I love Girl Genius too, but I agree they need to spread the love.
The Foglios recognize this, and have withdrawn themselves from consideration for next year's award. I don't know if it extends beyond that, but Girl Genius 11 won't be winning the 2012 Hugo.
Since Amazon say 60% of their book sales are Kindle, I imagine Macmillan are going to be hurting.
This number has been widely mis-interpreted. Amazon didn't say 60% of their sales are Kindle books. What they said was for books that have Kindle editions (in total) they sell 6 Kindle books for every 10 paper books. That's actually 37.5%, not 60%.
I believe that stat was intentionally published in a misleading manner to generate exactly the misinterpretation you've made.
You can't tell without access to the sharer's computer, but it's reasonable to assume the most likely number.
The 1.00000etc number in my GP post is off because I forgot that the initial uploader didn't have to download the file. The real number is slightly under 1.0, at 1-(1/N), where N is the total number of complete downloads across the entire network. I imagine a typical file will have a number like 0.9999. Multiply that by the value of the track and then multiply that product to get actual losses if you make the laughable assumption that every copy equals a lost sale.
Yet, even that's going to be off when you look at radically differing upload speeds and things like that.
I still think this is a possible defense avenue. I don't think you can actually prove (in the typical case with multiple up- and down-loaders) that a particular computer ever sends a complete copy of a file to any other single computer. But I don't know the tech deeply enough, hence my questions.
It's been a loophole in the past for shipping weapons around - ship the parts (which is legal) and the recipient assembles them. And since a part of an MP3 file is unusable without the rest, I'd think a similar defense might work here.
MAFIAA: You have to take into account everyone that downloaded them.
JUDGE: Ok so lets say 10 people downloaded each one, that's about so that's about $4800 right?
By definition, the average participant in a peer sharing network uploads one copy. There's no way around that. If the actual number of uploads is unknown, the only remotely reasonable assumption for damage calculations is 1.0000000000000000000000000.
I know the defendant in this case wasn't using bittorrent, but is there actually any way to prove a person has uploaded one entire, complete, copy to anyone? I expect it's more like 30% to that person, 40% to another, 30% to a third, but since people are connected to multiple uploaders, how can you tell?
Combined with this research, which shows that ugly men release more sperm, the chance of conception appears to be highest when a stunningly attractive woman sleeps with an truly ugly man. Somebody please think of the children.
Or, given the odds of that, we may just need to think of the child.
We've already had Christine Brinkley/Billy Joel.
Odds of another truly ugly man overchicking that much? Very small.
One other issue that eventually doomed the German war effort was their abject refusal to commit their industrial resources to "total war."
Allied factories were running around the clock. Not the German. They actually hamstrung their own industrial capacity by not doing this almost as much as the allied bombing efforts did.
Of course, by not taking Britain out of the war before Barbarossa, the allies were eventually able to deny Germans access to resources, and the German industrial capacity eventually wore out.
I really would prefer it if you people could just turn your music down. I don't care if you want to destroy your eardrums listening to crap. I just don't want to hear music so loud it drowns out normal conversations from people on the street.
See, the thing is, it doesn't have to be THAT loud.
All it has to be is loud enough for someone else to hear. Could be the person in the neighboring car. If we're both stopped at a light next to each other, it doesn't take a whole lot of volume for my music to be audible in your car. And that, by ASCAP's logic, is a public "performance."
And you can't tell me you've never cranked your stereo when one of your favorite songs comes on. We've all done it.
They gonna come after me when I've got my car stereo cranked and the windows down?
I know the people driving around me probably should, but is that really a "public performance?" A ringtone is no different than playing a stereo. It just goes off when you're not expecting it.
1. You want to be able to store documents that currently exist electronically, and also handle documents you're going to scan. The latter may, or may not, be OCR'd.
2. You want to attach keywords to the articles, and be able to bring up a list of articles that match some arbitrary combination of these keywords.
3. Full-text search isn't as important (but would be useful if available).
If that's the case, I'm thinking Alfresco might be what you're looking for. Multi-platform, open source, java-based content repository. Supports document tagging (and loads, loads more). Relatively easy to use right out of the box, and has a CIFS interface so you can just create a project and simply tree-copy your current documents into the project. Don't let the "enterprise" designation on the software scare you away.
I've actually considered going that route for my own personal document library, but while Alfresco might be one of the only good solutions, it's like killing a fly with a cannon.
