Interesting. My personal experience is the opposite.
After a steady climb where my average spam/day increased by about 20/day every month, it's fallen through the floor. Between March and May of 2004, my incoming caught and uncaught spam dropped 66% from 183/day to 61/day. I'm now averaging between 35 and 50 spam/day. These are the lowest levels I've seen in the previous 18 months.
It wouldn't surprise me that I'm seeing less spam because I'm opening less spam because prismemail is catching 96% of it. There have been days when I've seen zero spam because prismemail caught all of it.
(all stats courtesy of prismemail.com)
Re:How many got their items on time though?
on
Amazon Sales Record
·
· Score: 1
May not have been entirely their fault:
My mother simultaneously sent separate Christmas cards to myself, my wife, and my daughter.
One arrived on Tuesday, one on Wednesday, and the last on Friday. All the week before Christmas.
Sending things through the mail during the Christmas season is like watching pachinko balls. You never really know how long it's going to take to get to it's (hopefully correct) destination.
The price per song is reasonable ($0.50US or less).
I've got complete freedom to make as many backups as I wish, copy onto portable players, etc.
I still have the option to purchase full-quality copies of music I really like and use the money I've already paid as a discount.
If they can implement that, I might actually think about buying reasonable amounts of music again. For now, I only support my favorite bands and don't experiment much.
People who commit copyright violations have not taken anything from anyone. What they have done is deprive a chain of people a _possible_ bit of profit from a sale that may or may not have ever been made. Nobody can claim a loss (well, the RIAA tries) from an illegal copy, as there was never any guarantee that a sale would have been made.
Now, stealing a Boxter or Photoshop is different. Somebody (actually two or three people) have already been paid for that copy of that thing, and taking it is, in fact, costing the proprietor of the shop that owns it the money he paid for that copy.
Financially, it looks like this:
Copyright violation = possible loss of possible future sale. Violator may like said content enough to see enough value in owning a legal copy to purchase it. Or he may not. He also may never have had any intent of purchasing the item in the first place. In the meantime, though, NOBODY has fewer copies of said content than they had before. Nobody has suffered an actual loss. The store down the street still has 10 copies they can sell.
Theft = loss of a material good. You get one, somebody else loses one. Zero sum game. Previous owner of the good suffers an actual loss.
There's a big difference. Theft of a good directly hurts the victim. A copyright violation might hurt someone down the road, but we don't know for sure.
It's a important distinction to understand. And every post you've made so far shows you don't.
And it's a huge leap to believe that any significant percentage of people engaging in the copyright violations you refer to as theft would even think about physically stealing a copy of Photoshop from a store.
It's not legal, but don't presume to say it's immoral to break a copyright law that has been modified and extended for no apparent reason other than maintaining a particular way of doing business.
Personally, I feel some of the business practices of the companies whose copyrights are being broken are far more "immoral" than the copyright violation being discussed.
And there's a large legal difference between the two.
From dictionary.com:
theft
\Theft\, n. [OE. thefte, AS. [thorn]i['e]f[eth]e, [thorn][=y]f[eth]e, [thorn]e['o]f[eth]e. See Thief.] 1. (Law) The act of stealing; specifically, the felonious taking and removing of personal property, with an intent to deprive the rightful owner of the same; larceny.
Note: To constitute theft there must be a taking without the owner's consent, and it must be unlawful or felonious; every part of the property stolen must be removed, however slightly, from its former position; and it must be, at least momentarily, in the complete possession of the thief. See Larceny, and the Note under Robbery.
I guess I should have said every _major_ label. I really don't believe non-RIAA members would participate in this idea, but you never know. My guess is that if the RIAA runs it, you'd have to be a member to play along.
DGM happens to be the label founded (I think) by one of my favorite artists: Robert Fripp. So I'm moderately familiar with their practice. From what I know, they're about the only label/distributor with any sort of volume that allows the rights to remain with the artist.
1. Cheap downloads of decent quality (160 or 192) MP3s. Maybe US$0.25-$0.30/song. Give me a printable receipt. These are true MP3s, no time sensitivity or DRM. If you want to encode the receipt number into the MP3, I think I can deal with that. Just let me copy it onto my laptop, MP3 player, etc. and keep it for perpetuity.
