I agree that the headline pushes it a bit far, but based on the information in the article, the "outlaw" interpretation is about (almost?) as valid as the "not encourage" one.
I agree that outlawing OSS is a fairly ridiculous idea (First Amendment issues alone should stop this one right-quick). However, this being slashdot, you should expect such exaggerations as a matter of course.
People who only read headlines are just asking to be misinformed anyway.:-)
I don't think that it's a coincidence that the US, with it's many large corporations also has one of the highest stardards of living on the planet. I don't know too many other countries where people are literally killing themselves to try to get into.
Several points here:
Your statement makes typical assumptions about "standard of living". We Americans have far less leisure time than many 3rd world people.
Why are people "killing themselves to get in"? Laregly because the economies in their native lands have, over the past few centuries, been co-opted by imperialist western corps. Previously self-sufficient economies the world over have been tricked, forced, or manipulated into participating in Euro/Americentric mercantalist frameworks.
Furthermore, the "high standard of living" in the US is sort of a crock. Many people in this country live with debts people in less developed nations cannot comprehend. This is because Corporate America has done a good job of turning us into merchandise-addicted consumers instead of thoughtful and free-thinking citizens.
A bit of a stretch, maybe. But as others have replied, talk of "Threatening the American Way" and "communicating with policymakers" certainly implies it.
Also, thie is SLASHDOT. It's not SUPPOSED to be a credible and fair news source. If you want "fair" or "unbiased" reporting, try CNN, or NPR.
NPR's website has this little scrap of copy on their home page. There was a story involving them here a few somethings ago, and i noticed it:
Linking to or framing of any material on this site without the prior written consent of NPR is prohibited. To ask about linking rights, contact: webmaster@npr.org.
I asked about my "rights", but haven't seen a response yet
Go Here and you'll discover they don't want you linking to their pages, or framing them. If you want to secure "linking rights" you need to ask them for written permission. How... free
I think I saw one of these coming out of a concert a few weeks ago. It was further fest (guys from the grateful dead), and let's just say that my visual perception had been... um... enhanced.
Somehow, I don't think the police realized the dangerous situation they were creating...
I still haven't seen a worthy challenge to the 1-Click philosophy. Yes, of course you can say, "Well, duh, it's obvious that you can do that," but these guys did it and said, "Hey, we did it first," and I haven't really seen a conclusive proof against that.
If it's obvious to someone learned in the art, then it is not (technically) patentable. Also, prior art exists with, ie: catalog call centers, where they store you CC info and process your order. Adding "on the internet" to that is pretty lame "invention"
I'm really quite suprised that more US companies are not establishing development shops in economically disadvantaged places. Russia is a great example of place where you can get away with paying great people peanuts, all the while looking like a saint. If you've got some good management types (who have a clue), there is no reason not to start development offices in such places. Send one or two people overseas to recruit a team, toss them a project, and see what they get done. With US$, it is pretty easy to attract top people in places like Russia, India, or Indonesia. I'm suprised that we don't see more of this, or do we?
Nice idea, but I think the real point is that the Offspring aren't really in support of Napster. I'm pretty uninformed about this, but I think it's just a nice sort of publicity/public service plot.
I seem to remember Napster saying things like "We support Artists (getting paid)" and the such. So Offspring comes along and says "tit-for-tat": "We think napster is great, now let's profit off their IP" Their words of "support" are just parody, not sincerity.
This is exactly right, there is a huge difference between (perhaps unethically) offering a service that can easily be used to commit illegal activities and actually committing those activities.
No matter how cool napster wants to be, they do need to actively defend their trademark in order to preserve their rights.
If you read his responses to the previous article here on/. (which I'm not linking to because the site is moving awfully slow right now), you'll see that he repetively states that they're targeting for profit fan-sites that are making money on advertising. Of course you don't need to get a liscence for non-commercial use. But if you're running banners on your site, you do need one - and they're letting you have one for free.
Re:Always Withhold your Social Security #
on
A Matter Of Trust?
·
· Score: 2
Try calling your favorite credit card company and doing... well anything. How do they verify it's you on the phone? "What are the last/first n digits of your SSN?" That's how.
Also, a SSN is a pretty good starting place for developing a nice false identity. Pretty easy to get a birth certificate. With that and a SSN, you can, er, go places.
