Stephen King is counting # of downloads as compared to # of payments. If you download the PDF file for your use 10 times, he expects to get $7.50 out of the deal.
This whole plan is flawed.
King should have created a website that creates accounts for people wanting to download the book. If you want to pay, fine. If you don't fine. But if someone out there downloads the book a million times just to spite the author, there is nothing that the paying public can do about it.
Creating a user account system would allow King to log in people, and then find out which individuals paid for the document. Each individual could download the file as often as needed.
Personally I open the PDF in my browser, read what I want to at the time, then close it. I haven't ever saved the file to a specific spot on my disk. No need. Just pop it open in the browser and read a little bit where ever I am.
It's too bad that this was not thought out enough at the get-go. If there is a 3rd part to this book released, I will be very surprised if the reason is that King reached the %75 mark.
What happened to the Mars lander we sent out there? Did we ever regain control of it again? I think that it would be interesting to find out in the future that a band of wild sand pigmy's scrapped our $5 million mars lander and made it into cheap trinkets.
Maybe we can trade them some beads for half of the planet!
What kind of work do the telescopes at your facility generally do? Do local astronomers get to come in and do research or are the scopes reserved for some large project?
I have heard a lot of theories about matter flying into the Earth from Mars depositing life here.
Has anyone thought about the potential for large amounts of matter coming from another source outside of our galaxy that could have potentially collided with the Earth and with Mars?
Since I'm not a big planetary buff, what are the timelines of the estimated beginning of life on Earth and Mars? Do they coincide (within a few million years)? Any input on this idea would be cool.
Lawrence Lessig == smart is not a statement. Lawrence Lessig == smart could yield either a true or false boolean value. either Lawrence Lessig == smart or Lawrence Lessig smart. If Hemos thinks that Lawrence Lessig IS smart, he should have told us so with: Lawrence Lessig = smart But before this, tell me what programming language accepts spaces in variable names. -S
I just received a corporate memo barring this book from our offices. Good thing we told Amazon.com they couldn't track the books we buy... I think I'm going to have to cover this book with one of the extra copies of Catcher in the Rye I have over in the corner. Grin. -S
Me linking to an illegal file that is not contained on my server is the equivalent of me telling a junkie that I saw the crack dealer around the corner. There is nothing illegal in me pointing the junkie to the dealer. I do not have any crack, nor am I selling it. I am just being a nice guy and 'helping' someone find what they are looking for. If they go buy crack, do I get arrested? No, I did not think so. -S
I think that this might mean Sony is losing money making the PS2 console. Their reasoning may be that if they have other people making environments that their games will run on, they will sell more cd media (which is cheap to make). I think it's a pretty good business strategy, all they make money off of is the games anyways. The $0.10 profit on a console probably doesn't make anyone at Sony very excited.
They learned their lesson from minidisc. When it first came out, they wouldn't let anyone make minidiscs or minidisc players. Nothing sold. Now pretty much anyone can start manufacturing discs or players... and business is picking up.
MS only has rights to make a profit on the 'first sale'. Meaning the copy of windows98 that came on your computer from DELL was already sold to DELL then the license was transferred, or sold, to you. If you decide to sell it to someone else, it's way out of microsoft's hands. Already in a fourth set of hands.
What is the point of having a case on wheels when I have a 21" Sony Trinitron that weighs upwards of 75 pounds. The case is the easiest thing for me to lug around...
If the contract price for a stick of 64M PC100 SDRAM is $6, and at any local retail we pay around $1 per meg for this ram ($64).
If this logic is correct... then we are paying a 1066% mark up.
If the contract cost goes up, then the cost for retail stores will go up. Retail stores will increase prices to maintain the same profit on each unit...
They covered the fact that this was a possibility. Now that they are ready for a crack attempt, they are letting the readers know. I believe when I read that last story, they just discussed WHAT they wanted to do. Now it's ready.
In the question where Lars is talkign about a guy taping his vinyl for the guy down the street, he mentions the fact there are now master-perfect digital recordings on the internet.
