I agree, if it is OK to "share" music and ignore copyright restrictions, it is OK for me to "borrow" GPL'd source and stick it in my closed source software. An interesting conflict for the usual/. crowd!
Is it really a conflict? You're welcome to use GPL software in your closed source software, as long as you don't plan to resell or otherwise distribute that software. As soon as you resell the software, the GPL requires you to make your source available.
I doubt that many of the people who advocate file "sharing" also believe that it's OK to resell other's music. So what you've really pointed out is one of the flaws in the current way in which copyright is applied: that it doesn't distinguish sufficiently between personal use and commercial reselling.
In fact, original copyright law does make this distinction, which is where the concept of fair use comes from. Once you start selling someone's copyrighted work, you have crossed a very clear line. Recent trends in copyright have tried to push this line over to the personal use side, driven by the ease of copying nowadays. However, to do so without making allowances for the differences between personal copying and commercial copying, is not realistic.
I suspect this is part of the point of the upgrade. When students start measuring (or theorizing) and find that it's quite difficult to generate 1Gbps data streams from a PC, you might start seeing research projects about how to make PCs faster, how to overcome internal bottlenecks, etc.
To really take full advantage of the performance on individual workstations, they'll have to upgrade their machines quite significantly. 1Gbps is at the limit of what the standard PCI bus can sustain, and the storage buses like IDE and SCSI only reach those speeds at the high end (ATA/133 or Serial ATA, and Ultra-160 or -320). If they're simply putting gigabit cards into ordinary old machines, you're absolutely right that they'll get little to no benefit over 100Mbps.
Pure computer *science* programs are more commonly associated with pure math departments than with engineering colleges. The typical computer science curriculum deals with many topics that have little or no current application in real-world engineering, including things like quantum computing, computability theory, and even things like lambda calculus and type theory, which may arguably be applicable in the real world, but in practice often tend not to be, today (since almost no real world code is written in languages with theoretically sound type systems, and applying theoretic type system analyses to commercial languages can be a relatively futile exercise).
Engineers build real systems, and as such have to deal with all sort of outside constraints which are usually not considered in pure computer science curricula: the compromises introduced by tight schedules and limited budgets, unreasonable feature requests from marketing departments, etc. In general, having dealt with both camps, I've found that the "scientists" often dismiss real-world concerns on one of two grounds: either they're not theoretically interesting, or they're too theoretically complex to be realistically addressable. Engineers, OTOH, don't usually have the luxury of picking and choosing their battles like this. Engineers often dismiss pure theory on the grounds that it is insufficiently applicable. I have seen a number of cases where I don't think they were correct.
Last time I checked, the only difference between computer science and computer engineering was that the engineers are more geared towards building processors and integrated circuits whereas scientists are preped for software design.
"Engineers geared towards building processors and [ICs]" are hardware engineers. People "preped for software design" could be either software engineers or computer scientists. In fact, software design at the level of UML diagrams and the like is more likely to be covered in a software engineering-oriented course than in a pure computer science course - since it's not really a topic of interest in the pure computer sciences, having more to do with human factors and communication than what is mathematically provable or computable.
Of course, many curricula involve some (not always rational) mixture of both science and engineering, which in part reflects how new the entire discipline is - it will probably stratify even further in future.
Unfortunately, a "large amount of thought", when misdirected, can be worthless. In this case, the theory you mention indicates that a +1 Funny moderation is appropriate. -1 Kook would also work.
I agree with you about the focus, that it's not really important if the current music industry makes money. But in arguing with people who seem to side with the music industry (often because they think they're siding with artists), they don't tend to understand it if you simply say "well, the music industry as we know it is toast, get over it".
What's important is that good artists can earn a decent living, and that there are incentives for them to do good work, and that there's a way to pay for any infrastructure that's necessary to promote and distribute music. So it's quite likely that some kind of "music industry" needs to exist and be able to make money, but what resemblance it will have to today's industry is open to question.
