Connect the dots, babe! Don't you see it's all part of the man's plan?????
First they punitively tax "open" harddrives.
Then they say, well, if ya don't want to pay the tax, you can always buy these here
copy protected drives that won't let you break the law.
Then of course, Joe Q. Luser, when faced with a $70 surcharge for unprotected disks, abandons the old "free" ATA standard and eventually, we're stuck only with the drives deemed safe by the Media Barons(TM).
It's all part of the master plan, I tell ya!
Shouldn't we be instead looking toward the improvement of DVD burning technology?
The EE Times article pointed out that this technology is supposed to scale up to higher density and eventually move over to DVDs. (Also note that TDK has virtually the same press release on this page.This means it might be a cheaper way for us to get to HD-DVD than waiting for cheap blue lasers. I agree that we don't want another limited utility Sparc/Clik/LS120 device, but if the underlying tech gets added onto the CDR or DVD-R specs at some point, then it could be a positive development.
I again sense this particular one being designed less for the progress of information storage technology, and more to provide TDK with their own unique storage format.
Already they have Sanyo, Plextor and Mitsubishi lined up so it's not just TDK going at it alone. Of course they'd love to get royalties on this, but that means they'd want the technology to be widespread. Finally, let's not forget that in terms of storage density they'll be competing with the will-it-ever-get-released FMD drive from Ricoh and Constellation.
2030) End of "pursuit of happiness". More precisely, the end of privacy. Smart Dust is all-pervasive and allows the gov't to eavesdrop on all private conversations. Your Weblink, by law, is monitored to make sure you don't violate any copyrights and to "protect the children." All the illegal things you ever wanted to do, forget about it! Drugs, public spitting, downloading mp3s, jaywalking, shoplifting, cheating on tests, exceeding the speed limit, sex with a minor...you won't be able to get away with any of them.
2050) By this time, the end of Liberty has approached. Public education no longer exists, and to pay for private education, it becomes commonplace for individuals to indenture themselves to corporations. Zygazm Corp. will give you a million dollar grant to pay for your 6 year college education, but only if you agree to purchase 20 million in Zygote's products over the next 20 years. Also, people will be required to tithe giant media corps. in order to pay for so-called "fair use". (Steamboat Willie a/k/a Mickey Mouse will still be in copyright of course.) These corps will use advertising to ensure that most new words introduced into the language will be trademarks and you will be required to pay to license them. Compliance will be mandatory since privacy will not exist.
2150) The end of Life is nigh. Genetic engineering has brought great strides in human development, but has also decreased diversity. Everyone has the same super-strength gene, everyone's got the same "sparkling blu" eyed gene. Eventually a geno-terrorist comes up with a virus that attacks one of these genetic loci, and poof, away we all go. Or at least the relatively rich and successful people. The problem is that of the remaining population, no-one knows how to read, how to program nanites, how to operate the ozone dispersion machines, etc. So everyone who doesn't die from the virus either starves, dies of thirst, from UV rays, from feral bots, or some other disaster.
Like it or not. People OWN music, movies, and books they buy. Fenegal with "licensing" all you want, but books, movies, and music don't require signatures to buy, nor do they have "i agree" buttons to click, so not even the DMCA protects them.
The problem is that in the not-too-distant future, books, movies and music will require electronic signatures to buy (excuse me, to "license") and/or will have software/hardware encryption keyed to our personal codes, making it impossible to sell and illegal to circumvent. And before we get to that point, we need to make sure our rights are preserved. I'd say things are pretty shaky right now. On the plus side, UCITA looks like it's running into roadblocks. On the negative side, DMCA is alive and kicking.
First of all, Jackie Chan usually doesn't do wire-fu work.
Not true, Jackie does use wires in his flicks, according to his terrific documentary
Jackie Chan: My Stunts. But he attempts to restrict their use to situations where it interferes as little as possible with the realism of the movements. E.g. if he "hits" someone really hard, and they fall over, of course he's not really hitting them. So he frames the shot so he appears to be hitting them, plus there is a wire attached to their leg which jerks them down to the ground very quickly so it appears they have been struck.
