>> in Australia, unless you are profiting from the illegal copying of copyrighted works, it is a civil matter, not criminal.
Presumably, the ISP's in question are in the business of selling web access and server space. I.e., they profit from customers who park pirated files on their servers and use their network to make those files available to others.
If the police have reason to believe that ISP servers hold pirated files (a safe bet), why shouldn't they investigate? If someone had a warehouse stocked with illegal booze, or drugs, would you expect them to look the other way? Or, better yet for this crowd, how about a warehouse full of Linux CD's containing code that violates the GPL?
Regardless of where you stand on this issue, it's silly and naive to expect the police to alter their behavior because of your political opinions.
They know because they buy the tickets. The feds, the military, and other large organizations operate their own ticketing agencies. They see free miles as a perk for the organization that bought the ticket, not the employee who took the flight.
Even when employees buy their own tickets off the market, it's not exactly rocket science to track who earned miles from which airline when employees do their expense accounting.
Not every company allows employees to keep miles as a perk. The miles are applied to future business travel. And, I believe, in the U.S., federal employees and military members are not allowed to use miles for personal travel. When employees do enough flying -- certainly the case with the feds and the military -- it is worth the time and effort to track the miles earned by employees.
Depends. Since they're eliminating CD production and distribution costs, the profit per each track purchased for 99 cents should be quite nice in comparison.
In effect, online sales of music, or any other digitized property, allows the seller to sell the same thing, over and over, with no damage or wear and tear to the original. You'd think this would be a no-brainer.
Agree, with this caveat: Someone -- it doesn't need to be government -- needs to set goals for space exploration. When these goals are actual destinations, then the appropriately constructed infrastructure built to support those missions can be readily used in other, perhaps more mundane but more profitable, space activities.
Case in point: The decision to use ballistic capsules for Mercury, Gemini and Apollo was made to accellerate putting a man on the moon. But, as you correctly point out, it built no useful infrastructure on which to build future activity. Conceivably, another choice would have focused on building a generic heavy-lift to LEO capability in tandem with a reliable and cheap way to get people into LEO.
The danger of the current reexamination of the Shuttle's viability is that NASA will continue to simply iterate over bad ways tp gt to LEO. Getting heavy tonnage to LEO is a problem that was solved more than 30 years ago. Ditto getting people there.
The focus on "What Next for the Shuttle?" is wrong. The right focus is: "Where Do We Go In Space and What Do We Do When We Get There?"
Beginning with the Nixon administration, U.S. presidents have failed to exert the leadership necessary to sustain a legitimate U.S. space program. Nixon scuppered all of NASA's ambititous and logical Apollo follow-on projects, allowed the budget beancounters to shape the Shuttle's budget to a point that was certain to cripple it's intended capabilities while simultaneously compelling NASA to put all it's human spaceflight efforts into a Shuttle gambit that they knew could not deliver as advertised.
And, where was this under-funded and bastardized Shuttle supposed to take us? To a space station in low Earth orbit. You know, a new, expensive version of Skylab that goes no place but in circles.
The Shuttle is just a vehicle, a means to an end. Sadly, the U.S. leaders have spent the last 25 years using the Shuttle as a cover for the fact that they lack enough interest, courage and wisdom to select a destination for human travel in space.
Instead of building trucks that go nowhere, the U.S. should pick a target and then build the capability to get there. My own preference -- easily acheived with current technology -- is a return to the moon and the establishment of a pemanent and growing human community there.
Oh, posh. Television is an advertising medium. If it won't make money, no one is going to put it on air. If you want somethng original, go read a book or find a theater. They can be produced with less financial risk.
Besides, being original is hard. But, from the looks of your post, you know that.
Open Software Closing Door to Wider Use
on
Has GNOME Become LAME?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
>> XML is human-readable
And so are C++, x86 assembly, and calculus. But why should someone need to learn them, or XML, to configure a desktop?
Software can be as open and free as you can make it, but it will remain closed to the real world so long as it comes with a "For Geeks Only" label.
>> You're talking about making a completely idiofied operating system...
That's an example of tech bigotry. Ease of use doesn't mean loss of capability. In fact, it should mean just the opposite: enabling more people to do more computing, more often.
I'd imagine that even you are using a leyboard and a monitor, rather than pushing buttons and watching LED's.
