators of the software, and networks who happen to have users of Napster. This a very thin case in my book because neither of the parties mentioned is responsible for the illicit trade. Its the users. Moreover its not any user of Napster that can be prosecuted, its specifically the ones who trace music illegally. Compare this to the blanket attacks by the RIAA.
Boy, I's sure like to know who gave Katz the figures he cited in the beginning of his piece. I like even more to know who gives that kind of deal. The figure of 50 cents for a cd is ludicrous. If you press in the neighborhood of 10,000 cds, most production houses will charge you about $1.00 per cd. Although this goes down if you do your own mastering, which means you pay the mastering costs yourself. Then you have to pay for art and that runs a fair amount of money. Add to that the legal costs associated with copyrights and trademarks and all that, and you get a cost that comes closer to $2.00 per cd. Of course, this scales better the bigger the label, but there's only so far those economies can go. That said, labels take the real hit in going from production to distribtion, and consumers take the hit from distribution to retail. Like I said in my earlier post to Katz first article, the distributor ain't gonna give a label much better than $6.00 per cd to the label, even if it does get marked up to $17 bucks at retail. This is where your money goes folks: to the middle men.
Enter MP3s, or whatever the digital media du jour is. The enterprising label invests in some decent servers, eliminates the physical production costs, cuts out the middlemen, and presto: Your costs go way down, and your profits go up. People come directly to you site and pay you money directly. And, the best part is that you can deal with other web sites as retailers with no friggin distributor, increasing the availablity of your artists works, while keeping costs real low. If you're smart, you pass this onto the consumer through something like a music subscription service where you grant download rights for a period for a reasonable fee, or you just price stuff real low. For instance, would you rather pay say $5.00 for your favorite artists mp3 collection and burn your own CD, or would you rather pirate it and watch the poor fool go broke? I'm optimistic that with reasonable prices, and free sample pieces, and innovative retail services--like a subscription service--that people would buy into the system. I see this whole digital media thing going the same way that cassettes did; ultimately increasing profits. Two things have to happen first: People need to realize that artists and producers use their money to make works that they put out. And, the music producers have got to realize that the current prices for physical media are outrageous and that they can reduce the costs asociated with physical reproduction by going digital.
Sure Metallica and that other group are big artists with lots of money, but most musicians are not. I don't know if the Slashdot crowd realizes how marginal the music business is for the most part. The big names and big labels are indeed rolling in cash and could use a good loosening up. Most musicians, even fairly well known ones, do not fall into this category. To give you an idea on what the artist gets back, the average rate I've been quoted by pro musicians and industry reps alike is 10% of the wholesale price. Now, the avergage CD retails for something like $14-16 these days, but the best you're gonna get a distributor to go for is $6.00. So, the label sells the cd to the distributor for $6.00 and the the distributor marks it up when they sell it to the retailer, and so on til you wind up paying $16 for a cd these days. The artist gets a whopping sixty cents out of that. Even if they sell like 10,000 cds they only get $6000 out if it. That's pretty damn pathetic if you're trying to eat. Most bands and musicians make their real money touring. Now y'all come in and rip the music, burn your own cds and never spend a cent. Pretty good for you, but for they guy trying to make living with his art, that's really bad.
That said, this situation still isn't Napster's fault. Napster is at worst a file sharing program. Infact, the only reason I could see for banning Napster is the traffic load it can put on network--that's why the UofM banned it here. People have got to get away from the free ride mentality and respect the needs of the musicans they listen to. As a music producer myself, I find the notion of people trading my artists music freely a bit annoying. In my case, I run a real marginal operation and my artists are basically using proceeds from their music to finance their equipment. Free trading like this can break my operation and shutdown my artists. Even larger labels will run into this problem and will dump anyone who can't move CDs, leaving us with nothing besides, oh, the 'Back Street Boys' or whatever trash they decide to push tomorrow.
How do we resolove this situation? First look at the costs for producing an album run of 1000 cds. I'll use my own cost structure as an example. Your mileage will vary. I return 10% of revenue to my artists on the first pressing and increase the share the more we sell. Now lets get some real cost figures here:
- Label Art: $500--and only because I happen to know the artist.
- Mastering: $500--real easy to master electronica.
- Reproducion:$2500--includes packaging and UPC code.