I'm frankly amazed that with the "paperless living" meme currently going through the productivity circles that someone hasn't come up with a simple tool to do something just like what you're looking for: point it at a root folder, let it suck in all the files, then start tagging away. Search with keywords or filenames or both, and provide a clickable list of hits. Full-text search isn't needed, as there's already a ton of tools out there that'll happily index your hard drive for you.
And, if a tool like that exists, could someone point me to it, please?
Whats next? Some sort of physical DRM for printed copies?
If you dig back into storage and find some of those early 1st edition dungeon crawls, you'll find that they were printed in a lightish blue ink.
Mimeograph machines and black and white copiers at the time (I don't think color copiers were commercially available yet) had real trouble with that color ink.
And that wouldn't have happened with a racist judge just as easily as it happened with a racist jury? I'd still rather have the jury, if for no other reason than the fact that it's (hopefully) harder to wind up with 12 racists sitting on a jury than one racist sitting on the bench......
You haven't been through the jury selection process, have you?
In rare cases, I buy both. I have very limited time to read actual books, but I have a lot of time to _listen_ to books. And I'm not a long-haul trucker. Just a guy that spends ~1-1.5 hours/day in a car with a direct iPod hookup.
So, I subscribe to Audible (ignoring rants about DRM - I know) for most "reading" and on rare occasions buy the hardcopy for things I want long-term.
One of the great things about Linux is that you hardly ever have to boot at all... My home server has gone months at a time without any rebooting. Shaving 5 seconds off boot (as it seems would happen moving from 8.10 to 9.04 on a Core 2 Duo system) will save me around 5 seconds/month. That's one extra slashdot summary.
Now, an unstable O/S like Windows, then boot time matters. You might be saving a few minutes a day with those kinds of numbers. There's a serious productivity gain.
I haven't shopped Amazon all that much recently (used to be a big customer, but just slowly drifted awa) but this will bring me back if it gets widespread.
As a parent of two children under 5, I believe the person who invented those wire-wrap fasteners should be shot, drawn, quartered, and hung from the neck until dead. In whichever order is most convenient.
If someone downloads 5 tracks and seeds each to 1:1 ratio, what they've sent out on the net has only replaced copies (in pieces and blocks) that they got instead of someone else. In that case the net increase in copies going to others is ZERO making the damages only the lost-sale revenue for the downloader.
Uh, no.
1. Let's say Server A is seeding a track. (For sake of simplicity, assume he's got the entire track already.)
2. User T downloads the track from the cloud (if there's more than one server, difficult to track how much was received from each) while simultaneously sending to other peers. (Users B, C, and D.)
If users T, B, and C each seed at 1:1 ratio and D simply leeches, that's the equivalent of a full copy sent by A, B, C, and T, and downloaded by B, C, D, and T.
By your logic, there's no net gain they've only "replaced copies" yet now five people now have the file where only one did before.
Your logic would work if whatever was sent is deleted from the server as it's sent, but that would be silly.
The part that bugs me is where Toder (defense lawyer) says that the plaintiff can't introduce evidence of the investigators downloading files from the defendant. According to TFA:
Those downloads, Toder said, cannot be considered unauthorized downloads because the RIAA authorized them.
I don't think that's going to stand up. Undercover cops buy drugs and the state doesn't have to prosecute them for buying them. Why couldn't investigators "illegally" download copyrighted material and still have it considered infringing on the part of the defendant, but not be prosecuted?
Not defending the RIAA, but just pointing out something that seems illogical to me.
Because the crime being prosecuted, in both cases, is the distribution of the item in question, not the acquisition.
The primary difference between the drug and MP3 analogy is that the act of an authorized agent of the copyright holder requesting distribution of the MP3 constitutes permission to distribute, and that's legal. It would likely be entrapment, otherwise.
That is not the case for drugs. You (generally) cannot create a situation for authorized distribution of drugs.
Slashdot Mirror
I love Girl Genius too, but I agree they need to spread the love.
The Foglios recognize this, and have withdrawn themselves from consideration for next year's award. I don't know if it extends beyond that, but Girl Genius 11 won't be winning the 2012 Hugo.
He called them "BitBots" and they feature prominently in his recent book "The Dervish House."
I want some.
Since Amazon say 60% of their book sales are Kindle, I imagine Macmillan are going to be hurting.