The question is what sort of uses ought to be "authorized" - and who is the one doing the authorization? If TW wants to include language that makes unauthorized what would otherwise be considered "fair" use, we have a problem. I believe that is exactly what they want to do. Copyright law already defines and criminalizes the non-fair uses. TW is doing a little linguistic slight of hand in an attempt to turn fair use into unauthorized use.
What about non-video games? I'm sure many of us have encountered over-aggressive jock types. Interesting idea: Maybe it's all that football and hockey they're playing. Of course, nobody dares show any connection between agressive sports and violent behavior. I don't think it's not talked about because it's obvious either. It's just that Football is so Apple-Pie that nobody dares touch it with a ten foot pole.
Kind of an interesting idea here, despite the fact that this is awfully silly.
This is a model where the artists really *could* get payed. If every band set up a site, and said "pay us $5 for every album's worth of music that you download", and everyone who would have bought the disc downloads it and pays for it, the musicians would make more money per CD than they would through the record companies.
Getting people to respect an honor system like that is going to be tough though.
To me, the moral imperative of the Hellmouth series has always been simple: get these stories out to a wider audience. That's what they were sent. So to get the comments out to a wider audience, you are going to publish a book and sell it for ~$15... Will that REALLY get it to a wider audiance?
The fact is, people on the outside are likely to pay more attention because it costs money. I know a guy who published a directory of people and companies in a certain industry. When he doubled the price of the book, he sold about twice as many. Having it in buyable book form also will get it reviewed in mainstream publication, free advertising.
Larger Audience? (Score:2) by _xeno_ on 04-21-00 10:45 AM EST (#33) (User Info) To me, the moral imperative of the Hellmouth series has always been simple: get these stories out to a wider audience. That's what they were sent. So to get the comments out to a wider audience, you are going to publish a book and sell it for ~$15... Will that REALLY get it to a wider audiance? Is the publisher going to do any publicity on the book? Are you going to be on Oprah? Or is the book just going to sit on bookstore shelves, being bought only by those/. readers who feel for whatever reason they should buy a copy? How about posting the entire content of the book to a website so people can read it online for free. If you're not making a profit, then why not? It can't hurt profits if there aren't supposed to be any. And that might help get to a wider audience. You should really read the entire article before posting - Rob says explicitly that it will be available in downloadable form. In fact, it's the final thing in his addendum, and it's in boldface!
This story makes me wonder about how big companies interact with their legal department.
Here we have a case where there was a cheap, more or less foolproof, technical remedy that could have been implemented in well under one man-day, most likely. Yet instead they go for the legal solution.
This makes me wonder who's calling the shots? Is the "problem" that suits talk to their lawyers and not to their techs? Or is it that lawyers "sell" themseleves to these clients:
"Hey, Mr. CEO, I noticed Company X is deep-linking to our site. As your counsel, it is my responsibility to inform you that by doing so they're engaging in blah blah blah, and we should sue the pants off them. " Is anyone out there in a position at work where they deal with corporate lawyers? Is it really the companies that "sick their lawyers on them", or do lawyers "sell themselves" to their clients, by painting pictures of legal doom-and-gloom if they don't sue?
Obviosly in this case, the problem could have easily been solved without an expensive lawsuit - yet we see not technical solution, and an expensive lawsuit.
As I understand it, the key to this strategy would be to keep requesting. More specifically from different nodes. However, to get the information cached in many places requires doing a lot of requests from a lot of different places.
I think the only real problem is not physical resources, but the vast consumption of meaningful namespace.
Ooops, I misspoke, not we can't always solve halting problems. I forget the trick penrose uses, but it mimic's Goedel's proof (which I've all-but-forgoteen). It's incredible how much you forget in the real world.
I've been fairly convinced by Penrose's arguments in "Shadows of the Mind" that computantional conciousness is impossible - or at least that the human mind is non-computational. I studied CS and Philosophy at university, and did quite a bit of thinking and reading on the subject. I suggest anyone who's interested pick up a copy of "Shadows" - it's not a light read, but it's worth it. Be prepared to do some thought experiments using Turing machines.
The basic argument against computational intelligence (IIRC) is based on Goedel's Incompleteness Theorm. Penrose suggests that because humans can always solve halting problems (will a given program terminate) and turing machines can't, that the human brain is doing more than mere computation.
Consider a machine M1, which is fed as input the input (program+data) of another machine M2. Let it be the case that M1 will stop processing if and only if M2 will not. Consider when M2 = M1.