2. Now, since I've paid less for a lesser quality product, I'd like an upgrade path. Let me use that receipt as a discount coupon on the album I've downloaded. Usable anywhere.
This way, I can legally sample albums for about a buck. If I like it, I'm not out that dollar, It was just a down payment on the stuff I like.
3. (Since I'm already shooting for the moon, why not...) Let me order custom-mixed CDs of MP3s I've purchased. With or without the aforementioned discount. That part I don't care about. If there's 10 or 12 songs I like where the rest of the album's trash (i.e. just about everything released these days) then let me just buy those songs.
4. Access to _every_ label's material, not just two or three.
5. A shopping cart style interface. Something like Amazon will do nicely.
I can't imagine I'm the only person out there that thinks something like this would work.
How the royalties get distributed would naturally need some thinking. It's got to be better then a quarter of a cent per song, though.
One key thing to remember: the person listening to the music is not _necessarily_ the person doing the downloading.
I'm like most people on here: I download MP3s to get a feel for the new stuff that's out there to see if there's something I'm interested in buying. I'm having to be a LOT more selective in my purchases in the recent past, as we've been hit pretty hard by the economy. I've probably bought less than five CDs in the last 15 months, compared with 2-3 per month before that.
Every couple weeks, my wife will either send me an email from work telling me about an album that looks interesting that she'd like to hear, or we'll see something go by on one of the DirecTV audio channels. I do my searches, download the files, and burn a CD. We then usually listen to it in the car on the way to work the next day.
The latest albums that have been through this process are Celine Dion, Pink, Indigo Girls, and Melissa Etheridge. These are not people I'd normally listen to. My tastes tend towards artists like Aphex Twin, Tangerine Dream and King Crimson.
So - don't assume that just because it's a chick band or sappy singer that you can't find the stuff on a P2P system.
Also, your comment about "without copy protection there would be many more copies" is facitious. As many have stated, there are very few originals posted to the P2P systems. Most of the available copies were downloaded by someone else. All it takes is one copy to seed the system.
I must say that the Celine Dion album is probably the most downloaded thing off my system since I acquired it. That has surprised me quite a bit.
And, of course, they could try but it will never be voted in without significant deductions elsewhere. We've got an 8.7% (or so, depending on where you are) sales tax rate among many other things.
(to slightly paraphrase K from Men in Black)
Persons (including you, me, and many others) want thought provoking, emotionally engaging music.
People want Britney Spears and N-Sync.
And, as we well know, corporations always target People over Persons.
You'd be right, except for one important distinction. In the music industry, artists don't own the copyright, so extending/maintaining the copyright duration doesn't help the content creator at all in this case.
This service rips off artists even more so than the standard recording contract we've seen bandied about.
Shortening copyright limits removes control from the content sooner. What I would personally like to see is a clause that states the content creator acquires the copyright (for the same (reduced) amount of time) at expiration if the following two conditions are met: 1. They're still alive. (estates don't count.) 2. They weren't the original copyright holder.
This way, the content creator eventually gets their stuff back if they didn't have it already.
In the works. A good friend of mine is the health reporter for KGW-TV in Portland, OR. I'm writing up the whole background to this issue at the moment.
I can't make any guarantees that they'll cover it, but if you see something in the next couple months or so on TV in Portland, you can rest assured the catalyst for the story is a slashdot reader.
Re:College Football, what else is there?
on
New Years Marathons
·
· Score: 1
Agreed.
When your wife went to Penn State, best friend went to Nebraska, and his wife went to Washington, you don't really have a choice. (I just went to a tiny NAIA div-II school, but I'm the biggest sports junkie of the lot.)
At least there's a break tonight. That means alcohol and Iron Chef.
They're designations nearly always given to any abstract simulation of a military scenario.
Wargamers commonly use them in scenario descriptions that aren't dependant on particular armies being used. (i.e. it could be British vs. French, or North vs. South, or Egyptian vs. Hittite)
Yes, it's convenient that the US is referred to as "blue" and China is communist (therefore "red.") But that's not why the colors were chosen for the simulation.
Basilius
Re:Beware IT, Badtimes ahead!
on
What is 'IT'?