This number has been widely mis-interpreted. Amazon didn't say 60% of their sales are Kindle books. What they said was for books that have Kindle editions (in total) they sell 6 Kindle books for every 10 paper books. That's actually 37.5%, not 60%.
I believe that stat was intentionally published in a misleading manner to generate exactly the misinterpretation you've made.
The saddest indication of how jaded we are with big business these days is that your post was modded funny.
You can't tell without access to the sharer's computer, but it's reasonable to assume the most likely number.
The 1.00000etc number in my GP post is off because I forgot that the initial uploader didn't have to download the file. The real number is slightly under 1.0, at 1-(1/N), where N is the total number of complete downloads across the entire network. I imagine a typical file will have a number like 0.9999. Multiply that by the value of the track and then multiply that product to get actual losses if you make the laughable assumption that every copy equals a lost sale.
Yet, even that's going to be off when you look at radically differing upload speeds and things like that.
I still think this is a possible defense avenue. I don't think you can actually prove (in the typical case with multiple up- and down-loaders) that a particular computer ever sends a complete copy of a file to any other single computer. But I don't know the tech deeply enough, hence my questions.
It's been a loophole in the past for shipping weapons around - ship the parts (which is legal) and the recipient assembles them. And since a part of an MP3 file is unusable without the rest, I'd think a similar defense might work here.
MAFIAA: You have to take into account everyone that downloaded them.
JUDGE: Ok so lets say 10 people downloaded each one, that's about so that's about $4800 right?
By definition, the average participant in a peer sharing network uploads one copy. There's no way around that. If the actual number of uploads is unknown, the only remotely reasonable assumption for damage calculations is 1.0000000000000000000000000.
I know the defendant in this case wasn't using bittorrent, but is there actually any way to prove a person has uploaded one entire, complete, copy to anyone? I expect it's more like 30% to that person, 40% to another, 30% to a third, but since people are connected to multiple uploaders, how can you tell?
Combined with this research, which shows that ugly men release more sperm, the chance of conception appears to be highest when a stunningly attractive woman sleeps with an truly ugly man. Somebody please think of the children.
Or, given the odds of that, we may just need to think of the child.
We've already had Christine Brinkley/Billy Joel.
Odds of another truly ugly man overchicking that much? Very small.
One other issue that eventually doomed the German war effort was their abject refusal to commit their industrial resources to "total war."
Allied factories were running around the clock. Not the German. They actually hamstrung their own industrial capacity by not doing this almost as much as the allied bombing efforts did.
Of course, by not taking Britain out of the war before Barbarossa, the allies were eventually able to deny Germans access to resources, and the German industrial capacity eventually wore out.
I really would prefer it if you people could just turn your music down. I don't care if you want to destroy your eardrums listening to crap. I just don't want to hear music so loud it drowns out normal conversations from people on the street.
See, the thing is, it doesn't have to be THAT loud.
All it has to be is loud enough for someone else to hear. Could be the person in the neighboring car. If we're both stopped at a light next to each other, it doesn't take a whole lot of volume for my music to be audible in your car. And that, by ASCAP's logic, is a public "performance."
And you can't tell me you've never cranked your stereo when one of your favorite songs comes on. We've all done it.
They gonna come after me when I've got my car stereo cranked and the windows down?
I know the people driving around me probably should, but is that really a "public performance?" A ringtone is no different than playing a stereo. It just goes off when you're not expecting it.
What would be really interesting is if the ultimate solution to the problem ended up doing something very similar to this.
And no, I don't have the faintest clue how.
That's the enterprise version of Alfresco. Check out the Labs version. Free, open source version.
...something like this:
1. You want to be able to store documents that currently exist electronically, and also handle documents you're going to scan. The latter may, or may not, be OCR'd.
2. You want to attach keywords to the articles, and be able to bring up a list of articles that match some arbitrary combination of these keywords.
3. Full-text search isn't as important (but would be useful if available).
If that's the case, I'm thinking Alfresco might be what you're looking for. Multi-platform, open source, java-based content repository. Supports document tagging (and loads, loads more). Relatively easy to use right out of the box, and has a CIFS interface so you can just create a project and simply tree-copy your current documents into the project. Don't let the "enterprise" designation on the software scare you away.