What the movie studios and record companies fail to understand is that these efforts to get us to cough up more for their IP will fail. Individuals have only a limited amount of money and a limited amount of time to spend on non-essential items. If your media budget for the year is $5000 and 1000 hours/yr., then the media companies will find themselves unable to squeeze you for any more cash or time once you reach this plateau. So if they find a way to charge you up the wazoo for time-shifted programs, you will find a way to shift your purchases away from other items, maybe buying fewer CDs or DVDs. This means, in the end, less profit for the content producers because they wind up with the same revenue, yet they have to pay additional costs for all these encryption schemes.
And let's not forget DIVX. It is possible to alienate the public's goodwill so much that people will refuse to accept your new technology, no matter how inexpensive it is. After all, what's to stop manufacturers from reverting back to the current ATA standard?
>summed up: piracy hurts the little guy the most. Columbia Records might withstand it, The Backstreet Boys can withstand it, but labels like Trustkill, Relapse etc wont, and neither will the bands they carry.
I think you should reconsider this point of view. I've never heard of the labels Trustkill and Relapse, and that's probably true of 99.9% of the population. But guess what? If I downloaded a couple of.mp3's just for the hell of it, and they sounded cool, I'd run out and buy the CD's. Not everyone would do that, most wouldn't. But I would, and so would many many more people than who would otherwise be exposed to the music those smaller labels sell. You won't find them headlined at Best Buy or Circuit City, that's for sure.
I'm not really looking to deprive artists or labels of their just due, though. I really enjoy discovering new music and I'd be perfectly happy to pay, say, 10 bucks a month for an unlimited secure streaming radio channel where I get to handpick the playlist. And you know what? If I found myself streaming the same song over and over again, I'd still run out to buy the full priced CD so I could have a hard copy with lyrics and liner notes. Again, not everyone would do this, but I think enough people would that the labels could really see their revenue stream take off. They need to really agree on a universal secure standard and make the music available at a reasonable price.
> [Fans] don't, however, have the right to download [music] for free...
IMO, comments like this sort of miss the point of the whole debate. Sure, we know that copyright violation is illegal. But now that "everybody" does it, should it remain illegal? And does the fact that it is illegal make it morally wrong?
Used to be that homosexuality was illegal. Adultery was against the law. Interracial marriage could land you in the pokey. Even fellatio was technically a crime. In some jurisdictions, some of these things are still in the criminal statutes. But the civilized world (for the most part) decided that we really didn't want to punish people for these things. And part of the reason is because so many people did them on a regular basis, which enabled us to come to the realization that these "crimes" didn't injure society.
Copyright violation is at a similar point where society is trying to work out whether or not it should be vigorously enforced. I think that everyone would agree that the copyright laws we have now are imperfect. Is it morally wrong to disobey these imperfect laws? And doesn't the answer to that partially depend on the degree of the violation? Most people don't find anything wrong with those who smoke a joint every so often in the privacy of their own homes/dorms. But a lot more people have problems with street corner/campus pushers. Perhaps Napster's on shakier ground because it's the equivalent of an mp3 dealer.
...you have to buy a full loaf of bread, even though you may only eat 4-5 pieces a week.
Which is why young people often don't buy loaves of bread. When they want a sandwich, they go to the corner deli, which winds up charging them a lot more for two slices than they are worth. And the consumer is willing to pay the premium for the convenience. So the bread manufacturers lose potential income because they are unwilling to sell bread in convenient single serving packs. Similarly, if they don't cater to the market, record companies lose potential income, and leave an opening for others (Napster! mp3.com!) to step in. It's inevitable.
In other words:... The record companies are in charge. You're not.
That's not how it works. The record companies need consumers to survive. The consumers don't need record companies to survive. Guess who's in charge?
The subject matter caused me to wonder about something else:
What's to stop Microsoft from configuring their ubiquitous Internet Explorer to resolve to an alternate DNS...e.g. one of their own devising, in much the same way they already have IE supporting the (IMO execrable) RealNames?
For example, if you type www.news.com, you get the normal C|Net page. But under this scenario, if you type www.news.soft, you would get an alternate site hosted by Microsoft. Seems to me that if they pick an appropriately "cool" sounding TLD, they could slowly appropriate namespace the way they've appropriated web browswers. Or, at the very least, they could flood namespace with cheep TLDs (.soft,.cool,.stuff,.site,.space,.place ,.cola,.free,.etc) until ICANNs names are valueless.
