Yes, it is, and Love is a hypocrite
on
RIAA CEO Speaks
·
· Score: 1
You've hit it on the head; that's what capitalism is. Courtney, God Bless Her, is quite happy to simultaneously castigate the record companies for not investing enough in new, start up bands which might fail, and to criticise them for taking too much of the returns on their successful investments.
The Slashdot crowd seem to understand this point when it comes to venture capital; I've never understood why they can't seem to apply it to that subset of venture capital which is venturing into unsigned bands. Presumably it's because the cranks who denounce the VC industry don't also provide something which looks like it might also be a handy moral justification for breaking the law.
They are around, to provide three functions, two useful and worth rewarding, and one useless, harmful, but unavoidable under capitalism.
The useful function is that they select and edit muscial content. Please don't tell me about your friend's great band and their self-produced demo. Or about live music, or your local folk scene. Or jazz. Particularly not jazz. The fact is, listen to ten albums put out by members of the RIAA, and listen to ten albums "directly marketed" by acts who have never touched RIAA member money (for why this is important, see below), and you won't have too many problems working out which ten it is that suck. Or at least, if this experiment doesn't work for you, then your taste is sooper l337, and you have to recognise the existence of a lot of people out there to whom they *are* providing a useful service. Studios and labels serve a useful purpose by filtering out bands that suck, something I would have to do myself if everyone was equal on the Net.
Second, they are a financing organisation. In order to produce good music, you often need time. Time to practice, rehearse, write, record, re-record, etc. Time which can't be spent also working nine-hour shifts, or doing work which saps your creativity, or in some cases, even gigging regularly. In order to eat during that period, you need someone to advance the cash up front, against sales of music which will come later, if at all. Banks don't want to get involved in this business. But recording labels, if they get to diversify their risk, will do. And that's why they take such a big percentage of Courtney Love and George Michael's earnings when they are big stars -- it's like the venture capital business; the few big successes pay for the thousands of little failures. Established artists selling their music outside the RIAA system are not a counterexample to copyright arguments, because they wouldn't be established artists if someone hadn't invested in them at some point in the past. Prince, for example, certainly wouldn't. They've paid back the investment now, but that doesn't mean to say they never needed it.
Finally, their destructive function is that they are marketing organisations. In a capitalist economy, there is a constant tendency to produce more than people really need to consume. As Marx noted, this gives capitalism a structural tendency to "crises of underconsumption" (later rediscovered as Keynesian recessions). In order to avert this tendency, capitalism need to create new, previously nonexistent needs, so it can then satisfy them. A lot of pop music has to be seen in this regard -- the Britney Spearses etc. It's a nasty, destructive activity; if people could be prevented from creating these ersatz needs, and from creating the structures needed to serve them, we'd all have more spare time and resources to do things of real value for ourselves. But it's intrinsic to the capitalist system, and if you're not against that system, I don't see how you can be against specific instances of the general rule.
What does "pompous"-ness have to do with the ICANN story being important? Paying attention to ICANN is important. They are the U.N. of the internet. If I said, "The U.S. presidential election is important", would that also be "pompous"? Maybe you should also bookmark www.dictionary.com.
You know, Michael, if you understood irony, we could all laugh together at that one:)
Actually, I could win this one; I seem to remember that magenta syringe did a pretty lame version of the "Slashdot is suing me!" troll, which fooled about three people:)
streetlawyer, posting anonymously to preserve my precious Karma.
Post (Score:5, Interesting)
by ZikZak on Monday October 02, @11:38PM EDT
(User #153813 Info)
You can't leave, Siggy. It just doesn't work. You will stop posting under this account, but you will always be a reader. And eventually (about a month in my experience) you will see something that you just have to reply to.
The reason/. is so successful is because of all the games you can play and all the drama that ensues. The tech news is just an excuse to be here.
If all this fun moderation, hidden sids, outrageous personalities, impersonation, trolling, etc. didn't exist then this would be just another web log that would have already died. We can get our news anywhere. Only slash has the ridiculously disfunctional community of people who thrive on feeling superior to each other.
I'll repeat this, because I can not overstate its importance: If all the things you (and everyone else) complained about didn't exist, then/. also would not exist, at least not in any meaningful form. If people really just wanted small scale, intelligent discussion they would just join a mailing list.