I don't see the difference between what you assert is the recording industry's model and that of the company your salesperson works for. Both have made a determination about how much money they will pay the people who work for them, after accounting for costs. Whether or not those arrangements are seen as "fair" by some people is not especially relevant.
Perhaps the problem is that musicians who contract with recording companies don't understand that they're now working for that company, not themselves.
Human Space Travel Isn't Dependent on One Truck
on
More on Columbia
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· Score: 1
To ask about the future of the shuttle program is valid, but to preface it in fabricated conspiracy notions is typical of the deluded and unearned cynicism that masquerades as insight around here.
Whether the shuttle has a future or not is not particularly relevant. The real question is: What About Human Space Travel?
The shuttle is just one vehicle. Human space travel should no more stop because one vehicle crashed that human air travel should stop because one plane crashes.
The purpose of human space travel is not science. The purpose of human space travel is to travel in space, just like the purpose of air travel is to travel in air. It's the destination that counts. We need to pick a destination.
I suspect that the recording companies would reject the analogy to investment firms and argue that relatively few acts ever make a profit, so they have every reason to take their profits when they do. While the musicians may see themselves as "artists" with little interest in the mundane work of marketing, promoting, distribution, etc., someone must attend to all that if those musicians are to rise from street-corner invisibility.
If musicians don't want companies to take profits when they do, they can pay for all that themselves up front.
What's wrong with the music companies taking the cost of touring, recording, distribution and advertising from the revenue earned by an act? How else are they supposed to pay for it? It's a business, not a donation to the arts/
Musicians sign those contracts because they want to make money. What's left over after all the costs are paid is profit. Don't confuse that with the revenue generated by product sales.
People need to stop idealizing musicians and demonizing the recoding industry. They exist in a symbiotic relationship because both want to make money.
In the sanctimonious screed posing as reporting over at The Inquirer we find these completely unsubstantiated assertions:
>>...customers will vanish if they feel AOL can't protect their data...
Nah. Most will stay because the cost and hassle of leaving AOL outweigh the risk they perceive from this alleged breach....You won't find many AOL members running firewall software...
No, and people who use computers ought not to have to fuss about with building their own firewalls in order to have a modicum of security. Firewalls and other security-related code ought to be buried deep inside any consumer OS marketed for use on the Internet and their configuration ought to be done at a level of abstraction that requires no techncal knowledge.
Who cares? This is just reporters and editors conjuring phony contests and trumped up stories. Car magazines have been doing it for years. Ditto the computer press. (I'd include Slashdot, too, but that would demean the other members of the media.)
This has nothing to do with the Internet. The question is whether or not all existing and future case law, court proceedings, etc., ought to be available to the U.S. public free of charge. A very strong argument can be made that it should.
Remember, though, that the Internet is not the only publishing vehicle that reaches the public. Free distribution in hardcopy to all public libraries would also serve the same purpose. I'd argue that hardcopy should be available in libraries and duplicated online, to avoid disadvantaging those without Internet access.
Publishing and distributing takes resources, so "free" public access will almost certainly require the public to pay for it via taxes or increased court fees.
Seems to me a file could be tracked to a specific buyer only if each track carried a unique ID that mapped to that buyer. E.g., Track One of some new CD is sold one million times to one million different customers. Unless they generate one million unique ID's, the files cannot be traced to the original buyer. I don't see that in the article.
I've never understood why ISP's, especially in the U.S., don't follow a pricing model akin to U.S. cable television? I.e., sell a "Basic Broadband" package for one level of bandwidth usage, an "Enhanced Package" for another, etc. You get the point. If the customer goes over their monthly bandwidth limit, send them email and bill them per kilobyte for the excess.
Selling unlimited access to all comers for the same price just encourages people to imagine that an ISP is a public utility and that access to bandwidth is a right.
Agree that using the Shuttle for ISS is political at this point. But, it is, after all, only a slight exaggeration to say that ISS was created to give the Shuttle something to do. If the mission is to build and maintain a space station, it makes a lot more sense to use one kind of a craft, for cargo and another for crew transport. The Shuttle attempts to do too much.,
Slashdot Mirror
>> in Australia, unless you are profiting from the illegal copying of copyrighted works, it is a civil matter, not criminal.
Presumably, the ISP's in question are in the business of selling web access and server space. I.e., they profit from customers who park pirated files on their servers and use their network to make those files available to others.