Does he know how not true that is? A 3 minute Mp3 is only around 3-4 megs for good reason, a lot of the data contained in the song is done away with. The MP3 compressor takes the 100 meg WAV file (which would be closer to master quality...) and removes all the sounds that the human ear can't hear... etc, etc, and compresses it. It's like saving a high quality tiff image as a jpeg. Somethere in there you lose information due to compression and dithering.
Lars is wrong on that one.
If I could find people trading album.wav's instead of mp3's, I'd be a happy man... but for now I'm still buying the cd's that I like.
Me? I think it's insane to say that Mp3 made record sales decline. For years and years when I was a teen, I went out and bought at least one cd per week. I currently own approximately 400 cd's. My music collection is complete. Well, almost;-)
I believe that my ability to purchase a large quantity of music cd's was fascilitated by the fact that CD's were only 11.99 at best buy... Right now they're approaching 15.99 if you want to get any decent music. Maybe some Floyd?
That's about a %25 price increase.
I currently do not buy cd's. I think that it is sticker shock =) I can't justify spending $15 for a little piece of plastic with tunes on it. Unless it is really good.
Maybe if we get some artists better than Limp Bizkit or Korn sometime soon, record sales will rise. Until then I'm going to stick with The Who, Pink Floyd, PearlJam, and such.
Yes, I download mp3's. But I own most of the music I download... I think.
Personally, I think that fingerprint verification for high-security areas is horribly flawed. Yeah, it would be great if I could log into my box with my fingerprint ID. Wonderful.
What if you have root access at some huge defense company. You're an admin, you don't do development, but with that root PW you have access to all of the data on your network.
You use your thumbprint to log in everywhere you go.
Someone wants the plans to the new fighter that your company is developing.
So now, instead of kicking your ass until you give up the password, any evil terrorist group has two simple choices:
Cut off your thumb.
Kidnap you and use you to get into the system.
I don't know about you, but I don't think that my thumb is very good security at all. Great for identification, but there is no way in hell I would trust my thumb over a 16 character alpha-numeric password.
Ok, so now that we have established the fact that MySQL isn't beefy enough. Why was the choice made to go with MySQL instead of Oracle or PostgreSQL... etc? Just because the code was written for MySQL, or for some other reason that eludes us all?
Read that again. That just guarantees you the right to distribute programs that you use THEIR compiling tools to create. It isn't saying you can ONLY distribute things in binary executable format, but that you are allowed to.
I remember a couple of years ago reading an article about how Pepsi was researching a way to project an image of the Pizza Hut on the logo for one night. They were going to use lasers or something. The moon is a great advertising space, everyone can see it. Well, everyone near the projection equipment;-)
So they have over a quarter million people who had Metallica songs on their computers shared on any number of the Napster servers. Say that they have a Napster Username, supplied email address, and an IP address:
Those persons with dialup access have virtually no chance of being caught. Unless they have a static IP address, a new address is leased each time they dial in. Even if they used a specific username in an email address, you can't prove that the person who typed in Dork@dork.com really owns that address.
Cablemodem users can be caught if the RIAA can persuede @Home to give out a list of peoples home addresses and phone numbers in relation to their home IP addresses.
University students on resnet with DHCP and set IP addresses can be traced back to specific machines. Ownership of a machine would then prove guilt.
I don't see how it can be financially viable for the RIAA to track all of these people down. Even if they do, it isn't like they got caught with crack on their doorstep. They got caught with the WORD Metallica coming up on a search. Did this NetPD Company go and download each file that was offered to verify what the content was? Maybe I should go through my list of MP3's and rename them all to begin with the word Metallica. Just like our De-CSS utility to remove Cascading Style Sheets from our web pages;-) Does someone want to write a perl script to do this (not that it would be difficult at all).
Then they'd be screwed. I highly doubt that they have any physical data cross referenced to any of the names on that list. I would assume that each name has been jotted down when their search pulled up metallica.
Just wait until publishers get the hint and close libraries and post armed guards at copy machines.