- Legal fees $500--copy right and trademark stuff
- Total Cost: $4000
Now, I'll turn around and sell that to someone like Amazon or Orhcard--a distributor--for something on the order of $6000 or $7000 depending on how much I wanna soak the customer for. If, and that is the big question, I sell if all, I get back $1400 to $2400. The artist gets $600 or $700. If we get into a second run, prices go down and profits increase. The biggest cost here is the price of reproduction onto physical media. If I could cut that out, I could save $2500. Now, if I can cut out the middleman, I could retain more of my investment. So, selling MP3 downloads is looking real attractive. I still need to work on the figures, but I think MP3 downloads could go down to $3.00 for an entire album. So, looked at one way, the optimistic way, technology like MP3s and Napster even, could represent an opportunity to the industry and a deal for fans.You don't even have to go as far as encrypting the file system. You can just encrypt the files themselves. Although, that migth still leave plaintext copies laying around in various caches when the user decrypts them to do work. Never mind, encrypted files systems are the way to go on this. What all these incidents leave me wondering is where did the "Orange Book" go? I think carrying info in plaintext outside of the office violates information security guidelines outlined in that document. I think rather than idiot proofing things, hte better counter measure in intel agencies and any organization which deals in senstitive material is to get rid of the idiots. The only way to do that is establish clear information security rules, train, and enforce rigoursly. Lets face it, the value of a laptop is minimal--especially if its insured--compared to the value of the data on it.
Linux may be a work in progress, but at least its progressing. Windows has been stagnating for a long time. I mean, Microsoft is the only party--at least til the penalty phase is complete--that can modify and check its source for bugs and vulnerablities. Linux on the other hand has a small army of people making it better with each revision. All that seems to happen when I upgrade windows is that it takes up more drive space and reserves more memory for itself.
One of the weirdest concerts I have every been to was one where the punk band had a theremin player. Its was cool, this guy had put together a theremin small enough to strap on like a guitar. I can't even begin to describe 'Holiday in Cambodia' as played on a theremin.
Yeah, the bulk of the music out these days is overproduced crap put out by uninspired corp execs, and yes a lot of it is perpetrated with a synth. Is it the Snyth's fault? Nope, the synth is a tool. Whether its tool for evil or good is up to the user. I reccomend exploring some of Tangerine Dream's work--Miracle Mile is personal fav--, Vangelis, Kraftwerk, of course Jean Michaeil Jarre. I also like the Moog Cookbook's take on various pop tunes.
The experiment in which participants bombarded one and other with white noise is suggestive, but may not be measuring agression. Instead it may be measuring acquired reflexes. In 3-D shooters like Wolfenstein, you learn to react quickly to ambush situations, and you learn that it takes more than one hit to put a bad guy down. Therefore, it stands to reason that anyone who's been playing a 3-D shooter will be quicker on any test involving reaction and reflex. It also stands to reason that by virtue of having learned to shoot an opponent several times by keeping the fire key pressed down, the particpant will tend to hold the 'punishment' button down longer. This is a tricky thing to measure. This test may measure agressiveness in most instances, but in dealing with 3d shooter games, especially those that use the keyboard as a controller, the test may simply be measuring a profeciency in game playing which may not indicate agressive tendancies. The rest of the study is very interesting, and merits more research into the connection especially into the behaviors exhbited by different age groups.
I don't think it was being warm blooded which allowed the ancestors of mammals to survive, it was size. If I remember my palentology right--not likely since I have degree in physics--about the only critters to survive the extinction were tiny ones. This makes a bit of sense if you think about it in terms of the asteroid collison. The ejecta probably created a huge cloud of dust in hte atmosphere, blocking sunlight, causing a huge plant die off. The only critters that could survive that environment were ones with minimal food requirments.
Y'know, I was going to rip into this over the hill fool. Then I read the article. Too bad his comments were edited down and chopped. I would have liked to hear more of what he said, just so I felt sure I understood his posistion. He's pointing out that libraries are focal points of the physical world community and that we should be reluctant to give traditional libraries up. He's also saying that the Internet has a very short history compared to print. There's some serious questions about the longevity of material in digital format. First, there's the question of how to read the format a bit down the road, then there's issues of the media decay. For instance, a well kept book written on acid free--better yet hemp--paper, will last over a hundred years. A CD will undergo chemical changes that render the plastic opaque within twenty years. Then there's the issue of what happens to the availablity of virtual works. Take for example the Hornet server. Anyone form the demo/tracking scene a few years back remembers this place. It was host to some of the most original music and art on the net. Fans and artists simply assumed it would be around forever. Then one day, the guy running it came to a point where he couldn't continue to do so--I don't know the details. Poof! An unique archive of artisic works is gone just like that. I think Billington is concerned with these issues and is resisting change for its own sake.
