"And it's a necessary step toward eradicating the music
industry."
Just like open-source software has so successfully eliminated the
closed-source software industry?
You may (ideally) reform the music industry to the point where it's no
longer locking artists into unfair contracts, but eradicating it? As
much as we may wish otherwise, there'll always be a job for people who
invest money in the creation of something. There'll always be a job
for people who promote a finished product.
They only thing that might potentially eradicate the music industry
would be a general repeal of copyright laws. And while that may sound
good, there's quite a bunch of nifty intellectual property that only
exists because it was commercially viable to recoup the investment
under copyright law.
Which reduces the problem but doesn't negate it. Everyone loves pointing out that anyone can get their hands on the tools necessary to modify open-source software, but they tend to conveniently ignore the fact that not everyone has the programming skills necessary to do so.
Sure there are a lot of people out there who can program, and even a decent number of people out there who can program well. But in this case, you'd need someone with at least some Linux kernel hacking skills and enough programming know-how to be able to close a bug (possibly even a security bug) that made it past all those people who've hacked on 2.0 so far. Now factor in that you'd want a programmer good enough to be trusted with mucking around with the kernel for Very Important Systems -- systems important enough, at least, that you aren't willing to even take the next big jump in kernel versions.
It all boils down to a dicey situation. Even certain Open Source projects/versions get end-of-lifed by the official maintainers. You aren't always guaranteed that someone else will pick it up.
"They, and only they, decide what "excessive use" really is."
Even so, I think they'd have a hard time justifying that a certain P2P application always qualifies as "excessive use" no matter what. For example, if I were to hop on to KaZaA just long enough to download a single 5 MB file (such as an mp3), my bandwidth usage is going to be significantly less than if I download a single 51 MB file via HTTP (such as the latest update for Day of Defeat). So they're limiting users even in cases of non-excessive bandwidth usage, which wouldn't be protected by that TOS clause.
"Once they start doing that, IMO the ISP ackknowledges that they are responsible for what happens on their network, whereas normally the ISP is just a medium."
I suspect the law agrees with you.
This article talks about a suit against Prodigy a while back where it was determined that the fact that they exercised editorial control over postings on their boards made them liable for everything that was posted there. The only major difference here is that the control is this case is in the form of limiting certain protocols. However, the (apparently) public explaination that it's over moral reasons might be enough to establish that the ISP is engaging in such control.
Amen. She seems to completely miss the point that free downloads are exposure at a cost, where the cost is the opportunity cost of having the music available for free (i.e. lost sales since the songs in question are already available).
In her case, there's no question that the benefit of the exposure (180 CD sales) exceeded the cost having the songs out there (almost nothing, given her obscurity). Unfortunately, it's naive to automatically assume that this extrapolates to any circumstance.
Does this remain true for an already well-known/pop artist? Maybe, maybe not. On one hand, quite a lot of people are already getting bombarded with the artist's work via the radio, MTV, and even TV show soundtracks. On the other hand, there's a definite reinforcement value in that when you're in the store, you're more likely to remember the name of that artist who's mp3 you listened to quite a few times.
Does this remain true for the case where the entire album is available as an mp3? This is even less likely to be true, as the "free download" is rapidly approaching the value of the album. You'll still have people who want to "support the artist", but you've now got a business model that relies on the willingness of your customers not to cheat the system. That's not a very good business model.
Fortunately, getting an entire album off the P2P services currently requires quite a bit of effort. However, I honestly believe that we're just a few engineering tweaks away from achieving it. Pick and choose the best of the P2P features seen so far, throw in freenet's anonymity, and create a wrapper file to keep an entire album together as a continguous chunk -- BAM! You've just negated a lot of the unique value of a retail CD.
As it stands currently, I've already seen people distribute (via non-P2P means) collections of multiple CDs by a single artist, all encoded at a decent bitrate. It's really only a matter of time before it catches on.
New, top of the line PC: $2000 Broadband connection: $59.95/month Slashdot account: Free
Seeing 8 different people all making the same cookie-cutter "Priceless" jokes: (-1, Redundant)
Seriously, the priceless thing has been more run into the ground than "All your base". Hell, they even did a priceless parody on that shortlived, humor-free golf show on Comedy Central with the Murray Brothers. It's just not funny anymore, if it ever was in the first place.
"part of the requirement was that it must run on an UNmodded XBox..."