Ok, say I write a virus. That source code is my speech, I guess. So if I distribute the source to 1000 of my skript kiddie buddies, and they compile it, distribute it and take down millions of machines worldwide. Is it my fault? Can A virus be classified as a weapon?
In the US we have a freedom to own weapons. Specifically guns. But if mob boss Bubba takes a gun off of his wall and gives it to a crazy little kid and that kid puts bullets in it and shoots someone... well, wouldn't mob boss Bubba be in a pickle.
Maybe we're taking this whole ruling out of context. Or maybe this ruling is one of the stupidest things to come out of the legal system in a while. Imagine the MS employee deciding that his work on windows95 was just speech and posting all the code he has ever written into his public diary;-) Wouldn't that be neat. We'll see the extent of this ruling the next time someone gets sued over their source code.
Has anyone thought of how this might apply to DECSS!? That program was just speech =)
-S
P.S. Please don't compile the above "conversation source code", it might prove dangerous or lethal depending on your choice of compile tools.
P.P.S. Wait until we have to put EULA's on source code that we don't really care about.
P.P.P.S. We should have a contest on slashdot to see who can create the coolest looking thing out of the allowed html tags. No graphics allowed.
Slashdot Mirror
We should start a /. poll on who paid what for the book.
$0.00
$1.00
More than $1.00
-S
Scott Ruttencutter
Stephen King is counting # of downloads as compared to # of payments. If you download the PDF file for your use 10 times, he expects to get $7.50 out of the deal.
This whole plan is flawed.
King should have created a website that creates accounts for people wanting to download the book. If you want to pay, fine. If you don't fine. But if someone out there downloads the book a million times just to spite the author, there is nothing that the paying public can do about it.
Creating a user account system would allow King to log in people, and then find out which individuals paid for the document. Each individual could download the file as often as needed.
Personally I open the PDF in my browser, read what I want to at the time, then close it. I haven't ever saved the file to a specific spot on my disk. No need. Just pop it open in the browser and read a little bit where ever I am.
It's too bad that this was not thought out enough at the get-go. If there is a 3rd part to this book released, I will be very surprised if the reason is that King reached the %75 mark.
-S
Scott Ruttencutter
What happened to the Mars lander we sent out there? Did we ever regain control of it again? I think that it would be interesting to find out in the future that a band of wild sand pigmy's scrapped our $5 million mars lander and made it into cheap trinkets.
Maybe we can trade them some beads for half of the planet!
-S
Scott Ruttencutter
But what do you do with them?
What kind of work do the telescopes at your facility generally do? Do local astronomers get to come in and do research or are the scopes reserved for some large project?
Thanks,
-S
Scott Ruttencutter
As of this posting, the bid price on the car is a mere $150,000. This has exceeded the sellers reserve price.
-S
Scott Ruttencutter
I have heard a lot of theories about matter flying into the Earth from Mars depositing life here.
Has anyone thought about the potential for large amounts of matter coming from another source outside of our galaxy that could have potentially collided with the Earth and with Mars?
Since I'm not a big planetary buff, what are the timelines of the estimated beginning of life on Earth and Mars? Do they coincide (within a few million years)? Any input on this idea would be cool.
-S
Scott Ruttencutter
Lawrence Lessig == smart is not a statement. Lawrence Lessig == smart could yield either a true or false boolean value. either Lawrence Lessig == smart or Lawrence Lessig smart. If Hemos thinks that Lawrence Lessig IS smart, he should have told us so with: Lawrence Lessig = smart But before this, tell me what programming language accepts spaces in variable names. -S
Scott Ruttencutter
I just received a corporate memo barring this book from our offices. Good thing we told Amazon.com they couldn't track the books we buy... I think I'm going to have to cover this book with one of the extra copies of Catcher in the Rye I have over in the corner. Grin. -S
Scott Ruttencutter
Me linking to an illegal file that is not contained on my server is the equivalent of me telling a junkie that I saw the crack dealer around the corner. There is nothing illegal in me pointing the junkie to the dealer. I do not have any crack, nor am I selling it. I am just being a nice guy and 'helping' someone find what they are looking for. If they go buy crack, do I get arrested? No, I did not think so. -S
Scott Ruttencutter
I think that this might mean Sony is losing money making the PS2 console. Their reasoning may be that if they have other people making environments that their games will run on, they will sell more cd media (which is cheap to make). I think it's a pretty good business strategy, all they make money off of is the games anyways. The $0.10 profit on a console probably doesn't make anyone at Sony very excited.
