I reacted slightly differently. At first, yes I was eager to sign this... but then I paused... what about the Mystery Science Theater 3000s and Cinematic Titanics of the future? Where will they buy the rights to destroy movies for a couple thousand dollars?
Nothing wrong with him making crap films. The problem is with making crap derivative works. Crap derivative works that the original artists in most cases are opposed to.
But, then, that's more a problem with copyrights being owned by corporations. The artists get boned and the lawyers and MBAs get paid. And oh how those (sociopathic, since we increasingly select for that in the corporate world) lawyers and MBAs love to sell their children to cannibals for a few bucks.
Copyright to support the progress of the useful arts? If that is truly the goal (and I'm not saying it is, or should be, just if it is), then give the artist more non-transferrable authority.
'Engineers ideally make excellent strategic planners, and they make excellent field operatives. They think differently from how other people think.'... 'because of those traits, terrorist groups actively recruit engineers.'
Well, gosh. I'd've never thunk it.
The part that surprises me is not that terrorist groups recognize that good strategic thinkers should be actively recruited, but that US corporations typically pay more to socially proficient people even if they lack good strategic thinking skills. That is not to say that there are no business people who are exceedingly adept strategic thinkers (they may even be more rare and perhaps more valuable than good engineers), just that there are so many nimrod schmoozers getting wheelbarrows full of cash for short-term-oriented stupidity (see Bear Stearns; how could I see the real estate crash coming in 2002 and they missed it?!? With all those MBAs! And they get bailed out?!?!?! FEH!).
the very real question of whether the military should be manipulating domestic media.
[Following message is US centric. My apologies to non-US citizens, and hopefully similar sentiments work for you in your country, but trying to make this generally applicable weakens the message.]
The very simple answer is another question: Is the government the subject of the people or are the people the subjects of the government? If the government knows better than we then the military should engage in information manipulation to control the perceptions of the public.
Which leads us to a more interesting question: Are there any politicians who appear to believe that they know better what is right for America than we? I think that answer is an unqualified yes. And, for example, I hold that view in some cases: I believe that the first amendment supercedes the will of the people in those cases where the people wish to censor undesirable information.
Which leads us to a deeper question: Given that most people, and probably all people who have a desire to govern, believe that there are certain issues on which they know better what is right than the people, answer the following: Which people with a desire to govern seem to have the fewest such positions, or hold those views in most congruence with your views? Help to get them elected.
But that is not enough. Can you present a rational position supporting your view? Can you present it pursuasively? If not, learn how.
Then grab yourself a soapbox. They are available free of charge from YouTube, MySpace, and many others. The ballot box may be working, but not very well. The jury box has been closed due to national security. And it will suck if we have to go to that other box. So get out there and establish national opinion. If you think the initial question at the top of this post (in the more general form, "Should government representatives manipulate the public perception?") has not already been answered in the extreme affirmative by most people in government, you are sorely mistaken.
It is an information war, it has been going on in this country since we were a British colony and a few truly heroic men and women decided to risk everything for freedom, starting with broadsheets. Your duty as a US citizen (see Declaration of Independence) is to fight that war to the best of your abilities. If we can use these new media to defend our country from all aggressors, foreign and domestic, then we won't have to choose between the ammo box and the loss of the ideals on which this country was founded. Nobody will benefit from reaching that decision point (except Blackwater and a handful of others, and screw them).
Your country needs you in the service of liberty. Not just now, but ten years ago, and ten years from now, and everywhen else. Your country needs you to stand up for our ideals. When things are going right to keep them right. When things are going wrong to put them right. Start a blog. Make a video mashup. Write a song about the founding ideals. Dig into congressional records and publish processed information. Or just write posts like this. Animate the public to defend our nation from all aggressors, arm them with the information to make the right decisions, and build in them the belief that we can win.
We are a huge portion of the media. We may not always be - many forces are seeking to control the Internet. Now is the time to act (and it always will be). Don't kid yourself, we are at war and it will be hard. Now is a volatile time, and we have the greatest information distribution tools in history at our command. You can do this.