Yes, but the rewards were segmented into different requirements. I believe only $100,000 was ear-marked towards getting unsigned code to run on an unmodified Xbox. The rest of it covers "easier" things such as kernel and XFree drivers.
"Even people who download songs and movies pay for their bandwidth"
Except that most people are doing this on connections that generally have TOS provisions prohibiting the users from running servers. With P2P networks, each client is a server.
Furthermore, most bandwidth providers haven't botthered metering individual bandwidth (at least in the U.S.). The bandwidth these people are chewing up is going to push us toward a metered model.
"Your p2p application (which supports metadata, hashes etc) will wait to add a downloaded file to the "shared" section until after you view it."
This is quite inefficient. Some of the more effective P2P systems allow clients to immediately reupload parts of downloaded files even before the entire file has been received.
The downside is that it's easy for partial transfers to clutter the system, but the upside is that high-demand files almost immediately get mirrored.
"Oh, what terrible people they are......for protecting the property that they own."
Did you even bother reading the article? If you had, you'd see that the bulk of it explains why the rental agency's activites could be seen as more than just protecting their property.
For example, consider the following quote from the article, "Some customers said they didn't realize the $1-per-mile charge would be applied to their entire trip." In other words, if I were to drive an unlimited mileage in-state rental for 5,000 in-state miles and 2 out-of-state miles, I get hit with a $5,002 penalty.
It gets even worse, as "In some cases, according to court documents, the customers discussed their travel routes with Budget rental agents, and permitted areas were noted on rental contracts."
In short, this sounds like the rental agency is using the penalties as a gotcha-style revenue scheme rather than a legitimate means of protecting their own property. The fact that you ignored that entire aspect of the article makes me suspect that you're either delibrately trolling or at least weren't diligent enough to read up on the issue that you're commenting on.
"almost all monitors that have come out in the last 7 or 8 years are multisync compatible. I don't think it's fair to blame ancient hardware not working on the system."
Of course the Lindows PC is a bare-bones system that comes sans monitor. Sounds like the perfect upgrade for someone who's currently doing word processing on their now ancient 286 or 386. And if it's just a simple, utilitarian solution, they might be interested in cutting corners by reusing the monitor.
There's no direct way to tell. However, it's an educated guess based on seeing the post-meta-mod karma drop and correlating that with my moderation activity at the time -- which was almost exclusively modding down the sort of trolling garbage that popped up in a freshly posted story. At the time, I was reading Slashdot a little on the obsessive side, so I was running into the fresh story garbage before it was getting modded down by other people.
Of course there's a small loophole in meta-moderation in that it
doesn't occur for the "Overrated" moderations, which was what was used
to mod the comment down in this case.
"In the case of a geniune troll the only solution I can think of is
when a person gets enough bad meta-mods they lose their
privaleges,"
Unfortunately, the genuine trolls are the ones who don't have a
problem cooking up a new account and karma-whoring it back up to 50.
Meanwhile, someone like myself winds up stuck with an account that
virtually never gets mod points (except when the mod point system went
nuts a few months back) due to some questionable meta-mods against me.
"If a company wanted to use junk email, they would send junk email
for nearly free."
But this isn't the same sort of junk email. Unlike spam, this is something of an opt-in scenario. The recipient provided his/her email address so as to receive the digital alternates of real-world junkmail. A sender using this system (ideally) wouldn't have to worry about any sort of anti-spam attacks -- no abuse complaints to their ISP, no anti-spammers attempting get their website taken down, no threat of being blacklisted.
"$200,000 to have some of the smartest minds in the industry TRYING to break your unit's security so you can do it better next time?"
Except that if he doesn't offer the prize money, less people try and break it, which means it's less likely to get broken soon, which means Microsoft is more likely to "win".
If Microsoft plans on sacrificing the Xbox in an effort to make the Xbox 2 harder to crack, I think they'll wait until the product is closer to the end of its life-cycle before they do it.
"Note that to get the full money, you have to make a copy of Linux that will run on an UNMODIFIED BOX. This would spurr sales, and give them a bigger installed base, but would still MAKR PIRACY HARD because there is no modchip."
Harder? I think it would make piracy easier, as the same techniques used to run Linux on an unchipped box could be used to make games run on an unchipped box. Yes, individual games may have copy protection, but that can be bypassed on a game-by-game basis, which is still easier than chipping Xboxes on a box-by-box basis (and still potentially dealing with copy protection).