The soap opera drama that is Slashdot is what keeps people here.
The real reason you are "leaving" (like I said, no one really leaves) is because you are tired of being one of the main characters on stage. I don't blame you. You *ahem* "shined" far brighter than any other, and I don't think anyone else will ever achieve your level of notariety here.
So, make your speeches or whatever. You'll be back, and it won't be the news that brings you.
And a footnote for those of you who will disagree with me: I am right. The only reason you don't recognize it is because you are living a lie, trying to convince yourself that you're here for "pure" reasons. It's all a game, so you might as well admit to being a player.
people who flat-out say they're here to destroy the site
One link, Michael, one singlelink, to anyone who is a regular poster on trolltalk, and who has "flat out said they're here to destroy the site", and I walk out of here forever. Every troll on here has said that they make the site better
C'mon, put up or shut up.
"Put up or shut up", by the way, constitutes not one, but two constructive suggestions for you.
I never said my actions were justifiable on any grounds other than the very best one; that they're funny.
And my comments aren't crap -- I weight them on purpose to maintain constant Karma, and the ones which bring me down (usually by defending the concept of copyright in terms only slightly more vitriolic than the Slashbots attack it) are always much, much better than the ones which bring me up.
You need me. And people like me. We keep the arguments going which bring in the page views and return visitors which keep your page views up. People will come and post "DMCA SUCKS!" to a copyright story, or "If this was Open Source, it would never have crashed", but they'll only post it once. It takes someone who tells them they're wrong to bring them back.
I've contributed a fair old amount to your site, Mike, all of it under the streetlawyer identity (unlike a few other bigtime trolls, I have no alter ego). I contributed one of your April Fool jokes this year. This morning I submitted a story warning you about how a prominent geek site could be used to bring cross-site scripting vulnerabilities to your bulletin boards. I'm happy to play along with you. But I'm not going to play along with your legion of little me-toos and catamites. I'm not going to agree with your own dangerously naive political views. And, while you provide me with this bulletin board (which is to say; forever; you have no economic alternative), I'm not going to stop saying that you, personally, and your followers, collectively, are frequently full of shit, and doing so in as amusing (to myself) a way as possible.
1) No, it's trolls like me. OS isn't a troll, AFAIK, and I know most of 'em
2) If it's "making it suck" that we're talking about, I'd appreciate you pointing me to the URL of an instance in which a troll has posted a blatantly inaccurate or self-serving story. I stopped feeling guilty about trolling the day that you guys posted "Hotmail Set to Collapse Under Load" as the title of a story about them moving a few servers to W2K. When you pull shit like that on the main page, you kind of lose your right to complain when other people do the same thing on the threads.
On the other hand, at least we don't have to listen to Emmett Plant's self-absorbed whinings any more, so hurray for that.
"There is no such thing as a "non-response response". No, saying "obvious troll" does not make you less of a biter. If anything, it makes you more, because you know you're being made a monkey of, but still can't resist"
That's not a "vaguely worded clause"; it's just a bog standard codification of the common law principle that aiding and abetting an act is potentially an equal crime to committing the act. If you know of cases in which authors of tools have been prosecuted for hacks, then that's a problem with your local courts' interpretation, not that boiler-plate piece of statute.
HTTP cookies. The principle is clear, obvious, and unpatentable. The means of Actually Doing It, would have been patentable. "Using tokens", is an idea, and not patentable. The actual machine described in RFC whatever-it-was is a specific device, with substantial original content, and patentable. The question is breadth, not innovativeness.
Using a hard disk drive to store video information is obvious. TiVo is patentable. Jet propulsion has been around for ages. The Rolls-Royce jet engine is, unless a very basic implementation, patentable.
This is why I always think that the BT hyperlinking patent actually looks like it has merit (unlike one-click ordering). The Post Office came upon an unsolved problem (how to structure data storage and transmission using the telephone system), and left behind a particular solution which was original. Later, someone else independently came up with the same thing, and implemented it. Tough luck; it's well established that "I never knew I hadn't invented it" is still an infringement.