That said, I still think he's wrong. I don't know if we're all gonna be curling up with our favorite CRT to read the latest Stephen King anytime soon. Waitaminute.... Anyway, whether or not the age of the virtual novel is upon us, the net is an ideal place to distribute reference materials; the kinda materials where we turn pages to look for the fact we want to find. I also think that the web could easily replace coffee table book for that matter. As for the issue of preservation, Billington ignore the fact that preserving works for posterity is an active process that societies take because they value the result. Look back in history: One of the reason we have so many books from antiquity is that monks transcribed them from the originals and made copies by hand, and later by press. Digital media doesn't change this fact. It may even make the process of transcription easier. So, I think Billington needs to get with the times.
I'll go one better here. I've always looked at some of the MIT people with their borg style home brew wearables, and thought, now if I didn't have a full time job and still had more money than I do noew, I could make something cool like that. With this thing, they've done a lot of the hard work. Put this together with those VR glasses you see in computer catalogs and you have a lazy man's wearable. For a power supply, I'd go into Performance Bicycle's catalog and look at those NiCad and LiH batteries for bicycle lights. I don't know too much about their power characteristics, but I do know those buggers pack a lot of use time in 'em. You could fit the PC, battery and CD into a hip sack. Jand Mounteering even makes a hipsack with a set of elastic bands for securing stuff internally. Now the question of what to do with it comes up, but that's the pereninal question for wearables: what are they good for? That's someone else's problem they're still cool in the meantime. Heay, waitaminute; cameras! Ooh, the possibilities.
Another good point. The same thing is true in Detroit where the governor basically disolved the board over long standing issues of corruption. Way too strong armed in my opinion because I think the mayor and citizens were mobilizing to deal wth it. When I think of it, I know several communities in just my state where the state came in to assume control over areas with defecient test scores. Not a bad thing necessarily, but it does concentrate control and distance the decision making bodies from the people affect by their decisions. It makes it easier for the Pinkertons to pitch WAVE. So, as concerned citizes we have to be even more vigilant, and more expressive to the elected officals who make decisons. I think an issues like this needs to be brough to the school board and hte mayor's attention.
If anyone is interested, I just set up a preliminary mailing list: freakpower@umich.edu To join, send email to freakpower-request@umich.edu. Sorry for the name, but it's what popped into my head as a catchy title that wouldn't already be taken.
No doubt there's always someone higher the food chain, but the school board is the entry level. Unless pro monitoring activists can muster the support to sponsor a statewide movement, these things often--not always as M-G points out--get implemented at the local level. Opinions on issues like monitoring often vary immensely from community to community in any give state--your mileage may differ, as I'm used to states with largely urban environments. For instance in Michigan, Jackson might be for WAVE, while Ann Arbor and Detroit might be ready to secede from the state over it. Of course, every state does make decisons about education differently, but a lot does happen at the municipal level, and it is a great way to get your foot in the door.
Meanwhile the higher on the food chain point gets a little scary. The governor can issue statewide mandates that carry all the way down. I'm worried that in my state--and in quite a few others--that the governor and his administration is fundamentally disconnected from the people. Its would be all to likely a scenario for Pinkerton to market its program directly to the governor. To a lot of conservative governors, law and order, figures very highly in their worldview, and by virtue of being big and popular enough to win elections, the issues around abuse of power towards minorities is not something they canot see without help. In this case, I use the term minority to refer to anyone who exists outside of the mainstream. Lets face it, a lot of the people reading this could be considered a cultural minority. Anyway, this problem with someone higher on the foodchain being disconnected is someting to watch out for very closely. Of course, it can also be an important check and balance to short sighted school boards if those higher up are progressive. Definitely something to bear in mind in either case.
As if extremists on school boards banning the teaching of evolution wasn't enough, this WAVE thing points out how important it is to check out what's going in local school boards. The local school board is one of the most ignored public decison making entities in the entire US system of government. This is where decisons like implementing WAVE are being made and affirmed. I think we all need to locate our school board reps and write them some letters expressing our concerns. Sitting in on the open meetings is a darned good idea too. Running for school board is another really good idea. In a lot of cities and counties, board members often run unopposed due to the overall lack of interest. Great place for a concenred geek looking to get into politics to start. At the same time, this lack of interest is dangerous. Decisons to implement programs like WAVE often happen without any attention being paid. We're lucky it got noticed this time. At the same time, we have an opportunity to make a real difference here. Due to the scale involved here, your input as a citizen has a big impact, and if you should decide to run, you might get elected. It'd be good to have some technically savvy people resident in these decision making bodies. It'd be even better to have level headed, analyical people making good decisons.