·
· Score: 1
That amount includes exercised stock options from long-term employees.
When I left MS three years ago, my annual salary was in the low $50K range after more than eight years on the job. However, my annual income was well into six figures due to exercised stock options.
With the exception of truly brilliant developers, Microsoft has always treated their employees as expendable resources.
Currently, they're having a very hard time keeping people. They claim they pay competitive wages, but other companies in the area pay, on average, 15-20% more, offer better hours and comparable benefits. Contractors get their benefits through their agency and frequently make _double_ what Microsoft is paying to full-time employees for the same position. MS still believes their stock makes up for the shortfall in salary, but nobody's believing it any more.
When I left there almost three years ago, I took a year off. After that, I started looking around in the market again, and could get 40-50% more than I was getting when I left. It's no wonder a significant percentage of the people being hired by MS right now are either straight out of college, or being imported into the US.
What a typical MS employee has access to is entirely dependant on what they work on. Most developers would only have access to other source trees if one tree was dependant on the other for some reason.
If they're some plebe slogging away on Whistler, then they'll likely have (or have access to a server that has) the Whistler source code. Or maybe Excel. Or maybe they're someone in the R&D department, in which case who knows what they have access to.
In any case, if the hackers were using just one password, then they've only got access to one or two program's worth of source code. If they had two or three or more different users, then they could have quite a bit of source available to them.
MS is entirely behind a firewall. Lots of employees log in from home, and some are permanently logged in on broadband connections. Most of these people are pretty bright, and protect their home machines. Not all do. There's an obvious chain there for anyone that cares enough to try. Looks like our news item is from someone that tried.
Or it's an inside job, in which case the conspiracy theorists just might be right...
(also, for whoever it was that said IE is based on the Spyglass browser, they used to be right. IE 4.0 is the first version developed entirely in house. Previous versions were modifications to the Spyglass code base.)
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting. My personal experience is the opposite.
After a steady climb where my average spam/day increased by about 20/day every month, it's fallen through the floor. Between March and May of 2004, my incoming caught and uncaught spam dropped 66% from 183/day to 61/day. I'm now averaging between 35 and 50 spam/day. These are the lowest levels I've seen in the previous 18 months.
It wouldn't surprise me that I'm seeing less spam because I'm opening less spam because prismemail is catching 96% of it. There have been days when I've seen zero spam because prismemail caught all of it.
(all stats courtesy of prismemail.com)
May not have been entirely their fault:
My mother simultaneously sent separate Christmas cards to myself, my wife, and my daughter.
One arrived on Tuesday, one on Wednesday, and the last on Friday. All the week before Christmas.
Sending things through the mail during the Christmas season is like watching pachinko balls. You never really know how long it's going to take to get to it's (hopefully correct) destination.
I've posted this before but people just don't get it.
Copyright violations are NOT theft. Illegal acts, yes, but NOT theft.
Pay particular attention to the note after the definition.
- The price per song is reasonable ($0.50US or less).
- I've got complete freedom to make as many backups as I wish, copy onto portable players, etc.
- I still have the option to purchase full-quality copies of music I really like and use the money I've already paid as a discount.
If they can implement that, I might actually think about buying reasonable amounts of music again. For now, I only support my favorite bands and don't experiment much.You still haven't figured it out, have you?
People who commit copyright violations have not taken anything from anyone. What they have done is deprive a chain of people a _possible_ bit of profit from a sale that may or may not have ever been made. Nobody can claim a loss (well, the RIAA tries) from an illegal copy, as there was never any guarantee that a sale would have been made.
Now, stealing a Boxter or Photoshop is different. Somebody (actually two or three people) have already been paid for that copy of that thing, and taking it is, in fact, costing the proprietor of the shop that owns it the money he paid for that copy.
Financially, it looks like this:
Copyright violation = possible loss of possible future sale. Violator may like said content enough to see enough value in owning a legal copy to purchase it. Or he may not. He also may never have had any intent of purchasing the item in the first place. In the meantime, though, NOBODY has fewer copies of said content than they had before. Nobody has suffered an actual loss. The store down the street still has 10 copies they can sell.
Theft = loss of a material good. You get one, somebody else loses one. Zero sum game. Previous owner of the good suffers an actual loss.