"It's that same [level of] success and its own questionable privacy practices that will lead to Google's PR downfall and propel it into a position of disdain going forward. Trust me, the future of Apple and Google may look bright from an economic standpoint, but these companies will be hated one day too. Sad, but true."
I am so sick of hearing this. It is not success that makes me dislike Microsoft. Oracle is just as dominant in databases as Microsoft is in operating systems, but I like Oracle. Why? Because Oracle competes on merit. I use MySQL both at home and in the office, so it is not that I am a mindless fanboi, but I do respect Oracle. I do not care how successful a company is. I care about how honorable they are. Being a monopoly enables a dishonorable company to do more damage, and less successful companies generally do not have the lattitude or power to be abusive, but it is not the success itself that I hold in contempt.
I find it as infuriating as hearing someone who supports the Iraq war say they support the troops or that they want to fight terrorism. We all support the troops. We all want to fight terrorism. And we all support honorable companies regardless of their success, and most of us dislike abusive companies regardless of their success. The only real double standard is success fanbois who cannot see the abusive nature of Microsoft because they are too busy wallowing in adulation of Microsoft's giant $-peen.
I'm a bit surprised IT workers are split. While I voted for McCain for Senate while living in Phoenix, I feel Obama is much stronger on tech issues. Here's what really sold me:
True, false, whatever. The market is entirely capable of fixing this problem.
Here's the solution: Common carrier. There, problem solved.
All you have to do is say, "If you route every packet on your network the same regardless of origin, destination, or content, you are a common carrier, and you are not liable for what those packets constitute. If you treat anything flowing over your network preferentially, you are not a common carrier, and you are liable for the content of ever packet that travels on your network." Simple. Nobody is going to put their company in the path of child pornography enforcement. All this talk of extra legislation for net neutrality is completely unnecessary. The common carrier laws are already in place, the only remaining step is to clarify that they apply to data as well as voice.
I love the idea of net neutrality, but I am convinced we don't need an extra law to make it happen. Just enforce common carrier.
First, RTFA. The summary picks the least useful poll in the entire article as its example of the otherwise very strong support the article gives for the author's position.
Reading the popular media, you might get the impression that the people don't care that our government is at war with our country. But then, that may just be the media pushing its preference for a stable tapestry on which to paint transient images of sex scandals. Those people who supposedly don't care have also been giving tens of millions of dollars a month, in individual amounts betraying the fact that they are not members of the ruling class and in numbers demonstrating an extraordinarily broad base, to one presidential candidate who does not represent business as usual.
If you look to establishment journalism for serious critique of the establishment, should you really be surprised if what you find is not truth, but spurious defense?
... or is the assertion "Americans don't care about domestic spying" only very loosely tied to "Americans think the Government is very secretive?"
Don't get me wrong, I think the federal government is *very* secretive, and I greatly dislike domestic spying... but the two are not mutually inclusive. It's far from "Poll B proves Assertion A is a blatantly false."
RTFA. The summary is crap. The article supports it's position very well.
I'm not sure how I like how the summary contrasts "Do you like domestic spying?" with "Do you think federal government is very secretive?". You can clearly think the government is very secretive and still not care about the spying. That isn't to say that people do or do not care, I just don't like the summary's cheap attempt at swaying people.
Completely agreed. The summary is crap. However, if you RTFA, the conclusion is very well supported.
Excellent info. I love the idea of using balloons, and the steam balloons are very cool!
The safe landing power could be relatively minimal, considering gliding or autorotating to a controlled emergency landing.
Thinking that the most value would be reaped by areas with limited road infrastructure, I am curious where this sort of vehicle would take off [sorry, bad pun, the author has been sacked] first. Wireless phone practicality made Scandinavian countries, with their wire-hostile winters, dominant in the handset market, for example.
Not as a whole, but it has problems in it. It has the kind of problems that are nice to have. However, there is an increasing school of thought (even echoed in some of the responses to my post) that scarcity and greed are the only things that drive innovation. I think that is the narrow-minded view of a person who is blinkered by religious devotion to capitalism, but the fact that the belief is unfounded does not make it any less dangerous.