As for the reasons for the strict controls on computer equipment, what it comes down to is that many people perceive computers as an indispensable tool but at the same time as a terrible threat to existing ways of livelihood. They think they can control the perceived threat with laws and technology. I guess they (and unfortunately, we) are just going to have to find out the hard way how well that'll work...
Any and all 'physical property' is just the embodiment of 'intellectual property' into physical forms.
Certainly, but the question is whether the greater economic value is assigned to the intellectual "property" (an interesting and artifical ideological concept) or to the physical manifestation. Most of our markets have relied on the physical manifestation as a barrier to "copying".
When you purchase an automobile, all you are doing is 'leasing' somebody's intellectual property, in the form of the tools and know-how that transformed the raw ore into a vehicle.
You're oversimplifying - this ignores important distinctions. You obtain possession of a physical object which you are free to do with as you please, within reason. The intellectual property is secondary to the user of a physical object.
It happens to be far easier to make a facsimilie of a recording of music
It's that word "happens" that I'm saying has implications for business models, whether you like it or not.
the recording of the musical performance is really just somebody's IP forged into a recording that can be played back, the same as an automobile is somebody's IP forged into an automobile
You're the one pushing an ideology here: you've fixated on a single and specific meaning of intellectual "property" which happens to be very close to that of physical property.
I'm not arguing what's right or wrong, simply what's realistically likely to happen, given human tendencies and the facts of the situation.
Both are instances where you pay someone else to do something better than you ostensibly could.
Again, the question is how much you pay for the one-time invention of something like a car, vs. how much you pay for each manufacture of a car. You're assuming, without any basis, that the majority of the value is in the invention. I'm suggesting that the history of human valuation of each other's output does not favor your position.
Far be it for me to change your mind. But I don't have to change your mind. I can just nod approvingly when society as a whole agrees with me, and you are prohibited from acting freely on your beliefs.
I have no need or desire to copy music. I'm simply saying that in the long term, the ideology which treats intellectual "property" as having all the same rights as physical property, despite clear and obvious differences, is unlikely to survive in the marketplace. I don't doubt that in the short term, we'll get DRM and legislation crafted by people who share your views; but I'm equally certain that these measures are bound to fail.
"Legislating against copying" isn't a sufficiently different business model for you?
From the business perspective (as opposed to the perspective of user rights), I don't consider it very different from the status quo. In any case, I doubt that it'll be successful. Legislating against copying is like legislating against alcohol. People are going to do it anyway. I'm saying that unless business models take this into account, they're going to fail.
I'm of the opinion that it would help to have options other than a subscription service, but I suspect options like Paypal probably haven't reached the level of acceptance and ubiquity that would make this viable right now.
To use myself as an example, I'm an infrequent music buyer - I'll buy maybe three or four albums a year. I don't listen to copied music except to try it. $120/year sounds steep to me, especially if I have to choose music from a limited pool, although clearly it could be a bargain for someone with different habits.
True, but wouldn't it make even more sense to attempt to leverage that position into the new era? Actually, I suspect that a lot of the desperation comes from the fact that the current recording industry knows that they probably won't be the ones to succeed at doing that...
"Disintermediated" was a big buzzword during the dot-com heyday, the idea being that the Internet would eliminate or at least change the role of all sorts of intermediaries or middlemen. That's happened in some areas, including stockbroking and car & book sales, but the process is still ongoing.
Actually, the word has always reminded me of a much longer one: antidisestablishmentarianism, which has a related meaning: the people defending the RIAA are antidisestablishmentarianists, who are against those who want to "disestablish" the status quo.
There is a scarcity of musical talent, top grade recording equipment and studios, and professional producers. The cost of recorded music pays these factors, not for the physical media cost.
This is irrelevant to the point I am making, which is that it's because of the ease of copying that different business models have to be considered. Legislating against copying, or trying to prevent all copying technically, is just sticking a thumb in the dike.
I've explained some of these points in a bit more detail in this message.
It sounds to me like it's pure ideology, not a 'reality.'