If the police have reason to believe that ISP servers hold pirated files (a safe bet), why shouldn't they investigate? If someone had a warehouse stocked with illegal booze, or drugs, would you expect them to look the other way? Or, better yet for this crowd, how about a warehouse full of Linux CD's containing code that violates the GPL?
Regardless of where you stand on this issue, it's silly and naive to expect the police to alter their behavior because of your political opinions.
They know because they buy the tickets. The feds, the military, and other large organizations operate their own ticketing agencies. They see free miles as a perk for the organization that bought the ticket, not the employee who took the flight.
Even when employees buy their own tickets off the market, it's not exactly rocket science to track who earned miles from which airline when employees do their expense accounting.
Not every company allows employees to keep miles as a perk. The miles are applied to future business travel. And, I believe, in the U.S., federal employees and military members are not allowed to use miles for personal travel. When employees do enough flying -- certainly the case with the feds and the military -- it is worth the time and effort to track the miles earned by employees.
Would I let someone compensate me for writing this nonsense on my own site instead of giving it free to Slashdot?
You betcha.
Depends. Since they're eliminating CD production and distribution costs, the profit per each track purchased for 99 cents should be quite nice in comparison.
In effect, online sales of music, or any other digitized property, allows the seller to sell the same thing, over and over, with no damage or wear and tear to the original. You'd think this would be a no-brainer.
Agree, with this caveat: Someone -- it doesn't need to be government -- needs to set goals for space exploration. When these goals are actual destinations, then the appropriately constructed infrastructure built to support those missions can be readily used in other, perhaps more mundane but more profitable, space activities.
Case in point: The decision to use ballistic capsules for Mercury, Gemini and Apollo was made to accellerate putting a man on the moon. But, as you correctly point out, it built no useful infrastructure on which to build future activity. Conceivably, another choice would have focused on building a generic heavy-lift to LEO capability in tandem with a reliable and cheap way to get people into LEO.
The danger of the current reexamination of the Shuttle's viability is that NASA will continue to simply iterate over bad ways tp gt to LEO. Getting heavy tonnage to LEO is a problem that was solved more than 30 years ago. Ditto getting people there.
The focus on "What Next for the Shuttle?" is wrong. The right focus is: "Where Do We Go In Space and What Do We Do When We Get There?"
Beginning with the Nixon administration, U.S. presidents have failed to exert the leadership necessary to sustain a legitimate U.S. space program. Nixon scuppered all of NASA's ambititous and logical Apollo follow-on projects, allowed the budget beancounters to shape the Shuttle's budget to a point that was certain to cripple it's intended capabilities while simultaneously compelling NASA to put all it's human spaceflight efforts into a Shuttle gambit that they knew could not deliver as advertised.
And, where was this under-funded and bastardized Shuttle supposed to take us? To a space station in low Earth orbit. You know, a new, expensive version of Skylab that goes no place but in circles.
The Shuttle is just a vehicle, a means to an end. Sadly, the U.S. leaders have spent the last 25 years using the Shuttle as a cover for the fact that they lack enough interest, courage and wisdom to select a destination for human travel in space.
Instead of building trucks that go nowhere, the U.S. should pick a target and then build the capability to get there. My own preference -- easily acheived with current technology -- is a return to the moon and the establishment of a pemanent and growing human community there.
Oh, posh. Television is an advertising medium. If it won't make money, no one is going to put it on air. If you want somethng original, go read a book or find a theater. They can be produced with less financial risk.
Besides, being original is hard. But, from the looks of your post, you know that.
>> XML is human-readable
And so are C++, x86 assembly, and calculus. But why should someone need to learn them, or XML, to configure a desktop?
Software can be as open and free as you can make it, but it will remain closed to the real world so long as it comes with a "For Geeks Only" label.
>>...they are one of the best sources of independant journalism on the web--even if I happen to agree with less than 10%...
If you're disagreeing with it, it's an opinion, not journalism.
>> You're talking about making a completely idiofied operating system...
That's an example of tech bigotry. Ease of use doesn't mean loss of capability. In fact, it should mean just the opposite: enabling more people to do more computing, more often.
I'd imagine that even you are using a leyboard and a monitor, rather than pushing buttons and watching LED's.
I don't see the difference between what you assert is the recording industry's model and that of the company your salesperson works for. Both have made a determination about how much money they will pay the people who work for them, after accounting for costs. Whether or not those arrangements are seen as "fair" by some people is not especially relevant.