The trick is to find other ways of rewarding creators between now and then, or the end of scarcity simply will not come. The powers that be will argue (as they have done so successfully with software over the past 20 years in fighting Open Source) that scarcity and greed must be artificially maintained.
The two problems are not related to the end of scarcity, but that there are lots of people making lots of money from scarcity, and that we must continue to motivate creative work. If we don't come up with another solution for motivating creative work, those entrenched interests will most certainly create artificial, fiat, scarcity because it is all they know.
>> With nanomachines on the horizon, it won't be more than 50 years till you will have access to a formulator capable of replicating a car
> Make mine a flying car.
Violating the laws of physics is hard. You'll have a formulator long before you have a four-seat flying car that gets 40 miles on a gallon of pump gas.
Read TFA, this really would make P2P legal. That means for $5 per month you can P2P music to your heart's content.
"The administration would be impossible!" - Bullshit. The administration of their current contracts is 1000x more difficult than this would be. This is the billboard charts in a database with a financial report stapled to the front. I could write everything but the rating mechanism in a few weeks (enterprise grade - I could get the proof of concept up in a few hours, as could many people here, I'm sure). The rating mechanism? It might seem tough at first, but once P2P became legal "again" (like it sort of was in the late 90's), a few new Napsters would appear that everyone would use. It'd be another couple weeks to make it really sing. Heck, set up a webservice API and require P2P services to send data, decentralize the P2P from the central ratings body. Don't make it onerous on the P2P services; make them feel honored to be contributing to the system that gives royalties to the artists.
"P2P MP3s suck!" - They won't once it's legal. If you want to P2P flac, go for it. Heck, P2P the wav straight from the CD. It's not illegal anymore.
The numbers work too. Assuming 100M broadband connections in the US, that's 6 billion per year just for digital, and the overhead plummets. CDs, DVDs, vinyl, concerts - those are outside the scope and are free to evolve their own efficient markets. The music industry would have more cashflow than they have today, with less overhead. That's a win in anybody's book.
Of course, you have to hamstring the shit out of the RIAA's financials weasels. No, you don't get to pay a percentage of what's left after expenses, with lots of room for creative bookkeeping. The RIAA gets X% (10? 50? whatever, let competitors bid a lower percentage to takeover the contract) of revenue and the rest must be distributed to the artists. Require the books to be 100% open. Who cares if the books are open if every artist gets the same deal and the P2P Billboard charts are already public? Any artist with a $3.00 calculator can confirm that they're getting a fair shake.
Sure, there'll still be labels prospecting on new bands, paying for studio time and headshots for a share of the digital revenue, but that's outside the digital cashflow calculations. (and CDs and concerts would be handled in their current demonic forms - so the lawyers wouldn't go hungry)
But the real reason I love it is entirely personal; I hate all the models that currently exist, and I've tried most of them. They suck. So I don't buy, nor pirate, music anymore. That sucks. I really like music, but the current hostility in the music market has driven me away.
I wonder what would happen if someone figured out how to torrent a car.
We are laying the legal groundwork for that problem right now (albeit unknowingly). With nanomachines on the horizon, it won't be more than 50 years till you will have access to a formulator capable of replicating a car. But someone will still have to design the car in the first place. We will be up against the exact same problems we are now with music. People will be trading atom-level model files for Ferraris over the intarwebs. Toss in your old car, a design file, and a whole lot of power (assuming we haven't hit, or have solved, the peak oil problem by then), and you get a new car.
It will be the end of natural scarcity of manufactured goods, but not the end of scarcity of energy, good design, or the rarer raw materials. While I loathe the current state of Intellectual Monopoly law, it will be necessary to continue to compensate creators (not necessarily labels) for their work, and the fields where the cost of design can be hidden in the price of the manufactured good will dwindle.
The laws that will protect cars 50 years from now are the laws we are using today to attempt to protect music. Maybe cops will ask for "License, registration, and proof of designer royalty payment, please?"
But then, we'll probably just be the computers' pets by then anyway, so no need to worry.