There's a big difference. Theft of a good directly hurts the victim. A copyright violation might hurt someone down the road, but we don't know for sure.
It's a important distinction to understand. And every post you've made so far shows you don't.
And it's a huge leap to believe that any significant percentage of people engaging in the copyright violations you refer to as theft would even think about physically stealing a copy of Photoshop from a store.
It's not legal, but don't presume to say it's immoral to break a copyright law that has been modified and extended for no apparent reason other than maintaining a particular way of doing business.
Personally, I feel some of the business practices of the companies whose copyrights are being broken are far more "immoral" than the copyright violation being discussed.
They've got you hoodwinked, don't they?
It's not theft. It's a copyright violation.
And there's a large legal difference between the two.
From dictionary.com:
theft
\Theft\, n. [OE. thefte, AS. [thorn]i['e]f[eth]e, [thorn][=y]f[eth]e, [thorn]e['o]f[eth]e. See Thief.] 1. (Law) The act of stealing; specifically, the felonious taking and removing of personal property, with an intent to deprive the rightful owner of the same; larceny.
Note: To constitute theft there must be a taking without the owner's consent, and it must be unlawful or felonious; every part of the property stolen must be removed, however slightly, from its former position; and it must be, at least momentarily, in the complete possession of the thief. See Larceny, and the Note under Robbery.
Obviously, you're missing the humor.
Trailer parks are commonly referred to as "Tornado Magnets."
But you probably won't find that funny, either.
You're confused. It's _tornadoes_ that take out trailer parks, not hurricanes.
Basilius
I guess I should have said every _major_ label. I really don't believe non-RIAA members would participate in this idea, but you never know. My guess is that if the RIAA runs it, you'd have to be a member to play along.
DGM happens to be the label founded (I think) by one of my favorite artists: Robert Fripp. So I'm moderately familiar with their practice. From what I know, they're about the only label/distributor with any sort of volume that allows the rights to remain with the artist.
Freedom of choice is king. For the consumer.
And, most likely, what I'll never see.
1. Cheap downloads of decent quality (160 or 192) MP3s. Maybe US$0.25-$0.30/song. Give me a printable receipt. These are true MP3s, no time sensitivity or DRM. If you want to encode the receipt number into the MP3, I think I can deal with that. Just let me copy it onto my laptop, MP3 player, etc. and keep it for perpetuity.
2. Now, since I've paid less for a lesser quality product, I'd like an upgrade path. Let me use that receipt as a discount coupon on the album I've downloaded. Usable anywhere.
This way, I can legally sample albums for about a buck. If I like it, I'm not out that dollar, It was just a down payment on the stuff I like.
3. (Since I'm already shooting for the moon, why not...) Let me order custom-mixed CDs of MP3s I've purchased. With or without the aforementioned discount. That part I don't care about. If there's 10 or 12 songs I like where the rest of the album's trash (i.e. just about everything released these days) then let me just buy those songs.
4. Access to _every_ label's material, not just two or three.
5. A shopping cart style interface. Something like Amazon will do nicely.
I can't imagine I'm the only person out there that thinks something like this would work.
How the royalties get distributed would naturally need some thinking. It's got to be better then a quarter of a cent per song, though.
One key thing to remember: the person listening to the music is not _necessarily_ the person doing the downloading.
I'm like most people on here: I download MP3s to get a feel for the new stuff that's out there to see if there's something I'm interested in buying. I'm having to be a LOT more selective in my purchases in the recent past, as we've been hit pretty hard by the economy. I've probably bought less than five CDs in the last 15 months, compared with 2-3 per month before that.
Every couple weeks, my wife will either send me an email from work telling me about an album that looks interesting that she'd like to hear, or we'll see something go by on one of the DirecTV audio channels. I do my searches, download the files, and burn a CD. We then usually listen to it in the car on the way to work the next day.
The latest albums that have been through this process are Celine Dion, Pink, Indigo Girls, and Melissa Etheridge. These are not people I'd normally listen to. My tastes tend towards artists like Aphex Twin, Tangerine Dream and King Crimson.
So - don't assume that just because it's a chick band or sappy singer that you can't find the stuff on a P2P system.