Not to mention, if enough companies were to use one of MS's alternate TLDs (let's say they make them extraordinarily cheap at first), then other browsers would be "broken". In particular, surfing on Linux would become problematic if MS didn't allow Linux browsers to access their TLDs.
Slashdot Mirror
Connect the dots, babe! Don't you see it's all part of the man's plan?????
First they punitively tax "open" harddrives.
Then they say, well, if ya don't want to pay the tax, you can always buy these here copy protected drives that won't let you break the law.
Then of course, Joe Q. Luser, when faced with a $70 surcharge for unprotected disks, abandons the old "free" ATA standard and eventually, we're stuck only with the drives deemed safe by the Media Barons(TM). It's all part of the master plan, I tell ya!
The EE Times article pointed out that this technology is supposed to scale up to higher density and eventually move over to DVDs. (Also note that TDK has virtually the same press release on this page .This means it might be a cheaper way for us to get to HD-DVD than waiting for cheap blue lasers. I agree that we don't want another limited utility Sparc/Clik/LS120 device, but if the underlying tech gets added onto the CDR or DVD-R specs at some point, then it could be a positive development.
I again sense this particular one being designed less for the progress of information storage technology, and more to provide TDK with their own unique storage format.
Already they have Sanyo, Plextor and Mitsubishi lined up so it's not just TDK going at it alone. Of course they'd love to get royalties on this, but that means they'd want the technology to be widespread. Finally, let's not forget that in terms of storage density they'll be competing with the will-it-ever-get-released FMD drive from Ricoh and Constellation.
...in reverse order!
2030) End of "pursuit of happiness". More precisely, the end of privacy. Smart Dust is all-pervasive and allows the gov't to eavesdrop on all private conversations. Your Weblink, by law, is monitored to make sure you don't violate any copyrights and to "protect the children." All the illegal things you ever wanted to do, forget about it! Drugs, public spitting, downloading mp3s, jaywalking, shoplifting, cheating on tests, exceeding the speed limit, sex with a minor...you won't be able to get away with any of them.
2050) By this time, the end of Liberty has approached. Public education no longer exists, and to pay for private education, it becomes commonplace for individuals to indenture themselves to corporations. Zygazm Corp. will give you a million dollar grant to pay for your 6 year college education, but only if you agree to purchase 20 million in Zygote's products over the next 20 years. Also, people will be required to tithe giant media corps. in order to pay for so-called "fair use". (Steamboat Willie a/k/a Mickey Mouse will still be in copyright of course.) These corps will use advertising to ensure that most new words introduced into the language will be trademarks and you will be required to pay to license them. Compliance will be mandatory since privacy will not exist.
2150) The end of Life is nigh. Genetic engineering has brought great strides in human development, but has also decreased diversity. Everyone has the same super-strength gene, everyone's got the same "sparkling blu" eyed gene. Eventually a geno-terrorist comes up with a virus that attacks one of these genetic loci, and poof, away we all go. Or at least the relatively rich and successful people. The problem is that of the remaining population, no-one knows how to read, how to program nanites, how to operate the ozone dispersion machines, etc. So everyone who doesn't die from the virus either starves, dies of thirst, from UV rays, from feral bots, or some other disaster.
The problem is that in the not-too-distant future, books, movies and music will require electronic signatures to buy (excuse me, to "license") and/or will have software/hardware encryption keyed to our personal codes, making it impossible to sell and illegal to circumvent. And before we get to that point, we need to make sure our rights are preserved. I'd say things are pretty shaky right now. On the plus side, UCITA looks like it's running into roadblocks. On the negative side, DMCA is alive and kicking.
Not true, Jackie does use wires in his flicks, according to his terrific documentary Jackie Chan: My Stunts. But he attempts to restrict their use to situations where it interferes as little as possible with the realism of the movements. E.g. if he "hits" someone really hard, and they fall over, of course he's not really hitting them. So he frames the shot so he appears to be hitting them, plus there is a wire attached to their leg which jerks them down to the ground very quickly so it appears they have been struck.