There are numerous real facts here that are not ideologically based:
Stealing a physical product is not comparable to *copying* a digital product. I hardly think I need to belabor this point, but just in case, the point is that copying does not deprive anyone else of the original product.
Physical products inevitable have a significantly higher cost of production than the cost of copying a digital product. This is a barrier to copying - not many people violate Ford's intellectual property by making copies of Tauruses.
Humans - not just kids - will do things that they can get away with. This is a sociobiological and game theory imperative. Yes, we have evolved social constraints to avoid all sorts of behaviors agreed upon as undesirable, but most of these are in fact quite directly related to improving the survival capability of societies, individuals, and the species. It's questionable whether, in the presence of a cheap digital copying capability, the ability of Lance Bass to earn the money to fly into space by enforcing the non-copyability of his output is actually in society's overall interest.
If you consider the above three facts in combination, you find that the situation with digital media is factually different from that of physical products. In particular, it seems likely from the above that there will be less social stigma and more acceptance and support for copying of digital media than there will be for stealing of cars. At the very least, it puts price pressure on the products in question.
Business models do need to take these realities into account, and this is exactly what's leading to the current debate. No-one is debating whether it's OK to steal cars, because of the factual differences that I've outlined. Drawing a parallel between the two, as the post I originally replied to did, demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of the issues at work, or perhaps simply an attempt to confuse.
Either we adopt the ideology that intellectual property rights are wrong, and share away, or we adopt the ideology that intellectual property rights are fair
Not at all. You've set up a simplistic binary scenario with respect to intellectual property rights, treating them as equivalent to physical property rights on the one hand, and eliminating them on the other hand. There are an infinite variety of possibilities between those two extremes. You either aren't thinking very deeply about this, or have a vested interest in the current status quo.
You're asking the wrong question, with faulty assumptions: that the amount of money that can currently be generated from a very successful album is somehow a necessity. It's not. Your question is a little like asking how the buggy whip manufacturers are going to sell as many whips to car owners - not a perfect analogy by any means, but my point is that there's a discontinuous change here, and "business as usual" will have to change as a result.
One model that can work has already been mentioned by someone else: to focus more on making money from live performances, a la Grateful Dead. Not everyone gets to create something and stamp out millions of copies very cheaply, making huge profit margins on each one. The music industry is actually something of an anomaly in this respect.
Providing convenient and cheap downloadable music would also help, so that it's easier and preferable to pay a small fee to download a high-quality recording than it is to copy a crappy one. No-one has yet actually done this, the middlemen are all too busy resisting the inevitable reduction in their revenue stream.
The fact that middlement are being disintermediated doesn't mean that there's no future for the industry as a whole, just that there's no future for certain kinds of middlemen.
RIAA members won't fall all over themselves to copy whatever successful model arises, because that model will not involve them at the profitability levels they currently enjoy. However, I'd bet that consumers and artists will both find the end result more congenial, on average, with the possible exception of the likes of Maddona, Britney, and the Back Street Boys.
These analogies miss an important point, which is that cars cost significant money to manufacture, and when someone "nicks" one, the original owner is now short one car. Neither of these things (the cost, nor the scarcity) is true of digital products. Like it or not, business models do have to take this into account - it's simple reality, not ideology.
You're right - Maine is good, since it's so large and relatively unpopulated. And there are still plenty other similarly good locations. I'm not saying you can't get "amazing" skies any more, but rather that they've deteriorated relative to what they used to be like, and what they're like in some less populated parts of the world. Getting away from the cities makes an enormous difference, but doesn't usually eliminate the effect. Finding a place where there is absolutely no visible light pollution, even on the horizon, is increasingly difficult.
Actually, I'm not a city boy, and what I'm talking about is that "the country" can be a hellofa distance from a major metro area like New York, which is surrounded by other cities and towns.
The kinds of skies that I grew up with can't be found anywhere on the East coast of the US, including places like Vermont and New Hampshire. The combination of air pollution and light pollution has pretty much destroyed astronomical viewing conditions in all but the most remote places.