We saw this scenario with the Dreamcast. As soon as people were able to get away with just burning games to disc (without risking performing tricky modifications to their system), piracy took off.
"Dare I say, who cares about shows on the WB and why is this a headline?"
Any show that uses ultra-geeks as pseudo-villains/comic relief is definite Slashdot material. I mean how often on TV do you see people pause during a game of D&D to decide to take over the world? When was the last time you saw someone threatened with the destruction of a rare Boba Fett figure as a means of coercion?
There's some hilarious, geek-centric humor in the show. The problem is that too many people automatically write it off has just generic horror/comedy/pretty girls.
"But the great thing is that anyone can build a config tool and
sell it, thus creating competition."
Or they can create an OSS project to develop a snort configuration
tool, thereby undercutting the software end of the SourceFire project.
I'm not sure if this scenario would be a win (an OSS project improves
the usability of another OSS project) or a loss (an OSS project
reduces revenue that's indirectly helping another OSS project).
"Actually I remember reading about a test where students were asked
to torture someone who they couldn't see, but only here the
results."
I believe you're referring to Stanley Milgram's famous experiment
about authoritarian control. The experiment wasn't about people's
capacity for random cruelty so much as their capacity for following
direct orders from an authority figure (in this case, a scientist in
charge of the fake experiment).
An interesting experiment along similar lines is Philip Zimbardo's
Stanford Prison Experiment, where he divided the participants into two
groups. One group played the role of jail guards while the other
group became prisoners. He had to end the experiment prematurely, as
the role of authority figure resulted in some of the jail guards
getting extremely abusive toward the "inmates".
I've heard a second-hand account of a slightly different version. In
this version, the mysterious stranger explicitly states that the
person killed from pushing the button is someone that the person
doesn't know.
(Spoiler below)
The person debates whether or not to push the button for quite awhile,
and finally gives in to temptation. As the stranger departs, the
person asks the stranger where he's going. The stranger replies, "To
find someone who doesn't know you."
"Unauthorized access into an OS vis-a-vis an audio program shows an
inherent problem with XP."
Yes, but it's no different from similar cases in other operating
systems. Buffer overflows happen in both Windows and Linux, and in
both cases they can allow the mallicious data to execute arbitrary
machine code as the current user. In both systems, this is usually
sufficient to cause severe damage.
"Think before YOU post--you clearly demonstrate the common mindset
of finding someone with an exposed problem and attacking it like a
shark in order for a much needed ego-boost."
Yes, except that you don't appear to have the slightest clue as to
what you're talking about. Anyone who's done more than a cursory look
at computer security and exploits would be aware as to how prevalent
buffer overflows are. It's not a problem specific to any type of
program.
So I just don't see where XP even comes into the picture. You made an
absurd, hand-waving claim, someone called bullshit on you, and now
you're going on a tirade about how it's this vicious shark attack.
Oh, and you threaded your post incorrectly, as your reply seems to be
targetted specifically at Zeddicus_Z, but you replied to your own
post.
Slashdot Mirror
Just like open-source software has so successfully eliminated the closed-source software industry?
You may (ideally) reform the music industry to the point where it's no longer locking artists into unfair contracts, but eradicating it? As much as we may wish otherwise, there'll always be a job for people who invest money in the creation of something. There'll always be a job for people who promote a finished product.
They only thing that might potentially eradicate the music industry would be a general repeal of copyright laws. And while that may sound good, there's quite a bunch of nifty intellectual property that only exists because it was commercially viable to recoup the investment under copyright law.
Which reduces the problem but doesn't negate it. Everyone loves pointing out that anyone can get their hands on the tools necessary to modify open-source software, but they tend to conveniently ignore the fact that not everyone has the programming skills necessary to do so.
Sure there are a lot of people out there who can program, and even a decent number of people out there who can program well. But in this case, you'd need someone with at least some Linux kernel hacking skills and enough programming know-how to be able to close a bug (possibly even a security bug) that made it past all those people who've hacked on 2.0 so far. Now factor in that you'd want a programmer good enough to be trusted with mucking around with the kernel for Very Important Systems -- systems important enough, at least, that you aren't willing to even take the next big jump in kernel versions.
It all boils down to a dicey situation. Even certain Open Source projects/versions get end-of-lifed by the official maintainers. You aren't always guaranteed that someone else will pick it up.