They learned their lesson from minidisc. When it first came out, they wouldn't let anyone make minidiscs or minidisc players. Nothing sold. Now pretty much anyone can start manufacturing discs or players... and business is picking up.
I'll stick to my burner, though.
-S
Scott Ruttencutter
MS only has rights to make a profit on the 'first sale'. Meaning the copy of windows98 that came on your computer from DELL was already sold to DELL then the license was transferred, or sold, to you. If you decide to sell it to someone else, it's way out of microsoft's hands. Already in a fourth set of hands.
Geesh.
Scott Ruttencutter
What is the point of having a case on wheels when I have a 21" Sony Trinitron that weighs upwards of 75 pounds. The case is the easiest thing for me to lug around...
I just don't get it.
-S
Scott Ruttencutter
If the contract price for a stick of 64M PC100 SDRAM is $6, and at any local retail we pay around $1 per meg for this ram ($64).
If this logic is correct... then we are paying a 1066% mark up.
If the contract cost goes up, then the cost for retail stores will go up. Retail stores will increase prices to maintain the same profit on each unit...
-S
Scott Ruttencutter
http://www.jpeg.org/JPEG2000.htm
This is the jpeg.org website for the JPEG2000 specs. It contains articles about the format, etc...
-S
Scott Ruttencutter
No, they did not.
They covered the fact that this was a possibility. Now that they are ready for a crack attempt, they are letting the readers know. I believe when I read that last story, they just discussed WHAT they wanted to do. Now it's ready.
-S
Scott Ruttencutter
In the question where Lars is talkign about a guy taping his vinyl for the guy down the street, he mentions the fact there are now master-perfect digital recordings on the internet.
.wav's instead of mp3's, I'd be a happy man... but for now I'm still buying the cd's that I like.
Does he know how not true that is? A 3 minute Mp3 is only around 3-4 megs for good reason, a lot of the data contained in the song is done away with. The MP3 compressor takes the 100 meg WAV file (which would be closer to master quality...) and removes all the sounds that the human ear can't hear... etc, etc, and compresses it. It's like saving a high quality tiff image as a jpeg. Somethere in there you lose information due to compression and dithering.
Lars is wrong on that one.
If I could find people trading album
-S
Scott Ruttencutter
Me? I think it's insane to say that Mp3 made record sales decline. For years and years when I was a teen, I went out and bought at least one cd per week. I currently own approximately 400 cd's. My music collection is complete. Well, almost ;-)
I believe that my ability to purchase a large quantity of music cd's was fascilitated by the fact that CD's were only 11.99 at best buy... Right now they're approaching 15.99 if you want to get any decent music. Maybe some Floyd?
That's about a %25 price increase.
I currently do not buy cd's. I think that it is sticker shock =) I can't justify spending $15 for a little piece of plastic with tunes on it. Unless it is really good.
Maybe if we get some artists better than Limp Bizkit or Korn sometime soon, record sales will rise. Until then I'm going to stick with The Who, Pink Floyd, PearlJam, and such.
Yes, I download mp3's. But I own most of the music I download... I think.
-S
Scott Ruttencutter
For those of us who do not yet know, what does "B2B" stand for? Thanks, -S
Scott Ruttencutter
Personally, I think that fingerprint verification for high-security areas is horribly flawed. Yeah, it would be great if I could log into my box with my fingerprint ID. Wonderful.
What if you have root access at some huge defense company. You're an admin, you don't do development, but with that root PW you have access to all of the data on your network.