This problem is not confined to the most densely populated areas, either. If you go to Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado, they'll tell you about how the views from the various overlooks have degraded over the past few decades due to air pollution. Mesa Verde is in a location that's pretty "country", 9 miles from the tiny town of Cortez, and 35 miles from the only slightly larger town of Durango.
This level of pollution translates into poor astronomical viewing, and it's much worse when you're not that far out in the country.
Astronomy clubs in New York go to pathetic viewing locations in small parks along highways north of the city, where you can still barely see the Milky Way with the naked eye.
The bottom line is that the country which you so fondly fantasize about barely exists in the U.S. any more.
...is that Disney is advance-promoting its new movie by sending people (or robots?) back in time to make crop circles years ago, thus seeding a worldwide interest in crop circles that otherwise would not have existed.
Those of you who were paying attention might remember that about a year ago, there was no such thing as crop circles. The only reason you think you've already heard of them now is because Disney has messed with the timeline.
Now you know why Disney really needed to extend the copyright term... When you're creating works in the past, you need that extra time!
Leave the city. The lights won't follow you, I promise.
Ever tried that in the New York metro area? The lights do follow you! You can go from New York to Philadelphia without encountering a single dark spot...
William Gibson wasn't imagining things when he wrote about BAMA, the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis.
Realistically, though, it'll take time for DVD recorders and media to reach the cost levels of CD recorders and media. So for applications where cost is an issue - especially education - VCDs may make a lot of sense right now. And since they work on the same players, there's no compatibility or upgrade issue for the players.
I doubt anything will "delay even bigger acceptance of DVD's" - I mean, your local video store carries DVDs, it's not exactly a struggling medium at this point. VCDs could actually help drive the market, they may not be a zero-sum game with DVDs.
Methinks its all just overkill, given that 9/11 seems to have been caused by some very basic oversights* rather than high-level terrorist subtlety.
You're absolutely correct. Unfortunately, at least two mutually reinforcing trends have resulted from 9/11: one is that the general public is spooked in various ways, and wants assurances of greater security; and the other is that those in power, who may have a better grasp of the real risks (which have not in fact changed significantly), see various benefits in offering answers to the public, whether or not those answers make sense.
Those answers are on the government's terms: a "war" which requires "sacrifices", which provides an enormous distraction from the nation's real business, making it difficult to judge the performance of the politicians on real issues; a wonderful excuse to push through laws addressing every inconvenience law enforcement and government has ever encountered; the list goes on.
I think the individuals involved have little in the way of ulterior motives beyond the gain they perceive for themselves and the groups to which they are loyal - groups including law enforcement, the wealthy, big business, and the the Christian right (who are every bit as scary as any Islamic extremist). But the net effect of all of this is likely to be a lot more scary, in the long run, than anything terrorists are able to do.
The problem is that it doesn't seem possible to teach historical subtleties to the society as a whole - we're going to have to relearn, through painful experience, a lesson that was last covered in the 1950s, during the McCarthy era.
Re:Robert Steel- A Great Speaker?
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H2K2 Wrapup
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· Score: 2
You're right. I think what I really meant to say is that just because someone's a good speaker - and can engage people emotionally - doesn't mean that they have something interesting to say. Good speakers can give content-poor speeches.
If the presentation is right, people tend to focus on that and overlook the lack of content. This can result in people coming away from a talk completely jazzed up but totally unable to coherently explain a single reason why they should be. ("But he was just so... forceful!")
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I agree, if it is OK to "share" music and ignore copyright restrictions, it is OK for me to "borrow" GPL'd source and stick it in my closed source software. An interesting conflict for the usual /. crowd!
Is it really a conflict? You're welcome to use GPL software in your closed source software, as long as you don't plan to resell or otherwise distribute that software. As soon as you resell the software, the GPL requires you to make your source available.
I doubt that many of the people who advocate file "sharing" also believe that it's OK to resell other's music. So what you've really pointed out is one of the flaws in the current way in which copyright is applied: that it doesn't distinguish sufficiently between personal use and commercial reselling.