Even so, I think they'd have a hard time justifying that a certain P2P application always qualifies as "excessive use" no matter what. For example, if I were to hop on to KaZaA just long enough to download a single 5 MB file (such as an mp3), my bandwidth usage is going to be significantly less than if I download a single 51 MB file via HTTP (such as the latest update for Day of Defeat). So they're limiting users even in cases of non-excessive bandwidth usage, which wouldn't be protected by that TOS clause.
I suspect the law agrees with you.
This article talks about a suit against Prodigy a while back where it was determined that the fact that they exercised editorial control over postings on their boards made them liable for everything that was posted there. The only major difference here is that the control is this case is in the form of limiting certain protocols. However, the (apparently) public explaination that it's over moral reasons might be enough to establish that the ISP is engaging in such control.
In her case, there's no question that the benefit of the exposure (180 CD sales) exceeded the cost having the songs out there (almost nothing, given her obscurity). Unfortunately, it's naive to automatically assume that this extrapolates to any circumstance.
Does this remain true for an already well-known/pop artist? Maybe, maybe not. On one hand, quite a lot of people are already getting bombarded with the artist's work via the radio, MTV, and even TV show soundtracks. On the other hand, there's a definite reinforcement value in that when you're in the store, you're more likely to remember the name of that artist who's mp3 you listened to quite a few times.
Does this remain true for the case where the entire album is available as an mp3? This is even less likely to be true, as the "free download" is rapidly approaching the value of the album. You'll still have people who want to "support the artist", but you've now got a business model that relies on the willingness of your customers not to cheat the system. That's not a very good business model.
Fortunately, getting an entire album off the P2P services currently requires quite a bit of effort. However, I honestly believe that we're just a few engineering tweaks away from achieving it. Pick and choose the best of the P2P features seen so far, throw in freenet's anonymity, and create a wrapper file to keep an entire album together as a continguous chunk -- BAM! You've just negated a lot of the unique value of a retail CD.
As it stands currently, I've already seen people distribute (via non-P2P means) collections of multiple CDs by a single artist, all encoded at a decent bitrate. It's really only a matter of time before it catches on.
On the other hand, Lucas has only directed 3 of the 5 Star Wars movies to date. And of those 3, 2 of them are widely regarded as not up to par.
Broadband connection: $59.95/month
Slashdot account: Free
Seeing 8 different people all making the same cookie-cutter "Priceless" jokes: (-1, Redundant)
Seriously, the priceless thing has been more run into the ground than "All your base". Hell, they even did a priceless parody on that shortlived, humor-free golf show on Comedy Central with the Murray Brothers. It's just not funny anymore, if it ever was in the first place.
Yes, but the rewards were segmented into different requirements. I believe only $100,000 was ear-marked towards getting unsigned code to run on an unmodified Xbox. The rest of it covers "easier" things such as kernel and XFree drivers.
Except that most people are doing this on connections that generally have TOS provisions prohibiting the users from running servers. With P2P networks, each client is a server.
Furthermore, most bandwidth providers haven't botthered metering individual bandwidth (at least in the U.S.). The bandwidth these people are chewing up is going to push us toward a metered model.
This is quite inefficient. Some of the more effective P2P systems allow clients to immediately reupload parts of downloaded files even before the entire file has been received.
The downside is that it's easy for partial transfers to clutter the system, but the upside is that high-demand files almost immediately get mirrored.
Try www.etree.org. Since the Grateful Dead were cool with bootlegs, there are more reliable distribution means than P2P systems.
Did you even bother reading the article? If you had, you'd see that the bulk of it explains why the rental agency's activites could be seen as more than just protecting their property.
For example, consider the following quote from the article, "Some customers said they didn't realize the $1-per-mile charge would be applied to their entire trip." In other words, if I were to drive an unlimited mileage in-state rental for 5,000 in-state miles and 2 out-of-state miles, I get hit with a $5,002 penalty.
It gets even worse, as "In some cases, according to court documents, the customers discussed their travel routes with Budget rental agents, and permitted areas were noted on rental contracts."
In short, this sounds like the rental agency is using the penalties as a gotcha-style revenue scheme rather than a legitimate means of protecting their own property. The fact that you ignored that entire aspect of the article makes me suspect that you're either delibrately trolling or at least weren't diligent enough to read up on the issue that you're commenting on.
Of course the Lindows PC is a bare-bones system that comes sans monitor. Sounds like the perfect upgrade for someone who's currently doing word processing on their now ancient 286 or 386. And if it's just a simple, utilitarian solution, they might be interested in cutting corners by reusing the monitor.