Wake up folks! The NSF net was turned off about six years ago. The Internet is an instrument of the public now. It has been for a long time. There are no longer such things as outsiders. You want an exclusive little playground, fine, run a private ip network behind a firewall. That said, the newcomers need a serious education in the concepts behind references. Us academics love references because in terms of a print document it tells you where the author got his/her information and points the way to related works. The original idea on the web was to make to make this kind of research work instaneous. Want to check a reference to get more information? Click on the link. Much quicker than journal searches and inter-library loans. Now, we've gone from the Net being the playground of a few weird scientists to a medium where money changes hands. Now we have to make distinction between private and public. Fortunately, the technology exists to accomplish that. Having all the capitalists and other such unwashed barbarians on the net doesn't destroy it by any means, but it does mean we need think about things like property.
When this debate first surfaced, it had me scratching my head. The sites I run, I'm real glad to have someone hit 'em. I don't really care how they get there, just that the web statistics keep justifying the salary I get. I'd think the same thing would apply to commerce sites like E-Bay. Who care if someone out there indexes your site? It brings people to your site who will click on your banner ads, and use any fee based services you might have. It seems like the deeplinkers are actually providing a service to a lot of sites. In the real world, people make money and get perks for refering someone to a company. Why shouldn't the same thing apply on the web? If your site does have stuff you don't want people linking to, then I imagine you can protect that with a little creative javascript or something else like cgi. I've even done this on my own sites--mainly to make sure people didn't fill out a huge application form out of sequence. So, again, why are these corp people upset about deeplinking when it effectively refers customers to them?
"Has unlawful possession and use of firearms." Uhhm... Is it just me, or should yoube calling 911 emergency police and not the WAVE hotline on this one? How do law enforcement agencies feel about this? Reading the rest of the imminent warning signs, I notice that most of the acts covered are distinctly criminal in nature and are covered under the criminal code in most states. The only ones that aren't covered uniformly are detailed threats--most states regard detailed an explicit threats as a criminal act of varying degree-- and the suicidal stuff. Rage is covered under the first ammendment I guess. So the question here is why does Pinkerton want a kid to call them and not the appropriate law enforcement agency? I have to wonder what their aims really are in this case. On the other hand it'd be great to have good counseling hotline to call in and get advice on what to do with a suicidcal classmate. In any case, I simply don't think Pinkerton's really out to serve the community.
Like, Jon Katz, I too am impressed that Pinkerton has actually taken the time to read the Slashdot comments, but something in this responsiveness bothers me. That being the they're meeting with Katz. In and of itself its not a bad thing; taking the time to have face to face contact with a journalist is a good sign. However, if they believe they are speaking to a representative of the community that their program targets, they are mistaken. Katz does not represent that community even if he strongly advocates for that community. The only thing that represents the community is the community itself. The point being that Pinkerton needs to have hearings open to the public on their program. As /.ers have noted, there are serious concerns about privacy, the incentive structure, the accuracy of the reports and the impact such reporting will have on those singled out as problems. As I commented on the previous story, this reporting program does not have to be a bad thing at all; it can save lives if propoerly administered. If poorly run this program will be nothing more than Mcarthy style witch hunt aimed at a vulnerable and legally defensless culture. I cannot stress that last point enough. This program targets minors! Under the law in most states minors have very few rights and no access to due process. In the case of minors, a simple accusation is often enough to justify all manner of 'corrective' action ranging from school suspension and expulsion to compulsory mental treatment. The consequences of being falsely labeled or mistakenly labeled as a problem youth can be devastating. While parents are supposed to represent their children in such matters, the truth is that parents are often bullied by the system and even when they do stand tall, the find that there is not much they can do.
Another problem I have is with Katz himself. I'll just chalk this up to my paranoid and anti authoritarian nature. It seems that Katz is taking on the mantle of sage or religous leader for the oppressed geeks of the US. I'm just a bit worried that the meeting of minds here is nothing more than a clueless, disconnected corporation meeting with a demagogue who claims to represent the community impacted by WAVE. I would encourage people to speak up to Pinkerton as individuals rather than let Katz speak for us. He probably is fighting the good fight and all, but lets keep him honest.