In fact, original copyright law does make this distinction, which is where the concept of fair use comes from. Once you start selling someone's copyrighted work, you have crossed a very clear line. Recent trends in copyright have tried to push this line over to the personal use side, driven by the ease of copying nowadays. However, to do so without making allowances for the differences between personal copying and commercial copying, is not realistic.
It's the most concise and accurate description of DragonBall Z I've ever seen...
To really take full advantage of the performance on individual workstations, they'll have to upgrade their machines quite significantly. 1Gbps is at the limit of what the standard PCI bus can sustain, and the storage buses like IDE and SCSI only reach those speeds at the high end (ATA/133 or Serial ATA, and Ultra-160 or -320). If they're simply putting gigabit cards into ordinary old machines, you're absolutely right that they'll get little to no benefit over 100Mbps.
Engineers build real systems, and as such have to deal with all sort of outside constraints which are usually not considered in pure computer science curricula: the compromises introduced by tight schedules and limited budgets, unreasonable feature requests from marketing departments, etc. In general, having dealt with both camps, I've found that the "scientists" often dismiss real-world concerns on one of two grounds: either they're not theoretically interesting, or they're too theoretically complex to be realistically addressable. Engineers, OTOH, don't usually have the luxury of picking and choosing their battles like this. Engineers often dismiss pure theory on the grounds that it is insufficiently applicable. I have seen a number of cases where I don't think they were correct.
Last time I checked, the only difference between computer science and computer engineering was that the engineers are more geared towards building processors and integrated circuits whereas scientists are preped for software design.
"Engineers geared towards building processors and [ICs]" are hardware engineers. People "preped for software design" could be either software engineers or computer scientists. In fact, software design at the level of UML diagrams and the like is more likely to be covered in a software engineering-oriented course than in a pure computer science course - since it's not really a topic of interest in the pure computer sciences, having more to do with human factors and communication than what is mathematically provable or computable.
Of course, many curricula involve some (not always rational) mixture of both science and engineering, which in part reflects how new the entire discipline is - it will probably stratify even further in future.
Unfortunately, a "large amount of thought", when misdirected, can be worthless. In this case, the theory you mention indicates that a +1 Funny moderation is appropriate. -1 Kook would also work.
What's important is that good artists can earn a decent living, and that there are incentives for them to do good work, and that there's a way to pay for any infrastructure that's necessary to promote and distribute music. So it's quite likely that some kind of "music industry" needs to exist and be able to make money, but what resemblance it will have to today's industry is open to question.
As for the reasons for the strict controls on computer equipment, what it comes down to is that many people perceive computers as an indispensable tool but at the same time as a terrible threat to existing ways of livelihood. They think they can control the perceived threat with laws and technology. I guess they (and unfortunately, we) are just going to have to find out the hard way how well that'll work...
Certainly, but the question is whether the greater economic value is assigned to the intellectual "property" (an interesting and artifical ideological concept) or to the physical manifestation. Most of our markets have relied on the physical manifestation as a barrier to "copying".
When you purchase an automobile, all you are doing is 'leasing' somebody's intellectual property, in the form of the tools and know-how that transformed the raw ore into a vehicle.
You're oversimplifying - this ignores important distinctions. You obtain possession of a physical object which you are free to do with as you please, within reason. The intellectual property is secondary to the user of a physical object.
It happens to be far easier to make a facsimilie of a recording of music
It's that word "happens" that I'm saying has implications for business models, whether you like it or not.
the recording of the musical performance is really just somebody's IP forged into a recording that can be played back, the same as an automobile is somebody's IP forged into an automobile
You're the one pushing an ideology here: you've fixated on a single and specific meaning of intellectual "property" which happens to be very close to that of physical property.
I'm not arguing what's right or wrong, simply what's realistically likely to happen, given human tendencies and the facts of the situation.
Both are instances where you pay someone else to do something better than you ostensibly could.
Again, the question is how much you pay for the one-time invention of something like a car, vs. how much you pay for each manufacture of a car. You're assuming, without any basis, that the majority of the value is in the invention. I'm suggesting that the history of human valuation of each other's output does not favor your position.