Perhaps the problem is that musicians who contract with recording companies don't understand that they're now working for that company, not themselves.
To ask about the future of the shuttle program is valid, but to preface it in fabricated conspiracy notions is typical of the deluded and unearned cynicism that masquerades as insight around here.
Whether the shuttle has a future or not is not particularly relevant. The real question is: What About Human Space Travel?
The shuttle is just one vehicle. Human space travel should no more stop because one vehicle crashed that human air travel should stop because one plane crashes.
The purpose of human space travel is not science. The purpose of human space travel is to travel in space, just like the purpose of air travel is to travel in air. It's the destination that counts. We need to pick a destination.
I suspect that the recording companies would reject the analogy to investment firms and argue that relatively few acts ever make a profit, so they have every reason to take their profits when they do. While the musicians may see themselves as "artists" with little interest in the mundane work of marketing, promoting, distribution, etc., someone must attend to all that if those musicians are to rise from street-corner invisibility.
If musicians don't want companies to take profits when they do, they can pay for all that themselves up front.
What's wrong with the music companies taking the cost of touring, recording, distribution and advertising from the revenue earned by an act? How else are they supposed to pay for it? It's a business, not a donation to the arts/
Musicians sign those contracts because they want to make money. What's left over after all the costs are paid is profit. Don't confuse that with the revenue generated by product sales.
People need to stop idealizing musicians and demonizing the recoding industry. They exist in a symbiotic relationship because both want to make money.
In the sanctimonious screed posing as reporting over at The Inquirer we find these completely unsubstantiated assertions:
...customers will vanish if they feel AOL can't protect their data...
...You won't find many AOL members running firewall software...
>>
Nah. Most will stay because the cost and hassle of leaving AOL outweigh the risk they perceive from this alleged breach.
No, and people who use computers ought not to have to fuss about with building their own firewalls in order to have a modicum of security. Firewalls and other security-related code ought to be buried deep inside any consumer OS marketed for use on the Internet and their configuration ought to be done at a level of abstraction that requires no techncal knowledge.
Who cares? This is just reporters and editors conjuring phony contests and trumped up stories. Car magazines have been doing it for years. Ditto the computer press. (I'd include Slashdot, too, but that would demean the other members of the media.)
Nothing is really free. If the public thinks it is vital to have all case law available in hardcopy to everyone, they'l have to pay for it.
A more sensible approach would be to retain it all online, and enable Internet access. That, too, would incur a non-trivial cost.
This has nothing to do with the Internet. The question is whether or not all existing and future case law, court proceedings, etc., ought to be available to the U.S. public free of charge. A very strong argument can be made that it should.
Remember, though, that the Internet is not the only publishing vehicle that reaches the public. Free distribution in hardcopy to all public libraries would also serve the same purpose. I'd argue that hardcopy should be available in libraries and duplicated online, to avoid disadvantaging those without Internet access.
Publishing and distributing takes resources, so "free" public access will almost certainly require the public to pay for it via taxes or increased court fees.
Seems to me a file could be tracked to a specific buyer only if each track carried a unique ID that mapped to that buyer. E.g., Track One of some new CD is sold one million times to one million different customers. Unless they generate one million unique ID's, the files cannot be traced to the original buyer. I don't see that in the article.
...to tape the bus schedule to the refrigerator door?
I'd be more impressed if he built a robot that poked him with a sharp stick 5 minutes before the bus got there.
I didn't say cut customers off in mid-month. I just said start billing them at a different rate.
Pay-per-view deals, in effect, are the same thing. The more you watch, the more you pay.
I've never understood why ISP's, especially in the U.S., don't follow a pricing model akin to U.S. cable television? I.e., sell a "Basic Broadband" package for one level of bandwidth usage, an "Enhanced Package" for another, etc. You get the point. If the customer goes over their monthly bandwidth limit, send them email and bill them per kilobyte for the excess.
Selling unlimited access to all comers for the same price just encourages people to imagine that an ISP is a public utility and that access to bandwidth is a right.
Agree that using the Shuttle for ISS is political at this point. But, it is, after all, only a slight exaggeration to say that ISS was created to give the Shuttle something to do. If the mission is to build and maintain a space station, it makes a lot more sense to use one kind of a craft, for cargo and another for crew transport. The Shuttle attempts to do too much.,