That seems like an extremely harsh/strict test. Pretty much anything could be seen as analogous to something else. Inventing cookies, for example, is not just a trivial idea, the same as customer numbers; it's a whole set of techniques for making this work well online, and the person who invented cookies really did create something that didn't exist before. Cookies, ironically, would be a classic example of a good patent, if they had in fact been patented.
Most of the problems with patents are about breadth, not obviousness. The trouble is that people who have come up with a genuinely new, patentable, innovative technique, are being given patents over excessively broad, non-patentable class of techniques which appear obvious.
In general, when saying "anyone could have come up with this", you need to have a good explanation handy about why nobody in fact did come up with it.
Therefore, everyone else is all right now and will be forever.
There are numerous other, well-documented cases of H1-B horror stories, from people who have not had your good fortune. In assuming that your case applies to all of these, you provide ammunition for the advocates of H1-B versus green card, and do them a disservice. You may end up regretting taking this stance, but whether you do or not, it's still wrong.
Interesting point -- though the analogy is not exact, particularly between builders and implementors. More generally, although the idea of separating planning and execution has been around for donkeys' years, the fact is that when Brooks wrote his book, it was iin fact not general practice in the management of large software projects. This suggests that it was not "obvious to an average practitioner in the field" that this distinction should be made. Brooks' innovation is the analogy itself between architecture and systems design (I'll note in passing that Brooks' "Architects" correspond to a combination of architects and structural engineers), and that was in fact his. If he had applied for a business process patent, I think I would have awarded it to him under current law.
In one company they even put a wall, making different people do requirements gathering, database design and programming, often excluding actual developer (me) from the making the decisions on the early stages of the project, and holding me responsible for implementing their stupid decisions, based on the lack of understanding of what programmers do!
This is the distinction between architecture and implementation, invented by Fred Brooks, and is the only feasible way of managing a large project.
sorry, I didn't realise your site was to do with amateur science fiction. I'm afraid that I will be unable to visit it again, as that stuff brings me out in hives. Nothing personal.
He's talking about the basic old supply-and-demand stuff that assumes the consumer has as much market power as the producer
You'll find this assumption nowhere in Adam Smith; the perfect competition model basically comes in with Samuelson, or with Debreu and the Lausanne School at a pinch.
Adam Smith was an actual person, who had a very specific view of political economy. He wasn't a minor pagan deity to be invoked in support of any random argument you might care to support with a vaguely free-market flavour.
Change your bank. I have never experienced this, in ten years in the financial sector. I think I might have to gently suggest to you that the person who makes this demand of you may not be an HR employee, or even employed by your company. It might quite possibly be a passing urine fetishist.
On the other hand, since you appear to have hallucinated the word "diasporing", and created a phony French LaPhroig out of the perfectly Scots Laphroaig, these urine tests might be fignments of your imagination.
Adam Smith capitalism is supposed to be consumer driven,
I promise you that it isn't, and Adam Smith agrees with me. The idea of systematically rebalancing economic power away from the owners of the means of production is one that only arrives after Marx, let alone Smith. And I think you may be working from a wonky definition of "fascism", too.
Your algorithm sounds like the easiest thing in the world to break. Remember, the trolls are in general in the upper quartile of readers by intelligence. It's the simplest thing in the world to combine lots of interesting content with a huge amount of incendiary disinformation. On other sites, I've managed to start a huge flamewar on the subject of whether I was a troll or not (I was). I say, bring it on, dude. Implement your algorithm on a site with decent traffic (so that people aren't able to use the "off-line trust metric", the only trollproof one). I betcha that within a couple of weeks, your top rated poster will be me or someone like me, and it'll all be from posting shit.
Remember the words of the Troll Anthem
You can't beat the trolls You can't beat the trolls Ee aye addio You can't beat the trolls
I think the real issue is more why I'm defending Taco and his shitty code (which is probably shit, by the way, not that I'd recognise good computer programming from lentil soup). Friday was not a good day for me.
So now you're telling me that you know the code is "shit"? Well that gives three options. Either:
You've never looked at the code, but you're claiming to know that it's "shit". In which case you are a punk and a faker. Fuckhead.
You have looked at the code, but didn't spot this hole. In which case you have no moral authority to criticise Taco, so you are a punk, and a faker. Fuckhead.
You have looked at the code and found the hole, but didn't bother to do anything about it. Guess what that makes you? It makes you a punk, a faker and a fuckhead.