Far be it for me to change your mind. But I don't have to change your mind. I can just nod approvingly when society as a whole agrees with me, and you are prohibited from acting freely on your beliefs.
I have no need or desire to copy music. I'm simply saying that in the long term, the ideology which treats intellectual "property" as having all the same rights as physical property, despite clear and obvious differences, is unlikely to survive in the marketplace. I don't doubt that in the short term, we'll get DRM and legislation crafted by people who share your views; but I'm equally certain that these measures are bound to fail.
From the business perspective (as opposed to the perspective of user rights), I don't consider it very different from the status quo. In any case, I doubt that it'll be successful. Legislating against copying is like legislating against alcohol. People are going to do it anyway. I'm saying that unless business models take this into account, they're going to fail.
I'm of the opinion that it would help to have options other than a subscription service, but I suspect options like Paypal probably haven't reached the level of acceptance and ubiquity that would make this viable right now.
To use myself as an example, I'm an infrequent music buyer - I'll buy maybe three or four albums a year. I don't listen to copied music except to try it. $120/year sounds steep to me, especially if I have to choose music from a limited pool, although clearly it could be a bargain for someone with different habits.
True, but wouldn't it make even more sense to attempt to leverage that position into the new era? Actually, I suspect that a lot of the desperation comes from the fact that the current recording industry knows that they probably won't be the ones to succeed at doing that...
Actually, the word has always reminded me of a much longer one: antidisestablishmentarianism, which has a related meaning: the people defending the RIAA are antidisestablishmentarianists, who are against those who want to "disestablish" the status quo.
An excellent page, thank you.
This is irrelevant to the point I am making, which is that it's because of the ease of copying that different business models have to be considered. Legislating against copying, or trying to prevent all copying technically, is just sticking a thumb in the dike.
I've explained some of these points in a bit more detail in this message.
There are numerous real facts here that are not ideologically based:
- Stealing a physical product is not comparable to *copying* a digital product. I hardly think I need to belabor this point, but just in case, the point is that copying does not deprive anyone else of the original product.
- Physical products inevitable have a significantly higher cost of production than the cost of copying a digital product. This is a barrier to copying - not many people violate Ford's intellectual property by making copies of Tauruses.
- Humans - not just kids - will do things that they can get away with. This is a sociobiological and game theory imperative. Yes, we have evolved social constraints to avoid all sorts of behaviors agreed upon as undesirable, but most of these are in fact quite directly related to improving the survival capability of societies, individuals, and the species. It's questionable whether, in the presence of a cheap digital copying capability, the ability of Lance Bass to earn the money to fly into space by enforcing the non-copyability of his output is actually in society's overall interest.
If you consider the above three facts in combination, you find that the situation with digital media is factually different from that of physical products. In particular, it seems likely from the above that there will be less social stigma and more acceptance and support for copying of digital media than there will be for stealing of cars. At the very least, it puts price pressure on the products in question.Business models do need to take these realities into account, and this is exactly what's leading to the current debate. No-one is debating whether it's OK to steal cars, because of the factual differences that I've outlined. Drawing a parallel between the two, as the post I originally replied to did, demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of the issues at work, or perhaps simply an attempt to confuse.
Either we adopt the ideology that intellectual property rights are wrong, and share away, or we adopt the ideology that intellectual property rights are fair
Not at all. You've set up a simplistic binary scenario with respect to intellectual property rights, treating them as equivalent to physical property rights on the one hand, and eliminating them on the other hand. There are an infinite variety of possibilities between those two extremes. You either aren't thinking very deeply about this, or have a vested interest in the current status quo.
One model that can work has already been mentioned by someone else: to focus more on making money from live performances, a la Grateful Dead. Not everyone gets to create something and stamp out millions of copies very cheaply, making huge profit margins on each one. The music industry is actually something of an anomaly in this respect.
Providing convenient and cheap downloadable music would also help, so that it's easier and preferable to pay a small fee to download a high-quality recording than it is to copy a crappy one. No-one has yet actually done this, the middlemen are all too busy resisting the inevitable reduction in their revenue stream.