You use your thumbprint to log in everywhere you go.
Someone wants the plans to the new fighter that your company is developing.
So now, instead of kicking your ass until you give up the password, any evil terrorist group has two simple choices:
Cut off your thumb.
Kidnap you and use you to get into the system.
I don't know about you, but I don't think that my thumb is very good security at all. Great for identification, but there is no way in hell I would trust my thumb over a 16 character alpha-numeric password.
-S
Scott Ruttencutter
Ok, so now that we have established the fact that MySQL isn't beefy enough. Why was the choice made to go with MySQL instead of Oracle or PostgreSQL... etc? Just because the code was written for MySQL, or for some other reason that eludes us all?
-S
Scott Ruttencutter
Why was the choice made to use one beefy-as-hell SQL server instead of multiple lesser powered systems?
Scott Ruttencutter
Read that again. That just guarantees you the right to distribute programs that you use THEIR compiling tools to create. It isn't saying you can ONLY distribute things in binary executable format, but that you are allowed to.
Why did someone post this as a story?
-S
Scott Ruttencutter
I remember a couple of years ago reading an article about how Pepsi was researching a way to project an image of the Pizza Hut on the logo for one night. They were going to use lasers or something. The moon is a great advertising space, everyone can see it. Well, everyone near the projection equipment ;-)
-S
Scott Ruttencutter
So they have over a quarter million people who had Metallica songs on their computers shared on any number of the Napster servers. Say that they have a Napster Username, supplied email address, and an IP address:
;-) Does someone want to write a perl script to do this (not that it would be difficult at all).
Those persons with dialup access have virtually no chance of being caught. Unless they have a static IP address, a new address is leased each time they dial in. Even if they used a specific username in an email address, you can't prove that the person who typed in Dork@dork.com really owns that address.
Cablemodem users can be caught if the RIAA can persuede @Home to give out a list of peoples home addresses and phone numbers in relation to their home IP addresses.
University students on resnet with DHCP and set IP addresses can be traced back to specific machines. Ownership of a machine would then prove guilt.
I don't see how it can be financially viable for the RIAA to track all of these people down. Even if they do, it isn't like they got caught with crack on their doorstep. They got caught with the WORD Metallica coming up on a search. Did this NetPD Company go and download each file that was offered to verify what the content was? Maybe I should go through my list of MP3's and rename them all to begin with the word Metallica. Just like our De-CSS utility to remove Cascading Style Sheets from our web pages
Then they'd be screwed. I highly doubt that they have any physical data cross referenced to any of the names on that list. I would assume that each name has been jotted down when their search pulled up metallica.
Just wait until publishers get the hint and close libraries and post armed guards at copy machines.
Sheesh.
-S
Scott Ruttencutter
Ok, say I write a virus. That source code is my speech, I guess. So if I distribute the source to 1000 of my skript kiddie buddies, and they compile it, distribute it and take down millions of machines worldwide. Is it my fault? Can A virus be classified as a weapon?
;-) Wouldn't that be neat.
In the US we have a freedom to own weapons. Specifically guns. But if mob boss Bubba takes a gun off of his wall and gives it to a crazy little kid and that kid puts bullets in it and shoots someone... well, wouldn't mob boss Bubba be in a pickle.
Maybe we're taking this whole ruling out of context. Or maybe this ruling is one of the stupidest things to come out of the legal system in a while. Imagine the MS employee deciding that his work on windows95 was just speech and posting all the code he has ever written into his public diary
We'll see the extent of this ruling the next time someone gets sued over their source code.
Has anyone thought of how this might apply to DECSS!? That program was just speech =)
-S
P.S. Please don't compile the above "conversation source code", it might prove dangerous or lethal depending on your choice of compile tools.
P.P.S. Wait until we have to put EULA's on source code that we don't really care about.
P.P.P.S. We should have a contest on slashdot to see who can create the coolest looking thing out of the allowed html tags. No graphics allowed.
Scott Ruttencutter