Is that like interpretive dance? Maybe code that says, url.openInputStream, but by the way it's written it makes you feel like you're walking on a beach with a newfound and transient love?
meh - I just looked it up, it's a synonym for interpreted language. But I still like my joke, so I'm posting anyway.:p
24.244.141.117 is the IP for all the virtual addresses listed. You can add it to your hosts file to see the virtual host. Also many of the host names are not down, for example, the Hemingway one can be seen here:
Again, I don't support US citizens violating the embargo, nor do I necessarily support the embargo itself. But I do support reading whatever you want whenever you want.
Apparently the author of the article doesn't understand that "they" are already watching. Through every ATM and a healthy chunk of other cameras. Google Street View is just the common man getting in on the action. It hasn't added surveillance where there was none, it has added navel-gazing where there was surveillance.
Shit like this is why I want to scream whenever I hear corporations whining about anti-trust laws and how the free market should be allowed to self-regulate. Here's a thought; stop working so hard to break the perfect information that is a fundamental requirement of efficient free market capitalism, and maybe I'll take you a little more seriously.
If you're going to show such complete lack of respect for Adam Smith's ideals, it is unreasonable to ask the government to abide by them. Once you decide to stand up and compete like an honorable person, then you can invoke the term "free market" in your defense.
Tell ya what Microsoft, I've got a deal for you. You unbundle your products; sell your OS, windowing system, window manager, and applications separately (or give them away, without restrictions on their use, if one or more components are considered not commercially viable alone). And don't use any non-published features, rapidly changing software interfaces under your control, or other anti-competitive advantages to glue them together. The price of the bundle (if you do sell a complete kit) should be within maybe 20% of the sum of the unbundled prices (a reasonable package discount is OK, but anything more than 10% starts to sound like bundling to me). You do that, then we'll talk.
A big part of *nix's advantage is that it is componentized. You can use the best tool for your particular needs. I don't want to be tied to a particular window manager when I choose a kernel. And if I don't like or need your windowing system, I don't want to pay for it. The nice thing about that approach is that each product has to stand on its own merit. It leads to this cornerstone of free market economics thing called "competition."
Oh - and stop calling your entire software stack an "OS". You're confusing the end users.
So there was a story about TechNet users wanting, and being denied, early access to SP1 -- apparently specifically so they could do battle testing. I don't know much about TechNet, but I'm guessing those are pretty much the most tech-savvy bundle of customers Microsoft can easily assemble. Why did Microsoft decide to skip the public beta phase with a bunch of expert customers with diverse operating environments and go straight to the world at large?
We have a strategy for competing in the search space that Google dominates today,
"Ballmer has his panties in a bunch. He said we're going to fucking kill Google, and he gets a little attached sometimes, you know? So now we've got to figure a way to f'ing kill Google."
that we'll pursue that we had before we made the Yahoo offer,
"In case you think we're upset about Yahoo's rejection, we're not. Ballmer's still stuck on the '<expletive> kill Google' thing (do I have to keep saying it?) - he can't even see Yahoo past the bulging vein in his forehead."
<from offstage> "Yes you have got to goddammed keep saying it!" <sound of chair crashing into wall>
and that we can pursue without that.
"OK, we admit he's a little obsessed. But don't think this will divert an painful amount of capital into an a space in which we have utterly failed for years. Because, ummm, we don't want you to think that."
It involves breakthrough engineering.
"All we need is some of that breakthrough engineering stuff. We hear that stuff is all the rage with the kids these days, and we figure if we can get some of it, we'll be all set to *** kill Google."
We think that the combination with Yahoo would accelerate things in a very exciting way,
"We looked around for startups to partner with, so we could copy their technology then dump them, but apparently everyone has heard the compendium of stories that start with Stac. We figure it'll be easier to buy Yahoo. (we figure it would be easier to host a snowman making competition in hell, incidentally) Just have to figure a way past that little, 'Yahoo flipping hates us' thing."
Slashdot Mirror
I reacted slightly differently. At first, yes I was eager to sign this ... but then I paused ... what about the Mystery Science Theater 3000s and Cinematic Titanics of the future? Where will they buy the rights to destroy movies for a couple thousand dollars?
Nothing wrong with him making crap films. The problem is with making crap derivative works. Crap derivative works that the original artists in most cases are opposed to.