And you can't even fucking flame well. I'd just loooove to meet you on a dark night on Usenet.....
Slashdot Mirror
The Slashdot crowd seem to understand this point when it comes to venture capital; I've never understood why they can't seem to apply it to that subset of venture capital which is venturing into unsigned bands. Presumably it's because the cranks who denounce the VC industry don't also provide something which looks like it might also be a handy moral justification for breaking the law.
The useful function is that they select and edit muscial content. Please don't tell me about your friend's great band and their self-produced demo. Or about live music, or your local folk scene. Or jazz. Particularly not jazz. The fact is, listen to ten albums put out by members of the RIAA, and listen to ten albums "directly marketed" by acts who have never touched RIAA member money (for why this is important, see below), and you won't have too many problems working out which ten it is that suck. Or at least, if this experiment doesn't work for you, then your taste is sooper l337, and you have to recognise the existence of a lot of people out there to whom they *are* providing a useful service. Studios and labels serve a useful purpose by filtering out bands that suck, something I would have to do myself if everyone was equal on the Net.
Second, they are a financing organisation. In order to produce good music, you often need time. Time to practice, rehearse, write, record, re-record, etc. Time which can't be spent also working nine-hour shifts, or doing work which saps your creativity, or in some cases, even gigging regularly. In order to eat during that period, you need someone to advance the cash up front, against sales of music which will come later, if at all. Banks don't want to get involved in this business. But recording labels, if they get to diversify their risk, will do. And that's why they take such a big percentage of Courtney Love and George Michael's earnings when they are big stars -- it's like the venture capital business; the few big successes pay for the thousands of little failures. Established artists selling their music outside the RIAA system are not a counterexample to copyright arguments, because they wouldn't be established artists if someone hadn't invested in them at some point in the past. Prince, for example, certainly wouldn't. They've paid back the investment now, but that doesn't mean to say they never needed it.
Finally, their destructive function is that they are marketing organisations. In a capitalist economy, there is a constant tendency to produce more than people really need to consume. As Marx noted, this gives capitalism a structural tendency to "crises of underconsumption" (later rediscovered as Keynesian recessions). In order to avert this tendency, capitalism need to create new, previously nonexistent needs, so it can then satisfy them. A lot of pop music has to be seen in this regard -- the Britney Spearses etc. It's a nasty, destructive activity; if people could be prevented from creating these ersatz needs, and from creating the structures needed to serve them, we'd all have more spare time and resources to do things of real value for ourselves. But it's intrinsic to the capitalist system, and if you're not against that system, I don't see how you can be against specific instances of the general rule.
You know, Michael, if you understood irony, we could all laugh together at that one :)
streetlawyer, posting anonymously to preserve my precious Karma.
One link, Michael, one singlelink, to anyone who is a regular poster on trolltalk, and who has "flat out said they're here to destroy the site", and I walk out of here forever. Every troll on here has said that they make the site better
C'mon, put up or shut up.
"Put up or shut up", by the way, constitutes not one, but two constructive suggestions for you.
And my comments aren't crap -- I weight them on purpose to maintain constant Karma, and the ones which bring me down (usually by defending the concept of copyright in terms only slightly more vitriolic than the Slashbots attack it) are always much, much better than the ones which bring me up.
You need me. And people like me. We keep the arguments going which bring in the page views and return visitors which keep your page views up. People will come and post "DMCA SUCKS!" to a copyright story, or "If this was Open Source, it would never have crashed", but they'll only post it once. It takes someone who tells them they're wrong to bring them back.
I've contributed a fair old amount to your site, Mike, all of it under the streetlawyer identity (unlike a few other bigtime trolls, I have no alter ego). I contributed one of your April Fool jokes this year. This morning I submitted a story warning you about how a prominent geek site could be used to bring cross-site scripting vulnerabilities to your bulletin boards. I'm happy to play along with you. But I'm not going to play along with your legion of little me-toos and catamites. I'm not going to agree with your own dangerously naive political views. And, while you provide me with this bulletin board (which is to say; forever; you have no economic alternative), I'm not going to stop saying that you, personally, and your followers, collectively, are frequently full of shit, and doing so in as amusing (to myself) a way as possible.
Oh yeh, and I don't do IRC either.