That has something to do with it, maybe I'll do a short paper on this sometime - need to re-read the book.
A bit-for-bit copy would be identical to the original. No player could tell the difference. This is exactly why "deCSS is a pirate tool" is either false or misleading. Anyone with access to the (expensive) equiptment to duplicate DVDs in this manner can make as many copies as they wish. Most consumers do not. CSS controls how you access the content (and where - region codes). It also keeps you from decrypting the video and saving it, say, on your hard drive.
I did some programming contests a few years ago. In one we got killed at the first level, but the first year we got to go the North Eastern US and get killed by Harvard, MIT, and RIT (which was at the local competition, but placed at the regionsals). It was fun, but we didn't take it very seriously. Alot of it seems to come down to figuring out some trick, or just hacking something out.
In 1996 (the only year it was run - if at all it was) it was a Chinese Checkers competition. Build a chinese checkers player, and duke it out. There was a hack contest in the morning too... I wanted to see it happen while I was there, but it never came about. Too bad, seemed like it would be fun.
What's even scarier to them is the thought that somehow, some day, somewhere, somebody is going to start creating *EDUCATED* music consumers who recognize that there's more to appreciating music than hit singles. If and when demand starts driving the market, things are going to get really ugly, because (good) musicians won't need the industry to shovel their crap into people's ears.
The bulk of the of money artists make is from the album. Tours are from a business standpoint advertising rather than actual presentation of the product.
There are exceptions to this rule. If you're a musician who's willing to work long hard hours touring, you can make an AWFUL LOT. This is exactly what the Grateful Dead did. They sold out arena after arena for years (decades even), and got very wealthy in the process
Even better, they essentially gave away their music. They pioneered the practice of encouraging people to record their shows, and make copies for their friends. You could get "taper's tickets", and get a nice spot behind the soundboard to set up your reel-to-reel, DAT, Minidisc, whatever.
And when you think about it, music is great stuff. But is one song worth all the money that is squeezed out of it?
I am a musician and a songwriter. I'm going to "do the dream" this june. I'm moving to Colorado with my band, and we're going to work very very hard. We have (what I think are) some great songs. I hope people like them. I don't think that I deserve millions of dollars for them. I already wrote and recorded them for chissake!
How much is a flash of inspiration really worth. I don't think it's worth millions of bucks.
On the other hand, touring is HARD WORK - and also requires *talent* - something studio musicians don't really need as much of. While touring you're working very long days in uncomfortable surroundings. It ain't all Sex and Drugs.
Furthermore, do you know why touring is "advertising"? It's because these one hit wonders have just that - one hit. Even if it's good, people aren't going to come back to see them perform it more than once or twice. Real, live musicians have a repitoire, they sometimes play different sets every night. They play the same song in different ways, and improvise. You hear a performance. Let talented musicians (those for whom performance != lip-syncing) work hard, be creatively challenged to keep the show interesting, and people will buy tickets for every night of a four night stand. hundreds of thousands of people have done this and will continue to Just my two cents. Click this link in my sig to hear 2-year old tracks from my band.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, compared to slashdot...
But who am I to argue with the godfather of soul.
I agree that outlawing OSS is a fairly ridiculous idea (First Amendment issues alone should stop this one right-quick). However, this being slashdot, you should expect such exaggerations as a matter of course.
People who only read headlines are just asking to be misinformed anyway.
Several points here:
Your statement makes typical assumptions about "standard of living". We Americans have far less leisure time than many 3rd world people.
Why are people "killing themselves to get in"? Laregly because the economies in their native lands have, over the past few centuries, been co-opted by imperialist western corps. Previously self-sufficient economies the world over have been tricked, forced, or manipulated into participating in Euro/Americentric mercantalist frameworks.
Furthermore, the "high standard of living" in the US is sort of a crock. Many people in this country live with debts people in less developed nations cannot comprehend. This is because Corporate America has done a good job of turning us into merchandise-addicted consumers instead of thoughtful and free-thinking citizens.
A bit of a stretch, maybe. But as others have replied, talk of "Threatening the American Way" and "communicating with policymakers" certainly implies it.
Also, thie is SLASHDOT. It's not SUPPOSED to be a credible and fair news source. If you want "fair" or "unbiased" reporting, try CNN, or NPR.
Linking to or framing of any material on this site without the prior written consent of NPR is prohibited. To ask about linking rights, contact: webmaster@npr.org.