But, then, that's more a problem with copyrights being owned by corporations. The artists get boned and the lawyers and MBAs get paid. And oh how those (sociopathic, since we increasingly select for that in the corporate world) lawyers and MBAs love to sell their children to cannibals for a few bucks.
Copyright to support the progress of the useful arts? If that is truly the goal (and I'm not saying it is, or should be, just if it is), then give the artist more non-transferrable authority.
'Engineers ideally make excellent strategic planners, and they make excellent field operatives. They think differently from how other people think.' ... 'because of those traits, terrorist groups actively recruit engineers.'
Well, gosh. I'd've never thunk it.
The part that surprises me is not that terrorist groups recognize that good strategic thinkers should be actively recruited, but that US corporations typically pay more to socially proficient people even if they lack good strategic thinking skills. That is not to say that there are no business people who are exceedingly adept strategic thinkers (they may even be more rare and perhaps more valuable than good engineers), just that there are so many nimrod schmoozers getting wheelbarrows full of cash for short-term-oriented stupidity (see Bear Stearns; how could I see the real estate crash coming in 2002 and they missed it?!? With all those MBAs! And they get bailed out?!?!?! FEH!).
OK, maybe I'm just venting.
the very real question of whether the military should be manipulating domestic media.
[Following message is US centric. My apologies to non-US citizens, and hopefully similar sentiments work for you in your country, but trying to make this generally applicable weakens the message.]
The very simple answer is another question: Is the government the subject of the people or are the people the subjects of the government? If the government knows better than we then the military should engage in information manipulation to control the perceptions of the public.
Which leads us to a more interesting question: Are there any politicians who appear to believe that they know better what is right for America than we? I think that answer is an unqualified yes. And, for example, I hold that view in some cases: I believe that the first amendment supercedes the will of the people in those cases where the people wish to censor undesirable information.
Which leads us to a deeper question: Given that most people, and probably all people who have a desire to govern, believe that there are certain issues on which they know better what is right than the people, answer the following: Which people with a desire to govern seem to have the fewest such positions, or hold those views in most congruence with your views? Help to get them elected.
But that is not enough. Can you present a rational position supporting your view? Can you present it pursuasively? If not, learn how.
Then grab yourself a soapbox. They are available free of charge from YouTube, MySpace, and many others. The ballot box may be working, but not very well. The jury box has been closed due to national security. And it will suck if we have to go to that other box. So get out there and establish national opinion. If you think the initial question at the top of this post (in the more general form, "Should government representatives manipulate the public perception?") has not already been answered in the extreme affirmative by most people in government, you are sorely mistaken.
It is an information war, it has been going on in this country since we were a British colony and a few truly heroic men and women decided to risk everything for freedom, starting with broadsheets. Your duty as a US citizen (see Declaration of Independence) is to fight that war to the best of your abilities. If we can use these new media to defend our country from all aggressors, foreign and domestic, then we won't have to choose between the ammo box and the loss of the ideals on which this country was founded. Nobody will benefit from reaching that decision point (except Blackwater and a handful of others, and screw them).
Your country needs you in the service of liberty. Not just now, but ten years ago, and ten years from now, and everywhen else. Your country needs you to stand up for our ideals. When things are going right to keep them right. When things are going wrong to put them right. Start a blog. Make a video mashup. Write a song about the founding ideals. Dig into congressional records and publish processed information. Or just write posts like this. Animate the public to defend our nation from all aggressors, arm them with the information to make the right decisions, and build in them the belief that we can win.
We are a huge portion of the media. We may not always be - many forces are seeking to control the Internet. Now is the time to act (and it always will be). Don't kid yourself, we are at war and it will be hard. Now is a volatile time, and we have the greatest information distribution tools in history at our command. You can do this.
"It's that same [level of] success and its own questionable privacy practices that will lead to Google's PR downfall and propel it into a position of disdain going forward. Trust me, the future of Apple and Google may look bright from an economic standpoint, but these companies will be hated one day too. Sad, but true."