Also, your comment about "without copy protection there would be many more copies" is facitious. As many have stated, there are very few originals posted to the P2P systems. Most of the available copies were downloaded by someone else. All it takes is one copy to seed the system.
I must say that the Celine Dion album is probably the most downloaded thing off my system since I acquired it. That has surprised me quite a bit.
Basilius
I find it vaguely bemusing that Compaq voted No and HP voted yes.
And, of course, they could try but it will never be voted in without significant deductions elsewhere. We've got an 8.7% (or so, depending on where you are) sales tax rate among many other things.
As you've probably seen in 47 other places, Washington State does not have a state income tax, so this argument is moot.
...is one cool cat toy :) Probably even better than a laser pointer.
(to slightly paraphrase K from Men in Black) Persons (including you, me, and many others) want thought provoking, emotionally engaging music. People want Britney Spears and N-Sync. And, as we well know, corporations always target People over Persons.
You'd be right, except for one important distinction. In the music industry, artists don't own the copyright, so extending/maintaining the copyright duration doesn't help the content creator at all in this case.
This service rips off artists even more so than the standard recording contract we've seen bandied about.
Shortening copyright limits removes control from the content sooner. What I would personally like to see is a clause that states the content creator acquires the copyright (for the same (reduced) amount of time) at expiration if the following two conditions are met:
1. They're still alive. (estates don't count.)
2. They weren't the original copyright holder.
This way, the content creator eventually gets their stuff back if they didn't have it already.
In the works. A good friend of mine is the health reporter for KGW-TV in Portland, OR. I'm writing up the whole background to this issue at the moment.
I can't make any guarantees that they'll cover it, but if you see something in the next couple months or so on TV in Portland, you can rest assured the catalyst for the story is a slashdot reader.
Agreed.
When your wife went to Penn State, best friend went to Nebraska, and his wife went to Washington, you don't really have a choice. (I just went to a tiny NAIA div-II school, but I'm the biggest sports junkie of the lot.)
At least there's a break tonight. That means alcohol and Iron Chef.
Basilius
They're designations nearly always given to any abstract simulation of a military scenario. Wargamers commonly use them in scenario descriptions that aren't dependant on particular armies being used. (i.e. it could be British vs. French, or North vs. South, or Egyptian vs. Hittite) Yes, it's convenient that the US is referred to as "blue" and China is communist (therefore "red.") But that's not why the colors were chosen for the simulation. Basilius
But... I LIKE my mother-in-law...
That amount includes exercised stock options from long-term employees. When I left MS three years ago, my annual salary was in the low $50K range after more than eight years on the job. However, my annual income was well into six figures due to exercised stock options.
With the exception of truly brilliant developers, Microsoft has always treated their employees as expendable resources. Currently, they're having a very hard time keeping people. They claim they pay competitive wages, but other companies in the area pay, on average, 15-20% more, offer better hours and comparable benefits. Contractors get their benefits through their agency and frequently make _double_ what Microsoft is paying to full-time employees for the same position. MS still believes their stock makes up for the shortfall in salary, but nobody's believing it any more. When I left there almost three years ago, I took a year off. After that, I started looking around in the market again, and could get 40-50% more than I was getting when I left. It's no wonder a significant percentage of the people being hired by MS right now are either straight out of college, or being imported into the US.
If they're some plebe slogging away on Whistler, then they'll likely have (or have access to a server that has) the Whistler source code. Or maybe Excel. Or maybe they're someone in the R&D department, in which case who knows what they have access to.
In any case, if the hackers were using just one password, then they've only got access to one or two program's worth of source code. If they had two or three or more different users, then they could have quite a bit of source available to them.
MS is entirely behind a firewall. Lots of employees log in from home, and some are permanently logged in on broadband connections. Most of these people are pretty bright, and protect their home machines. Not all do. There's an obvious chain there for anyone that cares enough to try. Looks like our news item is from someone that tried.
Or it's an inside job, in which case the conspiracy theorists just might be right...
(also, for whoever it was that said IE is based on the Spyglass browser, they used to be right. IE 4.0 is the first version developed entirely in house. Previous versions were modifications to the Spyglass code base.)
Basilius
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