I asked about my "rights", but haven't seen a response yet
Go Here and you'll discover they don't want you linking to their pages, or framing them. If you want to secure "linking rights" you need to ask them for written permission. How ... free
Somehow, I don't think the police realized the dangerous situation they were creating...
If it's obvious to someone learned in the art, then it is not (technically) patentable. Also, prior art exists with, ie: catalog call centers, where they store you CC info and process your order. Adding "on the internet" to that is pretty lame "invention"
I'm really quite suprised that more US companies are not establishing development shops in economically disadvantaged places. Russia is a great example of place where you can get away with paying great people peanuts, all the while looking like a saint. If you've got some good management types (who have a clue), there is no reason not to start development offices in such places. Send one or two people overseas to recruit a team, toss them a project, and see what they get done. With US$, it is pretty easy to attract top people in places like Russia, India, or Indonesia. I'm suprised that we don't see more of this, or do we?
I seem to remember Napster saying things like "We support Artists (getting paid)" and the such. So Offspring comes along and says "tit-for-tat": "We think napster is great, now let's profit off their IP" Their words of "support" are just parody, not sincerity.
This is exactly right, there is a huge difference between (perhaps unethically) offering a service that can easily be used to commit illegal activities and actually committing those activities.
No matter how cool napster wants to be, they do need to actively defend their trademark in order to preserve their rights.
If you read his responses to the previous article here on /. (which I'm not linking to because the site is moving awfully slow right now), you'll see that he repetively states that they're targeting for profit fan-sites that are making money on advertising. Of course you don't need to get a liscence for non-commercial use. But if you're running banners on your site, you do need one - and they're letting you have one for free.
Try calling your favorite credit card company and doing ... well anything. How do they verify it's you on the phone? "What are the last/first n digits of your SSN?" That's how.
Also, a SSN is a pretty good starting place for developing a nice false identity. Pretty easy to get a birth certificate. With that and a SSN, you can, er, go places.
The question is what sort of uses ought to be "authorized" - and who is the one doing the authorization? If TW wants to include language that makes unauthorized what would otherwise be considered "fair" use, we have a problem. I believe that is exactly what they want to do. Copyright law already defines and criminalizes the non-fair uses. TW is doing a little linguistic slight of hand in an attempt to turn fair use into unauthorized use.
What about non-video games? I'm sure many of us have encountered over-aggressive jock types. Interesting idea: Maybe it's all that football and hockey they're playing. Of course, nobody dares show any connection between agressive sports and violent behavior. I don't think it's not talked about because it's obvious either. It's just that Football is so Apple-Pie that nobody dares touch it with a ten foot pole.
This is a model where the artists really *could* get payed. If every band set up a site, and said "pay us $5 for every album's worth of music that you download", and everyone who would have bought the disc downloads it and pays for it, the musicians would make more money per CD than they would through the record companies.
Getting people to respect an honor system like that is going to be tough though.
The fact is, people on the outside are likely to pay more attention because it costs money. I know a guy who published a directory of people and companies in a certain industry. When he doubled the price of the book, he sold about twice as many. Having it in buyable book form also will get it reviewed in mainstream publication, free advertising.
Larger Audience? (Score:2) by _xeno_ on 04-21-00 10:45 AM EST (#33) (User Info) To me, the moral imperative of the Hellmouth series has always been simple: get these stories out to a wider audience. That's what they were sent. So to get the comments out to a wider audience, you are going to publish a book and sell it for ~$15... Will that REALLY get it to a wider audiance? Is the publisher going to do any publicity on the book? Are you going to be on Oprah? Or is the book just going to sit on bookstore shelves, being bought only by those /. readers who feel for whatever reason they should buy a copy? How about posting the entire content of the book to a website so people can read it online for free. If you're not making a profit, then why not? It can't hurt profits if there aren't supposed to be any. And that might help get to a wider audience. You should really read the entire article before posting - Rob says explicitly that it will be available in downloadable form. In fact, it's the final thing in his addendum, and it's in boldface!
Here we have a case where there was a cheap, more or less foolproof, technical remedy that could have been implemented in well under one man-day, most likely. Yet instead they go for the legal solution.