I am so sick of hearing this. It is not success that makes me dislike Microsoft. Oracle is just as dominant in databases as Microsoft is in operating systems, but I like Oracle. Why? Because Oracle competes on merit. I use MySQL both at home and in the office, so it is not that I am a mindless fanboi, but I do respect Oracle. I do not care how successful a company is. I care about how honorable they are. Being a monopoly enables a dishonorable company to do more damage, and less successful companies generally do not have the lattitude or power to be abusive, but it is not the success itself that I hold in contempt.
I find it as infuriating as hearing someone who supports the Iraq war say they support the troops or that they want to fight terrorism. We all support the troops. We all want to fight terrorism. And we all support honorable companies regardless of their success, and most of us dislike abusive companies regardless of their success. The only real double standard is success fanbois who cannot see the abusive nature of Microsoft because they are too busy wallowing in adulation of Microsoft's giant $-peen.
I'm a bit surprised IT workers are split. While I voted for McCain for Senate while living in Phoenix, I feel Obama is much stronger on tech issues. Here's what really sold me:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4yVlPqeZwo
I'm feeling lucky with google can be kinda scary to use now
Feeling lucky with Google? That's sick man, Google is only 9 years old!
True, false, whatever. The market is entirely capable of fixing this problem.
Here's the solution: Common carrier. There, problem solved.
All you have to do is say, "If you route every packet on your network the same regardless of origin, destination, or content, you are a common carrier, and you are not liable for what those packets constitute. If you treat anything flowing over your network preferentially, you are not a common carrier, and you are liable for the content of ever packet that travels on your network." Simple. Nobody is going to put their company in the path of child pornography enforcement. All this talk of extra legislation for net neutrality is completely unnecessary. The common carrier laws are already in place, the only remaining step is to clarify that they apply to data as well as voice.
I love the idea of net neutrality, but I am convinced we don't need an extra law to make it happen. Just enforce common carrier.
Am I missing something here?
First, RTFA. The summary picks the least useful poll in the entire article as its example of the otherwise very strong support the article gives for the author's position.
Reading the popular media, you might get the impression that the people don't care that our government is at war with our country. But then, that may just be the media pushing its preference for a stable tapestry on which to paint transient images of sex scandals. Those people who supposedly don't care have also been giving tens of millions of dollars a month, in individual amounts betraying the fact that they are not members of the ruling class and in numbers demonstrating an extraordinarily broad base, to one presidential candidate who does not represent business as usual.
If you look to establishment journalism for serious critique of the establishment, should you really be surprised if what you find is not truth, but spurious defense?
... or is the assertion "Americans don't care about domestic spying" only very loosely tied to "Americans think the Government is very secretive?"
Don't get me wrong, I think the federal government is *very* secretive, and I greatly dislike domestic spying... but the two are not mutually inclusive. It's far from "Poll B proves Assertion A is a blatantly false."
RTFA. The summary is crap. The article supports it's position very well.
I'm not sure how I like how the summary contrasts "Do you like domestic spying?" with "Do you think federal government is very secretive?". You can clearly think the government is very secretive and still not care about the spying. That isn't to say that people do or do not care, I just don't like the summary's cheap attempt at swaying people.
Completely agreed. The summary is crap. However, if you RTFA, the conclusion is very well supported.
Excellent info. I love the idea of using balloons, and the steam balloons are very cool!
The safe landing power could be relatively minimal, considering gliding or autorotating to a controlled emergency landing.
Thinking that the most value would be reaped by areas with limited road infrastructure, I am curious where this sort of vehicle would take off [sorry, bad pun, the author has been sacked] first. Wireless phone practicality made Scandinavian countries, with their wire-hostile winters, dominant in the handset market, for example.
Thanks for the intriguing concept!
and thats a PROBLEM?!?!?!
Not as a whole, but it has problems in it. It has the kind of problems that are nice to have. However, there is an increasing school of thought (even echoed in some of the responses to my post) that scarcity and greed are the only things that drive innovation. I think that is the narrow-minded view of a person who is blinkered by religious devotion to capitalism, but the fact that the belief is unfounded does not make it any less dangerous.
The trick is to find other ways of rewarding creators between now and then, or the end of scarcity simply will not come. The powers that be will argue (as they have done so successfully with software over the past 20 years in fighting Open Source) that scarcity and greed must be artificially maintained.
