My uncle Walt told me that actually, the weather on Earth is surprisingly dependent on the weather on the sun. There's some chap who's been using solar activity to predict Earth's weather months in advance with sufficient accuracy to not be dismissed as a nut - afraid I don't have the link to hand, but details should be easy enough to find.
So perhaps predicting the weather on the sun is an (admittedly fairly non-intuitive) step towards predicting the weather closer to home.
Let the industry spend its time, money and energy killing MP3 if it wants. How long do you think it'll be before it's perfectly viable to exchange music in 44.1kHz CDA format? MP3 simply brought the debate on a few years.
And soon it won't be just CDs. Moore's law all but stipulates that anything desirable and non-tangible will eventually be available online, whether legally or not. As rocketing bandwidth and tumbling storage prices make online CD archives as commonplace as JPEGs are now, all media will eventually succumb. Missed a TV show last night? Ask around on IRC for someone who captured it. Fancy that new DVD release? Rent it, rip it, return it. Websites that now carry ten thousand MP3s will be joined by sites carrying ten thousand movies. Find a cheap way to automatically OCR literature and watch the biggest library in history spring up overnight - its virtual shelves filled entirely with bootlegged books that are always available for permanent loan.
The fundamentals of intellectual property will have to be reassessed over the coming decades. MP3 has opened the can of worms, but to focus on its particulars simply defers the real debate: how can copyright have any meaning in an age of instant, global, unmetered, unmoderated information sharing?
Slashdot Mirror
Sometimes a bit dykish? Well, you know, she is a dyke (in the show at least)...
Wow, I wonder how many Slashdot readers are too young to know about that movie...
Probably lots, but I'd hope the HG Wells novel it's based on is pretty timeless... *shrug*
I misread that as: "What do 100% of net types use, every single day? 1) base, 2) ... "
And the thing is, it still worked!
Spooky.
My uncle Walt told me that actually, the weather on Earth is surprisingly dependent on the weather on the sun. There's some chap who's been using solar activity to predict Earth's weather months in advance with sufficient accuracy to not be dismissed as a nut - afraid I don't have the link to hand, but details should be easy enough to find.
So perhaps predicting the weather on the sun is an (admittedly fairly non-intuitive) step towards predicting the weather closer to home.
And soon it won't be just CDs. Moore's law all but stipulates that anything desirable and non-tangible will eventually be available online, whether legally or not. As rocketing bandwidth and tumbling storage prices make online CD archives as commonplace as JPEGs are now, all media will eventually succumb. Missed a TV show last night? Ask around on IRC for someone who captured it. Fancy that new DVD release? Rent it, rip it, return it. Websites that now carry ten thousand MP3s will be joined by sites carrying ten thousand movies. Find a cheap way to automatically OCR literature and watch the biggest library in history spring up overnight - its virtual shelves filled entirely with bootlegged books that are always available for permanent loan.
The fundamentals of intellectual property will have to be reassessed over the coming decades. MP3 has opened the can of worms, but to focus on its particulars simply defers the real debate: how can copyright have any meaning in an age of instant, global, unmetered, unmoderated information sharing?
D.