There's no direct way to tell. However, it's an educated guess based on seeing the post-meta-mod karma drop and correlating that with my moderation activity at the time -- which was almost exclusively modding down the sort of trolling garbage that popped up in a freshly posted story. At the time, I was reading Slashdot a little on the obsessive side, so I was running into the fresh story garbage before it was getting modded down by other people.
Of course there's a small loophole in meta-moderation in that it doesn't occur for the "Overrated" moderations, which was what was used to mod the comment down in this case.
"In the case of a geniune troll the only solution I can think of is when a person gets enough bad meta-mods they lose their privaleges,"
Unfortunately, the genuine trolls are the ones who don't have a problem cooking up a new account and karma-whoring it back up to 50. Meanwhile, someone like myself winds up stuck with an account that virtually never gets mod points (except when the mod point system went nuts a few months back) due to some questionable meta-mods against me.
But this isn't the same sort of junk email. Unlike spam, this is something of an opt-in scenario. The recipient provided his/her email address so as to receive the digital alternates of real-world junkmail. A sender using this system (ideally) wouldn't have to worry about any sort of anti-spam attacks -- no abuse complaints to their ISP, no anti-spammers attempting get their website taken down, no threat of being blacklisted.
Except that if he doesn't offer the prize money, less people try and break it, which means it's less likely to get broken soon, which means Microsoft is more likely to "win".
If Microsoft plans on sacrificing the Xbox in an effort to make the Xbox 2 harder to crack, I think they'll wait until the product is closer to the end of its life-cycle before they do it.
Harder? I think it would make piracy easier, as the same techniques used to run Linux on an unchipped box could be used to make games run on an unchipped box. Yes, individual games may have copy protection, but that can be bypassed on a game-by-game basis, which is still easier than chipping Xboxes on a box-by-box basis (and still potentially dealing with copy protection).
We saw this scenario with the Dreamcast. As soon as people were able to get away with just burning games to disc (without risking performing tricky modifications to their system), piracy took off.
Any show that uses ultra-geeks as pseudo-villains/comic relief is definite Slashdot material. I mean how often on TV do you see people pause during a game of D&D to decide to take over the world? When was the last time you saw someone threatened with the destruction of a rare Boba Fett figure as a means of coercion?
There's some hilarious, geek-centric humor in the show. The problem is that too many people automatically write it off has just generic horror/comedy/pretty girls.
Call me crazy, but I'm pretty sure that the argument that it's good because it's popular won't work at all on Slashdot.
Or they can create an OSS project to develop a snort configuration tool, thereby undercutting the software end of the SourceFire project. I'm not sure if this scenario would be a win (an OSS project improves the usability of another OSS project) or a loss (an OSS project reduces revenue that's indirectly helping another OSS project).
Or maybe it's just the greatest fantasy/sci-fi crossover of all time.
I believe you're referring to Stanley Milgram's famous experiment about authoritarian control. The experiment wasn't about people's capacity for random cruelty so much as their capacity for following direct orders from an authority figure (in this case, a scientist in charge of the fake experiment).
An interesting experiment along similar lines is Philip Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment, where he divided the participants into two groups. One group played the role of jail guards while the other group became prisoners. He had to end the experiment prematurely, as the role of authority figure resulted in some of the jail guards getting extremely abusive toward the "inmates".
(Spoiler below)
The person debates whether or not to push the button for quite awhile, and finally gives in to temptation. As the stranger departs, the person asks the stranger where he's going. The stranger replies, "To find someone who doesn't know you."
Yes, but it's no different from similar cases in other operating systems. Buffer overflows happen in both Windows and Linux, and in both cases they can allow the mallicious data to execute arbitrary machine code as the current user. In both systems, this is usually sufficient to cause severe damage.
"Think before YOU post--you clearly demonstrate the common mindset of finding someone with an exposed problem and attacking it like a shark in order for a much needed ego-boost."
Yes, except that you don't appear to have the slightest clue as to what you're talking about. Anyone who's done more than a cursory look at computer security and exploits would be aware as to how prevalent buffer overflows are. It's not a problem specific to any type of program.
So I just don't see where XP even comes into the picture. You made an absurd, hand-waving claim, someone called bullshit on you, and now you're going on a tirade about how it's this vicious shark attack.
Oh, and you threaded your post incorrectly, as your reply seems to be targetted specifically at Zeddicus_Z, but you replied to your own post.