What the movie studios and record companies fail to understand is that these efforts to get us to cough up more for their IP will fail. Individuals have only a limited amount of money and a limited amount of time to spend on non-essential items. If your media budget for the year is $5000 and 1000 hours/yr., then the media companies will find themselves unable to squeeze you for any more cash or time once you reach this plateau. So if they find a way to charge you up the wazoo for time-shifted programs, you will find a way to shift your purchases away from other items, maybe buying fewer CDs or DVDs. This means, in the end, less profit for the content producers because they wind up with the same revenue, yet they have to pay additional costs for all these encryption schemes. And let's not forget DIVX. It is possible to alienate the public's goodwill so much that people will refuse to accept your new technology, no matter how inexpensive it is. After all, what's to stop manufacturers from reverting back to the current ATA standard?
>summed up: piracy hurts the little guy the most. Columbia Records might withstand it, The Backstreet Boys can withstand it, but labels like Trustkill, Relapse etc wont, and neither will the bands they carry.
I think you should reconsider this point of view. I've never heard of the labels Trustkill and Relapse, and that's probably true of 99.9% of the population. But guess what? If I downloaded a couple of .mp3's just for the hell of it, and they sounded cool, I'd run out and buy the CD's. Not everyone would do that, most wouldn't. But I would, and so would many many more people than who would otherwise be exposed to the music those smaller labels sell. You won't find them headlined at Best Buy or Circuit City, that's for sure.
I'm not really looking to deprive artists or labels of their just due, though. I really enjoy discovering new music and I'd be perfectly happy to pay, say, 10 bucks a month for an unlimited secure streaming radio channel where I get to handpick the playlist. And you know what? If I found myself streaming the same song over and over again, I'd still run out to buy the full priced CD so I could have a hard copy with lyrics and liner notes. Again, not everyone would do this, but I think enough people would that the labels could really see their revenue stream take off. They need to really agree on a universal secure standard and make the music available at a reasonable price.
IMO, comments like this sort of miss the point of the whole debate. Sure, we know that copyright violation is illegal. But now that "everybody" does it, should it remain illegal? And does the fact that it is illegal make it morally wrong?
Used to be that homosexuality was illegal. Adultery was against the law. Interracial marriage could land you in the pokey. Even fellatio was technically a crime. In some jurisdictions, some of these things are still in the criminal statutes. But the civilized world (for the most part) decided that we really didn't want to punish people for these things. And part of the reason is because so many people did them on a regular basis, which enabled us to come to the realization that these "crimes" didn't injure society.
Copyright violation is at a similar point where society is trying to work out whether or not it should be vigorously enforced. I think that everyone would agree that the copyright laws we have now are imperfect. Is it morally wrong to disobey these imperfect laws? And doesn't the answer to that partially depend on the degree of the violation? Most people don't find anything wrong with those who smoke a joint every so often in the privacy of their own homes/dorms. But a lot more people have problems with street corner/campus pushers. Perhaps Napster's on shakier ground because it's the equivalent of an mp3 dealer.
Which is why young people often don't buy loaves of bread. When they want a sandwich, they go to the corner deli, which winds up charging them a lot more for two slices than they are worth. And the consumer is willing to pay the premium for the convenience. So the bread manufacturers lose potential income because they are unwilling to sell bread in convenient single serving packs. Similarly, if they don't cater to the market, record companies lose potential income, and leave an opening for others (Napster! mp3.com!) to step in. It's inevitable.
In other words: ... The record companies are in charge. You're not.
That's not how it works. The record companies need consumers to survive. The consumers don't need record companies to survive. Guess who's in charge?
The subject matter caused me to wonder about something else:
.cool, .stuff, .site, .space, .place , .cola, .free, .etc) until ICANNs names are valueless.
What's to stop Microsoft from configuring their ubiquitous Internet Explorer to resolve to an alternate DNS...e.g. one of their own devising, in much the same way they already have IE supporting the (IMO execrable) RealNames?
For example, if you type www.news.com, you get the normal C|Net page. But under this scenario, if you type www.news.soft, you would get an alternate site hosted by Microsoft. Seems to me that if they pick an appropriately "cool" sounding TLD, they could slowly appropriate namespace the way they've appropriated web browswers. Or, at the very least, they could flood namespace with cheep TLDs (.soft,
Not to mention, if enough companies were to use one of MS's alternate TLDs (let's say they make them extraordinarily cheap at first), then other browsers would be "broken". In particular, surfing on Linux would become problematic if MS didn't allow Linux browsers to access their TLDs.