This makes me wonder who's calling the shots? Is the "problem" that suits talk to their lawyers and not to their techs? Or is it that lawyers "sell" themseleves to these clients:
"Hey, Mr. CEO, I noticed Company X is deep-linking to our site. As your counsel, it is my responsibility to inform you that by doing so they're engaging in blah blah blah, and we should sue the pants off them. " Is anyone out there in a position at work where they deal with corporate lawyers? Is it really the companies that "sick their lawyers on them", or do lawyers "sell themselves" to their clients, by painting pictures of legal doom-and-gloom if they don't sue?
Obviosly in this case, the problem could have easily been solved without an expensive lawsuit - yet we see not technical solution, and an expensive lawsuit.
Any anecdotes would be appreciated.
Don't forget to post as AC
As I understand it, the key to this strategy would be to keep requesting. More specifically from different nodes. However, to get the information cached in many places requires doing a lot of requests from a lot of different places.
I think the only real problem is not physical resources, but the vast consumption of meaningful namespace.
a good description of the halting probelm
And here's a review of SOM
I've been fairly convinced by Penrose's arguments in "Shadows of the Mind" that computantional conciousness is impossible - or at least that the human mind is non-computational. I studied CS and Philosophy at university, and did quite a bit of thinking and reading on the subject. I suggest anyone who's interested pick up a copy of "Shadows" - it's not a light read, but it's worth it. Be prepared to do some thought experiments using Turing machines.
The basic argument against computational intelligence (IIRC) is based on Goedel's Incompleteness Theorm. Penrose suggests that because humans can always solve halting problems (will a given program terminate) and turing machines can't, that the human brain is doing more than mere computation.
Consider a machine M1, which is fed as input the input (program+data) of another machine M2. Let it be the case that M1 will stop processing if and only if M2 will not. Consider when M2 = M1.
That has something to do with it, maybe I'll do a short paper on this sometime - need to re-read the book.
Anyhow, I thought the reference might be useful.
A bit-for-bit copy would be identical to the original. No player could tell the difference. This is exactly why "deCSS is a pirate tool" is either false or misleading. Anyone with access to the (expensive) equiptment to duplicate DVDs in this manner can make as many copies as they wish. Most consumers do not. CSS controls how you access the content (and where - region codes). It also keeps you from decrypting the video and saving it, say, on your hard drive.
A professor of mine (Dr. Hans Koomen) had developed a contest more focused on planning, design, and doing it right.
In 1996 (the only year it was run - if at all it was) it was a Chinese Checkers competition. Build a chinese checkers player, and duke it out. There was a hack contest in the morning too... I wanted to see it happen while I was there, but it never came about. Too bad, seemed like it would be fun.
Absolutely.
They should have though of this first.
What's even scarier to them is the thought that somehow, some day, somewhere, somebody is going to start creating *EDUCATED* music consumers who recognize that there's more to appreciating music than hit singles. If and when demand starts driving the market, things are going to get really ugly, because (good) musicians won't need the industry to shovel their crap into people's ears.
There are exceptions to this rule. If you're a musician who's willing to work long hard hours touring, you can make an AWFUL LOT. This is exactly what the Grateful Dead did. They sold out arena after arena for years (decades even), and got very wealthy in the process
Even better, they essentially gave away their music. They pioneered the practice of encouraging people to record their shows, and make copies for their friends. You could get "taper's tickets", and get a nice spot behind the soundboard to set up your reel-to-reel, DAT, Minidisc, whatever.
And when you think about it, music is great stuff. But is one song worth all the money that is squeezed out of it?
I am a musician and a songwriter. I'm going to "do the dream" this june. I'm moving to Colorado with my band, and we're going to work very very hard. We have (what I think are) some great songs. I hope people like them. I don't think that I deserve millions of dollars for them. I already wrote and recorded them for chissake!
How much is a flash of inspiration really worth. I don't think it's worth millions of bucks.
On the other hand, touring is HARD WORK - and also requires *talent* - something studio musicians don't really need as much of. While touring you're working very long days in uncomfortable surroundings. It ain't all Sex and Drugs.
Furthermore, do you know why touring is "advertising"? It's because these one hit wonders have just that - one hit. Even if it's good, people aren't going to come back to see them perform it more than once or twice. Real, live musicians have a repitoire, they sometimes play different sets every night. They play the same song in different ways, and improvise. You hear a performance. Let talented musicians (those for whom performance != lip-syncing) work hard, be creatively challenged to keep the show interesting, and people will buy tickets for every night of a four night stand. hundreds of thousands of people have done this and will continue to Just my two cents. Click this link in my sig to hear 2-year old tracks from my band.