The two problems are not related to the end of scarcity, but that there are lots of people making lots of money from scarcity, and that we must continue to motivate creative work. If we don't come up with another solution for motivating creative work, those entrenched interests will most certainly create artificial, fiat, scarcity because it is all they know.
>> With nanomachines on the horizon, it won't be more than 50 years till you will have access to a formulator capable of replicating a car
> Make mine a flying car.
Violating the laws of physics is hard. You'll have a formulator long before you have a four-seat flying car that gets 40 miles on a gallon of pump gas.
I gotta say, I'm all in favor.
Read TFA, this really would make P2P legal. That means for $5 per month you can P2P music to your heart's content.
"The administration would be impossible!" - Bullshit. The administration of their current contracts is 1000x more difficult than this would be. This is the billboard charts in a database with a financial report stapled to the front. I could write everything but the rating mechanism in a few weeks (enterprise grade - I could get the proof of concept up in a few hours, as could many people here, I'm sure). The rating mechanism? It might seem tough at first, but once P2P became legal "again" (like it sort of was in the late 90's), a few new Napsters would appear that everyone would use. It'd be another couple weeks to make it really sing. Heck, set up a webservice API and require P2P services to send data, decentralize the P2P from the central ratings body. Don't make it onerous on the P2P services; make them feel honored to be contributing to the system that gives royalties to the artists.
"P2P MP3s suck!" - They won't once it's legal. If you want to P2P flac, go for it. Heck, P2P the wav straight from the CD. It's not illegal anymore.
The numbers work too. Assuming 100M broadband connections in the US, that's 6 billion per year just for digital, and the overhead plummets. CDs, DVDs, vinyl, concerts - those are outside the scope and are free to evolve their own efficient markets. The music industry would have more cashflow than they have today, with less overhead. That's a win in anybody's book.
Of course, you have to hamstring the shit out of the RIAA's financials weasels. No, you don't get to pay a percentage of what's left after expenses, with lots of room for creative bookkeeping. The RIAA gets X% (10? 50? whatever, let competitors bid a lower percentage to takeover the contract) of revenue and the rest must be distributed to the artists. Require the books to be 100% open. Who cares if the books are open if every artist gets the same deal and the P2P Billboard charts are already public? Any artist with a $3.00 calculator can confirm that they're getting a fair shake.
Sure, there'll still be labels prospecting on new bands, paying for studio time and headshots for a share of the digital revenue, but that's outside the digital cashflow calculations. (and CDs and concerts would be handled in their current demonic forms - so the lawyers wouldn't go hungry)
But the real reason I love it is entirely personal; I hate all the models that currently exist, and I've tried most of them. They suck. So I don't buy, nor pirate, music anymore. That sucks. I really like music, but the current hostility in the music market has driven me away.
I wonder what would happen if someone figured out how to torrent a car.
We are laying the legal groundwork for that problem right now (albeit unknowingly). With nanomachines on the horizon, it won't be more than 50 years till you will have access to a formulator capable of replicating a car. But someone will still have to design the car in the first place. We will be up against the exact same problems we are now with music. People will be trading atom-level model files for Ferraris over the intarwebs. Toss in your old car, a design file, and a whole lot of power (assuming we haven't hit, or have solved, the peak oil problem by then), and you get a new car.
It will be the end of natural scarcity of manufactured goods, but not the end of scarcity of energy, good design, or the rarer raw materials. While I loathe the current state of Intellectual Monopoly law, it will be necessary to continue to compensate creators (not necessarily labels) for their work, and the fields where the cost of design can be hidden in the price of the manufactured good will dwindle.
The laws that will protect cars 50 years from now are the laws we are using today to attempt to protect music. Maybe cops will ask for "License, registration, and proof of designer royalty payment, please?"
But then, we'll probably just be the computers' pets by then anyway, so no need to worry.
"interpretive language"?
:p
Is that like interpretive dance? Maybe code that says, url.openInputStream, but by the way it's written it makes you feel like you're walking on a beach with a newfound and transient love?
meh - I just looked it up, it's a synonym for interpreted language. But I still like my joke, so I'm posting anyway.