The fact that middlement are being disintermediated doesn't mean that there's no future for the industry as a whole, just that there's no future for certain kinds of middlemen.
RIAA members won't fall all over themselves to copy whatever successful model arises, because that model will not involve them at the profitability levels they currently enjoy. However, I'd bet that consumers and artists will both find the end result more congenial, on average, with the possible exception of the likes of Maddona, Britney, and the Back Street Boys.
These analogies miss an important point, which is that cars cost significant money to manufacture, and when someone "nicks" one, the original owner is now short one car. Neither of these things (the cost, nor the scarcity) is true of digital products. Like it or not, business models do have to take this into account - it's simple reality, not ideology.
You're right - Maine is good, since it's so large and relatively unpopulated. And there are still plenty other similarly good locations. I'm not saying you can't get "amazing" skies any more, but rather that they've deteriorated relative to what they used to be like, and what they're like in some less populated parts of the world. Getting away from the cities makes an enormous difference, but doesn't usually eliminate the effect. Finding a place where there is absolutely no visible light pollution, even on the horizon, is increasingly difficult.
The kinds of skies that I grew up with can't be found anywhere on the East coast of the US, including places like Vermont and New Hampshire. The combination of air pollution and light pollution has pretty much destroyed astronomical viewing conditions in all but the most remote places.
This problem is not confined to the most densely populated areas, either. If you go to Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado, they'll tell you about how the views from the various overlooks have degraded over the past few decades due to air pollution. Mesa Verde is in a location that's pretty "country", 9 miles from the tiny town of Cortez, and 35 miles from the only slightly larger town of Durango.
This level of pollution translates into poor astronomical viewing, and it's much worse when you're not that far out in the country.
Astronomy clubs in New York go to pathetic viewing locations in small parks along highways north of the city, where you can still barely see the Milky Way with the naked eye.
The bottom line is that the country which you so fondly fantasize about barely exists in the U.S. any more.
Those of you who were paying attention might remember that about a year ago, there was no such thing as crop circles. The only reason you think you've already heard of them now is because Disney has messed with the timeline.
Now you know why Disney really needed to extend the copyright term... When you're creating works in the past, you need that extra time!
Posting on /. means never having to apologize for your spelling...
Ever tried that in the New York metro area? The lights do follow you! You can go from New York to Philadelphia without encountering a single dark spot...
William Gibson wasn't imagining things when he wrote about BAMA, the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis.
I doubt anything will "delay even bigger acceptance of DVD's" - I mean, your local video store carries DVDs, it's not exactly a struggling medium at this point. VCDs could actually help drive the market, they may not be a zero-sum game with DVDs.
You're absolutely correct. Unfortunately, at least two mutually reinforcing trends have resulted from 9/11: one is that the general public is spooked in various ways, and wants assurances of greater security; and the other is that those in power, who may have a better grasp of the real risks (which have not in fact changed significantly), see various benefits in offering answers to the public, whether or not those answers make sense.
Those answers are on the government's terms: a "war" which requires "sacrifices", which provides an enormous distraction from the nation's real business, making it difficult to judge the performance of the politicians on real issues; a wonderful excuse to push through laws addressing every inconvenience law enforcement and government has ever encountered; the list goes on.
I think the individuals involved have little in the way of ulterior motives beyond the gain they perceive for themselves and the groups to which they are loyal - groups including law enforcement, the wealthy, big business, and the the Christian right (who are every bit as scary as any Islamic extremist). But the net effect of all of this is likely to be a lot more scary, in the long run, than anything terrorists are able to do.
The problem is that it doesn't seem possible to teach historical subtleties to the society as a whole - we're going to have to relearn, through painful experience, a lesson that was last covered in the 1950s, during the McCarthy era.
If the presentation is right, people tend to focus on that and overlook the lack of content. This can result in people coming away from a talk completely jazzed up but totally unable to coherently explain a single reason why they should be. ("But he was just so... forceful!")