1) No, it's trolls like me. OS isn't a troll, AFAIK, and I know most of 'em
2) If it's "making it suck" that we're talking about, I'd appreciate you pointing me to the URL of an instance in which a troll has posted a blatantly inaccurate or self-serving story. I stopped feeling guilty about trolling the day that you guys posted "Hotmail Set to Collapse Under Load" as the title of a story about them moving a few servers to W2K. When you pull shit like that on the main page, you kind of lose your right to complain when other people do the same thing on the threads.
On the other hand, at least we don't have to listen to Emmett Plant's self-absorbed whinings any more, so hurray for that.
From the Slashdot Troll FAQ:
Fiddle de dee.That's not a "vaguely worded clause"; it's just a bog standard codification of the common law principle that aiding and abetting an act is potentially an equal crime to committing the act. If you know of cases in which authors of tools have been prosecuted for hacks, then that's a problem with your local courts' interpretation, not that boiler-plate piece of statute.
Using a hard disk drive to store video information is obvious. TiVo is patentable. Jet propulsion has been around for ages. The Rolls-Royce jet engine is, unless a very basic implementation, patentable.
This is why I always think that the BT hyperlinking patent actually looks like it has merit (unlike one-click ordering). The Post Office came upon an unsolved problem (how to structure data storage and transmission using the telephone system), and left behind a particular solution which was original. Later, someone else independently came up with the same thing, and implemented it. Tough luck; it's well established that "I never knew I hadn't invented it" is still an infringement.
Most of the problems with patents are about breadth, not obviousness. The trouble is that people who have come up with a genuinely new, patentable, innovative technique, are being given patents over excessively broad, non-patentable class of techniques which appear obvious.
In general, when saying "anyone could have come up with this", you need to have a good explanation handy about why nobody in fact did come up with it.
I am all right now
Therefore I will be all right forever
Therefore, everyone else is all right now and will be forever.
There are numerous other, well-documented cases of H1-B horror stories, from people who have not had your good fortune. In assuming that your case applies to all of these, you provide ammunition for the advocates of H1-B versus green card, and do them a disservice. You may end up regretting taking this stance, but whether you do or not, it's still wrong.
But, interesting point.
This is the distinction between architecture and implementation, invented by Fred Brooks, and is the only feasible way of managing a large project.
Thanks. That's all I was asking for really.
John Montoya
goatse.cx
sorry, I didn't realise your site was to do with amateur science fiction. I'm afraid that I will be unable to visit it again, as that stuff brings me out in hives. Nothing personal.
it's definitely from Diaspora; I was complaining about it being so brutally verbed.
Gambling's only inefficient for people who are shit at it. I regularly make more in a weekend on the horses than I earned the preceding week.
You'll find this assumption nowhere in Adam Smith; the perfect competition model basically comes in with Samuelson, or with Debreu and the Lausanne School at a pinch.
Adam Smith was an actual person, who had a very specific view of political economy. He wasn't a minor pagan deity to be invoked in support of any random argument you might care to support with a vaguely free-market flavour.
On the other hand, since you appear to have hallucinated the word "diasporing", and created a phony French LaPhroig out of the perfectly Scots Laphroaig, these urine tests might be fignments of your imagination.
I promise you that it isn't, and Adam Smith agrees with me. The idea of systematically rebalancing economic power away from the owners of the means of production is one that only arrives after Marx, let alone Smith. And I think you may be working from a wonky definition of "fascism", too.
Remember the words of the Troll Anthem
You can't beat the trolls
You can't beat the trolls
Ee aye addio
You can't beat the trolls
I think the real issue is more why I'm defending Taco and his shitty code (which is probably shit, by the way, not that I'd recognise good computer programming from lentil soup). Friday was not a good day for me.
- You've never looked at the code, but you're claiming to know that it's "shit". In which case you are a punk and a faker. Fuckhead.
- You have looked at the code, but didn't spot this hole. In which case you have no moral authority to criticise Taco, so you are a punk, and a faker. Fuckhead.
- You have looked at the code and found the hole, but didn't bother to do anything about it. Guess what that makes you? It makes you a punk, a faker and a fuckhead.
And you can't even fucking flame well. I'd just loooove to meet you on a dark night on Usenet