Some of the values I've seen tossed around so far are ridiculous. Look at the web site as a small business. $20K/yr in earnings is pretty small. Its a healthy contribution to an overall bottom line, but it'd better be one of many projects. Look at it this way: If you're lucky you'll get five years out of your current business plan--the way the web changes I figure very lucky. So, any perspective buyer is going to want get a few years of profit on this thing. I'd figure around $60k on a site that earns $20k/yr. If I as a buyer were able to bring more traffic onto the site I'd get the value of advertising up, but thats very iffy. So, I'd be scale my offering price to something that would pay itself off in a couple of year and start earning a profit after that. The other question I'd have to ask on the business level is what does your business--the web site--produce. Right now the value of banner advertising seems to be a very cheap commodity because every one is jumping on the bandwagon. Not to mention, who knows how that market is going to change in the next single year, let alone the next several years?
Yeah, I mean its not like depression is very well understood by the vast majority of adults in this country. I made the mistake of letting an employer know that I was seeking help for depression, and, did I ever regret it. I found that the people in the office regarded me as a potential serial killer or something. I also started hearing nasty jokes told when they thought I wasn't around. I finally put a stop to it all by having my shrink write up a document "certifying" that I was sane. Did it up one of those award templates all fancy. I should have framed it. I presented that at a staff meeting and told all present that I was the only person there who was certifiably sane and that I would have no more of the jokes and ostracism. It worked suprisingly well. I was lucky. Sadly, mental illness still carries a stigma and too many people like to pretend there is no such thing as depression, or they treat it as moral failing. Or worse they fear it on the same level as demonic possession. So now we have a program that puts depressed people in an database of suspicious persons. Great. Just what we need to encourage people to go get help.
In so far as the recent episodes of school violence represent anomalies, this monitoring program is uncalled for. However, violence in US schools has been a problem. This has been especially true in the so called innter city where gangs have been the main culprits behind the violence. In my own school for instance, the existence of an anonymous hotline could stopped two nasty incidents I can think of. Lots of us knew these kids had guns and knives and those of us on the peripheries of the gangs knew something was up, but it wasn't clear who to tell, and it was less clear if we could remain anonymous. And with the gangs, this anonymity is a matter of life and death. So, yeah, having a hotline would be a good thing, but who would run it? As this is a law enforcement issue, it should be run through police and sheriff's depts with effective liason to the schools. Having a private company administer and run this type of system is a bad idea for several reasons. First, public agencies are accountable to the community--at least in theory--whereas private companies are not. They are accountable only to their owners; owners whose interests may or may not conflict with the community interests. Second, private programs like this can be set up and marketed with no public input. And, that brings up the question or just what the true aim of the program is. Lastly, there's the question of oversight: Who checks up on WAVE to make sure they aren't defaming individuals? As a private program, no one does.
The last point, I want to make to the /. community is don't take Katz' word for this. He is essentially writing an opionon piece here, even if it does bring some necessary information. Like any bit of journalism these days, you cannot take it at face value. Before condemning this program out of hand, check it out. Find out more and make your own judgements. My own comments are merely first impressions based on the article. I need to find out more to really judge. Still, if Katz is right, this program is evil on the level of Mcarthyism. Thats the closest precedent we have to this thing.
Reading the abstract, this guy is not patenting faster than light anything. He's patenting electro magnetic waves. At least thats if you read the abstract. Go into the background and summary and you get way deep into nutdom here. If I understand the patent right, he's saying that by putting a magnet in front of a heat lamp, you open a wormhole into hyperspace. Yeah... I wanna get the drawings from the USPTO so I can build my own. It'd be a great conversion piece. In the meantime, set your oven on clean, run two wires paralell to the heating elements, and put current going in opposite directions, and you too can communicate with friendly aliens in the Peliades cluster. And, your plants will grow faster too. Does it cure baldness and help with hemoroids too?
In and of itself, this case of improper search and seizure is not terribly interesing. What is interesting is the set of misconceptions about computer technologies the feds had on this case. I'd reccomend reading the write up on Steve Jackson Games web site. The other thing that was intersting was the apparently sincere fear of the law enforcement agencies that GURPS Cyberpunk was a how to guide for hackers. Seriously. The tragic side of this story was how the agencies involved were unable to admit their mistake and how the whole thing escalated to precedent setting case. This whole case is a must read for anyone getting into the criminal/legal issues of technology. A cautionary read.
Take a look at the companies you mention and compare behavior. Thats why slashdotters rail against certain companies and not others. When a company does well by making a good product, or service, everyone likes 'em. When they're conduct restricts the way companies and individuals pursue their interests, then we're up in arms. Look at this patent: They patented a technology that they neither pioneered nor created. The technology--if you can even call it that--has been in use for years. Just about anyone who uses persistent cookies has done something similar if not identical to Amazon's one-click shopping. In that case, why should Amazon get exclusive control of a trick that's already in every web developer's bag?