Brief, to the point, and insightful. I wish I had mod points. Thanks!
story about NASA's plutonium shortage, and how it may affect future missions to the far reaches of the solar system.
Need plutonium to get to Pluto, eh? I don't want to think about what it takes to get to Uranus.
24.244.141.117 is the IP for all the virtual addresses listed. You can add it to your hosts file to see the virtual host. Also many of the host names are not down, for example, the Hemingway one can be seen here:
http://www.cuba-hemingway.net/
Again, I don't support US citizens violating the embargo, nor do I necessarily support the embargo itself. But I do support reading whatever you want whenever you want.
Just in case, here's the IP address of www.cuba-guantanamo.com, another site owned by the same company:
24.244.141.117
Apparently the author of the article doesn't understand that "they" are already watching. Through every ATM and a healthy chunk of other cameras. Google Street View is just the common man getting in on the action. It hasn't added surveillance where there was none, it has added navel-gazing where there was surveillance.
Shit like this is why I want to scream whenever I hear corporations whining about anti-trust laws and how the free market should be allowed to self-regulate. Here's a thought; stop working so hard to break the perfect information that is a fundamental requirement of efficient free market capitalism, and maybe I'll take you a little more seriously.
If you're going to show such complete lack of respect for Adam Smith's ideals, it is unreasonable to ask the government to abide by them. Once you decide to stand up and compete like an honorable person, then you can invoke the term "free market" in your defense.
Tell ya what Microsoft, I've got a deal for you. You unbundle your products; sell your OS, windowing system, window manager, and applications separately (or give them away, without restrictions on their use, if one or more components are considered not commercially viable alone). And don't use any non-published features, rapidly changing software interfaces under your control, or other anti-competitive advantages to glue them together. The price of the bundle (if you do sell a complete kit) should be within maybe 20% of the sum of the unbundled prices (a reasonable package discount is OK, but anything more than 10% starts to sound like bundling to me). You do that, then we'll talk.
A big part of *nix's advantage is that it is componentized. You can use the best tool for your particular needs. I don't want to be tied to a particular window manager when I choose a kernel. And if I don't like or need your windowing system, I don't want to pay for it. The nice thing about that approach is that each product has to stand on its own merit. It leads to this cornerstone of free market economics thing called "competition."
Oh - and stop calling your entire software stack an "OS". You're confusing the end users.
So there was a story about TechNet users wanting, and being denied, early access to SP1 -- apparently specifically so they could do battle testing. I don't know much about TechNet, but I'm guessing those are pretty much the most tech-savvy bundle of customers Microsoft can easily assemble. Why did Microsoft decide to skip the public beta phase with a bunch of expert customers with diverse operating environments and go straight to the world at large?
We have a strategy for competing in the search space that Google dominates today,
"Ballmer has his panties in a bunch. He said we're going to fucking kill Google, and he gets a little attached sometimes, you know? So now we've got to figure a way to f'ing kill Google."
that we'll pursue that we had before we made the Yahoo offer,
"In case you think we're upset about Yahoo's rejection, we're not. Ballmer's still stuck on the '<expletive> kill Google' thing (do I have to keep saying it?) - he can't even see Yahoo past the bulging vein in his forehead."
<from offstage> "Yes you have got to goddammed keep saying it!" <sound of chair crashing into wall>
and that we can pursue without that.
"OK, we admit he's a little obsessed. But don't think this will divert an painful amount of capital into an a space in which we have utterly failed for years. Because, ummm, we don't want you to think that."
It involves breakthrough engineering.
"All we need is some of that breakthrough engineering stuff. We hear that stuff is all the rage with the kids these days, and we figure if we can get some of it, we'll be all set to *** kill Google."
We think that the combination with Yahoo would accelerate things in a very exciting way,
"We looked around for startups to partner with, so we could copy their technology then dump them, but apparently everyone has heard the compendium of stories that start with Stac. We figure it'll be easier to buy Yahoo. (we figure it would be easier to host a snowman making competition in hell, incidentally) Just have to figure a way past that little, 'Yahoo flipping hates us' thing."