I've actually considered going that route for my own personal document library, but while Alfresco might be one of the only good solutions, it's like killing a fly with a cannon.
I'm frankly amazed that with the "paperless living" meme currently going through the productivity circles that someone hasn't come up with a simple tool to do something just like what you're looking for: point it at a root folder, let it suck in all the files, then start tagging away. Search with keywords or filenames or both, and provide a clickable list of hits. Full-text search isn't needed, as there's already a ton of tools out there that'll happily index your hard drive for you.
And, if a tool like that exists, could someone point me to it, please?
Whats next? Some sort of physical DRM for printed copies?
If you dig back into storage and find some of those early 1st edition dungeon crawls, you'll find that they were printed in a lightish blue ink.
Mimeograph machines and black and white copiers at the time (I don't think color copiers were commercially available yet) had real trouble with that color ink.
This was intentional. It was, in effect, DRM.
And that wouldn't have happened with a racist judge just as easily as it happened with a racist jury? I'd still rather have the jury, if for no other reason than the fact that it's (hopefully) harder to wind up with 12 racists sitting on a jury than one racist sitting on the bench......
You haven't been through the jury selection process, have you?
In rare cases, I buy both. I have very limited time to read actual books, but I have a lot of time to _listen_ to books. And I'm not a long-haul trucker. Just a guy that spends ~1-1.5 hours/day in a car with a direct iPod hookup.
So, I subscribe to Audible (ignoring rants about DRM - I know) for most "reading" and on rare occasions buy the hardcopy for things I want long-term.
One of the great things about Linux is that you hardly ever have to boot at all... My home server has gone months at a time without any rebooting. Shaving 5 seconds off boot (as it seems would happen moving from 8.10 to 9.04 on a Core 2 Duo system) will save me around 5 seconds/month. That's one extra slashdot summary.
Now, an unstable O/S like Windows, then boot time matters. You might be saving a few minutes a day with those kinds of numbers. There's a serious productivity gain.
...never really turns out well in the end.
You know, clicking the link you provided is the first time I've been to the Zune.net site.
Who the hell designed that? For more than a few seconds, I thought I was on one of those parked domain link sites.
Yech.
Particularly since the links on the site go to Powell's.
Powell's is freaking cool. And independent, if you care about such things. (And, for that matter, even if you don't.
I haven't shopped Amazon all that much recently (used to be a big customer, but just slowly drifted awa) but this will bring me back if it gets widespread.
As a parent of two children under 5, I believe the person who invented those wire-wrap fasteners should be shot, drawn, quartered, and hung from the neck until dead. In whichever order is most convenient.
If someone downloads 5 tracks and seeds each to 1:1 ratio, what they've sent out on the net has only replaced copies (in pieces and blocks) that they got instead of someone else. In that case the net increase in copies going to others is ZERO making the damages only the lost-sale revenue for the downloader.
Uh, no.
1. Let's say Server A is seeding a track. (For sake of simplicity, assume he's got the entire track already.)
2. User T downloads the track from the cloud (if there's more than one server, difficult to track how much was received from each) while simultaneously sending to other peers. (Users B, C, and D.)
If users T, B, and C each seed at 1:1 ratio and D simply leeches, that's the equivalent of a full copy sent by A, B, C, and T, and downloaded by B, C, D, and T.
By your logic, there's no net gain they've only "replaced copies" yet now five people now have the file where only one did before.
Your logic would work if whatever was sent is deleted from the server as it's sent, but that would be silly.
Who woulda thunk it?
There's a huge difference between tangible property and intellectual property.
Don't mingle the two.
The part that bugs me is where Toder (defense lawyer) says that the plaintiff can't introduce evidence of the investigators downloading files from the defendant. According to TFA:
I don't think that's going to stand up. Undercover cops buy drugs and the state doesn't have to prosecute them for buying them. Why couldn't investigators "illegally" download copyrighted material and still have it considered infringing on the part of the defendant, but not be prosecuted?
Not defending the RIAA, but just pointing out something that seems illogical to me.
Because the crime being prosecuted, in both cases, is the distribution of the item in question, not the acquisition.
The primary difference between the drug and MP3 analogy is that the act of an authorized agent of the copyright holder requesting distribution of the MP3 constitutes permission to distribute, and that's legal. It would likely be entrapment, otherwise.
That is not the case for drugs. You (generally) cannot create a situation for authorized distribution of drugs.